“Nix on the other fellow. He’s not on in this film. I’ll have him beaten to a frazzle long before I see good old New York again.”
Then Maseden did contrive to choke back the very obvious comment that Madge Forbes might even be married already. Sufficient for the day was the problem thereof. It was not matrimony that was bothering him, though the queer marriage tie contracted in San Juan seemed fated to make its fetters felt even in the wilderness. He was wondering what would happen if, as was highly probable, they were marooned on an island rarely if ever visited by man.
He laughed grimly.
“New York is away below the horizon this morning,” he said. “Let’s go and hunt more oysters!”
Still, for the life of him he could not altogether get rid of the spectre raised by Sturgess’s almost banal candor. The New Yorker was unmistakably a good fellow. He had behaved like a man during twenty-four hours which tested one’s moral fibre as pure metal is separated from dross in a furnace. Was it quite fair that he should be kept in ignorance of the astounding fact that Madge Forbes, and none other, was the heroine of that extraordinary ceremony in the Castle of San Juan?
Why not tell him? There was every reason to believe that he had indulged in no overt love-making as yet. Why not emulate his outspokenness, and thus spare him the certain shock of discovery?
Moreover, when the truth came out, would he not feel with justice that he had been very badly treated both by Maseden and the woman whom he professed to love?
Maseden squirmed under the thought. Such a discussion, at such a moment, savored of rank lunacy, but it was better to act crazily than dishonorably.
Then came a reflection that hurt like a cut from a jagged knife. Sturgess was an impressionable youngster. He might easily transfer his wooing from Madge to Nina.
Maseden could not help asking himself why a torturing question of that kind should come to plague him at a time when their lives were in dire jeopardy. They might, by chance, exist a week, a month—several months in that dreadful fastness of rock, forest and sea, but the briefest glance towards the interior showed how desperate was their case, and he knew only too well that the absence of proper food, of fire, of clothing, of everything that renders life tolerable and joyous, would soon bring mortal sickness in its train, even though they ran the gantlet of other perils like unto those of yesterday.