Three weeks later, after putting his cash-box away in the safe which
filled with its iron bulk a corner of their room, Schomberg turned
towards his wife, but without looking at her exactly, and said:
"I must get rid of these two. It won't do!"
Mrs. Schomberg had entertained that very opinion from the first; but she
had been broken years ago into keeping her opinions to herself. Sitting
in her night attire in the light of a single candle, she was careful not
to make a sound, knowing from experience that her very assent would be
resented. With her eyes she followed the figure of Schomberg, clad in
his sleeping suit, and moving restlessly about the room.
He never glanced her way, for the reason that Mrs. Schomberg, in
her night attire, looked the most unattractive object in
existence--miserable, insignificant, faded, crushed, old. And the
contrast with the feminine form he had ever in his mind's eye made his
wife's appearance painful to his aesthetic sense.
Schomberg walked about swearing and fuming for the purpose of screwing
his courage up to the sticking point.
"Hang me if I ought not to go now, at once, this minute, into his
bedroom, and tell him to be off--him and that secretary of his--early in
the morning. I don't mind a round game of cards, but to make a decoy of
my table d'hote--my blood boils! He came here because some lying rascal
in Manila told him I kept a table d'hote."
He said these things, not for Mrs. Schomberg's information, but simply
thinking aloud, and trying to work his fury up to a point where it would
give him courage enough to face "plain Mr. Jones."
"Impudent overbearing, swindling sharper," he went on. "I have a good
mind to--"
He was beside himself in his lurid, heavy, Teutonic manner, so unlike
the picturesque, lively rage of the Latin races; and though his eyes
strayed about irresolutely, yet his swollen, angry features awakened in
the miserable woman over whom he had been tyrannizing for years a fear
for his precious carcass, since the poor creature had nothing else but
that to hold on to in the world. She knew him well; but she did not know
him altogether. The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man
whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage. And, timid in her corner, she ventured to say pressingly:
"Be careful, Wilhelm! Remember the knives and revolvers in their
trunks."
In guise of thanks for that anxious reminder, he swore horribly in
the direction of her shrinking person. In her scanty nightdress, and
barefooted, she recalled a mediaeval penitent being reproved for her
sins in blasphemous terms. Those lethal weapons were always present to
Schomberg's mind. Personally, he had never seen them. His part, ten
days after his guests' arrival, had been to lounge in manly, careless
attitudes on the veranda--keeping watch--while Mrs. Schomberg, provided
with a bunch of assorted keys, her discoloured teeth chattering and her
globular eyes absolutely idiotic with fright, was "going through" the
luggage of these strange clients. Her terrible Wilhelm had insisted on
it.
"I'll be on the look-out, I tell you," he said. "I shall give you a
whistle when I see them coming back. You couldn't whistle. And if he
were to catch you at it, and chuck you out by the scruff of the neck, it
wouldn't hurt you much; but he won't touch a woman. Not he! He has told
me so. Affected beast. I must find out something about their little
game, and so there's an end of it. Go in! Go now! Quick march!"