‘It is all the purest conjecture,’ shrugged the Governor.
I looked him in the face, and I think my eyes told him pretty plainly my views of the meaning of the note. He answered my glance at first with a carefully inexpressive gaze; but presently a meaning came into his eyes. He seemed to confess to me and to challenge me to make what use I could of the confession. But the next instant the momentary candour of his regard passed, and blankness spread over his face again.
Desperately I struggled with myself, clinging to self-control. To this day I believe that, had my life and my life only been in question, I should then and there have compelled Mouraki to fight me, man to man, in the little gloomy room where the dead woman lay on the sofa. We should not have disturbed her; and I think also that Mouraki, who did not want for courage, would have caught at my challenge and cried content to a proposal that we should, there and then, put our quarrel to an issue, and that one only of us should go alive down the hill. I read such a mood in his eyes in the moment of their candour. I saw the courage to act on it in his resolute lips and his tense still attitude.
Well, we could neither of us afford the luxury. If I killed him, I should bring grave suspicion on Phroso. She and her islanders would be held accomplices; and, though this was a secondary matter to hot rage, I myself should stand in a position of great danger. And he could not kill me; for all his schemes against me were still controlled and limited by the necessities of his position. Had I been an islander, or even an unknown man concerning whom no questions would be asked, his work would have been simple, and, as I believed, would have been carried out before now. But it was not so. He would be held responsible for a satisfactory account of how I met my death. It would tax his invention to give it if he killed me himself, with his own hand, and in a secret encounter. In fact, the finding of the note left us where we were, so far as action was concerned, but it tore away the last shreds of the veil, the last pretences of good faith and friendliness which had been kept up between us. In that swift, full, open glance which we had exchanged, our undisguised quarrel, the great issue between us, was legibly written and plainly read. Yet not a word passed our lips concerning it. Mouraki and I began to need words no more than lovers do. For hate matches love in penetration.
I put the note in my pocket. Mouraki blinked eyes now utterly free from expression. I gave a final glance at the dead woman. I felt a touch of shame at having for a moment forgotten her fate for my quarrel.
‘Shall we go down, Pasha?’ said I.
‘As soon as you please, Lord Wheatley,’ he answered. This formal mode of address was perhaps an acknowledgment that the time for hypocrisy and the hollow show of friendship between us was over. The change was just in his way, slight, subtle, but sufficient.
I followed Mouraki out of the house. He walked in his usual slow deliberate manner. He beckoned to the sentry as we passed him, told him that two women, who would shortly come up, were to be admitted, but nobody else, until an officer came bearing further orders. Having made these arrangements, he resumed his way down, taking his place in front of me and maintaining absolute silence. I did not care to talk. I had enough to think about. But already, now I was out in the fresh air, the feeling of sick horror with which the little room had affected me began to pass away. I felt braced up again. I was better prepared for the great effort which loomed before me now as a present and urgent necessity. Mouraki had found an instrument. He had set Constantine free, that Constantine might do against me what Mouraki himself could not do openly. My friends were away. The hour of the stroke must even now be upon me. Well, the hour of my counter-stroke was come also, the counter-stroke for which my interview with Phroso and Mouraki’s absence opened the way. For he thought the passage no more than a mediæval curiosity.
We reached the house and entered the hall together. As we passed through the compound I had seen an alert sentinel. Looking out from the front door, I perceived two men on guard. A party of ten or a dozen more was drawn up, an officer at its head; these were the men who waited to attend Mouraki on his evening expedition. The Pasha seated himself and wrote a note. He looked up as he finished it, saying:
‘I am informing the Lady Euphrosyne that you will await her here in half-an-hour’s time, and that she is at liberty to spend what time she pleases with you. Is that what you wish?’