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At length the Sheriffs, Brice and Bickley, arrived, attended by all the paraphernalia of office, in company with Mr. Richard Hart Davis, whom I now eyed for the first time. All persons were pompously commanded to stand back from the door; but I had a sturdy set of friends now to support me, and they stood as firm as a rock, and almost as immovable.
"Those corpses are very interesting, but I don't see any use in staring at them again at present. One can always do that at any time. I have missed Marama once already by being away in that cave, and I have a lot to say to him about my people; I don't want to be absent in case he should return." "To wash up the things, I suppose," said Bickley with a sniff; "or perhaps to eat the tea-leaves."
I pointed at them to Bickley with my finger, for really I could not speak. "Coffins, by Jove!" he whispered. "Glass or crystal coffins and people in them. Come on!" A few seconds later we were crawling into that vault while Bastin, still nursing the head of Oro as though it were a baby, stood confused outside muttering something about desecrating hallowed graves.
But who could have thought that he would run so cunning, even when he knew my sentiments towards the lady? I hope she told him her mind." "The point is, what did she tell you, Bickley?" "Me? Oh, she was perfectly charming! It really was a pleasure to be refused by her, she puts one so thoroughly at one's ease." Such a lot that it is difficult to remember. Oh! that she was not thinking of marriage.
I cannot recall that any of the early martyrs were ever roasted and eaten, though, of course, throwing them into boiling oil or water was fairly common. I take it that the rite is sacrificial and even in a low sense, sacramental, not merely one of common cannibalism." I stared at him, and Bickley gasped out: "If you are to be eaten, what does it matter why you are eaten?"
"Well, how have you been getting on?" said Bickley. "I should like some tea, also anything there is to eat." We supplied him with these necessaries, and after a while he said slowly and solemnly: "I cannot help thinking of a childish story which Bickley told or invented one night at your house at home.
"Well," said Bickley, seating himself on the edge of one of the coffins and holding up his lamp to look about him, "this place seems fairly empty. No one is keeping the assignation, Arbuthnot, although the sun is well down." As he spoke the words Yva stood before us. Whence she came we did not see, for all our backs were turned at the moment of her arrival.
Before we had been many days on that island he had built us a kind of native hut or house roofed with palm leaves in which, until provided with a better, as happened afterwards, we ate and he and Bickley slept, leaving the tent to me. By means of these he secured some veritable monsters of the carp species that proved most excellent eating.
Give up dreams, old boy, and take to something useful. You might go back to your fiction writing; you seem to have leanings that way, and you know you need not publish the stories, except privately for the edification of your friends." With this Parthian shaft Bickley took his departure to make a job of Widow Jenkins's legs. I took his advice.
"We don't know where we are or if there is any other land within a thousand miles. I think we had better stop here as Providence seems to have intended, especially when there is so much work to my hand." "Be careful," answered Bickley, "that the work to your hand does not end in the cutting of all our throats.
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