’He told me further that he didn’t know
what made him hang on—but of course we
may guess. He sympathised deeply with the defenceless
girl, at the mercy of that “mean, cowardly scoundrel.”
It appears Cornelius led her an awful life, stopping
only short of actual ill-usage, for which he had not
the pluck, I suppose. He insisted upon her calling
him father—“and with respect, too—with
respect,” he would scream, shaking a little
yellow fist in her face. “I am a respectable
man, and what are you? Tell me—what
are you? You think I am going to bring up somebody
else’s child and not be treated with respect?
You ought to be glad I let you. Come—say
Yes, father. .
. . No? . . . You wait a bit.”
Thereupon he would begin to abuse the dead woman,
till the girl would run off with her hands to her
head. He pursued her, dashing in and out and round
the house and amongst the sheds, would drive her into
some corner, where she would fall on her knees stopping
her ears, and then he would stand at a distance and
declaim filthy denunciations at her back for half an
hour at a stretch. “Your mother was a devil,
a deceitful devil—and you too are a devil,”
he would shriek in a final outburst, pick up a bit
of dry earth or a handful of mud (there was plenty
of mud around the house), and fling it into her hair.
Sometimes, though, she would hold out full of scorn,
confronting him in silence, her face sombre and contracted,
and only now and then uttering a word or two that would
make the other jump and writhe with the sting.
Jim told me these scenes were terrible. It was
indeed a strange thing to come upon in a wilderness.
The endlessness of such a subtly cruel situation was
appalling—if you think of it. The
respectable Cornelius (Inchi ’Nelyus the Malays
called him, with a grimace that meant many things)
was a much-disappointed man. I don’t know
what he had expected would be done for him in consideration
of his marriage; but evidently the liberty to steal,
and embezzle, and appropriate to himself for many
years and in any way that suited him best, the goods
of Stein’s Trading Company (Stein kept the supply
up unfalteringly as long as he could get his skippers
to take it there) did not seem to him a fair equivalent
for the sacrifice of his honourable name. Jim
would have enjoyed exceedingly thrashing Cornelius
within an inch of his life; on the other hand, the
scenes were of so painful a character, so abominable,
that his impulse would be to get out of earshot, in
order to spare the girl’s feelings. They
left her agitated, speechless, clutching her bosom
now and then with a stony, desperate face, and then
Jim would lounge up and say unhappily, “Now—come—really—what’s
the use—you must try to eat a bit,”
or give some such mark of sympathy. Cornelius
would keep on slinking through the doorways, across
the verandah and back again, as mute as a fish, and
with malevolent, mistrustful, underhand glances.
