For she, who had observed Joseph carefully all her lifetime, could read his nature as easily as a book; she knew what those tempests of fury, followed by an enforced self-subduing, meant. Above all, she knew what the sudden determination on his part to share the treasure--or the appearance of sudden determination--meant also. It meant either trickery, or violence, or murder. Most probably the latter!
His greed for money to squander on himself had always been great, even from boyhood. In those days, and before he could earn anything for himself, he would rob his father of small sums, pilfering them from his pocket when he slept, or from places where he kept his earnings; later on, if a goat or a sheep were taken by him to Tortola and sold, there would be always some dispute about the price obtained, always something missing. And when he was a man the scenes between him and his father, the fights and the ill-treatment to which old Alderly was subjected, were sufficient to make him stand forth in very distinct characters.
Therefore, she knew that he intended something now against Reginald Crafer--she felt perfectly sure that never would her brother allow the latter to become possessed of one-half of whatever buried treasure there might be. What his exact intentions were she could not, of course, make sure. It might be that he meant to watch him, until, in some way, the spot where the treasure was should be revealed, when, by some trickery, Joseph would manage to secure it all; it might be that he had resolved to do the worst and slay him. For, if he could do that, then he would become possessed of the papers which told where the treasure was, and, since he was able to read enough, she thought, to decipher even the crabbed, indistinct characters in the writing, as she had seen them to be, to thus possess himself of all. And she knew, too, that whatever Joseph did would be done by stealth and craft--the only way in which he ever worked when not consumed by his passion--and, therefore, he was doubly to be suspected and guarded against.
All through the warm tropical afternoon she sat on by the bank of the river; it was the very spot, as she knew, or thought she knew, where two centuries ago Simon Alderly had slain the diver--thinking always, and taking no heed of all the multitudinous animal life around her. The humming-birds hovered in front of her, bright specks of gorgeous colour; the butterflies, representing in their brilliant bodies every known hue, flitted backwards and forwards; sometimes a monkey peered at her with wide-open eyes from moriche and bamboo, and insects of numerous varieties crept about the bush-ropes and the fan-palms, while all around her was the warmth and perfume of the tropics.
Yet she heeded none of these things. They were the accompaniments of the whole of her young existence, and--even had they not been--she would not now have noticed them. Her thoughts were intent on the saving of a human life--a life she had come to love, the life of the handsome Englishman who had journeyed from far-off England to her lonely, desolate home.
Presently she knew that night was at hand, that it was coming swiftly. The atmosphere was all suffused by a rich saffron hue, into which the crimson tints of the sun and the blue of the heavens were being absorbed; the sun itself was sinking over the mount behind her; even the air was cooling and becoming fresher.
"If he would only come," she whispered to herself; "if he would only come before night falls."
And then she resolved to go to the mouth of the river and look for him. To do so meant that she must force her way through a hundred yards of undergrowth of cacti and all kinds of clinging creepers; yet she was so anxious to see him and to warn him of the danger in which, she felt sure, he would stand on his return, that she did not hesitate a moment. Therefore she plunged bodily in amongst the luxuriant vegetation, and, after a considerable amount of struggling and a numerous quantity of scratches received, stood at last upon the beach, gazing almost south towards Tortola.
And soon she saw that he was coming back--as she had never doubted he would come: he had not parted from her in a manner that meant a last farewell!--he was very near the island now, not a quarter of a mile away.
Presently he, too, saw her standing there regarding him, and, as he did so, took his handkerchief from his pocket and waved it to her. And five minutes later the Pompeia passed in between the river banks, so that they could speak to each other.