Niâbon and Lucia, I must mention, had insisted on standing watch ever since we had left Apamama, and they certainly helped us a lot, for both could now steer very well, and took pleasure in it. The former, with Tepi, was in my watch, the latter was with Tematau, who, like all Eastern Polynesians, was a good sailor-man and could always be relied upon.
We had now sailed over a thousand miles; and every day—every hour I gained more confidence in myself, and the resolution to make one of the greatest boat voyages across the Pacific had been ever strengthening in my mind since the day I looked at Chart No. 780 in Krause's house at Taritai.
What could I not do with such a boat and two such men as Tepi and Tematau, after we had landed Lucia and Niâbon at Guam in the for north! We would refit the boat, and then turn our faces south once more, and sail back through the Western Carolines on to wild New Guinea—Dutch New Guinea, and run along the coast till we came to one of the few scattered Dutch settlements on the shores of that terra incognita. Tepi and Tematau would stick to me—they had sworn to do so—had told me so in whispers one bright night, as we three kept watch together and Lucia and Niâbon slept.
Niâbon! What a strange strange girl she was! I should find it hard to say goodbye to her, I thought; and then I felt my cheeks flush.
Say goodbye to her—part from her! Why should we part? Was I so much her superior that I need be ashamed of asking her to be my wife? What was I, anyway, but a broken man—a man whose father, my sole remaining relative, had nearly twenty years before told me with savage contempt that I had neither brains, energy, nor courage enough to make my way in the world, thrown me a cheque for a hundred pounds, and sneeringly told me to get it cashed at once, else he might repent of having given it to me to squander among the loose people with whom I so constantly associated. And I had never seen or heard from him, and never would. But I had that cheque still, for there always was in me a latent affection for the cold-faced, unsympathetic man who had broken my mother's heart, not by open unkindness, but by what the head gardener whisperingly told me (when she was lying dead, and I, sent for from college to attend the funeral, went to his cottage to see him) was “silent, inwisible neglect, Master James; silent, inwisible neglect. That's wot killed her.” For the servants loved my poor mother—their opinion of my father they discreetly kept to themselves. So I had kept the cheque, for burning with resentment against him as I was at the time, I remembered the words of my mother's last letter to me, written with her dying hand.
“Try hard to please him, James. He is very cold and stern, but I am sure that, deep down in his heart, he loves you well.”
That letter, with the cheque inside it, was now yellowed, and the writing faint, but I had kept them both. I would write to him some day, I had thought, and send him back the cheque, and my mother's letter as well, and then perhaps the hard old man would forgive me, and write and say “Come.” But the years went by, and I never wrote, and now it was too late, after fifteen had passed. Very likely he was dead, and had willed his money to churches or hospitals, or some such charities, and I should always be “Jim Sherry, the trader,” to the end of my days, and never “James Shervinton, Esq., of Moya Woods, Donegal.”
Well, after all, what did it matter? I thought, as I held on to the forestay, and looked at the now paling moon sinking low down on our lee, as the glow of the coming sun tipped a bank of cloud to windward, with a narrow wavering ribbon of shining gold. I had nothing at which to grumble. My fifteen years of wandering had done me good, although I had not saved money—money, that in my father's eyes brought, before eternal salvation in the next world, primarily the beatitudes of some county eminence in Ireland and British respectability generally in this. Unless my father was still alive, and I could know he wanted to see me before he died, I should never go home—not after fifteen years of South Sea life.
Why should I not accept what Fate meant for me, and my own inclinations told me that I was destined for? I was intended to be “Jim Sherry, the trader,”—and I should ask “Niâbon, of Danger Island,” to be “Jim Sherry's” wife. Why not. I had never cared for any woman before except in a fleeting, and yet degrading manner—in a way which had left no memories with me that I could look back upon with tender regrets. She and I together might do great things in the South Seas, and found a colony of our own. She had white blood in her veins—of that I felt certain—and where Ben Boyd, of the old colonial days, failed to achieve, I, with a woman like Niâbon for my wife, could succeed. Ben Boyd was a dreamer, a man of wealth and of flocks and herds, in the newly-founded convict settlement of New South Wales, and his dream was the founding of a new state in the Solomon Islands, where he, an autocratic, but beneficent ruler, would reign supreme, and the English Government recognise him as a Clive, a Warren Hastings of the Southern Seas. But the clubs of the murderous Solomon Islanders—the country of the people in which he had already planned out vast achievements on paper—battered out his brains almost under the guns of his beautiful armed yacht, the Wanderer; and the name of Ben Boyd was now alone remembered by a decayed village and a ruined lighthouse on the south headland of Twofold Bay, in New South Wales, where, in the days of his prosperity, he had erected it, as a guide to the numerous American and English whaleships, which in those times traversed the Pacific from one end to the other, and would, he imagined, eagerly avail themselves of the quiet, landlocked harbour to repair and recruit, and sell their cargoes of sperm oil. But they never came, and his dream was ended ere his life was gone.
Yes, I would ask her, as soon as I had an opportunity of speaking to her alone. It was true that she had once told me that she would never part from Lucia—and Lucia had often spoken to me of their plans for the future.