WILLATOPY SPURNS HIS GODS
That was the last of Madame Gilbert's happy days in Tops Island. Before
twenty-four hours had gone by, the storm burst which whirled Willatopy
as we have known him out of my story. In his place remained Lord
Topsham. In the course of the last ten chapters I have tried to realise
Willatopy and to paint his portrait for you. It has been a labour of
love, for he was a gallant lad. But for the Lord Topsham, into whom by
woeful mischance of birth he developed, I have neither respect nor
affection. He seems to me to have displayed the worst qualities of the
two races whose blood formed an unstable mixture in his veins. It is
true that the boy never had a chance. The lawyer, John Clifford, and the
girl Marie were the worse conceivable guides for his halting steps on
the threshold of a new life. And just when Madame Gilbert's influence
was most vitally needed by him it failed. She who had been raised to the
throne of a goddess came tumbling down and lay prostrate--a mere human
widow. Willatopy spurned both his gods--his dead father the wise madman
of Tops Island, and the living Madame. He rejected the precepts of the
father, and he bitterly resented the restraints which Madame Gilbert
sought to impose upon him. His misguided, masterful spirit then led him
with terrible swiftness down the steep slope which ended in
irretrievable disaster. I love the boy Willatopy, and I would that it
had been my fate to tell this story differently.
When Willie found the place of assignation empty, on the afternoon which
followed the turtle feast, he descended in great leaps to Madame's camp,
and made enquiries of her escort. From a talkative sailor he learned
that Marie had been embarked in the motor boat two days before, and had
not returned to the camp. Willie scented a discovery of his amour, and,
as a deeply resentful Peer of England, sought an explanation from Madame
Gilbert.
"What have you done with Marie, Madame Gilbert?" demanded he.
"What has my maid Marie to do with Lord Topsham?" asked Madame. She saw
the fury burning in the bright blue eyes, and faced him with a hauteur
as fierce as his own.
"I have made her my white slave," growled he.
"That is very good of you," said Madame blandly. "But Marie Lambert
happens to be my maid and otherwise engaged. By my orders she has been
returned to the yacht, where she will remain. Please bear in mind,
Willie, that your heirship to a Peerage gives you no rights whatever
over my servants."
"John says...." began Willie, but Madame waved him into silence with a
royal gesture.
"If you paid more attention to your father's memory and to my words, and
less to that miserable wretch, John Clifford, you would understand
better your position. An English Lord has no rights which are not
common to every English gentleman. John Clifford is deceiving you for
his own ends, that he may take you to England and rob you. You think
yourself rich, my poor boy. Wait till Clifford has had his will of you.
There will not be a shilling left in your purse, and not an ounce of
flesh upon your bones, when Clifford has done with the stripping of
you."
"John came all the way from England to tell me that I was the heir of my
uncle. You also came all the way from England, but you told me nothing.
You must have known, for you came here in a Toppys yacht, the property
of my cousin. Yet you told me nothing. John Clifford is a little mean
white beast, but he has been more of a friend to me than you, Madame.
Although you knew what I had become you told me nothing."
"Yes," said Madame calmly. "I knew. And yet I told you nothing."
"It was you who wished to rob me, you and Sir John Toppys. If John
Clifford had not come I should still be Willatopy."
"It is my great regret that you have not remained the Willatopy whom I
met and loved in the Torres Straits. You were happy then, you are
unhappy now. Nothing except misery for you can come of this most
lamentable succession of yours."
"John has often told me that you wished to rob me, you and Sir John
Toppys. But I did not believe. I beat John for the words that he spoke
against you. But now I begin to believe. You and your _Humming Top_
would never have taken me to England if John had not come to search me
out."
"You would not have wished to go to England if John Clifford had not
come to spoil your life."
"Willatopy would not have gone to England. Why should he? But now that I
am the lawful Lord of Topsham I shall certainly go. My father was wrong.
I see now that my place is not here. I see it more clearly because you
have tried to keep me in ignorance. You who were my friend, my false
friend, have now become openly my enemy. You tried to steal my place in
England from me, and now you have torn away my white girl, Marie."
"Willie," said Madame gently. "It is not very long since in the _Humming
Top_ I offered to raise the anchor and bear you homewards myself. Does
this look as if I wished to steal your place from you? I offered to
carry you home and protect you. It was you, Willie, who declined to go."
"I would not leave Marie."
"I suspected that Marie was the explanation. The publicity of a yacht
does not offer much opportunity for assignations. You have behaved very
badly towards me, Willie. You had no right to make appointments with my
servant. Still less have you any right to resent my action in sending
her back to the _Humming Top_. I am speaking to you exactly as I should
to an English gentleman and a social equal. Lord Topsham has behaved
badly, Willie. Lord Topsham, under the malign influence of that Clifford
wretch, has got his head swelled. When you go to England you will have
many miseries and many disappointments. You will discover that, in these
modern days, English Lords count for nothing except for their worth as
men. They have no rights and no powers beyond those of common men. But,
Willie, because of their rank and place they are expected to behave
always as honourable gentlemen. It is no act of a gentleman to come
ranting and raging at me because I stopped your intrigue with my servant
Marie. An Englishman, even one without rank or station, would be ashamed
to speak to me in reproof upon such a subject. He would have felt too
much of shame for his conduct. You played me a low trick, Willie, and I
am excessively angry with you."
"Why should I feel shame before you?" asked Willie haughtily. Never
before had he used such a tone towards Madame Gilbert, and she looked
searchingly at him. She had noticed and lamented the almost daily change
observable in him, but though much of his old tender regard for her had
been visibly slipping away, he had never yet used words of offence.
"Why should I feel shame before you?" he asked again.
Madame Gilbert shrugged her shoulders. It was a question difficult to
answer. After all the boy was a Melanesian who had never been outside
his own seas, and one could not expect him to comprehend the standards
of social conduct in Europe.
"You were my friend, Willie, my dear friend. And Marie was my maid.
Don't you see that your action was not quite worthy of one who calls
himself Lord Topsham? You are now the head of a very ancient and
honourable family."
"Honourable!" cried Willie scornfully. "You told me that you were the
honourable wife of a big and handsome husband. Now I know that you are
nothing but a widow."
"Who told you that?" asked Madame quietly.
"Is it true?"
"Yes, it is true. My big and handsome husband is dead. But what
difference does that make? I put up my big and handsome husband because
at our first meeting in the yacht, which seems now so long ago, your
admiration was so very outspoken. You wanted, if I remember rightly, to
marry me yourself."
"I did not then know that you were a widow. Men do not marry widows in
the Torres Straits."
"So that is the trouble. I am a widow, and therefore disreputable.
Willie, dear, when I think how much you have to learn about the ways of
white men and women, my heart fails because of you. You will have a
very, very, rotten time in England. Clifford is your white slave, and
Marie is, or was, your white mistress. You have made a very bad
beginning, and a beginning most unfortunate for you. You think, no
doubt, that all white men will be your slaves and all white women will
be at your pleasure. That is what Clifford tells you. He stuffs you up
with this dreadful rubbish and stifles your sense--you have plenty of
good sense about things that you understand--he stifles your sense with
filthy liquors brought over from Thursday Island. You are a fly in the
spider's web, Willie, and I, who have done my best to save you from him,
am spurned as a mere widow. If you were a little older, my dear, you
would remember that a Widow sat on the throne of England for more years
than you or I are likely to live."
"Queens are different. My mother is a widow, but she also is different.
Her husband was a white god. You, Madame, are not different. You tried
to rob me of my rank and place, and you have torn away Marie whom I
loved. I will never forgive you, Madame. You thought that I was a
helpless brown boy who could be played with and deceived. If you had
been a queen with a big handsome king for husband I would have obeyed
your wishes. I would have stayed here in Tops Island and forgotten Marie
whom I should not love if she were not white. But I am not going to be
ruled by a widow, even by one so beautiful as you. I am not Willatopy
any more; I am William, Lord Topsham."
"I do not think," responded Madame coldly, "that I am greatly interested
in William, Lord Topsham, or that I desire his further acquaintance. You
have my permission to depart."
He stared, puzzled by the formula of dismissal. Then when Madame turned
her broad back, his skin flushed into deep purple. He a great English
Lord had been curtly sent away by a mere widow! Something must be wrong
with the world which in ignorant imagination he had constructed.
William, Lord Topsham, went to consult John Clifford, who advised that
Madame, with her paraphernalia of tents and escort, should be summarily
expelled from the Toppys property on the Island. But Willie in becoming
an English Lord had not shed his native courtesy. So long as Madame
wished to remain on Tops Island, she was free to stay. But for his part
he would visit her no more.
Madame Gilbert summoned her friends into council, and described in
detail the stormy interview with Willie.
"We were both very angry, very haughty, and very ridiculous," said
Madame. "I think that the late supper upon excessive quantities of rich
turtle had something to do with our loss of temper. The high
mightinesses of his brown lordship ought to have made me laugh. But
there will emerge, I fancy, certain solid advantages. It is clear that
Master Willie _à la tête montée_ has flung away the precepts of his late
father, and means to claim his English peerage. He will very soon find
that the Madame Gilbert whom he is pleased to scorn holds the key to
that project. We will begin at once to make ostentatious preparations
for departure. You might, if you will, Captain, hire sundry brown boys
to scrape weed off the _Humming Top's_ teak fenders. Our preparations
will instantly come to Willie's ears, and he will rapidly pass from
curiosity to worry. Prompted by John Clifford it will dawn upon his
infant mind that the _Humming Top_ holds not only Marie, but the command
of his passage to England."
"The boys will be delighted to scrape off the worst of our weed," said
Ching, "and their labours will help us up to Singapore. But I don't
quite grasp the rest of your scheme, Madame."
"It is quite simple," said she. "In these days of overcrowded shipping
how is Willie to get away beyond Thursday Island unless as our guest in
the _Humming Top_? He might hang about for months waiting for a ship to
take him to Singapore, and might spend months more before he could get
any farther. Grant, if I mistake not, will not unloose the money bags,
and John Clifford, whatever may be his resources, will not spend a penny
more than he can help. It will be the interest of both to come hat in
hand to me, and make peace. Then I shall command the situation and lay
down my own terms."
"Madame is right," cried Ewing. "She always is. It will cost Clifford a
small fortune to get Willie home by passenger steamers even if he can
secure berths, which is not likely. When he is up against staying here
or in Thursday Island at indefinite delay and expense for a passage, he
will send his brown master to Madame to eat humble pie. I don't want to
let either of them get out of my sight, and it will be a great pull for
us if they come of their own accord."
"Besides," went on Madame serenely, "I have the bait of Marie locked up
in the _Humming Top_, and Willie does not know that my hold over her is
so terrifying that she will avoid him like the plague when he comes
aboard. Let him find that out later for himself." Madame then explained
the nature of her influence over Marie Lambert. "If she remains
convinced that I shall certainly take her to France she may become
reckless, but I shall hint judiciously that a rigid obedience to my
orders may bring about a reprieve. I've got her tight, and Master Willie
too. They may both be as savage as they please so long as they dance to
my strings."
"The weak point of your scheme, Madame, if I may say so," observed
Ching, "is the presence of that damned Jonah Clifford in my yacht. He
will bring along enough ill luck to sink a battleship. My officers won't
have him in their mess, and if I put him in the foc's'le there will be a
mutiny among the men. The best of lawyers would make them restive, and
this poisonous little blighter would bust up all the restraints of
discipline. Not a man in my ship would eat or drink with him. I would
sooner give passage to a plague-stricken Chinky than to that Clifford
beast."
"I feel for you," said Madame, smiling. "We will give him a cabin
somewhere forrard, and let him take his food there. He shall learn what
it feels like to be a pariah. The experience will do him good."
"I expect," observed Alexander thoughtfully, "that he will pick his bit
of offal in the shaft tunnel. He won't be safe from man-handling
anywhere else. My stokehold staff would love to put him in their fires."
"Still, however rightly unpopular he may be, we can't leave him here,"
declared Madame. "I cannot have that dear little Mrs. Topy and the jolly
girls burdened with the swine hound. But we will dump him over the side
at Singapore, and leave him to find his way home from there. We will
carry him out of harm's way and then shunt him. I have quite decided to
disappoint the poachers of St. Mary Axe. Once Willie, Lord Topsham,
comes aboard my yacht, he doesn't leave it till I hand him over to his
own Trustees. Sir John Toppys and Gatepath will be furious with me, but
there is nothing else to be done. I won't have the boy plundered by
those land sharks."
Madame's plans were at once put in train, and it quickly spread through
the Island that good pay was to be won by diving down and cutting weed
from the _Humming Top's_ bottom. Willie's black boys deserted his
plantation under the magnetic pull of the yacht's treasure chest. Boats
full of divers clustered about the vessel throughout all the hours of
daylight, and every kind of scraper was furbished up and turned to
account in the novel labour. It was given about that the _Humming Top_
would sail as soon as her bottom had been made tolerably clean, and John
Clifford, in dread of being marooned for months on Tops Island, was
prepared to face even Madame's straight-shooting pistol rather than be
left there by himself. He suspected that Willie would be welcome on
board, but he cherished no illusions concerning his own popularity. He
urged his lordly master to approach Madame with humility, and to seek
passage for both. John Clifford, a human "sucker," had all the remora's
love for free transport. His voyage out had occupied months and
contained exasperations innumerable; whatever might be his sufferings in
the detested _Humming Top_, they could not compare with the professional
disaster of losing his hardly won client--spirited off in the yacht--and
being left himself upon the loathed beach. He was insistent upon a free
passage for both, the client and the lawyer. It cost him the surviving
bottles in his liquor cases to win the assent of Lord Topsham, and he
would not have won even with their fiery aid, had not recollections of
the ravished Marie been present to Willie's mind. William, Lord Topsham,
under the stimulus of hot, bad wine, became convinced that Madame had
done him grievous wrong, and was savagely resentful. He had spurned her
as a goddess. Now he came near to spurning her as a woman, and to
accepting John's theory that Madame had swept Marie off into captivity
because the mistress was jealous of his lordship's attentions to the
maid. The pair of them argued much as Madame had anticipated. Willie
would regain his Marie under Madame's forbidding nose, and both would
secure a passage to England in a luxurious private yacht. Neither
appreciated the hidden disadvantages. Willie did not realise that Marie,
given one last chance of reprieve from a shameful death in France, would
flee from the smallest association with himself; and before Clifford's
mind arose no picture of an outcast Hedge Lawyer, spurned as vermin by
the humblest seaman, driven to pick his bit of offal in the shaft
tunnel.
The preparations for departure went on, and for a week Madame Gilbert
saw nothing of Willie or John Clifford. The lawyer she had not met since
she had thrust him off the yacht's deck into the mangrove swamp. Mrs.
Topy and the girls she encountered now and then. They looked at her
sorrowfully, but said little. Some hint of Willie's intended abandonment
of Tops Island had been conveyed to them, and they grieved. The mother,
and perhaps the sisters also, realised that if he went they would never
look upon his face again. He was an English Lord; they were Hulas of New
Guinea. Lawful inheritance ran in the male line; to the women it brought
nothing except loss. From the artless chatter of Joy and Cry, Madame
gathered that Willie was working up an appetite for the humble pie. He
was furious against her, she learned, and smiled. Madame had been fond
of Willatopy, but she felt very little regard for William, Lord Topsham.
She did not care how furious he grew so long as he fell in with her
plans.
Willie took his meal as soon as the divers had all been paid off, and
the work of cleaning completed--in so far as it could be completed out
of dock. He approached the camp one evening, observed the ostentatious
signs of packing up, and then plunged into a request that Madame would
see him. She graciously assented, and he was shown into that tent
whither not so long since he had fled, a frightened savage boy, and
sobbed out his troubles at her feet. Then he had been Willatopy; now he
was William, Lord Topsham. Just as Willie had changed so Madame had
changed. She was no longer the half-maternal comforter who had nursed
the frizzy head in her lap and playfully suggested that he should really
get his hair cut in honour of his peerage. Now she received him with
ceremony, bowed him towards a chair, and seated herself opposite. He who
had been so gay and outspoken was now tongue-tied, his spirit frozen by
the chilly atmosphere in which Madame had enwrapped herself. Even then
had Madame relented, stretched out both her hands, and smiled upon him
in the old fashion, I believe that the boy would have cast aside his
absurd pretensions to dignity, and given back to her his heart. Madame
could, I am convinced, have made him kiss the dust off her feet. But she
was still sore and angry. A goddess does not take pleasure in being
tumbled into ruin by a brown half-caste, and Madame, who had brought so
many white men to her feet, scorned to win an easy conquest over Willie.
Since he had elected to be William, Lord Topsham, he should be treated
as he deserved.
"Well," said Madame, as the boy mumbled and stammered before her. "You
wish to speak to me?"
"They say that you are leaving my Island," muttered Willie.
"Yes," replied Madame. "There is nothing to keep me here now. I stayed
as your friend. You have spurned me, and I go. My yacht is under orders
to sail as soon as the camp gear has been transferred. I am obliged to
you for your hospitality, Lord Topsham, and should have called to bid
you farewell and thank you. Since you have come I thank you now." She
was certainly not making his humble pie very appetising.
"We have been honoured by your presence, Madame," said he. It was quite
a good beginning, and gave him courage. "And since I have been so
fortunate as to be able to show you hospitality, I feel bold enough to
request a return favour from you."
Madame stared. The speech did not sound a bit like the composition of
Willie--certainly not of the old Willatopy--and had little flavour of
the Hedge Lawyer. There were no books upon the Island from which Willie
might have gleaned polite phrases. The change in him from brown to
white, which was taking place before her eyes, was almost incredible in
its speed. She remembered his faithful recollection of his father's
words, and supposed that expressions which the father had used remained
embedded in the son's mind.
"It will be a real pleasure, Lord Topsham," said she with gravity, "if I
may be permitted to return your kind hospitality."
"You once offered me passage to England in the _Humming Top_," said
Willie. "I refused then but I shall no longer refuse if you repeat the
offer."
"Consider it repeated, Lord Topsham," said Madame, and a smile flickered
round her lips. "Since you have decided to go to England it is fitting
that you should go in a Toppys ship."
"And my lawyer, Mr. John Clifford?" enquired he. A little while since
since it had been "My white slave, John." Now it was "My lawyer, Mr.
John Clifford."
"I will not pretend that I care for the society of your lawyer. But I
will not be so unkind as to separate a client from his legal adviser."
This was language above Willie's head, and it was his turn to stare.
Madame translated: "John Clifford may come in the yacht, but please
don't expect me to entertain him myself. You will be my guest, but
Clifford must fend for himself with the men."
"Of course," said Willie, indifferently consigning the Hedge Lawyer to
the shaft tunnel. "He is a noxious animal. But he is my lawyer, and I
would not leave him here."
Madame smiled again, and thought of how the legal adviser would be shot
off into desolate space at Singapore. She was willing that he should
travel thus far in the yacht, and hoped, but without confidence, that
his voyage would be pleasant.
"Thank you, Madame," said Willie, rising. "We will come aboard when you
are ready to receive us. Have I your permission to go?" He was a quick
lad, very quick to pick up English phrases.
Madame relaxed at the words, and her old friendly smile shone out. If
Willie had then forgotten his ridiculous assumption of dignity and
relaxed too, the pair of them might have attained to happy
reconciliation in one another's arms. But Fate had spoken, and the boy
moved towards his destined end. "How could we sail," whispered she,
"without our Pilot Willatopy?"
He frowned. "I will sail as your guest, Madame. But Lord Topsham is not,
and will not be, your pilot."
"Well, well," muttered Madame as she watched him go, "I could not have
believed that my boy Willatopy would so quickly turn into an
insufferable fool. So he is too proud now even to pilot the _Humming
Top_. Soon he will be too proud to sail his own yawl. His pride will
come down with a pretty hard bump upon the unkindly soil of England.
That is some comfort."
She sent for Ching, and told him the latest of Lord Topsham's
incarnations. "He is now much too fine a gentleman to navigate a steam
yacht. His Highness will presently seek the services of a valet when his
wardrobe has had an opportunity of development. He pictures himself
surrounded by white slaves among whom you and I have the honour of
inclusion. Captain, can you manage to take the blessed yacht back to
Thursday Island without butting her aground? That confounded Peer would
sneer disgustingly at us if we couldn't get through the channels without
his help. He wants to bring us to our knees imploring his assistance. I
would sooner that the _Humming Top_ were wrecked in the Straits and
perished with all hands."
"I think that I can do it," said Ching cautiously. "His young lordship
brought us up here so fast and fearlessly that I took no soundings, but
I have all the channels marked, and the bearings of every headland. It
stuck in my mind that we might have to get back without a pilot, so my
first officer or myself were on watch all the time in the chart-house
following the course, charting the channels, and working out the
bearings. We have had a lot of time on our hands here, and have filled
some of it by constructing a chart of our own of the Torres Straits. I
can't con the yacht with the ease and certainty of his lordship, but I
can get through without bumping much on the ground. After we pass
Thursday Island, it is just deep-sea work up to Sunda. I can manage,
Madame, I think."
This assurance from the careful and competent Ching gave Madame Gilbert
the utmost satisfaction. Now that William, Lord Topsham, though anxious
to take passage in the yacht, had refused to work for his living, she
would have perished rather than seek help from him. He should learn that
there were others besides himself capable of navigating his own familiar
seas. She blessed the cautious foresight of the complete seaman, Robert
Ching, and was prepared to trust him to save the bottom of the _Humming
Top_ and the face of her owner. As for William, Lord Topsham, her
resentment began to take root and grow with tropical rapidity. The boy
Willatopy, whom she had loved, was in danger of being obliterated
altogether. And yet until the Hedge Lawyer appeared to bring woe upon
the happy Island, he had been a boy eminently lovable.