"I shall never go to England," said Willatopy. Yet he desisted from the hammering of John Clifford, and his tone lacked its customary resolution.
It had been an arduous day for the Hedge Lawyer. Yet I think that he was well content. In a few hours, at the price of much sweat and many aching bones, he had powerfully stirred up the soul of Willatopy so that it would never resettle in its old simple contented form. He had driven belief into the half-white, half-brown mind of the once happy boy that beyond the wide seas, over in that England whence his father had fled, he himself had become a man of consequence. His poor, childlike brain boiled and threw up visions in its steaming vapours. White women at his pleasure, white men as his slaves, splendid yachts at his orders, big stone houses with many, many rooms—the big houses left him cold, but to the other visions he could give something of warm concrete form. Marie who made eyes at him, John who slaved for him, the yacht better even than the splendid Humming Top—these would all be his, and they were but an earnest of greater delights to follow. The round world and all that was therein would lie beneath his brown feet if only he would go to England and become, in his own unchallengeable right, the Twenty-Eighth Baron of Topsham. Already the impressions left by the father upon the small soft mind of the twelve-year-old boy were beginning to yield under the moulding hand of the white slave John. Already the white, restless strain in his blood, which throughout his life had reposed dormant, was beginning to bestir itself within him. He tossed John Clifford into the boat, and rowed ashore himself. He drove Clifford before him up into the woods, and left him there supperless and without shelter. Let him forage in the woods if he hungered, and seek for cover under the ample branches about him.
Then Willatopy, that gallant boy of mixed blood, torn from his lifelong island roots by the exotic pressure of a cursed Heirship, ran as if devils pursued to the tent of Madame Gilbert, and bursting in, flung his naked body at her feet. Never before had he entered without leave. And Madame, seeing the tumult which raged in his soul, and already understanding something of the agony of his partial awakening, listened while the boy poured out the story much as I have told it here.
"Madame," he cried at the end. "What shall I do? What shall I do?"
"Send Clifford away," said she, "and never go to England."
"I cannot send him away," said Willatopy. "He is my white slave. And if he went I should still be an English Lord. But when a schooner calls he shall go. And I will never go to England. My father said: 'Always stick to Hula, Willie: Hula is better than England.' And I always will."
"That's right," said Madame. "You can't go wrong if you follow your father. And now, Willie dear, go back to your own hut, and be Hula once more. I love Willatopy, but I should hate an English Lord. He couldn't come to my tent like this—without even a bootlace about his middle. But my dear Willatopy may wear as little as he pleases. Be off; I don't want Marie to find you here."
The blue eyes, so strange in the almost black face, flashed with a new light.
"Marie," he said. "The white Marie. If I were an English Lord...."
Madame held up a warning hand.