CHAPTER XI.A SAIL.
I was roused next morning by the report of a gun, followed by a strange commotion in the village. I had barely time to dress, and join the Ancient in the sitting-room, when a man ran in, breathless, to announce a ship off the Point, and a Queen’s ship.
A Queen’s ship! No wonder the village was astir. A ship that might fly the Royal Standard, a ship that was English authority and English might! No work in the Island this day!
The Ancient put on his Sunday coat, and quietly took command. ‘How lucky the landing is easy this morning! Jonah, hurry off to the Point, with the white flag, and signal their cutter “All right!” Quintal, you go down to the landing, and see themover the breakers. Now, folks, who’s to take them in?’
It was a call to public meeting on the question of the entertainment of the officers. The islanders always claimed this privilege of boarding and lodging the Queen’s uniform. Half a dozen heads of families at once offered to provide for as many guests. There was a brisk competition for the Captain, who would have fallen to the Governorex-officio, but for my occupancy of the spare bedroom in his Excellency’s house. I offered to retire, but my generous hostess would not hear of it.
‘I found him, father, and he belongs to me,’ said Victoria, in the terms of that earlier claim which had sometimes made me suspect the existence of slavery in the Island. The blood of the free-born ought to have rushed to my face in protest against this attempt to count me as a chattel; but it did not.
The Captain is knocked down to the schoolmaster; the women hurry away to light their ovens; the meeting breaks up. Its dispersed groups, however, form so many subcommittees of reception, for they talk of nothing but the comfort and delight of thepublic guests. The only private interest is represented by the two litigants who have the case on appeal from a decision of the Island courts to the supreme tribunal of a British man-of-war. They are tossing with a parti-coloured bean, to see which shall open the pleadings first.
The Ancient, hurrying down to the landing-place, calls for his whale-boat and his mariners three, and our navy goes forth inmodestpride to meet the Queen’s ship. She is close in-shore, the depth of water admitting of a near approach; so, when our Governor boards her, we see all that passes. His Excellency takes off his hat, and pulls at a forelock that is not there to pull. No real one has been pulled in that family since the time of George III., but the gesture has survived with them as a sign of respect. The Captain shakes hands with him, and presents him to his officers, who do the same. Then they leave the clean white deck, flashing light from its polished brasses, and go below, as though for complimentary refreshments. On their return, the Governor takes charge of the ship’s cutter, in which ourguests embark. Only a native can dodge the rocks, rocklets, and surf currents of our bay. They wait at the back of the rollers till the look-out man ashore waves his hat; then they give way with a will, and are hurled in, safely, on the crest of the wave.
Two of the officers are old friends of mine. What a little world it is! You would think all were old friends of the islanders, by the warmth of welcome. Men, women and children struggle for a grasp of their hands, and a girl offers flowers to the Captain. He kisses her; his officers kiss the other girls: fathers, brothers, and cousins hurrah approval, and content.
Then we lead them to the schoolhouse, by the steep paths, in joyous procession of old and young. Here the Captain must enter in the Island register the name of his ship, with other particulars, and meet a deputation of the elders, who come to trade. The ship wants water, yams, and potatoes: we want hardware. The terms of exchange are settled according to a written tariff, and the elders depart, to weigh over the commodities on their side. They are poor traders, though:yams are scarce at the moment, yet they ask no higher price for them; nor can I make them understand that to do so would be to seek an honest gain. ‘Is there less steel in the hatchets than there used to be,’ they ask, ‘that we are to give less in yams?’ I remember that the value of a thing is what it will fetch, and I tell them so, but they shake their heads. For the first time, it occurs to me that these people have no natural turn for economic speculation; and that, with all their religion, they may need a missionary of a kind. A certain finer sense is wanting; but no more of this just now.
The guests have, meanwhile, been led to their quarters, the Captain beaming with affability and good nature. He foresees his report to the Lords of the Admiralty on the morals, manners and customs of these innocent islanders, with the articles thereon in the daily papers. It is all such a relief after the official landings of the Pacific station, and the French polish of the South American dons, much tarnished by keeping in a torrid clime.
The people are as curious and inquisitive as children. They draw the officers’ swords,run their fingers along the dulled edges, cry wonder at the damascened blades. Some of them have never seen the uniform before: none can ever see it too often. They have the fullest confidence in the honour of the wearers; and they give themselves up to enjoyment, without a thought of harm. All the rules governing their intercourse with traders are suspended. The girls go where they please, with whom they please: every middy, even, has his feminine aide-de-camp, and local guide. The Captain is attended by no less a person than the Ancient himself, though I think he would prefer to rough it with his officers. The Ancient treats him with a fine courtesy, affecting not to be master in his own domain.
Nor indeed is he master for the time—at least on the judicial side. The Queen’s navy, as already stated, is our court of final appeal under the constitution; and there is that unsettled case. It is called on the morrow of the Captain’s visit, with the cocoa grove for the seat of the appellate tribunal. The Ancient offered the schoolhouse, but the Judge asked why a clearing in the trees would notdo as well; and his will was law. It is quieter than most halls of justice, for the whispers are lost in the open air. The twitter of the birds overhead is not so troublesome as an usher’s cry of ‘Silence in Court.’ The gentle breeze is hardly an inconvenience, for there are no papers to blow about; and the perfume which it brings from the village gardens would be a distinct improvement to the atmosphere of Lincoln’s Inn.
I had never quite understood this case, and no wonder, for it had puzzled all the courts of the Island. A cat had been killed: it opened in that way, clearly enough, but, soon after, the obscurity began. Who killed the cat? Even here there was broad daylight—one Elias McCall. Was he justified in the deed?—Ha! His plea was that the cat had sought the lives of his chickens, and that, after losing several of these in successive midnight raids, he had, at length, sought the life of the cat. The law of the case is perfectly explicit: the cat that slays fowl shall itself be slain. But the proof of murderous outrage must be conclusive: the cat must be ‘positively detected in killing’—the Ancient read the statute fromhis pocket-book, at the request of the Court. Now, was the circumstantial evidence so strong as to constitute detection within the meaning of the Act? The proprietor of the fledglings, as a truthful man, could say no more than that the cat had been in the habit of taking up her station near his hen-coop in the cool of the evening, and that, on the morrow of every such visit, he had missed one or more birds. He had put two and two together, that was his expression, and finally, his feelings getting the better of him, he had ‘let go’ at the cat (the Ancient, at this point, bade him remember in whose presence he stood), with the result that his brood thereafter remained intact. On a post-mortem examination, moreover, he had found a small feather clinging to the fur. Pressed by the other side, he was bound in honour to admit that he had never seen the cat looking at the hen-coop—on the contrary, her head was usually turned the other way. She often sang to herself, as though pre-occupied; and her movements were so little of a threatening nature that she was washing her face at the very moment of the fatal stroke. It was notdenied that there were many other cats in the neighbourhood; it was not denied that the fowls often flew upon the fence where the cat used to sit, nor that they might there have left the stray feather found on her person. With this evidence, the owner of the cat left his case in the hands of the Supreme Court. The courts below had decided against him, the Ancient first, as Chief Magistrate, and then a jury. Now, the Captain of H.M.S. ‘Rollo’ was asked to give the final award.
That his Honour was troubled was evident by the frequency with which he asked his assessor, the First Lieutenant, to give him a light for his cheroot. The ‘positively detected’ of the statute was his stumbling-block; we could see that with half an eye.
‘Where did you find the feather?’ he said at length, ‘near the tail end, where the cat might have been sitting?’ It was a leading question, but no one seemed to notice the irregularity. ‘No, sir,’ returned the murderer, ‘on her cheek, just under the right whisker.’
‘That settles it, I think,’ said the Judge; ‘she was washing up, after she had eaten thebird.’ ‘Yes, that settles it,’ echoed the First Lieutenant. ‘That settles it, of course,’ said the ship’s surgeon, who, as a mere bystander, had no business to deliver an opinion on the matter. ‘That settles it,’ said the Ancient; ‘I never thought of asking the question.’ ‘That settles it,’ said all the villagers present, including, strange to say, the owner of the cat.—Judgment of the courts below confirmed.