PART FIVE
THE WHITE NIGHT
CHAPTER XII
THE FLAMES OF LIFE'S FURNACE
A large room with open windows shewing a great square of hot blue sky and a palm branch that swayed in front of them, bright gold in the vivid light, was before my eyes as I lay alone, stretched out on my bed, the mosquito-curtains draped round me, and raised on the side next the windows.
How many weary days and nights had gone slowly by since that night which hung veiled in crimson mists in my memory! Horrible night of anger, of struggle, of death, of blood! Would its remembrance always cling to me like this?
Hop Lee thought I had broken my promise to him. That was the poisoned thorn that rankled and twisted and festered within me. No wonder he had cursed me and wanted to kill me. And Suzee—how well she had deceived me! I remembered her as she had sat trying to weep at the supper-table in San Francisco, telling me of the last moments of Hop Lee, her own devotion to him, and the child in their dying sufferings! Husband and child that she had deserted so gladly! A dull anger burnt within me at the thought of that deception, and most fiercely at the knowledge that she had forced me to break my word.
Yet that anger, strongly though it flamed against her, could not wholly dry the tears that came between my lids as I thought of her. She had loved me in her own selfish, childish way, and had risked her own life as well as mine to come to me.
After all, was it not I who had been in the wrong from the first? I had known she was married. Why had I ever looked at her with that admiration which had stirred her passion for me? Morley had warned me. Now it had ended like this and nearly cost us all our lives. But I, the most guilty of the three, had escaped, and they were both dead.
I appeared to have broken my promise, and now, after already injuring him so much—one who had never injured me—I had killed Hop Lee. I had taken his wife, who, he had said, was more than his life. Not satisfied with that, I had taken his life, too! How horrible it all was! I felt suffocated beneath the weight of it. But surely, surely it was Suzee who had thrown this burden on me? Yes, but I had begun the evil far back in the sunny days at Sitka.