“She must not know that I am not.”
“Ah, but she does know it.”
Larrieau sprang erect, terrible. “You dared to tell her——” he roared, and advanced with upraised hand.
“Sit down. The girl has eyes, and in Riva she has, doubtless, seen more than one leper. I told her nothing. Listen, Captain.”
From the stateroom came the sound of a muffled sob.
Larrieau sat down, dumb and distressed. “Yes, there is leprosy in Riva. And tuberculosis and worse. The scourges of our white civilization are creeping in and where they strike there is no hope. So I brought Tamea away—only to be stricken—— Well, I knew that was one of the risks I had to take, and a life without risks is as an egg without salt. In my day I have adventured in strange and terrible places, and while this is the very devil of a joke to have fate play on me, still”—he shrugged again—“I have lived my life and I have loved my love, and by the blood of the devil, life owes me nothing. I am ready! Voilà!” And the Triton snapped his fingers. “I am no mealy-mouthed clerk to go whimpering to my finish, protesting at the last that my heart is breaking with sorrow for my sins.” He laughed his mellow, resonant, roaring laugh.
“No, no. Old Gaston of the Beard has enjoyed his sins. They were not many, for I was ever a simple man, but such sins as I had—ah, they were magnificent! I have children in a hundred islands. But Tamea is the child of my love, and like her mother she is a glorious pagan.”
“You say her mother is dead.”
Gaston of the Beard nodded. “She was a queen and believed herself descended from her Polynesian gods. Damnation! She had every right to, for she was a goddess. Tall, Monsieur Doctor—six feet, for she came of a race of hereditary rulers and in Polynesia before the white men came to ruin and degenerate these children of nature, a king was not a king in very truth unless, standing among his people, he could gaze over their heads as one gazes over a wheat field from the top rail of a fence. Tamea’s great-great-grandfather was deposed and exiled to an island five hundred miles to the west, where his enemies enslaved him. In his old age his people rescued him and offered him the scepter he had lost in his youth. But he would not accept, for age and toil had crooked his back and he could no longer stand head and shoulders over his people.”
“What a magnificent old chap he must have been, Captain!” said the doctor.