“Certainly. On that I insist. He must take his punishment.”
“Write to him that you have saved his life, but that this is conditional on his surrendering to the man who will await him at the gates of the club enclosure some time before midnight. He can bring his personal belongings with him; you see I give him time to get his things together, and to clear up his business as secretary of the club. You may say further that he will not be ill-treated, but that he will be kept in custody until you choose to sail.”
“Thank you, sir, from the bottom of my heart. You have taken a great weight off my mind. I will write to him precisely in those terms. May I have a messenger?”
“There are many men here,” said the King, “and they are here only as your servants, to go where you like and to do what you wish. They understand that.”
The King was deep in thought as he drove back to his business residence on the beach. There he became busy. He remembered to send up to his big house the preserved asparagus which would be wanted for dinner. He examined with care a still that was then working. He saw the overseer from his plantations inland. He calculated the number of bags of copra that would be ready for his next schooner. He settled a dispute between two natives as to the ownership of a goat. But he gave no orders for a man to be at the gates of the club enclosure shortly before midnight, nor did he give, nor had he given, any orders whatever about Bassett.
In the afternoon, up at the palace, Tiva, Ioia and Hilda explored the garden, and the native girls discovered with joy the wide pool into which the waterfall plashed. They begged Hilda to come for a swim with them. The idea was certainly alluring, but for two reasons Hilda demurred. One was the presence of a patrol of athletic-looking natives with rifles on their shoulders, but this reason was disposed of at once.
“We speak him,” cooed Tiva. “He go pretty dam quick.” And it was so.
The other reason vanished before the resources of the rather fantastic wardrobe which Ioia had brought with her. Two hours later Hilda sat on the verandah with her wet hair loose. She had considered herself fairly expert in the water, but Tiva and Ioia quite eclipsed her; there had seemed to be absolutely nothing which they could not do, and they did everything with the most beautiful ease and grace. Hilda rather wished she had been a sculptor. The two water-nymphs now sat at her feet—Tiva in a loose salmon-coloured robe, with a gold bangle on one arm, and Ioia in a similar robe of olive-green surmounted by a barbarous kimono. The bangle and the kimono were Hilda’s gifts. The hurricane had passed as quickly as it had come, and far away before her Hilda could see a sea of marvellous sapphire, foam-streaked, trying to be good again.
Lechworthy spent much of his time that afternoon in his room alone. Then he roamed the garden, camera in hand. He took three snapshots of the armed patrol, and he took them all on the same section of film. But, not yet aware of this little mistake, he was in a placid and even sunny temper when he came on to the verandah for tea. Tiva and Ioia, commanded by Hilda, took tea with them; Ioia tried most things, including tea-leaves, which she ate with moderation but with apparent enjoyment. Then the two sang—a beautiful voice and a correct ear are part of the island girl’s natural inheritance—and Hilda and her uncle listened. The song was in the native tongue and for the most part improvised, and perhaps it was just as well that the listeners did not understand it. It was wholly in praise of Hilda, but it praised her with a wealth of detail unusual in European eulogies.