“Well,” said Parget, “they’re the finest set of natives I’ve seen yet anywhere. I shan’t be round here again. We meet on the Snowflake. Au revoir, Mr Lechworthy.”
“Au revoir,” echoed Lechworthy, mechanically.
There is a kind of insolence in au revoir, a confidence in the future. Neither man ever saw the other again.
Lechworthy wandered back to the house. He was deep in thought. From the dark hidden pool, where Tiva and Ioia were bathing together, came a burst of musical laughter. On the verandah he found Hilda, with the wreath of white flowers that Ioia had brought her in her dark hair; Soames Pryce stood on the steps below looking up at her, saying something in a low voice to which she listened with happiness.
Lechworthy’s mind was preoccupied, not only with his dream of a native Faloo, but with this Parget, this scrap of London that met him suddenly in the Southern Seas. He admired the courage and resource of the man, as much as he hated his profession—necessary of course, lamentably necessary, but scarcely ennobling and foreign to that way in which Lechworthy had come to regard all sinners. Obviously Parget had heard nothing of the impending dissolution of the club, and Lechworthy, who did not know that this was a secret reserved for the committee, was rather puzzled that Parget had not heard. On the Snowflake he would expound to Parget the scheme for a native Faloo, and his fears that the members of the club had got to hear of it and would now disperse. Of course Scotland Yard might still be able to close its hand on them—or might not. Lechworthy smiled placidly. Those fibres of his being which had made him a great Christian were curiously interwoven with those other fibres which had made him a successful man of business.
Not only was Lechworthy’s mind preoccupied. There was another reason why he could not read the story in Hilda’s eyes. He was absolutely blind to all sex romance. Every engagement among his wide circle of friends and acquaintances came to him as a surprise, though it were a foregone conclusion to the rest of the circle. He had found many interests in life and absorbing interests outside the realm of sex romance. Hilda, doubtless, would be married one day, but the day was always very vague and very far away. Hilda had determined that her uncle was to be told nothing at present. On the Snowflake she would tell him all, and slowly win him over. She would make him see that her happiness was here with her lover—not in Europe without him. At Tahiti she expected to part from her uncle, and to remain there until the Snowflake brought Pryce to her.
“You see, dear,” she said, “just at the beginning of things one wants to shut out all the rest of the world, even one’s nearest relatives and people to whom one is devoted. In London that can never be. If our engagement had been the normal product of a London season, you would have had to take me to see people, and I should have had to take you to see others, and it would have been all congratulations, and interference, and horrors of that kind. Here, thank heaven, that can be avoided. We will avoid it.”
To everything Pryce agreed. “It isn’t that I don’t know, Hilda. I do. I know I have no right to accept such a sacrifice as you make. I know that nobody can think that I’ve been straight about this. It can’t be helped. It doesn’t matter. Since last night, down by the pool, it’s seemed to me as if since the world began only one thing has ever mattered. Oh, it’s too good—too good to happen. Your uncle will insist on carrying you off to England, and he will be right too.”
“He would try to do that if he were an ordinary man with a conventional set of views. He would not succeed, because I am of age and in this—in this alone—I will not be controlled at all. But he is not an ordinary man. He is as broad in some of his views as he is narrow in others. He has little respect for social conventions, and he is losing some of his respect for the law. He thinks nobody beyond reclamation—except the ritualists and a few politicians. He has had the courage of his opinions all his life; whatever his convictions have been, right or wrong, he has always acted on them. Then, again, he trusts me as well as he loves me. If I tell him that I know where my happiness is, he will believe me, and he loves me too much to refuse it.”
They talked a long time together that morning. Yet still, when all was said, Pryce was haunted by the same thought. It was like a dream of unearthly beauty, such as before he had never even imagined, a dream to which the awakening must come.