“Flint,” he said, beating his pink, soapy hands up and down in the air, “I can not tell you. I can not tell you. My God, what have I done!”
He sat down on the floor (we had no chair) right in the middle of the deluge of water and began to cry.
“I have betrayed and ruined you, my friend,” he said. “I would like to die, here where I am; what is the use that I should live? I say that I can not tell you what I have done.” He wept again.
“Oh, get out of that water and sit on the bed,” I said. “You don’t need to tell me; all I want to know is, how it happened and what Mrs. Vandaleur has to do with it.” I was feeling pretty bad about the affair—for I saw in a moment that he had lost the diamond—but there is never any use, to my mind, in making a fuss.
The Marquis jumped up and tore open his shirt with the air of a man who was opening his very heart for your inspection. Round his neck was hanging a string and on the string was a small silk bag—empty.
“Not one confoundable thing has that angel had to do with it,” he said. “It is altogether me. I took it out of the chamois case this morning, because when I play tennis that chamois sticks and comes to go out of the front of my shirt. But the silk, it slips and does not come out. So I take away the chamois and I play tennis all the afternoon. And in the end, when it is time to go and they have all gone, all but Mrs. Daisee and me, I feel my hand into my shirt and there is nothing there! I tear out the bag and it is splitted——”
“Don’t you know that no silk will stand in the tropics? It was only a protection for the stone. You might as well trust tissue-paper as silk, in New Guinea,” I said wearily.
“I did not know, I swear. Well, when I see it is gone, I tell Daisee that I have lost a something I have the greatest value for, a gem—I do not say a diamond. And she call many native boys. And they look, look, look, till it get dark. And I will swear, if it were that I was dying, we look every inch. But there is no stone.”
“I reckon Mrs. Daisie could tell you——” I began.
“Halt!” cried the Marquis. “Daisee is as innocent as the lamb unborn. When we see the stone is lost, she will not look herself. She sit on the seat and watch. She weep for me, that little one, she is most blooming sorry. But she will not be suspect; she won’t touch that searching herself. She can not understand and I can not understand. It was all razed clean, that ground; there was no gulfs anywhere, and the weeds was not. I should have been finding all right. But, my God, it is not!”