"You don't know, you don't understand," she began; "if you did you would behave differently. Mr. Crafer has come----" But Reginald was speaking also.
"Mr. Joseph Alderly," he said, "this is the first night I have ever stayed in your house as late as this. I should not be here now were it not for the storm. However, I will trespass upon your hospitality no longer. Miss Alderly, I wish you 'Good-night.'" He touched her hand as he spoke--not knowing what her glance meant to convey, yet feeling sure that there must be much she would have said to him if she had had but the opportunity--and then he turned on his heel, passed through the jalousie, and so out on to the verandah.
The storm was ceasing as he went forth, the clouds were rolling away to the south; around him there were the odours of all the tropical flowers, their perfume increased threefold by the rain. He knew the path so well now from having traversed it many times backwards and forwards from the Pompeia, that it took him very little time even in the dark to reach the bank of the river, to unmoor the dinghy, and to get on board the craft. Then, lighting his pipe, he sat himself down in his little cabin to meditate on what this fresh incident--the arrival of Joseph Alderly--might mean.
"I should know better what to think," he mused, "if I only knew how long he had been behind the blind. The brute may have been there for sufficient time to have heard all the last instructions of old Nicholas about finding the treasure which I read out. Or he may have heard only enough to give him an inkling that I know where the treasure is. Let me see," and he put his hand in his pocket and drew forth his forerunner's narrative.
"Yes," he muttered, as he turned over the leaves, "yes, I had got far enough--having reached the rescue of Nicholas by the Virgin Prize--for him to have heard all if he was there. If he was there; that's it. Only--was he? or did he come later when there was nothing more to be overheard than the description of Nicholas leaving the island?"
Again he pondered, turning the arrival of Alderly over in his mind, and then he remembered how the jalousies had rattled at a time when the wind had lulled, though he had taken little heed of the fact beyond glancing up from the papers. Yet, as he racked his mind to recall what they had been saying, or he reading, at the moment, he remembered the words he had uttered--
"There is nothing to tell you now but the burying of the treasure in the spot where it lies and where we will dig it up."
These had been his words, or very similar ones. If Alderly had been there then--if he had arrived on the verandah by the time they were uttered--he knew all. He had heard the middle Key mentioned, he had heard how the measurements were to be taken, he knew as much as Reginald and Barbara knew. But--had he been there? was it his hand that shook the blind, or was it some light gust of air, a last breath of the storm? That was the question.
Still, independent of this--indeed, far beyond the thought of the treasure, which he had definitely decided he would take no portion of, since it was not, could not be, his by any right--his mind was troubled. Troubled about Barbara and her being alone with the savage creature who was her brother--"Heavens!" he thought, "that they should be the same flesh and blood!"--troubled to think of what form his brutality might take towards her if he suspected that she knew where all the long-sought wealth was hidden away.
"But," he said to himself, as he still sat on smoking, "no harm shall come to her if I can prevent it--if I can! nay, as I will. He may order me out of these moorings since the whole island is his--well, let him. If he does, I will find out Nicholas's cove and anchor myself there--or, better still, I will go and lie off the middle Key. And, by the powers! if he does know that the treasure is there and begins to dig for it, not a penny, not a brass farthing shall he take away without my being by to see that he shares fair and fair alike with his sister. He seems capable, from what I have seen of him and she has told me, of taking the whole lot off to Aspinwall or Porto Rico and losing it in one of his loathsome gambling dens, while he leaves her here alone!"