"I shall, confound him," exploded Saunders, smiting the table mightily.
"He"s too d.a.m.ned uppish anyhow. He needs taking down--"
"Ah, Selim," interrupted the Enemy, as the native boy entered, "no mail, eh?"
"No, excellency, the ship is not due to arrive for two weeks."
"Ah, but, Selim, you forget that I am expecting a letter from Von Blitz"s wives. They promised to let me know how soon he is able to resume work at the mines."
"I hear you polished him off neatly," said Britt, with a grin.
"Just the rough edges, Mr. Britt. He is now a gem of purest ray serene.
By the way, I hope you"ll not take my mild suggestions amiss."
"There"s nothing I object to except your power to call strikes among our servants. That seems to me to be rather high-handed," said Britt good-naturedly.
"No doubt you"re right," agreed the other, "but you must remember that I needed the cigarettes."
"My word!" muttered Saunders admiringly.
"Look here, old man," said Britt, his cheeks glowing, "it"s mighty good of you to take this trouble for----"
"Don"t mention it. I"d only ask in return that we three be a little more sociable hereafter. We"re not here to cut each other"s throats, you know, and we"ve got a deadly half year ahead of us. What say?"
For answer the two lawyers arose and shook hands with the excellent Enemy. When they started for the chateau at seven o"clock, each with six mint juleps about his person, they were too mellow for a.n.a.lysis. The Enemy, who had drunk but little, took an arm of each and piloted them st.u.r.dily through the town.
"I"d walk up to the chateau if I were you," he said, when they clamoured for a jinriksha apiece. "It will help pa.s.s away the time."
"By Jove," said Saunders, hunting for the Enemy"s hand. "I"m going to "nform L-Lord Deppingham that he"s "nsufferable a.s.s an"--an" I don"t care who knows it."
"Saunders," said Britt, with rare dignity, "take your hand out of my pocket."
CHAPTER XI
THE SLOUGH OF TRANQUILLITY
Three months stole by with tantalising slowness. How the strangers on the island of j.a.pat employed those dull, simmering, idle weeks it would not be difficult to relate. There was little or no incident to break the monotony of their enforced residence among the surly j.a.pat.i.tes; the same routine obtained from day to day. Sultry, changeless, machine-like were those hundred days and nights. They looked forward with hopeful, tired eyes; never backward. There was nothing behind them but a dour waste, a bog through which they had driven themselves with a lash of resolution.
Autumn pa.s.sed on into winter without a change of expression in the benign face of nature. Christmas day was as hot as if it had come in midsummer; the natives were as naked, the trees as fully clad. The curious sun closed his great eye for a few hours in the twenty-four; the remainder of the time he glared down upon his victims with a malevolence that knew no bounds. Soft, sweet winds came with the typhoon season, else the poor whites must have shrivelled and died while nature revelled. Rain fell often in fitful little bursts of joyousness, but the hungry earth sipped its moisture through a million greedy lips, eager to thwart the mischievous sun. Through it all, the chateau gleamed red and purple and gray against the green mountainside, baked where the sun could meet its face, cool where the caverns blew upon it with their rich, damp breath.
The six months were pa.s.sing away, however, in spite of themselves; ten weeks were left before the worn, but determined heirs could cast off their bonds and rush away to other climes. It mattered little whether they went away rich or poor; they were to go! Go! That was the richest thing the future held out to them--more precious than the wealth for which they stayed. Whatever was being done for them in London and Boston, it was no recompense for the weariness of heart and soul that they had found in the green island of j.a.pat.
True, they rode and played and swam and romped without restraint, but beneath all of their abandon there lurked the ever-present pathos of the jail, the asylum, the detention ward. The blue sky seemed streaked with the bars of their prison; the green earth clanked as with the sombre tread of feet crossing flagstones.
Not until the end of January was there a sign of revolt against the ever-growing, insidious condition of melancholy. As they turned into the last third of their exile, they found heart to rejoice in the thought that release was coming nearer and nearer. The end of March! Eight weeks off! Soon there would be but seven weeks--then six!
And, all this time, the islanders toiled as they had toiled for years; they reckoned in years, while the strangers cast up Time"s account in weeks and called them years. Each day the brown men worked in the mines, piling gems into the vaults with a resoluteness that never faltered.
They were the sons of Martha. The rubies of Mandalay and Mogok were rivalled by the takings of these indifferent stockholders in the great j.a.pat corporation. Nothing short of a ruby as large as the Tibet gem could have startled them out of their state of taciturnity. Gems weighing ten and fifteen carats already had been taken from the "byon"
in the wash, and yet inspired no exaltation. Sapphires, nestling in the soft ground near their carmine sisters, were rolling into the coffers of the company, but they were treated as so many pebbles in this ceaseless search.
The tiniest child knew that the ruby would not lose its colour by fire, while the blue of the sapphire would vanish forever if subjected to heat. All these things and many more the white strangers learned; they were surfeited with a knowledge that tired and bored them.
From London came disquieting news for all sides to the controversy. The struggle promised to be drawn out for years, perhaps; the executors would probably be compelled to turn over the affairs of the corporation to agents of the Crown; in the meantime a battle royal, long drawn out, would undoubtedly be fought for the vast unentailed estate left behind by the two legators.
The lonely legatees, marooned in the far South Sea, began to realise that even after they had spent their six months of probation, they would still have months, even years, of waiting before they could touch the fortune they laid claim to. The islanders also were vaguely awake to the fact that everything might be tied up for years, despite the provisions of the will; a restless, stubborn feeling of alarm spread among them.
This feeling gradually developed itself into bitter resentment; hatred for the people who were causing this delay was growing deeper and fiercer with each succeeding day of toil.
Their counsellor, the complacent Enemy, was in no sense immune to the blandishments of the climate. His tremendous vitality waned; he slowly drifted into the current with his fellows, although not beside them. For some unaccountable reason, he held himself aloof from the men and women that his charges were fighting. He met the two lawyers often, but nothing pa.s.sed between them that could have been regarded as the slightest breach of trust. He lived like a rajah in his shady bungalow, surrounded by the luxuries of one to whom all things are brought indivisible. If he had any longing for the society of women of his own race and kind, he carefully concealed it; his indifference to the subtle though unmistakable appeals of the two gentlewomen in the chateau was irritating in the extreme. When he deliberately, though politely, declined their invitation to tea one afternoon, their humiliation knew no bounds. They had, after weeks of procrastination, surrendered to the inevitable. It was when they could no longer stand out against the common enemy--Tranquillity! Lord Deppingham and Bobby Browne suffered in silence; they even looked longingly toward the bungalow for the relief that it contained and refused to extend.
Lady Deppingham and Mrs. Browne should not be misunderstood by the reader. They loved their husbands--I am quite sure of that; but they were tired of seeing no one else, tired of talking to no one else.
Moreover, in support of this one-sided a.s.sertion, they experienced from time to time the most melancholy attacks of jealousy. The drag of time hung so heavily upon them that any struggle to cast it off was immediately noticeable. If Mrs. Browne, in plain despair, went off for a day"s ride with Lord Deppingham, that gentleman"s wife was sick with jealousy. If Lady Agnes strolled in the moonlit gardens with Mr. Browne, the former Miss Bate of Boston could scarcely control her emotions. They shed many tears of anguish over the faithlessness of husbands; tears of hatred over the viciousness of temptresses. Their quarrels were fierce, their upbraidings characteristic, but in the end they cried and kissed and "made up"; they actually found some joy in creating these little feuds and certainly there was great exhilaration in ending them.
They did not know, of course, that the wily Britt, despite his own depression, was all the while acc.u.mulating the most astounding lot of evidence to show that a decided streak of insanity existed in the two heirs. He won Saunders over to his way of thinking, and that faithful agent unconsciously found himself constantly on the watch for "signs,"
jotting them down in his memorandum book. Britt was firm in his purpose to make them out as "mad as March hares" if needs be; he slyly patted his typewritten "manifestations" and said that it would be easy sailing, so far as he was concerned. One choice bit of evidence he secured in a most canny manner. He was present when Miss Pelham, at the bank, was "taking" a dictation for the Enemy--some matter pertaining to the output of the mines. Lady Deppingham had just been guilty of a most astounding piece of foolhardiness, and he was discussing it with the Enemy. She had forced her horse to leap across a narrow fissure in the volcano the day before. Falling, she would have gone to her death three hundred feet below.
"She must be an out and out lunatic," the Enemy had said. Britt looked quickly at Miss Pelham and Mr. Bowles. The former took down the statement in shorthand and Bowles was afterward required to sign "his deposition." Such a statement as that, coming from the source it did, would be of inestimable value in Court.
"If they could only be married in some way," was Britt"s private lament to Saunders, from time to time, when despair overcame confidence.
"I"ve got a ripping idea," Saunders said one day.
"Let"s have it. You"ve always got "em. Why not divide with me?"
"Can"t do it just yet. I"ve been looking up a little matter. I"ll spring it soon."
"How long have you been working on the idea?"
"Nearly four months," said Saunders, yawning.
""Gad, this climate _is_ enervating," was Britt"s caustic comment.
Saunders was heels over head in love with Miss Pelham at this time, so it is not surprising that he had some sort of an idea about marriage, no matter whom it concerned.
Night after night, the Deppinghams and Brownes gave dinners, b.a.l.l.s, musicales, "Bridges," masques and theatre suppers at the chateau. First one would invite the other to a great ball, then the other would respond by giving a sumptuous dinner. Their dinners were served with as much punctiliousness as if the lordliest guests were present; their dancing parties, while somewhat barren of guests, were never dull for longer than ten minutes after they opened. Each lady danced twice and then pleaded a headache. Whereupon the "function" came to a close.
For a while, the two hostesses were not in a position to ask any one outside their immediate families to these functions, but one day Mrs.
Browne was seized by an inspiration. She announced that she was going to send regular invitations to all of her friends at home.
"Regular written invitations, with five-cent stamps, my dear," she explained enthusiastically. "Just like this: "Mrs. Robert Browne requests the pleasure of Miss So-and-so"s company at dinner on the 17th of Whatever-it-is. Please reply by return steamer." Won"t it be fun?
Bobby, please send down to the bank for the stamps. I"m going to make out a list."
After that it was no unusual thing to see large packages of carefully stamped envelopes going to sea in the ships that came for the mail.
"And I"d like so much to meet these native Americans that you are asking," said Lady Agnes sweetly, and without malice. "I"ve always wondered if the first families over there show any trace of their wonderful, picturesque Indian blood."