CHAPTER XIX
Cyprian took the motor-boat to a further point than he had originally intended choosing.
Kingfisher, who had fastened his canoe behind it, with forethought concerning creeks which did his intelligence justice, found his companion, even for a foreigner, exceedingly stupid over the fishing. Cyprian, on the other hand, was regretting proper tackle, and finding Kingfisher's methods irritatingly childish.
Everybody in the islands was childish. Jellybrand with his weak chin and his goggles, and his ridiculous tuft of hair sticking out at the back, and his lisping faith; the natives with their infantile intellects, not half a degree removed from John's, and now Ferlie with her clouded illogical trust in the differing satellites of a long-dead Teacher, who, to Cyprian's mind, had shown less courage in deciding the doubtful question of the Life-to-Come than had the Buddha. Cyprian recalled the words of one modern writer, "Buddhism is the religion of men; not of children." Assuredly, had the Christ only professed to preach the religion of children. Well, Ferlie was a child. She would outgrow it, and he, in the light of his extra experience, must be patient.
It never occurred to him that there might be something childish in his angry flight from the thing that had annoyed him. He decided to give her time to get this uncomfortable mood over before he went back and, consequently, steered the boat towards a likely-looking creek biting into what was known as the mainland.
To his astonishment he was checked by Kingfisher, who, for some time past, had been shading his eyes and muttering at the reflection of trees in water so clear that it was difficult not to believe that there was no material substance to the drowned world it mirrored.
He now clutched Cyprian's arm, indicating that they must not land. The latter was in no temper to be thwarted.
"Is it ghosts or devils which will prevent you, Kingfisher? Or is the ground tabu on account of a birth or a death?"
The man could not explain himself any more clearly than to insist that it would be unsafe to land.
His fear was very genuine and when he had gauged Cyprian's obstinacy he climbed resignedly into his canoe, from the motor-boat, and cut it adrift.
"All right!" Cyprian agreed cheerfully, "If you fish long enough you may catch a whale. I am going to explore."
He beached the motor-boat, and the jungle swallowed him up.
Then Kingfisher did a very sensible thing: he seized his paddles and made for home.
* * * * * *
Ferlie was going down the forest road to the shore to meet the fishermen. Long before he saw her Kingfisher heard her singing to herself and thought, for a little while, that it was Giri.
"Oh, ye'll tak the high road and I'll tak the low road,"
... and ever the last two lines filled the green gloom with haunting sorrow....
"But me and my true love will never meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond."
But there was no sorrow in Ferlie's face just then.
It was the little padre who wiped the joy out of it after he had seen Kingfisher.
* * * * * *
In a few moments everybody in the Settlement had collected round the two of them while the sun reached out long scarlet-sleeved arms through the plain glass window of the church and took St. Paul in a ruddy embrace.
The agent's face was grotesquely serious, thought Ferlie. No one could make her understand why for quite a long time.
It sounded so incredible—the thing they were telling her. A patch of colour from a boy's adventure book. That there existed a tribe of savages, within reach of a comparatively civilized Mission Settlement, whose hand was against every human being and against whom every man's hand was raised in enmity; that Kingfisher's trained sight had noticed signs of them along the shore in a vicinity to which they seldom came, and that Cyprian, ignoring Kingfisher's warning, had landed on that particular stretch of beach—this was the gist of it all.
"But what will they do to Cyprian?" asked Ferlie, desperately incredulous. "He is unarmed and, they can see, unaggressive; if they are not cannibals why should they want to interfere with him?"
"They shoot at sight," explained Jellybrand slowly. "They do not wait to find out if harm is intended. They strike first, even at the neighbouring tribes, w-which go in terror of them. They are called the Shorn Pen."
She turned on him in cold fury.
"And you never warned us!"
"They live so far afield; right out in Great Nicobar. How w-was one to dream——? The Andamanese have a similar tribe to cope w-with, the Jarawas. But they, like the Shorn Pen, are so seldom seen that one forgets. For centuries the Shorn Pen have managed to isolate themselves from the remaining islanders, and they are now practically a different people. Markedly Malayan. Intermarriage and contact with foreigners has altered the ordinary Nicobarese and civilized him."
She became, of a sudden, stoically calm.
"What are we going to do about it first?"
Jellybrand and Mr. Toms, having decided on a search-party, had a little difficulty in organizing their men, and, since this too was necessary, in arming them.
The people, by nature, were no heroes, and it took more than the sight of the foreign lady's stricken insensibility to induce them to collect canoes at this late hour, when the labours of the day should be over.
The padre's influence did more than Mr. Toms' promises of reward, but little Jelly, having finally shouldered his shot-gun, was surprised to find Ferlie prepared to accompany them armed with a small despatch case and Cyprian's revolver.
"The children, Mrs. Sterne," he stammered. "Surely you w-will remain w-with them."
"There will be Naomi and Young Brown," said Ferlie coolly. "And I want to explain that, should anything happen to us, those converts who take care of the boys till my brother and Colonel Maddock return will be very substantially rewarded for their trouble. I have left a note with Naomi."
The hardness of her voice frightened him.
"Nothing should happen," he said haltingly. "Really——"
She was not listening.
"John," she called, "Come here."
He came, dragging his imitation spear, and she knelt down putting her arms about him.
"I have got to go away for a little while, John. If I do not get back very soon, wait for Uncle Peter and look after Thu Daw. And when Uncle Peter comes, tell him that Mother went away to follow Cyprian wherever he had gone. Can you repeat it after me? Say, 'Wherever he had gone.'"
He spoke the words wonderingly, straining back, boylike, from the close pressure of her arms.
He was always proud to be entrusted with a commission and the charge of Thu Daw. Only when she had hurried a little way down the road, walking between the padre and Mr. Toms, some intuition made him drop his weapon and run after her, crying, "Mother! Mother!"
She whirled back to meet him and lift him against her heart.
"You are a man," she told him. "And one day you will stay by your woman, please God, as I am going to choose to stay by my man to-night and through Eternity."
Jellybrand surveyed the little scene, his face troubled, but he did not again try to prevent her from joining them.
In the canoe he leaned forward and touched her cold hand.
"The smallest boy," he said softly. "Did you adopt him?"
"No. He is Cyprian's. His mother is dead."
He was puzzled, but not inquisitive. Ferlie added dully, "That was before we found one another."
"I see." said her companion compassionately. And did not.
It took a long time in the canoes, under Kingfisher's guidance, to arrive at the spot where, eventually, they caught sight of the dim outlines of the motor-boat.
There was no sign of any living thing on the shimmering starlit shore. The canoes crept closer and closer, under the shadow of the bank, cutting the water noiselessly as otters. The foremost one, containing Kingfisher, had only just been beached when he took a sudden flying leap into the creek. They heard him scruffling with someone on the far side of the motor-boat.
The two struggled out into the open; two naked forms grappling in the stream where the water was just shallow enough to allow a precarious footing.
"Keep quiet!" commanded the padre in Nicobarese, whispering, as another of their party splashed to the leader's relief.
"There! They've got him.... Yes. It is one of the Shorn Pen!"
The man was dragged towards the bank and a dozen willing hands stretched out to draw him up. Scarecrow, who, generally, showed more initiative than his fellows, stepped forward to act as spokesman. Fingers were firmly pressed against the prisoner's mouth, lest his alarmed shout should attract his friends.
"Tell him," said Jellybrand, "that if he gives us the information we require, no harm shall come to him; but that on his making the least sound it w-will be the w-worse for him. Our revenge w-will be horrible," he informed the man himself with the utmost placidity.
The latter had, evidently, made up his mind not to risk shouting. Or, maybe, he was only a stray member of the tribe, lured back to the motor-boat out of curiosity.
To get him to speak, however, was another matter. His dialect, also, differed from that of his interlocutors.
"He must speak," said Ferlie. "He shall speak. He will speak under torture."
"Mrs. Sterne!"
She wheeled round upon the padre as he advanced hastily to her side, pushing him back into the arms of his huddling flock.
"Let me be!" cocking the revolver. "Stand aside, any one of you who does not want to be shot. But if I shoot this wild beast to bits, inch by inch, I will know where Cyprian is to-night."
This, Ferlie, the long-suffering and so-compassionate of all human pain. There may have been an hour, far back in some forgotten life, when she stood, herself a half-savage incarnation of Womanhood, surrounded by her slaves, directing the slow doing-to-death of a feudal enemy who had deprived her of mate or son.
Whether or no, the present captive, who had obviously never set eyes until that moment on a white woman, was startled by the impression that she was an avenging devil, it was certain he considered her supernatural.
He broke shuddering from his gaolers to prostrate himself at her feet in crawling supplication.
In due time they extracted from him a promise to lead them to "the place where they had put the white man."
Yes, the white man had come there in the boat. Yes, he had walked in the jungle. Yes, he had been captured. The rest was not clear.
Jellybrand saw that, although they might be moving directly into a trap, there was nothing for it but to go on. Everybody understood that there would probably be a scrap. They must rely upon the terrorizing effect of their fire-arms. He stopped to make the sign of the cross.
Ferlie noticed that unsympathetically. She felt insanely cruel, and he avoided those wild eyes.
It was not long before they arrived at a fired clearing, the centre of which showed the remains of an earth-oven. A low bamboo platform, beyond, supported a primitive hammock of plaited grass, hung round with queer indistinguishable objects.
The whole thing suggested a funeral pyre; not an unlikely idea, since the padre knew that the Jarawas in the Andamans burnt the bodies of their dead.
Ferlie was the first to push aside the grass and leaves completely screening the still form on that rude dais.
And then the birds of the forest rose in fluttering distress, disturbed by the exceeding bitter cry of a soul in torment.
Cyprian lay there with an arrow, dimly discernible, pinning his coat to the dark stain which had spread over his breast. They held the dancing torches high, and poured brandy between his lips, but he did not appear to swallow; they splashed his face with water from a flask and listened desperately for the beating of his heart. His hands were clammy cold.
The arrow had pierced clean through his coat to the other side of the shoulder; after cutting off the barbed head they were able to remove the shaft. And Ferlie, having done all she could with no result, flung herself moaning like a wounded thing upon the charred ground.
All at once she raised her tortured face to the priest's and out of the extremity of her suffering challenged him.
"You talk of faith! Use yours. You talk of prayer. Pray! You believe there is Someone to pray to: speak to Him, then, but do not come near me nor try to take this revolver from me, until I see whether the God you uphold as faithful answers faithful prayer."
It was fruitless to attempt comfort; utterly hopeless to argue. He knew that her face would remain imprinted on his memory to his dying day, wearing just such a look as must have shadowed the faces of those sorrowing women who stood beneath the Cross of the Beloved.
But he also considered the danger of resorting to such prayer before the marvelling undeveloped intellects of the adult children round him, so hardly-won to Christ. Their faith was ever-ready to rise or fall to the success or failure of a sign. How could he thus tempt the Lord his God?
His hesitation scorched her to scorn.
"You are afraid!" she said. "And there is not even God left."
"Hush!" he pleaded. "Hush, child. W-wait and I w-will pray ... that His w-will be done."
It was a strange scene: the girl writhing in her mental agony at the foot of the savage bier; the frail diminutive figure of the little shepherd, in his unsuitable draggled white robe, who had proved himself, whatever his weakness, no hireling to his Master's flock; the scared human animal, naked as his Creator made him, starting from the grasp of the hybrid agent clad in khaki shorts and bowler hat; and, behind, the straight smooth-skinned forms of the Nicobarese, leaning on spear and long bow, awaiting the miracle their Christian witch-doctor must, surely, perform upon the white woman's man, who lay so still in the dead light of torch and mocking star.
Jellybrand knelt forlornly on the earth. It has been shown that St. Francis—the "little sheep of Christ"—was small and starved of appearance with no physical beauty but his transfiguring trust....
"Our Father——" And that was all.
For coincidence or miracle, at the same moment the man on the rickety erection twitched one hand faintly and opened glazed eyes.
"For God's sake get the arrow out!" he muttered, and once more relapsed into unconsciousness.
* * * * * *
Ferlie never remembered how they got him home.
From the fact that those present ever after respected her as a superwoman, she supposed she must have taken over charge again of the reins she had relinquished, for the time being, to the padre and his God.
In her dreams she would often hear the padre's voice saying,
"Let him bleed; it is best."
She had necessary things with her in the despatch-case. It was really blood-poisoning they had to fear, for the actual hurt proved not serious.
They had reason to be glad of the glassy night-harbour and the smooth stealing of their canoe.
Their prisoner they took with them, it being the padre's inspiration to load him with gifts and send him back to his tribe with a wholesome narrative of good returned for evil.
He obviously expected protracted death, but Ferlie was now indifferent to his fate, where she sat silent in the bows, holding Cyprian's head on her knees.
Mr. Toms clung to a theory that the Shorn Pen, amazed at the appearance of their quarry, had left him for dead at a popular festival ground, in charge of the prisoner, wishing to display him to the rest of their tribe before burning him with due ceremony. Probably, not more than three or four were responsible for the actual outrage....
Several delirious nights dragged between drawn-out days of tireless nursing before Cyprian opened comprehending eyes upon the world.
Before that hour came Gabriel Jellybrand had learnt more than he had ever sought to know of his new friends. He took his turn at watching beside the fever-stricken bed and was able to spare Ferlie a considerable amount of the sick raving that wrung her heart.
Sometimes, Cyprian, who so seldom needed to emphasize his speech with oaths, would break out into frantic blasphemies entirely alien to his mentality.
"It is nothing." And the padre would describe other sick-beds at which he had officiated. "He is not worse. It is as if he were speaking in a foreign language, absorbed at some time or other by his sub-conscious mind."
But always the sick man returned to the same poignant theme; that Ferlie was his and the barrier between them a figment of her imagination.
"Do not distress yourself over that delusion either," Jellybrand implored her.
"No," said Ferlie at last, shocked by revelations of the restraint it had been Cyprian's part to endure. "That is not delusion. That is Truth.... And now you know...."
"My poor child," he answered, "I ought to have understood.... I am not very clever, you see. I only w-went to a cheap school. My mother w-was a w-widow and did mending for Colonel Maddock at one time, in order to give me my chance. He w-was very good to us. But I only got through my exams by much prayer.... My mother prayed too, and that helped. I w-was able to visit her as an ordained priest before she died.... I, wh-wo w-was so stupid and—and not very strong. W-we both felt that God had w-worked a miracle."
She saw that he was shying away from her admission, eager to show that he claimed no right to pry into more than she willed to confide in him.
It was inevitable then that she should make known to him the circumstances which had driven them to seek temporary refuge at some spot where they would not be hampered by the living lie represented in their lives side by side.
"And even here," she finished pathetically, "there was you to deceive."
He thought it all out for some while before his slow wits responded gropingly.
"You see, though God understands, His 'little ones' can't. And it is forbidden to cause them to stumble.... And so again... There were only three magi w-who came across the thirsty desert in their w-wisdom to the Cradle. But many shepherds clustered about it, simple and adoring, w-who imagined the star to have been lit in the Heavens that very night by some supernatural hand. The w-wise men did not seek to convince them, by astronomical data, that it had probably existed before the w-world began. They merely followed them and adored."
"But they did not accept the shepherds' view," objected Ferlie. "They reserved their own. What matter, if it was the same star and led them to the same Cradle?"
"I know—I know. But, by action, they accepted the belief of the simple folk. They conformed, outwardly, for the sake of those 'little ones'..."
He passed his hand over the back of his head, accentuating the tuft of hair, like a drake's tail.
"I am so sorry for the W-wise; they have such heavy responsibilities."