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Updated: May 24, 2025
I assured Miss Stanleigh that the Sylph was at her service. Mrs. Stanleigh was a large bland woman, inclined to stoutness and to making confidences, with an intense dislike of the tropics and physical discomforts of any sort. How her niece prevailed upon her to make that surreptitious trip to Muloa, which we set out upon two days later, I have never been able to imagine.
We reached Muloa just before nightfall, letting go the anchor in placid water under the lee of the shore while the Sylph swung to and the sails fluttered and fell. A vast hush lay over the world. From the shore the dark green of the forest confronted us with no sound or sign of life.
My surmise was that she had met and married Farquharson, whoever he was, under the spell of some momentary infatuation, and that he had proved himself to be an unspeakable brute whom she had speedily abandoned. "I am determined to go to Muloa, Mr. Barnaby," she announced, with decision. "I want you to make the arrangements, and with as much secrecy as possible. I shall ask my aunt to go with me."
Ostensibly, it was Major Stanleigh who was bent on locating this young Englishman Miss Stanleigh's interest in the quest was guardedly withheld and the trail had led him a pretty chase around the world until some clue, which I never clearly understood, brought them to Port Charlotte. The major's immediate objective was an eccentric chap named Leavitt who had marooned himself in Muloa.
But of the wanderer Farquharson he spoke with precision and authority, for he had shared with Farquharson his bungalow there in Muloa a period of about six months, it seemed and there Farquharson had contracted a tropic fever and died. "Well, at last we have got all the facts," Major Stanleigh sighed with satisfaction when the Sylph was heading back to Port Charlotte.
With the Sylph at anchor, we lay off Muloa for three nights, and Leavitt gave us our fill of Farquharson, along with innumerable digressions about volcanoes, neoplatonism, the Single Tax, and what not. There was no keeping Leavitt to a coherent narrative about the missing Farquharson.
To the world at large that should have sufficed. That I choose to remain alive is my own affair. Your sudden return to Muloa with a lady would have upset everything, if Fate and that inspired fool of a Malay had not happily intervened. But now, surely, there can be no doubt that I am dead?" I nodded assent in a dumb, helpless way.
Already it begins to seem like a horrid dream. And as for that island" her eyes looked off toward Muloa now impending upon us and lighting up the heavens with its sullen flare "it seems incredible that I ever set foot upon it. "Perhaps you understand," she went on, after a pause, "that I have not told my husband. But I have not deceived him.
It was during the general chorus of farewells at the last moment before the Sylph cast off. Her last appeal, cried after us from the wharf where she stood frantically waving a wet handkerchief, was that I should give Muloa a wide berth. It brought a laugh from Joyce.
Joyce still standing by the rail, her hand nestling within the arm of her husband, indifferent to the heavy grayish dust that fell in benediction upon her like a silent shower of snow. The island of Muloa remains to-day a charred cinder lapped about by the blue Pacific. At times gulls circle over its blackened and desolate surface devoid of every vestige of life.
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