“So he took the clock off home with him to fix up, and the poor woman was overcome with gratitude. And, by and by, he sent it back, saying it was all right. A few days after, he called on the poor woman again, and said, in that high and mighty tone a lot of parsons have, ‘Well, my good woman, how does your clock go now?’ And the poor creature said, trembling, ‘Thank you, sir, it’s only too kind of you, sir, and it goes very well indeed, sir. There’s only just one little thing, sir—since you was so good as to mend it, it oos before it cucks!’ Mark, don’t you ever oo before you cuck. Lots of people do, and it’s a mighty bad habit to get into.”
“Certainly, I will remember, and I will not dance the dance of Marguerite and the jewels, or indeed any dance at all. You have much wisdom, Flint,” said the Marquis, quite gravely. “I am afraid it shall be a good while that we have to wait and do nothing. Truly, hope deferred makes a long turning.”
It certainly seemed a long time, though it was only a week, before I thought the nights were dark enough to carry out our plan. In the blazing moonlight of New Guinea some wandering native would without doubt have seen us crossing the straits to the cemetery island, even if no white man spied us. The moonless nights were our only chance. But it was irksome to wait, and wonder and speculate whether any one, by any possible chance, knew as much as we knew ourselves.
Well, the moonless nights came round, and the evening I had fixed upon arrived. It was Saturday, when I reckoned that the greater part of Samarai would be drunk and not in a condition to notice any one’s movements very closely. I had not adopted a disguise, which the Marquis was very anxious for me to do. I explained to him that one might as well hope to disguise the keeper of an elephant successfully—the elephant would be bound to give him away. And the elephant itself, I added, couldn’t be made to look like anything but an elephant.
The conclusion was obvious. We did not disguise.
With two spades and a pick in the bottom of a good, double-outrigged canoe, we set out quietly from the beach in the starlit dusk, not too early and not too late. There was not the least difficulty about it, which fact I am sure disappointed the Marquis terribly. I think he would have liked to black his face and wear a conspirator’s cloak, and wriggle on his stomach from the hotel to the beach, and have half-a-dozen Greeks and Malays chase him with revolvers.
But, as a matter of fact, nobody saw us, and we got away without so much as a splash.
It was a glorious night: we floated in a hollow globe of stars—stars above, stars below, some flashing like the great diamond we had gone out to find, some glowing like little moons and casting long spears of light into the sea. We had a mile or two to go to the cemetery island; I paddled all the way, and the Marquis, crouched rather uncomfortably on the rough perch that does duty for a seat in native canoes, sang softly to himself in I do not know how many languages. The more his emotions were stirred, the more polyglot he became, as a rule. He seemed to be a perfect Tower of Babel that night.
We grounded on a white sand beach that shone faintly in the starlight, and made our way up to the cemetery, along a dank, overgrown track, with the weird nightbirds of New Guinea chipping and sawing, and clanking bells, and cracking whips, in the bush alongside. The intoxicating scent of the tropical forest came sweet and strong in our faces, on the fresh night-breeze—the smell that “makes your heart-strings crack,” when you encounter it unexpectedly in some warm, scented hothouse, far away from the burning equatorial lands.
I do not think either of us thought more than we could help of the horrible task we had come to do. I, for one, rigidly kept my mind away from it, and thought only of the stone.... How many carats was it?—I wondered. We were all familiar with the photographs of the great Cullinan in the rough, just then. I judged the Sorcerer’s Stone, compared with that, to be small, but large compared with any other in the world. Say, three hundred in the rough.... What would it cut to? How much would it be worth? How many tens of thousands? And who would buy such a costly gem?