He spread the chart out on the table, and weighted it down with a couple of tumblers.
Vaiti, her mind charged full with watchful suspicion, felt that sudden small, sick thrill that is the forerunner of the thought—"I wish I hadn't!" Afterwards, when she came to think matters over, she knew that it was because Donahue had made the mistake of bringing out the chart before the terms had been discussed, which was an improbable sort of thing to do. In such moments, however, one does not think, one only feels. Still, the warning was unmistakable, and Vaiti made as if to rise, intending to plead sudden illness and get out on deck. But Donahue, sharp as a snake, saw the movement, and brought out his trump card at once.
"Sure, I'm a —— fool, I am, to forget the necklashe! You haven't seen that yet," he said, whipping a stream of white fire out of his pocket and letting it fall across the dark wood of the table. It was a magnificent piece of paste-work, and had taken in Donahue himself, some few weeks ago, after a fashion that made him sore enough to remember. Vaiti gasped when she saw it, and laid both her pretty olive hands upon it at once. Her suspicions were not exactly killed, but they had for the moment no room to live with the passionate feeling aroused by the gems. Donahue, with his unspeakable experience of the sex, had calculated rightly when he classified her among the women who would almost do murder for a diamond.... Such jewels! and she had never had one in her hand before, though her eyes had often filled and her heart ached with hopeless desire before the maddening glories of the jewellers' windows in Auckland and Sydney.
She hugged the necklace to her breast like a baby, she shook it, she danced it in the light.... And then, was it in woman's nature to refrain from snapping the clasp about her neck, and feeling the dear touch of those cold drops and pendants on her bosom?
"Ah, now, but you're the beauty wit' them little jokers round your neck! And the lovely neck you have, darlin'!" blarneyed Donahue. He had better have been silent, for Vaiti, used to admiration of every kind and degree as to daily bread, felt the falseness of the tone. If all other men admired her beauty, this one did not, though he said so. His grey, goat-like eyes looked something more like hate across the narrow table, under the ill-smelling oily lamp, and Vaiti saw they did.
Donahue, taught by twenty years of active villainy, was quick to feel the necessity for the next move. He went into his own cabin and turned up the lamp. The looking-glass shone out brightly under its rays.
"Come and look at yourself, me beauty," he said; "and let me ould shavin'-glass see the handsomest girl in the islands wearin' what she ought to wear every day of her life, if she'd her rights."
For the moment, Vaiti was not herself. She was drunk with the jewels; she was crazed with the desire to see herself in them. If heaven and hell had stood between her and the looking-glass, she was bound to go to it, and Donahue knew it, as surely as he knew that the moon would set that night.
Vaiti—still sensing the danger that she would not heed, through all the intoxication of the jewels—thought, in a cinematographic flash, that one was safe before a glass, at all events.... No one could come up behind you.... Besides, there was the little revolver, hanging on the chain that would snap with a tug....
And then, for the space of a full minute, she saw nothing, knew nothing, lived for nothing but the sight of her own dark, beautiful face in the glass, lit up into surpassing loveliness by the scintillating fires about her neck. There was no movement in the mirror behind her. Donahue sat motionless at the table, and the cabin was very still.