Was she married? Maybe. Was she single? Who could tell? But well he knew that, whether she were married or single, she was his. Why not, if she were still as beautiful as ever, why not keep her as his—her, whom the sharks had eaten over thirty long months ago.
There are women who persist in the memory like perfumes or tunes, and the sweet perfume of Cerise breathed in one ecstatic hour had never quite vanished; the sight of the foam line of New Caledonia, the hills and the ghost-white lighthouse brought it back, revived it. It was almost as though she stood on the deck beside him; and at the cost of three thousand dollars the wheel of the schooner spun, the main boom lashed out to starboard. Altering her course, the ship steered due east for the break.
She came into the harbor with a flooding tide and a failing wind, a tremendous sunset lighting the wharves and the town from which faint on the flower- and harbor-scented air came the sound of the band playing in the public square.
Everything looked just the same, from the town and its fortifications to the trees topped by the spires of the cathedral.
But Carstairs found himself forgotten. No one would have recognized in the well dressed man wearing a Panama the mate of the Hawk, and he saw nobody that he recognized. The very hotel where he put up was new-built. Having booked his room, he left the place before dining, crossed Coconut Square and entered the Rue Austerlitz.
Ribot’s shop stood just as of old, the name over the front and the baskets swinging in the doorway.
He went in, and there behind the counter stood Marianne Ribot just as she had stood on the day when first he saw her.
“Monsieur,” said old Roche, “there is no doubt in my mind that she had been expecting him. Some instinct had told her that he would come back; maybe she had willed it—who knows?—but the fact remained that she had a cane knife on a ledge behind the counter. And as he came up to her with a bold smile on his lips and his hand outstretched, she turned as if to pick up some trifle and, turning again, drove the knife into his throat.
“When the police arrived she refused to speak, Monsieur Carstairs was taken to the hospital and she was taken to prison, where a magistrate visited her; but she would only say, ‘I have done what I have done’—nothing more.