Spurlock laughed.  “Drink your peg; don’t bother about me.  I wouldn’t touch the stuff for all the pearls in India.  A cup of lies.  I know all about it.”

Ruth’s eyes began to glow.  She had often wondered if Hoddy would ever go back to it.  She knew now that he never would.

“Sometimes a cup of lies is a cheering thing,” replied the trader.  “In wine there is truth.  What about that?”

“It means that drink cheats a man into telling things he ought not to.  And there’s your liver.”

“Ay, and there’s my liver.  It’ll be turning over to-morrow.  But never mind that,” said McClintock grinning as he drew the dish of bread-fruit toward him.  “To-morrow I shall have a visitor.  I do not say guest because that suggests friendship; and I am no friend of this Wastrel.  I’ve told you about him; and you wrote a shrewd yarn on the subject.”

“The pianist?”

“Yes.  He’ll be here two or three days.  So Mrs. Spurlock had better stick to the bungalow.”

“Ah,” said Spurlock; “that kind of a man.”

“Many kinds; a thorough outlaw.  We’ve never caught him cheating at cards; too clever; but we know he cheats.  But he’s witty and amusing, and when reasonably drunk he can play the piano like a Paderewski.  He’s an interpretative genius, if there ever was one.  Nobody knows what his real name is, but he’s a Hollander.  Kicked out of there for something shady.  A remittance man.  A check arrives in Batavia every three months.  He has a grand time.  Then he goes stony, and beats his way around the islands for another three months.  Retribution has a queer way of acting sometimes.  The Wastrel—­as we call him—­cannot play when he’s sober; hands too shaky.  He can’t play cards, either, when he’s sober.  Alcohol—­would you believe it?—­steadies his nerves and keens his brain:  which is against the laws of gravitation, you might say.  He has often told me that if he could play sober, he would go to America and reap a fortune.”

“You never told me what he is like,” said Spurlock.

“I thought it best that you should imagine him.  You were wide the mark, physically; otherwise you had him pat.  He is big and powerful; one of those drinkers who show it but little outwardly.  Whisky kills him suddenly; it does not sap him gradually.  In his youth he must have been a remarkably handsome man, for he is still handsome.  I don’t believe he is much past forty.  A bad one in a rough-and-tumble; all the water-front tricks.  His hair is oddly streaked with gray—­I might say a dishonourable gray.  Perhaps in the beginning the women made fools of themselves over him.”

“That’s reasonable.  I don’t know how to explain it,” said Spurlock, “but music hits women queerly.  I’ve often seen them storming the Carnegie Hall stage.”

“Aye, music hits them.  I’m thinking that the Wastrel was one day a celebrated professional; and the women were partly the cause of his fall.  Women!  He is always chanting the praise of some discovery; sometimes it will be a native, often a white woman out of the stews.  So it will be wise for Mrs. Spurlock to keep to the bungalow until the rogue goes back to Copeley’s.  Queer world.  For every Eden, there will be a serpent; for every sheepfold, there will be a wolf.”