Part 7

The next day, from a rocky cliff above his house, de Charruel saw the yacht hoist her white sails and steal out to sea. He watched her as long as she remained in sight, and when at last she sank over the horizon, he threw himself on the ground in a paroxysm of despair. For an hour he lay in a sort of stupor, rising only at the insistent whistle from the mine. This told him that it was twelve o’clock, and brought him back to the realities and obligations of life. Descending to the farm, he once more took up the threads of his existence, for the habits of twelve years are not to be lightly disregarded. But it was with difficulty that he brought himself to perform his usual tasks. His heart seemed dead within his breast. He wondered miserably at his former patience and industry as he saw on every side the exemplification of both. How could he ever have found contentment in such drudgery, in such pitiful digging and toiling in the dirt! What a way for a man to pass his days--an earth-stained peasant, ignobly sweating among his cabbages! Oh, the intolerable loneliness of those years! How grim they seemed as he looked back at them, those tragic, wasted years!

Tortured by the stillness and emptiness of his hut, he spent the night at Fitzroy’s, lying on the bare verandah boards till daylight. But he returned home before the household was astir, lest he should be invited to breakfast and be expected to talk. He shrank from the thought of meeting any one, and for days afterwards kept close within the limits of his little farm, shunning every human being near him. Every convict has such phases, such mutinies of the soul. The malady runs its course like a fever, and if it does not kill or impair the victim’s reason, it leaves him at last too often a hopeless sot. But, fortunately for himself, it was work, not cognac, that cured Paul de Charruel. He came to himself one day in his garden, as he was digging potatoes. He stood up, drew his hand across his face, and realised that the brain-sickness had left him. He went into the house and looked at himself in the glass, shuddering at the scarecrow he saw reflected there. He examined his clothes, his rooms, his calloused hands, with a strange, new curiosity, studying them all with the same speculation, the same surprise. He stood off, as it were, and looked at himself from a distance. He walked about his tangled, weedy farm, and wondered what had come over him these past weeks. He had been starving, he said to himself many times over--starving for companionship.

He sought out Fitzroy at the mine. It was good again to hear the Irishman’s honest laugh, to clasp his honest hand, to think there was one person, at least, that cared for him. He hung about Fitzroy all that day, as though it would be death to lose sight of him--Fitzroy, his friend. He repeated that last word a dozen times. His friend! He talked wildly and extravagantly for the mere pleasure of hearing himself speak. He was convulsed with laughter when an accident happened to a truck, and could scarcely contain himself when Fitzroy had a mock altercation with the engineer. No one could be more humourous than Fitzroy, and the engineer was a man of admirable wit! What a fool he had been to sulk these weeks on his farm. His farm! It made him tremble to think of it, so unendurably lonely and silent it had become. It was horrible that he must return to it,--his green prison,--with its ghosts and memories.

He went back late, but not to sleep. He sat on the dark porch of his hut and thought of the woman he had lost. Like a shadow she seemed to pass beside him, and if he shut his eyes he could feel her breath against his cheek and almost hear the beating of her heart. He closed his arms on the empty air and called her name aloud, half hoping that she might come to him. But she was a thousand miles at sea, and every minute was widening the distance between them. The folly and uselessness of these repinings suddenly came over him. She was a most charming girl, but would not any charming girl have captivated him after the life he had been leading? Was he not hungry for affection? Was he not in love with love? He rose and walked up and down the porch, greatly stirred by the new current of his thoughts. Yes; he was dying for something to love--something, were it only a dog. For twelve years he had sufficed for himself, but he could do so no more.

By dawn he was at Fitzroy’s, begging the Irishman for a black boy and a horse. A little later his messenger was galloping along the Noumea road, charged with a letter to the Chef de l’Administration Pénitentiaire to request that “le nommé de Charruel” be permitted to leave his farm for seven days. The permission was accorded almost as a matter of form, for it was not the custom to refuse anything to “le nommé de Charruel.”

The count went straight to the convent and asked to see the Mother Superior. She was a stately old lady, with silvery hair, an aristocratic profile, and a voice like an ancient bell. She at once cut short his explanations, closing her ears to his official number and other particulars of his convict life.

“M. le Comte,” she said, “I knew your mother very well, and your father also, whom you favour not a little. I have often thought of you out there by the strait--ah, monsieur, believe me, often.”

De Charruel thanked her with ceremony.

“Your errand cannot be the same as that which brings the others,” she went on, half smiling. “_Mon Dieu!_” she exclaimed, as she saw the truth in his reddening face. “You, a noble! a _chef de famille_! It is impossible.”

“I am only the convict de Charruel,” he answered.

The old woman looked at him with keen displeasure.

“You know the rules?” she said in an altered voice. “You know, I suppose, that you can take your choice of three. If you are not satisfied you can return in six months.”

“Oh, madame,” he said, “spare me such a trial. I stipulate for two things only: give me not a poisoner nor a thief; but give me, if you can, some poor girl whose very honesty and innocence has been her ruin.”

“I can very easily supply you with such a one,” said the Mother Superior. “Your words apply to half the female criminals the government sends me to marry to the convicts. When I weigh their relative demerits I almost feel I am giving angels to devils, so heavy is the scale in favour of my sex. I have several young women of unusual gentleness and refinement, who could satisfy requirements the most exacting. If you like,” she went on, “I shall introduce you first to a poor girl named Suzanne. In the beginning it was like caging a bird to keep her here, but insensibly she has given her heart to God and has ceased to beat her wings against the bars.”

“Does she fulfil my conditions?” asked the count.

“Yes; a thousand times, yes!” exclaimed the Mother Superior. “Shall I give orders for her to be brought?”

“If you would have the kindness,” said de Charruel.

There was a long waiting after the command had gone forth. All the womanliness and latent coquetry of the nuns came out in this business of making ready their charges for the ordeal; and when it was whispered that the wooer was the Comte de Charruel himself, a personage with whose romantic history there was not a soul unfamiliar, great indeed was the excitement and preparation. At last, with a modest knock, the door opened and let in a young girl clothed in conventual grey. She had a very pretty face, a touch hardened by past misfortunes, a figure short, well knit, and not ungraceful, and wild black eyes that shrank to the ground at the sight of the count.

The Mother Superior motioned her to take a seat.

“This is Suzanne,” she said.

De Charruel rose to his feet and bowed.

There was a dead silence.

“Can you not say something?” said the old lady, turning to the count with some asperity.

“Mademoiselle,” he said, with a sensation of extreme embarrassment, “I have the honour to ask you to marry me.”

“You need not commit yourself,” interrupted the Mother Superior. “You can have the choice of two more.”

“If I saw a hundred, madame,” he replied, “I could find no one I preferred to this young lady.”

There was another prolonged silence.

“You must answer, Suzanne,” said the old lady. “Yes or no?”

The girl burst into tears.

“Yes or no?” reiterated the Mother.

“I weep at monsieur’s extraordinary goodness,” said the girl. “Yes, madame, yes.”

* * * * *

Ten days later de Charruel was resting in the taro-field where he had been at work, when he felt Suzanne’s arm around his neck and her warm lips against his forehead. He leaned back with a smile.

“Paul,” she said, with a little tremor in her voice, “you have hidden nothing from me? You have done nothing wrong, Paul?”

“Wrong!” he exclaimed. “Have I not told thee repeatedly that I am the model convict, the hero of a hundred official commendations, the shining star of the penal administration? Wrong! What dost thou mean?”

“The authorities--” she answered. “There has been a messenger from the mine with a blue official letter. Oh, Paul, it frightens me.”

“Thou needst not fear,” he said. “It is only some matter of routine. I could paper my house (if it would not be misunderstood) with blue official letters about nothing.”

“I am so happy, Paul,” she said,--“so happy that I tremble for my happiness!”

He smiled at her again as he reached his hand for the letter. Nonchalantly he tore it open, but turned deadly pale as he ran his eyes down the sheet inside.

“You must go back to prison?” she cried in a voice of agony.

He could only shake his head.

“Speak!” she cried again. “Paul, Paul, I must know, if it kills me!”

He gave her a dreadful look.

“I am pardoned,” he said. “I am free!”

THE HAPPIEST DAY OF HIS LIFE

THE HAPPIEST DAY OF HIS LIFE

His thirtieth birthday! His first youth was behind him, with all its heartburnings, its failures, its manifold humiliations. What had he done these years past but drift, forlorn, penniless, and unattached, over those shallows where others had stuck and prospered--a gentle decline all the way from college in hope and fulfilment? The army and civil service had alike refused him. In the colonies he had toiled unremittingly in half a hundred characters,--groom, cook, boundary rider, steamer roustabout,--always sinking, always failing. Then those last four years in the Islands, and his tumble-down store in Vaiala! Had life nothing more for him than an endless succession of hot, empty days on the farthest beach of Upolu, with scarcely more to eat than the commonest Kanaka, and no other outlet for his energies than the bartering of salt beef for coprah and an occasional night’s fishing on the reef? On the other hand, he was well in body, and had times of even thinking himself happy in this fag-end of the world. The old store, rotten and leaky though it was, gave him a dryer bed than he had often found in his wandering life, and the food, if monotonous and poor, was better than the empty belly with which he had often begun an arduous day in Australia. And the place was extraordinarily beautiful. Yes, he had always admitted that, even in his blackest days of depression, though the beauty of it seemed almost to oppress him at times. But beautiful or not, this was a strange place for his father’s son, a strange thirtieth birthday for one who had begun the world with every prospect of faring well and rising high in its esteem, and the sense of his failure again seized him by the throat.

The noise of an incoming boat drew him to the door, and he looked out to see the pastor’s old whaler heading through the reef. They had made a night trip to avoid the heat, and all looked tired and weary with their long pull from Apia, and the song with which they timed their paddles sounded mournfully across the lagoon. A half-grown girl leaped into the water and hastened up to the store with something fastened in a banana-leaf.

It was a letter, which she shyly handed the trader. Walter Kinross looked at it with surprise, for it was the first he had received in four years, and the sight of its English stamp and familiar handwriting filled him with something like awe.

“The white man said you would give us a tin of salmon and six _masi_,” said the little girl, in native.

Kinross unlocked the dingy trade-room, still in a maze of wonder and impatience, and gave the little girl a box of matches in excess of postage. Then he opened the letter.

MY DEAR NEPHEW [it ran]: Your letter asking me to send you a book or two or any old papers I might happen to have about me has just come to hand, and finds me at Long’s Hotel, pretty miserable and ill. Yours was a strange note, after a silence of eight years, telling me nothing on earth about yourself save that you are trading in some islands, and seldom see a white face from one year’s end to another. When a man is seventy years of age and is ill, and his nigh-spent life unrolls before him like the pages of a musty old book, and when he wonders a little how it will feel to be dead and done with altogether, I tell you, my boy, he begins to see the spectres of all sorts of old misdeeds rising before him. Past unkindnesses, past neglects, a cold word here, a ten-pound note saved there and an old friend turned empty away--well, well! Without actually going the length of saying that I was either unkind or negligent in your case, I feel sometimes I was rather hard on you as to that mess of yours in London, and that affair at Lowestoft the same year. I was disappointed, and I showed it.

I know you’re pretty old to come back and start life afresh here, but if you have not had the unmitigated folly to get married out there and tied by the leg for ever, I’ll help you to make a new start. You sha’n’t starve if three hundred pounds a year will keep you, and if you will try and turn over a new leaf and make a man of yourself in good earnest, I am prepared to mark you down substantially in my will. But mind--no promises--payment strictly by results. You’re no longer a boy, and this is probably the last chance you’ll ever get of entering civilised life again and meeting respectable folk. I inclose you a draft at sight on Sydney, New South Wales, for two hundred and fifty pounds, for you will doubtless need clothes, etc., as well as your passage money, and if you decide not to return you can accept it as a present from your old uncle. I have told Jones (you would scarcely know the old fellow, Walter, he’s so changed) to send you a bundle of books and illustrated papers, which I hope will amuse you more than they seem to do me.

Affectionately yours,

ALFRED BANNOCK.

The trader read the letter with extraordinary attention, though the drift of it was at first almost beyond him--read it and re-read it, dazed and overcome, scarcely realising his good fortune. He spread out the bill on his knee and smoothed it as he might have patted the head of a dog. It spelled freedom, friends, the life he had been trained and fitted to lead, a future worth having and worth dividing. The elation of it all tingled in his veins, and he felt like singing. London, the far distant, the inaccessible, now hummed in his ears. He saw the eddying, crowded streets, the emptying play-houses, the grey river sparkling with lights. The smoke of a native oven thrilled him with memories of the underground, and he had but to close his eyes and the surf thundered with the noise of arriving trains.

The house could not contain him and his eager thoughts; he must needs feel the sky overhead and the trades against his cheek, and take all nature into his puny confidence. Besides, Vaiala had now a new charm for him, one he had never counted on to find. Soon, now, it would begin to melt into the irrevocable past; its mist-swept mountains, its forests and roaring waterfalls would fade into nothingness and become no more than an impalpable phantom of his mind, the stuff that dreams are made of. He wandered along the path from one settlement to another, round the great half-moon of the bay, absorbing every impression with a new and tender interest.

There were a dozen little villages to be passed before he could attain the rocky promontory that barred the western shore, pretty hamlets in groves of cocoanuts and breadfruit, in each perhaps a dozen beehive houses and as many sheds and boat-shelters. Between village and village the path led him under rustling palms and beside the shallow waters of the lagoon and across a river where he surprised some laughing girls at their bath. In the deep shade old men were mending nets, and children were playing tag and cricket with boisterous shouts, or marbles in sandy places. From one house he heard the clapping hands that announced the _’ava_; in another the song and stamp of practising dancers. Hard and lonely though his life had been, this Samoan bay was endeared to him by a thousand pleasant memories and even by the recollection of his past unhappiness. Here he had found peace and love, freedom from taskmasters, scenes more beautiful than any picture, and, not least, a sufficiency to eat. A little money and his life might have been tolerable, even happy--enough money for a good-sized boat, a cow or two, and those six acres of the Pascoe estate he had so often longed to buy. Only the month before, the American consul had offered them for two hundred dollars Chile money, and here he was with two hundred and fifty pounds in his pocket, seventeen hundred and fifty dollars currency! Cruel fate, that had made him in one turn of her wrist far too rich to care. He would buy them for Leata, he supposed; he must leave the girl some land to live on. But where now were all the day-dreams of the laying out of his little estate?--the damming of the noisy stream, the fencing, terracing, and path-making he had had in mind; the mangoes, oranges, and avocados he had meant to plant in that teeming soil, with coffee enough for a modest reserve? What a snug, cosy garden a man could make of it! What a satisfaction it might have been! How often had he talked of it with Leata, who had been no less eager than himself to harness their quarter-acre to the six and make of them all a little paradise.

Poor Leata! whom he had taken so lightly from her father’s house and paid for in gunpowder and kegs of beef--his smiling, soft-eyed Leata, who would have died for him! What was to become of her in this new arrangement of things? The six acres would provide for her, of course; in breadfruit, cocoanuts, and bananas she would not be badly off: but where was the solace for the ache in her heart, for her desolation and abandonment? He sighed as he thought of her, the truest friend he had found in all his wanderings. He would get her some jewellery from Apia, and a chest of new dresses, and a big musical box, if she fancied it. What would it matter if he did go home in the steerage? It would be no hardship to a man like him. She would soon forget him, no doubt, and take up with somebody else, and live happily ever afterwards in the six acres. Ah, well! he mustn’t think too much about her, or it would take the edge off his high spirits and spoil the happiest day of his life.

By this time he had worked quite round the bay, and almost without knowing it he found himself in front of Paul Engelbert’s store. Engelbert was the other trader in Vaiala--a passionate, middle-aged Prussian, who had been a good friend of his before those seven breadfruit-trees had come between them. In his new-found affluence and consequent good humour the bitterness of that old feud suddenly passed away. He recalled Engelbert’s rough, jovial kindness--remembered how Paul had cared for him through the fever, and helped him afterwards with money and trade. How could he have been so petty as to make a quarrel of those breadfruit-trees? He recollected, with indescribable wonder at himself, that he had once drawn a pistol on the old fellow, and all this over six feet of boundary and seven gnawed breadfruits! By Jove! he could afford to be generous and hold out the right hand of friendship. Poor old Paul! it was a shame they had not spoken these two years.

On the verandah, barefoot and in striped pyjamas, was Engelbert, pretending not to see him. Kinross thought he looked old and sick and not a little changed.

“How do you do, Engelbert?” he said.

The German looked at him with smouldering eyes. “Gan’t you see I’m busy?” he said.

“You might offer a man a chair,” said Kinross, seating himself on the tool-chest.

“Dere iss no jare for dem dat issn’t welgome,” said the German.

“I used to be welcome here,” said Kinross. “There was a time when you were a precious good friend of mine, Paul Engelbert.”

“Dat wass long ago,” said the trader.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Kinross, “that I’ve acted like a damned fool about those trees.”

“Dat wass what I wass dinking, too, dese two dree years,” responded the other.

“Take them; they are yours,” said Kinross. “You can build your fence there to-morrow.”

“So!” said Engelbert, with dawning intelligence. “The Yerman gonsul has at last to my gomplaint listened.”

“Hang the German consul! No!” cried Kinross. “I do it myself, because I was wrong--because you were good to me that time I was sick, and lent me the hundred dollars and the trade.”

“And you want noding?” asked Engelbert, still incredulous.

“I want to shake your hand and be friends again, old man,” said Kinross, “same as we used to be when we played dominoes every night, and you’d tell me about the Austrian War, and how the Prince divided his cigars with you when you were wounded.”

The German looked away. “Oh, Kinross,” he said, with a shining look in his eyes, “you make me much ashamed.” He turned suddenly round and wrung the Englishman’s hand in an iron grasp. “I, too, was dam fool.”

“A friend is worth more than seven breadfruits,” said Kinross.

“It wass not breadfruid: it wass brincible,” said the German. “Poof! de drees dey are noding; here it wass I wass hurted,” and he laid a heavy paw against his breast. “Ho, Malia, de beer!”

His strapping native wife appeared with bottles and mugs; at the sight of their guest she could scarcely conceal her surprise.

“Prosit!” said Engelbert, touching glasses.

“You know dem six agers of de Pasgoe estate,” he said, looking very hard at his companion. “Very nice leetle place, very sheap, yoost behind your store?”

Kinross nodded, but his face fell in spite of himself.

“I from the American gonsul bought him,” went on the German, “very sheap: two hundred dollars Chile money.”

Kinross looked black. Engelbert patted his hand and smiled ambiguously.

“Dey are yours,” he said. “Pay me back when you have de money. I buy dem only to spite you. _My friend_, take dem.”

“Paul, Paul,” cried Kinross, “I don’t know what to say--how to thank you. Only this morning I got money from home, and the first thing I meant to do was to buy them.”

“All de better,” said Engelbert; “and, my boy, you blant goffee. Cobrah, poof! Gotton, poof! It’s de goffee dat bays, and I will get you blenty leetle drees from my friend, de gaptain in Utumabu Blantation. You must go? So? Yoost one glass beer. Nein? I will be round lader.”

Kinross tore himself away with difficulty and started homeward, his heart swelling with kindness for the old Prussian. He exulted in the six acres he had so nearly lost, and they now seemed to him more precious than ever. It was no empty promise, that of the coffee-trees from Utumapu; these would save him all manner of preparatory labor and put his little plantation six months ahead. Then he remembered he was leaving Vaiala, and again he heard the hum of London in his ears. Well, he would explain about the trees to Leata, and would beg old Engelbert to help and advise her a bit. Poor Leata! she had lots of good sense and was very quick to learn. He could trust Leata.