第2章

Doubting very much if Renouard really liked him, he was himself without great sympathy for a certain side of that man which he could not quite make out.He only felt it obscurely to be his real personality - the true - and, perhaps, the absurd.As, for instance, in that case of the assistant.Renouard had given way to the arguments of his friend and backer - the argument against the unwholesome effect of solitude, the argument for the safety of companionship even if quarrelsome.Very well.In this docility he was sensible and even likeable.But what did he do next? Instead of taking counsel as to the choice with his old backer and friend, and a man, besides, knowing everybody employed and unemployed on the pavements of the town, this extraordinary Renouard suddenly and almost surreptitiously picked up a fellow - God knows who - and sailed away with him back to Malata in a hurry; a proceeding obviously rash and at the same time not quite straight.That was the sort of thing.The secretly unforgiving journalist laughed a little longer and then ceased to shake all over.

"Oh, yes.About that assistant of yours....""What about him," said Renouard, after waiting a while, with a shadow of uneasiness on his face.

"Have you nothing to tell me of him?"

"Nothing except...." Incipient grimness vanished out of Renouard's aspect and his voice, while he hesitated as if reflecting seriously before he changed his mind."No.Nothing whatever.""You haven't brought him along with you by chance - for a change."The Planter of Malata stared, then shook his head, and finally murmured carelessly: "I think he's very well where he is.But Iwish you could tell me why young Dunster insisted so much on my dining with his uncle last night.Everybody knows I am not a society man."The Editor exclaimed at so much modesty.Didn't his friend know that he was their one and only explorer - that he was the man experimenting with the silk plant....

"Still, that doesn't tell me why I was invited yesterday.For young Dunster never thought of this civility before....""Our Willie," said the popular journalist, "never does anything without a purpose, that's a fact.""And to his uncle's house too!"

"He lives there."

"Yes.But he might have given me a feed somewhere else.The extraordinary part is that the old man did not seem to have anything special to say.He smiled kindly on me once or twice, and that was all.It was quite a party, sixteen people."The Editor then, after expressing his regret that he had not been able to come, wanted to know if the party had been entertaining.

Renouard regretted that his friend had not been there.Being a man whose business or at least whose profession was to know everything that went on in this part of the globe, he could probably have told him something of some people lately arrived from home, who were amongst the guests.Young Dunster (Willie), with his large shirt-front and streaks of white skin shining unpleasantly through the thin black hair plastered over the top of his head, bore down on him and introduced him to that party, as if he had been a trained dog or a child phenomenon.Decidedly, he said, he disliked Willie - one of these large oppressive men....

A silence fell, and it was as if Renouard were not going to say anything more when, suddenly, he came out with the real object of his visit to the editorial room.

"They looked to me like people under a spell."The Editor gazed at him appreciatively, thinking that, whether the effect of solitude or not, this was a proof of a sensitive perception of the expression of faces.

"You omitted to tell me their name, but I can make a guess.You mean Professor Moorsom, his daughter and sister - don't you?"Renouard assented.Yes, a white-haired lady.But from his silence, with his eyes fixed, yet avoiding his friend, it was easy to guess that it was not in the white-haired lady that he was interested.

"Upon my word," he said, recovering his usual bearing."It looks to me as if I had been asked there only for the daughter to talk to me."He did not conceal that he had been greatly struck by her appearance.Nobody could have helped being impressed.She was different from everybody else in that house, and it was not only the effect of her London clothes.He did not take her down to dinner.Willie did that.It was afterwards, on the terrace....

The evening was delightfully calm.He was sitting apart and alone, and wishing himself somewhere else - on board the schooner for choice, with the dinner-harness off.He hadn't exchanged forty words altogether during the evening with the other guests.He saw her suddenly all by herself coming towards him along the dimly lighted terrace, quite from a distance.

She was tall and supple, carrying nobly on her straight body a head of a character which to him appeared peculiar, something - well -pagan, crowned with a great wealth of hair.He had been about to rise, but her decided approach caused him to remain on the seat.