Читать книгу Seibert of the Island - Gordon Ray Young - Страница 13

Nada, eagerly half-smiling, waited expectantly for him to speak. The veil had been bunched in cobwebby layers on the red velvet hood, exposing her face, rich with dark colouring. The black strings of the hood were tied in a bow at one side of her chin.

Williams looked at her with piercing intensity, as if he was trying to get through the years that overlay this woman and see again the child of ten years before. Now he saw a girl of small, shapely body, dark eyed, with full, soft, flexible lips, and every curve and line of her little amber-tinted face hinted at a merry impulsiveness; but he looked at her so long, so penetratingly, that she began to feel a little uncertain, and her pretty face clouded.

Afterwards, when he knew her well, McGuire said, "A child then, with no harm in you. And you'd come back to him a woman, something he dreads, hates, is afraid of. The ten years between were half your life. To him they were hardly more than the wakeful passing of a night. An' he didn't know what you wanted—just to have somebody killed, or another kiss."

At last, making quite as much statement as question of it, Williams said: "You are in trouble?"

Nada's lips burst into a smile, and a little gloved hand darted out at him, as quickly she said: "No; you are!"

He was stiff as an iron man, and watchful; far from sure of her, though she was from among his friends.

"How!" he asked, without interest.

A moment before her lips had flashed into a smile and her eyes had sparkled; this instant her face was slightly shadowed, and a glow of sadness appeared far in the depths of the dark eyes, as if there was something unpleasant in why she had come. Her glance turned inquiringly toward McGuire, then again to Williams. No one spoke or gestured, but she knew then that McGuire, too, was expected to hear whatever she had come to tell. He had edged back upon a corner of the desk, and waited with an appearance of idling.

"To-night I came here straight from Alan Penwenn——"

McGuire straightened, turning quickly toward Williams; but not a flickering of surprise had crossed Williams's face, and he merely continued to look at her and wait.

Penwenn was the owner of many ships. It was through the great wide doors of his firm's warehouses that much of the Orient's exotic merchandise came into the States. The fortune of the Penwenn family had been founded by a hard-boned Scotch grandfather, who had been a great sea-gambler and married the daughter of an old Spanish family. Young Penwenn, as his father and grandfather had done, occasionally turned from regular business to buy up wrecks, listen to tales of lost treasure, and he liked a bit of a gamble—a wee little bit of a gamble; not much of one, for he was cautious, and thought himself a far shrewder man than his father had been.

"'Nada,' Alan said to me not two hours ago, 'you are a little South Sea savage, and you have heard of Hurricane Williams?'

"'Heard of Hurricane Williams!' I said, and would have told him what I really knew, but he gave me no chance.

"He said, 'The Penwenns are seamen, Nada, and right now I am to windward of that rascal. I've got him—just like that!'

"And he pressed his finger and thumb together right up against my eyes to show me how he had you, Captain Williams.

"He said, 'And it is Alan Penwenn that will have his name in all the papers for capturing that blasted pirate. It's in the Penwenn blood to do things on the sea. That old grand-dad of mine made it lively for rascals. Then won't you be proud of me, Nada?'

"Then I most surely did not tell him anything! I got him to talk, and I came at once here to tell you. Look out for him, Captain Williams!"

In some way hardly visible, Williams's expression toward her had changed without softening. It may have been that his feeling was sensed and nothing seen.

McGuire liked her, liked the flashing movement of her pretty lips, the impulsiveness, the emotion in her; the little body was vibrantly intense, and her small hands had flown about in expressive gestures, acting out her scorn.