THE RAT-TRAP

By
DOLF WYLLARDE

New York:
JOHN LANE COMPANY
1914

Copyright 1904
By John Lane

TO
THE GENERAL PUBLIC

The only critic whose opinion is finally worth having

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHARACTERS

• Evelyn Gregory, Administrator and Colonial Secretary of Key Island
• Alfred Halton, commissioned to enquire into the causes of recent riots when the island was under the administration of the British African Island Company
• The Hon. Arthur White, Attorney-General of Key Island
• Major Bute Churton (the Wessex Regiment), Officer commanding H. M. Troops in Key Island
• Gifford Ambroise, Town Warden of Port Albert
• John Burton, Town Warden of China Town
• Melton Hanney, British Consul at Port Cecil, East Africa
• Captain Alaric Lewin (28th Lancers), Private Secretary and A. D. C. to the Administrator of Key Island
• Captain Bristow Nugent (Wessex Regiment)
• Lieutenant Hamilton Gurney (Wessex Regiment)
• Captain Wray Gilderoy (Royal Garrison Artillery at Key Island)
• Second Lieutenant Edward Rennie (Royal Garrison Artillery at Key Island)
• Lieutenant George Clayton (Army Service Corps)
• The Rev. Archie Lysle (Chaplain to the Forces)
• Captain Ritchie Stern, R.N., commanding H.M.S. Greville
• The Hon. James Denver, Sugar Planter, Member of the Legislative Council
• Abdallah, Captain Lewin’s Arab butler
• Leoline Lewin, Captain Lewin’s wife
• Diana Churton, Major Churton’s wife
• Alice Gilderoy, Captain Gilderoy’s wife
• Eva Clayton, Lieutenant Clayton’s wife
• Blanche Stern, Captain Ritchie Stern’s wife
• Mrs. Arthur White (wife of the Attorney-General)
• Beatrix Denver (James Denver’s daughter)

CHAPTER I

“Beware of fire, of water, of savage dogs, and of the man who talks under his breath.”—English Proverb.

The troop-ship was twenty-four hours before her time in arriving, which put the authorities out, for they like to take their leisure in Key Island and as the thermometer rarely stands below 88° in the shade they have some reason for their objection to hurry. The bungalow which Government had thoughtfully apportioned to the private secretary and A.D.C. to the Administrator was not ready, and word came down to the ship that he must please to spend the night at the hotel, whereat Captain Alaric Lewin swore in fluent English (he could have done the same in five different languages) and wanted to know why the several dashes Government had parted him from his regiment and sent him to an asterisk hole like Key Island, if they did not mean to provide him with a blank shelter when he got there. It was all very well for his predecessor, who had been a bachelor; but Captain Lewin was a married man, and a six-months-old husband to boot. He objected to taking his wife to dubious Colonial “hotels”—so-called.

Out in the sunshine of the deck Mrs. Lewin was sitting among her baggage (while she waited for her lord and master to have arranged matters before taking her ashore), because she knew no better, the atmospheric conditions and effects of Key Island being as yet a sealed book to her. She was watching the men formed up and marched off the gangway, and formed up again on the wharf, and finally departing in a cloud of dust and sunshine to the barracks on the Maitso Hill. Now and then an officer saluted her in passing, and she nodded back and smiled, for the five days out from Cape Town had been worth an intimacy of three weeks on shore. There was idle speculation in her gaze as it rested on this small corner of the British Empire, in which her present lot was cast; but in this present moment of coming close to it Key Island was no more than a flat picture on her mind of an absurd little white town tufted with palms, and completely overweighted by that harbour and the wharves which the Government were converting into a great coaling-station, the whole shut in by the exquisite hills, loaded with timber and softly drawn against a sky of pure deep blue. There is no bluer sky than that which hangs above Key Island, and reflects itself in the Mozambique Channel all round it on a clear day, but Mrs. Lewin saw no more than the outward semblance of the place. It takes characters in a landscape to endue it with vitality either to present sense or bitter memory. All she saw on this occasion was the green slopes of Maitso and Mitsinjovy, forming each side of the bay, and beyond them the principal feature of the harbour,—two great conical rocks, rising sheer from the sea to the height of two thousand feet, which the English call the Gates, but the native population, who have caught strange words from Madagascar, name Teraka and Tsofotra, Sunrise and Sunset. There is a half-mile of blue water between the base of the right and left Gate, and between them the troop-ship had but lately passed, giving Mrs. Lewin a profile view of their frowning sides. It was practically impossible not to see the Gates, because they were as giants in the landscape; but the significance of their name and position, shutting in the little tropical island at which she had but just arrived, was as yet an unknown tongue to her. She had not heard them close softly behind her, and bar the way to the outer world, as residents grow to fancy that they have after a while.

“Port Victoria!” said Mrs. Lewin musingly, her thoughts reverting to the tumbled houses and the windy palms. “I wonder if it will ever grow up to its name? At present it might be called Little Vic.”

Her thoughts were distracted by the white figure of her husband coming along the deck, and distinct against the other units in khaki as a white sheep amongst a flock of brown. He was immaculate, but cross, and one end of his moustache was caught between his teeth, and his handsome face looked darker than usual because he did not appear upon the edge of a smile, which was his normal expression.

“We must go to the hotel, Chum,” he said. “No help for it. Come out of the sun. What made you sit there?”

“I don’t feel it very hot. Don’t bother about me, Ally, I expect the hotel will be bearable—you wouldn’t mind it for yourself.” The habit of a lifetime, rather than the relationship of six months, had taught Leoline Lewin to classify every shade on her husband’s face with sub-conscious accuracy. She had no least intention of knowing Ally’s mind for him, but she did it all the same.

“There is no help for it, anyway,” Captain Lewin said. “I’ve got a buggy—our luggage will come up behind us.”

Mrs. Lewin followed him off the boat and across the dusty road to the Customs House, and so through the farce of having their luggage examined, to the ramshackle conveyance drawn by a broken-kneed pony, which was bunched up forlornly in the shade of the Customs House.

“Couldn’t we go up by tram, Ally?” she said, a little comically. “This is so musty—and the trams look quite clean and airy!”

“Oh, they are only intended for the niggers, going up and down from the coaling, or for people connected with the wharves!” remarked Captain Lewin with unusual irony. “Everything exists here simply to be a convenience to the wharves and the coaling, you will find. Mere human beings don’t count in the new Government scheme!” He helped her into the buggy, and flung his own big dissatisfied self into the seat beside her, which creaked beneath his weight, for Captain Lewin rode twelve stone for his five feet eleven inches. The buggy rumbled along, pitching like a ship, and gave Mrs. Lewin a glimpse of open stores and motley groups of coloured people, an undrained street, and now and then a large, hard building, obviously new and solid, and as out of keeping with the older houses as the town with the harbour. The whole place had an unfinished appearance, as of a production begun by one workman and put down as hopeless, and then taken up by another who had not yet matured his plan for improvement.

The buggy came to a stop before one of the older houses, a long rough bungalow with a wide stoep, and empty doorways like open mouths, in and out of which a small white Chinaman passed now and then, monotonously bent on business. These were the waiters and servants of the Hotel Natale, who bore the badge of the place on their grass-cloth liveries, and the caps on their heads, which, by the way, they only wore until it should be time to shave themselves, according to the laws of Confucius. They swarmed out of the place like the white ants on the wooden railing to the stoep, spread themselves on the luggage in the hinder cart, and carried Captain and Mrs. Lewin into the hotel in a whirlwind of their own property.

“Get us two rooms—and be quick about it!” Alaric said shortly. “I’m very sorry, Chum—but at all events it’s a place to rest and clean up in.”

His wife had passed him and walked into the cool shadows beyond the stoep with some interest and curiosity in her face. She was a tall girl, and had an enquiring way of carrying her chin, but her interest was really unfeigned, for beyond England her experiences had been limited to the Continent, and there was nothing Continental in the Hotel Natale. Before Mrs. Lewin stretched a long carpetless passage, some seventeen feet high, and lighted by one large whitewashed window at the further end. It was the only real window, with glass panes, in Port Victoria, as she afterwards found, and its proprietor was proud of it. All the rest consisted of frames filled with wooden blinds, or shutters that would shift up and down, to let in the air or shut out the light. The windows in Mrs. Lewin’s bedroom were on this plan, as she found when the Chinese scurried before her and piled her boxes in the middle of the huge bare room. There was neither light nor bell in the hotel, but they brought her one candle, and Ally’s dressing-room was next door, so she managed as best she might. By-and-by she wandered in to him to see how he fared, and found his apartment the counterpart of her own, as to furnishing—a narrow bed, with a dirty mosquito curtain over it, a chest of drawers, without paint or key, a basket-work chair, a washstand, and a looking-glass. Captain Lewin in his shirt-sleeves appeared the most valuable thing in the room. A good-looking man is never more good-looking than in that severely simple costume, and despite the fact that he was red from wrestling with his shirt case, and swearing at the hotel and all its resources all over again, he seemed to his wife a goodly possession.

“What are you doing, Ally?” Mrs. Lewin said, coming to the rescue, and taking the keys out of his hand with cool, soft fingers. “Here, you helpless boy, I’ll valet you to-night. I suppose the Chinese are not reliable?”

“Don’t suppose they know the use of a stud, except to loot it. It’s awfully good of you, Chum. Got it open, already? I’ll engage a man before I’m many hours older. But look here, if you’ll unpack the things I shall want, I’ll go and get you some tea!”

She laughed at the wheedling tone, and accepted the bribe. Even at five o’clock in the day it was hot, with the clinging, muscle-sapping heat of the tropics, but Chum had the vitality and sting of an English winter still in her veins, and did not suffer as yet. She did some unpacking—her own as well as Ally’s—and drank the tea he ordered in lieu of his own whiskey and soda; and then she dressed for dinner, coming into his room again to have her blouse fastened, for it hooked at the back. Ally was in a better temper; he manipulated the complicated fastening wonderfully with his large hands, and stooped to kiss his wife’s pretty neck.

“You’re too good to be wasted on this damned hole—beg pardon, Chum!” he said, “I wish I’d got you out to Malta, or some other decent station.”

“What does it matter, old boy? The blouse is just as pretty for you to look at on Key Island, and you can’t hope for Malta at your age without unprecedented luck. Let’s make the best of our step up—private secretary and A.D.C. is something, anyway.”

“I expect it will be too, with this man. I was told at Cape Town he was a Tartar.”

“Know anything of him?”

“Nothing. He’s been somewhere on the Indian frontier, quelling rebellions without much ceremony, and a good deal of unofficial slaughter. The Government always sends him out when there’s trouble to squash, and then censures him when he’s done it. He’s here now to expiate his sins, his measures having been a little too drastic to be winked at any longer.”

“Oh!” said Chum thoughtfully, “he must be one of our few strong men. And they are worth having behind you, Ally. Let us annex the Administrator, you and I, and make him the good geni of our fortunes!”

“It would be the first time that Gregory was any one’s good geni!” said Ally dryly. “They say he works his men to death, and when he can get no more out of ’em, he throws ’em aside like a spent cartridge-case. Come on, Chum—that fiendish row on a gong means some sort of a meal, I suppose.”

“Is my hair all right?” said Mrs. Lewin carelessly, as she tucked her hand into his arm.

He looked down at her somewhat critically, for he set much store by appearance, and nodded. From his point of view it was unfortunate that Leoline was cast in too individual a mould to be turned out quite like the well-groomed, clean young Englishwoman whom the Mother Country breeds in serviceable batches as wives for sensible men. But common-sense had done much for Mrs. Alaric Lewin, and had made her as near her husband’s ideal as Nature would go. It was really only her hair which gave Chum much anxiety now, for its splendid weight and ripples did not lend themselves very well to the mode of the moment, but she laboured with it earnestly, and by the aid of a hair-net gave it something the sameness of other women’s. She had no desire to be conspicuous.

“It’s all right—but don’t wear it over your ears, whatever you do!” Ally advised, as they went down the empty, echoing passage arm in arm. “We can stand anything but that.”

“But, Ally, it’s the fashion—which doesn’t matter; and a pretty one—which does!”

“Can’t help it. Men always hate it. When we see a woman with her hair dressed so, we always say she hasn’t washed her ears this morning!”

“Pigs!” said Chum, laughing. “It’s your own unclean minds. Ally, isn’t the waiter the image of Ah Sin!”

“Yes, says his name’s Chun Low, or some such variation—but it doesn’t matter. Have some chicken, Chum—I’m afraid it’s not up to much.”

“I never quarrel with my food,” said Chum contentedly, attacking the tough fowl.

The coffee-room at the Natale was like a parochial hall, or an arcade at some exhibition, both on account of its size and its bareness. It was an immense place, built out from the rest of the bungalow as if to allow of more room, though evidently in no hope of custom, for there were but five small tables in all its desert space. These were spread with coarse cloths and such table cutlery as should suffice to take away a diner’s appetite. Mrs. Lewin made a face at her dingy pewter, and amused herself with looking round the walls for distraction. There was nothing to be seen but some dilapidated fans and a square of coloured muslin on a stick which bore some far-off resemblance to a flag. Outside the three or four long doors the day was still lingering among the creepers and shrubs on the stoep, for green things seemed to flourish there in tubs, and three dirty basket-chairs converted the place into a popular lounge. It was infinitely forlorn. Chum looked away again, towards the waiter this time, and observed that he was trying to attract Ally’s attention, which was just then riveted upon the fowl’s iron joints.

“Ally,” she said, “I think Ah Sin wants to tell you something—he’s either going to have a fit, or it’s Anglo-Saxon attitudes!”

Lewin turned round quickly, to find that the Chinese waiter had come to his elbow, evidently with some more important news than the next course of a bad dinner. The guests at his table were lunatics to the mind of the Chinaman, who could not use his name of Chung Low, but must needs call him by some one else’s. Furthermore they joked and laughed like children, and made comments on their surroundings and on himself which were nonsense, and which should not alter a line of his outward imperturbability.

“What is it?” said Lewin impatiently.

“One piecey man he come see you!” said Chung Low without a crease of expression in his yellow face.

The corners of Chum’s mouth lifted deliciously. Ally dared not meet her eyes across the table.

“Which piece of him, Ah Sin?” she said, leaning her chin in her hands and looking gravely at the Chinaman.

“Chum!” said Ally warningly, under his breath. Indeed he was choked with laughter. “Er—you can show him in, boy!” he added, with a rather larger manner than usual to impress the Celestial, and Ally was never very condensed. “I expect it’s one of the fellows from barracks come down to see if he can do anything,” he added vaguely to his wife. “People are generally so deuced friendly in a station like this that it becomes a bore. Might have left us to our dinner, anyhow, such as it is. Still we can’t say no—can we?”

“Of course not. Besides, I want to see if he is whole!” said the irrepressible Chum. “Here comes Ah Sin—bowing before a young man who looks all teeth!” (Chum could see the advance along the stoep of the hotel, to which Ally had his back.) “Now he is making Anglo-Saxon attitudes before him. Oh, Ally, do get up and meet him first—I know I’m going to laugh!... Well!”

The last exclamation was due to the fact that Ally had risen at her desire, but no sooner did he see his visitor than he made a stride forward to meet him, and the visitor being equally impetuous the next few seconds presented a confused babel of greeting to Mrs. Lewin’s amazed eyes and ears.

“Hulloa, Bristles!”

“Why, it’s old Ally Sloper!”

“What luck blew you here? You’re not with the regiment—the Wessex?”

“Yes I am. Changed from the Rutlandshire after the African show. Not seen you but once since Sandhurst, Ally—are you our new A. D. C. to Gregory’s Powder?”

“Yes, worse luck! This is a nice beginning—no quarters, and obliged to bring my wife to this sort of shanty! Oh, Chum—this is an old pal who was at Sandhurst with me. Captain Nugent—Mrs. Lewin.”

One of Ally’s most salient characteristics was that he could use slang and remain a gentleman. As she shook hands with his friend Mrs. Lewin inwardly commented upon the fact that the same indulgence would convert Captain Nugent into a coster. He stared at her with eyes which were burnt by much foreign service, and seemed to approve of the survey.

“I heard that a Captain Lewin was coming, but never thought it was you,” he explained. “Fact is, I came down to see if you were too tired to come to the Gunnery, to-night—there’s a scratch dance on, and, of course, as we didn’t expect you till to-morrow, we couldn’t send you an invitation.”

“What’s the show?” said Ally lazily, as he lit a cigarette. “You fellows?”

“No, the town cricket team. We had a match this week, and they got up this hop as a finish. It’s only a small thing, so you might waive ceremony and come!” He looked at Mrs. Lewin’s promising young figure as a man might a horse he means to back.

“Are you too tired, Chum?” Ally said doubtfully.

“I am never too tired to dance,” said Mrs. Lewin with refreshing cordiality. “Wait till I get into something less dinnery. I was afraid to before, because it wouldn’t get dark and let us have candles. There is nothing so disreputable as dining by daylight—it makes one feel décolletée in the highest gown.”

Both men laughed as she vanished through one of the endless doorways. Then there was a silence of some seconds while the cigarette smoke rose in meditative threads. The man who thinks while he smokes draws slowly, but if he is actively employed he produces little woolly clouds.

“You’re married too, aren’t you?” said Ally, looking across the table.

“Yes; left the missus at home. She isn’t strong enough for this place.” Captain Nugent’s burnt young eyes looked away from his friend as he spoke.

“Any family?”

“One,” said Nugent, knocking the ash on to the bare boards of the floor to the inconvenience of the ants who lived there. “It’s a tom!” he added thoughtfully.

Another pause.

“D’you remember, we both vowed we’d marry widows rather than a raw girl?” said Ally in reminiscence. “By Jove! How I wished I had.”

“It’s cornery at first. My wife told me what struck her most was that I came in to speak to her in my shirt-sleeves, and without thinking took up one of her brushes and brushed my hair. She thought, ‘What cheek!’”

“Well, there’s one thing that stumps me now,” said Ally.

“I know what you’re going to say—she buttons her gowns from right to left.”

“You’ve seen it too? Why the devil do they? All our clothes go from left to right. I believe it’s that that makes women always look at a thing hind-side before—their very point of view grows topsy-turvy.”

“Ally!” came Mrs. Lewin’s voice from the doorway. “Come and change your coat—you can’t dance in a jacket. Captain Nugent, how are we to get there?”

Both men rose rather guiltily. “I am afraid you’ll have to ride, Mrs. Lewin,” Nugent said. “Ponies, y’know. Every one does here. Can you turn up your skirt? I’d get you a buggy, but there are only three in Port Victoria, and they are all hired for to-night.”

“Elementary, but exciting,” said Chum calmly. “Go and get me a pony, that’s all, and I’ll show you.”

She was as good as her word when the ponies came round; they were rats of things, and the new lady’s saddle which Mrs. Lewin had brought out looked astonishingly big on the animal assigned her. But she tucked up her silk skirts as if to the manner born, and the procession clattered off from the front of the hotel, audienced by half-a-dozen Chinese, loafers of three dusky races—for Key Island has a mixed population—and some lean hens. The darkness had come at last, but out of the irregular wooden houses shone the electric light with the bizarre effect it always produces in such elementary places. The ponies shambled along at a miniature canter, and Leoline gripped the pommel by habit with a dreamy remembrance that some time since she had set a thoroughbred across the finest hunting country in England. Such things seemed to belong to another life, with the smell of eucalyptus and moonflowers coming into her nostrils on a warm, wet breeze, and the glimpses of Port Victoria by electric flashes. They rocked down the main street, and for an instant the quay was on their left before they turned up-hill to their destination; again she saw the grouped ravenala palms, the huge wharves, the bay, and the grim Gates at the harbour mouth, black sentinels against the darkening sky. Then Captain Nugent steered to the left, along a bad road where anything but a Key’land pony would have stumbled, and suddenly they emerged into the most wonderful avenue of cocoanut palms, with soft sand underfoot, and as if by common consent the up-hill canter changed to a hard gallop.

“Look out!” Nugent called, pulling in beside Mrs. Lewin. “This is Mitsinjovy Straight, the only bit of flat land round about. They always gallop here; mind!”

It was difficult to talk going at that pace, the wind buffeting them with such violence. Mrs. Lewin looked along the aisle of straight stems, each with its crown-tuft far overhead, and said, “I like it!” It seemed to her the most characteristic spot in all the island, from first to last—that wonderful avenue of cocoanuts where the ponies were so glad to gallop!—and she was half regretful when they pulled up before an old sugar factory beyond the palms, a white, hoary-looking building, evidently converted from the sugar industry to other uses now-a-days.

“This is the Gunnery,” Captain Nugent explained. “It’s the Gunners’ mess until their quarters are finished. The men will take your pony, Mrs. Lewin.”

Chum found the dressing-room full of women, lingering to gossip with the assurance of already filled programmes. Powder-puffs were going vigorously, and the place was stuffy with wraps. She tossed her cloak to an attendant, and rejoined her escort, who awaited her at the ballroom door. Nothing of the old sugar works remained, only the shell of the barn-like building served now as a shelter in which the gentlemen of the Royal Artillery could dine.

It was as Nugent had said, a scratch dance, and the Gunnery had not even been decorated, but the floor was unexpectedly good, and the Wessex had arranged a band of a sort on a rough staging. Below this impromptu daïs stood several people at whom Mrs. Lewin looked at once, with an instinct for those of mark. There was a tall man with thick silver hair, and a stout woman in black, a jovial-looking parson, and another man with his back to her, of whom she could not judge. Nugent’s eyes followed hers.

“Those are the Seats of the Mighty there,” he said. “The parson is Archie Lysle, our chaplain (best fellow goin’!); the lady’s Mrs. White, and the grey-haired Johnnie is her husband—he’s Attorney-General.”

“Who’s the other man?” Ally asked.

“Halton, the Commissioner. Gregory’s Powder half promised to turn up, but he went off to the Tsara Valley yesterday morning, and I don’t expect he is back. Halton is probably representing Government House.”

“I can’t understand this place,” said Chum, knitting her brows. “When the Government took over Key Island from the British African Island Company——”

“Limited!” Ally put in significantly.

“Limited,—why did they send out an Administrator and a Commissioner to enquire into the riots? Surely the man who takes the responsibility should be the one to find out what is wrong?”

“Well, you see, Halton’s the drag on the wheel, and Gregory’s the wheel itself. Gregory’s a man who is always sent into a tight place, but unless they brigade him with a drag, he’d make it an absolute monarchy—he’s a born slave ruler. So they put Halton in to enquire, and Gregory to act on the enquiry. See?”

“Oh!” Chum’s whole thought was concentrated into the word. “And does that succeed?”

“Don’t much know—and it don’t matter either in such a beastly little corner as this. Can’t think why we bother about the place at all. Let France have it.”

“But we want it for a coaling-station, don’t we; and it’s the key of the Mozambique Channel!”

“You’re thinking of the name—but Key’land takes its name as much from its shape as anything, or so they say. Besides, who cares about the Mozambique Channel? I don’t know what Government is up to, of course—don’t mind either, so long as I get out of this pretty quick. We’ve been here six months, and we’re all dead nuts on getting away. May I have some dances, Mrs. Lewin?” His tone had brightened.

Chum looked at him curiously as he wrote his name on her programme, and in her own mind contrasted him with Ally, and found him vastly inferior. He could not even take an intelligent interest in his surroundings, and she attributed it to a certain curious formation in the back of his head. It was flattened on the top, but curved out from the neck too much to Mrs. Lewin’s critical inspection. Ally, with a superior skull, would of course be more intelligent; but she did not realise that she intended him to be so by her own motive power.

“Would you like to know Halton? He’s a very decent chap,” Bristow Nugent said simply. “This is quite an unofficial affair, y’know. No need for ceremony. I’ll bring him over.”

He swung in and out of the thickening crowd towards the band, but the dancing had begun, and Mrs. Lewin’s programme had filled with the men she had known on the troop-ship, and others who followed in their wake. The evening was half over before Captain Nugent fulfilled his promise and brought the Commissioner up to her.

He was a very quiet man in appearance, with that instinctive colouring which in an Englishman is always called fair, but his eyes were a dark-brown, rather opaque, and had a trick of half closing while he talked. He looked about forty, and the lines of his clean-shaven face appealed to Chum as suggesting humour.

“I suppose you have not had time to report yourselves yet,” he said quizzically; “and as a fact you are not due until to-morrow, so to-night’s appearance must be regarded as a kind of provision of good things.”

“There is no one to report oneself to, is there? I hear that the Administrator is not in Port Victoria.”

“He is standing behind you—not a dozen yards away,” said Halton quietly. “If you turn round as though suddenly struck by the attractiveness of the band, you will be able to look at him at your leisure.”

Their eyes met, and they both laughed, while Mrs. Lewin did as suggested. There was no mistaking the Administrator, because he happened to be the only man near, and was walking towards them with Mrs. White, the Attorney-General’s wife. Evelyn Gregory was peculiar rather than attractive, but more emphatic than either. He was considerably taller than most men present, and was of that spare build which made his dress suit look as if it hung over a clothes-horse.

“He seems as if he were only on a bowing acquaintance with his clothes, and was afraid of taking liberties with them!” was Mrs. Lewin’s comment to herself. “Evening dress appears more inappropriate to him than to any man I ever saw. Not that he is awkward either—but he looks too tremendous for it!”

The Administrator was still advancing, and revealed a long hatchet-shaped face, with an unusual overhanging width at the temples. His hair was reddish and cropped closely, and his features were cast in a rather savage mould, the mouth hidden by a huge moustache. His eyes were his most distinguishing feature, being nearly lidless and seeming to fill the whole socket, the effect being that of extreme far sight and almost cruel keenness. Mrs. Lewin was the more struck by their expression in contrast to the Commissioner’s, but she could not see their colour, for he was looking straight before him, and speaking in what she at first thought was an intentional undertone to Mrs. White.

“I don’t think you know Mrs. Lewin?” said that lady, who had been talking to Chum earlier in the evening, and now paused near her. “Mr. Gregory!”

As Chum bowed she was conscious that the Administrator looked at her, classified her in his own mind, and dropped the very thought of her. He lingered for a minute, expressing his regret that they should have been forced to go to the hotel, but he hoped their bungalow would be at their disposal to-morrow, and Mrs. Lewin discovered that it was his custom to speak in a rapid undertone like a forceful whisper. The curiously concentrated effect of this was uncanny. His words came below his breath, but not one of them was lost. When he had passed on, she turned to Mr. Halton with relief, to find him regarding her in his turn.

“I cannot think how you do it!” he said promptly.

“Do what?” said Chum, as they ensconced themselves on two chairs in a corner, as if by tacit consent. She made a furtive snatch at her mental attitude as she spoke, for, to tell the truth, she had been making use of that good gift of nature, her eyes. Even in this brief few minutes she had found Mr. Halton responsive.

“You come here,” said the Commissioner thoughtfully, “in a perfectly fresh and smiling gown. Yet you arrived this afternoon, and must have untrunked it, as you could not have worn it for landing.” He glanced at her so daintily as to be free of offence; the pretty white shoulders were innocent of sleeve, and the shoulder-strap was generous, and hardly marred them. “I usually know the packed look of a new arrival, but you have upset my calculations.”

“I am sitting on the creases,” said Mrs. Lewin amicably. “They are all in my tail! By the way, Mr. Halton, are all the servants here Chinamen?”

“No; only at the hotel, and one or two houses which believe in them. They are not very good servants, though they compare favourably with most of the ruffians who inhabit Key Island. The fact is that no good Chinaman leaves China—the best will hardly go out of their own districts.”

“What am I to do for servants, then?”

“I should advise your having Arabs. You begin to think that this is a tower of Babel, I see; but the fact is, we get Arabs from the Comoros, as well as Chinese labour, like the Mauritius, and unless you can pick and choose, they are easier to manage. You can have a choice of evils, of course. There is the African negro, who is deceitful and desperately wicked, Creole and half-caste (but they won’t work), and even some Malagasy. Would you like a brace of Arabs to begin with?”

“Thank you,” laughed Chum. “I suppose we shall begin housekeeping to-morrow, and I tremble when I think of my husband’s sufferings during my novitiate.”

“Turn him over to the club if he dares to grumble; that will sober him. I will send you Abdallah and Hafez, if I may. You will find them two very average idiots. Make Hafez your cook and Abdallah your butler, and they will find you the rest of your household.”

“You are much better than a registry office! But I feel I’m taking liberties with the Government.”

“We are terribly unofficial in Key’land!” said the Commissioner, with a little grimace. “But a week here will tell you more of the place than any secrets I could give away. The fact is that the Home Authorities are spring cleaning, and we are living on the stairs and in the passages meanwhile, after the manner of householders in such circumstances.”

Mrs. Lewin had absorbed a fair amount of information even when she returned to the hotel that night with her husband. It was their custom to become confidential after a tour among strangers, and to exchange experiences; but they took different standpoints.

“I saw you talking to a red-haired woman,” said Chum. “What was she like?”

“Oh, rather nice. She knows the Tavistocks—Indian people, you know. I was at the Pindi with them.” Ally’s interest in people was usually founded on mutual acquaintances.

“I thought she looked Army, herself. Who is she?”

“A Mrs. Churton. Her husband is senior Major of the Wessex and O.C.T. here. She is rather a smart woman, I thought.” This was Ally’s praise.

“But does she put all her goods in the shop windows, so to speak? There are people like that.”

“Well, her hair was all right, wasn’t it? And she knows every one here.”

“Ah!” said Chum thoughtfully, letting down the masses of her own irreclaimable hair, which objected to being smart either in colour or fashion. “Then I hope she will come to call soon.”

“How did you get on? And what did you think of Bristles?”

“I don’t think of Bristles. But on the whole I didn’t do badly. I was offered ten ponies to ride, three men are coming to call on me with their wives (not only sending their wives to call—it’s a broader compliment), and the Commissioner is selecting all the rogues and vagabonds in the island for my servants!”

“The Commissioner! I thought it was the Administrator you were going to annex.”

“I am feeling round at present. If I see that he is the right man to advance our fortunes, Ally, nothing can save him!”

“I am afraid you had better keep to Halton. I heard all round that Gregory’s Powder is a stiff dose. Lysle—that chaplain fellow—tells me that every woman out here has had a shot at him, and never made more than a fleeting impression.”

“If he sets up as a woman-hater, he is a foregone conclusion,” said Chum scornfully. “He seemed on excellent terms with that stout woman, Mrs. White, though.”

“He is on excellent terms with them all, and with no one in particular. He is absorbed in his work wherever it is, they say, and the worst of it is he’s a slave driver. I’m going to have a lovely time of it!”

He looked so really rueful and impressed that Chum opened her charming eyes with a little laugh.

“Why, Ally,” she said, “you are all making a little tin god of him,—and I can’t think why!”

“He is the Administrator of Key Island, and a hard nut to crack. Perhaps that is why.”

“My dear fellow, he is—only a man!”

CHAPTER II

“A woman and a cherry are painted to their own harm.”—English Proverb.

To understand the overwhelming military flavour in the society of Key Island, it must be remembered that Port Victoria is girdled with the garrison, and that the garrison is stationary, whereas the cruisers only put in to coal, and at the best stay three weeks on one excuse or another. The naval flavour, therefore, is general, but indistinct; whereas one cannot get away from the smell of khaki, go where one will. On the right, as one enters the harbour, is Teraka, the Gate of Sunrise, and behind this, though unconnected with it, rises Maitso Hill with its solid quarters for troops; on the left Tsofotra, or the Sunset Gate, is flanked in the same way by the lower slopes of Mitsinjovy. When the Lewins arrived in Key Island Maitso was occupied by the Wessex, and the Gunners were in hurricane huts at Mitsinjovy, pending the completion of their barracks, which were to accommodate yet more batteries as soon as finished; add to this the usual percentage of A.S.C., R.A.M.C., and A.P.D., and the result is that from nine to twelve, when the men go out of uniform, Port Victoria is nothing but a parade ground, and every man at afternoon tennis looks as if he missed a stripe down his trousers. There are civilians, of course (Leoline Lewin counted three that she knew after a residence of as many weeks), but they are not enough to leaven the lump, and so the social world remains Official and Military, and the aristocracy of the place are always those who are most ferociously Army. Mrs. Lewin had two great advantages, when she was introduced to the station, over most of the young married women who fought a mental battle for their rights before they established themselves in the uppermost seats of the synagogue—Captain Lewin belonged to a very much smarter regiment than either the Wessex or the Artillery then at Port Victoria; and also, he was not attached to the garrison. Therefore Chum started with an insured position that could not be torn from her, and yet rivalled no other lady’s. Incidentally, she was also much better looking than any other woman in the island, and she knew how to put on her clothes, which is a gift quite apart from possessing the garments themselves, or even the taste to choose them. When they had talked her over at the club, from the ripples of her pretty hair to her openwork stockings and American shoes, the married men did a shrewd thing, and waited for their wives to mention her first, while the unmarried went to call without waiting for Sunday—which is a great compliment, because by the law of Port Victoria Sunday is the day set aside for visiting, it not being etiquette to play polo or dance.

The Alaric Lewins took their married life as a huge joke, a point of view which speedily communicated itself to Key Island, who proceeded to laugh with them over the situation. They had been brought up together, Mrs. Lewin’s father having been Alaric’s guardian, and an admiration of Ally had been amongst the rudiments of Chum’s education. At intervals Alaric had disappeared out of her life to Harrow, and Sandhurst, and India, always to reappear a good deal handsomer and better mannered and more travelled. His view of life was necessarily larger than her own by forced experience; but the girl, left at home, knew more deeply by theory than the man by practice. At twenty-six a woman who thinks is in a very dangerous position if she has had no actual experience to reduce her ideas of life to the level of reality. But Leoline looked innocent enough of anything out of the common, when seen against the background of her home. Captain Lewin was much influenced by surroundings; he saw a solid position in the county, irreproachable frocks, popularity with men and women alike, and a coveted possession by others of his kind, while the unimportant item of a girl’s individuality, which was the centrepiece of all this, he took for granted. Leoline, the victim of her own theories, found the relations between them hardly altered after the clergyman of the parish, who had hitherto behaved like a gentleman, said very rude things to her from the altar rails, for which he had scriptural authority. She congratulated herself that she was still Ally’s “Chum,” and made their interests one with a touch of comradeship in the wifehood. Her knowledge of the man she had married consisted in the fact that he was nearly six feet in height and well built, that he had a well-shaped dark head, and a handsome face, that he had always had good manners and appearance, and that they were excellent companions. Marriage, to Chum, meant a certain amount of mutual toleration and avoidance of friction, whereby she called it a success. It seemed to her that she and Ally had done the same thing from their nursery days; they must certainly have learned all of each other that there was to learn by now. But in an indefinite future she believed that he was to do great things, because she could not imagine herself the wife of a man who was a failure.

A week in Key Island revealed the inner workings of its life, as Halton had said it would, but the Lewins still knew different sides of it. Alaric’s duties tied him to Government House as he had predicted, but he escaped to play tennis and to ride and bathe after the manner of his kind. There was an heroic effort at a polo ground too, but things being on an eternal slant in the island, the game had to be played on a gentle slope. Gentlemen of the home clubs, who swear at a daisy tuft, think of the pathos of this, and see how exiled brothers can follow the sport abroad! Leoline, by the grace of Hafez and Abdallah, was free early in the day, but squandered her liberty in reducing her house to order. She did not care to ride out to tennis much before the hour when her husband could arrive there also, and it even sometimes happened that she would for preference go for a gallop through the cocoanuts up and down Mitsinjovy Straight, so that he had got home and changed, and was at their mutual destination before her. This happened one day about a week after their arrival; Mrs. Lewin had ordered her pony for four o’clock, but the day clouded over, and the sky over Maitso was so threatening that she gave up her gallop and half hesitated about going to the further garrison. As, however, tennis was on at Mrs. Churton’s this afternoon, and as Ally liked Mrs. Churton, she decided to ride up to Maitso, anyhow, and cantered soberly away, past the gates of Government House, and, leaving Port Victoria to the right, began to climb the hill.

It was a steep climb, and the pony sobered at once to a walk. No Key’land pony can trot—either he walks or he canters, and even that he does in a manner peculiarly his own, using three of his legs to the distinct saving of the fourth. As Liscarton dug his toes into the dust and hitched his lean quarters upwards, Mrs. Lewin turned in the saddle and looked down at the view, which was gaining an indefinite fascination for her—the town, the harbour, and the gates. The two cone-shaped rocks had a threatening appearance to-day, with the low loose clouds nearly touching their crests, and there was a sullen light upon everything. Even the sun-soaked green of the hills cuddled round Port Victoria were draped with passing veils of rain that were being blown over them and down towards the town. It was not as yet wet at Maitso, though it had been threatening all day, and the Lewins’ bungalow, being on a level with Government House, had also escaped with an angry shower.

“Shall we have a storm, boy?” said Chum, as she rode into the Churtons’ yard and delivered her pony to a loafing servant. The groom nodded, and murmured an assent in Arabic or Malagasy—she had not yet learned to know which—but with so obvious a disbelief in the weather that she hastened her steps into the house in consequence. He was right, for the first large drops splashed on to the roof of the stoep, even as the butler bowed her into the drawing-room through one of its many doors; and the clouds darkened the day so that the carefully shaded room was really dusky after the outside world.

Mrs. Churton happened to be crossing the room, and greeted Mrs. Lewin on the way. She was of a type that wears the regimental badge as a waist-buckle, and seems proud of a weather-beaten skin as proof that she has followed the drum through many climates. Chum glanced at the hair that Ally had said was “All right,” and saw that Diana Churton had tightened a coiffeur in the Queen into a form entirely unbecoming to her face. Her instinct could not approve, but her judgment meekly followed Ally’s.

There were many people crowded into the little room who would have spread themselves out comfortably upon the tennis courts, but thus condensed seemed to Chum too complicated to be greeted in detail. So she remained where she had drifted, near an open window, and watched the storm. It had begun to rain, as it always does there, with half-a-dozen great drops, like the first tears of a breaking grief, and then as if a window opened in heaven and an angry God threatened to drown the earth a second time. For some minutes it was impossible to hear anything but the shouting of the rain as it drove past; but after a few minutes it softened to a steady hissing whisper, and the conversation in the room behind her caught Mrs. Lewin’s idle attention. She wondered what was absorbing the party, and turned to hear. Mrs. Churton had had a large volume in her hands when she spoke to her latest guest, which she promptly deposited upon Ally’s knee—Chum had recognised his flat shoulders and oval dark head, though his back was towards her—and a minute later she gained the key to the mystery.

“My husband always takes about two hundred pounds worth with him for exchange,” Mrs. Churton was saying. “There’s the variation, Captain Lewin—see the difference between DIE I and II?”

“Oh, I’ve got this,” Ally’s voice chimed in. “DIE II has a clean engraved cut under the eye, hasn’t it? But you’ve beaten me in shades.”

“I can get ten pounds for that one penny on five shilling dull rose Barbadoes of mine!” broke in another voice.

“You’re a specialist, aren’t you, Mr. Lysle?”

“Yes, I only take the Portuguese colonies. A collector really has no time for more than one corner of the world, if he does it seriously.”

Mrs. Churton laughed rather loudly. “I’m not serious enough to confine myself to one country. I take anything that comes in my way—the more valuable the better. Bute says he wouldn’t trust me with his own common duplicates.”

“Stamps!” said Chum blankly, under her breath. It was so long since she had helped to arrange those little coloured squares of paper in a fancy album with Ally, that she had not realised that the usual boy’s hobby had grown up into Philately—a fearsome disease that ravages both Services all the world over. Not being a “collector” herself, she stood by in amazed amusement while the jargon of the cult rang across the room, until she became aware that Mr. Halton had appeared at her side, without her having known him to be in the room.

“Disgusting weather, isn’t it?” he said, as they shook hands. “For those who want to play tennis. I am afraid the crops want water so badly that, as a government official, I must rejoice, however.”

“Is rain wanted?” said Mrs. Lewin, with interest. “What for? The cane? I wish you would talk about Key Island a little, Mr. Halton!”

“Why?”

“Because it interests me. I have been trying to pump my husband for information all the week, but he is an unsatisfactory person, and won’t explain things to me. When one understands a thing oneself, it is difficult to realise the ignorance of other people.”

The Commissioner looked at her beneath his drooping eyelids, and there was some speculation in his glance.

“Perhaps he is like most Key’landers, and feels no interest in the island himself?” he remarked drily. “Most of the victims whom Government has chained here for three years think of nothing those three years but getting away!”

“Yes, I know they do; but it seems rather silly, don’t you think? Why should people always live in the future, or the past, when it is really the present that matters? As I am in Key Island, I have a deep interest in Key Island—I belong to her, and every move of the Government makes me long to know their plans still more!”

“You should talk to the Administrator,” said Halton, laughing. “He is the only man likely to encourage you. I must confess I have some sympathy with the people who hate this place, though I can’t share Gregory’s enthusiasms.”

“Ah, but you are only a passing compliment from the Colonial Office, are you not? and we cannot expect to keep you! Major Churton told me yesterday that they would hardly spare you from more important places much longer. But why do you hate Key’land?”

Halton looked out of the window at the clearing sky. The rain had ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and overhead was the pure deep blue that Mrs. Lewin was beginning to associate with the place.

“It’s a rat-trap!” said the Commissioner, glancing up into the hollow heavens. “One of the rat-traps that connect all the British Empire. And already the rats are beginning to run round and round and find no way of escape.”

But the words held no present meaning for Chum’s ears. She was listening half-idly to the scraps of conversation in the room behind her.

“I have got the Provincial issue for St. Thomas when they surcharged the two cents on three cent stamps until the mail could get in with more of the current issue!”

“By Jove! that’s ten shillings in the catalogue at least.”

“Yes, old man, but it isn’t in the market, as there’s no price quoted for it!”

Then Ally laughed, and Chum smiled in sympathy. Ally’s sense of humour was easily tickled, and his laugh was infectious. Mrs. Churton’s metallic voice rang above the babel.

“Well, anyhow he had Zanzibar complete, and they say it’s worth a thousand!”

“No, he hadn’t—he couldn’t get the one rupee unused slate, small second, after all.”

“The only things to go for now-a-days are new issues—all the old ones are too rare.”

“What’s that Turk’s Island twopence halfpenny on penny dull red, that Mrs. Ritchie Stern had from Captain Tullock?”

“Oh, a beauty! I offered her an old Pacific Steam Navigation stamp for it, but she wouldn’t exchange.”

“Nonsense! It’ll be as common as Black English in a little while.”

“Isn’t that a lovely set—those Venezuelans! And do you notice that the over-print is different in just one out of the whole sheet? I wrote to the paper about it, and they took no notice. I’m positive there’s a variation.”

Five heads were eagerly bent over a square half inch of printed paper, while a chorus of indistinguishable argument arose that made Mrs. Lewin laugh out loud.

“I never yet met any one closely connected with the Navy or Army who did not possess a collection of stamps worth at least a thousand pounds!” remarked Halton drily, following her glance.

“And did they ever realise the thousand pounds?”

“Oh no, not personally. You heard their ingenuous remarks about catalogues and market prices! But then they never want to sell—personally. They know some one, however, who did so. It is generally Browne who had the Taradiddle on the El Dorado Station, unless it is Smyth of the 1,000!”

“I know so many men in that regiment!” said Chum sweetly, “and they are all such nice fellows, too! The Duke of Humbug’s Own, isn’t it?”

“Yes; and the regimental motto is, ‘When you tell a lie, tell a good one!’—the badge, a chimera seen in a mirage!”

They had no time to laugh, because Mrs. Churton’s voice was heard across the room, earnestly expostulating with Ally.

“The colours on the red Brazilian unpaid letter-stamp won’t stand steaming. You had better try wet blotting-paper.”

“Oh, come outside!” said Halton impatiently, pushing open the shuttered window-frame, and holding out his hand to help his companion over the step. Mrs. Lewin followed him down the stoep and into a narrow path lightly flanked by logwood. Three ravenala palms stood sentinel outside the quarters of the O.C.T., their split fans looking like raised hands to her imagination. The ravenala is the “Traveller’s Tree,” and is tapped for water by enterprising tourists; but it is too common in Key’land to excite the inhabitants, who look upon it as any other palm. To Mrs. Lewin it had become somehow symbolic of the place, and she liked its solemn hands outspread above her head, and regretted that there did not happen to be a single specimen at the bungalow. Besides the ravenalas and the logwood, the Churtons’ quarters were singularly treeless, but they owned one of the three tennis courts in Port Victoria. Maitso and Mitsinjovy are not remarkable for flat spaces of ground, and the Churtons were esteemed fortunate. All the houses on Maitso Hill had been apportioned to married officers when the troops were first quartered there, and as the paths zigzagged up and down the steep incline, each sharp curve would reveal a small bungalow, until the long line of actual barracks crowned the crest. From a distance it looked as if one house were hung above another, tier on tier in the green, but a nearer acquaintance proved the garrison more rugged than picturesque. At Mitsinjovy the officers’ quarters, being new and specially built for them, were of a more regular type, and proportionately hideous; but Maitso had been a favourite residence to the old planters, and when given over to the Wessex, they counted themselves luckier than the Gunners. Halton and Mrs. Lewin sauntered as far as the tennis courts, and there paused, looking down on the best view of Port Victoria and the bay that Key Island affords, while they talked in desultory fashion.

“So you are interested in Key’land!” said the Commissioner meditatively. “Have you seen anything of the island yet?”

“Nothing but Port Victoria—and the docks!” said Mrs. Lewin, with a laughing glance at the forests of masts far off in the bay.

“I am glad you give the Government hobby its chance—but you should have said the Docks, the Harbour, the Coaling Wharves, and—Port Victoria! That is the correct order. We are merely here on sufferance, as Government House bears witness! Would you like me to take you out to China Town, I wonder?”

“I am sure I should—if I knew anything about it. Where is China Town?”

“It is on the other side of that hill,”—he pointed up the valley to an undiscovered inland. “It is the headquarters of the Chinese here, and we suspect at the root of the mischief. They have got some place where they brew this abominable form of hashish which sends the ordinary native mad, and makes him get up riots and kill white people—you see? But as yet we have not absolutely spotted John Chinaman brewing in any large quantities, and we cannot condemn on isolated instances. You are really interested, Mrs. Lewin!”

Chum laughed a little, conscious that her wide eyes were alight with the absorption of the moment, and Mr. Halton laughed too. It was one of his chief attractions to her that he never paid her a compliment, or made a personal remark; and yet his quiet admiration was as patent to her as the noisy homage of duller men.

“I am extremely interested! Is that your theory as to the cause of the rioting?”

“The real cause, certainly. The oppression and low wage that was offered as an excuse is nothing to a logical mind dealing with these people. There are the innocent hemp-crops, and there are the wily yellow man and the fools of blacks. But as yet we have not the connecting link. They complained of corvée (forced labour), it is always the plea—but we complain of ganja with much more reason!”

“And do these people profess to cultivate hemp for export?”

“A Chinaman, dear lady, will profess anything—save the truth. It is all pidgeon to use his own universal expression. But if you will get up very early to-morrow—say be in the saddle by seven—I will take a day off and expound the ethics of China Town to you, with spectacular views as illustrations. Will you come?”

“With pleasure. But can’t you tell me—Ah! what a pity!”

The compliment contained in the genuine exclamation was perfect because impromptu. It was caused by the arrival on the scene of Captain Nugent, Mrs. Churton, and Ally, no longer talking of stamps but of tennis.

“Is it too wet to play, d’you think?” Diana Churton said to the Commissioner and Mrs. Lewin long before she reached them. “That’s the worst of grass—I wish we had gravel courts like that stuck-up Mrs. Bertie used to tell us they had in the Cape. D’you remember her, Brissy? My husband used to call her pea-hen!”

“Was she stuck-up? I thought she made herself rather friendly,”—Captain Nugent’s voice was equally strident to Mrs. Lewin’s ears. “She was telling some story about the State theatricals very first time I met her, and Jordan coming on the stage dead drunk! Rather good tale she made of it too.”

Chum began to see that she would have to like Brissy in spite of herself, if it were to be done at all. A sudden impatience of the chatter round her seized her with the tantalising glimpse of more exciting things to hear of from Halton. Five seconds later she changed her mental attitude, and condemned herself for her own lack of adaptability. It was one of her theories that the immediate thing was the one to grasp and develop as best might be, which mental schooling resulted in her becoming involved in a game of cat’s-cradle with Captain Nugent, who was playing with a piece of string which had been tied round the stamps album. Brissy had no conception of mental flirtations undermining even a discussion on hemp-growing round China Town; but he knew that if he got “fish-in-the-pond” his large hands would very likely touch Mrs. Lewin’s in the manipulation of the string. Ally had gone to find their ponies for the return home, and by the time he reappeared the Commissioner had also extricated himself after his quiet fashion and started with them.

“Then you will come for a ride to-morrow?” he said to Chum carelessly. “I am going to show your wife China Town, Lewin—she displays such a flattering interest, that Government cannot afford to allow it to die for lack of cultivation. You were there yesterday, eh?”

“I was!” said Ally significantly. “The most beastly hot ride I ever had. You had better be careful what time of day you go, Chum.”

“Mr. Halton says seven A. M.”

“I wish the Administrator had said seven A. M.!” said Ally, laughing good-humouredly. “Instead of that he said twelve—at a minute’s notice.”

“He does not spare himself!” said Halton, with a shrug of his shoulders. “And he sees no reason to spare other people. Our paths divide here, I am sorry to say. Yours is the shorter cut, Mrs. Lewin.”

“Good-bye till to-morrow, then.”

She turned in her saddle, her face framed in by the Panama hat she wore for riding, her eyes in the shadow, a new shade in which the Commissioner had not yet surprised them. He reined his own pony’s head round into the winding path that made a carriage-drive to Government House, while the Lewins rode straight on. Their bungalow lay only a few hundred yards further down the direct road, with a short cut through their own plantation to Government House. It was by this private path that Ally went to his work every morning and returned—the click of the rough gate dividing the grounds being Chum’s signal for the first luncheon bell; but visitors, or the residents of Government House themselves, had a half-mile of winding path and tangled green before they emerged opposite the long straight building where the Union Jack flew above lines of blank window-frames and the straight pillars of the stoep. There were two stories to Government House; it could accommodate some thirty people independently of servants, and the Administrator and Commissioner, alone in their glory, called it a useful barn.

As Halton rode slowly along under the palms he was hardly thinking of the ethics of China Town, being too busy in breaking the tenth commandment. He was a man who had always hankered after the unattainable, and been afraid to risk what he had for what he desired. He had seen many pretty women, whom he thought of regretfully as possible wives—after they had been married by other men. The old process was beginning again in his mind, but the outcome of it was merely a half-irritated remark to the Administrator across the tête-à-tête dinner-table.

“What on earth made you send Lewin out to China Town in the heat of the day? It’s enough to kill a man!”

“There was no one else to send,” said Gregory simply, looking up in momentary surprise from helping himself to fried banana. “I had a message for Burton. He’s a good man if you like.”

“And not to be wasted. It wouldn’t matter if Lewin were used up, eh?”

Gregory shrugged his shoulders. “What on earth did Government mean by sending me a Mediterranean Station man?” he said in his repressed tones. “Who am I to depend on when you go?”

“He may wake up.”

“He’ll play tennis.”

“I have an idea his wife may push him through,” said the Commissioner slowly, poking a hard-back beetle with his forefinger as he spoke. He was looking at the insect as he spoke, and not at his vis-à-vis. Gregory’s lidless eyes were fixed on him, however, in their usual direct fashion. “She is by way of being an ambitious woman.”

“Is she? I have no impression of her beyond the fact that she was talking rather intelligently to Churton, on one occasion.”

“When was that?” Halton raised his eyes and spoke more quickly, still mechanically keeping the beetle struggling on his back.

“Two days ago, at Mrs. White’s. I didn’t speak to Mrs. Lewin, but I heard her talk.” He was unaware of the fact that Mrs. Lewin had been conscious of him as an audience what time she quietly drained the O.C.T. for information.

“I think she has brains. She is more attracted by Key Island than its meagre diversions.”

“Pity the girl isn’t the boy, then!” said the Administrator cynically. “This thing that sweats through a morning as my private secretary, and then with a sigh of relief scrambles into his flannels, is cursed with the curse of Reuben.”

“Your pet aversion. I think you might be worse off, myself. Lewin is at least a gentleman—and his duties include an A.D.C.’s, as well as a secretary’s.”

“Lewin has a pretty wife!” said Gregory bluntly. “That’s all about it, Halton. I hope the lady will be so shrewd as to see which side her husband’s bread is buttered, that’s all. I may get the report into some form if she makes him work.” He rose in his usual irrelevant fashion, pushing aside the last course offered him by the butler, and tossed over some papers on a side table. “Ambroise had no news,” he remarked.

“So you need hardly have slipped off to Port Albert!” retorted Halton. “I’ve an engagement to-morrow morning, by the way—I shan’t be on hand to save friction between you and Lewin.”

The Administrator opened his lips as if to say something; but the under-breathed words did not come. His hard eyes searched Halton’s reticent face for a moment with intent, and in his mind he bore another grudge against his Secretary for having a wife who could make a fool of a Commissioner. Taff Halton was a clever man, too. They had worked together in Central Africa. The devil take all women!

“Mrs. Lewin,” drawled Halton, “was wearing a blouse, this afternoon, of a peculiar shade of grey-lavender, which seemed like a reflection of her eyes. It’s a pity you don’t study colour effects, Gregory. You lose so much pleasure.” He knew just where to plant his sting, for if there was one thing that Evelyn Gregory loathed it was dilettantism. Halton’s sleepy eyes saw the curbed impatience in Gregory’s face, and he dropped back in his chair so happy that other relaxation was forgotten; and the hard-back beetle, no longer kept helplessly clawing the air, crawled away, and immediately married a lady he discovered in the shade of a dessert dish. All grades of life are elementary in Key Island.

CHAPTER III

“No maker of images worships the gods; he knows what they are made of!”—Chinese Proverb.

“I am not sure that I am not making a mistake!” said Chum to her reflection, as she tied her tie in severe perfection, and pinned on the Panama hat. “If I could only get hold of the real man himself, I am sure I could do something. After all, Mr. Halton is only the shadow—he will pass as shadows do, and his influence cannot really push Ally.”

She took up her riding-whip slowly, and stood a minute in thought. It was ten minutes to seven, and she could afford to arrange her ideas. On the dressing-table stood the tray with her early coffee, but Ally must breakfast alone this morning; she did not expect to get back from China Town till then. The room was very large and very airy, for furniture is superfluous in Key Island, and the lack of it increased the sense of size. The bare boards were not even polished or stained, and only two African goat-skins were thrown down as rugs to break its monotony; there were basket-work chairs and a lounge from Madeira, and a bed draped with a mosquito curtain with the usual bridal effect. The window-frames were many, and were filled with shutters turned to let in the air, but not the sun, and there was a door with the same contrivance in its upper panels. Outside the windows ran the wide bare stoep carefully clear of creepers, because vegetation means mosquitoes, which need no encouragement. Chum fretted over the bareness, for her hammock was slung there, and she would have liked to swing in a bower of flame-colour and rose and greenery, which is to be had for the asking in the island. But common-sense was triumphant over sentiment, and the stoep was comparatively flyless.

Common-sense was just then fighting for the upper hand in Mrs. Lewin’s mental attitude, and her pause with the riding-whip idly tapping her skirt was the result. It was easy, to say nothing of being pleasant, to go on as she had begun, with the garrison quite ready to follow in her train, and the Commissioner to lend it a certain distinction. But it meant no future good for Ally, and Leoline Lewin had, without admitting it, begun to see that if Ally went up the ladder somebody would have to push him rung by rung.

“Mr. Halton is so much more interesting!” said inclination.

“The Administrator has the real power!” said reason.

It was all the harder because in the one case she knew herself sure of success, and in the other she saw probable failure—and Mrs. Lewin disliked failure. Every woman in Key Island had made tentative efforts to bind Mr. Gregory to her chariot wheels, and had quietly drawn back without a hint of her defeat, after the manner of her sex. The only difference to Mrs. Lewin’s case was that she really wished to interest Mr. Gregory in her husband and not in herself; but she could not hope that this would make her any more successful.

“Besides, he must begin by liking me, and being interested in me, though he doesn’t know it,” she said to herself candidly. “And at present he simply does not know that I exist. Well, perhaps China Town may prove useful—some day.”

She went across the house to her husband’s dressing-room, where he had slept in order that her early rising might not disturb him, and looked in before starting. Alaric was lying with his arm thrown up above his head, in a boyish fashion that made him seem very young in spite of the manliness of the bronzed dark face, and the thick moustache on his upper lip. Chum bent down and ruffled his hair rather fondly, and he sighed in his sleep and turned over, but did not wake. There was a shadow of vague yearning in her eyes as she turned away and went out on to the stoep. Marriage had touched her lightly, but this was one of the rare moments when she felt a craving after something more satisfying—something that might even be welcome pain if it were only less ephemeral.

The morning air was brisk compared to the general laxity of Key Island. Mrs. Lewin mounted the pony which the sais held for her, and rode away through the listening day, with her senses equally alert. For it seemed at this hour as if everything had ears, or a keener vitality that looked for new experiences. Even Liscarton trod daintily, and sidled through the gate into the highway, pretending that he saw bogies among the ragged fans of the bananas. Where the path dipped down into Port Victoria the hoofs of a second pony became audible, and a minute later the Commissioner overtook her and drew up alongside.

“You are before your time, Mrs. Lewin; I meant to pick you up at your own gate,” he said gaily. He also seemed in unusual harmony with Nature. “Isn’t it worth while to rise early and get the spring of the morning into one’s system? I feel like that charming person in Scripture who ‘walked delicately,’ though I am afraid he was hardly a model to copy in his after-history.”

“Agag, wasn’t it?” said Chum. “I always felt I should have liked to follow his career a little further, but one never gets a chance. Do you notice how very badly they tell a story in the Bible? They have no idea of keeping back the end of the plot. ‘Now Ahab was fallen sick of the sickness whereof he died,’ they say, and, of course, as you know what is coming, it seems superfluous to read any further.”

“In fact, you don’t care about Ahab unless he is going to live.”

“I never did care for the pawns in the game who are sacrificed. It is the big pieces who accomplish the struggle, whether they do ill or well, who interest me. I feel that they have made something out of life, instead of life making something out of them.”

“And yet there can be no attainment without self-sacrifice,” said Halton quietly.

They were riding through the little town, sometimes in the shadow of the unruly palms, which waved like banners over the low wooden houses, sometimes in the new-born sunshine. There were a few natives about, but no white people. At the hotel a single disconsolate Chinaman was flapping a cloth on the stoep, and Mrs. Lewin looked up, remembering her first night there, and laughed. Discomforts passed by her easily at present. By-and-by the ponies began to ascend the further hill which circles the back of the town by a zigzag path, and it seemed that the little white houses and the blue bay fell gradually below them, until they topped the ridge and drew rein a moment to breathe their mounts before they began to descend on the other side of the hill called the Pass. In Africa it would have been a “Nek,” for it really connected Maitso and the lower heights of Mitsinjovy, but Key Island has not caught so much of the Dutch influence.

“Are you afraid to canter?” Halton said. “Your pony does not seem blown.”

“He is Captain Nugent’s pony, and you probably know his capacities better than I. He danced when I set off, but the hill has sobered him—however, we can soon see. Come up, Liscarton!”

The game little chestnut stretched his neck to the loosened rein, and broke into the rocking Key’land canter. There was a rough, tangled path before them, and a gradual descent, but the ponies were used to it and took it with a sober joy. As the second valley opened before them Mrs. Lewin saw the draped hills and the patches of liquid yellow-green that meant cane intermixed with the darker hemp, and as they rounded a curve of the track they came suddenly in view of a tiny native settlement.

The Commissioner drew rein. “I’m not going to take you absolutely into it,” he said, “but that is China Town. It is suspected of yellow fever just now, and a man has died—it is probably only biliousness though. The doctors are always quarrelling about the two.”

It looked the happiest and most innocent little spot on earth—far more innocent than Port Victoria, with its ominous wharves and coaling jetties for the sea traffic. There was even a little pagoda to one building, and tiny blue-coated figures were moving about busily, looking like a new kind of ant from the distance of the hillside. Most of the huts were thatched with reed, and the whole village was little more than a scattered group.

“Do you see that larger house apart from the others?” said Halton, pointing across the valley. “That is where Burton, the Town Warden, lives. He is Gregory’s right-hand man out here, and watches the place like a sleuth-hound.”

“It seems impossible that anything could be hidden there!” Mrs. Lewin exclaimed involuntarily. “Why, there is nowhere to hide it!”

“Nevertheless they very successfully have hidden their source of murder,” said Halton dryly. “That large barn-like arrangement is the sugar factory, but you cannot very well distinguish it from here. Unless they manage to conceal their evil brew there it must be done in their own houses.”

“And is it really so serious an evil?”

“It caused the death of some eighty white people, indirectly. The rioters were mad with drink—with this hashish—and they rose with a suddenness no one could foresee, because it was unpremeditated on their own part. Let a native get drunk on hashish and he goes out to kill. There were no regular troops here in the time of the Company, only a police force officered by men lent by the War Office, and these gentlemen appear to have been mostly on leave, shooting in Madagascar.”

“But how were the rioters armed?”

“They broke into the houses and armed themselves. The favourite weapon was a razor bound on to a stick, with which they jabbed upwards, but no kind of knife was despised. The most appalling thing was when they made a kind of torch out of the half-worked hemp soaked in oil and set their victims alight—am I frightening you, Mrs. Lewin?”

“No—but I have a very vivid imagination. I can see it all, and it turns me rather sick. Did the Chinamen fight too?”

“A few, though the worst offenders were the half-castes and the Malagasy. The Arab is as great a coward as the pure native, so that part of the population were comparatively harmless. There was a good deal of carnage among the planters and residents before the police got the upper hand, and the consequence was that Government had to step in and take over the island to reduce it to order.”

“Whence followed a Commissioner to make enquiries, and Mr. Gregory to teach them a lesson. Did he teach them, by the way?”

“I believe he did—a slight one,” said Halton briefly. “I arrived on the scene a week or so later.”

“I wonder the Government puts power into his hands, considering that they always seem to have to censure him afterwards,” said Mrs. Lewin musingly.

“It is rather difficult to ignore a successful man,” said Halton, “even the British Government find that. And he has been most uncomfortably successful on several occasions, though his measures may have been drastic.”

“I see. You generally come out a week or so later, I suppose?”

“It is the one boon I wring out of the Colonial Office; but I am speaking confidentially, Mrs. Lewin. You happen to know these things because you are here and in touch with them. At home they know little, because Mr. Gregory has quite a prejudice against the Press.”

“They might hinder him, but I doubt anything really stopping his drastic measures, as you call them.” A memory of the Administrator’s face rose before her like a revelation—the overhanging brows and forehead, the savage, lidless eyes, the secretive mouth, that lurked under the ragged moustache. Above all, the voice that spoke under his breath seemed to her ominous. Here was a strong man, not afraid to do lawless things and call them law by his own authority. Her blood tingled a little with the thought. “How they must hate him!” she said. “How weaker men must long to tie his hands and make him pay for proving them his inferiors, in action at least!”

“If we could tax success it would no doubt be a popular measure with the majority—who have not succeeded.”

There was a flash of appreciation in Mrs. Lewin’s eyes, but all she said was, “The lighter green is the cane, I suppose?” in an irrelevant tone.

“Yes, but this is a small crop compared to a big sugar estate—Denver’s, or the Tsara Valley crops, for instance. There is no considerable hemp-growing in Key’land, and we wish there was none at all. There it is at present, however.”

He pointed with his whip, and her eyes followed and distinguished the two plantations. The hemp was thinly sown, as it always is for intoxicating purposes, whereas when honestly cultivated for fibre the plants are crowded together. It was not yet in flower, for the sowing was in October or November—the spring of the Key’land year, the Tsara of Madagascar. The young plants stood stiffly, and were branched even to the roots; from the distance where Mrs. Lewin and Halton had paused it was just possible to distinguish how far apart the plants grew, unlike the unbroken sweep of the sugar-cane. The crop was always sown on higher ground too, generally on the gentle slope of the further hills, for hemp does not love a low level. The dark green of its wide leaves contrasted boldly with the lighter cane, and made a pleasant patchwork of the valley.

“They don’t pull the male flowers until January, and the female a month later,” remarked Halton, looking across the wicked sexual hemp that flowered twelve feet high in Hashish Valley, for it liked the rich soil. “You know, of course, that it has two genders.”

“And then?”

“Then it is converted, ostensibly, into ropes, and food for small birds, and other innocent and useful things, in that hemp mill down there. Now, Mrs. Lewin, you are looking at the sugar factory.”

“I am not, indeed; I can see the mill quite plainly. And I suppose the Chinese really turn it into hashish?”

“Well, I suppose it is stolen and secretly converted into bhang or ganja first. I don’t exactly know what form it takes here, but I’ve seen bhang, and its results, in India. So has Gregory!” he added significantly.

“I wonder they are not found out.”

“It is so simple, you see. Bhang is only the dried leaves and stalks of the hemp, and if you heat it with water and butter I assure you that you get quite a surprising result! My own opinion is, though, that they are yet more diabolical down there in China Town, and dissolve the resin in rum; you can use any alcohol for the purpose, but the rum being at hand they would naturally take it.”

“And then they dance the carrab dance. I remember the pictures in the illustrated papers at the time of the rioting. Ally—I mean Captain Lewin—says they were quite wrong, but I found them sufficiently impressive. I should like to be that man down there, nevertheless—Burton, did you say his name was?—who is working with Mr. Gregory. I feel I want to have a hand in it too—to meddle, in fact. It has its advantages, being a man, though I seldom see them.”

“I thought that to be a pretty girl was the height of bliss,” said Halton, with his gentlest insinuation.

“So it is, until you meet with a prettier, perhaps,” said Chum. There was a flash of mirth in her eyes, and the deeper drift of the conversation passed away like the shadow of the clouds over the sugar-cane.

“I suppose we ought to turn back,” said Halton regretfully, as the sun’s warmth began to increase to undoubted heat and glare. “If I bring you home in the trying part of the day I shall expect to hear of it from Captain Lewin.”

Chum had loosened her rein, and Liscarton, with his lean head stretched out, was cropping an early breakfast on the hillside. Liscarton was always hungry—his sais calls it greedy—and the instant his rein was relaxed, he would wrench it through his rider’s hands and nose the ground for something to eat. Mrs. Lewin had already learned that he had a will of his own that threatened to take the skin off her fingers did she keep his head up when standing; and she loved him none the less. She could forgive wrong-headedness, but she found it very difficult to forgive docility when it meant laziness. She sat easily in her saddle, her right hand resting on the pony’s flank, her body turned that she might look down on China Town with those musing eyes that were green and dusk and lavender-grey by turns. And Alfred Halton watched her with fastidious appreciation, while by an irony of fate she thought definitely of the Administrator and his plans, and the ominous strength that was his attribute. A man to have as a friend—a power to reach to high places—yes, decidedly an influence to have for you rather than against you!

“Have you noticed the names in Key Island?” said Halton, as they gathered up the reins and rode their ponies slowly homeward over the Pass.

“No, not particularly, except that I heard Mrs. Churton say she should go out to Vohitra if it grew much hotter. Where is Vohitra?”

“Vohitra is our health-resort—it is a big bungalow up in the hills at the northern part of the island, some two miles or so from Port Albert. Vohitra is a badly-chosen name, for it simply means hill. The place is shut up unless any one wants to go out there, but sometimes the garrison ladies make up a house-party, and then I believe it is pleasant, though there is nothing to do except shoot fish.”

“How very unsportsmanlike!”

“Well, you can’t catch them otherwise. No fly has ever been found that they will take. Can you shoot?”

“Yes—though I prefer a revolver to a gun. I object to a bruised shoulder! What language is Vohitra?”

“Malagasy. All the names on this side the island—the Madagascan side—have a flavour of their giant neighbour, though she is some two hundred and fifty miles off, except Port Victoria and Port Albert, which are strictly loyal, you will note. Maitso means ‘green,’ and Mitsinjovy ‘look out’ or ‘see’; but,” he added, laughing, “the Gunners’ quarters have almost been renamed by White’s little boy, who calls Mitsinjovy the ‘By-Jovey-Hill!’ and the name has stuck.”

“How lovely! I do like the way children wrestle with names they don’t understand, and turn them into the sense that lies nearest. You said Vohitra was at Port Albert—I have not been there yet.”

“Well, it is rather in the Tsara Valley. There is another lovely name for you—Tsara, spring o’ the year! And the Volofatsy River that cuts the valley in two, means the silver river. I wish, for the sake of euphony, that Key Island had all Malagasy names; but on the west coast you feel the influence of Africa, and get Sand Bay, and Africa Point, and even the Little Zambesi.”

“I like that—there seems some suggestion in it. But then I am rather inclined to like Key Island.”

“So I am amazed to observe. You will forgive my wondering if it will last, or if you too will grow to look on it as a three years’ probation to better things.”

“And call it a rat-trap, as you did! I dare say I shall—and yet I cannot imagine it. The place seems to me too recently dangerous to be dull, and too possibly important in the near future to be ignored. And then one can always hope for one of Mr. Gregory’s drastic measures, and a little excitement!”

“Do let me get home first!” said Halton plaintively. “You have never seen him through one of his shindies, and you don’t know how fatiguing it is. I hope the Government will recall me while I can plead peace with honour, and give me an armchair in a quiet corner, from which to contemplate Gregory burning the hemp-crops seven thousand comfortable miles away.”

For a minute Mrs. Lewin looked a little startled, but she did not comment on the suggestion, which was lightly made. Even her ignorance of the popular feeling and prejudices could not blind her to the seriousness of such a step as the burning of the hemp-crops would be, and she wondered if the man who gave orders under his breath would have the nerve for such an incredible stroke. She also wondered why Halton had put such an idea into her head under the guise of absurd exaggeration, for she did not believe in his lack of motive.

“I am really very much obliged to you!” she said frankly, as they shook hands at her own gate. “You have appeased some of my curiosity, and given me a delightful ride before the heat.” Her eyes met the sleepy brown ones that watched her so covertly. “I can’t, of course, repay you——”

“Unless you will let me plan another like excursion?”

“Will I not?” said Chum gaily. “Only try me! Good-bye, Mr. Halton—if you see my husband you might tell him not to be late for luncheon. There are granadillas and flying-fish, and he loves both!”

As he rode away Halton thought of the shady dining-room in the bungalow, the fruit-laden table, and the wife who thought of her husband’s tastes and sat opposite to him in the cool sweetness of her white gowns. No one thought of his tastes, without irritated supervision, and he found Evelyn Gregory a poor alternative to the tall girl whose effect haunted his mind. He did not see her exactly in detail, as a woman whose inches looked more from her slight build, and whose hair was a warm brown, and her eyes as changing as

“The rare glooms on the far blue hills,”

but he said inclusively that she was charming, and her atmosphere left a blank in his consciousness when it was removed.

“Note from garrison,” the Administrator said briefly, tossing it across the luncheon-table as he sat down. “Mrs. Churton has a function of sorts next week. Gymkana, or some such foolery, at the polo-ground—she hopes we will refresh at her house.”