Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas Part 26

I guess there was nothing Doc couldn't do if he tried, though why accordion was more than I could answer. But it wasn't loafing that kept him stuffed in a hot shed all day, wheezing polkas out of the hurdy-gurdy, but a real good idea of improving on the handcart. What if he didn't make a whole band out of himself, with a harness holding a comb across his mouth, and a ba.s.s drum for him to kick with one foot and a tambourine to frisk with the other. My, when he started off with "The Stars and Stripes Forever" you might have thought he was six, with a drum major prancing along in front! He give a demonstration that night in the Tivoli Hotel, and drew the town; and when he come home it was with a pocketful of silver and a couple of dates for a wedding and the Kaiser's birthday.

After that Doc became an inst.i.tution, with a pretty Kanaka girl to carry the drum and pa.s.s round the saucer; and every night when he hadn't a special engagement he would make the round of the bars, picking up what little he could. If there was a ship to be sold at auction, or a public meeting to protest against a high-handed something, it got to be the fashion to plaster the notice of it on Doc's back, him playing under a tree for all he was worth with the sweat pouring down his face, while all hands turned out to see what was the rumpus. He made money hand over fist, and would have paid for his keep only I wouldn't have it. We had grown to be sort of friends, him and me, from both having so much to bear--for he was too proud and highly educated a man to like making a monkey of himself, and it ground into him hard, and with me it was Rosie, Rosie, Rosie.

Oh, G.o.d, what things I had to put up with! What endless mortifications!

What everlasting, heartbreaking scenes and scandals! She got to following me to Council meetings, bellowing like a wildcat, and clawing the policeman who was ordered to put her out; and again and again I had to leave in the middle to try and get her home, half the beach tagging along with us, laughing and jeering till I could have died of shame.

The day I resigned from the Council, being unable to stand it any longer, I was sitting in the front room, with my head in my hands, when Doc came in, and patted me on the back.

"Too bad," he says, "too bad."

"Oh, Doc," I says, "I'm the most miserable chap alive."

"It's bound to end some time," he remarked.

I shook my head. We had no means of taking care of lunatics, and that was about what Rosie was. The Colonies all had laws, barring out undesirables and such, even if a steamer would have taken her, which none of them would. "I'll tell you what I'd do," said Doc. "I'd give five hundred dollars to a labor-ship captain, put her aboard at night, and leave it to him to land her in one of those islands where they eat you for dinner."

"I couldn't do that," I said.

"Too fond of your money, eh?" he sneers.

"Oh, Doc," I answered, "I'd give everything I possess, lock, stock and barrel--and ten years of my life thrown in--to be decently quit of her."

He smiled a bit incredulous. "Suppose an angel came down from heaven and took you at your word," he says. "The next day you'd be beating Mr.

Angel out of his price--you know you would, and screaming worse than she does at being held to your bargain."

"Perhaps I would, Doc," I agreed, his manner of speaking somehow making it feel very real; "it's hard to begin without a dollar and nothing but the clothes you stand in. But downstairs in my safe I have two thousand dollars in hard cash, American money, which the angel could take and welcome."

"That's a lot of money," he says, wondering like, "but it would be worth it to you, wouldn't it?"

"My G.o.d, yes," I says, rather regretting I told him about the safe, for there was a shine in his eyes and a calculating look I didn't like.

"And you wouldn't bilk the angel when he handed in his bill?" he went on.

"Oh, h.e.l.l, Doc," I said, "what's the use of talking of angels? I've just got to grin and bear it."

"But you'd pay, wouldn't you?" he persisted.

I said yes, just to stop his pestering; and after a couple of drinks off of the sideboard he went away. That evening I locked myself in the store, took the money out of the safe, and carried it up to the attic where I hid it under an old mattress. I smeared a little varnish around the combination lock with a rag, and next day I looked for finger marks, but there weren't none. Yet I was still suspicious, and the money stayed in the attic. Doc was too bright a man to have left home without a reason.

Things went on as usual for a long time--business middling, Doc rounding up the bars, Rosie raising Cain occasionally, or snarling and muttering in the hammock just as the humor took her. It was the d.a.m.nedest life for a man to lead, just pigging it and worse every day, with no order and anything--a can of meat for lunch, a can of meat for dinner, and the table left slovenly like it was. Then she fell kind of sick, and though I felt sorry to see her doubled up and groaning, it had a good side to it, for I got a Chinaman in to cook at forty dollars a month, and he straightened things out fine and cleaned up the dirt of ages. I called in Doctor Funk, the regular physician, and for a time Rosie improved, getting well enough to nearly bite the cook's finger off when he tried to stop her giving away a consignment of hams. But after a while she took sick again, the cramps coming back worse than ever, and I let Doc do what he could for her, which wasn't much, though better than Funk, whose stuff didn't seem any more good and had lost its effect.

Finally, early one morning, she was taken most awful bad, vomiting blood, and twisting and twitching in a way horrible to see, she being so mountainous fat, and gibbering crazily in the Gilbert language--all about me and little Benny, and devils snapping at her toes, and a giant squid what was dragging her down to drown. Then of a sudden she grew very quiet, and Doc, looking close to her face, said, "Good G.o.d, she is dead!" Yes, dead, just as Doctor Funk hurried in, glaring to see Doc there, and saying something out loud about G.o.d d.a.m.n quacks, and looking and smelling savagely at the different bottles. Doc slunk out of sight, and then Funk, he calmed down, and spoke to me very sympathetic and kind as to what I was to do, and how, after all, it was a merciful release.

I buried her the same day, that being the rule in the tropics, and the better part of the town followed her to the grave in the foreign cemetery, that being a kind of rule or custom, too, in Apia, as well as everybody getting tight afterwards at the Tivoli bar.

It was a strange feeling to come back to the house and to know that Rosie was gone out of it forever, and that I had pa.s.sed another big landmark in my life. For all it was such a release, I was bluer than blue, yet I won't deny I was glad, too, but in a frightened kind of way, and half wishing again and again that she was back. Her running on about Benny and me before she died stuck in my throat, and seemed awful pitiful; and I remembered how pretty she once had been, and always such a good, true wife, and how me and the little store was all the world to her before sorrow broke her heart.

I went upstairs, and sat looking out on the bay, thinking it all over, and how in time death comes to every one of us, high or low; thinking, too, that I was a free man now--a prosperous, respected, looked-up-to man, and an ex-Councillor with a home that many a woman would consider well worth sharing. I wondered if Miss Nelson up at the Mission would consider a man as unrefined as I was and thirty-seven years old, she so sweet and young and with such gentle, winning ways. She was a governess to their children, and that made me think she would, for no woman likes to be a dependent and at the beck and call of another. I sat there dreaming of her, and of the place nicely fixed up, and of us driving out of a Sunday to Vailele in a smart little buggy, with me reelected to the Council, and people saying: "How d'ye do, won't you drop in a moment"--to me and Miss Nelson, married.

If this sounds wrong, remember Rosie had been no wife to me for three years--only a torment and a disgrace--and I deserved some credit for having stood it like I did. I had never dared have such thoughts before, though I'd often remarked what a pretty creature Miss Nelson was, just like a man does without anything further in his head. Yet looking back on it, and the few times she had been in the store when we had spoken together, I kind of felt she liked me, and she had certainly never been in any hurry to leave; with this much to go on, and the fact that she always smiled at me most winsome the few times we pa.s.sed each other on the street, I couldn't help thinking I had made a start without my knowing it, and that if I followed it up hard this dream of her and me might be made to come true.

I was turning this over in my mind when a squall of rain came tearing along, the sky all black with it, and the roof hammering like a boiler factory. In Samoa you needn't look out of the window to see if it is raining. It comes down deafening, and the iron roars with the weight and smash of it. This was how I didn't notice Doc till he stood right there beside me. There was something awful strange and grave about him, and I give a little jump I was that taken by surprise.

He lit a cigar, and waited very impatient for the squall to pa.s.s; and as he went to the window and beat a little tattoo on it with his finger nail, I noticed he was all dressed up like I'd never seen him before.

Then he came back, looking at me very steadfast, and says: "Well, Ben, you're out of the woods at last."

"Yes, thank the Lord!" says I.

"Same here," he says, meaning himself. "When the mail comes in to-night, I'm off to San Francisco."

"Why, Doc!" I cried out, utterly flabbergasted.

"Yes," he says, "and for all I care, the whole d.a.m.ned island may sink in the sea, and stay there, with nothing but coconuts and my old accordion to mark the place and maybe one of the wheels of that b.l.o.o.d.y handcart."

I was still knocked silly.

"But, Doc," I says, "you can't have enough to pay your pa.s.sage."

Then he laughs.

"A hundred and seventy-five ain't much out of two thousand," he says.

"Two thousand?" I says, more mystified than ever.

"Yes," he answers, facing me square. "The two thousand that you owe me, Mr. Ben."

I was just going to answer I didn't owe him nothing when the words stopped midway on my tongue. I began to tremble instead--tremble till my hands could hardly hold to my chair, till I couldn't keep my mouth from dribbling.

"It's a debt of honor," he went on. "You can repudiate it if you want to, and snap your fingers in my face, but I trusted you, I got you out of your mess, and now I ask you for my money."

I couldn't answer anything, but looked at him speechless while he goes to the door, peeks outside of it very careful lest any one might be listening, and then comes tiptoeing back. It was so plain what he meant to tell me that I managed to cry out, "No, no," and shook worse nor ever.

"You're a straight man, Ben," he says. "What you owe, you pay. I wouldn't have risked it if I had had any doubt about that."

I stumbled to the sideboard, poured myself out a big drink, never minding what I spilled, and then went up to the attic where the bag of money was still lying under the old mattress. I brought it down and give it to him, only asking him not to count it as that was more than I could bear.

He made a grab for it, never saying a word, and as he went out of the doorway that was the last I ever saw of him.

Was I a fool to have paid him? Was it all a bluff, and just his h.e.l.lish ingeniousness for turning everything to account? Funk never questioned she had died a natural death. Yet true or untrue, paying Doc that two thousand dollars made me a murderer. In the bottom of my heart I believe he did it, and there are nights when I wake up in a sweat of horror. But wouldn't it have been a dirty act to bilk him of his money, all the more as it would have been so easy? To this day I don't know whether I ought to have paid or not, though if I hadn't it would have lightened my conscience of a frightful load. But when I think that I always see him closing the door and tiptoeing back, ready to whisper the truth.

If it was the truth.

Well, what would you have done?

THE END