"May I venture to ask for a fuller account of the injury he did you?" said Nigel with some hesitancy.
For some moments the hermit did not answer. He was evidently struggling with some suppressed feeling. Turning a look full upon his young friend, he at length spoke in a low sad voice—
"I have never mentioned my grief to mortal man since that day when it pleased God to draw a cloud of thickest darkness over my life. But, Nigel, there is that in you which encourages confidence. I confess that more than once I have been tempted to tell you of my grief—for human hearts crave intelligent sympathy. My faithful servant and friend Moses is, no doubt, intensely sympathetic, but—but—well, I cannot understand, still less can I explain, why I shrink from making a confidant of him. Certainly it is not because of his colour, for I hold that the souls of men are colourless!
"I need not trouble you with the story of my early life," continued the hermit. "I lost my dear wife a year after our marriage, and was left with a little girl whose lovely face became more and more like that of her mother every day she lived. My soul was wrapped up in the child. After three years I went with her as a passenger to Batavia. On the way we were attacked by a couple of pirate junks. Baderoon was the pirate captain. He killed many of our men, took some of us prisoners, sank the vessel, seized my child, and was about to separate us, putting my child into one junk while I was retained, bound, in the other."
He paused, and gazed over the glowing tree-tops into the golden horizon, with a longing, wistful look. At the same time something like an electric shock passed through Nigel's frame, for was not this narrative strangely similar in its main features to that which his own father had told him on the Keeling Islands about beautiful little Kathleen Holbein and her father? He was on the point of seizing the hermit by the hand and telling him what he knew, when the thought occurred that attacks by pirates were common enough in those seas, that other fathers might have lost daughters in this way, and that, perhaps, his suspicion might be wrong. It would be a terrible thing, he thought, to raise hope in his poor friend's breast unless he were pretty sure of the hope being well founded. He would wait and hear more. He had just come to this conclusion, and managed to subdue the feelings which had been aroused, when Van der Kemp turned to him again, and continued his narrative—
"I know not how it was, unless the Lord gave me strength for a purpose as he gave it to Samson of old, but when I recovered from the stinging blow I had received, and saw the junk hoist her sails and heard my child scream, I felt the strength of a lion come over me; I burst the bonds that held me and leaped into the sea, intending to swim to her. But it was otherwise ordained. A breeze which had sprung up freshened, and the junk soon left me far behind. As for the other junk, I never saw it again, for I never looked back or thought of it—only, as I left it, I heard a mocking laugh from the one-eyed villain, who, I afterwards found out, owned and commanded both junks."
Nigel had no doubt now, but the agitation of his feelings still kept him silent.
"Need I say," continued the hermit, "that revenge burned fiercely in my breast from that day forward? If I had met the man soon after that, I should certainly have slain him. But God mercifully forbade it. Since then He has opened my eyes to see the Crucified One who prayed for His enemies. And up till now I have prayed most earnestly that Baderoon and I might not meet. My prayer has not been answered in the way I wished, but a better answer has been granted, for the sin of revenge was overcome within me before we met."
Van der Kemp paused again.
"Go on," said Nigel, eagerly. "How did you escape?"