He died some months before my arrival on the islands,and no one regretted him;rather all looked hopefully to his successor.This was by repute the hero of the family.Alone of the four brothers,he had issue,a grown son,Natiata,and a daughter three years old;it was to him,in the hour of the revolution,that Nabakatokia turned too late for help;and in earlier days he had been the right hand of the vigorous Nakaeia.Nontemat',MR.CORPSE,was his appalling nickname,and he had earned it well.Again and again,at the command of Nakaeia,he had surrounded houses in the dead of night,cut down the mosquito bars and butchered families.Here was the hand of iron;here was Nakaeia REDUX.He came,summoned from the tributary rule of Little Makin:he was installed,he proved a puppet and a trembler,the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators;and the reader has seen the remains of him in his summer parlour under the name of Tebureimoa.
The change in the man's character was much commented on in the island,and variously explained by opium and Christianity.To my eyes,there seemed no change at all,rather an extreme consistency.
Mr.Corpse was afraid of his brother:King Tebureimoa is afraid of the Old Men.Terror of the first nerved him for deeds of desperation;fear of the second disables him for the least act of government.He played his part of bravo in the past,following the line of least resistance,butchering others in his own defence:
to-day,grown elderly and heavy,a convert,a reader of the Bible,perhaps a penitent,conscious at least of accumulated hatreds,and his memory charged with images of violence and blood,he capitulates to the Old Men,fuddles himself with opium,and sits among his guards in dreadful expectation.The same cowardice that put into his hand the knife of the assassin deprives him of the sceptre of a king.
A tale that I was told,a trifling incident that fell in my observation,depicts him in his two capacities.A chief in Little Makin asked,in an hour of lightness,'Who is Kaeia?'A bird carried the saying;and Nakaeia placed the matter in the hands of a committee of three.Mr.Corpse was chairman;the second commissioner died before my arrival;the third was yet alive and green,and presented so venerable an appearance that we gave him the name of Abou ben Adhem.Mr.Corpse was troubled with a scruple;the man from Little Makin was his adopted brother;in such a case it was not very delicate to appear at all,to strike the blow (which it seems was otherwise expected of him)would be worse than awkward.'I will strike the blow,'said the venerable Abou;and Mr.Corpse (surely with a sigh)accepted the compromise.The quarry was decoyed into the bush;he was set to carrying a log;and while his arms were raised Abou ripped up his belly at a blow.
Justice being thus done,the commission,in a childish horror,turned to flee.But their victim recalled them to his side.'You need not run away now,'he said.'You have done this thing to me.
Stay.'He was some twenty minutes dying,and his murderers sat with him the while:a scene for Shakespeare.All the stages of a violent death,the blood,the failing voice,the decomposing features,the changed hue,are thus present in the memory of Mr.
Corpse;and since he studied them in the brother he betrayed,he has some reason to reflect on the possibilities of treachery.Iwas never more sure of anything than the tragic quality of the king's thoughts;and yet I had but the one sight of him at unawares.I had once an errand for his ear.It was once more the hour of the siesta;but there were loiterers abroad,and these directed us to a closed house on the bank of the canal where Tebureimoa lay unguarded.We entered without ceremony,being in some haste.He lay on the floor upon a bed of mats,reading in his Gilbert Island Bible with compunction.On our sudden entrance the unwieldy man reared himself half-sitting so that the Bible rolled on the floor,stared on us a moment with blank eyes,and,having recognised his visitors,sank again upon the mats.So Eglon looked on Ehud.
The justice of facts is strange,and strangely just;Nakaeia,the author of these deeds,died at peace discoursing on the craft of kings;his tool suffers daily death for his enforced complicity.
Not the nature,but the congruity of men's deeds and circumstances damn and save them;and Tebureimoa from the first has been incongruously placed.At home,in a quiet bystreet of a village,the man had been a worthy carpenter,and,even bedevilled as he is,he shows some private virtues.He has no lands,only the use of such as are impignorate for fines;he cannot enrich himself in the old way by marriages;thrift is the chief pillar of his future,and he knows and uses it.Eleven foreign traders pay him a patent of a hundred dollars,some two thousand subjects pay capitation at the rate of a dollar for a man,half a dollar for a woman,and a shilling for a child:allowing for the exchange,perhaps a total of three hundred pounds a year.He had been some nine months on the throne:had bought his wife a silk dress and hat,figure unknown,and himself a uniform at three hundred dollars;had sent his brother's photograph to be enlarged in San Francisco at two hundred and fifty dollars;had greatly reduced that brother's legacy of debt and had still sovereigns in his pocket.An affectionate brother,a good economist;he was besides a handy carpenter,and cobbled occasionally on the woodwork of the palace.
It is not wonderful that Mr.Corpse has virtues;that Tebureimoa should have a diversion filled me with surprise.
