_The Strange Meeting of Annabel and Beelo. Captain Mason’s Cruel
Decision. I Tell a Romantic Story and Make a Guess at Lentala’s Origin._
CAPTAIN MASON and I had a serious talk in our hut that night.
“Don’t think for a moment,” he said, “that my intentions with regard to
Vancouver have been upset by a woman’s pretty face.”
“But she is very lovely,” I interposed, anxious to turn his thoughts
from whatever purpose he might have.
“That is as one thinks.” I could not restrain a smile at his
ungraciousness, particularly as I saw that Annabel’s effect on him had
impaired his frankness. “For that matter,” he went on, “her father is
blindly planning her destruction.” In answer to my look he explained:
“How can a man let his avarice and cowardice make such a fool of him!
Can’t he see that the king is using him as a tool to disrupt and destroy
the camp, including him and his party?”
I knew, as well as I knew my own thoughts, that a terrible apprehension
of a fate worse than death for us all rested on him, as on me; but we
had dared not give it tongue. Both had seen the naïve inconsistency
between the king’s desire that the island should not be discovered and
his promise to send us away one at a time, and so had Mr. Vancouver. No
foreigner straying to the island had ever left it, and none except our
colony was alive on it today. But in what dreadful manner had they been
disposed of? And why had we been spared so long? We had been prisoners
nearly two months.
Whether these fears and speculations haunted others of the colony we
were both careful not to inquire, and were prompt in suppressing every
uncomfortable hint. Captain Mason and I understood that the perfect
cohesion of our colony, taken with our considerable numbers, offered
the sole hope for our safety; and Mr. Vancouver was secretly planning to
destroy our one means of defense.
We had been sitting in silence after Captain Mason’s last speech. He
broke it by saying:
“The situation is complex. Your interruption of Vancouver’s plot and
Christopher’s dismissal of the native require us to lay a counter train.
The king will infer from what Christopher told the native that Mr.
Vancouver has abandoned his scheme to betray the colony, and that we are
determined to hang together, and fight it out to the end. I imagine that
the natives are growing impatient for a victim. What do you suggest, Mr.
Tudor?”
“I suppose I should continue in the rôle of the king’s emissary and
inform Mr. Vancouver that the sending out of the young men is postponed.
Fortunately we have stopped that.”
“We have done nothing of the sort,” declared the president. “They shall
go out.”
Astonishment silenced me.
“They shall go out,” he drove into me again.
“To their destruction--and ours?” I asked.
“No. But they must go and take their punishment. Then they will hear
from me. You can manage it through the native boy and his sister. Let
her see that they are soundly whipped and sent back to the colony. She’s
our friend.”
“That is unthinkable,” I protested. “The risk is too great. Lentala
can’t----”
“Don’t underestimate her. You have your instructions, sir.” He rose.
“I’ll be on hand tomorrow when you call out the men for the fields.”
I had risen, and stood facing a commander instead of an ally. After a
moment’s struggle with desperately rebellious emotions, I saw my own
absurdity, and abruptly left without a word, to fight for patience and
wisdom under the stars.
*****
The smiling ease with which Rawley stepped forth when I called his name
with the others next morning might have disarmed me had I not caught a
look of understanding between him and Mr. Vancouver, and known what it
meant. My dread had been on Annabel’s account, but she did not appear.
Rawley worked faithfully in the fields that day, but I saw the furtive
way in which he talked now and then with certain of the men, and I noted
all whom he thus favored. None of them had a guilty manner, though
a concealing one. It was evidence of Mr. Vancouver’s shrewdness in
plotting.
*****
Annabel met Christopher outside the camp that afternoon and came with
him to Beelo and me. The boy betrayed a singular uneasiness as they
approached, and, drawing his hat down, stood in awkward embarrassment.
It puzzled me, for he had been anxious to see her. In a glow of
excitement, Annabel was conspicuously handsome, and though dressed in
the rougher of the two suits which she had saved from the wreck, showed
in every line the thoroughbred that she was. Seeing the lad’s confusion,
she spared him by giving him hardly more than a smiling glance with her
warm hand-clasp, and breezily said to me as she held out an exquisite
orchid:
“See what I found on the way. Isn’t it beautiful!” I took it and was
fumbling to put it in the buttonhole of my lapel, when she stepped up
and with frank comradeship adjusted it, remarking as she did so:
“He’s very much like his sister, but smaller, and not so pretty and
graceful.” She did not realize that he understood English.
“I thank you--for Lentala,” he constrainedly said, staring at her as his
eyes began to burn.
“Oh!” cried Annabel in amused surprise. “But you are quite too
good-looking for a boy, Beelo!”
He did not smile, but studied her with a disconcerting seriousness, and
looked from her to me, as though watching for something which I guessed
to be a sly understanding between Annabel and me that might mean
ridicule of him. I saw that Annabel had innocently blundered into a
wrong start. Evidently the pleasure that the lad had expected from the
meeting had gone astray.
As though the words were wrenched from him by the striking picture that
Annabel made, he said in a stolid, colorless voice:
“You are more beautiful than Lentala.”
“Hear his disloyalty to his sister!” laughingly exclaimed Annabel, but
I could see that the boy’s bearing was trying her composure. “Come!” she
added; “let’s be friends, for Lentala and I are, and I want you to tell
me about her.” She coaxingly held out her hand as to an ill-tempered
child.
But he ignored it, and lowered his head till his hat-rim concealed his
eyes. Annabel looked at me in questioning surprise, but before I could
say anything,--being as much astonished as she,--Beelo, without raising
his head, asked half sullenly, half commandingly:
“Have you and--Choseph known each other a long time?”
“A year or so,” Annabel promptly answered, anxious to show her
friendliness. “He’s been very kind. I became a skilful horsewoman under
his teaching, and we’ve danced together and taken long walks in the
country. He knows a great many interesting things. You see, he was
educated at West Point, where young men are trained to be officers of
our army, and has fought in the war, and----”
Beelo broke in with a toss of the head and a laugh that sounded much
like a sneer.
Annabel opened her eyes and looked in wonder from the boy to me. She
was not laughing now; alarm was creeping into her face. I could think of
nothing to say, but was confident that the two fine souls would find a
way.
Without raising his face to Annabel, Beelo slowly looked round at me,
and regarded me deeply and in silence. Sadness stole into his eyes, and
with it reproach. The mystery of it touched me as I steadily returned
his look.
As he did not speak, I did. “Beelo,” I kindly said, “I don’t understand
you, and I don’t like your conduct. You wished to see Annabel. To please
me, she kindly took the trouble to come and tried to be friendly to you.
But you treat her rudely. You are not worthy to touch her hand.”
He blazed and went rigid. For a moment he was choked with passion; then,
locking his hands behind him, and throwing back his head and shoulders,
he said loudly, while his nostrils quivered:
“No! I’m not worthy to touch her hand! I’m glad of it! You send fine
words to Lentala, who has not a white friend in the world! Then you
bring the white girl to Beelo, that Beelo may see how different they are
and go back to shame Lentala. Riding! Dancing! Walking! Ah, Beelo is a
little fool,--a fool no bigger that a toad! But he can be useful,--he
can make Lentala a fool too! And Lentala can be useful. She can trick
King Rangan. She shall be the tool of the white people who want to
leave!” He paused breathless, but there was more of despair than anger
in his attitude.
Annabel had gone very white. She gave me a glance of new amazement, and
then went forward, seized Beelo’s arm, and forcibly turned him to look
into her eyes. With a start she straightened, looking at me strangely,
as if a great light had broken.
“There’s a misunderstanding,” she calmly said to Beelo and me as she
apologetically held the quivering figure. To me she added: “You and
Christopher please retire. I’ll call you soon.”
We left, and when screened and beyond earshot I gave Christopher a look
of wondering inquiry. He blinked benignly at me, as a dog at his foolish
master.
“What does it mean?” I demanded.
“Mean, sir?”
“Yes.”
“You are asking me, sir?”
“Of course.”
He looked away, but not with a listening manner, yet the mystery
appeared to demand it. I did not happen to remember that he was the most
chivalrous and the least meddlesome man I had ever known.
“Well, I’ll tell you, sir,” he presently said in his slow, gentle way;
“it will be all right.”
So it apparently was when Annabel called us back, for the two were
chatting amicably as they sat on the ground. Annabel’s serious mistake,
by which she had imperiled my plans, had been turned by her to excellent
account.
Christopher was waiting to conduct her back to camp; he would return,
for Beelo had informed me that there were matters which he wished to
tell us alone. The parting between him and Annabel was friendly and held
promise, but Beelo’s face was not wholly unclouded. Holding Annabel’s
hand and gazing into her face, he said, with a touch of sadness:
“Anybody would love you.”
Annabel blushed, and turned laughingly away.
“I’ll see you again very soon!” called the boy.
Annabel turned and blew him a smiling kiss. The lad stood and gazed long
at the spot where she was lost among the trees.
“You like her, Beelo?” I asked.
Much to my surprise, a little droop pulled at his mouth-corners.
“She is very lovely,” he softly said.
“Is that a thing to be sad about?”
“Yes. Lentala can never be as sweet and beautiful.”
“She is as sweet and beautiful as Annabel, and--and--what shall I
say?--more fascinating.”
His face was turned away, and he was silent. After a while he faced me,
and said, while observing me closely:
“But she belongs to your kind, your world.”
“My heart finds my kind, and that is my world.” He again turned away.
In trying to find a reason why any of this mattered to him, or why he
appeared in a measure to resent Annabel, the old suspicion that had
lodged in a corner of my mind came forth. The remarkable difference
between Lentala and her brother on one hand and the natives on the other
must have some special explanation, and Beelo must have a secret which
he had a good reason for guarding. Christopher and I had probably been
the only white men to touch their lives, and there was in them that
which knew and claimed its own. It was a hungry demand, and jealous.
To see the desired companionship subject to an older claim, such as
Annabel’s, was the finding of a barrier. I determined to probe for the
secret by indirect means.
“The soul that finds its kind finds its world, Beelo,” I said, “and
souls have neither race nor color. Would you like to hear a strange
little story?”
“Yes!” he eagerly answered.
I sat down, and he seated himself facing me, keenly interested.
“A long time ago a white man--a gentleman, no doubt--was in a ship that
was sailing the seas. A great storm came on. His ship was wrecked,
and he was cast up on the beach of a beautiful tropical island. It was
decreed by the natives, who were jealous for their country, that he
should suffer the fate of all who had drifted before him to those
shores. But for some reason--that may be another story some time--he was
spared, and the king gave him a wife from among the native girls. Two
children were born to them, a girl and afterward a boy; but their father
had so strongly impressed his racial peculiarities on them that they
were in an unfortunate position,--outcasts in a way, and perhaps in
danger of their lives, by reason of the deeply planted native hatred for
the white blood. So the king, who had spared the man, took them under
his protection, and as the queen had no children, she loved them as her
own. But in time, as the children grew up, the white blood in them began
to starve for its kind, and to whisper of a far country whence it had
come. That is nature’s way. She lets us go just so far from the plan on
which she started us, and then she sends a voice that speaks deep within
us. We may not know at first what it says, but--”
“Just a longing?” Beelo asked
“Merely that. We want something very much, but don’t know what it is. We
are dissatisfied. That comes in youth, when the tides of life flow free,
and before the soul is fully awake. Afterward, when it has ripened and
mellowed, it finds its kind and makes its home wherever----”
“After a while. But now!” demanded Beelo.
I ignored him with a smile, and went back to the story.
“At last the sister had grown to womanhood and the brother nearly to
manhood. A much larger company of white people than had ever before been
stranded on the island came to its shores. The girl and the boy had been
spoiled by the king, and they had much their own way. The girl demanded
that she be taken with the king to see the castaways. It was the voice
in her heart.”
Beelo nodded, and then with nervous fingers began to weave a twig-house
on the sand.
“Do you like the story?” I asked.
He looked up in surprise. “Is that all, Choseph?”
“Isn’t that sufficient?”
He drew a deep breath. “She went there just to _see_ them?” he said.
I smiled into his brilliant eyes. “I’ll tell you the rest of the story
some other time,” I remarked, satisfied, because at not a single point
had he criticized my guessing. “There is one thing more,” I went on. “Of
course the children adopted the native dress, but their father’s blood
in them had lightened their native color, and that must be overcome.”
His eyes kindled brighter; his lips had fallen apart. There was not a
movement in his body.
“Lad, how did you learn to stain a fair skin so well that it looks like
a native’s?”
With that I seized the collar of his blouse, to tear it open and see the
real color of his chest before he could prevent.