The life of the Reverend Titus E. Laurie contained two active principles. The first of these was a tireless enthusiasm for the propagation of the principles of Methodist Christianity, and this had moved him ever since he could remember. The second was solicitude for his daughter Margaret, which, necessarily, had been operative for only the last twenty years. During these twenty years he had been absent from America almost all the time; the total number of weeks he had spent with Margaret would scarcely have aggregated a year; so that his affection was obliged to take the form of voluminous letters from out-of-the-way places in Asia and Polynesia, and of remittances of more money than he could afford.
But his religious work took always first place in his mind. There never was, one might suppose, a man more clearly “called to the work” than Titus E. Laurie. He cared little for theology. He had never had any doubts of anything; if he had had them, they would not have troubled him. His temper was purely practical, and the ideal which filled his soul was the redemption of the world from its state of sin and death by the forces of the gospel as systematized by John Wesley. He was tolerant of other Protestant churches, but not of Roman Catholicism. He had preached when he was fifteen; at eighteen he was a “local preacher,” and at twenty he was in full charge of a church of his own in South Rock, New York.
He was shifted about on that “circuit” according to the will of the Conference till the opening of the war, when he went to the front as an army nurse. In three months, however, he came back, vaguely in disgrace. It appeared that he had been unable to resist the entreaties of his patients, and had supplied them surreptitiously with tabooed chewing tobacco and liquor. But this was an error of kindness and inexperience; it was easily condoned by his supporters, and he resumed his more regular pastoral work. In 1866 he was much in demand as a revivalist.
Mr. Laurie had charge of the funds of his church as well as of its souls. It was hard for a non-producer to live in the period of high prices succeeding the war. Just what he did with the money in his custody was never definitely ascertained; probably he could not have said himself; but he was unable to restore it when the time came. He did not face his parishioners; he left in the night for Mexico, leaving behind a letter of agonized remorse and promises of amendment.
In Mexico he worked for two years in the mines and on a coffee plantation, and sent home the whole amount of his embezzlement in monthly instalments. At the same time he undertook to conduct Methodist prayer-meetings among the mine labourers, who were chiefly Indians and half-castes. This brought him into collision with his employer, the local priest, and his prospective converts. He was threatened, stoned, ducked, and menaced with murder, but he persisted and actually succeeded in establishing a tiny Methodist community, which survived for six months after he left it.
Laurie was forgiven by his church, and returned to the North, but not to resume pastoral work. He became a bookkeeper in New York; but the evangelist’s instinct was too strong for him, and he took to mission work on the lower East Side. After a year of this, he succeeded in getting himself sent to the Sandwich Islands as a missionary, from which post he returned in five years, in disgrace once more. There were rumours of a shady transaction in smuggled opium, in which he had been involved, though not to his own pecuniary benefit.
He remained in America this time for three or four years, and married a lady much older than himself. These domestic arrangements were broken up, however, by his leaving once more for the South Seas, having been able to secure another appointment for the mission field. He never saw his wife again. She died a year later in giving birth to a daughter, who was taken in charge by an aunt living in the West.
Since that time his labours had extended over much of Polynesia, with digressions into Africa and China. He had sailed the first missionary schooner, the Olive Branch, among the Islands, and he had preached on the beach to brown warriors armed to the teeth, who had never before seen a white man. But the Reverend Titus E. Laurie escaped with his life. He thrived on danger, from the Fiji spears to the typhoons that came near to swamping his wretchedly found vessel on every voyage.
And yet he did not escape scathless. It was rumoured that the fascinations of certain of his female converts in Tahiti had proved too much for him; a scandal was averted by his leaving the station. He was accused of pearling in forbidden waters; and in the end he had to resign his command of the Olive Branch, as it was conclusively proved that the missionary schooner had run opium in her hold with the connivance of her chief. The Rev. Titus E. Laurie, in fact, was granite against hostility when in the regular line of his work. He was made of the stuff of martyrs, but responsibilities found him weak, and he could no more make head against a sudden strong temptation than he could deliberately plan a crime.
Elliott gleaned these details of Mr. Laurie’s career by scraps in the course of the next three weeks, but just how the missionary had come to change his name and settle in Victoria was a mystery to him. At any rate, Laurie, or Eaton, as he persisted in calling himself, had secured a position as accountant in the godown of one of the largest English importing firms, and seemed to propose to spend the remainder of his life in that station. He had now been there for over two months, and Elliott presently discovered that he was already in the habit of visiting the mission settlement at Kowloon and taking part in the meetings held there. The missionaries on duty found him a valuable assistant, and, as Elliott discovered, had made proposals to him to join them; but these Eaton had refused.
Accustomed to the tropics, the heat did not affect him much, but Elliott at once insisted that a house must be rented upon the Peak for Miss Margaret. Coming directly from the sparkling air of the American plains, the girl could never have lived in the hot steam of the lower town. Laurie demurred a little on the score of expense,—not that he grudged the money, but because he did not have it. Elliott said nothing, but began to look about, and was lucky enough to obtain the lease of a cottage upon the mountain-top at a nominal figure, considering the locality. It had been taken by a retired naval officer who was unexpectedly obliged to return to England and was glad to dispose of the lease, so that Elliott bound himself to pay only eighty dollars a month for the remainder of the summer.
He had the lease transferred to Laurie’s new name. “If you say a word to your daughter about this,” he warned him when he handed over the document, “I’ll tell her about your sporting life in Macao.”
The missionary smiled uneasily, and then looked grave. “I can never begin to thank you, much less repay you. I am not much good now,—nothing but a weak old man, but my prayers—”
“Oh, cut it out!” said Elliott, impatiently.
Laurie flushed.
“I beg your pardon; I didn’t mean that, of course. Only, you know, your daughter and I are old friends, and you mustn’t talk of gratitude for any little thing I do.”
“But there is one thing I wish,” replied the old man, after an embarrassed moment. “I insist that you share the cottage with us.”
Elliott hesitated, wondering whether it would be judicious, and yielded.
“Certainly I will,” he said, “and glad to have the chance.”
Margaret was delighted at the appearance of the cottage, a tiny bungalow, deep-verandahed, standing amid a grove of China pines that rustled perpetually with a cooling murmur. The highway leading to it was more like a conservatory than a street.
“You dear old papa!” she exclaimed, sitting down rapturously upon the steps, after having rushed through the building from front to rear, startling the dignified and spotless Chinese cook which they had inherited from the former tenants.
“How good you are to get all this for me! It must have cost such a lot, too. Mr. Elliott says that houses up here cost two hundred dollars a month. You didn’t pay all that, did you? Now we must be very economical, and we’ll all work. I’m going to discharge that Chinaman.”
“You can’t work. You’d scandalize the Peak,” said Elliott.
“I don’t care anything for the Peak. I’m going to fire that Chinee first of all. I’m afraid of him, he looks so mysteriously solemn, as if he knew all sorts of Oriental poisons, and I never can learn pidgin-English. No, I’m going to cook, and I’ll make you doughnuts and fried chicken and mashed potatoes and real American coffee and all the good old United States things that you haven’t tasted for so long.”
“But you can’t do anything like that. No white woman works in this country,” Elliott expostulated.
“But I shall,” she retorted, firmly.
And she did,—or, rather, she tried hard to do it. But it turned out to be difficult, and often impossible, to procure the ingredients for the preparation of the promised American dishes, and she was by increasing degrees forced back upon the fare of the country, which she did not quite know how to deal with. It did not matter,—not even when it came to living chiefly upon canned goods, which usually were American enough to satisfy the most ardent patriot. The three had come to regard the affair in the light of a prolonged picnic, and they agreed that it was too hot to eat doughnuts and fried chicken, anyway.
Laurie still went down the mountain to the sweltering lower city every morning and did not return till sunset. Elliott and Margaret usually spent the day together, for he had temporarily abandoned the search for the mate. An unconquerable horror of the town had filled him, and he silenced an uneasy conscience by telling himself that he would learn nothing new if he did go there.
Sometimes he helped Margaret to wash the breakfast things, and then he sat lazily in a long chair on the wide veranda, smoking an excellent Manila cheroot and reading the China Daily Mail. He could hear Margaret softly moving about inside the house; she dropped casual remarks to him through the open window, and usually she ended by coming out and sitting with him, reading or sewing with an industry that even the climate could not tame. Below them the steamy rain-clouds drifted and wavered over the city; Hongkong Roads ran like a zigzag strip of gray steel out to the ocean, but it was cool, if damp, upon the Peak, and the two had reached such a degree of intimacy that sometimes for an hour they did not say a word.
To Elliott this period bore an inexpressible charm. For many years his associates had been almost altogether men, the rough and strong men of action of the West; and the graceful domesticity that a womanly woman instinctively gathers about her was new to him, or so old that it was almost forgotten. They were alone together, for the ex-missionary scarcely counted, and they knew no one else on the Island. It was almost as if the Island had been a desert one, and they wrecked upon it. They were isolated in the midst of this great, torrid, bustling half-Chinese colony, and in that most improbable spot he found a little corner of perfume with such quiet and peace as he had scarcely imagined. He did not quite understand its charm, and he was not much given to analyzing his sensations. It was enough for him that he was happy as he had never been before in his life, and he thanked the treasure trail for leading him to this, and tried to forget that the trail was not yet ended.
But he was astonished to find that Margaret made no reference to her father’s change of name, and seemed to accept it with as little surprise as if she supposed an alias to be a regular Anglo-Chinese custom. Elliott was afraid to speak of the matter, but his amazement grew till he could no longer restrain his curiosity, and he asked her one morning, pointblank.
“Miss Margaret, do you know why your father has changed his name?”
“Yes, I know,” she replied, looking slightly troubled. “I can’t tell you the reason, though. But it was for nothing disgraceful,—though I don’t need to tell you that. He had to do it; I can’t say any more.”
“I beg your pardon—I merely wondered—of course I knew there was some good reason. It was none of my business, anyway,” Elliott blundered, privately wondering what fiction Laurie had dished up for his daughter’s consumption.
“There is the best of reasons. My father is one of the noblest men in the world. You don’t know him yet, but he knows you. He is very keen, and he has been studying you; he told me so.”
“Oh!” said Elliott.
“Yes. And he has the very highest opinion of you, I may tell you, if your modesty will stand it. He says you have helped him a great deal. Have you?”
“Not so far as I know.”
“Well, he thinks you have, which comes to the same thing. Some day he may be able to do something for you—something really great.”
“He has done it already in bringing you out here,” said Elliott, and was sorry directly he had said it.
“I don’t like speeches like that,” said Miss Margaret. “Now, you’ve never told me why you are here yourself.”
“Didn’t I tell you that I came on business?”
“Yes, but what sort of business? Another hunt for easy fortunes, I suppose, such as you promised to give up. How much do you stand to win this time?”
“What would you say if I said millions?”
“I’d say that you didn’t appear to be looking for them very hard.”
Elliott squirmed in the long chair and moaned plaintively.
“I haven’t seen you looking for them at all, in fact. Since we moved to the Peak, you’ve done nothing but sit in that long chair.”
“Yes, hang it, you’re right,” Elliott exclaimed, sitting up. “It’s true. I’ve been wasting my time for two weeks, spending my partners’ money and not doing the work I’m paid to do.”
“You must do it, then. Tell me, what is it?”
“No, I can’t tell it, not even to you. It’s not my own secret. I’ve got three partners in it, and my particular task is to hunt down a man whom I never set eyes on. I’ve chased him a matter of ten thousand miles, and he’s supposed to be somewhere in this city,” looking down at the wet smoke that hung over the bustling port.
Somewhere under that haze was the clue to the drowned million, and he felt the shame of his idleness. He had been philandering away his time, and at this juncture when every day was priceless. He turned back to the girl.
“Thank you for waking me up. Your advice always comes at the psychological moment,” he said. “My holiday’s over. To-morrow I start work again.”
He went down to the city that afternoon, in fact, but the old perplexity returned upon him when he tried to think how and where he was to begin his search. He went the rounds of the steamer offices and scrutinized the outgoing passenger-lists for the past three weeks. There was no name that he recognized. He tried the consulates again without any result. He could think of no new move, and he was irritated at his own lack of resource.
Yet the Hongkong Club was the centre of all the foreign life of the colony; it was visited daily by almost every white man on the island, and if Burke, or Baker, were in the city, he would be certain to gravitate there sooner or later. So Elliott took to spending days in that institution, eagerly scrutinizing every big-boned elderly man of seafaring appearance who entered. But, as he often reflected, he might rub elbows with his man daily and not know it; and he regretted more than ever that he had not obtained a full description of the mate.
After a week of this sedentary sort of man-hunting, he became imbued with a deep sense of the futility of the thing. It was only by the merest chance that he could hope to learn anything. It was chance that had assisted the affair up to the present; the whole scheme was one gigantic gamble, discovered, financed, and operated by sheer good luck, and the run seemed exhausted. Anyhow, he thought fatalistically, good fortune was as likely to strike him on the Peak as in the city, and he took to spending his days on the veranda once more. He cabled again to Henninger:
“Track totally lost. What shall do?”
Still, he did not totally abandon the search, but rather he made it a pretext for little exploring expeditions round the city and suburbs with Margaret, accompanied by her father when he could get away from business. They prowled about Kowloon, and they all visited Macao together, where Laurie exhibited the blandest oblivion of his recent lapse, and lectured his companions most edifyingly upon the curse of gambling, the degeneracy of the Portuguese race, and the corruption of the Church of Rome.
They visited the shipyards opposite Hongkong, saw the naval headquarters and the missionary station, and, a week later, all three of them crossed to Formosa on Saturday and returned on Sunday, merely for the refreshing effect of the open sea breezes.
The heavy Chinese smell came off the coast as they returned into Hongkong Roads late on Sunday night. Elliott sickened at the thought of resuming the search that had become hateful to him, in a city that, but for one thing, had become intolerable.
Margaret was leaning over the bows with him, watching the prow rise and fall in splashes of orange and gold phosphorescence. The missionary was dozing in a chair somewhere astern. A score of coolies were gambling and talking loudly between decks.
“This is all so wonderful to me!” said Margaret, suddenly. “Only a month or two ago I was in Nebraska, but it seems years. I had never seen anything; I had no idea what a great and wonderful place the world was. I think of it all, and I sometimes wonder if I am the same girl. But do you know what it makes me think most?
“It makes me feel,” she went on, as Elliott did not reply, “how great and noble my father must be to have given his life to help this great, swarming heathen world. I never knew there were so many heathens; I thought they were mostly Methodists and Episcopalians. Don’t you think he really is the best man in the world?”
“I never saw a man so full of high ideals,” Elliott answered.
He had answered at random, scarcely listening to what she said. But the sound of her voice through the darkness had brought illumination to him, and he realized why he had shrunk from returning to the gold-hunt. He had found a higher ideal himself, and as he thought of his years and years of ineffectual, topsyturvy scrambling after a fortune which he would not have known how to keep if he had found, they seemed to him inexpressibly futile and childish. He had missed what was most worth while in life—but it was not too late. He hoped, and doubted, and his heart beat suddenly with an almost painful thrilling.
Her white muslin sleeve almost touched his shoulder, but her face was turned from him, looking wide-eyed toward the dark China coast. He knew that she was meditating upon the virtues of her evangelistic father. He did not speak, but she turned her head quickly and looked at him, with a puzzled, almost frightened glance.
“What’s the matter?” he said, almost in a whisper.
“I don’t know,” Margaret murmured, and her eyes dropped. For a moment she stood silent; she seemed to palpitate; then she roused herself with a little shrug.
“I am nervous to-night. For a moment I had a shudder—I felt as if something had happened, or was happening—I don’t know what. Come, let’s go back and find father. We’re nearly in.” She thrust her arm under his with a return to her usual frank confidence.
“I’m so glad you’re here, too,” she said, impulsively.
This was not what Elliott wanted, not what he had seen revealed suddenly between the blaze of the stars and the flame of the sea. But he would not tell her so—not yet. Not for anything would he shatter their open comradeship.