The news that Lutz was a passenger on the Saint François with Mademoiselle Narbonne brought a prolonged whistle from Ducat, and an exclamation from Lying Bill:
“Well, ’e’ll bloody well get ’is! Maná won’t take a club to ’im because the ’usban’ does the beatin’ when ’e’s a Dutchman, but she’s not lettin’ ’im walk over ’er so easy. I ’ad a long palaver with ’er on the voyage up. She says everybody in Taaoa knows Barbe is a leper, an’ she’s preparin’ to ’ave the bleedin’ Frog doctors cage ’er up out there by Papenoo, if she goes to Tahiti.”
“I never heard before that she had leprosy,” said Ducat. “I think that Maná is spreading that report to scare Lutz.”
“I feel sure that it has not reached him,” I said. “Nobody in Atuona would mention it to him.”
Abruptly there occurred to me the cryptic assertion of Peyral at my first sight of Barbe in the mission church.
“I wouldn’t be her with all her money,” he had said. “Me, I value my skin.”
That was weeks or months before Lemoal had come to me, or I had known of the taua, or of Lutz’s courtship. If there had been a plot against her happiness, it must have been laid early, or what did Peyral mean?
McHenry broke in on my train of reasoning.
“I’ll see that the German sausage learns about it damn soon,” he said spitefully. “He’s doin’ too good a business in both copra an’ women.”
The whistle of the Saint François blew the recall of boats and crew.