There with Marlow’s signature the letter proper ended.  The privileged reader screwed up his lamp, and solitary above the billowy roofs of the town, like a lighthouse-keeper above the sea, he turned to the pages of the story.

CHAPTER 38

‘It all begins, as I’ve told you, with the man called Brown,’ ran the opening sentence of Marlow’s narrative.  ’You who have knocked about the Western Pacific must have heard of him.  He was the show ruffian on the Australian coast—­not that he was often to be seen there, but because he was always trotted out in the stories of lawless life a visitor from home is treated to; and the mildest of these stories which were told about him from Cape York to Eden Bay was more than enough to hang a man if told in the right place.  They never failed to let you know, too, that he was supposed to be the son of a baronet.  Be it as it may, it is certain he had deserted from a home ship in the early gold-digging days, and in a few years became talked about as the terror of this or that group of islands in Polynesia.  He would kidnap natives, he would strip some lonely white trader to the very pyjamas he stood in, and after he had robbed the poor devil, he would as likely as not invite him to fight a duel with shot-guns on the beach—­which would have been fair enough as these things go, if the other man hadn’t been by that time already half-dead with fright.  Brown was a latter-day buccaneer, sorry enough, like his more celebrated prototypes; but what distinguished him from his contemporary brother ruffians, like Bully Hayes or the mellifluous Pease, or that perfumed, Dundreary-whiskered, dandified scoundrel known as Dirty Dick, was the arrogant temper of his misdeeds and a vehement scorn for mankind at large and for his victims in particular.  The others were merely vulgar and greedy brutes, but he seemed moved by some complex intention.  He would rob a man as if only to demonstrate his poor opinion of the creature, and he would bring to the shooting or maiming of some quiet, unoffending stranger a savage and vengeful earnestness fit to terrify the most reckless of desperadoes.  In the days of his greatest glory he owned an armed barque, manned by a mixed crew of Kanakas and runaway whalers, and boasted, I don’t know with what truth, of being financed on the quiet by a most respectable firm of copra merchants.  Later on he ran off—­it was reported—­with the wife of a missionary, a very young girl from Clapham way, who had married the mild, flat-footed fellow in a moment of enthusiasm, and, suddenly transplanted to Melanesia, lost her bearings somehow.  It was a dark story.  She was ill at the time he carried her off, and died on board his ship.  It is said—­as the most wonderful put of the tale—­that over her body he gave way to an outburst of sombre and violent grief.  His luck left him, too, very soon after.  He lost his ship on some rocks off Malaita, and disappeared for a time as though he had