"No one. D'ye think that this d—d President cares for anybody but hisself?"
Philip felt the deck throbbing with the pulsations of the screw. The lights on shore were gliding by. The launch was leaving Fernando Noronha, and Iris was waiting in that wretched hut beyond the hill, waiting for the summons that would not reach her, for Marcel was dead, and Domingo, the one other man who could have gone to her, was lying in the cabin with three ribs broken and a collar-bone fractured.
CHAPTER IX
WHEREIN CERTAIN PEOPLE MEET UNEXPECTEDLY
Iris came back from the void to find herself lying on a truckle bed in a dimly-lighted hovel. A cotton wick flickered in a small lamp of the old Roman type. It was consuming a crude variety of castor oil, and its gamboge-colored flame clothed the smoke-darkened rafters and mud walls in somber yet vivid tints that would have gladdened the heart of a Rubens. This scenic effect, admirable to an artist, was lost on a girl waking in affright and startled by unfamiliar surroundings. She gazed up with uncomprehending eyes at two brown-skinned women bending over her.
One, the elder, was chafing her hands; the other, a tall, graceful girl, was stirring something in an earthenware vessel. She heard the girl murmur joyfully:
"Graças a Deus, elh' abria lhes olhas!"
Iris was still wandering in that strange borderland guarded by unknown forces that lies between conscious life and the sleep that is so close of kin to death. If in full possession of her senses, she might not have caught the drift of the sentence, since it was spoken in a guttural patois. But now she understood beyond cavil that because she had opened her eyes, the girl was giving thanks to the Deity. The first definite though bewildering notion that perplexed her faculties, at once clouded and unnaturally clear, was an astonished acceptance of the fact that she knew what the strange girl had said, though the phrase only remotely resembled its Spanish equivalent. She gathered its exact meaning, word for word, and it was all the more surprising that both women should smile and say something quite incomprehensible as soon as Iris lifted herself on an elbow and asked in English:
"Where am I? How did I come here?"