“Charlotte stopped playing just then, and asked me why I had broken into the octave. The chord, she said, was so much prettier. I couldn’t tell her that it was Lulukuila’s interval haunting me. I hadn’t even known I was singing an octave,” Cartwright added with a sudden laugh. Then he went on.
“We didn’t sing any more, but went out to join the others. Lulukuila wasn’t there. I was just asking Davidson where she had gone, when I heard a splash down by the lagoon. All in a flash I remembered how her face had looked in the lamplight, and I started off down the path. . . . I got there too late.”
After a while he began muttering in a disconnected sort of way. “She had her way. I’ve never touched the piano since. Surely I have the right now, though, now Charlotte’s coming back—a little happiness.”
“That’s the thing to think of now, sir,” I says, wondering if I should call his man or leave him to talk himself out. “You weren’t to blame for what happened. Think of your cousin now.”
“My cousin, yes,” Cartwright murmured. He pulled himself up with a sharp breath.
“I’m afraid I’ve been talking an uncommon lot,” he said in his ordinary tone. “It’s late. You must be wanting to turn in.”
We commented on the sultriness of the night as we parted. The stars were hidden in a sort of murk, and the air had grown so still that the beetles bumping against the banana leaves overhead startled one like the crack of artillery.
Inside I found Simmons, Cartwright’s servant, tapping the barometer.
“It’s fallen uncommonly fast,” Simmons said to me. “Just as it did before the hurricane five years ago.
“The hurricane!” I said. “Did it do much damage?”