I SUPPOSE praiseworthy motives are a sufficient justification almost for
anything. What could be more commendable in the abstract than a girl’s
determination that “poor papa” should not be worried, and her anxiety
that the man of her choice should be kept by any means from every
occasion of doing something rash, something which might endanger the
whole scheme of their happiness?
Nothing could be more tender and more prudent. We must also remember the
girl’s self-reliant temperament, and the general unwillingness of women—I
mean women of sense—to make a fuss over matters of that sort.
As has been said already, Heemskirk turned up some time after Jasper’s
arrival at Nelson’s Cove. The sight of the brig lying right under the
bungalow was very offensive to him. He did not fly ashore before his
anchor touched the ground as Jasper used to do. On the contrary, he hung
about his quarter-deck mumbling to himself; and when he ordered his boat
to be manned it was in an angry voice. Freya’s existence, which lifted
Jasper out of himself into a blissful elation, was for Heemskirk a cause
of secret torment, of hours of exasperated brooding.
While passing the brig he hailed her harshly and asked if the master was
on board. Schultz, smart and neat in a spotless white suit, leaned over
the taffrail, finding the question somewhat amusing. He looked
humorously down into Heemskirk’s boat, and answered, in the most amiable
modulations of his beautiful voice: “Captain Allen is up at the house,
sir.” But his expression changed suddenly at the savage growl: “What the
devil are you grinning at?” which acknowledged that information.
He watched Heemskirk land and, instead of going to the house, stride away
by another path into the grounds.
The desire-tormented Dutchman found old Nelson (or Nielsen) at his
drying-sheds, very busy superintending the manipulation of his tobacco
crop, which, though small, was of excellent quality, and enjoying himself
thoroughly. But Heemskirk soon put a stop to this simple happiness. He
sat down by the old chap, and by the sort of talk which he knew was best
calculated for the purpose, reduced him before long to a state of
concealed and perspiring nervousness. It was a horrid talk of
“authorities,” and old Nelson tried to defend himself. If he dealt with
English traders it was because he had to dispose of his produce somehow.
He was as conciliatory as he knew how to be, and this very thing seemed
to excite Heemskirk, who had worked himself up into a heavily breathing
state of passion.
“And the worst of them all is that Allen,” he growled. “Your particular
friend—eh? You have let in a lot of these Englishmen into this part.
You ought never to have been allowed to settle here. Never. What’s he
doing here now?”
Old Nelson (or Nielsen), becoming very agitated, declared that Jasper
Allen was no particular friend of his. No friend at all—at all. He had
bought three tons of rice from him to feed his workpeople on. What sort
of evidence of friendship was that? Heemskirk burst out at last with the
thought that had been gnawing at his vitals:
“Yes. Sell three tons of rice and flirt three days with that girl of
yours. I am speaking to you as a friend, Nielsen. This won’t do. You
are only on sufferance here.”
Old Nelson was taken aback at first, but recovered pretty quickly. Won’t
do! Certainly! Of course, it wouldn’t do! The last man in the world.
But his girl didn’t care for the fellow, and was too sensible to fall in
love with any one. He was very earnest in impressing on Heemskirk his
own feeling of absolute security. And the lieutenant, casting doubting
glances sideways, was yet willing to believe him.
“Much you know about it,” he grunted nevertheless.
“But I do know,” insisted old Nelson, with the greater desperation
because he wanted to resist the doubts arising in his own mind. “My own
daughter! In my own house, and I not to know! Come! It would be a good
joke, lieutenant.”
“They seem to be carrying on considerably,” remarked Heemskirk moodily.
“I suppose they are together now,” he added, feeling a pang which changed
what he meant for a mocking smile into a strange grimace.
The harassed Nelson shook his hand at him. He was at bottom shocked at
this insistence, and was even beginning to feel annoyed at the absurdity
of it.
“Pooh! Pooh! I’ll tell you what, lieutenant: you go to the house and
have a drop of gin-and-bitters before dinner. Ask for Freya. I must see
the last of this tobacco put away for the night, but I’ll be along
presently.”
Heemskirk was not insensible to this suggestion. It answered to his
secret longing, which was not a longing for drink, however. Old Nelson
shouted solicitously after his broad back a recommendation to make
himself comfortable, and that there was a box of cheroots on the
verandah.
It was the west verandah that old Nelson meant, the one which was the
living-room of the house, and had split-rattan screens of the very finest
quality. The east verandah, sacred to his own privacy, puffing out of
cheeks, and other signs of perplexed thinking, was fitted with stout
blinds of sailcloth. The north verandah was not a verandah at all,
really. It was more like a long balcony. It did not communicate with
the other two, and could only be approached by a passage inside the
house. Thus it had a privacy which made it a convenient place for a
maiden’s meditations without words, and also for the discourses,
apparently without sense, which, passing between a young man and a maid,
become pregnant with a diversity of transcendental meanings.
This north verandah was embowered with climbing plants. Freya, whose
room opened out on it, had furnished it as a sort of boudoir for herself,
with a few cane chairs and a sofa of the same kind. On this sofa she and
Jasper sat as close together as is possible in this imperfect world where
neither can a body be in two places at once nor yet two bodies can be in
one place at the same time. They had been sitting together all the
afternoon, and I won’t say that their talk had been without sense.
Loving him with a little judicious anxiety lest in his elation he should
break his heart over some mishap, Freya naturally would talk to him
soberly. He, nervous and brusque when away from her, appeared always as
if overcome by her visibility, by the great wonder of being palpably
loved. An old man’s child, having lost his mother early, thrown out to
sea out of the way while very young, he had not much experience of
tenderness of any kind.
In this private, foliage-embowered verandah, and at this late hour of the
afternoon, he bent down a little, and, possessing himself of Freya’s
hands, was kissing them one after another, while she smiled and looked
down at his head with the eyes of approving compassion. At that same
moment Heemskirk was approaching the house from the north.
Antonia was on the watch on that side. But she did not keep a very good
watch. The sun was setting; she knew that her young mistress and the
captain of the _Bonito_ were about to separate. She was walking to and
fro in the dusky grove with a flower in her hair, and singing softly to
herself, when suddenly, within a foot of her, the lieutenant appeared
from behind a tree. She bounded aside like a startled fawn, but
Heemskirk, with a lucid comprehension of what she was there for, pounced
upon her, and, catching her arm, clapped his other thick hand over her
mouth.
“If you try to make a noise I’ll twist your neck!”
This ferocious figure of speech terrified the girl sufficiently.
Heemskirk had seen plainly enough on the verandah Freya’s golden head
with another head very close to it. He dragged the unresisting maid with
him by a circuitous way into the compound, where he dismissed her with a
vicious push in the direction of the cluster of bamboo huts for the
servants.
She was very much like the faithful camerista of Italian comedy, but in
her terror she bolted away without a sound from that thick, short,
black-eyed man with a cruel grip of fingers like a vice. Quaking all
over at a distance, extremely scared and half inclined to laugh, she saw
him enter the house at the back.
The interior of the bungalow was divided by two passages crossing each
other in the middle. At that point Heemskirk, by turning his head
slightly to the left as he passed, secured the evidence of “carrying on”
so irreconcilable with old Nelson’s assurances that it made him stagger,
with a rush of blood to his head. Two white figures, distinct against
the light, stood in an unmistakable attitude. Freya’s arms were round
Jasper’s neck. Their faces were characteristically superimposed on each
other, and Heemskirk went on, his throat choked with a sudden rising of
curses, till on the west verandah he stumbled blindly against a chair and
then dropped into another as though his legs had been swept from under
him. He had indulged too long in the habit of appropriating Freya to
himself in his thoughts. “Is that how you entertain your visitors—you . . . ”
he thought, so outraged that he could not find a sufficiently
degrading epithet.
Freya struggled a little and threw her head back.
“Somebody has come in,” she whispered. Jasper, holding her clasped
closely to his breast, and looking down into her face, suggested
casually:
“Your father.”
Freya tried to disengage herself, but she had not the heart absolutely to
push him away with her hands.
“I believe it’s Heemskirk,” she breathed out at him.
He, plunging into her eyes in a quiet rapture, was provoked to a vague
smile by the sound of the name.
“The ass is always knocking down my beacons outside the river,” he
murmured. He attached no other meaning to Heemskirk’s existence; but
Freya was asking herself whether the lieutenant had seen them.
“Let me go, kid,” she ordered in a peremptory whisper. Jasper obeyed,
and, stepping back at once, continued his contemplation of her face under
another angle. “I must go and see,” she said to herself anxiously.
She instructed him hurriedly to wait a moment after she was gone and then
to slip on to the back verandah and get a quiet smoke before he showed
himself.
“Don’t stay late this evening,” was her last recommendation before she
left him.
Then Freya came out on the west verandah with her light, rapid step.
While going through the doorway she managed to shake down the folds of
the looped-up curtains at the end of the passage so as to cover Jasper’s
retreat from the bower. Directly she appeared Heemskirk jumped up as if
to fly at her. She paused and he made her an exaggerated low bow.
It irritated Freya.
“Oh! It’s you, Mr. Heemskirk. How do you do?” She spoke in her usual
tone. Her face was not plainly visible to him in the dusk of the deep
verandah. He dared not trust himself to speak, his rage at what he had
seen was so great. And when she added with serenity: “Papa will be
coming in before long,” he called her horrid names silently, to himself,
before he spoke with contorted lips.
“I have seen your father already. We had a talk in the sheds. He told
me some very interesting things. Oh, very—”
Freya sat down. She thought: “He has seen us, for certain.” She was not
ashamed. What she was afraid of was some foolish or awkward
complication. But she could not conceive how much her person had been
appropriated by Heemskirk (in his thoughts). She tried to be
conversational.
“You are coming now from Palembang, I suppose?”
“Eh? What? Oh, yes! I come from Palembang. Ha, ha, ha! You know what
your father said? He said he was afraid you were having a very dull time
of it here.”
“And I suppose you are going to cruise in the Moluccas,” continued Freya,
who wanted to impart some useful information to Jasper if possible. At
the same time she was always glad to know that those two men were a few
hundred miles apart when not under her eye.
Heemskirk growled angrily.
“Yes. Moluccas,” glaring in the direction of her shadowy figure. “Your
father thinks it’s very quiet for you here. I tell you what, Miss Freya.
There isn’t such a quiet spot on earth that a woman can’t find an
opportunity of making a fool of somebody.”
Freya thought: “I mustn’t let him provoke me.” Presently the Tamil boy,
who was Nelson’s head servant, came in with the lights. She addressed
him at once with voluble directions where to put the lamps, told him to
bring the tray with the gin and bitters, and to send Antonia into the
house.
“I will have to leave you to yourself, Mr. Heemskirk, for a while,” she
said.
And she went to her room to put on another frock. She made a quick
change of it because she wished to be on the verandah before her father
and the lieutenant met again. She relied on herself to regulate that
evening’s intercourse between these two. But Antonia, still scared and
hysterical, exhibited a bruise on her arm which roused Freya’s
indignation.
“He jumped on me out of the bush like a tiger,” said the girl, laughing
nervously with frightened eyes.
“The brute!” thought Freya. “He meant to spy on us, then.” She was
enraged, but the recollection of the thick Dutchman in white trousers
wide at the hips and narrow at the ankles, with his shoulder-straps and
black bullet head, glaring at her in the light of the lamps, was so
repulsively comical that she could not help a smiling grimace. Then she
became anxious. The absurdities of three men were forcing this anxiety
upon her: Jasper’s impetuosity, her father’s fears, Heemskirk’s
infatuation. She was very tender to the first two, and she made up her
mind to display all her feminine diplomacy. All this, she said to
herself, will be over and done with before very long now.
Heemskirk on the verandah, lolling in a chair, his legs extended and his
white cap reposing on his stomach, was lashing himself into a fury of an
atrocious character altogether incomprehensible to a girl like Freya.
His chin was resting on his chest, his eyes gazed stonily at his shoes.
Freya examined him from behind the curtain. He didn’t stir. He was
ridiculous. But this absolute stillness was impressive. She stole back
along the passage to the east verandah, where Jasper was sitting quietly
in the dark, doing what he was told, like a good boy.
“Psst,” she hissed. He was by her side in a moment.
“Yes. What is it?” he murmured.
“It’s that beetle,” she whispered uneasily. Under the impression of
Heemskirk’s sinister immobility she had half a mind to let Jasper know
that they had been seen. But she was by no means certain that Heemskirk
would tell her father—and at any rate not that evening. She concluded
rapidly that the safest thing would be to get Jasper out of the way as
soon as possible.
“What has he been doing?” asked Jasper in a calm undertone.
“Oh, nothing! Nothing. He sits there looking cross. But you know how
he’s always worrying papa.”
“Your father’s quite unreasonable,” pronounced Jasper judicially.
“I don’t know,” she said in a doubtful tone. Something of old Nelson’s
dread of the authorities had rubbed off on the girl since she had to live
with it day after day. “I don’t know. Papa’s afraid of being reduced to
beggary, as he says, in his old days. Look here, kid, you had better
clear out to-morrow, first thing.”
Jasper had hoped for another afternoon with Freya, an afternoon of quiet
felicity with the girl by his side and his eyes on his brig, anticipating
a blissful future. His silence was eloquent with disappointment, and
Freya understood it very well. She, too, was disappointed. But it was
her business to be sensible.
“We shan’t have a moment to ourselves with that beetle creeping round the
house,” she argued in a low, hurried voice. “So what’s the good of your
staying? And he won’t go while the brig’s here. You know he won’t.”
“He ought to be reported for loitering,” murmured Jasper with a vexed
little laugh.
“Mind you get under way at daylight,” recommended Freya under her breath.
He detained her after the manner of lovers. She expostulated without
struggling because it was hard for her to repulse him. He whispered into
her ear while he put his arms round her.
“Next time we two meet, next time I hold you like this, it shall be on
board. You and I, in the brig—all the world, all the life—” And then he
flashed out: “I wonder I can wait! I feel as if I must carry you off
now, at once. I could run with you in my hands—down the path—without
stumbling—without touching the earth—”
She was still. She listened to the passion in his voice. She was saying
to herself that if she were to whisper the faintest yes, if she were but
to sigh lightly her consent, he would do it. He was capable of doing
it—without touching the earth. She closed her eyes and smiled in the
dark, abandoning herself in a delightful giddiness, for an instant, to
his encircling arm. But before he could be tempted to tighten his grasp
she was out of it, a foot away from him and in full possession of
herself.
That was the steady Freya. She was touched by the deep sigh which
floated up to her from the white figure of Jasper, who did not stir.
“You are a mad kid,” she said tremulously. Then with a change of tone:
“No one could carry me off. Not even you. I am not the sort of girl
that gets carried off.” His white form seemed to shrink a little before
the force of that assertion and she relented. “Isn’t it enough for you
to know that you have—that you have carried me away?” she added in a
tender tone.
He murmured an endearing word, and she continued:
“I’ve promised you—I’ve said I would come—and I shall come of my own free
will. You shall wait for me on board. I shall get up the side—by
myself, and walk up to you on the deck and say: ‘Here I am, kid.’ And
then—and then I shall be carried off. But it will be no man who will
carry me off—it will be the brig, your brig—our brig. . . . I love the
beauty!”
She heard an inarticulate sound, something like a moan wrung out by pain
or delight, and glided away. There was that other man on the other
verandah, that dark, surly Dutchman who could make trouble between Jasper
and her father, bring about a quarrel, ugly words, and perhaps a physical
collision. What a horrible situation! But, even putting aside that
awful extremity, she shrank from having to live for some three months
with a wretched, tormented, angry, distracted, absurd man. And when the
day came, the day and the hour, what should she do if her father tried to
detain her by main force—as was, after all, possible? Could she actually
struggle with him hand to hand? But it was of lamentations and
entreaties that she was really afraid. Could she withstand them? What
an odious, cruel, ridiculous position would that be!
“But it won’t be. He’ll say nothing,” she thought as she came out
quickly on the west verandah, and, seeing that Heemskirk did not move,
sat down on a chair near the doorway and kept her eyes on him. The
outraged lieutenant had not changed his attitude; only his cap had fallen
off his stomach and was lying on the floor. His thick black eyebrows
were knitted by a frown, while he looked at her out of the corners of his
eyes. And their sideways glance in conjunction with the hooked nose, the
whole bulky, ungainly, sprawling person, struck Freya as so comically
moody that, inwardly discomposed as she was, she could not help smiling.
She did her best to give that smile a conciliatory character. She did
not want to provoke Heemskirk needlessly.
And the lieutenant, perceiving that smile, was mollified. It never
entered his head that his outward appearance, a naval officer, in
uniform, could appear ridiculous to that girl of no position—the daughter
of old Nielsen. The recollection of her arms round Jasper’s neck still
irritated and excited him. “The hussy!” he thought. “Smiling—eh?
That’s how you are amusing yourself. Fooling your father finely, aren’t
you? You have a taste for that sort of fun—have you? Well, we shall
see—” He did not alter his position, but on his pursed-up lips there
also appeared a smile of surly and ill-omened amusement, while his eyes
returned to the contemplation of his boots.
Freya felt hot with indignation. She sat radiantly fair in the
lamplight, her strong, well-shaped hands lying one on top of the other in
her lap. . . “Odious creature,” she thought. Her face coloured with
sudden anger. “You have scared my maid out of her senses,” she said
aloud. “What possessed you?”
He was thinking so deeply of her that the sound of her voice, pronouncing
these unexpected words, startled him extremely. He jerked up his head
and looked so bewildered that Freya insisted impatiently:
“I mean Antonia. You have bruised her arm. What did you do it for?”
“Do you want to quarrel with me?” he asked thickly, with a sort of
amazement. He blinked like an owl. He was funny. Freya, like all
women, had a keen sense of the ridiculous in outward appearance.
“Well, no; I don’t think I do.” She could not help herself. She laughed
outright, a clear, nervous laugh in which Heemskirk joined suddenly with
a harsh “Ha, ha, ha!”
Voices and footsteps were heard in the passage, and Jasper, with old
Nelson, came out. Old Nelson looked at his daughter approvingly, for he
liked the lieutenant to be kept in good humour. And he also joined
sympathetically in the laugh. “Now, lieutenant, we shall have some
dinner,” he said, rubbing his hands cheerily. Jasper had gone straight
to the balustrade. The sky was full of stars, and in the blue velvety
night the cove below had a denser blackness, in which the riding-lights
of the brig and of the gunboat glimmered redly, like suspended sparks.
“Next time this riding-light glimmers down there, I’ll be waiting for her
on the quarter-deck to come and say ‘Here I am,’” Jasper thought; and his
heart seemed to grow bigger in his chest, dilated by an oppressive
happiness that nearly wrung out a cry from him. There was no wind. Not
a leaf below him stirred, and even the sea was but a still uncomplaining
shadow. Far away on the unclouded sky the pale lightning, the
heat-lightning of the tropics, played tremulously amongst the low stars
in short, faint, mysteriously consecutive flashes, like incomprehensible
signals from some distant planet.
The dinner passed off quietly. Freya sat facing her father, calm but
pale. Heemskirk affected to talk only to old Nelson. Jasper’s behaviour
was exemplary. He kept his eyes under control, basking in the sense of
Freya’s nearness, as people bask in the sun without looking up to heaven.
And very soon after dinner was over, mindful of his instructions, he
declared that it was time for him to go on board his ship.
Heemskirk did not look up. Ensconced in the rocking-chair, and puffing
at a cheroot, he had the air of meditating surlily over some odious
outbreak. So at least it seemed to Freya. Old Nelson said at once:
“I’ll stroll down with you.” He had begun a professional conversation
about the dangers of the New Guinea coast, and wanted to relate to Jasper
some experience of his own “over there.” Jasper was such a good
listener! Freya made as if to accompany them, but her father frowned,
shook his head, and nodded significantly towards the immovable Heemskirk
blotting out smoke with half-closed eyes and protruded lips. The
lieutenant must not be left alone. Take offence, perhaps.
Freya obeyed these signs. “Perhaps it is better for me to stay,” she
thought. Women are not generally prone to review their own conduct,
still less to condemn it. The embarrassing masculine absurdities are in
the main responsible for its ethics. But, looking at Heemskirk, Freya
felt regret and even remorse. His thick bulk in repose suggested the
idea of repletion, but as a matter of fact he had eaten very little. He
had drunk a great deal, however. The fleshy lobes of his unpleasant big
ears with deeply folded rims were crimson. They quite flamed in the
neighbourhood of the flat, sallow cheeks. For a considerable time he did
not raise his heavy brown eyelids. To be at the mercy of such a creature
was humiliating; and Freya, who always ended by being frank with herself,
thought regretfully: “If only I had been open with papa from the first!
But then what an impossible life he would have led me!” Yes. Men were
absurd in many ways; lovably like Jasper, impracticably like her father,
odiously like that grotesquely supine creature in the chair. Was it
possible to talk him over? Perhaps it was not necessary? “Oh! I can’t
talk to him,” she thought. And when Heemskirk, still without looking at
her, began resolutely to crush his half-smoked cheroot on the
coffee-tray, she took alarm, glided towards the piano, opened it in
tremendous haste, and struck the keys before she sat down.
In an instant the verandah, the whole carpetless wooden bungalow raised
on piles, became filled with an uproarious, confused resonance. But
through it all she heard, she felt on the floor the heavy, prowling
footsteps of the lieutenant moving to and fro at her back. He was not
exactly drunk, but he was sufficiently primed to make the suggestions of
his excited imagination seem perfectly feasible and even clever;
beautifully, unscrupulously clever. Freya, aware that he had stopped
just behind her, went on playing without turning her head. She played
with spirit, brilliantly, a fierce piece of music, but when his voice
reached her she went cold all over. It was the voice, not the words.
The insolent familiarity of tone dismayed her to such an extent that she
could not understand at first what he was saying. His utterance was
thick, too.
“I suspected. . . . Of course I suspected something of your little goings
on. I am not a child. But from suspecting to seeing—seeing, you
understand—there’s an enormous difference. That sort of thing. . . .
Come! One isn’t made of stone. And when a man has been worried by a
girl as I have been worried by you, Miss Freya—sleeping and waking, then,
of course. . . . But I am a man of the world. It must be dull for you
here . . . I say, won’t you leave off this confounded playing . . .?”
This last was the only sentence really which she made out. She shook her
head negatively, and in desperation put on the loud pedal, but she could
not make the sound of the piano cover his raised voice.
“Only, I am surprised that you should. . . . An English trading skipper,
a common fellow. Low, cheeky lot, infesting these islands. I would make
short work of such trash! While you have here a good friend, a gentleman
ready to worship at your feet—your pretty feet—an officer, a man of
family. Strange, isn’t it? But what of that! You are fit for a
prince.”
Freya did not turn her head. Her face went stiff with horror and
indignation. This adventure was altogether beyond her conception of what
was possible. It was not in her character to jump up and run away. It
seemed to her, too, that if she did move there was no saying what might
happen. Presently her father would be back, and then the other would
have to leave off. It was best to ignore—to ignore. She went on playing
loudly and correctly, as though she were alone, as if Heemskirk did not
exist. That proceeding irritated him.
“Come! You may deceive your father,” he bawled angrily, “but I am not to
be made a fool of! Stop this infernal noise . . . Freya . . . Hey! You
Scandinavian Goddess of Love! Stop! Do you hear? That’s what you
are—of love. But the heathen gods are only devils in disguise, and
that’s what you are, too—a deep little devil. Stop it, I say, or I will
lift you off that stool!”
Standing behind her, he devoured her with his eyes, from the golden crown
of her rigidly motionless head to the heels of her shoes, the line of her
shapely shoulders, the curves of her fine figure swaying a little before
the keyboard. She had on a light dress; the sleeves stopped short at the
elbows in an edging of lace. A satin ribbon encircled her waist. In an
access of irresistible, reckless hopefulness he clapped both his hands on
that waist—and then the irritating music stopped at last. But, quick as
she was in springing away from the contact (the round music-stool going
over with a crash), Heemskirk’s lips, aiming at her neck, landed a
hungry, smacking kiss just under her ear. A deep silence reigned for a
time. And then he laughed rather feebly.
He was disconcerted somewhat by her white, still face, the big light
violet eyes resting on him stonily. She had not uttered a sound. She
faced him, steadying herself on the corner of the piano with one extended
hand. The other went on rubbing with mechanical persistency the place
his lips had touched.
“What’s the trouble?” he said, offended. “Startled you? Look here:
don’t let us have any of that nonsense. You don’t mean to say a kiss
frightens you so much as all that. . . . I know better. . . . I don’t
mean to be left out in the cold.”
He had been gazing into her face with such strained intentness that he
could no longer see it distinctly. Everything round him was rather
misty. He forgot the overturned stool, caught his foot against it, and
lurched forward slightly, saying in an ingratiating tone:
“I’m not bad fun, really. You try a few kisses to begin with—”
He said no more, because his head received a terrific concussion,
accompanied by an explosive sound. Freya had swung her round, strong arm
with such force that the impact of her open palm on his flat cheek turned
him half round. Uttering a faint, hoarse yell, the lieutenant clapped
both his hands to the left side of his face, which had taken on suddenly
a dusky brick-red tinge. Freya, very erect, her violet eyes darkened,
her palm still tingling from the blow, a sort of restrained determined
smile showing a tiny gleam of her white teeth, heard her father’s rapid,
heavy tread on the path below the verandah. Her expression lost its
pugnacity and became sincerely concerned. She was sorry for her father.
She stooped quickly to pick up the music-stool, as if anxious to
obliterate the traces. . . . But that was no good. She had resumed her
attitude, one hand resting lightly on the piano, before old Nelson got up
to the top of the stairs.
Poor father! How furious he will be—how upset! And afterwards, what
tremors, what unhappiness! Why had she not been open with him from the
first? His round, innocent stare of amazement cut her to the quick. But
he was not looking at her. His stare was directed to Heemskirk, who,
with his back to him and with his hands still up to his face, was hissing
curses through his teeth, and (she saw him in profile) glaring at her
balefully with one black, evil eye.
“What’s the matter?” asked old Nelson, very much bewildered.
She did not answer him. She thought of Jasper on the deck of the brig,
gazing up at the lighted bungalow, and she felt frightened. It was a
mercy that one of them at least was on board out of the way. She only
wished he were a hundred miles off. And yet she was not certain that she
did. Had Jasper been mysteriously moved that moment to reappear on the
verandah she would have thrown her consistency, her firmness, her
self-possession, to the winds, and flown into his arms.
“What is it? What is it?” insisted the unsuspecting Nelson, getting
quite excited. “Only this minute you were playing a tune, and—”
Freya, unable to speak in her apprehension of what was coming (she was
also fascinated by that black, evil, glaring eye), only nodded slightly
at the lieutenant, as much as to say: “Just look at him!”
“Why, yes!” exclaimed old Nelson. “I see. What on earth—”
Meantime he had cautiously approached Heemskirk, who, bursting into
incoherent imprecations, was stamping with both feet where he stood. The
indignity of the blow, the rage of baffled purpose, the ridicule of the
exposure, and the impossibility of revenge maddened him to a point when
he simply felt he must howl with fury.
“Oh, oh, oh!” he howled, stamping across the verandah as though he meant
to drive his foot through the floor at every step.
“Why, is his face hurt?” asked the astounded old Nelson. The truth
dawned suddenly upon his innocent mind. “Dear me!” he cried,
enlightened. “Get some brandy, quick, Freya. . . . You are subject to
it, lieutenant? Fiendish, eh? I know, I know! Used to go crazy all of
a sudden myself in the time. . . . And the little bottle of laudanum from
the medicine-chest, too, Freya. Look sharp. . . . Don’t you see he’s got
a toothache?”
And, indeed, what other explanation could have presented itself to the
guileless old Nelson, beholding this cheek nursed with both hands, these
wild glances, these stampings, this distracted swaying of the body? It
would have demanded a preternatural acuteness to hit upon the true cause.
Freya had not moved. She watched Heemskirk’s savagely inquiring, black
stare directed stealthily upon herself. “Aha, you would like to be let
off!” she said to herself. She looked at him unflinchingly, thinking it
out. The temptation of making an end of it all without further trouble
was irresistible. She gave an almost imperceptible nod of assent, and
glided away.
“Hurry up that brandy!” old Nelson shouted, as she disappeared in the
passage.
Heemskirk relieved his deeper feelings by a sudden string of curses in
Dutch and English which he sent after her. He raved to his heart’s
content, flinging to and fro the verandah and kicking chairs out of his
way; while Nelson (or Nielsen), whose sympathy was profoundly stirred by
these evidences of agonising pain, hovered round his dear (and dreaded)
lieutenant, fussing like an old hen.
“Dear me, dear me! Is it so bad? I know well what it is. I used to
frighten my poor wife sometimes. Do you get it often like this,
lieutenant?”
Heemskirk shouldered him viciously out of his way, with a short, insane
laugh. But his staggering host took it in good part; a man beside
himself with excruciating toothache is not responsible.
“Go into my room, lieutenant,” he suggested urgently. “Throw yourself on
my bed. We will get something to ease you in a minute.”
He seized the poor sufferer by the arm and forced him gently onwards to
the very bed, on which Heemskirk, in a renewed access of rage, flung
himself down with such force that he rebounded from the mattress to the
height of quite a foot.
“Dear me!” exclaimed the scared Nelson, and incontinently ran off to
hurry up the brandy and the laudanum, very angry that so little alacrity
was shown in relieving the tortures of his precious guest. In the end he
got these things himself.
Half an hour later he stood in the inner passage of the house, surprised
by faint, spasmodic sounds of a mysterious nature, between laughter and
sobs. He frowned; then went straight towards his daughter’s room and
knocked at the door.
Freya, her glorious fair hair framing her white face and rippling down a
dark-blue dressing-gown, opened it partly.
The light in the room was dim. Antonia, crouching in a corner, rocked
herself backwards and forwards, uttering feeble moans. Old Nelson had
not much experience in various kinds of feminine laughter, but he was
certain there had been laughter there.
“Very unfeeling, very unfeeling!” he said, with weighty displeasure.
“What is there so amusing in a man being in pain? I should have thought
a woman—a young girl—”
“He was so funny,” murmured Freya, whose eyes glistened strangely in the
semi-obscurity of the passage. “And then, you know, I don’t like him,”
she added, in an unsteady voice.
“Funny!” repeated old Nelson, amazed at this evidence of callousness in
one so young. “You don’t like him! Do you mean to say that, because you
don’t like him, you—Why, it’s simply cruel! Don’t you know it’s about
the worst sort of pain there is? Dogs have been known to go mad with
it.”
“He certainly seemed to have gone mad,” Freya said with an effort, as if
she were struggling with some hidden feeling.
But her father was launched.
“And you know how he is. He notices everything. He is a fellow to take
offence for the least little thing—regular Dutchman—and I want to keep
friendly with him. It’s like this, my girl: if that rajah of ours were
to do something silly—and you know he is a sulky, rebellious beggar—and
the authorities took into their heads that my influence over him wasn’t
good, you would find yourself without a roof over your head—”
She cried: “What nonsense, father!” in a not very assured tone, and
discovered that he was angry, angry enough to achieve irony; yes, old
Nelson (or Nielsen), irony! Just a gleam of it.
“Oh, of course, if you have means of your own—a mansion, a plantation
that I know nothing of—” But he was not capable of sustained irony. “I
tell you they would bundle me out of here,” he whispered forcibly;
“without compensation, of course. I know these Dutch. And the
lieutenant’s just the fellow to start the trouble going. He has the ear
of influential officials. I wouldn’t offend him for anything—for
anything—on no consideration whatever. . . . What did you say?”
It was only an inarticulate exclamation. If she ever had a half-formed
intention of telling him everything she had given it up now. It was
impossible, both out of regard for his dignity and for the peace of his
poor mind.
“I don’t care for him myself very much,” old Nelson’s subdued undertone
confessed in a sigh. “He’s easier now,” he went on, after a silence.
“I’ve given him up my bed for the night. I shall sleep on my verandah,
in the hammock. No; I can’t say I like him either, but from that to
laugh at a man because he’s driven crazy with pain is a long way. You’ve
surprised me, Freya. That side of his face is quite flushed.”
Her shoulders shook convulsively under his hands, which he laid on her
paternally. His straggly, wiry moustache brushed her forehead in a
good-night kiss. She closed the door, and went away from it to the
middle of the room before she allowed herself a tired-out sort of laugh,
without buoyancy.
“Flushed! A little flushed!” she repeated to herself. “I hope so,
indeed! A little—”
Her eyelashes were wet. Antonia, in her corner, moaned and giggled, and
it was impossible to tell where the moans ended and the giggles began.
The mistress and the maid had been somewhat hysterical, for Freya, on
fleeing into her room, had found Antonia there, and had told her
everything.
“I have avenged you, my girl,” she exclaimed.
And then they had laughingly cried and cryingly laughed with
admonitions—“Ssh, not so loud! Be quiet!” on one part, and interludes of
“I am so frightened. . . . He’s an evil man,” on the other.
Antonia was very much afraid of Heemskirk. She was afraid of him because
of his personal appearance: because of his eyes and his eyebrows, and his
mouth and his nose and his limbs. Nothing could be more rational. And
she thought him an evil man, because, to her eyes, he looked evil. No
ground for an opinion could be sounder. In the dimness of the room, with
only a nightlight burning at the head of Freya’s bed, the camerista crept
out of her corner to crouch at the feet of her mistress, supplicating in
whispers:
“There’s the brig. Captain Allen. Let us run away at once—oh, let us
run away! I am so frightened. Let us! Let us!”
“I! Run away!” thought Freya to herself, without looking down at the
scared girl. “Never.”
Both the resolute mistress under the mosquito-net and the frightened maid
lying curled up on a mat at the foot of the bed did not sleep very well
that night. The person that did not sleep at all was Lieutenant
Heemskirk. He lay on his back staring vindictively in the darkness.
Inflaming images and humiliating reflections succeeded each other in his
mind, keeping up, augmenting his anger. A pretty tale this to get about!
But it must not be allowed to get about. The outrage had to be swallowed
in silence. A pretty affair! Fooled, led on, and struck by the girl—and
probably fooled by the father, too. But no. Nielsen was but another
victim of that shameless hussy, that brazen minx, that sly, laughing,
kissing, lying . . .
“No; he did not deceive me on purpose,” thought the tormented lieutenant.
“But I should like to pay him off, all the same, for being such an
imbecile—”
Well, some day, perhaps. One thing he was firmly resolved on: he had
made up his mind to steal early out of the house. He did not think he
could face the girl without going out of his mind with fury.
“Fire and perdition! Ten thousand devils! I shall choke here before the
morning!” he muttered to himself, lying rigid on his back on old Nelson’s
bed, his breast heaving for air.
He arose at daylight and started cautiously to open the door. Faint
sounds in the passage alarmed him, and remaining concealed he saw Freya
coming out. This unexpected sight deprived him of all power to move away
from the crack of the door. It was the narrowest crack possible, but
commanding the view of the end of the verandah. Freya made for that end
hastily to watch the brig passing the point. She wore her dark
dressing-gown; her feet were bare, because, having fallen asleep towards
the morning, she ran out headlong in her fear of being too late.
Heemskirk had never seen her looking like this, with her hair drawn back
smoothly to the shape of her head, and hanging in one heavy, fair tress
down her back, and with that air of extreme youth, intensity, and
eagerness. And at first he was amazed, and then he gnashed his teeth.
He could not face her at all. He muttered a curse, and kept still behind
the door.
With a low, deep-breathed “Ah!” when she first saw the brig already under
way, she reached for Nelson’s long glass reposing on brackets high up the
wall. The wide sleeve of the dressing-gown slipped back, uncovering her
white arm as far as the shoulder. Heemskirk gripping the door-handle, as
if to crush it, felt like a man just risen to his feet from a drinking
bout.
And Freya knew that he was watching her. She knew. She had seen the
door move as she came out of the passage. She was aware of his eyes
being on her, with scornful bitterness, with triumphant contempt.
“You are there,” she thought, levelling the long glass. “Oh, well, look
on, then!”
The green islets appeared like black shadows, the ashen sea was smooth as
glass, the clear robe of the colourless dawn, in which even the brig
appeared shadowy, had a hem of light in the east. Directly Freya had
made out Jasper on deck, with his own long glass directed to the
bungalow, she laid hers down and raised both her beautiful white arms
above her head. In that attitude of supreme cry she stood still, glowing
with the consciousness of Jasper’s adoration going out to her figure held
in the field of his glass away there, and warmed, too, by the feeling of
evil passion, the burning, covetous eyes of the other, fastened on her
back. In the fervour of her love, in the caprice of her mind, and with
that mysterious knowledge of masculine nature women seem to be born to,
she thought:
“You are looking on—you will—you must! Then you shall see something.”
She brought both her hands to her lips, then flung them out, sending a
kiss over the sea, as if she wanted to throw her heart along with it on
the deck of the brig. Her face was rosy, her eyes shone. Her repeated,
passionate gesture seemed to fling kisses by the hundred again and again
and again, while the slowly ascending sun brought the glory of colour to
the world, turning the islets green, the sea blue, the brig below her
white—dazzlingly white in the spread of her wings—with the red ensign
streaming like a tiny flame from the peak.
And each time she murmured with a rising inflexion:
“Take this—and this—and this—” till suddenly her arms fell. She had seen
the ensign dipped in response, and next moment the point below hid the
hull of the brig from her view. Then she turned away from the
balustrade, and, passing slowly before the door of her father’s room with
her eyelids lowered, and an enigmatic expression on her face, she
disappeared behind the curtain.
But instead of going along the passage, she remained concealed and very
still on the other side to watch what would happen. For some time the
broad, furnished verandah remained empty. Then the door of old Nelson’s
room came open suddenly, and Heemskirk staggered out. His hair was
rumpled, his eyes bloodshot, his unshaven face looked very dark. He
gazed wildly about, saw his cap on a table, snatched it up, and made for
the stairs quietly, but with a strange, tottering gait, like the last
effort of waning strength.
Shortly after his head had sunk below the level of the floor, Freya came
out from behind the curtain, with compressed, scheming lips, and no
softness at all in her luminous eyes. He could not be allowed to sneak
off scot free. Never—never! She was excited, she tingled all over, she
had tasted blood! He must be made to understand that she had been aware
of having been watched; he must know that he had been seen slinking off
shamefully. But to run to the front rail and shout after him would have
been childish, crude—undignified. And to shout—what? What word? What
phrase? No; it was impossible. Then how? . . . She frowned, discovered
it, dashed at the piano, which had stood open all night, and made the
rosewood monster growl savagery in an irritated bass. She struck chords
as if firing shots after that straddling, broad figure in ample white
trousers and a dark uniform jacket with gold shoulder-straps, and then
she pursued him with the same thing she had played the evening before—a
modern, fierce piece of love music which had been tried more than once
against the thunderstorms of the group. She accentuated its rhythm with
triumphant malice, so absorbed in her purpose that she did not notice the
presence of her father, who, wearing an old threadbare ulster of a check
pattern over his sleeping suit, had run out from the back verandah to
inquire the reason of this untimely performance. He stared at her.
“What on earth? . . . Freya!” His voice was nearly drowned by the piano.
“What’s become of the lieutenant?” he shouted.
She looked up at him as if her soul were lost in her music, with unseeing
eyes.
“Gone.”
“Wha-a-t? . . . Where?”
She shook her head slightly, and went on playing louder than before. Old
Nelson’s innocently anxious gaze starting from the open door of his room,
explored the whole place high and low, as if the lieutenant were
something small which might have been crawling on the floor or clinging
to a wall. But a shrill whistle coming somewhere from below pierced the
ample volume of sound rolling out of the piano in great, vibrating waves.
The lieutenant was down at the cove, whistling for the boat to come and
take him off to his ship. And he seemed to be in a terrific hurry, too,
for he whistled again almost directly, waited for a moment, and then sent
out a long, interminable, shrill call as distressful to hear as though he
had shrieked without drawing breath. Freya ceased playing suddenly.
“Going on board,” said old Nelson, perturbed by the event. “What could
have made him clear out so early? Queer chap. Devilishly touchy, too!
I shouldn’t wonder if it was your conduct last night that hurt his
feelings? I noticed you, Freya. You as well as laughed in his face,
while he was suffering agonies from neuralgia. It isn’t the way to get
yourself liked. He’s offended with you.”
Freya’s hands now reposed passive on the keys; she bowed her fair head,
feeling a sudden discontent, a nervous lassitude, as though she had
passed through some exhausting crisis. Old Nelson (or Nielsen), looking
aggrieved, was revolving matters of policy in his bald head.
“I think it would be right for me to go on board just to inquire, some
time this morning,” he declared fussily. “Why don’t they bring me my
morning tea? Do you hear, Freya? You have astonished me, I must say. I
didn’t think a young girl could be so unfeeling. And the lieutenant
thinks himself a friend of ours, too! What? No? Well, he calls himself
a friend, and that’s something to a person in my position. Certainly!
Oh, yes, I must go on board.”
“Must you?” murmured Freya listlessly; then added, in her thought: “Poor
man!”