As is Mazeppa to the last!’
. . . . . . . . .
Once more the course was changed—another forty-eight hours would bring the Leonora to Apia harbour. Here the erstwhile Spanish Don would be landed. The identification of Alister Lilburne with the Spanish-speaking, Spanish-garmented Alvarez would be difficult, if not impossible.
All that the crew—discreet of their kind—knew, or could testify to, was, that a Spanish-speaking individual had been on board their vessel for a few weeks, and had left them at Norfolk Island. They had heard that he had come from Sydney, and was going back as soon as he could get a ship. Had he come from Molokai? They did not know. [203] ]In fact, the four Rotumah men had been carefully prevented from showing themselves on shore, and the rest of the crew had been advised by Bill Hicks to recognise no one, and to notice nothing outside of the ordinary cruise of their voyage. They had shipped a cargo of copra at Ponapé, and declined to answer any questions save such as related to island produce.
. . . . . . . . .
Carteret was always reticent as to the route by which he and Lilburne made their way to West Australia—landing at Albany from a German cargo-boat, and parting at Perth. It was discovered after Lilburne had been on board the Leonora, that the white mark, more or less circular, on account of which he might so easily have lost his life, as well as his liberty, had no more to do with leprosy than with scarlet fever. It was simply the remains of a cicatrice, resulting from an Arab spear-wound received in one of his desert wanderings in early life. The skin had contracted, after the healing process was complete, and, as often happens, had lost its original colour and shape. Hayston himself—who had taken a medical course in his University days, and was no mean practitioner in the department of wounds, and surgical matters generally—after a minute examination pronounced it to be free from the remotest likeness to the earlier stages of the disease. Not satisfied with this, he called a quartermaster, who had lived on every island in the South Pacific, and had acquired a reputation as a successful medicine-man among the sailors and beach-combers.
[204]
]‘Take a look at Don Carlos Alvarez here, Ben!’ said Hayston. ‘What d’ye make of it? Any Molokai business about it?’
‘No more than there is about this, Captain!’—pointing to a scar upon his brawny chest, right in the centre of a tattooed mermaid’s bosom, that marine enchantress being represented as smiling seductively upon a shipwrecked mariner. ‘That was a touch I got at the Navigators, when the natives nearly cut us off—a close thing it was, Captain. But it healed up wonderful—and there it is—white enough too. I suppose those cranks at Tahiti would have boxed me up with the other poor devils if I hadn’t taken French leave—in a native canoe. But I gave ’em leg-bail for it, and here I am to-day, as sound as a roach, and as good an A.B. as there is in the fleet.’
‘That will do, Ben, I am satisfied; you have been two years in the Leonora, so your case is proved, at any rate. The fact is, señor, that there was such a scare about the disease when first the native Councils at Honolulu began to legislate, that they went to the other extreme in suspected cases; thinking it better that a few should be wrongfully imprisoned than that infection should run riot over the whole island. To this day, however, medical men are not agreed on the subject of contagion.’
Of course Mrs. Lilburne had been advised by letter from time to time of the possibility of her husband’s release. What such hope and expectation meant to these hardly entreated lovers may be imagined. In her case, she was supported by [205] ]an unshaken faith in the goodness of God. The belief in which she had been reared had for years furnished her with support and consolation, even in a state of exile, loneliness, and comparative poverty. Was it for her to doubt that He would make a way for her to escape from that lamentable position, when it pleased Him to put a period to her misery? If she was wretched, lonely, forsaken, placed by fate among the sick and the dying, was it for her to repine—to despair? Day by day she saw the strong perish before her eyes—the young and fair—the hopeful and the indifferent. The terrible fever of camps and crowds spared neither age nor sex. Who was she, that she should be specially protected? Rather ought she to be thankful that she was in a position to help the helpless, to succour the dying, to cheer the terrified soul, on the verge of ‘the undiscovered country,’ with the vision of a serene and glorified hereafter.