That was the last of Madame Gilbert's happy days in Tops Island. Before twenty-four hours had gone by, the storm burst which whirled Willatopy as we have known him out of my story. In his place remained Lord Topsham. In the course of the last ten chapters I have tried to realise Willatopy and to paint his portrait for you. It has been a labour of love, for he was a gallant lad. But for the Lord Topsham, into whom by woeful mischance of birth he developed, I have neither respect nor affection. He seems to me to have displayed the worst qualities of the two races whose blood formed an unstable mixture in his veins. It is true that the boy never had a chance. The lawyer, John Clifford, and the girl Marie were the worse conceivable guides for his halting steps on the threshold of a new life. And just when Madame Gilbert's influence was most vitally needed by him it failed. She who had been raised to the throne of a goddess came tumbling down and lay prostrate—a mere human widow. Willatopy spurned both his gods—his dead father the wise madman of Tops Island, and the living Madame. He rejected the precepts of the father, and he bitterly resented the restraints which Madame Gilbert sought to impose upon him. His misguided, masterful spirit then led him with terrible swiftness down the steep slope which ended in irretrievable disaster. I love the boy Willatopy, and I would that it had been my fate to tell this story differently.

When Willie found the place of assignation empty, on the afternoon which followed the turtle feast, he descended in great leaps to Madame's camp, and made enquiries of her escort. From a talkative sailor he learned that Marie had been embarked in the motor boat two days before, and had not returned to the camp. Willie scented a discovery of his amour, and, as a deeply resentful Peer of England, sought an explanation from Madame Gilbert.

"What have you done with Marie, Madame Gilbert?" demanded he.

"What has my maid Marie to do with Lord Topsham?" asked Madame. She saw the fury burning in the bright blue eyes, and faced him with a hauteur as fierce as his own.

"I have made her my white slave," growled he.

"That is very good of you," said Madame blandly. "But Marie Lambert happens to be my maid and otherwise engaged. By my orders she has been returned to the yacht, where she will remain. Please bear in mind, Willie, that your heirship to a Peerage gives you no rights whatever over my servants."

"John says...." began Willie, but Madame waved him into silence with a royal gesture.

"If you paid more attention to your father's memory and to my words, and less to that miserable wretch, John Clifford, you would understand better your position. An English Lord has no rights which are not common to every English gentleman. John Clifford is deceiving you for his own ends, that he may take you to England and rob you. You think yourself rich, my poor boy. Wait till Clifford has had his will of you. There will not be a shilling left in your purse, and not an ounce of flesh upon your bones, when Clifford has done with the stripping of you."

"John came all the way from England to tell me that I was the heir of my uncle. You also came all the way from England, but you told me nothing. You must have known, for you came here in a Toppys yacht, the property of my cousin. Yet you told me nothing. John Clifford is a little mean white beast, but he has been more of a friend to me than you, Madame. Although you knew what I had become you told me nothing."

"Yes," said Madame calmly. "I knew. And yet I told you nothing."

"It was you who wished to rob me, you and Sir John Toppys. If John Clifford had not come I should still be Willatopy."

"It is my great regret that you have not remained the Willatopy whom I met and loved in the Torres Straits. You were happy then, you are unhappy now. Nothing except misery for you can come of this most lamentable succession of yours."

"John has often told me that you wished to rob me, you and Sir John Toppys. But I did not believe. I beat John for the words that he spoke against you. But now I begin to believe. You and your Humming Top would never have taken me to England if John had not come to search me out."

"You would not have wished to go to England if John Clifford had not come to spoil your life."

"Willatopy would not have gone to England. Why should he? But now that I am the lawful Lord of Topsham I shall certainly go. My father was wrong. I see now that my place is not here. I see it more clearly because you have tried to keep me in ignorance. You who were my friend, my false friend, have now become openly my enemy. You tried to steal my place in England from me, and now you have torn away my white girl, Marie."

"Willie," said Madame gently. "It is not very long since in the Humming Top I offered to raise the anchor and bear you homewards myself. Does this look as if I wished to steal your place from you? I offered to carry you home and protect you. It was you, Willie, who declined to go."

"I would not leave Marie."

"I suspected that Marie was the explanation. The publicity of a yacht does not offer much opportunity for assignations. You have behaved very badly towards me, Willie. You had no right to make appointments with my servant. Still less have you any right to resent my action in sending her back to the Humming Top. I am speaking to you exactly as I should to an English gentleman and a social equal. Lord Topsham has behaved badly, Willie. Lord Topsham, under the malign influence of that Clifford wretch, has got his head swelled. When you go to England you will have many miseries and many disappointments. You will discover that, in these modern days, English Lords count for nothing except for their worth as men. They have no rights and no powers beyond those of common men. But, Willie, because of their rank and place they are expected to behave always as honourable gentlemen. It is no act of a gentleman to come ranting and raging at me because I stopped your intrigue with my servant Marie. An Englishman, even one without rank or station, would be ashamed to speak to me in reproof upon such a subject. He would have felt too much of shame for his conduct. You played me a low trick, Willie, and I am excessively angry with you."

"Why should I feel shame before you?" asked Willie haughtily. Never before had he used such a tone towards Madame Gilbert, and she looked searchingly at him. She had noticed and lamented the almost daily change observable in him, but though much of his old tender regard for her had been visibly slipping away, he had never yet used words of offence.

"Why should I feel shame before you?" he asked again.

Madame Gilbert shrugged her shoulders. It was a question difficult to answer. After all the boy was a Melanesian who had never been outside his own seas, and one could not expect him to comprehend the standards of social conduct in Europe.

"You were my friend, Willie, my dear friend. And Marie was my maid. Don't you see that your action was not quite worthy of one who calls himself Lord Topsham? You are now the head of a very ancient and honourable family."

"Honourable!" cried Willie scornfully. "You told me that you were the honourable wife of a big and handsome husband. Now I know that you are nothing but a widow."

"Who told you that?" asked Madame quietly.

"Is it true?"

"Yes, it is true. My big and handsome husband is dead. But what difference does that make? I put up my big and handsome husband because at our first meeting in the yacht, which seems now so long ago, your admiration was so very outspoken. You wanted, if I remember rightly, to marry me yourself."

"I did not then know that you were a widow. Men do not marry widows in the Torres Straits."

"So that is the trouble. I am a widow, and therefore disreputable. Willie, dear, when I think how much you have to learn about the ways of white men and women, my heart fails because of you. You will have a very, very, rotten time in England. Clifford is your white slave, and Marie is, or was, your white mistress. You have made a very bad beginning, and a beginning most unfortunate for you. You think, no doubt, that all white men will be your slaves and all white women will be at your pleasure. That is what Clifford tells you. He stuffs you up with this dreadful rubbish and stifles your sense—you have plenty of good sense about things that you understand—he stifles your sense with filthy liquors brought over from Thursday Island. You are a fly in the spider's web, Willie, and I, who have done my best to save you from him, am spurned as a mere widow. If you were a little older, my dear, you would remember that a Widow sat on the throne of England for more years than you or I are likely to live."

"Queens are different. My mother is a widow, but she also is different. Her husband was a white god. You, Madame, are not different. You tried to rob me of my rank and place, and you have torn away Marie whom I loved. I will never forgive you, Madame. You thought that I was a helpless brown boy who could be played with and deceived. If you had been a queen with a big handsome king for husband I would have obeyed your wishes. I would have stayed here in Tops Island and forgotten Marie whom I should not love if she were not white. But I am not going to be ruled by a widow, even by one so beautiful as you. I am not Willatopy any more; I am William, Lord Topsham."

"I do not think," responded Madame coldly, "that I am greatly interested in William, Lord Topsham, or that I desire his further acquaintance. You have my permission to depart."

He stared, puzzled by the formula of dismissal. Then when Madame turned her broad back, his skin flushed into deep purple. He a great English Lord had been curtly sent away by a mere widow! Something must be wrong with the world which in ignorant imagination he had constructed. William, Lord Topsham, went to consult John Clifford, who advised that Madame, with her paraphernalia of tents and escort, should be summarily expelled from the Toppys property on the Island. But Willie in becoming an English Lord had not shed his native courtesy. So long as Madame wished to remain on Tops Island, she was free to stay. But for his part he would visit her no more.

Madame Gilbert summoned her friends into council, and described in detail the stormy interview with Willie.

"We were both very angry, very haughty, and very ridiculous," said Madame. "I think that the late supper upon excessive quantities of rich turtle had something to do with our loss of temper. The high mightinesses of his brown lordship ought to have made me laugh. But there will emerge, I fancy, certain solid advantages. It is clear that Master Willie À la tÊte montÉe has flung away the precepts of his late father, and means to claim his English peerage. He will very soon find that the Madame Gilbert whom he is pleased to scorn holds the key to that project. We will begin at once to make ostentatious preparations for departure. You might, if you will, Captain, hire sundry brown boys to scrape weed off the Humming Top's teak fenders. Our preparations will instantly come to Willie's ears, and he will rapidly pass from curiosity to worry. Prompted by John Clifford it will dawn upon his infant mind that the Humming Top holds not only Marie, but the command of his passage to England."

"The boys will be delighted to scrape off the worst of our weed," said Ching, "and their labours will help us up to Singapore. But I don't quite grasp the rest of your scheme, Madame."

"It is quite simple," said she. "In these days of overcrowded shipping how is Willie to get away beyond Thursday Island unless as our guest in the Humming Top? He might hang about for months waiting for a ship to take him to Singapore, and might spend months more before he could get any farther. Grant, if I mistake not, will not unloose the money bags, and John Clifford, whatever may be his resources, will not spend a penny more than he can help. It will be the interest of both to come hat in hand to me, and make peace. Then I shall command the situation and lay down my own terms."

"Madame is right," cried Ewing. "She always is. It will cost Clifford a small fortune to get Willie home by passenger steamers even if he can secure berths, which is not likely. When he is up against staying here or in Thursday Island at indefinite delay and expense for a passage, he will send his brown master to Madame to eat humble pie. I don't want to let either of them get out of my sight, and it will be a great pull for us if they come of their own accord."

"Besides," went on Madame serenely, "I have the bait of Marie locked up in the Humming Top, and Willie does not know that my hold over her is so terrifying that she will avoid him like the plague when he comes aboard. Let him find that out later for himself." Madame then explained the nature of her influence over Marie Lambert. "If she remains convinced that I shall certainly take her to France she may become reckless, but I shall hint judiciously that a rigid obedience to my orders may bring about a reprieve. I've got her tight, and Master Willie too. They may both be as savage as they please so long as they dance to my strings."

"The weak point of your scheme, Madame, if I may say so," observed Ching, "is the presence of that damned Jonah Clifford in my yacht. He will bring along enough ill luck to sink a battleship. My officers won't have him in their mess, and if I put him in the foc's'le there will be a mutiny among the men. The best of lawyers would make them restive, and this poisonous little blighter would bust up all the restraints of discipline. Not a man in my ship would eat or drink with him. I would sooner give passage to a plague-stricken Chinky than to that Clifford beast."

"I feel for you," said Madame, smiling. "We will give him a cabin somewhere forrard, and let him take his food there. He shall learn what it feels like to be a pariah. The experience will do him good."

"I expect," observed Alexander thoughtfully, "that he will pick his bit of offal in the shaft tunnel. He won't be safe from man-handling anywhere else. My stokehold staff would love to put him in their fires."

"Still, however rightly unpopular he may be, we can't leave him here," declared Madame. "I cannot have that dear little Mrs. Topy and the jolly girls burdened with the swine hound. But we will dump him over the side at Singapore, and leave him to find his way home from there. We will carry him out of harm's way and then shunt him. I have quite decided to disappoint the poachers of St. Mary Axe. Once Willie, Lord Topsham, comes aboard my yacht, he doesn't leave it till I hand him over to his own Trustees. Sir John Toppys and Gatepath will be furious with me, but there is nothing else to be done. I won't have the boy plundered by those land sharks."

Madame's plans were at once put in train, and it quickly spread through the Island that good pay was to be won by diving down and cutting weed from the Humming Top's bottom. Willie's black boys deserted his plantation under the magnetic pull of the yacht's treasure chest. Boats full of divers clustered about the vessel throughout all the hours of daylight, and every kind of scraper was furbished up and turned to account in the novel labour. It was given about that the Humming Top would sail as soon as her bottom had been made tolerably clean, and John Clifford, in dread of being marooned for months on Tops Island, was prepared to face even Madame's straight-shooting pistol rather than be left there by himself. He suspected that Willie would be welcome on board, but he cherished no illusions concerning his own popularity. He urged his lordly master to approach Madame with humility, and to seek passage for both. John Clifford, a human "sucker," had all the remora's love for free transport. His voyage out had occupied months and contained exasperations innumerable; whatever might be his sufferings in the detested Humming Top, they could not compare with the professional disaster of losing his hardly won client—spirited off in the yacht—and being left himself upon the loathed beach. He was insistent upon a free passage for both, the client and the lawyer. It cost him the surviving bottles in his liquor cases to win the assent of Lord Topsham, and he would not have won even with their fiery aid, had not recollections of the ravished Marie been present to Willie's mind. William, Lord Topsham, under the stimulus of hot, bad wine, became convinced that Madame had done him grievous wrong, and was savagely resentful. He had spurned her as a goddess. Now he came near to spurning her as a woman, and to accepting John's theory that Madame had swept Marie off into captivity because the mistress was jealous of his lordship's attentions to the maid. The pair of them argued much as Madame had anticipated. Willie would regain his Marie under Madame's forbidding nose, and both would secure a passage to England in a luxurious private yacht. Neither appreciated the hidden disadvantages. Willie did not realise that Marie, given one last chance of reprieve from a shameful death in France, would flee from the smallest association with himself; and before Clifford's mind arose no picture of an outcast Hedge Lawyer, spurned as vermin by the humblest seaman, driven to pick his bit of offal in the shaft tunnel.

The preparations for departure went on, and for a week Madame Gilbert saw nothing of Willie or John Clifford. The lawyer she had not met since she had thrust him off the yacht's deck into the mangrove swamp. Mrs. Topy and the girls she encountered now and then. They looked at her sorrowfully, but said little. Some hint of Willie's intended abandonment of Tops Island had been conveyed to them, and they grieved. The mother, and perhaps the sisters also, realised that if he went they would never look upon his face again. He was an English Lord; they were Hulas of New Guinea. Lawful inheritance ran in the male line; to the women it brought nothing except loss. From the artless chatter of Joy and Cry, Madame gathered that Willie was working up an appetite for the humble pie. He was furious against her, she learned, and smiled. Madame had been fond of Willatopy, but she felt very little regard for William, Lord Topsham. She did not care how furious he grew so long as he fell in with her plans.

Willie took his meal as soon as the divers had all been paid off, and the work of cleaning completed—in so far as it could be completed out of dock. He approached the camp one evening, observed the ostentatious signs of packing up, and then plunged into a request that Madame would see him. She graciously assented, and he was shown into that tent whither not so long since he had fled, a frightened savage boy, and sobbed out his troubles at her feet. Then he had been Willatopy; now he was William, Lord Topsham. Just as Willie had changed so Madame had changed. She was no longer the half-maternal comforter who had nursed the frizzy head in her lap and playfully suggested that he should really get his hair cut in honour of his peerage. Now she received him with ceremony, bowed him towards a chair, and seated herself opposite. He who had been so gay and outspoken was now tongue-tied, his spirit frozen by the chilly atmosphere in which Madame had enwrapped herself. Even then had Madame relented, stretched out both her hands, and smiled upon him in the old fashion, I believe that the boy would have cast aside his absurd pretensions to dignity, and given back to her his heart. Madame could, I am convinced, have made him kiss the dust off her feet. But she was still sore and angry. A goddess does not take pleasure in being tumbled into ruin by a brown half-caste, and Madame, who had brought so many white men to her feet, scorned to win an easy conquest over Willie. Since he had elected to be William, Lord Topsham, he should be treated as he deserved.

"Well," said Madame, as the boy mumbled and stammered before her. "You wish to speak to me?"

"They say that you are leaving my Island," muttered Willie.

"Yes," replied Madame. "There is nothing to keep me here now. I stayed as your friend. You have spurned me, and I go. My yacht is under orders to sail as soon as the camp gear has been transferred. I am obliged to you for your hospitality, Lord Topsham, and should have called to bid you farewell and thank you. Since you have come I thank you now." She was certainly not making his humble pie very appetising.

"We have been honoured by your presence, Madame," said he. It was quite a good beginning, and gave him courage. "And since I have been so fortunate as to be able to show you hospitality, I feel bold enough to request a return favour from you."

Madame stared. The speech did not sound a bit like the composition of Willie—certainly not of the old Willatopy—and had little flavour of the Hedge Lawyer. There were no books upon the Island from which Willie might have gleaned polite phrases. The change in him from brown to white, which was taking place before her eyes, was almost incredible in its speed. She remembered his faithful recollection of his father's words, and supposed that expressions which the father had used remained embedded in the son's mind.

"It will be a real pleasure, Lord Topsham," said she with gravity, "if I may be permitted to return your kind hospitality."

"You once offered me passage to England in the Humming Top," said Willie. "I refused then but I shall no longer refuse if you repeat the offer."

"Consider it repeated, Lord Topsham," said Madame, and a smile flickered round her lips. "Since you have decided to go to England it is fitting that you should go in a Toppys ship."

"And my lawyer, Mr. John Clifford?" enquired he. A little while since since it had been "My white slave, John." Now it was "My lawyer, Mr. John Clifford."

"I will not pretend that I care for the society of your lawyer. But I will not be so unkind as to separate a client from his legal adviser." This was language above Willie's head, and it was his turn to stare. Madame translated: "John Clifford may come in the yacht, but please don't expect me to entertain him myself. You will be my guest, but Clifford must fend for himself with the men."

"Of course," said Willie, indifferently consigning the Hedge Lawyer to the shaft tunnel. "He is a noxious animal. But he is my lawyer, and I would not leave him here."

Madame smiled again, and thought of how the legal adviser would be shot off into desolate space at Singapore. She was willing that he should travel thus far in the yacht, and hoped, but without confidence, that his voyage would be pleasant.

"Thank you, Madame," said Willie, rising. "We will come aboard when you are ready to receive us. Have I your permission to go?" He was a quick lad, very quick to pick up English phrases.

Madame relaxed at the words, and her old friendly smile shone out. If Willie had then forgotten his ridiculous assumption of dignity and relaxed too, the pair of them might have attained to happy reconciliation in one another's arms. But Fate had spoken, and the boy moved towards his destined end. "How could we sail," whispered she, "without our Pilot Willatopy?"

He frowned. "I will sail as your guest, Madame. But Lord Topsham is not, and will not be, your pilot."

"Well, well," muttered Madame as she watched him go, "I could not have believed that my boy Willatopy would so quickly turn into an insufferable fool. So he is too proud now even to pilot the Humming Top. Soon he will be too proud to sail his own yawl. His pride will come down with a pretty hard bump upon the unkindly soil of England. That is some comfort."

She sent for Ching, and told him the latest of Lord Topsham's incarnations. "He is now much too fine a gentleman to navigate a steam yacht. His Highness will presently seek the services of a valet when his wardrobe has had an opportunity of development. He pictures himself surrounded by white slaves among whom you and I have the honour of inclusion. Captain, can you manage to take the blessed yacht back to Thursday Island without butting her aground? That confounded Peer would sneer disgustingly at us if we couldn't get through the channels without his help. He wants to bring us to our knees imploring his assistance. I would sooner that the Humming Top were wrecked in the Straits and perished with all hands."

"I think that I can do it," said Ching cautiously. "His young lordship brought us up here so fast and fearlessly that I took no soundings, but I have all the channels marked, and the bearings of every headland. It stuck in my mind that we might have to get back without a pilot, so my first officer or myself were on watch all the time in the chart-house following the course, charting the channels, and working out the bearings. We have had a lot of time on our hands here, and have filled some of it by constructing a chart of our own of the Torres Straits. I can't con the yacht with the ease and certainty of his lordship, but I can get through without bumping much on the ground. After we pass Thursday Island, it is just deep-sea work up to Sunda. I can manage, Madame, I think."

This assurance from the careful and competent Ching gave Madame Gilbert the utmost satisfaction. Now that William, Lord Topsham, though anxious to take passage in the yacht, had refused to work for his living, she would have perished rather than seek help from him. He should learn that there were others besides himself capable of navigating his own familiar seas. She blessed the cautious foresight of the complete seaman, Robert Ching, and was prepared to trust him to save the bottom of the Humming Top and the face of her owner. As for William, Lord Topsham, her resentment began to take root and grow with tropical rapidity. The boy Willatopy, whom she had loved, was in danger of being obliterated altogether. And yet until the Hedge Lawyer appeared to bring woe upon the happy Island, he had been a boy eminently lovable.