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Updated: May 24, 2025
"It was almost disaster. After meeting Mr. Joyce and I was weak enough to let myself become engaged to have discovered that I was still chained to a living creature like that.... I should have killed myself." "But surely the courts " She shook her head with decision. "My church does not recognize that sort of freedom." We were drawing steadily nearer to Muloa.
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.
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."
The two of us had returned that afternoon from Muloa, where I had taken him in my schooner, the Sylph, to seek out Leavitt and make some inquiries very important inquiries, it seemed, in Miss Stanleigh's behalf.
By day, the Pacific is a vast stretch of blue, flat like a floor, with a blur of distant islands on the horizon chief among them Muloa, with its single volcanic cone tapering off into the sky. At night, this smithy of Vulcan becomes a glow of red, throbbing faintly against the darkness, a capricious and sullen beacon immeasurably removed from the path of men.
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.
The island offered an ideal retreat for one bent on shunning his own kind, if he did not object to the close proximity of a restive volcano. Clearly, Leavitt did not. He had a scientific interest in the phenomena exhibited by volcanic regions and was versed in geological lore, but the rumors about Leavitt practically no one ever visited Muloa did not stop at that.
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.
He was watching me with a sort of malicious relish in the shock he had given me. "It was not your intention to stop at Muloa," he observed, dryly, for the plight of the schooner was obvious. "We'll float clear with the tide," I muttered. "But in the meantime" there was something almost menacing in his deliberate pause "I have the pleasure of this little call upon you."
He had discussed everything under heaven in his brilliant, erratic way, with a fleer of cynicism toward it all, but he had left himself out completely. He had given us Farquharson with relish, and in infinite detail, from the time the poor fellow first turned up in Muloa, put ashore by a native craft. Talking about Farquharson was second only to his delight in talking about volcanoes.
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