Schomberg,
dressed for duty, stood facing him down the whole length of the room.
She clung to the handle for a moment, then came in and glided to her
place, where she sat down to stare straight before her, as usual.

PART THREE

CHAPTER ONE

Tropical nature had been kind to the failure of the commercial
enterprise. The desolation of the headquarters of the Tropical Belt Coal
Company had been screened from the side of the sea; from the side where
prying eyes--if any were sufficiently interested, either in malice or
in sorrow--could have noted the decaying bones of that once sanguine
enterprise.

Heyst had been sitting among the bones buried so kindly in the grass of
two wet seasons' growth. The silence of his surroundings, broken only by
such sounds as a distant roll of thunder, the lash of rain through the
foliage of some big trees, the noise of the wind tossing the leaves of
the forest, and of the short seas breaking against the shore, favoured
rather than hindered his solitary meditation.

A meditation is always--in a white man, at least--more or less an
interrogative exercise. Heyst meditated in simple terms on the mystery
of his actions; and he answered himself with the honest reflection:

"There must be a lot of the original Adam in me, after all."

He reflected, too, with the sense of making a discovery, that his
primeval ancestor is not easily suppressed. The oldest voice in the
world is just the one that never ceases to speak. If anybody could have
silenced its imperative echoes, it should have been Heyst's father, with
his contemptuous, inflexible negation of all effort; but apparently he
could not. There was in the son a lot of that first ancestor who,
as soon as he could uplift his muddy frame from the celestial mould,
started inspecting and naming the animals of that paradise which he was
so soon to lose.

Action--the first thought, or perhaps the first impulse, on earth! The
barbed hook, baited with the illusions of progress, to bring out of the
lightless void the shoals of unnumbered generations!

"And I, the son of my father, have been caught too, like the silliest
fish of them all." Heyst said to himself.

He suffered. He was hurt by the sight of his own life, which ought to
have been a masterpiece of aloofness. He remembered always his last
evening with his father. He remembered the thin features, the great mass
of white hair, and the ivory complexion. A five-branched candlestic