Were welcomed in South Seas and found a treat!”
I can see Grimes’s grin in the moonlight now. The tune was fine. Of course I didn’t mean it exactly as I sang it. Nor is there any need to explain what I really meant. No one but a fool would suggest that missionaries and men who strive to do their best are not a thousand times better than the millions who are not missionaries.
Dear old Grimes! Writing in this strain brings back the old memories.
I often dressed him up, lent him a white collar and nice clean tie, and very well he looked. It’s true that when I took him to the Presidential Ball, given by the French commissionaires at Papeete, he got drunk, disgraced me, went on his knees before the President’s wife, kissed her hand, and murmured “Vivy L’Impératrice.” I must admit she was a fascinating creature. He cried afterwards and begged my forgiveness. But there! my memories of the hallowed Grimes are too sacred to recall his little failings.
But to return to the home-coming of Benbow. As I have said, there was a terrible rumpus when he arrived. He came to the grog shanty ere he went up to his home, accompanied by Ken-can, his chief mate, who had a face like a death’s-head and on his lips a sinister, everlasting grin.
Ken-can was a mystery, and, God knows, he looked one. They even hinted in the shanty that he had once been a hangman in Sydney. Be that as it may, no one on earth knew why Benbow liked, or even tolerated, that shadow-like, silent figure by his side. He seldom spoke, his eyes seemed always staring, as though he knew his destiny, and moved towards it with a grin. He looked and behaved, for all the world, like a peaked-capped, ragged, walking scarecrow, watching over old Benbow and striving to frighten off his jolly pals. He would stand at the shanty door while Benbow drank, waiting like some Nemesis. When Benbow was in his homestead, and the shellbacks roared forth their songs, that ragged figure would stand before the door, staring at the stars. Waylao would run by him half scared out of her wits, as if he were a ghost.
He roused my curiosity, and one night as he stood outside the shanty staring up at the heavens I asked him for a match, put out my hand to receive it, and lo! I touched nothing—the figure, that sardonic face, had vanished.
“Rum,” you say. Well, perhaps you haven’t lived near Tai-o-hae. It may have been a joke of Ken-can’s; he knew that we discussed him, and called him “that mystery.” He looked unearthly enough for a joke of any subtle kind.
Well that night when the beachcombers were sitting in Benbow’s snug parlour roaring forth song in the good old style, while their host was reviving his wonderful tales of his good old blackbirding days, Waylao crept out of the forest, returning from her tryst. The sounds of that rollicking chorus told her that her father was home from sea. She was trembling, for she had just crossed the hollows where the officials had but a few days before found a dead convict, an escape with gyves still gripping his cold wrists. As the girl approached her home she saw that everlasting figure, Ken-can, standing at the door, pointing with his finger to the stars. His shadow on the moonlit taro patch by the door was the first hint of his presence to Waylao. That shadow stood erect in the moonlight, magnified on the mossy slope in front of the brightly lit parlour window. Even the bearded faces of the shellbacks, lifting mighty shadow rum mugs to their lips, were distinctly visible on that little slope outside.
Waylao crept by Ken-can with her face half averted; like a terror-stricken child she rushed by him, entered the doorway and nearly fell into her mother’s arms. I could easily understand Waylao’s fright, for I had often felt that way myself, in the dark. Old Benbow embraced his daughter. His pride at seeing her developed beauty was immense. He held her in his arms as he sat there in the old chair surrounded by his ragged, impecunious courtiers. Old Lydia opened her mouth with astonishment and pride as Benbow told of his wonderful deeds.