"Five hundred pounds," said the captain.
"I can match you," said Harber.
"Man, but that's fine!" cried the captain. "I've been looking for you—you, you know—just you—for the last two years! And when Pierson told me about you … why, it's luck, I say!"
It was luck for Harber, too. Farringdon, you see, knew precisely where he wanted to go, and he had his schooner, and he knew that part of the world, as we say, like a man knows his own buttons. Harber, then, was to manage the plantation; they were going to set out rubber, both Para and native, and try hemp and maybe coffee while they waited for the Haevia and the Ficus to yield. And Farringdon was ready to put the earnings from his schooner against Harber's wage as manager. The arrangement, you see, was ideal.
Skip seven years with me, please. Consider the plantation affair launched, carried, and consummated. Farringdon and Harber have sold the rubber-trees as they neared bearing, and have sold them well. They're out of that now. In all likelihood, Harber thinks, permanently. For that seven years has seen other projects blossom. Harber, says Farringdon, has "the golden touch." There has been trading in the islands, and a short and fortunate little campaign on the stock-market through Sydney brokers, and there has been, more profitable than anything else, the salvaging of the Brent Interisland Company's steamer Pailula by Farringdon's schooner, in which Harber had purchased a half-interest; so the partners are, on the whole, rather well fixed. Harber might be rated at, perhaps, some forty thousand pounds, not counting his interest in the schooner.
One of Janet Spencer's argosies, then, its cargo laden, is ready to set sail for the hills of home. In short, Harber is now in one of the island ports of call, waiting for the steamer from Fiji. In six weeks he will be in Tawnleytown if all goes well.
It isn't, and yet it is, the same Harber. He's thirty now, lean and bronzed and very fit. He can turn a hundred tricks now where then he could turn one. The tropics have agreed with him. There seems to have been some subtle affinity between them, and he almost wishes that he weren't leaving them. He certainly wouldn't be, if it were not for Janet.
Yes, that slender thread has held him. Through ten years it has kept him faithful. He has eyed askance, ignored, even rebuffed, women. The letters, that still come, have turned the trick, perhaps, or some clinging to a faith that is inherent in him. Or sheer obstinacy? Forgive the cynicism. A little of each, no doubt. And then he hadn't often seen the right sort of women. I say that deliberately, because:
The night before the steamer was due there was a ball—yes, poor island exiles, they called it that!—and Harber, one of some thirty "Europeans" there, went to it, and on the very eve of safety …
The glare and the oily smell of the lanterns, the odour of jasmine, frangipanni, vanilla, and human beings sickeningly mingled in the heat, the jangling, out-of-tune music, the wearisome island gossip and chatter, drove him at length out into the night, down a black-shadowed pathway to the sea. The beach lay before him presently, gleaming like silver in the soft blue radiance of the jewelled night. As he stood there, lost in far memories, the mellow, lemon-coloured lights from the commissioner's residence shone beautifully from the fronded palms and the faint wave of the waltzes of yesteryear became poignant and lovely, and the light trade-wind, clean here from the reek of lamps and clothing and human beings, vaguely tanged with the sea, blew upon him with a light, insistent pressure. Half dreaming, he heard the sharp sputter of a launch—bearing belated comers to the ball, no doubt—but he paid no attention to it. He may have been on the beach an hour before he turned to ascend to the town.