* * * * *
Ruth and the doctor returned to the hotel at four. Both carried packages of books and magazines. There was an air of repressed gaiety in her actions: the sense of freedom had returned; her heart was empty again. The burden of decision had been transferred.
And because he knew it was a burden, there was no gaiety upon the doctor's face; neither was there speech on his tongue. He knew not how to act, urged as he was in two directions. It would be useless to tell her to go back, even heartless; and yet he could not advise her to go on, blindly, not knowing whether her aunt was dead or alive. He was also aware that all his arguments would shatter themselves against her resolutions. There was a strange quality of steel in this pretty creature. He understood now that it was a part of her inheritance. The father would be all steel. One point in her narrative stood out beyond all others. To an unthinking mind the episode would be ordinary, trivial; but to the doctor, who had had plenty of time to think during his sojourn in China, it was basic of the child's unhappiness. A dozen words, and he saw Enschede as clearly as though he stood hard by in the flesh.
To preach a fine sermon every Sunday so that he would lose neither the art nor the impulse; and this child, in secret rebellion, taking it down in long hand during odd hours in the week! Preaching grandiloquently before a few score natives who understood little beyond the gestures, for the single purpose of warding off disintegration! It reminded the doctor of a stubborn retreat; from barricade to barricade, grimly fighting to keep the enemy at bay, that insidious enemy of the white man in the South Seas—inertia.
The drunken beachcombers; the one-sided education; the utter loneliness of a white child without playfellows, human or animal, without fairy stories, who for days was left alone while the father visited neighbouring islands, these pictures sank far below their actual importance. He would always see the picture of the huge, raw-boned Dutchman, haranguing and thundering the word of God into the dull ears of South Sea Islanders, who, an hour later, would be carrying fruit penitently to their wooden images.
He now understood her interest in Taber, as he called himself: habit, a twice-told tale. A beachcomber in embryo, and she had lent a hand through habit as much as through pity. The grim mockery of it!—those South Sea loafers, taking advantage of Enschede's Christianity and imposing upon him, accepting his money and medicines and laughing behind his back! No doubt they made the name a byword and a subject for ribald jest in the waterfront bars. And this clear-visioned child had comprehended that only half the rogues were really ill. But Enschede took them as they came, without question. Charity for the ragtag and the bobtail of the Seven Seas, and none for his own flesh and blood.
This started a thought moving. There must be something behind the missioner's actions, something of which the girl knew nothing nor suspected. It would not be possible otherwise to live in daily contact with this level-eyed, lovely girl without loving her. Something with iron resolve the father had kept hidden all these years in the lonely citadel of his heart. Teaching the word of God to the recent cannibal, caring for the sick, storming the strongholds of the plague, adding his own private income to the pittance allowed him by the Society, and never seeing the angel that walked at his side! Something the girl knew nothing about; else Enschede was unbelievable.
It now came to him with an added thrill how well she had told her story; simply and directly, no skipping, no wandering hither and yon: from the first hour she could remember, to the night she had fled in the proa, a clear sustained narrative. And through it all, like a golden thread on a piece of tapestry, weaving in and out of the patterns, the unspoken longing for love.
"Well," she said, as they reached the hotel portal, "what is your advice?"
"Would you follow it?"