‘Leave me to judge of that. There cannot be any harm in seeing you, in talking to you.’
So, I leave the disgusted gulls; and we ramble to the further side of the Island, to the place where I landed in the dawn of history to find the New World.
We do not talk much at first. I am working out the situation, with due aid from certain phrases of convention that help to reconcile poverty of thought to self-respect. These little felicities of epigram on the inconsistency of Woman never helped anybody to comprehension of her; yet, if they were taken out of its phrase books, the world would be acutely sensible of the void. Few people are inconsistent, but a good many people fail to understand. I wish I were not so dull. I seem to have found Victoria to about as much purpose as a savage might find a watch.
So, for some precious moments, it is the old footing again. We are as free as the other animals about us, and perhaps still more exquisitely happy. It might be rash, though, to attempt to answer for any but ourselves. Our myriads of birds and insects, and our select assortment of beasts, seem to have a good time—a life in the sun, and a quick death in their prime of strength, with their business hours mainly employed in dining, and in exercise in the open air. Most of the beasts belong to the Island family as much as the men and women; and Victoria could give them each a name. With her, they only play at being wild; and the outlaw goats seek her as regularly for their morning caress as their friends who have made their peace with civilisation.
If she and I could be like this for ever! But we cannot. We seem to be friends and strangers, by turns; for the life of me, I know not why. We move to and from each other in some mysterious way. For, what happened just now, happens again and again. I am with her, as I could always wish to be, till some subtle change in her manner makes me think she wants me to keep away. I keep away, and she seeks me out, with reproaches for coldness and neglect. We reach perfection, and then imperfection begins. Slowly, slowly, as some change in the colour of a plant, comes Victoria’s new mistrust of me, or of herself. What is it? what can it be? It is a movement of some strange law of her emotions; but what is the law? The savage has learned so much about his watch as to feel the utter inadequacy of the reflection that watches have curious ways. He cannot examine, but he begins to guess. There is but one guess to make, the old one—it must be the phantasm of the living Curly that stands between us and the perfect light. We know what came of that guess before. If I step back to make way for him, Victoria will follow, to know the reason why. A pest on him for a phantom that plays us on and off: it is neither my fault, nor Victoria’s; it is the phantom that does not know its own mind!
CHAPTER XXIII.
ANOTHER SAIL.
Let him be forgotten for the moment. There is a new ship off the Point!
Not an English ship this time—a Yankee, by her beautiful flag.
It is the old scene—the hurried assembling of the people; the signals and answering signals; the manning of the surf boat; the meeting of the elders for consultation as to ways and means of reception. But this meeting is for serious work. The new ship is a trader; and only a ship of war imports no danger to these defenceless folk. There may be a rough crew, not too well in hand, fierce men, beyond punishment for excess, immediate or remote. If they choose to go wrong, the whole Island is at their mercy, not only in goods and chattels, but in the honour of the women, the lives of all.
The troubled Ancient, I think, would like to bury his treasure of maidens for awhile, if only he might hope to dig them up again, safe and sound, when the danger is past. He looks about him with the furtive glance that seeks a hiding-place, like some Jute progenitor on the approach of a pirate horde. But he wisely gives no public sign of alarm, and he sets out in his whaler to board the new-comer, with a cheerful face.