But the man's real secret, the canker at the back of his diseased mind, was revealed to me—as I have no doubt it has been to many others—in the most startling fashion. Suddenly, and apropos of nothing either of us had said, he sprang to his feet and struck an attitude in front of the rusty hurricane lantern standing on an empty fruit crate.
"Do you notice anything?" he asked me.
All I noticed was an elderly gentleman, inclining to corpulence and baldness, with rather a fine profile terminating in a Vandyke beard, standing rigidly with folded arms and an air of imperiousness that struck me as out of place.
"You see no resemblance?" he suggested, incredulously.
I saw none in particular, and said so. He took his seat with an air of disappointment.
"Then perhaps I may help you," he said. "My mother was lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria when King Edward was Prince of Wales. Does that convey anything to you?"
Naturally, it did, and I was forced to admit a resemblance that had escaped me.
Touched? Perhaps.
Taking this unworthy as the lowest rung of the white Tahitian social ladder, one comes next to the clerks of the larger stores, who, after a year or two with their firm, are marooned in charge of a trading station on some distant island at a wage that makes honesty and prosperity incompatible.
Then comes the store manager in crackling white drills and a luxuriant office, who welcomes you with a winning smile, and speeds you with a staggering bill; the schooner skipper, a genial soul possessed of an enviable independence that empowers him to tell his "owners" to go to the devil for three months of a hurricane season each year, the while his ship lies in port, and he disports himself and his latest yarn over variegated drinks on the balcony of the Bougainville Club; the French Government official, as awe-inspiring in business hours as he is charming out of them.