I heard this story in a farmhouse upon Dartmoor, and I give it in the
words of the local doctor who told it. We were a reading-party of
three undergraduates and a Christ Church don. The don had slipped on a
boulder, two days before, while fishing the river Meavy, and sprained
his ankle; hence Dr. Miles's visit. The two had made friends over the
don's fly-book and the discovery that what the doctor did not know about
Dartmoor trout was not worth knowing; hence an invitation to extend his
visit over dinner. At dinner the talk diverged from sport to the
ancient tin-works, stone circles, camps and cromlechs on the tors about
us, and from there to touch speculatively on the darker side of the old
religions: hence at length the doctor's story, which he told over the
pipes and whisky, leaning his arms upon the table and gazing at it
rather than at us, as though drawing his memories out of depths below
its polished surface.
It must be thirty--yes, thirty--years ago (he said) since I met the man,
on a bright November morning, when the Dartmoor hounds were drawing
Burrator Wood. Burrator House in those days belonged to the Rajah
Brooke--Brooke of Sarawak--who had bought it from Harry Terrell; or
rather it had been bought for him by the Baroness Burdett Coutts and
other admirers in England. Harry Terrell--a great sportsman in his
day--had been loth enough to part with it, and when the bargain was
first proposed, had named at random a price which was about double what
he had given for the place. The Rajah closed with the sum at once,
asked him to make a list of everything in the house, and put a price on
whatever he cared to sell. Terrell made a full list, putting what
seemed to him fair prices on most of the furniture, and high ones--
prohibitive he thought--on the sticks he had a fancy to keep. The Rajah
glanced over the paper in his grand manner, and says he, "I'll take it
all." "Stop! stop!" cried Terrell, "I bain't going to let you have the
bed I was married in!" "As you please; we'll strike out the bed,
then," the Rajah answered. That is how he took possession.
Burrator House, as I daresay you know, faces across the Meavy upon
Burrator Wood; and the wood, thanks to Terrell, had always been a sure
draw for a fox. I had tramped over from Tavistock on this particular
morning,--for I was new to the country, a young man looking around me
for a practice, and did not yet possess a horse,--and I sat on the slope
above the house, at the foot of the tor, watching the scene on the
opposite bank. The fixture, always a favourite one, and the Rajah's
hospitality--which was noble, like everything about him--had brought out
a large and brightly-dressed field; and among them, in his black coat,
moved Terrell on a horse twice as good as it looked. He had ridden over
from his new home, and I daresay in the rush of old associations had
forgotten for the while that the familiar place was no longer his.
The Rajah, a statue of a man, sat on a tall grey at the covert's edge,
directly below me; and from time to time I watched him through my
field-glass. He had lately recovered from a stroke of paralysis, and
was (I am told) the wreck of his old self; but the old fire lived in the
ashes. He sat there, tall, lean, upright as a ramrod, with his eyes
turned from the covert and gazing straight in front, over his horse's
ears, on the rushing Meavy. He had forgotten the hounds; his care for
his guests was at an end; and I wondered what thoughts, what memories of
the East, possessed him. There is always a loneliness about a great
man, don't you think? But I have never felt one to be so terribly--yes,
terribly--alone as the Rajah was that morning among his guests and the
Devonshire tors.
"Every inch a king," said a voice at my elbow, and a little man settled
himself down on the turf beside me. I set down my glasses with a start.
He was a spare dry fellow of about fifty, dressed in what I took for the
working suit of a mechanic. Certainly he did not belong to the moor.
He wore no collar, but a dingy yellow handkerchief knotted about his
throat, and both throat and face were seamed with wrinkles--so thickly
seamed that at first glance you might take them for tattoo-marks; but I
had time for a second, for without troubling to meet my eyes he nodded
towards the Rajah.
"I've cut a day's work and travelled out from Plymouth to get a sight of
him; and I've a wife will pull my hair out when I get home and she finds
I haven't been to the docks to-day; and I've had no breakfast but thirty
grains of opium; but he's worth it."
"Thirty grains of opium!" I stared at him, incredulous. He did not
turn, but, still with his eyes on the valley below us, stretched out a
hand. It's fingers were gnarled, and hooked like a bird's claw, and on
the little finger a ruby flashed in the morning sunlight--not a large
ruby, but of the purest pigeon's-blood shade, and in any case a stone of
price.
"You see this? My wife thinks it a sham one, but it's not. And some
day, when I'm drunk or in low water, I shall part with it--but not yet.
You've an eye for it, I see,"--and yet he was not looking towards me,--
"but the Rajah, yonder, and I are the only two within a hundred miles
that can read what's in the heart of it."
He gazed for a second or two at the stone, lifted it to his ear as if
listening, and lowering his hand to the turf, bent over it and gazed
again. "Ay, _he_ could understand and see into you, my beauty!
_He_ could hear the little drums tum-a-rumbling, and the ox-bells and
bangles tinkling, and the shuffle of the elephants going by; _he_ could
read the lust in you, and the blood and the sun flickering and licking
round the _kris_ that spilt it--for it's the devil you have in you, my
dear. But we know you--he and I--he and I. Ah! there you go," he
muttered as the hounds broke into cry, and the riders swept round the
edge of the copse towards the sound of a view-halloo. "There you go,"
he nodded after the Rajah; "but ride as you will, the East is in you,
great man--its gold in your blood, its dust in your eyelids, its own
stink in your nostril; and, ride as you will, you can never escape it."
He clasped his knees and leaned back against the slope, following the
grey horse and its rider with idolatrous gaze; and I noted that one of
the clasped hands lacked the two middle fingers.
"You know him?" I asked. "You have seen him out there, at Sarawak?"
"I never saw him; but I heard of him." He smiled to himself. "It's not
easy to pass certain gates in the East without hearing tell of the Rajah
Brooke."
For a while he sat nursing his knee while I filled and lit a pipe.
Then he turned abruptly, and over the flame of the match I saw his eyes,
the pupils clouded around the iris and, as it were, withdrawn inward and
away from the world. "Ever heard of Cagayan Sulu?" he asked.
"Never," said I. "Who or what is it?"
"It's an island," said he. "It lies a matter of eighty miles off the
north-east corner of Borneo--facing Sandakan, as you might say."
"Who owns it?"
He seemed to be considering the question. "Well," he answered slowly,
"if you asked the Spanish Government I suppose they'd tell you the King
of Spain; but that's a lie. If you asked the natives--the Hadji Hamid,
for instance--you'd be told it belonged to them; and that's half a lie.
And if you asked the Father of Lies he might tell you the truth and call
me for witness. I lost two fingers there--the only English flesh ever
buried in those parts--so I've bought my knowledge."
"How did you come there?" I asked,--"if it's a fair question."
He chuckled without mirth. "As it happens, that's _not_ a fair
question. But I'll tell you this much, I came there with a brass band."