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Title: Never the twain shall meet

Author: Peter B. Kyne

Release date: December 14, 2022 [eBook #69547]
                Most recently updated: February 21, 2023

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Grosset & Dunlap

Credits: Al Haines, John Routh & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET ***






                            NEVER THE TWAIN
                               SHALL MEET

                                   BY
                             PETER B. KYNE

                               AUTHOR OF
                          CAPPY RICKS RETIRES,
                         THE PRIDE OF PALOMAR,
                       KINDRED OF THE DUST, ETC.


                            GROSSET & DUNLAP
                        PUBLISHERS      NEW YORK

                  Made in the United States of America




                         _Copyright, 1923, by_
                             PETER B. KYNE

    _All Rights Reserved, including that of translation into foreign
                              languages,_
                      _including the Scandinavian_


             _Manufactured in the United States of America_




                          _To a Little Girl_—

                              who believed
                     that when the fairies married,
                    one might, by lying very quietly
                             in the grass,
                       hear the bluebells ringing

                       Never the Twain Shall Meet




                               CHAPTER I


It was a song that never before had been sung; once sung, never again
would it be heard. Such a song, indeed, as little girls croon to their
dolls; half funeral chant, half hymn, sung in a minor key by a girl with
a powerfully sweet lyric soprano. The last of the land breeze carried it
aft to Gaston Larrieau, the master of the 200-ton auxiliary trading
schooner Moorea, where he stood on the top step of the companion, his
leonine head and tremendous shoulders showing above the deck-house, as
he smoked his first after-breakfast pipe.

While he listened, a shadow passed over the man’s face, as when winds
drive a dark cloud above a sunny plain. He removed his pipe thoughtfully
to murmur:

“Ah, my poor Tamea! Dear child of the sun! Homesick already!” Then he
came out on deck and stood by the weather rail, looking forward until he
espied the figure of the singer stretched face downward, at full length,
alongside the bowsprit, but snuggled comfortably in the belly of the
jib. One arm enveloped the bowsprit; at each rise and fall of the
Moorea’s long clipper bow, her feet, sandal-clad, beat the canvas in
rhythm. And, because she was young and athrill with the music of the
spheres, because the dark blue water purling under the schooner’s
forefoot brought to her memories of the insistent, peaceful swish of the
surf enveloping the outer reef at Riva, the girl Tamea sang:

    “Behold! Tamea, Queen of Riva,
    Has forsaken her mother’s people.
    In her father’s great canoe called Moorea
    After the mother of Tamea, who loved him,
    Tamea sails over a cold sea
    To the white man’s country.
    Tamea is happy and curious.
    But if the hearts in this new land
    Are cold as the fog this morning,
    Then will the heart of Tamea grow heavy.
    Then will she weep for a sight of Riva.
    Then will she yearn for love and pleasure,
    For dancing and feasting; for the water
    White on the reef where the fishermen stand . . .”

“I must shake her out of that mood,” Larrieau muttered, and strode aft
to the wheel. The Tahitian helmsman gave way to him and as the master
put the helm down and the schooner came sharply up into the wind and
hung there shivering her canvas until it cracked like pistol shots,
Tamea rose briskly from her hammock in the belly of the jib and stood
poised on the bowsprit, with one hand clasping the jib to steady her.
The suddenness with which she had been disturbed and the air of regal
hauteur she assumed as she faced aft for an explanation from the
Tahitian helmsman, who had now resumed the wheel and was easing the
Moorea away on her course once more, brought a bellow of Brobdingnagian
laughter from Larrieau.

Tamea came aft with stately tread, pausing at the forward end of the
deck-house. “So it was you, great, wicked Frenchman,” she cried in a
Polynesian dialect. “Truly, my father forgets that he is but a wandering
trader, while I am Tamea, Queen of Riva!” Simulating a royal fury she
was far from feeling, Tamea grasped a bucket attached to a rope, dropped
it overboard, drew it back filled with water and, poising it in position
to hurl its contents, advanced to the assault.

“_Tiens!_” Gaston Larrieau chuckled. “I shall never succeed in making a
Christian of you. It is written that even a queen shall honor her father
and mother? nevertheless you, my own child, would dishonor me with sea
water!” As she threatened him laughingly, he leaped for the opposite
corner of the deck-house, and she saw that it was his humor to invite
the deluge. Wherefore, with the perversity of her sex and royal blood,
she deluged the helmsman, who stood grinning at her.

“Your eye belongs on the lubber’s mark, on the sails, on the
horizon—anywhere but on me, Kahanaha,” she admonished the amazed
fellow. And then, while Gaston Larrieau, momentarily off guard, stood
roaring great gales of laughter at the discomfited Kahanaha, Queen Tamea
of Riva dashed into his face fully a quart of water remaining in the
bucket. She smiled upon Larrieau adorably.

“He laughs best who laughs last. Kahanaha, you may laugh.”

Larrieau dashed the water from his bush of a beard. “_Nom d’un chien!_
This is mutiny. Tamea, come here!” But Tamea merely wrinkled her nose at
him, and when he charged at her she cried aloud, half delighted, half
deliciously apprehensive, and started up the starboard main shrouds. Her
father followed her, moving, despite his sixty years and his tremendous
bulk, with something of the ease and swiftness of a bear.

At the masthead Tamea cowered, pretending to be frightened and cornered,
until his hand reached for her slim ankle; when without the slightest
hesitation she sprang for the backstay and went whizzing swiftly down to
the deck. Here she threw him a peace offering, in the way of a kiss, but
he ignored her. From the masthead he was looking out over the low-lying
smear of fog that shrouded the coast of California, and the girl
thrilled as his stentorian voice rang through the ship.

“Land, ho!”

Within a few minutes the Moorea had slipped through the cordon of fog
into the sunshine. Off to starboard the red hull of the lightship loomed
vividly against the blue of sea and sky; a white pilot schooner ratched
lazily across their bows, while off to port three gasoline trawlers out
of San Francisco coughed violently away toward the Cordelia banks, their
hulls painted in bizarre effects of Mediterranean blue with yellow decks
and upper works. Their Sicilian crews waved tassled, multicolored
tam-o’-shanter caps at Tamea and when she threw kisses to them with both
hands they shouted their approval in ringing fashion.

From Point San Pedro on the south to Point Reyes on the north fifty
miles of green, mountainous shore line sweeping down abruptly to
ocher-tinted bluffs lay outspread before Tamea. She viewed it with mixed
feelings of awe, delight and a half sensed feeling of apprehension, for
all that enthralling vision impressed her with the thought that beyond
the indentation which her father called to her was the Golden Gate, lay
another world of romance, of dreams, curiosity-compelling, palpitant
with something of the same warmth that had nurtured Tamea in the little
known, seldom visited and uncharted island kingdom under the Southern
Cross. Following the fashion of her people when their emotions are
profoundly stirred, again Tamea’s golden voice was lifted in a
semi-chant, an improvised pæan of appreciation.

Down through the entrance the Moorea ramped, with Tamea standing far out
on the bowsprit, as if she would be the first to arrive, the first to
see the wonders she felt certain lurked just around the bend behind
crumbling old Fort Winfield Scott. As she leaned against the jib stay
and held on with her elbows she searched the shore line with her
father’s marine glasses until, the Moorea having loafed up to the
quarantine grounds, the crew disturbed the girl in order to take in the
headsails.

They were scarcely snugged down before the Customs tug scraped
alongside. While Gaston was down below in the cabin presenting his
papers for the inspection of the port officer, a representative of the
Public Health Service examined the crew on deck. Before Tamea he stood
several moments in silent admiration. Then he asked:

“Miss, do you speak English?”

Tamea looked him over with frank admiration and approval. “You bet your
sweet life I speak English,” she replied melodiously; and from her
English the doctor knew that she also spoke French. Having heard her
giving an order to the Kanaka steward in an alien tongue, he concluded
she spoke Hawaiian and sought confirmation of that conclusion.

“No, mister, I do not speak Hawaiian,” said Tamea. “I can understand
much of it, because all Polynesian languages are derived from the same
Aryan source. The difference between the hundreds of languages in
Polynesia is mostly one of dialect—phonetic differences, you know.”

He sighed. “I didn’t know, but I’m glad to find out—from you. Are you
Venus or Juno or one of the Valkyries from some tropical Valhalla?”

“Now you grow very queer,” she retorted soberly. “You make the josh, and
I do not like men who do that. I am Tamea Oluolu Larrieau. I am the
Queen of Riva, and in Riva it is taboo to josh the Queen.”

“I think the Queen is a josher, however,” he replied gravely.

“Ah! You do not believe, then, that I am the Queen of Riva?”

“No, I do not. You’re the Queen of Hearts.”

Fortunately for Tamea she knew how to play casino and was, therefore,
acquainted with the queen of hearts. Hence she could assimilate the
compliment, and a ravishing smile was the reward of the daring doctor.

He bowed low.

“Will Tamea Oluolu Larrieau, Queen of Riva—wherever that may be, if it
isn’t another name for Paradise, since an houri has come from
Riva—oblige a mere mortal by opening her mouth, sticking out her tongue
and saying, ‘_Ah-h-h!_’—like that.”

“Why?” There was suspicion in Tamea’s glance now.

“It is a ceremonial peculiar to this country, Your Majesty. It is
required of all visitors, of whatever rank. An Indian prince did it
yesterday and a _dato_ from Java will do it this afternoon.”

Tamea shrugged—a Gallic shrug—and complied.

“What a lovely death it would be to be fatally bitten by those teeth!
Now, just one more ceremonial, if you please. It is required that I
shall look into your eyes very closely. You may have trachoma, but if
you have I’ll never survive the shock of having to deport you.”

Again Tamea shrugged. A peculiar custom, she thought, but one that was
not difficult to comply with.

“Well, if you’re a fair sample of the womanhood of Riva, O Tamea Oluolu
Larrieau, I’m mighty glad that I’m not a practicing physician there. I
should never earn a fee.”

“And if you should earn a fee nobody would think of paying it,” she
laughed. “Perhaps, if you liked bananas or coconuts——” And her
shoulders came up in collaboration, as it were, with an adorable little
_moue_. The young doctor laughed happily.

“Alas! God help the poor missionaries with sirens like her on every
hand,” he thought as he descended into the cabin, where Larrieau was in
conference with an immigration official touching his daughter’s right to
land. This detail was, happily, quickly passed and the health officer
tapped Gaston Larrieau on the arm.

“Captain, it will be necessary for me to give you a physical examination
before I can issue your vessel a clean bill of health.”

“Open your mouth and say, ‘_Ah-h-h!_’” commanded Tamea, who had followed
the doctor below. “Then open your eyes and look wise. Is my father not a
frail little man, eh?” she demanded of the doctor.

“The examination of this physical wreck is merely a matter of routine,
Your Majesty.”

Gaston Larrieau; came close to the doctor and opened his cavernous
mouth.

“_Ah-h-h!_” he said.

“Ah!” the doctor repeated softly—and touched lightly, in succession, a
slightly puffed spot high up on each of the captain’s cheeks. As he
pressed the color fled, leaving a somewhat sickly whitish spot that
stood out prominently in an otherwise ruddy face. A moment later the
spots in question had regained their original color, which had been a
ruddiness somewhat less pronounced than the surrounding tissue.

Perhaps only a doctor’s eye—an eye especially alert for such
spots—would have detected them.

“Is this not a fine doctor, father Larrieau!” Tamea exclaimed almost
breathlessly. “You open your mouth—and he looks at your eyes!”

The health officer glanced at her. A minute before he had noted
particularly the glory of her complexion—pale gold, with an old-rose
tint, very faintly diffused through the clear skin, like a yellow light
masked by a pale pink silk cloth. Now the rose tint was gone and old
ivory had replaced the pale gold. There was a gleam of excitement, of
fear, in her smoky eyes, and the smile which accompanied her attempted
badinage was just a bit forced. As the glances of the two met each
realized that the other _knew_!

“I cannot help it; I must do my duty,” the doctor murmured helplessly,
and turned to look down Gaston Larrieau’s open throat. “Any soreness in
the nose, Captain?”

“A little, of late, Doctor.”

“Any other pain?”

“Well, for a couple of months I’ve had a small, steady pain in my right
shoulder—like rheumatism.”

“No. It is neuritis.” He picked up the captain’s ham-like hand and noted
on the back of it, close to the knuckles, the same faintly white, puffy
spots. “Now please remove your shirt.”

Tamea’s eyes closed in momentary pain before she retired to a stateroom
adjoining the main cabin. Larrieau removed his shirt and the doctor
examined his torso critically. On his back, partially covering the right
scapula, he found that which he sought. “That will be all,” he informed
Larrieau. “Replace your garments.”

An assistant poured some disinfectant on his hands and he washed them
vigorously in it, wiping them on a handkerchief which he tossed
overboard through a porthole. At a sign from the doctor the others went
on deck.

He lighted a cigarette and when Larrieau faced him inquiringly he said:

“Now, regarding your daughter, Captain. What are your plans for her?”

“I have brought her up to San Francisco to place her in a convent to
complete her education. As you have observed, she speaks English very
well, but with a very slight French accent. She has had some schooling
in English, but not very much.”

“Her mother, I take it, is a Polynesian.”

“Pure-bred Polynesian. She died a year ago, during the influenza
epidemic.”

“Forgive me, Captain, if my questions appear impertinent. They are not,
strictly speaking, questions which I should ask you, but under the
circumstances the immigration officer has left the asking of them to me.
Have you or your daughter any friends or relatives in this country?”

“We have no relatives, Monsieur Doctor, and the only friends I have in
this country are my owners.”

“Is your financial situation such that, should you be taken away from
your daughter, she would be provided for to the extent that she would
not be likely to become a public charge?”

Gaston Larrieau smiled. “And you ask that of a Frenchman, to whom thrift
is a virtue? I have not traded among the South Pacific islands more than
thirty-five years to come away without the price of a peaceful old age.
I am worth a quarter of a million dollars, and with the exception of a
few pearls and a quarter interest in this vessel, all of my fortune is
in cash.”

“Did you plan to return to the Islands after placing your child in
school here?”

“_Parbleu_, no! No one could manage Tamea without my help. I am finished
with the sea. All of my interests and those of Tamea in the South have
been sold. Two years hence, when Tamea has grown used to civilized
customs, we will return to France—to Brittany, where I was born.”

“Tamea will probably marry well in France,” the doctor suggested.

“Yes. We Frenchmen are more democratic than Americans or the English in
our choice of wives. The fact that my Tamea is half Polynesian—ah, they
would not forget that, though she is more wonderful than a white girl! I
was married to her mother,” he added, as if he suspected the doctor
might secretly be questioning that point. “We were married by the
mission priest in Nukahiva.”

The doctor finished his cigarette and suddenly hurled the butt through
the porthole. “Lord!” he growled. “I’m so tired of breaking people’s
hearts and shattering their hopes.”

“Eh? What is that? Have you, then, unpleasant news for me?”

The doctor nodded gravely. “Captain, I have very unpleasant news for
you. Dreadful news, in fact. While I hesitate to state so absolutely
until a microscopic examination has been made and the presence of the
bacillus in your body determined beyond question, I am morally certain
that you have contracted—leprosy!”

The master of the Moorea met the terrible blow as a ship meets an
unexpected squall. He flinched and trembled for a moment, then righted
himself. His wind-and-sun-bitten face and neck went greenish white; his
eyes closed for perhaps ten seconds; his shoulders sagged and his great
breast heaved with a single sigh. In those ten seconds old age appeared
to have touched him for the first time. When his eyes opened again he
was the same calm, good-natured, almost boyish man who had romped
through the rigging of the Moorea with his child that morning. He smiled
a little sadly—and shrugged.

“Well, that’s over,” he murmured. “I am very sorry for you, Doctor.
These things are very unpleasant. However, I have no regrets. I have
enjoyed my life—down yonder—because nothing matters. There are not
many rules and regulations—and we ignore them.”

“It is different here.”

“Alas, yes!”

“You are a naturalized citizen of the United States?”

“Yes, Monsieur Doctor.”

“It is my duty to remove you from this schooner to the quarantine
station at Angel Island. You will be held there for observation, and
when the fact that you are a leper is officially determined, you will be
removed to the Isolation Hospital in San Francisco. However, it might be
arranged to have you sent to the colony at Molokai. If you were not a
citizen of the United States you would be deported to the country of
which you are a subject.”

“We have said good-by to Riva and the South, and we are not going back.
The white blood predominates in my girl; I want her to live her life
among white men and women. Besides, she can afford it. She may marry
some fine fellow here. Who knows? I had picked on Brittany for my old
age—so Molokai will not do. _Bon dieu!_ I should have such ennui in
Molokai. I could not stand that.”

“Rules and regulations, Captain,” the doctor reminded him
sympathetically.

Gaston Larrieau shook his head. “Old Gaston of the Beard caged like a
pet monkey, eh? I think not.” He sat down and tugged at his beard
thoughtfully. “Well, one thing is certain,” he continued. “It is more
than seventeen years since I begot Tamea. I was clean then and for all
the years since until this morning.”

“Non-leprous children are born of leprous parents, Captain. Tamea is
clean.”

“She must not know that I am not.”

“Ah, but she does know it.”

Larrieau sprang erect, terrible. “You dared to tell her——” he roared,
and advanced with upraised hand.

“Sit down. The girl has eyes, and in Riva she has, doubtless, seen more
than one leper. I told her nothing. Listen, Captain.”

From the stateroom came the sound of a muffled sob.

Larrieau sat down, dumb and distressed. “Yes, there is leprosy in Riva.
And tuberculosis and worse. The scourges of our white civilization are
creeping in and where they strike there is no hope. So I brought Tamea
away—only to be stricken—— Well, I knew that was one of the risks I
had to take, and a life without risks is as an egg without salt. In my
day I have adventured in strange and terrible places, and while this is
the very devil of a joke to have fate play on me, still”—he shrugged
again—“I have lived my life and I have loved my love, and by the blood
of the devil, life owes me nothing. I am ready! _Voilà!_” And the Triton
snapped his fingers. “I am no mealy-mouthed clerk to go whimpering to my
finish, protesting at the last that my heart is breaking with sorrow for
my sins.” He laughed his mellow, resonant, roaring laugh.

“No, no. Old Gaston of the Beard has enjoyed his sins. They were not
many, for I was ever a simple man, but such sins as I had—ah, they were
magnificent! I have children in a hundred islands. But Tamea is the
child of my love, and like her mother she is a glorious pagan.”

“You say her mother is dead.”

Gaston of the Beard nodded. “She was a queen and believed herself
descended from her Polynesian gods. Damnation! She had every right to,
for she was a goddess. Tall, Monsieur Doctor—six feet, for she came of
a race of hereditary rulers and in Polynesia before the white men came
to ruin and degenerate these children of nature, a king was not a king
in very truth unless, standing among his people, he could gaze over
their heads as one gazes over a wheat field from the top rail of a
fence. Tamea’s great-great-grandfather was deposed and exiled to an
island five hundred miles to the west, where his enemies enslaved him.
In his old age his people rescued him and offered him the scepter he had
lost in his youth. But he would not accept, for age and toil had crooked
his back and he could no longer stand head and shoulders over his
people.”

“What a magnificent old chap he must have been, Captain!” said the
doctor.

Larrieau nodded. “Tamea’s mother, Moorea, could walk! You, my young
friend, have never seen a woman walk; it is a lost art; our women mince
or hop or strut. Moorea was a beautiful woman in point of features. Her
hair was a wonderful seal-brown and her skin—well, her skin——”

“Was Tamea’s,” the doctor interrupted.

Gaston of the Beard smiled and nodded. “She was regal of bearing and
regal of soul—and the missionaries called her a heathen. For years I
kept them out of Riva, with their mummery of morals and religion. Why,
there was no sin in Riva until I came—and then it wasn’t recognized
until the missionaries gave it a name. Monsieur Doctor, behold a man who
dwelt in Eden until the serpents drove him out.”

The doctor chuckled quietly.

“Tamea’s mother,” the sailor resumed, “had features as fine and regular
as any white woman. But then, why should she not? Her blood was pure,
because it was a chief’s blood. The dark skin, the flat nose and the
crinkly hair are souvenirs, in the Polynesian race, of their sojourn in
the Fijis before they resumed their age-old hegira that started in Asia
Minor. In the common people we find evidences of Papuan blood, and that
is negroid, Monsieur Doctor. But the pure-bred Polynesian is not a
nigger, as ignorant and stupid people might have you believe. They are a
lost fragment of the Caucasian race, and any ethnologist who has studied
them carefully and sympathetically knows this. Monsieur Doctor, they are
not of Malayan origin, but Cushite, and the Cushites were an Aryan
people, as doubtless you know.”

“My knowledge of ethnology is very meager, Captain Larrieau,” said the
doctor.

“Mine is not. Gaston of the Beard they call me down under the Line, but
I have a head to hold up my beard. How do you account for the fact that
the Polynesian priesthood in Hawaii was possessed of the story of the
Hebrew Genesis as early as the sixth century, and that, in many
respects, this version is more complete than the Jewish?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” the doctor protested. He had the feeling
that to argue with Larrieau was to argue with an encyclopedia.

“Well, they acquired the story while drifting eastward from the land of
their origin and establishing contact with the Israelites, although on
the other hand it may be an independent and original version of legends
common to the Semite and Aryan tribes of the remote past and handed down
to posterity quite as accurately as the Jewish version before the latter
became a part of the literature of that race.”

The doctor glanced at his watch. “Captain, it would be most delightful
to linger and receive instruction in so interesting a subject, but we
have a Japanese liner to clear before noon, so I must be off.”

“But,” persisted the sailor, “have I convinced you that, if this brutal
and iconoclastic world but knew it, my little Tamea is _all_ Caucasian,
not merely half?”

“Captain, your daughter is the most dazzling, the most glorious woman I
have ever seen.”

“Would you care to marry her, Monsieur Doctor?” The words shot out from
the man who had been condemned to a living death with calm but deadly
earnestness. “That is,” Larrieau continued, “provided you are not
already married.”

“I am engaged to be married, Captain.”

“You have seen Tamea. It will not be hard to forget the other woman.
Come, come, my boy! How does the proposition strike you?”

“It doesn’t strike me at all. One does not accept such a proposition for
consideration quite so abruptly, my friend.”

“Ah, why not? Why not, indeed? Because others do not? Blood of the
devil, what a horrible thing is tradition! If it were not a tradition
that a woman shall accept from her fiancé a diamond ring which the idiot
cannot, in all probability, afford to give her—well, women would not
accept them. If it were the custom, they would accept a blow or a brass
ring through the nose or a brand, with equal eagerness. Monsieur Doctor,
he who has not learned to accept both good and evil, the usual and the
unusual, abruptly and without mature consideration, has not learned to
live. Life has not given him of its richness and fulness. Why be afraid?
Why shrink from the silly comment of silly people who do not understand
when you have a woman with a glorious body, a glorious soul and a
glorious mind, to compensate you?”

“I am not free to marry her——”

Gaston of the Beard brushed aside this feeble excuse with a quotation
from Epictetus: “‘He only is free who does as he pleases.’”

But the young doctor was not to be persuaded by such philosophical
considerations.

“Has your fiancée a _dot_ of a quarter of a million dollars?” Larrieau
shot at him.

“It is quite useless to discuss the matter, Captain.”

The latter hung his head, disappointed. “You realize why I asked you, of
course,” he said presently.

“I do, Captain. You must see her provided for. You were at some pains to
prove to me that her blood was the equal of mine——”

“I spoke of her mother’s people. But I am not a common man. There is
blood and breeding back of me—yes, far back, but I can trace it.”

“You pay me a tremendous compliment, Captain.”

“You are young, you have education, intelligence. You are a doctor, a
man of broad human sympathy and understanding. It is too bad your spirit
is not free. Too bad!”

“I will return for you this afternoon, about six o’clock, Captain. You
will not attempt to leave the Moorea, will you?”

“I told you I was a thrifty man, but I did not tell you, also, that I am
generous.”

“I am rebuked, Captain Larrieau. Forgive me.”

“On one condition. Give my vessel pratique—now.”

“I dare say we can risk that. But why do you ask it?”

“So that young Mr. Pritchard, of Casson and Pritchard, my owners, may be
permitted to come aboard, with an attorney. I have some business details
to attend to before I accompany you to the quarantine shed at Angel
Island. There is the business of the Moorea, and the financial future of
my Tamea must be provided for.”

“Do you wish me to return to the dock and telephone Mr. Pritchard?”

“If you will be so kind. And ask Mr. Pritchard to bring flowers—a great
many beautiful flowers. We sons of Cush are childishly fond of flowers.”

The health officer nodded and went over the side into the Customs tug
with a constricted feeling in his throat. Had he not gone then he would
have remained to weep, with Tamea, for old Gaston of the Beard!




                               CHAPTER II


In his office in the suite of Casson and Pritchard, on the top floor of
a building in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district, Daniel
Pritchard, the junior partner, sat with his back to his desk and his
feet on the sill of a window that gave a view, across the roofs of the
city, to the bay beyond. He was watching the ferryboats ply backward and
forward between the old gray town and Oakland; viewed from that height
and distance their foamy wakes held for him a subconscious fascination.
Indeed, whenever he desired to indulge a habit of day-dreaming, the view
from his window on a clear, warm day could quickly lull him into that
state of mind. This morning Dan Pritchard was day-dreaming.

A buzzer sounding at his elbow aroused him. He reached for the
inter-office telephone and murmured “Yes?” in the low-pitched, kindly,
reassuring voice that is inseparable from men of studious habits and
placid dispositions.

“The Moorea is passing in, Mr. Pritchard. The Merchants’ Exchange
lookout has just telephoned,” his secretary informed him.

“Thank you.” He glanced at his desk clock. “She should clear quarantine
and the Customs before noon, and Captain Larrieau should report in by
one o’clock at the latest. You’ll recognize him immediately, Miss
Mather. A perfectly tremendous fellow with a huge black beard a foot
long. When he arrives show him in at once, please. Meanwhile I’m not in
to anybody else.”

He resumed his day-dreaming, drawing long blissful drafts from a
pleasant smelling pipe, his mind in a state of absolute quiescence in so
far as business was concerned. He had that sort of control over himself;
a control that rested him mentally and armed his nerves against the
attrition that comes of the high mental pressure under which modern
American business men so frequently operate.

At twelve-fifteen Miss Mather entered.

“The Meiggs Wharf office of the Merchants’ Exchange telephoned that the
Moorea has been given pratique, but that Captain Larrieau is ill and the
health officer is going to have him removed to the quarantine station at
Angel Island,” she informed him. “Evidently his disease is not
contagious, because the health officer said it would be quite safe for
you to visit him. The Captain requests that you come aboard at your
earliest convenience and that you bring an attorney and some flowers.”

Dan Pritchard’s eyebrows went up. “That request is suggestive of
approaching dissolution, Miss Mather.”

“Scarcely, Mr. Pritchard. If that were the case would the Captain not
have requested the attendance of your doctor to confirm the health
officer’s diagnosis? And would he not have sent for a clergyman?”

“Not that great pagan! His approach to death would be marked by an
active scientific curiosity in the matter up to the moment when his mind
should cease to function. Please telephone Mr. Henderson, of Page and
Henderson, our attorneys, and ascertain what hour will be convenient for
him to accompany me to the Moorea.”

“I have already done so, Mr. Pritchard. Mr. Henderson is playing in a
golf tournament at Ingleside and will be finished about three o’clock.
He is in the club-house now and says he can meet you at Meiggs Wharf at
four o’clock, provided the matter cannot go over until tomorrow
morning.”

“It cannot. Old Gaston of the Beard is an impatient man, and this is an
urgent call. Please telephone Mr. Henderson that I will meet him at
Meiggs Wharf at four o’clock. Then telephone Crowley’s boathouse to have
a launch waiting there for us at five o’clock. When you have done that,
Miss Mather, you might close up shop and enjoy your Saturday afternoon
freedom.”

“Thank you, Mr. Pritchard. Miss Morrison is in Mr. Casson’s office. She
said she might look in on you a little later.”

When his secretary had departed he resumed his reverie, to be roused
from it at twelve-thirty o’clock by the soft click of the latch as his
office door was gently opened. He turned and observed a girl who stood
in the general office, with her head and one shoulder thrust into Dan’s
office.

“May I come in?” she queried.

“Of course you may, Maisie. You’re as welcome as a gale in the doldrums.
The best seat in my office isn’t half worthy of you.” He rose and took
her hand as she advanced into the room.

“Doing a little ground and lofty dreaming, I observe.” The girl—her
name was Maisie Morrison, and she was the niece of Casson, the senior
member of the firm—seated herself in a swivel desk chair and looked
brightly up at him as he stood before her, his somewhat long grave face
alight with approval and welcome.

“It’s very nice of you to pay me this little visit, Maisie,” he
declared. “And I like that hat you’re wearing. Indeed, I don’t think I
have ever seen you looking more—er—lookable!”

It was like him to ignore her implied query and voice the thought in his
mind.

“Sit down, Abraham Lincoln, do, please,” she urged.

He obeyed. “Why do you call me Abraham Lincoln?”

“Oh, you’re so long and loose-jointed and raw-boned and lantern-jawed!
Your shoulders are bowed just a little, as if from bearing great
burdens, and when I caught a glimpse of your face, as I entered, it was
in repose and incredibly sad and wistful. Really, Dan, you’re a very
plain man and very dolorous until you smile, and then you’re easy to
look at. Your right eyebrow is about a quarter of an inch higher than
your left and that lends whimsicality to your smile, even when you are
feeling far from whimsical.”

His chin sank low on his breast and he appeared to be pondering
something. “Perhaps,” he said aloud, but addressing himself
nevertheless, “it’s spring fever. But then I have it in the summer,
autumn and winter also. I want to go away. Where, I do not know.”

“Perhaps you are suffering from what soul analysts call ‘the divine
unrest.’”

“I’m suffering from the friction that comes to a square peg in a round
hole. That much I know. The round hole I refer to is the world of
business, and I’m the square peg. The situation is truly horrible,
Maisie, because the world believes I fit into that hole perfectly. But I
know I do not.”

Her calm glance rested on him critically but not sympathetically. In
common with the majority of her sex she believed that men are prone to
conjure profound pity for themselves over trifles, and her alert mind,
which was naturally disposed toward practicalities, told her that Daniel
Pritchard had, doubtless, been up too late the night previous and had
eaten something indigestible.

“This is an interesting and hitherto unsuspected condition, Dan. I have
always been told, and believed, that you are a particularly brilliant
business man.”

“I am not,” he objected, with some vehemence. “But if I am, that is
because I work mighty hard to be efficient at a disgusting trade. I know
I am regarded as being far from a commercial dud, for I am a director in
a bank, a director in a tugboat company, and really the managing partner
of Casson and Pritchard. But I loathe it all. Consider, Maisie, the
monstrous depravity of dedicating all of one’s waking hours to the mere
making of money. Why, if any man of ordinary intelligence and prudence
will do that for a lifetime he just can’t help leaving a fortune for his
heirs to squabble over. Making money isn’t a difficult task. On the
other hand, painting a great picture is, and if one’s task isn’t
difficult and above the commonplace, how is one to enjoy it?”

“I was right,” the girl declared triumphantly. “It is the divine unrest.
You are possessed of a creative instinct which is being stifled. It
requires elbow room.”

He smiled an embarrassed little smile. “Perhaps,” he admitted. “I like
to work with my hands as well as with my head. I think I could have been
happy as a surgeon, slicing wens and warts and things out of people, and
I could have been happiest of all if I had nothing to do except paint
pictures. If I could afford it I would devote my life to an attempt to
paint a better picture of Mount Tamalpais yonder, with the late
afternoon sun upon it, than did Thad Walsh. And I do not think that is
possible.”

“That picture yonder,” she said, pointing to an oil on the wall of his
office, “indicates that you have excellent judgment. What is the
subject, Dan?”

“Blossom time in the Santa Clara Valley.”

“It’s a beautiful thing and much too fine for a business office.”

His face, on the instant, was alight with happiness. “Now, I’m glad to
have you say that, Maisie, because _I_ painted that picture.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“But you never told us——”

“My dear Maisie, you must never breathe a word of this to anybody. If
the world of business had discovered ten years ago that I would rather
dabble in paint and oil than figure interest, it would not now be
regarding me as a capable, conservative business man. I would be that
crazy artist fellow, Pritchard.”

She walked to a point where the best view of the picture was obtainable
and studied it thoughtfully for several minutes.

“It’s very beautiful and the colors are quite natural, I think,” was her
comment. “What do you say it is worth, Dan?”

“Oh, about a million dollars in satisfaction over a good job
accomplished, and fifty or a hundred dollars in the average art shop.”

Maisie returned to her seat. “Well,” she declared with an emphasis and
note of finality in her tone that stamped her as a young woman of
initiative and decision, “if I were as rich as you, Dan Pritchard, I’d
continue to be a square peg in a round hole just long enough to send
that picture home and then walk out of this office forever. How old are
you?”

“Thirty-four, in point of years, but at least a hundred viewed from any
other angle.”

“Fiddlesticks! Why don’t you retire and live your life the way you want
to live it? I would if I were you. . . . Now, Dan, there you go again
with that sad Abraham Lincoln look!”

“I am sad. I’ve just had a great disappointment. I told you I wanted to
go away but that I didn’t know where to go. Well, I did know where I
wanted to go—until this morning. I had planned to take one more cruise
with old Gaston of the Beard——”

“With whom?”

“Captain Gaston Larrieau, master of our South Seas trading schooner
Moorea. I had planned to knock around with him in strange places for the
next six months.”

“I cannot visualize you making a pal of a sea captain, Dan.”

“Nonsense, Maisie. Gaston is a satyr with a soul. Twelve years ago I
took a cruise with him and I’ve never had time for another. Gaston of
the Beard—my father dubbed him that thirty years ago and the name has
stuck to him ever since—is like no other man living. He’s about sixty
years old now, six feet six inches tall, and weighs about two hundred
and fifty pounds in condition. He’s a Breton sailor with the blood of
Vikings in him, and if I ever find the tailor who makes his clothes I’m
going to pension the man in order to remove a monster from the sartorial
world. When going ashore in a temperate climate Gaston affects very wide
trousers, a long black Prince Albert coat, a top silk hat, vintage of
1880, and a stiff white linen shirt with round detachable cuffs bearing
tremendous moss-agate cuff buttons. When he walks he waddles like a bear
and when I walk with him I run.

“He is most positive in his likes and dislikes; he has read everything
and remembers it; he plays every card game anybody ever heard of and
plays them all well; he performs very well on the accordion, the flute
and the French horn; he knows music and the history of music. He speaks
four or five European languages and a dozen South Seas dialects. He is a
sinful man, but none of his sins are secret. He loathes swanks, frauds
and pretenders, and he bubbles with temperament. When he is enthusiastic
about anything or when he is angry, his voice rises to a roar; when he
is touched he weeps like a baby. He knows more English poetry than any
man living and is quite as much at home with the best of our modern
literature as he is with all of the ancient classics. He knows all about
ships and shipping since the days of the Phoenicians and the Hanseatic
League; there are as many facets to his character as to a well cut
diamond, and every facet sparkles. Good Lord, Maisie, the man’s
different, and I want a change.”

“Well, then, as I said before, why not have it? You can afford it, Dan.”

“That’s the rub. I cannot. And even if I could I’ve just received word
that Gaston of the Beard is ill with some sort of disease that requires
his removal to quarantine. It must be a very serious illness, because he
has sent for an attorney—to draw his will, doubtless. Henderson and I
are going aboard at four o’clock this afternoon.”

“But why can’t you go for a cruise if and when your satyr recovers his
health?”

“A man cannot drop a business just because he desires to. My going would
disorganize everything and distress a great many people. I’m the binder
that holds this organization together.”

“Don’t take yourself too seriously, Dan. You weren’t born to daddy the
world, you know. You worry too much about other people and what will
happen to them when they can no longer lean against you for support. Why
not give them an opportunity to care for themselves for a change?”

From the tip of her small feet to the cockade on her dainty little hat,
his calm, serious glance roved over her. “Well,” he replied soberly,
“how would you relish the prospect of caring for yourself—for a
change?”

“I’m sure I do not know. I fear I’d be rather helpless—for a while.”

“Do you think I ought to accord your uncle and aunt an opportunity to
care for themselves—for a change?”

“Good gracious, no! Is there a possibility of that situation presenting
itself?”

“An excellent possibility—if I elect to forget that I am a square peg
in a round hole and doomed to remain such.”

“Oh, Dan, I’m so sorry!”

“Sorry for whom?”

“For—everybody.”

The slight hesitation between her words caused him to smile faintly.
Vaguely he had hoped she would feel sorry for him exclusively. Her next
question convinced him that Maisie, in common with the rest of the
world, had a more alert interest in herself than in him.

“Then there is danger, Dan? Something may happen to us?”

“There is a possibility, Maisie. However, I must admit that my feeling
that such a possibility exists is based on nothing tangible. If I leave
the office for a long vacation, this firm will be in the position of a
pugilist who has incautiously left a wide opening for his opponent to
swat him to defeat.”

“Whose fault is it?” said Maisie.

“I do not mean to criticize my partner, Maisie, but if, while I should
be away, we climb out on the end of a limb and then somebody saws off
the limb, the responsibility for our fall will be entirely your Uncle
John Casson’s. The man is an optimist, devoid of mental balance.”

“Have you and Uncle John been quarreling, Dan?”

“No. What good does that do? If mischief is done, quarreling will
neither avert nor cure it. In a business dilemma your uncle always loses
his head, so I practise the gentle art of keeping mine!” He drew a chair
up to her and prepared for a confidential chat. “You must know, Maisie,
that following my entrance into this firm after my father’s death we
have had five narrow escapes from serious financial embarrassment, due
to Mr. Casson’s passion for taking long chances for large profits. And
if five beatings fail to cure a man my opinion is that he is incurable.
Holding that opinion as I do, I fear the result if I leave the office
for more than a month and expose your uncle to temptation.”

“It is kind of you to say that, Dan. Perhaps you have been too gentle
with Uncle John. Perhaps if you had asserted yourself——”

He held up a deprecating hand. “Forgive me, Maisie, if I assure you that
the only way to assert oneself with your avuncular relative is with some
sort of heavy blunt instrument.”

His bluntness caused her to flush faintly, but she kept her temper. “I
believe your father and Uncle John quarreled frequently, Dan.”

“Yes, that is true. But that was not because your uncle is a difficult
man to get along with in the ordinary day to day business. He is a
charming and agreeable old gentleman for whom I entertain a great deal
of respect and affection. My father was undiplomatic, aggressive and
extremely capable. For a quarter of a century he dominated the affairs
of Casson and Pritchard, and before he died he warned me if I should
take his place in the firm to do likewise.” He was silent, looking out
of the window at the ferryboats. “A horrible legacy,” he said. “I loathe
dominating people.”

“Uncle John always resented your father’s domination.”

“I have observed that most people resent that which is good for them.
Since my father’s death your uncle has evinced a disposition to run
hog-wild with power, as the senior member of the firm. The sublimated
old jackass!”

“My uncle is nothing of the sort, Dan Pritchard.”

He disregarded her protest, because he knew she had protested out of a
sense of loyalty to an uncle who had stood in the place of a father to
her since her fifth birthday. And John Casson, he knew, was both kind
and indulgent. But he also knew that Maisie knew her relative was
exactly what Dan Pritchard had called him.

“The first time Mr. Casson disregarded my youth and lack of business
experience and jumped in over his head,” Dan continued, “I hauled him
out by the simple method of disregarding him and insuring all of our
ledger accounts, because one of them was very doubtful. Well, we
collected that insurance and all we were out was the premium. Your uncle
talked of suicide when he thought he had ruined both of us, but when he
discovered I’d saved the firm he accepted about seventy-five per cent of
the credit for my perspicacity. In those days, Maisie, it wasn’t
necessary for us to have a very heavy loss in order to be embarrassed or
ruined. All that saved us the last time was the war, which caught us
with a flock of schooners on long time charters at low freight rates.

“Why, Maisie, I haven’t dared to leave him alone for years. He is no
longer a young man, and his naturally uncertain judgment hasn’t improved
with age. From August, nineteen fourteen, when the Great War began until
April, nineteen seventeen, when this country joined with the Allies, I
admit I gambled. I gambled everything I had and I induced your uncle to
gamble everything he had, and between us we committed Casson and
Pritchard to a point miles in advance of what would, ordinarily, have
been the danger point.

“I am a conservative in business, but I knew then that we were gambling
on a rising market and that we would be safe while the war lasted. Even
during the year and a half I was in the navy and your uncle had a free
hand in the direction of our business, I did not worry. Those were the
days when all radicals made quick fortunes because they just could not
go wrong on charters and the prices of commodities. Three months after
the armistice had been signed I returned to civil life and since then I
have been very busy getting our firm out from under the avalanche of
deflation which must inevitably follow this war, even as it followed the
Civil War. It has not been an easy task, Maisie, for your uncle has
developed a spirit of arrogance and stubbornness difficult to combat.”

“Yes,” Maisie agreed, “Uncle John has acquired a very good opinion of
himself as a business man.”

Pritchard nodded. “Those days when I was in the service and he operated
alone have spoiled him. However, only this morning I succeeded in
gaining his consent—in writing—to the sale, at a nice profit, of the
last of our long-term charters at war rates. Now, if I can hold him in
line until the deflation process commences, I shall be well pleased with
myself.”

“Is the money burning a hole in Uncle’s pocket?”

“I fear it is. He is seventy years old; yet, instead of planning to
retire, he seethes with a desire to double his present fortune. He has
dreams of vast emprise. I wish he had gout instead!”

“Casson and Pritchard is a partnership, Dan. Why do you not incorporate?
Then if the business fails, through any indiscretion of Uncle John, you
will not be responsible for more than your fifty per cent of the
company’s debts.”

“Forty per cent, Maisie. I was admitted to partnership on that basis,
although my father was an equal partner. However, his death terminated
that partnership and I suppose Mr. Casson felt that with my youth and
inexperience forty per cent was generous.”

The girl was silent, gazing abstractedly out of the window. Dan realized
that she was striving to scheme a way out for him, and he smiled in
anticipation of what her plan would be. He was not mistaken.

“Dan,” she said presently, “I believe you are more or less of a thorn in
Uncle John’s side. Why do you not sell out to him, retire and paint
pictures? I feel certain he would be glad to buy you out.”

He sighed. “There are several minor reasons and one major reason why
such a course would be repugnant to me.”

“Name them.”

“Mr. Casson, Mrs. Casson and all of our employees constitute the minor
reasons. You constitute the major one.”

She flushed pleasurably and the lambent light of a great affection
leaped into her fine eyes. He continued:

“I fear the old gentleman would make a mess of the business if my
guiding hand should be withdrawn, and at his age—consider the sheltered
life you have led, the ease and comfort and luxury and freedom from
financial worry! Maisie, it would be a sorry mess, indeed.”

“So you have concluded to hang on, eh, Dan?”

He nodded. “And while hanging on I hang back, like a balky mule on his
halter.”

“‘Go not, like the quarry slave, scourged to his dungeon,’” she quoted
bitterly. “Nevertheless, I fail to see why a nice consideration of
my—of our—comfort should deter you from seeking your own happiness.”

“Why, Maisie, you know very well I’m terribly fond of you.”

“Indeed, Dan! This is the first official knowledge I have had of it,
although, of course, I have for years suspected that you and I were very
dear friends. However, Dan, my friendship is not one that demands great
sacrifices. I—I——”

Tears blurred her eyes and her voice choked, but she recovered her poise
quickly. With averted face she said: “I’m sure, my dear Dan, I would
much prefer to see you painting your pictures than serving as a
sacrifice on the altar of your—of our—friendship.”

“I think I might be able to glean a certain melancholy happiness from
the sacrifice,” he protested.

“Dan Pritchard, you are exasperatingly dull today. I dislike being under
obligation to anybody.”

He held up a deprecating hand. “You know, Maisie, I have always given
you my fullest confidence, as I would to a sister. And I do this in the
belief that you will understand perfectly. My dear girl, I am not
complaining because I have to stick by this business. I am merely
voicing my disappointment at the impossibility of taking the sort of
vacation I had planned. If I——”

A knock sounded on the door, and a moment later John Casson entered. He
was a large, florid old gentleman, groomed to the acme of sartorial and
tonsorial perfection—a handsome old fellow with a hearty and expansive
manner, but a man, nevertheless, whom a keen student of human nature
would instantly deduce to be one who thought rather well of himself.

“What? Dan, my boy, are you still on the job? Maisie, can’t you induce
him to drive to the country club with us? How about nine holes of golf?”

Dan Pritchard shook his head. “Not today, sir, thank you.”

“No? Sorry, my boy. Maisie, are you ready to run along?”

“Yes, Uncle.”

She rose hurriedly, went to the mirror in Dan’s wash cabinet and
powdered her nose. And while powdering it she studied critically the
reflection, in that mirror, of Dan Pritchard’s long, sad, wistful,
thoughtful face. It was in repose now, for Casson had walked to the
window and was looking out over the bay; and Maisie had ample
opportunity to watch Dan and wonder what was going on inside that bent
head.

“Sweet old thing,” she soliloquized. “I love you so. I wonder if you’ll
ever know—if you’ll ever care—if it will ever occur to you, dear
dreamer, to diagnose that warm friendship and discover that it may be
love. For just now, stupid, you talked of sacrifice—for me. Oh, Dan, I
could beat you!”

She crossed the room silently and stood beside his chair. As he started,
politely, to rise, she bent and placed her lips to his ear. “Art is a
jealous mistress. I am told. I hope, Dan, you’ll be as true to her as
you can be. I’m almost jealous of her.”

He glanced meaningly at old Casson, who was beating time with his
fingers on the window-pane and striving to hum a popular fox-trot. “The
old bungler!” Dan whispered. “Come in and visit me the next time you
come to the office. And if you’ll invite me over to dinner some night
next week I shall accept. I want to continue our conversation. I——”

He glanced swiftly at Casson, saw that the old gentleman was still
preoccupied with his pseudo-valuable thoughts and decided to risk
putting through a plan which had that instant popped into his head. He
took Maisie’s chin in thumb and forefinger, drew her swiftly toward him
and kissed her on the lips. Old Casson continued to beat his unmusical
tattoo on the window-pane, and Maisie, observing this, grimaced at his
broad back and—returned Dan’s kiss! For a breathless instant they stood
staring at each other—and then old Casson turned.

“_Au revoir_, Danny dear,” said Maisie in a voice that rang with joy.

“Good-by, Maisie. Good afternoon, Mr. Casson. I hope you’ll enjoy your
game.”

“Thank you, boy. Ta-ta!”

Dan bowed them out of his office and returned to his seat by the window.

“Thunder!” he murmured presently. “Thunder, lightning and a downpour of
frogs and small fishes! Now, what imp put into my silly head that
impulse to kiss Maisie! I’m mighty fond of Maisie, but I’m not at all
certain that I’d care to marry her—she’s so practical and dominating
and lovable. Such a good pal. I wonder if I’d be happy married to
Maisie. . . . I’m a lunatic. When fellows of my mental type marry they
give hostages to fortune, and I haven’t lived yet. My life has been dull
and prosaic—nothing new under heaven—and then I had that impulse—yes,
that was new! That kiss from Maisie was an adventure. It thrilled me. I
wonder what put the idea into my fool head!”

If he had not been fully as stupid as Maisie gave him credit for being,
he would have known that Maisie had put the idea into his head. Being
what he was, however, he went down to Meiggs Wharf at four o’clock to
meet Henderson, still obsessed with the belief that, all unknown to
himself hitherto, he was a singularly daring, devilish and original
character!




                              CHAPTER III


Following the departure of the Customs tug, Gaston of the Beard had sat
below in earnest converse with Tamea. The Triton had wept a little at
first, albeit his tears were not for himself but for Tamea; and after
her initial gust of despair and grief, the girl had remembered that
strength and not weakness was what her father expected of her.
Accordingly she had rallied to the task of comforting him.

“And you knew I had contracted this disease, my daughter?” old Gaston
queried amazedly.

“_Oui, mon père._ I saw the puffy places on your cheeks and knuckles
before we sailed from Riva, but I was not certain until I saw you one
day in swimming. There is a white patch on your right shoulder.”

“But you have touched me, Tamea. You have caressed me——”

“And shall again, dear one. The disease has but recently made its
appearance. There are no active lesions and I am not fearful, father
Larrieau.”

“In this country, Tamea, when one is afflicted so, he is restrained of
his liberty. He is confined in a hospital called the pesthouse. There
are no men or women there with whom I should care to associate—and I am
old enough to die, anyhow. I would be free from this tainted body and
dwell with your mother in Paliuli”—the Polynesian equivalent of heaven.

Tamea had no answer for this. All too thoroughly she divined the hidden
meaning in his speech, but because she was what she was—a glorious
pagan—the knowledge of the course which Gaston of the Beard
contemplated aroused in her neither apprehension nor grief. To Tamea the
mystery of death was no greater than the mystery of birth. Men and women
lived their appointed time and passed on to Paliuli, if they were worthy
like her father; or to Po, the world of darkness, if they were unworthy.
The departure for Paliuli was not one to cause a grief greater than that
experienced when one’s nearest and dearest departed for a neighboring
island, to be absent for an indefinite period. Of course she would weep,
for were not her people the most affectionate and tender-hearted race in
the world?

And was not she, the last of her line, a descendant of kings and
expected to meet with complacency whatever of good or of evil life might
have in store for her? So she tugged the great bush of a beard
affectionately, from time to time, as her father talked, telling her of
his plans for her, his ambitions and desires, impressing upon her, above
all things, the necessity for absolute obedience to the man whom he
would name her guardian.

With a full heart Tamea gave him the promise he desired, and when she
noticed how much the assurance comforted him her triumphant youth routed
for the nonce consideration of everything save the necessity for
cheering her father. So she went to her stateroom and returned with—an
accordion! It was a splendid instrument belonging to old Larrieau, and
Tamea had learned to play it very well by ear. She lay back in her chair
and commenced to play very, very softly a ballad that was old a decade
before Tamea was born, to wit, “Down Went McGinty!”

But—it had a lilt to it, and presently her father was beating time and
humming the song. And Tamea, like her father, like so many of her
mother’s race, had a gift for clowning; now, as she played, she swayed
her body a trifle, raised her shoulders on the long drawn out “D-o-w-n”
and made funny faces; somehow the instrument seemed to wail and sob as
McGinty sank to the bottom of the sea. It was ridiculous, wholly
amusing, and old Gaston’s mellow bellow of laughter reached the ears of
Dan Pritchard while yet his launch was a cable’s length from the Moorea.
And then Tamea swung her instrument and broke into “La Marseillaise”
while her father sang it as only a Frenchman can.

Dan Pritchard came overside and stuck his head down through the
ventilator over the deck-house. “Gaston,” he remarked, when the singer
ceased, “I came because I heard you were very ill.”

“Ill, _mon petit_, ill? I am worse than ill. I am a dead man and I sing
at my own wake. Come down, rascal! By my beard, my old heart sings to
see you, Dan Pritchard. Come down, I tell you.”

“Coming,” Dan answered laughingly—and came.

“I could embrace you, my boy,” the old sailor informed him, “but during
Lent one must do something to mortify the flesh. Besides, I have had the
devilish luck to acquire leprosy.”

Dan Pritchard made no sign that this news was disturbing, albeit he was
hearing it for the first time.

“Well, if I may not shake your hand, give me a tug at your beard,
Gaston. Upon my word, there is no blight on those whiskers, old
shipmate.” And before Larrieau could prevent him he had grasped a
handful of whiskers and given the huge head a vigorous shaking. The
Triton, tremendously pleased, roared out an oath to hide a sob.

“Dan, this is my well beloved daughter, Tamea. Tamea, my dear child,
this is Monsieur Dan Pritchard, the gentleman of whom we were speaking.”

Tamea’s wondrous smoky eyes glowed with a welcoming light. “He who
twitches my father’s beard—when he _knows_,” she said very distinctly,
“shall never lack the love and respect of my father’s daughter. Monsieur
Dan Pritchard, my father would he might embrace you. Behold! I embrace
you—once for old Gaston of the Beard and once for myself.” And she set
her accordion on the cabin table, walked calmly to Dan Pritchard, drew
him to her heart and kissed him, in friendly fashion, on each cheek.

Embarrassed, Dan took her hand in his and patted it. “You are a sweet
child,” he said simply. Then, turning to the old man: “Gaston, it’s
great to see you again. But explain yourself, wretch. How dare you foul
up the Moorea with your frightful indisposition?”

“I was ever a disciple of the devil, Dan. It’s all through the islands.
The Chinese brought it. Dan, I am to be taken from Tamea—forever—and I
go as soon as my business has been arranged. Here is the book containing
my accounts as master to date. There is a balance of four thousand eight
hundred and nine dollars and eight cents due me. Give this to Tamea for
her personal needs. The vouchers are in this envelope. What is a fair
price for my one-quarter interest in the Moorea?”

“She is an old vessel but sound, and she pays her way like a lady,
Gaston. She’s worth twenty-five thousand dollars. I will buy your
interest on that basis.”

“Sold. Invest the money for Tamea. Here are drafts on the Bank of
California for one hundred and eighty thousand dollars. I have indorsed
them to you. Buy bonds with them for Tamea. And here”—he burrowed in
the base of his beard and brought forth a small tobacco bag he had
hidden in that hirsute forest—“are the crown jewels of my little Tamea.
They are the black pearls I have come by, from time to time. It was
known that I had some of great value and I have had to conceal them
carefully.” He laughed his bellowing laugh. “Pay the duty on them, Dan,
if you are more honest than I; then sell them and buy more bonds for
Tamea.”

Dan Pritchard took an old envelope from his pocket, Larrieau dropped the
bag into it, and Dan sealed the envelope.

“I desire that Tamea be educated and affianced to some decent fellow.
Tamea, hear your father. You are not to marry any man Monsieur Dan
Pritchard does not approve of.”

Dan looked at her. “I promise,” she replied simply.

“You are to be her guardian, Dan.”

“Very well, Gaston,” said Dan instantly, “since you desire it. I shall
try to discharge the office in a commendable manner.”

“That, my boy, is why the office is yours. For your trouble you shall
have my gratitude while I live and the gratitude of Tamea after I am
dead. Also, you shall be the executor of my estate, which will bring you
a nice fee, and in addition the largest and most beautiful pearl in that
lot is yours. It will make a magnificent setting for a ring for the
woman you may marry—if you have not married.”

“I still revel in single blessedness, Gaston.”

The sailor nodded approvingly. “Time enough to settle down after you are
forty,” he agreed. “You will select the pearl, however. It is yours now.
It is magnificent. Its equal is not to be found in the world, I do
believe. The heart of it has a warm glow, like my old heart when I think
of my friendship for your good father and for you—when I think of Tamea
and Tamea’s wonderful mother. Damnation! I have lived! I have known
love; my great carcass has quivered to the thrill of life as a schooner
quivers in the grip of a _willi-waw_!” He smiled wistfully at Dan. Then:
“Well, bring down your lawyer, Dan. I would make my will, leaving all I
possess to Tamea.”

At a summons from Dan, Henderson came down into the cabin and was
introduced to Gaston of the Beard and his daughter. The last will and
testament of the Triton was as simple as the man who signed it, and Dan
and the lawyer appended their signatures as witnesses.

“Now then, Gaston,” said Dan, “of what does your estate consist?”

“These pearls, the money due me for disbursements made for account of
the Moorea and her owners, my interest in the Moorea and these drafts on
San Francisco. I have no real estate, and I owe nobody. Neither does
anybody owe me.”

“Then,” said Dan smilingly, “why make a will, with its fees and taxes?
Why not make a gift of all you possess to Tamea now? Gifts are not
taxable, nor do they have to be probated—expensively.”

Gaston of the Beard smiled and winked at the lawyer. “I knew I should
make no mistake in entrusting my little Tamea to this good friend,” he
declared. “Dan, the drafts are already indorsed to her. Take them. The
pearls you already have. Go ashore, my good friend, and return with a
bill of sale and a check for my interest in the Moorea, which I sell to
you, and your firm’s check for the amount due me on the final adjustment
of the ship’s accounts. I will then indorse both checks to Tamea and the
troublesome business of dying will have been simplified a
thousand-fold.”

Dan returned to the office of Casson and Pritchard, found a printed bill
of sale form such as is used in shipping offices, filled it in, unlocked
the safe, drew Casson and Pritchard’s check and his own for the amount
due Larrieau and returned to the Moorea. Three scratches of a pen and
Dan’s word passed, and the estate of Gaston of the Beard had been
probated and distributed.

Meanwhile Tamea had opened the boxes of flowers Dan had brought aboard
in compliance with her father’s request. Deftly she wove a _lei_ of
sweet peas, and when the business with Dan and the lawyer was done she
hung the _lei_ around old Gaston’s burly neck and garlanded his shaggy
head with roses.

Presently, at his suggestion, Tamea called the steward, who brought
glasses and a dusty bottle of old French Malaga. When the glasses had
been filled and passed by Tamea, Gaston of the Beard raised his on high.

“I drink to my loves, living and dead; to you, friend Dan Pritchard, and
to you, Monsieur l’Avocat! _Morituri te salutamus!_ I wish you good
luck, good health, happiness and a life just long enough not to become a
burden. May you live as joyously as I have lived and love life as I have
loved it; may you die as contented as I shall die, and without repining.
And may we embrace, like true friends and clean, in Paliuli!”

They drank.

“I have six quarts of that Malaga left. It is very old and of a rare
vintage. Monsieur l’Avocat, will you have money for your fee or would
you prefer the six live soldiers?. . . Ah, I thought so! The steward
will deliver them to you at your home, provided the prohibition agents
are not encountered first. Let us go on deck.”

At the head of the companion Tamea kissed a rose and passed it to her
father.

And that was their farewell.

“The tide has turned. It is at the ebb. It will bear me far to the sea
that I have loved and upon whose bosom my days have been spent,” said
Gaston of the Beard casually. “Thank you, dear Dan, for all that you
have been to me in life, for all that you will be to me in death. I go,
finding it hurts to leave those I love. Farewell, Dan Pritchard, and you
also, my good Monsieur l’Avocat. . . Tamea, dear child, I depart, loving
you.”

He pressed to his red lips the rose she had given him and then, with a
look of unutterable love for Tamea and a blithe kiss tossed to sea and
sky, he ran swiftly to the rail, stepped over it, and disappeared with a
very small splash for so huge a man. . . .

“He has gone to join my mother in Paliuli,” said Tamea bravely. “He goes
to her, flower-laden, like a bridegroom. It is the custom in Riva with
those for whom life has lost its taste to have their loved ones adorn
them with flowers; then they walk out into the sea until they are seen
no more.”

Presently, to Dan Pritchard, watching over the taffrail of the Moorea,
something floated up from the dark depths and drifted astern. It was the
emblem of love, the crown of roses and the _lei_ with which Tamea had
decked the great pagan e’er he left her for Paliuli. . . . Afterward Dan
remembered that Gaston had worn his marvelous going-ashore clothes and
that his tremendous trousers had bagged somewhat more than usual. So Dan
suspected he had taken the precaution to fill his pockets with pig lead
or iron bolts, and with the tide at the ebb he was drifting in those
dark depths out through the Golden Gate at the rate of four miles an
hour. . . . Well, they would not see _him_ again.

The sun had sunk behind Telegraph Hill, and dusk was creeping over the
waters of the bay of St. Francis. Dan saw the flag at Fort Mason come
fluttering down, and across the waters came the sound of the garrison
band; from the church of St. Francis de Sales over in North Beach the
Angelus was ringing.

“Well, Mr. Henderson,” said Dan presently, “the day’s work is done. The
launch is still alongside, so I suggest that you go ashore first and
send the launch back for me. Your family doubtless expects you home to
dinner. I shall remain here, I think, and go ashore later, when Tamea
has packed her belongings. I don’t suppose I ought to leave the child
here all night alone.”

Mr. Henderson inclined his head, for he was profoundly affected; as the
launch coughed away in the gathering gloom to land him at Meiggs Wharf,
Dan descended to the cabin, whither Tamea had gone.

As he entered the main cabin she came out of her stateroom. Her glorious
black hair had been loosely braided and hung over her left breast; in
the braid a scarlet sweet pea-blossom nestled. She still wore the cheap
white cotton skirt Dan had observed on her when he first came aboard and
she was still hatless, but buttoned tightly around her lithe young body
she now wore an old navy pea-jacket; under her arm she carried her
father’s very expensive accordion.

“I am your Tamea now, Monsieur Dan Pritchard,” she announced
tremulously. “In this new land I know no one but you. I go with you
where you will. I will obey you always, for you are my father and my
mother.”

The pathos of that simple speech stabbed him. Poor, lonely little alien!
Poor wanderer, in a white man’s world—a world which, Dan sensed, she
would never quite understand. How wondrously simple and sweet and
unspoiled she was! How transcendently lovely! He wished he might paint
her thus—he had a yearning to stretch forth his hand and touch her
hair. . . and presently he yielded to this desire. At his gentle,
paternal touch all the stark, suppressed agony in the heart of the Queen
of Riva rose in her throat and choked her. . . .

Dan Pritchard took the outcast in his arms and soothed and petted her
while she emptied her full heart. And to him the experience did not seem
an unusual one, for as Maisie had often assured him he had been born to
bear the burdens of other people. He was one of those great-hearted men
who seem destined to daddy the world. . . .

He wiped her tears away with his handkerchief and when the launch bumped
alongside again they said good-by to the Moorea. Kahanaha, the Kanaka,
wept, for he had sailed ten years with Gaston of the Beard. As they
disappeared into the darkness headed for Meiggs Wharf, his mellow
baritone voice followed them.

He was singing “_Aloha!_”




                               CHAPTER IV


Throughout the ten minute journey from the Moorea to Meiggs Wharf, Tamea
sat beside Dan Pritchard in the stern sheets of the launch, holding his
hand tightly and, in silence, gazing ahead toward the lights of the
city. She seemed afraid to let go his hand, nor did she relinquish it
when they paused beside Dan’s limousine, waiting for them at the head of
the dock. Graves, his chauffeur, with the license of an old and favored
employee, was sound asleep inside the car when Dan opened the door and
prodded him; at sight of his employer standing hand in hand with Tamea,
Graves’s eyes fairly popped with excitement and interest.

Tamea’s lashes still held a few recalcitrant tears and she looked very
childish and forlorn. Dan was carrying her accordion, and observing
this, Graves instantly concluded that his master had casually attached
himself to some wandering gipsy troubadour. He stared and pursed his
lips in a soundless whistle; his eyebrows went up perceptibly.

Tamea’s moist eyes blazed. Rage superseded her grief.

“Monsieur Dan Pritchard,” she demanded, “is this man your servant?”

Dan nodded.

“If we were in Riva I should have him beaten with my father’s razor belt
to teach him humility.”

Dan reflected, sadly humorous, that it would be like Gaston of the Beard
to utilize a razor strop for any purpose save the one for which it had
been intended. But the girl’s complaint annoyed him.

“Oh, don’t bother about Graves!” he urged. “He isn’t awake yet. He
thinks he’s seeing things at night.”

“The man stares at me,” Tamea complained. “He is saying to himself:
‘What right has this girl with my master?’ I know. Yes, you bet.”

“Graves,” said Dan wearily, “you are, I fear, permitting yourself a
liberty. Wake up, get out of here and in behind the wheel. And by the
way, Graves, hereafter you will be subject to the orders of Miss
Larrieau. In her own country Miss Larrieau is a queen and accustomed to
the most perfect service from everybody with whom she comes in contact.
I expect, therefore, that you will remember your manners. Driving for a
bachelor is very apt, I quite realize, to make any chauffeur careless,
but from now on, Graves, whenever Queen Tamea of Riva craves snappy
service, see that she gets it. I should regret very much the necessity
for flaying you with a razor strop.”

“Lay forward, you,” Tamea commanded. “What business have you aft? Your
place is in the fo’castle, not the cabin.”

Fortunately, Graves was blessed with a sufficient sense of humor to
respond humbly: “Beg pardon, Your Majesty. I didn’t mean to get fresh.
As the boss says, wakin’ me up sudden like that scared me sorter.”

He carefully drew the curtains in the rear, on both sides and in front,
for, notwithstanding his cavalier manner in the presence of royalty,
Graves was more than passing fond of his employer and desired to spare
the latter the humiliation of being seen with a lady of uncertain
lineage and doubtful social standing riding in public with him in his
limousine. Graves was fully convinced that his master suddenly had gone
insane, and as a result it behooved him now, more than ever before, to
render faultless service. He wondered where the Queen was taking the
boss or where the boss was taking the Queen; already he was resolved to
drive them through streets rarely frequented by the people who dwelt in
Dan Pritchard’s world.

Tamea’s haughty voice disturbed his benevolent thoughts.

“Are you ashamed to ride with me, Dan Pritchard?”

“Certainly not, my dear girl. Graves, how dare you draw those curtains
without permission? I’ll skin you alive for this!”

“Beg pardon, sir,” mumbled the bewildered Graves.

He raised the curtains, vacated the car immediately and stood at a stiff
salute while Dan handed Tamea into the luxurious interior. As he
followed her in he turned to Graves and growled, “Scoundrel! You shall
pay dearly for this.” A lightning wink took the sting out of his words,
however, and caused Graves to bow his head in simulated humiliation;
nevertheless the faithful fellow could not forbear one final effort.
Just before he closed the door upon them he switched off the dome light.
As he did so he saw Tamea’s hand slip into Dan Pritchard’s.

“All I ask,” Graves murmured a moment later to the oil gage, “is that
Miss Morrison don’t get her lamps on them two. She don’t seem to have no
success gettin’ him to fall for her, but along comes this Portugee or
gipsy or somethin’ with an accordion on her arm, and the jig is up.
She’s dressed like a North Beach wop woman that’s married a fisherman,
but she tells him she’s a queen and wants to step out with him in his
automobile. Right away he falls for her. Bing! Bang! And they’re off in
a cloud of dust. Ain’t it the truth? When these quiet birds do step out
they go some!”

There was a buzzing close to his left ear.

“Sailing directions,” murmured Graves and inclined his ear toward the
annunciator.

“Home, Graves!” said the voice of Daniel Pritchard.

Graves quivered as if mortally stung, but out of the chaos of his
emotions the habit of years asserted itself. He nodded to indicate that
he had received his orders and understood them, and the car rolled away
down the Embarcadero.

“Now,” murmured the hapless Graves, addressing the speedometer, “I
_know_ he’s crazy! Of course I can stand it, Sooey Wan won’t give a hoot
and Julia probably won’t let on she’s saw anything out of the way, but
Mrs. Pippy’ll give notice p. d. q. and quit quicker’n that. . . . Well,
I should worry and grow a lot of gray hairs.”

He tooled the car carefully through rough cobbled streets which
ordinarily he would have avoided, and by a circuitous route reached Dan
Pritchard’s house in Pacific Avenue. “I’ll be shot if I’ll pull up in
front to unload them,” he resolved, and darted in the automobile
driveway, nor paused until the car was in the garage! As he reached for
the hand brake the annunciator buzzed again; again Graves inclined a
rebellious ear.

“While appreciating tremendously the sentiments that actuate you,
Graves,” came Dan Pritchard’s calm voice, “the fact is that my garage is
scarcely a fitting place in which to unload a lady. Back out into the
street and so maneuver the car that we will be enabled to alight at the
curb in front of the house.”

Again the habit of years conquered. Graves nodded. But to the button on
the motor horn he said dazedly:

“He’s got the gall of a burglar! Here I go out of my way to help him and
he throws a monkey wrench into the machinery. Very well, boss! If you
can stand it I guess I can. I ain’t got no proud flesh!”

With a sinking heart he obeyed and stood beside the car watching Dan
Pritchard steer Tamea up the steps; saw the incomprehensible man open
the street door with his latchkey; saw him propel Tamea gently through
the portal and follow; saw the door close on the incipient scandal!

Then he looked carefully up and down the street and satisfied himself
that he had been the only witness to the amazing incident; whereupon he
put the car up and hastened into the servants’ dining room to ascertain
what, if any, impression had been created upon Mrs. Pippy, the
housekeeper, Julia, the maid, and Sooey Wan, the Chinese cook, who, with
Graves, constituted the Pritchard _ménage_.

As Graves took his seat at the servants’ table and gazed inquisitively
through the door into the kitchen where Sooey Wan, squatted on his
heels, was glowering at something in the oven, Pritchard entered the
kitchen. Sooey Wan looked up at him but did not deem it necessary to
stand up.

“Boss,” he demanded, “wha’ for you allee time come home late for
dinner?”

“I don’t come home late for dinner all the time. Confound your Oriental
hide, Sooey Wan, are you never going to quit complaining?”

The imperturbable Sooey Wan glanced at the alarm clock on an adjacent
shelf.

“You klazy, boss,” he retorted. “You fi’, ten, fi’teen, twenty-fi’
minutes late. Dinner all spoil, ever’thing go lotten boss don’ come home
on time.”

“Go to thunder, you old raven! Quit your croaking,” Dan admonished the
heathen.

Sooey Wan flew—or rather pretended to fly—into a rage. “Helluva note,”
he cried, and shied a butcher knife into the sink. “Twenty year I cook
for you papa, but he never late. Papa allee time in heap hurry. Son,
allee time go slow, takum easy. Well, you likee lotten dinner I ketchum,
boss. You likee A-numba-one dinner no can do—gee, Missa Dan, wha’s
mallah? You no look happy.”

“I’m a bit distressed tonight, Sooey Wan.”

Sooey Wan stood up and laid a hand on Dan’s shoulder. “You tell Sooey
Wan,” he urged, and in his faded old eyes, in his manner and in the
intonation of his voice, no longer shrill with pretended rage, there was
evidenced the tremendous affection which the old San Francisco Chinese
servant class always accords to a kindly and generous employer and
particularly to that employer’s children.

“A good friend has died, Sooey Wan.”

“That’s hell,” said Sooey Wan sympathetically. “Me know him, boss?”

“Yes, he was a friend of yours, too, Sooey, Captain Larrieau, the
Frenchman with the big beard.”

“Sure, I remember him. When he come Sooey Wan have sole for dinner. He
teachee me how makum sauce Margie Lee.”

“Yes, poor Gaston was very fond of tenderloin of sole with sauce
Margery, as it is made in Marseilles. Well, he’s dead, Sooey Wan, and
tonight I brought his daughter home with me. I am her guardian.”

“Allee same papa, eh?”

Dan nodded, and Sooey Wan thoughtfully rubbed his chin. “All li’, Missa
Dan,” he replied. “I have A-numba-one dinner! Too bad captain die. Him
one really nice man—him likee Missa Dan velly much. Too bad!”

He patted his employer on the shoulder in a manner that meant volumes.

“The lady has to dress, Sooey Wan, so we cannot have dinner for half an
hour yet.”

“You leavee dinner to Sooey Wan,” the old Chinaman assured him. “Missa
Dan, you likee cocktail now?”

“Never mind, thank you.”

“Sure, boss, you likee cocktail now. You no talkee Sooey Wan. Sooey Wan
fixee nice Gibson cocktail. My boy ketchum cold heart, Sooey Wan makum
heart warm again. . . . Shut up, shut up! Boss, you allee time talkee
too damn much.”

Realizing the uselessness of protest, Dan stood by while Sooey Wan
manufactured the heart-warmer. And when the drink was ready the old
Chinaman produced two glasses and filled one for himself. “I dlink good
luck to spirit Captain Larrieau. Hoping devil no catchum,” he said.
“Tonight me go joss-house and burn devil paper.”

He set down his empty glass and with paternal gentleness thrust Dan out
of the kitchen; as the door swung to behind the latter, Sooey Wan began
audibly to discharge a cargo of oaths, both Chinese and English. This
appeared to relieve his feelings considerably, for presently he
commenced to sing softly, which emboldened Graves to address him.

“Say, Sooey,” he suggested, “I wouldn’t mind bein’ wrapped around one of
those cocktails of the boss’s myself.”

Sooey Wan looked at him—once. Once was sufficient. Ah, these new
servants—these fresh American boys! How little did they know their
place! What a febrile conception of their duty toward the author of the
payroll was theirs!

“Bum!” hissed Sooey Wan. “Big Amelican bum!” Seizing the poker he
commenced stirring the fire vigorously, from time to time favoring
Graves with a tigerish glance which said all too plainly, “I stir the
fire with this, but if I hear any more of your impudence I’ll knock your
brains out with it.”

Graves subsided. He knew who was the head of that house!




                               CHAPTER V


From the moment that he and Tamea left the schooner Dan’s thoughts had
been occupied with the weightiest problem that had ever been presented
to him for solution. What was he to do with Tamea and where was he to
take her? For a while he was comforted by the thought that he could not
possibly do better than bring her to Maisie Morrison, explain the
circumstances and ask Maisie to take the orphan in for the night, lend
her some clothing and tell her a few things about life in a civilized
community which it was apparent she should know at the earliest
opportunity. Then he reflected that Maisie might not be at all obliged
to him for thrusting such a task upon her; clearly it was none of her
business what happened to this half-caste Polynesian girl. Always
practical, Maisie would, doubtless, suggest that the girl be taken to a
hotel; even if she did not suggest it, that pompous old ass, Casson,
would.

Dan remembered that Gaston of the Beard had never liked Casson and that
Casson had never liked Gaston of the Beard. Nothing save Gaston’s record
for efficiency and shrewd trading, plus Dan’s influence, had conduced to
keep the pagan in the employ of Casson and Pritchard.

So Dan resigned that plan, but not before he had broached it to Tamea.

“Who is the woman, Maisie?” Tamea queried without interest.

Dan informed her.

“I do not like her,” Tamea decided. “I will not go to the home of a
woman I do not know.”

It was then that Dan considered the plan of taking the girl to a hotel.
But the prospect horrified him. He could not abandon her to her own
resources in a metropolitan hotel. He had no definite idea how far Riva
had progressed in civilization, but he assumed it was still, to all
intents and purposes, in the Neolithic Age, and consequently Tamea would
find plumbing, hot and cold water, electric lights, telephones, strange
maids and perky little bellhops much too much to assimilate alone on
this, her first night in her new environment. Moreover, Dan shrank from
the task of entering the Palace or the St. Francis hotels with Tamea,
registering her as Queen Tamea of Riva, and having the room clerk, for
the sake of publicity for the hotel, give the ever watchful hotel
reporters a tip on an interesting story of a foreign potentate, clothed
in white cotton and a pea-jacket, who had just arrived tearful and
bareheaded, with no baggage other than a huge accordion, and accompanied
by a wealthy shipping man.

Decidedly he could not risk that. He must avoid publicity. Remained,
therefore, no alternative save taking her to his own home, in San
Francisco’s most exclusive residence section on Pacific Heights.

Thank God, he had in his employ as housekeeper a prim and proper person,
a Mrs. Pippy. In her fiftieth year Mrs. Pippy’s husband, a bank cashier,
had absconded to parts unknown with a lady somewhat younger and
handsomer than Mrs. Pippy, who thereupon had been forced to earn her
living in almost the only way possible for a woman of her advanced age.
Knowing her to be a woman of taste, culture and refinement, Maisie had
induced Dan to engage her at his housekeeper, which he was very loath to
do, owing to serious objection on the part of Sooey Wan. Maisie had run
this oriental tyrant quickly to earth, however. Sooey Wan could cook a
dinner, but he couldn’t order one and he couldn’t see that it was served
properly; wherefore, since Dan liked to entertain his friends at dinner
very frequently, Mrs. Pippy could be depended upon to manage his
household affairs efficiently and delightfully.

At Maisie’s suggestion, Mrs. Pippy had engaged as waitress and housemaid
an exile from Erin who answered to the name of Julia. Julia was an
amiable creature who daily entrusted Sooey Wan with the sum of
twenty-five cents to be bet for her in a Chinese lottery in Washington
Alley. Dan remembered now that Julia was about the same size as Tamea,
and only the Sunday afternoon previous he had seen Julia leaving the
house clad in a tailored suit that gave her what Graves termed a
“snappy” look.

“I’ll buy that suit from Julia and pay her a fine price for it,” Dan
soliloquized. “Tamea has just naturally got to have something decent to
wear downtown when the horrible job of shopping begins. And I wouldn’t
be at all surprised if Julia could sell me a pair of shoes, some
stockings and a shirtwaist, and do Tamea’s hair up in an orderly manner.
Mrs. Pippy will take her in hand and do the needful. If she doesn’t,” he
added fiercely, “I’ll dismiss her immediately.”

Fortunately, Tamea’s mournful thoughts claimed her attention; she was
content to sit perfectly quiet and hold Dan’s hand, as if from the
contact she drew strength to face the unknown. When Dan broached the
subject of turning her over to Maisie she had been distinctly alarmed,
and when he sang Maisie’s praises so generously, she decided that he was
very fond of Maisie, and, for a reason which she did not consider
necessary to analyze, Tamea made up her mind instantly that she was not
going to like Maisie; which decision, in view of the fact that she had
never seen Maisie, must be regarded as only another example of the
extraordinary instinct or intuition of the feminine sex, wheresoever
situated and with regard to age, color, creed, or previous condition of
servitude.

She was relieved when Dan abandoned the subject without comment or
urging; she had a hazy impression that he had been rather nice about it
and that her father had selected, to take his place, a singularly kindly
and comfortable person, indeed. She gave his hand a little squeeze,
which he didn’t even notice.

Mrs. Pippy was just ascending the stairs from the entrance hall when Dan
let Tamea and himself into the house. The good lady paused in her ascent
with much the same abruptness which, we imagine, characterized the
termination of the flight of Lot’s wife when that lady was metamorphosed
into a pillar of salt.

“Good heavens, Mr. Pritchard!” she exclaimed—and assumed a regal
attitude.

“Good evening, Mrs. Pippy,” Dan saluted her cheerfully. “May I have your
attendance here for a moment, dear Mrs. Pippy?. . . Thank you so much.
Mrs. Pippy, this young lady is Miss Tamea Larrieau, and in her own land,
which is the island of Riva, in eastern Polynesia, she is quite the most
important person of her sex. In fact, Miss Tamea is the hereditary ruler
of the Rivas, or Rivets, or whatever one might term them. Tamea, this
lady is Mrs. Pippy, who is kind enough to manage my household, Mrs.
Pippy is a kind lady who will take good care of you, won’t you, Mrs.
Pippy?”

Mrs. Pippy favored Tamea with a wintry nod and an equally wintry and
fleeting smile. She still stood on the stairs in her regal attitude;
apparently, in the presence of royalty, she was not impressed.

Immediately Tamea gave her guardian additional evidence of an alert
mentality and extreme sensitiveness to the slightest atmosphere of
disapproval or hostility. She favored Mrs. Pippy with a long, cool,
impersonal glance, before she turned to Dan and said, naïvely:

“She looks like Columbia, the gem of the ocean!”

Decidedly, Dan Pritchard was not in humorous mood; nevertheless he
burbled and churned inwardly for several seconds before conquering an
impulse to burst into maniac laughter. He realized in time, fortunately,
that he could not possibly afford to laugh at his housekeeper. The good
soul was arrayed in a black crêpe de Chine gown, trimmed with lace—a
voluminous and extremely frippery garment; standing there, her cold
countenance handsome with a classic handsomeness beneath a pile of
silvery hair, she did indeed offer a splendid comparison with the
popular conception of Columbia.

“Pardon me, Mr. Pritchard,” said Mrs. Pippy frigidly, “did I understand
you to say that Miss Larrieau comes from eastern Polynesia?”

“Yes, indeed, Mrs. Pippy. She arrived from there today.”

“For a moment I was inclined to think you had been misinformed and that
the young lady hails from the region known as ‘south of Market Street.’”

“That one went over Tamea’s head,” Dan thought. “It was meant for me.
Well, it landed.”

He smiled upon his housekeeper.

“We will, if you please, Mrs. Pippy, call that round a draw. Miss
Larrieau is my ward. I acquired her about two hours ago and it is my
firm intention to do as well by her as possible. To that end I crave
your indulgence and hearty coöperation, Mrs. Pippy.”

The housekeeper thawed perceptibly. “I shall be most happy to aid you in
making Miss Larrieau as comfortable and happy as possible.”

“That’s perfectly splendid of you, Mrs. Pippy. Tamea, my dear, will you
step into the living room and play your accordion, or do something to
amuse yourself, while Mrs. Pippy and I hold a conference?”

“You will not go away—far?” Tamea pleaded.

“This is my house, Tamea, and it is your home for the present at least.
You are very welcome. Whenever your dear father came to San Francisco it
was his pleasure to visit me here, to dine with me and sit up half the
night talking with me. He always felt that this was his San Francisco
home, and you must feel likewise.”

“Very well,” Tamea replied and entered the room. A wood fire was
crackling in the large fireplace, and Tamea sat down on her heels before
this fire and held her hands out to the cheerful flames.

“This is a cold country,” she complained. “Cold winds and cold hearts.”

Dan rejoined Mrs. Pippy and drew her into the dining room, where, in
brief sentences, he explained Tamea and his hopes and desires concerning
her. Mrs. Pippy gave a respectful ear to his recital; that was all.

“I have a feeling, Mr. Pritchard, that you are going to have your hands
full with that young woman,” she declared. “I have always heard that
half-castes of any kind partake of the worst characteristics of both
parents. Eurasians are—well, scarcely desirable.”

“Tamea is not a Eurasian. She is a pure-bred Caucasian, but in many
respects she is a child of nature. It is evident that her father saw to
it that she received all the educational advantages possible in her
little world, but I must impress upon you, Mrs. Pippy, that when dealing
with her you are not dealing with a modern girl. Her outlook on life,
her thoughts, impulses—and, I dare say, her moral viewpoint—antedate
the Christian era.”

“Is she a—Christian, Mr. Pritchard?”

“I think not. Her father was not. Neither was he an atheist. He was a
pagan. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Tamea’s religious beliefs, if
she has any, are idolatrous.”

“Horrible!”

Dan smiled. “I dare say Tamea is quite as happy as any Christian, Mrs.
Pippy.”

“I do hope she’s clean, Mr. Pritchard.”

“Well, her people usually are. However, you might explain to her the
mysteries of a modern bathtub. Do you think you and Julia can manage to
dress her for dinner—after a fashion?”

Mrs. Pippy expressed the hope that the experiment might prove successful
and suggested that Julia be interviewed.

Julia, a romantic, rosy-cheeked, imaginative but extremely plain woman
in the early thirties, was overwhelmed with importance to discover that
the master of the house had elected to lean upon her, to seek her advice
and coöperation when confronted by this most unusual dilemma.

“An’ is it lady-in-waitin’ to a queen you’d ask me to be, Misther
Pritchard? Faith, then, an’ I’ll defy you to find a body more willin’.
Of course we’ll take care of her. Why shouldn’t we? Sure, ’tis sympathy
an’ undhershtandin’ she’ll need this night. Where’s the poor lamb?”

For some reason not quite apparent to him, Dan had a feeling that Julia
Hagerty was, beyond a doubt, the most wonderful woman he had ever met.
Mrs. Pippy, he thought, had been overeducated and civilized and
sheltered to the point where all the humanity had been squeezed out of
her, while Julia, child of the soil, had, in the daily battle for bread
and butter, been humanized to the point where she and Tamea could meet
on something akin to common ground.

At that moment Tamea, having warmed her fingers and stretched herself
flat on her back on the thick oriental rug, took up her accordion and
commenced improvising a melody that had in it that wailing quality, that
funereal suggestion inseparable from the music of a dying race, or an
oppressed.

As she played Tamea sang, in a sweet little voice that scarcely filled
the room, a semi-chant that Dan Pritchard suspected was also an
improvisation, with words and music dedicated to the one who was still
drifting outward with the tide.

Mrs. Pippy’s ultra-superior countenance commenced to soften and Julia
stood listening open-mouthed.

“The poor darlin’,” murmured Julia.

Suddenly Tamea ceased her improvisation, shifted a few octaves and
played “One Sweetly Solemn Thought.” In the twilight of the big living
room it seemed that an organ was softly playing.

“She’s a Christian!” Mrs. Pippy whispered dramatically.

“I hope not,” Dan replied. “I think I prefer her pagan innocence.”

“But how strange that, with her father not yet cold in his—ah—watery
grave, she should elect to sing and play whatever it is she plays.”

“Well, if one be tied to tradition and humbug and false standards and
cowardice, I suppose Tamea’s conduct _is_ strange,” Dan admitted. “I
think, however, that I can understand it. Certainly I appreciate it.
What if the girl was passionately devoted to her father? What if he did
commit suicide in her presence two hours ago? They had talked it over
beforehand, sanely, and both had agreed that it was the best and
simplest way out. And Gaston wasn’t messy about it. To me his passing
was as magnificent as that of the doomed Viking of old who put out to
sea in his burning galley. Smiling, composed, he stepped blithely over
the ship’s rail.

“Just one step from life to death, you say? No, not to death, but to
another life! We Christians who believe in the resurrection of the dead
and the communion of saints are horribly afraid of death, but the pagan
has nothing to regret and journeys over the Styx in a spirit of
adventure and altruism. Tamea will, from time to time, weep because she
will miss her father’s comradeship and affection, but never because her
father has parted with life, for to her and her people life without joy
is worse than death.

“They make no mystery of death; it is not an occasion or a tremendous
event save when a monarch passes. No mourning clothes or mourning period
to bolster up a pretense of an affection for the deceased stronger than
that which actually existed; no tolling of bells, no sonorous ritual.
That is the hokum of our civilization. But tradition, mummery and
religion are unknown to Tamea. She is simple, sane and philosophical,
and whatever you do, Mrs. Pippy, and you, Julia, don’t pretend that
anything unusual has happened. Do not proffer her sympathy. What she
craves is affection and understanding.”

“You are already late to dinner, Mr. Pritchard. Sooey Wan is on the
warpath,” Mrs. Pippy suggested. She was not in sympathy with Mr.
Pritchard’s views and desired to change the subject.

“Some day I’m going to do something to Sooey Wan. I grow weary of his
tyranny. Julia, come with me and I’ll introduce you to Her Majesty.”

Tamea turned her head as they entered the room but did not trouble to
rise. Dan noticed that her eyes were bright with unshed tears, that her
lips quivered pitifully, that the brave little smile of welcome she
summoned for him was very wistful.

“Tamea, this is Julia, who will take good care of you.”

The Queen of Riva sat up and looked Julia over. Julia, fully alive to
the tremendous drama of the situation, had wreathed her plain features
in a smile that was almost a friendly leer; her Irish blue eyes
glittered with curiosity and amiability.

“Hello, Tammy, darlin’,” she crooned. “Come here to me, you poor gir’rl,
till I take care o’ you. Glory be to the Heavenly Father, did you ever
see the like o’ that shmile? An’ thim eyes, Mrs. Pippy! An’ her hair
that long she’s sittin’ on it! Wirra, will you look at her complexion!
Like ripe shtrawberries smothered in cream.”

Julia held out her arms. Tamea stared at her for several seconds, then
carefully laid aside her accordion and stood up.

“She is a plain woman, but her heart is one of gold,” she said to Dan,
and went to Julia and was gathered into her arms.

Poor Julia! Like Tamea, she too was an exile, far from a land she loved
and the loving of which, with her kind, amounts to a religious duty.
Julia was a servant, a plain, uneducated woman, but at birth God had
given her the treasure for which Solomon, in his mature years, had
prayed. She had an understanding heart, and to it now she pressed the
lonely Tamea, the while she stroked the girl’s wondrous, rippling,
jet-black tresses.

“Poor darlin’,” she crooned. “You poor orphant, you.”

“I will kiss you,” Tamea declared, and did it. She looked over her
shoulder at Dan Pritchard. “And you will give me this woman all for
myself?” she queried.

“Yes, my dear,” he answered brazenly. “Julia belongs to you. Did she not
give herself to you? Why should I withhold my permission? Julia is your
slave.”

She beamed her gratitude. “Give me, please, one of my father’s black
pearls—any one you do not want for yourself.”

Gravely Dan took from his pocket the envelope Gaston of the Beard had
entrusted to him for Tamea, and spread the pearls on his open palm.
Tamea selected one that was worth ten thousand dollars if it was worth a
penny, and handed it to Julia.

“Observe, Julia,” she said, “the warm bright glow in the heart of this
pearl. It is like the warm bright glow in the heart of you, my Julia.
Take it. Thus I reward those who love me—thus and thus,” and she kissed
Julia’s russet cheeks.

Julia eyed her employer with amazement and wonder. “Glory be, Misther
Pritchard,” she gasped, “what’ll I do with it?”

“Put it away in a safe deposit box, Julia,” he suggested. “It is worth a
small fortune. And remember what I told you. Nothing that may happen
must be unusual. Understand. Now take Tamea upstairs and dress her while
I call on Sooey Wan and set dinner back half an hour.”




                               CHAPTER VI


With a shower bath, a change of linen and the donning of dinner clothes,
Dan always felt a freshening of the spirit—rather as if the grime of
commercialism had been washed away. Whether he dined alone or with
guests he always dressed for dinner.

Sooey Wan, who added to his duties as cook those of general
superintendent of Dan’s establishment, in defiance of the authority
vested in Mrs. Pippy, and who was, on occasion, valet, counselor and
friend, came up to his room with another cocktail just as Dan finished
dressing. Also, he brought a cocktail for himself, and, while waiting
for Dan to adjust his tie, the old Chinaman helped himself to one of
Dan’s gold-tipped cigarettes.

Ordinarily, Sooey Wan permitted himself few liberties with his boss, but
upon occasions when his acute intuition told him that the boss was low
in spirits, Sooey Wan always forgot that Dan was his boss. Then Dan
became merely Sooey Wan’s boy, the adored male baby of the first white
man for whom Sooey Wan had ever worked. The years fell away and Dan was
just a ten-year-old, and he and Sooey Wan were making red dragon kites
in the kitchen and planning to fly them the following Saturday from Twin
Peaks.

Indeed, Pritchard, senior, had left to Sooey Wan a large share in the
upbringing and character-building of his only son, for Dan’s mother had
died that Dan might live. It had been Sooey Wan who had imparted to Dan
a respect for the inflexible code of the Chinese that a man shall honor
his father and his mother and accord due reverence to the bones of his
ancestors and the land that gave him birth. It had been Sooey Wan who,
inveterate gambler himself, nevertheless taught Dan that when a man
loses he shall take his losses smilingly and never neglect to pay his
debts. Into Dan’s small head he had instilled as much Chinese philosophy
and as much Chinese honor as he would have instilled into a son of his
own had his strange gods not denied him this supreme privilege.

Dan knew the old Chinaman for the treasure he was and nothing that Sooey
Wan might do could possibly have offended him. In thirty-five years of
perfect service to the Pritchards, father and son, Sooey Wan had bought
and paid for the few liberties he took—an occasional cigarette in their
presence and about six cocktails per annum.

What Sooey Wan realized his boss needed tonight was human society. Sooey
Wan felt fully equal to the task of supplying that rare commodity, and
he was in Dan’s room now for that purpose.

“My boy feelee little better, eh?” he suggested.

“Considerably. Life isn’t half bad, Sooey Wan. The world isn’t filled
entirely with muckers.”

“Oh, velly nice world!” Sooey Wan agreed. “Today I ketchum ten spot in
China lottery. I play fi’ dollar. Tonight Sooey Wan feel pretty damn
good, too.”

A silence while Dan sat down, lighted a cigarette and sipped his
cocktail. Then:

“Julia velly happy, boss. Captain’s girl give Julia velly nice plesent.
She come show me. Missie Pip velly sorry no can understand at first. No
ketchum pearl.” And Sooey Wan chuckled like a malevolent old gnome,
while Dan laughed with him.

“Missie Pip too high-tone’,” Sooey Wan decided. “Yeh, too muchee. No pay
muchee Missie Pip for be high-tone’. Sooey Wan don’t give a damn. Sooey
Wan ketchum pearl, all li’. No ketchum pearl, all li’. Ketchum ten spot
China lottery, velly good. Ketchum ten spot for Julia, too, but Julia no
playum heavy. Twenty-fi’ cen’s, two bittee limit.”

The Chinese lottery was then discussed, with Sooey Wan adverting with
delightful regularity to the fact that Mrs. Pippy was in a mood to kick
herself up hill and down dale because of her lamentable failure to
recognize a queen. The gift of all the pearls ever collected in the
South Seas could not have afforded the old Chinese schemer one-half the
delight this knowledge afforded him, and Dan quickly realized that for
the pleasure of this social visit from Sooey Wan he was indebted quite
as much to Mrs. Pippy’s misfortune as he was to Sooey Wan’s unfaltering
affection. He _had_ to share this joyous news with somebody who could
appreciate it!

Presently Sooey Wan grew serious. “I lookee thlough dining room door
when Captain’s girl go upstair,” he confided. “Velly pitty girl. Velly
damn nice, Missa Dan, you mally lady queen?”

“No, confound you, no. What put that idea into your fool head?”

“Captain’s girl velly nice. Bimeby, boss, you have fi’, six, seven,
maybe eight son! Sure, you have good luck. She give you many son.”

“I don’t want many sons. Just now I do not want any.”

“You klazy. What you think Sooey Wan stick around for, anyhow. You no
ketchum baby pretty quick wha’ for I workee for you? Hey? Me ketchum
plenty money. Me go China.”

“You’re an interfering, scheming old duffer, Sooey. Get back to your
kitchen.”

Sooey Wan departed in huge disgust, slamming the door. A moment later he
opened it a couple of inches and looked in. “Lady queen leady for
dinner. Look velly nice. Missa Dan, you listen Sooey Wan. Captain’s girl
velly nice.”

Dan threw a book at him and descended to dinner.

At the foot of the stairs he met Tamea, attended by Mrs. Pippy and
Julia. Mrs. Pippy was a being reincarnated. She beamed, she seemed
fairly to drip with the milk of human kindness. The simple Julia stood,
grinning like a gargoyle, head on one side and hands clasped under her
chin, presenting a picture of pride personified.

“Look at her now, Misther Pritchard, an’ the day you got her,” said
Julia.

Tamea looked up at him pridefully. She was wearing a white dress, white
silk stockings and white buckskin shoes. Her hair, caught at her nape
with a scarlet ribbon, hung in a dusky cascade down her fine straight
back.

The combination was startling, vivid, amazingly artistic, and Dan stood
lost in admiration. If Tamea could only have managed a smile that
predicated happiness rather than sadness, Dan told himself she would
have been ravishingly beautiful.

“You’re tremendous! Perfectly tremendous!” he assured Tamea. “But that
stunning dress——”

“I took the liberty of telephoning Miss Morrison,” Mrs. Pippy gurgled.
“I sent Graves over after some things of hers I thought might fit Miss
Larrieau.”

“I am extremely grateful to you, Mrs. Pippy.” In the back of his head
the words of Sooey Wan were ringing: “Missie Pip velly sorry no can
understand at first. No ketchum pearl.” Whatever the reason behind her
present cordiality, she was making a strenuous effort to overcome the
unfortunate impression she had made upon Tamea a half-hour previous.

Sooey Wan appeared in the dining room entrance and beamed cordially upon
the guest. “What Sooey Wan tell you, boss? Velly nice, eh? You bet.
Dinner leady.”

Dan silenced the wretch with a furious glance, took Tamea by the arm and
steered her into the dining room. Sooey Wan retreated, but paused at the
entrance to the butler’s pantry and grinned his approval before
disappearing into the kitchen to pass out two plates of soup for Julia
to serve. Mrs. Pippy disappeared.

Having tucked Tamea’s chair in under her, Dan took his place opposite.
Tamea looked around the dining room with frank approval. She appeared a
trifle subdued by the somber richness of it, the vague shadows cast by
the warm pale pink glow of the four candles in four old silver
candlesticks, the dark bowl, flower-laden, in the center of the table.

Dan was aware that she was watching him; not until he had selected his
soup spoon from among—to Tamea—a bewildering array of silverware, did
she imitate his action. Her host instantly realized that the niceties of
hospitality would have to be dispensed with for the sake of Tamea’s
education; consequently, when Julia entered with some toasted crackers
and approached Tamea with the intention of serving her first, Dan caught
Julia’s eye and directed her to his side.

“You will serve me first,” he whispered and helped himself. Tamea did
likewise.

“Now, her French father taught her to break her crackers into her soup
and partake of the soup without regard to the resultant melody. I will
see if she is a victim of habit,” he decided.

He waited. Tamea set the crackers on her butter plate, as she had
observed him do; like him, she made no movement to eat them. Dan took up
his butter knife and buttered a cracker. Tamea instantly searched out
her butter knife—Dan would have been willing to wager considerable she
had never seen one before—and buttered her cracker. Bite for bite and
sip for sip she followed his lead, her smoky glance seldom straying from
him. Observing that she was not using her napkin, Dan flirted his, on
pretense of straightening it out, and respread it. Immediately Tamea
unfolded her napkin and spread it.

“She’ll do,” Dan soliloquized. “Doesn’t know a thing, but has the
God-given grace to know she doesn’t know and is smart enough not to try
to four-flush. That girl has brains to spare. She speaks when she is
spoken to, but tonight silence is not good for her. She must not think
too much about her father.” Aloud he said: “Tamea, what was your life in
Riva like?”

“Very simple, Dan Pritchard. While our family ruled Riva we were rulers
with little ruling to do. Ten years ago my mother’s father died. After
that my mother and I spent many months each year with my father aboard
the Moorea. My mother did not speak good French, but my father would
speak to me in no other tongue. He taught me to read and write French
and English, and when I was twelve years old he brought a woman from
Manga Riva to be my governess. She was half Samoan and half English, and
she had been educated in England. The island blood called her back. She
played the piano and was lazy and would get drunk if she could, but she
feared my father, so she taught me faithfully each day when sober. My
father paid her well—too well.”

“What became of her, Tamea?”

“She is dead. Influenza in nineteen eighteen. Our people do not survive
it, although I was very ill with it. My father said it was his blood
that saved me.”

“Doubtless. What did you do all day in Riva?”

“In the morning, early, I swam in the river or to the lagoon. The tiger
shark seldom comes inside the reef. Then breakfast and lessons for two
hours, then some sleep and more lessons late in the afternoon, followed,
perhaps, by another swim. Then dinner and after dinner some music and
song and perhaps a dance. Twice a year, sometimes three times a year, we
would have a big feast when some schooner would call for water and
supplies and offer trade for our copra. But my father controlled that.”

“Were you happy, Tamea?”

“Oh, yes, very!”

“When your mother died, was your father in Riva?”

“No, he came two months later. When he left I went with him, to go to
school in Tahiti. I have lived two years in Tahiti, and studied English
and French with a school teacher from Australia. She was governess to
the children of a Frenchman who was a good friend of my father.”

“So that’s why you speak such good English.”

She smiled happily. “You think so, Monsieur Dan Pritchard?”

He nodded. “And do not call me Monsieur Dan Pritchard,” he suggested.
“Just call me plain Dan.”

“As you like, Plain Dan.”

Julia, listening, burst into a guffaw, caught herself in the middle of
it and was covered with confusion. Tamea looked at her very
suspiciously, but Julia’s quick Celtic wit saved her. She pretended to
have a violent fit of coughing.

“Do you think you will be happy in San Francisco, Tamea?” Dan queried,
in an effort to stimulate conversation.

“Who knows? Where one is not known, where it is cold and there is
neither singing nor dancing nor laughter nor love——”

“Oh, that will come after you get acquainted! The first thing you must
do is to become familiar with your surroundings and outgrow a very
natural feeling of loneliness and, perhaps, homesickness. Then you shall
be sent to a boarding school and become a very fine young lady.”

The suggestion aroused no enthusiasm in his guest, so he tried a new
tack and one which he felt assured would appeal to the eternal feminine
in her.

“Tomorrow I shall ask Miss Morrison to go shopping with you and buy a
wonderful wardrobe for you, Tamea.”

“I will take this woman Julia instead, if you please, Plain Dan,” she
replied.

“Call me Dan,” he pleaded. “Just one word—Dan.”

She nodded. “How long will I stay in your house, Dan?”

“Why, as long as you care to, Tamea.”

Again the grateful and adorable smile. “Then I shall stay here with you
always, Dan.”

“Do you think we can manage without quarreling?”

“There will be no quarreling.”

“But you will obey me, Tamea. You will recognize my authority and do
exactly what I tell you to do.”

She sighed.

“Privately she thinks that’s a pretty large order,” Dan decided.

Slowly Tamea sipped a glass of light white wine and pecked, without
enthusiasm, at a lamb chop. She sighed again.

“I am very tired, Dan,” she said wearily. “I cannot eat more. I would
sleep.”

Dan nodded to Julia, who set her tray on the sideboard and stood
prepared to escort her charge to bed. Tamea rose, walked around to Dan’s
chair, put her arms around his neck and drew his head toward her until
her cheek rested against his.

“You are a good father and kind. I shall love you, _chéri_,” she said
softly. “You will kiss your little girl good night? No? But, yes, I
demand it, _mon père_. There, that is better. . . . Good night. In the
morning I will be brave; I will not be sad and oppress this household
with my sorrows.”

She kissed him. It was not a mere peck but it was undoubtedly filial,
and Dan indeed was grateful in a full realization of this.

“Good night, Tamea, dear child,” he said, and watched Julia lead her
away.

He was still watching her as she crossed the entrance hall to the foot
of the stairs, when the door of the butler’s pantry squeaked very
slightly. Dan turned. Sooey Wan’s nose was at the aperture, and one of
his slant eyes was bent appreciatively upon Dan.

“Get out,” Dan cried. “What are you spying for, you outrageous heathen?”

“Velly nice. Captain’s girl velly nice. Heap nice kissee, eh? You bet!
Velly nice!”

Dan was instantly furious. “Sooey Wan,” he roared, “you’re fired!”

“Boss,” retorted Sooey Wan in dulcet, honeyed tones, “you klazy.”

The door slid back into place and Sooey Wan returned chuckling to the
domain where he was king.

An hour later, as Dan finished his first postprandial cigar, he decided
that after all there might be a modicum of truth in Sooey Wan’s
assertion. Sane he might be now—that is, moderately sane—but for all
that a still small voice had commenced to whisper that the extraordinary
events of this day were but a preliminary to still more extraordinary
events to follow. And that night he dreamed that a Chinese infant, with
a tuft of white ribbon tied in a bow at his midriff and armed with bow
and arrow, climbed up on the footboard of his bed and shot him, crying
meanwhile:

“Velly nice! Velly, velly nice!”




                              CHAPTER VII


The guest chambers in Dan Pritchard’s home were two in number—richly
furnished but solid looking rooms for men. Julia scuttled from one to
the other, in a frenzy of indecision as to which was worthy to receive
her charge, while Tamea sat at the head of the staircase and waited.
Julia was several minutes making her decision as to whether Tamea would
look best in the room with taupe carpet and the French gray single bed,
or the one with the old-rose carpet and the old black walnut double bed.
Finally she decided on the former, and then sought Mrs. Pippy to ask if
Miss Morrison had sent over a spare nightgown. It developed that Miss
Morrison had neglected this important detail, so Mrs. Pippy graciously
donated one of her own and Julia returned with it.

Then she discovered that Tamea, being a young woman of initiative and
decision, had very promptly solved the problem of sleeping quarters.
While she had been no stranger to bedsteads and pillows, nevertheless
her upbringing in Riva had taught Tamea that there was no necessity to
be particular as to a lodging for the night. She could always glean an
excellent rest on a mat spread on a stone floor, with a polished section
of the trunk of a coco-palm as a pillow; and while waiting for Julia to
return, the richly carpeted floor had attracted her attention. Promptly
she lay down in the hall, pillowed her head on her arm and went to sleep
almost instantly.

“Poor lamb!” murmured the sympathetic Julia, and fled to summon Mrs.
Pippy to behold the unconventional guest. Mrs. Pippy gazed
disapprovingly, shook her handsome silvery head as if to say, “Mr.
Pritchard’s action in bringing this tomboy home for us to care for is
quite beyond _me_!” and retired to her room again, still shaking her
head.

Julia awakened her sleepy charge. “Come with me, Tammy, darlin’,” she
pleaded. “Sure, the flure is no place for you.”

“It is very soft,” Tamea protested. “And very warm, for such a cold
country.”

“Wait till Sooey Wan—bad cess to him!—puts the furnace out. Ye’d be
froze shtiff in the mornin’, Tammy——”

“My name is Tamea Oluolu Larrieau. You may call me Tamea, but to others
I must be Mademoiselle Larrieau.”

“Oh, sure, why not lave me call ye Tammy? Not a one but me will use that
name.”

“Your desire is granted because you are kind to me, Julia.”

“Thank you, Tammy. Here, sit you down in this chair and I’ll take off
your shlippers. . . . Now, thin, here’s your nightgown. Take off your
clothes and put the nightgown on whilst I fix the bed for you and get
you a dhrink of wather.”

Tamea held up Mrs. Pippy’s nightgown and looked it over critically. “The
wife of the missionary in Riva had several such as this,” she commented.
“It is not pretty. I had prettier ones than this aboard ship, but—for a
reason—I brought no baggage ashore with me. I do not like this
garment.” She tossed it through the open bathroom door into the tub.

“Now, Tammy,” began Julia, mildly expostulating.

“I will not wear it, Julia.”

“Sure, why not, Tammy, you little ninny, you?”

“What is a ninny?”

“Heaven knows,” the helpless Julia replied, “but I’m thinkin’ I’m it,
whatever it may be. Why won’t you wear the nightgown, Tammy? Sure all
nice gir’rls——”

“It belongs to her,” said Tamea and pointed majestically upward. “It
bears the letter _P_.”

“Be the Rock of Cashel,” sighed poor Julia, “you’re windictive so you
are,” and without further ado she went upstairs and brought down one of
her own plain _chemises de nuit_. Without a word Tamea donned it and
crept dutifully into bed.

“Do you not say your prayers before you get into bed, Tammy?” the pious
Julia queried reproachfully.

Tamea shook her head, dark and beautiful against the snowy pillow. Julia
sighed. Her own problems were always dumped, metaphorically speaking, in
the lap of her Christian God, night and morning.

“This is truly a bed for a queen,” said Tamea thoughtfully. “Is Monsieur
Dan Pritchard, then, a very rich man?”

“He have barrels of it,” Julia replied reverently.

“My father gave me to him, Julia.”

“Faith, an’ that’s where he showed his common sinse. Divil a finer
gintleman could you find the wide wur’rld over.”

Fell a long silence. Then: “Where is Madame Pritchard?”

“The masther has never been married, Tammy.”

“What? Has he, then, in his house none but serving women?”

“Ssh! Don’t talk like that, Tammy. Of course he hasn’t.”

“Strange,” murmured Tamea thoughtfully. “He is different from other men
of his race. Have no women sought his favor?”

Julia was embarrassed and exasperated. “How the divil should I know?”
she protested indignantly.

“You live in this house. You are his servant. Have you not ears? Are you
blind?”

“I never shpy on the masther.”

“Perhaps,” Tamea suggested, “it is because Monsieur Dan Pritchard has a
hatred of women.”

“Sorra bit o’ that.”

“Then is it that women have a hatred of him?”

“They’d give the two eyes out of their heads to marry him.”

A silence. “All this is very strange, Julia.”

“Don’t worry about it, Tammy. Go to sleep now.”

“Here is a great mystery. Has Monsieur Dan Pritchard, then, no
children?”

“Heaven forbid!” Julia was now thoroughly scandalized.

“Here _is_ a mystery. Does he not desire sons to inherit his name and
wealth?”

“I never discussed the matther wit’ him.”

“This is, indeed, a strange country with strange customs.”

“We’ll think o’ that in the mornin’, Tammy darlin’. Shall I put out the
light?”

“Yes, my good Julia. Good night.”

“Good night, dear.” Julia switched off the light and retired to the
door. Here, poised for flight, she turned and shot back at her charge a
question that had been perplexing her:

“Are you a Protestant or a Catholic, Tammy?”

“Neither,” murmured Tamea.

“Glory be! ’Tis not a Jew you are?”

“No.”

“Well, what, thin?”

“Are you trying to convert me, Julia?”

“I am not.”

“Then why do you ask?”

“I’m that curious, Tammy.”

“If you act like a missionary’s wife I shall dismiss you from my
service, Julia. I have no religion. I am free. I do what I jolly well
please. Yes, you bet.”

“An’ there’s an idea for you!” Julia soliloquized as she passed softly
out. “Begorry, we’ll have a grand time of it with that one, so we will.
Somebody’s been puttin’ notions in her head. _Ochone!_ Where the divil
was that one raised, I dunno. Angel that she is to look at she’s had a
slack father an’ mother, I’ll lay odds on that.”

Julia sighed and went downstairs to seek the aid of Sooey Wan in
scratching out the numbers of her choice on a ticket for the next day’s
drawing in the Chinese lottery. She found Sooey Wan washing the dishes
and singing softly.

“Are you singin’ or cryin’, Sooey Wan?” Julia greeted him.

“Hullah for hell,” said Sooey Wan. He tossed a soup plate to the ceiling
and caught it deftly as it came down. “Boss ketchum velly nice girl,” he
began.

“Can’t the poor man be kind to an orphan without you, you yellow divil,
puttin’ dogs in windows?”

“Velly nice,” Sooey Wan repeated doggedly. “Pretty soon I think give
boss many sons.”

“Say-y-y, what sort o’ place is this gettin’ to be, anyhow?”

“Pretty soon Sooey Wan think this going be legular place. One house no
ketchum baby, no legular house.”

“Say nothin’ to Mrs. Pippy of what’s in that ould head of yours, Sooey
Wan. What wit’ one haythen downstairs an’ another upstairs the woman’ll
be givin’ notice.”

Sooey Wan pulled open a drawer in the kitchen table and tossed out a
handful of bills and silver. “Ketchum ten spot for you today, Julia,” he
explained. “You lucky. Ketchum ten spot, ketchum pearl.”

“Faith, you’ll catch more than that if you don’t lear’rn to mind your
own business,” Julia warned him.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Long after the household had retired Dan Pritchard sat before the living
room fireplace reviewing in his mind’s eye the startling events of that
day. He felt depressed, obsessed by an unreasonable, wholly inexplicable
presentiment of events still more startling to occur in the not very
distant future.

As a rule, the majority of women puzzled Dan, many of them frightened
him, and all of them disturbed him. Of all the women he had ever known,
Maisie Morrison alone appeared to possess the gift of contributing to
his mental rest, his sense of spiritual well-being, even while her
practical, definite and positive personality occasionally disturbed his
creature comfort, robbed him of that sense of leadership and strength
which it is the right of all men to exhibit toward the women of their
choice, and appeared to render null and void the necessity for any
exhibition of the protective instinct. Infrequently Dan complained to
himself that Maisie would be a transcendently wonderful girl if she but
possessed just a trifle more imagination; having convinced himself that
this was so, he would watch for definite evidence to convict Maisie of
such a lack, only to be hurled back into his old state of mental
confusion by indubitable evidence that Maisie could read him and his
innermost thoughts as readily as if he were a signboard.

When he had complained to Maisie that morning that he was a square peg
in the round hole, he had voiced the unrest which all born radicals
experience when forced to live conservatively. For Dan knew he was a
radical in his viewpoint on many things held sacred by his conservative
brethren; he knew he lacked the instinctive caution and constructive
conservatism so evident in Maisie. He felt as one whose soul was hobbled
with a ball and chain. Maisie, he knew, suffered from no such sense of
repression, and this knowledge of her mental freedom sometimes forced
upon him a secret, almost womanish irritation.

Sometimes Dan was almost convinced that he ought to rid himself of his
habit of introspection, marry Maisie and live happily ever afterward.
Then, just as he would be almost on the point of growing loverlike,
Maisie would seem to pop out at him from a mental ambush; would seem to
lay a cool finger on the soul of him and say quite positively: “Here,
Dan, is where it hurts. The pain isn’t where you think it is at all. You
are a foolish, imaginative man, and if you do not heed my direction now,
you will eventually regret that you did not.”

And then Dan, outwardly smiling and expansive but inwardly glum and
shriveling, would tell himself that he could never, never dwell in
idyllic married bliss with such a dominating and interfering woman; and
Maisie, secretly furious, baffled, would watch him change from the
devoted admirer to the warm friend.

Tonight Dan decided that he was, beyond the slightest vestige of a
doubt, tremendously fond of Maisie Morrison. But—he was not at all
certain that he loved her well enough to ask her to marry him; he
marveled now, more than ever previously, what imp of impulse had moved
him to kiss her that morning. How warm and sweet and responsive had been
that momentary pressure of her lips to his? He visualized again that
lambent light that had leaped into her eyes. . . had he gone too far?

The telephone in the booth under the stairs in the entrance hall rang
faintly. He reached for the extension telephone on the living room table
and said: “Yes, Maisie?”

“How did you know it was I?” Maisie’s voice demanded.

“I cannot answer that question, Maisie. I merely knew. You see, I was
just beginning to think that I might have called you up and——”

“Indeed, yes,” she interrupted. How like her, he reflected. Her agile
brain was always leaping ahead to a conclusion and landing on it fairly
and squarely. “I have waited three hours for a report from you, Dan, and
when eleven o’clock came and you had not telephoned I couldn’t restrain
my curiosity any longer. Mrs. Pippy telephoned about seven o’clock and
told me an extraordinary and unbelievable tale of a semi-savage young
woman whom you had brought home and established as a guest in your
bachelor domicile. Mrs. Pippy tried her best to appear calm, but I
sensed——”

“I’m quite certain you did, Maisie,” he interrupted in turn. “You sensed
Mrs. Pippy’s amazement, indignation and disapproval. You’re the most
marvelous woman for sensing things that I have ever known.”

“But then, Dan,” she reminded him, “you haven’t known very many women
intimately. You’re such a shy man. Sometimes I think you must have
gleaned all of your knowledge of my sex from your father and Sooey Wan.
Who is the South Sea belle, Dan, and what _do_ you mean by picking up
with such a creature and expecting me to help you render her
presentable?”

“I didn’t expect you to, Maisie. I didn’t ask you and I didn’t suggest
that Mrs. Pippy ask you.”

“I couldn’t get any very coherent information from Mrs. Pippy. She was
greatly agitated. However, I called Julia up a few minutes later and
from Julia I learned that your guest hasn’t sufficient of a wardrobe to
pad a crutch.”

“Julia is very amusing,” he replied evenly. “However, do not think the
young lady arrived here in a hula-hula costume. I am her guardian.”

“How do you know you are?” Maisie demanded, a bit crisply.

“Her father, Captain Larrieau, of our schooner Moorea, asked me to be
before he died this afternoon.”

“Hum-m-m!” Maisie was silent momentarily. “How like a man to think he
can fill such an order without outside help.”

He was exasperated. “There you go, Maisie,” he complained, “jumping to a
conclusion.”

“If I’ve jumped to a conclusion, Dan, rest assured I have landed
squarely on my objective. Why didn’t you telephone me the instant you
reached home with your ward? I would have been happy to aid you, Dan.”

“I am sure you would have been, Maisie, but—well——”

“I knew I was right, Dan. The only way I can find things out is to be
rude and ask questions. You thought I might not approve of——”

“Of what?” he demanded triumphantly.

“Of the young woman you brought home with you, of course.” Maisie’s
voice carried just a hint of irritation.

“Certainly not. I was certain you would approve of her. She’s quite a
child—about seventeen or eighteen years old, I should say—and a
perfectly dazzling creature—ah, that is, amazingly interesting in her
directness, her frankness, her unconventionality and innocence. I do
hope you’ll like her. I thought at first I could entrust her to Mrs.
Pippy but——”

“I gathered as much, Dan. Now, start at the beginning and tell me
everything about her.”

Dan complied with her demand. When the recital was ended, said Maisie:
“What are you going to do with her, Dan?”

“My instructions from her father were to educate her and affiance her to
some worthy fellow. I shall cast my eye around the local French colony
after the girl has completed her schooling. She has a fortune of
approximately a quarter of a million dollars—always an interesting
subject for contemplation and discussion in the matrimonial
preliminaries.” He heard her chuckle softly and realized that she found
amusement visualizing him in the role of a matchmaker. “I suppose,” he
ventured, “you’re wondering why I didn’t take her to a hotel.”

“Any other man in your sphere of life would, but I am not so optimistic
as to expect you to do the usual thing. I’m consumed with curiosity to
see your Tamea, Dan.”

“A meeting can be arranged,” he answered dryly. “As soon as my little
queen has had an opportunity to purchase a wardrobe befitting her rank
and wealth, I shall be happy to have you presented at court, Maisie.”

“I suppose you’re going to select her wardrobe?”

“No, I think Julia will attend to that.”

“In heaven’s name, Dan, why Julia? Have you ever seen Julia all dressed
up and about to set out for Golden Gate Park? Mrs. Pippy has excellent
taste.”

“Mrs. Pippy is not, I fear, the favorite of the queen.”

“Then I shall attend to her outfitting, Dan.

“Will you, Maisie, dear?”

“Of course, idiot.”

“Well, that lifts a burden off my shoulders.”

“You do not deserve such consideration, Dan. You’re too uncommunicative
when you are the possessor of amazing news. However, you’re such a
helpless, blundering Simple Simon I knew somebody would have to manage
you while you’re managing Tamea. So I concluded to volunteer for the
sacrifice.”

“Maisie, you’re a peach. I could kiss you for that speech.”

“Really, you’re running wild, Dan. You kissed me once today. And I’ve
been wondering why ever since.”

“How should I know?” he confessed. He had a sudden, freakish impulse to
annoy her.

“Stupid! Were I as stupid as you—— I’ll be at your house at about ten
o’clock tomorrow and take charge of your problem.”

“I shall be eternally grateful.”

“And eternally silly and eternally afraid of me and what I’m going to
think about everything. I could pull your nose. Good night.” She hung up
without waiting for his answer.

“I fear me Maisie is the bossy, efficient type of young woman,” he
soliloquized as he replaced the receiver. “I hope she and Tamea will hit
it off together. I sincerely hope it.”

At midnight Sooey Wan came in from Chinatown, following a prodigious
burning of devil papers in a local joss-house and a somewhat profitable
two hours of poker.

His slant eyes appraised Dan kindly. “Boss,” he ordered, “go bed. You
all time burn ’em too muchee light, too muchee coal, too muchee wood.
Cost muchee money.” He moved briskly about the room, switching off the
electric light. “Too muchee thinkee, too muchee headache,” he warned
Dan. “You not happy, boss, you thinkee too much. No good!”

“Oh, confound your Oriental philosophy!” Dan rasped back at him. “The
curse of it is, you’re right!”

Sooey Wan pointed authoritatively upward and Dan slowly climbed the
stairs to his room.

Thus ended a momentous day.




                              CHAPTER VIII


At breakfast the following morning Maisie Morrison decided to make no
mention to her aunt and uncle of the interesting bit of news concerning
Dan Pritchard of which she was the possessor.

Always cautious and conservative, she preferred to place herself in full
possession of the facts in the case, and to have this information
bolstered up by her own feeling about the situation following a meeting
with Dan’s ward, before discussing his business with anybody.

Maisie was mildly amused in the knowledge that Dan, of all men, should
have such a problem thrust upon him; she looked forward with no little
interest to watching the peculiar man approach his unusual duty. She
expected if she mentioned the matter that old Casson would laugh
patronizingly and pretend to find the situation devoid of a mature man’s
interest; he might even indulge himself in some light and caustic
criticism, with a touch of elephantine humor in it. That had seemed to
be his attitude toward Dan for a year past and Maisie resented it
fiercely—all the more fiercely, in fact, because her position in
Casson’s household forbade an expression of her resentment.

“I think I shall motor to Del Monte this morning for two weeks of golf,”
old Casson announced to his wife and Maisie at breakfast. “Suppose you
two pack up and go with me.”

“I think that would be delightful, John,” his wife replied.

“I have other fish to fry. Sorry!” Maisie answered him. “If you had
hinted of this yesterday, Uncle John——”

“My dear Maisie, the idea but this moment occurred to me. Better alter
your plans and come along.”

She shook her head.

“It occurred to me this instant—as I have already stated—” Casson
continued, “to escape boredom for two weeks. Our schooner Moorea is in
port and will remain here that long, in all probability. That means the
office will be set by the heels. Her bear-like skipper, Larrieau, will
go roaring from one room to the other, disturbing everybody except
Pritchard and amusing everybody except me. I cannot tolerate the man,
and if I should see too much of him I fear I might forget his record for
efficiency and dismiss him. He was a pet of Dan’s father, and Dan, too,
makes much of him. I dislike pets in a business office.”

Maisie looked at him coolly. “Then you will be happy to know that your
contemplated exile to Del Monte is quite unnecessary, Uncle John.
Captain Larrieau was discovered, upon arrival, to be a leper, so he sent
ashore for Dan, settled all of his business and committed suicide by
drowning yesterday evening.”

“Bless my soul! Where did you glean this astounding intelligence?”

“I talked with Dan over the telephone late last night.”

“You should have told me sooner, Maisie.”

Old Casson’s voice was stern; his weak, handsome face pretended chagrin.

“Why?”

“Why? What a question! Isn’t the man in my employ—or, at least, wasn’t
he?”

“He was in the employ of Casson and Pritchard, and Dan Pritchard has
attended to the matter for the firm.”

“I should have been communicated with immediately. Pritchard should have
telephoned to me, not to you.”

“Oh dear, Uncle John! One would think you revered the man so highly you
planned to have the bay dragged to recover his body, instead of being
happy in the knowledge that you have gotten rid of the nuisance.”

“Humph-h-h-h! We’ll not discuss it further, my dear. However, it is
difficult for me to refrain from expressing my irritation. How like
young Pritchard it was to disregard me entirely in this matter! For all
the deference or consideration that fellow pays me as the senior member
of the firm, I might as well be a traffic policeman.”

Maisie’s fine eyes flamed in sudden anger. “Has it ever occurred to you,
Uncle John, that in declining to annoy you with unnecessary details, by
his persistence in relieving you of the labor and worry of the business
management of Casson and Pritchard, Dan may be showing you the courtesy
and consideration due you as the senior member of the firm?”

“I am not a back number—yet, Maisie,” he assured her.

“Why do you not buy him out, Uncle John? He seems to be a very great
trial to you.”

Old Casson appeared to consider this suggestion very seriously as he
gravely tapped the shell of his matutinal egg. “That isn’t a half bad
idea, Maisie,” he answered. “At present, however, I am scarcely in
position to buy his interest. I anticipate this condition will be
materially changed within the next three or four months, and then——”

He paused eloquently and scooped his egg into the glass.

“I infer you have a hen on,” Maisie suggested.

“Perhaps the metaphor would be less mixed if we substituted a goose for
the hen. I believe the goose is the fowl currently credited with the
ability to lay golden eggs.”

“John Casson!” His wife now spoke for the first time. “Are you mixed in
another gamble?”

“Not at all, my dear, not at all. I have invested in several cargoes of
Chinese rice at a very low price, and I have sold one cargo at a very
high price. I am holding the others for the crest of a market that is
rising like a toy balloon. It isn’t gambling, my dear. It’s just a
mortal certainty.”

The good lady sighed. How often, in the thirty years of her life with
John Casson, had she heard him, in those same buoyant, confident,
mellifluous tones, assure her of the infallibility of victory due to his
superior judgment!

As usual, Maisie placed her finger on the sore spot. “What does Dan
think of it, Uncle John?”

“He doesn’t think anything, my dear. He doesn’t know.”

“Oh, I see! This is a private venture of yours?”

He nodded. “Yes—and no, Maisie. It’s a Casson and Pritchard deal, only
I’m engineering it myself. I’m going to prove to that overconfident
young man the truth of the old saying ‘Nothing risked, nothing gained.’
Why, the biggest thing in years lay right under his nose—and he passed
it by.”

“He was in Honolulu on that pineapple deal when you stumbled across this
good thing, was he not, Uncle John?”

“Yes, but then he knew about it before he left for Honolulu.”

“Well, I hope you’ll make a killing, Uncle John.”

He beamed his thanks upon her. “When I do—and I cannot _help_ doing
it—I’m going to be mighty nice to my niece,” he assured her. “However,”
he continued reminiscently, “my day for taking a sporting chance is
over. I’ve learned my lesson.”

“Have you?” his wife ventured hopefully.

“Just to prove to you that I have,” he challenged, “if I get an offer of
twenty-four cents per pound, f.o.b. Havana, today, I’ll sell every pound
of rice I have in transit or hold under purchase contract.”

“What was the market yesterday, John?”

“Twenty-three cents.”

“Sell at that today,” Maisie urged him.

He smiled and shook his head. These women! How little they knew of the
great game of business! How little did they realize that, to succeed, a
man must be possessed of an amazing courage, a stupendous belief in his
own powers, in his knowledge of the game he is playing. Maisie read him
accurately. He was as easy to read as an electric sign.

When he had departed for the office, Mrs. Casson, a dainty, very
youthful appearing woman of fifty-five, and long since robbed of any
illusions concerning certain impossible phases of her husband’s
character spoke up:

“Sometimes, Maisie, I suspect John Casson is in his second childhood.”

“You’re wrong, Auntie. In some respects he hasn’t emerged from his first
childhood. For instance, Uncle John is nurturing the belief that Dan
isn’t aware of his operations.”

“You think Dan knows?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“Has he told you so?”

“No.”

“He ought to be told.”

“I shall tell him—this very morning. Uncle John, wrapped in his supreme
sense of self-sufficiency, appears to have forgotten that in an
unlimited partnership each partner is irrevocably bound by the actions
of the other.”

“I wonder at Dan’s patience with him.”

“I do not. Dan has explained it to me.”

Mrs. Casson’s maternal glance dwelt tenderly upon her dead sister’s
daughter. “Maisie, I want to talk to you about Dan,” she began, but
Maisie raised a deprecating hand.

“What profit could possibly arise from such a discussion?”

Mrs. Casson, however, was a woman driven by curiosity. “I wonder if he
is in love with you, my dear. Sometimes I am almost certain of it, and
at other times I am not so certain.”

“I think dear old simple Dan finds himself similarly afflicted.”

“Well?” The query, the inflection and the dramatic pause before the good
soul continued were not lost on Maisie. “Why don’t you do something
about it, dear?”

“Why should I?”

“You’re twenty-four years old—and certainly Dan Pritchard is the most
eligible bachelor in your set. And I know you’re very, very fond of
him.”

“Everybody is. He is wholly lovable.”

“Well, then, Maisie——”

“Men dislike pursuit, dear. That is their peculiar prerogative. I prefer
to be dear to Dan Pritchard, as his closest friend, rather than to
disturb him as a prospective wife. Dan is old-fashioned, quite
dignified, idealistic, altruistic, artistic, and as shy and retiring as
a rabbit. I’m certain he isn’t the least bit interested in your plans to
alter his scheme of existence by adding a wife to it.”

“You’d marry Dan Pritchard tomorrow if he asked you today.”

“Perhaps,” Maisie agreed. “However, I shall not pursue him nor shall I
hurl myself at him. I prefer to operate on the principle that, after
all, I may prove more or less eligible myself!”

“You desire to be pursued, I see.”

“What woman does not—by the right man?”

“Then is Dan Pritchard the right man?”

“No woman could really answer such a question truthfully until after she
had been married to Dan. I have never given much thought to Dan as a
matrimonial possibility.”

“That is an admission that you have at least given him _some_ thought,
Maisie.”

“Of course, silly. What is a girl to think when a man’s freakish humor
dictates that he shall develop all of the outward evidences of a
sentimental interest one week and shrink from exhibiting the slightest
evidence of it a week later? Sometimes I think that Dan is a habit with
me; sometimes I’m quite certain I am a habit with him. I think I was
twelve years old when Dan took me to a vaudeville show one Saturday
afternoon. I remember I held his hand all through the show and he fed me
so much candy I was ill. However, he is a pleasant and delightful habit
to me, and I am not anxious to renounce him; I hope he feels the same
toward me. By the way, I have an engagement with him this morning. I
must run along and dress.”

She left her aunt gazing speculatively after her. Mrs. Casson shook her
head and sighed. “It’s her frightful spirit of independence,” she
soliloquized. “She scares him away. I just know it. And I do wish I knew
what to do about it.”

Providentially, she did not!




                               CHAPTER IX


Promptly at ten o’clock the Casson limousine deposited Maisie in front
of the Pritchard residence. Dan, watching for her appearance from behind
the front window curtains, observed that two young women and a fussy,
somewhat threadbare little man of undoubted Hebraic ancestry emerged
from the limousine and followed her up the stairs.

Julia opened the door and Maisie led her followers into the living room.
“Good morning, Dan,” she greeted him and gave him her hand. “I’ve
brought half a dozen evening dresses which may or may not impress your
ward; also a model to parade the dresses for Tamea’s inspection, and a
fitter to note the necessary alterations. Of course, she’ll have to have
some street clothes, so I’ve brought Rubenstein, my tailor, to take
measurements.”

“By Jupiter, Maisie, you’re a marvel! You think of everything.” He
pressed Maisie’s hand in his. “You may ask Miss Larrieau if she will be
good enough to come down to the living room, Julia,” he directed.

“I will go up with Julia,” Maisie said, and followed the maid.

The Queen of Riva sat in a small, low chair before the window. She wore
a dark silk dressing gown, which the democratic Julia had filched from
Dan Pritchard’s clothes closet, and she was gazing down into the street,
gray and wet with fog. Her elbows rested on her knees, her face reposed
in her hands, and she was weeping, silently and without a quiver. Julia
went to her, patted her wet cheek and said:

“Look up, Tammy darlin’. Here is Miss Morrison to see you. Miss Morrison
is the kind leddy that sint over the nice dhress for you last night, an’
sure she has tailors an’ cloak models and dhressmakers an’ dhresses
downshtairs waitin’ for you.”

Tamea dried her eyes, shook her wonderful hair back over her ivory brow,
rose slowly and faced Maisie with a certain cool deliberation. Her eyes
swept Maisie’s figure; she forced a smile of greeting.

“I am—happy to—meet—Miss Morrison. When one is—almost—alone and
very unhappy—kindness from a stranger is like the sun that comes to dry
the sails, following a storm.”

“Her greeting is as regal as her bearing,” was Maisie’s thought. She
favored Tamea with a courteous little nod and her bright smile—then
held out her hand. Tamea hesitated, then extended her own.

“You are Maisie?” she queried.

“Yes, I am Maisie. How did you know, Miss Larrieau?”

“I guessed,” Tamea answered simply. “You are a much nicer woman than I
had expected to meet.”

Maisie flushed, partly with pleasure, partly with embarrassment. “I
shall try to be nice to you, Miss Larrieau, always.”

“You may call me Tamea, if you please. I shall call you Maisie.”

“Will ye listen to that!” Julia declared happily. “Sure, Tammy’s no
different from the rest of us. She’s in love wit’ you at sight, Miss
Morrison, so she is.”

“I think with you, Tamea, that we should dispense with formality. I
shall be happy to be your friend and to help you to adjust your life to
new conditions.”

“I accept your friendship.” Tamea’s words came slowly, gravely. “You are
not a woman of common blood.”

Maisie stepped close to her, removed from her fingers the sodden little
ball of a handkerchief and replaced it with a fresh one of filmy lace
from her handbag. “Tell my chauffeur to go back to the house and fetch
Céleste, my maid,” she ordered Julia. “Between Céleste and me this
wonderful hair shall be done exactly right. When you come upstairs
again, Julia, bring up those boxes and the two girls in the living room.
Rubenstein shall wait.”

“Monsieur Dan Pritchard told me at breakfast that Miss Morrison would
call to help me select the clothing which it is fit that I should wear
in this country,” said Tamea when they were alone.

“You are a brunette—one of the wonderful, olive-skinned type. With
those great dark eyes and that wealth of jet-black hair you will look
amazingly chic in something red and silvery or white. May I see your
foot, Tamea?”

Tamea sat down and thrust out a brown foot. It was somewhat shorter and
broader than Maisie had expected to see, but the arch was high and the
toes perfect, with the great toe quite prehensile.

“You have gone barefoot a great deal, Tamea?”

“In Riva, always. In Tahiti I wore sandals.”

“You will have to wear shoes here, Tamea. I think a number five will do,
but we must be very particular not to spoil that foot. It is the only
natural foot I have ever seen except on a baby. How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

Maisie could scarcely believe this statement. Physically Tamea was a
fully developed woman, perhaps five feet seven inches tall, a creature
of soft curves, yet lithe and graceful and falling just a trifle short
of being slim. Her ears were delicately formed but of generous
proportions, her neck, sturdy and muscular, swept in beautiful curves to
meet a torso full-breasted and deep.

“Her form is perfect, and I believe she has a magnificent back,” thought
Maisie. “Her neck and head are Junoesque.”

They were, indeed. Tamea’s head, in shape, resembled her father’s in
that it was larger than that of most women, and of that width between
the ears which denotes brain capacity and consequently intelligence. Her
features were not small; indeed, they were almost large, but of
patrician regularity and loveliness of line. Her brow was high and wide,
her eyebrows fine, silken and thick, while her eyelashes were
extraordinarily long, giving a slightly sleepy appearance to large,
intelligent, beautiful eyes of a very dark brown shade—almost black.
Her chin was well developed, firm; from behind full, red, healthy lips
Maisie saw peeping fine, strong, white, regular teeth. Tamea’s skin was
clear to the point of near-transparency and her hands were small with
lovely tapered fingers.

“A perfect woman,” thought Maisie. “She is more than beautiful. She is
magnificent—and when she has been dressed properly——”

Her thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of Julia and the cloak
model and fitter. Thereafter, for an hour, Tamea dwelt in paradise.
Maisie’s taste, in the matter of dress, was undoubtedly exquisite, and
when she discovered that this exotic islander could wear with dignity
raiment which, on another woman, would be regarded as flamboyant, Maisie
felt that quiet joy which comes to all women who discover beauty or help
to create it. Tamea, too, developed all of the interest of her sex in
the beautiful garments submitted for her selection; so engrossing was
that interest that by the time Rubenstein had departed Tamea’s drooping
spirits had been more than a little uplifted. She commanded Julia to
summon Dan to admire such portions of her wardrobe as she had already
selected.

“My dear, but you must wait until you are fully dressed,” Mrs. Pippy
cautioned her. Tamea was barefooted and wearing the skirt of a
ready-made tailored suit, but not the coat; neither was she wearing
waist or brassiere.

“Why?” she demanded coolly. “Why should I demand of Monsieur Dan
Pritchard that he wait upon my pleasure?”

“But you can’t receive him half dressed.”

Tamea, for answer, took from the dresser a large framed photograph of
Maisie Morrison in evening dress. “Mademoiselle Maisie was but half
dressed when she had this photograph made. Julia, call Monsieur Dan
Pritchard.”

Mrs. Pippy’s cold blue eye warned Julia that the price of obedience
might be prohibitive. Julia hesitated.

Tamea, Queen of Riva, stamped a bare foot. “Obey me!” she commanded.

“Och, sure now, Tammy, darlin’, listen to Mrs. Pippy, there’s a
dear——”

“There will be no talk. Obey!”

“Julia,” said Mrs. Pippy firmly, “in this house you take your orders
from me. When Miss Larrieau is properly dressed she may receive Mr.
Pritchard, but not before.”

“Julia is my servant. She takes orders from no one but me,” Tamea warned
Mrs. Pippy. “Dan Pritchard gave Julia to me.”

“Julia is not a slave, to be given away at will, Miss Larrieau. She must
be consulted in such transactions.”

“Did you not accept me as your mistress, Julia?” There could be no
evasion.

“I did that,” Julia confessed weakly.

“Summon Monsieur Dan Pritchard. Take no heed of this woman—this Pippy.”

“If you disobey me, Julia,” Mrs. Pippy warned, “I shall be forced to
dismiss you without a reference.”

“If you disobey _me_, Julia,” Tamea countered, “I shall dismiss you but
not until you have been beaten. In my country that is how bad servants
are treated.”

Julia appealed to Maisie. “What shall I do, Miss Morrison?”

Maisie sighed. “It is apparent, Julia,” she replied, “that Mrs. Pippy
and Tamea have not hit it off very well together. Mrs. Pippy’s position
in this house must not, she very properly feels, be questioned. Tamea,
who has doubtless never heretofore had her authority questioned, has
elected to make an issue of the seat of authority. We will seek a
compromise.” She turned to Tamea and smiled upon her kindly. “Will you
please me, Tamea, by declining to oppose Mrs. Pippy’s authority in this
house?”

“I will not, Maisie, although I am sorry not to be kind to you. I am not
one accustomed to taking orders and I will not have this Pippy thwart my
desires. As you say, I have elected to force the issue. It is better
thus. Why wait? Julia, for the last time, I order you to obey my
command.”

“Heaven help me!” groaned Julia, and turned to open the door. Mrs.
Pippy’s cool, firm voice halted her.

“Julia!”

“I’m thinkin’, Mrs. Pippy, ye’ll have a hard time queenin’ it over a
rale queen,” said Julia. She made Mrs. Pippy a curious curtsy. “I quits
yer service, ma’am,” she announced, thereby in the language of the
sporting world beating the excellent Mrs. Pippy to the punch. The door
closed behind her.

“You are dismissed. Pack and leave at once.” Thus the Pippy edict,
shouted after the retiring maid.

Tamea smiled and watched the door until Dan Pritchard knocked on it.

“Come, Dan Pritchard,” Tamea called. She was standing in the center of
the room, on parade as it were, when he entered and permitted his amazed
glance to rest upon her. Maisie saw him recoil perceptibly, saw him as
quickly become master of the situation.

“Well, well, what a marvelous apparition!” was all he said.

“You like these garments?”

“Indeed I do, Tamea. Put the coat on, please, until I see the fit of
it. . . .” He sat down and waited until Tamea had finished. Then:
“Stunning, by Jupiter! Maisie, I’m so grateful to you for helping Tamea
and me. You’re the shadow of a rock in a weary land.”

He approached Tamea and fingered the material in her suit. “Do you think
this is quite heavy enough, Maisie?” he queried anxiously. “Our climate
is not quite so salubrious as our little queen is accustomed to.”

Tamea came close to him, grasping each lapel, gazing upward at him with
frank approval and admiration.

“You would not care to have your Tamea die?” she queried.

“Indeed, my dear, I would not.”

“You would not care to have your Tamea put out of this warm house to
suffer in the cold?”

“Certainly not.”

“You will never, never put Tamea away from you?”

“Great Scot, no! I promised your father I’d take care of you, child.
What’s worrying you?”

Tamea sighed. “I have felt the necessity to leave this house,” she
confessed, “unless assured that my orders to my servant will not be
interfered with. Pippy grows very—well, what you call—fresh!”

Dan sensed the approach of a cyclone and hastily sought the cellar. “My
dear Tamea,” he assured her, “it is conceivable that you may find _me_
growing what you call fresh if you seek to impose your will on mine.
Mrs. Pippy’s orders to the servants of this house must be obeyed by
those servants. Meanwhile, try to be nice and—er—polite to Mrs.
Pippy.”

“I think you ought to know what Tamea is driving at, Dan,” Maisie
interposed. “Tamea is in open rebellion against Mrs. Pippy and the
disaffection has spread to Julia.”

“Mr. Pritchard,” said Mrs. Pippy with great dignity, “I have found it
necessary to dismiss Julia for insubordination.”

“Julia belongs to me. Pippy cannot dismiss my Julia, can she, dear Dan
Pritchard?” Thus the unhappy man was caught between the cross-fire of
the conflicting pair. Dan looked helplessly at Maisie, who eyed him
sympathetically and humorously. “Let there be no weakness here,” Tamea
warned. “I would have my answer.”

“Why, of course, you asked me for Julia and I said you could have her,”
Dan began. At that moment Julia entered the room. “Julia,” Dan queried,
“do you desire to remain in the service of Miss Larrieau?”

“Humph! Faith, I’ve never left her ser’rvice, sir.”

“Mrs. Pippy informs me she has dismissed you.”

“The back o’ me hand to Mrs. Pippy.” Julia had started running true to
her racial instincts, which dictate a bold, offensive spirit in the face
of disaster.

“Julia remains!” cried Tamea.

“Julia goes!”

Devoutly Dan wished that an old-fashioned magician were on hand to
render him invisible.

“Dear Mrs. Pippy,” he pleaded, “I appeal to the undoubted wisdom of your
years—to your innate sense of proportion—er—to your—why, dash it
all, this difference of opinion about Julia has me in the very deuce of
a box. Surely you must realize, Mrs. Pippy, the total lack of reason, of
understanding, from our viewpoint, in this child!”

“Oh,” Tamea interrupted coldly, “you think I am a fool!” Suddenly she
commenced to cry and cast herself, sobbing, upon the Pritchard breast.

He glanced over her heaving ivory shoulders to Mrs. Pippy, then to
Maisie. “I’ve taken a big contract,” he complained.

“Julia goes,” said Mrs. Pippy firmly.

Tamea heard the edict and her round, wonderful arms clasped Dan
Pritchard a trifle tighter—it seemed that her heart was just one notch
closer to disintegration.

“Julia stays,” she sobbed. “You gave Julia to your Tamea—yes, you
did—you did—_you did_!”

Suddenly, impelled by what cosmic force he knew not, Dan Pritchard made
his decision and with it precipitated upon his defenseless head a swarm
of troubles. “Excuse me, dear Mrs. Pippy,” he said gently. “I am sorry
to have to veto your decision, which I trust is not an unalterable one.
Julia—confound her Celtic skin—stays!”

Mrs. Pippy bowed her silvery head with the utmost composure and swept
magnificently from the room; Tamea raised her tear-stained face from
Dan’s breast, took a Pritchard ear in each hand, drew his face down to
hers and rewarded him for his fearless stand with a somewhat moist and
fervent kiss. Maisie, watching the tableau composedly, felt a sharp,
sudden stab of resentment against Tamea—or was it jealousy?

“Well, that’s settled,” she remarked dryly, and Dan sensed the sting.

He looked at his watch. “Got to be going down to the office,” he
mumbled, presenting the first excuse for escape that came to his mind.
His anxious glance searched Maisie’s blue eyes in vain for that humorous
glint that had marked them when he first entered the room. “Please help
me, Maisie,” he murmured appealingly. “I’ve got my hands full.”

Maisie nodded. “I’ll try to undo the mischief, Dan. By the way, Uncle
John told me something this morning that you ought to know. He’s up to
his silly eyebrows in the rice market.”

“The double-crossing old idiot! I had begun to suspect he was up to some
skull-duggery. I was on his trail and would have smoked him out in a day
or two.”

“I imagine that is why he told Auntie and me about it. He wanted me to
break the news to you, I think.”

Dan’s head hung low on his breast—the sad Abraham Lincoln look was in
his face and in his troubled eyes. Tamea, looking up at him very soberly
now, read the distress which, momentarily, he could not conceal; in a
sudden burst of sympathy her arm started to curve around his neck.

“Oh, stop it, stop it, Tamea!” Maisie cried sharply. “Mr. Pritchard is
not accustomed to such intimate personal attentions from comparative
strangers.”

Tamea drew away from Dan quickly.

“Dress yourself!” Maisie commanded. “Julia, help her. Dan, run along and
try not to worry.”

Tamea’s eyes flashed, but nevertheless she sat down and when Julia
handed her a pair of black silken hose she commenced dutifully to draw
them on.

“Much obliged for the tip, Maisie. I’ll start a riot in Casson and
Pritchard’s office this very day. By the way, I think Mrs. Pippy is on
her high horse. Please try to wheedle her down.”

“Mrs. Pippy has resigned, Dan.”

“The deuce she has; how do you know?”

“Why, any woman of spirit would.”

He pondered this.

“Oh, well, let her go if she wants to. She’s scarcely human at times.
Well, if she insists upon leaving I’ll give her a year’s salary in
advance. . . . Damnation. . . . Good morning, Maisie, dear. Please try
to reason with—the sundry females about this house. . . . Tamea, I go
to my office. Be a good girl.”

“You are my father and my mother,” she replied humbly. “I will kiss you
farewell.” And she did it.

“This primitive young witch has been in this house less than twenty-four
hours and already she has kissed that defenseless man twice in my
presence. I have known Dan all my life—and I have kissed him but once,”
Maisie thought.

The stab of resentment, of jealousy, perhaps, was more poignant this
time; in addition Maisie was just a little bit peeved at the ease with
which Tamea had achieved her victory.

Maisie had sufficient imagination to understand why Tamea, daughter of a
thousand despots, with the instinct to rule complicated by the desire,
must be excused for precipitating the clash with Mrs. Pippy. But what
Maisie could also understand very clearly, since she too was a woman,
was that Tamea, by the grace of her sex and her shameless effrontery in
using every wile of that sex, was likely to become absolute master of
Dan Pritchard’s establishment. The man was helpless before her. Maisie
permitted a challenging gleam in the glance which she now bent upon
Tamea.

Tamea intercepted that glance and interpreted it correctly. It was as if
Maisie had heliographed to her: “Young lady, you’ve got a fight on your
hands.” Without an instant’s hesitation Tamea’s smoky orbs acknowledged
the message and flashed back the reply: “Very well. I accept the
challenge.”

Then Maisie smiled, and Tamea, with hot resentment in her heart, smiled
back.




                               CHAPTER X


Dan left his home with the alacrity of one who seeks escape from a most
uncomfortable situation. As a bachelor he was conscious of the fact that
this morning there had been four women too many in his life. He cringed
from the prospect of having Mrs. Pippy resign his service in a huff. He
hoped she would, under Maisie’s cogent reasoning, consent to make
allowances for Tamea until Maisie should have impressed upon the latter
the fact that in a white democracy a South Sea Island queen was expected
to be seen and not heard.

“Tamea is such a child,” Dan told himself. “And a spoiled child at that.
Old Gaston has permitted her to do exactly as she pleased, and now the
task of correcting that mistake is mine. It isn’t going to be an easy
task, and what’s more I haven’t the slightest idea where to commence and
where to stop. . . . What fragrant hair she has. . . such an appealing
creature. When she weeps she’s just a broken-hearted little girl . . .
makes me want to take her on my knee and soothe her. . . .

“Maisie’s nose went up a trifle the first time the child kissed me, and
there was steel in her voice when she reproved Tamea. Fine state of
affairs if she and Tamea fail to hit it off together and Tamea elects to
use me as a club to hurt Maisie. I have a feeling it would be like her
to try! Come to think of it, most women would! As soon as Tamea has
adjusted herself to her new life, I’ll pack her off to some select
school.”

He picked up the annunciator and ordered Graves to halt alongside the
first newsstand he could find. Thus presently he found himself with half
a dozen magazines, skimming through their advertising pages in search of
some hint of the most advantageous school for girls of Tamea’s sort.
Preferably the school should be situated in the center of a boundless
prairie; as an additional safeguard, it should be surrounded by a very
tall barbed-wire fence or a cactus hedge and sans communication with the
outside world.

By the time Graves had deposited him on the sidewalk before his office
building the problem of the right school was as far from solution as
ever, and a growing resentment against Gaston of the Beard was rising in
Dan’s heart. Down under the Southern Cross the problem of living was an
easy one. Why, then, had Gaston transplanted this girl to a land where
the problem was so complicated—where she was so certain to add to the
complications?

“I feel tremendous events portending,” Dan soliloquized. “The very
foundations of my life are tottering.”

On his desk he found a memorandum from his secretary to the effect that
he was to call Miss Morrison at his home the moment he came in.

“Hello, Dan’l!” Maisie’s voice carried a triumphant note that cheered
him wonderfully. “I merely wanted to relieve your mind of your domestic
worries before you crossed swords with Uncle John. I have had a talk
with Mrs. Pippy and she will remain—for the present at least.”

“I’ll raise her monthly stipend very materially,” he answered
gratefully. “Have you talked to Tamea?”

“No, but I shall, Dan. I realize the precise proportions of the
predicament your generous acceptance of a white man’s burden has placed
you in. So, my dear, I dare say I shall have to stand at thy right hand
and hold the bridge with thee.”

“God bless you for that, Maisie. I think Tamea is a wonderfully
affectionate girl—fiery, but generous, loyal and grateful, but hard to
handle. She must be appealed to through her heart rather than her head.”

“You don’t know anything about it, Dan.” Maisie rather bit that sentence
off short. “That’s her plan for ruling you—via your soft heart and your
softer head. The girl Tamea has brains, she can reason and she can
understand, and the instant she realizes that your words of wisdom are
about to undermine her opposition to your desires, she will make a
flying leap for your manly breast——”

“Do you really think she might develop such a habit?”

“Dan, she’s a fully developed woman——”

“Don’t build me a mare’s nest, Maisie. She’s just a little girl.”

“Have it your way. But I warn you she’s the sort of little girl that a
respectable bachelor cannot afford to have around his house a day longer
than is quite necessary. That sounds catty, Dan, but I know whereof I
speak.”

“Yes, I suppose I’ll have to do something radical and do it quickly,” he
agreed. “Thank you, Maisie—a million thanks.”

“Happy to be of service to you, old boy.”

“Maisie! Will you accord me another favor?”

“Certainly. What is it?”

“Consider yourself duly and affectionately kissed.”

“Oh! Dan, you’re developing a habit. But don’t you think two kisses are
quite sufficient to start the day with?”

“That was a little mean feminine jab, Maisie. Good-by. I’m going to hang
up.”

He did, albeit smiling and much relieved. He could now turn to the task
of standing old John Casson on the latter’s snowy head, so to speak, and
see how much rice would run out of his pockets.

Experience had taught Dan that the best way to handle his partner was to
rough him from the start, for, like all weak and pompous men, Casson was
not superabundantly endowed with courage or the ability to think fast
and clearly under fire. He would fight defensively but never
offensively, and Dan had discovered the great fundamental truth that the
offensive generally wins, the defensive never.

He summoned his secretary. “Miss Mather, please inform Mr. Casson that I
desire to confer with him—in my office—immediately.”

As he had anticipated, old Casson obeyed him without question.

“Well, boy, what have you got on your mind this morning?” he began
genially.

“Rice,” Dan answered curtly. “Sit down.”

Casson walked to the window, looked out over the vista of bay and
commenced thinking as rapidly as he could under the circumstances.

“I told you to sit down,” Dan reminded him crisply. “I mean it. Sit down
and face me. I want to look into your face and smoke the deception out
of it.”

“By the gods of war, I’ll not stand such talk from any man!” Old Casson
had decided to bluster.

Dan glowered at him. “You’ll stand it from me. You’ve got some rice
deals on in this crazy market and you’ve kept the news of your
operations from me. Have you speculated any in coffee or sugar?”

“No, no, Dan. Nothing but rice.”

“What sort of rice have you committed us to—California or Oriental?”

“Both.”

“Playing alone or in a pool?”

“Alone.”

“How much California rice have you purchased?”

“One million sacks.”

“Paid for any of it?”

“Half of it. Balance in sixty days.”

“Where is the rice?”

“Scattered in various warehouses throughout the upper Sacramento
valley.”

“I didn’t notice that our bank account had been particularly depleted
during the month I was in Hawaii. You bought the rice on open credit,
hypothecated the warehouse receipts with various banks, paid for half
the rice with the proceeds and used the remainder of the loan to pyramid
with. I suppose you sunk that in a little jag of Philippine rice.”

“I did,” Casson admitted, flushed and anxious. He had seated himself,
facing Dan.

“Holding your warehoused rice for a rising market, eh?”

“Exactly.”

“Suppose the bottom drops out?”

Casson shrugged and for the first time smiled. “I think, Pritchard,
you’ll have to admit that I’ve put one over on you this time, and what’s
more, you’re going to like it. I bought that California rice at prices
ranging from nine and a quarter to ten and a half cents per pound, and
today it is worth twenty. We stand to clean up a hundred thousand
dollars on that lot alone.”

“We are engaged in legitimate business, not food profiteering. Can you
dispose of that million sacks readily?”

“Had an offer of twenty cents for it this morning.”

“Reliable people?”

“Rated up to five million, A-A-A-one.”

“Cash?”

“No, ninety days.”

“Suspicious. Don’t like ninety-day paper. The banks are beginning to
discriminate in their loans. All over the country there has been a wide
expansion of credit in all lines, due to war-time prosperity, and my
guess is that the demand for credit will soon result in the usual
banking situation. The banks will discover that their loans have so
increased as to be out of proportion to their reserves and deposits; and
if the banks once get frightened, business will be crippled overnight.”

“Pooh, no danger of that for a couple of years yet, Pritchard.”

“On that subject I prefer sounder advice than yours, Mr. Casson. Call up
the people who want that rice and tell them we’re willing to cut our
price considerably if they will pay cash.”

“Sorry, but it can’t be done, my boy. I’ve already traded on a
ninety-day basis. Don’t worry. We’re perfectly safe.”

“With you, the wish is father to the thought. How much Oriental rice
have you bought?”

“We’ve got the British steamer Malayan loading a cargo of eight thousand
tons in Manila, for Havana, Cuba. On or about the middle of next month
the steamer Chinook will load four thousand tons at Shanghai, for
delivery at Havana.”

“Our specialty, of which we have a good, safe, working knowledge, is
South Sea products—mostly copra, and the operation of ships. The
shoemaker should stick to his last. Now, then, listen to my ultimatum.
If the sun sets today and leaves Casson and Pritchard the proprietors of
rice stored anywhere except in our respective kitchens, you and I are
going to dissolve partnership about an hour after the sun rises
tomorrow. And, whether you realize it or not, the moment our partnership
is dissolved, that moment you start tobogganing to ruin.”

Casson rose and stretched himself carelessly. “Oh, well, boy,” he
replied, the patronizing quality of his words driving Dan into a silent
fury, “suppose we leave the crossing of our bridges until we come to
them.”

Dan’s fist smashed down on his desk with a thud that caused old Casson
and the inkwell to jump simultaneously. “We’ll cross our bridges today,”
he roared, “and we’ll start now. Sit down, you consummate old jackass!”

Casson trembled, paled and sat down very abruptly. “My dear Dan, control
yourself,” he stammered.

“I’ll control myself, never fear. My chief job is controlling you. How
dare you commit me to ruin without consulting me?”

“Ruin? Ridiculous! Only a fool would have neglected this golden
opportunity—and I’m the senior member of this firm and a sixty percent
owner in it.” Simulating righteous indignation, Casson too commenced to
pound Dan’s desk.

“No bluffs!” Dan ordered, and took down the intercommunicating office
telephone. The chief clerk responded. “Bring to me immediately all of
the data pertaining to Mr. Casson’s rice operations,” he ordered. He
hung up and faced Casson. “That will be all, Mr. Casson. From this
moment you are out of the rice market and I’m in it. I’ll attend to the
marketing of more rice than this firm is worth.”

“Pritchard, I forbid this!”

“Very well.” Dan reached for his hat. “I’m going up to our banker and
tell him all about your rice deals. A business man should be as frank
with his banker as with his lawyer. You’ll get your orders from the man
higher up. If a loss threatens us, I prefer to have the blow fall now.”

The battle was over. “Oh, have it your own way, my boy!” Casson cried
disgustedly and with a wave of his plump hand absolved himself from any
and all disasters that might overtake the firm.

Half an hour later a well-known rice broker appeared in Dan’s office in
response to the latter’s telephoned request.

“This firm,” Dan announced, “owns eight thousand tons of rice now
loading for Havana, in Manila. It owns four thousand tons due to be
loaded in thirty days at Shanghai. Is that rice quickly salable?”

“How soon do you want it sold?”

“Immediately.”

“Can do—at a price.”

“Do it!” Dan Pritchard commanded. “And if you can dig me up a cash
customer—at a cent or two under the market—I’ll pay you an extra
quarter of one per cent commission.”

“Cash, eh? Well, that’s a bit doubtful. However, that extra commission
will make me work. I’ll report when I have something you can get your
teeth into.”

“May I hope to hear from you today?”

“Scarcely. The market’s a bit off—somewhat sluggish. Trading has been
pretty rapid of late, and the opinion prevails in some quarters that the
market has about reached the point of saturation.”

“Many traders unloading?”

“Oh, no! Everybody is still holding on for a further rise in price,
which I personally believe will come. We’re all optimists in the rice
market.”

“Well, I’m a pessimist, but only because I do not care for rice. I have
never dealt in it before and I don’t know anything about the rice
market. Frankly, I’m closing out some trades of Mr. Casson’s under his
protest. My instructions to you are practically to throw Casson’s trades
overboard in order to get us out of the rice market.”

The broker eyed him keenly. “No necessity for getting stampeded and
breaking the market,” he suggested.

The remainder of that day Dan devoted to Tamea’s business. First he went
to the Appraisers’ Building and declared the pearls which Gaston had
smuggled in on the Moorea. Having paid the duty on them, he called on
the leading jewelers and had them appraised again, after which he added
ten per cent to the appraisal value and sold the entire lot to a
wholesale jeweler for cash. He reasoned, very wisely, that at the height
of a period of such prosperity as the country had not hitherto known,
the selected pearls of Gaston of the Beard would never bring a better
price. He then deposited all of her funds to the credit of “Daniel
Pritchard, guardian of Tamea Oluolu Larrieau, a minor,” in a number of
savings banks. He next called upon his attorney, who drew up, at his
request a formal petition to the Superior Court for letters of
guardianship for Tamea.

Yes, Dan was a practical business man, a slave to the accepted forms. He
was taking his office as Tamea’s guardian so very seriously that his
position was analogous to that of the man who failed to see the woods
because of the trees. It did not occur to him that the administration of
an estate for a minor who knew nothing of the value of money and cared
less, who had never known discipline and who yielded instantly to every
elemental human desire and instinct, might be provocative of much
distress and loss of sleep to him. On the contrary, what he did do was
to return to his office hugely satisfied with the world as at that
moment constituted.




                               CHAPTER XI


At four o’clock Dan telephoned his home and ascertained from Sooey Wan
that Tamea and Maisie had gone out together.

He decided, therefore, to return to his office and look over the mail;
perchance he might find there some comforting light on the rice
situation.

As he came into the general office his secretary called to him that Mr.
Mellenger was in his office, waiting to see him; that he had been
waiting there since one o’clock.

Dan nodded comprehendingly and walked into the ambuscade. Mellenger was
seated in Dan’s chair. He had his feet up on the window sill and in his
left hand he held a cigar.

“Well, old horse thief,” he murmured with lazy cordiality, “you’ve given
me quite a wait. Have you told the story to any other newspaper?”

“What story, you fat parasite?”

“Romantic skipper, leprosy, suicide, lovely half-caste daughter of royal
blood, to be adopted by well-known young business man of highest social
standing. Where is her photograph, and if no photo be available, where
is she?” He touched with his toe a camera on the floor beside him.
“Great story,” he continued. “Front page stuff. Got to give it a
spread.”

“I could spread your nose for news all over your impudent countenance,”
Dan retorted irritably. “There must be no publicity on this matter,
Mel!”

“Got to be, my son. The doctor of the public health service who examined
your shipmaster yesterday boarded the Moorea this morning to remove the
man to quarantine, and was informed by the mate that the leprous one had
gone over the rail and failed to come up. That doctor suspects Larrieau
has escaped—and you know they can’t afford to have a leper running
around on the loose. All the water front reporters have part of the
story from the doctor and part from old Casson and they’re satisfied
with that, but I’m here to get the facts.”

“I understand you’ve been here since one o’clock.”

Mellenger nodded. “My day off, Dan, but the city editor knew how close
you and I have always been, so he called me up at my hotel and asked me
to get the story.”

“Call him up and tell him that I decline to be interviewed.”

“Sorry, but I must interview you. I’ve already interviewed by telephone
old Casson, Miss Morrison, Mrs. Pippy, Julia, Sooey Wan and Graves. The
crew of the Moorea I have seen personally. I’ve got a crackerjack story
but I want a better one. Sooey Wan said he thought you’d marry the queen
about a week from tomorrow.”

“That Chink is absolutely out of control.”

“You leave him alone. He’s a friend of mine. And you’ll be interviewed!”
He puffed at his cigar and looked sorrowfully out over the roofs of the
city. “Only one way to handle a newspaper man,” he ruminated. “Receive
him, ignore him or kill him. Ah, to be rich and beloved by a queen—to
dwell in marble halls, with vassals and serfs rendering snappy service!”

“Mel, don’t be an ass. Don’t insist upon injecting a romantic note into
this story.”

“Sooey Wan says he’ll back her against the field at a hundred to one,
and any time Sooey has a celestial hunch I’ll play it.”

“Mel, you shouldn’t discuss my private affairs with my servants——”

The knight of the pad and pencil waved him into silence. “Sooey Wan
isn’t a servant, Dan. He’s an institution who accepts a hundred and
fifty dollars a month from you just to please you and perpetuate the
institution. Why shouldn’t the old idol discuss you with me? Haven’t I
been dining at your house every Thursday night for ten years? Sooey Wan
knows I think almost as much of you as he does. Come, I’m listening.”

In five minutes the tale was told.

“Her photograph,” Mellenger insisted.

“You cannot have it.”

“One of the crew—by name Kahanaha—found this one for me in the late
skipper’s desk,” the imperturbable Mellenger informed him, and produced
a photograph of Tamea, hibiscus-crowned, barefooted, garbed in a dotted
calico Mother Hubbard.

“Hideous as death,” Dan growled and snatched at it.

But Mellenger whisked it away. “It is, as you say, hideous, but if no
other photograph is available we shall be forced regretfully to use it.
Woodley, of the Chronicle, has one like it, but I know I can prevail
upon him to hand it back for something more recent and not so colorful.”

“He shall have it.”

“You understood I couldn’t permit Woodley to scoop me on the
photograph.”

There was a knock at the door and Miss Mather entered. “Miss Morrison
and Miss Larrieau are in the general office, asking to see you, Mr.
Pritchard.”

“God is good and the devil not half bad,” murmured Mellenger and picked
up his camera. “Certainly, Miss Mather. Admit the ladies, by all means.”

To Dan he said: “I’ve always wished I might live to see a queen enter a
room. Tall, stately, majestic, coldly beautiful, they sweep through the
door with a long undulating stride—Judas priest!”

“_Chéri!_ Look at me, Dan.” From the door, violently flung open, Tamea’s
golden voice challenged his admiration. For one breathless instant she
stood, alert, seemingly poised for flight, a glorious creature
gloriously garbed, her arms held toward him, beseeching his approval;
the next she was rushing to him, to fling those arms around his neck and
implant a chaste salute upon each cheek.

She thrust him from her, ignored Mellenger and struck a pose.

“There, dear one,” she pleaded, “is your Tamea, then, so much uglier
than the women of your own race?”

“You are perfectly glorious, Tamea.”

“As the aurora borealis,” Mellenger spoke up.

Tamea, seemingly not aware of his presence until now, turned upon him
eyes which frankly sought a confirmation of the enthusiasm and pride she
read in Dan’s. “You like me, too?”

“Queen, you’re adorable.”

He glanced past her to Maisie Morrison, standing, flushed and faintly
smiling, in the doorway. Maisie was gazing with an eager intensity at
Dan Pritchard, who saw her not. Mellenger twitched the tail of Dan’s
coat, and the latter, as if summoned out of a trance, turned and gazed
at him inquiringly.

“Introduce me, fool, introduce me!” Mellenger suggested, and Dan
complied.

Maisie acknowledged the introduction with a cordial nod and a weary
little smile, but Tamea thrust out her long, beautiful hand. “How do you
do, Mr. Mel. How are all your people? Very well, I hope.” She swung
around to give him a view of her from the back.

“Marvelous,” he declared. “Your Majesty is so beautiful I must make a
picture of you at once.”

With the adroitness of his profession he set his camera up on the
telephone stand, posed Tamea where the late afternoon sun shone through
the window and photographed her half a dozen times; then, with a promise
to Tamea to send her prints, he bowed himself out to have the films
developed and write his story.

Dan in the meantime had provided seats for both his visitors.

“So that’s Mark Mellenger,” said Maisie. “I wish he had stayed longer. I
have a curiosity to know anybody who loves you, Dan.”

“Old Mel is the salt of the earth,” he declared warmly. “When we were in
college together he was editor of the college daily and I was by way of
being a cartoonist. In those days we were the heroes of the campus, and
thoughtless enthusiasts used to predict for each of us the prompt
acquisition of a niche in the Hall of Fame. Mel was to write the great
American novel and I was to create riots among millionaires anxious to
buy my pictures.” He shrugged ruefully, nor did he note Maisie’s wistful
smile as he turned to the radiant Tamea. “I’ll paint you, you tropical
goddess,” he soliloquized audibly. “You’ve had a fine time in the shops
today, eh, my dear?”

“It was very wonderful, Dan Pritchard.”

Dan turned to Maisie. “You’re so good and kind, Maisie, and your taste
is always so exquisite. In this instance it is more than exquisite. It
is exotic.”

“I cannot claim credit for it, Dan. All I did was bring Tamea to the
best shops. What she is wearing is entirely of her own selection.”

“But, Maisie, how could she?”

“You forget that Tamea is half French. She has been born with a positive
genius for artistic adornment.”

He and Tamea exchanged approving smiles. “And is our Tamea an
extravagant girl?” he queried.

“Tamea,” said Maisie bluntly, “would bankrupt Midas.”

“For money,” quoth Tamea, “I care not that much!” She snapped her
fingers. “But why should I love money? Is money not to be used to make
men happy and women beautiful in the eyes of their men, that they may
hold them against other women?”

“I suppressed your ward’s spending frenzy as well as I could, Dan, but
nevertheless we spent nearly two thousand dollars.”

Dan came close to Maisie. He had noticed for the first time how tired
she looked; in her weariness he detected a wistfulness and a repression
that told him Maisie’s patience had been sorely tried. “I suspect your
work today has required all that you had of fortitude and courage,
Maisie.” He pinched her pale cheek and then patted the spot he had
pinched. “You’re a great comfort to me, Maisie.”

“Well, that helps, Dan. I think if Tamea had not been permitted to dash
home with her purchases, array herself in fine raiment and return here
to dazzle you, the day would have been quite spoiled for her. The
excitement has been good for her, I think. She has not had time to
grieve for her father.”

“My father dwells happily in Paliuli with my mother. I will not grieve
for him again. I will live now to be happy.”

“And make others happy, too, dear?” Maisie suggested.

“_Certainement!_ But first I must know others and learn how to make them
happy.”

“We will be patient and teach you, Tamea. By the way, Dan, it’s time to
close down your desk, isn’t it? I’ll leave Tamea to you now until you
need me again.”

She gave him her hand and he noticed it was very cold.

“Poor old dear,” he whispered as he escorted her into the hall. “I’ve an
idea you’ve had the very devil of a day.”

“Naturally. I went shopping with an imp, didn’t I?”

He raised his extra high eyebrow a trifle higher. “Is she very hard to
manage?”

“She is.”

“Any hope at all?”

“I’m afraid I’m not a fair judge, Dan. Every little while she grows
impulsively angelic. She doesn’t like me a bit, yet today, after my maid
Céleste had come over and done the imp’s hair, Tamea assured me I was
very sweet and kissed me. She has a perfect passion for having her own
way.”

“I’ll have to be firm with her, Maisie.”

“Don’t be humorous, Dan. In her hands you are as clay.”

“Nonsense! She’s just a simple child of nature. With tactful
handling——”

Maisie was suddenly furious. “Oh, you’re such a helpless, lovable booby!
You are the one man in this world whom Providence has selected as the
rightful receiver of gold bricks. Why did you take on this frightful
responsibility? Wouldn’t it have been far simpler and less expensive to
have urged upon her father the wisdom of sending her back to her
outlandish island to queen it over the cannibals instead of——”

“Instead of whom, Maisie?”

“Instead of setting your little world by the ears? You just cannot begin
to imagine the terrific time I had inducing Mrs. Pippy to remain.”

“Deuce take Mrs. Pippy!” he protested. “She ought to thank her lucky
stars for the chance to remain. The first time she met Tamea she looked
down her nose at the child——”

“What you do not seem to comprehend, Dan, is that Tamea is _not_ a
child.”

“Well, Maisie, all I’ve got to say is that whether Tamea be a child or a
woman, an imp or an angel, I promised her father I’d look after her, and
I’m going to do it. If she refuses to be directed, if she declines to be
obedient, I’ll——”

“Yes, you’ll——”

“You do not like her, Maisie?”

“Oh, I do not dislike her. She merely startles me. She is such a flashy,
exotic, alien sort of person, voicing whatever thoughts pop into her
head, and with the most extraordinary ideas and outlook on life. She
told me all about an Englishman in Riva who was madly in love with her.
He was a drunken profligate, and she would have none of him because he
was dull and stupid, not because he was such an out-and-out scoundrel.
She speaks of sinful people as impersonally as we would of some
unfortunate who has measles or tuberculosis.” He laughed. “I suppose you
realize, Dan, that to keep Tamea in your home hereafter will be to
invite gossip and criticism from those who do not know you so well as we
do.”

“But what shall I do with the girl?”

“Send her to a hotel or a convent,” was Maisie’s suggestion.

“Very well, Maisie. You spoke of a convent. That’s a splendid idea. A
convent’s the very place for Tamea. I wonder where I might find a good
one.”

Maisie brightened perceptibly. “I’ll look one up for you.”

She gave him her hand and he pressed it tenderly. “You’re mighty sweet,”
he murmured. “I do appreciate you tremendously. Good night, dear.”

Instantly there was in her face a flash of the Maisie of yesterday, the
light he had seen there when he kissed her. “Good night, booby,” she
whispered. “Think of me once in a while.”

“I think of you more frequently than that.”

“I’m glad.”

“You nuisance! You interfere with my conduct of business.”

“I rejoice in my mendacity. You might walk to the elevator with me,
Dan.”

He did, and they talked there five minutes longer before Maisie finally
left him.




                              CHAPTER XII


Meanwhile, back in Dan’s office, the childishly curious Tamea had
started a critical inspection of the room. She looked in the wash
closet, turned on the water, inspected the books in the bookcase and the
model of a clipper ship on top of it, and presently discovered on the
side of Dan’s desk a row of push buttons. She touched one of these and
almost immediately Dan’s secretary, Miss Mather, entered the office. She
glanced around and failing to see Pritchard, she said:

“You called me?”

Tamea shook her head and Miss Mather excused herself and retired.
Instantly Tamea pressed another button, and to her amazement a youth of
about sixteen summers entered, gazed around the room and said:

“Yes’m. Whadja want? Me?”

Tamea solemnly shook her head and the youth departed, mystified, leaving
her with a delightful sense of occult power. She tried another button,
and some thirty seconds later a bald-headed man, the chief clerk,
entered very deferentially.

“Ha! ha!” Tamea laughed. “Nothing doing, Monsieur, nothing, I assure.”

The chief clerk retired, registering amazement, and Tamea adventured
with the fourth button, this time without result. So she turned her
attention to the telephone switch box and commenced pressing buttons and
ringing bells all over the suite of Casson and Pritchard, with the
result that everybody was trying to answer his telephone at once.
Impelled by curiosity, Tamea picked up the receiver just in time to hear
a tiny voice say very distinctly: “Hello! Hello! Casson speaking.”

With a shriek she dropped the receiver. Here, indeed, was magic.
Trembling and white, she pressed all four push buttons in succession,
and again Miss Mather entered.

“It speaks,” Tamea gasped. “There are devils in this house. _Regardez!_”

Miss Mather saw the dangling telephone receiver and replaced it on the
hook. “It is silent now. The devil is dumb,” she assured Tamea. “Have
you never seen a telephone before?”

“But no, never. And I press here—and here—and servants come without a
summons. This is proof that Monsieur Dan Pritchard is indeed a great
chief.”

“He is a very kind chief, at any rate. We all love him here.”

Tamea stared at Miss Mather disapprovingly. “I have heard that he is
much beloved by women.” She frowned. “You may go,” she decreed.

Miss Mather, highly amused, retired. At the door she found the office
boy, the chief clerk and Dan Pritchard about to enter, and explained to
them the reason for the excitement. Dan entered, chuckling.

“You laugh!” Tamea challenged him haughtily.

“Yes, and I laugh at you.”

“Is that—what shall I say—very nice, very polite?”

“No, but I can’t help it. However, I’ll be fair with you, Tamea. You may
laugh at me whenever you desire.”

“I shall never desire to laugh at you, Dan.”

“Forgive me, my dear.” He got his hat and overcoat from the closet. “We
will go home now, Tamea.”

She took hold of his hand and walked with him thus out through the
general office and down the hall. He was slightly embarrassed and wished
that she would let go his hand, but he dared not suggest it. During the
swift drop in the elevator Tamea gasped, quivered and clung tightly to
his arm. When the car reached the lobby and the passengers made their
exit, the girl retreated into the corner and dragged Dan with her.

“We get out here, Tamea.”

“I know, dear one. But I like this. It is a longer and swifter fall than
when the stern of a schooner drops down a heavy sea. I would rise once
more.”

“Oh, come, Tamea! This is nonsense. One does not ride in an elevator
unless one has to.”

“Is a second ride, then, forbidden by this man?” She indicated the
elevator operator.

“No, you may ride up and down all day if you desire. But it’s so silly,
Tamea.”

“In this country men fear they may be thought foolish. But you are a
brave man. You will not deny your Tamea this simple pleasure.” He
frowned. “Very well. I obey.”

Tamea started for the door; but Dan pressed her back into the corner
again; the elevator operator favored him with a knowing grin and the car
shot upward without a pause to the fifteenth floor. . . .

When they were settled in the limousine the girl reached again for his
hand and possessed herself of it. “I think I shall be very happy with
you,” she confided.

He reflected that Tamea would always be happy if given free rein to her
desires. Aloud he said: “Tamea, it is my duty to make you happy.”

Gratefully she cuddled his hand to her cheek and implanted upon it a
fervent kiss.

“Of course,” she agreed. “_Certainement._”

They rolled out Market Street through the heavy evening traffic, and
presently were climbing to the crest of Twin Peaks. As the car swept
around the last curve and gave a view of the city from the Potrero to
the Cliff House snuggled below them, Tamea gasped. A little wisp of fog
was creeping in the Golden Gate, but the light, still lingering although
the sun had almost set, clothed the city in an amethyst haze that
softened its ugly architecture and made of it a thing of superlative
beauty. The sweep of blue bay, the islands and the shipping, the
departing light heliographed from the western windows of homes on the
Alameda County shore, the high green hills on the eastern horizon, all
combined to make a picture so impressively beautiful that Tamea, born
with the appreciation of beauty so distinct a characteristic of her
mother’s race, sighed with the shock of it. Graves had stopped the car
and the girl gazed her fill in silence.

“I wanted to bring you up here and prove to you that ours is not an ugly
land, although not so beautiful perhaps as Riva,” Dan explained.

Then they swept down the western slope of Twin Peaks, up the Great
Highway along the Pacific shore and home through Golden Gate Park. As
was his custom, Dan opened the front door with his latchkey and he and
Tamea stepped into the hall.

“You have an hour in which to dress for dinner, child,” he told her.
“Ring for Julia. She will help you.”

The girl came close to him, drew his head down on her shoulder and
pressed her lips to his ear.

“Yesterday,” she whispered, “was a day of sorrow. It did not seem that I
could bear it. But today has been so joyous I have almost forgotten my
sorrow; in a week it will be quite gone. To you I am indebted for this
great happiness.”

She kissed him rapturously, first on one cheek, then on the other, and
Dan reflected that this Gallic form of osculation had evidently been
learned from old Gaston of the Beard. How warm and soft her lips were,
how fragrant her breath and hair! In the dim light of the hall her
marvelous eyes beamed up at him with a light that suddenly set his pulse
to pounding wildly. A tremor ran through him.

“You tremble, dear one,” the girl whispered. “You are cold! Ah, but my
love shall warm,” and she lifted her lips to his.

She was Circe, born again. Decidedly, here was dangerous ground. He was
far too intelligent not to realize the complication that might ensue
should he yield to this sudden gust of desire, this strange new yearning
never felt before, this impulse for possession without passion, that
shook his very soul. He told himself he must continue to play a part, to
decline to take her otherwise than paternally, to evade, at all hazard,
the pitfall yawning before him.

“It is not well to think too long or too hard,” Tamea whispered. “Your
people count the costs, but mine do not.”

Apparently the amazing creature knew of what he was thinking! He was
cornered, he would have to escape and that quickly. “I was just
thinking, Tamea, that my house will be lonely after your bright
presence,” he said, a trifle unsteadily.

She gasped. “You plan to send me from you, Dan Pritchard?”

“Temporarily, my dear. In spring the climate of this part of California
is too cold and raw for you. Tomorrow you and Julia and Mrs. Pippy will
go in the car to Del Monte, where it is more like your own country.
After you have been there a month and have grown accustomed to our ways,
you will go to a convent to be educated.”

She stood with her hands on his shoulders, pondering this. Then: “This
is your desire?”

“Yes.”

She looked into the very soul of him. “I do not believe that,” she
declared and looked up at him so wistfully that his reason tottered on
its throne and fell, crashing, into the valley of his desire. He crushed
her to him and their lips met. . . .

Out of the semi-darkness a familiar voice spoke. “Captain’s girl velly
nice. What Sooey Wan tell you, boss? Now you ketchum heap savvy.”

Dan Pritchard fled upstairs, leaving the triumphant Tamea to follow at
her leisure. “Fool, fool!” The voice of conscience beat in his brain.

“That wasn’t kind of me. . . no, not even sensible. . . . I’ve spoiled,
everything. . . Maisie. . . . Why wasn’t I man enough to be strong?. . .
Gaston entrusted her to me and I’ve failed. . . .”

As he reached the door of his room Tamea’s voice floated up the
stairway. She was singing a pæan of triumph, and she sang it in her
mother tongue. Ah, youth and love and golden dreams! In Tamea’s heart
there was no longer room for sorrow, in her primitive but wonderfully
acute intelligence there was no room for disturbing reflections touching
the whys and wherefores which, in Dan Pritchard’s world, were
concomitant with all decisions and made the wisdom of all issues
doubtful.

“She is exotic—overpowering, like a seductive perfume. She appeals
profoundly, in her solitary state, to my sympathy; her beauty, her
vitality, her unspoiled and innocent outlook, the impulsiveness and
naturalness of her desire, in which, from her viewpoint, there is
nothing to criticize, all conspire to drive me into the very situation I
would avoid because I know it to be ruinous. ‘East is East and West is
West and never the twain shall meet.’ Kipling knew. When they do meet it
is only an illusion of meeting, and the illusion fades. And yet, from
the moment that girl first gazed upon me, Maisie has been receding
farther and farther from my conscious mind. An incredibly bad compliment
to Maisie, and the deuce of it is I think that, subconsciously, Maisie
realizes this. What a cad I have been!”

Julia knocked at his door. “Miss Morrison on the ’phone, sir.”

He went into the hall and took down the receiver. “Yes, Maisie.”

“Dan, dear,” Maisie replied, almost breathlessly, “would you think me
very forward if I were to invite myself to dinner at your house
tonight?”

“Indeed I would not! As a matter of fact, Maisie, I very much desire
your presence at dinner tonight. I wasn’t quite aware of this desire
until you spoke, but I think that in about five minutes the same bright
idea would have occurred to me.”

“Uncle John came home in an ill humor. Scolded me all the way up and
complained to me about you, and of course that put me in a bad
temper——”

“Why have your dinner spoiled by being forced to sit and listen to your
avuncular relative rave? Shall I send my car for you?”

“Do, please!” A silence. Then: “You’re quite sure you would have
telephoned and invited me to dinner if I had not telephoned and invited
myself?”

“Positive, Maisie. I’m at a loose end. I need your moral support. My
duties as a foster father——”

“I understand. I thought too, Dan, it might relieve you of your
embarrassment if the school or convent question could be settled
tonight. I’ve been doing some thinking and am prepared to submit a
plan.”

“Good news! Graves will call for you at seven o’clock. And by the way,
my oldest and dearest man friend, Mark Mellenger, is coming. You met him
in the office this afternoon.”

“Good! Is he interesting, Dan?”

“The Lord made but one Mellenger and then the plates were destroyed. He
dines with me every Thursday night he is in town. He’s a newspaper man
and Thursday is his day off. He celebrates it with me. Women have never
appeared to interest Mel, and I’m looking forward to watching the effect
on him of two extremes in interesting and charming women.”

“So Tamea has grown up—so soon,” Maisie challenged. Then she added,
while he searched his puzzled mind for an answer: “Thank you so much for
asking me over, Dan. Until a quarter past seven, then. Good-by, booby!”




                              CHAPTER XIII


When Dan came downstairs he found Mark Mellenger seated before the fire
in the living room. Sooey Wan stood before him, vigorously shaking a
cocktail mixer and discussing volubly with the newspaper man some inside
facts concerning the latest tong war in Chinatown.

“Hello, here come boss. Hello, boss. How my boy tonight, eh? Velly
happy, eh?” Thus Sooey Wan, his idol face wreathed in a smile that
indicated his entire satisfaction with the world as at that moment
constituted. Dan glared at him, for he knew the thought uppermost in
that curious Oriental mind; Sooey Wan assimilated the hint but continued
to grin and giggle. Mellenger stood up.

“I drink success to your administration of your new job,” he said.

“It’s a perfectly horrible job, Mel, and nothing but woe can come out of
it. Keeping pace with Tamea is a real chore.”

“Would that the gods had favored me with her father’s faith and
friendship. Dan, that girl is as glorious as a tropical sunset.”

“I thought something had happened to you, Mel. So you’re a casualty, eh?
And in the name of the late Jehoshaphat, what do you mean by coming to
my house in dinner clothes? I have never suspected you of owning dinner
clothes.”

“I am a very easy man to fit in ready-made clothing,” his guest replied.
“I bought these after leaving your office tonight. Made up my mind you’d
be dining more or less formally.”

“But my dear Mel, you might have known Tamea would not have considered
you _de trop_ if you had appeared for dinner in a suit of striped
pajamas.”

“No, but Miss Morrison would.”

“What sorcery is this? I did not invite her until twenty minutes ago.”

Mellenger drank his cocktail slowly and thoughtfully and held out his
glass for Sooey Wan’s further attention.

“I am not one of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear
not. I’m a fairly good judge of human nature, and I always judge the
characters of men and women—particularly women—the moment the sample
is submitted. Which reminds me that for the first time I suspect you of
a failure to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

“That’s a definite charge. State your specification.”

Mellenger’s somewhat heavy, impassive face lighted humorously. “Now,
didn’t Miss Morrison invite herself?” he challenged.

Dan’s mouth flew open in amazement. “Yes. How did you know?”

Mellenger sat down and gazed owlishly at the fire before replying: “I
had a suspicion, amounting to a moral certainty, that she would.
Usually, as you know, I am a careless fellow. I snatch quick meals in
cheap restaurants and I work like a dog. Hence my one day of rest is
devoted to rest, meditation and observation. Observation and subsequent
meditation convinced me that Miss Morrison would be a guest here
tonight.”

“Remarkable man!”

“I had never had the privilege of meeting Miss Morrison before this
afternoon,” Mellenger continued. “A very striking, intelligent, splendid
looking girl. She has brains and wit.”

“How do you know? She spoke four-words to you—‘How do you do?’”

“She has eyes. Why have you delayed marrying her? You’re a bit of a
dodo, Dan.”

“How do I know she’d marry me, Mel?”

“Because you do not know constitutes the basis for my charge that you’re
a bit of a dodo. Anybody else would know.” He looked up at Dan suddenly,
his gray, deep-set eyes very earnest under shaggy brows. “Are you aware
that this very excellent young woman is deeply in love with you?”

“No, I’m not.”

Mellenger sighed. “Have you ever suspected she might be?”

“That sounds presumptuous, Mel. Of course, once in a while——”

“You have suspected it but have banished the suspicion. . . . You’re
very comfortable here; you’re rich and getting richer; you have a
yearning to chuck business one day and woo art.” He stared again at the
fire and sipped at his cocktail. “The victim of a suppressed artistic
desire is loath to give hostages to fortune in the way of a wife and
children. Good Lord, I’ve written a trunkful of short stories and novels
that haven’t sold; I have never been satisfied with one of them, and
until I am satisfied I have planned to remain single and live in a
hotel. . . . Everybody in town in your set knows how Maisie Morrison
feels toward you. Your indifference constitutes a choice topic of
conversation among the tea tabbies.”

“You are a mine of information, Mel.”

“I get it from our society editor. She knows all the gossip.”

“Oh!”

“Ever consider marrying Miss Morrison, Dan?”

“Yes, I have.”

“He who hesitates is lost, my friend.”

Dan’s face had suddenly gone haggard. “I must not hesitate,” he
murmured, “or I may be lost.”

“Yes,” Mellenger agreed coolly, “only in this case suppose we substitute
for the word _may_ the word _shall_.”

“Tamea?” asked Dan.

Mellenger nodded. “She is exotic, marvelous, irresistible—just the sort
of woman to sweep an idealistic ass like you off his feet—into the
abyss. Maisie Morrison knows that, and Tamea, young as she is, knows
that Maisie Morrison knows it. This afternoon in your office your ward
favored you with an impulsive, childish hug and kiss. That was a stab to
the other girl. They exchanged swift glances. There was challenge in
Maisie’s and triumph and purpose in Tamea’s.”

“This is perfectly horrible, Mel.”

“We-l-l, at any rate it’s inconvenient and embarrassing. It would be
horrible for Maisie to have to come to a realization that this
half-caste islander had won you away from her—and it would be very
horrible for you to arrive at the same realization after it was too
late.”

“But I entertain no such crazy intention.”

“You don’t know what intentions you _may_ entertain. You may never truly
fall in love with Tamea, but—you may become infatuated with her. She
has a singularly potent lure for men—men who love beauty and fire and
vitality—men who feel mentally crowded by a mediocre world. I have
known such men, when infatuated, to sacrifice everything they valued in
life for the transient favor of women who did not assay very highly in
mental or moral values. As a matter of fact, my boy, you are infatuated
with Tamea already.”

“How do you know?”

“I do not know how or why I know. I just know it, and now I am sure I
know it. Forget it, Dan.”

Pritchard’s head sunk on his chest in the thoughtful, half sad posture
that Maisie termed the Abraham Lincoln look. He sighed and said
presently, “What should I do about it, Mel?”

“Get this girl out of your life at once and marry Maisie Morrison as
soon as you can procure a license.”

“I think that’s very sound advice, Mel.”

“I think so, too.”

Mellenger drifted over to the piano and commenced playing very softly;
the words of the song he played rang in Dan Pritchard’s mind with
something of the sad poignancy of the distant tolling of church bells:

    Tow-see mon-ga-lay, my dear,
    You’ll leave me some day, I fear,
    Sailing home across the sea
    To blue-eyed girl in Melikee.
    If you stay, I love you true,
    If you leave me—no can do!
    Me no cry, me only say
    Tow-see mon-ga-lay.

“Yes”—Mellenger resumed the train of his thoughts—“my advice is
eminently sound—but you’ll not follow it.” The doorbell rang. “There’s
Maisie Morrison now, Dan.”

“I shall ask her this very night to marry me, Mel.”

“I think not, old-timer.”

“You are a very wise man, Monsieur Mel.”

Tamea spoke from the doorway and Dan, looking up startled, beheld her
standing there, a thing of beauty, dazzling, glorious, shimmering, in a
dinner gown of old rose that displayed her matchless figure to
bewildering perfection. Her eyes, not flashing but softly luminous, were
bent upon Dan Pritchard a little bit sadly, a little bit puzzled.

“I have been a stranger here, _chéri_,” she said very distinctly, “but
you have looked with favor upon your Tamea, Dan Pritchard—and we are
strangers to each other no longer. You are my man. I love you, and
though I die this Maisie shall not possess that which I love.”

She crossed swiftly to Dan’s side; as he sought to rise she drew him
down in his chair again and pressed his head back to meet her glance as
she bent over him, her arms around his neck. A silence, while she
searched the soul of him. Then: “You do love your Tamea?”

Dan Pritchard murmured, “I don’t know, Tamea.”

“_Je t’adore!_” She patted his cheek. “I have no wish to hurt this
Maisie,” she informed him and with a glance included Mellenger in the
confidence, “but that which I have, I hold.”

“Exactly,” said Mellenger and commenced to play again, softly and with
devilish humor:

    The bells of hell go ting-a-ling,
    For you and not for me . . .

Dan sprang up and brushed Tamea aside as Julia appeared in the doorway.

“Miss Morrison,” she announced.

As Maisie entered Mark Mellenger’s heart almost skipped a beat. “She has
accepted the challenge. Zounds! What a woman!” he thought, and stared at
her in vast admiration as she advanced to meet Dan and carelessly gave
him her hand—to kiss! As Dan bent his white face over it Tamea’s voice
shattered the silence.

“I think, Maisie, perhaps you should know that Dan Pritchard belongs to
me. I love him and he is mine.”

Maisie’s smile was tolerant, humorous, maddening; it was apparent to the
watching Mellenger that she had anticipated some such open, direct
attack and had schooled herself to meet it.

“Indeed, Tamea, my dear!” she drawled. “Has Mr. Pritchard, then, given
himself to you so soon?”

“No,” Tamea replied honestly, “he has not. But—he will.”

“How interesting!” She turned to Dan. “Dan, old boy, since it is your
mission in life to make Tamea happy, permit me to give you to her. Here
he is, Tamea, you greedy girl.” She chuckled adorably, gave Dan a little
shove toward Tamea and crossed to the piano where Mellenger stood, grave
and embarrassed. She gave him her hand in friendly fashion.

“Clever, clever woman,” he breathed, for her ear alone.

“How adorably primitive she is, Mr. Mellenger!”

He nodded. “Between the two of us, however,” he answered, still in low
voice, “we’ll fix the young lady’s clock.”

The mask fell from Maisie’s face and Mellenger saw in it naught but pain
and terror.

And then Julia announced dinner.




                              CHAPTER XIV


Many arduous and adventurous years in the Fourth Estate had sharpened
Mark Mellenger’s native ability to think and act quickly in an
emergency. He saw that Tamea’s bold onslaught for the love rights in his
friend had disturbed Pritchard greatly; the latter’s face was rosy with
an embarrassment that was all the more poignant because nothing that Dan
could do or say would relieve the situation; Maisie had apparently
exhausted her ammunition and would, unless supported promptly, retire
from the field. Weeping, doubtless. Something had to be done, and in
this emergency anything would be better than nothing.

Mellenger strolled up to Tamea and offered her his arm to take her in to
dinner. But Tamea only smiled at him the tender, tolerant smile which,
apparently, she had for all men, and said in a low voice: “Thank you,
Monsieur Mellengair, but I will take the arm of Dan Pritchard.”

“Oh, but you must not do that!” Mellenger protested confidentially and
addressing her in excellent French. “You are a member of this household,
while Miss Morrison is a guest here tonight. If Mr. Pritchard were to
permit her to go in to dinner on my arm, that would be equivalent to
informing her that she was not welcome in his home. It would be a very
great discourtesy—in this country,” he added parenthetically.

“Oh! I did not understand that. Nobody has told me these things. I would
not care to embarrass anyone.”

“Thank you, Miss Larrieau. You are very kind and considerate.” He bowed
to her with great courtesy, and she accepted his arm.

“I like you, Mellengair—no, I will call you Mel, like Dan who loves
you.”

“That’s better.”

“And you shall call me Tamea.”

“Thank you. I think that is better, too.”

She came closer to him. “And you will tell me—things?”

“You mean the things you should know in order to avoid embarrassment to
yourself—and others?”

“_Oui_, Mel.”

“There is not a great deal that you will have to be told, Tamea. Merely
an outline of the principal customs of this country which differ so
radically from yours. For instance, just now you made a very sad
mistake—oh, very, very sad!”

“But no!” the girl protested.

“But yes! You were very discourteous to Miss Morrison.”

“About Dan?”

“Yes.”

“But that is the truth.”

“It is not always necessary to tell the truth. You have assumed that
Miss Morrison is in love with Dan.”

“She is, Mel. I know.”

“But he does not know this, and she would not tell him for all the
wealth of the world.”

“Such a stupid! Why not?”

“It is the custom of the land,” he assured her.

“Then I must not tell Dan Pritchard I love him?”

“Not unless he tells you first that he loves you.” She laughed softly
but scornfully. “Has he told you that he loves you?”

“With his eyes—yes.”

“Eyes are not admissible as evidence. What you mistook for love may be
admiration. Until he speaks with his tongue you must remain silent, else
will you be dishonored.”

They had reached the dining room. Maisie and Dan were following, in
frozen silence. Mellenger tucked her chair in under Tamea, and over her
head he winked at Maisie and Dan. There was a terrifying silence until
after Julia had served the soup. Then Tamea spoke.

“It appears,” she said very contritely, “that I have been stupid and of
gross manners. I have offended you, Maisie, and to you, dear Dan, I am
as a dishonored woman. I am truly sorry. Will you both forgive, please?”

“You poor, bewildered dear,” said Maisie, and laughed. To Mellenger’s
amazement the laugh held real humor. She got up, walked around the table
to Tamea’s side and kissed her. “Of course you are forgiven. You did not
understand. How could you know, Tamea, that Dan and I are to be married?
Nobody told you, I dare say. Dan, darling, did you tell Tamea of our
engagement?”

“Of course, I didn’t,” he began. He was at once amazed, indignant and
profoundly complimented. “Why, Maisie——”

“Shut up, fool!” Mellenger’s lips formed the words without speaking
them. “Do you want to spill the beans?”

Maisie returned to her seat, flushed, bright-eyed, distinctly
triumphant, and Mellenger realized that, between himself and Maisie,
poor Tamea had been thoroughly crushed, humiliated beyond words. She
contented herself with looking at Dan very curiously, as if she were
seeing him for the first time.

“Now,” Mellenger remarked dryly, “I think we’ll all feel equal to
imbibing a modicum of soup. Maisie—pardon my effrontery in calling you
by your first name on such brief acquaintance, but then those who love
Dan always inspire me with a desire to know them better and act as if I
had known them always—how long have you and Dan been engaged?”

Dan glared at him. Maisie, scenting the deviltry behind his query, liked
him for it. “I really do not remember, Mark—pardon my effrontery in
addressing you by your first name on such brief acquaintance, but it
seems I’ve known you always. Dan, when did you first propose to me?”

“Maisie, you’re an imp.”

“A benevolent imp, at any rate,” Mellenger adjured him. “She goes out of
her way to make everybody around her comfortable.”

“Did Dan tell you he desired you, Maisie?” Tamea was speaking now.

“What makes you ask that, Tamea?”

“I inquire to know. This is important.”

“Well, Tamea, I don’t suppose Dan ever told me in so many words——”

“Ah! With his eyes, then?”

Maisie shrugged. “I suppose so.”

Tamea favored Mellenger with a sidelong glance of disillusionment and
contempt. She spoke in French. “It appears that the rules of deportment
are broken as readily by those who dwell in this country as by those who
are ignorant of those rules. Now I shall proceed to be happy again. What
an excellent soup!”

She saw by the look in Maisie’s eyes that Maisie had not understood her.
And this was true, for while Maisie was presumed to have learned French
in high school, it was high-school French, and Tamea’s rapid-fire
utterance was far beyond her understanding.

“I hope you will be very happy,” she said in English to Maisie, who
thanked her with a demure smile. To Mellenger she said in a swift aside:
“I know very well she will not! What a curious dinner party! This woman
is thinking of schemes to take from me the man whom I desire. Alas! She
is no match for me, for look you, Mel, she has not the courage to take
that which she desires.”

“Unfortunately, she has not, Tamea. Nevertheless, she may develop a form
of courage that may amaze you. Just now she gave you a bad minute or
two.”

Tamea shrugged. “I have no fear. That which I desire I take, and that
which I take I think, perhaps—I—can—keep.”

“Well, suppose we discuss something else,” Mellenger suggested in his
surprisingly good French. “And if you do not feel equal to the task of
keeping pace with the discussion, try being silent awhile.”

Tamea included Dan and Maisie in her retort to this fundamentally solid
bit of advice. “This large friend of yours does not like me, no?”

“Why, of course he likes you. Nobody could help liking you!” This from
Maisie, who was bound to be cheerful and complimentary at any cost.

“You are wrong, Maisie. Mel thinks very quickly, and he talks as quickly
as he thinks. He thinks clearly, too. . . . Well, I should like him for
my good friend. One does not care for stupeed men. Mel is very honest.
He will make a good fight, yes? I think so. Yes, you bet. And I will
make a good fight, also.”

“Something tells me you will. Are you the offspring of a nation of
warriors?” Mellenger queried.

“My mother was the daughter of a chief—a king, bred from a thousand
kings. And in Riva he who would be king must be a warrior and a leader
of warriors.”

“Is polyandry practiced in Riva?” Dan had emerged from the trance into
which the startling events of the past few minutes had thrown him.

“I do not know what that is, dear Dan Pritchard,” declared Tamea.

“I mean, do the women have more than one husband, and do the women
choose their husbands? In this country,” he hastened to add, “the men do
the choosing.”

“Indeed?” Tamea seemed to find this humorous. “Men are weaklings
everywhere, I think, and in this country, as in Riva, it appears the
women sometimes do the choosing of their husbands. What else may one do?
You men are so stupeed!”

“Let us discuss the League of Nations, Dan,” Mellenger suggested. “That
is a subject upon which you and I may hazard an opinion. Tamea, are you
an advocate of the right of self-determination for the lesser
nations—Ireland, for instance?”

“You make the josh, Mel.”

He chuckled, gave his attention to Maisie and displayed an amazing
facility at small talk and the gossip of her set. Thereafter he
addressed but an occasional word to Tamea, who, however, appeared to
relish this neglect, since it gave her ample opportunity to favor the
uncomfortable Dan with languishing looks. With the advent of the salad
Mellenger deftly piloted the conversation into the realm of trade and
finance, appealed very frequently to Dan for confirmation of some theory
or an expression of opinion. He contrived to leave Tamea quite out of
it, and when at last Maisie rose from the table and the others followed
her into the drawing room, Tamea was sensible of a feeling of neglect,
of paternalism. She resented this with all the fierce resentment of her
hot blood.

But Mellenger was tact and graciousness personified; and when, as the
evening wore on, it began to dawn on Tamea that his action was not
predicated so much on antagonism to her as on a desire to save Maisie
from humiliation, her resentment began to fade. She observed that Dan
had little to say, that the conversation was dominated by Mellenger and
Maisie; in listening to their words, in watching the play of emotions on
their faces, an hour slipped by. Then Mellenger sat at the piano and
played while Maisie sang; and later Maisie played while Mellenger sang.
Tamea enjoyed their songs immensely and urged them on until ten o’clock,
when Dan suggested that perhaps she was tired and would like to retire.

“You wish it?” Tamea queried softly.

He nodded, so Tamea kissed him good night and then followed her caress
with one each for Mellenger and Maisie.

When she had gone Mellenger swung round on the piano stool and grinned
at Dan Pritchard.

“This has been a trying evening, old horse,” he declared, “but, by and
large and thanks to two people who appear to possess the faculty of
keeping their heads when all about them are losing theirs, what
threatened to become a riot has ended in a love feast. Dan, that girl is
nobody’s fool. Her head is quite filled with brains.”

“I think, when she has become a little more civilized, she will be
adorable,” Maisie added.

“She is adorable now,” Dan reminded them. Subconsciously he desired to
defend any weakness he might have exhibited during the evening. Also, he
had an impulse to castigate Maisie for her inexplicable conduct in
declaring, in the presence of his other guests, that an engagement
existed between them.

“That’s no excuse for your losing your head over her, old son.”

“Quite so,” Maisie echoed. “Because I sensed your helpless state,
following Tamea’s frank declaration of a proprietary interest in you, I
invented our engagement as a sort of funk-hole for you to crawl into,
Dan.”

“You were very courageous, Maisie.”

“It was a forlorn hope and it failed. I might as well inform you, my
friends, that Tamea was unimpressed.” Mellenger was very serious now.
“What are you going to do about this girl, Dan? You’ve got to get her
out of your house.”

Dan shrugged helplessly.

“If you send her to a boarding school now,” Maisie suggested, “she would
matriculate in the middle of a semester. You refer to her as a child,
Dan, but she is a fully developed woman, and I fear that her education,
in English at least, has been so neglected that she would have to start
in the same class with girls of ten or twelve. This would prove
embarrassing to her. She should have a year of private tutoring.”

“Where, Maisie?”

“I do not know, Dan.”

“But you telephoned to me this evening that you had a plan to discuss.”

“My plan is not fully developed, Dan, but it contemplated the engagement
of a governess and companion for Tamea, and sending them both to a
warmer climate—say Los Angeles—until Tamea becomes acclimated. You
seemed worried about her in the cooler climate of San Francisco.”

“That’s a splendid plan,” Mellenger hastened to interrupt. “The success
of it depends upon the acquisition of the right sort of governess, of
course. She should be firm, indomitable, tactful, able and possess the
physical attributes of the champion heavyweight pugilist of the world.”

“I fear you are absolutely right,” Dan sighed.

“Well, then, I’m at my wits’ end, Dan’l,” Maisie confessed.

“I am not,” Mellenger replied coolly. “I beg of you, Maisie, to dismiss
the matter. I shall go into executive session with myself and evolve a
plan that will be puncture-proof. I fear me neither you nor Dan is able
to think clearly in this emergency.”

Maisie flashed him a swift glance of deepest gratitude. “In that event I
think I shall go home,” she said, and rang for Julia to fetch her wrap.
Dan escorted her out to her car, and as she gave him her hand at parting
he bent and kissed it humbly, turned and left her without the formality
of saying good night.

Fortunately, Maisie thought she could understand the failure of his
conversational powers.




                               CHAPTER XV


“Well, Mel,” Dan declared as he returned to the drawing room after
seeing Maisie to her car, “I am prepared for the worst. Fly to it, old
philosopher. I observe you are fairly bristling with bellicose veins.”

“That is only additional proof that you are purblind.” Mellenger helped
himself to a cigar, rang for Sooey Wan, ordered a Scotch and soda and
removed his dinner coat. The major portion of his existence was spent
working in his shirt-sleeves, and tonight he had work to do. So he
cleared for action.

“Now, then,” he began, “are you or are you not engaged to be married to
Maisie Morrison?”

“I am not.”

“I thought so. Going to be?”

“I—don’t know, Mel.”

“I’ll make up your mind for you. You are.”

“Why?”

“For any number of incontestable reasons. However, the principal reason
is that she is very much in love with you, and she is not particularly
happy about it. You’re such a dull dog.”

“Granting that, why should I engage myself to Maisie?”

“Because it would be good for you. It would be protection from the
world. You’re going to marry Maisie sooner or later. Why not do it now
and get the worry of it off your mind?”

“But, you double-dyed idiot, I’m not at all certain I’d be perfectly
happy with Maisie.”

“I’ll dissipate your doubts. You wouldn’t be. No man ever is perfectly
happy in the married state.”

“How do you know?”

“Observation and philosophical meditation. You would be perfectly happy
with Maisie about eighty-five per cent of the time, and all you have to
have in order to win is a controlling interest, or fifty-one per cent.
All married life is a continuous adjustment of conflicting
personalities. What you are seeking, we all seek—the wild, abandoned
thrill of a love that will never grow old or stale or commonplace—a
love that will punctuate your life with wonderful, breathless
moments—moments that you would not miss, even though in claiming them
you realized that sorrow and heartbreak might be the inevitable outcome
of your yielding. My dear old friend, you paint pictures in water colors
and see them turn to crude charcoal smudges. Dan, you seek the
unattainable; when you have found her, she will have been married ten
years to a barber!”

There fell between them a long and pregnant silence. Then:

“You spoke just now of—breathless moments, moments one would not miss,
even though in claiming them one realizes that sorrow and heartbreak may
be the inevitable outcome. Have you ever known such a breathless
moment?”

“Yes—in France, during the war. She was a little dancer, about twenty,
I should say. I found her weeping and half conscious in the Place
Vendôme at four o’clock of a winter morning. There had been an air raid
and a great deal of anti-aircraft firing; she had been struck in the
foot by a shrapnel falling five thousand meters. I carried her to my
billet. . . two months. . . she will never dance again. . . fortunately
I was ordered home. . . send her a few francs every month. . . not very
much, because I can’t afford much, but she writes. . . breathless
moments when I get her letters. . . brains, imagination. . . I think she
loves me—always will, perhaps, but it’s no good thinking too much about
it. I have gotten over it.” Mellenger blew a succession of smoke rings
and watched them float upward to frame a face he would never see again,
except in his dreams. And dreams fade as men grow older and the fires of
youth burn out.

“And was it worth the price, Mel?”

“No, I knew that in the beginning. No joy that leaves a pain is quite
worth having.”

“Yet we will never have done with our longing for the adventure. I
suppose that is why men who have never worn a uniform feel their hearts
beat high at the sight of homecoming troops.”

“Yes, I think so. But remember, those civilians see only the avenue with
the flags flying; they have never seen the wreckage or heard the wail of
a funeral march. They’ve only dreamed of that and painted a vision they
call the Field of Honor, with a trail across it labeled the Path of
Glory. They know it leads to Hell, but they know also that some men
escape. You know, Dan, we can always visualize ourselves escaping,
because the wish is father to the thought.”

“Well, at any rate, Mel, I have lived to know—one breathless moment.”

“Do not know another, my friend.”

“Believe me, I did not desire to know this one. I—I——”

Mellenger waved his cigar in absolution. “You didn’t have any help at
the critical moment. I observed the event. I was sitting in the
semi-twilight of this room, thinking—I had asked Julia not to turn on
the light except in the hall. And then you and Tamea came in. . . I saw
your face, I saw hers. . . . And I had seen the face of the other girl
this afternoon. Tamea has told me in so many words, in French, that she
is going to land you; that she doesn’t consider Maisie a foeman worthy
of her steel. Says Maisie hasn’t got the courage to take that which she
desires. Tamea has. I’ll swear to that.”

“There is nothing wrong about that.”

“Certainly not. A convention of maidenly modesty has metamorphosed many
a fine woman into an embittered, disillusioned old maid. She could have
had her man for the asking—for the taking; and because she neither
asked nor took he thought her repression spelled indifference or
dislike.

“There are many shy, embarrassed men in this world, you know. They are
always unhappy because always married to terrible women.

“Big women, fat women, red-headed, dominating, coarse women, women with
thick ankles, sloppy women, dull women, over-dressed women, loud women,
but all women who flouted convention and who just naturally helped
themselves to the shy, embarrassed, gentle little men they coveted.”

“Praise be, Tamea doesn’t come within the scope of your female _index
expurgatorius_. Isn’t she a glorious creature?”

“Of course she is,” Mellenger agreed petulantly. “She’s more than
glorious. She’s devastating, and all the more ruinous to your peace of
mind because she is simple, natural, unspoiled, eager and amorous. But
you’ve got to put your bright day-dreams behind you and marry Maisie
Morrison.”

“But why, Mel?”

“Why, man, you cannot possibly contemplate the prospect of
miscegenation?”

“Does Tamea remotely resemble a mulatto, a quadroon or an octoroon?”

“She is half Polynesian.”

“But a pure-bred Polynesian is a Caucasian.”

“Very well, then, if you insist. But I insist that the Caucasian race
has many subdivisions. An Arab is a Caucasian; so is a Hindoo; but if
you marry a woman of Arabic or Hindoo blood and have children by her,
your offspring will be Eurasians. Tamea is a half-breed brown white. And
she’s not very brown, either—sort of old ivory. She’d pass for a white
girl anywhere. People who do not know her blood will say, ‘Isn’t she a
marvelous brunette type of beauty!’”

“Well?”

“If she bore you sons, how would you feel if they should grow up to be
great, hearty, brown fellows, unmistakably Polynesian, with prehensile
great toes, an aversion to work, a penchant for white vices? You cannot
dodge the Mendelian law, my boy. Like begets like, but in a union of
opposites we get throwbacks. Breed a black rabbit to a white one and you
will get piebald rabbits. Breed these latter to a white rabbit, and
continue to breed the offspring of succeeding unions to other white
rabbits until you have bred all the black out of them. About the time
you think you have beaten the Mendelian law, the pure white descendant
of a black and white union, a hundred generations removed, will present
you with a litter of pure black rabbits! You’re not going to run the
risk of mongrelizing the species, are you?”

“No, I do not think I am, Mel.”

“Do you know you are not?”

“No.”

“I thought so.” Mellenger rose, walked to Dan and thrust the ruddy end
of his cigar in the latter’s face. “You’re in love with Tamea already,
aren’t you?”

“I don’t know, Mel. Something has happened. It happened tonight. You saw
it happen. It never happened to me before. Good Lord, Mel, old man, my
head has been in a whirl ever since.”

“That isn’t love. It’s infatuation. I’ve been through it. I know. It’s a
wonderful madness. It’s what’s wrong with the world today. It’s at the
root of the divorce problem. Infatuation. And the fools think it is
love.

“Nothing divine about it, nothing spiritual; its victims take no thought
of the qualifications so essential to successful marriage—an even
temper, generosity, unselfishness, tenderness, physical fitness, the
absence of mental and physical repulsiveness.

“My dear man, love should be born in reverence, and if later it develops
into infatuation—well, I suppose that would be quite all right, since
in that case infatuation would be the natural, normal outgrowth of
love—the apotheosis of it. If you marry Maisie Morrison—look here,
Dan, you say you do not love her——”

“I’m not certain, Mel.”

“Then it is a fact that you think a very great deal of her. You have the
utmost respect for her, you are happy in her society, you feel reverent
toward her.”

“Of course I do.”

“Then, you star-gazing jackanapes, marry her and become infatuated with
her afterward. She can’t reach out and grab you and maul you and paw you
over and kiss you and whisper love words to you—like this child of
nature, Tamea. It’s up to you to do that, Dan. How are you going to
discover Maisie’s possibilities to compete with this passion-flower,
Tamea, unless you uncover them yourself? You’re a weak, cowardly sort of
man where women are concerned. I grow very weary of you, my friend. You
want to eat your cake and have it.”

Dan laughed long and pleasurably at his old friend’s outburst. “You’re
such a comfort to me, Mel,” he declared. “I dare say you are right. I’m
cowardly. But then, one shouldn’t take even the most remote chance when
he marries. Marriage is until death.”

“Death sometimes comes early to some married men, and it is welcome. If
you marry Tamea you will die spiritually long before the breath leaves
your carcass and the doctor signs a death certificate authorizing your
burial.”

“What a gloomy picture you paint!”

“Marrying an exotic woman like Tamea—a half aborigine—is like marrying
any other aborigine, because all aborigines are pigmented. And no matter
how transcendent the beauty of a pigmented aborigine—or half-breed
aborigine—that beauty fades early. They degenerate physically and
mentally. They are old at thirty, repulsive at forty, hags at fifty.”

“Nonsense! Educate Tamea, spread over her the veneer of civilization,
teach her how to play, cultivate her voice, dress her exquisitely, and
who shall say of her, ‘You—_you_—are half aborigine’?”

“You speak of a veneer of civilization. Sometimes I think the veneer is
very thin and that man today stands, basically, where he stood five
thousand years ago. Dan, it isn’t a question of a veneer of
civilization. It’s a question of the adaptability of species to its
environment. How long do you suppose it would take you, a white man, to
adapt yourself to the environment of such an island, say, as Riva, in
eastern Polynesia?”

“I couldn’t hazard a guess.”

“I could, and it would be a fairly accurate guess, since the history of
white occupation of the isles of the south Pacific will support my
contention. You would be an infinitesimal portion of the moral and
physical decay before you had lived there five years. After that you
wouldn’t care. It’s like mixing two acids that, combined, produce an
explosion. There is never any real adaptability of the human species,
you know. As long as you and Tamea lived you would have different
thoughts and different thought impulses, different moral values. This
difference would prove an attraction at first; then, gradually, you
would begin to find her ways inferior to yours, so you would have a
contempt for them, which means that presently you would grow to hate
Tamea.”

Mellenger sat down and rested his head in his hands. “I wish I could
remember my geology and paleontology,” he complained. “However, I never
cared for it, so I swept it out of my rag bag of a mind. At any rate,
you are much older than Tamea——”

“Oh, not so old as to make a vital difference. About eighteen years.”

“Shut up, you ass. You ditch my train of thought. You are millions of
years older than Tamea. She is a Neolithic maid and you’re Paleozoic or
Silurian or Cretaceous or something, and in order to reach common ground
she’ll have to climb up through a lot of queer strata or you’ll have to
dig down. You paint mighty fine pictures, but down in Riva they’re still
carving hideous gods out of limestone and making hieroglyphics with a
burned stick; they’re still chasing each other around stumps with knobby
clubs.”

“You’re the man who can paint pictures!”

Mellenger sighed. “No, I cannot. I used to think I could, but nobody
else agrees with me, and now I agree with them. Thought once I’d develop
into a great novelist, when all that God Almighty created me for was to
be a great newspaper man!. . . Well, I’m not embittered, because I can
still think clearly and without illusion. And I can see fairly clearly,
too. . . . You’ve got to get rid of this girl.”

“You’re quite bent on clearing the way for Maisie, aren’t you?”

“Yes. But you are my friend, faithful and just to me, and I’ve loved you
since our freshman days in college. The years and wealth and success
haven’t changed you. You’re still the same shy, helpless, gentle,
obstinate, wistful boy, and—and—I—I want to do something for you, old
son. The best thing I can do is to clear the decks for Maisie and marry
you off to her. She’s a fine woman.”

“But I do not know, really, how to get rid of Tamea. I can’t just chuck
her out, you know. Can’t send her to a hotel or an apartment house and
let her go on the loose. Maisie’s plan is ill-advised. You realized
that.”

“Maisie didn’t have any plan. She isn’t up to the job of collected
thinking now.”

“But she said she had a plan.”

“Yes, I know. She wanted an excuse to come over here this evening to
guard you from Tamea.”

“Mel, you have the most extraordinary ideas. You newspaper men are
always so suspicious of motives.”

“Rats! Not suspicion. Absolute knowledge. When you asked her for her
plan she floundered. Got into deep water close to the shore and I had to
throw her a line. Immediately thereafter—but not until Tamea had
retired—Maisie went home.”

“Have you a plan?”

“You bet I have. The talk of a school is sheer nonsense. That girl is
beyond school, and if you put her in a school she’ll not remain put.”

“You’ve overlooked one important detail. If she may not remain here or
in school she may promptly go to the deuce, for lack of proper control.”

“That would be all right, Dan. The main point is that she must not take
you with her. If she sticks around this house she’ll get you into Town
Topics. She has designs on you, my boy. That’s why I suggest you queer
them by marrying Maisie Morrison immediately, if not sooner. Maisie has,
in effect, proposed to you, and you’ve been very cavalier in your
treatment of the proposal.”

“What do you suppose made her make that wild statement to Tamea, Mel?”

“The best excuse in life. Self-preservation. It’s the first law of human
nature.”

“Just starting a backfire, eh?”

Mellenger nodded and put on his dinner jacket. “I suppose you have
observed that women usually marry the men they make up their minds to
marry.”

“No, I have not observed it.”

“You’re a greater numbskull than I thought you were. Two women have made
up their minds to get you, and one of them is going to succeed.” He
glanced at his watch. “Well, I suppose Maisie Morrison is safe in her
bed by this time, crying herself to sleep, wondering how she is ever to
muster the courage to face you again after tonight. Better send her some
flowers in the morning and ask her to go for a drive with you. That will
put her at her ease. I managed to give Tamea some food for thought, and
with her sleep has been out of the question. She looked out of her
bedroom window and saw Maisie drive away. Then she crept downstairs, and
even now she is sitting out on the hall stairs listening to every word
we say. Tamea! Enter!”

Tamea appeared in the doorway.

“I am such a splendid clairvoyant. I can see around a corner,” Mellenger
remarked dryly. . . . “Well, if I had heard the stairs squeak a little
earlier in the evening I would not have talked so freely. Good night,
Tamea. Good night, Dan. Thanks for a wonderful dinner and a wonderful
evening. I’ll be back next Thursday night, as usual.”

He smiled patronizingly as, on his way to the door, he passed Tamea. She
turned slowly and her fiery glance followed him.

“No, Monsieur Mellengair, you have made the great mistake. I am not the
go-to-the-deuce kind. But if that is interesting, perhaps I shall make
the experiment, no? Well, when I do I shall make it alone, thank you.”

“Now I suppose you’re very angry with me, Tamea.”

“A little. Not so much as I think I shall be tomorrow. I forgive you
much tonight because you are not a fool. But—I shall remember some
things that you said—and those things that I remember I shall not
forgive. Good night.”

“Good night.”

Dan Pritchard roused from the dumb amazement into which he had been
thrown by Tamea’s sudden appearance on the scene. “Hey, wait a moment,
Mel! I’ll walk downtown with you,” he called. He had a sudden impulse to
flee from danger.

But the heavy oaken door had already closed behind his friend, and in
the entrance to the drawing room Tamea stood looking at him. “Come to
me,” she murmured. “Come, _chéri_!”

He went.

Tamea’s round, beautiful arms came up around his neck slowly,
caressingly, and his head was drawn gently down toward her glorious face
until her lips touched his ear.

“That man Mellengair—he is your friend. He is not mine. But if I had,
like you, such a friend—ah, I would be so rich! You must never lose
him, _chéri_! Oh, yes, I hate him, but that does not matter. He is very
wise, but he does not know your Tamea. Ah, no, dear one. I would have
you—ah, so happy—and I would be happy with you. But if to be with me
meant sorrow for you—oh, I could not be so cruel! First I would die.
And you will believe that? Yes?”

Dan’s heart swelled—with that ecstacy that was almost a pain. And then
Tamea kissed his ear lightly, patted his cheek and fled upstairs to her
room, leaving him standing there—breathless, with a feeling that, be
the price what it might be, he could not afford to miss such another
moment as this. . . . It did not occur to him that sorrow and heartbreak
might be the outcome of his yielding.




                              CHAPTER XVI


Long before the sun came creeping up beyond Mt. Diablo, Dan Pritchard
made the discovery that the man who has too many things to think about
cannot devote constructive thought to any of them. After being the
innocent cause of more discomfort than Dan had thought it possible for
any man to experience in a single evening, Tamea had swept from his
heart in a moment a feeling of resentment, or irritation, that had been
developing there. Her tender little speech, evidencing as it did the
essential nobility of her primitive soul, had surrounded the girl, in
Dan’s eyes, with a newer, more distinctive charm, and rendered more
distressing the prospect of the impending parting. For all the
embarrassment she had caused him in Maisie’s presence, Dan realized that
Tamea was not _gauche_, that she possessed in full measure a
characteristic rather uncommon among her white sisters, and that was
sportsmanship.

Tamea fought in the open; she was above a mean, small, underhanded
action. Notwithstanding the fact that Tamea’s calm announcement to her
rival that Dan was her man had caused him to yearn for a hole into which
he might disappear, effectually dragging the aperture in after him, Dan
had a hearty man’s hearty appreciation of her frankness, her simplicity,
her utter lack of dissembling, of feminine guile. He entertained a
similar feeling of admiration for Maisie, in whom the exigencies of this
peculiar situation had developed similar characteristics. And lastly, he
was sensible of a little titillation to his masculine vanity in the
knowledge that two glorious women desired him, that they were engaged in
a battle of wits and charm to win him.

He was, on the whole, however, very uncomfortable and apprehensive of
unfortunate developments. Mellenger, beloved pal of his boyhood and
steadfast friend of his mature years, had read him truthfully and then
told him that which he had read. Dan was unwilling to believe that
Mellenger had read him aright yet he had lacked the courage to deny it.

What a keen fellow Mark Mellenger was! How prudent, farseeing and
fearless! And how charitable, how thoroughly understanding! Dear old
Mel! He hadn’t gotten ahead in life. His one great ambition had failed
dismally of realization, and he had had to content himself with second
place; nevertheless he was not embittered. His life was taken up with
doing well the task he could do so much better than others; no hint of
the sadness of unfulfilled dreams ever escaped him, and until tonight
Dan had never seen him excited or distressed about anything.

“The old boy has a tremendous affection for me,” Dan meditated as he got
out of bed, donned dressing gown and slippers and sat by the window to
watch the sun rise over San Francisco bay. “What a blow it would be to
him were I to—but of course I shall not. The idea is unthinkable.”

Gradually his mind turned to thoughts of business, to the increasing
annoyance of association with old John Casson, to the rice market. He
would call upon Ridley, the rice broker, and put pressure behind the
selling drive if Ridley failed to render an encouraging report by noon.
Once in the clear on those rice deals, he was resolved to do one of two
things—buy John Casson out or force Casson to buy him out.

And then there was the accursed question of what to do with Tamea. That
also would have to be solved today.

At seven o’clock he heard Sooey Wan puttering about in the kitchen
below, so he shaved, bathed, dressed and descended for an early
breakfast. Sooey Wan served him in profound silence, but eyed him with a
steady, speculative gaze; from time to time he shook his old head as if
he, too, wrestled with problems hard to solve. When Dan left the house
Sooey Wan accompanied him into the hall, helped him into his overcoat
and handed him hat and stick. Then he voiced something of what was on
his mind.

“Boss, how soon you mally Captain’s girl?”

“How dare you ask me such a question? Mind your own business, you
grinning old idol, or I’ll fire you one of these bright days. I’m not
going to marry the Captain’s girl.”

Sooey Wan did not seem to be impressed. “Helluva house you ketchum,
boss, you fire Sooey Wan. Allee time you makee too much talkee-talk.
Talk velly cheap, but ketchum money you likee buy whisky. You no mally
Captain’s girl, eh? Well, when you mally Missie Maisie?”

“I don’t know. Why do you ask?”

Sooey Wan rubbed his corrugated brow and scowled in huge despair. “Go
’long, boy, go ’long,” he entreated wearily. “Allee time you makee Sooey
Wan sick. Why I ask? Wha’s mallah? You no wanchee ketchum little
baby—ketchum fi’, six son?”

“I haven’t thought about it,” Dan growled.

“Hully up. Thinkee quick!” Sooey Wan entreated. “Pitty soon if you no
thinkee, evelything go blooey-blooey. Sooey Wan talkee Captain’s girl,
she tellee me pitty soon ketchum my boss for mally. Now you say no
ketchum. Wha’s mallah? You thinkee make fool of Sooey Wan? Listen, boy.
When Captain’s girl say ketchum boss, then Sooey Wan bettee bankroll on
Captain’s girl. She ketch you, sure. Oh-h-h, velly nice!”

Dan slammed the door in Sooey Wan’s face and hastened down the street.
It was an hour’s walk to his office and his head ached from too much
thinking. The exercise would do him good.

He purchased the morning papers and looked through them for Tamea’s
picture and the story of her arrival, of her father’s dramatic death.
Mellenger, for some unknown reason, had not featured his story as Dan
had expected. It was a short straight news story, on the second page,
with a very good picture of Tamea, and Dan noted that Mellenger had said
nothing of the fact that he was to be Tamea’s guardian, that she was a
guest at his home. The other paper had handled the story more
flamboyantly and featured it on the first page, but with an eye single
to local color the editor had run the photograph of Tamea in the Mother
Hubbard dress.

“Brainless apes,” Dan growled. “Makes her look like a colored mammy. I
hate them.”

Arrived at his office, he had scarcely read his mail before Ridley, the
rice broker, called him up.

“I can unload that four thousand tons at Shanghai for cash,” he
announced, “but the price I can get will not leave you much of a
profit.”

“How much?”

“Fourteen cents, at ships’ tackles, Shanghai.”

Dan figured rapidly while Ridley held the wire. The price quoted would
net his firm a profit of about eight thousand dollars. “Sold!” he cried
triumphantly.

By noon the deal had been definitely closed with Ridley’s client, the
space contracted for on the Malayan transferred to the new owner of the
rice, and the check in payment deposited in bank. Dan’s mental
thermometer commenced to rise, so he decided to accord himself the
delight of breaking the news to old Casson.

The senior partner’s face darkened with fury. “You’ve cost us a
potential profit of a quarter of a million dollars, Pritchard. I suppose
you realize that this confounded interference of yours means the end of
our business association.”

“I hope so. Thank you, I wouldn’t care for another helping of the
mustard. Do you propose buying me out or selling out to me?”

“I would prefer to buy you out—today—and carry those rice deals
myself.”

“Unfortunately, the sale of my interest here will not invalidate my
signature on some of this firm’s paper, Mr. Casson.”

“That might be arranged somehow. What do you want for your interest?”

Dan named a figure and old Casson nodded approval.

“Terms?” he queried.

“Cash.”

“Impossible.”

“Well, then, fifty thousand in cash and the balance on secured notes.”

“Impossible.”

“I had a suspicion you have dissipated in crazy deals most of your share
of the money we made during the war. Well, it appears you cannot buy me
out, and until our rice deals have been safely disposed of, if not at a
profit at least without loss, I do not yearn to take over your share. It
might prove a very bad investment. However, for reasons which would
never occur to you, I am willing, once the rice deals have been disposed
of, to buy you out on a basis of the actual value of our assets, but
with nothing additional for good-will. All the good-will value of Casson
and Pritchard has been created by my father and myself.”

“I shall not sell on that basis.”

“Very well. The day on which our last note is paid I am relieved of all
contingent liability as a partner in Casson and Pritchard. We will
dissolve partnership. That will kill your credit with our bankers and I
shall sit calmly by and watch you go to smash. When you’ve had your
beating, sir, you will be glad to sell—at my terms. I am generous now.
You may be sure I shall not be generous then.”

Old Casson glowered, puffed at his cigar and then studied the ash
reflectively.

“While you were busy this morning unloading that Shanghai rice at a
paltry eight thousand dollars profit—just because you lack the courage
of a jack-rabbit—I disposed of the Manila rice at the market.”

“To whom?”

“Katsuma and Company.”

“Japs, eh?”

“They’re good.”

“Financial rating is unquestionably splendid. Know anything about the
moral rating of a Japanese business firm?”

“They’ve always met their business obligations.”

“Any Jap will—until the meeting of them becomes burdensome or
unprofitable. Ninety day paper, I suppose.”

Casson smiled triumphantly. “No, not with Katsuma and Company. Sight
draft against bill of lading, payable at the Philippine National Bank.”

“Well, that’s better than I had expected. Unfortunately the cargo has to
be loaded aboard ship before that draft will be cashable. That means
thirty days of suspense—and I do not like the financial aspect in the
East. Prices _must_ come down—and once they start downward they may
develop into an economic avalanche. It’s an unhealthy situation and I
don’t like it. Where’s your contract with Katsuma and Company?”

Casson handed it to him and Dan scanned it carefully, nodded his
approval, rang for the chief clerk and gave the contract to him to be
placed in the safe.

“Well, on the face of things, we’re out of the rice market,” he said as
he rose to return to his own office. “I feel much relieved.”

In his private office he found Mark Mellenger waiting for him. “Well,
you bird of ill omen,” Dan greeted him cheerily, “what brings you here?”

“Had an hour to kill and thought I’d kill it here. I do not go on duty
until one thirty. Dan, I’ve been thinking. What, if anything, have you
decided in the matter of the girl, Tamea?”

“Nothing, Mel. I’ve been too busy on something else.”

“It would be well to make Tamea’s matter a special order of business.
Have you thought of anything to do?”

“Not a thing.”

“I suspected that might be the case. The fact is that you are being
ruled by your subconscious mind. You do not wish to do anything.
However, you shall. I have a plan.”

“Indeed?”

“None of your sarcasm. Not that it will avail you anything. It’s just
futile—wasted energy—on me. You must induce Maisie Morrison to take
Tamea to Del Monte for a couple of weeks.”

“My dear man, why should I ask Maisie to burden herself with such a
responsibility?”

“Well, it _is_ selfish, I admit, but then if one would make an omelette
one must break eggs. Maisie will regard it as a burden and she will
appreciate to the fullest your cussedness in asking her, but she will
accept the nomination gracefully—indeed, I am moved to
add—gratefully.”

“How do you know she will?”

“Don’t know. I’m merely guessing. I guessed her right last night, did I
not?. . . Yes, I’m not half bad at guessing things.”

“But something tells me there is mutual hostility between Maisie and
Tamea. They disliked each other at sight.”

“Quite true. But then women who despise each other for a reason which
may not be discussed will never admit that they despise each other. And
Maisie will subjugate her very natural desire to spank Tamea if she
realizes that by so doing she will be enabled to thwart Tamea in the
latter’s campaign for your affection. It occurs to me, therefore——”

“You mean that Maisie will eagerly grasp the opportunity to take Tamea
out of my presence and keep her out?”

“Dan, you poor moon-calf, you’re growing brilliant. You’re beginning to
do some head-work. Answering your question, I would say that such is my
interpretation of what will be her mental attitude.”

“Women are so queer,” Dan declared helplessly.

“Women study the essentials which most men overlook, to wit, cause and
effect. The adverb _why_ was invented for the use of women. They always
want to know. When they have a battle on they use their heads to think
continuously of the enemy. They do not forget him or ignore him or
underestimate him—I mean her.”

“Old cynic!”

“Not at all. That’s sound argument based on observation. A smart woman
never forgets that her opponent is extremely likely to act with
discretion.”

“Well?”

“I think you ought to ask Maisie and her aunt to be your guests at Del
Monte for a few weeks, and explain to Maisie that you will take it
kindly of her to look after Tamea. Be sure to inform her that while you
will drive down with them and spend the week-end, you will motor home on
Monday—and stay at home thereafter. You see, Dan,” Mellenger continued,
“there will be much to divert and interest Tamea down there. She can
ride, and if she cannot ride she can spend her time learning. Same thing
with golf. She can swim—and I dare say she’ll be the sensation of the
beach. Lots of good looking, idle gents down there to take her mind off
you, and with Maisie and her aunt to chaperon her, and Julia to help
steer her straight, you stand a very fair chance of forgetting her, of
having her forget you.”

“That is a very good plan. After a few weeks there I will have her
school arrangements made. Then I’ll have a talk with her, tell her
exactly what I want, and that I am going away on a trip to Europe and
that she must be a very good, obedient girl while I am away.”

“But—are you really going to Europe?”

“I am. In about thirty days I’m going to sell out to old Casson, or buy
him out. If the former, I’ll be free to go. If the latter, I’ll appoint
a manager and go abroad anyway.”

“The day you get Tamea into a convent—and that’s where she belongs—you
are to marry Maisie Morrison and take her to Europe with you. I’ll keep
an eye on Tamea for you.

“No risk, I assure you. I have a pachydermous hide which her glances may
not penetrate. Besides, I’ve always been singularly intrigued with the
idea that one of these bright days I may marry some fine woman and
father some blue-eyed, flaxen-haired children.”

“You old-fashioned devil!”

“Do not seek with specious compliments to swerve my single-track mind
from your _affaire de cœur_. It is understood, then, that you are
committed to my plan?”

“Absolutely.”

“Fine! Telephone Maisie at once.”

Dan hesitated, so Mellenger pressed the push-button that summoned Dan’s
secretary. “Please get Miss Morrison on the telephone for Mr.
Pritchard,” he requested.

Maisie was at home and to Dan’s suggestion she agreed—not with
enthusiasm, but upon the ground of obliging him, of helping him out of a
distressing situation. Mellenger, listening to Dan’s replies, managed to
patch together a very fair résumé of their conversation, and grinned
openly.

“Told you I was a good hand at guessing,” he bragged. “Ah, that’s a
smart girl, that Maisie. She’s a diplomat. Got tact—rarest feminine
gift. Before you hang up I should like to speak to her.”

There was a wait of a few minutes while Maisie urged her aunt to agree
to chaperon the party. Presently Maisie called back to say that Mrs.
Casson, having communicated by telephone with her husband, would be
delighted to accept.

“Falls in with old Casson’s mood very nicely,” Dan soliloquized. “He’s
morose and sulky and prefers to be alone.” To Maisie: “Mel is in my
office, Maisie. He wishes to say a word to you.”

“Miss Maisie,” Mellenger announced, “I’ve taken on a new job.”

“Indeed?”

“I’m managing Dan Pritchard. The man is bewildered and doesn’t know how
to manage himself. He’s afraid to act with force and decision at home,
although down in the office he never hesitates to crack the whip.”

“I know. Dan is so tender-hearted. He’s afraid his passion-flower will
droop and die if he exercises the least bit of authority. If his true
friends do not organize——”

“Exactly, Miss Maisie, exactly. You start for Del Monte at two o’clock
this afternoon, in Dan’s car. You will arrive in time for dinner. Your
trunks will follow by express.”

“Are you giving orders, Mel?”

“I am.”

“I hear you and I obey. Good-by. Thank you.”

Mellenger hung up and faced Dan. “Go home and get ready, but before you
leave this office, telephone Julia and start her packing.”

“You’re a fast worker.”

“I know a faster one,” Mellenger retorted significantly.




                              CHAPTER XVII


At a quarter past seven, when Dan Pritchard’s limousine drew up in front
of the Hotel Del Monte, a white, flannel-clad figure heaved itself out
of a chair on the porch, came down the steps and opened the door of the
car.

“Good evening, everybody,” he greeted Dan’s party.

“Hello! Mel! You here!”

Mellenger sighed. “One might glean the impression judging by your
intonation, that I haven’t any right here,” he complained. “After
leaving your office today I began to feel the downhill pull, so I jumped
the two o’clock train and here I am. How do you do, Miss Maisie.”

He gave Maisie his hand and assisted her to alight. They exchanged
glances and Mellenger felt his hand squeezed just a little. He answered
the pressure, was introduced to Mrs. Casson as Dan handed her out on the
steps, and immediately turned to greet Tamea.

“Good evening, Your Majesty.”

“Good evening, Monsieur Stoneface,” Tamea answered, and ignored his
outstretched hand. He knew she was not pleased to find him here, and her
next words, spoken in French, clinched this conclusion. “I will make
your task an easy one,” she challenged. “I have been doing some
thinking.” She smiled enigmatically. “Oh, I understand you very well,
indeed!”

“Yes, I think we understand each other, Tamea. I want you to know,
however,” he added as they followed Dan, Maisie and Mrs. Casson into the
hotel, “that my attitude is perfectly impersonal. I do not dislike you.”

“If you understood me there would have been no necessity for that
speech. Listen to my words, Stoneface. I——”

“Why do you call me Stoneface?” he interrupted.

“Because to many people your face reveals nothing. It is dull and blank
when you would deceive people, but you are not a fool, Stoneface. But
you remind me of the tremendous stone images on the coast of Easter
Island, with their plain, sad, dull faces turned ever toward the sea as
if seeking something that never comes. So you are Stoneface to me.”

“And what do I seek?” he demanded.

“You seek in men those qualities which are in you. They are hard to
find, Stoneface. And you seek from some woman a love that will give a
little in exchange for a great deal. You are a lonely man,
Stoneface—always seeking, seldom finding, never satisfied. You see, I
have been thinking of you. And I have done some thinking on your words
to Dan Pritchard.”

“I hope you will not quarrel with me for that.”

“It is hard to quarrel with the true friend of him I love, but you are
in my way, Stoneface, and you are a resolute man. So I shall not have
mercy. Of two women who love your friend, you must, it seems, approve of
one. I am not that one. . . . Well, when the gods rain blows on Tamea
she will take them standing and none shall know how much they hurt. And
you have hurt me, Stoneface. Still, I shall be what you call a good
sport. Dan Pritchard has come to this place for a few days to play—with
me—and you are here to have him play—with you! Well, Stoneface, I give
him to you for those few days because I love him. I would not have his
mind distressed with the striving to keep two women happy. I shall not
again be of gross manners and embarrass him,” she added darkly.

“You feel quite certain of yourself, do you not?”

“Yes. And why not? This girl”—with an infinitesimal shrug of her
shoulder she indicated Maisie, who had met a friend in the lobby and was
talking to her—“causes me no alarm, so I shall be kind to her.”

“I’m the bug in your amber, eh?”

“You must be considered,” she admitted.

He laughed.

“Why do you oppose my desires, Stoneface? I am not a black woman, I am
not stupid, I have, perhaps, as much beauty as——” And again she
shrugged a shoulder at Maisie.

“I am informed,” said Mellenger coolly, “that on your mother’s side you
are descended from a line of kings who have never mingled their blood
with that of the common people.”

“That is true.”

“I would that my friend refrained from mingling the blood of his
children with that of another race, a race that is not white.”

She was silent, digesting this unanswerable argument. Then: “Some day,
perhaps, Stoneface, you will cast away that argument. Like a child’s
garment, it will not fit a grown man.”

Maisie came toward them. “We will go to our rooms now and dress for
dinner, Tamea,” she suggested.

When he was alone in the lobby Mark Mellenger sat down in a quiet corner
to think. “She bombs one,” he complained. “She fairly blows one out of
the water. She will not be deferred to nor pitied nor patronized.
Realizing why I am here—why I have found it necessary to be here—she
renders me futile and my presence unnecessary by changing her tactics.
She reads my poker face, and, having read it this evening, she has taken
my job away from me and I feel foolish. Judas priest, what a woman!
She’s perfectly tremendous! Fair and square, hitting straight from the
shoulder and with character enough to dislike me intensely. She is
adorably feminine and I’ve got my hands full to defeat her purpose. She
isn’t going to plead with me to get out of her way, nor is she going to
oppose me. She’s just going to ignore me. . . . Well, poor old Dan, I
did the best I could by you, at any rate. The idealistic, altruistic
dreamer. He’s helpless, because this girl possesses a charm that Maisie
hasn’t got or hasn’t developed. Tamea can hear the pipes of Pan. That’s
it! She can hear them and make men hear them, too.”

It did not occur to Mellenger that he liked reedy music.




                             CHAPTER XVIII


At dinner Tamea captured a seat beside Dan but gave it up almost
instantly to Maisie, giving as a reason her desire to sit beside Mark
Mellenger and talk with him. However, she had little to say during the
meal. Seemingly she was content to be a good listener.

“Yes, she has been doing some thinking,” Mellenger thought. “And she has
decided to disarm active opposition by abandoning direct action and
fighting under the rules of the game as Maisie and her kind play it.
Preëmpted the seat beside Dan and then abandoned it, just to show her
power. She’s half French and a born coquette.”

Suddenly Tamea turned to him as if she had read his thoughts. “I have
decided to be all white,” she said.

He noted the fascination of her habit of starting a conversation as if
it were the continuation of a discussion, her trick of foreshortening
words and ideas.

“I commend your decision, Tamea.”

“Will you help me, Stoneface?” she pleaded with sad wistfulness.

“No!”

She bowed her head understandingly. . . . When the gods rained blows on
Tamea, Queen of Riva, she took them standing, and none might know how
much they hurt.

“I hate you—but I respect you,” she said in a low voice. “You are a man
of resolution, Stoneface.”

“I wonder, my dear, if you will believe me when I assure you it is very
difficult for me to act in a manner which causes you to dislike me.”

“Yes, I know that. If you were unkind because you enjoyed unkindness,
Dan Pritchard would not love you.”

“Tamea, you have, in full measure, the greatest gift, an understanding
heart. In time I shall hope to be understood and—forgiven.”

She frowned. “An understanding head might be a better gift. This
evening, when I saw you, I understood why you came without telling
anybody. And I thought: ‘Tamea, you are a little fool. Go back to Riva
where your mixed blood does not set you apart from your world. Here it
is difficult to know happiness!’”

“That was a sensible thought. Why do you not return to Riva? You are
terribly out of place here.”

“You, who are all white, cannot understand the combat in my heart,
Stoneface. I inherited too much from my father, who was a very wonderful
man. I comprehend too quickly, I see too clearly and, I think,
sometimes, I shall never be very happy. I am a child of love and
I—I—well, I am sorry you will not help me know the ways of your
people. I shall learn without aid but just now I would make haste. . . .
However, I understand.”

Her long, beautiful hands lay in her lap—her fingers lacing and
interlacing nervously; her face was downcast. Mellenger suspected that
her long black lashes, seeming to lie on her rose-ivory cheek,
effectually concealed a suspicious moistness. There was about her a sad,
gentle, Madonna-like wistfulness more poignant than sorrow. Mellenger
was touched.

Presently she raised her head and smiled defiantly. “Perhaps I, too,
shall be a Stoneface, searching the sea for that which never comes.
Tomorrow what shall we do to make happiness for ourselves?”

“Tomorrow I would like to dedicate to the delightful task of making you
happy.”

“Then go away. You are not needed here.”

“I will go on Monday with Dan in his car. Until then you must endure
me.”

“Thank you, Stoneface. This is a pretty place with none but fashionable
people in it, apparently. I shall learn much here so I shall be dutiful
and remain here very quietly with Maisie and Mrs. Casson.”

“That will please Dan very much.”

“He will think of me while he is away. He will write to me. Perhaps he
will think of Maisie too and write to her. If so—very well. It is not
nice to play the cat.”




                              CHAPTER XIX


That ended the conversation for that night. Tamea retired shortly after
dinner, leaving Maisie and Mellenger in possession of the field. The
next morning Dan and Mellenger breakfasted early and left for the golf
links at Pebble Beach. Maisie, her aunt and Tamea joined them there for
luncheon, and in the afternoon Maisie, Dan and Mellenger made up a
threesome and played nine holes, with Tamea following, playing the part
of the gallery and bored to the point of tears. At a point on the course
where one drives along the cliff, Mellenger sliced badly and drove a new
ball into the Pacific Ocean. Tamea was frankly delighted. In the evening
there was dancing and again Tamea was out of it. She could neither
fox-trot nor waltz; she could only gaze wistfully after Dan and Maisie.

Mellenger sat with her. “Do you dance, Stoneface?” she queried.

“Oh, yes!”

“Perhaps you will teach me?”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Oh, but a beginner——”

“You do not wish me to dance with Dan Pritchard?”

“I do not.”

She nodded. “I have listened to this music and I have watched these
others dance. I think I can dance the fox-trot, too. You shall dance
with me, Stoneface. I would learn.”

“I’ll not make a spectacle of myself, Tamea.”

“Then I shall. You shall dance with me or I shall dance alone, and when
I dance alone others cease dancing to watch me. I will do what you call
bust up the show. I will do the _hula_!”

“You win,” he declared, and they stood up. Tamea made a false step or
two, caught the rhythm and moved away rather easily. As she gathered
confidence she improved and they circled the hall without colliding with
anybody. “You’re an apt pupil,” said Mellenger.

“I grow more apt,” she retorted—and commenced to dance. In all his days
Mark Mellenger had never held in his arms a more wonderful partner. She
handled him easily, steering him cleverly among the dancers, moving with
a swiftness, a lightness and an abandon both new and thrilling.

“You have danced before?” he charged. “You’re marvelous.”

“In Tahiti,” she admitted. “I had a humor to force you to meet my will.
Now I am very weary—so weary that I shall not dance with Dan Pritchard
if he asks me—and he will.”

Dan did—and Tamea begged off. Mellenger was immensely amused. “Playing
me off against old Dan,” he thought. “Well, I think I shall fall in with
that mood and play the game. This is getting interesting.”

They drove around the seventeen mile drive the following forenoon and
had a Spanish luncheon in Monterey; in the afternoon Mark and Dan played
eighteen holes of golf while Tamea and Maisie went down to the beach
swimming. After dinner Tamea fell into step beside Mellenger as they
walked down the long hall and clasped her hand in his, after a childish
fashion she had.

“You have been very nice to me today, Stoneface,” she admitted. “I
think, perhaps, I may learn soon to forget that I dislike you. Do you
insist upon going back to the city tomorrow morning?”

“Yes, I’m going back with Dan.”

“Please do not go,” she whispered, and squeezed his hand a little.

“Why? Why do you ask me to remain, child?”

“Because I shall be lonely here—and if you remain perhaps we may have a
nice fight, no? I wish to talk to you—to understand some things.
Please?”

She halted him, came close to him and looked up at him in a manner that
could not be resisted. Mellenger felt a wild thrill in his heart and it
must have registered in his eyes, for Tamea’s great orbs answered thrill
for thrill.

“I’ll not stay,” he almost growled.

“Then walk with me a few minutes in the grounds,” she begged. “I must
have some conversation with you—alone.”

They strolled out and down a graveled path through the trees to a bench
Tamea had observed under one of them that day. They sat down. Tamea was
first to speak.

“Stoneface, I have done much thinking because of what I heard you tell
Dan the other night at his house. I know now how the friends of Dan
Pritchard will regard me if he takes me to wife. They will not say, ‘Ah,
there is that nice wife of his.’ No, they will say, ‘There is Dan
Pritchard and his Kanaka wife.’ I shall always be one apart. You have
made me very unhappy, Stoneface, but perhaps I should thank you for
telling me first. Now I shall not go too far until I know how far I
should go.”

“I’m so sorry,” he murmured humbly. “I didn’t mean it for your ears. I
wouldn’t have said it—then—if I had known you were eavesdropping.
You’re much too fine, Tamea, to have this happen to you, but I know Dan
Pritchard. You are not the woman for him. Maisie Morrison is.”

“Perhaps those are true words, Stoneface. I do not know men of your race
too well. Yet it is certain that some day a man will seek me and I will
be glad of the seeking. Many have sought me already, but you must
understand, Stoneface, they were not gentlemen. Ah, but you do not
understand. . . you do not know how much I wish to be all white. . . how
my heart hurts because here, where I am alone, I must be alone always
because I—am—different.”

He was overwhelmed with sympathy and possessed himself of her hand and
patted it, but without speaking.

“You like me, do you not, Stoneface?” she pleaded.

“You are wonderful—transcendently beautiful—you have a mind and a
heart and a soul.”

“And you like me—a very little?”

His grip on her hand tightened. “God help me,” he murmured huskily. “I
love you. I am like a man smitten with a plague.”

“Yes, you love me. I was quite certain of that, only you told me the
eyes were not admissible as evidence. You did not think I could stir a
heart of stone and see love and longing in Stoneface, no? But I saw it,
and I have not wished it, for I have not liked you. And now will I make
you humble. You shall seek the love of the woman you would not wish your
friend to take to wife—no, no, I dishonor you, Stoneface.

“Forgive, please. You would not seek it, but you shall yearn for it with
a great yearning that shall cause you to forget that in my veins flows
an ancient and alien blood. Stoneface, know you that if half of my blood
is dark it is not the blood of the unbeautiful or the base. It is the
blood of the kings and patriarchs of a lost race that is dying because,
in its innocence, it touched hands with the vilest of living things, the
white man civilized. No, I am not ashamed of my blood. I am proud of it
and I rejoice that it has given me a weapon to humble you.”

She grasped his hands and drew him toward her. “Look at me, Stoneface,”
she commanded. But he turned away his heavy, impassive face. “Ah, look
at me,” she pleaded now, “and let me see again in those strange, stern
eyes the look that was there when you betrayed yourself into my power.
For I have power—over men. I know it. It is not to brag, to show a
large conceit, when I admit it—to you. . . . Come, look at me,
Stoneface.”

He looked at her, turning his head slowly, as if it hurt him to move it.
There, in the moonlight, in that scented park, her power, her tremendous
magnetism, the intoxicating glory of her strange, baffling, childlike
but commanding personality made his heart pound and set up in his huge
frame a weak trembling. Had he possessed the power to think, this spell
she had cast upon him, all within the space of seventy-two hours, would
not have been possible of analysis. Perhaps the best explanation was the
one he had already given—that he was as a man suddenly smitten with a
plague.

“You tremble, Stoneface.”

“That is because I am weak, Tamea, and I am ashamed of my weakness. I,
who came to scoff, remain to pray.”

“That is my desire. I would have you, of all men, suffer as you have
made me suffer. I shall make of you a great stone idol, with stony face
turned sadly to the sea, like those colossal figures on the coast of
Easter Island. Yes, Stoneface. Now you may gaze long for that which
never comes. I am avenged.”

She dropped his hands and with her own clasped tight against her
tumultuous breast she looked at him with eyes that blazed with emotion.
Mellenger sighed deeply and then his heavy, almost dull face lighted
with a smile so tender the plain face was glorified.

“And when the gods rain blows upon me, O Tamea, I, too, shall take them
standing and smiling. You have called me Stoneface. Very well. I
withdraw my opposition. I would have you happy, even at the price of my
old friend’s unhappiness, even at the sacrifice of my own. But I shall
not gaze out to sea for that which never comes. For it shall come. And
when I see you bent and broken and taking the blows with your flower
face in the dust——”

Her glorious face softened. “Then what, Stoneface? Then what?”

“Then,” he murmured huskily, “I shall weep. But I shall also lift you up
and hold you to my heart and love you, and my love shall endure in the
days when you are old, and perhaps fat, when your beauty shall be but a
memory. Yes, Tamea, when you too are a Stoneface gazing sadly out to sea
for that which came—and went—and shall never, never come again, I
shall love you and love you the more because your child’s heart will
have been broken. You will, perhaps, remember this when you need a
friend.”

He left her there and went away, with hands outstretched a little before
him, like one who walks in darkness and is afraid.




                               CHAPTER XX


In the morning Mellenger was gone. He left a note to Dan explaining that
he had received a sudden and wholly unexpected call to return to San
Francisco and begged Dan to present his compliments to the ladies and to
express his regret at an unceremonious departure.

“The man’s a poor slave,” Dan declared.

Tamea, who had been at his elbow as he read, inquired: “Who?”

“Mellenger. He has left us.”

“Ah,” Tamea breathed—thoughtfully. After a brief silence she said:
“Then Maisie will have an opportunity to play with you. I am glad
Mellengair has gone.”

“Tamea, you mustn’t hold a grudge against my friend Mark. He is not an
enemy of yours.”

“An enemy conquered is no longer an enemy, Dan. I do not hold the
grudge. I have taken my vengeance on that man for the hurt he has done
me, and I am content to forget him.”

“But you’ll always be pleasant and courteous to him when you meet him at
my house?”

“_Certainement._”

“Sorry you cannot play golf, or we’d make it a threesome, Tamea.”

“What man would be delayed and annoyed in his sports by an unlearned
woman? I have letters to write to friends in Riva and Tahiti, so go you
with Maisie.”

Dan was glad to accept an invitation so heartily extended. He had a
feeling that, in the delicate operation of remaining strictly neutral,
he had neglected Maisie; he felt that Maisie sensed the neglect. With a
light heart and a beaming smile, therefore, he sought her out and drove
off with her to the golf links at Pebble Beach. They played eighteen
holes and had luncheon at the Lodge, and not once during the day did
either refer to Tamea, her future or her avowed attitude toward her
guardian.

Late in the afternoon they drove down the Monterey County coast. Dan
could not recall an occasion when Maisie had been more delightful in
conversation or more winsome as to personal appearance. She appeared to
have fallen suddenly into a habit he had not previously noted, that of
adjusting herself to his moods. Throughout that drive there were long,
blissful silences when Maisie observed his head sunk on his breast and
the dreamer’s look in his troubled eyes; when he saw fit to toss her a
conversational bone she seized it eagerly and managed to extract from it
a surprising quantity of red meat. He was thrilled with a new sense of
the girl’s potentialities for comradeship and sympathy, for abrupt and
infallible understanding. Today she made no attempt to dominate him, to
encompass and envelop him in the aura of her penchant for leadership,
for direction. And he liked that quite as much as he disliked criticism,
whether expressed or implied. Had Maisie at last sensed what had been
keeping them apart for so long—his repugnance to the slightest
suggestion of a hindrance to his masculine freedom? He pondered this.

Dan wished that women viewed men and their affairs from a more masculine
point of view. He wished that they did not have such a tendency to
condemn without trial by jury, as it were. He deplored their prompt and
definite acting on instinct or intuition, and he wished that the girl he
might desire ardently to marry should be possessed of a modicum of the
sportsmanship of a very gallant gentleman. Why did they dislike each
other so on sight? Why did they provoke silly little tiffs over nothing
in particular; and why, when they were not on speaking terms with each
other, did they decline to avoid the embarrassment of a meeting, as men
do? Why were they controlled by their emotions? How difficult of
understanding they were!

Well, at any rate, Tamea appeared to have a fairly well developed sense
of sportsmanship, for she had deliberately abdicated today in favor of
her rival, and Dan thought that was mighty decent of her. She had a
definite philosophy, and, it seemed to him, she could smother an active
dislike and not develop the remotest indications of a soul convulsion.
Poor child! He wondered if he had been quite kind in leaving her to
amuse herself all day at the hotel.

He shifted his position and his hand fell, not by design, on top of
Maisie’s. Instantly her soft, warm fingers closed over it. The touch
thrilled him pleasurably; he wanted to hold Maisie’s hand, so soft and
small and fragile; he did not want her to hold his. So he removed his
hand from hers and she drew away from him.

“Ah, don’t,” he murmured. “I didn’t mean that,” and his arm went up and
around her neck, deliberately, possessively. She leaned toward him and
he felt her tremble. “This has been a wonderful, wonderful day,” he said
huskily. “It’s been one of those rare days that upthrust themselves for
years in one’s dearest memories. You’re such a bully little comrade,
Maisie. I’m getting quite wild about you, dear,” and he kissed her
tenderly on the cheek closest to him and patted the other cheek.

Her eyes were starry with love; she snuggled closer to him and laid her
head in the hollow of his shoulder. “I’m glad you wanted to play with me
today, old dear,” she whispered. “I’ve been so happy. I was afraid, when
I heard Mark Mellenger had left early this morning, that you would
attempt the impossible task of spreading yourself over too much
territory. I don’t think I could have stood more than nine holes with
Tamea along for a gallery.”

“Score one for Tamea there,” he blurted undiplomatically. “She declined
to come with us.”

She raised her head and looked out of the window. “Oh,” she breathed,
“so you _did_ ask her!”

He was suddenly annoyed. “No, I did not, Maisie. She was the first to
suggest that I take you golfing.”

“Indeed! What magnanimity! I wonder why.”

“She said she had some letters to write.”

“Her letters could have waited. She had some other reason. I do not
relish being the recipient of her—of her—forbearance and generosity.
I’ll not be patronized by that barbarian.”

He was furious. “I’m sorry you mentioned her name,” he retorted. “_I_
have carefully refrained all day long from doing so.”

“Why?”

“Maisie, that eternal ‘why?’ of yours grows provoking. You make me feel
like a cadaver on a dissecting table.”

“You’re mixed in your metaphor, my dear Dan,” she replied with a small
clink of ice in her tones. “Your statement that you have carefully
refrained, all day long, from mentioning Tamea’s name to me seems to
imply an impression on your part that such mention would be distasteful
to me. I have a normal, healthy feminine curiosity, so I asked you why.
If one would ascertain information, one must make inquiries, I’m sure.”

“Well, you didn’t mention her name, and that seemed a bit queer. I
merely bowed to what I gathered was your unspoken wish.”

“How silly! Why, I didn’t refer to the girl today because I never once
thought of her today—until just now. Why should I think of her? She
doesn’t interest me in the least, Dan.”

“I’m glad to know that. I had a sneaking impression she did interest
you—vitally.”

“You amazing man! Now, why should she?”

“There you go,” he declared furiously, “driving me into a corner and
forcing me to say crazy things so you will not have to say them. How
like a woman!”

She laughed softly. Evidently she was enjoying his discomfiture
immensely. “Don’t evade the issue, Dan. Why did you have that sneaking
impression that Tamea did interest me—vitally?”

“Well, after that night Mel was up to dinner—that was a bit awkward,
you know. And you two do not like each other.”

“If you mean that I decline to fall on that young hussy’s neck and make
over her——”

“Don’t call her a hussy, Maisie. That doesn’t sound like you, and
besides, she isn’t a hussy. She’s a poor, lonely, misunderstood young
girl and——”

“And making desperate love to you,” Maisie taunted him.

“Well,” he chuckled, “that doesn’t annoy me particularly. In fact I feel
complimented.” Maisie winced. There was a note of sincerity in his tone
that robbed it of any hint of badinage. Dan continued: “The fact that
she is making desperate love to me—it would be useless and stupid to
endeavor to hide that fact—seemed to me to constitute sufficient ground
for my suspicion that you would prefer not to discuss her.”

Maisie turned abruptly and faced him with wide, curious eyes. There was
cleverly simulated amusement in those sea-blue orbs, and Dan’s train of
thought running his single-track mind was completely ditched.

“Indeed, Dan, my dear old friend, what possible interest could I have in
anything Tamea does—with you or any other man? You say you are
complimented. Perhaps you may even be delighted. I’m sure I do not know,
and I’m not sufficiently interested to inquire. It hasn’t occurred to me
to take you or Tamea or your love-making at all seriously.”

He was crushed. “I see I’ve made a star-spangled monkey of myself,” he
said gloomily.

“Oh, say not so, old boy!” Maisie bantered. She had him down in his
corner now; a little more battering and he would be counted out. “Have
you been indulging in some day-dreams, Dan?”

He nodded, and she laid her little hand on his forearm with an adorable
look of simulated interest, tenderness and banter. With a fascinating
uplift and outthrust of her lovely chin, Maisie said: “Tell Auntie about
it.”

“Oh, don’t annoy me. You’re a most provoking woman.”

“Do please tell, Dan’l. I’m that cur’ous.”

“Well, I suppose I might as well. It appears I have laid the flattering
unction to my soul that you loved me.”

“Yes?” Maisie barely cooed the word.

“And you do not.”

“How do you know, old snarleyow?”

“I’m not exactly feeble-minded.”

“No, indeed. I think you’re a high-grade moron. At least, you act like
one. Now, I want to know how you could possibly have gathered the
impression that I am in love with you.”

“I cannot answer that query, Maisie. I only know that very recently I
began to think you did.”

“You take too much for granted, Dan. Why didn’t you ask me to make
certain?”

“It’s not too late, Maisie.” He was desperate—afraid of Tamea and what
might happen to him if he did not forestall her by some definite
strategy—fearful of being “spoofed” so outrageously by Maisie for a
minute longer. In her present mood, half childish, half devilish, wholly
womanish, Maisie held a tremendous lure for him. Indeed, the environment
was ideal for such a situation. There was the blue sea out beyond them,
with the white waves breaking on a white beach; their little subdued
thunder as they broke, and then the mournful swish as the broken water
raced up the shingle, had a particularly soothing effect upon him. It
stimulated his imagination. On the mountains to their right the blue
sunset haze still lingered; cock quails were calling to their families
to “Come right home, come right home,” and somewhere over in the
chapparal a cowbell tinkled melodiously. Why, the man who could ride
with Maisie Morrison in such surroundings and not feel his pulse throb
with desire for love and contentment was fit for treason, stratagems and
spoils.

With a mighty sigh he said: “Well, Maisie, do you?”

Alas! The blundering idiot had neglected to postulate his monumental
query with a plain, blunt assertion of his own love for her. Maisie,
being what she was, could never by any possibility admit anything now.
She would not have him think of her in the years to come as a brazen
woman who had proposed to him—that she had been at all _gauche_. So she
looked him coolly in the eyes with a glance that did not conceal the
fact that she was irritated profoundly; with a certain silky waspishness
she gave him his answer.

“Well, not particularly, Dan.”

Fell a silence. Maisie, glancing sidewise at her victim, observed him
gulp. There was a momentary flush and then Dan took up the annunciator
and said very distinctly to Graves:

“Step on it, Graves. I think the county motorcycle officer has gone home
to dinner. At any rate, if we’re arrested I’ll pay the fine.”

Graves nodded and the car leaped to forty-five miles an hour. “I have a
special arrangement with Graves,” Dan continued, turning to Maisie as
calmly as if his heart were beating at its normal rate of seventy-six,
full and strong. “Unless instructions to the contrary are given him, his
orders from me are to obey the traffic laws. If he is arrested in the
absence of such instructions to the contrary, he pays his own fine.
Under any other circumstances, I pay it.”

“Fair enough,” Maisie answered, with a near approach to slang which,
coming from her, was rather delightful. To herself she said: “What a
charming old idiot he is! I’ve gotten him quite fussed and he is in a
hurry to get back to the hotel so he can go to his room and sulk. Well,
he almost proposed that time. I wonder if I wasn’t just a little bit too
feminine with him. I had an opportunity and failed to take advantage of
it. . . . Oh well, he shall propose again before the night is over, and
this time. . .”

Dan was humming a crazy little lumber-jack song:

    Oh, the Olson boys they built a shingle mill,
    They built it up on the side of a hill,
    They worked all night and they worked all day,
    And they tried to make the old mill pay.
      And—by heck—they couldn’t!

    So the Olson boys just took that shingle mill,
    And turned it into a whisky still;
    They worked all night and they worked all day,
    And tried to make the old still pay.
      And—by heck—they done it!

The golden moment had, indeed, passed. Maisie made one heroic attempt at
a rally. “Well?” she queried.

“Well, what?” Dan demanded.

“What we were discussing a moment ago.”

“I make a motion that we lay that motion on the table, Maisie.”

“The motion’s denied.”

“Well, a motion to lay on the table is not debatable. The question must
be put to a vote. All those in favor of laying on the table will vote
aye. Contrary minded—no!”

“No!” said Maisie.

“Aye!” boomed Daniel. “The ayes have it and it is so ordered.”

“Steam roller tactics,” Maisie protested and laughed to conceal her
chagrin. She had obeyed the instinct of her sex, which is to flee from
the male, even while obsessed with the desire to be overtaken. She had
yielded to the feminine impulse to chastise him for his clumsiness in
love-making, to play with him awhile, as a cat plays with a mouse,
before claiming the poor victim. She wanted him to be rough and
resolute, to thrust aside her protestations and claim her by brute force
and the right of discovery. She was very happy and she had desired to
linger a brief moment in the afterglow of her decision to surrender to
him—before surrendering. She wanted to be deferred to, to have him
plead with her for her love, to deluge her with a swift avalanche of
love words. How could she confess her yearning for him until he had laid
at her feet the wondrous burden of his own great love and asked her,
humbly, to accept the gift in exchange for her own?

Maisie had never really had a sweetheart before. She was a girl of the
type that has a cool habit of keeping amorous youths at arm’s length.
Unlike so many of her girl friends, she could not bear to be pawed over
by youths who failed to arouse in her the slightest interest. She had
never sought conquest for the sake of conquest, although all of her life
she had hugged to her heart an ideal of love. She would marry the one
great love of her life, and having married, she would devote her life to
making her husband happy and comfortable. She would bear children for
him; she would keep herself young and fresh; she would not do any of the
stupid things she frequently observed young matrons in her set doing to
their husbands—driving them crazy by daily, almost hourly, demands for
renewed, fervid assurances of undying love; tagging after them always,
herding them in, cutting them off from healthy association with other
harassed males, protesting against everything not connected with the
office and the home.

For Maisie was, without anybody close to her remotely suspecting it, a
tremendously romantic young woman. She yearned with a great yearning to
be wooed by a romantic lover who was fifty per cent slave and fifty per
cent Prince Charming. Long before she had ever fallen in love with Dan
Pritchard she had fallen in love with love; hence her automatic
resentment of Dan Pritchard’s peculiar approach to the Great Adventure.
Having shyly hidden within herself all her life, how could she expose
her heart to Dan merely to satisfy his accursed curiosity? What
assurance had she that he would, in turn, expose his heart to her?
Moreover, wasn’t it his first move, the monumental _omadhaun_! Maisie
smiled sweetly, but what she really wanted to do to Dan Pritchard was to
slap him furiously and then cry herself to silence and forgiveness in
his arms.

“Well, pride comes before a fall,” Dan answered her lugubriously.

“You weren’t so _very_ proud,” Maisie assured him, with a forgiving
glance.

“Perhaps. But that didn’t soften my fall.”

“I think perhaps you were quite within your rights in asking,” she
pursued eagerly. “You’ve known me so long and we’ve always been such
good pals, I suppose you concluded——”

“Yes, yes,” he interrupted. “I’m so glad you understand. Well, I’ll not
embarrass you again, my dear. You’re much too sweet and lovely to have
my silly action of a few minutes ago cast a shadow over our perfect
friendship.”

“I’ll have to propose to him after all,” Maisie thought. And she would
have done it if a car hadn’t come up behind them and with a hoarse toot
warned them of a desire to pass. Maisie could not bring herself to speak
at that moment. One does not desire to hint of one’s love to the
accompaniment of a motor siren. And to complicate matters Graves glanced
back quickly, measured at a glance the speed limit of the following car,
and proceeded to run away from it. This infuriated the driver of the
other car, who in turn speeded up and continued to honk at them until
Graves turned in at the entrance to the hotel grounds and, before Maisie
could renew the conversation, had paused before the portals of the hotel
and was standing beside the car holding the door open.

As Dan helped her out of the limousine she squeezed his hand and favored
him with a look of abject adoration.

“I know, dear,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t have presumed. It is sweet of
you to forgive me.”

Maisie ran quickly to her room, cast herself upon her bed and sought
surcease from her rage and chagrin in that soothing form of feminine
comfort known as “a good cry.” Indeed, she wept so long and so hard that
she decided she was too red and swollen of eye and nose to venture forth
where Tamea would see her. So she sent down word by her maid that she
had developed a severe headache, as a result of the hard day in the sun,
and would have dinner in her room.




                              CHAPTER XXI


Tamea, secretly delighted at Maisie’s misfortune, expressed to Mrs.
Casson and Dan a concern about Maisie which she was far from feeling.
Maisie had had him all day, and it had been Tamea’s generous thought to
abandon the evening to her rival. However, since fate had willed
otherwise, she decided promptly to make the most of her opportunity.
After dinner she managed to locate a bridge game with one partner
missing. The players were acquaintances of Mrs. Casson’s and it was no
trick at all for Tamea to steer her chaperon into this vacancy;
whereupon she took Dan’s arm and wandered with him down into the art
gallery. There was nothing in the art gallery that Dan could cheer for,
and Tamea quickly discovered this. Almost before he knew it, she had him
outside and was walking him through the scented starlit night down the
road toward Monterey Bay.

As they walked Tamea attempted no conversation. Instinctively she
realized that Dan did not want that. He had something on his mind and it
was depressing him. What he needed, therefore, was love and sympathy and
song; whereat Tamea twined her long soft fingers in his, swung his hand
as they walked and commenced softly, very softly, to sing a song of
Riva. It must have been a love song, for although Dan Pritchard could
not understand a word of it, yet in the soft succession of syllables he
caught a hint of passion, of longing, of pathos. . . . Once when,
apparently, Tamea had a half rest in her music, she raised his hand to
her lips before resuming her crooning love lullaby.

They came to a wooden bench on a low bluff, against which the waves beat
at extreme high tides. They sat down, Tamea still holding Dan’s hand.
She released it long enough for him to light a cigar, then she drew his
arm around her neck and laid her cheek against his. She continued to
sing and like a modern Circe she wove her spell about him.

Suddenly she ceased, placed one hand on his cheek and tilted his face
toward her.

“_Chéri_,” she whispered, “I love you with all my heart and soul.”

He stared at her incredulously. He seemed to be thinking of something
else—and he was. He was thinking how different—this—from his
experience of that afternoon with Maisie.

“But,” Tamea continued sadly, and let her hand fall back into her lap,
“my _chéri_ does not love his Tamea. She is half Kanaka.”

“Hush, child,” he admonished. “I have never thought of you as anything
save as one of God’s most glorious creations.”

“But,” Tamea persisted, “it makes a great difference—to be half Kanaka.
It makes a great difference to a white man like you.”

“It doesn’t make the slightest difference, sweetheart,” he cried, and
wondered why he had called her sweetheart. His heart was pounding now,
there was a drumming in his ears, he was atremble with the trembling
that had shaken him as a zephyr shakes the leaves of a forest that
evening on the Moorea after old Gaston had departed for Paliuli and the
girl had clung to him, weeping and despairing. “You’re wonderful,
glorious,” he continued, his words outpouring in a sort of rapturous
jumble and mumble, and swept her into his arms. Their lips met. . .
Tamea could kiss.

“Then you love your Tamea—truly, dear one?” she whispered finally.

“I adore you.”

“And you will not wed Maisie, even though you are engaged to her?”

“I am not engaged to Maisie and never have been. What’s more, I never
shall be, Tamea. No man could marry a more wonderful woman than Maisie,
but unfortunately for me, Maisie isn’t the least bit in love with me.”

Tamea started, drew away from him and eyed him wonderingly.

“You are wrong, dear one. Maisie adores you.”

He shook his head. “I asked her—once,” he explained. “She assured me
she did not.”

“She assured you of that which is not true, Dan Pritchard. Now why
should she do this? The women of your country are strange women, love of
my heart. They deny that which they feel. They pretend to be interested
in that which bores them. They desire a husband, yet they shrink from
taking him, even after he has looked upon them with the look that no
true woman should mistake.

“I do not understand this. I wanted you, dear one, and when you looked
upon me with favor I came to you. And I am very happy—so happy,
perhaps, that when we are married and I have borne children for you, I
may forget that I am not exactly that which you would wish me to be.

“But I shall learn, dear one. And I shall obey my lord because he is my
master and I love him.”

He stood up and held her tightly to his heart that was pounding so
madly, so rapturously. He rained kisses on her upturned flower face, and
the perfume of her glorious hair was as myrrh and incense to him.
“You’ve bewitched me, Tamea,” he muttered hoarsely. “Come, let us go
back to the hotel. Come!”

They went. Tamea knew better than to oppose a man. She knew that men
love best the women who give them their own way, who do not seek to
restrain or discipline or mold them to their own desires. Daughter of a
race that would disappear before emerging from the condition of family
life where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage for the
avoidance of sin and the preservation of property rights, Tamea was
following woman’s truest and most primitive instinct. She was ruling by
love and not by the sad and silly principle that possession is nine
points of the law.

Young as she was, Tamea was a fully developed woman, watchful,
observant, philosophical, courageous, resourceful; she had the gift,
rare in a woman, of initiative and instantaneous power of decision.
Gaston of the Beard had richly endowed her with the treasures of his
massive mind. She realized that she had swept Dan Pritchard off his
feet, that he was her slave, but that his servitude was not as yet
wholly voluntary. And she knew why. He was mentally hobbled by the
knowledge of her island blood and a vision of Maisie Morrison.

But Tamea was not dismayed. She had faith in her power—in the power of
love—to make him forget both. In the belief that he had been pledged to
Maisie she had decided gallantly to surrender him to Maisie that day.
She had told herself that if Maisie desired him, then, that day, she
would make certain of him, and if she did not, then was she a fool.
Well, she had not closed her deal, wherefore here was a fair field and
no favor. Tamea told herself that she had acted with a degree of
sportsmanship pleasing to Dan; and now, when from Dan’s own lips she
learned that Maisie had denied her love for him, Tamea had promptly
renewed the campaign; like a good soldier she had taken the offensive
and, as usually occurs in offensive campaigns, she had won. She had felt
Dan Pritchard’s wild kisses on her lips, her cheek, her hair, and she
was content.

Had Tamea been more conversant with Nordic custom, had she even a remote
conception of the holding power of the marriage vow even in a land where
thinking people speak learnedly of a divorce problem, she would have
urged upon Dan the desirability of motoring into Monterey that night and
getting married. It is probable that she would have urged this anyhow
had she the slightest fear of Maisie as a rival. All anxiety on that
point had now disappeared, however; on the morrow she would set herself
to the task of making friends with Maisie. . . . Meanwhile, if her
heart’s desire persisted in striding back to the hotel without speaking
to her, who was she to obtrude upon his mood? Instinctively she realized
that men resent intrusions upon their moods of depression or deep
thoughtfulness. Her father had been like that.

A white bench, gleaming through the cypress and fir trees down a path
that led off at right angles, caught her eye. She steered him toward it,
but he balked and shook his head in negation.

“You will come, dear one,” Tamea cooed.

“No, no,” he cried huskily. “Do not tempt me, Tamea.” And he moved a few
feet. When he looked back she was standing where he had left her and her
arms were outstretched to him. “No, I tell you,” he protested, and
hurried away from her. So Tamea walked down the little path and sat down
on the bench to await his return.

He returned to her. She knew he would.

“You are thinking, dear one, of what your friend Mellengair said to you
about me,” she challenged. “You are thinking of the danger to a great
white man to mate with a half-breed Kanaka.”

“Please,” he pleaded. “I wasn’t thinking of that at all.”

“Then you were wondering what Maisie would think—what she will say when
you tell her how it is with us two.”

“I—I do not think I shall tell her—yet.”

Tamea’s breast heaved and her dark eyes flashed. “Then I will tell her,
Dan. What have we to conceal? Maisie means nothing in my young life,”
she added, tossing in a colloquialism she had picked up, the Lord knows
where. “Why do you fear?”

“I do not fear.”

“I am glad to hear you say so. I should not love you if you were afraid
of anything.”

“Ah, but I am afraid of something, Tamea dear. I am afraid I do not love
you, with a sufficiently great love to marry you. Perhaps that which I
think is love is not really love, but passion.”

She laughed softly. Such fine distinctions were too difficult for her to
fathom. “What is love without passion?” she protested, “and what an
unlovely thing would be passion without love. Fear not, beloved. All is
well with that dear heart of yours, and even if it should be that you do
not love me too well—that some day your love should grow cold and you
should leave me—still would I ask of you tonight all the love of which
you are capable. Is it not better to have known a little happiness than
none at all? I think so. For look you, dear one. When the parting
comes—if come it should as Mellengair foretold that night—you will
leave me as you came to me—in love. What manner of fool is the woman
who would strive to hold a man whose love has grown cold and dim like
the stars at dawn? When you weary of me, Dan Pritchard, you will tell
me; then, because I shall always love you, I will prove my love; I will
send you away with a smile and a kiss. Ah, sweetheart, will that day
ever come? I think not. I think I shall never grow old or stale or
intolerable to you.”

“Never,” he promised, profoundly touched by her sweetness, her candor
and amazing magnetism. “You are driving me mad with longing for you,
Tamea.”

“And I am driving you mad against your will?”

He nodded.

Tamea actually chuckled, took his none too handsome, solemn face between
her two palms and looked at him long, earnestly and impersonally, as one
looks at an infant. She appeared to be puzzling something out in her
unspoiled mind.

“Such men as have sought me heretofore,” she said presently—“and I have
not been without attraction to several—have desired me—well, you
understand. There was that in their eyes that frightened me or disgusted
me and I would have none of them. I could read their hearts. They said
of me: ‘Ah, here is a half-caste maid. She is like the others—a
trusting, silly half-caste, without pride or dignity. I will amuse
myself with her.’ But you are different, _chéri_. It is not a woman you
seek, but a woman with a soul. I think I love you best because you are a
gentleman. I have not had many advantages, but something calls out in me
here”—she beat her breast—“to be different, that I may be beloved by
such as you.”

He murmured helplessly: “Well, I’ll be damned!”

“Possibly. Your white world is a strange world, with many things and
many customs that damn one—particularly a woman. Yet would I follow you
to damnation. Would you follow me?”

“I don’t know, Tamea. It requires courage for a white man to quarrel
with his white world—that is, such a white man as am I. Some of us
choose unhappiness rather than affront our world, you know.”

“Yes, I think I understand. That is your Christian religion. It teaches
strange things, such as duty, and the battle against sin. It is
something that makes one unhappy, uncertain, filled with many fears. It
causes men and women to be unhappy in this life that they may be happy
in a life to come. The missionary’s wife in Riva explained it to me—and
I laughed. I told her I would be happy in this, the only life I know I
shall know, and she grew angry and said I was a hopeless heathen.”

Tamea’s silvery little chuckle tinkled faintly on his ear like a distant
sheep bell. He hadn’t the slightest objection to spooning with Tamea,
but his natural refinement rebelled at a park bench. He felt like a
country lover; he wanted to go back to the hotel; he feared some one of
the guests might see them and start some silly gossip.

“Let us return to the hotel,” he blurted out bluntly. “Mrs. Casson will
be wondering what has become of us.”

Tamea raised his hand and looked at his wrist watch. “We will sit here
and talk until midnight,” she declared. “Two hours. It is little
enough.”

“Impossible, Tamea. We will get ourselves talked about. Of course I can
stand it, but you——”

“I can stand it too, dear Dan. Sit down, do!”

“Tamea! Please be sensible.”

The Queen of Riva stamped her foot. “You will place your arms around me
and speak to me of our love,” she commanded.

He obeyed. Nevertheless, while he held her to his breast and whispered
to her warm words of love; while his heart poured forth its passion and
longing and ecstasy so poignant it was almost pain, the vision of
Mellenger obtruded.

He was making a mistake. What his personal opinion of an alliance with
Tamea might be mattered not. His friends, the code of his class, forbade
the banns; and the realization of this brought him uneasiness and
unhappiness even in the midst of his wild happiness. He feared for the
future. Tonight the world appeared to stand still in space, but tomorrow
it would continue to revolve, and unless he took a very brave and
resolute stand, it would move on toward a tragedy.

However, he had sufficient sense, now that he found himself involved
with this tropic wild flower, to attempt the exercise of his undoubted
power over her to the end that he might outline definite plans for her
future and secure her acquiescence in them. He reverted, therefore, to
her father’s plans for her education and reminded Tamea that he had
promised her father to see to it that the latter’s plans were carried
out. He impressed upon her the vital necessity for acquiring as much
education, knowledge of the world and refinement, as white girls of her
age. She must have music lessons, she must learn to dance, to ride, to
drive a motor-car, to manage a household, to sing, to meet his white
friends on their own social level. In a word, she must make him very
proud of her.

Tamea agreed to obey him implicitly, but fought desperately against the
idea of a convent. She pleaded to be permitted to live at Dan’s house
and have private tutors; she reminded him that she was amply able to
afford them. When he explained to her the impossibility of this he saw
that she accepted his explanation as something irrelevant and immaterial
and decidedly peculiar. Reluctantly she abandoned her stand and sought a
compromise. If she went to a convent all week could she come home of
week-ends? Dan said she could not. Then would he come to the convent to
see her on Sundays? He promised to do this every Sunday, and thus the
momentous issue was settled. Tamea promised to enter the convent the day
after their return to San Francisco.

This was the first long, uninterrupted confidential conversation they
had ever had. Dan was an understanding and sympathetic listener with
sufficient patience to continue answering childish questions long after
the majority of his sex would have become irritated. And Tamea asked him
hundreds of questions on an amazing variety of topics; she discussed
intimately the principal features of her own life and extracted the last
shred of information he had to give concerning himself. He observed how
clear, direct and straightforward was her method of reasoning; she had a
nicely balanced choice of words, and a fascinating habit of clothing her
odd fancies in brilliant, brief, illuminating metaphor or simile. In
those two hours when Tamea talked to him, with her head on his breast,
he really began to know her; and to the spell which her physical beauty
had cast upon him was now added an ardent admiration for her mental
equipment. She possessed none of the flightiness, frivolity or
empty-headedness of the white flapper. To her, life was something very,
very real, something to be studied, considered and not to be tasted
indiscriminately. She had inherited from her father an insatiable
yearning for information on every subject that interested her remotely.

It was twelve-thirty before Dan, with a start, cast off his thraldom and
looked at his watch.

“Yes, I suppose we should go in,” Tamea said softly. “I have had my
delight spoiled for half an hour in the fear that you would look at your
watch. And now you have looked at it and the suspense is over.”

They walked slowly back to the hotel and came in the front entrance. In
the lobby of the hotel they came across Maisie reading a magazine.

“Hello, Maisie, my dear,” said Dan, “I had an impression you had a bad
headache and had retired. If I had remotely suspected you had recovered
we would have remained to keep you company.”

Maisie acknowledged this cheerful salutation with a forced smile. Her
eyes were cold and blue. “You must have taken a long walk, Dan. Were you
in to Monterey?”

“No, just down to the beach and back. The night is so balmy we’ve been
sitting outside. Tamea has been asking questions and I have been
answering them.”

“I had so many to ask,” said Tamea demurely, “that it was very late when
I finished.” She patted her mouth to stifle a little yawn. “I’m so
sleepy. Excuse me, please, Maisie. I am going to my room. Good night,
Dan, you darling. Good night, Maisie.”

Dan escorted her to the elevator, then returned to Maisie and sat down
beside her. Said she, coolly:

“Well, Dan, did Tamea propose to you tonight?”

On the instant he was irritated. He scowled at Maisie who, disdaining an
answer, reached over on his left shoulder and carefully brushed away a
very noticeable white patch on the blue cloth of his coat.

“I’ve told Tamea several times not to use so much powder,” she
complained.

Dan was aware that he was flushing very noticeably. When Maisie spoke
again the flush deepened.

“Aren’t you too old for that sort of thing—with that sort of
semi-developed girl, Dan?”

He knew that Maisie, coming downstairs for some purpose earlier in the
evening and learning from her aunt that he and Tamea had strolled away
together, had decided to sit where she could keep watch over both
entrances and await their return. What business had she spying upon
them? He was distinctly irritated.

“I must confess, Maisie, I do not relish——” he began, but Maisie
interrupted him.

“Oh, I dare say you’re thinking I’m an old snooper and that this is none
of my business. I’d be prepared to admit that if you had not asked me to
look after the child here. If you wish to have yourselves talked about,
why then, spooning around the hotel grounds until twelve-thirty o’clock
is a very good way.”

“Tamea is perfectly safe with me,” he defended, “and you ought to know
it.”

“I do. With any woman you have as much boldness as a canary bird, my
dear. What I object to, Dan, is the fact that you are not perfectly safe
with Tamea, and we might as well have an understanding regarding her now
as later. If you’re to be her guardian you cannot afford to let her vamp
you. As one of your very oldest and dearest friends I’m going to take
the liberty of painting you a picture of the future. I feel certain you
cannot see the future clearly, Dan, or else you refuse to see it. May I
speak very plainly, Dan?”

“What’s the use, Maisie? Mel has already painted me the same picture and
I disagree with his color tones. I think I know what I am doing and I
think, also, that one of the rarest gifts God ever grants to civilized
woman is a nicely balanced diplomacy. They have too much or too little.”

It was Maisie’s turn to flush now—with embarrassment and anger. The
flush departed, leaving her pale and trembling. “The first bearer of
unwelcome news hath but a losing office,” she forced herself to say.
“Are you driving back to town in the morning, Dan?”

He nodded.

“I think it would be just as well if you took Tamea with you,” Maisie
continued icily. “Aunt and I will remain here for a few weeks. I do not
feel quite up to the task of helping you with Tamea when you decline to
help me to help you to help her.”

“Oh, Maisie, I’m sorry——”

“Of course you are. And you’ll be much sorrier some day, old dear. I may
not have much of a gift for diplomacy, Dan, but it does not require the
gift of second sight to see that you are madly infatuated with this
girl, and common sense is as far from an infatuated man as the north
pole from the south. When you come to your senses send for me—should
you feel that you need me. Meanwhile—good night and—good-by until we
meet again.”

He was furious. He had assimilated smilingly one terrific blow from
Maisie within the past twelve hours and now he was forced to assimilate
another. He rose and bowed to Maisie with polite frigidity.

“You are perfectly right, Maisie,” he assured her. “I am, beyond
question, the most monumental ass in all California. Fortunately for
both of us, I was just about to inform you that Tamea has consented to
enter a convent immediately; consequently she no longer assumes the
proportions of a white elephant to both of us. I shall take her home
with me tomorrow and place her in school the day after. I am deeply
grateful to you for all that you have done for me in this emergency,
Maisie, and I am sincerely sorry my conduct has been displeasing to you.
It has been eminently satisfactory to myself! Good night and—since I
shall not see you before I leave tomorrow morning—_au revoir_. When I
need you again I shall not, however, send for you. I am already too deep
in your debt. Good night.”

Maisie managed her leave-taking admirably. A little nod, a cold and
twisted smile—and she was gone. The instant the elevator deposited her
on her floor, however, she fairly ran to her room, nor did she observe
that the door to Tamea’s room was opened ever so little; that Tamea’s
eye was at that crack and that the tears that rained down Maisie’s
cheeks had not escaped that keen scrutiny.

“I am right,” Tamea soliloquized as she switched off her bedside lamp
and slipped into bed. “Maisie loves him. She was too sure of him and
that is a mistake. No woman should be too sure of any man because all
men are children. After I left Dan with her they quarreled. That is
well. Dan is not ashamed of me, then. Now Maisie weeps. That is well,
too.”

The telephone tinkled faintly and Tamea took down the telephone.

“How do you do?” said Tamea cordially into the mouthpiece.

“Dan speaking, Tamea. I am going back to San Francisco tomorrow morning
and you are to accompany me.”

“But Maisie and her aunt remain here?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I am a very wonderful girl. I am smart—yes, you bet.” Her triumphant,
musical little chuckle was soothing to his scarred soul.

“Julia will be in your room at six o’clock to awaken you and pack your
suitcase and trunk. Good night, my dear.”

“I kiss you once—for luck,” said Tamea and smacked her lips loudly.
Then she hung up, snuggled down in bed and fell asleep almost instantly.
She had started the day with a handicap, but her finish had been
magnificent and she was well content.




                              CHAPTER XXII


Tamea was awakened by Julia at six o’clock. At seven she and Dan
breakfasted together; at seven-thirty they entered Dan’s limousine, the
smiling Julia tucked the robe in around her charge, took her seat beside
Graves, and the homeward hegira began. At San José they looked in on the
Mother Superior of a splendid convent that catered to the educational
needs of young ladies of high school age, and Dan made arrangements to
enter Tamea there the following day.

And this he did. Tamea had quite a wild weeping spell at the parting and
Dan had to promise to write to her daily. Then the necessity for
abandoning Julia was provocative of another outburst of grief, and to
add to the complications this proof of devotion so touched Julia, all
unused to such appreciation, that she wept loudly and copiously and was
pathetically homely after two minutes of it. Dan, aware that all
incoming and outgoing mail would be censored at this convent, realized
that he, faced daily the awful task of composing an innocuous little
letter to Tamea, and he was troubled with the thought that Tamea might
not understand and go into open revolt as a result.

Finally the ordeal was over and Dan motored back to San Francisco. Here
he discovered that there was trouble in the Seattle office of Casson and
Pritchard and that it was necessary for him to go there at once. He
welcomed the opportunity. Promptly he wrote Tamea that he was called
away, but that he would telegraph her every day while he was traveling.
Telegraphing was so much easier than writing under a handicap. Surely
Tamea would understand that he could not afford to call her endearing
names by wire. She must realize that men of his class did not do that
sort of thing.

He was gone two weeks. Graves met him at the ferry depot upon his
return.

“I’m glad you’ve returned, sir,” Graves announced. “The fur has been
flying since you left. Mrs. Pippy gave Julia the air the minute you and
Miss Larrieau were out of the house, so Julia beat it down to the
convent and reported to Miss Larrieau. Up comes Miss Larrieau from the
convent and tells Mrs. Pippy where to head in, and there’s a grand row.
Mrs. Pippy calls on Sooey Wan to give Julia the bum’s rush out of the
house and Sooey Wan tells her to go to Halifax or some other seaport.
Then Mrs. Pippy cries and Julia cries and Sooey Wan cusses like a pirate
and Miss Larrieau takes charge of the house and she and Sooey Wan are
running it.”

Dan gasped. “But where is Mrs. Pippy?”

“She must have got frightened and left, or else Miss Larrieau fired her.
Anyhow, she’s gone.”

“Has Miss Larrieau returned to school?”

“No, sir. I think she’s waiting until you get back.”

Dan sighed in lieu of the words he could not muster. Here indeed, in the
expressive terminology of Graves, was “hell to pay and no pitch hot.”

He dropped in at the office for a few minutes to look through his
accumulated mail. In it he found a formal resignation from Mrs. Pippy,
who regretted that the lack of his moral support at a time when her
position had grown untenable rendered her resignation imperative. She
informed him of the address to which he might mail her check.

“I suppose I shall never have another Mrs. Pippy,” Dan sighed, and
added, “and I hope I never shall.”

The moment he entered his home Tamea leaped out at him suddenly from
behind the portières where she had been hiding. “_Chéri!_” she cried and
favored him with a bone-cracking hug. “My adored one,” she added, and
delivered a barrage of osculation that left Dan quite breathless. When
he could speak he said:

“Graves has told me of the battle which took place here during my
absence. Tamea, I am not pleased with your high-handed procedure.”

“_P-f-f._ Dear one, that Pippy was offensive. I disliked that old woman
the first time she looked at me—like this,” and Tamea wrinkled her
adorable nose. “There was nothing else to do. She had defied me by
dismissing Julia, and this was mutiny, since Julia was mine and you had
given her to me. If the king fails to protect those who come under the
king’s protection, the people murmur and there is discontent and perhaps
revolt, is there not? My place was here to protect my servant and I came
and protected her. I have done well and you must not reprove me, dear
one. If you do I shall be very unhappy.”

“Oh, it’s all right, it’s all right,” Dan protested. “It’s just that I
hate a beastly row. You did not secure permission from the Mother
Superior to come here?”

“I?” the amazed girl demanded. “I—Tamea, plead for permission? You do
not know me, I think, dear one. Julia came in the car with Graves and I
left at once. At the gate the nun on watch desired to stop me. She even
laid hands upon me, but I thrust her aside. _Tiens_, I was angry!”

“I judged as much from a letter which the Mother Superior wrote me.
Tamea, you may not return to that convent. They cannot control you and
they do not desire that you remain there longer. My dear, can you not
realize that this is very, very embarrassing to me?”

“It is very delightful to me, darling Dan. I did not wish to remain
there. They opened your letters to me and before I could seal my letters
to you they were read. So I did not send them, but kept them all for
you. Tonight, after dinner, you shall read them, one by one. Yes, at
that convent there was much between us of what you call in this country
rough house.”

Sooey Wan came in from the kitchen, grunted a greeting to his employer,
picked up Dan’s bags and disappeared upstairs with them. Returning, he
paused for a moment at the foot of the stairs and said:

“Missa Dan, you fire Julia, Sooey Wan ketchum boat, go back China pretty
quick.”

His impudence enraged Dan. “You may start now, Sooey Wan,” he told the
Celestial. “I’ll keep Julia, but you’re fired.”

Sooey Wan looked at Tamea, who smiled and nodded to him. In effect she
said to him: “Don’t pay any attention to him, Sooey Wan. I am in command
here.”

Sooey Wan had evidently planned for this moment. His shrill, unmirthful
cachinnation rang through the house. “Boss,” he piped, “you klazy, allee
same Missie Pip. You fire me? Pooh-pooh! No can do. Sooey Wan belong
your papa, papa give me to you, how can do? You fire me, who ketchum
dinner, eh? You klazy.”

Again Dan sighed. It appeared that Sooey Wan’s first introduction to the
Pritchard household had been due to a tong war in Chinatown. Sooey Wan,
young, bold, aggressive, had been marked for slaughter in a tong feud,
and the high-binder whose duty it had been, for a consideration, to waft
him into the spirit world, had dropped Sooey Wan with his first shot.
Then a cane had descended upon his wrist, causing him to drop his
pistol. The peacemaker, Dan’s father, had thereupon possessed himself of
it, handed the would-be assassin over to the police and forgotten the
incident. Sooey Wan eventually recovered from his wound and at once
sought out Pritchard senior, to whom he explained that by reason of an
ancient Chinese custom he who saved a human life was forever after
responsible for that life. Therefore, it behooved Dan’s father to place
Sooey Wan on his payroll instanter, which, being done, the latter became
one of the assets of the Pritchard estate. Inasmuch as Dan had been the
sole heir to that estate, naturally, to Sooey Wan’s way of thinking, he
had inherited his father’s responsibility for Sooey Wan’s life while the
latter continued to live. _Ergo_, Sooey Wan could not be dismissed!

Decidedly, reprisals were not in order. There was naught to do save
accept the situation gratefully, cast about for another school for Tamea
and try, try again. Dan recalled that there was a very excellent convent
in Sacramento. He would call upon the Mother Superior there, explain
Tamea at length and seek to have the censorship law repealed in so far
as she was concerned. He would offer to pay double the customary rate in
return for special treatment and forbearance in Tamea’s case. And he
would tell that infernal Julia what he thought about her—no, he would
not. If he did she would weep and when Julia wept her pathetic lack of
beauty was extraordinarily depressing.

“Well, I’m awfully happy to see you again, sweetheart,” he said, and
favored Tamea with one hearty kiss in return for the dozens she had
showered upon him. “Any news from Maisie or her aunt?”

“Divil a wor’rd, sor,” said Julia, coming downstairs at that moment. “I
called her up, makin’ bould enough to ax her to reason wit’ Mrs. Pippy,
sor, but she would not. Says she to me, says she: ‘Julia, there’s no
reasonin’ wit’ anybody in that household, so I’ll not be botherin’ me
poor head about them. When Misther Pritchard wants me he’ll sind for
me’.”

“Quite so, Julia, quite so. She is absolutely right.”

He went upstairs, bathed and changed his clothes. He intended returning
to the office, but Tamea pleaded with him to spend the remainder of the
day amusing her. So he took her to a vaudeville show, and Tamea held his
hand and, between acts, whispered to him little messages of love. Once,
when the house was dark, she leaned over and kissed him very tenderly on
the ear. Then, remembering that he held a grudge against Sooey Wan, whom
he knew would prepare a special dinner to celebrate his return, Dan
decided to take Tamea out to dinner and, deliberately, to fail to
telephone Sooey Wan. He knew that would infuriate the old Chinaman and
indicate to him that he had been reproved.

They went to an Italian restaurant, the Fiore d’Italia, up in the Latin
quarter. It was a restaurant which was patronized nightly by the same
guests; indeed, Dan, who had a weakness for some of the toothsome
specialties of the house, had been a guest there about three times a
month for years, and Mark Mellenger had been, with the exception of
Thursday nights when he dined at Dan’s house, a nightly habitué of the
Fiore d’Italia for fifteen years. Dan had a desire to bask for an hour
in the light of Mellenger’s delightful but infrequent smile and had
chosen to take Tamea to the Fiore d’Italia in the hope of seeing him
there.

Mellenger was just rising from his table as they entered. He greeted
them both cordially, but to Dan’s pressing invitation to sit and talk
awhile he replied that he was much too busy at the office and hurried
away. Scarcely had he gone when Grandpère, an ancient waiter who looked
for his evening tip from Mark Mellenger as regularly as evening
descended upon San Francisco, came in with an order of striped bass _à
la_ Mellenger. Dan and Tamea had seated themselves at the table vacated
by Mellenger, and Grandpère stood a moment, blinking at the vacant
chair. Then he glanced toward the peg upon which Mellenger’s wide soft
hat always hung and, finding it gone, sighed and returned to the kitchen
with the order.

“Why, Mel left without eating!” Dan exclaimed.

“Yes, he saw us first, dear one. He desired to spare himself the
embarrassment of having to speak too much with me,” Tamea explained. “At
Del Monte I told Mellengair some things he did not like.”

“Oh, Tamea, how could you? He is my dearest friend.”

She shrugged. “He told me things I did not like. We are even now. I
think I should tell you that he will not come to your house again for
dinner while I am there.”

Again Dan sighed. Things were closing in around him. He had lost an
excellent housekeeper, his maid and his cook were in open revolt, his
best man friend avoided him and his best woman friend had quarreled with
him—and all over Tamea. The amazing part of it all was that he simply
could not quarrel with Tamea. He could only adore her and strive to
believe that it wasn’t adoration. Tamea, watching him narrowly, saw that
he had surrendered to the situation and, as was his custom, he would
forbear seeking the details of a situation repugnant to him. So she
dipped a small radish in salt and handed it to him with the air of
royalty conferring the accolade.

There was dancing to the music of an accordion played by an Italian. He
was a genial man, with smiles for all the dancers, and very generous
with his encores. Old patrons nodded to one another across the tables,
there was much pleasant conversation and some noisy eating, for the
Fiore d’Italia was a restaurant dedicated to food rather than the
niceties of eating, and was patronized by democratic folk who held good
food to be superior to table manners. The camaraderie of the place
appealed to Tamea at once, and when presently the accordion player,
between dances, commenced to play very softly “O Sole Mio,” and an
Italian waiter who had almost attained grand opera paused with a stack
of soiled dishes on his arm and sang it, Tamea was transported with
delight.

“We will dance, no?” she pleaded brightly.

Dan would have preferred the bastinado, but—they danced. All eyes were
on Tamea. Who was she? Where did she come from? That was Pritchard with
her, was it not? Who was Pritchard? Zounds, that girl was a corker! How
she could dance and how she loved it! A regular Bohemian, eh?

“You play very well, Monsieur,” Tamea complimented the musician as the
dance ceased. “Please, I would play your accordion. It is so much finer
than my own.”

Before Dan could protest the Italian had handed her his instrument,
Tamea had seated herself and commenced to play “Blue Danube Waves.” Dan
stood, beseeching her with his eyes to cease making a spectacle of
herself and return to the table, but the spirit of carnival had entered
into Tamea and she would not be denied. She knew what Dan wanted her to
do but she would not do it.

“Every one dance,” she commanded. “And I will play that this tired
musician may dance also. It is not fair that he should play always.”

There was a hearty round of applause and the dancers came out on the
floor.

“Tamea, dear, you’re making a spectacle of yourself,” Dan pleaded.

“If you would do the same, dear one,” she replied lightly, “you would be
such a happy boy.”

She was beating time with her foot; and when the dance was ended she
played a ballad of Riva and sang it. The Fiore d’Italia was in an uproar
of appreciation, athrill at a new sensation, as the girl handed the
accordion back to its owner, thanked him and joined Dan at their table.
Immediately all who knew Dan personally or who could rely on the
democracy and camaraderie of the place to excuse their action, came over
to be introduced to Tamea and felicitate her on her playing and singing.
Marinetti, the proprietor, was delighted, and in defiance of the
Eighteenth Amendment presented Tamea with a quart of California
champagne, which Grandpère fell upon and carried away to be frappéd.

The girl’s face glowed with a happiness that was touching. “Here is
life, dear one,” she cried. “Why should I stifle in a convent when there
is joy and singing and dancing in your world? We will come here very
frequently, no?. . . Oh, but yes! You would not deny your Tamea the
pleasure of this beautiful place? Would you, darling Dan Pritchard? Say
no—very loud—like that—_No_.”

“No,” he growled.

His reward was a loving twig at his nose while those around him laughed
at his embarrassment. What a dull fellow he was to be so evidently
appreciated by such a glorious creature, they thought. Some youths among
the diners even wondered if it might not be possible to relieve him of
the source of his embarrassment!

It was eleven o’clock when they left the Fiore d’Italia, and Tamea had
sung, danced and played her way into the hearts of the patrons to such
an extent that Dan felt he could never bear to patronize that restaurant
again. Thus he retired with the added conviction that in addition to
robbing him of his friends Tamea had now robbed him of his favorite
restaurant. Like all bachelors he was a creature of habit and resented
the slightest interference with those habits.

The following morning he journeyed to Sacramento to arrange for Tamea’s
entrance into the convent there. To his huge disgust small-pox had
developed in the school and the convent was under quarantine. So he
returned to San Francisco and, feeling a trifle depressed at the manner
in which fate was pursuing him, he telephoned to Maisie.

With characteristic feminine ease Maisie elected to forget that she had
been fifty per cent responsible for their disagreement at Del Monte. She
had thought the matter over, tearfully but at great length, and had come
to the conclusion that even if she was not a martyr she could not afford
to let Dan Pritchard think so. After a silence of about two weeks Dan
had a habit of ringing up and burying the hatchet, and Maisie hadn’t the
slightest doubt but that this was his mission now. She resolved to be
dignified and enjoy his suit for reëstablishment of the _entente
cordiale_.

“Hello, Dan’l,” she answered, and her clear, cool voice sounded like
music in Dan’s ears. “Are you in trouble?”

“I’m up to my eyebrows in it, Maisie!”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Dan! But then it’s no more than I expected. I thought
you’d send for me when you needed me.”

“I do not need you!” he replied furiously, and hung up.




                             CHAPTER XXIII


Throughout these late trying experiences Dan had been further distressed
to discover that during the hours he was unavoidably separated from
Tamea, he thought more about her than he did of his business. He had
missed her bright presence far too keenly during her brief sojourn at
the convent—so much so, in fact, that when one day he asked himself if
it were really possible that he, sober, steady, dependable, sane Dan
Pritchard, had fallen in love with this lovely half-caste girl, his
common sense assured him that it was even so.

He told himself that this was silly, stupid, unintelligent, that he
could not afford to yield to this tremendous temptation, that it would
be a terrible mistake, bitterly to be repented. Nevertheless, he lacked
the courage or the steadfastness of purpose to take the offensive
immediately; he told himself he _would_ take the offensive, but not
immediately. . . and following his brief spat with Maisie over the
telephone he found Tamea’s society so comforting and stimulating that he
shuddered at the thought of hurting her—himself—with the promulgation
of a sophisticated argument she could not possibly understand and which
she would have rejected even had she possessed the gift of understanding
a white man’s reason for discarding her love, even while he yearned for
it.

From time to time Sooey Wan, growing impatient at his adored employer’s
shilly-shallying, urged definite action. Again and again he reminded Dan
that the sooner he married the lady queen the sooner would his adventure
in fatherhood commence. Sooey Wan confided that he had consulted with
the most eminent magicians in Dupont Street, with a priest who was a
very wise man and an oracle; he had sought signs of approbation from his
numerous Chinese gods and had propitiated them with much burning of punk
in the Joss houses; he had burned devil papers in every room of the
house and had strung fire crackers completely around the house and set
them off, to the signal terror of the neighbors.

The magician had predicted for Dan five brawny sons—a hard hand to
beat. The oracle had advised quick action since procrastination has ever
been the thief of time and the girl was young and comely. Why, then,
dally until she should become a hag? In his own mind Sooey Wan was fully
convinced, from certain signs, that his Mongolian gods looked with favor
upon the match, and since practically all of the fire crackers had
exploded, the old heathen was certain that the devils of bad luck, which
might or might not have interfered, had been thoroughly exorcised.

To all of this harangue Dan gave a stereotyped reply: “Sooey Wan, you
are an interfering and impudent old Chinaman. Keep your nose out of my
private affairs.”

Whereupon Sooey Wan would fairly screech: “Missa Dan, wh’ for you play
damn fool? Boy, you klazy. Sure you klazy.”

When Dan discovered that he would have to mark time until the convent in
Sacramento should be released from quarantine, he pleaded the urgent
necessity for an unavoidable absence from the city and sought to start
his offensive campaign against Tamea’s steadily mounting influence over
him by going away for a two weeks’ fishing and painting excursion in
Southern California. Tamea was somewhat piqued because he did not invite
her to accompany him, but he ignored her little pout, kissed her
tenderly and fled. And he had no sooner settled himself comfortably in a
hotel at Santa Catalina Island than Maisie Morrison rang up Julia.

“Julia,” she said, “where is Mr. Pritchard?”

“The dear Lord only knows, Miss Morrison.”

“I _must_ know where a telegram can reach him, Julia. Mr. Pritchard did
not tell his secretary where he was going, so it could not have been a
business trip. Put Graves on the line, Julia.”

Graves, summoned from the garage, informed Maisie that he had driven Mr.
Pritchard to the Southern Pacific depot. There he had heard his employer
direct a porter to stow his baggage in a compartment. Included in this
impedimenta had been a case of fishing rods and a sketching outfit.
Graves had noted that his employer had not taken a creel with him, hence
he opined that if any fishing was to be done it would be sea
fishing—and the boss had always had a weakness for Santa Catalina.

When Dan Pritchard came in from fishing that first day he found a
telegram in his box at the hotel. It was from Maisie and read:

    Something has jarred Uncle John dreadfully. He is at home ill,
    but mentally, not physically. Better assure yourself that
    everything is quite right at the office. Would return
    immediately if I were you, although when you do you need not
    bother to call on me unless you feel you really ought to.

                                                             MAISIE.

Within the hour Dan Pritchard had chartered a seaplane and was flying
north. About ten o’clock that night the plane swooped down in the
moonlight and landed him at Harbor View; within half an hour he was
ringing the doorbell of John Casson’s home.

“Take me immediately to Mr. Casson’s room,” he ordered the butler who
admitted him. “It will not be necessary to announce me.”

The man eyed him sympathetically and silently led the way upstairs. John
Casson was not in bed, however. He was seated on a divan in his wife’s
upstairs sitting room, staring dully into a small grate fire. From her
seat across the room his wife watched him furtively.

“Good evening, Mrs. Casson. Good evening, Mr. Casson,” Dan greeted them.
“What’s gone wrong, Mr. Casson?”

The old dandy looked up, frightened. Dan could have sworn he shuddered.
“I’d rather not discuss the matter tonight, Pritchard,” he parried. “I’m
not well.”

“I’m sorry for that, sir. What appears to be the matter with you? Where
do you feel ill? Have you eaten something that didn’t agree with you
or——”

“He has,” Mrs. Casson interrupted bitterly. “He’s been on a diet of
high-priced rice for the past several weeks and it has made him ill.
John, do not evade Dan’s query. He is equally interested with you in
this matter. Tell him what happened the day he left town.”

“Well, Pritchard, my boy,” old Casson quavered, “the rice market has
gone to glory. It’s down to five cents and every rice dealer in this
city is a bankrupt.”

“Do you include Casson and Pritchard in the cataclysm?”

Casson nodded slowly and suddenly commenced to weep.

“But we sold our rice——”

“I know we did—on ninety days. Now the people we have sold it to are
wiped out and cannot pay for it. The damned Cubans are responsible. They
deliberately wrecked the market. Overnight they made up their minds they
had rice enough. The cargadores went on strike and refused to handle any
more rice. The port of Havana is glutted with rice. It’s on every dock
and on every barge. They jammed the docks with it and loaded all the
barges and then quit. Now the rice is being rained on; the ships that
brought it are lying under heavy demurrage because they cannot get
discharged; the rice brokers and wholesalers have treacherously refused
to accept delivery on bona fide orders because the Havana market broke
immediately when some frightened owners of cargoes cut their prices in
order to unload at any price. Panic, I tell you—worst rice panic
imaginable. Rice was up to twenty-one cents and overnight it broke to
five cents.”

Dan sat down. This was exactly what he had feared might happen. The war
was ended, but profiteers, still hungry for exorbitant gains, had put
the screws on rice, the staple food of Cuba. They had cornered the crop
there, such as it was, and the crop that year had been meager. Then they
had filled Havana harbor with ships loaded with Oriental rice and had
steadily jacked the price up to the point of saturation. And then the
Cubans, maddened at this brutal and perfectly legal form of brigandage,
had sprung their coup and, overnight, had smashed their oppressors by
the very simple method of refusing to handle longer the commodity which
was so necessary to their existence. They knew they could get rice when
they needed it, and get it at their price. These ships had brought rice
to Havana; now that Havana would not accept it or handle it, where could
another ready and highly profitable market be found? And would these
ships, chafing at the delay, agree to go elsewhere with their cargoes,
save at a prohibitive freight rate? Rice freights from the Orient would
collapse now, and that collapse would be followed by a debacle in other
lines.

In a flash Dan saw that the post-war slump had started—an economic
avalanche, traveling swiftly toward bankruptcy and ruin. “I see,” he
said quietly. “Beautiful work, beautiful. Three cheers for the Cubans. I
didn’t think they were up to a brilliant stroke like that. And now
you’re cussing them out, Mr. Casson, because they refused to let the
rice bandits take the food out of their mouths. Well, you deserve this,
Mr. Casson, but I’ll be hanged if I do. You dragged me into this,
without my knowledge or consent—you damned, silly, egotistical,
brainless idiot—Mrs. Casson, I forgot you were present. I crave your
pardon for my rudeness and I shall not again offend.
I—I—think—I—shall—sit down.”

He did, looking quite white and strained. His eyes burned like live
coals. “Well, Mr. Casson,” he said presently, “suppose we start in at
the beginning. To begin with, we had half a million bags of California
rice stored in warehouses here and there, and you hypothecated the
warehouse receipts and bought Philippine and Chinese rice. Well, we sold
our rice in warehouse at a huge profit, half cash, balance in ninety
days. How about Banning and Company, who bought it?”

“The chief clerk telephoned me today that they had filed a petition of
voluntary bankruptcy. They must be cleaned out because Banning blew his
brains out an hour after filing the petition. He had half a million
dollars’ worth of life insurance, without an anti-suicide clause in it.
His family will doubtless get that. I suppose he wanted to do the decent
thing.”

“Well,” said Dan, “Banning and Company jarred us but they didn’t put us
down. Lucky for us I sold that Shanghai rice, ex. steamer Chinook, for
cash. You raved at my idiocy when I made an eight thousand dollars’
profit on that deal and accused me of throwing away a potential profit
of a quarter of a million dollars. As a matter of fact, I threw away a
potential loss of about a million dollars. We’ll take a loss of more
than a dollar a bag on that million bags of California rice, however.
I’ll tell ’em you’re a smart business man, Mr. Casson. Well, how about
that eight thousand tons at Manila—the lot we sold to Katsuma and
Company at the market, against sight draft with bill of lading attached,
payable at the Philippine National Bank?”

“Our Manila agent cabled that the bank had refused to honor the
documents. I called up Katsuma and tried to get him to do something
about providing funds or a credit to meet that draft, but he wouldn’t or
couldn’t——”

“Katsuma didn’t want to. He was up to the usual Jap trick—running out
from a losing game. They never stand for their beating. You made him a
price, f.o.b. Havana, that included cost, insurance and freight, did you
not?”

Old Casson nodded miserably.

“Well, Katsuma got a notion that shipping rice to Havana was apt to lead
to great grief, so he just didn’t meet the draft. That keeps the owners
of the Malayan out of their freight money and the chances are they will
not permit the vessel to sail until the freight is paid. Did they come
back on us for the freight?”

“They did. I paid it, and the Malayan is at sea with a cargo of eight
thousand tons of rice fully insured but not paid for. It is going to
cost us eighteen cents a pound to deliver that rice in Havana, and when
it gets there we cannot deliver it. If we do it will be worth what we
can get for it—say three to five cents—and the demurrage on the
Malayan will be two thousand dollars a day. Of course we have a suit
against Katsuma and Company for breach of contract, but in the meantime
we have to pay for the rice and I’ve given a ninety-day draft on London
for that——”

“When it comes due we will not be able to meet it,” Dan said dully. “The
Katsuma assets are already nicely sequestrated. You monumental jackass!
Why didn’t you sue and attach their bank account, everything they have,
quietly and without notice, the instant you learned they had repudiated
their contract?”

“That would be a great deal like locking the stable door after the horse
had been stolen, wouldn’t it, Pritchard?”

Dan nodded. This was the first bright thing he could remember Casson
having said in years. Yes, the wily Orientals had seen the storm
gathering and had fled to their cyclone cellar, caring not a whit what
happened to others, to their own business honor, to their business,
provided their capital remained intact. They could always organize again
under a new name.

“Well, we’ve been sent to the cleaners, Mr. Casson. You have succeeded
magnificently, despite all I could do to thwart you. You have made a
hiatus of your own life and mine. You’ve smashed your wife and Maisie.
You were drowning; I tried to save you and you pulled me under with you.
Well, I don’t know what you intend doing with your private fortune—if
you have any, which I doubt—but I have assets close to two million
dollars and our creditors can have them. As your partner I am jointly
and severally responsible. If you cannot pay, I must. I shall. When the
squall hits us we will call a meeting of our creditors, tell them how it
happened, have a receiver appointed, turn over everything we have to him
and quit business with whatever dignity we can muster.”

He turned to Mrs. Casson. “If you will excuse me, Mrs. Casson, I will go
now. Good night.”

He went out into the hall and his head hung low on his heaving breast,
his shoulders sagged, his arms dangled loosely from his long, raw-boned
frame. He shook his head a little and mumbled something—curses,
doubtless. At the bottom of the stairs he ran into Maisie. Her face was
very white and she had been weeping.

“Thanks for your telegram, Maisie. I came as fast as I could. It’s too
late. Cleaned—cleaned—smashed by that madman—crooked as a can of
worms—lucky thing I didn’t ask you to marry me that day—lucky for you
you weren’t interested in my proposition. I couldn’t afford that luxury
now, my dear. It’s terrible to have made two million dollars doing work
one loathes, then lose the two million filthy dollars and have to start
in doing the loathsome job all over again.

“Well, I’m young—I suppose I can stand it. Good night, Maisie, good
night. Sorry for you and Mrs. Casson—mighty sorry.”

He fended away the imploring, uplifted arms that sought to enfold him,
for Maisie, like all women who trifle with a man’s heart when he is
prosperous and happy, desired to claim that heart now that it was
bruised and broken.

“Don’t—please—I can’t stand it—don’t want to be coddled,” he
muttered, and strode past her to the door. It opened and closed after
him swiftly, and Maisie, standing on the steps, watched through her
tears his tall, ungainly form stumbling down the street. She yearned
with a great yearning to run after him, to take that white face to her
heart, to whisper to him a torrent of love words, to cherish and comfort
him. Yet she knew that Dan, like all men, when cruelly hurt, preferred
to be alone, resenting sympathy and desiring silence.

“Poor dear,” she murmured, “when you have recovered a little from the
shock of this failure I shall go to you and nothing shall keep you from
me.”




                              CHAPTER XXIV


Dan walked home. He had to have physical action. It was close to
midnight when he let himself into his house, but there was a dim light
burning in the living room and Dan turned in here, cast his hat and coat
on top of the piano and rang savagely for Sooey Wan, who, having just
returned from his nightly pilgrimage to Chinatown, answered on the jump.
At sight of Dan’s pale, tortured face the old Chinaman turned and fled
to the kitchen. He returned presently bearing a siphon bottle, some ice,
a bottle of Scotch whisky and—two glasses. Silently he mixed two
highballs, handed one to Dan, took the other himself, sat down and said
in a voice of compelling gentleness:

“Missa Dan, you tellum ol’ Sooey Wan. Wha’s mallah, boy?”

Dan cooled his parched throat with the highball. Indeed, he had rung for
the Chinaman for the very purpose of ordering one. Strange, he thought,
how Sooey Wan could understand him without a blueprint and directions
for using!

“Sooey Wan, I’m all through. I have gone broke.”

“All the way?” Sooey Wan’s voice cooed like a flute.

“All the way and back, Sooey Wan. I’m done. You’ll have to leave me now
and go back to China. I cannot afford to pay your wages any more.”

“To hell with wages!” Sooey Wan, for the first time in his life, was
genuinely angry, disgusted and humiliated. His eyes showed it, his
wrinkled lower lip twisted and revealed his yellow fangs, his voice
reeked with the very soul of profanity as he rasped out a few words in
Chinese. Then: “Big fool, wha’ for you talkum money to Sooey Wan?”

“You know very well I didn’t mean to offend you, you old idol,” Dan
protested. “I spoke the truth. I am broke, utterly smashed.”

“Shut up!” screeched Sooey Wan. “Wha’ for you all time tellum lie?” He
set down untasted the highball he had planned to drink in profound
sympathy with his adored boss and left the room.

“Sooey Wan, come back here!” Dan ordered.

Sooey Wan’s voice rose in a shriek like the bull fiddle of his native
land. “Shut up! Shut up! You klazy fool, wha’s mallah you? You no bloke.
You bet. No can do.”

Dan sighed and sipped his highball. At the same moment Tamea slid out
from under a dark afghan on a divan in the far corner of the room. She
had fallen asleep there and, unknown to Sooey Wan and Dan, had been
listening to their conversation. Swiftly she crossed the room to him
now; as he rose to greet her she put her arms around his neck and drew
his head down until his cheek caressed hers. Thus she held him a long
time, in silence, save for the plainly discernible, regular beat of her
heart. Then:

“Poor boy! You are hurt? But yes, I know it.”

He nodded. “Smashed,” he murmured. “All my money gone. Ruined.”

Tamea’s glance went past his ear and rested on Sooey Wan standing in the
doorway, a large red lacquered box in his arms. She shook her head at
him ever so slightly and like a yellow wraith he faded back into the
hall.

“Ruined?” Tamea queried. “Has my lord, then, parted with his honor?”

“No, no, not that,” he cried brokenly. “Nobody will think that of me. I
will pay, but it will take all I have to do it, and when they have
finished with me I shall have nothing left wherewith to make a new
start. But never mind, Tamea. I’m not whipped. Just dazed, not down for
the count. I’ll come back.”

He could feel the little chuckle of mirth that rippled through the lithe
body pressed so close against him. “So?” she declared with her golden
little laugh, “it is only a matter of money. And yet my lord is shaken
like a coco-palm in the monsoon. Silly, silly white man. He does not
know that I have money and that all of it is his.” She drew his head
around and kissed him on the lips; he trembled with the knowledge of her
tremendous sweetness. “You will take my money and let me see you smile
again, Dan Pritchard,” she commanded.

“No, no, darling. I couldn’t do that—ever. Please do not ask me to.”

“But why, dear one?”

“Then indeed would I be parting with my honor.”

“What madness! Is it because I am not your wife? Well, we will be
married quickly and then——”

“No,” he protested. “I tell you it is impossible. I’ll never be able to
repay the debt of your asking me to take your money, but—I shall never,
never take one penny of it. I couldn’t.”

“But after we are married——”

“Never. I am your guardian. Your father gave you to me because he had
faith in my manhood, he believed me to be a gentleman. You will not
understand because your love blinds you, Tamea, but the white men of my
world have a code and we must never break it.”

“Oh,” said Tamea softly, and her eyes filled with tears. “Of what use is
money save to buy happiness? When a man takes a woman to wife does he
not take all she has—all of her love, all of her wealth, all of her
faith? Is she not to be the mother of his children? You are right, dear
one. I could never understand your white man’s code.”

“Some day you will, honey. Kiss me good night and run along to your
room, child. I am unhappy tonight and when I am unhappy I have a desire
to be alone. I wish to think.”

She kissed him and went upstairs obediently; as she paused on the first
landing and gazed down into the hall she saw Sooey Wan slide noiselessly
into the living room, his red lacquered box still clasped under his arm.
Tamea stood there, wondering—and then to her ears came distinctly the
sound of money clinking merrily.

Tamea came back downstairs and peered around the jamb of the door into
the living room. Sooey Wan was on his knees beside the red lacquered
box, with both hands tossing out on the carpet hundreds of gold pieces,
bales of yellow-backed bills and large, fat, heavy Manila envelopes.

“You count ’em, Missa Dan,” he begged when the box was empty. And Dan
Pritchard, wondering, knelt beside Sooey Wan and counted long and in
silence, making many notations on a piece of paper. And Tamea, watching,
presently was aware that Sooey Wan, who trusted not in banks, had, in
his forty-odd years in the United States, accumulated in that red
lacquered box a fortune of two hundred and nineteen thousand, four
hundred and nine dollars and eighty cents in cash and bonds.

“Sooey Wan,” said Dan Pritchard, “do you cook for me by day and rob
people by night?”

Sooey Wan cackled merrily. “Oh, your papa always pay me big
money—hund’ed, hund’ed fifty dolla month and Sooey Wan no spend velly
much. But Sooey Wan play poker velly nice, velly lucky fan tan and pi
gow, and bimeby I ketchum one cousin. Cousin no money hab got, but him
know all about raisee vegetable. You know, Missa Dan, ketchum farm up on
Saclamento Liver. So Sooey Wan makee partner with cousin and raisee
early spud, ketchum more land. Velly easy. Boss, you likee Sooey Wan
sellee lanch on Saclamento Liver, can do. Sure. Sellee that land plenty
quick, ketchum thousand dollar for one acre, have got thlee hund’ed
acre. You likee, Missa Dan, I sell for you. Sooey Wan no ketchum son, no
ketchum wifee, no ketchum papa, no ketchum mama, no ketchum nobody but
Missa Dan. Missa Dan allee same Sooey Wan’s boy. Eh? My boy losee money,
Sooey Wan no loosum. Long time ago Sooey Wan talkee your father. Your
father say: ‘Sooey, my partner, Missa Casson, no good. Heap damn fool.’
All light, I watchum.” He came close to Dan and rested his yellow old
claw of a hand on the beloved shoulder. “Boy,” he said, “Sooey Wan savum
all for you. You takee, you look out for Sooey Wan, givee little money
for play China lottery, givee room, givee job, that’s all light. Sooey
Wan likee this house. Likee live here, likee die here, then you send
Sooey Wan back to China, keepee land on Saclamento Liver, keepee money,
mally lady queen and have many son. I think that plenty good for my boy.
Sooey Wan velly old man,” he continued pleadingly. “No can live all
time. Sure you takee, boy. Then you play lone hand in office. Old man
Casson no damn good.” He shrugged optimistically. “Bimeby you ketchum
all your money back.”

Dan Pritchard thrust out his long arms and his fingers closed around
Sooey Wan’s neck. “No,” he said, “I’m not broke. I never was broke, and
I never will be broke while you and Tamea live. Thank God for you both!
I couldn’t take her money, Sooey Wan, but I will take yours—later, when
I need it. I’ll make you a partner in my reorganized business.” His
fingers tightened around the old servant’s throat. “You old yellow
devil!” he said and shook Sooey Wan vigorously. “We understand each
other, I think. God bless you and bring you to some sort of Oriental
heaven, you golden-hearted old heathen.”

Sooey Wan took up his untasted highball. “Hullah for hell!” he cackled,
tossed off the drink, gathered up his fortune and departed for his room,
chuckling like a malevolent old gnome.

Dan Pritchard sat down, alone in the living room, and wept. He was a bit
of a sentimentalist. About one o’clock in the morning he went up to bed.

At two o’clock Sooey Wan was awakened by a rapping at his door. He
crawled out of bed, opened the door an inch and found Tamea outside.

“Wha’s mallah?” he growled.

“Sooey Wan, please lend me five hundred dollars—now,” Tamea pleaded.
“Dan Pritchard will pay you back.”

“Wha’ for you want money now?” Sooey Wan demanded suspiciously.

“You are a servant,” Tamea reminded him. “You should not ask questions.
If you do not desire to oblige me I will make Dan Pritchard send you
away from this house.”

Sooey Wan wilted, dug around in his red lacquered box and handed Tamea
five hundred dollars. Then he went back to bed to think it over. As for
Tamea, ten minutes later she let herself out the front door very
quietly. She carried her accordion and a small suitcase which she had
appropriated from Julia.

A taxicab cruised down Pacific Avenue after having deposited a bibulous
gentleman in the arms of a sleepy butler. With an eye single to business
the driver pulled over to the curb and hailed Tamea.

“Ride, Miss?”

“Take me to the place where the ships may be found,” she ordered and
climbed in. At Clay Street wharf, just north of the ferry building, she
got out and walked along the waterside, north. At that hour the
Embarcadero was deserted, save for an occasional watchman at a dock
head, and to their curious glances Tamea paid no heed. She stumbled
blindly on, questing like a homecoming lost dog, and presently she found
that which she sought. It was the unmistakable odor of copra and it
brought Tamea to a little hundred and thirty foot trading schooner that
lay chafing her blistered sides against the bulkhead at the foot of
Pacific Street. Uninvited, Tamea stepped aboard, sat down on the hatch
coaming and waited for dawn. With the dawn came a gasoline tug and
bumped alongside the schooner. Then men came on deck and to them Tamea
spoke in a language they could understand. The master came, stood before
her and gazed upon her curiously.

“Who are you, young lady?” he said presently, “and what do you want?”

“I am the daughter of Gaston Larrieau, master of the schooner Moorea. My
father is dead. My name is Tamea and I am weary of this white man’s
land. My heart aches for my own people and I would go back to them. I
have money to pay for my passage. I would go to Riva.”

“I have no passenger license, child, but your father was my friend. If
you can stand us, we can stand you. There will be no charge for the
passage. We are towing out this morning with the tide and our first port
of call is Tahiti. Go below, girl, and the cook will give you
breakfast.”

As the sun was rising back of Mount Diablo the launch cast the little
schooner adrift off the Golden Gate and the Kanaka sailors, chanting a
hymn, ran up her headsails. As they filled, Tamea came out of the cabin
and looked again upon that ocher-tinted coastline, watched again the
bizarre painted gasoline trawlers of the Mediterranean fishermen put out
for the Cordelia banks. Then the mainsail went up and the schooner
heeled gently over, took a bone in her teeth and headed south.

“It is best to leave him thus,” the girl murmured. “He does not love me
and he never will. I would not stay to afflict him. What he would not
accept from me he accepted from a servant. Then I knew!”

She lifted her golden voice and sang “_Aloha_,” the Hawaiian song of
farewell. . . .

For Tamea, Queen of Riva, was of royal blood, and when the gods rained
blows upon her she could take them smiling!




                              CHAPTER XXV


At seven o’clock the following morning Dan Pritchard was awakened from a
light and fitful slumber by forceful hammering at his bedroom door. To
his query, “Yes, yes, who is it?” a voice freighted with tears and
fright answered:

“’Tis Julia, sor. Miss Tammy’s gone, God help us.”

“Gone? Gone? Gone where?”

“Sorra wan o’ me knows, but she’s not in the house and her bed has not
been shlept in. I found a letther for you, sor, on her bureau.” And
Julia opened his door an inch and slid an envelope in to him. He read:

    Beloved:

    I was very foolish to think you truly loved me, to think that I,
    a half-caste Polynesian girl, could make you love me as I desire
    to be loved. Therefore, I leave you, though I love you. Because
    I love you, last night I offered you all that I have. You needed
    it, but—you could not accept it from me because that would have
    made you feel that you must accept me also. I have been shamed.
    I am not a woman of common blood, yet you refused from me what
    you gladly accepted from your Chinese servant. So I have learned
    my lesson. I am not angry, dear one, but I am beginning to
    understand Mellenger was right. Your world is not for me. Please
    tell Mellenger that I forgive him and that I am sorry I spoke
    certain words to him, for he is both wise and brave and a loyal
    friend. Tell him I know he will forgive me, and why.

    I have begged of Sooey Wan five hundred dollars. Please repay
    him. As for the money my father gave me, I leave it to you, for
    I love you. You need it and I would have you happy, even though
    I may not know happiness myself. Where I go I shall never
    require money.

    Good-by, Dan Pritchard. Good-by to our love. Perhaps some day we
    shall meet in Paliuli, for the missionaries say that there even
    a half-caste girl shall be washed whiter than snow. But alas, I
    have never seen snow. I know not what it is.

    And now I depart from this house, with naught in my heart for
    you but love.

                                                             Your
                                                              TAMEA.

Dan’s heart was constricted. For several minutes he sat dumbly on the
side of the bed, reading and rereading the letter, striving to realize
that for the second time within twelve hours his world had come tumbling
about his ears. Julia’s sniffling came to him through the slightly
opened door. The sound irritated him.

“Send Sooey Wan up to me, Julia, please,” he ordered.

“He’s here now, sor.”

“Come in, you yellow idiot,” Dan roared, and the old Chinaman shuffled
into the room and stood before him dejectedly, but with eyes that met
his master’s glance unflinchingly. “When Miss Larrieau asked you to lend
her five hundred dollars, why did you not come up and tell me
immediately?” he demanded.

“Sometime, Missa Dan,” Sooey Wan answered humbly, “evlybody klazy. Las’
night I think Sooey Wan klazy, too. After Missa Dan go bed, lady queen
knock my door. She say: ‘Sooey Wan, I likee fi’ hund’ed dolla’.’ I think
velly funny, so I say ‘Wha’ for?’ and lady queen get velly mad, so Sooey
Wan think maybe lady queen wanchee buy plesent Missa Dan, maybe likee
make suplise party. Wha’ for Sooey Wan ketchum light for ask question to
lady queen? Sooey Wan allee same cook, lady queen allee same lady boss.
No can do, Missa Dan.”

“That confounded single-track Oriental mind of yours has broken my
heart,” Dan groaned. “Sooey Wan, last night the lady queen offered to
give me a quarter of a million dollars, but I would not accept it. It
was a trust and I couldn’t take advantage of her generous nature. I
dared not risk losing her money. Her father trusted me, and I couldn’t
accept money from a woman anyhow. She knows that you offered me money,
however, and that I accepted it from you, only she doesn’t know why. She
doesn’t understand that you’re a man, Sooey Wan, that you can take a
gambler’s chance, that I’ll throw old Casson out of the business and put
you in as a silent partner; she doesn’t understand that as a baby I
acquired the habit of accepting money from you. You remember how you
would give me spending money when my father wouldn’t? You old fool,
you’ve spoiled me, but you love me like a son and—well, Sooey Wan,
you’re not a Chinaman to me—a servant. You’re my friend—the whitest
white man and the truest friend I’ve ever known, God bless you—but oh,
I could kill you this morning! You’re such a lovable, loyal old booby,
and because of you the girl has gone. She thinks now that I do not want
her.”

“Women,” said Sooey Wan, “all klazy.”

“I haven’t the slightest idea where the girl could have gone.”

“I think maybe go back same place lady queen come from,” the crafty
Chinaman suggested. “Maybe ketchum steamer today. I think velly good job
talkee policeeman, policeeman ketchum velly quick. If lady queen no come
back Sooey Wan shootum blains”—and he struck fiercely his bony, yellow
temple.

“I have an idea, Sooey Wan. Last Sunday morning we walked along the
waterfront together. I had a schooner in from the south and I wanted to
talk to the captain. At Pacific Street bulkhead there was a trading
schooner, the Pelorus, unloading copra, and Tamea spoke to the Kanaka
mate in his own language.”

He reached for the telephone and called up the Meiggs wharf lookout of
the Merchants’ Exchange.

“Has the schooner Pelorus sailed?” he queried, after introducing himself
as a member of the Exchange.

“Towed out with the tide about five o’clock this morning, Mr.
Pritchard.”

“What towed her out?”

“A Crowley gasoline tug, sir. Wait a minute until I get the glass on
her. She’s just coming back after dropping the Pelorus off the Gate.” A
silence. Then, “Crowley Number Thirty-four.”

“Thank you.” Dan hung up and turned to Sooey Wan. “Bring me a cup of
coffee and a piece of toast. Get Graves out and tell him to have the car
waiting in front in fifteen minutes,” he ordered, and leaped for his
shower bath. By the time he was dressed Sooey Wan appeared with the
coffee and just as Crowley tug Number Thirty-four slid into her berth to
await another towing job, Dan Pritchard appeared on the dock and hailed
her skipper in the pilot house.

“You towed the Pelorus out a couple of hours ago. Did you happen to
observe whether she carried any passengers?”

“I did. One, sir. A young lady.”

“Describe her.”

“A handsome young lady, sir, dark complected in a way, and yet not dark.
Struck me she might have just a drop of Island blood in her, sir. She
was wearin’ a blue suit but no hat, and when I saw her first as I bumped
alongside she was settin’ on the main hatch coamin’ and she’d been
cryin’.”

“Any baggage?”

“A suitcase and an accordion. The skipper of the Pelorus found her
settin’ there and she introduced herself. I gathered that he knew her
people and was glad to meet her. She must have shipped as a passenger,
because she was standin’ aft lookin’ back at the city the last I saw of
the Pelorus.”

“How fast is the fastest tug or launch in the Crowley fleet?” Dan next
inquired.

“Fifteen miles an hour.”

“Great! I’ll charter her. I want to overhaul the Pelorus and take that
girl off.”

The man in the pilot house shook his head. “No use, sir. The Pelorus has
lines like a yacht and she’s a witch in a breeze of wind. There’s a
thirty mile nor’west breeze on her quarter and she’s logging fifteen
knots if she’s logging an inch this minute. I cast her off at six
fifteen—two hours ago. She’d be hull down on the horizon in an hour.
You couldn’t hope to overhaul her, sir.”

“Thank you, friend. I dare say you’re right.” He wadded a bill into a
ball and tossed it in the pilot house window, smiled wanly and returned
to his car. On the way up to the office of Casson and Pritchard he
formulated a plan of action, which he proceeded to place in operation
the moment he found himself alone in his private office.

First he looked up the Pelorus in Lloyd’s Register and satisfied himself
that she was staunch and seaworthy, or rather that she had been a year
previous. She was owned in Honolulu. Well, Tamea would doubtless be safe
aboard her—that is, safe from the elements, although a cold feeling
swept over him as he thought of that glorious creature alone on a
trading schooner, at the mercy of her captain. He hoped the man was
different from the majority of his kind.

At nine o’clock he telephoned the Customs House and learned that the
Pelorus had cleared for general cruising in the South Pacific, with her
first port of call Tahiti. With a sinking heart Dan recalled that there
was neither wireless station nor cable station at Tahiti, and a close
scrutiny of the Shipping Guide disclosed the fact that the next steamer
for Sidney, via Tahiti, Pago Pago and Raratonga would not sail for two
weeks. Well, he would write Casson and Pritchard’s agent at Tahiti to
board the Pelorus when she dropped hook in the harbor and deliver to the
girl a letter and a draft on the French bank in Tahiti, to enable her to
purchase a first class steamer passage back to San Francisco, where they
would be married immediately. Undoubtedly the steamer would beat the
Pelorus to Tahiti, even though the latter vessel should have a two
weeks’ start. Even should the Pelorus beat her in, the schooner would
probably lie in Tahiti harbor for a week and Tamea would go ashore and
visit friends of her father’s while awaiting passage on a schooner that
could drop her off at Riva. The chances for overhauling the heart-broken
fugitive were excellent; the letter which would reach her, via the
steamer and later by hand of Casson and Pritchard’s agent, would bring
her back to him. Of that he felt assured.

However, in the event the steamer should never reach Tahiti, he essayed
two other means of communicating with her, via his agent. There was a
wireless station at Fanning Island and another at Noumea, so he sent a
message to each, with a request that it be relayed to Tamea by the first
vessels touching there and bound for Tahiti.

He had done all he could to retrieve the situation now, so he spread his
long arms out on his desk, laid his face in them and suffered. He
yearned for the blessed relief of tears, for at last Dan Pritchard was
realizing that he did indeed love Tamea with all of the wild and
passionate love of which he had dreamed. He had not believed that it
would be possible for him to love any woman so. His heart ached for her.
He was thoroughly wretched.

What matter if her mother had been a Polynesian princess, her father a
carefree, wandering love-pirate, a very Centaur? Tamea was—Tamea—and
in all this world there would never, by God’s grace, exist another like
her.

He got out her letter and read it again, and a lump gathered in his
throat as he realized how sweet it was, how benignant, how overflowing
with love and the gladness of love’s sacrifice. How prideful she was and
how childish! What a tremendous indication was her act, of a
tremendously regal character! Poor, bruised, misunderstanding and
misunderstood heart. His tears came at last. . . .

By noon he had regained control of himself, and resolutely driving from
his mind all thoughts of Tamea, he concentrated upon his business
affairs. His first move was to order the firm’s books closed as of that
date and a schedule of assets and liabilities drawn up, after which he
wrote a form letter to the firm’s customers explaining the predicament
in which Casson and Pritchard found themselves and the reason for it,
pledged his own private fortune to retrieve the situation in part and
invited the creditors to meet with him and his attorneys in the assembly
room of the Merchants’ Exchange a week hence, when a thorough and
comprehensive review of the situation would be possible and at which
time he hoped to have worked out a scheme for the rehabilitation of the
business and the payment of one hundred cents on every dollar of the
firm’s obligations.

As yet no one, not even the chief clerk, knew that Casson and Pritchard
were listed among the casualties in the post-war collapse of values
which Dan had feared so long. Dan and his partner were the sole
custodians of that cheerless information, but in their minds existed no
illusions regarding their situation. That eight thousand tons of rice
aboard the Malayan alone spelled a loss of at least a million and a
half. Already the market on coffee, sugar, Oriental oils, copra and a
hundred other commodities had commenced to slump, and, in the wild
scramble to throw trades overboard before too heavy a loss should
accrue, Dan knew that every importing and exporting house in the country
would be hard put to weather the storm. Casson and Pritchard would have
to face other losses in the natural order of business, and Dan was
shrewd enough to realize that these, coupled with the tremendous loss on
old Casson’s rice gamble, would force him to cry for quarter. Therefore
he faced the issue resolutely and calmly made his preparations for the
assault of the firm’s creditors by assuming the initiative.

For a week he worked all day and part of each night at the office. Old
Casson, cruelly stung with remorse and fright, remained at home and did
not communicate with him, a condition for which Dan was grateful. He
heard nothing from Maisie, nor did his thoughts dwell long or frequently
upon her. He had room in his harassed mind for thoughts of but one
woman—Tamea.

All during that terrible week gossip linked irremediable disaster with
some of the oldest and soundest firms on the Street. Apparently Katsuma
and Company had been smashed beyond all hope of rehabilitation, for
Katsuma, Jap-like, had solved his problem by hanging himself and was as
dead as Julius Cæsar. There was a panic in Wall Street and already local
banks had grown timid and were refusing the loans so necessary to the
successful operation of the commerce upon which banks must, perforce,
predicate their existence. Demand loans were being called, and when not
met the collateral back of them was levied upon.

At the conclusion of that week’s business Dan had before him a written
record of Casson and Pritchard’s affairs; the letters to creditors lay
on his desk, awaiting his signature, and his plan of rehabilitation,
even his address to the firm’s creditors, had been rehearsed until he
knew it by heart. At eleven o’clock on Saturday his bank called a large
loan. Over the telephone the banker informed Dan crisply but courteously
that they expected the note to be paid on Monday; whereupon Dan
Pritchard sent out his letters to Casson and Pritchard’s creditors and
then sent for Mark Mellenger, whom he had not seen since the latter’s
sudden retreat from the Italian restaurant in the Latin quarter.

“I’ve sent for you, Mel,” Dan informed his friend, “to give you two
exclusive stories, one of which is for publication. In the first place,
Tamea has returned to Riva, or at least she is now en route there. I am
endeavoring, however, to turn her back at Tahiti in order that I may
marry her.”

“Why did she leave? Did you send her away?”

Dan briefly explained and Mellenger listened in silence; at the
conclusion of Dan’s recital he merely nodded and said: “I suppose any
man would be a very great fool not to marry a woman like Tamea. She is
the only one of her kind I ever heard of. What’s the other story?”

“It’s contained in this letter to the creditors of our firm. I’m busted,
Mel. However, I shall rise, like the phenix, from my ashes, thanks to
Sooey Wan. I’ll reorganize the firm, eliminating Casson, who is in no
position to dictate terms or claim an interest for alleged good-will. I
hope he has means to enable him to take care of Mrs. Casson and Maisie,
and if he hasn’t I dare say Maisie can do something to support herself.”

“I’ll write you a nice, kindly story regarding the embarrassment of your
firm. I’ve been writing such stories for two weeks. I dislike to air
your difficulty, Dan, but if I do not the other papers will, so I might
as well scoop them in the Sunday edition. Poor Tamea! I shall probably
not see her again, but I am glad to have her friendship at least. Her
friendship is worth something.”

He accepted one of Dan’s cigars and commenced to talk of other things;
at parting he remarked, casually, that he would be up to the house for
dinner the following Thursday night—now that Tamea was no longer there
to be oppressed by his presence.




                              CHAPTER XXVI


The wisdom of Dan’s course in announcing the insolvency of Casson and
Pritchard before the announcement should be forced from him by the
firm’s creditors was fully manifested at the meeting of the creditors.
Each creditor had received a copy of the firm’s trial balance and the
schedule of assets and liabilities; also a copy of Dan’s proposed plan
of settlement and reorganization. The settlement contemplated a payment
of twenty-five per cent on all liabilities at once, with a three-year
extension on the balance due, at five per cent, and a payment of the
interest and twenty-five per cent of the principal annually. All of the
creditors had had three days in which to read this plan, study it and
discuss it with their principals, and the result was that Dan’s plan was
enthusiastically and gratefully accepted, with the proviso that John
Casson retire from the partnership. The method of his retirement the
creditors left to Pritchard.

The task of severing Casson from the firm was not a difficult one. His
share of the debts practically equaled his equity in the assets and he
accepted eagerly Dan’s offer to take over his assets and liabilities in
return for a release from the creditors for Casson’s share of the firm’s
indebtedness to them. He had about a quarter of a million dollars in
cash and real estate in his private fortune and this Dan forced him to
turn over to his wife, as the only guarantee that he could think of
against a disastrous reëntry into business and, consequently, a
penniless and sorrowful old age for all concerned.

At the last moment a hitch occurred. Two banks, carrying nearly half a
million dollars’ worth of Casson and Pritchard paper, bearing Dan
Pritchard’s endorsement, suddenly decided, after the fashion of banks,
to play safe. “Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost” is
ever the fashion of the banker who finds himself the possessor of a
slight advantage over other creditors. Overnight they entered suit
against Dan, as endorser and guarantor of Casson and Pritchard’s notes,
and levied attachments against every asset of his they could locate. In
the face of this unexpected treachery Dan had but one alternative, and
he chose it unhesitatingly. He filed a voluntary petition in bankruptcy,
for himself and for the firm, thus vitiating the banks’ attachments and
placing all of his and Casson and Pritchard’s creditors upon an equal
footing. Thereupon the bank withdrew its suit against Dan and petitioned
the court for a receiver for Casson and Pritchard—a petition in which
the other creditors were now forced to join. A receiver was immediately
appointed and took charge of the business of Casson and Pritchard.

It was then that Dan Pritchard’s spirit broke. The day the receiver took
charge he cleaned out his desk and departed from that office. The
following day he had leased his home furnished, dismissed Graves and
Julia, stored his cars and purchased a passage to Tahiti. With Tamea’s
money he promptly purchased Liberty Bonds, which in the panic had
dropped twenty points, and established a trust fund for her with a local
trust company. Then, accompanied by Sooey Wan, he went aboard the Union
Line steamer Aorangi and departed for Tahiti, hoping to find Tamea,
marry her there and then consider what he should do with his life
thereafter. He was crushed at the unexpected turn his business affairs
had taken. He had turned over to the receiver every dollar, every asset
he possessed, and he no longer had the slightest interest in the affairs
of Casson and Pritchard.

The creditors might do what they pleased with the business. They could
either operate it under a receivership until it paid out, or they could
liquidate it. It was their business now and Dan had done all that any
honorable man could do to meet his obligations. Old Casson had his
release from all of the creditors, including the banks, for these latter
had fairly accurate information as to the latter’s finances, and, with
Pritchard’s endorsement to protect them, they had concluded to dispense
with picking old Casson’s financial bones.

The knowledge that Maisie would not be thrown under the feet of the
world comforted Dan greatly. He was too depressed to call upon her and
say good-by before sailing, so he wrote her a brief note of farewell
instead; desirous of losing touch with his world, he did not tell her
where he was bound. To Mellenger only did he confide, and that silent
and thoughtful man had merely nodded and declined comment.

At last, Dan reflected as, stretched out in a steamer chair in the snug
lee of the Aorangi’s funnel, he watched the coast of California fade
into the haze, he was free. Business no longer claimed him. If the
receiver desired any information touching the firm’s affairs he had
complete and comprehensive records before him, and if he could not
understand those records, there was the efficient office force to aid
him. Yes, he was free. He would wander now, with Sooey Wan to take care
of him financially and physically.

And he felt no qualms in the realization that he was now dependent
entirely upon Sooey Wan. In a way he had always been dependent upon
Sooey Wan, but on the other hand, was not Sooey Wan dependent upon his
Missa Dan?

As the old Chinaman had often assured him, the only human being in the
world to whom he was bound by the tightest tethers of affection was Dan
Pritchard. Wherefore, why should he decline a loan from Sooey Wan? To
have done so would have been to inflict upon the loyal old heathen a
cruel hurt. And money meant little to Sooey Wan; it was good to gamble
with, that was all. In the end Sooey Wan, dying, would have willed his
entire estate to his beloved Missa Dan; why, therefore, be a sentimental
idiot and decline to accept it while Sooey Wan lived? Why deny the old
man this great happiness?

Sooey Wan, neatly and unostentatiously arrayed in Oriental costume and
occupying a first class cabin all to himself, lolled in a chair
alongside Dan and puffed contentedly at a long briarwood pipe. He was
having the first vacation he had ever known and he was enjoying it, for
presently he turned to Dan and said:

“Missa Dan, I think evlybody pretty damn happy. No ketchum work, ketchum
plenty money, ketchum nice lest, ketchum lady queen, velly nice. Eh,
Missa Dan?”

“Sooey Wan,” Dan replied, “so far as I am concerned, I never want to
operate another ship or buy another pound of copra or draw another
check. I’m going to marry the lady queen the very day we find her; after
that I’m going to paint pictures and dream and soak myself from soul to
liver with just plain, unruffled, untroubled, simple living. Sooey Wan,
I’m content just to sit here and look at the ocean. The other fellows
can have all the worry now. They wanted it and I gave it to them and I
hope they enjoy it. I’m content to know they will get their money out of
Casson and Pritchard, although it ruins me.”

“You allee time talkee like klazy man, boss. Wha’ for you luined? Plenty
money hab got. Shut up! You makee me sick.”

Fell a long, blissful silence, while Dan stared at the sea and permitted
his brain to sink into a state of absolute quiescence, and Sooey Wan
speculated on the expectancy of life in superannuated Chinamen in
general and of himself in particular. For the paternal instinct was
strong in Sooey Wan and the years had been long since Dan’s baby arms
had been around his neck and Dan’s soft cheek had been pressed in love
against Sooey Wan’s. Sweet memories of a sweet experience! Childless old
Sooey Wan yearned for it again, yearned to have his Missa Dan know the
thrill that had been denied to Sooey Wan—the thrill of fatherhood.

Arrived at Tahiti, Dan’s eager glance swept the little harbor as the
Aorangi crept in. The Pelorus lay at anchor. The skipper of the tug that
had towed her out of San Francisco bay was right. She was a witch in a
breeze! The French customs officials who boarded the steamer informed
Dan that she had arrived the day before. Zounds, what a smashing
passage! And Tamea was over yonder in the town—just exactly where, he
would ascertain from the master of the Pelorus.

Dan and Sooey Wan were into a short boat and pulling toward the Pelorus
five minutes after the Aorangi had been given pratique. The master of
the Pelorus met them at the rail as Dan came up over the Jacob’s ladder.

“You had a passenger, Captain,” said Dan. “A Mademoiselle Tamea
Larrieau.”

The master of the Pelorus eyed him gravely and nodded. “You are Mr.
Pritchard, I take it, sir,” he said.

“I am, Captain. Where is Tamea?”

“I wanted her to wait, Mr. Pritchard. I told her you’d be following on
the first steamer, but she wouldn’t listen to me. And I one of her
father’s oldest and closest friends, Mr. Pritchard. But she was what you
might call broken-hearted. Nothing would do but she must get back to
Riva and lose herself. The day we got in she booked a passage on the
auxiliary schooner Doris Crane that was just leaving. The Crane has a
passenger license and very excellent passenger accommodations, and Tamea
will get as far as Tamakuku on her. Riva lies about eighty miles due
west and the girl will charter a gasoline launch for the remainder of
the journey.”

“I doubt if she has sufficient money, Captain.”

“She has. I charged her nothing for her passage. By the way,” he
continued with a sly smile, “the Doris Crane can be reached by
wireless—maybe. Why not have the operator on the Aorangi try to get
your message to Tamea?”

“Tamea told you about me, Captain?” asked Dan.

The skipper nodded, smiling. “When you know her better, sir, you’ll make
allowances for her native blood and her primitive way of reasoning.”

“Thank you,” Dan replied, and departed overside, to be pulled back to
the Aorangi, where he filed a message to Tamea informing her that he
would meet her in Riva, asking her to await him there, telling her that
he loved her and begging her to wireless him in reply.

Just before the Aorangi pulled out that night the wireless operator
telephoned him at his hotel to report that he had been unable to get in
touch with the Doris Crane. Dan was cruelly disappointed and Sooey Wan,
observing this, trotted out to the hotel bar and returned with two
Gibson cocktails which he had prevailed upon the barkeeper to mix
according to a time-honored formula. One of these cocktails Sooey Wan
drank, in silent sympathy and understanding, while Dan partook of the
other.

When the old cook noted a lifting of the cloud on Dan’s face, he spoke,
for Sooey Wan was one of those rare men who never speak out of their
turn.

“Captain of schooner velly nice man. Wha’ for you no rentum schooner?
Plenty money hab got.”

Dan’s long arm rested affectionately across Sooey Wan’s shoulders. “You
dad-fetched old heathen, what would I do without you? You’re the shadow
of a rock in a weary land. Let’s go.”

Together they went—out to the Pelorus. Her master, seated on deck under
an awning with a glass of grog before him, smiled as they came over the
rail.

“I’ve been expecting you, Mr. Pritchard. I was ready to sail at four
this afternoon, but something told me I’d best wait. It’s about five
hundred miles out of my way, but if you will insist on going to Riva I
might as well have the job as anybody. Mighty few vessels cruise down
that way. You might be hung up here for six months. Passage for two will
cost you two thousand dollars.”

“Hab got,” said Sooey Wan promptly, and shed his duck coat. Up out of
his linen trousers came his shirt tail and around his middle showed a
wide money belt. This he unbuckled and gravely counted out two thousand
dollars into the master’s palm.

“Now I go ketchum baggage,” he announced and went ashore. Half an hour
later the Pelorus, in tow of a launch, was slipping out of the harbor.
Once in the open sea, she heeled gently to the trade wind and rolled
away into the southwest in the wake of the Doris Crane.




                             CHAPTER XXVII


Pelorus proved to be a comfortable and seaworthy vessel and her master
(his name was Hackett) a most comfortable and seaworthy person. Although
plainly hungry for a more intellectual brand of masculine society than
ordinarily was to be found in the out-of-the-way places he visited, he
tactfully forbore to obtrude upon Dan’s mood of depression until quite
certain that he was not obtruding—whereupon he would become a most
delightful and entertaining companion. His besetting sin was Scotch and
soda, albeit he resolutely declined, when at sea, to touch a drop before
five o’clock in the afternoon and while he helped himself liberally
until the steward announced dinner, the liquor never appeared to affect
him. It developed that he and Gaston of the Beard had been warm friends.
Hackett’s admiration for the old Breton skipper had been very profound.

One day he said suddenly to Dan: “You have an unasked question in the
back of your head, Mr. Pritchard. You need not bother to ask it. I shall
answer it, however. Old Gaston Larrieau was my friend. We stood back to
back, once, and shot our way out of rather a dirty mess in the New
Hebrides; I was wounded and unconscious at the finish and he swam with
me half a mile through shark-infested waters to his ship. I am what I am
and rather less than that in port, but I behave myself at sea and I have
a long memory. Tamea was as nice a girl when she left the Pelorus as she
was when she came aboard. I wasn’t fixed to accommodate a woman
passenger, but to such as I had she was welcome and no questions asked.”

Dan smiled. “Thank you,” he replied. “I _was_ wondering.”

“You’re devilish frank,” Hackett laughed. “I think I like you the better
for your insulting thought. However, I wouldn’t have been above it with
anybody save old Gaston’s girl. One grows to hold them rather cheaply,
you know. Half-caste or full blood, they come and they go. Hearts are
not too readily broken down this way, Mr. Pritchard.”

“Tamea,” said Dan Pritchard, “is a white woman.”

“Nonsense, my dear sir. She’s a half-caste.”

“Her soul is white,” said Dan doggedly.

“I am not prepared to dispute that assertion,” Hackett replied casually.
“I never quarrel with any man’s likes or dislikes.” He eyed Dan
narrowly. “Something tells me you’re going to marry this girl, Mr.
Pritchard.”

“Certainly.”

“And take her back to the United States with you?”

Dan nodded.

Hackett shrugged, as who should say: “Well, it’s none of my business
what you do.”

“You deprecate my decision,” Dan charged irritably.

“I do not. I don’t give a hoot what you do. I was thinking of the girl.
If I stood in your shoes I wouldn’t marry her. Why should you? You don’t
have to, and she doesn’t expect you to. You’ll regret it if you take her
back to the United States, because she’ll never be truly happy there.
When you transplant these people they die of homesickness. They’re so
far behind our civilization they can never catch up, and the effort to
do so wearies them and they die. They have the home instinct and the
home yearning of a lost fox hound. They are children, I tell you. They
never grow up—and you are not the man to wed with a woman who will
never grow up.”

“Nonsense,” Dan growled. “Sheer, unadulterated nonsense.”

Hackett shrugged and poured himself another peg of Scotch. “I’ve had
three of them in my day. I think I ought to know. One was a Pitcairn
islander and more than half white. I sailed a thousand miles off my
course to bring her back to Pitcairn. She was slowly dying. She loved me
but she loved Pitcairn and her people more.”

There the conversation ceased, yet the effect of it remained. Day after
day, night after night, as the Pelorus rolled lazily before the trades,
Dan Pritchard’s mind dwelled on his problem. What if Hackett should be
proved right, after all? Dan recalled how swiftly, how inevitably,
Tamea’s hurt heart had called her back to Riva and her own people. How
poignantly had that bruised heart yearned for the understanding of those
who could understand her?

His mind harked back to the nights when Tamea lay upon the hearthrug in
his Pacific Avenue home and played sad little songs of Riva on her
accordion. Could it have been that on such occasions her soul had been
steeped in a vague, unsuspected nostalgia? If Hackett was right, then
he, Dan Pritchard, journeyed upon worse than a fool’s errand. Might he
not be doing the kindly, the decent thing, to turn back, to trust to
time and some other man to mend that broken heart? He wondered.

He could not, however, cherish seriously even for a moment the thought
of abandoning his journey. Old Gaston had given Tamea to him to care
for; the Triton had trusted him and he must go on. There was that cursed
money he held in trust for her. She had abandoned it to him, out of the
greatness of her love, but he could no more accept it now than he could
the night she had offered it. He had to see her and return it to her. He
had to win her complete forgiveness and understanding, to render her
happy again.

Suddenly, one evening while he paced slowly backward and forward in the
waist of the ship, he found the solution. He would marry Tamea and end
his days in the Islands. He wanted a change. He told himself he was sick
of civilization; he wanted to be simple and natural, free of the
competition of existence.

Down there nobody would wonder why he had married Tamea. Conventions did
not exist, nor foolish tradition nor social codes—and he could paint
landscapes to his heart’s content. He would establish a South Sea school
of landscape painting. He would be through with the riddle of
existence. . . and there was the embarrassment of Maisie and her aunt
and old Casson and Mellenger and all of his friends should he return to
San Francisco!

His decision, arrived at so suddenly, was peculiarly inexorable. He had
thought too long and too hard: mentally he had come to the jumping-off
place. On the instant his motto was: “The devil take
everything—including me!” The rewards to be gleaned from the struggle
that faced him, should he return to his white civilization, were
scarcely commensurate with the effort required. A sudden, passionate
yearning had seized him to chuck it all, to drift with the tide, to
sample life in its elemental phases, to be happy in a land where all of
the rules of existence were reversed . . . a man lived but once and he
was a long time dead. . . and Dan wanted Tamea. . . . Ah, how ardently
he desired her and how lonely and desolate would be his life without
her! Civilization demands much of repression, since civilized man, like
the domestic dog, still retains many of the instincts of his primitive
ancestors; and Dan was weary of repression. Hang it, he would go on the
loose! He would take the gifts that the gods provided and cease to worry
over the opinions of people whose sole claims to his consideration lay
in the fact that they were white and dwelled in his world and were
hobbled and frightened by tradition.

In all his life Dan had never arrived at a decision that he grasped more
tenaciously or which yielded him a greater measure of comfort. A
subconscious appeal permeated this new thought of freedom as a phrase
runs through an opera. Free! He was going to be free! He was a volatile
spirit and he had been corked too long; the collapse of his business
offered him a splendid excuse for pulling the cork, and by all the gods,
Christian and pagan, he would pull it. That was the idea! Chuck it,
chuck it all and walk out of the picture without even a word of farewell
to his world.

“I’ll do it! By judas priest, I’ll do it,” he said audibly.

“I thought you would,” said Captain Hackett’s calm voice. Dan turned and
caught the glow of the master’s cigar as the latter stood on the
companion with his head and shoulders out of the cabin scuttle. “You’ve
been thinking it over long enough. Your brains must be addled.”

“Well, it is comforting to have come to a conclusion, at any rate,” Dan
defended.

“My guess is that you have concluded to settle in Riva and let the rest
of the world go by, Mr. Pritchard.”

“That remark forces me to wonder again why you continue to skipper a
trading schooner, Captain. You should hang out your shingle as a
clairvoyant or mind reader or fortune teller.”

“I’ve seen your kind come and I’ve seen your kind go,” Hackett retorted.
“Once I was one of you—and I came but never went—and now it is too
late. Which is why I repeat, in all respect, that even if you stay, it
will not be necessary to marry Tamea. Let the world go by, if you
choose—you are the best judge of your wisdom in that regard—but
remember that down under the Line it goes by very slowly, my son. These
islands are not for white men—that is, your kind of white man—unless
you contemplate vegetating and going to pieces mentally, morally and
physically before you are forty. The sun does things to fair-haired and
blue-eyed men and women down in the latitude and longitude of Riva. You
will not be happy there, Mr. Pritchard, and one of these days when I
drop in at Riva you’ll hear your white world calling—and the Chink will
dig up another two thousand dollars for me. And when you leave, Mr.
Pritchard, it would be well to have no _legal_ appendages.”

Dan was silent. He wanted to bash this tropical philosopher over the
head with a belaying pin and cause him to stow forever his insulting and
impossible advice. But—he reflected—if he did that he would be delayed
getting to Riva and Tamea, and he could not bear that she should suffer
one moment longer than necessary. Hackett read his thoughts.

“We will not discuss this subject again, Mr. Pritchard,” he said gently.
“I have said my say because I have felt it my duty to do so. Personally,
I don’t give a damn what happens to you, but I should not care to see
Gaston’s daughter made unhappy. I have roved through these islands some
thirty years and I know what I know. Have a cigar. They’re genuine
Sumatras. A bit dry, but if you like a dry cigar—— No? Well, you
needn’t grow huffy.”

Dan continued his swift walk up and down the deck and Hackett continued
to smoke contemplatively. After a while he said:

“I’m going to install an ice-making machine with part of the two
thousand dollars the Chink paid me. Going to sea is a hard life and I
make enough money for my owners to entitle me to do myself rather well.
One does grow a bit weary of boiled Scotch and tepid wines.”




                             CHAPTER XXVIII


Two weeks later the brown crew of the Pelorus set Dan Pritchard and
Sooey Wan ashore in the whaleboat.

“I’ll drop in here on my way back—say a year hence,” Captain Hackett
promised him as they shook hands at the Jacob’s-ladder. “I’m a little
bit curious about you and when I’m curious about anybody I have to find
out. I think six months will be long enough to cure you, however.
Good-by, Mr. Pritchard, and good luck to you. Kiss the bride for me
and—forgive me if I venture to remind you once more—you really do not
have to marry her! Tamea hasn’t any very serious thoughts on the
validity or the sanctity of marriage. It is, comparatively, a recent
institution here.” He shook a horny finger at Dan and answered the
latter’s scowl with a mellow laugh. Dan thought he might be just a
little bit jingled a few hours earlier than was his wont. Strange man.
Dan had an idea he had fallen from high estate.

A Kanaka sailor carried Dan ashore from the boat through the wash of the
surf, and followed with Dan’s trunk. Sooey Wan, presumed to be a person
of no importance, struggled ashore in water up to his knees, and the
moment he found himself high and dry on the shingle he looked about him
with interest. What he saw was a half mile of white beach with a fringe
of tufted coconut palms leaning seaward, a few canoes hauled up on the
beach, a large corrugated iron godown and a small wooden bungalow,
painted white with green trimmings and wide, deep verandas, squatted on
the low bluff above the beach.

From the veranda of this bungalow a white man detached himself and came
down over the bluff to meet them. He introduced himself as the Reverend
Cyrus Muggridge, the resident missionary. He was a gloomy, liverish sort
of man and Dan had a feeling that to Mr. Muggridge his martyrdom in Riva
was a thing of the flesh and scarcely of the spirit. He repaid the
reverend gentleman’s compliment in kind and introduced himself. Then,
because he observed in the missionary’s eyes an unspoken query, he said:

“Are you, by any chance, Mr. Muggridge, acquainted with Miss Tamea
Larrieau, who is, I understand, the last blood of the ancient chiefs of
Riva?”

“I am, unhappily, acquainted with the young woman,” Muggridge replied
wearily, and added, “She is, like her father, wholly irreclaimable.”

“Perhaps you would be so good as to direct me to her home?” Dan
suggested. “That is, if she has arrived in Riva recently, as I have
reason to suspect she may have. You seem a bit shy on population, Mr.
Muggridge,” he added parenthetically.

“I think my last census showed some four hundred souls, but since then
we have had two epidemics of influenza and the birth rate has scarcely
kept pace with the mortality rate. Really, I must have another census.
Counting them roughly, I should say that the total population of the
island is two hundred and fifty, of which, perhaps, thirty families
reside in the village.”

“Where is the village?”

“About a quarter of a mile up a valley which runs up to those mountains
from the sea. Miss Larrieau, by the way, is again in Riva. She arrived a
week ago and has taken up her residence in her old home. I will point it
out to you, Mr. Pritchard.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You are, perhaps, wondering why none of my people are present,” Mr.
Muggridge continued. “You have unfortunately arrived in mid-afternoon,
when my people are sleeping or, what is more probable, over in the river
bathing.”

The Kanaka sailors having disposed Dan’s baggage above high-water mark,
the whaleboat pulled back to the ship and was hoisted aboard even while
the Pelorus slowly came about and headed for the open sea again. Mr.
Muggridge, evidently greatly pleased at the prospect of white
company—and a gentleman at that—courteously led the way to the white
bungalow and extended to Dan and his servant the hospitality of his
home.

“Thank you, Mr. Muggridge,” said Dan gratefully. “I shall be most happy
to accept your invitation—for the present at least. May I ask you to
point out to me Miss Larrieau’s habitation?”

Mr. Muggridge’s eyebrows went up perceptibly. What a hurry this well
bred, respectable-looking stranger was in to see that half-caste
Jezebel! “Follow the road up past the church yonder until you come to
the river, which you will cross on two coco-palm logs. They are very
slippery. Be careful. Having crossed the bridge, turn to the left and
follow the path up the hill to a house that is as distinctly a white
man’s dwelling as my own. You should find the lady you seek asleep on
the veranda.”

“Thank you, Mr. Muggridge. If you don’t mind, I think I shall run up to
Miss Larrieau’s house.”

“Dinner will be served at five-thirty,” the missionary warned him. “I
shall have my servant help your man bring the baggage up to your room.”

Tamea’s home stood in a grove of coco-palms, interspersed with some
flowering shrubs and a few lesser trees with luxuriant green foliage.
The house had been built on a solid foundation of cement and creosoted
redwood underpinning, to protect it from the native wood-devouring
insects. Dan suspected that the green paint which had at some distant
date been applied to the house was anti-fouling—the sort of paint used
on ships’ bottoms to protect them from teredos. From under the house the
snouts of half a dozen young pigs, taking their siesta, protruded, and
in the yard a stately gamecock and some hens were prospecting for worms.
The place smelled a little of neglect, of semi-decayed vegetation, of
insanitation—the smell peculiar to the homes of native dwellers in the
tropics. A well worn flight of five steps led up from the front of the
house to the veranda, from which one might glean a view of miles of
coastline. About the place there was a silence so profound that Dan
feared he might have come too late, after all.

He mounted the steps and rapped at a door with bronze screening on it.
There was no answer, so he opened the door and gazed into a large living
room. On the floor was a huge, blue, very old and very valuable Chinese
rug; in the center of this rug stood a large, plain table, of native
hardwood and—so Dan judged—native workmanship. In a corner he saw a
grand piano and on top of the piano Tamea’s accordion and a mandolin and
some scattered music. A few chairs and hardwood benches arranged along
the wall under windows which ran the full length of each wall and which,
when it was desired to ventilate the house, dropped down into a pocket
after the fashion of a train window, completed the furnishings, with the
exception of half a dozen rudely framed sketches of native life, and
ships at sea.

“Nobody home,” thought Dan, and walked around the veranda on three sides
of the house. On the fourth side, which gave upon the vivid green
mountain peak in the background and into which the late afternoon sun
could not penetrate, Dan paused.

Before him, on a folding cot, with a native mat spread over it, Tamea
lay, with her head pillowed on her left arm and her face turned slightly
toward him. Her eyes were closed, but she was not asleep, for even as
Dan gazed upon the beloved face he saw tears creep out from between the
shut lids, saw the beautiful, semi-naked body shaken by an ill
suppressed sob. Two swift strides and he was kneeling beside her, and as
she opened her eyes and sought to rise at sight of him, his arms went
around her and strained her to his heart while his lips kissed her
tear-dimmed eyes.

Thus, long, he held her, while her heart pounded madly against his
breast and the pent-up sorrow of weeks struggled with the rhapsody of
that one perfect moment and left her weak and trembling, able only to
gasp: “Ah, beloved! Beloved! You have come! Is it then that you love
your Tamea—after all?”

He held her closer and in that tremendous moment his soul overflowed and
he mingled, unashamed, his tears with hers. “Yes, love, I have come,” he
answered chokingly. “You could not be happy with me in my country—so I
have come to be happy with you—in yours.”

“You come—you mean you come to stay—that you have left—Maisie—your
friends——”

“I am here, Tamea. I love you. I cannot live without you. I need
you—when you left me you did not understand.”

“I understand now,” she whispered. “Captain Hackett of the Pelorus was
at pains to explain for you, but I could not believe then. But—you have
come to Riva—so now I understand. Captain Hackett was right, so let
there be no more explanations. Ah, dear one, my heart is bursting with
love for you. If you had not come life would have lost its taste and
your Tamea would have died.”

“Don’t,” he pleaded, “don’t,” and held her closer. “From this moment
until death we shall not be separated. Tonight we shall go to Mr.
Muggridge and be married.”

Tamea was suddenly thoughtful. “Since I have been away the wife of the
missionary has died, and he is mad about your Tamea. Before I left Riva
it was his habit to follow me about and in his eyes there was that look
I know and hate. I have been home a week and his madness has increased a
hundredfold. Dear one, I am afraid of him.”

“You need not be,” Dan assured her and stroked the glorious head of her.
“I met Mr. Muggridge half an hour ago when I landed and I observed that
he seemed interested when I asked about you. He looked to me like a man
with a fire in his soul. . . . Well, he’s a minister of the Gospel,
however, so I dare say if he struggles hard enough he can put the fire
out long enough to pronounce us man and wife.”

“But—a license is necessary if we would marry after the fashion of your
people, beloved,” she reminded him. “And there is no law in Riva,
although the island is claimed by the French Government.”

“It will be better than no marriage at all, Tamea.”

She smiled. “Such a queer, strange people, you all-whites,” was her
comment. “It is not a marriage but a substitute, yet you would ask this
man to perform a mummery to satisfy something in you that is a heritage
from your ancestors. I have no such heritage. For me, no mumbling of
words by this mad priest is necessary to happiness.”

“Well, they are necessary to me, strange as it may seem to you, Tamea,”
Dan replied with his shy smile. “You are half white and I am all white
and it is my purpose to dwell with you on a white basis. Therefore, we
will wed according to the custom of my people.”

“As you will,” Tamea agreed. “Is it that this matter touches your honor
if I will it otherwise?”

He nodded. “Then come to Mr. Muggridge,” the girl urged, and led him by
the hand down the hill to the missionary’s house. Sooey Wan was standing
in the doorway and at sight of Tamea he uncovered respectfully.

“Faithful one,” Tamea hailed him and gave him her hand in huge delight.
Sooey Wan shook it gingerly, his yellow teeth flashing the while in an
ecstatic grin.

At the sound of voices and footsteps on the veranda, Mr. Muggridge came
out. “You have returned quite soon, Mr. Pritchard,” he began, and then
his glance rested on Tamea. “Well?” he demanded irritably.

“Mr. Muggridge,” Dan said to him, “it is my desire that you should marry
Mademoiselle Larrieau and me at once.”

The missionary grew pale and his somber eyes grew even more somber. “I
shall require her father’s permission before performing the ceremony,
Mr. Pritchard,” he said with an effort.

“Her father is dead, Mr. Muggridge.”

“Have you a license of any sort?”

“No. Is it your custom to require a license when performing the marriage
ceremony between two of your converts?”

“No, indeed. My people do not understand what a license is, and it has
been deemed unnecessary to insist upon it with these primitive people.
In your case, however——”

“I understand that white man’s law is non-operative in Riva,” Dan
interrupted. “The sole regulations of this island have been promulgated
by you and other missionaries, have they not?”

Mr. Muggridge nodded, his blazing eyes still fastened on Tamea.

“Well,” Dan explained earnestly, “in the absence of white law I desire
you to marry me according to missionary law. I wish to feel that my
marriage has been sanctioned by a representative of a Christian faith. I
am a Christian.”

“A true Christian would not marry this woman, sir.”

“I did not come here to argue with you, Mr. Muggridge. It is my firm
intention to dwell in Riva with Tamea and I prefer to dwell with her in
accordance with the custom of my own people.”

“I must decline to perform the ceremony,” said Muggridge doggedly. “In
your case, without a license, should I perform this ceremony, I would be
sanctioning your right to live with this woman in defiance of the law of
the land.”

“But there is no law, Mr. Muggridge.”

“There is,” said the missionary tersely. “I am the Law, and in this
matter I am inexorable.”

“You’re a lunatic. You’re as crazy as a March hare,” Dan retorted hotly.

“It is because he has looked upon me with desire,” said Tamea coolly.
“Come, beloved. It is foolish to argue with one who is quite mad.”

She took his hand and led him back up the hill and out on to the edge of
the high headland that gave a view of the entire eastern coast of the
island. Inland, a high conical peak, which Dan now realized was a
volcano, lifted some four thousand feet into the sky, now rapidly
darkening as the sun sank. Still holding Dan’s hand, Tamea took her
stand beside him.

“Dear one,” she said, “if you would take me to wife, then must it be
after the fashion of my people, since it is plainly impossible that it
can be after the fashion of yours. I think I understand how it is that
you would take me to wife. You would be very serious, very sincere, very
solemn. It is something you would not do lightly.”

He nodded and the girl, turning, pointed to the volcano. From the crater
a rosy glow was beginning to appear, cast against the sky, and as
twilight crept over Riva this glow deepened.

“My heart,” said Tamea softly, “is like unto the hot heart of Hakataua
yonder. Throughout the day the sunlight beats down the glow so that no
man may see it, but with the coming of night comes the glow that all men
may see it, even those afar at sea in ships. With the coming of night I
yearn for you, beloved; the flame of my desire burns high and I am
unashamed that I desire you as all true women must desire a mate.” She
turned and kissed him solemnly and tenderly. “I love you, heart of my
heart,” she told him, “and though I live to be as old as Hakataua, I
swear, by your God, never shall I love any man but you, Dan Pritchard.
And, loving you, I shall respect you and obey you, nor shall I bring
dishonor or shame upon you, my husband. Here, in the presence of the sea
and the earth and the sky, I make my promise. While I can make you happy
that promise shall hold, but when I can no longer please you then are
you released. For that is the way of my people.”

“Here in the presence of God,” Dan Pritchard murmured, with bowed head
and a full heart, “I take thee, Tamea, for my lawful wife, to have and
to hold, in honor, always.” And he kissed her now, solemnly, tenderly,
without passion.

“My husband,” she said happily, “now it will not be necessary to beg
that mad Muggridge to quench the fire in his soul.”

“Poor devil,” Dan answered her, and together they returned to the green
bungalow. They found Sooey Wan sitting on the steps, mopping his high,
bony forehead.

“Kitchen lady queen no hab got. Cookee no can do,” he complained
bitterly. “House where leavee trunk kitchen hab got. Cookee can do.”

“You mean that missionary’s house, Sooey Wan?”

The old Chinaman nodded.

“Well, we’ll have to get along without his kitchen, I think, Sooey Wan.”
He turned to Tamea. “Have you no kitchen, dear? Strange that your father
should build and furnish a house such as this and yet not provide a
kitchen.”

“When my father and I left Riva, we did not bother to take anything out
of this house. Upon my return many things were missing. All were
returned by my people with the exception of the stove, which fell from
the shoulders of the men who carried it and was destroyed.”

“Sooey Wan isn’t accustomed to cooking over an open fire. He will be
continuously peeved and develop into a frightful nuisance.”

“I shall have my serving women wait upon my husband,” Tamea assured him
lightly. “As for this servant of yours, let his task be the catching of
fish, which will provide him with amusement. He has labored long and
faithfully in your house, dear one. He has earned his rest.”

“I hope he can see his way clear to take it,” Dan sighed. Then, turning
to his servant: “Sooey Wan, you’re retired. You do not have to cook any
more. From now on your job will consist in enjoying yourself. Tomorrow
we’ll find some sort of habitation for you, but for tonight park
yourself on the veranda.”

Sooey Wan vouchsafed no reply, until Tamea had entered the house and he
found himself alone for a moment with his master. “Boss,” he then said
confidentially, “missionaly heap klazy. Look out. Sooey Wan look out.”
And he permitted the butt of a long-barreled Colt’s .45 to slide down
from his voluminous sleeve. “Sooey Wan no likee. That missionaly ketchum
devil inside heap plenty.”




                              CHAPTER XXIX


Ten months had passed since Dan Pritchard had seen a human being whiter
than Tamea or talked English to a white man. He was acutely conscious of
this flight of time as he sat on the veranda of the green bungalow and
watched a schooner beating up the coast of Riva.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the Pelorus, Tamea,” he remarked.
“Even at this distance her lines look too fine for an ordinary trading
schooner. I hope she drops in. I’d like to have a visit with Hackett.
That man has a superior mind.”

Tamea glanced sharply at him from under lowered lids. Her lips trembled
ever so slightly and she bit them to stop the trembling. At length she
said: “Yes, that is the Pelorus, dear heart. She will drop anchor in the
lagoon for the night and Hackett will come ashore to visit us. Doubtless
he has supplies for the mission.”

“Won’t it be splendid to have him up for dinner, Tamea? Confound it, I
wish we had a really decent dinner to offer him. He must be as weary of
canned goods, chicken, fish and pig as I am.”

To this Tamea made no reply, but her sweet face was slightly clouded as
she sat down at the piano and commenced picking out a hymn by ear. Her
basses were not very good, and the piano, hard driven for many a year
without tuning, rendering sterling assistance in the attack upon Dan’s
nerves. He rose and walked out of the house and down the hill to the
beach, where he sat on an upturned canoe and waited patiently for the
Pelorus to negotiate the opening in the reef. She did it prettily
enough, and as her anchor splashed overside and the harsh grating of the
chain in her hawse-pipe floated across the lagoon to Dan, for a reason
scarcely possible for analysis, a lump rose in his throat.

Perhaps it was the impending drama of a meeting with his own kind after
ten months of alien association that thrilled him so, for he rose and
ran down to the wash of the surf on the white shingle, hallooing and
waving his arms. Two men on the poop waved back at him. One wore a
singlet, a short pair of white trousers and a Panama hat. The other was
arrayed in white linen and, at that distance, reminded Dan of a yacht
owner out with his guests for a cruise.

The whaleboat splashed overboard and the two men dropped overside into
it and were rowed ashore. The man in the short breeks and singlet was
Captain Hackett. He leaped overboard as the whaleboat grounded and
splashed through the wash, with outstretched hand, his face wearing a
hearty but cynical smile.

“How do you do, Mr. Pritchard?” he cried. “Do not bother to answer. I
know. You don’t do worth two squirts of bilge water.” He shook hands.
“Riva on your nerves a bit?” He laughed. “Well, they always wait for us
at the edge of the surf—the ‘back to nature and the simple life’ boys.”
He slapped the embarrassed Dan on the shoulder. “Got a friend of yours
with me.” He turned and waved toward a Kanaka sailor upon whose back was
just mounting, preparatory to being carried ashore so his feet would not
get wet, no less a person than—Mark Mellenger!

“Mel!” Dan’s cry of welcome sounded suspiciously like a sob. “Mel, my
dear old friend! Lord, man, what a joy to see you again!” And he folded
Mellenger to his heart and was silent for a minute, fighting his
emotions.

“It’s Thursday night, old son,” said Mellenger calmly, “so I thought I’d
drop around for dinner—as usual. Is Sooey Wan still dishing up the grub
in your Lares and Penates?” He cuffed Dan affectionately on the ear.
“I’m sort of halfway glad to see you again, Dan.”

They walked up the beach to the Muggridge residence. Captain Hackett
paused beside the veranda and looked the house over critically. “Where
is the sky pilot?” he queried.

“He’s dead, Captain. His wife died shortly before you were here last.
Before that he had been a little bit obsessed by Tamea and after his
wife’s death he rather went on the loose among the natives. I imagine he
was about half cracked——”

“Half?” Hackett sneered, “All. He was half cracked when he came here,
otherwise he would not have come. His wife was the last tie that bound
him to his self-respect, and when she died, doubtless it commenced to
dawn on him that she had been a martyr to a cause not particularly worth
while. The heat and the loneliness killed her. I could see it coming.”

“I dare say you are right, Captain. She was, as you say, the last tie
that bound him to his self-respect. Here, where there was no law save
his, after Gaston left and before I came, there was no longer any
incentive to remain a white man, and he started to degenerate. Religion
was not sufficient to sustain him. He had an uphill job here, at best,
and there was nothing to read except the Bible and he had known that by
heart for twenty years. I wouldn’t talk to him and neither would Tamea.”

“Why?”

“Because he was half crazy. When he wasn’t striving to convert Tamea he
was reviling her for an abandoned woman. Of course I had to put a stop
to that, and when I did he reviled me. Finally I warned him to stay off
the hill. But he wouldn’t. He came prowling up there one night and set
fire to our house. Sooey Wan caught him and we put out the fire before
any damage had been done. A week later I heard shooting outside our
veranda—three rifle shots and six pistol shots. Muggridge owned the
only rifle on the island and Sooey Wan owned the only pistol—and he
slept on the veranda.

“In the morning Muggridge was gone, there were three bullet holes
through our house and Sooey Wan was cleaning his .45 with kerosene. He
said nothing and I asked no questions. I did not care to know.”

“Comfortable old Chink, that, to have around one’s house,” Hackett
remarked dryly. “Well, I have a year’s supply of grub and trade goods
for the mission, so I suppose I might as well dump it here to await the
arrival of the successor to the mad Muggridge. It’s all paid for.”

“Comforting. I’ll use it, Hackett.”

Mellenger walked up into the mission house veranda and sat down. “It’s
as cool here as anywhere,” he reminded Dan. “I’d like to have a chat
with you, Dan, before I meet Tamea.”

“Certainly, Mel.”

“Well, while my crew is busy landing the supplies for the mission I’m
going up to your house and have a chin-chin with Tamea,” Captain Hackett
suggested. “By the way, Mr. Pritchard,” he added innocently, “did you
marry her?”

Dan flushed. “Muggridge, in his insane jealousy, refused to perform the
ceremony without some sort of a license, procurable God knows where—or
when—so we—that is—well, we did the best we could without him.”

The old sea dog went up the path to the hill, chuckling softly.

“Mel,” Dan demanded the instant the captain was out of hearing, “what
under the canopy has brought you here?”

“I came to get you and bring you home.”

Dan shook his head. “My home is here, Mel.” He threw out his arm
tragically toward the east. “I’m quite through with all of that.”

“Fortunately, you are not. Your private fortune and the business
formerly owned by Casson and Pritchard await your return. There’s a hole
amounting to approximately half a million dollars in your private
fortune but the business is all yours now and intact. As soon as you
appear to relieve the receiver of his task of managing your affairs, the
court will discharge him.”

Dan Pritchard stared at his friend, wide unbelief in his glance.
“Explain yourself, Mel. This is most astounding.”

“Some folks are fools for luck,” Mellenger sighed. “Banning and Company
paid forty-two cents on the dollar and that receiver managed to pry
fifty cents on the dollar out of the Katsuma estate. Other losses were
not as heavy as anticipated, and several of your heaviest debtors will
manage to pay out in three or four years, if your luck holds. The thing
that saved you, however, was a typhoon in the China Sea. The steamer
Malayan, with eight thousand tons of high-priced rice insured to its
full value, must have foundered in that typhoon, for she never reached
Havana and was eventually posted at Lloyd’s as missing. Consequently the
receiver collected the insurance, which put your business back on its
feet again. You’re still a rich man, Dan.”

Dan Pritchard placed his elbows on his knees and covered his face with
his hands. He quivered a little. Mellenger ignored him. He lighted one
of Hackett’s Sumatra cigars and puffed away silently, gazing out to the
white water purling over the reef.

“Peaceful spot, this,” he observed presently. “The Land of Never Worry.
How are you fixed for points of intellectual contact?”

“I haven’t any,” Dan confessed in a strangled voice.

“Been doing any painting, old son?”

“Half a dozen canvases. They’re no good.”

“You haven’t asked me about Maisie Morrison, Dan.”

“I haven’t any right to, Mel.”

“Then I shall tell you about her. She is in good health, but not very
happy. That is because she loves you. Splendid woman, Maisie. You made a
grave mistake by not marrying her. I told you to.”

“I didn’t think she cared—that much.”

“It appears she did. Everybody knew that except you, and sometimes I
think you suspected it, but were afraid to take a chance. If you had
your chance all over again, would you marry Maisie?”

“Mel,” Dan admitted wretchedly, “any man is a fool to marry out of his
class. Tamea is a wonderful woman, but——”

“I understand, my friend. It requires something more than love to
sustain love. Is Riva on your nerves?”

Dan raised his haggard face from his hands. “Well, I am beginning to
understand Muggridge a little better lately,” he confessed. “And, unlike
poor Muggridge, I have nothing spiritual to cling to. Nothing but my
sanity, and sometimes when I reflect that all of my future life will be
like this——”

“Ah, but it will not continue to be like this,” Mellenger interrupted
gently. “Tamea will see to that.”

“Tamea is a lovely, wonderful child of nature. She is happy here—so
happy, Mel, that she will never, never be able to understand why I
cannot be happy, too.”

“As usual,” Mellenger growled, “you continue to give abundant proof of
your monumental asininity and masculine ego. I have here a letter which
Tamea wrote Maisie three months ago, via the schooner Doris Crane.”

Dan could only stare at him. “You know the Doris Crane, of course?”
Mellenger queried.

“She came here three months ago for the accumulated trade. I was
pig-hunting on the northern coast of the island at the time, and missed
her. Mel, what could Tamea possibly have to write Maisie about?”

“About you, fool.”

“About me?”

“None other. Hold your peace now, old son, while I read you her letter
to Maisie.” And Mellenger read:

                                                  Riva, 16th August.

    Dear Maisie:

    Please read this letter from one who has spoiled much that was
    beautiful, one who has taken the taste out of three lives,
    yours, Dan Pritchard’s and my own.

    Maisie, Dan Pritchard is here with me. He is my husband, and to
    me he is very kind and loving and faithful. When he came first
    it was his desire to marry me according to the way of your
    people, but the missionary here was mad and would not oblige
    him, so we were married according to the desire of our hearts.
    In the presence of the sea and the earth and the sky we swore,
    each to the other, that we would love each other and dwell
    together in honor. This we have done. But Dan is no longer
    happy. Life slowly loses its taste for him, I have watched and I
    know. He is very lonely, nor can all of my love compensate him
    for the loss of his friends, for the loss of the world that was
    his. I know he feels as sometimes I felt when I dwelled in his
    house in San Francisco, and that is terrible.

    The thought has come to me that if Dan lives here he will some
    day grow to hate me. And I shall some day be too unlovely to
    hold him. These things cannot be helped. They are a part of
    life. My love wearies him even now. He is nervous and unhappy
    and sometimes he withdraws from my caresses, and last night in
    his sleep he spoke of you and his sorrow because you had not
    loved him. Perhaps you do not know this truth, Maisie, but men
    can never love as women love. It is very foolish to expect this.
    A woman can love one man until death, but a man can love two
    women, or even more, but he will love best that woman who gives
    to him the most comfort and peace of mind, the woman who makes
    few demands and who refrains from forcing love upon him when he
    is unhappy.

    Dan Pritchard does not like my people. We are as oil and water.
    He does not like the food we have here, nor the heat nor the
    rain nor the silence nor the loneliness. He would have his own
    people about him. Alas, I would have mine about me. He fits not
    into my world, nor can I ever fit into his. Therefore, it is
    wise that we should part. I would not have him in unhappiness.
    Rather would I die.

    Maisie, come for him. Please! Evil will befall him if you do
    not. If you love him as I think you do, you will come; nor will
    pride—the false pride of a woman—keep you from your happiness.
    Dan was always your man, Maisie. Never was he truly mine. I do
    not know why, but this is true. I would give him back to you,
    Maisie. Please come.

                                                               TAMEA

Mellenger folded the letter and put it back in his pocket. Dan hid his
face in his hands and wept.

“Poor child,” Mellenger murmured. “She has never heard that pity is akin
to love—that she stirred in you all the profound pity and tenderness of
your naturally kind and chivalrous heart. I wouldn’t feel so badly about
it if I were you, Dan. You weep now because your love lies dead and you
have killed it. You merely made a very human mistake. So did Tamea. But
she realizes it and has the courage to confess it. Old son, your romance
is at an end.”

“I shall not abandon her, Mel,” Dan cried brokenly. “My unhappiness
shall not be paid off against hers. She’s too tremendously fine, too
noble.”

“That is true. She is too tremendously fine, too noble, to permit you to
dramatize yourself for her sake. There is only one sacrifice necessary
here, and Tamea is making it—gladly, without regret and all because she
possesses in full measure a love so wonderful, so glorious that no man
can ever possibly understand it or appreciate it. There will be no
pandering to your ego, my son. You are no longer infatuated with Tamea,
she knows it and you might as well acknowledge it. Heroics are quite
unnecessary. Tamea, I take it, does not desire them and I shall not
permit them.”

“But Maisie. What of her, Mel?”

“Well, when she received this letter she sent for me and gave it to me
to read. She knew I was your friend so she sought my counsel. I asked
her pointblank if she loved you and she said she did. I asked her why
she had permitted you to escape and she told me. I think I can
understand her point of view. Then I asked her if she had any conception
of your point of view in this triangle and she said she thought she
understood enough of it to forgive you. I know you rather well, Dan, and
I tried to paint for Maisie a word picture of you as I know you. I told
her that you had never been truly in love with Tamea but rather in love
with love.

“It is your nature to idealize everything. You yearned for a high
romance and Tamea was a romantic figure. She appealed to you physically
and romantically. She aroused your pity, she stirred you and set your
soul afire, and neither of you knew that it was the sort of
conflagration that burns itself out and leaves only a heap of
ashes—ashes of sorrow and regret. I tried to make Maisie see that it
was largely her fault. She had declined to reach forth and possess you
as Tamea, in her primitive innocence, did not hesitate to do.

“I asked her if the memory of this escapade of yours would cloud her
future happiness, if she should marry you, and she said she thought she
could manage to forget it.” Mellenger paused and gazed out to sea
through half closed eyes. “As a matter of fact,” he continued, “there is
not the slightest necessity that anybody in our world need know what has
happened. You have merely been knocking around the isles of the South
Sea, painting and enjoying yourself. Nobody knows except Tamea, Maisie,
you, Hackett and myself—and none of us will ever tell.”

“But, Mel, Maisie refused to marry me. If she had, this would never have
happened.”

“You are a sublimated idiot. You never told Maisie that you loved her.
Women love love, too. You dawdled around, wishful to have your cake and
eat it, hating the freedom of your bachelorhood, yet dreading to abandon
it, restless, perturbed, unhappy—ah, you’re a _nut_. Understand? A
NUT!”

By his silence under fire Dan admitted the truth of this charge and
instantly the great-hearted Mellenger was sorry he had spoken. He laid
his hand gently on his friend’s shoulder.

“Buck up, old son,” he pleaded. “At least you’ve done your best to be a
gentleman all through this affair. Maisie understands that.”

“Tamea asked Maisie to come and get me. Did she come? Is she here?”

“She is aboard the Pelorus now. Old Casson and his wife think she is in
Tahiti. Nothing wrong with taking a summer trip to Tahiti, is there?
What the old folks do not know will not worry them. Well, we came down
on the same steamer and in the harbor at Tahiti we found the Pelorus.
When I told Hackett that I wanted to charter his vessel for a passage to
Riva, he eyed me curiously and said he had been expecting somebody to
come along and charter him for that trip. Then it developed that he knew
you. He wanted more money than Maisie and I could scrape up, but when I
informed him of this he said he’d collect the deficit at Riva. Said he’d
draw a draft on your Chinese bank. So he cleaned up a stateroom for
Maisie and shipped a real cook. He has an ice plant in his hold and we
had a pleasant trip. Hackett is a most agreeable man and for a monetary
consideration is prepared to carry us all directly to San Francisco.”

“Sorry, but I can’t go,” Dan repeated doggedly. “Nor will I inflict on
myself the pain of seeing Maisie.”

“Better toddle along home and talk it over with Tamea,” his friend
suggested patiently. “You may change your mind after that.”

Without a word Dan left him. On the way up the hill he met the master of
the Pelorus coming down. “I’ll send up a couple of my boys to carry down
your trunk,” he told Dan. “Your Tamea is packing it now.” And he smiled
his knowing little smile and continued on toward the mission.

Tamea met Dan as he came up the stairs. “Tamea, dear,” he began, “what
does this mean?”

“You have talked to Mellenger. You know what it means. When I took you
for my husband, _chéri_, I said: ‘I will take you and cherish you only
so long as I may make you happy.’ That time has passed. You are no
longer happy, so I have arranged that you shall leave me. There must be
no argument.”

“Tamea,” he almost groaned, “I cannot bear to break your heart.”

She smiled sadly. “My heart will not be broken. It will be hurt but time
will cure that. I do not wish you to remain longer. If you do I shall be
much more unhappy than if you go away. You will, perhaps, not
understand, but these are true words, dear one. We have both made a
large mistake and it would be foolish not to admit it and strive to mend
that mistake.”

He bowed his head. “And you truly desire this, Tamea?”

“With all my heart,” she answered. She came to him and placed her arms
around his neck. “Love of my life,” she said softly, and in her voice
the stored-up pathos and longing of her shattered life vibrated, “you
will kiss me once and then you will go—quickly.”

“Oh, sweetheart!” he moaned.

“Sh-h,” she pleaded. “I desire this parting, dear love, and because I
desire it I have been to some pains and expense to accomplish it. Here
you are as a fish cast up on the beach. You gasp and struggle for life
and in the end you will die—living. I understand, darling. _Chéri_,
believe me, I understand truly, and there is naught to grieve over.”

She kissed him and clung to him, wet-eyed and trembling, but resolute.
“Now, dear love, you will go,” she whispered, “nor will you look back as
you descend the hill. And sometimes you will think of your Tamea who
loved you better than you will ever be loved again. Adieu, my husband.”

She left him abruptly. He stood for about a minute, his thoughts
inchoate, his brain numbed; yet, out of the chaos of his conflicting
emotions there rose, almost subconsciously, the tiniest flicker of
relief. He hated himself for it. He felt low and mean and treacherous,
felt that he had played a sorry part, indeed, yet he had not meant to do
this, nor had he even contemplated doing it. The situation existed, that
was all, nor could any power of his or Tamea’s alter it in the
slightest. As well strive to restrain a falling star!

His heart constricted, his eyes blurred with tears of sorrow and shame,
he turned away at last and stumbled down the path to the Muggridge
bungalow. Hackett and Mellenger, seeing him coming, walked around to the
opposite side of the house, in order that he might be spared the
humiliation of knowing they had seen him with his soul laid bare.
Straight for the whaleboat, drawn up at the edge of the wash, Dan
headed, and the Kanaka sailors, seeing him coming, ran the boat into the
surf until it floated; there they held it, waiting; and when Dan
Pritchard climbed wearily in, they pulled him out to the Pelorus.

Up on the veranda of the mission house Captain Hackett produced two of
his famous Sumatra cigars. “We’ll give him a couple of hours in which to
straighten out his record with Miss Morrison,” the maritime philosopher
suggested. “Smoke up.”

Mellenger took the cigar, but he did not light it. “I think I shall make
a brief call on Tamea,” he declared. “I really think she would enjoy
seeing me, and until the Pelorus leaves Riva, I imagine Tamea will have
herself rather well under control. How does one reach her habitation?”

Hackett described the way and Mellenger left him. On the steps of
Tamea’s home he found Sooey Wan seated; the old Chinaman looked angry
and disconsolate, but at sight of Mellenger his yellow fangs showed in a
glad smile of welcome. He rose, proffered his hand, which Mellenger
grasped heartily, and for several seconds they stood, looking into each
other’s faces; then the look of desolation sifted back over Sooey Wan’s
face and he shook his head dolefully.

“Missa Mel,” he quavered, “evelybody clazy. Pitty soon Sooey Wan clazy,
too.”

“Yes, Sooey, my friend,” Mellenger replied, “everybody is. In fact, I’m
half crazy myself. Where is Tamea?”

Sooey Wan jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Lady queen packum tlunk,
Missa Mel.”

Mellenger entered the house. In the center of the living room Tamea sat,
folding Dan’s well worn linen and packing it away in trunk trays. She
looked up at his entrance—and stared unbelievingly a moment before
scrambling to her feet and rushing to him with outstretched arms.

“Mellengair! Mellengair, my friend!” she cried, and then she was sobbing
out, upon that great, understanding heart, the agony she had seen fit to
repress in the presence of Dan. He held her to him, stroking the
beautiful head but saying nothing, for he knew that her full heart was
emptying itself, that she would be the better for her tears.

Presently she ceased to sob, but still she clung to him; long,
heart-breaking sighs finally told Mellenger that she was getting herself
under control once more. Gently he lifted her face and with his own
handkerchief dried her eyes. “Poor Tamea!” he murmured. “Poor, unhappy,
misunderstood waif!”

“Do not pity me, my friend,” she pleaded. “It is the fate of half-breeds
to dwell in a world apart; in time we learn to make the best of it.” She
smiled wanly. “It was, perhaps, unfortunate for me that my father was
Gaston of the Beard. He put upon me the imprint of his own soul. So I
see too clearly, I understand too readily, I feel too deeply.” She
lifted his great hand and laid her cheek against the back of it. “Once I
hurt you, Mellengair. I am sorry. I have wept many tears because I have
called you Stoneface.”

“Don’t! Please don’t!” he pleaded hoarsely. “I didn’t mind. Really, I
didn’t.”

“You are a kind liar.” She kissed his hand humbly. “And now,” she added,
with just a suspicion of a quaver in her voice, “it is your friend,
Tamea, who is Stoneface—always to look out to sea for that which
came—and went—and will never, never come again.”

Mellenger’s poker face twitched ever so slightly. “I am here to help
you. Tell me how.”

“There can be no help, Mel. Dan is very unhappy with me. He loves me,
but he is not happy with me, and it has come to the knowledge that never
can the poor boy be happy with me. Great unhappiness is stronger than
great love. It will kill love—and I have watched and his love is dying.
I would have him leave me, loving me. If he remains he will grow mad,
like that missionary Muggridge. Something in him that is fine and very
like a little boy will wither and die.”

Mellenger nodded and Tamea continued: “To Dan also has been given the
gift of seeing too clearly, understanding too readily, feeling too
deeply.”

“Dan is my friend,” said Mellenger. “He has many virtues. He is lovable.
But he is too much given to introspection. He thinks too much about
himself and too little about others. He has not known great happiness
and he has been eager to protect the little he has known. He has a
restless soul, always poised for flight. In a word, he is utterly
selfish and doesn’t know it. He would be highly insulted if he heard me
say so, and he knows as much about women as a pig does about the
binomial theorem.”

Tamea smiled wistfully. “Yes, he knows little of women. He is not
observing, and, as you say, I think it is because he thinks overmuch
about what each new day may bring him. I am to be the mother of his
child, but he does not know this—and I have, for reasons of my own, not
told him.”

“Ah!” Mellenger gasped. “That complicates matters. You are not married,
I take it.”

“No, not the way you take it. You will not tell this to Dan, of course.”

“Of course I shall. If he is the father of your child he shall not evade
the responsibility of fatherhood, although, to do him full justice, I do
not think it would ever occur to him to evade it.”

“In his world, Mellengair, it is not quite _au fait_ to be the father of
a quarter-bred Polynesian child while still a bachelor.”

“It would be regarded as embarrassing.”

“I would not have Dan embarrassed.”

“You can obviate the embarrassment. Come with us to Tahiti and marry Dan
legally before the child is born. Nobody in his world, then, need know.”

“I could not be happy in Dan’s world any more than he can be happy in
mine. You do not seem to understand, Mellengair. I love him. I do not
delude myself, my friend. If I want him I can hold fast to him. I know
my power. But I love him too greatly to hold him when the holding will
smash his life. It is better that I should smash my own, for look you,
Mellengair,” she explained with an odd wistfulness, “I am but Tamea, the
half-caste Queen of Riva. I am old—very old—and I—I do not matter. I
have known the fulness of life. I am content. I cannot leave this land
in which the roots of my soul will ever cling; always when I dwelt with
Dan Pritchard in San Francisco I heard the sound of the surf on the reef
yonder I heard the sigh of these coco-palms, I heard the songs and the
woes of my people. You will, perhaps, not understand, Mellengair, but I
know that I am right.”

He bowed his head. He knew she was right, knew that only a great and
noble soul could so calmly enunciate such a bitter truth. The old,
immutable law of existence could not be shattered. Kind begets kind,
yearns for it, is happy with nothing else. Human beings, habituated to
their environment, cast in certain molds of evolution, may not progress
forward or backward when such progression is not a part of the Infinite
Plan. To attempt it is ruinous; to defy that immutable law—particularly
in the case of super-intelligences like Dan and Tamea—invites disaster.

“Dan Pritchard will go tonight and I shall not see him again,” Tamea
said, following the long silence while Mellenger revolved this sad
puzzle in his poor brain. “Farewells do but bear down the heart, and if
I do not see him again it will be much easier for him, poor dear. He
knows I love him. Why, then, tell him this at parting, why hurt him with
my tears, why subject him to the shame of having me see him bent and
broken? He will go. He greatly desires to go, and I know why, and it is
the law and I am not embittered. Nothing matters in life save that human
beings shall know true happiness—and I have known that. When my baby
comes I shall know it again. I have in me the blood of my mother, and we
were proud of our line. And I have in me the blood of my father and he
was brave and laughed when the seas boiled over the knightheads. I too
shall laugh.”

“I dare say you do not care to visit Maisie, or have her visit you.”

“You are right. You are always right, dear Stoneface. I give to her the
man she loves, the man who, in the bottom of his heart, has always loved
her, the man I took from her. From me he has learned something of life;
at least I have not hurt him, nor have I dwelt with him in dishonor. He
will be comforted by Maisie; life will have a taste for him again; and
of his life here with me, none in his world should ever know. You see, I
understand your people, Mellengair,” she added, with that same odd,
twisted, wistful little smile. “It is that you do not like to be found
out.”

Fell a silence. “You will go now, please, and take Dan Pritchard with
you. Sooey Wan is ready and the sailors from the Pelorus will come for
his trunk.” She gave him her hand.

“May I kiss you, Tamea?” he whispered, and there was that in his
deep-set, unlovely eyes, in his poker face, that might have been seen in
the face of Christ, writhing on the Cross. She lifted her face to his
and he kissed her, very tenderly, on each cheek, after the fashion of
her father’s people. Then he left her, and he descended the hill to the
beach.

“Well?” said Hackett, as Mellenger came up on the Muggridge veranda and
heaved himself wearily into a chair.

“I have just talked with the finest woman God Almighty ever made,”
Mellenger replied huskily. “Compared with her the noblest of men is so
low he could kiss a flounder without bending his knees.” He thoughtfully
bit the end off the cigar Hackett had given him and the latter struck a
match and held it to the tip of the cigar. “Brave, like her father,”
Mellenger continued. “Faces the issue without cringing. She is
magnificent—perfectly tremendous!”

“Well, that’s a comfort, Mr. Mellenger.”

Fell a silence. Then: “Captain Hackett, when you return to the Pelorus,
please send my dunnage ashore and have one of your men dump it in this
veranda. I have decided to remain in Riva. I do not fancy that long trip
home with Dan and Maisie. My presence would make them both
uncomfortable, and I am quite finished with my self-appointed task of
directing that man’s love affairs. He’s a fine man but a poor lover.”

“Nonsense, Mr. Mellenger,” Hackett urged. “The Pelorus is a hundred and
thirty feet long and there is room enough aboard her to make yourself
scarce.”

“Well, I have other reasons for staying. Unlike Dan Pritchard, I have no
dollars calling me back. All I had was a heart-breaking job on a
newspaper and I chucked that forever when I started for Riva. I have
never had a vacation and I have a notion I’ll enjoy knocking around in
the islands. At any rate, I’m going to remain. Having no conscience to
speak of, I will help myself to the supplies you are going to land for
this deserted mission. I shall get along quite nicely.”

“There is no accounting for the ways of white men,” Captain Hackett
declared. “Here comes the whaleboat, loaded with supplies.” He held out
his hand. “Happy days, Mr. Mellenger.”

“Thank you. Good-by. Do not tell Dan I have stayed. He might take it
into his fool head to come ashore and argue with me. And the next time
you happen to be passing along the coast of Riva, drop in and say howdy.
I might be ready to leave at that time.”




                              CHAPTER XXX


When Dan Pritchard descended into the main cabin of the Pelorus, he
found Maisie seated there. She stared at him a moment, not recognizing
in the brown, somewhat unkempt figure at the foot of the companion, the
man she had known and loved in another world.

“It is I—Dan,” he told her.

Maisie made no effort to rise. She knew she was unequal to the effort.
“I—I came—to see if you—cared to come home, Dan,” she said with
difficulty. “Tamea wrote—asked me to come and get you. It has been very
hard for me to do this, Dan. Perhaps you can understand why.”

He came and took her hand in both of his, but made no movement toward a
more affectionate greeting. He was not quite equal to such disloyalty so
soon, even though at sight of Maisie his heart thrilled wildly. “I can
understand your reluctance to running after any man, Maisie,” he
answered her. “Least of all myself.”

“This situation is perfectly amazing. I cannot, even now, understand why
I have come here, Dan.”

“Perhaps it would be just as well not to try to understand some things,
Maisie,” he pleaded. “Do you think it is possible for us to take up our
lives where they were when we saw each other last? You know all about
me, of course.”

“Mark Mellenger was at some pains to attempt a long, scientific and, at
times, reasonable, defense of masculine weaknesses in general and of
yours in particular. Somehow, Dan, I cannot feel that you have been
either weak or wicked. It—it—just happened. I cannot conceive that you
would ever be less than a gentleman.”

He bowed his head. “I have tried to be that, Maisie, although today I do
not feel that I have succeeded. But I cannot do otherwise than leave
Tamea. I do not think it would have occurred to me to leave her, no
matter how bitter the price of staying, but—she willed it otherwise. We
have parted without bitterness; I want you to know that so long as I
live she shall remain a holy and tender memory.”

“You love her?” Maisie choked on the query.

“I love her as one loves a beautiful and lovable child; for the nobility
of soul she possesses I feel a tremendous reverence.”

“I understand—being a woman. You have entertained for me something of
that same affection, I think. Well, it is no fault of yours, is it, if
you mistook infatuation for love?”

“Perhaps, at some future date, Maisie, it will not seem so—so
terrible—to discuss so intimately my feelings toward you or toward
Tamea. I only know that—at last—I am quite certain of myself. I tried
my best to play the game with Tamea, but I wasn’t smart enough to
conceal my true feelings from her, once those feelings became apparent
to myself. She has the mind of a warlock. I—I—tried to love her,
but—oh, my God, forgive me—we were as oil and water. We could not mix.
I couldn’t stand this place. There is beauty here and peace; life
tiptoes by so serenely that the sameness of the days was driving me mad.
I had no social intercourse—no points of intellectual contact—and
every relative of Tamea’s, no matter how distantly related—was dwelling
under the mantle of our—of her—philanthropy. She loves them all and
hasn’t the heart to drive them away. It is the custom and she is the
last of her blood. She will not alter the custom. I hate the food, I
hate the smell of decaying vegetation, I hate the rain, I hate the
music, I hate the sunshine—and the loneliness would, eventually, have
driven me insane. That’s what it did to Muggridge. I did some sketching
the first few months. Since then I have had no heart for it. My mind is
back in San Francisco; I can’t shake off the memories of the old life.
Tamea spends her days adoring me—and I’m sick of it. _I’m sick of it, I
tell you. I’m fed up on love. I’m—I’m_——”

Maisie managed to stand up. She placed her hands on Dan’s shoulders.
“Buck up, old booby,” she murmured, with something of the adorable
camaraderie that had charmed him so in happier days. “You are the victim
of a terrible tragedy and so is poor Tamea. But she was wise enough to
see that something radical had to be done—and she did it. You see,
Dan’l, you weren’t truly in love with Tamea and I knew it all the time.
You were in love with love, or perhaps your pity led you, like a
will-o’-the-wisp. At any rate, it’s all over and nobody shall ever know
and—and—I love you, Dan. I never thought I would be brave enough, or
unmaidenly enough, to tell you this. But I know you love me, Dan. I knew
it long before Tamea flashed across your life like a meteor and swept
you off your silly old feet. I was weak, or I would have saved you—and
when I found I could manage the strength, you were gone and it was too
late. You’ve been such an old stupid. I should have made allowance for
you, because I know you so well. . . . Well, I am here—and nothing that
has happened matters any more. There, there you go with that sad old
Abraham Lincoln look again—and now I’ll have to be friend Maisie
again.”

She forced him down into a seat and he laid his arms on the cabin table
and buried his face in them, in order that Maisie might not see the
agony in his soul. “Nobody can ever understand except one who has had
the experience,” he tried to explain. “Tamea is all white—and half
native. She gazes upon life native-fashion—she’s a tragic
contradiction. I could never quite know what was in her mind when she
gazed upon me so sweetly and tragically and she could never quite know
what was in mine.”

“Ah, but she did know, poor dear,” Maisie contradicted. “She has proved
that she knew.”

“She is old—old, with the wisdom of the aged and the philosophy of
patriarchs——”

“And the heart of a woman, Dan.”

“No, the heart of a child.”

Maisie smiled wistfully. Poor old booby Dan’l! He would never, never
know that a woman is always a child! Because she had tact and more
imagination than Dan Pritchard had ever given her credit for possessing,
she left him and went up on deck.

At sunset the Pelorus passed out of the lagoon and as her bow lifted to
the long, lazy rollers beyond the outer reef, Dan Pritchard, from her
quarter-deck, through a mist gazed back on his Paradise lost. High up on
the headland where Tamea’s home nestled in the grove, a white figure,
silhouetted against the sunset glow, waved to him. And presently, as the
Pelorus drew clear of the coast and the full force of the trades bellied
her canvas, to send her ramping toward the horizon, that white figure
slowly faded; the last Dan Pritchard saw of Riva was the steadily
deepening glow of the hot heart of Hakataua, pulsating against the
purple sky. And whatever thoughts occurred to him in that supreme moment
were never given utterance, for Maisie came and stood beside him and
said:

“Don’t be ashamed of it, Dan, dear. I understand. Truly, I do.”

“It will be terrible if you do not, Maisie, for I have lived to be too
thoroughly understood—I who am not worth understanding.”




                              CHAPTER XXXI


When the last sunlight faded from the earth and the sea and the swift
tropic twilight had swallowed the Pelorus, Tamea cast herself upon the
earth and beat it with her beautiful hands, sobbing aloud, in the
language of her mother’s people, the agony of her broken heart. Upon her
the gods had rained the supreme blow and she could no longer stand erect
and take it smiling. Upon the pungent, fetid earth she groveled in her
despair until, utterly spent, she lay like a beautiful wilted lily, an
occasional long, constricted gasp alone giving evidence that she still
lived—and suffered.

After a long time a voice spoke in the semi-darkness.

“Tamea! Stoneface is speaking.”

The girl started up. “Mellengair! You have not gone?”

“Did I not tell you once, Tamea, that I loved you? That when you too
were a Stoneface, with your flower face in the dust, I would love you
more than ever, because your child’s heart would have been broken? And
did I not tell you that I would lift you up and hold you to my heart and
comfort you? Behold, Tamea, these hands outthrust to you.” And with the
words he lifted her from the ground and held her against his great
breast. “Poor child!” he kept murmuring, and stroked her hair.

“Oh, why did you stay?” she sobbed. “I do not love you, Mel. You are to
me a true friend only.”

“I do not ask for love, Tamea,” he replied gently. “I seek service. I
thought I would stay until your baby should be born—it seemed I ought
to wait awhile and see that all goes well with you, child.”

“My race is dying. I too shall die, and that soon. Life has lost its
taste, and when my baby has been born—my friend, when such as we have
lost our taste for life, life departs. We do not live for the coward’s
love of life, but for life’s joys.”

“But the baby,” he reminded her.

“I will give him to you, my friend. Would you not care to have my son
and love him as your own?”

The poker face twitched, the unlovely eyes blinked a little. Mel bowed
his head affirmatively.

“I have an illness—here,” Tamea murmured, and placed her hand on her
side. “It is the lung disease that comes to so many of us Polynesians,
and when I knew my length of life was measured by but a year or two, I
did not hesitate. I had to make haste, since I did not desire Dan to
grow like Muggridge in his mind. Muggridge was here too long, too long
removed from his kind; in striving to draw my people upward, he drew
himself downward. I would not have Dan remember me as a thin and haggard
invalid, old before my time, no longer beautiful. Do you understand,
Mellengair?”

“I understand.”

“I have money. You know how much my father left me. When I am gone you
will take it and my child, both for your own. You are a poor man in your
own land, wherefore you must have money to dwell in contentment. And you
will never tell Dan Pritchard I have borne him a child, because that
would render him unhappy. And you will raise my child as a full white,
in white ways, and none shall know that my baby’s mother was a
half-breed Polynesian. Understand, I am not ashamed of my blood,
but”—through her tears she smiled the odd, wistful little smile—“it is
inconvenient. There are some who might regard my blood as base and
remind my child of it in years to come. In a three-quarter white none
but the very wise, the very observant, can tell the blood of the other
quarter.”

He held her close to him and stroked her wonderful black hair. “Poor
child,” he kept saying, “poor child.” And finally: “Remember, I do not
ask for love, but service.”

“I understand, dear, kind Stoneface. We are two with stone faces now,
are we not, my friend?. . . Well, you shall take me to my house, and
then you shall go to the house of Muggridge and dwell there until the
period of service shall be over. Or,” she added, “until it shall begin!”

She lifted his big hand and kissed it. “My friend,” she whispered, “my
good, kind friend!”

“Poor child,” said Mellenger. “Poor, poor child!”

                                THE END




                           TRANSCRIBER NOTES


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