Читать книгу Seibert of the Island - Gordon Ray Young - Страница 21

It was dark when Combe arrived home, and, wondering at the lights he saw in the house, came shambling along the veranda. Nada ran to him and threw her arms about his neck; and he stood bewildered, unresponsive, pushing feebly to get free.

"Why, father!" she cried, stepping back, sadly astonished.

"I'm glad 'o see you, Nada—I'm glad 'o see you. You're all I got now, child. Or'na she's not my daughter any more."

He shook his drooping head.

"Don't say that! No matter whom she's married she's still my sister!"

"I won't have it! I won't! Don't you go going over there, Nada. I won't have it! How'd you get home here anyhow? Ah, McGuire, where's Williams?"

He almost screamed the question, half-triumphantly.

"He has gone on," said McGuire, coming forward.

"Gone?"

"He put Nada ashore and a sick boy."

"But he knew Seibert had stole Or'na. He knew it! You tol' him, Nada? You tol' him what Dr. Lemater wrote you? Wasn't that why he come? An' he didn't stay to see that feller——"

It was incredible. Combe simply could not believe it.

Most of his time he loitered in colourless misery at the Pulotu Club and complained of Seibert, the big, hearty man, his son-in-law. It had become so that the languid idlers would stir and vanish at the sound of his melancholy voice. Combe drank little or nothing himself, and seldom stood drinks, which made the idlers feel they had been cheated after an hour of listening to his unending lamentation.

The club loungers would, in pretended sympathy for the son-in-law, often repeat all that Combe had said, and more, in the hope that it would annoy Seibert; but the old fellow's mumbling and grumbling might have been a fly buzzing for all that he seemed to care.

"His place it is going all to weeds and rot," Seibert would say, grinning with mask-like cheerfulness.

Which was largely true. Combe, shuffling, vague-eyed, made out as best he could in the gathering and splitting of cocoanuts with whatever superintendent it pleased the Lord to send him; though the one he now had was sent by Brundage a year or two before. This was Mr. Grinnell, one of England's younger sons—very young—who knew but little of his work, yet remained honest and sober.

Mr. Grinnell, like many of the younger sons of England, had been pushed from the nest and told to fly. After some awkward fluttering about he had landed flat on his back in a hot, wet, dirty, Santa Cruzian village. There a tall, grim old man with a sinister face had taken charge of Mr. Grinnell and set him on his feet. A Yankee trader came along, and the lean old man put Mr. Grinnell and his traps on board her, paid his passage, and gave him a letter to "Tom Combe, Pulotu."

After shifting from one trader to another two or three times, Mr. Grinnell finally reached Pulotu, and found Combe on the club veranda. Combe seemed so peculiarly mild and helpless that Mr. Grinnell's first impression was that the old fellow must be awfully shrewd. He presented the letter.

"Read it," said Combe. "I ain't got my specs."

He unfolded the letter, and with blinking surprise read:

"Tom,—Give this boy a try. He can't be worse than anybody you would pick to run your business.—Brundage."

"A'right," said Combe, as if nothing unusual had taken place. "You're my manager. Come on out an' go to work. Jake Brundage was always saving of his words."

"Most extr'ordinary!" said Mr. Grinnell.

"Un-hunh, ain't it? I got a manager out there now, an' he's no good. Drunk all the time, an' wants to fight. You go an' kick him off the place an' take his job. I got to try out your executive 'bility," said Combe, with a gentle, wary effort at being business-like. He could not discharge anybody. He had no fear; just a helpless shrinking from any kind of clash.

So Mr. Grinnell, believing that "his chance" had come, went out and found a squatty thick-faced Englishman asleep in a hammock. The squatty Englishman blustered and showed temper; but Brundage had seen the backbone down under Grinnell's fever-stained hide; so the squatty Englishman, in a profane way, called heaven and earth to witness his joy at being done with the blasted plantation. He then seemed determined to weep on Mr. Grinnell's neck out of sheer sympathy for the misery that lay before this "poor young 'un."

"Let's 'ave a drink to show no 'ard feelin's," said the ex-manager.

"No," said Mr. Grinnell. "I'm a teetotaller!"

The squatty Englishman eyed him in amazed disgust. Evidently he had never seen a teetotaller before. It was as if Mr. Grinnell had said, "I am a cannibal."

"God blime me!" he cried. "I knowed some'at were wrong with yer!"

He edged off in a wary circle, insultingly making believe that he thought Mr. Grinnell might spread a vile contagion, like small-pox. But at a distance he turned and shouted through the gloomy grounds, "If you stay sober th' worry o' it will kill yer!" He had weakened into giving the young fellow the best of his parting advice.

At the end of nearly two years it had nearly killed Mr. Grinnell; but he was chock-a-block with Dr. Lemaitre's quinine, and in a state of preoccupied worriment over weeds, bugs, failing crops, the lack of manures, the ineradicable laziness of labourers.

The one point of conflict between Combe and his manager lay in Mr. Grinnell's opinion of Seibert; for the young fellow, having that backbone Brundage had seen, bluntly told his employer:

"Seibert knows more about tropical agriculture than any man north of Australia. And he works harder. Pulotu loafers all hate him; they jolly well hate anybody that gets ahead."

When Combe turned to a fretful iteration of his unending grudge, and told of how Seibert had tried to get hold of the plantation years before, Mr. Grinnell would answer: "Been a tiptop thing for you if you had taken him on as partner!"

The night of Nada's return, as long as she would listen, her father talked on and on in a way that was very like drunken maundering about Seibert. He had stolen Oreena to get the plantation. Seibert knew that Brundage was dead; that was why the fellow had dared to steal his poor little daughter. But she was no longer his daughter. He would not own her. Seibert was a rascal. He wore grins to fool people. And Williams—and Williams, knowing his troubles, had gone away without again settling with that fellow, as if a daughter could be returned by force. And didn't Williams know that Seibert was his worst enemy, talked against him all the time, contributed to the reward got up at Apia after Williams had run off with a shipload of recruits and took them home?

The club idlers, full of whisky and soda, occasionally revenged themselves a little on Seibert's worldly success by bringing up the story of how Williams and Brundage had visited him. They may not have really believed it, but they could quote old Combe and ask Seibert how about it.

Seibert at times would sweat like a squeezed sponge, but he never got angry. Always that air of heartiness that did not convince. His hide seemed thick as a cocoanut husk. It was unmanly, positively unmanly, not to lose one's temper at times. In the tropics, and a Dutchman at that! Some of the idlers said that he had a nest of devils in his heart.