“Flint, my very good friend,” he said, twisting both ends of his mustache at once, “that which I chiefly regret in the affair is that it shall now be so many weeks that we shall see no white woman. And look, on the Norddeutscher Lloyd, we should in three or four days have been sitting on the feet of many beautiful ladies, and they should have said politenesses—what do you say?—smooged us greatly, because of the horrors we have encountered. I regret to lose that. Also, I begin to feel that this sacred pig of a diamond has made us enough adventure already.”
“You don’t suppose it was the Sorcerer’s Stone sunk the Waiwera?” I said.
“I don’t know, but I think it’s confoundedly likely,” said the Marquis, putting up his hand to the string that ran round his fat neck. “She brought us adventure, yes, adventure, that diamond, and she brings us more. And Flint, my friend, there comes the time, after all, when the rolling stone maketh the heart sick. Don’t you think it?”
“I reckon this isn’t just the time to think it, if I do,” I said. “We may get through this, and we mayn’t, Marky.”
“Is it so bad as that?”
“Just so bad,” I said.
The Marquis looked out at the sea, lying blue and calm above our late companions’ grave. He then produced a large, white silk handkerchief embroidered with a coronet at the corner, spread it between his two hands and deliberately began to shed tears.
I was long past being astonished at anything that he might do. I watched him, reasonably certain that my statement of our difficulties had nothing to do with his emotion. He cried quite simply and unaffectedly for a minute or two. Then he stopped, wiped his eyes and face with the handkerchief and said:
“I have wept them who died. I am finished. Lead on.” Adding as an afterthought: “It is a magnificent embroidery on that handkerchief. It was made for me by a little beautiful who loved me. Shall I tell you of her?”
“I’d be delighted, another time,” I answered. “Just now, we have to think of how we’re ever going to get back again to the ‘beautifuls’ who love us both. Marky, you and I have got to get up and travel right now. Do you see those mountains up there?”