TWO GENTLEMEN
“LOOK at that cat, Doctor,” said Leyden, “but do not let her see that you are looking. There!—did you see the beast crouch, and glance at us, and then begin to wash its face?”
I glanced at the ship’s cat—an interesting beast, as are most ship’s cats, either because one has more time to study their actions, or because a limited sphere develops the animal’s ingenuity. Some one had brought aboard a tulu-pial bird and hung its cage over the hand steering-gear, where the pineapples are strung out to ripen. The cat had lost no time in locating the bird and was busy measuring distances when we interrupted.
“That cat,” said Leyden, “would be typified by a sneak-thief among men. Do you know, Doctor, I believe that domestic animals, like men, have their grades of honesty. Have you not seen a finely bred dog of high courage subdue an animal impulse which he feels to be degrading?”
I had observed this thing, but, seeing that the subject had suggested something to Leyden’s mind, I merely nodded. Few men had looked as deeply into the nature of all things made as had this keen-sensed Teuton collector, who seemed equally at home in any part of the civilized or savage world. He had at times played the same quiet, modest part in the founding of empires as in the advancement of science; his friends were to be found from the palm tree to the palace, and I fear that a great many of his enemies were dead.
“I had once an occasion to watch a striking case of noblesse oblige in an animal,” Leyden continued. “I would not tell the story if it were a simple animal yarn, as such tales are, as a rule, tiresome and untruthful. This story concerns people, principally, but as those upon whom it reflects discreditably are dead—with certain others—there is no reason why it should not be told.
“This was a good many years ago, Doctor, when the steamer transportation in the Pacific was less efficient than to-day. I had engaged passage from ‘Frisco to Samoa on a schooner which was owned and captained by the son of one of those early blackguards who used to land their crews upon an island full of harmless cannibals, show them the way of civilization, demonstrate the wickedness of their present lives, and then go off and leave them to infect each other with constitutional disease in the place of eating one another. I hope there is an interesting corner of hell reserved for all such! Our captain, whose name was Deshay, was the frequent handsome outcrop of a vicious sire; his father had eloped with his mother, who was the half-caste wife of a missionary in the Marquesas and one of the most beautiful women I ever saw. Later, Deshay, senior, had made a good bit of money in the island trade, sent his son to England to be educated, and while the boy was there the parents had been lost in a typhoon.
“When I went down to the schooner on the morning of her sailing date I found aboard her a young man of very pleasing appearance, who introduced himself as Claud Dillingham and told me that we were to be shipmates.