“About everything, I fancy,” Davidson answers gruffly. “It hasn’t been touched in ten years.”
“Ten years!” I said. “He’s no business having a piano if he cares no more for it than that.”
“He cared too much for it, perhaps,” Davidson said in a peculiar tone. He took out his pipe and fussed with it, then he went on. “Perhaps I ought to tell you. He hasn’t touched the piano since the night his wife drowned herself. . . . I was there at the time. Cartwright and Charlotte had been singing together.”
“Was Charlotte his wife?”
“His cousin, Sir John Brooke’s daughter. Sir John is my chief, you know. They are expected back from England almost any day now.”
Davidson’s face had gone quite red at the mention of the girl’s name, and all at once I guessed why he had been so keen about having his piano in shape. I wondered if it was for this Charlotte’s sake that Cartwright, too, was preparing.
“Cartwright’s wife was the daughter of old Miakela, the native chief,” was the surprising information Davidson offered me next. “She had been educated at a convent in Manila, and she was very beautiful in a cold, foreign way. I think, though, it was her voice that first attracted Cartwright. It was perfect; it made other quite nice voices sound coarse and shrill. Cartwright had come out to Taku to visit his uncle, and he met the girl here the evening she came back from Manila. The next day he married her—rode over the mountains to ask her father’s permission. That old savage—fancy! There was a huge row with Sir John, and Cartwright took the girl and went to live on a little atoll about forty miles from here. . . . Miss Charlotte hadn’t come out from school in England then. She came back the next year. . . That’s how it happened.”
As a matter of fact he really hadn’t told me how it happened at all, but he began to talk of other things, and after a bit I said good-night, and went back to tell Molly about my new job.
I wish you could have seen the lagoon the next morning when I went down to meet Cartwright. The old coral wharf was flushed with pink that shaded into mauve below the water, and the mauve went amethyst, and then violet blue out where the Silvershell slept at her anchor in the middle of the lagoon. And still! Not a ripple anywhere until a high-prowed native canoe slipped out from a pool of shadow under the palms along the shore, cutting through the glassy water like a boat in a dream. As she neared the wharf the sun jumped up from the sea, and Cartwright, all in white, stood up in the stern and shaded his eyes with his hand. He was a picture, his haunted beauty above the bronzed backs of the rowers.
He apologized for bringing me out so early, then seemed to forget all about me and sat silent, his eyes on the horizon line. Not that I minded. I wanted to be let alone, so I could look about me as we slipped along over a sea that seemed to have no end.