"I almost understand," Julian muttered hoarsely--though he knew not why. "And others. Is that--? ah! yes--I do understand. Yet tell me further, tell----"
But she was gone; the window frame was empty of the dark shadowy figure it had enshrouded. Gone, as he saw when he stepped out on to the balcony and observed a sombre form stealing along betwixt the bright gleams of the low-lying stars and himself.
"Why does she warn me thus," he muttered to himself as now he began to undress slowly, "why? She is that man's servant--almost, as servants go here, his slave. Why warn me--she whom I deemed his creature--she who does his dirty work as croupier at a gambling hell? And she gloated over Carmaux's death in days of long ago--why that also? Does she hate this woman who governs here as mistress of the house?"
With some degree of horror on him now, with some sort of mystic terror creeping over him at unknown and spectrelike dangers that might be surrounding his existence, he turned down the light serape stretched over the bed for coverlet, and threw back the upper sheet Then he started away with a hoarse exclamation at what he saw.
For, lying coiled up in the middle of the bed, yet with a hideous flat head raised and vibrating, while from out that head gleamed a pair of threatening and scintillating emerald eyes, was a small, red coral-coloured snake--a snake that next unwound itself slowly with horribly lithe and sinuous movements which caused Julian to turn cold, warm as the night was.
"So," he whispered to himself, as now he seized a rifle that he had brought out from England with him, and, after beating the reptile on to the floor, used the stock as a bat and sent the thing flying out of the window; "this is what she was looking for, what she expected to find. But where are the others? The other snakes she hinted at? I think I can guess."
[CHAPTER XV.]
RECOLLECTIONS OF SEBASTIAN'S BIRTH
It is forty miles inland to where the Cockscomb mountains rear their appropriately named crests, but not half that distance to where obliquely from north to south there run spurs and ridges which, though they do not rise to the four thousand feet that is attained by the highest peak or summit of the range, are still lofty mountains. Here, amidst these spurs and ridges, which dominate and break up what is otherwise a country, or lowland, almost as flat as Holland (and which until a few years ago was marked on the maps as "unexplored country"), Nature presents a different aspect from elsewhere in the colony. The country becomes wild and rugged; the copses of mangroves are superseded by woods and forests of prickly bamboos and umbrageous figs; vast clumps of palms of all denominations cluster together, forming in their turn other little woods, while rivers, whose sources are drawn from the great lagoons inland, roll swiftly towards the sea.
Here, upon the bank of one of those lagoons, Julian sat next day beneath the shadow of a clump of locust-trees, in which were intermingled other trees of salm-wood, braziletto, and turtle-bone, as well as many others almost unknown of and unheard of by Europeans, with at his feet a fowling-piece, while held across his knees was a safety repeating rifle. This was the rifle with which he had overnight beaten out on to the veranda (where this morning he had left it dead and crushed) the coral snake, and which he had provided himself with ere he left England in case opportunities for sport should arise. The gun, an old-fashioned thing lent him by Sebastian, he had not used against any of the feathered inhabitants of the woods, although many opportunities had arisen of shooting partridges, wild pigeons, whistling ducks, quails, and others. Had not used it because, remembering one or two other incidents, such as that of the horse and that of the coral-snake (which might have crept into his bed for extra warmth, as such reptiles will do even in the hottest climates, but on the other hand might have reached that spot by different means), and because since also he was now full of undefined suspicion, he thought it very likely that if used it would burst in his hands.