Half-way over the hill, on a packing-case in a bare veranda, sat a man who for three months had avoided the hotel and these loungers, and been given up by all of them (by some enviously) as a lost friend. A woman reclined--good old novelists' word--in a sort of deck-chair three paces away. The windows of the house stood wide, and showed rooms within carpetless, matless, swept if not garnished, with other packing-cases stacked about and labelled. There was even a label on the chair in which the woman reclined: but her skirt hid it.

When the whistle of the fruit-steamer had first sounded, out beyond the Point, and almost before the alert young population of San Ramon could tear down the pathway beside the bungalow's discreet garden, she had risen with a catch of the breath, taken up a pair of field-gla.s.ses and scanned the offing.

"It is she beyond a doubt," she had announced.

"What other could it be?" the man had answered, pretty lazily.

"And that being so--"

Said the woman--I am trying to tell this in correct fashion--"Why are you so dull?--who, when the boat used to call, would s.n.a.t.c.h up the gla.s.ses and be no company for anyone until you had counted everything she discharged."

Farrell--oh! by the way it's about time I told you that the man was Farrell--Farrell looked at the woman. Farrell said:

No, the devil! I can't tell it the professional way, after all.

There's the woman. Well, the woman was young, and fair to see, dark, well-bred, with a tinge of lemon, and descended pretty straight from the Incas--"instead of which" she preferred to call herself Mrs.

M'Kay or M'Kie, having been caught and married in an unguarded moment by someone who had arrived in San Ramon to push a new brand of whisky and stayed to push it the wrong way. Since M'Kie's death--or M'Kay's--whichever it was--new-comers had to choose between Engelbaum's, on the summit, and the lady, an heiress in a small way, who played the guitar, half-way down the hill, but frowned on the drinking-habit.

Farrell, you will perceive, had chosen the better way, and had become a voluntary exile from Engelbaum's in consequence. That, or the exercise of running, had done him a power of good. Just now he was bronzed, spare, even inclining to gauntness. Twelve months before, he had shortened his whiskers, as a first step to disguise.

Since then, and to please this woman, he had grown a beard which he kept short and trimmed to a point, naval fashion. It was straw-coloured, went well with his bronzed complexion and improved his appearance very considerably. It may be that this growth had encouraged the hair on his scalp or stimulated it by rivalry to renewed effort: more likely the play of sunshine and sea-breeze had done the trick between them; but anyhow Farrell now possessed a light mat of silky yellowish hair on the top of his head--as the n.i.g.g.e.r song has it, in the place where the wool ought to grow. Shoes, blue dungaree trousers and a striped shirt were his clothing--the shirt opened at the throat and to the second b.u.t.ton, disclosing a V of naked chest as healthily tanned as his face. His face had thinned too. His eyes no longer bulged. They had receded well under the pent of his brow and, in receding, taken colour from its shadow.

"I am not dull, Santa," said Farrell. "I am only content and--well, a little bit regretful, and--well yes, again, the least bit lazy.

But what does it matter? Ylario has gone down to the beach. He will send off word to the skipper that all this truck will be ready on the foresh.o.r.e by five-thirty to-morrow. In good weather he never weighs before seven, and the weather is settled."

The woman, at one word of his, had turned and set down her gla.s.ses.

"Regretful?" She echoed it as a question, and followed it up with a question. "At what are you staring so hard?"

He lifted his eyes and met hers very steadily, earnestly. "At your shape, Santa," was his answer. "When your back is turned, I am always looking at you so."

"Regretfully?" she asked, mocking.

"As for the regret, you know what it is and must be. How can a man feel it different, when we leave this place to-morrow? Don't women feel that way towards places where they have been happy?"

She picked up the gla.s.ses again and set them with her gaze seaward before answering. Thus the shadow of her hands screened any emotion--if emotion there were--on her face.

"I have not been happy here, all the time," she answered softly, readjusting the gla.s.s, or pretending to. "Not by any means.

San Ramon to me is a hole. . . . Yes," she went on deliberately, "I know well what you are going to say. I have _you_: but I want something more--something I have always wanted and, it seems to me, every woman always wants--something beyond the sky-line. In Sydney, now--"

"You'll find there's a sky-line waiting for you at Sydney," said Farrell; "as like to this one as two peas--and just as impossible to get beyond"--which mayn't seem very good grammar, but is how he said it. "Now to me a sky-line's a sky-line--just something to have you standing against."

"You shall have a kiss for that, _caballero_--in a moment," she purred, and slanted the binoculars down to bear on the beach. "Only one pa.s.senger," she announced.

"Usual inspector, no doubt," said Farrell, rolling a cigarette.

"Ye-es--by the look of him. . . . Oh, there's Ylario, all right, talking to the boatman! . . . He must be a stranger, I think--by the way he's staring up at the town."

"Ylario was bred and born here; of uncertain parents, to be sure--"

She laughed. "Foolish! . . . I meant the inspector, of course."

"What's he like?" asked Farrell. "Report."

She lowered the gla.s.s, twisted the screw of it idly, and returned to her hammock-chair, beside which she set it down on the veranda floor.

"Now I'll make a confession to you," she said, picking up her guitar and throwing her body back in the chair. "I love you," she said.

"When you are close, and alone with me, my heart feels as if it could melt into yours. . . . No, don't get up: you shall have your kiss, in good time. But when you--what shall I say?--when you _all-white_ men are at all far off, or when many of you are together, I cannot well distinguish. . . . Ah, pardon me, beloved! Haven't you had that trouble with people of other races than your own--among a crowd of j.a.panese, say? And the shepherds on the mountains behind here--have you not wondered how they can know every sheep in a flock of many hundred?"

Farrell was on his feet by this time, and in something of a pa.s.sion.

"Am I, then," he stammered out; "--am I, then, so like any of the others, up at Engelbaum's?"

"Calm yourself, O beloved," said Santa, brushing her finger-nails, gipsy-wise and soft as b.u.t.terflies, over, the strings of her guitar.

"Calm yourself, and hearken. You are all the world to me, and you know it. Yet there is something--something I could explain to you better, maybe, if I knew English better . . . and yet I am not sure.

. . . Let me try, however. . . . It always seems to me with you English, you Americans, you white-skinned men--with all the ones I have known--that the fault is not all mine when I find you alike just at first; that every one of you ought to be a man quite different from all other men; that you, of your race--yes, every one--were meant for something you have missed--were meant to be--Oh, what is the word?"

"'Distinguished?'" suggested Farrell, standing up. "I never was that, Santa--though, back in England, at one time, I had a notion to make some sort of a mark."

Santa let the neck of the guitar fall back against her breast and clasped her hands suddenly. "Yes, that is it;--to make your mark!

Every woman who loves a man wants him to make his mark somehow, somewhere. . . . I cannot tell you why: but it is so."

Farrell took a turn on the veranda. "My dear," he said tenderly, coming back and halting before her, "do you realise that I am fifty years old?"

She pressed her palms over her eyes. "You keep telling me that, and it hurts! Besides, you grow younger every day . . . and--and I cannot bear to hear you say it!" She lowered her hands and smiled up, but through tears.

"The men who find their way to San Ramon from my country or from the States," he went on, picking up the binoculars absently while his eyes sought the sky-line, "do not come in any hope of making their mark--not even plantation-inspectors." Farrell fumbled with the screw, adjusting the focus. "If that is why we are going to Sydney--"

"Whatever happens," declared Santa, "I will love you better anywhere than in San Ramon: and I have loved you well enough here! The men who come to San Ramon--pah! this for them!" She thrummed an air-- _La Camisa de la Lola_--on the guitar and broke off with another small sound of scorn from her throat. "_That's_ what suits them, and what all of them are worth!"

She brushed the strings again: and if Farrell made any sound at all, the buzz of them covered it. He had brought the gla.s.ses to bear on the beach.

Santa started to thrum on the lower strings. Farrell swung about suddenly, set the gla.s.ses down, and walked back into the dismantled house.

Now so far I have evidence for all I'm telling you. From this point for thirty seconds or so, I am going to guess what happened.

Santa went on thrumming. She heard his footsteps on the bare floor as he went through the echoing, dismantled room behind her.

She heard them on the brick of the broad pa.s.sage which separated the living-rooms of the bungalow from its bed-chambers. She heard him lift the latch of the outer door. She heard the outer door shut behind him. Then she waited for his footsteps to sound again on the sunken pathway which ran downhill beside her patch of garden, hidden by the cactus fence--or rather, deep below it. "He is standing on the doorstep," she said to herself, "lighting a cigarette"; and then, "but he is a long while about it. This is strange." Still as her ear caught no sound of him, Santa sprang up and slipped, guitar in hand, to the outer door--the fence being too tall for her to over-pry, and moreover p.r.i.c.kly. She opened the door and peeped out.

There was no one down the pathway. There was no one up the pathway, which here, for some fifty or sixty yards, climbed straight, full in view. "And what on earth has become of him?" wondered Santa.

"He did not go down--I should have heard him. But why should he go up? He has broken with those drinkers at Engelbaum's. . . . Besides, it is unbelievable that, in this short time, he should have vanished.

So much for guesswork. Now I come back to the story as it was afterwards related to me.

Santa, standing there in the porch, guitar in hand and leaning forward over the rail which guarded a long flight of stone steps, heard a footfall on the road below--an ascending footfall.

For a moment she mistook it for Farrell's: she believed she could distinguish Farrell's from any other man's: and so for a moment she stood mystified.

Then a man hove in view around the corner . . . not Farrell, but the newly-landed stranger she had spied through her binoculars--the presumed Inspector. His eyes were lifted as he calculated the new gradient ahead of him, and thus on the instant he caught sight of Santa aloft in the porch-way. Something held Santa's feet.

"Many pardons, _senora_," said the Stranger, halting a little before he came abreast of the stairway and lifting his hat. "But can you tell me if this path leads to the Hotel?"