“And so,” he said breaking unconsciously into English, “let us begin by burning these beastly mortgages!”

And with a noble and dramatic gesture Benham cast his handful on the fire.  The assenting faces became masks of horror.  A score of hands clutched at those precious papers, and a yell of dismay and anger filled the room.  Some one caught at his throat from behind.  “Don’t kill him!” cried some one.  “He fought for us!”

6

An hour later Benham returned in an extraordinarily dishevelled and battered condition to his hotel.  He found his friend in anxious consultation with the hotel proprietor.

“We were afraid that something had happened to you,” said his friend.

“I got a little involved,” said Benham.

“Hasn’t some one clawed your cheek?”

“Very probably,” said Benham.

“And torn your coat?  And hit you rather heavily upon the neck?”

“It was a complicated misunderstanding,” said Benham.  “Oh! pardon!  I’m rather badly bruised upon that arm you’re holding.”

7

Benham told the story to White as a jest against himself.

“I see now of course that they could not possibly understand my point of view,” he said. . . .

“I’m not sure if they quite followed my German. . . .

“It’s odd, too, that I remember saying, ’Let’s burn these mortgages,’ and at the time I’m almost sure I didn’t know the German for mortgage. . . .”

It was not the only occasion on which other people had failed to grasp the full intention behind Benham’s proceedings.  His aristocratic impulses were apt to run away with his conceptions of brotherhood, and time after time it was only too manifest to White that Benham’s pallid flash of anger had astonished the subjects of his disinterested observations extremely.  His explorations in Hayti had been terminated abruptly by an affair with a native policeman that had necessitated the intervention of the British Consul.  It was begun with that suddenness that was too often characteristic of Benham, by his hitting the policeman.  It was in the main street of Cap Haytien, and the policeman had just clubbed an unfortunate youth over the head with the heavily loaded wooden club which is the normal instrument of Haytien discipline.  His blow was a repartee, part of a triangular altercation in which a large, voluble, mahogany-coloured lady whose head was tied up in a blue handkerchief played a conspicuous part, but it seemed to Benham an entirely unjustifiable blow.

He allowed an indignation with negro policemen in general that had been gathering from the very moment of his arrival at Port-au-Prince to carry him away.  He advanced with the kind of shout one would hurl at a dog, and smote the policeman to the earth with the stout stick that the peculiar social atmosphere of Hayti had disposed him to carry.  By the local standard his blow was probably a trivial one, but the moral effect of his indignant pallor and a sort of rearing tallness about him on these occasions was always very considerable.  Unhappily these characteristics could have no effect on a second negro policeman who was approaching the affray from behind, and he felled Benham by a blow on the shoulder that was meant for the head, and with the assistance of his colleague overpowered him, while the youth and the woman vanished.