“Well, he goes to work to-morrow. He won’t get much more time to parade.”
“Have you three divers, then?”
“No. The fellow that Mac kicked hasn’t been able to get over it. He resigned immediately, but I succeeded in convincing him that he couldn’t quit the job till I got a new man in his place. I believe he wants to go to law about it.”
“Can he make any trouble? Isn’t that taking the law into your own hands?”
Martin shrugged his shoulders. Kingsnorth laughed. “It would be dangerous on British soil,” he said, “but not under the great republic. Who is going to tack back and forth across this channel in a lorcha or a parao, because a Jap got kicked? His nearest magistrate is a Filipino juez de paz on the Antique coast. I wish him joy of all the law he can get there. When it comes to the island of Maylubi, Martin, Mac, and I are the law. ‘L’état, c’est nous.’”
Mrs. Collingwood smiled discreetly at the French, and pushed her chair back. Kingsnorth often threw a phrase of French into his speech, and she felt that it was aimed directly at her, and implied an exclusion of the others from their superior plane of conversation. It was not an act characteristic of an Englishman of his class, and she realized that only the intensity of his desire to establish himself on a footing of intimacy could induce him to use such methods.
They all walked down to the beach together, and after Charlotte had watched their row-boat pull alongside the launch, she sat down on a bit of sand grass beneath a cocoanut tree and revelled in the morning breeze. It was a “four man breeze” as they say when four men are needed on the outriggers of the paraos; and more than one deep-sea fishing craft swept by with its four naked squatting outriders sitting at ease on their well sprayed stations with the great sail bellying above them. As the tide went out, troops of children wandered up the beach, digging skilfully with their toes for clams, or pouncing with shrieks of delight on some stranded jelly fish. From the field beyond the house, their gardener could be heard hissing at their one draft animal, and once in awhile Mrs. Maclaughlin’s voice arose in a rain of pigeon Spanish as she bent over her garden beds, or ranged through her poultry yards.
It was very lonely, but Charlotte did not mind it. Barring the discomforts of their experiences in the early days with Mrs. Maclaughlin’s food, and the difficulty of holding John Kingsnorth in his place without betraying her feelings about him to Martin, she might have said that her island life hardly boasted of the crumpled rose leaf. Even Kingsnorth’s evident determination to be accepted as an intimate, did not imply a desire to establish any sentimental relation to herself, nor could she explain to her whole satisfaction just why she so vigorously thwarted him. She was only conscious of feeling that to accept his tacit offer of good fellowship was a clearly defined step downward, an open throwing over of standards which, if she had endangered them by her marriage, she had still high hopes of maintaining, and to which she hoped ultimately to win her husband.
On the whole, her thoughts were very sweet and wholesome as she sat there in the growing warmth. More than once a sense of housekeeping responsibility urged her to rise and betake herself indoors, but she could not bring herself to disturb her reverie till a respectful cough attracted her attention.
An old man and a young girl, carrying a child in her arms, stood a few feet away. The man was dressed in spotless white trousers with a Chinese shirt of white muslin. One sleeve was decorously adorned with a black mourning band, and his white bamboo plaited hat was also wreathed in sable. The girl was dressed in the deepest of Filipino mourning—black calico skirt, black alpaca tapis, or apron, and a camisa of thin barred black net, shiny and stiff with starch. Through its gauzy texture her white chemise, trimmed with scarlet embroidery, showed garishly, while the immense sleeves made no pretence of hiding her plump, gold-colored arms. Her face, of a very Malaysian type, was decidedly pretty, and the haughty column of her neck and a wealth of jetty hair lent still further charm. As she caught Charlotte’s eye, she stepped forward, throwing back, as she did so, the black veil which had hidden the child’s face.