* * * * *
Summer—yet a slow grey dawn, lingering long in the sky. August—yet a chilly morning, crisping the landlocked waters of the bay with cold knife-edges of foam. Out at sea, the wild white horses plunging madly under the whip of the sunrise wind; the bar beginning to thunder. Inshore, beneath the green slope of the castle hill, small angry ripples beating and fretting the untrampled sand. Dead rose-leaves from the gardens floating among the seaweed; a torn bird's-nest, flung down by the wind, lying on the edge of the steep cliff pathway.... It was still the time of summer, yet, too surely, autumn had come.
The sodden leaves lay thick in the bottom of the boat when the man seized it by the gunwale and ran it down the beach into the snatching waves.... Oh, an autumn day indeed, here in wild Caithness, though summer was still at its fairest in kinder lands. And in the heart of the man who was rowing fast through the angry dawn light, to the tall schooner yacht that swung and tore at her moorings out in the bay, there was autumn too, with winter close at hand.
All so long ago! who remembers?
Not the newspapers which, in a day or two after, shrieked the scandal broadcast, east and west. Not the guests of the castle house-party—they are dead, or old, which is half of death, since then. Not the Prince whose dignity had been insulted by the outbreak of a vulgar card scandal in his very presence—he struck the titled owner of the house off the list of his intimates forthwith, and then forgot about it and him. Not the colonel of the famous regiment, who found out defalcations in the funds belonging to the mess, a few days after, and knew why his most promising young officer had done the unforgiveable thing—for the Ashanti spears ended life and memory for him out on the African plains, before even Piccadilly had made an end of talking. Not the Royal Yacht Squadron—the reported loss of the famous Paquita at sea, with her disgraced owner on board, is a tale that even the oldest habitue of Cowes could not tell you to-day.... No one remembers. When the beautiful white schooner spread her wings below the castle wall, and beat her way like a frightened butterfly out to the stormy sea, she sailed away in silence, and she and hers were known no more.
Yet, but for that stormy day in the Highlands, and the boat that fled to sea, these tales of far-off lands had never been told.
CHAPTER I
THE PEARL LAGOON
"Where's the old man?"
"Old man drunk," replied Vaiti indifferently. She had learned to play "The Maiden's Prayer," maltreat three European languages, and cultivate a waist in her Tahitian convent school. But that was five years ago now, and Vaiti's "papalangi" verbs had dropped from her quite as soon, and as naturally, as her "Belitani" stays.