A WOMAN SCORNED
It was Inchi who brought the news of Paddy's return. Three days after
Koyala's departure the little Dyak lad burst breathlessly upon a
colloquy between Peter Gross and Captain Carver and announced excitedly:
"Him, Djath boy, him, _orang blanda_ Djath boy, him come."
"What the devil is he driving at?" Carver growled. The circumlocution of
the south-sea islander was a perennial mystery to him.
"Paddy is coming," Peter Gross cried. "Now get your breath, Inchi, and
tell us where he is."
His scant vocabulary exhausted, Inchi broke into a torrent of Dyak. By
requiring the lad to repeat several times, Peter Gross finally
understood his message.
"Paddy, Koyala, and some of Koyala's Dyaks are coming along the mountain
trail," he announced. "They will be here in an hour. She sent a runner
ahead to let us know, but the runner twisted an ankle. Inchi found him
and got the message."
There was a wild cheer as Paddy, dusty and matted with perspiration,
several Dyaks, and Koyala emerged from the banyan-grove and crossed the
plain. Discipline was forgotten as the entire command crowded around
the lad.
"I shot two Chinamans for you," Vander Esse announced. "An' now daat vas
all unnecessary."
"Ye can't keep a rid-head bottled up," Larry Malone, another member of
the company, shouted exultingly.
"Aye ban tank we joost get it nice quiet van you come back again,"
Anderson remarked in mock melancholy. The others hooted him down.
Koyala stood apart from the crowd with her Dyaks and looked on. Glancing
upward, Peter Gross noticed her, noticed, too, the childishly wistful
look upon her face. He instantly guessed the reason--she felt herself
apart from these people of his, unable to share their intimacy. Remorse
smote him. She, to whom all their success was due, and who now rendered
this crowning service, deserved better treatment. He hastened toward
her.
"Koyala," he said, his voice vibrant with the gratitude he felt, "how
can we repay you?"
Koyala made a weary gesture of dissent.
"Let us not speak of that now, _mynheer_," she said.
"But come to my home," he said. "We must have luncheon together--you and
Captain Carver and Paddy and I." With a quick afterthought he added: "I
will invite Mynheer Muller also."
The momentary gleam of pleasure that had lit Koyala's face at the
invitation died at the mention of Muller's name.
"I am sorry," she said, but there was no regret in her voice. "I must
go back to my people, to Djath's temple and the priests. It is a long
journey; I must start at once."
"You cannot leave us now!" Peter Gross exclaimed in consternation.
"For the present I must," she said resignedly. "Perhaps when the moon is
once more in the full, I shall come back to see what you have done."
"But we cannot do without you!"
"Is a woman so necessary?" she asked, and smiled sadly.
"You are necessary to Bulungan's peace," Peter Gross affirmed. "Without
you we can have no peace."
"If you need me, send one of my people," she said. "I will leave him
here with you. He will know where to find me."
"But that may be too late," Peter Gross objected. His tone became very
grave. "The crisis is almost upon us," he declared. "Ah Sing will make
the supreme test soon--how soon I cannot say--but I do not think he will
let very many days pass by. He is not accustomed to being thwarted. I
shall need you here at my right hand to advise me."
Koyala looked at him searchingly. The earnestness of his plea, the
troubled look in his straight-forward, gray eyes fixed so pleadingly
upon her, seemed to impress her.
"There is a little arbor in the banyan-grove yonder where we can talk
undisturbed," she said in a voice of quiet authority. "Come with me."
"We can use my office," Peter Gross offered, but Koyala shook her head.
"I must be on my journey. I will see you in the grove."
Peter Gross walked beside her. He found difficulty in keeping the pace
she set; she glided along like a winged thing. Koyala led him directly
to the clearing and reclined with a sigh of utter weariness in the shade
of a stunted nipa palm.
"It has been a long journey," she said with a wan smile. "I am very
tired."
"Forgive me," Peter Gross exclaimed in contrition. "I should not have
let you go. You must come back with me to the residency and rest until
to-morrow."
"A half-hour's rest will be all I need," Koyala replied.
"But this is no place for you," Peter Gross expostulated.
"The jungle is my home," Koyala said with simple pride. "The Argus
Pheasant nests in the thickets."
"Surely not at night?"
"What is there to harm me?" Koyala smiled wearily at his alarm.
"But the wild beasts, the tigers, and the leopards, and the orang-utans
in the hill districts, and the snakes?"
"They are all my friends. When the tiger calls, I answer. If he is
hungry, I keep away. I know all the sounds of the jungle; my
grandfather, Chawatangi, taught them to me. I know the warning hiss of
the snake as he glides through the grasses, I know the timid hoofbeat of
the antelope, I know the stealthy rustle of the wild hogs. They and the
jackals are the only animals I cannot trust."
"But where do you sleep?"
"If the night is dark and there is no moon, I cut a bundle of bamboo
canes. I bind these with creepers to make a platform and hang it in a
tree. Then I swing between heaven and earth as securely or more
securely, than you do in your house, for I am safe from the malice of
men. If it rains I make a shelter of palm-leaves on a bamboo frame.
These things one learns quickly in the forest."
"You wonderful woman!" Peter Gross breathed in admiration.
Koyala smiled. She lay stretched out her full length on the ground.
Peter Gross squatted beside her.
"You haven't told me where you found Paddy?" he remarked after a pause.
"Oh, that was easy," she said. "Ah Sing has a station a little way this
side of the Sadong country--"
Peter Gross nodded.
"I knew that he would go there. So I followed. When I got there Ah Sing
was loading his proa with stores. I learned that your boy was a prisoner
in one of the houses of his people. I went to Ah Sing and begged his
life. I told him he was sacred to Djath, that the Dyaks of Bulungan
thought him very holy indeed. Ah Sing was very angry. He stormed about
the loss of his proa and refused to listen to me. He said he would hold
the boy as a hostage.
"That night I went to the hut and found one of my people on guard. He
let me in. I cut the cords that bound the boy, dyed his face brown and
gave him a woman's dress. I told him to wait for me in the forest until
he heard my cry. The guard thought it was me when he left."
Her voice drooped pathetically.
"They brought me to Ah Sing. He was very angry, he would have killed me,
I think, if he had dared. He struck me--see, here is the mark." She drew
back the sleeve of her kabaya and revealed a cut in the skin with blue
bruises about it. Peter Gross became very white and his teeth closed
together tightly.
"That is all," she concluded.
There was a long silence. Koyala covertly studied the resident's
profile, so boyish, yet so masterfully stern, as he gazed into the
forest depths. She could guess his thoughts, and she half-smiled.
"When you left, I promised you that you should have a reward--anything
that you might name and in my power as resident to give," Peter Gross
said presently.
"Let us not speak of that--yet," Koyala dissented. "Tell me, Mynheer
Gross, do you love my country?"
"It is a wonderfully beautiful country," Peter Gross replied
enthusiastically, falling in with her mood. "A country of infinite
possibilities. We can make it the garden spot of the world. Never have I
seen such fertile soil as there is in the river bottom below us. All it
needs is time and labor--and men with vision."
Koyala rose to a sitting posture and leaned on one hand. With deft
motion of the other she made an ineffectual effort to cover her
nut-brown limbs, cuddled among the ferns and grasses, with the shortened
kabaya. Very nymphlike she looked, a Diana of the jungle, and it was
small wonder that Peter Gross, the indifferent to woman, gave her his
serious attention while she glanced pensively down the forest aisles.
"Men with vision!" she sighed presently. "That is what we have always
needed. That is what we have always lacked. My unhappy people! Ignorant,
and none to teach them, none to guide them into the better way. Leaders
have come, have stayed a little while, and then they have gone again.
Brooke helped us in Sarawak--now only his memory is left." A pause. "I
suppose you will be going back to Java soon again, _mynheer_?"
"Not until my work is completed," Peter Gross assured gravely.
"But that will be soon. You will crush your enemies. You will organize
the districts and lighten our burdens for a while. Then you will go. A
new resident will come. Things will slip back into the old rut. Our
young men are hot-headed, there will be feuds, wars, piracy. There are
turns in the wheel, but no progress for us, _mynheer_. Borneo!" Her
voice broke with a sob, and she stole a covert glance at him.
"By heaven, I swear that will not happen, Koyala," Peter Gross asserted
vehemently. "I shall not go away, I shall stay here. The governor owes
me some reward, the least he can give me is to let me finish the work I
have begun. I shall dedicate my life to Bulungan--we, Koyala, shall
redeem her, we two."
Koyala shook her head. Her big, sorrowful eyes gleamed on him for a
moment through tears.
"So you speak to-day when you are full of enthusiasm, _mynheer_. But
when one or two years have passed, and you hear naught but the unending
tales of tribal jealousies, and quarrels over buffaloes, and complaints
about the tax, and falsehood upon falsehood, then your ambition will
fade and you will seek a place to rest, far from Borneo."
The gentle sadness of her tear-dimmed eyes, the melancholy cadences of
her voice sighing tribulation like an October wind among the maples, and
her eloquent beauty, set Peter Gross's pulses on fire.
"Koyala," he cried, "do you think I could give up a cause like
this--forget the work we have done together--to spend my days on a
plantation in Java like a buffalo in his wallow?"
"You would soon forget Borneo in Java, _mynheer_--and me."
The sweet melancholy of her plaintive smile drove Peter Gross to
madness.
"Forget you? You, Koyala? My right hand, my savior, savior thrice over,
to whom I owe every success I have had, without whom I would have failed
utterly, died miserably in Wobanguli's hall? You wonderful woman! You
lovely, adorable woman!"
Snatching her hands in his, he stared at her with a fierce hunger that
was half passion, half gratitude.
A gleam of savage exultation flashed in Koyala's eyes. The resident was
hers. The fierce, insatiate craving for this moment, that had filled her
heart ever since she first saw Peter Gross until it tainted every drop
of blood, now raced through her veins like vitriol. She lowered her lids
lest he read her eyes, and bit her tongue to choke utterance. Still his
grasp on her hands did not relax. At last she asked in a low voice, that
sounded strange and harsh even to her:
"Why do you hold me, _mynheer_?"
The madness of the moment was still on Peter. He opened his lips to
speak words that flowed to them without conscious thought, phrases as
utterly foreign to his vocabulary as metaphysics to a Hottentot. Then
reason resumed her throne. Breathing heavily, he released her.
"Forgive me, Koyala," he said humbly.
A chill of disappointment, like an arctic wave, submerged Koyala. She
felt the sensation of having what was dearest in life suddenly snatched
from her. Her stupefaction lasted but an instant. Then the fury that
goads a woman scorned possessed her and lashed on the blood-hounds of
vengeance.
"Forgive you?" she spat venomously. "Forgive you for what? The words you
did not say, just now, _orang blanda_, when you held these two hands?"
Peter Gross had risen quickly and she also sprang to her feet. Her face,
furious with rage, was lifted toward his, and her two clenched fists
were held above her fluttering bosom. Passion made her almost
inarticulate.
"Forgive you for cozening me with sweet words of _our_ work, and _our_
mission when you despised me for the blood of my mother that is in me?
Forgive you for leading me around like a pet parrot to say your words to
my people and delude them? Forgive you for the ignominy you have heaped
upon me, the shame you have brought to me, the loss of friendships and
the laughter of my enemies?"
"Koyala--" Peter Gross attempted, but he might as well have tried to
stop Niagara.
"Are these the things you seek forgiveness for?" Koyala shrieked. "Liar!
Seducer! _Orang blanda!_"
She spat the word as though it were something vile. At that moment there
was a rustling in the cane back of Peter Gross. Bewildered, contrite,
striving to collect his scattered wits that he might calm the tempest of
her wrath, he did not hear it. But Koyala did. There was a savage
exultation in her voice as she cried:
"To-morrow the last white will be swept from Bulungan. But you will stay
here, _mynheer_--"
Hearing the footsteps behind him, Peter Gross whirled on his heel. But
he turned too late. A bag was thrust over his head. He tried to tear it
away, but clinging arms, arms as strong as his, held it tightly about
him. A heavy vapor ascended into his nostrils, a vapor warm with the
perfume of burning sandalwood and aromatic unguents and spices. He felt
a drowsiness come upon him, struggled to cast it off, and yielded. With
a sigh like a tired child's he sagged into the waiting arms and was
lowered to the ground.
"Very good, Mynheer Muller," Koyala said. "Now, if you and Cho Seng will
bind his legs I will call my Dyaks and have him carried to the house we
have prepared for him."