Loblulya advanced a pace, and took his hand in hers, and smiled. Emily, silent upon her perch, felt the hairs bristle upon her neck. Mr. Fatigay breathed deeply, then dizzily retreated a pace. Loblulya, with that gracefulness often noted in stout dancers, circumvented the table, and, still smiling, approached still nearer.

“What does this mean?” said Mr. Fatigay, whose wits now rallied to his sense of outrage.

“Om tsang bu t’long umbawa!” thickly replied the charmer, smiling still.

“Begone this moment,” said Mr. Fatigay, “or I’ll call for help.”

“Insensible monster!” returned Loblulya (whose remarks are here translatable into English). “Ingrate, lost equally to the chivalry of a gentleman and to the sensations of a man! Beware! For no sooner shall you raise an outcry impious to my honor and menacing to my life, than, I assure you, I will do likewise, and visit that punishment upon your treachery, which, but for your vicious insensibility, you might by this time have deserved, but not received.”

On hearing these words the chimp, paralyzed, remained suspended, but Mr. Fatigay, with a meaning glance at his cigar, on which an inch of ash had developed undisturbed, opened his mouth to summon assistance.

But at that moment, the terrible Loblulya, who had followed his eye, struck the Havana evidence from his hand, and, tearing the kerchief on her bosom, she soon tousled herself into an invidious disarray, while her shouts for assistance rang perjurously through the grove.

Within a minute or two, the sound of running feet was heard, and into the arbor burst three of four of the gigantic elders of the village.

Pale and trembling, Mr. Fatigay gasped for breath, looking the hard-breathed simulacrum of red-handed guilt, whose first stammering denials were drowned in the outcry of his twenty-stone accuser.

“Oh! the beast! the filthy beast!” she cried. “Scarcely had I set foot in this arbor when he offered me bribe, marriage, and violence simultaneously in word and deed.”

Not Judge Jefferies himself ever looked so blackly on the shrinking wretch in the dock as did then the fanatical elders upon poor Mr. Fatigay, helpless, alone, remote from any possibility of aid.

Alone? No, not alone, for at that moment something stole up noiselessly behind him, and into his nerveless shaking hand was pressed, by a hairy one, his cigar.

It was hot in his hand. Looking down, he could scarcely believe his eyes. There, upon the end of it, was the full inch of ash which he himself had seen shattered, two minutes before, into a thousand pieces.

Enheartened, he drew himself up, and faced his accusers, collecting all his dignity into a frowning brow.

Imposing silence, demanding attention, with the forefinger of his left hand, he slowly raised his right, and displayed to the astonished elders the fine old testimony of the unbroken ash.

In the breathless moment during which the significance of this simple final proof dawned upon the blacks, the smoke of the Corona rose straight up towards the roof of the arbor.

Many apologies followed, smiles and invitations were exchanged, and within a few minutes the elders had closed upon the gasping Loblulya and had borne her off, instantly to begin her execution. Mr. Fatigay was alone.

Alone? Yes, alone, for, at that moment, Emily, who had crept out unnoticed after placing the cigar in his hand, was being violently sick in the obscurest corner of the garden. It was she, who, seeing the invaluable evidence destroyed, had with a present and inspired mind swooped down upon the cigar, and, taking it into a corner, had so vigorously inhaled its unaccustomed fumes that by the time Loblulya had completed her tirade, the ash was reborn, blushing as ought the snows on Hekla.

“Oh, Emily! Emily!” murmured Mr. Fatigay, hastening to find his pet. “For this, you shall have a new collar with a gold medal, and your name on it.”

Chapter 3

Thou shalt hear the “Never, never”.

Nothing is more sudden than nightfall in the tropics. It resembles the swift transition, in a pantomime, between the fade-out of the principal boy, effulgent in his golden spotlight, on a last dying fall or expiring parrot scream, and the sudden appearance on the other side of the stage, in a silver ray, of the principal girl, with her chorus of fairies star-foreheaded.

On the edges of glades, under bushes white with nocturnal flowers, the long, tousled grass is torn and drenched with blood, black as a hole in appearances. The acetylene moonlight, like a local anesthetic, freezes pain, and the gorilla, standing, staring at the reeking pieces of leopard still clutched in his iron hands, feels the white-hot scratches on his chest and thighs, and his vegetarian disapproval of the carnivorous onslaught, and a certain sneaking sympathy for the tattered fur piece which is all that is left of it, to be part of a problem as remote and cold as some jigsaw mathematic.

Emily crouched, petrified, staring at certain phrases scrawled on a sheet of letter paper, gobbets of a mental organism, oozing and steaming with personality, the mind’s blood, felt much the same.

This is what had happened.

Days of peace followed upon the nerve-shattering Loblulya episode, days steeped in that golden classic quality in which our summer arrests itself towards its end, and with the same doomed illusion of eternity. Emily, in her brief periods of introspection, could not help feeling that her action had set a modest hallmark on her development into something far removed from the naïve sylvan creature, dazzled by a first glimpse of civilization, which she had been a few months before. And since, to her, knowledge and experience seemed the greatest addition by which a personality can be enriched, she would not have exchanged even the more melancholy strata of her deepened nature, not even the rich deposit of suffering which caused her suffering still, for all the blind confiding delight of her treetop childhood. For, rating its effects so highly, as she did all that conduced to enlargement, how could she but believe that its fruition in every glance and gesture must gain for her her protector’s deeper regard? She had yet to learn that it is not through suffering herself, a condition as common and infectious as the ordinary cold, but through being the cause of it in others, that a woman becomes fatal and fascinating to man. But who would grudge Emily this innocent, if ill-founded, optimism, in the light of the bitter experiences through which, like a tot of brandy, it was to be her only support.

Moreover, Mr. Fatigay himself exhibited certain marked changes of demeanor towards his humble admirer, and if these were slight in comparison to the construction she placed on them, yet let him who would laugh at this poor heart’s simplicity beware, for tomorrow may find him running his errand in high fettle, and building up heaven knows what fantastic castles in the air, all because his fine wife, with melting in her voice, and a rose in her cheek, and a note in her bosom, good-humoredly speaks to him as Mr. Fatigay did to Emily, as if he were not a beast, that is, but a human being. Yet our hero was as honest and good-hearted a fellow as any, and a very modest one, too, so that he had no suspicion of the true state of Emily’s feelings, and much less any intent to inflame them by the occasional terms of endearment which his affectionate nature proffered, in this solitude, to the nearest deserving object.

“Come, my dear! Come, my pretty!” he’d say, scooping her up on to his knee. “You and I are going to set off to England together very shortly.”

And once he added, staring at the desolate wide forest that stretched away on every side: “Yes, by God, I’ve been a bachelor long enough!” And, biting his lips in a nervous frenzy, he crushed her thin arm in a painful grip. Overcome, she sank her head upon his shoulder.

Her new hopes gave her the happy feeling of a completeness she never before had known.