Kummer watched her quietly, smoking his pipe. “What’s troubling you, Skeezicks?”
She started. “Troubling me? Troubling me? Why, whatever makes you think—”
“You act,” chuckled Kummer, “just about as expertly as you swim, Rosa. I’m afraid you don’t shine in either department. If it’s that young Hamlet of yours, Earle—”
She sniffed. “Earle! As if he could. Trouble me, I mean. I can’t imagine why mother’s given him the freedom of the house. She must be going off her mind. Having him around... I don’t want him. We’d definitely settled all that, you know, David. Oh, I... I suppose I was silly about him once, that time we were engaged—”
“Which time was that?” asked Kummer gravely. “Oh, yes! The eighth, I believe. The first seven times, I suppose, you two were merely playing house. My dear child, you’re still the merest infant emotionally—”
“Thanks, grandpa!” she jeered.
“—as is your sullen young swain. I believe strongly in the mating of emotional likes. For the... er... good of the stock. You could do worse than Cort, you know, Rosa, for all his Weltschmerz.”
“I’d like to know where! And I’m not an infant. And he... he’s intolerable. Imagine a grown man licking the pumps of that overdressed, underdone, half-baked imitation of a cheap little ex-chorus-girl...”
“True to type,” sighed Kummer. “The feline strain. The best of you are none too good. Skeezicks, my child, be reasonable. If there was any licking done, Mrs. Munn’s pretty tongue did it, not Earle’s, I’m sure. He looked after you a moment ago like a sick calf. Come, come, Rosa, you’re covering up.
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Rosa, staring out at the sea. It lay below them no longer blue, but purple. The pink flecks in the sky had died to the accompaniment of musical breakers.
“I believe you do,” murmured Kummer. “I believe you’re on the thin edge of doing something utterly mad, Rosa darling. I assure you it’s mad. If the man were any one but Marco I should mind my own business. But under the circumstances...”
“Marco?” she faltered, not very convincingly.
Kummer’s cynical blue eyes smiled a little. Even in the gathering murk she saw the smile, and lowered her own blue eyes. “I think I warned you, my dear, once before. But I didn’t think it would come to this—”
“To what?”
“Rosa.” His reproachful tone made her blush a little.
“I... I thought,” said Rosa in a muffled voice, “that Mr... Mr. Marco’s paid considerably more attention to... well, to Mrs. Munn, and to Mrs. Constable, and... yes, to mother, tool — than to me, David.”
“That,” said the big man grimly, “is something else again. At the moment we’re discussing a younger, although perhaps not sillier, woman.” His eyes narrowed as he bent over her. “Skeezicks, I tell you the man’s impossible, a worthless adventurer. No visible source of income. A smelly reputation, from what I heard; I’ve gone to some trouble to look the fellow up. Oh, I grant you his physical charms—”
“Thank you. Didn’t you know, David darling,” said Rosa with a sort of breathless malice, “that physically he resembles you a good deal? Perhaps it’s a sexual compensation of some sort—”
“Rosa! Don’t be obscene. It’s scarcely a joking matter to me. Your mother and you are the only women in this universe I care a rap about. I tell you—”
She rose suddenly, still looking at the sea. “Oh, David, I don’t want to discuss him!” Her lips trembled.
“But you do, honey.” He put his pipe on the table and gripped her shoulders, turning her about so that her blue eyes were very close to his. “I’ve seen it coming for a long time. If you do what you intend to do—”
“How do you know what I intend to do?” she asked in a low voice.
“I can guess. Knowing Marco’s filthy kind...”
She grasped his arm. “But, David, I haven’t really promised him—”
“You haven’t? From the gloating look in his eye I gathered a different impression. I tell you I’ve heard that the man’s a—”
She dropped her hand violently. “It’s nonsense what you’ve heard! John’s so good-looking all the men dislike him. Naturally, there would be women in the life of such a handsome man... David, please! I shan’t listen to another word.”
He released her shoulders, looked quietly at her for a moment, and then turned aside, picked up his pipe, knocked out the ashes, and dropped the brier into his pocket. “Since you’ve my own stubbornness,” he murmured, “I’ve no right to complain, I suppose. You’ve quite made up your mind, Rosa?”
“Yes!”
Then they both fell silent and turned toward the terrace stairs, moving a little closer together. Some one was coming down the upper path toward the terrace.
It was the oddest thing. They could hear heavy steps in the gravel, crunching sounds which held a note of clumsy stealth. Like a giant tiptoeing on broken glass, inhumanly oblivious to pain.
It was almost dark now. Kummer suddenly looked at his wrist-watch. It was thirteen minutes past eight.
Rosa felt her skin crawl and she shivered, quite without knowing why. She shrank back against her uncle, staring into the depths of the shadowy path above them.
“What’s the matter?” asked Kummer coolly. “Rosa, you’re trembling.”
“I don’t know. I wish we could — I wonder who it is.”
“Probably Jorum making one of his eternal rounds. Sit down, darling. I’m sorry if I’ve made you nerv—”
From such small beginnings are large endings made. It seemed, too, an ending inspired by coincidence. Kummer was clad in spotless whites; a big man, brunette both as to hair and complexion, clean-shaven, not ill-looking... And it was growing dark very fast, the kind of thick black night peculiar to moonless country and seaside.
An inky shape loomed at the head of the terrace stairs. It was monumental and yet composed of shadows. It moved, fluidly. And then it froze still and seemed to search their faces.
A hoarse bass voice said: “Quiet. Both of ye. You’re covered,” and they saw something small in what might have been a hand.
Kummer said coldly: “Who in hell are you?”
“Never mind who I am.” The immense paw never wavered. Rosa was very still, and she could feel the tension of Kummer’s body beside her. She groped for his hand in the darkness and pressed it, warningly, pleadingly. His fingers closed over hers with a warm electric strength and she sighed noiselessly, reassured. “Now come on up here,” continued the bass voice, “an’ make it snappy an’ make it quiet.”
“Is that really,” demanded Rosa, surprised at the steadiness of her voice, “a revolver you’re pointing at us?”
“Step!”
“Come on, Rosa,” said Kummer softly, and he shifted his hand to grip her bare arm. They marched across the intervening flags and began to mount the stairs. The formless shadow retreated a little before them. Rosa felt like giggling, now that the intangible fear had materialized. It was all so perfectly silly! And on Spanish Cape, of all places. Probably, now that she came to think of it, it was all an inane joke of some one’s. No doubt Earle’s! It would be just like him, the... the—
Then the giggle turned into a gasp. At arm’s length the creature with the bass voice became real. She saw him now, not clearly, but well enough to establish certain horrible truths.
The man — it could only have been a man — stood so tall that by contrast Kummer, who himself measured over six feet, looked a pigmy. He must have been at least six feet eight inches in height. And he was gross, a Chinese wrestler of a man, an inflated Falstaff, with an enormous belly and the shoulders of a Percheron. Really, he was too big and too fat, thought Rosa with a shiver, to be — to be human. The .38 revolver which nestled in the palm of his hand was a child’s toy. He was clothed in something roughly sailorish: a pair of dirty tattered dungarees like windblown canvas, a black or dark blue pea-jacket with tarnished brass buttons and the spread of a mainsail, and a cap with a chipped and broken visor.