Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas Part 7

"That must go no farther than you and me," said Hadow.

"It shall not, sir," returned the first lieutenant.

"We shall sail to-night at the turn of the tide," said the captain.

"Very good, sir," said Mr. Francis.

It was not nine months--it was fifteen, and some days to spare--before the _Dauntless_ again raised the peak of Borabora and backed her mainyard off the settlement. In the course of that eventful year and a quarter she had zigzagged the whole chart of the eastern Pacific; and from French Frigate Shoals to Pitcairn, from Diamond Head to Little Rapa, she had sounded and plotted reefs innumerable, and had covered, with a searching persistency, vast areas of blue water dotted with e.

d.'s and p. d.'s.[1] She had twice taken the ground, once so hard and fast that she had shifted her guns and lightered a hundred tons of stores among the gulls and mews of a half-sunken reef; she had had an affair with the unruly natives of the Walker Group, and had blown a village to fragments, and not a few of the Walkers themselves into a land as uncharted as their own; she had tried a beach-comber for murder, and had dangled him at the main yardarm, giving him later on a Church of England service, a hammock, and the use of a cannon ball at his feet; she had poked her nose into cannibal bays, where women of wild beauty and wilder license swam off to the ship in hundreds until the marines drove them back with muskets, and fired at their own comrades, who in their madness leaped into the water and were floated ash.o.r.e in the arms of naked girls; she had lain for weeks in enormous atolls, where the only life was that of birds, and the silence was unbroken save for the long roll of the surf, and at night the ghostly scurrying of turtles over the sand; she had been everywhere in those labyrinthine seas, those haunts of romance and mystery, with love, danger, and death always close aboard.

It was morning when Hadow raised the island, a fleecy speck of cloud against the sky line, and he shortened sail at once and lingered out the day so as to bring him up to it by dark. After supper every light on board was doused, and the great hull, gliding through the gla.s.s-smooth water, merged her steep sides and towering yards and canvas into the universal shadow. With whispering keel and a wind so fair and soft that one wondered to see the sails stiffen in the bolt ropes, the man-of-war stole steadily to leeward, with no sound but the occasional creak of cordage, or the hoa.r.s.e murmur of voices from the lower deck. Hadow himself, pacing the quarter-deck in his boat cloak, was lost in reverie, while the wardroom and the steerage in unredeemed darkness held nothing but dozing men.

By ten the ship was hove to close ash.o.r.e, and the lights of the little settlement glimmered through the palms. The warm night, laden with exotic fragrance and strangely exciting in the intensity of its stillness and beauty, hid beneath its far-reaching pall the various actors of an extraordinary drama. With pistols buckled to their hips, Brady, Winterslea, Hotham, and Stanbury-Jones, four officers of the ship, together with Hatch, a flinty-faced old seaman who could be trusted, all slipped down the ladder into the captain's gig and pulled with m.u.f.fled oars for the break in the reef. Picking their way through the pa.s.s, with the surf on either hand roaring in their ears, they slowly penetrated the lagoon and headed for the king's house. The shelving beach brought them to a stop, and all jumping out to lighten the boat, they drew her over the shingle and made her painter fast to a _panda.n.u.s_ tree. Then, acting in accordance with a preconcerted plan, Winterslea was sent forward to track down their prey, while the rest huddled together to await his return.

Ten minutes, twenty minutes pa.s.sed in palpitating suspense. A girl drew by wreathed in flowers; she looked out to sea, then up at the stars, and shrank again into the shadow. From the neighboring houses there came the sound of mellow voices and of laughter. A pig rooted and rustled among a heap of cocoanut sh.e.l.ls. Half an hour pa.s.sed, and from far across the water, as faint and silvery as some elfin signal, the ship sent her message of the time: six bells.

Panting and crouching, Winterslea groped his way among them.

"Come," he said.

They followed him in silence, unloosing their holsters and grimly ready.

A pair of handcuffs clinked in Hatch's jumper. They inhaled the deep breath of tried and resolute men inured to danger, and accustomed to give and to receive an unflinching loyalty.

Winterslea, with keen perception, led the way like a bloodhound, skirting lighted houses and following devious inland paths. The comparative openness of the village began to give way to the ranker undergrowth of the plantations behind it. The path sank into a choking vegetation that stood on either side and brushed their faces as they followed in single file. A fallen tree gave them the pa.s.sage of a stream.

"There!" said Winterslea.

The path opened out on a little clearing among the trees, and showed them, set on high, the out-lines of a native house. Like all Tahitian houses, it was on the model of a bird cage, and the oval wall of bamboos, set side by side, let through vertical streaks of light from the lamp or fire within. As the whole party drew nearer, they heard, deep below them on the other side, the pleasant sound of falling water, and realized the cliff they were mounting overlooked a little river at its foot. Here, in exquisite seclusion, Jack Garrard had chosen the spot for his moral suicide.

Creeping up to the house and looking through the cracks of the bamboos, his comrades had view of him within. Dressed like a native in _tapa_ cloth, with bare chest, and flowers in his tawny hair, the handsome boy was seated in a hammock. With her head against his knee, a beautiful girl was looking up into his face, one hand locked in his. In that land of pretty women she was the one that outshone them all--Tehea, the sister of the king, for whose sweet favor every man on board had sought in vain. And here she was, with her long hair loosened and her eyes swimming with love, looking up at the lad who had given name and honor to win her heart. The pair were hardly more than children; and Brady, a sentimentalist of forty, with red hair, sighed as he peeped through the eaves and thought of his own dear girl at home.

Garrard laid down the pipe he had been smoking, and, in happy unconsciousness of any audience but the woman at his feet, began to sing. His voice had always been his greatest charm, and the means of gaining him the friendship of men much older than himself. It had won Hadow; it had won Francis. There was not a blue-jacket on board the _Dauntless_ but whose eyes had moistened under the spell of Jack's clear tenor. No one could render with such delicacy, purity, and sentiment those ballads, now so old-fashioned, that used to solace our seafaring fathers in the fifties.

Jack lay back in the hammock, and with wonderful tenderness and feeling sang "Afton Water," repeating the last verse several times over. It was plain that something in it, some phrase or line, had deeply moved him, for he suddenly bent over and laid his face in his hands, shaking with a strange emotion. Tehea rose, and throwing her arms round his neck and forcing away his hands, pressed her lips to his wet eyes. Even as she did so Brady gave the signal for the whole party to move round to the entrance. He pa.s.sed through first, the others close behind him. Jack leaped to his feet, white and speechless, his wide-open eyes those of an animal at bay. Brady, Winterslea, Stanbury-Jones, Hotham, Hatch, the familiar faces, daunted him like the sight of ghosts. Friends no longer, they were now avengers, with the right to track him down and kill him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Jack leaped to his feet, white and speechless."]

"Jack!" cried Brady in a stifled voice.

The lad took a step back. The girl moaned, and tried to run between Hatch and Stanbury-Jones. The old seaman caught and shook her like a dog, tearing away the whistle she put to her lips and dashing it on the floor. Jack put up his hand and s.n.a.t.c.hed a pistol hidden in the thatch of the roof. Brady, on the instant, leveled his own and thundered out:

"Drop it, or I'll shoot!"

"Shoot, and be d.a.m.ned!" returned Jack, and with that he turned his pistol on himself, and, placing the muzzle against his forehead, pulled the trigger.

It missed fire.

Before he could try again Brady had caught him round the neck, while Hatch, resigning the girl to Stanbury-Jones, ran in and snapped the handcuffs on his wrists.

"Jack," cried Brady, "we aren't going to hurt you. We're rescuing you from the hill tribes. Man, you're saved!"

"You never was no deserter," said Hatch.

"Mind you back us up, old fellow," said Winterslea.

"Give us your fin, boy," said Hotham.

It was some time before Jack could pull himself together. When at last he did so, and began to appreciate the generosity of his captain and shipmates and their astounding concern to save him from the penalty of his crime, he underwent one of those reactions when despair gives way to the maddest gayety. He swore at Hatch, and made him take off the irons; he got out a bottle of white rum and forced them all to drink his health; he kept them in a roar with the story of his adventures, and laughed and cried in turn as he described his life ash.o.r.e.

"What does she want?" demanded Brady, as Tehea insistently repeated some words in native.

"She says," said Jack, calmly picking up the whistle from the floor and touching it to his lips, "she says I've only to blow this and you will all be dead in five minutes."

A hush fell upon the company.

Jack, with an oath, flung the whistle from him.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I am grateful. I am d.a.m.ned grateful! If I live I shall try and repay each one of you. I shall try and be a better man. I shall try to be worthy of your kindness."

He went round and shook hands solemnly with every one of them. "d.a.m.ned grateful!" he repeated.

"Let's be off," said Brady.

"Now, lad, your word of honor," said Winterslea. Jack looked about him helplessly.

"I suppose I've no right to ask such a thing," he said. "I know how good you've been to me already, and all that. But--but, gentlemen, she's my wife. I love her. I shall never see her again. May I not entreat a minute to myself?"

"No," said Brady.

Jack went over to Tehea and took her hand. He put his arms about her, and, unashamed before them all, pressed her comely head against his breast. He tried to explain the inexorable fate he was so powerless to resist; in incoherent whispers he told her he would break his chains and return to her, free in the years to come to devote his life to the woman he loved. He called her the dearest names, and begged her not to forget him. But she, with a perception greater than his own, swept away these despairing protestations with disdain. The daughter of one king, the sister of another, could she not meet force by force? These fierce intruders, with their rough voices and drawn pistols, who were they, to threaten a princess of the royal blood and carry away her lover before her eyes? If they were strong, she was stronger; and what ship cannon, she asked, however murderous or far-ranging, could penetrate those mountain recesses whither she would carry him before the morning? Ah, she said, it was for him to choose between her and them; between Britain and the island; between love and the service of the white Queen beyond the seas.

"I have chosen," he said.

Her eyes flashed as she freed herself from his arms.

"I am hateful in my own sight for having loved you," she said.

"Will you not even wish me well, Tehea?" he asked.

"No," she cried, "I hope you will die!" He turned away.

"_Siati!_" she cried after him in agony.

He turned back to her, downcast and silent.

"Remember," she said with sweet relenting, "that wherever thou goest, however many the years that may divide us, however wide the waters or the land, I shall be here waiting for thee, here in this house of our happiness; and if I die before thou comest here thou wilt find my grave."

"Tehea," he said, "as G.o.d sees me, some day I shall return!"