certain pigeonhole of human kind.--What we
had not counted on was the fierceness of the stimulus--like the taste of
blood to a carnivore or, to the true knight, a glimpse of the veritable
Grail.

All the following day I spent on board, overseeing the hundred minor
patchings and calkings a South Sea trader will want in port. When I went
ashore that evening, after sundown, I found the Dutchman sitting in the
same chair on the veranda, blowing smoke out into the afterglow. There
was the illusion of perfect continuity with the past. Yesterday, today,
tomorrow. Life flowed like a sleeping river, it would seem.

But this was the status of affairs. The three brown music makers,
sons-in-law to an island queen, lay on a platform somewhere within the
edge of the bush, heavier by ounces with thirty-two caliber slugs,
awaiting burial. And Signet, guttersnipe, beach comber, and midnight
assassin, was lodged in the "calaboose," built stoutly in a corner of
the biggest and reddest of the Dutchman's godowns. As for the royal
dancing woman, I was presently in the trader's phrase, to "have a look
at her."

At his solicitation I followed around the house, past the gun-room
window (locked fast enough now, you may be sure), and up steeply through
a hedged, immaculate garden, which witnessed to the ordered quality of
the owner's mind. At the upper end, under a wall of volcanic tufa, we
came to a summerhouse done in the native style, stilts below, palmite
thatch above, and walled on three sides only with hanging screens of
bamboo. Striking through this screen from the west, the rose and green
of the afterglow showed the woman as in a semi-luminous cavern, seated
cross-legged in the center of the platform, her hands drooped between
her knees, and her large, dark eyes fixed upon the sea beyond the roof
of the Residence below.

Was it the perfect immobility of defiance and disdain? Not once did her
transfixed gaze take us in. Was it the quiescence of defeat and
despair--that level brooding over the ocean which had been to her, first
and last, a cradle and roadway for her far, adventurious pilgrimages?
She sat there before our peering eyes, the sudden widow, the daughter of
potentates brought low, the goddess of an exuberant and passionate
vitality struck with quietude; mute, astounded by catastrophe, yet
unbowed. The beauty of that golden-skinned woman abashed me.

It did not abash the Dutchman. His was another and more indomitable
fiber.