Then seeing me to the door, very tranquil, he murmured earnestly the recommendation:  “Make yourself at home,” and also the hospitable hint about there being always “a plate of soup.”  It was only on my way to the quay, down the ill-lighted streets, that I remembered I had been engaged to dine that very evening with the S-family.  Though vexed with my forgetfulness (it would be rather awkward to explain) I couldn’t help thinking that it had procured me a more amusing evening.  And besides—­business.  The sacred business—.

In a barefooted negro who overtook me at a run and bolted down the landing-steps I recognised Jacobus’s boatman, who must have been feeding in the kitchen.  His usual “Good-night, sah!” as I went up my ship’s ladder had a more cordial sound than on previous occasions.

CHAPTER V

I kept my word to Jacobus.  I haunted his home.  He was perpetually finding me there of an afternoon when he popped in for a moment from the “store.”  The sound of my voice talking to his Alice greeted him on his doorstep; and when he returned for good in the evening, ten to one he would hear it still going on in the verandah.  I just nodded to him; he would sit down heavily and gently, and watch with a sort of approving anxiety my efforts to make his daughter smile.

I called her often “Alice,” right before him; sometimes I would address her as Miss “Don’t Care,” and I exhausted myself in nonsensical chatter without succeeding once in taking her out of her peevish and tragic self.  There were moments when I felt I must break out and start swearing at her till all was blue.  And I fancied that had I done so Jacobus would not have moved a muscle.  A sort of shady, intimate understanding seemed to have been established between us.

I must say the girl treated her father exactly in the same way she treated me.

And how could it have been otherwise?  She treated me as she treated her father.  She had never seen a visitor.  She did not know how men behaved.  I belonged to the low lot with whom her father did business at the port.  I was of no account.  So was her father.  The only decent people in the world were the people of the island, who would have nothing to do with him because of something wicked he had done.  This was apparently the explanation Miss Jacobus had given her of the household’s isolated position.  For she had to be told something!  And I feel convinced that this version had been assented to by Jacobus.  I must say the old woman was putting it forward with considerable gusto.  It was on her lips the universal explanation, the universal allusion, the universal taunt.

One day Jacobus came in early and, beckoning me into the dining-room, wiped his brow with a weary gesture and told me that he had managed to unearth a supply of quarter-bags.

“It’s fourteen hundred your ship wanted, did you say, Captain?”