It was a letter, which she shyly handed the trader. Walter Kinross looked at it with surprise, for it was the first he had received in four years, and the sight of its English stamp and familiar handwriting filled him with something like awe.
“The white man said you would give us a tin of salmon and six masi,” said the little girl, in native.
Kinross unlocked the dingy trade-room, still in a maze of wonder and impatience, and gave the little girl a box of matches in excess of postage. Then he opened the letter.
My dear Nephew [it ran]: Your letter asking me to send you a book or two or any old papers I might happen to have about me has just come to hand, and finds me at Long’s Hotel, pretty miserable and ill. Yours was a strange note, after a silence of eight years, telling me nothing on earth about yourself save that you are trading in some islands, and seldom see a white face from one year’s end to another. When a man is seventy years of age and is ill, and his nigh-spent life unrolls before him like the pages of a musty old book, and when he wonders a little how it will feel to be dead and done with altogether, I tell you, my boy, he begins to see the spectres of all sorts of old misdeeds rising before him. Past unkindnesses, past neglects, a cold word here, a ten-pound note saved there and an old friend turned empty away—well, well! Without actually going the length of saying that I was either unkind or negligent in your case, I feel sometimes I was rather hard on you as to that mess of yours in London, and that affair at Lowestoft the same year. I was disappointed, and I showed it.
I know you’re pretty old to come back and start life afresh here, but if you have not had the unmitigated folly to get married out there and tied by the leg for ever, I’ll help you to make a new start. You sha’n’t starve if three hundred pounds a year will keep you, and if you will try and turn over a new leaf and make a man of yourself in good earnest, I am prepared to mark you down substantially in my will. But mind—no promises—payment strictly by results. You’re no longer a boy, and this is probably the last chance you’ll ever get of entering civilised life again and meeting respectable folk. I inclose you a draft at sight on Sydney, New South Wales, for two hundred and fifty pounds, for you will doubtless need clothes, etc., as well as your passage money, and if you decide not to return you can accept it as a present from your old uncle. I have told Jones (you would scarcely know the old fellow, Walter, he’s so changed) to send you a bundle of books and illustrated papers, which I hope will amuse you more than they seem to do me.
Affectionately yours,
Alfred Bannock.
The trader read the letter with extraordinary attention, though the drift of it was at first almost beyond him—read it and re-read it, dazed and overcome, scarcely realising his good fortune. He spread out the bill on his knee and smoothed it as he might have patted the head of a dog. It spelled freedom, friends, the life he had been trained and fitted to lead, a future worth having and worth dividing. The elation of it all tingled in his veins, and he felt like singing. London, the far distant, the inaccessible, now hummed in his ears. He saw the eddying, crowded streets, the emptying play-houses, the grey river sparkling with lights. The smoke of a native oven thrilled him with memories of the underground, and he had but to close his eyes and the surf thundered with the noise of arriving trains.
The house could not contain him and his eager thoughts; he must needs feel the sky overhead and the trades against his cheek, and take all nature into his puny confidence. Besides, Vaiala had now a new charm for him, one he had never counted on to find. Soon, now, it would begin to melt into the irrevocable past; its mist-swept mountains, its forests and roaring waterfalls would fade into nothingness and become no more than an impalpable phantom of his mind, the stuff that dreams are made of. He wandered along the path from one settlement to another, round the great half-moon of the bay, absorbing every impression with a new and tender interest.
There were a dozen little villages to be passed before he could attain the rocky promontory that barred the western shore, pretty hamlets in groves of cocoanuts and breadfruit, in each perhaps a dozen beehive houses and as many sheds and boat-shelters. Between village and village the path led him under rustling palms and beside the shallow waters of the lagoon and across a river where he surprised some laughing girls at their bath. In the deep shade old men were mending nets, and children were playing tag and cricket with boisterous shouts, or marbles in sandy places. From one house he heard the clapping hands that announced the ’ava; in another the song and stamp of practising dancers. Hard and lonely though his life had been, this Samoan bay was endeared to him by a thousand pleasant memories and even by the recollection of his past unhappiness. Here he had found peace and love, freedom from taskmasters, scenes more beautiful than any picture, and, not least, a sufficiency to eat. A little money and his life might have been tolerable, even happy—enough money for a good-sized boat, a cow or two, and those six acres of the Pascoe estate he had so often longed to buy. Only the month before, the American consul had offered them for two hundred dollars Chile money, and here he was with two hundred and fifty pounds in his pocket, seventeen hundred and fifty dollars currency! Cruel fate, that had made him in one turn of her wrist far too rich to care. He would buy them for Leata, he supposed; he must leave the girl some land to live on. But where now were all the day-dreams of the laying out of his little estate?—the damming of the noisy stream, the fencing, terracing, and path-making he had had in mind; the mangoes, oranges, and avocados he had meant to plant in that teeming soil, with coffee enough for a modest reserve? What a snug, cosy garden a man could make of it! What a satisfaction it might have been! How often had he talked of it with Leata, who had been no less eager than himself to harness their quarter-acre to the six and make of them all a little paradise.
Poor Leata! whom he had taken so lightly from her father’s house and paid for in gunpowder and kegs of beef—his smiling, soft-eyed Leata, who would have died for him! What was to become of her in this new arrangement of things? The six acres would provide for her, of course; in breadfruit, cocoanuts, and bananas she would not be badly off: but where was the solace for the ache in her heart, for her desolation and abandonment? He sighed as he thought of her, the truest friend he had found in all his wanderings. He would get her some jewellery from Apia, and a chest of new dresses, and a big musical box, if she fancied it. What would it matter if he did go home in the steerage? It would be no hardship to a man like him. She would soon forget him, no doubt, and take up with somebody else, and live happily ever afterwards in the six acres. Ah, well! he mustn’t think too much about her, or it would take the edge off his high spirits and spoil the happiest day of his life.
By this time he had worked quite round the bay, and almost without knowing it he found himself in front of Paul Engelbert’s store. Engelbert was the other trader in Vaiala—a passionate, middle-aged Prussian, who had been a good friend of his before those seven breadfruit-trees had come between them. In his new-found affluence and consequent good humour the bitterness of that old feud suddenly passed away. He recalled Engelbert’s rough, jovial kindness—remembered how Paul had cared for him through the fever, and helped him afterwards with money and trade. How could he have been so petty as to make a quarrel of those breadfruit-trees? He recollected, with indescribable wonder at himself, that he had once drawn a pistol on the old fellow, and all this over six feet of boundary and seven gnawed breadfruits! By Jove! he could afford to be generous and hold out the right hand of friendship. Poor old Paul! it was a shame they had not spoken these two years.
On the verandah, barefoot and in striped pyjamas, was Engelbert, pretending not to see him. Kinross thought he looked old and sick and not a little changed.