With clenched hand grasping the two letters--the one that sank his last
hope of saving his plantation, and the other that blasted his trust in
human nature--Hilliard, the planter of Nairai Viwa, walked with quick,
firm step to his house, and sat down to think awhile. The great cotton
“burst-up” had ruined most men in Fiji, and although long delayed in his
case the blow had crushed him utterly.
An angry flush tinged his set features for a few seconds as he re-read
the curt, almost savage denial, by his father of the “couple of
thousand” asked for. “A fool to resign his commission in the Service and
go into a thing he knew nothing about, merely to humour the fantastic
whim of a woman of fashion who will, no doubt, now sheer very clear of
your wrecked fortunes.”
Ten minutes previously when Hilliard, who had thought his father would
never see him go under for the sake of a couple of thou., had read these
lines he had smiled, even with the despair of broken fortune at his
heart, as he looked at the other letter yet unopened.
Kitty, at least, would stick to him. He was not a maudlin
sentimentalist, but the memory of her farewell kisses was yet strong
with him; and his past experiences of woman's weaknesses and his own
strength justified him in thinking that in this one woman he had found
his pearl of great price.
Then he read her letter; and as he read the tappa mallets at work in the
Fijian houses hard by seemed to thump in unison with the dull
beats of his heart as he stared at the correctly-worded and
conventionally-expressed lines that mocked at his fond imaginings of but
a few breaths back.
*****
Jimmy, the curly-headed half-caste who had brought him his letters from
Levuka, had followed in his steps and was sitting, hat in hand, on the
sofa before him when Hilliard raised his face. The fixed pallor had left
his bronzed cheeks. For an instant the face of another man had passed
before him--Lamington, his one-time fellow-officer, whom every one but
Hilliard himself looked upon as being “first in the running” with the
woman who had pledged herself to him. But, then, Lamington himself had
told him that she had refused him, heir to a big fortune as he was, and
they had shaken hands, and Lamington had wished him luck in his honest,
good-natured fashion. “Perhaps,” and here the dark flush mantled his
forehead, “he's tried again and she's slung me. And I... what a damnably
unpleasant and quick intuition of women's ways my old dad has! I always
wondered why such a fiery devil as he was married such a milk-and-water
creature as my good mother. By ------, I begin to think he went on safe
lines, and I on a fallacy!”
The stolid face of Jimmy recalled him to the present. He must give up
the plantation and take a berth of some sort. From the sideboard he took
a flask of liquor and poured out two big drinks.
“Here, Jimmy, my boy. This is the last drink you'll get on Nairai Viwa.
I'm burst up, cleaned out, dead broke, and going to hell generally.”
Jimmy grunted and held out his brown hand for the grog. “Yes? I s'pose
you'll go to Levuka first? I'll give you a passage in the cutter.”
Hilliard laughed with mingled bitterness and sarcasm. “Right, Jimmy.
Levuka is much like the other place, and I'll get experience there, if I
don't get a billet.”
“Here's luck to you, sir, wherever you go,” and Jimmy's thick lips glued
themselves lovingly to the glass.
Hilliard drank his oft quietly, only muttering to himself, “Here's
good-bye to the fallacies of hope,” and then, being at bottom a man
of sense and quick resolution, he packed his traps and at sunset went
aboard the cutter. As they rippled along with the first puffs of the
land-breeze, he glanced back but once at the lights of Nairai Viwa
village that illumined the cutter's wake, and then, like a wise man, the
hopes and dreams of the past drifted astern too.
And then for the next two years he drifted about from one group to
another till he found an island that suited him well--no other white man
lived there.
*****