Yet, even to his thinking, Madge and Nina were like as a couple of pins! Being an eminently sensible sort of fellow, he realized in the next breath that Madge might be quite as nice a girl as Nina.
Then the thought struck him that she was purposely making things easier for him by cultivating a friendship with Sturgess. In any case, Sturgess was obviously destined to act as a pawn in the game. Even he, Maseden, had not scrupled to use that gentleman at sight when anxious to board the Southern Cross without attracting the attention of the news-mongering boatmen of Cartagena.
That night he lay awake for hours. For one thing, the ship was running into bad weather again, and complained nosily of the buffeting her stout frame was receiving. For another, his own course was beset with difficulties. He failed completely to understand the attitude of sister Nina.
If Madeleine—or Madge, as he had better learned to distinguish her—had sought marriage with a man about to die as a means to escape from some unbearable duress, was her plight accentuated rather than bettered by the fact that her husband still lived? If so, the announcement that he meant to obtain a legal dissolution of the bond at the earliest possible moment would relieve the tension.
But what if her need demanded that she should remain wed, a wife in name only? A development of that sort foreshadowed complexities of a rare order. Maseden knew himself as one capable of Quixotic action—even the scheming Steinbaum had paid him that tribute—but it was asking too much that he should go through life burdened with a wife who treated him as a benevolent stranger.
Common sense urged that they should meet and discuss a most trying and equivocal situation as frankly and fully as might be. Why, then, had Nina Gray been so disturbed, so anxious to keep the married pair apart? Both girls knew he was alive. What purpose could it serve that the fact should be ignored?
He puzzled his brain to recall incidents he had heard of Steinbaum’s history, but investigation along that line drew a blank. Was Suarez mixed up in the embroglio? It was unlikely. Though the man had spent some years in the United States and in Europe, he had not left San Juan since he, Maseden, came there, and, before that period, both Madge and Nina Gray must have been girls in short frocks and long tresses.
Perhaps the father’s record would provide a clew. Somehow, though he had never set eyes on Mr. Gray save as a shadowy form on a dark night, Maseden sensed him as unsympathetic. He was forced to form a judgment on the flimsiest of material, having none other; but Gray’s voice, his way of speaking to his daughters, had grated.
First impressions are treacherous guides; nevertheless the philosopher whom they cannot mislead does not exist.