"Never mind," said Julian, "better luck next time. You wait till I do come down and we'll have a regular chorus. When I give you some of my wardroom songs, you'll be surprised."
"Right," said Sebastian, with a laugh; "the sooner the better," whereon he took himself off.
"I didn't hear the silvery tones of Madame Carmaux, all the same," Julian thought to himself after the other was gone, "neither do I remember that I heard her return his 'good-night.' However, Sebastian's own tones are somewhat stentorian when he lets himself go, or as our Irish doctor used to say of the bo'sun's, 'enough to split a pitcher,' so I suppose that isn't very strange."
He took down his jacket now, and indeed the whole of his white drill suit which he had discarded for an exactly similar one that he had in his large Gladstone bag, and began to roll it up preparatory to packing it away. Though, as he did so, he again perceived the horrible fœtid odour which it had emitted overnight--the same odour that had also been so perceptible when he had laid his head upon the pillow. The revolting smell that had driven him from the bed to seek repose on that sofa.
"Faugh!" he exclaimed, "it is loathsome. Even now, with the room full of the fresh morning air, I feel as if I were getting giddy and bemused again." Whereon, and while uttering some remarks that were by no means complimentary to Honduras and some of its perfumes, he began rolling the clothes up as quickly as he could. Yet while he did so, being now engaged with the jacket, his eye was attracted by the lapel of the collar, the white surface of which was discoloured--though only in the faintest degree discoloured--a yellowish, grey colour. Each lapel, down to where the topmost button was! Then, after a close inspection of the jacket all over, he perceived that nowhere else was it similarly stained.
His curiosity becoming excited by this, since in no way could he account for such a thing (he distinctly remembered that there had been no stain, however faint, on the lapel before), he regarded the waistcoat next; and there, on the small lapel of that--both left and right--were the same marks.
"Strange," he muttered, "strange. Very strange. One might say that the washerwoman had spilt something on coat and waistcoat--purposely. Something, too, that smells uncommonly nasty."
For, by inspection, or rather test with his nostrils, he was easily able to perceive that no other part of his discarded clothing emitted any such disagreeable odour. While, too, as he applied his nose again and again to the faint stains, he also perceived that in his brain there came once more the giddiness and haziness from which he had suffered so much last night--as well as the feeling of stupid density amounting almost to dreaminess or delirium.
"If that stuff was under my nose all day long yesterday, and perhaps for a week or so before," he reflected, "I don't wonder that at last I became almost wandering in my mind, as well as stupefied." Then, a thought striking him, he went over to the pillow on the bed and gazed down on it. And there, upon it, on either side, was the same stain--faint, yellow, and emitting the same acrid, loathsome odour.
"So, so," he said to himself, "I begin to understand. I begin to understand very well, and to comprehend Sebastian's chemical experiments. The woman who washed my jacket and waistcoat in England is not the same woman who washed that pillow-case in British Honduras. Yet the same stain and the same odour are on both. All right! A good deal may happen in the next four days."