CHAPTER VII.—Secrets For Two.
The Strange Meeting of Annabel and Beelo. Captain Mason’s Cruel Decision. I Tell a Romantic Story and Make a Guess at Lentala’s Origin.
CAPTAIN MASON and I had a serious talk in our hut that night.
“Don’t think for a moment,” he said, “that my intentions with regard to Vancouver have been upset by a woman’s pretty face.”
“But she is very lovely,” I interposed, anxious to turn his thoughts from whatever purpose he might have.
“That is as one thinks.” I could not restrain a smile at his ungraciousness, particularly as I saw that Annabel’s effect on him had impaired his frankness. “For that matter,” he went on, “her father is blindly planning her destruction.” In answer to my look he explained: “How can a man let his avarice and cowardice make such a fool of him! Can’t he see that the king is using him as a tool to disrupt and destroy the camp, including him and his party?”
I knew, as well as I knew my own thoughts, that a terrible apprehension of a fate worse than death for us all rested on him, as on me; but we had dared not give it tongue. Both had seen the naïve inconsistency between the king’s desire that the island should not be discovered and his promise to send us away one at a time, and so had Mr. Vancouver. No foreigner straying to the island had ever left it, and none except our colony was alive on it today. But in what dreadful manner had they been disposed of? And why had we been spared so long? We had been prisoners nearly two months.
Whether these fears and speculations haunted others of the colony we were both careful not to inquire, and were prompt in suppressing every uncomfortable hint. Captain Mason and I understood that the perfect cohesion of our colony, taken with our considerable numbers, offered the sole hope for our safety; and Mr. Vancouver was secretly planning to destroy our one means of defense.
We had been sitting in silence after Captain Mason’s last speech. He broke it by saying:
“The situation is complex. Your interruption of Vancouver’s plot and Christopher’s dismissal of the native require us to lay a counter train. The king will infer from what Christopher told the native that Mr. Vancouver has abandoned his scheme to betray the colony, and that we are determined to hang together, and fight it out to the end. I imagine that the natives are growing impatient for a victim. What do you suggest, Mr. Tudor?”
“I suppose I should continue in the rôle of the king’s emissary and inform Mr. Vancouver that the sending out of the young men is postponed. Fortunately we have stopped that.”
“We have done nothing of the sort,” declared the president. “They shall go out.”
Astonishment silenced me.
“They shall go out,” he drove into me again.
“To their destruction—and ours?” I asked.
“No. But they must go and take their punishment. Then they will hear from me. You can manage it through the native boy and his sister. Let her see that they are soundly whipped and sent back to the colony. She’s our friend.”
“That is unthinkable,” I protested. “The risk is too great. Lentala can’t——”
“Don’t underestimate her. You have your instructions, sir.” He rose. “I’ll be on hand tomorrow when you call out the men for the fields.”
I had risen, and stood facing a commander instead of an ally. After a moment’s struggle with desperately rebellious emotions, I saw my own absurdity, and abruptly left without a word, to fight for patience and wisdom under the stars.
The smiling ease with which Rawley stepped forth when I called his name with the others next morning might have disarmed me had I not caught a look of understanding between him and Mr. Vancouver, and known what it meant. My dread had been on Annabel’s account, but she did not appear.
Rawley worked faithfully in the fields that day, but I saw the furtive way in which he talked now and then with certain of the men, and I noted all whom he thus favored. None of them had a guilty manner, though a concealing one. It was evidence of Mr. Vancouver’s shrewdness in plotting.
Annabel met Christopher outside the camp that afternoon and came with him to Beelo and me. The boy betrayed a singular uneasiness as they approached, and, drawing his hat down, stood in awkward embarrassment. It puzzled me, for he had been anxious to see her. In a glow of excitement, Annabel was conspicuously handsome, and though dressed in the rougher of the two suits which she had saved from the wreck, showed in every line the thoroughbred that she was. Seeing the lad’s confusion, she spared him by giving him hardly more than a smiling glance with her warm hand-clasp, and breezily said to me as she held out an exquisite orchid:
“See what I found on the way. Isn’t it beautiful!” I took it and was fumbling to put it in the buttonhole of my lapel, when she stepped up and with frank comradeship adjusted it, remarking as she did so:
“He’s very much like his sister, but smaller, and not so pretty and graceful.” She did not realize that he understood English.
“I thank you—for Lentala,” he constrainedly said, staring at her as his eyes began to burn.
“Oh!” cried Annabel in amused surprise. “But you are quite too good-looking for a boy, Beelo!”
He did not smile, but studied her with a disconcerting seriousness, and looked from her to me, as though watching for something which I guessed to be a sly understanding between Annabel and me that might mean ridicule of him. I saw that Annabel had innocently blundered into a wrong start. Evidently the pleasure that the lad had expected from the meeting had gone astray.
As though the words were wrenched from him by the striking picture that Annabel made, he said in a stolid, colorless voice:
“You are more beautiful than Lentala.”
“Hear his disloyalty to his sister!” laughingly exclaimed Annabel, but I could see that the boy’s bearing was trying her composure. “Come!” she added; “let’s be friends, for Lentala and I are, and I want you to tell me about her.” She coaxingly held out her hand as to an ill-tempered child.
But he ignored it, and lowered his head till his hat-rim concealed his eyes. Annabel looked at me in questioning surprise, but before I could say anything,—being as much astonished as she,—Beelo, without raising his head, asked half sullenly, half commandingly:
“Have you and—Choseph known each other a long time?”
“A year or so,” Annabel promptly answered, anxious to show her friendliness. “He’s been very kind. I became a skilful horsewoman under his teaching, and we’ve danced together and taken long walks in the country. He knows a great many interesting things. You see, he was educated at West Point, where young men are trained to be officers of our army, and has fought in the war, and——”
Beelo broke in with a toss of the head and a laugh that sounded much like a sneer.
Annabel opened her eyes and looked in wonder from the boy to me. She was not laughing now; alarm was creeping into her face. I could think of nothing to say, but was confident that the two fine souls would find a way.
Without raising his face to Annabel, Beelo slowly looked round at me, and regarded me deeply and in silence. Sadness stole into his eyes, and with it reproach. The mystery of it touched me as I steadily returned his look.
As he did not speak, I did. “Beelo,” I kindly said, “I don’t understand you, and I don’t like your conduct. You wished to see Annabel. To please me, she kindly took the trouble to come and tried to be friendly to you. But you treat her rudely. You are not worthy to touch her hand.”
He blazed and went rigid. For a moment he was choked with passion; then, locking his hands behind him, and throwing back his head and shoulders, he said loudly, while his nostrils quivered:
“No! I’m not worthy to touch her hand! I’m glad of it! You send fine words to Lentala, who has not a white friend in the world! Then you bring the white girl to Beelo, that Beelo may see how different they are and go back to shame Lentala. Riding! Dancing! Walking! Ah, Beelo is a little fool,—a fool no bigger that a toad! But he can be useful,—he can make Lentala a fool too! And Lentala can be useful. She can trick King Rangan. She shall be the tool of the white people who want to leave!” He paused breathless, but there was more of despair than anger in his attitude.
Annabel had gone very white. She gave me a glance of new amazement, and then went forward, seized Beelo’s arm, and forcibly turned him to look into her eyes. With a start she straightened, looking at me strangely, as if a great light had broken.
“There’s a misunderstanding,” she calmly said to Beelo and me as she apologetically held the quivering figure. To me she added: “You and Christopher please retire. I’ll call you soon.”
We left, and when screened and beyond earshot I gave Christopher a look of wondering inquiry. He blinked benignly at me, as a dog at his foolish master.
“What does it mean?” I demanded.
“Mean, sir?”
“Yes.”
“You are asking me, sir?”
“Of course.”
He looked away, but not with a listening manner, yet the mystery appeared to demand it. I did not happen to remember that he was the most chivalrous and the least meddlesome man I had ever known.
“Well, I’ll tell you, sir,” he presently said in his slow, gentle way; “it will be all right.”
So it apparently was when Annabel called us back, for the two were chatting amicably as they sat on the ground. Annabel’s serious mistake, by which she had imperiled my plans, had been turned by her to excellent account.
Christopher was waiting to conduct her back to camp; he would return, for Beelo had informed me that there were matters which he wished to tell us alone. The parting between him and Annabel was friendly and held promise, but Beelo’s face was not wholly unclouded. Holding Annabel’s hand and gazing into her face, he said, with a touch of sadness:
“Anybody would love you.”
Annabel blushed, and turned laughingly away.
“I’ll see you again very soon!” called the boy.
Annabel turned and blew him a smiling kiss. The lad stood and gazed long at the spot where she was lost among the trees.
“You like her, Beelo?” I asked.
Much to my surprise, a little droop pulled at his mouth-corners.
“She is very lovely,” he softly said.
“Is that a thing to be sad about?”
“Yes. Lentala can never be as sweet and beautiful.”
“She is as sweet and beautiful as Annabel, and—and—what shall I say?—more fascinating.”
His face was turned away, and he was silent. After a while he faced me, and said, while observing me closely:
“But she belongs to your kind, your world.”
“My heart finds my kind, and that is my world.” He again turned away. In trying to find a reason why any of this mattered to him, or why he appeared in a measure to resent Annabel, the old suspicion that had lodged in a corner of my mind came forth. The remarkable difference between Lentala and her brother on one hand and the natives on the other must have some special explanation, and Beelo must have a secret which he had a good reason for guarding. Christopher and I had probably been the only white men to touch their lives, and there was in them that which knew and claimed its own. It was a hungry demand, and jealous. To see the desired companionship subject to an older claim, such as Annabel’s, was the finding of a barrier. I determined to probe for the secret by indirect means.
“The soul that finds its kind finds its world, Beelo,” I said, “and souls have neither race nor color. Would you like to hear a strange little story?”
“Yes!” he eagerly answered.
I sat down, and he seated himself facing me, keenly interested.
“A long time ago a white man—a gentleman, no doubt—was in a ship that was sailing the seas. A great storm came on. His ship was wrecked, and he was cast up on the beach of a beautiful tropical island. It was decreed by the natives, who were jealous for their country, that he should suffer the fate of all who had drifted before him to those shores. But for some reason—that may be another story some time—he was spared, and the king gave him a wife from among the native girls. Two children were born to them, a girl and afterward a boy; but their father had so strongly impressed his racial peculiarities on them that they were in an unfortunate position,—outcasts in a way, and perhaps in danger of their lives, by reason of the deeply planted native hatred for the white blood. So the king, who had spared the man, took them under his protection, and as the queen had no children, she loved them as her own. But in time, as the children grew up, the white blood in them began to starve for its kind, and to whisper of a far country whence it had come. That is nature’s way. She lets us go just so far from the plan on which she started us, and then she sends a voice that speaks deep within us. We may not know at first what it says, but—”
“Just a longing?” Beelo asked
“Merely that. We want something very much, but don’t know what it is. We are dissatisfied. That comes in youth, when the tides of life flow free, and before the soul is fully awake. Afterward, when it has ripened and mellowed, it finds its kind and makes its home wherever——”
“After a while. But now!” demanded Beelo.
I ignored him with a smile, and went back to the story.
“At last the sister had grown to womanhood and the brother nearly to manhood. A much larger company of white people than had ever before been stranded on the island came to its shores. The girl and the boy had been spoiled by the king, and they had much their own way. The girl demanded that she be taken with the king to see the castaways. It was the voice in her heart.”
Beelo nodded, and then with nervous fingers began to weave a twig-house on the sand.
“Do you like the story?” I asked.
He looked up in surprise. “Is that all, Choseph?”
“Isn’t that sufficient?”
He drew a deep breath. “She went there just to see them?” he said.
I smiled into his brilliant eyes. “I’ll tell you the rest of the story some other time,” I remarked, satisfied, because at not a single point had he criticized my guessing. “There is one thing more,” I went on. “Of course the children adopted the native dress, but their father’s blood in them had lightened their native color, and that must be overcome.”
His eyes kindled brighter; his lips had fallen apart. There was not a movement in his body.
“Lad, how did you learn to stain a fair skin so well that it looks like a native’s?”
With that I seized the collar of his blouse, to tear it open and see the real color of his chest before he could prevent.