Читать книгу Seibert of the Island - Gordon Ray Young - Страница 7

Presently she sat up, her head half turned, alert, listening.

McGuire sagged more heavily against the table, watching the door. He knew the footfall out there; it was not at all stealthy, yet like the soft, firm pad of a jungle animal.

The door opened. Williams appeared. Whatever his age may have been, nothing of youth was left. A short beard, always cropped, but usually by being hacked away unevenly, curled down his cheeks. A glint of the Saxon colour was there, a hint at blondness, but a slight, obscure hint. Even his hair was sunburned. His eyes had the impact that madness gives, and were deep-set and narrowed from much staring into sun and wind. They widened with menace if anything challenging appeared. Tales of brutal work were told of him; and at times he showed an inflexible justice. Once he had been hanged; in McGuire's words, "He gave himself to a woman, and she sewed him on to a hangman's rope—for a tassel!" So it was said, but no one seemed really to know.

Now Williams paused for a moment, then slowly pushed the door behind him; in that silence the gentle click of its closing was sharply metallic. His eyes flashed from McGuire to the woman; they gleamed from under the cap visor, and were piercingly fastened on the grey veil. He stood tense, as if angered; his hands were thrust down into the side-pockets of his dark, square-cut coat, and anyone would have known that the hands were clenched. Moving only his eyes, he looked inquiringly at McGuire.

The woman had stood up and was lifting her veil, pushing it up from the sides of her cheeks, raising it over the tip of her nose. Her large, dark eyes were expectantly on Williams, and the look was intent with admiration, her whole attitude that of preparing a pleasing surprise. She was only a young girl, pretty, richly dark in colouring, and now almost radiant in her excitement.

"Skipper"—McGuire did not take his eyes from her—"she came out of the dark there, looking for you. The devil knows why."

Williams turned slightly, not facing her, but standing as if ready to walk away. His hard gaze went to her from an angle. He said nothing; there was no interest, not even curiosity, nothing but raw discourtesy.

A trace of uneasiness, doubt perhaps, shadowed her face and was gone. She smiled, and, raising both gloved hands half out to him, said in Samoan: "My captain, I am Tom Combe's daughter—Nada!"

McGuire now saw how in vivacity and tone she resembled the island girls, though in appearance she was very unlike a native; and he understood her amused self-assurance, too. He knew of her, of both the Combe girls.

He had seen the other—Orna, Arna, some such name—often out riding, with pretence of solitary stylishness, twenty yards ahead of her liveried groom, who was a small, ugly, impudent native; and she would look neither to the right nor to the left as she passed grinning natives, some of them relatives, as they trudged toward the village on foot with vegetables and flowers and fruit. Day after day, with the quiet trop-trop-trop of the slender pony's hoof-beat, the dark, haughty maiden rode by, aloof, remote, unhappily proud.

But when old Tom Combe looked at her he was proud. His daughter—and like that!