CHAPTER XV

KAU FAI

At the top of the nunnery stairs, Rudolph met them with awkward ceremony, and with that smiling air of encouragement which a nurse might use in trying cheerfully to deceive a sick man.  Heywood laughed, without mercy, at this pious fraud.

“Hallo, you Red-Bristled Ghost!” he cried.  “We came early—­straight from our walk.  Are the rest coming?  And did my cook arrive to help yours?”

Their host, carried by assault, at once became less mournful.

“The cook is here,” he replied, “by the kitchen-sounds.  They disagree, I think.  I have asked everybody.  We should have a full dinner-table.”

“Good,” said his friend; and then whispering, as they followed Miss Drake to the living-room, “I say, don’t act as though you expected the ghost of Banquo.”

In the bare, white loft, by candle-light, Sturgeon sat midway in some long and wheezy tale, to which the padre and his wife listened with true forbearance.  Greetings over, the stodgy annalist continued.  The story was forgotten as soon as ended; talk languished; and even by the quaking light of the candles, it was plain that the silence was no mere waiting solemnity before meat, but a period of tension.

The relief came oddly.  Up from the road sounded a hubbub of voices, the tramp of feet, and loud halloos.

“By Jove!” cried Sturgeon, like a man who fears the worst; and for all his bulk, he was first at the window.

A straggling file of lanterns, borne by some small army, came jogging and crowding to a halt under the walls.  Yellow faces gleamed faintly, bare heads bobbed, and men set down burdens, grunting.  Among the vanguard an angry voice scolded in a strange tongue. “Burra suar!” it raged; then hailed imperiously, “Ko hai?”

Where the lanterns clustered brightest, an active little figure in white waved a helmet, crying,—­

“On deck!  Where the devil does Maurice Heywood live?”

“I’m up here,” called that young man.

For reply, the stranger began to skip among his cohorts, jerking out his white legs like a dancing marionette.  Then, with a sudden drop-kick, he sent the helmet flickering high into the darkness over the wall.

“Here we come!” he shouted, in hilarious warning.  The squabbling retinue surged after him through the gate, and one by one the lanterns disappeared under the covered way.

“It’s the captain!” laughed Heywood, in amazement.  “Kneebone—­ashore!  He can’t be sober!”

All stared; for Captain Kneebone, after one historically brief and outspoken visit, had never in all these years set foot in the port.  The two young men hurried to the stairs.