“No, sir; Toro’s just an anchorage, out of the way, like. We goes to
Toro for turtle. Very good turtle on Toro. Them Mosquito boys gets ’em
with spears. You see ’em paddle out, Mrs. Stukeley, two of these red
Indians in a boat, and they just paddle soft, paddle soft, as still as
still, and they come up to the turtles as they lie asleep in the sea,
and then. Whang. They dart their fizgigs. They never miss.”
Olivia looked at Cammock with quickened interest; but she did not
speak. She was now leaning forward, over the table, resting her chin
upon her hands, probably with some vague belief that her throat was
beautiful and that these stupid men would never notice it. She may
have been conscious of her power. Yet perhaps she was not. She may
have given too much of herself to Stukeley; she may have tuned too
many of her emotional strings to that one note, to feel how other men
regarded her.
“Look, Olivia,” said Margaret. He placed the map before her.
Perrin and Cammock put out each a hand, to hold the curling vellum
flat for her. She looked at the map as a sibyl would have looked at
the golden scroll; she looked rapt; her great eyes shone so. She put
out one hand to flatten the vellum, and to Margaret, watching her, it
seemed that her whole nature was expressed in that one act, and that
her nature was beautiful, too beautiful for this world. Her finger-tip
touched Perrin’s finger-tip, for one instant, as she smoothed the
map’s edge; and to Perrin it seemed that his life would be well passed
in the service of this lady. She was, oh, wonderfully beautiful, he
thought; but not like other women. She was so strange, so mysterious,
and her voice thrilled so. In dreams, in those dreams of beauty which
move us for days together, he had seen that beauty before; she had
come to him, she had saved him; her healing hands had raised him,
bringing him peace. “She says nothing,” he said to himself; “but life
is often like that. I have talked with people sometimes whose bodies
seemed to be corpses. And all the time they were wonderful, possessed
of devils and angels.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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