The Ebbing Of The Tide

As the sun mounted higher, and the grey outlines of the shores darkened, he glanced carefully over the sea to the north-west. Nothing in sight there. But as the boat lifted to a sea he saw about five miles to leeward that a big steamer was coming up. In half an hour, unless she changed her course, she would be up to the boat and could not fail to see her.

In five minutes more Cressingham lay in the bottom of the boat unbound, but dying fast, and Challoner was speaking to him.

“Cressingham, you are dying. You know that, don’t you? And you know that I am not lying when I tell you that there is a steamer within five miles of us. In less than half an hour she will be up to us.”

One black, swollen hand was raised feebly, and then fell back, and a hoarse sound came from his throat.

“Well, now listen. I said I wanted to see you die—die as you are dying now—with my face over yours, watching you die. And you die and I live. I can live now, Cressingham, and perhaps the memory of those ten years of death in life that I suffered through you will be easier to bear. And yet there is one thing more that you must know—something that will make it harder for you to meet your Maker, but easier for me.... Listen.” He knelt beside him and almost shrieked it: “I had no one in the whole world to care for me when I was tried for my life but my wife—and you, you fiend, you murderer—you killed her. She died six years ago—starved and died.”

Cressingham, with closed eyes, lay with his head supported on Challoner’s left arm. Presently a tremor shook his frame, a fleck of foam bubbled from between his lips, and then the end.

With cold, merciless eyes the other regarded him, with clenched hands and set teeth. Then he went for’ard and unbent the boat’s kedge, and with the same lashings that had bound the living man to the thwart he lashed the kedge across the dead man’s chest.

He stood up and looked at the approaching steamer, and then he raised the body in his arms and dropped it over the side.

A few days later the papers said that the steamer Maungatapu had picked up a man named Harry, who with Captain Cressingham, of the Belted Will had been blown out to sea from Port –. It appeared from the survivor’s statement that during a heavy squall the same night Captain Cressingham had fallen overboard, and his companion was unable to rescue him.

“THE BEST ASSET IN A FOOL’S ESTATE”

A slight smile lit up the clear-cut, sombre face of Lawson from Safune, as looking up from his boat at Etheridge’s house he saw the glint of many lights shining through the walls of the roughly-built store. It was well on towards midnight when he had left Safune and sailed round to Etheridge’s, a distance of twelve or fifteen miles, and as his boat touched the sand the first streaks of dawn were changing the dead whiteness of the beach into a dull grey—soon to brighten into a creamy yellow as the sun pierced the heavy land-mist.

A native or two, wrapped from head to foot in the long lava lava of white calico, passed him as he followed the windings of the track to Etheridge’s, but gave him no sign of greeting. Had he been any one of the few other white men living on Savaii the dark men would have stopped him and, native-like, inquired the reason of his early visit to their town. But they knew Lawson too well. Matâaitu they called him—devil-faced. And in this they were not far wrong, for Lawson, with his dark olive skin, jet black beard, and eyes that belied the ever-smiling lips, was not a man whom people would be unanimous in trusting.

The natives knew him better than did his few white acquaintances in Samoa, for here, among them, the mask that hid his inner nature from his compeers was sometimes put aside, though never thrown away. But Etheridge, the hot-blooded young Englishman and friend of six months’ standing, thought and spoke of him as “the best fellow in the world.”

Etheridge had been taking stock, and the wearisome work had paled his usually florid features. His face flushed with pleasure at Lawson’s quiet voice:—

“Hard at it, Etheridge? I don’t know which looks the paler—you or Lâlia. Why on earth didn’t you send for me sooner? Any one would think you were some poor devil of a fellow trading for the Dutchmen instead of being an independent man. Now, I’m hungry and want breakfast—that is, if Lâlia isn’t too tired to get it,” and he looked compassionately at Etheridge’s young half-caste wife, sister to his own.

“I’m not tired,” said the girl, quietly. “I’ve had easy tasks—counting packets of fish-hooks, grosses of cotton, and things like that. Billy wouldn’t let me help him with the prints and heavy things,” and with the faintest shadow of a smile on her lips she passed through into the sitting-room and thence outside to the little thatched cook-house a few yards away. With ardent infatuation Etheridge rested his blue eyes on the white-robed, slender figure as she stood at the door and watched the Niuë cook light his fire for an early cup of coffee—the first overture to breakfast at Etheridge’s.

“By Jove, Lawson, I’m the luckiest man in Samoa to get such a wife as Lâlia—and I only a new-chum to the Islands. I believe she’d work night and day if I’d allow it. And if it hadn’t been for you I’d never have met her at all, but would have married some fast creature who’d have gone through me in a month and left me a dead-broken beachcomber.”

“Yes,” said Lawson, “she is a good girl, and, except her sister, about the only half-caste I ever knew whom I would trust implicitly. Their mother was a Hervey Island woman, as I told you, and Lâlia has been with Terere and me all over Polynesia, and I think I know her nature. She’s fond of you, Etheridge, in her quiet, undemonstrative way, but she’s a bit shy yet. You see, you don’t speak either Rarotongan or Samoan, and half-caste wives hate talking English. Now, tell me, what is it worrying you? You haven’t had another attack?”

“Yes,” said the younger man, “I have—and a bad one, too, and that’s why I sent for you. The stocktaking is nothing; but I was afraid I might get another that would stiffen me properly. Look here, Lawson, you’ve been a true friend to me. You picked me up six months ago a drunken, half-maddened beast in Apia and saved my life, reason, and money, and–”

“Bosh!” said Lawson, taking his coffee from the hand of Etheridge’s wife; “don’t think of it, my boy. Every man goes a bit crooked sometimes; so don’t thank me too much.”

Etheridge waited till his wife was gone and then resumed: “I’ve been horribly scared, Lawson, over this,” and he placed his hand over his heart, “I was lifting a case of biscuits when I dropped like a pithed bullock. When I came to, Lâlia was bathing my face.... I feel pretty shaky still. The doctor at Goddeffroy’s warned me, too—said I’d go off suddenly if I wasn’t careful. My father and one brother died like that. And I want to talk things over with you in case, you know.” Lawson nodded.

“Everything I have is for her, Lawson—land, house, trade, and money. You’re pretty sure there’s no irregularity in that will of mine, aren’t you?”

“Sure. It’s very simply written. It’s properly witnessed, and would hold in any court of law if contested. And perhaps your people in Australia might do that.”

Etheridge reddened. “No; I cut adrift from ‘em long ago. Grog, you know. Beyond yourself and Lâlia, I haven’t a soul who’ll bother about me. I think, Lawson, I’ll take a run up to Apia and see the Dutch doctor again. Fearful cur, am I not?”

“Come, Etheridge,” and Lawson laid his smooth, shapely hand—how dishonest are shapely hands!—on the other’s arm. “You’re a little down. Anything wrong with one’s heart always gives a man a bad shaking. There’s Lâlia calling us to breakfast, so I won’t say any more but this: Even if Lâlia wasn’t my wife’s sister, and anything happened to you, there’s always a home for her in my house. I’d do that for your sake alone, old man, putting aside the principle I go on of showing respect to any white man’s wife, even if she were a Oahu girl and had rickety ideas of morality.”

When Lawson had first met him and had carried him down to his station on Savaii, nursed him through his illness, and treated him like a brother, Etheridge, with the impulsive confidence of his simple nature, poured out his thanks and told his history, and eagerly accepted Lawson’s suggestion to try his hand at trading, instead of continuing his erratic wanderings—wanderings which could only end in his “going broke” at Tahiti or Honolulu, Fifteen miles or so away, Lawson said, there was a village with a good opening for a trader. How much could he put into it? Well, he had £500 with him, and there was another thousand in Sydney—the last of five. Ample, said his host. So one day the land was bought, a house and store put up, and Etheridge commenced life as a trader.

The strange tropic beauty of the place and the ways of the people soon cast their spell over Etheridge’s imaginative nature, and he was as happy as a man possibly could be—with a knowledge that his life hung by a thread. How slender that thread was Lawson knew, perhaps, better than he. The German doctor had said, “You must dell him to be gareful, Mr. Lawson. Any excidemend, any zooden drouble mit anydings; or too much visky midout any excidemends, and he drop dead. I dell you.”

A month or so after he had settled, Etheridge paid his weekly visit to Lawson, and met Lâlia.

“This is my wife’s sister,” said Lawson; “she has been on a visit to some friends in Tutuila, and came back in the Iserbrook?”

The clear-cut, refined, and beautiful features of the girl did their work all too quickly on Etheridge. He was not a sensualist, only a man keenly susceptible to female beauty, and this girl was. beautiful—perhaps not so beautiful as her sister, Terere, Lawson’s wife, but with a softer and more tender light in her full, dark eyes. And Lawson smiled to himself when Etheridge asked him to come outside and smoke when his wife and her sister had said good-night. A student of human nature, he had long ago read the simple mind of Etheridge as he would an open book, and knew what was coming. They went outside and talked—that is, Etheridge did. Lawson listened and smoked. Then he put a question to the other man.

“Of course I will, Lawson; do you think I’m scoundrel enough to dream of anything else? We’ll go up to Apia and get married by the white missionary.”

Lawson laughed in his quiet way. “I wouldn’t think you a scoundrel at all, Etheridge. I may as well tell you that I’m not married to her sister. We neglected doing that when I lived in the eastward groups, and no one in Samoa is any the wiser, and wouldn’t think anything of it if they were. But although I’m only a poor devil of a trader, I’m a man of principle in some things. Lâlia is but a child, so to speak, and I’m her natural protector. Now, you’re a fellow of some means, and if anything did happen to you she wouldn’t get a dollar if she wasn’t legally your wife. The consul would claim everything until he heard from your relatives. And she’s very young, Etheridge, and you’ve told me often enough that your heart’s pretty dicky. Don’t think me a brute.”

Etheridge grasped his hand and wrung it. “No, no—a thousand times no. You’re the best-hearted fellow in the world, and I honour you all the more, Lawson. Will you ask her to-morrow?”

Perhaps if he had heard the manner of Lawson’s asking it would have puzzled his simple brain. And the subdued merriment of the two sisters might have caused him to wonder still more.

A week or so after, Etheridge and the two sisters went up to Apia. Lawson was unable to go. Copra was coming in freely, he had said with a smile, and he was too poor to run away from business—even to the wedding of his own wife’s sister.

As Etheridge and his young wife came out of the mission church some natives and white loafers stood around and watched them.

“Ho, Mâgalo,” said one, “is not that teine, the sister of the wife of Matâaitu the black-visaged papalagi?”

“Aye,” answered a skinny old hag, carrying a basket of water-bottles, “‘tis she, and the other is Terere. I lived with them once at Tutuila. She who is now made a wife and looketh so good and holy went away but a year ago with the captain of a ship—a pig of a German—and now, look you, she marrieth an Englishman.”

The other natives laughed, and then an ugly fat-faced girl with lime-covered head and painted cheeks called out “Pâpatetele!” and Terere turned round and cursed them in good English.

“What does that mean?” said a white man to Flash Harry from Saleimoa—a man full of island lore.

“Why, it means as the bride isn’t all as she purfesses to be. Them pretty soft-lookin’ ones like her seldom is, in Samoa or anywhere else.”

The day following the stock-taking Etheridge went to Apia—and never came back.

One night a native tapped gently at Lawson’s window and handed him a note. As he read Terere with a sleepy yawn awoke, and, stretching one rounded arm out at full length, let it fall lazily on the mat-bed.

“What is it, Harry?”

“Get up, d– you! Etheridge is dead, and I’m going to take Lâlia up to Apia as quick as I can. Why the h– couldn’t he die here?”

A rapid vision of unlimited presents from the rich young widow passed through the mind of Terere—to whom the relations that had formerly existed between her and Lawson were well known—as she and he sped along in his boat to Etheridge’s. Lâlia received the news with much equanimity and a few tears, and then leaving Terere in charge, she got into the boat and rolled a cigarette. Lawson was in feverish haste. He was afraid the consul would be down and baulk his rapid but carefully arranged scheme. At Safune he sent his crew of two men ashore to his house for a breaker of water, and then once they were out of sight he pushed off and left them. They were in the way and might spoil everything. The breeze was strong, and that night Lawson and Lâlia, instead of being out in the open sea beating up to Apia, were ashore in the sitting-room of the white missionary house on the other side of Savaii.

“I am indeed glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Lawson. Your honourable impulse deserves commendation. I have always regretted the fact that a man like you whose reputation as an educated and intelligent person far above that of most traders here is not unknown to me”—Lawson smiled sweetly—“should not alone set at defiance the teaching of Holy Writ, but tacitly mock at our efforts to inculcate a higher code of morality in these beautiful islands. Ere long I trust I may make the acquaintance of your brother-in-law, Mr. Etheridge, and his wife.”

Lawson smiled affably, and a slight tinge suffused the creamy cheek of Lâlia.

“And now, Mr. Lawson, as you are so very anxious to get back home I will not delay. Here are my wife and my native assistant as witnesses. Stand up, please.”

“Get in, you little beast,” said Lawson, as he bundled Lâlia into the boat and started back home, “and don’t fall overboard. I don’t want to lose the Best Asset in that Fool’s Estate.”

When the consul, a week later, came down to take possession of Etheridge’s “estate,” he called in at Safune to ask Lawson to come and help him to take an inventory. Terere met him with a languid smile, and, too lazy perhaps to speak English, answered his questions in Samoan.

“He’s married and gone,” she said.

“Married? Aren’t you Mrs. Lawson?” said the bewildered consul, in English.

“Not now, sir; my sister is. Will you take me to Apia in your boat, please?”

And that is how Lawson, the papalagi mativa (poor white) and “the best-hearted fellow in the world,” became a mau aha—a man of riches, and went, with the Best Asset in Etheridge’s estate, the calm-eyed Lâlia, to start a hotel in—well, no matter where.

DESCHARD OF ONEAKA

I

Among the Gilbert Group—that chain of low-lying sandy atolls annexed by the British Government two years ago—there is one island that may be said to be both fertile and beautiful; yet for all this Kuria—for so it is called by the natives of the group generally—has remained almost uninhabited for the past forty years. Together with the lagoon island of Aranuka, from which it is distant about six miles, it belongs to the present King of Apamama, a large and densely populated atoll situated half a degree to the eastward. Thirty years ago, however, the grandfather of the lad who is now the nominal ruler of Apamama had cause to quarrel with the Kurians, and settled the dispute by invading their island and utterly destroying them, root and branch. To-day it is tenanted only by the young king’s slaves.

Of all the many groups and archipelagoes that stud the North and South Pacific from the rocky, jungle-covered Bonins to Juan Fernandez, the islands of the Gilbert Group are—save for this Kuria—the most uninviting and monotonous in appearance. They are for the most part but narrow strips of sandy soil, densely clothed, it is true, with countless thousands of stately cocoanut palms varied with groves of pan-danus and occasional patches of stunted scrub, but flat and unpleasing to the eye. Seldom exceeding two miles in width—although, as is the case at Drummond’s Island, or Taputeouea, they sometimes reach forty in the length of their sweeping curve—but few present a continuous and unbroken stretch of land, for the greater number consist of perhaps two or three score of small islands, divided only by narrow and shallow channels, through which at high water the tide sweeps in from the ocean to the calm waters of the lagoons with amazing velocity. These strips of land, whether broken or continuous, form the eastern or windward boundaries of the lagoons; on the western or lee side lie barrier reefs, between whose jagged coral walls there are, at intervals widely apart, passages sufficiently deep for a thousand-ton ship to pass through in safety, and anchor in the transparent depths of the lagoon within its protecting arms.

Years ago, in the days when the whaleships from Nantucket, and Salem, and Martha’s Vineyard, and New Bedford cruised northward towards the cold seas of Japan and Tchantar Bay, and the smoky glare of their tryworks lit up the ocean at night, the Gilberts were a wild place, and many a murderous scene was enacted on white beach and shady palm grove. Time after time some whaler, lying to in fancied security outside the passage of a lagoon, with half her crew ashore intoxicated with sour toddy, and the other half on board unsuspicious of danger, would be attacked by the ferocious brown people. Swimming off at night-time, with knives held between their teeth, a desperate attempt would be made to cut off the ship. Sometimes the attempt succeeded; and then canoe after canoe would put out from the shore, and the wild people, swarming up the ship’s side, would tramp about her ensanguined decks and into the cabins seeking for plunder and fiery New England rum. Then, after she had been gutted of everything of value to her captors, as the last canoe pushed off, smoke and then flames would arise, and the burning ship would drift away with the westerly current, and the tragedy of her fate, save to the natives of the island, and perhaps some renegade white man who had stirred them to the deed, would never be known.

In those days—long ere the advent of the first missionary to the isolated equatorial atolls of Polynesia and Melanesia—there were many white men scattered throughout the various islands of the Ellice, Gilbert, and Marshall groups. Men, these, with a past that they cared not to speak of to the few strangers they might chance to meet in their savage retreats. Many were escaped convicts from Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales, living, not in dread of their wild native associates, but in secret terror of recapture by a man-of-war and a return to the horrors of that dreadful past. Casting away the garb of civilisation and tying around their loins the airiri or grass girdle of the Gilbert Islanders, they soon became in appearance, manners, language, and thoughts pure natives. For them the outside world meant a life of degradation, possibly a shameful death. And as the years went by and the bitter memories of the black days of old, resonant with the clank of fetters and the warder’s harsh cry, became dulled and faint, so died away that once for-ever-haunting fear of discovery and recapture. In Teaké, the bronzed, half-naked savage chief of Maiana, or Mési, the desperate leader of the natives that cut off the barque Addie Passmore at Marakei, the identity of such men as “Nuggety” Jack West and Macy O’Shea, once of Van Diemen’s Land or Norfolk Island, was lost for ever.

II

On Kuria, the one beautiful island of the Gilberts, there lived four such white men as those I speak of. Whence they came they alone knew. Two of them—a Portuguese deserter from a whaler and a man named Corton—had been some years on the island when they were joined by two others who came over from Apamama in a boat. One was called Tamu (Tom) by the natives, and from the ease with which he spoke the Gilbert Island dialect and his familiarity with native customs, he had plainly lived many years among the natives; the other was a tall, dark-skinned, and morose-looking man of nearly fifty. He was known as Hari to the natives—once, in that outer world from which some crime had dissevered him for ever, he was Henry Deschard.

Although not familiar with either the language or the customs of the ferocious inhabitants of the Gilbert Group, it was soon seen by the ease with which he acquired both that Hari had spent long years roaming about the islands of the Pacific. In colour he was darker than the Kurians themselves; in his love of the bloodshed and slaughter that so often ran riot in native quarrels he surpassed even the fiercest native; and as he eagerly espoused the cause of any Kurian chief who sought his aid he rapidly became a man of note on the island, and dreaded by the natives elsewhere in the group.

There were then over a thousand people living on Kuria—or rather, on Kuria and Oneaka, for the island is divided by one of those narrow channels before mentioned; and at Oneaka Tamu and Deschard lived, while the Portuguese and the man Corton had long held joint sway with the native chief of Kuria.

During the time the four renegades had lived on the island two vessels that had touched there had had narrow escapes from seizure by the natives. The first of these, a small Hawaiian whaling brig, was attacked when she was lying becalmed between Kuria and Aranuka. A breeze springing up, she escaped after the loss of a boat’s, crew, who were entrapped on the latter island. In this affair Deschard and Tamu had taken part; in the next—an attempt to capture a sandalwooding barque bound to China—he was leader, with Corton as his associate. The sandalwooder, however, carried a large and well-armed crew, and the treacherous surprise so elaborately planned came to ignominious failure. Deschard accused his fellow-beachcomber of cowardice at a critical moment. The two men became bitter enemies, and for years never spoke to each other.

III

But one afternoon a sail was sighted standing in for the island, and in their hateful bond of villainy the two men became reconciled, and agreed with Pedro and Tamu and some hundreds of natives to try to decoy the vessel to an anchor and cut her off. The beachcombers, who were tired of living on Kuria, were anxious to get away; the natives desired the plunder to be obtained from the prize. A compact was then made that the ship, after the natives had done with her, was not to be burnt, but was to be handed over to the white men, who were to lead the enterprise.

Sailing slowly along till she came within a mile of the reef, the vessel hove to and lowered a boat. She was a large brigantine, and the murderous beings who watched her from the shore saw with cruel pleasure that she did not appear to carry a large crew.

It had been agreed upon that Corton, who had special aptitude for such work, should meet the boat and endeavour to lure the crew into the interior, under the promise of giving them a quantity of fresh-water fish from the artificial ponds belonging to the chief, while Deschard and the other two, with their body of native allies, should remain at the village on Oneaka, and at the proper moment attack the ship.