Then he felt, on a sudden, physically ill.
The hideous demon of the picture had, then, entered into his life, he could not doubt that the skeleton was that of Serpente and that the money in the belt was that of Serpente.
And he had warred with Yves over that money and he had killed Yves. For a moment he saw Evil in all its horror and the tenacious clutch which Evil has upon life. To look at this hideous monkey-man was bad enough, but to feel that you were his inheritor, and that, quarrelling over this inheritance, you had killed your friend, was beyond words shocking.
It is so seldom that God gives us an objective view of evil, that the sight when it comes is prodigious and soul-shaking.
Gaspard looked at the picture of the man whose money had soiled his hands. This man, dead long years ago, Anisette, living, but thousands of miles away, these two were of the same brand, belonged to the company of evil, they could touch nothing without tainting it and betraying it to evil, just as they had tainted Gaspard and betrayed him into the hands of Sagesse.
Controlling his emotion, he turned again to the table from which Sagesse was now rising to go.
Monsieur Jaques accompanied them through the storehouse, bade them good-bye, and next moment they were in the brilliant sunshine of the Place Bertine, Sagesse leading the way to the water’s edge.
“I am going on board to see how things are getting on,” said he, “you had better come with me and help. We can have something to eat aboard and you will want to overhaul your cabin—Hi there, bring your boat along here!”
He called to a longshoreman—a negro, black, and fantastic as a golliwog—who was paddling his boat along the shore edge, the man brought the boat up as directed and they stepped in.
The morning had become utterly windless, and the sea like a mirror. Away out towards Dominica, a becalmed, inter-island schooner lay helpless, the snow-white sails casting a mile-long reflection on the water, the three-master which had been getting her anchor up had scarcely filled her sails when the calm fell, striking the life out of her. St. Pierre, coloured houses and motionless palms, stood fronting the blue, and passionately burning sea. It was the scenery of a most vivid dream, such infinities of colour and light and silence cast on the mind the unreality of mirage. The very sounds from the city and the shipping in the bay were dream sounds, voices of visionary sailors, murmurs from lotus-land.