Pieces of Eight

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

Introduces the Secretary to the Treasury of His Britannic Majesty's Government at Nassau, New Providence, Bahama Islands.

Some few years ago—to be precise, it was during the summer of 1903—I was paying what must have seemed like an interminable visit to my old friend John Saunders, who at that time filled with becoming dignity the high-sounding office of Secretary to the Treasury of His Majesty's Government, in the quaint little town of Nassau, in the island of New Providence, one of those Bahama Islands that lie half lost to the world to the southeast of the Caribbean Sea and form a somewhat neglected portion of the British West Indies.

Time was when they had a sounding name for themselves in the world; during the American Civil War, for instance, when the blockade-runners made their dare-devil trips with contraband cotton, between Nassau and South Carolina; and before that again, when the now sleepy little harbour gave shelter to rousing freebooters and tarry pirates, tearing in there under full sail with their loot from the Spanish Main. How often those quiet moonlit streets must have roared with brutal revelry, and the fierce clamour of pistol-belted scoundrels round the wine-casks have gone up into the still, tropic night.

But those heroic days are gone, and Nassau is given up to a sleepy trade in sponges and tortoise-shell, and peace is no name for the drowsy tenor of the days under the palm trees and the scarlet poincianas. A little group of Government buildings surrounding a miniature statue of Queen Victoria, flanked by some old Spanish cannon and murmured over by the foliage of tropic trees, gives an air of old-world distinction to the long Bay street, whose white houses, with their jalousied verandas, ran the whole length of the water-front, and all the long sunny days the air is lazy with the sound of the shuffling feet of the child-like "darky" population and the chatter of the bean-pods of the poincianas overhead.

Here a handful of Englishmen, clothed in the white linen suits of the tropics, carry on the Government after the traditional manner of British colonies from time immemorial, each of them, like my friend, not without an English smile at the humour of the thing, supporting the dignity of offices with impressive names—Lord Chief Justice, Attorney General, Speaker of the House, Lord High Admiral, Colonial Secretary and so forth—and occasionally a figure in gown and barrister's wig flits across the green from the little courthouse, where the Lord Chief Justice in his scarlet robes, on a dais surmounted by a gilded lion and unicorn, sustains the majesty of British justice, with all the pomp of Westminster or Whitehall.

My friend the Secretary of the Treasury is a man possessing in an uncommon degree that rare and most attractive of human qualities, companionableness. He is a quiet man of middle age, an old white-headed bachelor with a droll twinkling expression, speaking seldom, and then in a curious silent fashion, as though the drowsy heat of the tropics had soaked him through and through....