She consented but meanwhile, as the engagement was of such a nebulous nature and until the matter was absolutely fixed, she refused his invitations to walk with him of an evening when the band was playing in the square or along those country roads when the moonlight casts the shadows of the palms and makes fairyland of the groves.
Cerise heard it all.
Never in her life before had she spied on any one, or possessed a secret unshared by Marianne; her passion for Carstairs, which had developed pari passu with the progress of Marianne’s love affair, had changed her nature as it had changed her outlook on life.
She hungered for him, and to feel his lips again on hers she would have parted with her soul.
Something of Ribot, her convict father, was perhaps awakened in her just as something of the same parent was perhaps dormant in the demure Marianne, and meanwhile Carstairs, a straight man in everything but love, in which he was a villain, saw the day of the Hawk’s sailing approach and Marianne as far off as ever.
He had no money to start a business in New Caledonia; he had no intention of marrying; he had lied throughout and all he had got for his trouble was disappointment, dalliance and the feeling that he had been cheated. For, to a man of his type, love is a game against love where any sort of bluff is permissible and woman is a counter to be played for, cashed and forgotten.
But in Marianne he had come on a woman who refused to be a counter though her passion for him was as real as the passion of Cerise. He might as well have tried to play with the statue of Joan of Arc which stands in front of Noumea’s Cathedral.
Marianne was hopeless, so he thought, till the afternoon of the day before the Hawk’s departure, when coming along the Rue Austerlitz he met an old woman who put a little note in his hand.
“Do not come to the shop today, but meet me this evening—sunset—on the road of the palms.” That was all.
Carstairs with the note in his pocket went on his way to complete his preparations and half an hour before sunset he started for the road of the palms through an evening sultry and perfumed with cassia and the flowers of the gardens by the way.