"A temporary gentleman," put in Madame. "Sit down, British officer, or I will set Willatopy at you. Where will you go? This Island belongs to Willatopy, and if you pick a banana without his leave, we will hale you to Thursday Island, and consign you to the deepest dungeon. No, on second thoughts we will punish you ourselves. To us is entrusted the high justice, the middle, and the low. We are monarchs of all we survey. We can keel-haul you under the teak fenders of the Humming Top, toast you over a slow fire, or throw you to your brethren the sharks of the sea. We can do any violent thing we please with you. No one will miss you; no one will inquire after you. We will say that you left the Island—the rest will be silence. Every man and boy in my yacht is my devoted servant; every man, woman, and child on this Island is a slave of Willatopy. Man, you did not know what perils you called up when you had yourself cast on this Island of Tops. Do not, I implore you, repeat in the hearing of my sailors this preposterous story of Willatopy's Heirship. For the moment they are my servants, but in blood and bone they are the feudal retainers of the Family of Toppys. The little fingers of my sailors are thicker than Willatopy's loins. You have felt the scorpion sting of his fish spear; you have yet to feel the searing shattering blast from the Humming Top's guns. My sailors would blow you into fragments from the foc's'le, and say grace afterwards with unction. We are smugglers and pirates every one of us. What to us is a lawyer more or less? You are homeless, and friendless, and in our power. We can put you to frizzle in the heat by day, and starve you with cold in the long nights. We can deny you food. Even the wayside streams belong to us. You cannot walk or lie down, or eat, or drink, save by our gracious permission. You are cut off from the world, an outcast. Draw comfort if you can from my words."
"You are pleased to chaff me, Madame Gilbert. The King's writ runs even in Tops Island."
"In the immortal words of a famous British statesman: wait and see, Mr. John Clifford, demobilised second lieutenant. And now for the moment I have done with you. Keep clear of my camp, and, for your life, flee from Willatopy. When you are hungered lie on the beach and howl like a dog that is lost. Maybe someone will hear you; maybe, on the other hand, someone won't. It is still less likely that anyone will minister to your wants even if your cries are heard. But as a merciful sister I indicate this one thin chance of preserving from extinction the pale flame of your life. If you will now excuse me, Mr. John Clifford, I will withdraw to my tent and complete my interrupted toilet. Good-bye-e-e."
"A good morning's work," murmured Madame Gilbert as she strolled away leaving the disconsolate Hedge Lawyer to complete his drying alone. "And let us pray that yet another wandering island schooner may drop into our bay that we may urgently speed the parting guest—with a boathook if he won't get moving of his own volition. In these remote islands of the British Empire one should never omit that punctilious hospitality which is due even to the most noxious of strangers."
CHAPTER XI THE CAMPAIGN OPENS
Madame Gilbert kept no diary of her adventures, and her memory for dates is precarious. But the log of the Humming Top—to which I have had access—confirms her impression that she arrived at Tops Island on the twentieth of May. It was in the fourth week of her stay that the island schooners began to arrive, of which the third carried the little unwelcome stranger, of whom Madame longed to be quit. But although three schooners came within a week, the much-desired fourth, for whose dirty sails Madame looked out so anxiously, tarried until the occasion for its employment vanished with the flying days. During this lamentable period of delay in speeding the parting guest, the opening rounds in the contest between Madame and the Hedge Lawyer had been fought and lost—lost by Madame Gilbert. No longer was it possible to eject him with a boathook; he had become the guest of Willatopy, and Willatopy, Lord of Topsham, was also Lord of Tops Island.
Looking back now over the series of incidents which I have to relate, I cannot but feel that there was some failure of adroitness in Madame's conduct of the campaign. It is true that she had no cards at all—except her own dominating personality—and the Hedge Lawyer possessed the entire pack. But even so her failure to put a wide distance in material space between the Heir of Topsham and his self-appointed legal adviser is almost inexplicable. She must have failed through excess of confidence. She did not grasp the elusive inconsistency of Willatopy's undeveloped mind. She believed that the influence of his dead white father would remain ineradicable—she conceived that it was bitten into steel instead of into soft South Sea wax—and she was misled utterly by the violence of Willatopy's first onslaught upon the managing indispensable clerk. When seated at that breakfast on the shore, she had torn with her feminine claws the quivering flesh of the miserable Hedge Lawyer, she had judged him to be a cowardly fool who could be readily frightened away from his purpose. He was no coward, and a long way from being a fool. A man needs more than the average equipment of Cockney cunning to become, at thirty-two, the managing clerk of a firm of speculative lawyers. This fellow, John Clifford, possessed the quick shrewdness of the City's streets, and the indomitable persistence of a man whose professional advancement depended upon his own unscrupulous ability. His employers had promised, ere he set sail for the Torres Straits, that his return to London with Willatopy as a dazzling and valuable new client, would mark his own promotion to the status of junior partner. He had everything to gain by persistence, and nothing to lose except his life. He was sufficiently astute to realise that Madame's threats were vain persiflage; that she was helpless if he chose to remain on the Island, and that the mind of a half-caste savage might, by adroit moulding, become receptive of strange and flattering impressions. He held all the cards—those which we know of, others which he played later. As he dried on the blazing beach, after Madame had left him, he determined to hang on at any risk from Willatopy's spear and the rude hands of Madame Gilbert's sailors, until he had won over to his side the wandering intelligence of the Lord of Topsham.
"After all," muttered Clifford to himself, "he is an English Lord, and it is a very great thing to be an English Lord." Madame he already hated—which is not surprising. She had not exactly cultivated his favour. He did not know that she had any interest in opposing his plans for the transfer of Willatopy to England, and he did not anticipate serious opposition from her when proof was offered of Willatopy's legal heirship. That proof—copies of the registers in Thursday Island—was in his lost suit case. Also the light flannel clothes which his damp blackness made urgently desirable. So the first step taken by John Clifford in his campaign was to hunt for that case which he had flung away in his flight from the terrible fish spear.