XIV.
A WEEK passed and we were still in the garden of Santo. Matthew Burnie remained with us now. Stuart had managed to make clear to Mary that the old man was her father. It meant little to her, yet she grew to like the patriarch.
It was not a cheerful week for me. Here was the lad, head over heels in love with the girl, who only lived for his glance on her. Matthew Burnie saw this, and said nothing.
“I shall not leave Santo,” he told me one night when we were watching the moonlight sift through the lacework of leaves overhead, and Mary and the lad were chattering a short distance away. “I shall die here, where Esther died.”
“And Mary?” I asked, for he had grown to call her that.
He did not reply for a long time.
“She would fare ill if she went from here,” he said, and his deep voice showed that he was moved.
“I’m not so sure,” I replied, although I knew he was right. “Jack has taught her a dozen words of English. She learns quickly. In Australia”
“She would not be happy. Twenty years of life cannot be done away with. The hand of the Lord has placed her in Santo.”
I said something about living on the schooners among the islands, for I knew that Jack Stuart loved her, and being the kind of man he was, wished her for his wife.
“I know that is the truth,” said Matthew Burnie firmly. “A flower cannot be cut and kept alive in a vase, sir. Mary must not leave Santo.”
That night Jack Stuart told me he had heard what we said, and asked if I believed as the missionary. I could not lie to Jack. I told him that books have been written about people who have lived in the wild returning to civilization. Yet it always works sorrow with them. Mary Burnie might not even live, if she were taken from Santo, to the English climate and cities.
The boy said nothing, going away alone for a walk. As I have said, he was little inclined to speak his feelings. And Burnie made no effort to influence the lad, believing rightly or wrongly that the problem was out of his hands.
“But I have already taught her some simple words,” remonstrated the lad the next day. “And she understands half what we say.”
“Nature has made her, lad,” I said, “and she cannot be changed. Mary must not leave Santo.”
The girl seemed to guess what was in my mind. She did all she could to keep Jack Stuart from me. I think if she had known what I told the lad she would have had her friends the hillmen send an arrow my way. Yet I did the only thing I could. I had promised McShea I would bring the lad back with me.
By that time McShea’s schooner must have been off Santo two or three days, if he had waited. I saw that there was no good in lingering—a great deal of harm in fact.
Matthew Burnie passed his days quietly, eating the food we got for him. I noticed that Mary brough us quantities of fruit and yams with an occasional roast pig that she had certainly not contrived to catch and guessed that her friends had not forgotten her—and that they still visited the coast villages.
But the tranquillity of the hills of Santo did not lessen my desire to take Jack Stuart away with me. I felt like a brute when I urged him to come, for the three of them seemed completely happy.
“You must not take the girl away. Jack,” I told him one night during a heavy rain. “And the longer you stay, the harder it will be to leave.”
He went for a walk that night in the rain. At dawn the next day he routed me out of my blankets.
“Take your gun and some food, old man,” he said soberly. “We are going back to the coast.”
As I said, the lad was a gentleman. That isn’t the word, however. He was a thoroughbred. Said we would leave without disturbing Mary and her father, who occupied a cavern adjoining ours.
Yet we did not succeed in escaping the girl. She was at Jack’s side before we were out of the clearing.
“We are going for a hunt, Mary,” he said. Then he whispered to me to drop the food I was carrying, for she was staring at it suspiciously. She let us go at that, watching us out of sight. That was the first and only time I heard her speak English.
“You come back?” she cried after us.
Jack Stuart choked. He waved his hand to her, and we passed out of sight. We traveled fast down to the Jordan and the dugouts. I don’t think either of us spoke during the trip which we made in two days, aided by the current.
We found McShea waiting.
That was the last I saw of Santo. We took Jack Stuart back to Maryborough. The lad was moody during the trip, but it was his way to be quiet, and beyond dosing him up with quinine, McShea paid him no attention.
That cruise was my last as government agent. I had to go to England and during my absence the labor trade was given up rightly.
As I have said, I returned to the South Seas eventually. Few stay away for long. I chartered a schooner at Maryborough, and was lucky enough to sign on. McShea as skipper. He had been knocking about, since the trade was given up, doing some pearl trading and odds and ends. He grunted when I told him all I wanted was to get out to the islands again.
The first night out, with the old spell of the stars and the night sea upon me, I asked after my old friends.
“Where is Jack Stuart?” I asked.
McShea spat over the side and took time to light his pipe. He was ever a dour soul.
“Dead, most like,” he said.
“How?” I inquired.
“Just after you sailed for London, he bought a small schooner and left for the islands. He dropped out of sight, since.”
McShea went on to say that the schooner had been found half wrecked off Santo and the lad had probably been massacred by the islanders.
“Perhaps not,” I said, remembering the two we had left in the hills of Santo. And I think I was right.