Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/165

Rh prowling by night as torn cats, and as insinuating as girls; good bait for fishing in troubled waters.

"Don't be afraid, Monsieur Lorki," said Tilbak, misunderstanding Laurent's amazement at the sight of this bivouac of smugglers.

Laurent, however, was concealing a more than partial curiosity beneath a very plausible constraint and repugnance. They were chewing tobacco, cheating at cards, passing the bottle, behaving as loosely as they could, mixing with their Burgundian-Flemish dialect the terms of a cosmopolitan language, eructations of slang. Trickery, anger, the lust for gain, and vice ruffled faces that were comely when shaded by the large peaks of sailors' caps, and the Rembrandtesque light of the wretched little den, the fleeting moonlight and the coppery false-dawn without, such a false-dawn as usually graces an execution, lent them an added ambiguity.

The good Tilbak, whom they respected sufficiently to let his customer pass first, disliked them from his sailor days.

"They know how to gouge the seafolk!" he said. "Ah! How they used to make me swear, those sloppy tars. The temptations and the claptrap chatter that I had to suffer when they swooped down on my deck like a school of flying fish. Fortunately I was too smitten with Siska to let myself be caught by their bait. They used to have samples of it, and their favors brought a market price. I would never have been fool enough to pledge them my advance pay, my flesh and my welfare. Never mind; I was glad to get on dry land in order to escape their hooks. I tell you. Monsieur Laurent, those runners are the true agents of the seven deadly sins!"