II.
The laughing, merry-voiced native children who, with speedy feet, ran to the house of Iliâti, the trader, to tell him that a visitor was coming from the man-of-war, had gathered with panting breath and hushed expectancy at the door as the figure of the naval officer turned a bend in the path, his right hand clasped with a proud air of proprietorship by that or the ten-year-old son of Alberti the Chief.
Iliati with a half-angry, half-pleased look, held out his hand. “Lamington!”
“Hilliard! old fellow. Why didn't you come on board i Are all your old friends forgotten?”
“Pretty nearly, Lamington. Since I came a cropper over that accursed cotton swindle I've not had any inclination to meet any one I knew—especially any one in the Service, but”—and his voice rang honestly, “I always wondered whether you and I would ever meet again.”
“Hilliard,” and Lamington placed his hand on the trader's shoulder, “I know all about it. And look here, old man. I saw her only two months ago—at her especial request. She sent for me to talk about you.”
“Ah!” and the trader's voice sounded coldly, “I thought, long ago, that she had reconsidered her foolish decision of other days and had long since become Mrs. Lamington. But it doesn't interest me, old fellow. Can you drink Fiji rum, Lamington? Haven't anything better to offer you.”
“I'll drink anything you've got, old fellow, even liquid Tophet boiled down to a small half-pint; but I want you to listen to me first. I've been a bit of a scoundrel to you, but, by God, old man, I exchanged into the beastly old Petrel for this cruise expressly to find you and make a clean breast of it. I promised her I would.”
“Confound it all, Lamington, don't harrow your feelings needlessly, and let us have the rum and talk about anything else.”
“No, we won't. Look here, Hilliard, it sounds beastly low, but I must get it out. We met again—at a ball in Sydney more than two years ago. Some infernal chattering women were talking a lot of rot about the planters in Fiji having very pretty and privileged native servants—and all that, you know. She fired up and denied it, but came and asked me if it was true, and I was mean enough not to give it a straight denial. How the devil it happened I can't tell you, but we danced a deuce of a lot and I lost my senses and asked her again, and she said 'Yes.' Had she been any other woman but Miss ———, I would have concluded that the soft music and all that had dazed her. It does sometimes—lots of 'em; makes the most virtuous wife wish she could be a sinner and resume her normal goodness next day. But Kitty is different. And it was only that infernal twaddle caused it and made her write you that letter. A week hadn't passed before she wrote to me and told me how miserable she was. But I knew all through she didn't care a d———about me. And that's the way it occurred, old man.”
Hilliard's hand met his. “Say no more about it, Lamington; it's a mea matê as we say here—a thing that is past.”
“But, good God, old fellow, you don't understand. She's written ever so many times to you. No one in Levuka knew where you had gone to; there's thousands of islands in the South Seas. And this letter here,” he held it toward him, “she gave to me, and I promised her on my honour as a man to effect an exchange into the Petrel and find you.”
“Thanks, Lamington. You always were a good fellow.” He laid the letter on the table quietly and rose and got the rum.
A young native girl, with deep lustrous eyes shining from a face of almost childish innocence, had entered the door and stood with one bare and softly-rounded arm clasped round the neck of Alberti's little son. Her lips parted in a smile as Lamington, with a gasping cough, set down his glass after drinking the potent spirit, and she set her brows in mock ferocity at Hilliard who drank his down like an old-time beachcomber.
“By Jove, Hilliard, what an astonishingly pretty face! She could give any New Orleans créole points. Time you got out of this before some of the Rotumah beauties make you forget things; and oh, by the way, I'm forgetting things. Remember you are to come aboard and dine with us to-night, and that you're in indifferent health, and that Captain ———, of Her Majesty's ship Petrel is going to give you a passage to Sydney.”
At an angry sign from Hilliard the girl disappeared. Then he shook his head. “No, Lamington. I appreciate your kindness, but cannot accept it. I've been here two years now, and Alberti, the principal local chief, thinks no end of me; and he's a deuced fine fellow, and has been as good as ten fathers to me. And I've business matters to attend to as well.”
Lamington pressed him no further. “Lucky devil,” he thought. “I suppose he'll clear out in the trading schooner to Sydney, next week; be there long before us any way, and I'll find them well over the first stage of married infatuation when I see him next.”
Another hour's chat of old times and old shipmates in the Challenger and Lamington, with his honest, clean-shaven face looking into the quiet, impassive features of the ex-officer, had gripped his hand and gone, and Hilliard went over to the house of Alberti, the chief, to drink kava—and see the old French priest. From there, an hour afterward, he saw the cruiser with wet, shining sides dip into the long roll of the ocean swell, as with the smoke pouring from her yellow funnel she was lost to sight rounding the point.
Said the son of Alberti to Léla, the innocent-faced girl with the dancing, starlike eyes and red lips, as they stood watching the last curling rings of the steamer's smoke—“And so that is why I knew much of what the papalagi from the man-of-war said to your Iliâti; Alberti, my father, has taught me much of your man's tongue. # And, look thou, Léla the Cunning, Iliâti hath a wife in his own country!”
“Pah!”—and she shook her long, wavy locks composedly, and then plucked a scarlet hibiscus flower to stick in front of one of her pretty little ears—“what does that matter to me, fathead? I am she here; and when Iliâti goeth away to her she will be me there. But he loveth me more than any other on Rotumah, and hath told me that where he goeth I shall go also. And who knoweth but that if I have a son he may marry me? Then shalt thou see such a wedding-feast as only rich people give. And listen—for why should I not tell thee: 'Tis well to starve thyself now, for it may be to-morrow, for look! fathead, there goeth the priest into thy father's house, and Iliâti is already there.”