Madame Gilbert's Cannibal

by Bennet Copplestone

"Madame is right," cried Ewing. "She always is. It will cost Clifford a small fortune to get Willie home by passenger steamers even if he can secure berths, which is not likely. When he is up against staying here or in Thursday Island at indefinite delay and expense for a passage, he will send his brown master to Madame to eat humble pie. I don't want to let either of them get out of my sight, and it will be a great pull for us if they come of their own accord."

"Besides," went on Madame serenely, "I have the bait of Marie locked up in the Humming Top, and Willie does not know that my hold over her is so terrifying that she will avoid him like the plague when he comes aboard. Let him find that out later for himself." Madame then explained the nature of her influence over Marie Lambert. "If she remains convinced that I shall certainly take her to France she may become reckless, but I shall hint judiciously that a rigid obedience to my orders may bring about a reprieve. I've got her tight, and Master Willie too. They may both be as savage as they please so long as they dance to my strings."

"The weak point of your scheme, Madame, if I may say so," observed Ching, "is the presence of that damned Jonah Clifford in my yacht. He will bring along enough ill luck to sink a battleship. My officers won't have him in their mess, and if I put him in the foc's'le there will be a mutiny among the men. The best of lawyers would make them restive, and this poisonous little blighter would bust up all the restraints of discipline. Not a man in my ship would eat or drink with him. I would sooner give passage to a plague-stricken Chinky than to that Clifford beast."

"I feel for you," said Madame, smiling. "We will give him a cabin somewhere forrard, and let him take his food there. He shall learn what it feels like to be a pariah. The experience will do him good."

"I expect," observed Alexander thoughtfully, "that he will pick his bit of offal in the shaft tunnel. He won't be safe from man-handling anywhere else. My stokehold staff would love to put him in their fires."

"Still, however rightly unpopular he may be, we can't leave him here," declared Madame. "I cannot have that dear little Mrs. Topy and the jolly girls burdened with the swine hound. But we will dump him over the side at Singapore, and leave him to find his way home from there. We will carry him out of harm's way and then shunt him. I have quite decided to disappoint the poachers of St. Mary Axe. Once Willie, Lord Topsham, comes aboard my yacht, he doesn't leave it till I hand him over to his own Trustees. Sir John Toppys and Gatepath will be furious with me, but there is nothing else to be done. I won't have the boy plundered by those land sharks."

Madame's plans were at once put in train, and it quickly spread through the Island that good pay was to be won by diving down and cutting weed from the Humming Top's bottom. Willie's black boys deserted his plantation under the magnetic pull of the yacht's treasure chest. Boats full of divers clustered about the vessel throughout all the hours of daylight, and every kind of scraper was furbished up and turned to account in the novel labour. It was given about that the Humming Top would sail as soon as her bottom had been made tolerably clean, and John Clifford, in dread of being marooned for months on Tops Island, was prepared to face even Madame's straight-shooting pistol rather than be left there by himself. He suspected that Willie would be welcome on board, but he cherished no illusions concerning his own popularity. He urged his lordly master to approach Madame with humility, and to seek passage for both. John Clifford, a human "sucker," had all the remora's love for free transport. His voyage out had occupied months and contained exasperations innumerable; whatever might be his sufferings in the detested Humming Top, they could not compare with the professional disaster of losing his hardly won client—spirited off in the yacht—and being left himself upon the loathed beach. He was insistent upon a free passage for both, the client and the lawyer. It cost him the surviving bottles in his liquor cases to win the assent of Lord Topsham, and he would not have won even with their fiery aid, had not recollections of the ravished Marie been present to Willie's mind. William, Lord Topsham, under the stimulus of hot, bad wine, became convinced that Madame had done him grievous wrong, and was savagely resentful. He had spurned her as a goddess. Now he came near to spurning her as a woman, and to accepting John's theory that Madame had swept Marie off into captivity because the mistress was jealous of his lordship's attentions to the maid. The pair of them argued much as Madame had anticipated. Willie would regain his Marie under Madame's forbidding nose, and both would secure a passage to England in a luxurious private yacht. Neither appreciated the hidden disadvantages. Willie did not realise that Marie, given one last chance of reprieve from a shameful death in France, would flee from the smallest association with himself; and before Clifford's mind arose no picture of an outcast Hedge Lawyer, spurned as vermin by the humblest seaman, driven to pick his bit of offal in the shaft tunnel.

The preparations for departure went on, and for a week Madame Gilbert saw nothing of Willie or John Clifford. The lawyer she had not met since she had thrust him off the yacht's deck into the mangrove swamp. Mrs. Topy and the girls she encountered now and then. They looked at her sorrowfully, but said little. Some hint of Willie's intended abandonment of Tops Island had been conveyed to them, and they grieved. The mother, and perhaps the sisters also, realised that if he went they would never look upon his face again. He was an English Lord; they were Hulas of New Guinea. Lawful inheritance ran in the male line; to the women it brought nothing except loss. From the artless chatter of Joy and Cry, Madame gathered that Willie was working up an appetite for the humble pie. He was furious against her, she learned, and smiled. Madame had been fond of Willatopy, but she felt very little regard for William, Lord Topsham. She did not care how furious he grew so long as he fell in with her plans.

Willie took his meal as soon as the divers had all been paid off, and the work of cleaning completed—in so far as it could be completed out of dock. He approached the camp one evening, observed the ostentatious signs of packing up, and then plunged into a request that Madame would see him. She graciously assented, and he was shown into that tent whither not so long since he had fled, a frightened savage boy, and sobbed out his troubles at her feet. Then he had been Willatopy; now he was William, Lord Topsham. Just as Willie had changed so Madame had changed. She was no longer the half-maternal comforter who had nursed the frizzy head in her lap and playfully suggested that he should really get his hair cut in honour of his peerage. Now she received him with ceremony, bowed him towards a chair, and seated herself opposite. He who had been so gay and outspoken was now tongue-tied, his spirit frozen by the chilly atmosphere in which Madame had enwrapped herself. Even then had Madame relented, stretched out both her hands, and smiled upon him in the old fashion, I believe that the boy would have cast aside his absurd pretensions to dignity, and given back to her his heart. Madame could, I am convinced, have made him kiss the dust off her feet. But she was still sore and angry. A goddess does not take pleasure in being tumbled into ruin by a brown half-caste, and Madame, who had brought so many white men to her feet, scorned to win an easy conquest over Willie. Since he had elected to be William, Lord Topsham, he should be treated as he deserved.