While crossing the courtyard, the moonlight, for a moment, fell upon his face, discovering to Cubina the sinister countenance of the Jew.
“I must have passed him on the path!” reflected the Maroon. “But no, that couldn’t be,” he added, correcting himself; “I saw his return track in the mud-hole just by. He must have got here before me. Like enough, he’s been back, and out again on some other dark business. Crambo! it’s true enough what I’ve heard say of him: that he hardly ever goes to sleep. Our people have met him in the woods at all hours of the night. I can understand it now that I know the partner he’s got up there. For Dios! to think of Chakra being still alive!”
The Maroon paused in his reflections; and kept his eye sharply bent upon the shadowy form that, like a spirit of darkness, was silently flitting through the corridor. He was in hopes that the Jew would soon retire to his chamber.
So long as the latter remained outside, there was not the slightest chance for Cubina to communicate with the occupant of the hammock without being observed. Worse than that, the Maroon was now in danger of being himself seen. Exposed as he was upon the cocoa—with nothing to shelter him from observation but its few straggling fronds—he ran every risk of his presence being detected. It was just a question of whether the Jew might have occasion to look upwards; if so, he could scarce fail to perceive the dark silhouette of a man, outlined, as it was, against the light blue of the sky.
That would be a discovery of which Cubina dreaded the consequences, and with reason. It might not only frustrate the intended interview with the young Englishman, but might end in his own capture and detention—the last a contingency especially to be avoided.
Under this apprehension the Maroon stirred neither hand nor foot; but kept himself silent and rigid. In this attitude of immobility he looked like some statue, placed in a sedentary posture upon the summit of a Corinthian column—the crushed crocus represented by the fronds of the palm-tree.