“The bos’un sent it up early this morning, sir,” he explained. “It was in one of the lower boats, swung out from the main deck—gone right through the canvas but there isn’t a scratch on it.”
Gregory drew on his dressing gown and staggered out on to the deck. He walked up and down for an hour and a half, fighting a distinct and definite battle, and with every step he took it seemed to him that he became saner. His waking idea took shape, gave him encouragement and life. With his craving for what it might have to give abandoned, the power of the Image, too, for evil, must decline. He wanted those jewels no longer. He was ready to face life and all its possibilities from a new standard. He went down to his bath, visited the barber, and dressed before any of the passengers were astir. Then he made his way into the writing room and drew paper and ink towards him. He wrote fluently, and without hesitation. All that he wished to say seemed so clear:
These few lines, dear, bring my prayer to you for pardon. The doctor talks of nerves. Well, I never suffered from them, and I would as soon believe in the supernatural. I believe that there is evil in my treasure. Last night, in a fit of self-disgust, I tried to throw it overboard, but it was caught by one of the canvas-covered boats on the lower deck and when I awoke this morning it was back in its accustomed place. If your answer to this note is what I pray for, it will be overboard before we meet, and overboard in such a place that it will sink to the bottom of the sea.
Will you marry me, Claire, as soon as we reach England, and my father and your uncle can meet and give their consent? I don’t pretend that I am a particularly desirable person, but I am, at any rate, not too bad to realise that you are the dearest and sweetest thing I have ever met, or to fail in keeping my word when I promise that you shall never regret it if you say “yes.” I haven’t a great deal to offer you, beyond my love, but that I offer to you, not in the spirit of last night in the shadow of that accursed Image, but earnestly, and faithfully, and eternally.
Please send me just a line. The black Buddha waits to know his fate, and I mine.
Gregory.
Perkins took the note, and after his departure Gregory climbed to the upper deck and stood there leaning over the rail, forgetting even to smoke, watching the sun mount a little higher and spread its gleams a little farther across the ocean, watching the blue haze of coming heat blot out the clearness of the horizon, waiting with an eagerness utterly unfamiliar, with a sense of having suddenly changed personalities with some simpler and stronger being. At last the head and shoulders of Perkins appeared, coming up the ladder.
“Your breakfast is in your room, sir,” he announced, as he handed over the note he was carrying.
Gregory made no reply. He was looking at the handwriting upon the envelope; rather faint and delicate, not too legible. For a moment or two he turned the note over. He absolutely feared to open it. A wave of pessimism had seized him. Then he suddenly tore the envelope across and read:
Dear Mr. Ballaston,