Chapter III: Part 3

‘It is bad, you know,’ he muttered again to himself. Young Raymond had strolled to the wheel, and was standing talking cheerily to the helmsman; the heat seemed to have no effect on his buoyant spirits. I, stretched on a locker, fanned myself lazily with the mate’s cap, and the mate himself sat in his favourite attitude with his hands clasping his knees, his chin sunk on his chest.

Presently the Doctor began to talk again, more to himself than to us.

‘What a night!’ he said. ‘What a ghastly, hellish, stifling night! Look at that oily pond, can’t you feel the heat lifting out of it into your face. I used to think nothing could lick the Queensland bush, but, Great Lordy! this is worse, many points worse; there was always a kind of a breeze there and some stir of life, but this flat, oily waste--Oh! for a breath of air. I can’t breathe; I tell you, Armand, I can’t breathe.’ He turned round to the mate fiercely, and threw out his thin hands, as if to thrust from him some suffocating weight. ‘What’s the good of you sea-men,’ he laughed a feeble hoarse laugh, ‘if you can’t fetch some sort of air up out of your hell-doomed oceans?’

‘No fear, Doctor, we’ll get you some before long annyway, three days flat cãlm is a big spell even for the Doldrums. How’s her head, my son?’ he called to the grey-bearded helmsman.

‘Nor-nor West, zurr.’

‘Is she doing anny?’

‘Noa, zurr, but zims theer’s a but of a swell tu th’ Sou East, mebbe we’ll ’ave wind ’fore the marnin’.’ The Shellback spat on his hand and held it out, then shook his head doubtfully.

‘The dawn will bring it,’ said the mate, ‘you will see.’

‘Not to me,’ said the Doctor to himself, ‘I’m through.’

Young Raymond turned at the sound of the dreary despairing voice.

‘What’s that?’ he said, ‘Through! we’re _all_ through, we’re all kippered to the nines; don’t be so beastly egotistical, Doctor, you’ve got no blooming monopoly.’ The sunny ring of his voice through the jaded night was as refreshing as a breeze, but the Doctor only said moodily:

‘Yes, my friend, but I guess you weren’t fried to start with, there was still some English juice in you; _you_ haven’t been spread-eagled on a gridiron for seven years till everything’s been sucked out of you,--even sleep.’

‘Thank the Lord,’ said young Raymond in fervent tones, as he threw his head back, and snuffed at an imaginary breeze, ‘I can always sleep.’

‘Sleep!’ echoed the Doctor shrilly, and his thin scarecrow of a figure writhed against the railing of the bulwark, ‘I havn’t slept for _weeks_,--I’m going home, _home_, I tell you, after seven God-forsaken years, but I’d give it all, and chuck in the rest of my life, for twenty-four hours of natural sleep.’

At the word ‘natural’ the mate shifted uneasily in his seat, and his foot beat a tatoo incessantly on the deck.

‘There will be trouble,’ he said softly, ‘big trouble, unless we get the wind, you know. Come, my dear fallow,’ he went on to the Doctor, ‘what is the matter with you to-night, you were not even amuséd with the Wray baby--oh!’ he laughed with a sudden unrestrained merriment curious to listen to in that sultry, joyless air, ‘that is an interésting little ãnimal. Did you see Cotter fill it with plum-duff at dinner, and Mrs Wray opposite laughing all the time, you know, and little Wray looking ’orrifiéd,--ah-ha! and the little ãnimal likéd it, you know,’ his laughter died out as suddenly, and he gazed at the Doctor with his mournful eyes,--the eyes of a man who has been to the edge of the world many times, and looking over--come back again.

‘You are hipped to-night, you are quite dull you know. Tell us a yarn of John Chinaman; he has a most curious individuãlity, annyway.’

There was silence a moment, then the spanker boom creaked slightly from pure inaction, as floors creak in houses at the dead of night, and a spark from the mate’s cigarette floated straight upwards in the dead air; then came a weird, droning sing-song whisper from the bulwarks.

‘Once upon a time,’ it said, ‘there was a poor devil of a doctor, whose lot it became after many wanderings to minister for his living, in an oven, to the extremities of John Chinaman, whereby he learnt many things,--for instance, that it was good to eat puppy-dog and go unshaven, that there was no such thing as right or wrong, beauty or ugliness, cleanliness or dirt, heaven or hell,--that there was no end to the miseries of the white man, and neither end nor beginning to the miseries of the yellow man. But also,’--the whisper almost died away, ‘he learnt one supreme good, ‘το καλὸν,’ that without which man withers--life has no taste, no colour, no scent,--the great, the glorious--My God! O my God!!’ The voice from the faintest whisper rose suddenly to a scream. With a spring young Raymond’s lithe white-clothed figure was by the Doctor’s side, his arm round his neck.

‘Steady, dear old boy!’ he said.

The meaning of those muttered sayings had suddenly been rendered plain, and the mate stood leaning forward with his long arms half stretched towards the Doctor. The melancholy fatalism of his face, that outcome of his Slav blood, was veiled by a look of sorrowful concern.

‘Ohé!’ he said, ‘Ohé! tck tck----’

As for me, I moved swiftly to the wheel, and stood between the group of men and the helmsman, speaking to him at random, in the instinctive dread of what was coming next on the shrill tones that lifted themselves behind me.

‘Yes!’ said the worn voice, ‘look at me!--look at me!--what am I? What have I sunk to? I, who was even as you,--public school--’Varsity--Bart’s--What’s the use of it all? Look at us, I say, look’--he clutched with one hand the arm thrown about him; and as if answering the hysterical cry, the moonlight streamed from behind the main tops’le, with a cruel suddenness, full on to the two men. It lit up the bright, fresh face and yellow hair of the one,--tall and lithe and radiantly white--and threw into a ghastly relief the other,--long, shrunken and shambling, with his twisted yellow face and sunken hunted eyes, with the little brown streak at the corner of the thin distorted mouth, the lank discoloured hair, the writhing, skeleton hands. He cowered as the light fell upon him, and buried his head like a child on young Raymond’s shoulder.

When I turned again, old Carey, the Shellback, was looking steadily at the deck, and, contrary to all orders, spitting vigourously upon it.

‘Fact is we’m tu fur tu the East; yu zee, zurr, these y’er ca’ms is all along o’ that.’

What answer I made to the soft West-country drawl I know not, because it is bewildering to hear a man’s sobs drawn under hard pressure against a linen coat. Then the mate was speaking.

‘Come down to your bunk, my dear fallow, it will be ãll right, you know; I will give you some things to make you sleep.’

‘Sleep!’ came out of the sobs, as a voice might come out of a grave, on to which the earth was being shovelled. ‘My God!--if I could sleep _without_.... Armand, for pity’s sake make me sleep--’

‘There! there!’ young Raymond spoke as to a child.

As swiftly as it had streamed forth, the moonlight hid itself behind a kindly sail, and the three soft footsteps, moving along the deck, slowly died away out of my hearing.

‘Might yu ’appen to ’ave zum baccy, zurr, the mate’s gone down, yu zee, an’ it du be rale ’ot tu-night, that’s zartain.’

I gave the understanding Carey out of my pouch, and we smoked in a sympathetic silence.

* * * * *

I woke with a start; a faint light was showing through the open port hole, and the half-drawn curtain of the bunk wavered unsteadily.

‘She’s moving,’ I thought, feeling with a vast sense of relief the fluttering pulse beginning to beat at last in the wind-logged ship.

‘Yes, there’s a breeze from the South-East; get up!’ Young Raymond was standing by the side of the bunk, his white clothes unchanged, but with a face unknown to me, so grave, drawn, and sunless was it.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘The Doctor!’ he said, ‘Come!’

We crossed the dark saloon, unswept and ungarnished, just as it had been left the evening before. Raymond silently drew aside the green baize curtain of a cabin on the starboard side. Within it stood the mate, stooping over a figure stretched limply on the lower bunk; he looked up as we came in, and withdrew his hand, with something in it, from under the pillow.

‘Look!’ he said, holding up a little inlaid box. ‘I was afrayd of it; I lookéd for it last night, you know,’--there was a curious note of appeal in his voice,--‘but dosé fallows are so cunning, you know.’

I looked at the face lying upturned to the growing light. It was no longer twisted; the eyes stared quietly at the roof of the bunk, the hands were crossed peacefully on the sunken chest. In that face, which had writhed the night before in hunted agony, there remained only the little brown stain at the corner of the mouth to mark it as the same.

‘Dead?’

‘Quite.’ The mate knelt, and reverently drew the lids over the quiet eyes.

Young Raymond was leaning silently apart against the side of the cabin, his head framed in the open port-hole, and his face was ever grey and drawn. I turned from him to the mate.

‘How?’

He answered the double question of my glances hurriedly.

‘No,--it was an accident, see--’ he unscrewed the lid of the little box, and counted the tiny black-brown pills in it. ‘Six--seven--ãyt--there are manny happy hours, you see; while desé were here, he would not have done it, you know. No, it was an accident,--perrhaps he took one too manny,--but it was the heat, you know, and that’--he laid his hand gently over the dead man’s heart. ‘Poor fallow! I likéd him greatly.’

There was a long silence in the little cabin; the faint ‘lip-lip’ of the rising waves against the ship’s side seemed very far away somehow, and the measured tramp of the second mate on the poop above sounded in muffled harmony to our thoughts--then six bells rang out clear and full.

‘It is Cotter’s watch still,’ said the mate, ‘I am free for an hour yet. We must talk, you know.’

He moved over and shut the door, then seated himself on the side of the dead man’s bunk with a reverent callousness, born of an intimate familiarity with many kinds of death.

The ends of the Doctor’s dusky crimson sash hanging over the upper bunk quivered slightly, with the faint rolling of the ship, against the mate’s smoothly dark head, as he crouched forward with his back hunched, and his bearded chin thrust out. His hands were clasped round one knee, the thin leg below them working incessantly with a quick, nervous movement. All the time he was speaking, he looked straight at young Raymond with his mournful eyes, and the latter, who had never moved from his leaning attitude against the cabin side, gazed abstractedly in front of him from out of a growing halo of flame-coloured light. The ship’s cat purring softly was rubbing itself slowly against the white trousered leg.

‘Dis thing had to hãppen, you know,’ said the mate at last. ‘It was written, you see, there’--he raised a hand and pointed to the still face. ‘_I_ knew it a long time. I think I knew it when he first came on board at Adelayde; he walkéd down the quay, you know, with that fatiguéd walk he had, poor fallow, and it was written in his eyes--they were quite hunted, you know. _I’ve_ rrãally been the doctor on the old galley this journey, you know, _he_ wasn’t fit for it. Hãng it all, I have been doseing the shellbacks, you know, poor devils--ah--ha!’ he laughed that sudden spontaneous laugh that must have come from his lips even in death, if an idea had commended itself to his sardonic humour.

‘The skipper should never have taken him on board, you know; but the old fallow was in a hole, he had to get off, and he had to have a doctor. The old galley is an invalid ship, you know, and so she has to have a doctor and a cow,--that blessed cow hasn’t given anny milk, still she hãs four legs, you know--and _I_ am the doctor.’ He gnawed at his moustache and muttered some words under his breath.

Then young Raymond spoke for the first time.

‘Did you know that?’ he said, pointing with a shrinking gesture to the opium box in the mate’s hand.

‘After Cape Town, I knew it. Guessed it when he came on board, you know, and shut himself into his cabin for two days. I got in once, and then I saw what the trouble was, you know. I lookéd for that’--he held up the box--‘but dosé fallows are so cunning. _He_ knew it too, he knew he was going to hand in his checks, you know. He uséd to talk to me, and he often said, “_If_ I get home.”’ The mate paused. ‘Well! that is ãll over, it had to hãppen, you know.’ His voice and face and the resigned dejection of his whole figure embodied the word ‘Kismet’; the threads of the situation, for the moment, had slipped through his fingers. He sat quite quiet, staring mournfully in front of him, but the leg beneath his clasped hands never ceased a second in its nervous movement.

The tramp above, and the ‘lip-lip’ of the little green waves against the ship’s side, were still the only sounds that broke in on the early silence.

‘For the sake of his people,’ said young Raymond suddenly, taking the little box from the mate’s hand.

‘Yes, he had an ayged father, you know, a parson in Yorkshire, he was going home to him--after seven years--that is harrd, you know,’ the mate said dreamily.

‘Well?’ said Raymond impatiently, and he put the hand that held the box through the open port-hole.

‘No--no--look here,’ said the mate, holding out his hand for the box, ‘I must tell the skipper, you know,’ and he put the box away in his pocket. ‘But you will see, it will be ãll right, he will leave the whole rãcket in my hands; he hates a fuss, you know, that old fallow. Besides, it wasn’t rrãally the opium at the end, you know, it was the heat--his hãart was so weakenéd, you see.’ He got up and looked earnestly, with narrowed eyes, at the dead man’s wasted figure.

‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘it was a little joke, the breeze would have savéd him, you know, ... but it will be ãll right,--failure of the hãart from the heat ... and then we shall put him over the side; anyway there will be no post-mortem. Nobody will come in here, you see, except the skipper, and the box will be in my pocket,--the wind will take away the smell in time.’ There was a faint, sweet, sickly smell as of drugs in the close air of the confined space.

‘So be it!’ said young Raymond, moving from his station against the cabin wall.

‘Let us put him to rest, though; his face haunts me, even when I don’t look at it,’ and he shuddered; ‘the light is too cruel.’ Keeping his head averted, he took a handkerchief from a drawer, and covered the dead man’s face. The flaming East was sending a shaft of orange light through the open port-hole full upon it, and the effect was not pretty.

‘When did he go?’ I said, breaking the silence that followed.

‘I don’t know,’ said the mate, ‘but it could not have been long before the breeze came, anyway--he was hardly cold, you know.’

Young Raymond faced round to the light with strained eyes.

‘_I_ know,’ he said suddenly, ‘_I_ know, I saw him go, I saw it all. I shall never get it out of my head--never! never!’

The mate looked at him half cynically, half concernedly.

‘Hãng it all, my dear fallow,’ he said, ‘death is not an aymiable joker, when you are not uséd to him, you know; but you musn’t let him play with your narves.’

‘Nerves!’ said young Raymond hoarsely, ‘you shall tell me if it _is_ nerves, Armand, for, by George! I should like to know.’

‘Well?’ said the mate; he had seated himself again in his favourite attitude.

The world seemed suddenly enclosed within the walls of this wooden crib, time was annihilated, everything stood still, there was no longer anything outside--just the cabin--we three--and the dead man. I felt giddy and stifled, but the moment young Raymond began to speak, all that feeling merged in wonder at the intense earnestness in his face and the tones of his voice.

‘After we left _him_, last night,’ he said, ‘I slung my hammock on the main deck, starboard side, just where the gymnastic bars are rigged by the main mast; it seemed cooler there than on the poop. Cotter came out on watch just after I turned in, so it was about midnight, I suppose. I couldn’t get the idea of _him_ out of my head;’ he avoided looking at the dead man always, and stared straight in front of him.

‘I could see him tossing and twisting in that bunk, and I couldn’t get to sleep for ages; I suppose I must have dropped off at last, though, because I didn’t hear two bells go. I woke suddenly out of an awfully jolly dream about home and my people. The moon was down, but it wasn’t very dark; there was just that light that comes before the dawn, you know. Oh! yes, I could see all right; I could see pretty clearly right to the starboard hatchway leading up to the poop--that was just facing me as my hammock was slung. It was frightfully hot, suffocating--there wasn’t a breath of air, not a breath. I lay awake a few minutes, and then I suppose I dozed off again; but though my eyes were shut, I seemed to have the feeling that something was coming towards me. It grew upon me, so that I must have half raised myself in my hammock, because when I woke again I was sitting up. There _was_ something--a figure; it came from under the starboard hatch out of the saloon. I could hardly see it in that horrible, misty, unreal light, but it came slowly along the deck close to the bulwark without making any noise. I don’t know why I was in a ghastly funk, but it seemed somehow uncanny--I wasn’t properly awake, you see. I waited for it--it seemed hours coming. When it was almost within touch, I saw what--it was--it was--_him_. His head was bent back and his hands thrown up; he was like a shot bird that’s towering for air, you know, but there was no sound, no choke or gasp--I listened for it, but there was none, not even a sigh’--he paused. ‘There ought, there must have been a gasp, if it _was_ he,’ he muttered to himself; ‘he couldn’t have stood like that without a sound. Oh! Armand, the face!’

He spoke in short broken sentences, and his hands twisted here and there in the full agony of recollection.

‘The eyes were staring open, as they were before you--and nothing moved in it--it was a _dead_ face ... and then it went away again, you know,--I don’t know _how_ it went. I shall never get that look out of my head--never!’ He drew his hands across his eyes.

‘It was far worse than _that_ dead face,’ he said solemnly, pointing to the bunk; ‘it was the dead face of a _living_ man.’

‘Then?’ said the mate.

‘Then I lay back in my hammock, not more than a minute, I think,--and then I got out and came here, and as I crossed the deck the first of the breeze crossed it too--too late!--he died for want of air, I _know_ he did--just too late, you see.’

‘Too late!’ echoed the mate softly, nodding his head. ‘_That_ is the joke.’

‘He was lying here as you found him. I didn’t touch him before I came and told you. And, look here! Armand, what have I seen? It scared me.’

An infinite and sombre gentleness was in the look the mate bent to meet the trouble in the young face turned to him, but he only said, ‘That is most interésting. You are not to be pitied, you know, you are to be envied; a man does not often see these things, you know.’

‘But _what_ did I see? _What?_ I tell you it scared me.’

‘I _think_,’ said the mate slowly--‘I don’t know, of course,--but I think you have seen what very few people have seen. I think there is a time, you know, which comes between life and death. It is perhaps the twilight of the body you know, and the dawning of the soul,--it is that breathless space which these old crãfts of our bodies have to go through, you know, where there is no life, and not yet death,--the Doldrums of our individuãlities hanging in the wind.’ There was a long silence.

‘Thanks,’ said young Raymond at last, and the old sunny look seemed to creep back into his face through the haunting shadow of fear cast there by the thing he had seen.

‘Thanks, old fellow! The dawning of the soul! I like that.’

He had caught, like a child, at the one idea in the mate’s words which appealed to his narrow, sanguine optimism; and only _I_ saw the look of wearily gentle cynicism in the mate’s face, and heard his words as he turned away out of the cabin, ‘Yes? if there _is_ such a thing, you know.’

So I turned away too from the ‘valley of the shadow,’ but young Raymond knelt softly by the bunk and drew the handkerchief from the dead man’s face. He could bear to look on him now. The breeze stole in and stirred the hair on the two heads close together.

The words came to me at the door.

‘You’re all right now, old fellow, aren’t you? You’ve gone home.’ Then through a choke in the voice, ‘but, oh! my God! your luck was hard.’

THE CAPITULATION OF JEAN JACQUES

S.S. Wapiti.
_May 16th, 188 ._

... To-day, fine again, gorgeous, but mighty hot. Left Suva at daybreak. Very one-horse place, with a lovely harbour. We got a lot of bananas and pines from a Fijian’s canoe as we went out--they ought to last till we get to Sydney....

A rum thing happened about five o’clock; some 150 miles sou’-west of Suva we sighted a small cutter with two men in her. They were making signals with a pair of breeches. The Captain stopped for them, and lowered a boat to see what was up. I got leave to go. The poor beggars were burnt up--I never saw men so completely frizzled; Frenchmen--one a very big man, one a very little--awfully plucky little chap, said he was ‘all ar-right,’ only wanted water, and was trying to make Suva from Tahiti! ’m! _In a ten-ton cutter!_ Double ’mm!!

He asked his course,--we gave it him, and a cask of water. I was the last to go over the side of the cutter, and he said to me: ‘Monsieur, you gentlemens, is it not?’ ‘Hope so,’ said I. ‘Going to Noumea, is it not?’ ‘Yes,’ said I. ‘Will it ’ave ze _extrêmement_ kindness to inform _ce cher Gouverneur_ zat “Jean Jacques” made to ’im ze compliments?’ With that he put his finger to his lips, and smiled sweetly upon me.

I don’t think any nigger could have given him points for brownness, but I liked the looks of him hugely.

As we were pulling back, the second officer said to me:

‘Scaped convicts, you bet, poor devils--no business of mine.’

I thought of that smile and forbore to wink....

(Extract from the Diary of a Passenger.)

‘_Sacré!_ these walls are high! lift me, Pierre.’

A very small lean man raised himself with the agility of a cat from his perch in the uplifted grasp of the giant below, and was through a window twelve feet from the ground, and crouching in the shadow of the white curtains without a sound stirring the silence of the night air.

Jean Jacques, Frenchman, man of genius, man of diminutive stature, man of sun-baked countenance, political convict, crouched in the shadow of the curtains and reflected. His reflections were the résumé of a carefully matured plan,--in fine, his reflections were these:

‘I, Jean Jacques, am at large; I have not been at large for some time; certainly, then, I wish to remain at large; I wish also my friend Pierre below to remain at large. _Que faire?_’ The reasoning unconsciously took the form of Ollendorf.

‘I am in the room of the four-year-old daughter of the Governor. How do I know this? Because I can see her little socks hanging over the end of the bed. Is not the four-year-old daughter of the Governor the apple of the Governor’s eye? Certainly, she is the apple of the eye of the Governor. Given, then, Jean Jacques, the apple of the eye of the Governor, and the desire to remain at large, what happens? P--s--s--t, it is apparent, any child can see what _must_ happen!’

Jean Jacques rose to the height of his five feet two, his lean, dark face glowing, and his crisp black hair curling with the greatness of his ideas, and advancing, drew aside the curtains of the little bed.

A small figure in a wisp of a nightgown stretched her limbs thereon in childish abandon, and turned her elf’s face up to her nocturnal visitor in the unconscious serenity of sleep. That Jean Jacques was a humane man was evidenced by the thoughtful way in which he bestowed dress, socks, slippers, dolls, and sun-bonnet within the capacious folds of his convict’s blouse; that he was a man of energy and action, by the manner in which he enveloped the child’s head in a soft shawl, and her little body in a discarded blanket, and, before she had time or breath to wake and scream, passed himself and her into the upstretched arms of Pierre, and regained the ground.

Then two dim figures, with a hostage to liberty, flitted through the deserted streets, and the night swallowed them up.

* * * * *

Noumea was looking its best; what that means one must have been there to know. Not yet astir with the day, the town and harbour were pretending an innocence of the twin spirits of despair and misery throbbing and raging within their boundaries. Out of the blue Pacific, also pretending a non-existent innocence, the sun was rising, and causing the ruddy copper tints of the island rocks to shine with a morning glory, the foam of the reefs to sparkle, and the green and red of leaf and flower to glint and glow with a tender and dewy freshness. The native market was already beginning to stir with the busy sellers of most conceivable, and some inconceivable, fruits and vegetables. Soon, above the everyday droning hum of the vending of merchandise, rose and swelled an ever-increasing buzz, like the tuning of an orchestra, in dozens of discordant quirks and twitters, till, hushing every sound, as does the uplifting of the conductor’s baton, there boomed forth once and twice over the stillness of the harbour the deep angry tone of the convict escape-gun. Then the buzz broke out again, but this time with the unanimity of knowledge and conviction. Not that a convict’s escape was any rare occurrence in a community boasting the possession of some nine thousand such, in a greater or less degree of captivity; the buzz had a deeper and a wider meaning; there were nine thousand convicts; there was but one Governor, and to that Governor was but one daughter. The ‘buzz,’ with an intelligence which did it credit, connected the two disappearances, it was even whispered--that is to say, it was bewailed and lamented at the top of the shrill native voice--that there was a third disappearance, of knives and ropes, and good food-stuff, to wit; this formed a tail to the comet in the opinion of the buzz. The buzz was immensely tickled and interested, it was even compelled to open its mouth--which was bad for it--when from the barracks issued patrols armed to the teeth, and from the quay departed snowily-breeched officials to the various ships lying at anchor. Grievously agape was the mouth of the buzz when from Government House marched the Governor, grey-headed and of soldierly bearing. The Governor was a widowed man, and had but one child; it amused the buzz and affected it to tears to see what he had suffered. In spite of his soldier’s pride, suffering had lined his face during the last hour, and the furrows deepened as he marched on with head up into the middle of the Place, and spoke to the buzz with wingéd words, that hushed it completely, distending its mouth and stimulating its stomach by the liberality of the promised reward.

There was a scattering and a hurrying, such as the official methodism of the town had not known since the French and English blue-jacket fight--a tussle of unquenchable memory and much friendly shedding of gore.

The hours rolled on, the sun blazed, the world forgot its siesta, while the shadow on the Governor’s face deepened with the waning of the day. He sat in the Place and waited--round him a staff of messengers coming and going, as fresh thoughts and possibilities thronged his anxious mind. Presently, as hope faded and grew wan, he said--

‘I can bear it no more here, I will go up and wait in the Cathedral--perchance God will send me inspiration,’ and he took his way thither....

Now, if one desires to see the most perfect picture in the world, one may look upon it--if one goes in the evening to the Cathedral at Noumea, and, standing at the eastern end, looks down the aisle to the west. There, framed in the grey walls, hangs a picture as of heaven--not, indeed, of canvas and paint, but of the sea and the air and the earth, as a man sees them when the glow of a setting sun is flooding and filling all with an unearthly glory of light. So the Governor, even in his great grief, saw the vision of heaven, and bowing his head upon his hands, sat gazing thereon--silent and alone. As the sun dipped he fell, worn out, into a sort of trance, rousing himself with a start as the rim of the fiery globe rested lightly on the horizon, seeming to poise itself before sinking to rest, while the grey shadows of the twilight crept out, as if eager before their time to whelm the last hopes of the day in a filmy maze. Out of the West, before the eyes of the Governor--far away in a reverie of pain--floated a white cloud, and dimly his mind became conscious of it. ‘Very odd cloud,’ he thought abstractedly, ‘that comes so suddenly and close;’ then he sprang up as though he had been shot. ‘Was it a cloud? No, assuredly it was not.’ It floated, it quivered, it waggled with the breeze, it was--bathos--it was a nightgown.

Suspended between sky and earth in the middle of that picture of heaven, fading already with the growing darkness, waved a child’s nightgown. Instinctively the answer to the whole problem of the day’s disappearance flashed before the Governor’s mind, and what he saw when he had hurried through the door under the folds of that flag of truce came as no surprise. He stood and gazed upwards. Down below in the streets of the town, in all the country round, the buzz was still actively engaged in pursuing the promised satisfaction of its stomach.

Now this was what the Governor saw on the roof of the Cathedral, thirty feet above him. Over the stone parapet a lean, dark face surmounting a bare brown arm and hand, from which hung the rope of the flag of truce; behind, what seemed to him a vast blue statue, astride the neck of which sat a little figure in a cotton blouse, dangling two bare legs, and patting the statue’s head with one hand, while with the other it blew kisses to the amazed and horrified Governor. His hand caught the butt of his revolver. Escaped convicts were wild beasts--and his child sat on the shoulders of one and played with what was left of its hair! The Governor’s aristocratic and sporting instincts were aroused.

Jean Jacques, leaning over the parapet, smiled genially, and his other hand, in which glistened the long blade of a knife, rested for a moment on the parapet. Only for a second, but the Governor let fall the pistol, and covered his face in his hands with a shrinking gesture of physical pain and fear.

‘_Bien! Monsieur_,’--Jean Jacques took the word in courteous tones, and with a caressing upward wave of the hand that no longer held the knife to the little white atom on his comrade’s shoulders. ‘_Bien!_ decidedly Monsieur and I shall understand one another. I have the honour of addressing Monsieur le Gouverneur? Good.’ Jean Jacques made a polite bow with what could be seen of him in response to the Governor’s sign of assent.

‘Monsieur, I will be brief. I am Jean Jacques. My friend Monsieur Pierre Legros--Monsieur le Gouverneur!’

He indicated the silent Pierre with a backward and airy wave.

‘My friend and I were bored--it was not your fault, Monsieur, do not be distressed--we were in want of distraction, we were also in want of being free--ah! Free----’

Jean Jacques looked up with a sigh that spoke volumes even to the Governor, pre-occupied as he was with dread anxiety.

‘_Nous voila!_ distracted and free--do you think we will again return to the other state?’ An accent of menace crept into his voice, but passed as quickly as it came.

‘No, we shall remain free; it rests with Monsieur to decide how and on what terms. Providence has kindly sent Monsieur to us alone; my friend and I do not wish that anyone should see Monsieur talking with us--it might compromise him as affairs will turn out. Therefore, if Monsieur will give to us his ears, my friend and I will briefly explain to him how things stand, and what we have the honour to desire at the hands of Monsieur.’

He paused for a moment, and turned to Pierre, standing in the shadow behind him; the latter made a sign of acquiescence, and Jacques went on:

‘Mademoiselle Cecile is very happy with us; it is a new game we are playing,’--he turned again and smiled at the child, who waved her hand and laughed back at him,--‘and we are very fond of Mademoiselle. But we have thought it may be best for everyone that we should continue to be free in another land--across the seas. Monsieur le Gouverneur will therefore cause to be prepared for us, in the little bay of Pontet to the east, a good seaworthy cutter of not less than ten tons, with provisions and water for twenty days; also he will in his kindness see that the road is clear for us to embark at midnight to-morrow, and he will give us--will he not?--his word of honour that he will not cause us to be pursued. Monsieur’s word of honour is his bond. If Monsieur will come to the little bay of Pontet at twelve on that night he will find Mademoiselle in the little cave close by the bay. Should Monsieur not see his way to accept these terms, he will do as he pleases, always remembering that Mademoiselle is with us, and that what happens to Jean Jacques or his friend Pierre, happens, unfortunately, to Mademoiselle also.’

So ending, Jean Jacques bared his teeth again in a genial smile.

The Governor groaned--his situation dawned slowly on him in the fulness of its horror--he clenched his teeth and groaned. His duty drew him one way, his feelings (and he was conscious then how overpoweringly) dragged him the other. He bowed his head, and pondered painfully. Jean Jacques waited some time in silent politeness, then he said:

‘Monsieur will understand that to my friend and myself our liberty is as dear as to Monsieur is Monsieur’s daughter: also Monsieur shall, if he pleases, have the night and the day in which to reflect and prepare; and in order that there may be no mistake as to the preparations, it will be best if Monsieur will return himself and give us his answer at two hours before midnight to-morrow.’

The Governor was conscious, with a feeling of rage and shame, that the convict knew only too surely that the game was in his hands; he raised his head with a jerk, and said, sharply and sternly:

‘It shall be so--at ten to-morrow night you shall have my answer.’

Then with one look at his little daughter calling merrily, and blowing kisses to him, and a muttered ‘Good-night, my darling, be a good brave child,’ he stepped firmly away, turning for a moment to say fiercely, ‘Be careful of her, men; if but one hair of her head be harmed, woe betide you.’ Then he marched heroically down the hill, and hastened to his home to hide his deadly agony of doubt and fear.

* * * * *

The buzz was hushed--hushed until the day should come again to lend it zeal and courage. It was one thing to hunt for escaped convicts, in packs, under the smiling sun, it was another to seek desperate men in the blue-black of the Southern night. The buzz was of opinion that its stomach might wait a little. Inland among the hills tired parties of soldiery still pursued their weary search, but to no purpose. That buttress on the Cathedral was a full fifteen feet from the ground--its combination with a giant, a man of genius, and a rope had occurred to no one’s mind; furthermore, the side of the Cathedral roof overlooked by the coastguard station was protected by a parapet, and this fact had also been unobserved.

Underneath the parapet the child lay tossing between her two captors. Even in her restlessness she seemed to have complete faith in them; one hand lay in Pierre’s monstrous paw, with the other she kept throwing off the clothing that Jean Jacques carefully replaced. Neither man slept; they watched their little prisoner anxiously, and every now and then Jacques spoke a word or two of soothing to the restless little mortal. In the middle watches of the night, Cecile waked suddenly from her dreams, and sat up, shaking her dark straight locks back from her hot little head, and looking wildly about her. Then she screamed, a child’s scream of terror, and the look of fright that the two men had been waiting for so painfully and anxiously shone in her black eyes. That, which only Jacques’ wonderful, almost mesmeric, power with children and the giant Pierre’s gentleness had restrained so far, was come at last.

‘_Bon Dieu_, but this is terrible,’ said Jacques; ‘gently, _ma chérie_, it is all play; see, here are thy two good friends, here is thy horse, the big Pierre who gave thee that good ride on his shoulders; gently, _ma chérie_, gently.’

He stroked the soft head, and with the tenderness of a mother kissed the hot little cheek. Pierre turned his head away, with the dumb and blind confidence in his comrade in all moments of danger and difficulty that possessed his faithful soul. But scream after scream broke from the child; it was not all play, she was in the dark, where was her little bed and her nurse? and she wanted her daddy. Jean Jacques was the father of children, a man of genius, and kindly, but he was unequal to this situation, perhaps from that very kindliness which forbade him to use the shawl to smother the child’s cries.

Now the Cathedral was high above the town, and the buzz in the nearest houses was tired, and only turned in its heavy sleep to say, ‘Listen to the wild cats in the mountains--to-morrow we will go and hunt them and the other wild beasts with dogs.’ So the paroxysm passed, and the child lay still again in Pierre’s arms, but with a dull fever burning in her cheeks and eyes. The night grew old, and the chill air smote the exhausted babe in spite of all the men’s care, and morning brought the raging fever that, if it be not stayed, means death to the white child. The men looked at each other with dismay in faces haggard with the strain of sleepless nights and dread anxiety.

‘Must we then fail after all?’ said Jacques, more to himself than to his comrade. He turned his eyes, gloomy with a bitter resentment at the rising sun.

‘Twenty hours--only twenty hours--and three lives hanging in the balance. I _will_ not fail; the child _shall_ live, and so shall we.’

‘Water,’ said Pierre, and without another word took off his hat and fitted the rope through the brim to make a bucket.

‘Yes, water before the people are stirring,’ said Jacques.

By the aid of the rope he descended with his extemporised bucket and stole down the hill under shelter of a wall to the nearest cottage--a laundry, as luck would have it--then, filling his bucket, he got back without being seen. Cecile was delirious, and as she raved and tossed, the tears stole down the cheeks of the big convict, and gently he stroked back the dark hair and carefully arranged the blanket so that no ray of the fast rising sun should fall on her. Jacques tore the flag of truce into shreds meet for bandages, and they bound them wet round the fevered head and laid the little frame in Pierre’s arms. They had no food left now except a few bananas, which they kept for the child. The fever seemed to abate somewhat, and presently she slept.

The two men sat hour after hour gazing at each other, and at the sun creeping up in the heavens. Now and then Jacques looked away at the sea gleaming brilliant and free, with a yearning look in his eyes that told more than a thousand words, and from it he looked back again at the flushed cheek of the babe in his comrade’s arms, weighing and weighing all that the sea meant to him against the pangs of that helpless innocent. Pierre sat immovable; cramp had possession of his limbs, but he sat still for his life; if the child slept through the heat of the day they were saved--what was dearer than life was theirs--if she waked, he dared not think.

Noon came and passed, and the two men sat on--sat on with the same yearning look in their eyes, and the same speechless constraint, and the child still slept. A change seemed to be stealing over the heated face. Jacques watched it anxiously.

‘The fever is leaving her,’ he said; ‘what will come after?’

Hope and despair alternated in his face.

Two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock, they counted the chimes with desperate eagerness--never were hours more leaden-footed--and still the child slept. A wan white look had come into her face, and she looked very ethereal and transparent.

‘_Bon dieu!_’ thought Jacques, in agony, ‘will she fade away before our very eyes?’

Involuntarily Pierre stirred; a spasm of cramp had shaken him to the soul, and Cecile awoke. Contrition and consternation stilled the cramp in Pierre’s vast frame, and he rocked her gently to and fro.

‘Give her to me, my friend,’ said Jean Jacques, quietly, but the look he bent on the child and the tone of his voice showed that despair had entered into him.

Truly it was pitiful--the babe was strengthless and voiceless, she only made a little imploring gesture, and looked with eyes big and dark-shadowed in helpless appeal. The two men gazed at each other in silent accord, then Jacques said:

‘She will die, if she meets again the chill night air--it is all over, my friend; with the first shadows we must take her back.’

He gave one burning look at the sea that mocked him in long blue ripples of laughter, then turned to the babe in his arms with a smile in his eyes and soothing words.

Pierre groaned, and turning over lay on his face motionless. Jacques’ watch had begun. How terrible those next three hours were--waiting for the pitiless sun to go down and the ending, ah!--such an ending of the Day of Hope. If they took her back at sunset, the child would live--yes, he knew that, he was sure of it--but at what a cost! Freedom to him was the all of life, the air he breathed; in the cause of freedom, or what he deemed such, had he not already endured two years of torment--must he go back to heaven knew how many more? Stay, could he not harden his heart? After all, who knows, the child might live anyway; it was only to keep her another four hours. A silent and bitter rage filled his heart, his own brilliant idea had cut from them their last chance; so near to freedom and yet how far; not even a run for their money, as the English say. Then his glance fell again on those appealing eyes that seemed to ask so much and yet so little--only to be taken back to her own little bed. A terrible dread and horror welled up in the convict’s heart, and quenched the flames of rage; the shame of his deed was casting its shadow before, and with anxious, desperate eyes, he watched the sun’s departure from the heavens with an agonising hope that the remorse of the murderer of an innocent might be spared him.

Slowly, slowly, the sun went down. With the lengthening of the shadows Jacques made his preparations for the return. He formed a cradle of the blanket by passing a piece of the rope through the four corners, and then made the end of the rope fast to the roof. When the lights began to twinkle from the town through the fast gathering dusk, and the strains of the convict band playing in the Place came to their ears, they journeyed--and it was time indeed.

Pierre went first down the rope, then Jacques lowered the child in her blanket cradle into his arms and followed, flinging the rope back again on to the roof, that no sign of their hiding should be left for the buzz to make mock of. They took a narrow upper path that led above the town to the back of the Governor’s house.

A sneering fate kept that procession as secret as the former one--not a creature came nigh them. The buzz was recruiting its disappointed energies with gossip to the strains of Faust. Jean Jacques, a former distinguished member of that orchestra, even now, as he walked in Pierre’s wake, jaded with hunger and fatigue, and racked with the pangs of despair, cursed his successor under his breath for a wrong note in the solo of the Devil’s serenade, the strains of which were wafted to him on an unfriendly breeze.

‘Hurry, Pierre,’ he said between his teeth.

Rapidly and noiselessly they skirted the outer wall, passed through a wicket gate, and crossed the garden to the long white house. It seemed deserted, save for a light streaming into the outside darkness from a window on the ground floor. Creeping quietly forward, Jacques saw through the open casement the figure of the Governor seated at a table in a long low room that did duty as a library. His head was bowed upon his two outstretched arms, a hat, cloak, and pistol were laid on the table in front of him.

So the preparations had been made!...

Jean Jacques withdrew, and making a sign to Pierre they moved back along the verandah until once again they were below the window of their little prisoner’s room. Noiselessly as she had been taken from it Cecile was restored to the little bed that lay ready for her. With a deep sigh she turned her eyes gratefully on Jacques as he placed her softly amongst the pillows, and then closed them in an exhaustion, deep as the grave. After listening a moment to make certain from her breathing that all was well, he drew the clothes gently over her, closed the mosquito-curtains, and slid to the ground.

‘_Allons!_’ said he to Pierre, and linked his arm in his comrade’s.

So they passed through the open window and stood before the Governor. He raised his grey head slowly from his arms, and sat staring in amaze at the two figures in front of him.

‘Monsieur le Gouverneur,’ said Jean Jacques, simply, ‘we are here, my friend and I, to render ourselves; you may do to us what you please--we have failed.’

He raised his head, and confronted the Governor, with calm and haggard face. The latter sprang to his feet with the cry:

‘My child! My child! Cowards, miscreants, what have you done to my child?’

‘Pardon, Monsieur, we are not cowards--we should not be here else. Go and look for your child in her own bed; we wait for your return.’

The Governor, without a word, turned and fled out of the room and up the stairs.

The two stood immovable and waited; Pierre indeed made a gesture towards the pistol, but Jacques, into whose eyes had crept a look almost of hope, shook his head, and the giant, faithful in his confidence to the last, left it untouched. The Governor returned, grave and stern, but his eye was bright and he walked with a firm step.

‘My child is ill,’ he said.

‘Monsieur,’ said Jacques, with dignity, ‘we were afraid for her, so we brought her home; had we kept her till midnight she would have died; but have no fear--I know the fever; she will be well again in a short time.’

The Governor shivered--the shock and strain of the last two days had unnerved him. He sat down again, and leant back, thinking. A flame shot into his eyes.

‘And you would have killed my child!’ he said, with a menacing gesture at the two figures in front of him.

‘No, Monsieur, we would not, and the proof is in that we have brought her back rather than that she should be harmed.’ Jacques looked fearlessly back into the searching and resentful eyes. The Governor fell back in his chair, and it seemed to them an eternity before he spoke again. When he did it was slowly and measuredly, and his words were those of a judge:

‘Men, I, the Governor of this great island, and a French gentleman, had sacrificed my duty and my honour to my love. What you required has been done--the boat is provisioned and ready, the way will be clear from eleven o’clock till twelve. At your bidding, _yours_, had I done this; _you_ had put me to this shame, but Fate has delivered you into my hands, and saved me what, as God be my witness, was necessity. Why should I spare you? Yet,’ he paused, and the sombre calm of Jacques’ face was pierced again for an instant by that gleam of hope, ‘you have made a sacrifice. I know that to such as you, liberty is sweeter than life,--I cannot doubt the sacrifice,--and I will grant you one chance. If that chance favour you, you will find in that chest what I have prepared for you--disguises and some papers, signed by me, assuring you a passport; hide in this room till eleven o’clock, then go, and may fortune speed you--the boat is at the little bay; but if the chance favour you not--look for no mercy from me, for by heaven, you shall have none. Wait for me here.’

Again he left the room and ascended the stairs.

‘Go, go!’ said Pierre, ‘there is still time.’

‘No,’ said Jacques, and they waited--for nearly an hour they waited, so worn that they no longer felt the strain,--there is a limit to suffering, bodily and mental, beyond which feeling is not.

The Governor returned; his eyes softened somewhat when he saw them, and he took the pistol in his hand.

‘Mademoiselle is awake; _this_ is your chance. Follow me upstairs and into her room. If, when her eyes fall upon you, there pass but a shadow over her beloved face, there is no mercy for you.’

So saying, he went out. Jean Jacques turned to Pierre and gripped his hand.

‘_Courage_,’ he said, ‘_jouons bon jeu_,’ and the indomitable spirit shone out of his black eyes into his comrade’s.