"I find," declared Ching solemnly, "and so I shall write in my report to the English Board of Trade, that Madame Gilbert shot and killed William, Lord Topsham, in defence of her own life, and that she was fully justified in what she did."
After the enquiry had been closed, Madame went to her room, and rummaged among her trunks. She was looking for something which she vaguely remembered to have packed, and presently she found what she sought. Madame Gilbert, a Catholic by birth and upbringing, was infamously negligent of religious observances, yet she always, impelled by some inherited instinct, carried upon her travels a small ivory crucifix. It had been her mother's. Now Madame drew forth this emblem of her loosely fitting faith and bore it reverently to the cabin where the body of Willatopy lay awaiting sea burial. There she stood looking down upon the face of the boy whom she had killed. The bright blue eyes were closed for ever, but the quiet, almost smiling face was that of the Willatopy of Tops Island. She laid the crucifix upon the boy's breast that it might go into the depths with him. It was the last service that she could render, and, for some reason, it brought solace to her.
She had never kissed Willie in life, but now she stooped and pressed her lips upon the cold forehead.
"Willie," she murmured, "forgive the Madame who loved and killed you. I was the best friend that you ever had, Willie dear. It was better, far better, that you should die by my little bullet than that you should cease for always to be Willatopy." And with that kiss of farewell, there departed from Madame Gilbert all sense of blood guilt. Her hand had been the Hand of Fate, and it had been a bountiful and kindly Fate.
Willatopy lies in the depths of the Straits of Sunda. The seas are all one, and he, a sailor on both sides of the house, went home to the Great Mother upon whose bosom he had been born and lived. Madame's crucifix was sewn up in his sailcloth shroud, and he lies with it for ever upon his breast. The yacht was stopped for the ceremony, and the whole ship's company with bared heads watched the Twenty-Eighth Lord of Topsham enter into his inheritance. For his true heritage was the Sea, which he knew and loved so well.
As Madame told the story to me, in that room of mine in Whitehall—so remote in distance and in atmosphere from Tops Island and the Torres Straits—she asked me anxiously, often with tears glittering in those violet eyes of hers, if there was anything which she could have done, or left undone, to thrust tragedy away from the bright young life of Willatopy. She had loved the boy, though his skin was of so very dark a brown, and his hair so definitely negroid. And I could do no better than shake my head and lament that which was inevitable. The Hedge Lawyer, that little London cad, quickened the movement towards destruction, and set at naught Madame's own kindly exertions, but sooner or later tragedy must have fallen, heavy footed, upon Willatopy's soul and body.
"You fought and lost," said I sadly, "but in the end you won. I am sure of this: that when Will Toppys, the wise mad father, met beyond the stars the brave though erring son, the blessing of the father descended from Heaven upon the head and hand of Madame Gilbert. He knew, that beachcomber, from what a calamitous fate your shot had saved his Willatopy."
"Do you really, honestly think so?" she asked eagerly.
"I do, really and honestly," said I.
* * * * * * *