Davidson did not trouble his head about them. He lost no time in getting out of the creek directly the Sissie floated. After steaming some twenty miles clear of the coast he (in his own words) consigned the body to the deep. He did everything himself. He weighted her down with a few fire-bars,^* he read the service, he lifted the plank, he was the only mourner. And he certainly felt, while rendering these last services to the dead, the desolation of that life and the atrocious wretchedness of its end.

‘He could not look back on it without remorse. He ought to have handled the warning she had given him in another way. He was convinced that a simple display of watchfulness would have been enough to restrain that vile and cowardly crew. But the fact was, as he told me himself, that he had not quite believed that anything would be attempted.

‘ “I’ve been amusing myself by playing at being jolly clever without thinking of the consequences,” he said to me mournfully.

‘The body of Laughing Anne having been committed to the deep some eighteen miles SSW from Cape Selatan,^* the task before Davidson was to commit Laughing Anne’s child to the care of his wife. And there poor, good Davidson made a fatal move. He didn’t want to tell her the whole awful story, since it involved the knowledge of the danger from which he, Davidson, had escaped. And this, too, after he had been laughing at her unreasonable fears only a short time before.

‘ “I thought that if I told her everything,” Davidson explained to me, “she would never have a moment’s peace while I was away on my trips.”

‘He simply stated that the boy was an orphan, the child of some people to whom he, Davidson, was under the greatest obligation, and that he felt morally bound to look after him. Some day he would tell her more, he said, and meantime he trusted in the goodness and warmth of her heart, in her woman’s natural compassion.

‘He didn’t know that her heart was about the size of a parched pea and had about the proportional amount of warmth; and that her faculty of compassion was mainly directed to herself. He was only startled and disappointed at the air of cold surprise and the suspicious look with which she received his imperfect tale. But she did not say much. She never had much to say. She was a fool of the silent, hopeless kind.

‘What story Davidson’s crew thought fit to set afloat in Malay town is neither here nor there. Davidson himself took some of his friends into his confidence, besides giving the full story officially to the Harbour Master.

‘The Harbour Master was considerably astonished. He didn’t think, however, that a formal complaint should be made to the Dutch Government. They would probably do nothing in the end, after a lot of trouble and correspondence. Better let the matter drop.

‘This was good common sense. But he was impressed.

‘ “Sounds a terrible affair, Captain Davidson.”

‘ “Aye. Terrible enough,” agreed the remorseful Davidson. But the most terrible thing for him, though he didn’t know it yet then, was that his wife’s silly brain was slowly coming to the conclusion that Tony was Davidson’s child, and that he had invented that lame story to introduce him into her pure home in defiance of decency, of virtue—of her most sacred feelings.

‘Davidson was aware of some constraint in his domestic relation. But at the best of times she was not demonstrative; and perhaps that very coldness was part of her charm in the placid Davidson’s eyes. Women are loved for all sorts of reasons, and even for characteristics which one would think repellent. She was watching him and nursing her suspicions.