"Never," assented Madame. "You employ a steam syren."
"Then it be all true," groaned Ching, who had remained silent during this interchange. Except in the speech of his profession, his tongue was inflexible. The babble of his friends broke upon him as the sea foam on an immovable rock. "Then it be all true. That Moor be the rightful Lord of Topsham."
"It is true," said Madame gently. "We must make the best of it, Captain." Much as Madame Gilbert admired and respected the solid merits of Robert Ching, she never relaxed towards him her form of address. He was always "Captain." The Chief Engineer had long since become the "Alexander" of reproof or the "Sandy" of familiar converse. One may respect, and in emergency cling to, an immovable rock. But one does not pat it familiarly.
"Whatzimever be us vur to do?" wailed Ching, reverting in distress to the peasant dialect of his youth.
"I do not hold," put in Ewing, "that it is for us to do anything. I am a Leeberal, a good Scots Leeberal. In Paisley, where my home is, and where the poets come from, we have always been steadfast, unshaken Leeberals. No argument can shift us. For ten years past we have done our Leeberal best to pull down the House of Lords, and Willatopy is a damn sight better than most of the scum of them. His skin is an accident of bairth. If his skin had come as white as his eyes are blue he would have been a vairy presentable Head for the House of Toppys. He has, it seems to me, all the instincts of the Idle Rich, and what more can you Tories want? He is a grand pilot and a very hardy sailor and sportsman. His eye for the gur-r-ls is worthy of the loftiest aristocrat. It is nothing but the brown epidermis which sets Ching here groaning like a gravid cow, and Madame bewailing the undoubted legitimacy of a Topy heir."
"Not quite," objected Madame, though she was impressed by the Scot's shrewd analysis. "I admit that if Willatopy had been born white, or as light-skinned as his sisters, his lawyers at home would long ago have summoned him to claim his peerage. His half blood would not then have made the Family a butt for ridicule. But to me his half blood and not his colour is an occasion for genuine distress. It is because Willatopy here in his own Tops Island is so artless and attractive a creature, that I dread the effect of his transfer to England and his succession to what still is, even in these democratic days, an eminence ringed about with peculiar and dangerous temptations. Let me give you the opinion of a man—one of your own countrymen, Sandy—who knew the father well, and feels the gravest apprehensions lest the son should come to utter wreck." Then Madame, in the frank fashion which draws men's hearts to her, repeated that conversation with Grant of Thursday Island, which I have recounted in a previous chapter. She kept back nothing. As she spoke of the neglected deposits of osmiridium—at fifty pounds an ounce—Ewing shrieked as a man tortured in the most tender nerve centres of his being. As she told of the death of William Toppys, and of the twelve-year-old son's desperate voyage with the father's corpse lashed to the yawl's deck, her hearers fell silent, and she could see that both men were deeply moved.
"Good lad," whispered Ching, who hated Willatopy.
"Good lad," whispered Ewing, who liked him. As Madame proceeded and painted in her forcible vivid English the twin demons which threatened the half-caste boy, torn from his native island environment, the men followed her words with grave assent. Both of them in their wanderings over the wide world had seen men and women of the black and brown races wither and die at the touch of white vices.
The story drew to its end.