Chapter VIII

“_For now they are so few indeed_
(_Not more than three in all_)
_Who e’er will think of me or heed_
_What fate may me befall._”

On board the S.S. _Batava_, outward bound for West Africa, all was bustle and confusion. On the lower deck a couple of men stood, one of whom was watching the passengers coming off the last tender.

“Well,” he remarked presently, “your little girl with the ‘clematis’ eyes married him in spite of the word in season.”

The remark made Captain Fletcher turn sharply.

“What the devil are you talking about?” he asked.

“Here comes your latest Hyena with the little white lamb you were so anxious about.”

Fletcher’s gaze followed Mellors’. He saw a girl with a pair of eyes that he, in a weak and sentimental moment, had likened to a clematis.

“Poor kid! She must have been all alone in the world or that wouldn’t have happened.”

“Well, there’s no need for you to waste any further thought or sympathy on her,” Mellors replied. “She looks perfectly pleased with her bargain. But it’s surprising what some women will swallow provided it’s sufficiently gilded.”

Fletcher watched the two coming along the deck. Lebrassa was the first to see him and over his dark face there crept a vestige of sardonic amusement.

He made some remark to Leslie that brought her attention to the two men.

For an instant the vivid eyes that had haunted Fletcher for the last few months looked straight at him. But the girl made no acknowledgment of his presence, unless the sudden rush of color to her face counted as such.

“The cut direct,” Mellors murmured as she passed on.

There he was wrong. It was the act of a child caught doing what it knew it ought not to do, moreover, what it had been told not to do, very anxious to attract no further attention to itself.

Lebrassa’s remark, “There are two friends of yours,” had made Leslie look round in quick curiosity.

Fletcher and Mellors were the last people she had expected to see. She knew they had recognized her. With an unpleasant rush their presence brought back every word Fletcher had said about colored men. And the look of contempt on Mellors’ face told her, for the first time, what she might have to put up with on the voyage out, and what certainly would be her lot in Calabar.

By the time she was two steps away it dawned on her that she might have saved herself some future unpleasantness had she given Fletcher the barest recognition. Having once cut him she could hardly smile upon him the next time they met. Then all he had said about Lebrassa, which had proved absolutely false, made her glad she had treated him in the way he deserved.

A prey to a variety of emotions, Fletcher watched her go, the principal being that their former meetings had left her with such an unfavorable impression of himself that his advice counted for nothing.

In gloomy silence he stood watching her retreating figure, then he left his friend and went to the saloon to study the passenger list.

He returned to Mellors with a buoyancy in his step that had not been there when he left.

“You’re wrong,” he said. “She’s not married to that nigger.”

“What the deuce is she doing with him then?”

“I want to know what he’s doing with her,” Fletcher replied, “because she’s going to Calabar.”

For the rest of the day Fletcher kept a sharp lookout for Leslie, but he saw nothing more of her. Out in the Irish Sea the worst gale of the season was raging, and all but the most seasoned travelers sought the refuge of their cabins.

One afternoon about two days later, he came across what looked to be a bundle of rugs stretched out on a deck chair. As he neared it, it took shape and became a girl asleep in the sun. The sight brought him to an abrupt halt, for he had determined to make, not one, but many efforts to gain the confidence of this friendless little girl, and the opportunity seemed favorable.

Leaning on a rail near, he waited until Leslie awoke.

All at once she opened her eyes, but seeing him on guard there, closed them again before he had time to speak.

Fletcher knew she had seen him. Also, he knew she was now keeping her eyes shut deliberately, for the sole purpose of not seeing him.

Leslie was very conscious of the big man leaning against the rail near. Angrily she wondered why he should take it upon himself to stand just there, and she was waiting for him to move before she sat up.

She had made up her mind to ignore everybody on board except Lebrassa. Already her destination was being whispered about. To feel herself despised and an object of contempt was a new sensation.

Fletcher had heard rumors of where she was going, and it had made him all the more determined to come between her and her folly.

Presently the vigorous ringing of the tea bell, almost in her ear, made any further pretense impossible.

Leslie sat up, ready for the fray, knowing Fletcher was going to speak to her.

“I hope you’re feeling better, Miss Graham,” he said.

“I’m quite well, thank you,” she replied in a frosty manner.

“I think you must have forgotten me,” he continued, ignoring her icy tone, “so I’ve taken the liberty of recalling myself.”

“I remember seeing you in Harrogate.”

The reply was not encouraging. It said plainly she had no desire for his acquaintance.

Fletcher’s jaw set in the way it did when he was leading a forlorn hope.

“I’m going to Calabar,” he said stiffly. “If I can be of any use to you either there or during the voyage, I’m always at your service.”

“I don’t think I shall have to avail myself of your offer,” she said in a cutting one.

Fletcher was sorry he had spoken. He had wanted her to know she had at least one friend on board, and he had only succeeded in annoying her.

“May I tell the steward to bring you some tea?” he asked prior to departure.

“Mr. Lebrassa will do that.”

Fletcher knew she had said this purposely, to show him how much either he, his opinion, or advice were worth in her estimation.

For three days Leslie pursued her own way, ignoring everybody but Lebrassa, and herself ignored by most people.

The climax came the evening before the steamer reached Grand Canary.

A dance was taking place on the saloon deck, and the strains of the music were wafted over the calm, starlit sea. Leslie was alone on the deserted lower deck, gazing rather wistfully over the shrouded water.

She was learning that the lot of a pariah is not enviable.

All at once a figure loomed up beside her with a silence that made her jump and broke the current of her thoughts.

“How you made me jump, Mr. Lebrassa,” she said, smiling up at him.

“What are you thinking about, all alone here?” he asked.

“I was thinking--how nice and quiet it was.”

The reply made Lebrassa smile.

In spite of her trying position no word of complaint had ever passed the girl’s lips.

“Then you were not thinking you were just the least bit sorry you hadn’t taken my advice and stayed in England?”

“Why should I be?” she asked, almost defiantly.

“I was afraid you were beginning to find things a bit changed.”

“I’d made up my mind to all that before I left England. It would be rather foolish to start worrying now, wouldn’t it?”

“Are you always so brave and loyal?” he asked.

“There’s nothing very brave in giving up a hard life for an easy one.”

“So you think your life with Mrs. Cooper will be easy?”

“Well, I shan’t have to turn out every morning, whether I’m in the mood for it or not. And in past days Molly was awfully good to me.”

He made no reply. Leaning against the rail, with stifled, unwilling tenderness he watched her small, brave face.

“May I do my poor best to entertain you, Miss Graham?” he said at length. “The other day you were boasting of your prowess as a chess-player. May I challenge you to mortal combat?”

“It won’t be combat at all, but simple slaughter. I shall be wiped out of existence in the first round.”

“Shall we fight over there?” he asked, indicating a lamp in a remote and secluded corner. “Just the two of us alone, mortal enemies, to the death. Then, when I’ve killed you I can drop you overboard and no one will be any the wiser.”

“How vicious you sound! Hankering after bloodshed.”

“You forget I’m half a savage.”

In a gentle, understanding manner Leslie smiled at him.

“I don’t forget because I never thought you were.”

Rather abruptly Lebrassa turned away to fetch the chess-board and the pieces. Leslie went across to the lighted corner and stood there watching the figures flitting on the upper deck.

Up there were women who turned their backs on her, and men who did the same or, worse still, whispered and laughed and tried to talk to her.

As the music struck up afresh she turned her back on the scene, and picking up a book from one of the chairs looked at it with eyes too blurred with tears to distinguish the letters.

Presently, approaching footsteps made her glance round, thinking it was Lebrassa. But when her gaze fell on the figure coming along the deck, she looked away again very quickly.

The newcomer was a stout, red-faced man--one of those who laughed and whispered and tried to talk to her.

Halting at her side, he leant over her in a most familiar manner.

“What about this dance, Miss Graham?” he asked.

“I don’t dance,” she said curtly.

“Well, now I come to think of it, I don’t seem to have seen you hopping round with that nigger.”

Leslie plunged again into her book, ignoring him completely.

“You’re not a very sociable sort,” he said, “and I’ve seen you talking nineteen to the dozen to that Lebrassa.”

It was evident he meant to stay. Deliberately Leslie closed her book and was in the act of moving away when he seized one of her bare arms and, despite her struggles, kept her where she was.

“You’re not in such a dashed hurry to run away when that nigger comes and talks to you,” he said, “so you needn’t put on any airs with me.”

The unexpected contact of his coarse, hot hand on her bare flesh made her give a little gasping scream. The sound reached Fletcher just as he was leaving the smoke-room. It brought him to a halt and made him look sharply along the deserted deck.

On seeing the couple under the lamp, he turned swiftly in that direction.

A voice, hoarse with suppressed anger, made the man loose Leslie’s arm.

“You damned skunk!” it said. “How dare you come and annoy this lady. If I catch you at it again I’ll thrash the life out of you.”

Gripping the man’s shoulder, Fletcher sent him swinging across the deck.

In Leslie’s mind was the memory of her last interview with Fletcher. Under his gaze all speech fled. Then, just as she was pulling herself together, his voice scattered her thoughts again.

“At the risk of annoying you again, I must say it’s not wise of you to stand about alone on deck at night. Considering the circumstances, you lay yourself open to that sort of thing. And while I’m talking, let me say I think you’re very foolish to ignore everybody but Lebrassa. I know half a dozen men on board you could be friendly with and who wouldn’t take advantage of your peculiar position.”

“I… I don’t want to know any one.”

Into the voice of the pariah crept the least suspicion of tears.

“I can quite understand that,” Fletcher replied. “But you’re putting Lebrassa in a very unfair position. You can’t realize what you’re doing or you wouldn’t act in such a foolish manner. What thoughts would come into any man’s head if you were with him as much as you are with this Lebrassa? In the words of the Americans, he’d think you’d ‘fallen for him.’ I’ve seen enough of Lebrassa to know he can behave himself when he wants, and in you he knows he’s dealing with some one very different from the women who usually seek out a man of his sort. But if he should forget himself, you’ve only yourself to blame. I’m sorry to have to speak so plainly. And if you should consider my advice worth taking I’m always ready to help you.”

Quickly Fletcher turned away, fearing the storm that might break on his offending head.

His words left Leslie stunned and petrified.

The idea that she might be leading Lebrassa to think she loved him, filled her with horror.

The mulatto’s voice roused her from her stunned bewilderment.

“I must apologize for being so long, Miss Graham, but I had some difficulty in collecting the weapons together.”

His bored, cultured voice that, in all her experience of him, had never varied one whit, comforted her a little. Sitting down, she watched him arrange the pieces, answering his remarks in a preoccupied manner.

The game started. But Leslie was too full of what Fletcher had said to give her whole attention to it.

Closely Lebrassa watched her. At once he noticed she was perturbed and unusually silent.

During his absence something had happened--something that had startled this little white fawn of his.

He recollected having met Fletcher coming along the deck as though from her direction, and he determined to find out if his enemy had been with her.

“If Captain Fletcher wanted you to dance, I hope you didn’t consider our game,” he remarked.

Leslie looked up from her silent contemplation of the board.

“He didn’t ask me to dance,” she replied, her face flushing.

So Fletcher had been talking to her! Lebrassa wondered what had been said, and he was sufficiently acquainted with his man to know it would be nothing to his, Lebrassa’s, credit.

The thought appeared to amuse him, for a smile, half-tender, half-cruel, came and played about his mouth as he watched his companion. Her hand hovering uncertainly about a piece made his smile deepen.

“If you make that move, I win,” he remarked presently.

Leslie surveyed the position more closely.

“So you do,” she said.

Another move was tried, but further consideration proved it to be no better than the first.

Lebrassa watched her as she sat, with puckered brow, considering her position on the chess board. Just then he was filled with great relief to know that Cooper had _not_ connected Molly’s friend with Lionel de Tourville. In fact the negro had been too elated over his own marriage to inquire further into the matter.

“Why, whatever I do, you win,” Leslie said presently.

Lebrassa swept the pieces together.

“Exactly. Whatever you do I win,” he replied in a voice that had in it a queer undercurrent of savage satisfaction. “Shall we play again? This time I’ll give you unto half of my kingdom, then we shall be more evenly matched.”

“There are one or two letters I must write, so perhaps you’ll excuse me,” Leslie said, very conscious of Fletcher’s advice.

“If I can give you a hand in any way, getting the right sort of stamps or anything, don’t be afraid to ask,” he volunteered.

“… I’ve already been taking up too much of your time.”

Her nervous reply, with an unmistakable note of reserve, so different from her usual friendly, straightforward manner, made a surge of anger go coursing through Lebrassa.

What Fletcher had said to the girl had made her lose faith in him.

“How can you take up too much of my time, when Mrs. Cooper put you in my charge?” he asked.

“But--I keep you away from your own friends.”

“My own friends! Who are they? If you mean the black passengers, I’m sufficiently akin to them to despise them utterly. My friends! I never had any. Those I want, despise me. Those who want me, I despise. I’m nothing, neither black nor white, above the one, below the other. An outcast and a pariah.”

Leslie was aghast at the storm her words had roused. And his dreary, bitter voice cut her to the quick.

For a second time she had a glimpse of the galling black yoke--how it chafed and tortured the man who wore it.

She glanced at him as he sat, all else forgotten but the black curse on his life, with massive shoulders bowed, and a hopeless weariness in his eyes.

The sight made her heart ache. He was so big and strong, so capable of feeling, so full of suffering, so absolutely alone with a burden not of his own making, and which none could help him with.

A sudden flood of sympathy and understanding swept through her. Getting to her feet, she leant over him, a hand lightly on his shoulder.

“It isn’t any fault of yours,” she whispered.

Her voice and light, caressing touch made him start up, shivering as from ague.

Startled by the abruptness of his movement, she drew back quickly. He had loomed over her so suddenly, big and all-powerful, blocking out everything but the fact of himself. There was some emotion on his face that her frightened expression and shrinking attitude stifled.

In a bitter, hopeless way, he laughed.

“Don’t waste any sympathy on me, Miss Graham. I’m not worth it.”

Abruptly he turned away.

As Leslie watched him go, the wail of a violin came sweeping along on the night wind and died away in a long-drawn sigh. Just then the world seemed all pain--pain that no human hands could lighten.

Hardly aware of where she was going, Leslie went along the deck. Her only desire was to reach the light, to get away from the blackness that shadowed and spoilt everything.

On the upper deck, among the gay flags and the colored lanterns, the music that had seemed like weeping was only a waltz tune!

She leant against the rail, thankful for the light, watching the dancers, glad there were still some happy people in the world, people whom the black did not touch.

She looked round the deck for Fletcher. She knew she must accept his offer of friendship, and not risk making things even worse by letting Mr. Lebrassa think they ever could be more than friends.

A little way off, she saw her quarry watching the crowd moodily.

Leslie hesitated. His air of aloofness did not argue well for the coming interview. And the fact that Fletcher had never on any occasion approved of her behavior made her courage shrivel to vanishing point. Then the thought of the consequences that might arise if she persisted in her present line of action made her take her wavering determination firmly in both hands.

A voice with a desperate “do or die” note in it broke in on his moody reverie.

“I hadn’t time to thank you, Captain Fletcher. And I’m very grateful for what you said and did.”

Hardly able to believe his ears, he turned. The cause of his gloomy musings was with him, for the first time condescending to take any notice of him or his advice.

“I’m only too pleased to be of any use to you, Miss Graham,” he said eagerly.

There was a brief pause as Leslie wondered how to put her project into words. She was anxious to justify Molly and to give Lebrassa his due by letting Fletcher know the mulatto had done his best to keep her from going to Africa.

Groping round in his head for some commonplace remark Fletcher watched her, but her presence seemed to have deprived him of speech.

“You were quite right in what you said when that man came and annoyed me,” Leslie said in a nervous manner. “But I’d never looked at it in that light before. So I’d like you for my friend, and… and I’d like to explain everything to you.”

“Don’t bother to explain. I shall be only too delighted if you will count me as your friend without that.”

“But I’d much rather tell you all about it,” she insisted.

“Very well then, if you wish, but let me get you a chair first.”

In a more light-hearted frame of mind than had been his since leaving Liverpool, he skirmished round the deck to find two chairs.

As they sat side by side, into Fletcher’s ears was poured the story of the letter, how it never reached its destination, and the fatal result. She told him of the one that had come to her from Molly in Africa. How Lebrassa had tried to persuade her not to go to her friend, but she had insisted.

“You see,” she finished, “Mrs. Cooper married that dreadful man to save me, not because he’s rich, as people say. And I couldn’t leave her in the lurch.”

Fletcher could read between the lines, and he knew Leslie had struggled on, trying to keep her friend, handicapped beyond her strength.

“I always suspected it was something of the sort, both in your case and Mrs. Cooper’s,” he said in a kindly tone.

“It’s very good of you to have given the case so lenient a view. It was all a mistake, so ghastly that at times I can’t believe it. Poor little Molly tied for life to that--man, all because my letter went astray.”

Fletcher recollected what he had heard in the hotel concerning Lebrassa’s desire for his partner to marry Molly Seaton. With the recollection came a feeling that the mulatto may have wanted the marriage as a means of getting Leslie to Africa.

The idea made him probe deeper into the affair.

“Have any of your people anything to do with West Africa, Miss Graham?”

“No. My father disliked everything African and he had an absolute hatred of negroes. I once had a piece of jewelry that I found among his things. A friend told me it was of West African origin, but it couldn’t have been because my father had never been there, and he had been to the place the name of which was engraved on the armlet, because when he was… ill, he used to talk about it.”

“What was the name of the place?” Fletcher asked.

“Kallu.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m much interested in things West African, and I know more about them than most people. If you’d let me have a look at that armlet I could tell whether it had come from those parts.”

“I haven’t got it now. I had to sell it last year when Molly was so ill.”

Scenting a mystery, Fletcher pondered on what she had said. He wanted to ask Leslie more about her father. Finally he decided to leave the subject until a more advanced stage of friendship permitted of questions bordering on the inquisitive.

Her voice roused him.

“I like Mr. Lebrassa, and I consider the world is hard on him for a reason that is no fault of his. For all that I shouldn’t like him to think--to think he could be anything more than my friend.”

Leslie got to her feet.

“I’ve not been at all nice to you,” she continued, “and I appreciate your kindness in… in coming to my rescue. Good-night and many thanks.”

Fletcher took the hand she held out to him, wondering why Fate had left such an honorable, high-minded child to find her way through the maze of life alone.

When she had gone, a desire for solitude drove him to the lower deck, to walk up and down there, thinking of all she had said.

Lebrassa was there also, pacing up and down with the quiet, stealthy tread of a jungle beast.

The sight of his dark, powerful face with its cruel mouth and indifferent expression eventually drove Fletcher to his cabin, more than ever convinced there was something behind it all that only the mulatto knew.