They went on climbing steadily without exchanging another word; and when they stood on the top she gazed a long time before her.The low evening mist veiled the further limit of the reefs.Above the enormous and melancholy confusion, as of a fleet of wrecked islands, the restless myriads of sea-birds rolled and unrolled dark ribbons on the sky, gathered in clouds, soared and stooped like a play of shadows, for they were too far for them to hear their cries.
Renouard broke the silence in low tones.
"They'll be settling for the night presently." She made no sound.
Round them all was peace and declining sunshine.Near by, the topmost pinnacle of Malata, resembling the top of a buried tower, rose a rock, weather-worn, grey, weary of watching the monotonous centuries of the Pacific.Renouard leaned his shoulders against it.Felicia Moorsom faced him suddenly, her splendid black eyes full on his face as though she had made up her mind at last to destroy his wits once and for all.Dazzled, he lowered his eyelids slowly.
"Mr.Renouard! There is something strange in all this.Tell me where he is?"He answered deliberately.
"On the other side of this rock.I buried him there myself."She pressed her hands to her breast, struggled for her breath for a moment, then: "Ohhh!...You buried him!...What sort of man are you?...You dared not tell!...He is another of your victims?...You dared not confess that evening....You must have killed him.What could he have done to you?...You fastened on him some atrocious quarrel and..."Her vengeful aspect, her poignant cries left him as unmoved as the weary rock against which he leaned.He only raised his eyelids to look at her and lowered them slowly.Nothing more.It silenced her.And as if ashamed she made a gesture with her hand, putting away from her that thought.He spoke, quietly ironic at first.
"Ha! the legendary Renouard of sensitive idiots - the ruthless adventurer - the ogre with a future.That was a parrot cry, Miss Moorsom.I don't think that the greatest fool of them all ever dared hint such a stupid thing of me that I killed men for nothing.
No, I had noticed this man in a hotel.He had come from up country I was told, and was doing nothing.I saw him sitting there lonely in a corner like a sick crow, and I went over one evening to talk to him.Just on impulse.He wasn't impressive.He was pitiful.
My worst enemy could have told you he wasn't good enough to be one of Renouard's victims.It didn't take me long to judge that he was drugging himself.Not drinking.Drugs.""Ah! It's now that you are trying to murder him," she cried.
"Really.Always the Renouard of shopkeepers' legend.Listen! Iwould never have been jealous of him.And yet I am jealous of the air you breathe, of the soil you tread on, of the world that sees you - moving free - not mine.But never mind.I rather liked him.
For a certain reason I proposed he should come to be my assistant here.He said he believed this would save him.It did not save him from death.It came to him as it were from nothing - just a fall.A mere slip and tumble of ten feet into a ravine.But it seems he had been hurt before up-country - by a horse.He ailed and ailed.No, he was not a steel-tipped man.And his poor soul seemed to have been damaged too.It gave way very soon.""This is tragic!" Felicia Moorsom whispered with feeling.
Renouard's lips twitched, but his level voice continued mercilessly.
"That's the story.He rallied a little one night and said he wanted to tell me something.I, being a gentleman, he said, he could confide in me.I told him that he was mistaken.That there was a good deal of a plebeian in me, that he couldn't know.He seemed disappointed.He muttered something about his innocence and something that sounded like a curse on some woman, then turned to the wall and - just grew cold.""On a woman," cried Miss Moorsom indignantly."What woman?""I wonder!" said Renouard, raising his eyes and noting the crimson of her ear-lobes against the live whiteness of her complexion, the sombre, as if secret, night-splendour of her eyes under the writhing flames of her hair."Some woman who wouldn't believe in that poor innocence of his...Yes.You probably.And now you will not believe in me - not even in me who must in truth be what Iam - even to death.No! You won't.And yet, Felicia, a woman like you and a man like me do not often come together on this earth."The flame of her glorious head scorched his face.He flung his hat far away, and his suddenly lowered eyelids brought out startlingly his resemblance to antique bronze, the profile of Pallas, still, austere, bowed a little in the shadow of the rock."Oh! If you could only understand the truth that is in me!" he added.
She waited, as if too astounded to speak, till he looked up again, and then with unnatural force as if defending herself from some unspoken aspersion, "It's I who stand for truth here! Believe in you! In you, who by a heartless falsehood - and nothing else, nothing else, do you hear? - have brought me here, deceived, cheated, as in some abominable farce!" She sat down on a boulder, rested her chin in her hands, in the pose of simple grief -mourning for herself.
"It only wanted this.Why! Oh! Why is it that ugliness, ridicule, and baseness must fall across my path."On that height, alone with the sky, they spoke to each other as if the earth had fallen away from under their feet.
