CHAPTER XI
THE SLOUGH OF TRANQUILLITY
Three months stole by with tantalising slowness. How the strangers onthe island of Japat employed those dull, simmering, idle weeks it wouldnot be difficult to relate. There was little or no incident to break themonotony of their enforced residence among the surly Japatites; the sameroutine obtained from day to day. Sultry, changeless, machine-like werethose hundred days and nights. They looked forward with hopeful, tiredeyes; never backward. There was nothing behind them but a dour waste, abog through which they had driven themselves with a lash of resolution.
Autumn passed on into winter without a change of expression in thebenign face of nature. Christmas day was as hot as if it had come inmidsummer; the natives were as naked, the trees as fully clad. Thecurious sun closed his great eye for a few hours in the twenty-four; theremainder of the time he glared down upon his victims with a malevolencethat knew no bounds. Soft, sweet winds came with the typhoon season,else the poor whites must have shrivelled and died while naturerevelled. Rain fell often in fitful little bursts of joyousness, but thehungry earth sipped its moisture through a million greedy lips, eager tothwart the mischievous sun. Through it all, the chateau gleamed red andpurple and gray against the green mountainside, baked where the suncould meet its face, cool where the caverns blew upon it with theirrich, damp breath.
The six months were passing away, however, in spite of themselves; tenweeks were left before the worn, but determined heirs could cast offtheir bonds and rush away to other climes. It mattered little whetherthey went away rich or poor; they were to go! Go! That was the richestthing the future held out to them--more precious than the wealth forwhich they stayed. Whatever was being done for them in London andBoston, it was no recompense for the weariness of heart and soul thatthey had found in the green island of Japat.
True, they rode and played and swam and romped without restraint, butbeneath all of their abandon there lurked the ever-present pathos of thejail, the asylum, the detention ward. The blue sky seemed streaked withthe bars of their prison; the green earth clanked as with the sombretread of feet crossing flagstones.
Not until the end of January was there a sign of revolt against theever-growing, insidious condition of melancholy. As they turned into thelast third of their exile, they found heart to rejoice in the thoughtthat release was coming nearer and nearer. The end of March! Eight weeksoff! Soon there would be but seven weeks--then six!
And, all this time, the islanders toiled as they had toiled for years;they reckoned in years, while the strangers cast up Time's account inweeks and called them years. Each day the brown men worked in the mines,piling gems into the vaults with a resoluteness that never faltered.They were the sons of Martha. The rubies of Mandalay and Mogok wererivalled by the takings of these indifferent stockholders in the greatJapat corporation. Nothing short of a ruby as large as the Tibet gemcould have startled them out of their state of taciturnity. Gemsweighing ten and fifteen carats already had been taken from the "byon"in the wash, and yet inspired no exaltation. Sapphires, nestling in thesoft ground near their carmine sisters, were rolling into the coffers ofthe company, but they were treated as so many pebbles in this ceaselesssearch.
The tiniest child knew that the ruby would not lose its colour by fire,while the blue of the sapphire would vanish forever if subjected toheat. All these things and many more the white strangers learned; theywere surfeited with a knowledge that tired and bored them.
From London came disquieting news for all sides to the controversy. Thestruggle promised to be drawn out for years, perhaps; the executorswould probably be compelled to turn over the affairs of the corporationto agents of the Crown; in the meantime a battle royal, long drawn out,would undoubtedly be fought for the vast unentailed estate left behindby the two legators.
The lonely legatees, marooned in the far South Sea, began to realisethat even after they had spent their six months of probation, they wouldstill have months, even years, of waiting before they could touch thefortune they laid claim to. The islanders also were vaguely awake to thefact that everything might be tied up for years, despite the provisionsof the will; a restless, stubborn feeling of alarm spread among them.This feeling gradually developed itself into bitter resentment; hatredfor the people who were causing this delay was growing deeper andfiercer with each succeeding day of toil.
Their counsellor, the complacent Enemy, was in no sense immune to theblandishments of the climate. His tremendous vitality waned; he slowlydrifted into the current with his fellows, although not beside them. Forsome unaccountable reason, he held himself aloof from the men and womenthat his charges were fighting. He met the two lawyers often, butnothing passed between them that could have been regarded as theslightest breach of trust. He lived like a rajah in his shady bungalow,surrounded by the luxuries of one to whom all things are broughtindivisible. If he had any longing for the society of women of his ownrace and kind, he carefully concealed it; his indifference to the subtlethough unmistakable appeals of the two gentlewomen in the chateau wasirritating in the extreme. When he deliberately, though politely,declined their invitation to tea one afternoon, their humiliation knewno bounds. They had, after weeks of procrastination, surrendered to theinevitable. It was when they could no longer stand out against thecommon enemy--Tranquillity! Lord Deppingham and Bobby Browne suffered insilence; they even looked longingly toward the bungalow for the reliefthat it contained and refused to extend.
Lady Deppingham and Mrs. Browne should not be misunderstood by thereader. They loved their husbands--I am quite sure of that; but theywere tired of seeing no one else, tired of talking to no one else.Moreover, in support of this one-sided assertion, they experienced fromtime to time the most melancholy attacks of jealousy. The drag of timehung so heavily upon them that any struggle to cast it off wasimmediately noticeable. If Mrs. Browne, in plain despair, went off for aday's ride with Lord Deppingham, that gentleman's wife was sick withjealousy. If Lady Agnes strolled in the moonlit gardens with Mr. Browne,the former Miss Bate of Boston could scarcely control her emotions. Theyshed many tears of anguish over the faithlessness of husbands; tears ofhatred over the viciousness of temptresses. Their quarrels were fierce,their upbraidings characteristic, but in the end they cried and kissedand "made up"; they actually found some joy in creating these littlefeuds and certainly there was great exhilaration in ending them.
They did not know, of course, that the wily Britt, despite his owndepression, was all the while accumulating the most astounding lot ofevidence to show that a decided streak of insanity existed in the twoheirs. He won Saunders over to his way of thinking, and that faithfulagent unconsciously found himself constantly on the watch for "signs,"jotting them down in his memorandum book. Britt was firm in his purposeto make them out as "mad as March hares" if needs be; he slyly pattedhis typewritten "manifestations" and said that it would be easy sailing,so far as he was concerned. One choice bit of evidence he secured in amost canny manner. He was present when Miss Pelham, at the bank, was"taking" a dictation for the Enemy--some matter pertaining to the outputof the mines. Lady Deppingham had just been guilty of a most astoundingpiece of foolhardiness, and he was discussing it with the Enemy. She hadforced her horse to leap across a narrow fissure in the volcano the daybefore. Falling, she would have gone to her death three hundred feetbelow.
"She must be an out and out lunatic," the Enemy had said. Britt lookedquickly at Miss Pelham and Mr. Bowles. The former took down thestatement in shorthand and Bowles was afterward required to sign "hisdeposition." Such a statement as that, coming from the source it did,would be of inestimable value in Court.
"If they could only be married in some way," was Britt's private lamentto Saunders, from time to time, when despair overcame confidence.
"I've got a ripping idea," Saunders said one day.
"Let's have it. You've always got 'em. Why not divide with me?"
"Can't do it just yet. I've been looking up a little matter. I'll springit soon."<
br />
"How long have you been working on the idea?"
"Nearly four months," said Saunders, yawning.
"'Gad, this climate _is_ enervating," was Britt's caustic comment.
Saunders was heels over head in love with Miss Pelham at this time, soit is not surprising that he had some sort of an idea about marriage, nomatter whom it concerned.
Night after night, the Deppinghams and Brownes gave dinners, balls,musicales, "Bridges," masques and theatre suppers at the chateau. Firstone would invite the other to a great ball, then the other would respondby giving a sumptuous dinner. Their dinners were served with as muchpunctiliousness as if the lordliest guests were present; their dancingparties, while somewhat barren of guests, were never dull for longerthan ten minutes after they opened. Each lady danced twice and thenpleaded a headache. Whereupon the "function" came to a close.
For a while, the two hostesses were not in a position to ask any oneoutside their immediate families to these functions, but one day Mrs.Browne was seized by an inspiration. She announced that she was going tosend regular invitations to all of her friends at home.
"Regular written invitations, with five-cent stamps, my dear," sheexplained enthusiastically. "Just like this: 'Mrs. Robert Brownerequests the pleasure of Miss So-and-so's company at dinner on the 17thof Whatever-it-is. Please reply by return steamer.' Won't it be fun?Bobby, please send down to the bank for the stamps. I'm going to makeout a list."
After that it was no unusual thing to see large packages of carefullystamped envelopes going to sea in the ships that came for the mail.
"And I'd like so much to meet these native Americans that you areasking," said Lady Agnes sweetly, and without malice. "I've alwayswondered if the first families over there show any trace of theirwonderful, picturesque Indian blood."
"Our first families came from England, Lady Deppingham," said Drusilla,biting her lips.
"Indeed? From what part of England?" Of course, that query killed everychance for a sensible discussion.
One morning during the first week in February, the steamer from Adenbrought stacks of mail--the customary newspapers, magazines, novels,telegrams and letters. It was noticed that her ladyship had severalhundred letters, many bearing crests or coats-of-arms.
At last, she came to a letter of many pages, covered with a scrawl thatlooked preposterously fashionable.
"Nouveau riche," thought Drusilla Browne, looking up from her ownletters. Lady Agnes gave a sudden shriek, and, leaping to her feet,performed a dance that set her husband and Bobby Browne to gasping.
"She's coming!" she cried ecstatically, repeating herself a dozen times.
"Who's coming, Aggie?" roared her husband for the sixth time.
"She!"
"She may be a steamship for all I know, if--"
"The Princess! Deppy, I'm going to squeeze you! I must squeeze somebody!Isn't it glorious? Now--now! Now life will be worth living in thisbeastly place."
Her dearest friend, the Princess, had written to say that she was comingto spend a month with her. Her dear schoolmate of the old days inParis--her chum of the dear Sacred Heart Convent when it flourished inthe Boulevard des Invalides--her roommate up to the day when thatinstitution was forced to leave Paris for less unfriendly fields!
"In her uncle's yacht, Deppy--the big one that came to Cowes last year,don't you know? Of course, you do. Don't look so dazed. He's cruisingfor a couple of months and is to set her down here until the yachtreturns from Borneo and the Philippines. She says she hopes it will bequiet here! Quiet! She _hopes_ it will be _quiet_! Where are thecigarettes, Deppy? Quick! I must do something devilish. Yes, I know Iswore off last week, but--please let me take 'em." The four of themsmoked in wondrous silence for two or three minutes. Then Browne spokeup, as if coming from a dream:
"I say, Deppingham, you can take her out walking and pick up a crownfulof fresh rubies every day or so."
"Hang it all, Browne, I'm afraid to pluck a violet these days. Everytime I stoop over I feel that somebody's going to take a shot at me. Iwonder why the beggars select me to shoot at. They're not always poppingaway at you, Browne. Why is it? I'm not looking for rubies every time Istoop over. They shot at me the other day when I got down to pick up mycrop."
"It's all right so long as they don't kill you," was Browne's consolingremark.
"By Jove!" said Deppingham, starting up with a look of horror in hiseyes, sudden comprehension rushing down upon him. "I wonder if theythink I am _you_, Browne! Horrible!"