He reflected. These men were thieves and murderers as well as gamblers. Their fitness for purposes of vengeance was appallingly complete. But he preferred not to think of it in detail. He put it to himself summarily that he would be paying Heyst out and would, at the same time, relieve himself of these men's oppression. He had only to let loose his natural gift for talking scandalously about his fellow creatures. And in this case his great practice in it was assisted by hate, which, like love, has an eloquence of its own. With the utmost ease he portrayed for Ricardo, now seriously attentive, a Heyst fattened by years of private and public rapines, the murderer of Morrison, the swindler of many shareholders, a wonderful mixture of craft and impudence, of deep purposes and simple wiles, of mystery and futility. In this exercise of his natural function Schomberg revived, the colour coming back to his face, loquacious, florid, eager, his manliness set off by the military bearing.
“That's the exact story. He was seen hanging about this part of the world for years, spying into everybody's business: but I am the only one who has seen through him from the first—contemptible, double-faced, stick-at-nothing, dangerous fellow.”
“Dangerous, is he?”
Schomberg came to himself at the sound of Ricardo's voice.
“Well, you know what I mean,” he said uneasily. “A lying, circumventing, soft-spoken, polite, stuck-up rascal. Nothing open about him.”
Mr. Ricardo had slipped off the table, and was prowling about the room in an oblique, noiseless manner. He flashed a grin at Schomberg in passing, and a snarling:
“Ah! H'm!”
“Well, what more dangerous do you want?” argued Schomberg. “He's in no way a fighting man, I believe,” he added negligently.
“And you say he has been living alone there?”
“Like the man in the moon,” answered Schomberg readily. “There's no one that cares a rap what becomes of him. He has been lying low, you understand, after bagging all that plunder.”