And the evening and the morning were the first day.
IX
THE BULLY
That remark of Edith Van Tromp's, to the effect that the illusions would all be swept away, had its confirmation before we had tholed through the first week of our island captivity. Little by little the masks slipped aside, and some of the revealments of the true character hiding behind them—some of the revelations, but not all—were grimly illuminating.
Before the week's end I saw the major slyly slip the last box of the precious cigars under his coat when he thought no one was looking and go off to hide it in a shallow hole scooped in the dry sand of the beach edge at a safe distance from the camp. Later, I came upon him as he was burying a couple of bottles of the diminishing supply of liquor in the same place—and he lied to me and said he was digging for shell-fish.
Two or three days earlier than this, Holly Barclay had taken to his hammock bed in a fit of purely imaginary illness, exacting constant attendance and pampering in which he made a toiling slave of his pretty daughter. When the pampering began and continued with no sign of abatement in the querulous demands Barclay was making upon Madeleine, Van Dyck grew gloomy and snappish, and I knew that the day was only postponing itself when Bonteck would flame out at the sham invalid and tell him exactly and precisely what a selfish malingerer he was.
Still lower in the unmasking scale came Ingerson—the real Ingerson—who had lapsed into a sullen barbarian; unshaven, unbathed, and with the coarse warp and woof of him showing at every threadbare seam. What time he had free access to the liquor, he drank himself ugly at least once in every twenty-four hours; and when Mrs. Van Tromp finally shamed him out of his daylight attacks upon the liquor chest, he took to raiding it after the camp was asleep, keeping this up until one night when he found that the remainder of the bottled stuff had disappeared. After this he became a morose threat to everybody, and even Mrs. Van Tromp ignored his millions and turned a cold shoulder upon him.
Three nights after his unsuccessful effort to turn up another bottle of whiskey in the stores, the drink maniac tried it again, and this time Van Dyck awoke and caught him at it.
"Looking for something you haven't lost, Ingerson?" he said, speaking quietly to keep from disturbing the others.