Next day he did not come to the shop, nor the next. He had told Marianne the name of his ship because in a small port like Noumea to have told a lie might have meant being found out; but he had also told her that it would not leave for some months as it would have to wait for repairs. In the meantime money for which he had cabled to England would arrive and they could get married and the ship get another second mate. So sure was Marianne in her faith that it was not till the third day of his absence that she made inquiries and found the Hawk gone. Mother Rimbaut sent down among the people of the quayside and obtained details. Carstairs had sailed with the Hawk; no accident had happened to him; he was not sick; he had left no debts behind him and no enemies.
Marianne found herself face to face with an utterly inexplicable problem. Why had this man left her suddenly and without a word of good-by?
Cerise was facing the same problem but in her case she could say nothing and open her mind to no one, not even Mother Rimbaut—who yet knew everything.
Then Marianne remembered what he had said about the ship being under repair, and making inquiries through the old woman she discovered that the Hawk had never been in dock, that there had been nothing wrong with her, and that Carstairs was a liar.
The revelation was complete and sudden as the unveiling of a statue, the unmasking of a battery, the view of a landscape by a lightning flash; but it did not tell her why this man had fooled her, simply because she could not yet understand the man.
She was innocent enough to ask herself, “Why did he say he loved me, why did he ask me to marry him, and why, all that time, was he telling me lies?” She could not understand that all that time he was making plans to betray her, plans foiled by her own common sense in refusing his offers of amusement, evenings in the public square, walks beneath the palm trees and remaining firm behind her counter in the commonplace atmosphere of the tobacco shop.
So things went on for two months or more, her anger against Carstairs deepening and spreading like fire in tinder. Then one day came a new revelation.
One day returning from the market she found Cerise gone.
She had left behind her a letter confessing everything. Her love for Carstairs, the fact that he had betrayed her, and the fact that she had betrayed Marianne—by making an appointment with him to meet him on the road of the palms that fatal evening before he left. Marianne remembered how late it was that night before Cerise returned, saying she had been with friends; and she had believed the story because Cerise never lied.