CHAPTER XIV.

"THIS LAND IS FULL OF SNAKES."

The truth was, as the reader is by now very well aware, that Julian no more believed in either Sebastian's lawful possession of Desolada or in his being the son of Charles Ritherdon, than he believed that George Ritherdon had concocted the whole of that story which he narrated ere his death. "For," said the young man to himself, "if it were true, his manner and her manner--that of the superb Madame Carmaux--would not be what they are. 'Think it out,' our old naval instructor in the Brit, used to say, 'analyze, compare, exercise the few brains Heaven has mercifully given you.' Well, I will--or, rather, I have."

And he had done so. He had thought it all over and over again--Sebastian's manner, Madame Carmaux's manner, Sebastian's slight inaccuracies of statement, Madame Carmaux's pretence of being asleep when she was awake, and her strange side-glances at him when she thought he was not observing her.

"I played _Hamlet_ once at an amateur show in the Leviathan," he mused. "It was an awful performance, and, if it had been for more than one act, I should undoubtedly have been hissed out of the ship. All the same it taught me something. What was it the poor chap said? 'I'll take the ghost's word for a thousand pounds.' Well, I'll take my uncle's word--for uncle he was and he was telling the truth--for a thousand pounds, too. Only, how to prove it? That is the question--which, by-the-bye, Hamlet also remarked."

That was indeed the question. How to prove it!

"That fellow is no more Charles Ritherdon's son than I'm a soldier," he went on, "and I _am_ the son. That I'm sure of! Everything, every fresh look on their faces, every word they say, convinces me only the more certainly. Even this shifting of the room I am to occupy: why, Lord bless me! does he think I'm a fool? Yet, all the same, I don't see how it is to be proved. Confound them! Some one played a trick on Charles Ritherdon after George had stolen me--for steal me he did--some trick or other. And she, this Madame Carmaux was in it. Only why--why--_why?_"

He clenched his hands in front of his forehead, as he recalled now Mr. Spranger's words: "It is a blank wall against which you will push in vain." Almost, indeed, he began to fear that such was the case; that never would he throw down that wall which rose an adamantine object between him and his belief. Yet, even as he did so, he recollected that he was an Englishman and a sailor; that, consequently, he must be resolved not to be beaten. Only, how was it to be accomplished; how was the defeat to be avoided?

As he arrived at this determination he heard, outside on the veranda, a sound which he had heard more than once on his first visit, and when he slept on the other side of the mansion. A sound, light, stealthy--such a one as if some soft-footed creature, a cat, perhaps, was creeping gently in the night along the balcony. Creeping nearer to his window in front of which, as had been the case before, the Venetian blind was lowered.

Then he resolved that, this time, his strange visitant should know that he had discovered the spying to which he was again to be subjected.

In a moment he feigned sleep as he sat by the table on which stood the lamp--casting out a considerable volume of light--while, as he did so, he let his outstretched hands and fingers cover the revolver.

And still the weird, soft scraping of those catlike feet came nearer; he knew that his ghost-like visitor was close to the open window. He heard also, though it was the faintest click in the world, the slat or lath turning the least little bit, he knew that now those eyes that had gleamed into the other and darkened room were gleaming in at him in this one.

Then, suddenly, he opened his own eyes as wide as he could, while with his outstretched hand he now raised the revolver and pointed it at the little dusky figure that he could see was holding the slat back, while he said in a voice, low but perfectly clear in the silence of the night:

"Don't move. Stop where you are--there--outside that blind till I come to you. If you do move I will scatter your brains on the floor of the veranda!"

And as he rose and went towards the persianas he could see that his instructions were--through fear--obeyed. The eyes, now white, horrible, almost chalky in their glare of fright, instead of being dusky as he had once seen them, stared with a hideous expression of terror into the room. Also, the brown finger which was crooked over the blind-slat trembled.

He pulled the persianas up with his left hand, still keeping his right hand extended with the revolver in it (of course only with the intention of frightening the girl into making no attempt to fly); then, when he had fastened the pulley he took her unceremoniously by the upper part of the arm and led her into the room.

"Now, Mademoiselle Zara, as I understand your name to be, kindly give me an explanation of why, whenever I am in my room in this house, you honour me with these attentions. My manly beauty can be observed at any time in the daylight much better than at night, and----"

"Don't tell him," the girl whispered, and he felt as he still held her arm that she was trembling, while, also, he saw that she was deathly pale, her usual coffee-and-milk complexion being more of the latter than the former now. "Oh, don't tell him!"

"Don't tell whom?" he asked astonished. Astonished at first, since he had deemed her an emissary of his host, sent to pry in on him for some reason best known to both of them. Then, he reflected, this was only some ruse hatched in her scheming, half-Indian brain, whereby to escape from his clutches; upon which he said:

"Now, look here. No lies. What do you come peeping and prying in on me for in the middle of the night. Perhaps you're not aware that I saw you do so the last time I was here."

"I came to see," she said inconsequently, "if you were comfortable; I am a servant----"

But now Julian laughed so loudly at this ridiculous statement that the girl in hasty terror--and if it was assumed, she must be a good actress, he thought--put up her hand as though she intended to clap it over his mouth.

"Oh!" she whispered, "don't! Don't! He will hear you--or _she_ will----"

"Well, what if they do! I suppose they know you are here just as much as I do. Come," he continued, "come, don't look so frightened, I'm not going to shoot you or harm you in any way. Though, mind you, my dark beauty, you might have got shot if you had timed your visit at a later hour and startled me out of a heavy slumber, or if I had seen those eyes looking in on me in the dead of night However, out with the explanation. Quick."

For a moment the girl paused as though thinking deeply, then she looked up at him with all the deep tropical glow once more in her sombre eyes, and said:

"I won't tell you. No. But----"

"But what?"

"I--will you believe what I say?"

"Perhaps. That depends. I might, if it sounded likely."

"Listen, then. I don't come here to do you any harm. My visits won't hurt you. Only--only--this is a dangerous house in more ways than one. It is a very old one--strange things happen sometimes in it. How," she said, and now her voice which had been sunk to a whisper became even lower, "how would you like to die in it?"

Perhaps the slow mysterious tones of that voice--the something weird and wizard in the elf-like appearance of this dusky girl who was, in truth, beautiful with that beauty often found in the half-caste Indian--was what caused Julian to feel a sort of creepiness to come over him in spite of the warm, bath-like temperature of the night.

"Neither in this house nor elsewhere, just at present," he remarked, steadying his nerves. "But," he continued, "I don't suppose there is much likelihood of that. Who is going to cause me to die?"

For answer the girl cast those marvellous orbs of hers all around the room, taking, meanwhile, as she did so, the mosquito curtains in her hands and shaking them with a swish away from the floor on which they drooped in festoons; she looking also behind the bedposts and in other places.

"No one--to-night," she said, "but--but--if I may not come here again, if you will not let me, then do this always. And--perhaps--some night you will know."

After which she moved off towards the window, her lithe, graceful figure seeming to glide without the assistance of any movement from her feet towards the open space; and made as though she meant to retire. Yet, as she stood within the framework of that window, she turned and looked back at him, her finger slightly raised as though impressing silence.

Then she stepped outside on to the boards of the veranda and peered over the front of it down towards the garden from which, now, there rose the countless perfumes exhaled by the Caribbean wealth of flowers. Also, she crept along to either side of the window, glancing to right and left of her until, at that moment, borne on the soft night breeze, there came from the front of the house, a harsh, strident, and contemptuous laugh--the laugh of Sebastian Ritherdon. When, seemingly reassured by this, she returned again towards the open window and said:

"You go to-morrow to the Cockscomb mountains shooting. Yet, when there, be careful. Danger is there, too. This land is full of snakes, the coral snake--which kills instantly, even like the _fer de lance_ of the islands, the rattlesnake, the tamagusa, or, as you English say, the 'tommy-goff.' One killed him--her husband," and she pointed down to where Madame Carmaux might be supposed to be sitting at this moment, while as she did so he saw in her eyes a look so startling--since they blazed with fire--that he stared amazed. Was she, this half-savage girl, gloating over the horrid death of a man which must have taken place ere she was born? Or--or--what?

"In all the land," she went on, "there are snakes. Those I tell you of--and--others. You understand? And others."

"I almost understand," Julian muttered hoarsely--though he knew not why. "_And others_. Is that--? ah! yes--I do understand. Yet tell me further, tell----"

But she was gone; the window frame was empty of the dark shadowy figure it had enshrouded. Gone, as he saw when he stepped out on to the balcony and observed a sombre form stealing along betwixt the bright gleams of the low-lying stars and himself.

"Why does she warn me thus," he muttered to himself as now he began to undress slowly, "why? She is that man's servant--almost, as servants go here, his slave. Why warn me--she whom I deemed his creature--she who does his dirty work as croupier at a gambling hell? And she gloated over Carmaux's death in days of long ago--why that also? Does she hate this woman who governs here as mistress of the house?"

With some degree of horror on him now, with some sort of mystic terror creeping over him at unknown and spectrelike dangers that might be surrounding his existence, he turned down the light serape stretched over the bed for coverlet, and threw back the upper sheet Then he started away with a hoarse exclamation at what he saw.

For, lying coiled up in the middle of the bed, yet with a hideous flat head raised and vibrating, while from out that head gleamed a pair of threatening and scintillating emerald eyes, was a small, red coral-coloured snake--a snake that next unwound itself slowly with horribly lithe and sinuous movements which caused Julian to turn cold, warm as the night was.

"So," he whispered to himself, as now he seized a rifle that he had brought out from England with him, and, after beating the reptile on to the floor, used the stock as a bat and sent the thing flying out of the window; "this is what she was looking for, what she expected to find. But where are the others? The other snakes she hinted at? I think I can guess."