Freya of the Seven Isles / Joseph Conrad

CHAPTER I

One day--and that day was many years ago now--I received a long,

chatty letter from one of my old chums and fellow-wanderers in

Eastern waters. He was still out there, but settled down, and

middle-aged; I imagined him--grown portly in figure and domestic in

his habits; in short, overtaken by the fate common to all except to

those who, being specially beloved by the gods, get knocked on the

head early. The letter was of the reminiscent "do you remember"

kind--a wistful letter of backward glances. And, amongst other

things, "surely you remember old Nelson," he wrote.

Remember old Nelson! Certainly. And to begin with, his name was

not Nelson. The Englishmen in the Archipelago called him Nelson

because it was more convenient, I suppose, and he never protested.

It would have been mere pedantry. The true form of his name was

Nielsen. He had come out East long before the advent of telegraph

cables, had served English firms, had married an English girl, had

been one of us for years, trading and sailing in all directions

through the Eastern Archipelago, across and around, transversely,

diagonally, perpendicularly, in semi-circles, and zigzags, and

figures of eights, for years and years.

There was no nook or cranny of these tropical waters that the

enterprise of old Nelson (or Nielsen) had not penetrated in an

eminently pacific way. His tracks, if plotted out, would have

covered the map of the Archipelago like a cobweb--all of it, with

the sole exception of the Philippines. He would never approach

that part, from a strange dread of Spaniards, or, to be exact, of

the Spanish authorities. What he imagined they could do to him it

is impossible to say. Perhaps at some time in his life he had read

some stories of the Inquisition.

But he was in general afraid of what he called "authorities"; not

the English authorities, which he trusted and respected, but the

other two of that part of the world. He was not so horrified at

the Dutch as he was at the Spaniards, but he was even more

mistrustful of them. Very mistrustful indeed. The Dutch, in his

view, were capable of "playing any ugly trick on a man" who had the

misfortune to displease them. There were their laws and

regulations, but they had no notion of fair play in applying them.

It was really pitiable to see the anxious circumspection of his

dealings with some official or other, and remember that this man

had been known to stroll up to a village of cannibals in New Guinea

in a quiet, fearless manner (and note that he was always fleshy all

his life, and, if I may say so, an appetising morsel) on some

matter of barter that did not amount perhaps to fifty pounds in the

end.

Remember old Nelson! Rather! Truly, none of us in my generation

had known him in his active days. He was "retired" in our time.

He had bought, or else leased, part of a small island from the

Sultan of a little group called the Seven Isles, not far north from

Banka. It was, I suppose, a legitimate transaction, but I have no

doubt that had he been an Englishman the Dutch would have

discovered a reason to fire him out without ceremony. In this

connection the real form of his name stood him in good stead. In

the character of an unassuming Dane whose conduct was most correct,

they let him be. With all his money engaged in cultivation he was

naturally careful not to give even the shadow of offence, and it

was mostly for prudential reasons of that sort that he did not look

with a favourable eye on Jasper Allen. But of that later. Yes!

One remembered well enough old Nelson's big, hospitable bungalow

erected on a shelving point of land, his portly form, costumed

generally in a white shirt and trousers (he had a confirmed habit

of taking off his alpaca jacket on the slightest provocation), his

round blue eyes, his straggly, sandy-white moustache sticking out

all ways like the quills of the fretful porcupine, his propensity

to sit down suddenly and fan himself with his hat. But there's no

use concealing the fact that what one remembered really was his

daughter, who at that time came out to live with him--and be a sort

of Lady of the Isles.

Freya Nelson (or Nielsen) was the kind of girl one remembers. The

oval of her face was perfect; and within that fascinating frame the

most happy disposition of line and feature, with an admirable

complexion, gave an impression of health, strength, and what I

might call unconscious self-confidence--a most pleasant and, as it

were, whimsical determination. I will not compare her eyes to

violets, because the real shade of their colour was peculiar, not

so dark and more lustrous. They were of the wide-open kind, and

looked at one frankly in every mood. I never did see the long,

dark eyelashes lowered--I dare say Jasper Allen did, being a

privileged person--but I have no doubt that the expression must

have been charming in a complex way. She could--Jasper told me

once with a touchingly imbecile exultation--sit on her hair. I

dare say, I dare say. It was not for me to behold these wonders; I

was content to admire the neat and becoming way she used to do it

up so as not to conceal the good shape of her head. And this

wealth of hair was so glossy that when the screens of the west

verandah were down, making a pleasant twilight there, or in the

shade of the grove of fruit-trees near the house, it seemed to give

out a golden light of its own.

She dressed generally in a white frock, with a skirt of walking

length, showing her neat, laced, brown boots. If there was any

colour about her costume it was just a bit of blue perhaps. No

exertion seemed to distress her. I have seen her land from the

dinghy after a long pull in the sun (she rowed herself about a good

deal) with no quickened breath and not a single hair out of its

place. In the morning when she came out on the verandah for the

first look westward, Sumatra way, over the sea, she seemed as fresh

and sparkling as a dewdrop. But a dewdrop is evanescent, and there

was nothing evanescent about Freya. I remember her round, solid

arms with the fine wrists, and her broad, capable hands with

tapering fingers.

I don't know whether she was actually born at sea, but I do know

that up to twelve years of age she sailed about with her parents in

various ships. After old Nelson lost his wife it became a matter

of serious concern for him what to do with the girl. A kind lady

in Singapore, touched by his dumb grief and deplorable perplexity,

offered to take charge of Freya. This arrangement lasted some six

years, during which old Nelson (or Nielsen) "retired" and

established, himself on his island, and then it was settled (the

kind lady going away to Europe) that his daughter should join him.

As the first and most important preparation for that event the old

fellow ordered from his Singapore agent a Steyn and Ebhart's

"upright grand." I was then commanding a little steamer in the

island trade, and it fell to my lot to take it out to him, so I

know something of Freya's "upright grand." We landed the enormous

packing-case with difficulty on a flat piece of rock amongst some

bushes, nearly knocking the bottom out of one of my boats in the

course of that nautical operation. Then, all my crew assisting,

engineers and firemen included, by the exercise of much anxious

ingenuity, and by means of rollers, levers, tackles, and inclined

planes of soaped planks, toiling in the sun like ancient Egyptians

at the building of a pyramid, we got it as far as the house and up

on to the edge of the west verandah--which was the actual drawing-

room of the bungalow. There, the case being ripped off cautiously,

the beautiful rosewood monster stood revealed at last. In reverent

excitement we coaxed it against the wall and drew the first free

breath of the day. It was certainly the heaviest movable object on

that islet since the creation of the world. The volume of sound it

gave out in that bungalow (which acted as a sounding-board) was

really astonishing. It thundered sweetly right over the sea.

Jasper Allen told me that early of a morning on the deck of the

Bonito (his wonderfully fast and pretty brig) he could hear Freya

playing her scales quite distinctly. But the fellow always

anchored foolishly close to the point, as I told him more than

once. Of course, these seas are almost uniformly serene, and the

Seven Isles is a particularly calm and cloudless spot as a rule.

But still, now and again, an afternoon thunderstorm over Banka, or

even one of these vicious thick squalls, from the distant Sumatra

coast, would make a sudden sally upon the group, enveloping it for

a couple of hours in whirlwinds and bluish-black murk of a

particularly sinister aspect. Then, with the lowered rattan-

screens rattling desperately in the wind and the bungalow shaking

all over, Freya would sit down to the piano and play fierce Wagner

music in the flicker of blinding flashes, with thunderbolts falling

all round, enough to make your hair stand on end; and Jasper would

remain stock still on the verandah, adoring the back view of her

supple, swaying figure, the miraculous sheen of her fair head, the

rapid hands on the keys, the white nape of her neck--while the

brig, down at the point there, surged at her cables within a

hundred yards of nasty, shiny, black rock-heads. Ugh!

And this, if you please, for no reason but that, when he went on

board at night and laid his head on the pillow, he should feel that

he was as near as he could conveniently get to his Freya slumbering

in the bungalow. Did you ever! And, mind, this brig was the home

to be--their home--the floating paradise which he was gradually

fitting out like a yacht to sail his life blissfully away in with

Freya. Imbecile! But the fellow was always taking chances.

One day, I remember I watched with Freya on the verandah the brig

approaching the point from the northward. I suppose Jasper made

the girl out with his long glass. What does he do? Instead of

standing on for another mile and a half along the shoals and then

tacking for the anchorage in a proper and seamanlike manner, he

spies a gap between two disgusting old jagged reefs, puts the helm

down suddenly, and shoots the brig through, with all her sails

shaking and rattling, so that we could hear the racket on the

verandah. I drew my breath through my teeth, I can tell you, and

Freya swore. Yes! She clenched her capable fists and stamped with

her pretty brown boot and said "Damn!" Then, looking at me with a

little heightened colour--not much--she remarked, "I forgot you

were there," and laughed. To be sure, to be sure. When Jasper was

in sight she was not likely to remember that anybody else in the

world was there. In my concern at this mad trick I couldn't help

appealing to her sympathetic common sense.

"Isn't he a fool?" I said with feeling.

"Perfect idiot," she agreed warmly, looking at me straight with her

wide-open, earnest eyes and the dimple of a smile on her cheek.

"And that," I pointed out to her, "just to save twenty minutes or

so in meeting you."

We heard the anchor go down, and then she became very resolute and

threatening.

"Wait a bit. I'll teach him."

She went into her own room and shut the door, leaving me alone on

the verandah with my instructions. Long before the brig's sails

were furled, Jasper came up three steps at a time, forgetting to

say how d'ye do, and looking right and left eagerly.

"Where's Freya? Wasn't she here just now?"

When I explained to him that he was to be deprived of Miss Freya's

presence for a whole hour, "just to teach him," he said I had put

her up to it, no doubt, and that he feared he would have yet to

shoot me some day. She and I were getting too thick together.

Then he flung himself into a chair, and tried to talk to me about

his trip. But the funny thing was that the fellow actually

suffered. I could see it. His voice failed him, and he sat there

dumb, looking at the door with the face of a man in pain. Fact. .

. . And the next still funnier thing was that the girl calmly

walked out of her room in less than ten minutes. And then I left.

I mean to say that I went away to seek old Nelson (or Nielsen) on

the back verandah, which was his own special nook in the

distribution of that house, with the kind purpose of engaging him

in conversation lest he should start roaming about and intrude

unwittingly where he was not wanted just then.

He knew that the brig had arrived, though he did not know that

Jasper was already with his daughter. I suppose he didn't think it

was possible in the time. A father naturally wouldn't. He

suspected that Allen was sweet on his girl; the fowls of the air

and the fishes of the sea, most of the traders in the Archipelago,

and all sorts and conditions of men in the town of Singapore were

aware of it. But he was not capable of appreciating how far the

girl was gone on the fellow. He had an idea that Freya was too

sensible to ever be gone on anybody--I mean to an unmanageable

extent. No; it was not that which made him sit on the back

verandah and worry himself in his unassuming manner during Jasper's

visits. What he worried about were the Dutch "authorities." For

it is a fact that the Dutch looked askance at the doings of Jasper

Allen, owner and master of the brig Bonito. They considered him

much too enterprising in his trading. I don't know that he ever

did anything illegal; but it seems to me that his immense activity

was repulsive to their stolid character and slow-going methods.

Anyway, in old Nelson's opinion, the captain of the Bonito was a

smart sailor, and a nice young man, but not a desirable

acquaintance upon the whole. Somewhat compromising, you

understand. On the other hand, he did not like to tell Jasper in

so many words to keep away. Poor old Nelson himself was a nice

fellow. I believe he would have shrunk from hurting the feelings

even of a mop-headed cannibal, unless, perhaps, under very strong

provocation. I mean the feelings, not the bodies. As against

spears, knives, hatchets, clubs, or arrows, old Nelson had proved

himself capable of taking his own part. In every other respect he

had a timorous soul. So he sat on the back verandah with a

concerned expression, and whenever the voices of his daughter and

Jasper Allen reached him, he would blow out his cheeks and let the

air escape with a dismal sound, like a much tried man.

Naturally I derided his fears which he, more or less, confided to

me. He had a certain regard for my judgment, and a certain

respect, not for my moral qualities, however, but for the good

terms I was supposed to be on with the Dutch "authorities." I knew

for a fact that his greatest bugbear, the Governor of Banka--a

charming, peppery, hearty, retired rear-admiral--had a distinct

liking for him. This consoling assurance which I used always to

put forward, made old Nelson (or Nielsen) brighten up for a moment;

but in the end he would shake his head doubtfully, as much as to

say that this was all very well, but that there were depths in the

Dutch official nature which no one but himself had ever fathomed.

Perfectly ridiculous.

On this occasion I am speaking of, old Nelson was even fretty; for

while I was trying to entertain him with a very funny and somewhat

scandalous adventure which happened to a certain acquaintance of

ours in Saigon, he exclaimed suddenly:

"What the devil he wants to turn up here for!"

Clearly he had not heard a word of the anecdote. And this annoyed

me, because the anecdote was really good. I stared at him.

"Come, come!" I cried. "Don't you know what Jasper Allen is

turning up here for?"

This was the first open allusion I had ever made to the true state

of affairs between Jasper and his daughter. He took it very

calmly.

"Oh, Freya is a sensible girl!" he murmured absently, his mind's

eye obviously fixed on the "authorities." No; Freya was no fool.

He was not concerned about that. He didn't mind it in the least.

The fellow was just company for her; he amused the girl; nothing

more.

When the perspicacious old chap left off mumbling, all was still in

the house. The other two were amusing themselves very quietly, and

no doubt very heartily. What more absorbing and less noisy

amusement could they have found than to plan their future? Side by

side on the verandah they must have been looking at the brig, the

third party in that fascinating game. Without her there would have

been no future. She was the fortune and the home, and the great

free world for them. Who was it that likened a ship to a prison?

May I be ignominiously hanged at a yardarm if that's true. The

white sails of that craft were the white wings--pinions, I believe,

would be the more poetical style--well, the white pinions, of their

soaring love. Soaring as regards Jasper. Freya, being a woman,

kept a better hold of the mundane connections of this affair.

But Jasper was elevated in the true sense of the word ever since

the day when, after they had been gazing at the brig in one of

those decisive silences that alone establish a perfect communion

between creatures gifted with speech, he proposed that she should

share the ownership of that treasure with him. Indeed, he

presented the brig to her altogether. But then his heart was in

the brig since the day he bought her in Manilla from a certain

middle-aged Peruvian, in a sober suit of black broadcloth,

enigmatic and sententious, who, for all I know, might have stolen

her on the South American coast, whence he said he had come over to

the Philippines "for family reasons." This "for family reasons"

was distinctly good. No true caballero would care to push on

inquiries after such a statement.

Indeed, Jasper was quite the caballero. The brig herself was then

all black and enigmatical, and very dirty; a tarnished gem of the

sea, or, rather, a neglected work of art. For he must have been an

artist, the obscure builder who had put her body together on lovely

lines out of the hardest tropical timber fastened with the purest

copper. Goodness only knows in what part of the world she was

built. Jasper himself had not been able to ascertain much of her

history from his sententious, saturnine Peruvian--if the fellow was

a Peruvian, and not the devil himself in disguise, as Jasper

jocularly pretended to believe. My opinion is that she was old

enough to have been one of the last pirates, a slaver perhaps, or

else an opium clipper of the early days, if not an opium smuggler.

However that may be, she was as sound as on the day she first took

the water, sailed like a witch, steered like a little boat, and,

like some fair women of adventurous life famous in history, seemed

to have the secret of perpetual youth; so that there was nothing

unnatural in Jasper Allen treating her like a lover. And that

treatment restored the lustre of her beauty. He clothed her in

many coats of the very best white paint so skilfully, carefully,

artistically put on and kept clean by his badgered crew of picked

Malays, that no costly enamel such as jewellers use for their work

could have looked better and felt smoother to the touch. A narrow

gilt moulding defined her elegant sheer as she sat on the water,

eclipsing easily the professional good looks of any pleasure yacht

that ever came to the East in those days. For myself, I must say I

prefer a moulding of deep crimson colour on a white hull. It gives

a stronger relief besides being less expensive; and I told Jasper

so. But no, nothing less than the best gold-leaf would do, because

no decoration could be gorgeous enough for the future abode of his

Freya.

His feelings for the brig and for the girl were as indissolubly

united in his heart as you may fuse two precious metals together in

one crucible. And the flame was pretty hot, I can assure you. It

induced in him a fierce inward restlessness both of activity and

desire. Too fine in face, with a lateral wave in his chestnut

hair, spare, long-limbed, with an eager glint in his steely eyes

and quick, brusque movements, he made me think sometimes of a

flashing sword-blade perpetually leaping out of the scabbard. It

was only when he was near the girl, when he had her there to look

at, that this peculiarly tense attitude was replaced by a grave

devout watchfulness of her slightest movements and utterances. Her

cool, resolute, capable, good-humoured self-possession seemed to

steady his heart. Was it the magic of her face, of her voice, of

her glances which calmed him so? Yet these were the very things

one must believe which had set his imagination ablaze--if love

begins in imagination. But I am no man to discuss such mysteries,

and it strikes me that we have neglected poor old Nelson inflating

his cheeks in a state of worry on the back verandah.

I pointed out to him that, after all, Jasper was not a very

frequent visitor. He and his brig worked hard all over the

Archipelago. But all old Nelson said, and he said it uneasily,

was:

"I hope Heemskirk won't turn up here while the brig's about."

Getting up a scare about Heemskirk now! Heemskirk! . . . Really,

one hadn't the patience--

CHAPTER II

For, pray, who was Heemskirk? You shall see at once how

unreasonable this dread of Heemskirk. . . . Certainly, his nature

was malevolent enough. That was obvious, directly you heard him

laugh. Nothing gives away more a man's secret disposition than the

unguarded ring of his laugh. But, bless my soul! if we were to

start at every evil guffaw like a hare at every sound, we shouldn't

be fit for anything but the solitude of a desert, or the seclusion

of a hermitage. And even there we should have to put up with the

unavoidable company of the devil.

However, the devil is a considerable personage, who has known

better days and has moved high up in the hierarchy of Celestial

Host; but in the hierarchy of mere earthly Dutchmen, Heemskirk,

whose early days could not have been very splendid, was merely a

naval officer forty years of age, of no particular connections or

ability to boast of. He was commanding the Neptun, a little

gunboat employed on dreary patrol duty up and down the Archipelago,

to look after the traders. Not a very exalted position truly. I

tell you, just a common middle-aged lieutenant of some twenty-five

years' service and sure to be retired before long--that's all.

He never bothered his head very much as to what was going on in the

Seven Isles group till he learned from some talk in Mintok or

Palembang, I suppose, that there was a pretty girl living there.

Curiosity, I presume, caused him to go poking around that way, and

then, after he had once seen Freya, he made a practice of calling

at the group whenever he found himself within half a day's steaming

from it.

I don't mean to say that Heemskirk was a typical Dutch naval

officer. I have seen enough of them not to fall into that absurd

mistake. He had a big, clean-shaven face; great flat, brown

cheeks, with a thin, hooked nose and a small, pursy mouth squeezed

in between. There were a few silver threads in his black hair, and

his unpleasant eyes were nearly black, too. He had a surly way of

casting side glances without moving his head, which was set low on

a short, round neck. A thick, round trunk in a dark undress jacket

with gold shoulder-straps, was sustained by a straddly pair of

thick, round legs, in white drill trousers. His round skull under

a white cap looked as if it were immensely thick too, but there

were brains enough in it to discover and take advantage maliciously

of poor old Nelson's nervousness before everything that was

invested with the merest shred of authority.

Heemskirk would land on the point and perambulate silently every

part of the plantation as if the whole place belonged to him,

before her went to the house. On the verandah he would take the

best chair, and would stay for tiffin or dinner, just simply stay

on, without taking the trouble to invite himself by so much as a

word.

He ought to have been kicked, if only for his manner to Miss Freya.

Had he been a naked savage, armed with spears and poisoned arrows,

old Nelson (or Nielsen) would have gone for him with his bare

fists. But these gold shoulder-straps--Dutch shoulder-straps at

that--were enough to terrify the old fellow; so he let the beggar

treat him with heavy contempt, devour his daughter with his eyes,

and drink the best part of his little stock of wine.

I saw something of this, and on one occasion I tried to pass a

remark on the subject. It was pitiable to see the trouble in old

Nelson's round eyes. At first he cried out that the lieutenant was

a good friend of his; a very good fellow. I went on staring at him

pretty hard, so that at last he faltered, and had to own that, of

course, Heemskirk was not a very genial person outwardly, but all

the same at bottom. . . .

"I haven't yet met a genial Dutchman out here," I interrupted.

"Geniality, after all, is not of much consequence, but don't you

see--"

Nelson looked suddenly so frightened at what I was going to say

that I hadn't the heart to go on. Of course, I was going to tell

him that the fellow was after his girl. That just describes it

exactly. What Heemskirk might have expected or what he thought he

could do, I don't know. For all I can tell, he might have imagined

himself irresistible, or have taken Freya for what she was not, on

account of her lively, assured, unconstrained manner. But there it

is. He was after that girl. Nelson could see it well enough.

Only he preferred to ignore it. He did not want to be told of it.

"All I want is to live in peace and quietness with the Dutch

authorities," he mumbled shamefacedly.

He was incurable. I was sorry for him, and I really think Miss

Freya was sorry for her father, too. She restrained herself for

his sake, and as everything she did she did it simply,

unaffectedly, and even good humouredly. No small effort that,

because in Heemskirk's attentions there was an insolent touch of

scorn, hard to put up with. Dutchmen of that sort are over-bearing

to their inferiors, and that officer of the king looked upon old

Nelson and Freya as quite beneath him in every way.

I can't say I felt sorry for Freya. She was not the sort of girl

to take anything tragically. One could feel for her and sympathise

with her difficulty, but she seemed equal to any situation. It was

rather admiration she extorted by her competent serenity. It was

only when Jasper and Heemskirk were together at the bungalow, as it

happened now and then, that she felt the strain, and even then it

was not for everybody to see. My eyes alone could detect a faint

shadow on the radiance of her personality. Once I could not help

saying to her appreciatively:

"Upon my word you are wonderful."

She let it pass with a faint smile.

"The great thing is to prevent Jasper becoming unreasonable," she

said; and I could see real concern lurking in the quiet depths of

her frank eyes gazing straight at me. "You will help to keep him

quiet, won't you?"

"Of course, we must keep him quiet," I declared, understanding very

well the nature of her anxiety. "He's such a lunatic, too, when

he's roused."

"He is!" she assented, in a soft tone; for it was our joke to speak

of Jasper abusively. "But I have tamed him a bit. He's quite a

good boy now."

"He would squash Heemskirk like a blackbeetle all the same," I

remarked.

"Rather!" she murmured. "And that wouldn't do," she added quickly.

"Imagine the state poor papa would get into. Besides, I mean to be

mistress of the dear brig and sail about these seas, not go off

wandering ten thousand miles away from here."

"The sooner you are on board to look after the man and the brig the

better," I said seriously. "They need you to steady them both a

bit. I don't think Jasper will ever get sobered down till he has

carried you off from this island. You don't see him when he is

away from you, as I do. He's in a state of perpetual elation which

almost frightens me."

At this she smiled again, and then looked serious. For it could

not be unpleasant to her to be told of her power, and she had some

sense of her responsibility. She slipped away from me suddenly,

because Heemskirk, with old Nelson in attendance at his elbow, was

coming up the steps of the verandah. Directly his head came above

the level of the floor his ill-natured black eyes shot glances here

and there.

"Where's your girl, Nelson?" he asked, in a tone as if every soul

in the world belonged to him. And then to me: "The goddess has

flown, eh?"

Nelson's Cove--as we used to call it--was crowded with shipping

that day. There was first my steamer, then the Neptun gunboat

further out, and the Bonito, brig, anchored as usual so close

inshore that it looked as if, with a little skill and judgment, one

could shy a hat from the verandah on to her scrupulously holystoned

quarter-deck. Her brasses flashed like gold, her white body-paint

had a sheen like a satin robe. The rake of her varnished spars and

the big yards, squared to a hair, gave her a sort of martial

elegance. She was a beauty. No wonder that in possession of a

craft like that and the promise of a girl like Freya, Jasper lived

in a state of perpetual elation fit, perhaps, for the seventh

heaven, but not exactly safe in a world like ours.

I remarked politely to Heemskirk that, with three guests in the

house, Miss Freya had no doubt domestic matters to attend to. I

knew, of course, that she had gone to meet Jasper at a certain

cleared spot on the banks of the only stream on Nelson's little

island. The commander of the Neptun gave me a dubious black look,

and began to make himself at home, flinging his thick, cylindrical

carcass into a rocking-chair, and unbuttoning his coat. Old Nelson

sat down opposite him in a most unassuming manner, staring

anxiously with his round eyes and fanning himself with his hat. I

tried to make conversation to while the time away; not an easy task

with a morose, enamoured Dutchman constantly looking from one door

to another and answering one's advances either with a jeer or a

grunt.

However, the evening passed off all right. Luckily, there is a

degree of bliss too intense for elation. Jasper was quiet and

concentrated silently in watching Freya. As we went on board our

respective ships I offered to give his brig a tow out next morning.

I did it on purpose to get him away at the earliest possible

moment. So in the first cold light of the dawn we passed by the

gunboat lying black and still without a sound in her at the mouth

of the glassy cove. But with tropical swiftness the sun had

climbed twice its diameter above the horizon before we had rounded

the reef and got abreast of the point. On the biggest boulder

there stood Freya, all in white and, in her helmet, like a feminine

and martial statue with a rosy face, as I could see very well with

my glasses. She fluttered an expressive handkerchief, and Jasper,

running up the main rigging of the white and warlike brig, waved

his hat in response. Shortly afterwards we parted, I to the

northward and Jasper heading east with a light wind on the quarter,

for Banjermassin and two other ports, I believe it was, that trip.

This peaceful occasion was the last on which I saw all these people

assembled together; the charmingly fresh and resolute Freya, the

innocently round-eyed old Nelson, Jasper, keen, long limbed, lean

faced, admirably self-contained, in his manner, because

inconceivably happy under the eyes of his Freya; all three tall,

fair, and blue-eyed in varied shades, and amongst them the swarthy,

arrogant, black-haired Dutchman, shorter nearly by a head, and so

much thicker than any of them that he seemed to be a creature

capable of inflating itself, a grotesque specimen of mankind from

some other planet.

The contrast struck me all at once as we stood in the lighted

verandah, after rising from the dinner-table. I was fascinated by

it for the rest of the evening, and I remember the impression of

something funny and ill-omened at the same time in it to this day.

CHAPTER III

A few weeks later, coming early one morning into Singapore, from a

journey to the southward, I saw the brig lying at anchor in all her

usual symmetry and splendour of aspect as though she had been taken

out of a glass case and put delicately into the water that very

moment.

She was well out in the roadstead, but I steamed in and took up my

habitual berth close in front of the town. Before we had finished

breakfast a quarter-master came to tell me that Captain Allen's

boat was coming our way.

His smart gig dashed alongside, and in two bounds he was up our

accommodation-ladder and shaking me by the hand with his nervous

grip, his eyes snapping inquisitively, for he supposed I had called

at the Seven Isles group on my way. I reached into my pocket for a

nicely folded little note, which he grabbed out of my hand without

ceremony and carried off on the bridge to read by himself. After a

decent interval I followed him up there, and found him pacing to

and fro; for the nature of his emotions made him restless even in

his most thoughtful moments.

He shook his head at me triumphantly.

"Well, my dear boy," he said, "I shall be counting the days now."

I understood what he meant. I knew that those young people had

settled already on a runaway match without official preliminaries.

This was really a logical decision. Old Nelson (or Nielsen) would

never have agreed to give up Freya peaceably to this compromising

Jasper. Heavens! What would the Dutch authorities say to such a

match! It sounds too ridiculous for words. But there's nothing in

the world more selfishly hard than a timorous man in a fright about

his "little estate," as old Nelson used to call it in apologetic

accents. A heart permeated by a particular sort of funk is proof

against sense, feeling, and ridicule. It's a flint.

Jasper would have made his request all the same and then taken his

own way; but it was Freya who decided that nothing should be said,

on the ground that, "Papa would only worry himself to distraction."

He was capable of making himself ill, and then she wouldn't have

the heart to leave him. Here you have the sanity of feminine

outlook and the frankness of feminine reasoning. And for the rest,

Miss Freya could read "poor dear papa" in the way a woman reads a

man--like an open book. His daughter once gone, old Nelson would

not worry himself. He would raise a great outcry, and make no end

of lamentable fuss, but that's not the same thing. The real

agonies of indecision, the anguish of conflicting feelings would be

spared to him. And as he was too unassuming to rage, he would,

after a period of lamentation, devote himself to his "little

estate," and to keeping on good terms with the authorities.

Time would do the rest. And Freya thought she could afford to

wait, while ruling over her own home in the beautiful brig and over

the man who loved her. This was the life for her who had learned

to walk on a ship's deck. She was a ship-child, a sea-girl if ever

there was one. And of course she loved Jasper and trusted him; but

there was a shade of anxiety in her pride. It is very fine and

romantic to possess for your very own a finely tempered and trusty

sword-blade, but whether it is the best weapon to counter with the

common cudgel-play of Fate--that's another question.

She knew that she had the more substance of the two--you needn't

try any cheap jokes, I am not talking of their weights. She was

just a little anxious while he was away, and she had me who, being

a tried confidant, took the liberty to whisper frequently "The

sooner the better." But there was a peculiar vein of obstinacy in

Miss Freya, and her reason for delay was characteristic. "Not

before my twenty-first birthday; so that there shall be no mistake

in people's minds as to me being old enough to know what I am

doing."

Jasper's feelings were in such subjection that he had never even

remonstrated against the decree. She was just splendid, whatever

she did or said, and there was an end of it for him. I believe

that he was subtle enough to be even flattered at bottom--at times.

And then to console him he had the brig which seemed pervaded by

the spirit of Freya, since whatever he did on board was always done

under the supreme sanction of his love.

"Yes. I'll soon begin to count the days," he repeated. "Eleven

months more. I'll have to crowd three trips into that."

"Mind you don't come to grief trying to do too much," I admonished

him. But he dismissed my caution with a laugh and an elated

gesture. Pooh! Nothing, nothing could happen to the brig, he

cried, as if the flame of his heart could light up the dark nights

of uncharted seas, and the image of Freya serve for an unerring

beacon amongst hidden shoals; as if the winds had to wait on his

future, the stars fight for it in their courses; as if the magic of

his passion had the power to float a ship on a drop of dew or sail

her through the eye of a needle--simply because it was her

magnificent lot to be the servant of a love so full of grace as to

make all the ways of the earth safe, resplendent, and easy.

"I suppose," I said, after he had finished laughing at my innocent

enough remark, "I suppose you will be off to-day."

That was what he meant to do. He had not gone at daylight only

because he expected me to come in.

"And only fancy what has happened yesterday," he went on. "My mate

left me suddenly. Had to. And as there's nobody to be found at a

short notice I am going to take Schultz with me. The notorious

Schultz! Why don't you jump out of your skin? I tell you I went

and unearthed Schultz late last evening, after no end of trouble.

'I am your man, captain,' he says, in that wonderful voice of his,

'but I am sorry to confess I have practically no clothes to my

back. I have had to sell all my wardrobe to get a little food from

day to day.' What a voice that man has got. Talk about moving

stones! But people seem to get used to it. I had never seen him

before, and, upon my word, I felt suddenly tears rising to my eyes.

Luckily it was dusk. He was sitting very quiet under a tree in a

native compound as thin as a lath, and when I peered down at him

all he had on was an old cotton singlet and a pair of ragged

pyjamas. I bought him six white suits and two pairs of canvas

shoes. Can't clear the ship without a mate. Must have somebody.

I am going on shore presently to sign him on, and I shall take him

with me as I go back on board to get under way. Now, I am a

lunatic--am I not? Mad, of course. Come on! Lay it on thick.

Let yourself go. I like to see you get excited."

He so evidently expected me to scold that I took especial pleasure

in exaggerating the calmness of my attitude.

"The worst that can be brought up against Schultz," I began,

folding my arms and speaking dispassionately, "is an awkward habit

of stealing the stores of every ship he has ever been in. He will

do it. That's really all that's wrong. I don't credit absolutely

that story Captain Robinson tells of Schultz conspiring in

Chantabun with some ruffians in a Chinese junk to steal the anchor

off the starboard bow of the Bohemian Girl schooner. Robinson's

story is too ingenious altogether. That other tale of the

engineers of the Nan-Shan finding Schultz at midnight in the

engine-room busy hammering at the brass bearings to carry them off

for sale on shore seems to me more authentic. Apart from this

little weakness, let me tell you that Schultz is a smarter sailor

than many who never took a drop of drink in their lives, and

perhaps no worse morally than some men you and I know who have

never stolen the value of a penny. He may not be a desirable

person to have on board one's ship, but since you have no choice he

may be made to do, I believe. The important thing is to understand

his psychology. Don't give him any money till you have done with

him. Not a cent, if he begs ever so. For as sure as Fate the

moment you give him any money he will begin to steal. Just

remember that."

I enjoyed Jasper's incredulous surprise.

"The devil he will!" he cried. "What on earth for? Aren't you

trying to pull my leg, old boy?"

"No. I'm not. You must understand Schultz's psychology. He's

neither a loafer nor a cadger. He's not likely to wander about

looking for somebody to stand him drinks. But suppose he goes on

shore with five dollars, or fifty for that matter, in his pocket?

After the third or fourth glass he becomes fuddled and charitable.

He either drops his money all over the place, or else distributes

the lot around; gives it to any one who will take it. Then it

occurs to him that the night is young yet, and that he may require

a good many more drinks for himself and his friends before morning.

So he starts off cheerfully for his ship. His legs never get

affected nor his head either in the usual way. He gets aboard and

simply grabs the first thing that seems to him suitable--the cabin

lamp, a coil of rope, a bag of biscuits, a drum of oil--and

converts it into money without thinking twice about it. This is

the process and no other. You have only to look out that he

doesn't get a start. That's all."

"Confound his psychology," muttered Jasper. "But a man with a

voice like his is fit to talk to the angels. Is he incurable do

you think?"

I said that I thought so. Nobody had prosecuted him yet, but no

one would employ him any longer. His end would be, I feared, to

starve in some hole or other.

"Ah, well," reflected Jasper. "The Bonito isn't trading to any

ports of civilisation. That'll make it easier for him to keep

straight."

That was true. The brig's business was on uncivilised coasts, with

obscure rajahs dwelling in nearly unknown bays; with native

settlements up mysterious rivers opening their sombre, forest-lined

estuaries among a welter of pale green reefs and dazzling sand-

banks, in lonely straits of calm blue water all aglitter with

sunshine. Alone, far from the beaten tracks, she glided, all

white, round dark, frowning headlands, stole out, silent like a

ghost, from behind points of land stretching out all black in the

moonlight; or lay hove-to, like a sleeping sea-bird, under the

shadow of some nameless mountain waiting for a signal. She would

be glimpsed suddenly on misty, squally days dashing disdainfully

aside the short aggressive waves of the Java Sea; or be seen far,

far away, a tiny dazzling white speck flying across the brooding

purple masses of thunderclouds piled up on the horizon. Sometimes,

on the rare mail tracks, where civilisation brushes against wild

mystery, when the naive passengers crowding along the rail

exclaimed, pointing at her with interest: "Oh, here's a yacht!"

the Dutch captain, with a hostile glance, would grunt

contemptuously: "Yacht! No! That's only English Jasper. A

pedlar--"

"A good seaman you say," ejaculated Jasper, still in the matter of

the hopeless Schultz with the wonderfully touching voice.

"First rate. Ask any one. Quite worth having--only impossible," I

declared.

"He shall have his chance to reform in the brig," said Jasper, with

a laugh. "There will be no temptations either to drink or steal

where I am going to this time."

I didn't press him for anything more definite on that point. In

fact, intimate as we were, I had a pretty clear notion of the

general run of his business.

But as we are going ashore in his gig he asked suddenly: "By the

way, do you know where Heemskirk is?"

I eyed him covertly, and was reassured. He had asked the question,

not as a lover, but as a trader. I told him that I had heard in

Palembang that the Neptun was on duty down about Flores and

Sumbawa. Quite out of his way. He expressed his satisfaction.

"You know," he went on, "that fellow, when he gets on the Borneo

coast, amuses himself by knocking down my beacons. I have had to

put up a few to help me in and out of the rivers. Early this year

a Celebes trader becalmed in a prau was watching him at it. He

steamed the gunboat full tilt at two of them, one after another,

smashing them to pieces, and then lowered a boat on purpose to pull

out a third, which I had a lot of trouble six months ago to stick

up in the middle of a mudflat for a tide mark. Did you ever hear

of anything more provoking--eh?"

"I wouldn't quarrel with the beggar," I observed casually, yet

disliking that piece of news strongly. "It isn't worth while."

"I quarrel?" cried Jasper. "I don't want to quarrel. I don't want

to hurt a single hair of his ugly head. My dear fellow, when I

think of Freya's twenty-first birthday, all the world's my friend,

Heemskirk included. It's a nasty, spiteful amusement, all the

same."

We parted rather hurriedly on the quay, each of us having his own

pressing business to attend to. I would have been very much cut up

had I known that this hurried grasp of the hand with "So long, old

boy. Good luck to you!" was the last of our partings.

On his return to the Straits I was away, and he was gone again

before I got back. He was trying to achieve three trips before

Freya's twenty-first birthday. At Nelson's Cove I missed him again

by only a couple of days. Freya and I talked of "that lunatic" and

"perfect idiot" with great delight and infinite appreciation. She

was very radiant, with a more pronounced gaiety, notwithstanding

that she had just parted from Jasper. But this was to be their

last separation.

"Do get aboard as soon as you can, Miss Freya," I entreated.

She looked me straight in the face, her colour a little heightened

and with a sort of solemn ardour--if there was a little catch in

her voice.

"The very next day."

Ah, yes! The very next day after her twenty-first birthday. I was

pleased at this hint of deep feeling. It was as if she had grown

impatient at last of the self-imposed delay. I supposed that

Jasper's recent visit had told heavily.

"That's right," I said approvingly. "I shall be much easier in my

mind when I know you have taken charge of that lunatic. Don't you

lose a minute. He, of course, will be on time--unless heavens

fall."

"Yes. Unless--" she repeated in a thoughtful whisper, raising her

eyes to the evening sky without a speck of cloud anywhere. Silent

for a time, we let our eyes wander over the waters below, looking

mysteriously still in the twilight, as if trustfully composed for a

long, long dream in the warm, tropical night. And the peace all

round us seemed without limits and without end.

And then we began again to talk Jasper over in our usual strain.

We agreed that he was too reckless in many ways. Luckily, the brig

was equal to the situation. Nothing apparently was too much for

her. A perfect darling of a ship, said Miss Freya. She and her

father had spent an afternoon on board. Jasper had given them some

tea. Papa was grumpy. . . . I had a vision of old Nelson under the

brig's snowy awnings, nursing his unassuming vexation, and fanning

himself with his hat. A comedy father. . . . As a new instance of

Jasper's lunacy, I was told that he was distressed at his inability

to have solid silver handles fitted to all the cabin doors. "As if

I would have let him!" commented Miss Freya, with amused

indignation. Incidentally, I learned also that Schultz, the

nautical kleptomaniac with the pathetic voice, was still hanging on

to his job, with Miss Freya's approval. Jasper had confided to the

lady of his heart his purpose of straightening out the fellow's

psychology. Yes, indeed. All the world was his friend because it

breathed the same air with Freya.

Somehow or other, I brought Heemskirk's name into conversation,

and, to my great surprise, startled Miss Freya. Her eyes expressed

something like distress, while she bit her lip as if to contain an

explosion of laughter. Oh! Yes. Heemskirk was at the bungalow at

the same time with Jasper, but he arrived the day after. He left

the same day as the brig, but a few hours later.

"What a nuisance he must have been to you two," I said feelingly.

Her eyes flashed at me a sort of frightened merriment, and suddenly

she exploded into a clear burst of laughter. "Ha, ha, ha!"

I echoed it heartily, but not with the game charming tone: "Ha,

ha, ha! . . . Isn't he grotesque? Ha, ha, ha!" And the

ludicrousness of old Nelson's inanely fierce round eyes in

association with his conciliatory manner to the lieutenant

presenting itself to my mind brought on another fit.

"He looks," I spluttered, "he looks--Ha, ha, ha!--amongst you three

. . . like an unhappy black-beetle. Ha, ha, ha!"

She gave out another ringing peal, ran off into her own room, and

slammed the door behind her, leaving me profoundly astounded. I

stopped laughing at once.

"What's the joke?" asked old Nelson's voice, half way down the

steps.

He came up, sat down, and blew out his cheeks, looking

inexpressibly fatuous. But I didn't want to laugh any more. And

what on earth, I asked myself, have we been laughing at in this

uncontrollable fashion. I felt suddenly depressed.

Oh, yes. Freya had started it. The girl's overwrought, I thought.

And really one couldn't wonder at it.

I had no answer to old Nelson's question, but he was too aggrieved

at Jasper's visit to think of anything else. He as good as asked

me whether I wouldn't undertake to hint to Jasper that he was not

wanted at the Seven Isles group. I declared that it was not

necessary. From certain circumstances which had come to my

knowledge lately, I had reason to think that he would not be much

troubled by Jasper Allen in the future.

He emitted an earnest "Thank God!" which nearly set me laughing

again, but he did not brighten up proportionately. It seemed

Heemskirk had taken special pains to make himself disagreeable.

The lieutenant had frightened old Nelson very much by expressing a

sinister wonder at the Government permitting a white man to settle

down in that part at all. "It is against our declared policy," he

had remarked. He had also charged him with being in reality no

better than an Englishman. He had even tried to pick a quarrel

with him for not learning to speak Dutch.

"I told him I was too old to learn now," sighed out old Nelson (or

Nielsen) dismally. "He said I ought to have learned Dutch long

before. I had been making my living in Dutch dependencies. It was

disgraceful of me not to speak Dutch, he said. He was as savage

with me as if I had been a Chinaman."

It was plain he had been viciously badgered. He did not mention

how many bottles of his best claret he had offered up on the altar

of conciliation. It must have been a generous libation. But old

Nelson (or Nielsen) was really hospitable. He didn't mind that;

and I only regretted that this virtue should be lavished on the

lieutenant-commander of the Neptun. I longed to tell him that in

all probability he would be relieved from Heemskirk's visitations

also. I did not do so only from the fear (absurd, I admit) of

arousing some sort of suspicion in his mind. As if with this

guileless comedy father such a thing were possible!

Strangely enough, the last words on the subject of Heemskirk were

spoken by Freya, and in that very sense. The lieutenant was

turning up persistently in old Nelson's conversation at dinner. At

last I muttered a half audible "Damn the lieutenant." I could see

that the girl was getting exasperated, too.

"And he wasn't well at all--was he, Freya?" old Nelson went on

moaning. "Perhaps it was that which made him so snappish, hey,

Freya? He looked very bad when he left us so suddenly. His liver

must be in a bad state, too."

"Oh, he will end by getting over it," said Freya impatiently. "And

do leave off worrying about him, papa. Very likely you won't see

much of him for a long time to come."

The look she gave me in exchange for my discreet smile had no

hidden mirth in it. Her eyes seemed hollowed, her face gone wan in

a couple of hours. We had been laughing too much. Overwrought!

Overwrought by the approach of the decisive moment. After all,

sincere, courageous, and self-reliant as she was, she must have

felt both the passion and the compunction of her resolve. The very

strength of love which had carried her up to that point must have

put her under a great moral strain, in which there might have been

a little simple remorse, too. For she was honest--and there,

across the table, sat poor old Nelson (or Nielsen) staring at her,

round-eyed and so pathetically comic in his fierce aspect as to

touch the most lightsome heart.

He retired early to his room to soothe himself for a night's rest

by perusing his account-books. We two remained on the verandah for

another hour or so, but we exchanged only languid phrases on things

without importance, as though we had been emotionally jaded by our

long day's talk on the only momentous subject. And yet there was

something she might have told a friend. But she didn't. We parted

silently. She distrusted my masculine lack of common sense,

perhaps. . . . O! Freya!

Going down the precipitous path to the landing-stage, I was

confronted in the shadows of boulders and bushes by a draped

feminine figure whose appearance startled me at first. It glided

into my way suddenly from behind a piece of rock. But in a moment

it occurred to me that it could be no one else but Freya's maid, a

half-caste Malacca Portuguese. One caught fleeting glimpses of her

olive face and dazzling white teeth about the house. I had

observed her at times from a distance, as she sat within call under

the shade of some fruit trees, brushing and plaiting her long raven

locks. It seemed to be the principal occupation of her leisure

hours. We had often exchanged nods and smiles--and a few words,

too. She was a pretty creature. And once I had watched her

approvingly make funny and expressive grimaces behind Heemskirk's

back. I understood (from Jasper) that she was in the secret, like

a comedy camerista. She was to accompany Freya on her irregular

way to matrimony and "ever after" happiness. Why should she be

roaming by night near the cove--unless on some love affair of her

own--I asked myself. But there was nobody suitable within the

Seven Isles group, as far as I knew. It flashed upon me that it

was myself she had been lying in wait for.

She hesitated, muffled from head to foot, shadowy and bashful. I

advanced another pace, and how I felt is nobody's business.

"What is it?" I asked, very low.

"Nobody knows I am here," she whispered.

"And nobody can see us," I whispered back.

The murmur of words "I've been so frightened" reached me. Just

then forty feet above our head, from the yet lighted verandah,

unexpected and startling, Freya's voice rang out in a clear,

imperious call:

"Antonia!"

With a stifled exclamation, the hesitating girl vanished out of the

path. A bush near by rustled; then silence. I waited wondering.

The lights on the verandah went out. I waited a while longer then

continued down the path to my boat, wondering more than ever.

I remember the occurrences of that visit especially, because this

was the last time I saw the Nelson bungalow. On arriving at the

Straits I found cable messages which made it necessary for me to

throw up my employment at a moment's notice and go home at once. I

had a desperate scramble to catch the mailboat which was due to

leave next day, but I found time to write two short notes, one to

Freya, the other to Jasper. Later on I wrote at length, this time

to Allen alone. I got no answer. I hunted up then his brother,

or, rather, half-brother, a solicitor in the city, a sallow, calm,

little man who looked at me over his spectacles thoughtfully.

Jasper was the only child of his father's second marriage, a

transaction which had failed to commend itself to the first, grown-

up family.

"You haven't heard for ages," I repeated, with secret annoyance.

"May I ask what 'for ages' means in this connection?"

"It means that I don't care whether I ever hear from him or not,"

retorted the little man of law, turning nasty suddenly.

I could not blame Jasper for not wasting his time in correspondence

with such an outrageous relative. But why didn't he write to me--a

decent sort of friend, after all; enough of a friend to find for

his silence the excuse of forgetfulness natural to a state of

transcendental bliss? I waited indulgently, but nothing ever came.

And the East seemed to drop out of my life without an echo, like a

stone falling into a well of prodigious depth.

CHAPTER IV

I suppose praiseworthy motives are a sufficient justification

almost for anything. What could be more commendable in the

abstract than a girl's determination that "poor papa" should not be

worried, and her anxiety that the man of her choice should be kept

by any means from every occasion of doing something rash, something

which might endanger the whole scheme of their happiness?

Nothing could be more tender and more prudent. We must also

remember the girl's self-reliant temperament, and the general

unwillingness of women--I mean women of sense--to make a fuss over

matters of that sort.

As has been said already, Heemskirk turned up some time after

Jasper's arrival at Nelson's Cove. The sight of the brig lying

right under the bungalow was very offensive to him. He did not fly

ashore before his anchor touched the ground as Jasper used to do.

On the contrary, he hung about his quarter-deck mumbling to

himself; and when he ordered his boat to be manned it was in an

angry voice. Freya's existence, which lifted Jasper out of himself

into a blissful elation, was for Heemskirk a cause of secret

torment, of hours of exasperated brooding.

While passing the brig he hailed her harshly and asked if the

master was on board. Schultz, smart and neat in a spotless white

suit, leaned over the taffrail, finding the question somewhat

amusing. He looked humorously down into Heemskirk's boat, and

answered, in the most amiable modulations of his beautiful voice:

"Captain Allen is up at the house, sir." But his expression

changed suddenly at the savage growl: "What the devil are you

grinning at?" which acknowledged that information.

He watched Heemskirk land and, instead of going to the house,

stride away by another path into the grounds.

The desire-tormented Dutchman found old Nelson (or Nielsen) at his

drying-sheds, very busy superintending the manipulation of his

tobacco crop, which, though small, was of excellent quality, and

enjoying himself thoroughly. But Heemskirk soon put a stop to this

simple happiness. He sat down by the old chap, and by the sort of

talk which he knew was best calculated for the purpose, reduced him

before long to a state of concealed and perspiring nervousness. It

was a horrid talk of "authorities," and old Nelson tried to defend

himself. If he dealt with English traders it was because he had to

dispose of his produce somehow. He was as conciliatory as he knew

how to be, and this very thing seemed to excite Heemskirk, who had

worked himself up into a heavily breathing state of passion.

"And the worst of them all is that Allen," he growled. "Your

particular friend--eh? You have let in a lot of these Englishmen

into this part. You ought never to have been allowed to settle

here. Never. What's he doing here now?"

Old Nelson (or Nielsen), becoming very agitated, declared that

Jasper Allen was no particular friend of his. No friend at all--at

all. He had bought three tons of rice from him to feed his

workpeople on. What sort of evidence of friendship was that?

Heemskirk burst out at last with the thought that had been gnawing

at his vitals:

"Yes. Sell three tons of rice and flirt three days with that girl

of yours. I am speaking to you as a friend, Nielsen. This won't

do. You are only on sufferance here."

Old Nelson was taken aback at first, but recovered pretty quickly.

Won't do! Certainly! Of course, it wouldn't do! The last man in

the world. But his girl didn't care for the fellow, and was too

sensible to fall in love with any one. He was very earnest in

impressing on Heemskirk his own feeling of absolute security. And

the lieutenant, casting doubting glances sideways, was yet willing

to believe him.

"Much you know about it," he grunted nevertheless.

"But I do know," insisted old Nelson, with the greater desperation

because he wanted to resist the doubts arising in his own mind.

"My own daughter! In my own house, and I not to know! Come! It

would be a good joke, lieutenant."

"They seem to be carrying on considerably," remarked Heemskirk

moodily. "I suppose they are together now," he added, feeling a

pang which changed what he meant for a mocking smile into a strange

grimace.

The harassed Nelson shook his hand at him. He was at bottom

shocked at this insistence, and was even beginning to feel annoyed

at the absurdity of it.

"Pooh! Pooh! I'll tell you what, lieutenant: you go to the house

and have a drop of gin-and-bitters before dinner. Ask for Freya.

I must see the last of this tobacco put away for the night, but

I'll be along presently."

Heemskirk was not insensible to this suggestion. It answered to

his secret longing, which was not a longing for drink, however.

Old Nelson shouted solicitously after his broad back a

recommendation to make himself comfortable, and that there was a

box of cheroots on the verandah.

It was the west verandah that old Nelson meant, the one which was

the living-room of the house, and had split-rattan screens of the

very finest quality. The east verandah, sacred to his own privacy,

puffing out of cheeks, and other signs of perplexed thinking, was

fitted with stout blinds of sailcloth. The north verandah was not

a verandah at all, really. It was more like a long balcony. It

did not communicate with the other two, and could only be

approached by a passage inside the house. Thus it had a privacy

which made it a convenient place for a maiden's meditations without

words, and also for the discourses, apparently without sense,

which, passing between a young man and a maid, become pregnant with

a diversity of transcendental meanings.

This north verandah was embowered with climbing plants. Freya,

whose room opened out on it, had furnished it as a sort of boudoir

for herself, with a few cane chairs and a sofa of the same kind.

On this sofa she and Jasper sat as close together as is possible in

this imperfect world where neither can a body be in two places at

once nor yet two bodies can be in one place at the same time. They

had been sitting together all the afternoon, and I won't say that

their talk had been without sense. Loving him with a little

judicious anxiety lest in his elation he should break his heart

over some mishap, Freya naturally would talk to him soberly. He,

nervous and brusque when away from her, appeared always as if

overcome by her visibility, by the great wonder of being palpably

loved. An old man's child, having lost his mother early, thrown

out to sea out of the way while very young, he had not much

experience of tenderness of any kind.

In this private, foliage-embowered verandah, and at this late hour

of the afternoon, he bent down a little, and, possessing himself of

Freya's hands, was kissing them one after another, while she smiled

and looked down at his head with the eyes of approving compassion.

At that same moment Heemskirk was approaching the house from the

north.

Antonia was on the watch on that side. But she did not keep a very

good watch. The sun was setting; she knew that her young mistress

and the captain of the Bonito were about to separate. She was

walking to and fro in the dusky grove with a flower in her hair,

and singing softly to herself, when suddenly, within a foot of her,

the lieutenant appeared from behind a tree. She bounded aside like

a startled fawn, but Heemskirk, with a lucid comprehension of what

she was there for, pounced upon her, and, catching her arm, clapped

his other thick hand over her mouth.

"If you try to make a noise I'll twist your neck!"

This ferocious figure of speech terrified the girl sufficiently.

Heemskirk had seen plainly enough on the verandah Freya's golden

head with another head very close to it. He dragged the

unresisting maid with him by a circuitous way into the compound,

where he dismissed her with a vicious push in the direction of the

cluster of bamboo huts for the servants.

She was very much like the faithful camerista of Italian comedy,

but in her terror she bolted away without a sound from that thick,

short, black-eyed man with a cruel grip of fingers like a vice.

Quaking all over at a distance, extremely scared and half inclined

to laugh, she saw him enter the house at the back.

The interior of the bungalow was divided by two passages crossing

each other in the middle. At that point Heemskirk, by turning his

head slightly to the left as he passed, secured the evidence of

"carrying on" so irreconcilable with old Nelson's assurances that

it made him stagger, with a rush of blood to his head. Two white

figures, distinct against the light, stood in an unmistakable

attitude. Freya's arms were round Jasper's neck. Their faces were

characteristically superimposed on each other, and Heemskirk went

on, his throat choked with a sudden rising of curses, till on the

west verandah he stumbled blindly against a chair and then dropped

into another as though his legs had been swept from under him. He

had indulged too long in the habit of appropriating Freya to

himself in his thoughts. "Is that how you entertain your visitors-

-you . . " he thought, so outraged that he could not find a

sufficiently degrading epithet.

Freya struggled a little and threw her head back.

"Somebody has come in," she whispered. Jasper, holding her clasped

closely to his breast, and looking down into her face, suggested

casually:

"Your father."

Freya tried to disengage herself, but she had not the heart

absolutely to push him away with her hands.

"I believe it's Heemskirk," she breathed out at him.

He, plunging into her eyes in a quiet rapture, was provoked to a

vague smile by the sound of the name.

"The ass is always knocking down my beacons outside the river," he

murmured. He attached no other meaning to Heemskirk's existence;

but Freya was asking herself whether the lieutenant had seen them.

"Let me go, kid," she ordered in a peremptory whisper. Jasper

obeyed, and, stepping back at once, continued his contemplation of

her face under another angle. "I must go and see," she said to

herself anxiously.

She instructed him hurriedly to wait a moment after she was gone

and then to slip on to the back verandah and get a quiet smoke

before he showed himself.

"Don't stay late this evening," was her last recommendation before

she left him.

Then Freya came out on the west verandah with her light, rapid

step. While going through the doorway she managed to shake down

the folds of the looped-up curtains at the end of the passage so as

to cover Jasper's retreat from the bower. Directly she appeared

Heemskirk jumped up as if to fly at her. She paused and he made

her an exaggerated low bow.

It irritated Freya.

"Oh! It's you, Mr. Heemskirk. How do you do?" She spoke in her

usual tone. Her face was not plainly visible to him in the dusk of

the deep verandah. He dared not trust himself to speak, his rage

at what he had seen was so great. And when she added with

serenity: "Papa will be coming in before long," he called her

horrid names silently, to himself, before he spoke with contorted

lips.

"I have seen your father already. We had a talk in the sheds. He

told me some very interesting things. Oh, very--"

Freya sat down. She thought: "He has seen us, for certain." She

was not ashamed. What she was afraid of was some foolish or

awkward complication. But she could not conceive how much her

person had been appropriated by Heemskirk (in his thoughts). She

tried to be conversational.

"You are coming now from Palembang, I suppose?"

"Eh? What? Oh, yes! I come from Palembang. Ha, ha, ha! You

know what your father said? He said he was afraid you were having

a very dull time of it here."

"And I suppose you are going to cruise in the Moluccas," continued

Freya, who wanted to impart some useful information to Jasper if

possible. At the same time she was always glad to know that those

two men were a few hundred miles apart when not under her eye.

Heemskirk growled angrily.

"Yes. Moluccas," glaring in the direction of her shadowy figure.

"Your father thinks it's very quiet for you here. I tell you what,

Miss Freya. There isn't such a quiet spot on earth that a woman

can't find an opportunity of making a fool of somebody."

Freya thought: "I mustn't let him provoke me." Presently the

Tamil boy, who was Nelson's head servant, came in with the lights.

She addressed him at once with voluble directions where to put the

lamps, told him to bring the tray with the gin and bitters, and to

send Antonia into the house.

"I will have to leave you to yourself, Mr. Heemskirk, for a while,"

she said.

And she went to her room to put on another frock. She made a quick

change of it because she wished to be on the verandah before her

father and the lieutenant met again. She relied on herself to

regulate that evening's intercourse between these two. But

Antonia, still scared and hysterical, exhibited a bruise on her arm

which roused Freya's indignation.

"He jumped on me out of the bush like a tiger," said the girl,

laughing nervously with frightened eyes.

"The brute!" thought Freya. "He meant to spy on us, then." She

was enraged, but the recollection of the thick Dutchman in white

trousers wide at the hips and narrow at the ankles, with his

shoulder-straps and black bullet head, glaring at her in the light

of the lamps, was so repulsively comical that she could not help a

smiling grimace. Then she became anxious. The absurdities of

three men were forcing this anxiety upon her: Jasper's

impetuosity, her father's fears, Heemskirk's infatuation. She was

very tender to the first two, and she made up her mind to display

all her feminine diplomacy. All this, she said to herself, will be

over and done with before very long now.

Heemskirk on the verandah, lolling in a chair, his legs extended

and his white cap reposing on his stomach, was lashing himself into

a fury of an atrocious character altogether incomprehensible to a

girl like Freya. His chin was resting on his chest, his eyes gazed

stonily at his shoes. Freya examined him from behind the curtain.

He didn't stir. He was ridiculous. But this absolute stillness

was impressive. She stole back along the passage to the east

verandah, where Jasper was sitting quietly in the dark, doing what

he was told, like a good boy.

"Psst," she hissed. He was by her side in a moment.

"Yes. What is it?" he murmured.

"It's that beetle," she whispered uneasily. Under the impression

of Heemskirk's sinister immobility she had half a mind to let

Jasper know that they had been seen. But she was by no means

certain that Heemskirk would tell her father--and at any rate not

that evening. She concluded rapidly that the safest thing would be

to get Jasper out of the way as soon as possible.

"What has he been doing?" asked Jasper in a calm undertone.

"Oh, nothing! Nothing. He sits there looking cross. But you know

how he's always worrying papa."

"Your father's quite unreasonable," pronounced Jasper judicially.

"I don't know," she said in a doubtful tone. Something of old

Nelson's dread of the authorities had rubbed off on the girl since

she had to live with it day after day. "I don't know. Papa's

afraid of being reduced to beggary, as he says, in his old days.

Look here, kid, you had better clear out to-morrow, first thing."

Jasper had hoped for another afternoon with Freya, an afternoon of

quiet felicity with the girl by his side and his eyes on his brig,

anticipating a blissful future. His silence was eloquent with

disappointment, and Freya understood it very well. She, too, was

disappointed. But it was her business to be sensible.

"We shan't have a moment to ourselves with that beetle creeping

round the house," she argued in a low, hurried voice. "So what's

the good of your staying? And he won't go while the brig's here.

You know he won't."

"He ought to be reported for loitering," murmured Jasper with a

vexed little laugh.

"Mind you get under way at daylight," recommended Freya under her

breath.

He detained her after the manner of lovers. She expostulated

without struggling because it was hard for her to repulse him. He

whispered into her ear while he put his arms round her.

"Next time we two meet, next time I hold you like this, it shall be

on board. You and I, in the brig--all the world, all the life--"

And then he flashed out: "I wonder I can wait! I feel as if I

must carry you off now, at once. I could run with you in my hands-

-down the path--without stumbling--without touching the earth--"

She was still. She listened to the passion in his voice. She was

saying to herself that if she were to whisper the faintest yes, if

she were but to sigh lightly her consent, he would do it. He was

capable of doing it--without touching the earth. She closed her

eyes and smiled in the dark, abandoning herself in a delightful

giddiness, for an instant, to his encircling arm. But before he

could be tempted to tighten his grasp she was out of it, a foot

away from him and in full possession of herself.

That was the steady Freya. She was touched by the deep sigh which

floated up to her from the white figure of Jasper, who did not

stir.

"You are a mad kid," she said tremulously. Then with a change of

tone: "No one could carry me off. Not even you. I am not the

sort of girl that gets carried off." His white form seemed to

shrink a little before the force of that assertion and she

relented. "Isn't it enough for you to know that you have--that you

have carried me away?" she added in a tender tone.

He murmured an endearing word, and she continued:

"I've promised you--I've said I would come--and I shall come of my

own free will. You shall wait for me on board. I shall get up the

side--by myself, and walk up to you on the deck and say: 'Here I

am, kid.' And then--and then I shall be carried off. But it will

be no man who will carry me off--it will be the brig, your brig--

our brig. . . . I love the beauty!"

She heard an inarticulate sound, something like a moan wrung out by

pain or delight, and glided away. There was that other man on the

other verandah, that dark, surly Dutchman who could make trouble

between Jasper and her father, bring about a quarrel, ugly words,

and perhaps a physical collision. What a horrible situation! But,

even putting aside that awful extremity, she shrank from having to

live for some three months with a wretched, tormented, angry,

distracted, absurd man. And when the day came, the day and the

hour, what should she do if her father tried to detain her by main

force--as was, after all, possible? Could she actually struggle

with him hand to hand? But it was of lamentations and entreaties

that she was really afraid. Could she withstand them? What an

odious, cruel, ridiculous position would that be!

"But it won't be. He'll say nothing," she thought as she came out

quickly on the west verandah, and, seeing that Heemskirk did not

move, sat down on a chair near the doorway and kept her eyes on

him. The outraged lieutenant had not changed his attitude; only

his cap had fallen off his stomach and was lying on the floor. His

thick black eyebrows were knitted by a frown, while he looked at

her out of the corners of his eyes. And their sideways glance in

conjunction with the hooked nose, the whole bulky, ungainly,

sprawling person, struck Freya as so comically moody that, inwardly

discomposed as she was, she could not help smiling. She did her

best to give that smile a conciliatory character. She did not want

to provoke Heemskirk needlessly.

And the lieutenant, perceiving that smile, was mollified. It never

entered his head that his outward appearance, a naval officer, in

uniform, could appear ridiculous to that girl of no position--the

daughter of old Nielsen. The recollection of her arms round

Jasper's neck still irritated and excited him. "The hussy!" he

thought. "Smiling--eh? That's how you are amusing yourself.

Fooling your father finely, aren't you? You have a taste for that

sort of fun--have you? Well, we shall see--" He did not alter his

position, but on his pursed-up lips there also appeared a smile of

surly and ill-omened amusement, while his eyes returned to the

contemplation of his boots.

Freya felt hot with indignation. She sat radiantly fair in the

lamplight, her strong, well-shaped hands lying one on top of the

other in her lap. . . "Odious creature," she thought. Her face

coloured with sudden anger. "You have scared my maid out of her

senses," she said aloud. "What possessed you?"

He was thinking so deeply of her that the sound of her voice,

pronouncing these unexpected words, startled him extremely. He

jerked up his head and looked so bewildered that Freya insisted

impatiently:

"I mean Antonia. You have bruised her arm. What did you do it

for?"

"Do you want to quarrel with me?" he asked thickly, with a sort of

amazement. He blinked like an owl. He was funny. Freya, like all

women, had a keen sense of the ridiculous in outward appearance.

"Well, no; I don't think I do." She could not help herself. She

laughed outright, a clear, nervous laugh in which Heemskirk joined

suddenly with a harsh "Ha, ha, ha!"

Voices and footsteps were heard in the passage, and Jasper, with

old Nelson, came out. Old Nelson looked at his daughter

approvingly, for he liked the lieutenant to be kept in good humour.

And he also joined sympathetically in the laugh. "Now, lieutenant,

we shall have some dinner," he said, rubbing his hands cheerily.

Jasper had gone straight to the balustrade. The sky was full of

stars, and in the blue velvety night the cove below had a denser

blackness, in which the riding-lights of the brig and of the

gunboat glimmered redly, like suspended sparks. "Next time this

riding-light glimmers down there, I'll be waiting for her on the

quarter-deck to come and say 'Here I am,'" Jasper thought; and his

heart seemed to grow bigger in his chest, dilated by an oppressive

happiness that nearly wrung out a cry from him. There was no wind.

Not a leaf below him stirred, and even the sea was but a still

uncomplaining shadow. Far away on the unclouded sky the pale

lightning, the heat-lightning of the tropics, played tremulously

amongst the low stars in short, faint, mysteriously consecutive

flashes, like incomprehensible signals from some distant planet.

The dinner passed off quietly. Freya sat facing her father, calm

but pale. Heemskirk affected to talk only to old Nelson. Jasper's

behaviour was exemplary. He kept his eyes under control, basking

in the sense of Freya's nearness, as people bask in the sun without

looking up to heaven. And very soon after dinner was over, mindful

of his instructions, he declared that it was time for him to go on

board his ship.

Heemskirk did not look up. Ensconced in the rocking-chair, and

puffing at a cheroot, he had the air of meditating surlily over

some odious outbreak. So at least it seemed to Freya. Old Nelson

said at once: "I'll stroll down with you." He had begun a

professional conversation about the dangers of the New Guinea

coast, and wanted to relate to Jasper some experience of his own

"over there." Jasper was such a good listener! Freya made as if

to accompany them, but her father frowned, shook his head, and

nodded significantly towards the immovable Heemskirk blotting out

smoke with half-closed eyes and protruded lips. The lieutenant

must not be left alone. Take offence, perhaps.

Freya obeyed these signs. "Perhaps it is better for me to stay,"

she thought. Women are not generally prone to review their own

conduct, still less to condemn it. The embarrassing masculine

absurdities are in the main responsible for its ethics. But,

looking at Heemskirk, Freya felt regret and even remorse. His

thick bulk in repose suggested the idea of repletion, but as a

matter of fact he had eaten very little. He had drunk a great

deal, however. The fleshy lobes of his unpleasant big ears with

deeply folded rims were crimson. They quite flamed in the

neighbourhood of the flat, sallow cheeks. For a considerable time

he did not raise his heavy brown eyelids. To be at the mercy of

such a creature was humiliating; and Freya, who always ended by

being frank with herself, thought regretfully: "If only I had been

open with papa from the first! But then what an impossible life he

would have led me!" Yes. Men were absurd in many ways; lovably

like Jasper, impracticably like her father, odiously like that

grotesquely supine creature in the chair. Was it possible to talk

him over? Perhaps it was not necessary? "Oh! I can't talk to

him," she thought. And when Heemskirk, still without looking at

her, began resolutely to crush his half-smoked cheroot on the

coffee-tray, she took alarm, glided towards the piano, opened it in

tremendous haste, and struck the keys before she sat down.

In an instant the verandah, the whole carpetless wooden bungalow

raised on piles, became filled with an uproarious, confused

resonance. But through it all she heard, she felt on the floor the

heavy, prowling footsteps of the lieutenant moving to and fro at

her back. He was not exactly drunk, but he was sufficiently primed

to make the suggestions of his excited imagination seem perfectly

feasible and even clever; beautifully, unscrupulously clever.

Freya, aware that he had stopped just behind her, went on playing

without turning her head. She played with spirit, brilliantly, a

fierce piece of music, but when his voice reached her she went cold

all over. It was the voice, not the words. The insolent

familiarity of tone dismayed her to such an extent that she could

not understand at first what he was saying. His utterance was

thick, too.

"I suspected. . . . Of course I suspected something of your little

goings on. I am not a child. But from suspecting to seeing--

seeing, you understand--there's an enormous difference. That sort

of thing. . . . Come! One isn't made of stone. And when a man has

been worried by a girl as I have been worried by you, Miss Freya--

sleeping and waking, then, of course. . . . But I am a man of the

world. It must be dull for you here . . . I say, won't you leave

off this confounded playing . . .?"

This last was the only sentence really which she made out. She

shook her head negatively, and in desperation put on the loud

pedal, but she could not make the sound of the piano cover his

raised voice.

"Only, I am surprised that you should. . . . An English trading

skipper, a common fellow. Low, cheeky lot, infesting these

islands. I would make short work of such trash! While you have

here a good friend, a gentleman ready to worship at your feet--your

pretty feet--an officer, a man of family. Strange, isn't it? But

what of that! You are fit for a prince."

Freya did not turn her head. Her face went stiff with horror and

indignation. This adventure was altogether beyond her conception

of what was possible. It was not in her character to jump up and

run away. It seemed to her, too, that if she did move there was no

saying what might happen. Presently her father would be back, and

then the other would have to leave off. It was best to ignore--to

ignore. She went on playing loudly and correctly, as though she

were alone, as if Heemskirk did not exist. That proceeding

irritated him.

"Come! You may deceive your father," he bawled angrily, "but I am

not to be made a fool of! Stop this infernal noise . . . Freya . .

. Hey! You Scandinavian Goddess of Love! Stop! Do you hear?

That's what you are--of love. But the heathen gods are only devils

in disguise, and that's what you are, too--a deep little devil.

Stop it, I say, or I will lift you off that stool!"

Standing behind her, he devoured her with his eyes, from the golden

crown of her rigidly motionless head to the heels of her shoes, the

line of her shapely shoulders, the curves of her fine figure

swaying a little before the keyboard. She had on a light dress;

the sleeves stopped short at the elbows in an edging of lace. A

satin ribbon encircled her waist. In an access of irresistible,

reckless hopefulness he clapped both his hands on that waist--and

then the irritating music stopped at last. But, quick as she was

in springing away from the contact (the round music-stool going

over with a crash), Heemskirk's lips, aiming at her neck, landed a

hungry, smacking kiss just under her ear. A deep silence reigned

for a time. And then he laughed rather feebly.

He was disconcerted somewhat by her white, still face, the big

light violet eyes resting on him stonily. She had not uttered a

sound. She faced him, steadying herself on the corner of the piano

with one extended hand. The other went on rubbing with mechanical

persistency the place his lips had touched.

"What's the trouble?" he said, offended. "Startled you? Look

here: don't let us have any of that nonsense. You don't mean to

say a kiss frightens you so much as all that. . . . I know better.

. . . I don't mean to be left out in the cold."

He had been gazing into her face with such strained intentness that

he could no longer see it distinctly. Everything round him was

rather misty. He forgot the overturned stool, caught his foot

against it, and lurched forward slightly, saying in an ingratiating

tone:

"I'm not bad fun, really. You try a few kisses to begin with--"

He said no more, because his head received a terrific concussion,

accompanied by an explosive sound. Freya had swung her round,

strong arm with such force that the impact of her open palm on his

flat cheek turned him half round. Uttering a faint, hoarse yell,

the lieutenant clapped both his hands to the left side of his face,

which had taken on suddenly a dusky brick-red tinge. Freya, very

erect, her violet eyes darkened, her palm still tingling from the

blow, a sort of restrained determined smile showing a tiny gleam of

her white teeth, heard her father's rapid, heavy tread on the path

below the verandah. Her expression lost its pugnacity and became

sincerely concerned. She was sorry for her father. She stooped

quickly to pick up the music-stool, as if anxious to obliterate the

traces. . . . But that was no good. She had resumed her attitude,

one hand resting lightly on the piano, before old Nelson got up to

the top of the stairs.

Poor father! How furious he will be--how upset! And afterwards,

what tremors, what unhappiness! Why had she not been open with him

from the first? His round, innocent stare of amazement cut her to

the quick. But he was not looking at her. His stare was directed

to Heemskirk, who, with his back to him and with his hands still up

to his face, was hissing curses through his teeth, and (she saw him

in profile) glaring at her balefully with one black, evil eye.

"What's the matter?" asked old Nelson, very much bewildered.

She did not answer him. She thought of Jasper on the deck of the

brig, gazing up at the lighted bungalow, and she felt frightened.

It was a mercy that one of them at least was on board out of the

way. She only wished he were a hundred miles off. And yet she was

not certain that she did. Had Jasper been mysteriously moved that

moment to reappear on the verandah she would have thrown her

consistency, her firmness, her self-possession, to the winds, and

flown into his arms.

"What is it? What is it?" insisted the unsuspecting Nelson,

getting quite excited. "Only this minute you were playing a tune,

and--"

Freya, unable to speak in her apprehension of what was coming (she

was also fascinated by that black, evil, glaring eye), only nodded

slightly at the lieutenant, as much as to say: "Just look at him!"

"Why, yes!" exclaimed old Nelson. "I see. What on earth--"

Meantime he had cautiously approached Heemskirk, who, bursting into

incoherent imprecations, was stamping with both feet where he

stood. The indignity of the blow, the rage of baffled purpose, the

ridicule of the exposure, and the impossibility of revenge maddened

him to a point when he simply felt he must howl with fury.

"Oh, oh, oh!" he howled, stamping across the verandah as though he

meant to drive his foot through the floor at every step.

"Why, is his face hurt?" asked the astounded old Nelson. The truth

dawned suddenly upon his innocent mind. "Dear me!" he cried,

enlightened. "Get some brandy, quick, Freya. . . . You are subject

to it, lieutenant? Fiendish, eh? I know, I know! Used to go

crazy all of a sudden myself in the time. . . . And the little

bottle of laudanum from the medicine-chest, too, Freya. Look

sharp. . . . Don't you see he's got a toothache?"

And, indeed, what other explanation could have presented itself to

the guileless old Nelson, beholding this cheek nursed with both

hands, these wild glances, these stampings, this distracted swaying

of the body? It would have demanded a preternatural acuteness to

hit upon the true cause. Freya had not moved. She watched

Heemskirk's savagely inquiring, black stare directed stealthily

upon herself. "Aha, you would like to be let off!" she said to

herself. She looked at him unflinchingly, thinking it out. The

temptation of making an end of it all without further trouble was

irresistible. She gave an almost imperceptible nod of assent, and

glided away.

"Hurry up that brandy!" old Nelson shouted, as she disappeared in

the passage.

Heemskirk relieved his deeper feelings by a sudden string of curses

in Dutch and English which he sent after her. He raved to his

heart's content, flinging to and fro the verandah and kicking

chairs out of his way; while Nelson (or Nielsen), whose sympathy

was profoundly stirred by these evidences of agonising pain,

hovered round his dear (and dreaded) lieutenant, fussing like an

old hen.

"Dear me, dear me! Is it so bad? I know well what it is. I used

to frighten my poor wife sometimes. Do you get it often like this,

lieutenant?"

Heemskirk shouldered him viciously out of his way, with a short,

insane laugh. But his staggering host took it in good part; a man

beside himself with excruciating toothache is not responsible.

"Go into my room, lieutenant," he suggested urgently. "Throw

yourself on my bed. We will get something to ease you in a

minute."

He seized the poor sufferer by the arm and forced him gently

onwards to the very bed, on which Heemskirk, in a renewed access of

rage, flung himself down with such force that he rebounded from the

mattress to the height of quite a foot.

"Dear me!" exclaimed the scared Nelson, and incontinently ran off

to hurry up the brandy and the laudanum, very angry that so little

alacrity was shown in relieving the tortures of his precious guest.

In the end he got these things himself.

Half an hour later he stood in the inner passage of the house,

surprised by faint, spasmodic sounds of a mysterious nature,

between laughter and sobs. He frowned; then went straight towards

his daughter's room and knocked at the door.

Freya, her glorious fair hair framing her white face and rippling

down a dark-blue dressing-gown, opened it partly.

The light in the room was dim. Antonia, crouching in a corner,

rocked herself backwards and forwards, uttering feeble moans. Old

Nelson had not much experience in various kinds of feminine

laughter, but he was certain there had been laughter there.

"Very unfeeling, very unfeeling!" he said, with weighty

displeasure. "What is there so amusing in a man being in pain? I

should have thought a woman--a young girl--"

"He was so funny," murmured Freya, whose eyes glistened strangely

in the semi-obscurity of the passage. "And then, you know, I don't

like him," she added, in an unsteady voice.

"Funny!" repeated old Nelson, amazed at this evidence of

callousness in one so young. "You don't like him! Do you mean to

say that, because you don't like him, you--Why, it's simply cruel!

Don't you know it's about the worst sort of pain there is? Dogs

have been known to go mad with it."

"He certainly seemed to have gone mad," Freya said with an effort,

as if she were struggling with some hidden feeling.

But her father was launched.

"And you know how he is. He notices everything. He is a fellow to

take offence for the least little thing--regular Dutchman--and I

want to keep friendly with him. It's like this, my girl: if that

rajah of ours were to do something silly--and you know he is a

sulky, rebellious beggar--and the authorities took into their heads

that my influence over him wasn't good, you would find yourself

without a roof over your head--"

She cried: "What nonsense, father!" in a not very assured tone,

and discovered that he was angry, angry enough to achieve irony;

yes, old Nelson (or Nielsen), irony! Just a gleam of it.

"Oh, of course, if you have means of your own--a mansion, a

plantation that I know nothing of--" But he was not capable of

sustained irony. "I tell you they would bundle me out of here," he

whispered forcibly; "without compensation, of course. I know these

Dutch. And the lieutenant's just the fellow to start the trouble

going. He has the ear of influential officials. I wouldn't offend

him for anything--for anything--on no consideration whatever. . . .

What did you say?"

It was only an inarticulate exclamation. If she ever had a half-

formed intention of telling him everything she had given it up now.

It was impossible, both out of regard for his dignity and for the

peace of his poor mind.

"I don't care for him myself very much," old Nelson's subdued

undertone confessed in a sigh. "He's easier now," he went on,

after a silence. "I've given him up my bed for the night. I shall

sleep on my verandah, in the hammock. No; I can't say I like him

either, but from that to laugh at a man because he's driven crazy

with pain is a long way. You've surprised me, Freya. That side of

his face is quite flushed."

Her shoulders shook convulsively under his hands, which he laid on

her paternally. His straggly, wiry moustache brushed her forehead

in a good-night kiss. She closed the door, and went away from it

to the middle of the room before she allowed herself a tired-out

sort of laugh, without buoyancy.

"Flushed! A little flushed!" she repeated to herself. "I hope so,

indeed! A little--"

Her eyelashes were wet. Antonia, in her corner, moaned and

giggled, and it was impossible to tell where the moans ended and

the giggles began.

The mistress and the maid had been somewhat hysterical, for Freya,

on fleeing into her room, had found Antonia there, and had told her

everything.

"I have avenged you, my girl," she exclaimed.

And then they had laughingly cried and cryingly laughed with

admonitions--"Ssh, not so loud! Be quiet!" on one part, and

interludes of "I am so frightened. . . . He's an evil man," on the

other.

Antonia was very much afraid of Heemskirk. She was afraid of him

because of his personal appearance: because of his eyes and his

eyebrows, and his mouth and his nose and his limbs. Nothing could

be more rational. And she thought him an evil man, because, to her

eyes, he looked evil. No ground for an opinion could be sounder.

In the dimness of the room, with only a nightlight burning at the

head of Freya's bed, the camerista crept out of her corner to

crouch at the feet of her mistress, supplicating in whispers:

"There's the brig. Captain Allen. Let us run away at once--oh,

let us run away! I am so frightened. Let us! Let us!"

"I! Run away!" thought Freya to herself, without looking down at

the scared girl. "Never."

Both the resolute mistress under the mosquito-net and the

frightened maid lying curled up on a mat at the foot of the bed did

not sleep very well that night. The person that did not sleep at

all was Lieutenant Heemskirk. He lay on his back staring

vindictively in the darkness. Inflaming images and humiliating

reflections succeeded each other in his mind, keeping up,

augmenting his anger. A pretty tale this to get about! But it

must not be allowed to get about. The outrage had to be swallowed

in silence. A pretty affair! Fooled, led on, and struck by the

girl--and probably fooled by the father, too. But no. Nielsen was

but another victim of that shameless hussy, that brazen minx, that

sly, laughing, kissing, lying . . .

"No; he did not deceive me on purpose," thought the tormented

lieutenant. "But I should like to pay him off, all the same, for

being such an imbecile--"

Well, some day, perhaps. One thing he was firmly resolved on: he

had made up his mind to steal early out of the house. He did not

think he could face the girl without going out of his mind with

fury.

"Fire and perdition! Ten thousand devils! I shall choke here

before the morning!" he muttered to himself, lying rigid on his

back on old Nelson's bed, his breast heaving for air.

He arose at daylight and started cautiously to open the door.

Faint sounds in the passage alarmed him, and remaining concealed he

saw Freya coming out. This unexpected sight deprived him of all

power to move away from the crack of the door. It was the

narrowest crack possible, but commanding the view of the end of the

verandah. Freya made for that end hastily to watch the brig

passing the point. She wore her dark dressing-gown; her feet were

bare, because, having fallen asleep towards the morning, she ran

out headlong in her fear of being too late. Heemskirk had never

seen her looking like this, with her hair drawn back smoothly to

the shape of her head, and hanging in one heavy, fair tress down

her back, and with that air of extreme youth, intensity, and

eagerness. And at first he was amazed, and then he gnashed his

teeth. He could not face her at all. He muttered a curse, and

kept still behind the door.

With a low, deep-breathed "Ah!" when she first saw the brig already

under way, she reached for Nelson's long glass reposing on brackets

high up the wall. The wide sleeve of the dressing-gown slipped

back, uncovering her white arm as far as the shoulder. Heemskirk

gripping the door-handle, as if to crush it, felt like a man just

risen to his feet from a drinking bout.

And Freya knew that he was watching her. She knew. She had seen

the door move as she came out of the passage. She was aware of his

eyes being on her, with scornful bitterness, with triumphant

contempt.

"You are there," she thought, levelling the long glass. "Oh, well,

look on, then!"

The green islets appeared like black shadows, the ashen sea was

smooth as glass, the clear robe of the colourless dawn, in which

even the brig appeared shadowy, had a hem of light in the east.

Directly Freya had made out Jasper on deck, with his own long glass

directed to the bungalow, she laid hers down and raised both her

beautiful white arms above her head. In that attitude of supreme

cry she stood still, glowing with the consciousness of Jasper's

adoration going out to her figure held in the field of his glass

away there, and warmed, too, by the feeling of evil passion, the

burning, covetous eyes of the other, fastened on her back. In the

fervour of her love, in the caprice of her mind, and with that

mysterious knowledge of masculine nature women seem to be born to,

she thought:

"You are looking on--you will--you must! Then you shall see

something."

She brought both her hands to her lips, then flung them out,

sending a kiss over the sea, as if she wanted to throw her heart

along with it on the deck of the brig. Her face was rosy, her eyes

shone. Her repeated, passionate gesture seemed to fling kisses by

the hundred again and again and again, while the slowly ascending

sun brought the glory of colour to the world, turning the islets

green, the sea blue, the brig below her white--dazzlingly white in

the spread of her wings--with the red ensign streaming like a tiny

flame from the peak.

And each time she murmured with a rising inflexion:

"Take this--and this--and this--" till suddenly her arms fell. She

had seen the ensign dipped in response, and next moment the point

below hid the hull of the brig from her view. Then she turned away

from the balustrade, and, passing slowly before the door of her

father's room with her eyelids lowered, and an enigmatic expression

on her face, she disappeared behind the curtain.

But instead of going along the passage, she remained concealed and

very still on the other side to watch what would happen. For some

time the broad, furnished verandah remained empty. Then the door

of old Nelson's room came open suddenly, and Heemskirk staggered

out. His hair was rumpled, his eyes bloodshot, his unshaven face

looked very dark. He gazed wildly about, saw his cap on a table,

snatched it up, and made for the stairs quietly, but with a

strange, tottering gait, like the last effort of waning strength.

Shortly after his head had sunk below the level of the floor, Freya

came out from behind the curtain, with compressed, scheming lips,

and no softness at all in her luminous eyes. He could not be

allowed to sneak off scot free. Never--never! She was excited,

she tingled all over, she had tasted blood! He must be made to

understand that she had been aware of having been watched; he must

know that he had been seen slinking off shamefully. But to run to

the front rail and shout after him would have been childish, crude-

-undignified. And to shout--what? What word? What phrase? No;

it was impossible. Then how? . . . She frowned, discovered it,

dashed at the piano, which had stood open all night, and made the

rosewood monster growl savagery in an irritated bass. She struck

chords as if firing shots after that straddling, broad figure in

ample white trousers and a dark uniform jacket with gold shoulder-

straps, and then she pursued him with the same thing she had played

the evening before--a modern, fierce piece of love music which had

been tried more than once against the thunderstorms of the group.

She accentuated its rhythm with triumphant malice, so absorbed in

her purpose that she did not notice the presence of her father,

who, wearing an old threadbare ulster of a check pattern over his

sleeping suit, had run out from the back verandah to inquire the

reason of this untimely performance. He stared at her.

"What on earth? . . . Freya!" His voice was nearly drowned by the

piano. "What's become of the lieutenant?" he shouted.

She looked up at him as if her soul were lost in her music, with

unseeing eyes.

"Gone."

"Wha-a-t? . . . Where?"

She shook her head slightly, and went on playing louder than

before. Old Nelson's innocently anxious gaze starting from the

open door of his room, explored the whole place high and low, as if

the lieutenant were something small which might have been crawling

on the floor or clinging to a wall. But a shrill whistle coming

somewhere from below pierced the ample volume of sound rolling out

of the piano in great, vibrating waves. The lieutenant was down at

the cove, whistling for the boat to come and take him off to his

ship. And he seemed to be in a terrific hurry, too, for he

whistled again almost directly, waited for a moment, and then sent

out a long, interminable, shrill call as distressful to hear as

though he had shrieked without drawing breath. Freya ceased

playing suddenly.

"Going on board," said old Nelson, perturbed by the event. "What

could have made him clear out so early? Queer chap. Devilishly

touchy, too! I shouldn't wonder if it was your conduct last night

that hurt his feelings? I noticed you, Freya. You as well as

laughed in his face, while he was suffering agonies from neuralgia.

It isn't the way to get yourself liked. He's offended with you."

Freya's hands now reposed passive on the keys; she bowed her fair

head, feeling a sudden discontent, a nervous lassitude, as though

she had passed through some exhausting crisis. Old Nelson (or

Nielsen), looking aggrieved, was revolving matters of policy in his

bald head.

"I think it would be right for me to go on board just to inquire,

some time this morning," he declared fussily. "Why don't they

bring me my morning tea? Do you hear, Freya? You have astonished

me, I must say. I didn't think a young girl could be so unfeeling.

And the lieutenant thinks himself a friend of ours, too! What?

No? Well, he calls himself a friend, and that's something to a

person in my position. Certainly! Oh, yes, I must go on board."

"Must you?" murmured Freya listlessly; then added, in her thought:

"Poor man!"

CHAPTER V

In respect of the next seven weeks, all that is necessary to say

is, first, that old Nelson (or Nielsen) failed in paying his

politic call. The Neptun gunboat of H.M. the King of the

Netherlands, commanded by an outraged and infuriated lieutenant,

left the cove at an unexpectedly early hour. When Freya's father

came down to the shore, after seeing his precious crop of tobacco

spread out properly in the sun, she was already steaming round the

point. Old Nelson regretted the circumstance for many days.

"Now, I don't know in what disposition the man went away," he

lamented to his hard daughter. He was amazed at her hardness. He

was almost frightened by her indifference.

Next, it must be recorded that the same day the gunboat Neptun,

steering east, passed the brig Bonito becalmed in sight of

Carimata, with her head to the eastward, too. Her captain, Jasper

Allen, giving himself up consciously to a tender, possessive

reverie of his Freya, did not get out of his long chair on the poop

to look at the Neptun which passed so close that the smoke belching

out suddenly from her short black funnel rolled between the masts

of the Bonito, obscuring for a moment the sunlit whiteness of her

sails, consecrated to the service of love. Jasper did not even

turn his head for a glance. But Heemskirk, on the bridge, had

gazed long and earnestly at the brig from the distance, gripping

hard the brass rail in front of him, till, the two ships closing,

he lost all confidence in himself, and retreating to the chartroom,

pulled the door to with a crash. There, his brows knitted, his

mouth drawn on one side in sardonic meditation, he sat through many

still hours--a sort of Prometheus in the bonds of unholy desire,

having his very vitals torn by the beak and claws of humiliated

passion.

That species of fowl is not to be shooed off as easily as a

chicken. Fooled, cheated, deceived, led on, outraged, mocked at--

beak and claws! A sinister bird! The lieutenant had no mind to

become the talk of the Archipelago, as the naval officer who had

had his face slapped by a girl. Was it possible that she really

loved that rascally trader? He tried not to think, but, worse than

thoughts, definite impressions beset him in his retreat. He saw

her--a vision plain, close to, detailed, plastic, coloured, lighted

up--he saw her hanging round the neck of that fellow. And he shut

his eyes, only to discover that this was no remedy. Then a piano

began to play near by, very plainly; and he put his fingers to his

ears with no better effect. It was not to be borne--not in

solitude. He bolted out of the chartroom, and talked of

indifferent things somewhat wildly with the officer of the watch on

the bridge, to the mocking accompaniment of a ghostly piano.

The last thing to be recorded is that Lieutenant Heemskirk instead

of pursuing his course towards Ternate, where he was expected, went

out of his way to call at Makassar, where no one was looking for

his arrival. Once there, he gave certain explanations and laid a

certain proposal before the governor, or some other authority, and

obtained permission to do what he thought fit in these matters.

Thereupon the Neptun, giving up Ternate altogether, steamed north

in view of the mountainous coast of Celebes, and then crossing the

broad straits took up her station on the low coast of virgin

forests, inviolate and mute, in waters phosphorescent at night;

deep blue in daytime with gleaming green patches over the submerged

reefs. For days the Neptun could be seen moving smoothly up and

down the sombre face of the shore, or hanging about with a watchful

air near the silvery breaks of broad estuaries, under the great

luminous sky never softened, never veiled, and flooding the earth

with the everlasting sunshine of the tropics--that sunshine which,

in its unbroken splendour, oppresses the soul with an inexpressible

melancholy more intimate, more penetrating, more profound than the

grey sadness of the northern mists.

The trading brig Bonito appeared gliding round a sombre forest-clad

point of land on the silvery estuary of a great river. The breath

of air that gave her motion would not have fluttered the flame of a

torch. She stole out into the open from behind a veil of

unstirring leaves, mysteriously silent, ghostly white, and solemnly

stealthy in her imperceptible progress; and Jasper, his elbow in

the main rigging, and his head leaning against his hand, thought of

Freya. Everything in the world reminded him of her. The beauty of

the loved woman exists in the beauties of Nature. The swelling

outlines of the hills, the curves of a coast, the free sinuosities

of a river are less suave than the harmonious lines of her body,

and when she moves, gliding lightly, the grace of her progress

suggests the power of occult forces which rule the fascinating

aspects of the visible world.

Dependent on things as all men are, Jasper loved his vessel--the

house of his dreams. He lent to her something of Freya's soul.

Her deck was the foothold of their love. The possession of his

brig appeased his passion in a soothing certitude of happiness

already conquered.

The full moon was some way up, perfect and serene, floating in air

as calm and limpid as the glance of Freya's eyes. There was not a

sound in the brig.

"Here she shall stand, by my side, on evenings like this," he

thought, with rapture.

And it was at that moment, in this peace, in this serenity, under

the full, benign gaze of the moon propitious to lovers, on a sea

without a wrinkle, under a sky without a cloud, as if all Nature

had assumed its most clement mood in a spirit of mockery, that the

gunboat Neptun, detaching herself from the dark coast under which

she had been lying invisible, steamed out to intercept the trading

brig Bonito standing out to sea.

Directly the gunboat had been made out emerging from her ambush,

Schultz, of the fascinating voice, had given signs of strange

agitation. All that day, ever since leaving the Malay town up the

river, he had shown a haggard face, going about his duties like a

man with something weighing on his mind. Jasper had noticed it,

but the mate, turning away, as though he had not liked being looked

at, had muttered shamefacedly of a headache and a touch of fever.

He must have had it very badly when, dodging behind his captain he

wondered aloud: "What can that fellow want with us?" . . . A naked

man standing in a freezing blast and trying not to shiver could not

have spoken with a more harshly uncertain intonation. But it might

have been fever--a cold fit.

"He wants to make himself disagreeable, simply," said Jasper, with

perfect good humour. "He has tried it on me before. However, we

shall soon see."

And, indeed, before long the two vessels lay abreast within easy

hail. The brig, with her fine lines and her white sails, looked

vaporous and sylph-like in the moonlight. The gunboat, short,

squat, with her stumpy dark spars naked like dead trees, raised

against the luminous sky of that resplendent night, threw a heavy

shadow on the lane of water between the two ships.

Freya haunted them both like an ubiquitous spirit, and as if she

were the only woman in the world. Jasper remembered her earnest

recommendation to be guarded and cautious in all his acts and words

while he was away from her. In this quite unforeseen encounter he

felt on his ear the very breath of these hurried admonitions

customary to the last moment of their partings, heard the half-

jesting final whisper of the "Mind, kid, I'd never forgive you!"

with a quick pressure on his arm, which he answered by a quiet,

confident smile. Heemskirk was haunted in another fashion. There

were no whispers in it; it was more like visions. He saw that girl

hanging round the neck of a low vagabond--that vagabond, the

vagabond who had just answered his hail. He saw her stealing bare-

footed across a verandah with great, clear, wide-open, eager eyes

to look at a brig--that brig. If she had shrieked, scolded, called

names! . . . But she had simply triumphed over him. That was all.

Led on (he firmly believed it), fooled, deceived, outraged, struck,

mocked at. . . . Beak and claws! The two men, so differently

haunted by Freya of the Seven Isles, were not equally matched.

In the intense stillness, as of sleep, which had fallen upon the

two vessels, in a world that itself seemed but a delicate dream, a

boat pulled by Javanese sailors crossing the dark lane of water

came alongside the brig. The white warrant officer in her, perhaps

the gunner, climbed aboard. He was a short man, with a rotund

stomach and a wheezy voice. His immovable fat face looked lifeless

in the moonlight, and he walked with his thick arms hanging away

from his body as though he had been stuffed. His cunning little

eyes glittered like bits of mica. He conveyed to Jasper, in broken

English, a request to come on board the Neptun.

Jasper had not expected anything so unusual. But after a short

reflection he decided to show neither annoyance, nor even surprise.

The river from which he had come had been politically disturbed for

a couple of years, and he was aware that his visits there were

looked upon with some suspicion. But he did not mind much the

displeasure of the authorities, so terrifying to old Nelson. He

prepared to leave the brig, and Schultz followed him to the rail as

if to say something, but in the end stood by in silence. Jasper

getting over the side, noticed his ghastly face. The eyes of the

man who had found salvation in the brig from the effects of his

peculiar psychology looked at him with a dumb, beseeching

expression.

"What's the matter?" Jasper asked.

"I wonder how this will end?" said he of the beautiful voice, which

had even fascinated the steady Freya herself. But where was its

charming timbre now? These words had sounded like a raven's croak.

"You are ill," said Jasper positively.

"I wish I were dead!" was the startling statement uttered by

Schultz talking to himself in the extremity of some mysterious

trouble. Jasper gave him a keen glance, but this was not the time

to investigate the morbid outbreak of a feverish man. He did not

look as though he were actually delirious, and that for the moment

must suffice. Schultz made a dart forward.

"That fellow means harm!" he said desperately. "He means harm to

you, Captain Allen. I feel it, and I--"

He choked with inexplicable emotion.

"All right, Schultz. I won't give him an opening." Jasper cut him

short and swung himself into the boat.

On board the Neptun Heemskirk, standing straddle-legs in the flood

of moonlight, his inky shadow falling right across the quarter-

deck, made no sign at his approach, but secretly he felt something

like the heave of the sea in his chest at the sight of that man.

Jasper waited before him in silence.

Brought face to face in direct personal contact, they fell at once

into the manner of their casual meetings in old Nelson's bungalow.

They ignored each other's existence--Heemskirk moodily; Jasper,

with a perfectly colourless quietness.

"What's going on in that river you've just come out of?" asked the

lieutenant straight away.

"I know nothing of the troubles, if you mean that," Jasper

answered. "I've landed there half a cargo of rice, for which I got

nothing in exchange, and went away. There's no trade there now,

but they would have been starving in another week--if I hadn't

turned up."

"Meddling! English meddling! And suppose the rascals don't

deserve anything better than to starve, eh?"

"There are women and children there, you know," observed Jasper, in

his even tone.

"Oh, yes! When an Englishman talks of women and children, you may

be sure there's something fishy about the business. Your doings

will have to be investigated."

They spoke in turn, as though they had been disembodied spirits--

mere voices in empty air; for they looked at each other as if there

had been nothing there, or, at most, with as much recognition as

one gives to an inanimate object, and no more. But now a silence

fell. Heemskirk had thought, all at once: "She will tell him all

about it. She will tell him while she hangs round his neck

laughing." And the sudden desire to annihilate Jasper on the spot

almost deprived him of his senses by its vehemence. He lost the

power of speech, of vision. For a moment he absolutely couldn't

see Jasper. But he heard him inquiring, as of the world at large:

"Am I, then, to conclude that the brig is detained?"

Heemskirk made a recovery in a flush of malignant satisfaction.

"She is. I am going to take her to Makassar in tow."

"The courts will have to decide on the legality of this," said

Jasper, aware that the matter was becoming serious, but with

assumed indifference.

"Oh, yes, the courts! Certainly. And as to you, I shall keep you

on board here."

Jasper's dismay at being parted from his ship was betrayed by a

stony immobility. It lasted but an instant. Then he turned away

and hailed the brig. Mr. Schultz answered:

"Yes, sir."

"Get ready to receive a tow-rope from the gunboat! We are going to

be taken to Makassar."

"Good God! What's that for, sir?" came an anxious cry faintly.

"Kindness, I suppose," Jasper, ironical, shouted with great

deliberation. "We might have been--becalmed in here--for days.

And hospitality. I am invited to stay--on board here."

The answer to this information was a loud ejaculation of distress.

Jasper thought anxiously: "Why, the fellow's nerve's gone to

pieces;" and with an awkward uneasiness of a new sort, looked

intently at the brig. The thought that he was parted from her--for

the first time since they came together--shook the apparently

careless fortitude of his character to its very foundations, which

were deep. All that time neither Heemskirk nor even his inky

shadow had stirred in the least.

"I am going to send a boat's crew and an officer on board your

vessel," he announced to no one in particular. Jasper, tearing

himself away from the absorbed contemplation of the brig, turned

round, and, without passion, almost without expression in his

voice, entered his protest against the whole of the proceedings.

What he was thinking of was the delay. He counted the days.

Makassar was actually on his way; and to be towed there really

saved time. On the other hand, there would be some vexing

formalities to go through. But the thing was too absurd. "The

beetle's gone mad," he thought. "I'll be released at once. And if

not, Mesman must enter into a bond for me." Mesman was a Dutch

merchant with whom Jasper had had many dealings, a considerable

person in Makassar.

"You protest? H'm!" Heemskirk muttered, and for a little longer

remained motionless, his legs planted well apart, and his head

lowered as though he were studying his own comical, deeply-split

shadow. Then he made a sign to the rotund gunner, who had kept at

hand, motionless, like a vilely-stuffed specimen of a fat man, with

a lifeless face and glittering little eyes. The fellow approached,

and stood at attention.

"You will board the brig with a boat's crew!"

"Ya, mynherr!"

"You will have one of your men to steer her all the time," went on

Heemskirk, giving his orders in English, apparently for Jasper's

edification. "You hear?"

"Ya, mynherr."

"You will remain on deck and in charge all the time."

"Ya, mynherr."

Jasper felt as if, together with the command of the brig, his very

heart were being taken out of his breast. Heemskirk asked, with a

change of tone:

"What weapons have you on board?"

At one time all the ships trading in the China Seas had a licence

to carry a certain quantity of firearms for purposes of defence.

Jasper answered:

"Eighteen rifles with their bayonets, which were on board when I

bought her, four years ago. They have been declared."

"Where are they kept?"

"Fore-cabin. Mate has the key."

"You will take possession of them," said Heemskirk to the gunner.

"Ya, mynherr."

"What is this for? What do you mean to imply?" cried out Jasper;

then bit his lip. "It's monstrous!" he muttered.

Heemskirk raised for a moment a heavy, as if suffering, glance.

"You may go," he said to his gunner. The fat man saluted, and

departed.

During the next thirty hours the steady towing was interrupted

once. At a signal from the brig, made by waving a flag on the

forecastle, the gunboat was stopped. The badly-stuffed specimen of

a warrant-officer, getting into his boat, arrived on board the

Neptun and hurried straight into his commander's cabin, his

excitement at something he had to communicate being betrayed by the

blinking of his small eyes. These two were closeted together for

some time, while Jasper at the taffrail tried to make out if

anything out of the common had occurred on board the brig.

But nothing seemed to be amiss on board. However, he kept a look-

out for the gunner; and, though he had avoided speaking to anybody

since he had finished with Heemskirk, he stopped that man when he

came out on deck again to ask how his mate was.

"He was feeling not very well when I left," he explained.

The fat warrant-officer, holding himself as though the effort of

carrying his big stomach in front of him demanded a rigid carriage,

understood with difficulty. Not a single one of his features

showed the slightest animation, but his little eyes blinked rapidly

at last.

"Oh, ya! The mate. Ya, ya! He is very well. But, mein Gott, he

is one very funny man!"

Jasper could get no explanation of that remark, because the

Dutchman got into the boat hurriedly, and went back on board the

brig. But he consoled himself with the thought that very soon all

this unpleasant and rather absurd experience would be over. The

roadstead of Makassar was in sight already. Heemskirk passed by

him going on the bridge. For the first time the lieutenant looked

at Jasper with marked intention; and the strange roll of his eyes

was so funny--it had been long agreed by Jasper and Freya that the

lieutenant was funny--so ecstatically gratified, as though he were

rolling a tasty morsel on his tongue, that Jasper could not help a

broad smile. And then he turned to his brig again.

To see her, his cherished possession, animated by something of his

Freya's soul, the only foothold of two lives on the wide earth, the

security of his passion, the companion of adventure, the power to

snatch the calm, adorable Freya to his breast, and carry her off to

the end of the world; to see this beautiful thing embodying

worthily his pride and his love, to see her captive at the end of a

tow-rope was not indeed a pleasant experience. It had something

nightmarish in it, as, for instance, the dream of a wild sea-bird

loaded with chains.

Yet what else could he want to look at? Her beauty would sometimes

come to his heart with the force of a spell, so that he would

forget where he was. And, besides, that sense of superiority which

the certitude of being loved gives to a young man, that illusion of

being set above the Fates by a tender look in a woman's eyes,

helped him, the first shock over, to go through these experiences

with an amused self-confidence. For what evil could touch the

elect of Freya?

It was now afternoon, the sun being behind the two vessels as they

headed for the harbour. "The beetle's little joke shall soon be

over," thought Jasper, without any great animosity. As a seaman

well acquainted with that part of the world, a casual glance was

enough to tell him what was being done. "Hallo," he thought, "he

is going through Spermonde Passage. We shall be rounding Tamissa

reef presently." And again he returned to the contemplation of his

brig, that main-stay of his material and emotional existence which

would be soon in his hands again. On a sea, calm like a millpond,

a heavy smooth ripple undulated and streamed away from her bows,

for the powerful Neptun was towing at great speed, as if for a

wager. The Dutch gunner appeared on the forecastle of the Bonito,

and with him a couple of men. They stood looking at the coast, and

Jasper lost himself in a loverlike trance.

The deep-toned blast of the gunboat's steam-whistle made him

shudder by its unexpectedness. Slowly he looked about. Swift as

lightning he leaped from where he stood, bounding forward along the

deck.

"You will be on Tamissa reef!" he yelled.

High up on the bridge Heemskirk looked back over his shoulder

heavily; two seamen were spinning the wheel round, and the Neptun

was already swinging rapidly away from the edge of the pale water

over the danger. Ha! just in time. Jasper turned about instantly

to watch his brig; and, even before he realised that--in obedience,

it appears, to Heemskirk's orders given beforehand to the gunner--

the tow-rope had been let go at the blast of the whistle, before he

had time to cry out or to move a limb, he saw her cast adrift and

shooting across the gunboat's stern with the impetus of her speed.

He followed her fine, gliding form with eyes growing big with

incredulity, wild with horror. The cries on board of her came to

him only as a dreadful and confused murmur through the loud

thumping of blood in his ears, while she held on. She ran upright

in a terrible display of her gift of speed, with an incomparable

air of life and grace. She ran on till the smooth level of water

in front of her bows seemed to sink down suddenly as if sucked

away; and, with a strange, violent tremor of her mast-heads she

stopped, inclined her lofty spars a little, and lay still. She lay

still on the reef, while the Neptun, fetching a wide circle,

continued at full speed up Spermonde Passage, heading for the town.

She lay still, perfectly still, with something ill-omened and

unnatural in her attitude. In an instant the subtle melancholy of

things touched by decay had fallen on her in the sunshine; she was

but a speck in the brilliant emptiness of space, already lonely,

already desolate.

"Hold him!" yelled a voice from the bridge.

Jasper had started to run to his brig with a headlong impulse, as a

man dashes forward to pull away with his hands a living, breathing,

loved creature from the brink of destruction. "Hold him! Stick to

him!" vociferated the lieutenant at the top of the bridge-ladder,

while Jasper struggled madly without a word, only his head emerging

from the heaving crowd of the Neptun's seamen, who had flung

themselves upon him obediently. "Hold--I would not have that

fellow drown himself for anything now!"

Jasper ceased struggling.

One by one they let go of him; they fell back gradually farther and

farther, in attentive silence, leaving him standing unsupported in

a widened, clear space, as if to give him plenty of room to fall

after the struggle. He did not even sway perceptibly. Half an

hour later, when the Neptun anchored in front of the town, he had

not stirred yet, had moved neither head nor limb as much as a

hair's breadth. Directly the rumble of the gunboat's cable had

ceased, Heemskirk came down heavily from the bridge.

"Call a sampan" he said, in a gloomy tone, as he passed the sentry

at the gangway, and then moved on slowly towards the spot where

Jasper, the object of many awed glances, stood looking at the deck,

as if lost in a brown study. Heemskirk came up close, and stared

at him thoughtfully, with his fingers over his lips. Here he was,

the favoured vagabond, the only man to whom that infernal girl was

likely to tell the story. But he would not find it funny. The

story how Lieutenant Heemskirk--No, he would not laugh at it. He

looked as though he would never laugh at anything in his life.

Suddenly Jasper looked up. His eyes, without any other expression

but bewilderment, met those of Heemskirk, observant and sombre.

"Gone on the reef!" he said, in a low, astounded tone. "On-the-

reef!" he repeated still lower, and as if attending inwardly to the

birth of some awful and amazing sensation.

"On the very top of high-water, spring tides," Heemskirk struck in,

with a vindictive, exulting violence which flashed and expired. He

paused, as if weary, fixing upon Jasper his arrogant eyes, over

which secret disenchantment, the unavoidable shadow of all passion,

seemed to pass like a saddening cloud. "On the very top," he

repeated, rousing himself in fierce reaction to snatch his laced

cap off his head with a horizontal, derisive flourish towards the

gangway. "And now you may go ashore to the courts, you damned

Englishman!" he said.

CHAPTER VI

The affair of the brig Bonito was bound to cause a sensation in

Makassar, the prettiest, and perhaps the cleanest-looking of all

the towns in the Islands; which however knows few occasions for

excitement. The "front," with its special population, was soon

aware that something had happened. A steamer towing a sailing

vessel had been observed far out to sea for some time, and when the

steamer came in alone, leaving the other outside, attention was

aroused. Why was that? Her masts only could be seen--with furled

sails--remaining in the same place to the southward. And soon the

rumour ran all along the crowded seashore street that there was a

ship on Tamissa reef. That crowd interpreted the appearance

correctly. Its cause was beyond their penetration, for who could

associate a girl nine hundred miles away with the stranding of a

ship on Tamissa reef, or look for the remote filiation of that

event in the psychology of at least three people, even if one of

them, Lieutenant Heemskirk, was at that very moment passing amongst

them on his way to make his verbal report?

No; the minds on the "front" were not competent for that sort of

investigation, but many hands there--brown hands, yellow hands,

white hands--were raised to shade the eyes gazing out to sea. The

rumour spread quickly. Chinese shopkeepers came to their doors,

more than one white merchant, even, rose from his desk to go to the

window. After all, a ship on Tamissa was not an everyday

occurrence. And presently the rumour took a more definite shape.

An English trader--detained on suspicion at sea by the Neptun--

Heemskirk was towing him in to test a case, and by some strange

accident--

Later on the name came out. "The Bonito--what! Impossible! Yes--

yes, the Bonito. Look! You can see from here; only two masts.

It's a brig. Didn't think that man would ever let himself be

caught. Heemskirk's pretty smart, too. They say she's fitted out

in her cabin like a gentleman's yacht. That Allen is a sort of

gentleman too. An extravagant beggar."

A young man entered smartly Messrs. Mesman Brothers' office on the

"front," bubbling with some further information.

"Oh, yes; that's the Bonito for certain! But you don't know the

story I've heard just now. The fellow must have been feeding that

river with firearms for the last year or two. Well, it seems he

has grown so reckless from long impunity that he has actually dared

to sell the very ship's rifles this time. It's a fact. The rifles

are not on board. What impudence! Only, he didn't know that there

was one of our warships on the coast. But those Englishmen are so

impudent that perhaps he thought that nothing would be done to him

for it. Our courts do let off these fellows too often, on some

miserable excuse or other. But, at any rate, there's an end of the

famous Bonito. I have just heard in the harbour-office that she

must have gone on at the very top of high-water; and she is in

ballast, too. No human power, they think, can move her from where

she is. I only hope it is so. It would be fine to have the

notorious Bonito stuck up there as a warning to others."

Mr. J. Mesman, a colonial-born Dutchman, a kind, paternal old

fellow, with a clean-shaven, quiet, handsome fade, and a head of

fine iron-grey hair curling a little on his collar, did not say a

word in defence of Jasper and the Bonito. He rose from his arm-

chair suddenly. His face was visibly troubled. It had so happened

that once, from a business talk of ways and means, island trade,

money matters, and so on, Jasper had been led to open himself to

him on the subject of Freya; and the excellent man, who had known

old Nelson years before and even remembered something of Freya, was

much astonished and amused by the unfolding of the tale.

"Well, well, well! Nelson! Yes; of course. A very honest sort of

man. And a little child with very fair hair. Oh, yes! I have a

distinct recollection. And so she has grown into such a fine girl,

so very determined, so very--" And he laughed almost boisterously.

"Mind, when you have happily eloped with your future wife, Captain

Allen, you must come along this way, and we shall welcome her here.

A little fair-headed child! I remember. I remember."

It was that knowledge which had brought trouble to his face at the

first news of the wreck. He took up his hat.

"Where are you going, Mr. Mesman?"

"I am going to look for Allen. I think he must be ashore. Does

anybody know?"

No one of those present knew. And Mr. Mesman went out on the

"front" to make inquiries.

The other part of the town, the part near the church and the fort,

got its information in another way. The first thing disclosed to

it was Jasper himself, walking rapidly, as though he were pursued.

And, as a matter of fact, a Chinaman, obviously a sampan man, was

following him at the same headlong pace. Suddenly, while passing

Orange House, Jasper swerved and went in, or, rather, rushed in,

startling Gomez, the hotel clerk, very much. But a Chinaman

beginning to make an unseemly noise at the door claimed the

immediate attention of Gomez. His grievance was that the white man

whom he had brought on shore from the gunboat had not paid him his

boat-fare. He had pursued him so far, asking for it all the way.

But the white man had taken no notice whatever of his just claim.

Gomez satisfied the coolie with a few coppers, and then went to

look for Jasper, whom he knew very well. He found him standing

stiffly by a little round table. At the other end of the verandah

a few men sitting there had stopped talking, and were looking at

him in silence. Two billiard-players, with cues in their hands,

had come to the door of the billiard-room and stared, too.

On Gomez coming up to him, Jasper raised one hand to point at his

own throat. Gomez noted the somewhat soiled state of his white

clothes, then took one look at his face, and fled away to order the

drink for which Jasper seemed to be asking.

Where he wanted to go--or what purpose--where he, perhaps, only

imagined himself to be going, when a sudden impulse or the sight of

a familiar place had made him turn into Orange House--it is

impossible to say. He was steadying himself lightly with the tips

of his fingers on the little table. There were on that verandah

two men whom he knew well personally, but his gaze roaming

incessantly as though he were looking for a way of escape, passed

and repassed over them without a sign of recognition. They, on

their side, looking at him, doubted the evidence of their own eyes.

It was not that his face was distorted. On the contrary, it was

still, it was set. But its expression, somehow, was

unrecognisable. Can that be him? they wondered with awe.

In his head there was a wild chaos of clear thoughts. Perfectly

clear. It was this clearness which was so terrible in conjunction

with the utter inability to lay hold of any single one of them all.

He was saying to himself, or to them: "Steady, steady." A China

boy appeared before him with a glass on a tray. He poured the

drink down his throat, and rushed out. His disappearance removed

the spell of wonder from the beholders. One of the men jumped up

and moved quickly to that side of the verandah from which almost

the whole of the roadstead could be seen. At the very moment when

Jasper, issuing from the door of the Orange House, was passing

under him in the street below, he cried to the others excitedly:

"That was Allen right enough! But where is his brig?"

Jasper heard these words with extraordinary loudness. The heavens

rang with them, as if calling him to account; for those were the

very words Freya would have to use. It was an annihilating

question; it struck his consciousness like a thunderbolt and

brought a sudden night upon the chaos of his thoughts even as he

walked. He did not check his pace. He went on in the darkness for

another three strides, and then fell.

The good Mesman had to push on as far as the hospital before he

found him. The doctor there talked of a slight heatstroke.

Nothing very much. Out in three days. . . . It must be admitted

that the doctor was right. In three days, Jasper Allen came out of

the hospital and became visible to the town--very visible indeed--

and remained so for quite a long time; long enough to become almost

one of the sights of the place; long enough to become disregarded

at last; long enough for the tale of his haunting visibility to be

remembered in the islands to this day.

The talk on the "front" and Jasper's appearance in the Orange House

stand at the beginning of the famous Bonito case, and give a view

of its two aspects--the practical and the psychological. The case

for the courts and the case for compassion; that last terribly

evident and yet obscure.

It has, you must understand, remained obscure even for that friend

of mine who wrote me the letter mentioned in the very first lines

of this narrative. He was one of those in Mr. Mesman's office, and

accompanied that gentleman in his search for Jasper. His letter

described to me the two aspects and some of the episodes of the

case. Heemskirk's attitude was that of deep thankfulness for not

having lost his own ship, and that was all. Haze over the land was

his explanation of having got so close to Tamissa reef. He saved

his ship, and for the rest he did not care. As to the fat gunner,

he deposed simply that he thought at the time that he was acting

for the best by letting go the tow-rope, but admitted that he was

greatly confused by the suddenness of the emergency.

As a matter of fact, he had acted on very precise instructions from

Heemskirk, to whom through several years' service together in the

East he had become a sort of devoted henchman. What was most

amazing in the detention of the Bonito was his story how,

proceeding to take possession of the firearms as ordered, he

discovered that there were no firearms on board. All he found in

the fore-cabin was an empty rack for the proper number of eighteen

rifles, but of the rifles themselves never a single one anywhere in

the ship. The mate of the brig, who looked rather ill and behaved

excitedly, as though he were perhaps a lunatic, wanted him to

believe that Captain Allen knew nothing of this; that it was he,

the mate, who had recently sold these rifles in the dead of night

to a certain person up the river. In proof of this story he

produced a bag of silver dollars and pressed it on his, the

gunner's, acceptance. Then, suddenly flinging it down on the deck,

he beat his own head with both his fists and started heaping

shocking curses upon his own soul for an ungrateful wretch not fit

to live.

All this the gunner reported at once to his commanding officer.

What Heemskirk intended by taking upon himself to detain the Bonito

it is difficult to say, except that he meant to bring some trouble

into the life of the man favoured by Freya. He had been looking at

Jasper with a desire to strike that man of kisses and embraces to

the earth. The question was: How could he do it without giving

himself away? But the report of the gunner created a serious case

enough. Yet Allen had friends--and who could tell whether he

wouldn't somehow succeed in wriggling out of it? The idea of

simply towing the brig so much compromised on to the reef came to

him while he was listening to the fat gunner in his cabin. There

was but little risk of being disapproved now. And it should be

made to appear an accident.

Going out on deck he had gloated upon his unconscious victim with

such a sinister roll of his eyes, such a queerly pursed mouth, that

Jasper could not help smiling. And the lieutenant had gone on the

bridge, saying to himself:

"You wait! I shall spoil the taste of those sweet kisses for you.

When you hear of Lieutenant Heemskirk in the future that name won't

bring a smile on your lips, I swear. You are delivered into my

hands."

And this possibility had come about without any planning, one could

almost say naturally, as if events had mysteriously shaped

themselves to fit the purposes of a dark passion. The most astute

scheming could not have served Heemskirk better. It was given to

him to taste a transcendental, an incredible perfection of

vengeance; to strike a deadly blow into that hated person's heart,

and to watch him afterwards walking about with the dagger in his

breast.

For that is what the state of Jasper amounted to. He moved, acted,

weary-eyed, keen-faced, lank and restless, with brusque movements

and fierce gestures; he talked incessantly in a frenzied and

fatigued voice, but within himself he knew that nothing would ever

give him back the brig, just as nothing can heal a pierced heart.

His soul, kept quiet in the stress of love by the unflinching

Freya's influence, was like a still but overwound string. The

shock had started it vibrating, and the string had snapped. He had

waited for two years in a perfectly intoxicated confidence for a

day that now would never come to a man disarmed for life by the

loss of the brig, and, it seemed to him, made unfit for love to

which he had no foothold to offer.

Day after day he would traverse the length of the town, follow the

coast, and, reaching the point of land opposite that part of the

reef on which his brig lay stranded, look steadily across the water

at her beloved form, once the home of an exulting hope, and now, in

her inclined, desolated immobility, towering above the lonely sea-

horizon, a symbol of despair.

The crew had left her in due course in her own boats which directly

they reached the town were sequestrated by the harbour authorities.

The vessel, too, was sequestrated pending proceedings; but these

same authorities did not take the trouble to set a guard on board.

For, indeed, what could move her from there? Nothing, unless a

miracle; nothing, unless Jasper's eyes, fastened on her tensely for

hours together, as though he hoped by the mere power of vision to

draw her to his breast.

All this story, read in my friend's very chatty letter, dismayed me

not a little. But it was really appalling to read his relation of

how Schultz, the mate, went about everywhere affirming with

desperate pertinacity that it was he alone who had sold the rifles.

"I stole them," he protested. Of course, no one would believe him.

My friend himself did not believe him, though he, of course,

admired this self-sacrifice. But a good many people thought it was

going too far to make oneself out a thief for the sake of a friend.

Only, it was such an obvious lie, too, that it did not matter,

perhaps.

I, who, in view of Schultz's psychology, knew how true that must

be, admit that I was appalled. So this was how a perfidious

destiny took advantage of a generous impulse! And I felt as though

I were an accomplice in this perfidy, since I did to a certain

extent encourage Jasper. Yet I had warned him as well.

"The man seemed to have gone crazy on this point," wrote my friend.

"He went to Mesman with his story. He says that some rascally

white man living amongst the natives up that river made him drunk

with some gin one evening, and then jeered at him for never having

any money. Then he, protesting to us that he was an honest man and

must be believed, described himself as being a thief whenever he

took a drop too much, and told us that he went on board and passed

the rifles one by one without the slightest compunction to a canoe

which came alongside that night, receiving ten dollars apiece for

them.

"Next day he was ill with shame and grief, but had not the courage

to confess his lapse to his benefactor. When the gunboat stopped

the brig he felt ready to die with the apprehension of the

consequences, and would have died happily, if he could have been

able to bring the rifles back by the sacrifice of his life. He

said nothing to Jasper, hoping that the brig would be released

presently. When it turned out otherwise and his captain was

detained on board the gunboat, he was ready to commit suicide from

despair; only he thought it his duty to live in order to let the

truth be known. 'I am an honest man! I am an honest man!' he

repeated, in a voice that brought tears to our eyes. 'You must

believe me when I tell you that I am a thief--a vile, low, cunning,

sneaking thief as soon as I've had a glass or two. Take me

somewhere where I may tell the truth on oath.'

"When we had at last convinced him that his story could be of no

use to Jasper--for what Dutch court, having once got hold of an

English trader, would accept such an explanation; and, indeed, how,

when, where could one hope to find proofs of such a tale?--he made

as if to tear his hair in handfuls, but, calming down, said:

'Good-bye, then, gentlemen,' and went out of the room so crushed

that he seemed hardly able to put one foot before the other. That

very night he committed suicide by cutting his throat in the house

of a half-caste with whom he had been lodging since he came ashore

from the wreck."

That throat, I thought with a shudder, which could produce the

tender, persuasive, manly, but fascinating voice which had aroused

Jasper's ready compassion and had secured Freya's sympathy! Who

could ever have supposed such an end in store for the impossible,

gentle Schultz, with his idiosyncrasy of naive pilfering, so

absurdly straightforward that, even in the people who had suffered

from it, it aroused nothing more than a sort of amused

exasperation? He was really impossible. His lot evidently should

have been a half-starved, mysterious, but by no means tragic

existence as a mild-eyed, inoffensive beachcomber on the fringe of

native life. There are occasions when the irony of fate, which

some people profess to discover in the working out of our lives,

wears the aspect of crude and savage jesting.

I shook my head over the manes of Schultz, and went on with my

friend's letter. It told me how the brig on the reef, looted by

the natives from the coast villages, acquired gradually the

lamentable aspect, the grey ghastliness of a wreck; while Jasper,

fading daily into a mere shadow of a man, strode brusquely all

along the "front" with horribly lively eyes and a faint, fixed

smile on his lips, to spend the day on a lonely spit of sand

looking eagerly at her, as though he had expected some shape on

board to rise up and make some sort of sign to him over the

decaying bulwarks. The Mesmans were taking care of him as far as

it was possible. The Bonito case had been referred to Batavia,

where no doubt it would fade away in a fog of official papers. . .

. It was heartrending to read all this. That active and zealous

officer, Lieutenant Heemskirk, his air of sullen, darkly-pained

self-importance not lightened by the approval of his action

conveyed to him unofficially, had gone on to take up his station in

the Moluccas. . . .

Then, at the end of the bulky, kindly-meant epistle, dealing with

the island news of half a year at least, my friend wrote: "A

couple of months ago old Nelson turned up here, arriving by the

mail-boat from Java. Came to see Mesman, it seems. A rather

mysterious visit, and extraordinarily short, after coming all that

way. He stayed just four days at the Orange House, with apparently

nothing in particular to do, and then caught the south-going

steamer for the Straits. I remember people saying at one time that

Allen was rather sweet on old Nelson's daughter, the girl that was

brought up by Mrs. Harley and then went to live with him at the

Seven Isles group. Surely you remember old Nelson--"

Remember old Nelson! Rather!

The letter went on to inform me further that old Nelson, at least,

remembered me, since some time after his flying visit to Makassar

he had written to the Mesmans asking for my address in London.

That old Nelson (or Nielsen), the note of whose personality was a

profound, echoless irresponsiveness to everything around him,

should wish to write, or find anything to write about to anybody,

was in itself a cause for no small wonder. And to me, of all

people! I waited with uneasy impatience for whatever disclosure

could come from that naturally benighted intelligence, but my

impatience had time to wear out before my eyes beheld old Nelson's

trembling, painfully-formed handwriting, senile and childish at the

same time, on an envelope bearing a penny stamp and the postal mark

of the Notting Hill office. I delayed opening it in order to pay

the tribute of astonishment due to the event by flinging my hands

above my head. So he had come home to England, to be definitely

Nelson; or else was on his way home to Denmark, where he would

revert for ever to his original Nielsen! But old Nelson (or

Nielsen) out of the tropics seemed unthinkable. And yet he was

there, asking me to call.

His address was at a boarding-house in one of those Bayswater

squares, once of leisure, which nowadays are reduced to earning

their living. Somebody had recommended him there. I started to

call on him on one of those January days in London, one of those

wintry days composed of the four devilish elements, cold, wet, mud,

and grime, combined with a particular stickiness of atmosphere that

clings like an unclean garment to one's very soul. Yet on

approaching his abode I saw, like a flicker far behind the soiled

veil of the four elements, the wearisome and splendid glitter of a

blue sea with the Seven Islets like minute specks swimming in my

eye, the high red roof of the bungalow crowning the very smallest

of them all. This visual reminiscence was profoundly disturbing.

I knocked at the door with a faltering hand.

Old Nelson (or Nielsen) got up from the table at which he was

sitting with a shabby pocket-book full of papers before him. He

took off his spectacles before shaking hands. For a moment neither

of us said a word; then, noticing me looking round somewhat

expectantly, he murmured some words, of which I caught only

"daughter" and "Hong Kong," cast his eyes down, and sighed.

His moustache, sticking all ways out, as of yore, was quite white

now. His old cheeks were softly rounded, with some colour in them;

strangely enough, that something childlike always noticeable in the

general contour of his physiognomy had become much more marked.

Like his handwriting, he looked childish and senile. He showed his

age most in his unintelligently furrowed, anxious forehead and in

his round, innocent eyes, which appeared to me weak and blinking

and watery; or was it that they were full of tears? . . .

To discover old Nelson fully informed upon any matter whatever was

a new experience. And after the first awkwardness had worn off he

talked freely, with, now and then, a question to start him going

whenever he lapsed into silence, which he would do suddenly,

clasping his hands on his waistcoat in an attitude which would

recall to me the east verandah, where he used to sit talking

quietly and puffing out his cheeks in what seemed now old, very old

days. He talked in a reasonable somewhat anxious tone.

"No, no. We did not know anything for weeks. Out of the way like

that, we couldn't, of course. No mail service to the Seven Isles.

But one day I ran over to Banka in my big sailing-boat to see

whether there were any letters, and saw a Dutch paper. But it

looked only like a bit of marine news: English brig Bonito gone

ashore outside Makassar roads. That was all. I took the paper

home with me and showed it to her. 'I will never forgive him!' she

cries with her old spirit. 'My dear,' I said, 'you are a sensible

girl. The best man may lose a ship. But what about your health?'

I was beginning to be frightened at her looks. She would not let

me talk even of going to Singapore before. But, really, such a

sensible girl couldn't keep on objecting for ever. 'Do what you

like, papa,' she says. Rather a job, that. Had to catch a steamer

at sea, but I got her over all right. There, doctors, of course.

Fever. Anaemia. Put her to bed. Two or three women very kind to

her. Naturally in our papers the whole story came out before long.

She reads it to the end, lying on the couch; then hands the

newspaper back to me, whispers 'Heemskirk,' and goes off into a

faint."

He blinked at me for quite a long time, his eyes running full of

tears again.

"Next day," he began, without any emotion in his voice, "she felt

stronger, and we had a long talk. She told me everything."

Here old Nelson, with his eyes cast down, gave me the whole story

of the Heemskirk episode in Freya's words; then went on in his

rather jerky utterance, and looking up innocently:

"'My dear,' I said, 'you have behaved in the main like a sensible

girl.' 'I have been horrid,' she cries, 'and he is breaking his

heart over there.' Well, she was too sensible not to see she

wasn't in a state to travel. But I went. She told me to go. She

was being looked after very well. Anaemia. Getting better, they

said."

He paused.

"You did see him?" I murmured.

"Oh, yes; I did see him," he started again, talking in that

reasonable voice as though he were arguing a point. "I did see

him. I came upon him. Eyes sunk an inch into his head; nothing

but skin on the bones of his face, a skeleton in dirty white

clothes. That's what he looked like. How Freya . . . But she

never did--not really. He was sitting there, the only live thing

for miles along that coast, on a drift-log washed up on the shore.

They had clipped his hair in the hospital, and it had not grown

again. He stared, holding his chin in his hand, and with nothing

on the sea between him and the sky but that wreck. When I came up

to him he just moved his head a bit. 'Is that you, old man?' says

he--like that.

"If you had seen him you would have understood at once how

impossible it was for Freya to have ever loved that man. Well,

well. I don't say. She might have--something. She was lonely,

you know. But really to go away with him! Never! Madness. She

was too sensible . . . I began to reproach him gently. And by and

by he turns on me. 'Write to you! What about? Come to her! What

with? If I had been a man I would have carried her off, but she

made a child, a happy child, of me. Tell her that the day the only

thing I had belonging to me in the world perished on this reef I

discovered that I had no power over her. . . Has she come here with

you?' he shouts, blazing at me suddenly with his hollow eyes. I

shook my head. Come with me, indeed! Anaemia! 'Aha! You see?

Go away, then, old man, and leave me alone here with that ghost,'

he says, jerking his head at the wreck of his brig.

"Mad! It was getting dusk. I did not care to stop any longer all

by myself with that man in that lonely place. I was not going to

tell him of Freya's illness. Anaemia! What was the good? Mad!

And what sort of husband would he have made, anyhow, for a sensible

girl like Freya? Why, even my little property I could not have

left them. The Dutch authorities would never have allowed an

Englishman to settle there. It was not sold then. My man Mahmat,

you know, was looking after it for me. Later on I let it go for a

tenth of its value to a Dutch half-caste. But never mind. It was

nothing to me then. Yes; I went away from him. I caught the

return mail-boat. I told everything to Freya. 'He's mad,' I said;

'and, my dear, the only thing he loved was his brig.'

"'Perhaps,' she says to herself, looking straight away--her eyes

were nearly as hollow as his--'perhaps it is true. Yes! I would

never allow him any power over me.'"

Old Nelson paused. I sat fascinated, and feeling a little cold in

that room with a blazing fire.

"So you see," he continued, "she never really cared for him. Much

too sensible. I took her away to Hong Kong. Change of climate,

they said. Oh, these doctors! My God! Winter time! There came

ten days of cold mists and wind and rain. Pneumonia. But look

here! We talked a lot together. Days and evenings. Who else had

she? . . . She talked a lot to me, my own girl. Sometimes she

would laugh a little. Look at me and laugh a little--"

I shuddered. He looked up vaguely, with a childish, puzzled

moodiness.

"She would say: 'I did not really mean to be a bad daughter to

you, papa.' And I would say: 'Of course, my dear. You could not

have meant it.' She would lie quiet and then say: 'I wonder?'

And sometimes, 'I've been really a coward,' she would tell me. You

know, sick people they say things. And so she would say too:

'I've been conceited, headstrong, capricious. I sought my own

gratification. I was selfish or afraid.' . . . But sick people,

you know, they say anything. And once, after lying silent almost

all day, she said: 'Yes; perhaps, when the day came I would not

have gone. Perhaps! I don't know,' she cried. 'Draw the curtain,

papa. Shut the sea out. It reproaches me with my folly.'" He

gasped and paused.

"So you see," he went on in a murmur. "Very ill, very ill indeed.

Pneumonia. Very sudden." He pointed his finger at the carpet,

while the thought of the poor girl, vanquished in her struggle with

three men's absurdities, and coming at last to doubt her own self,

held me in a very anguish of pity.

"You see yourself," he began again in a downcast manner. "She

could not have really . . . She mentioned you several times. Good

friend. Sensible man. So I wanted to tell you myself--let you

know the truth. A fellow like that! How could it be? She was

lonely. And perhaps for a while . . . Mere nothing. There could

never have been a question of love for my Freya--such a sensible

girl--"

"Man!" I cried, rising upon him wrathfully, "don't you see that she

died of it?"

He got up too. "No! no!" he stammered, as if angry. "The doctors!

Pneumonia. Low state. The inflammation of the . . . They told me.

Pneu--"

He did not finish the word. It ended in a sob. He flung his arms

out in a gesture of despair, giving up his ghastly pretence with a

low, heartrending cry:

"And I thought that she was so sensible!"