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The Ebbing Of The Tide

by Louis Becke · English · Gutenberg #24896 · 356,507 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Ebbing Of The Tide

Author: Louis Becke


        
Release date: March 22, 2008 [eBook #24896]
                Most recently updated: March 8, 2018

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by David Widger


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Produced by David Widger





THE EBBING OF THE TIDE

SOUTH SEA STORIES

1896

By Louis Becke




“LULIBAN OF THE POOL”

A boy and a girl sat by the rocky margin of a deep mountain pool in
Ponape in the North Pacific. The girl was weaving a basket from the
leaves of a cocoa-nut. As she wove she sang the “Song of Luliban,” and
the boy listened intently.

“'Tis a fine song that thou singest, Niya,” said the boy, who came from
Metalanien and was a stranger; “and who was Luliban, and Red-Hair the
White Man?”

“_O Guk!_” said Niya, wonderingly, “hast never heard in Metalanien of
Luliban, she who dived with one husband and came up with another--in
this very pool?”

“What new lie is this thou tellest to the boy because he is a stranger?”
 said a White Man, who lay resting in the thick grass waiting for the
basket to be finished, for the three were going further up the mountain
stream to catch crayfish.

“Lie?” said the child; “nay, 'tis no lie. Is not this the Pool of
Luliban, and do not we sing the 'Song of Luliban,' and was not Red-Hair
the White Man--he that lived in Jakoits and built the big sailing boat
for Nanakin, the father of Nanakin, my father, the chief of Jakoits?”

“True, Niya, true,” said the White Man, “I did but jest; but tell thou
the tale to Sru, so that he may carry it home with him to Metalanien.”

*****

Then Niya, daughter of Nanakin, told Sru, the boy from Metalanien,
the tale of Luliban of the Pool, and her husband the White Man called
“Red-Hair,” and her lover, the tattooed beachcomber, called “Harry from
Yap.”

*****

“It was in the days before the fighting-ship went into Kiti Harbour and
burnt the seven whaleships as they lay at anchor{*} that Red-Hair the
White Man lived at Jakoits. He was a very strong man, and because that
he was cunning and clever at fishing and killing the wild boar and
carpentry, his house was full of riches, for Nanakin's heart was towards
him always.”

     * The Shenandoah, in 1866.

“Was it he who killed the three white men at Roan Kiti?” asked the White
Man.

“Aye,” answered Niya, “he it was. They came in a little ship, and
because of bitter words over the price of some tortoise-shell he and the
men of Nanakin slew them. And Red-Hair burnt the ship and sank her. And
for this was Nanakin's heart bigger than ever to Red-Hair, for out of
the ship, before he burnt her, he took many riches--knives, guns
and powder, and beads and pieces of silk; and half of all he gave to
Nanakin.”

“_Huh!_” said Sru, the boy. “He was a fine man!”

“Now, Harry from Yap and Red-Hair hated one another because of Luliban,
whom Nanakin had given to Red-Hair for wife. This man, Harry, lived at
Ngatik, the island off the coast, where the turtles breed, and whenever
he came to Jakoits he would go to Red-Hair's house and drink grog with,
him so that they would both lie on the mats drunk together. Sometimes
the name of Luliban would come between them, and then they would fight
and try to kill each other, but Nanakin's men would always watch and
part them in time. And all this was because that Luliban had loved
Harry from Yap before she became wife to Red-Hair. The men favoured the
husband of Luliban because of Nanakin's friendship to him, and the women
liked best Harry from Yap because of his gay songs and his dances, which
he had learnt from the people of Yap and Ruk and Hogelu, in the far
west; but most of all for his handsome figure and his tattooed skin.

“One day it came about that his grog was all gone, and his spirit was
vexed, and Red-Hair beat Luliban, and she planned his death from that
day. But Nanakin dissuaded her and said, 'It cannot be done; he is too
great a man for me to kill. Be wise and forget his blows.'

“Then Luliban sent a messenger to Ngatik to Harry. He came and brought
with him many square bottles of grog, and went in to Red-Hair's house,
and they drank and quarrelled as they ever did; but because of what lay
in his mind Harry got not drunk, for his eyes were always fixed on the
face of Luliban.

“At last, when Red-Hair was fallen down on the mats, Luliban whispered
to Harry, and he rose and lay down on a couch that was placed against
the cane sides of the house. When all were asleep, Luliban stole outside
and placed her face against the side of the house and called to Harry,
who feigned to sleep. And then he and she talked for a long time. Then
the white man got up and went to Nanakin, the chief, and talked long
with him also.

“Said Nanakin the chief, 'O White Man, thou art full of cunning, and my
heart is with thee. Yet what will it profit me if Red-Hair dies?'

“'All that is now his shall be thine,' said Harry.

“'And what shall I give thee?' said Nanakin.

“'Only Luliban,'” said the White Man with the tattooed body.

*****

“On the morrow, as the day touched the night, the people of Jakoits
danced in front of Nanakin's house, and Harry, with flowers in his hair
and his body oiled and stained with turmeric, danced also. Now among
those who watched him was Luliban, and presently her husband sought her
and drove her away, saying; 'Get thee to my house, little beast. What
dost thou here watching this fool dance!'

“Harry but laughed and danced the more, and then Red-Hair gave him foul
words. When the dance was ended, Harry went up to Red-Hair and said,
'Get thee home also, thou cutter of sleeping men's throats. I am a
better man than thee. There is nothing that thou hast done that I cannot
do.'

“Then Nanakin, whose mouth was ready with words put therein by Luliban,
said, 'Nay, Harry, thou dost but boast. Thou canst not walk under the
water in the Deep Pool with a heavy stone on thy shoulder--as Red-Hair
has done.'

“'Bah!' said Harry. 'What he can do, that I can do.'

“Now, for a man to go in at one end of this pool here”--and Niya nodded
her head to the waters at her feet--“and walk along the bottom and come
out at the farther end is no great task, and as for carrying a heavy
stone, that doth but make the task easier; but in those days there were
devils who lived in a cave that is beneath where we now sit, and none of
our people ever bathed here, for fear they would be seized and dragged
down. But yet had Red-Hair one day put a stone upon his shoulder, and
carried it under the water from one end of the pool to another--this to
show the people that he feared no devils. But of the cave that can be
gained by diving under the wall of rock he knew nothing--only to a few
was it known.

“'Show this boaster his folly,' said Nanakin to Red-Hair, who was
chewing his beard with wrath. And so it was agreed upon the morrow that
the two white men should walk each with a stone upon his shoulder, in
at one end of the deep pool and come out of the other, and Harry should
prove his boast, that in all things he was equal to Red-Hair.”

*****

“When Red-Hair went back to his house Luliban was gone, and some said
she had fled to the mountains, and he reproached Nanakin, saying: 'Thy
daughter hath fled to Ngatik to the house of Harry. I will have her life
and his for this.' But Nanakin smoothed his face and said: 'Nay, not so;
but first put this boaster to shame before the people, and he shall die,
and Luliban be found.'

“Now, Luliban was hid in another village, and when the time drew near
for the trial at the pool she went there before the people. In her hand
she carried a sharp _toki_ (tomahawk) and a long piece of strong cinnet
with a looped end. She dived in and clambered out again underneath and
waited. The cave is not dark, for there are many fissures in the top
through which light comes when the sun is high.

“The people gathered round, and laughed and talked as the two white men
stripped naked, save for narrow girdles of leaves round their loins. The
skin of Red-Hair was as white as sand that lies always in the sun that
of Harry was brown, and covered from his neck to his feet with strange
tattooing, more beautiful than that of the men of Ponape.

“They looked at each other with blood in their eyes, and the long,
yellow teeth of Red-Hair ground together, but no words passed between
them till Red-Hair, poising a great stone on his shoulder, called out
to Harry: 'Follow me, O boastful stealer of my wife, and drown thy blue
carcass.'

“Then he walked in, and Harry, also with a heavy stone, followed him.
Ere one could count a score those that watched could not see Harry,
because of the depth of the water and the darkness of his skin. But
the white skin of Red-Hair gleamed like the belly of a shark when it
turneth--then it disappeared.

“When they were half-way through a stone fell through a fissure of the
cave, and Luliban, who watched for the signal, dived outwards with the
line of cinnet, and came behind Red-Hair and put the noose over his left
foot, and Harry, who followed close, cast the stone he carried away and
raised his hand and stabbed him in the belly as he turned, and then,
with Luliban and he dragging tight the line of cinnet, they shot up from
beneath the water into the cave and pulled Red-Hair after them.”

*****

“The people had gathered at the farther end of the pool to see the two
men come up; and when they came not they wondered, and some one said:
'The devils have seized them!'

“Then Nanakin, who alone remained on the top of the rocks, called out,
'Alas for the white men! I can see bubbles, and the water is bloody,'
and he beat his head on the rocks and made great grief and called out
to the devils in the cave, 'Spare me my white men, O devils of the cave,
spare me my good white men. But if one must die let it be him that hath
offended.'

“Ah! he was a cunning man, was Nanakin, the father of Nanakin my father.

“The men and the women and children ran up again from the end of the
pool; for, although they were greatly afraid, they durst not leave their
chief by himself to beat out his head upon the stones. So they clustered
round him and wailed also with him. And Nanakin raised his voice again
and again and called out to the devils of the pool to spare him one
white man; and the people called out with him. Yet none of them dared
look upon the water of the pool; only Nanakin turned his eyes that way.

“At last the chief said, 'Ho, what is that?' and he pointed to the
water, and they saw bubbles again rise up and break the surface of the
water. 'Now shall I know if my white men are dead.'

“And, as they looked, behold there shot up from the water a yellow
gourd, and the men shouted, some in wonder and more in fear. And Nanakin
leaned over the edge of the rock and stretched out his hand and drew the
gourd to him. Then he took it in his hand, and lo! there was tied to the
neck a piece of plaited cinnet, which ran deep down into the water under
the rock.

“Again Nanakin called out to his men who stood crouched up behind him.
'What shall I do with this? shall I pull it up?'

“And then--so the people said--there came a voice from the bowels of the
earth, which said, 'Pull!'

“So they drew in the line, and as they drew it became heavy, and then
something came up with a splash, and those that held the line looked
over, and lo! there was the head of Red-Hair, wet and bloody, tied to
the end of it by the ear.

“The head was laid upon the rock, and then the people would have turned
and fled, but that Nanakin and two of his priests said there was now no
fear as the cave devils were angry alone with Red-Hair, who had twice
braved them.

“Then the two priests and Nanakin leant over the wall of rocks and
called out again for the life of Harry to be spared, and as they called,
he shot out from underneath and held out his hands; and they pulled him
in.

“'Let us away from here quickly,' was all he said. 'I thank thee, O
chief, for thy prayers; else had the devils of the pool taken off my
head as they have taken off that of Red-Hair, and devoured my body as
they have devoured his.'

“Then the people picked him up, for he was weak, and every one that was
there left the pool in fear and trembling, except Nanakin and the two
priests, who laughed inwardly.

“When all was quiet, Luliban, too, came up from under the water and
dried her body, and oiled and scented her hair from a flask that she
had hidden in the bushes, and went back to Red-Hair's house, and, with
downcast face but a merry heart, asked her women to plead with her
husband not to beat her for running away. Then they told her of the
doings at the pool.

“When ten days were gone by for mourning, Luliban became wife to 'Harry
from Yap,' and he took her with him to Ngatik, and the favour of Nanakin
that was once Red-Hair's became his, and he prospered. And for long,
long years no one knew how it was that Red-Hair lost his head till
Luliban told it.”

*****

“_Huh!_” said Sru, the boy, admiringly. “He was a Fine Man, that
Red-Hair; but the white man with the tattooed skin was a Better.”




NINIA




I.

Away out upon the wide Northern Pacific there is a group of three little
islands. They are so very, very small that you need not seek to discover
them on the map of the Pacific Ocean; but if any of you have a chart of
the North or West Pacific, then you would easily be able to find them.
Run your eye up north, away past the Equator, in the direction of China,
and you will see, to the north of New Guinea, a large cluster of islands
named the “Caroline Islands,” some of which are named, but most are
not--only tiny dots no bigger than a pin's head serve to mark their
position. Perhaps, however--if you get a German chart--you may see one
of the largest of the small dots marked “Pingelap,” and Pingelap is the
name of the largest of the three little islands of my story; the others
are called Tugulu and Takai.

Now, although Pingelap and Tugulu and Takai are so close together that
at low tide one may walk across the coral reef that encircles the whole
group from one island to another, yet are they lonely spots, for there
is no other island nearer than Mokil, which is ninety miles away.

But yet, although the three islands are so small, a great number of
natives live upon them--between four and five hundred. There is only one
village, which is on Pingelap, and here all the people lived. The island
itself is not more than two miles in length, and in no place is it
more than a quarter of a mile in width; and Tugulu and Takai are still
smaller. And from one end to the other the islands are covered with a
dense verdure of cocoanut palms, with scarcely any other tree amongst
them, so that when seen from the ship two or three miles away, they
look exactly like a belt of emerald surrounding a lake of silver, for
in their centre is a beautiful lagoon surrounded on three sides by the
land, and on the west protected from the sweeping ocean rollers by a
double line of coral reef stretching from little Takai to the south end
of Pingelap.

There are hundreds of beautiful islands in the Pacific, but not any
one of them can excel in beauty lonely little Pingelap. There are two
reefs--an outer and an inner. Against the outer or ocean reef huge
seas for ever dash unceasingly on the windward side of the island, and
sometimes, in bad weather, will sweep right over the coral and pour
through the shallow channel between Tugulu and Pingelap; and then the
calm, placid waters of the lagoon will be fretted and disturbed until
fine weather comes again. But bad weather is a rare event in those seas,
and usually the lagoon of Pingelap is as smooth as a sheet of glass.
And all day long you may see children paddling about in canoes, crossing
from one shining beach to another, and singing as they paddle, for they
are a merry-hearted race, the people of these three islands, and love to
sing and dance, and sit out in front of their houses on moonlight nights
and listen to tales told by the old men of the days when their islands
were reddened with blood. For until fifteen years before, the people
of Pingelap and Tugulu were at bitter enmity, and fought with and
slaughtered each other to their heart's delight. And perhaps there would
have soon been none left to tell the tale, but that one day an American
whaleship, called the _Cohasset_ touched there to buy turtle from
Sralik, the chief of Pingelap, and Sralik besought the captain to give
him muskets and powder and ball to fight the Tugulans with.

So the captain gave him five muskets and plenty of powder and bullets,
and then said--

“See, Sralik; I will give you a white man too, to show you how to shoot
your enemies.”

And then he laughed, and calling out to a man named Harry, he told him
to clear out of the ship and go and live ashore and be a king, as he was
not worth his salt as a boatsteerer.

And so this Harry Devine, who was a drunken, good-for-nothing,
quarrelsome young American, came ashore with Sralik, and next day he
loaded the five muskets and, with Sralik, led the Pingelap people over
to Tugulu. There was a great fight, and as fast as Sralik loaded a
musket, Harry fired it and killed a man. At last, when nearly thirty had
been shot, the Tugulu people called for quarter.

“Get thee together on Takai,” called out Sralik, “and then will we talk
of peace.”

Now Takai is such a tiny little spot, that Sralik knew he would have
them at his mercy, for not one of them had a musket.

As soon as the last of the Tugulu people had crossed the shallow channel
that divides Tugulu from Takai, the cunning Sralik with his warriors
lined the beach and then called to the Tugulans--

“This land is too small for so many.”

And then Harry, once the boatsteerer and now the beachcomber, fired his
muskets into the thick, surging mass of humanity on the little 'islet,
and every shot told. Many of them, throwing aside their spears and
clubs, sprang into the water and tried to swim over to Pingelap across
the lagoon. But Sralik's men pursued them in canoes and clubbed and
speared them as they swam; and some that escaped death by club or spear,
were rent in pieces by the sharks which, as soon as they smelt the blood
of the dead and dying men that sank in the quiet waters of the lagoon,
swarmed in through a passage in the western reef. By and by the last of
those who took to the water were killed, and only some eighty or ninety
men and many more women and children were left on Takai, and the five
muskets became so hot and foul that Harry could murder no longer, and
his arm was tired out with slaughter.

All that night Sralik's warriors watched to see that none escaped, and
at dawn the hideous massacre began again, and club, spear, and musket
did their fell work till only the women and children were left. These
were spared. Among them was Ninia, the wife of Sikra, the chief of
Tugulu. And because she was young and fairer than any of the others, the
white man asked her of Sralik for his wife. Sralik laughed.

“Take her, O clever white marn--her and as many more as thou carest for
slaves. Only thou and I shall rule here now in this my island.”

So Harry took her and married her according to native custom, and Ninia
was his one wife for nearly fifteen years, when one day he was quietly
murdered as he lay asleep in his house with his wife and two children;
and although Sralik wept loudly and cut his great chest with a shark's
teeth dagger, and offered sacrifices of turtle flesh to the white
man's _jelin_, Ninia his wife and many other people knew that it was by
Sralik's orders that Harry had been killed, for they had quarrelled
over the possession of a whaleboat which Harry had bought from a passing
ship, and which he refused to either sell or give to Sralik.

However, Sralik was not unkind to Ninia, and gave her much of her
dead husband's property, and told her that he would give her for an
inheritance for her two daughters the little islet--Takai.

And there in the year 1870 Ninia the widow, and Ninia her eldest
daughter (for on Pingelap names of the first-born are hereditary) and
Tarita, the youngest, went to live. With them went another girl, a
granddaughter of the savage old Sralik. Her name was Ruvani. She was
about eleven years of age, and as pretty as a gazelle, and because of
her great friendship for Ninia--who was two years older than she--she
had wept when she saw the mother and daughters set out for Takai.

Fierce-hearted Sralik coming to the doorway of his thatched hut heard
the sound of weeping, and looking out he saw Ruvani sitting under the
shade of some banana trees with her face hidden in her pretty brown
hands.

When he learned the cause of her grief his heart softened, and drawing
his little grand-daughter to him, patted her head, and said--

“Nay, weep not, little bird. Thou too shalt go to Takai; and see,
because of thee my heart shall open wide to Ninia and her daughters, and
I will give her four slaves--two men and two women--who shall toil for
you all. And when thou art tired of living at Takai, then thou and thy
two playmates shall come over here to me and fill my house with the
light of thy eyes.”

So that is how Ninia, the widow of the wandering white man, and her
two daughters and their friend came to live at the little islet called
Takai.




II.

The months went by and Ruvani, the chief's granddaughter, still lived
with her friends, for she was too happy to leave them. Sometimes,
though, on bright moonlight nights, the three girls would paddle across
to the big village and gather with the rest of the village girls in
front of the chiefs house, and dance and sing and play the game called
_n'jiajia_; and then, perhaps, instead of going home across the lagoon
in the canoe, they would walk around on the inner beaches of Pingelap
and Tugulu. And long ere they came to the house they could see the faint
glimmer of the fire within, beside which Ninia the widow slept awaiting
their return.

Stealing softly in, the girls would lie down together on a soft white
mat embroidered with parrots' feathers that formed their bed, and
pulling another and larger one over them for a coverlet, they would fall
asleep, undisturbed by the loud, hoarse notes of a flock of _katafa_
(frigate birds) that every night settled on the boughs of a great _koa_
tree whose branches overhung the house.

Sometimes when the trade-winds had dropped, and the great ocean rollers
would beat heavily upon the far-off shelves of the outer reef, the
little island would seem to shake and quiver to its very foundations,
and now and then as a huge wave would curl slowly over and break with
a noise like a thunder-peal, the frigate-birds would awake from their
sleep and utter a solemn answering squawk, and the three girls nestling
closer together would whisper--

“'Tis Nanawit, the Cave-god, making another cave.”

Ere the red sun shot out from the ocean the eight dwellers on Takai
would rise from their mats; and whilst Ninia the widow would kindle
a fire of broken cocoanut shells, the two men slaves would go out and
bring back young cocoanuts and taro from the plantation on Tugulu, and
their wives would take off their gaily-coloured grass-girdles and tie
coarse nairiris of cocoanut fibre around them instead, and with the
three girls go out to the deep pools on the reef and catch fish.
Sometimes they would surprise a turtle in one of the pools, and, diving
in after the frightened creature, would capture and bring it home in
triumph to Ninia the widow.

Such was the daily life of those who dwelt on Takai.

*****

One day, ere the dews of the night had vanished from the lofty plumes
of the cocoanut palms, there came to them a loud cry, borne across the
waters of the silent lagoon, over from the village--

“A ship! A ship!”

Now not many ships came to Pingelap--perhaps now and then some wandering
sperm-whaler, cruising lazily along toward the distant Pelew Islands,
would heave-to and send a boat ashore to trade for turtle and young
drinking cocoanuts. But it was long since any whaleship had called, and
Ninia the widow, as she looked out seawards for the ship, said to the
girls--

“'Tis not yet the season for the whaleships; four moons more and we may
see one. I know not what other ships would come here.”

By and by they saw the ship. She sailed slowly round the south point of
Pingelap and backed her foreyard, and presently a boat was lowered and
pulled ashore.

Little Tarita, clapping her hands with joy, darted into the house,
followed by Ruvani and Ninia, and casting off their wet girdles of
banana fibre--for they had just come in from fishing--they dressed
themselves in their pretty _nairiris_ of coloured grasses, and put on
head-dresses of green and gold parrots' feathers, with necklaces of
sweet-smelling berries around their necks, and were soon paddling across
the lagoon to see the white strangers from the ship, who had already
landed and gone up the beach and into the village.

It is nearly a mile from Takai to the village, and before the girls
reached there they heard a great clamour of angry voices, and presently
two white men dressed in white and carrying books in their hands came
hurriedly down the beach, followed by a crowd of Sralik's warriors, who
urged them along and forced them into the boat.

Then seizing the boat they shot her out into the water, and, shaking
their spears and clubs, called out--

“Go, white men, go!”

But although the native sailors who pulled the boat were trembling
with fear, the two white men did not seem frightened, and one of them,
standing up in the stern of the boat, held up his hand and called out to
the angry and excited people--

“Let me speak, I pray you!”

The natives understood him, for he spoke to them in the language spoken
by the natives of Strong's Island, which is only a few hundred miles
from Pingelap.

*****

The people parted to the right and left as Sralik, the chief, with
a loaded musket grasped in his brawny right hand, strode down to the
water's edge. Suppressed wrath shone in his eyes as he grounded his
musket on the sand and looked at the white man.

“Speak,” he said, “and then be gone.”

The white man spoke.

“Nay, spare us thy anger, O chief. I come, not here to fill thy heart
with anger, but with peace; and, to tell thee of the great God, and of
His Son Christ who hath sent me to thee.”

Sralik laughed scornfully.

“Thou liest. Long ago, did I know that some day a white-painted ship
would come to Pingelap, and that white, men would come and speak to us
of this new God and His Son who is called Christ, and would say that
this Christ had sent them, and: then would the hearts of my people be
stolen from Nanawit the Cave-god, and Tuarangi the god of the Skies,
and I, Sralik the king, would become but as a slave, for this new God of
theirs would steal the hearts of my people from me as well.”

The white man said sorrowfully--

“Nay, that is not so. Who hath told thee this?”

“A better white man than thee--he who slew my enemies and was named Haré
(Harry). Long ago did he warn me of thy coming and bid me beware of thee
with thy lies about thy new God and His Son Christ.”

Again the missionary said--

“Let me speak.”

But Sralik answered him fiercely--

“Away, I tell thee, to thy white-painted ship, and trouble me no more,”
 and he slapped the stock of his musket, and his white teeth gleamed
savagely through his bearded face.

So the two missionaries went back, and the _Morning Star_ filled away
again and sailed slowly away to the westward.

*****

That night as the three girls lay on the mats beside the dying embers
of the fire, they talked of the strange white men whom Sralik had driven
away.

Ninia the widow listened to them from her corner of the house, and then
she said musingly--

“I, too, have heard of this God Christ; for when Haré, thy father, lay
in my arms with the blood pouring from his wound and death looked out
from his eyes, he called upon His name.”

Young Ninia and her sister drew closer and listened. Never until now had
they heard their mother speak of their white father's death. They only
knew that some unknown enemy had thrust a knife into his side as he lay
asleep, and Ninia the widow had, with terror in her eyes, forbidden them
to talk of it even amongst themselves. Only she herself knew that Sralik
had caused his death. But to-night she talked.

“Tell us more, my mother,” said girl Ninia, going over to her, and
putting her cheek against her mother's troubled face and caressing her
in the darkness.

“Aye, I can tell thee now, my children, for Sralik's anger is dead
now.... It was at the dawn, just when the first note of the blue pigeon
is heard, that I heard a step in the house--'twas the death-men of
Sralik--and then a loud cry, and Haré, thy father, awoke to die. The
knife had bitten deep and he took my hands in his and groaned.

“'Farewell,' he said, 'O mother of my children, I die!' Then he cried,
'And Thou, O Christ, look down on and forgive me; Christ the Son of
God.'

“With my hand pressed to his side, I said: 'Who is it that thou callest
upon, my husband? Is it the white man's God?'

“'Aye,' he said, 'this Christ is He whom I have so long denied. He is
the Son of the God whose anger I fear to meet now that my soul goes out
into darkness.'

“'Fear not,' I said, weeping, 'I, Ninia, will make offerings to this
white God and His Son Christ, so that their anger may be softened
against thy spirit when it wanders in ghost-land.'

“So he groaned and was dead. And for six or more moons did I put
offerings to the white God upon thy father's grave as I had promised.
No offerings made I to our own gods, for he despised them even as he
despised his own. But yet do I think his _jelin_ (spirit) is at rest in
ghost-land; else had it come to me in the night and touched me on the
forehead as I slept.”




III.

A month had gone by since the day that Sralik had driven away the
“Christ ship,” as the people called the _Morning Star_, and then word
came over from Sralik to Ruvani, his granddaughter, to come over and
take her part in a night-dance and feast to the rain-god, for the year
had been a good one and the cocoanut trees were loaded with nuts. For
this was the dancing and feasting.

All that day the eight people of Takai were busied in making ready their
gifts of food for the feast which was to take place in two days' time.
In the afternoon, when the sun had lost its strength, the three girls
launched their canoe and set out for a place on the northern point
of Pingelap, where grew in great profusion the sweet-smelling _nudu_
flower. These would they get to make garlands and necklets to wear at
the great dance, in which they were all to take part.

In an hour or two they had gathered all the _nudu_ flowers they desired,
and then little Tarita looking up saw that the sky was overcast and
blackening, and presently some heavy drops of rain fell.

“Haste, haste,” she cried to the others, “let us away ere the strong
wind which is behind the black clouds overtakes us on the lagoon.”

Night comes on quickly in the South Seas, and by the time they had
seated themselves in the canoe it was dark. In a little while a sharp
rain-squall swept down from the northward, and they heard the wind
rattling and crashing through the branches, of the palms on Tugulu.

Ninia, who was steering, boldly headed the canoe across the lagoon for
Takai, and laughed when Ruvani and Tarita, who were wet and shivering
with the cold rain, urged that they should put in at the beach on Tugulu
and walk home.

“Paddle, paddle strongly,” she cried, “what mattereth a little rain and
wind! And sing, so that our mother will hear us and make ready something
to eat. Look, I can already see the blaze of her fire.”

Striking their paddles into the water in unison, they commenced to sing,
but suddenly their voices died away in terror as a strange, droning hum
was borne down to them from the black line of Tugulu shore; and then the
droning deepened into a hoarse roaring noise as the wild storm of wind
and fierce, stinging rain tore through the groves of cocoanuts and
stripped them of leaves and branches.

Brave Ninia, leaning her lithe figure well over the side of the canoe,
plunged her paddle deep down and tried to bring the canoe head to
wind to meet the danger, and Ruvani, in the bow, with long hair
flying straight out behind her, answered her effort with a cry of
encouragement, and put forth all her strength to aid.

But almost ere the cry had left her lips, the full fury of the squall
had struck them; the canoe was caught in its savage breath, twirled
round and round, and then filled.

“Keep thou in the canoe, little one, and bale,” cried Ninia to Tarita,
as she and Ruvani leaped into the water.

For some minutes the two girls clung with one hand each to the gunwale,
and Tarita, holding the large wooden _ahu_ or baler, in both hands,
dashed the water out. Then she gave a trembling cry--the baler struck
against the side of the canoe and dropped overboard.

Ninia dared not leave the canoe to seek for it in the intense darkness,
and so clinging to the little craft, which soon filled again, they
drifted about. The waters of the lagoon were now white with the breaking
seas, and the wind blew with fierce, cruel, steadiness, and although
they knew it not, they were being swept quickly away from the land
towards the passage in the reef.

The rain had ceased now, and the water being warm none of them felt
cold, but the noise of the wind and sea was so great that they had to
shout loudly to each other to make their voices heard.

Presently Ruvani called out to Ninia--

“Let us take Tarita between us and swim to the shore, ere the sharks
come to us.”

“Nay, we are safer here, Ruvani, And how could we tell my mother that
the canoe is lost? Let us wait a little and then the wind will die
away.”

Canoes are valuable property on Pingelap, where suitable wood for
building them is scarce, and this was in Ninia's mind.

They still kept hold of their paddles, and although afraid of the
sharks, waited patiently for the storm to cease, little thinking that
at that moment the ebbing tide and wind together had swept them into
the passage, and that they were quickly drifting away from their island
home.

All that night Ninia the widow and her four slaves sought along the
beach of Tugulu for the three girls, who they felt sure had landed
there. And when the day broke at last, and they saw that the gale had
not ceased and that the canoe had vanished, they ran all the way over to
the village, and Ninia threw herself at Sralik's feet.

“Thy granddaughter and my children have perished, O chief.”

The chief came to the door of his house and looked out upon the wild
turmoil of waters.

“It is the will of the gods,” he said, “else had not my whaleboat been
crushed in the night,” and he pointed to the ruins of the boat-shed upon
which a huge cocoanut tree had fallen and smashed the boat.

Then he went back into his house and covered his face, for Ruvani was
dear to his savage old heart.

And Ninia went back to her lonely house and wept and mourned for her
lost ones as only mothers weep and mourn, be they of white skins or
brown.

*****

Away out into the ocean the canoe was swept along, and Ruvani and Ninia
still clung to her, one at the head and one at the stern. Once there
came a brief lull, and then they succeeded in partly freeing her from
water, and Tarita using her two hands like a scoop meanwhile, the canoe
at last became light enough for them to get in.

They were only just in time, for even then the wind freshened, and Ninia
and Ruvani let the canoe run before it, for they were too exhausted to
keep her head to the wind.

When daylight broke Ninia, with fear in her heart, stood up in the canoe
and looked all round her.

There was no land in sight! Poor children! Even then they could not have
been more than twenty miles away from the island, for Pingelap is very
low and not visible even from a ship's deck at more than twelve or
fifteen miles.

But she was a brave girl, although only fourteen, and when Tarita and
Ruvani wept she encouraged them.

“Sralik will come to seek us in the boat,” she said, although she could
have wept with them.

The wind still carried them along to the westward, and Ninia knew that
every hour was taking them further and further away from Pingelap, but,
although it was not now blowing hard, she knew that it was useless for
them to attempt to paddle against it. So, keeping dead before the wind
and sea, they drifted slowly along.

At noon the wind died away, and then, tired and worn out, she and Ruvani
lay down in the bottom of the canoe and slept, while little Tarita sat
up on the cane framework of the outrigger and watched the horizon for
Sralik's boat.

Hour after hour passed, and the two girls still slept. Tarita, too, had
lain her weary head down and slumbered with them.

Slowly the sun sank beneath a sea of glassy smoothness, unrippled even
by the faintest air, and then Ninia awoke, and, sitting up, tossed her
cloud of dark hair away from her face, and looked around her upon the
darkening ocean. Her lips were dry and parched, and she felt a terrible
thirst.

“Tarita,” she called, “art sleeping, dear one?”

A sob answered her.

“Nay, for my head is burning, and I want a drink.”

*****

The whole story of those days of unutterable agony cannot be told here.
There, under a torrid sun, without a drop of water or a morsel of food,
the poor creatures drifted about till death mercifully came to two of
them.

It was on the evening of the second day that Ninia, taking her little
sister in her own fast weakening arms, pressed her to her bosom, and,
looking into her eyes, felt her thirst-racken body quiver and then grow
still in the strange peacefulness of death. Then a long wailing cry
broke upon the silence of the night.

How long she had sat thus with the child's head upon her bosom and her
dead sightless eyes turned upward to the glory of the star-lit heavens
she knew not; after that one moaning cry of sorrow that escaped from her
anguished heart she had sat there like a figure of stone, dull, dazed,
and unconscious almost of the agonies of thirst. And then Ruvani, with
wild, dreadful eyes and bleeding, sun-baked lips, crept towards her,
and, laying her face on Ninia's hand, muttered--

“Farewell, O friend of my heart; I die.”

And then, as she lay there with closed eyes and loosened hair falling
like a shroud over the form of her dead playmate, she muttered and
talked, and then laughed a strange weird laugh that chilled the blood in
Ninia's veins. So that night passed, and then, as the fiery sun uprose
again upon the wide sweep or lonely sea and the solitary drifting canoe
with its load of misery, Ruvani, who still muttered and laughed to
herself, suddenly rose up, and with the strength of madness, placing
her arms around the stiffened form of little Tarita, she sprang over the
side and sank with her.

Ninia, stretching her arms out piteously, bowed her head, and lay down
to die.

*****

She was aroused from her stupor by the cries of a vast flock of sea
birds, and, opening her eyes, she saw that the canoe was surrounded by
thousands upon thousands of bonita that leaped and sported and splashed
about almost within arm's length of her. They were pursuing a shoal of
small fish called _atuli_, and these every now and then darted under the
canoe for protection. Sometimes, as the hungry bonita pressed them hard,
they would leap out of the water, hundreds together, and then the sea
birds would swoop down and seize them ere they fell back into the sea.

Ninia, trembling with excitement and the hope of life, watched
eagerly. Presently she heard a curious, rippling noise, and then a
rapidly-repeated tapping on the outrigger side of the canoe.

Oh! the joy of it; the water was black with a mass of _atuli_ crowded
together on the surface, and frightened and exhausted.

She thrust her hands in among them and threw handsful after handsful
into the canoe, and then her dreadful thirst and hunger made her cease,
and, taking fish after fish, she bit into them with her sharp teeth, and
assuaged both hunger and thirst.

As she tore ravenously at the _atuli_ the sky became overcast, and while
the bonitas splashed and jumped around her, and the birds cried shrilly
overhead, the blessed rain began to fall, at first in heavy drops, and
then in a steady downpour.

Taking off her thick grass girdle, she rolled it up into a tight coil
and placed it across the bottom of the canoe, about two feet from the
bows, so as to form a dam; and then, lying face downwards, she drank
and drank till satisfied. Then she counted the _atuli_. There were over
forty.

All that day the rain squalls continued, and then the wind settled and
blew steadily from the east, and Ninia kept the canoe right before it.

That night she slept but little. A wild hope had sprung up in her heart
that she might reach the island of Ponape, which she knew was not many
days' sail from Pingelap. Indeed, she had once heard her father and
Sralik talking about going there in the whaleboat to sell turtle-shell
to the white traders there.

But she did not know that the current and trade wind were setting the
canoe quickly away from Ponape towards a group of low-lying atolls
called Ngatik.

*****

The rain had ceased, and in the warm, starlight night she drifted on to
the west, and as she drifted she dreamed of her father, and saw Ninia
the widow, her mother, sitting in the desolate house on Takai, before
the dying embers of the fire, and heard her voice crying:

“_O thou white Christ God, to whom my husband called as he died, tell me
are my children perished? I pray thee because of the white blood that is
in them to protect them and let me behold my beloved again_.”

The girl awoke. Her mother's voice seemed to still murmur in her ears,
and a calm feeling of rest entered her soul. She took her paddle, and
then stopped and thought.

This new God--the Christ-God of her father--perhaps He would help her
to reach the land. She, too, would call upon Him, even as her mother had
done.

“See, O Christ-God. I am but one left of three. I pray Thee guide my
canoe to land, so that I may yet see Ninia my mother once more.”

As the dawn approached she dozed again, and then she heard a sound that
made her heart leap--it was the low, monotonous beat of the surf.

When the sun rose she saw before her a long line of low-lying islands,
clothed in cocoanuts, and shining like jewels upon the deep ocean blue.

She ate some more of the fish, and, paddling as strongly as her strength
would permit, she passed between the passage, entered the smooth waters
of the lagoon, and ran the canoe up on to a white beach.

“The Christ-God has heard me,” she said as she threw her wearied form
under the shade of the cocoa-nut palms and fell into a heavy, dreamless
slumber.

And here next morning the people of Ngatik found her. They took the poor
wanderer back with them to their houses that were clustered under the
palm-groves a mile or two away, and there for two years she dwelt with
them, hoping and waiting to return to Pingelap.

One day a ship came--a whaler cruising back to Strong's Island and the
Marshall Group. The captain was told her story by the people of Ngatik,
and offered to touch at Pingelap and land her.

Ninia the widow was still living on Takai, and her once beautiful face
had grown old and haggard-looking. Since the night of the storm four
ships had called at Pingelap, but she had never once gone over to the
village, for grief was eating her heart away; and so, when one evening
she heard that a ship was in sight, she took no heed.

Her house was very sad and lonely now, and as night came on she lay down
in her end of the house and slept, while the other four people sat round
the fire and talked and smoked.

In the middle of the night the four slaves got up and went away to the
village, for they wanted to be there when the boat from the ship came
ashore.

At daylight the ship was close in, and the people in the village saw a
boat lowered. Then a cry of astonishment burst from them when they
saw the boat pull straight in over the reef and land at Takai, about a
hundred yards from the house of Ninia, the white man's widow.

Only one person got out, and then the boat pushed off again and pulled
back to the ship.

*****

Ninia the widow had risen, and was rolling up the mat she had slept
upon, when a figure darkened the doorway. She turned wonderingly to
see who it was that had come over so early from the village, when the
stranger, who was a tall, graceful young girl, sprang forward, and,
folding her arms around her, said, sobbing with joy--

“My mother... The Christ-God hath brought me back to thee again.”




BALDWIN'S LOISÈ--Miss Lambert.

Her mother was a full-blooded native--a woman of Anaa, in the Chain
Islands--her father a dissolute and broken white wanderer. At the age
of ten she was adopted by a wealthy South Sea trading captain, living
on the East Coast of New Zealand. He, with his childless wife, educated,
cared for, and finally loved her, as they once loved a child of their
own, dead twenty years before.

At sixteen Loisé was a woman; and in the time that had passed since the
morning she had seen her reckless, beach-combing father carried ashore
at Nukutavake with a skinful of whisky and his pockets full of the
dollars for which he had sold her, the tongue and memories of her
mother's race had become, seemingly, utterly forgotten.

*****

But only seemingly; for sometimes in the cold winter months, when savage
southerly gales swept over the cloud-blackened ocean from the white
fields of Antarctic ice and smote the New Zealand coast with chilling
blast, the girl would crouch beside the fire in Mrs. Lambert's
drawing-room, and covering herself with warm rugs, stare into the
glowing coals until she fell asleep.

She had not forgotten.

One day a visitor came to see her adopted father. He was captain of a
small trading schooner running to the Paumotus--her mother's land--and
although old Lambert had long since given up his trading business and
voyagings, he liked to meet people from the Islands, and, indeed, kept
open house to them; so both he and Mrs. Lambert made him welcome.

The captain of the schooner was a man of a type common enough in the
South Seas, rough, good-humoured, and coarsely handsome.

After dinner the two men sat over their whisky and talked and smoked.
Mrs. Lambert, always an invalid, had gone to her room, but Loisé, book
in hand, lay on a sofa and seemed to read. But she did not read, she
listened. She had caught a word or two uttered by the dark-faced,
black-bearded skipper--words that filled her with vague memories of long
ago. And soon she heard names--names of men, white and brown, whom she
had known in that distant, almost forgotten and savage childhood.

*****

When the seaman rose to leave and extended his tanned, sinewy hand to
the beautiful “Miss Lambert,” and gazed with undisguised admiration into
her face, he little thought that she longed to say, “Stay and let me
hear more.” But she was conventional enough to know better than that,
and that her adopted parents would be genuinely shocked to see her
anything more than distantly friendly with such a man as a common
trading captain--even though that man had once been one of Lambert's
most trusted men. Still, as she raised her eyes to his, she murmured
softly, “We will be glad to see you again, Captain Lemaire.” And the
dark-faced seaman gave her a subtle, answering glance.

*****

All that night she lay awake--awake to the child memories of the life
that until now had slumbered within her. From her opened bedroom window
she could see the dulled blaze of the city's lights, and hear ever and
anon the hoarse and warning roar of a steamer's whistle. She raised
herself and looked out upon the waters of the harbour. A huge,
black mass was moving slowly seaward, showing only her masthead and
side-lights--some ocean tramp bound northward. Again the boom of the
whistle sounded, and then, by the quickened thumping of the propeller,
the girl, knew that the tramp had rounded the point and was heading for
the open sea.

*****

She lay back again on the pillow and tried to sleep. Why couldn't she
sleep, she wondered. She closed her eyes. The branches of the pine that
grew close to her window rustled and shook to a passing breath of wind,
and her eyes opened again. How strangely, though, it sounded to-night,
and how her heart was thumping! Again the white lids drooped and half
closed again, and the pine branches waved and soughed gently to the
breeze.

And then the dead grey of the wall of the room changed to a bright,
shimmering white--the white of an island beach as it changes, under the
red flush of the morn, from the shadows of the night to a broad belt of
gleaming silver--and the sough of the pine-tree by the window deepened
into the humming music of the trade-wind when it passes through the
sleeping palms, and a million branches awake trembling to its first
breaths and shake off in pearly showers the dews of the night. Again she
raced along the clinking sand with her childish, half-naked companions,
and heard the ceaseless throb of the beating surf upon the windward
reef, and saw the flash of gold and scarlet of a flock of parrakeets
that with shrill, whistling note, vanished through the groves of
cocoa-nuts as they sped mountain wards. Then her latent native soul
awoke and made her desperate.

*****

Ere two days had passed she was missing, and six weeks later a little
white-painted schooner hove-to off one of the Paumotu Group, lowered a
boat, and landed her amongst the wondering natives.

The dark-faced, black-bearded man who steered the boat held her hand a
moment ere he said good-bye.

“It is not too late, Loisé.”

She raised her face and laughed scornfully.

“To go back? To go back to hear the old man who was a father and the
good woman who was a mother to me, tell me that they hated and despised
me!” And then quick, scalding tears.

The man's face flushed. “No, not that, but,” with an oath, “look here,
if you'll come with me I'll head the schooner for Tahiti, and as soon as
she swings to her anchor we will be ashore and married.”

She shook her head. “Let me go, Captain Lemaire. Whatever comes to me,
'tis I alone who must answer for it. And so--good-bye.”

*****

She stood and watched the boat hoisted to the davits, and saw the
schooner slowly gather way, and then glide past and disappear round
the palm-crowned point. Then she turned with streaming eyes and choking
voice to the brown-skinned people that stood around her, and spoke to
them in her mother's tongue.

So ended the sixteen years' life of the beautiful Miss Lambert and began
that of Loisé, the half-blood.


                                 LOISÉ, THE HALF-BLOOD

There was a wild rush of naked, scurrying feet, and a quick panting
of brown bosoms along the winding path that led to Baldwin's house at
Rikitea. A trading schooner had just dropped anchor inside the reef,
and the runners, young lads and girls--half-naked, lithe-limbed and
handsome--like all the people of the “thousand isles,” wanted to welcome
Baldwin the Trader at his own house door.

*****

Two of them--a boy and girl--gained the trader's gate ahead of their
excited companions, and, leaning their backs against the white palings,
mocked the rest for their tardiness in the race. With one arm around the
girl's lissom waist, the boy, Maturei, short, thickset, muscular, and
the bully of the village, beat off with his left hand those who sought
to displace them from the gate; and the girl, thin, créole-faced,
with soft, red-lipped mouth, laughed softly at their vexation. Her
gaily-coloured grass waist girdle had broken, and presently moving the
boy's protecting arm, she tried to tie the band, and as she tied it she
rattled out oaths in English and French at the score of brown hands that
sought to prevent her.

“_Hui! Hui!!_ Away, ye fools, and let me tie my girdle,” she said in the
native tongue. “'Tis no time now for such folly as this; for, see, the
boat is lowered from the ship and in a little time the master will be
here.”

The merry chatter ceased in an instant and every face turned towards the
schooner, and a hundred pair of curious eyes watched. Then, one by one,
they sat down and waited; all but the two at the gate, who remained
standing, the boy's arm still wound round the girl's waist.

*****

The boat was pulling in swiftly now, and the “click-clack” of the
rowlocks reached the listening ears of those on shore.

There were two figures in the stern, and presently one stood up, and
taking off his hat, waved it towards the shore.

A roar of welcome from the thronging mass of natives that lined the
beach drowned the shrill, piping treble of the children round the gate,
and told sturdy old Tom Baldwin that he was recognised, and scarce had
the bow of the boat ploughed into the soft sand of the beach when he
was seized upon and smothered with caresses, the men with good-natured
violence thrusting aside the women and forming a body-guard to conduct
him and the young man with him from the boat to the house. And about
the strange white man the people thronged with inquiring and admiring
glances, for he was big and strong-looking--and that to a native mind is
better than all else in the world.

With joyous, laughing clamour, the natives pressed around the white men
till the gate was reached, and then fell back.

The girl stepped forward, and taking the trader's hand, bent her
forehead to it in token of submission.

“The key of this thy house, Tâmu,” she murmured in the native tongue, as
she placed it in his hand.

“Enter thou first, Loisé,” and he waved it away.

A faint smile of pleasure illumined her face; Baldwin, rough and
careless as he was, was yet studious to observe native custom.

The white men followed her, and then in the open doorway Baldwin
stopped, turned, and raised his hand, palm outwards, to the throng of
natives without.

“I thank thee, friends, for thy welcome. Dear to mine ears is the sound
of the tongue of the men of Rikitea. See ye this young man here. He
is the son of my friend who is now dead--he whom some of ye have seen,
Kapeni Paraisi” (Captain Brice).

A tall, broad-shouldered native, with his hair streaming down over his
shoulders, strode up the steps, and taking the young man's hand in his,
placed it to his forehead.

“The son of Paraisi is welcome to Rikitea, and to me, the chief of
Rikitea.”

There was a murmur of approval; Baldwin waved his hand again, and then,
with Brice, entered the house.

Outside, the boy and girl, seated on the verandah steps, talked and
waited for orders.

Said Maturei, “Loisé, think you that now Tâmu hath found thee to be
faithful to his house and his name that he will marry thee according to
the promise made to the priests at Tenararo when he first brought thee
here?”

She took a thick coil of her shining black hair and wound it round and
round her hand meditatively, looking out absently over the calm waters
of the harbour.

“Who knows, Maturei? And I, I care not. Yet do I think it will be so;
for what other girl is there here that knoweth his ways, and the ways
of the white men as I know them? And this old man is a glutton; and, so
that my skill in baking pigeons and making _karri_ and rice fail me not,
then am I mistress here.... Maturei, is not the stranger an evil-looking
man?”

“Evil-looking!” said the boy, wonderingly; “nay, how canst thou say that
of him?”

*****

“What a jolly old fellow he is, and how these people adore him!” thought
Brice, as they sat down to dinner. Two or three of the village girls
waited upon them, and in the open doorway sat a vision of loveliness,
arrayed in yellow muslin, and directing the movements of the girls by
almost imperceptible motions of her palm-leaf fan.

Brice was strangely excited. The novelty of the surroundings, the
wondrous, bright beauty of sea, and shore, and palm-grove that lay
within his range of vision were already beginning to weave their fetal
spell upon his susceptible nature. And then, again and again, his glance
would fall upon the sweet, oval face and scarlet lips of the girl that
sat in the doorway. Who was she? Not old Baldwin's wife, surely! for had
not the old fellow often told him that he was not married?... And what
a lovely spot to live in, this Rikitea! By Jove, he would like to stay a
year here instead of a few months only.... Again his eyes rested on
the figure in the doorway--and then his veins thrilled--Loisé, lazily
lifting her long, sweeping lashes had caught his admiring glance.

*****

Brice was no fool with women--that is, he thought so, never taking
into consideration that his numerous love affairs had always ended
disastrously--to the woman. And his mother, good simple soul, had
thought that the best means of taking her darling son away from
unapproved-of female society would be a voyage to the islands with old
Tom Baldwin!

Dinner was finished, and the two men were sitting out on the verandah
smoking and drinking whisky, when Brice said, carelessly--

“I wonder you never married, Baldwin.”

The old trader puffed at his pipe for a minute or two ere he answered--

“Did you notice that girl at all?” and he inclined his head towards the
door of the sitting-room.

The young man nodded.

Then the candid Baldwin told him her history. “I can't defend my own
position. I am no better than most traders--you see it is the custom
here, neither is she worse than any of these half-blooded Paumotuans. If
I married a native of this particular island I would only bring trouble
on my head. I could not show any preference for any particular girl for
a wife without raising the bitterest quarrels among some of the leading
chiefs here. You see, as a matter of fact, I should have married as soon
as I came here, twenty years ago; then the trouble would have been over.
But I didn't. I can see my mistake now, for I am getting old pretty
fast;... and now that the missionaries are here, and I do a lot of
business with them, I think us white men ought to show them some kind of
respect by getting married--properly married--to our wives.”

Brice laughed. “You mean, Baldwin, they should get married according to
the rites of the Roman Catholic Church?”

“Aye,” the old trader assented. “Now, there's Loisé, there--a clever,
intelligent, well-educated girl, and as far as money or trade goes,
as honest as the day. Can I, an old white-headed fool of sixty, go to
Australia and ask any _good_ woman to marry me, and come and live down
here? No.”

He smoked in silence awhile, and then resumed.

“Yes; honest and trustworthy she is, I believe; although the white
blood in her veins is no recommendation. If ever you should live in the
islands, my lad--which isn't likely--take an old fool's advice and never
marry a half-caste, either in native fashion or in a church with a brass
band and a bishop as leading features of the show.”

*****

Loisé came to them. “Will you take coffee, Tâmu?” she asked, standing
before them with folded hands.

The trader bent his head, and as the girl with noiseless step glided
gracefully away again he watched her.

“I think I will marry her, Brice. Sometimes when the old Marist priest
comes here he makes me feel d----d uncomfortable. Of course he is too
much of a gentleman--although he is a sky-pilot--to say all he would
like to say, but every time he bids me good-bye he says--cunning old
chap--'And think, M. Baldwin, her father, bad as he was, was a _white
man!_”

The young man listened in silence.

“I don't think I will ever go back to civilisation again, my lad--I am
no use there. Here I am somebody--there I am nobody; so I think I'll
give the old Father a bit of a surprise soon.” Then with his merry,
chuckling laugh--“and you'll be my best man. You see, it won't make any
difference to you. Nearly all that I have, when I peg out, will go to
you--the son of my old friend and shipmate.”

A curious feeling shot through Brice's heart as he murmured his thanks.
The recital of the girl's history made him burn with hot anger against
her. He had thought her so innocent. And yet the old trader's words,
“I've almost made up my mind to marry her,” seemed to dash to the ground
some vague hope, he knew not what.

*****

That night he lay on a soft mat on Baldwin's verandah and tried to
sleep. But from between the grey-reds of the serried line of palms that
encompassed the house on all but the seaward side, a pale face with
star-like eyes and ruby lips looked out and smiled upon him; in the
distant and ever varying cadences of the breaking surf he heard the
sweet melody of her voice; in the dazzling brilliancy of the starry
heavens her haunting face, with eyes alight with love, looked into his.

“D------n!” He rose from his couch, opened the gate, and went out along
the white dazzle of the starlit beach. “What the devil is the matter
with me? I must be drunk--on two or three nips of whisky.... What a
glorious, heavenly night!... And what a grand old fellow Baldwin is!...
And I'm an infernal scoundrel to think of her--or a d------d idiot, or a
miserable combination of both.”

*****

In a few days two things had happened. Baldwin had married Loisé, and
Brice was madly in love with her and she with him. Yet scarcely a word
had passed between them--he silent because of genuine shame at the
treachery of his thoughts to the old man; she because she but bided her
time.

One day he accepted an invitation from the old French priest to pay a
visit to the Mission. He went away quietly one morning, and then wrote
to Baldwin.

“Ten miles is a good long way off,” he thought. “I'll be all right in a
week or so--then I'll come back and be a fool no longer.”

The priest liked the young man, and in his simple, hospitable way, made
much of him. On the evening of the third day, as they paced to and fro
on the path in the Mission garden, they saw Baldwin's boat sail up to
the beach.

“See,” said the priest, with a smile, “M. Baldwin will not let me keep
you; and Loisé comes with him. So, so, you must go, but you will come
again?” and he pressed the young Englishman's hand.

The sturdy figure of the old trader came up through the garden; Loisé,
native fashion, walking behind him.

Knitting his heavy white eyebrows in mock anger he ordered Brice to the
boat, and then extending his hand to the priest--“I must take him back,
Father; the _Malolo_ sails to-morrow, and the skipper is coming ashore
to-night to dinner, to say good-bye; and, as you know, Father, I'm a
silly old man with the whisky bottle, and I'll get Mr. Brice to keep me
steady.”

The tall, thin old priest raised his finger warningly and shook his head
at old Baldwin and then smiled.

“Ah, M. Baldwin, I am very much afraid that I will never make you to
understand that too much of the whisky is very bad for the head.”

With a parting glass of wine they bade the good Father good-bye, and
then hoisting the sail, they stood across for Rikitea. The sun had
dipped, and the land-breeze stole softly down from the mountains and
sped the boat along. Baldwin was noisy and jocular; Brice silent and ill
at ease.

Another hour's run and Baldwin sailed the boat close under the trading
schooner's stern. Leaning over the rail was the pyjama-clad captain,
smoking a cigar.

“Now then, Harding,” bawled the old trader, “don't forget to be up to
time, eight o'clock.”

“Come aboard, and make out your order for your trade, you noisy old
_Areoi_ devil,” said Harding. “You'll 'make it out ashore,' eh? No
fear, I won't trust you, you careless, forgetful old dog. So just lay up
alongside, and I'll take you ashore in half an hour.”

“By Jupiter, I mustn't forget the order,” and Baldwin, finding he could
not inveigle the captain ashore just then, ran the boat alongside the
schooner and stepped over her rail--“Go on, Brice, my lad. I'll soon be
with you. Give him some whisky or beer, or something, Loisé, as soon as
you get to the house. He looks as melancholy as a ghost.”

As the boat's crew pushed off from the schooner, Brice came aft to
steer, and placing his hand on the tiller it touched Loisé's. She moved
aside to make room for him, and he heard his name whispered, and in the
darkness he saw her lips part in a happy smile.

Then, still silent, they were pulled ashore.

*****

From his end of the house he heard a soft footfall enter the big room,
and then stop. She was standing by the table when, soon after, he came
out of his room. At the sound of his footstep she turned the flame of
the shaded lamp to its full height, and then raised her face and looked
at him. There was a strange, radiant expectancy in her eyes that set his
heart to beat wildly. Then he remembered her husband--his friend.

“I suppose Tom won't be long,” he began, nervously, when she came over
to him and placed her hand on his sleeve. The slumbrous eyes were all
aglow now, and her bosom rose and fell in short, quick strokes beneath
her white muslin gown.

“Why did you go away?” she said, her voice scarce raised above a
whisper, yet quivering and tremulous with emotion.

He tried to look away from her, trembling himself, and not knowing what
to say.

“Ah,” she said, “speak to me, answer me; why don't you say something to
me? I thought that once your eyes sought mine in the boat”--then as she
saw him still standing awkward and silent, all her wild passion burst
out--“Brice, Brice, I love you, I love you. And you, you hate me.” He
tried to stop her.

Her voice sank again. “Oh, yes, yes; you hate me, else why would you go
away without one word to me? Baldwin has told you of--of--of something.
It is all true, quite true, and I am wicked, wicked; no woman could have
been worse--and you hate me.”

She released her hold upon his arm, and walking over to the window leant
against it and wept passionately.

He went over to her and placed his hand upon her shoulder.

“Look here, Loisé, I'm very, very sorry I ever came here in the
_Malolo_”--her shaking figure seemed to shrink at the words--“for I love
you too, but, Loisé--your husband was my father's oldest friend--and
mine.”

The oval, tear-swept face was dangerously close to his now, and set his
blood racing again in all the quick, hot madness of youth.

“What is that to me?” she whispered; “I love you.”

Brice shut his fists tightly and then--fatal mistake--tried to be angry
and tender at the same moment.

“Ah, but Loisé, you, as well as I, know that among English people, for a
man to love his friend's wife----”

Again the low whisper--“What is that to me--and you? You love me, you
say. And, we are not among English people. I have my mother's heart--not
a cold English heart.”

“Loisé, Baldwin is my friend. He looks upon me as his son, and he trusts
me--and trusts you.... I could never look him in the face again.... If
he were any other man I wouldn't care, or if, if----”

She lifted her face from his shoulder. “Then you only lied to me. You
don't love me!”

That made him reckless. “Love you! By God. I love you so that if you
were any other man's wife but his-------” He looked steadily at her and
then, with gentle force, tried to take her arm from his neck.

She knew now that he was the stronger of the two, and yet wished to hear
more.

“Brice, dear Brice,” she bent his head down to her lips, “if Baldwin
died would you marry me?”

The faintly murmured words struck him like a shot; she still holding her
arms around him, watched his face.

He kissed her on the lips. “I would marry you and never go back to the
world again,” he answered, in the blind passion of the moment.

A hot, passionate kiss on his lips and she was gone, and Brice, with
throbbing pulses and shame in his heart, took up his hat and went out
upon the beach. He couldn't meet Baldwin just then. Other men's wives
had never made him feel such a miserable scoundrel as did this reckless
half-blood with the scarlet lips and starry eyes.

*****

That night old Baldwin and the captain of the _Malolo_ got thoroughly
drunk in the orthodox and time-honoured Island business fashion. Brice,
afraid of “making an ass of himself,” was glad to get away, and took
the captain on board at midnight in Baldwin's boat, and at the mate's
invitation remained for breakfast.

At daylight the mate got the _Malolo_ under weigh, the skipper, with
aching head, sitting up in his bunk and cursing the old trader's
hospitality.

When the vessel was well outside the reef, Brice bade him good-bye, and
getting his boat alongside started for the shore.

“I will--I must--clear out of this,” he was telling himself as the boat
swept round the point of the passage on the last sweep of the ocean
swell. “I can't stay under the same roof with him day after day, month
after month, and not feel my folly and her weakness. But where the deuce
I can get to for five months till the schooner comes back, I don't know.
There's the Mission, but that is too close; the old fellow would only
bring me back again in a week.”

*****

Suddenly a strange, weird cry pealed over the water from the native
village, a cry that to him was mysterious, as well as mournful and
blood-chilling.

The four natives who pulled the boat had rested on their oars the
instant they heard the cry, and with alarm and deep concern depicted on
their countenances were looking toward the shore.

“What is it, boys?” said Brice in English.

Before the native to whom he spoke could answer, the long, loud wailing
cry again burst forth.

“Some man die,” said the native who pulled stroke-oar to Brice--he was
the only one who knew English.

Then Brice, following the looks of his crew, saw that around the
white paling fence that enclosed Baldwin's house was gathered a great
concourse of natives, most of whom were sitting on the ground.

“Give way, boys,” he said, with an instinctive feeling of fear that
something dreadful had happened. In another five minutes the boat
touched the sand and Brice sprang out.

Maturei alone, of all the motionless, silent crowd that gathered around
the house, rose and walked down to him.

“Oh, white man, Tâmu is dead!”

*****

He felt the shock terribly, and for a moment or two was motionless and
nerveless. Then the prolonged wailing note of grief from a thousand
throats again broke out and brought him to his senses, and with hasty
step he opened the gate and went in.

With white face and shaking limbs Loisé met him at the door and
endeavoured to speak, but only hollow, inarticulate sounds came from
her lips, and sitting down on a cane sofa she covered her face with her
robe, after the manner of the people of the island when in the presence
of death.

Presently the door of Baldwin's room opened, and the white-haired old
priest came out and laid his hand sympathetically on the young man's
arm, and drew him aside.

He told him all in a few words. An hour before daylight Loisé and the
boy Maturei had heard the old trader breathing stertorously, and ere
they could raise him to a sitting position he had breathed his last.

Heart disease, the good Father said. And he was so careless a man, was
M. Baldwin. And then with tears in his eyes the priest told Brice how,
from the olden times when Baldwin, pretending to scoff at the efforts of
the missionaries, had yet ever been their best and truest friend.

“And now he is dead, M. Brice, and had I been but a little sooner I
could have closed his eyes. I was passing in my boat, hastening to take
the mission letters to the _Malolo_ when I heard the_ tagi_ (the death
wail) of the people here, and hastening ashore found he had just passed
away.”

Sick at heart as he was, the young man was glad of the priest's
presence, and presently together they went in and looked at the still
figure in the bedroom.

When they returned to the front room they found Loisé had gone.

“She was afraid to stay in the house of death,” said Maturei, “and has
gone to Vehaga” (a village eight miles away), “and these are her words
to the Father and to the friend of Târau--'Naught have I taken from the
house of Tâmu, and naught do I want'--and then she was gone.”

The old priest nodded to Brice--“Native blood, native blood, M. Brice.
Do not, I pray you, misjudge her. She only does this because she knows
the village feeling against her. She does not belong to this island,
and the people here resented, in a quiet way, her marriage with my old
friend. She is not cruel and ungrateful as you think. It is but her
way of showing these natives that she cares not to benefit by Baldwin's
death. By and by we will send for her.”

*****

After Baldwin had been buried and matters arranged, Brice and the
priest, and a colleague from the Mission, read the will, and Brice found
himself in possession of some two or three thousand dollars in cash and
as much in trade. The house at Rikitea and a thousand dollars were for
Loisé.

He told the Fathers to send word over to Vehaga and tell Loisé that
he only awaited her to come and take the house over from him. As for
himself he would gladly accept their kind invitation to remain at the
Mission as their guest till the schooner returned.

The shock of his friend's death had all but cured him of his passion,
and he felt sure now of his own strength.

*****

But day after day, and then week after week passed, and no word came
from Vehaga, till one evening as he leant over the railing of the
garden, looking out upon the gorgeous setting of the sun into the ocean,
Maturei came paddling across the smooth waters of the harbour, and,
drawing his canoe up on the beach, the boy approached the white man.

“See,” he said, “Loisé hath sent thee this.”

He unrolled a packet of broad, dried palm leaves, and taking from it a
thick necklet of sweet-smelling _kurahini_ buds, placed it in Brice's
hand.

He knew its meaning--it was the gift of a woman to an accepted lover.

The perfume of the flowers brought back her face to him in a moment.
There was a brief struggle in his mind; and then home, friends, his
future prospects in the great outside world, went to the wall, and the
half-blood had won.

Slowly he raised the token and placed it over his head and round his
neck.

*****

In the morning she came. He held out his hand and drew her to him, and
looking down into her eyes, he kissed her. Her lips quivered a little,
and then the long lashes fell, and he felt her tremble.

“Loisé,” he said simply, “will you be my wife?”

She glanced up at him, fearfully.

“Would you marry me?”

His face crimsoned--“Yes, of course. You were his wife. I can't forget
that. And, besides, you said once that you loved me.”

*****

They were very happy for five or six years down there in Rikitea. They
had one child born to them--a girl with a face as beautiful as her
mother's.

Then a strange and deadly epidemic, unknown to the people of Rikitea,
swept through the Paumotu Group, from Pitcairn Island to Marutea, and
in every village, on every palm-clad atoll, death stalked, and the brown
people sickened and shivered under their mat coverings, and died. And
from island to island, borne on the very breath of the trade-wind, the
terror passed, and left behind it empty, silent clusters of houses,
nestling under the cocoanuts; and many a whale-ship beating back to the
coast of South America, sailed close in to the shore and waited for the
canoes to come off with fruit and vegetables; but none came, for the
canoes had long months before blistered and cracked and rotted under
the fierce rays of the Paumotu sun, and the owners lay dead in their
thatched houses; for how could the dead bury the dead?

It came to Rikitea, and Harry Brice and the priests of the Mission went
from village to village trying by such means as lay in their power to
allay the deadly scourge. Brice had seen his little girl die, and then
Loisé was smitten, and in a few days Brice saw the imprint of death
stamped upon her features.

*****

As he sat and watched by her at night, and listened to the wild,
delirious words of the fierce fever that held her in its cruel grasp,
he heard her say that which chilled his very heart's blood. At first
he thought it to be but the strange imaginings of her weak and fevered
brain. But as the night wore on he was undeceived.

Just as daylight began to shoot its streaks of red and gold through
the plumed palm-tops, she awoke from a fitful and tortured slumber, and
opened her eyes to gaze upon the haggard features of her husband.

“Loisé,” he said, with a choking voice, “tell me, for God's sake, the
truth about Baldwin. _Did you kill him?_”

She put her thin, wasted hands over her dark, burning eyes, and Brice
saw the tears run down and wet the pillow.

Then she answered--

“Yes, I killed him; for I loved you, and that night I went mad!”

*****

“Don't go away from me, Harry,” she said, with hard, panting breaths;
“don't let me die by myself.... I will soon be dead now; come closer to
me, I will tell you all.”

He knelt beside her and listened. She told him all in a few words. As
Baldwin lay in his drunken sleep, she and Maturei had pierced him to the
heart with one of the long, slender, steel needles used by the natives
in mat-making. There was no blood to be seen in the morning, Maturei was
too cunning for that.

Brice staggered to his feet and tried to curse her. The last grey pallor
had deepened on her lips, and they moved and murmured, “It was because I
loved you, Harry.”

*****

The sun was over the tops of the cocoanuts when the gate opened, and the
white-haired old priest came in and laid his hand gently on Brice who
sat with bowed figure and hidden face.

“How is your wife now, my good friend?” he asked.

Slowly the trader raised his face, and his voice sounded like a sob.

“Dead; thank God!”

With softened tread the old man passed through to the inner room,
and taking the cold hands of Brice's wife tenderly within his own, he
clasped them together and placed the emblem of Christ upon the quiet
bosom.




AT A KAFA-DRINKING




I.

The first cool breaths of the land breeze, chilled by its passage
through the dew-laden forest, touched our cheeks softly that night as
we sat on the traders' verandah, facing the white, shimmering beach,
smoking and watching the native children at play, and listening for the
first deep boom of the wooden _logo_ or bell that would send them racing
homewards to their parents and evening prayer.

*****

“There it is,” said our host, who sat in the farthest corner, with his
long legs resting by the heels on the white railing; “and now you'll see
them scatter.”

The loud cries and shrill laughter came to a sudden stop as the boom of
the _logo_ reached the players, and then a clear boyish voice reached
us--“_Ua ta le logo_” (the bell has sounded). Like smoke before the gale
the lithe, half-naked figures fled silently in twos and threes between
the cocoanuts, and the beach lay deserted.

*****

One by one the lights gleamed brightly through the trees as the women
piled the fires in each house with broken cocoanut shells. There was but
the faintest breath of wind, and through the open sides of most of the
houses not enough to flicker the steady light, as the head of the family
seated himself (or herself) close to the fire, and, hymn-book in hand,
led off the singing. Quite near us was a more pretentious-looking
structure than the others, and looking down upon it we saw that the
gravelled floor was covered with fine, clean mats, and arranged all
round the sides of the house were a number of camphorwood boxes,
always--in a Samoan house--the outward and visible sign of a well-to-do
man. There was no fire lighted here; placed in the centre of the one
room there stood a lamp with a gorgeous-looking shade, of many colours.
This was the chief's house, and the chief of Aleipata was one of the
strong men of Samoa--both politically and physically. Two of our party
on the verandah were strangers to Samoa, and they drew their chairs
nearer, and gazed with interest at the chief and his immediate following
as they proceeded with their simple service. There were quite a number
of the _aua-luma_ (unmarried women) of the village present in the
chief's house that evening, and as their tuneful voices blend in an
evening hymn--

“_Matou te nau e faafetai_”--we wished that instead of four verses there
had been ten.

“Can you tell us, Lester,” said one of the strangers to our host, “the
meaning of the last words?--they came out so clearly that I believe I've
caught them,” and to our surprise he sang the last line--

     Ia matou moe tau ia te oe.

*****

“Well, now, I don't know if I can. Samoan hymns puzzle me; you see the
language used in addressing the Deity is vastly different to that used
ordinarily, but I take it that the words you so correctly repeated mean,
'Let us sleep in peace with Thee.' Curious people these Samoans,” he
muttered, more to himself than for us: “soon be as hypocritical as the
average white man. 'Let us sleep in peace with Thee,' and that fellow
(the chief), his two brothers, and about a paddockful of young Samoan
bucks haven't slept at all for this two weeks. All the night is spent in
counting cartridges, melting lead for bullets, and cleaning their arms,
only knocking off for a drink of kava. Well, I suppose,” he continued,
turning to us, “they're all itching to fight, and as soon as the U.S.S.
_Resacca_ leaves Apia they'll commence in earnest, and us poor devils of
traders will be left here doing nothing and cursing this infernal love
of fighting, which is inborn with Samoans and a part of their natural
cussedness which, if the Creator hadn't given it to them, would have put
many a dollar into my pocket.”

*****

“Father,” said a voice that came up to us from the gloom of the young
cocoanuts' foliage at the side of the house, “Felipe is here, and
wants to know if he may come up and speak to the _alii papalagi_ (white
gentlemen).”

“Right you are, Felipe, my lad,” said the trader in a more than usual
kindly voice, “bring him up, Atalina, and then run away to the chief's
and get some of the _aua-luma_ to come over, with you and make a bowl of
kava.”

“Now, Doctor L------,” Lester continued, addressing himself to one of
his guests, the surgeon of an American war vessel then stationed in
Samoa, and a fellow-countryman of his, “I'll show you as fine a specimen
of manhood and intelligence as God ever made, although he has got a
tanned hide.”

*****

The native that ascended the steps and stood before us with his hat in
his hand respectfully saluting, was indeed, as Lester called him,
“a fine specimen.” Clothed only in a blue and white _lava lava_ or
waist-cloth, his clean-cut limbs, muscular figure, and skin like
polished bronze, stood revealed in the full light that now flooded room
and verandah from the lamp lit in the sitting-room. The finely-plaited
Manhiki hat held in his right hand seemed somewhat out of place with the
rest of his attire, and was evidently not much worn. Probably Felipe had
merely brought it for the occasion, as a symbol to us of his superior
tastes and ideas.

He shook hands with us all round, and then, at Lester's invitation,
followed us inside, and sat down cross-legged on the mats and
courteously awaited us to talk to him. The American surgeon offered him
a cigar, which he politely declined, and produced from the folds of
his _lava lava_ a bundle of banana-leaf cigarettes, filled with strong
tobacco. One of these, at a nod from the trader, he lit, and commenced
to smoke.

*****

In a few minutes we heard the crunching of the gravelled path under bare
feet, and then some three or four of the _aua-luma_--the kava-chewing
girls--ascended the steps and took up their position by the huge wooden
kava bowl. As the girls, under the careful supervision of the trader's
wife, prepared the drink, we fell into a general conversation.

“I wonder now,” said the doctor to the trader, “that you, Lester, who,
by your own showing, are by no means infatuated with the dreamy monotony
of island life, can yet stay here, year after year, seeing nothing and
hearing nothing of the world that lies outside these lonely islands.
Have you no desire at all to go back again into the world?”

A faint movement--the index of some rapidly passing emotion--for a
moment disturbed the calm, placid features of Lester, as he answered
quietly: “No, doctor, I don't think it's likely I'll ever see the
outside world, as you call it, again. I've had my hopes and ambitions,
like every one else; but they didn't pan out as I expected,... and then
I became Lester the Trader, and as Lester the Trader I'll die, have
a whitey-brown crowd at my funeral; and, if you came here ten years
afterwards, the people couldn't even tell you where I was planted.”

The doctor nodded. “Just so. Like all native races, their affections and
emotions are deep but transient--no better in that way than the average
American nigger.”

The kava was finished now, and was handed round to us by the slender
graceful hands of the trader's little daughter. As Felipe, the last to
drink, handed back the _ipu_ to the girl, his eyes lit up, and he spoke
to our host, addressing him, native fashion, by his Christian name, and
speaking in his own tongue.

“How is it, Tiaki (Jack), that I hear thee tell these thy friends that
we of the brown skins have but shallow hearts and forget quickly? Dost
think that if, when thy time comes, and thou goest, that thy wife and
child will not grieve? Hast thou not heard of our white man who, when he
died, yet left his name upon our hearts?--and yet we were in those days
heathens and followers of our own gods.”

The trader nodded kindly, and turned to us. “Do you want to hear a
yarn about one of the old style of white men that used to live like
fighting-cocks in Samoa? Felipe here has rounded on me for saying that
his countrymen soon forget, and has brought up this wandering _papalagi
tafea_ (beachcomber) as an instance of how the natives will stick to a
man once he proves himself a man.”




II.

“It was the tenth year after the Cruel Captain with the three ships had
anchored in Apia,{*} and when we of Aleipata were at war with the people
of Fagaloa. In those days we had no white man in this town and longed
greatly to get one. But they were few in Samoa then; one was there at
Tiavea, who had fled from a man-of-war of England, one at Saluafàta, and
perhaps one or two more at Tutuila or Savaii--that was all.

     * Commodore Wilkes, in command of the famous United States
     Exploring Expedition, 1836-40. He was a noted martinet, and
     was called _Le alii Saua_ (the Cruel Captain).

“My father's name was Lauati. He, with his mother, lived on the far side
of the village, away from the rest of the houses. There were no others
living in the house with them, for my father's mother was very poor, and
all day long she laboured--some-times at making mats, and sometimes at
beating out _siapo_ (tappa) cloth. As the mats were made, and the tappa
was bleached, and figures and patterns drawn upon it, she rolled them up
and put them away overhead on the beams of the house, for she was
eaten up with poverty, and these mats and tappa cloth was she gathering
together so that she might be able to pay for my father's, tattooing.
And as she worked on the shore, so did my father toil on the sea, for
although he was not yet tattooed he was skilled more than any other
youth in _sisu atu_ (bonita catching). Sometimes the chief, who was a
greedy man, would take all his fish and leave him none for himself to
take home to his house. Sometimes he would give him one, and then my
father would cut off a piece for his mother, and take the rest and sell
it for taro and bread-fruit. And all this time he worked, worked with
his mother, so that he would have enough to pay for his tattooing, for
to reach his age and not be tattooed is thought a disgrace.

*****

“Now, in the chief's house was a young girl named Uluvao. She used to
meet my father by stealth, for the chief--who was her uncle--designed to
give her in marriage to a man of Siumu, who was a little chief, and had
asked him for her. So Uluvao, who dreaded her uncle's wrath, would creep
out at night from his house, and going down to the beach swim along
the shore till she came to the lonely place where my father lived. His
mother would await her coming on the beach, and then these three would
sit together in the house and talk. If a footstep sounded, then the
girl would flee, for she knew her uncle's club would soon bite into my
father's brain did he know of these stolen meetings.

*****

“One day it came about that a great _fono_ (meeting) was to be held
at Falealili, and Tuialo, the chief, and many other chiefs, and their
_tulafale_ or talking men, set out to cross the mountains to Falealili.
Six days would they be away, and Uluvao and my father rejoiced, for they
could now meet and speak openly, for the fear of the chiefs face was
not before them, and the people of the village knew my father loved the
girl, so when they saw them together they only smiled, or else turned
their faces another way. That night, in the big council house, there was
a great number of the young men and women gathered together, and they
danced and sang, and much kava was drunk. Presently the sister of the
chief, who was a woman with a bitter tongue, came to the house, and
saw and mocked at my father, and called him a c naked wretch.' (Thou
knowest, Tiaki, if a man be not tattooed we called him naked.)

“'Alas!' said my father, 'I am poor; oh, lady, how can I help it?'

“The old woman's heart softened. 'Get thee out upon the sea and catch a
fat turtle for a gift to my brother, and thou shalt be tattooed when he
returns,' she said.

“The people laughed, for they knew that turtle were not to be caught
at a silly woman's bidding. But my father rose up and went out into
the darkness towards his house. As he walked on the sand his name was
called, and Uluvao ran by his side.

“'Lauati,' she said, 'let me come with thee. Let us hasten and get thy
canoe, and seek a turtle on Nu'ulua and Nu'utele, for the night is dark,
and we may find one.'

“My father took her hand, and they ran and launched the canoe.

*****

“My father paddled, Uluvao sat in the bow of the canoe. The night was
very dark, and she was frightened, for in the waters hereabout are many
_tanifa_ the thick, short shark, that will leap out of the water and
fall on a canoe and crush it, so that those who paddle may be thrown out
and devoured. And as she trembled she looked out at the shore of the two
islands, which were now close to, and said to my father, 'Lo! what is
this? I see a light as of a little fire.'

“Lauati ceased to paddle and looked. And there, between the trunks of
the cocoanuts, he saw the faint gleam of a little fire, and something,
as of a figure, that moved.

“The girl Uluvao had a quick wisdom. 'Ah,' said she, 'perhaps it is the
war canoes (taumualua) from Falifa. Those dogs hath learnt that all our
men are gone away to Falealili to the _fono_ and they have come here to
the islands to eat and rest, so that they may fall upon our town when it
is dawn, and slay us all. Let us back, ere it is too late.'

“But as she spoke she looked into the water, and my father looked too;
and they both trembled. Deep down in the blackness of the sea was it
that they saw--yet it quickly came nearer and nearer, like unto a great
flame of white fire. It was a _tanlfa_. Like flashes of lightning did
my father dash his paddle into the water and urge the canoe to the land,
for he knew that when the _tanifa_ had come to the surface it would look
and then dive, and when it came up again would spring upon and devour
them both.

“'It is better to give our heads to the men of Falifa than for us to go
into the belly of the shark,' he said, 'and it may be we can land, and
they see us not.' And so with fear gnawing at their vitals the canoe
flew along, and the streak of fire underneath was close upon them when
they struck the edge of the coral and knew they were safe.

*****

“They dragged the canoe over the reef and then got in again, and paddled
softly along till they passed the light of the fire, and then they
landed on a little beach about a hundred _gafa_ (fathoms) away. Then
again Uluvao, who was a girl of wisdom, spoke.

*****

“'Listen,' she said, 'O man of my heart. Let us creep through the bushes
and look. It may be that these men of Falifâ are tired and weary, and
sleep like hogs. Take thou, then, O Lauati, thy shark club and knife
from the canoe, and perchance we may fall upon one that sleepest away
from the rest, then shalt thou strike, and thou and I drag him away into
the bushes and take his head. Then, ere it is well dawn, we will be back
in the town, and Tuialo will no longer keep me from thee, for the head
of a Falifa man will win his heart better than a fat turtle, and I will
be wife to thee.'

“My father was pleased at her words. So they crept like snakes along the
dewy ground. When they came to a jagged boulder covered with vines, that
was near unto the fire, they looked and saw but one man, and, lo! he was
a _papalagi_--a white man. And then, until it was dawn, my father and
the girl hid behind the jagged rock and watched.

*****

“The white man was sitting on the sand, with his face clasped in his
hands. At his feet lay another man, with his white face turned up to the
sky, and those that watched saw that he was dead. He who sat over the
dead man was tall and thin, and his hands were like the talons of the
great fish eagle, so thin and bony were they. His garments were ragged
and old, and his feet were bare; and as my father looked at him his
heart became pitiful, and he whispered to Uluvao, 'Let us call out. He
is but weak, and I can master him if he springs upon me. Let us speak.'?

“But Uluvao held him back. 'Nay,' she said, 'he may have a gun and
shoot.'

“So they waited till the sun rose.

*****

“The white man stood and looked about. Then he walked down to the beach,
and my father and the girl saw lying on the rocks a little boat. The man
went to the side, and put in his hand and brought out something in his
hand, and came back and sat down again by the face of the dead. He had
gone to the boat for food, and my father saw him place a biscuit to his
mouth and commence to eat. But ere he swallowed any it fell from his
hand upon the sand and he threw himself upon the body of the dead man
and wept, and his tears ran down over the face that was cold and were
drank up by the sand.

“Then Uluvao began to weep, and my father stood up and called out to the
white man _Talofa!_

“He gazed at them and spoke not, but let them come close to him, and
pointing to him who lay on the sand, he covered his face with his hands
and bowed his head. Then Lauati ran and climbed a cocoanut tree and
brought him two young nuts and made him drink, and Uluvao got broad
leaves and covered over the face of the dead from the hot sun. Not
one word of our tongue could he speak, but yet from signs that he made
Lauati and the girl knew that he wished to bury the dead man. So they
two dug a deep grave in the sand, far up on the bank, where it lay soft
and deep and covered with vines. When it was finished they lifted the
dead white man and laid him beside it. And as they looked upon him the
other came and knelt beside it and spoke many words into the ear that
heard not, and Uluvao wept again to see his grief. At last they laid him
in the grave and all three threw in the sand and filled it up.

“Then these two took the strange white man by the hand and led him
away into a little hut that was sometimes used by those who came to the
island to fish. They made him eat and then sleep, and while he slept
they carried up the things out of the boat and put them in the house
beside him.

*****

“When the sun was high in the heavens, the white man awoke, and my
father took his hand and pointed to the boat, and then to the houses
across the sea. He bent his head and followed, and they all got into the
boat, and hoisted the sail. When the boat came close to the passage of
Aleipata, the people ran from out their houses, and stood upon the beach
and wondered. And Lauati and Uluvao laughed and sang, and called out:
'Ho, ho, people! we have brought a great gift--a white man from over
the sea. Send word quickly to Tuialo that he may return and see this our
white man,' and, as the boat touched the sand, the old woman, the sister
of Tuialo, came up, and said to Lauati, 'Well hast thou done, O lucky
one! Better is this gift of a white man than many turtle.'

“Then she took the stranger to her house, and pigs and fowls were
killed, and yams and taro cooked, and a messenger sent to Tuialo to
hasten back quickly, and see this gift from the gods. For they were
quick to see that in the boat were muskets and powder and bullets, and
all the people rejoiced, for they thought that this white man could mend
for them many guns that were broken and useless, and help them to fight
against the men or Falifa.

*****

“In two days Tuialo came back, and he made much of the white man, and
Uluvao he gave to my father for wife. And for the white man were the
softest mats and the best pieces of _siapo_ and he lived for nearly the
space of two years in the chief's house. And all this time he worked
at making boats and mending the broken guns and muskets, and little by
little the words of our tongue came to him, and he learned to tell us
many things. Yet at night-time he would always come to my father's house
and sit with him and talk, and sometimes Uluvao would make kava for him
and my father.

“At about the end of the second year, there came a whaleship, and
Tuialo, and the white man, whom we called _Tui-fana,_ 'the gun-mender,'
went out to her, and took with them many pigs and yams to exchange for
guns and powder. When the buying and selling was over, the captain of
the ship gave Tui-fana a gun with two barrels--bright was it and new,
and Tuialo, the chief, was eaten up with envy, and begged his white man
for the gun, but he said: 'Nay, not now; when we are in the house we
will talk.'

*****

“Like as a swarm of flies, the people gathered round the council-house
to see the guns and the powder and the swords that had been brought from
the ship. And in the middle of the house sat Tui-fana with the gun with
two barrels in his hand.

“When all the chiefs had come in and sat down Tuialo came. His face was
smiles, but his heart was full of bitterness towards Tui-fana, and as he
spoke to the people and told them of the words that had been spoken
by the captain of the ship, he said, 'And see this white man, this
Tui-fana, who hath grown rich among us, is as greedy as a Tongan, and
keepeth for himself a new gun with two barrels.'

“The white stood up and spoke: 'Nay, not greedy am I. Take, O chief, all
I have; my house, my mats, my land, and the wife thou gavest me, but yet
would I say, “Let me keep this gun with the two barrels.”'

“Tuialo was eaten up with greed, yet was his mind set on the gun, so he
answered, 'Nay, that were to make thee as poor as when thou comest to
us. Give me the gun, 'tis all I ask.'

“'It is not mine to give,' he answered. Then he rose and spoke to the
people. 'See,' said he, 'Tuialo, the chief, desires this gun, and I say
it is not mine to give, for to Lauati did I promise such a gun a year
gone by. This, then, will I do. Unto Tuialo will I give my land, my
house, and all that is mine, but to Lauati I give the gun, for so I
promised.'

*****

“Then fierce looks passed between the chief and the white man, and the
people surged together to and fro, for they were divided, some for the
fear of the chief, and some for the love of the white man. But most
were for that Lauati should keep the gun. And so Tuialo, seeing that the
people's hearts were against him, put on a smooth face, and came to the
white man and said--

“'Thou art as a son to me. Lauati shall keep the gun, and thou shalt
keep thy house and lands. I will take nothing from thee. Let us be for
ever friends.'

“Then the white said to the chief, 'O chief, gladly will I give thee all
I have, but this man, Lauati, is as my brother, and I promised------'

“But Tuialo put his hand on the white man's mouth, and said, 'Say no
more, my son; I was but angered.'

*****

“Yet see now his wickedness. For that night, when my father and Uluvao,
my mother, were sitting with the white man and his wife, and drinking
kava, there suddenly sprang in upon them ten men, who stood over them
with clubs poised. They were the body-men of Tuialo.

“'Drink thy kava,' said one to the white man, 'and then come out to
die.'

*****

“Ah, he was a man! He took the cup of kava from the hands of his wife's
sister, and said--

“'It is well. All men must die. But yet would I see Tuialo before the
club fells.'

“The chief but waited outside, and he came.

“'Must I die?' said the white man.

“'Ay,' said Tuialo. 'Two such as thee and I cannot live at the same
time. Thou art almost as great a man as I.'

“The white man bent his head. Then he put out his hand to my father and
said, 'Farewell, O my friend.'

“Lauati, my father, fell at the chief's feet. 'Take thou the gun, O
chief, but spare his life.'

“Tuialo laughed. 'The gun will I take, Lauati, but his life I must have
also.'

“'My life for his,' said my father.

“'And mine,' said Uluvao, my mother.

“'And mine also,' said Manini, the white man's wife; and both she and
Taulaga, her sister, bent their knees to the chief.

“The white man tried to spring up, but four strong men held him.

“Then Tuialo looked at the pair who knelt before him. He stroked his
club, and spoke to his body-men.

“'Bring them all outside.' They went together to the beach. 'Brave
talkers ye be,' said he; 'who now will say “I die for the white man”?'

“'Nay, heed them not, Tuialo,' said the white man. 'On me alone let the
club fell.'

“But the chief gave him no answer, looking only at my father and the
three women.”

*****

“'My life,' said Taulaga, the girl; and she knelt on the sand.

“The club swung round and struck her on the side of her head, and it
beat it in. She fell, and died quickly.

“'Oho,' mocked Tuialo, 'is there but one life offered for so great a man
as Tiufana?'

“Lauati fell before him. 'Spare me not, O chief, if my life but saves
his.'

“And again the club swung, and Lauati, my Either, died too, and as he
fell his blood mixed with that of Taulaga.

“And then Uluvao and Manini, placing some little faith in his mocking
words, knelt, and their blood too poured out on the ground, and the
three women and my father lay in a heap together.

“Now I, Felipe, was but a child, and when my mother had gone to kneel
under the club she had placed me under a _fetan_ tree near by. The
chiefs eye fell on me, and a man took me up and carried me to him.

“Then the white man said, 'Hurt not the child, O chief, or I curse thee
before I die, and thou wastest away.'

“So Tuialo spared me.

“Then the chief came to the white man, and the two who held his hands
pulled them well apart, and Tuialo once more swung his blood-dyed club.
It fell, and the white man's head fell upon his breast.”




MRS. LIARDET: A SOUTH SEA TRADING EPISODE

Captain Dave Liardet, of the trading schooner _Motutakea_, of Sydney,
was sitting propped up in his bunk smoking his last pipe. His very last.
He knew that, for the Belgian doctor-naturalist, his passenger, had just
said so; and besides, one look at the gaping hole in his right side,
that he had got two days before at La Vandola, in the Admiralties, from
the broad-bladed obsidian native knife, had told him he had made his
last voyage. The knife-blade lay on the cabin table before him, and his
eye rested on it for a moment with a transient gleam of satisfaction as
he remembered how well Tommy, the Tonga boy, who pulled the bow oar, had
sent a Snider bullet through the body of the yellow-skinned buck from
whom the knife-thrust had come. From the blade of obsidian on the table
his eye turned to the portrait of a woman in porcelain that hung just
over the clock. It was a face fair enough to look at, and Liardet, with
a muttered curse of physical agony, leant his body forward to get a
closer view of it, and said, “Poor little woman; it'll be darned rough
on her.” Then Russell, the mate, came down.

*****

“Joe,” said Liardet, in his practical way, which even the words of the
doctor and the face of the clock before him could not change, “cock your
ears and listen, for I haven't got much time, and you have the ship to
look to. I want you to tell the owners that this affair at La Vandola
wasn't my fault. We was doing fair and square trading when a buck drives
his knife into me for no apparent reason beyond the simple damned fun of
the thing. Well, he's done for me, and Tommy Tonga for him, and that's
all you've got to say about that. Next thing is to ask 'em to sling
Tommy a fiver over and above his wages--for saving of the boat and
trade, mind, Joe. Don't say for potting the nigger, Joe; boat and trade,
boat and trade, that's the tack to go on with owners, Joe. Well, let's
see now.... My old woman. See she gets fair play, wages up to date of
death, eh, Joe? By God, old man, she won't get much of a cheque--only
four months out now from Sydney. Look here, Joe, the Belgian's all
right. He won't go telling tales. So don't you log me dead for another
month, and make as bad a passage as you can. There's only us three white
men aboard, and the native boys will take their Bible oath I didn't die
until the ship was off Lord Howe Island if you give 'em a box of
tobacco. You see, Joe? That's the dodge. More days, more dollars, and
the longer you keep the ship at sea the more money comes to all hands.
And I know I can trust you, Joe, to lend a hand in making the old
woman's cheque a little bigger. Right.... We've been two years together
now, Joe, and this is the only thing I've ever asked you to do or done
myself that wasn't square and aboveboard. But look here”--here, for some
half-minute, Captain Dave Liardet launched into profanity--“I tell you
that the owners of this ship wouldn't care a single curse if you and I
and every living soul aboard had had our livers cut out at La Vandola as
long as _they_ didn't lose money over it, and haven't to pay our wages
to our wives and children.”

*****

Liardet gasped and choked, and the little Belgian naturalist tripped
down and wiped away the dark stream that began to trickle down the
grizzled beard, and then he and Russell, the mate, laid him down again.

“Don't go,” whispered the Belgian to the other, “he sink ver' fast now.”
 The closed eyelids opened a little and looked up through the skylight
at the brown face of Tommy the Tongan, and then Russell gave the dying
skipper brandy and water. Then, with fast-fading eyes on the picture in
porcelain, he asked Russell what course he was keeping.

“As near south as can be,” said the mate, “but with this breeze we could
soon make the Great Barrier, and there's always hope, cap'n. Let me keep
her away to the westward a bit, and who knows but you may----”

For answer the grizzled Liardet held out his hand, shook his head
faintly, and muttering, “I hope to God it'll come on a Hell of a Calm
for a Month of Sundays,” he turned his face to the port and went over
_his_ Great Barrier.

***** Every one was “_so_ sorry for poor little Mrs. Liardet.” She
was so young to be a widow, “and having no children, my dear, the poor
creature must have felt the shock the more keenly.” Thus the local
gabble of the acquaintances and friends of the pretty widow. And she
laughed softly to herself that she couldn't feel overwhelmed with grief
at her widowhood. “He hadn't a thought above making money,” she said to
herself--oh, Nell Liardet, for whom did he desire to make it!--“and yet
never could make it.” And then she thought of Russell, and smiled again.
His hand had trembled when it held hers. Surely he did not come so often
to see her merely to talk of rough, old Dave Liardet. A man whom she had
only tolerated--never loved. And then, Russell was a big, handsome
man; and she liked big, handsome men. Also, he was captain now. And, of
course, when he had told her of that rich patch of pearl-shell, that he
alone knew of at Caille Harbour, in which was a small fortune, and had
looked so intently into her blue eyes, he had meant that it was for her.
“Yes,” and she smiled again, “I'm sure he loves me. But he's terribly
slow; and although I do believe that blonde young widows look 'fetching'
in black, I'm getting sick of it, and wish he'd marry me to-morrow.”

Russell had stood to his compact with the dead skipper. The owners had
given her £150, and Russell, making up a plausible story to his dead
captain's wife of Liardet having in bygone days lent him “fifty pounds,”
 had added that sum to the other. And he meant, for the sake of old Dave,
never to let his pretty little widow run short as long as he had a shot
in the locker. The patch of shell at Caille he meant to work, and if
Dave had lived they would have “gone whacks.” But as he was dead, he
wouldn't do any mean thing. She should have half of whatever he got--“go
whacks” just the same. But as for love, it never entered his honest
brain, and had any one told him that Nell Liardet was fond of him, he
would have called him a liar and “plugged” him for insulting a lady.

*****

“Going away! Mr. Russell--Joe! Surely you won't go and leave me without
a friend in the world? I thought you cared for me more than that?”

The big man reddened up to his temples.

“Don't say that, Mrs. Liardet. If you'll allow me, I'll always be a
friend. And, as I thought it would be hard for you to have to spend the
little that Liardet left you, I have made arrangements for you to draw
a few pounds whenever you need it from the agents. And as long as ever I
have a pound in the world, Dave Liardet's wife----”

“Wife!” and the blue eyes flashed angrily. “He is dead and I am free.
Why do you always talk of him? I hate the name. I hated him--a coarse,
money-loving----”

“Stop!”

Russell stepped forward. “Good-bye, Mrs. Liardet. I hold to what I have
said. But the man that you call coarse and money-loving died in trying
to make it for you. And he was a good, honest man, and I can't stay here
and hear his memory abused by the woman he loved better than life.” And
then he turned to go, but stopped, and, with a scarlet face, said, “Of
course you're a lady and wouldn't do anything not right and straight, so
I know that if you intend to marry again you'll send me word; but if you
don't, why, of course, I'll be proud and glad to stand by you in money
matters. I'm sure poor Dave would have done the same for my wife if I
had got that knife into me instead of him.”

Nell Liardet, sitting with clenched hands and set teeth, said, in a
hoarse voice, “Your wife! Are you married?”

“Well--er--yes, oh, yes. I have a--er--native wife at the Anchorites.
Poor old Dave stood godfather to one of my little girls. God knows how
anxious I am to get back to her.”

“_Good_ bye, Mr. Russell!”





KENNEDY THE BOATSTEERER

Steering north-west from Samoa for six or seven hundred miles you will
sight the Ellice Group--low-lying, palm-clad coral atolls fringed on the
lee with shimmering sandy beaches. On the weather-side, exposed to the
long sweep of the ocean-rollers, there are but short, black-looking
reefs backed by irregular piles of loose, flat, sea-worn coral, thrown
up and accumulating till its surface is brushed by the pendant leaves of
the cocoanuts, only to be washed and swirled back seawards when the wind
comes from the westward and sends a fierce sweeping current along the
white beaches and black coral rocks alike.

*****

Twenty-three years ago these islands were almost unknown to any one save
a few wandering traders and the ubiquitous New Bedford whaler. But now,
long ere you can see from the ship's deck the snowy tumble of the surf
on the reef, a huge white mass, grim, square, and ugly, will meet your
eye--whitewashed walls of a distressful ghastliness accentuated by doors
and windows of the deadliest black. This cheerful excrescence on the
face of suffering nature is a native church.

The people have mostly assimilated themselves, in their manners and
mode of life generally, to the new order of things represented by the
fearful-looking structure aforementioned. That is to say, even as the
Tongan and Fijian, they have degenerated from a fierce, hardy, warlike
race into white-shirted, black-coated saints, whose ideal of a lovely
existence is to have public prayer twice a day on week-days and all day
on Sundays. To them it is a good thing to get half a dollar from the
white trader for a sick fowl--which, when bought, will be claimed by
another native, who will have the white man fined two dollars for
buying stolen property. Had the white man paid a dollar he had done
wisely--that coin sometimes goes far in the Tokelaus. For instance, the
truly unctuous native Christian may ask a dollar for two fowls, but
he will also lease out his wife for a similar amount. Time was, in the
Ellices, when the undue complaisance of a married woman meant a sudden
and inartistic compression of the jugular, or a swift blow from
the heavy, ebony-wood club of the wronged man. Nowadays, since the
smug-faced native teacher hath shown them the Right Way, such domestic
troubles are condoned by--a dollar. That is, if it be a genuine American
dollar or two British florins; for outraged honour would not accept the
cast-iron Bolivian money or the poor silver of Chili and Peru. And for a
dollar the native “Christian” can all but pay for a nicely-bound Bible,
printed in the Samoan tongue, and thus, no doubt, out of evil would come
good; for he could, by means of his newly-acquired purchase, picture to
his dusky mate the terrors that await those who look upon strange men
and _tupe fa'apupula_ (bright and shining money).

*****

But I want to tell about Kennedy. Kennedy the Boatsteerer he was called;
although twenty years had passed and gone since that day at Wallis
Island when he, a bright-eyed, bronze-faced lad--with the fighting-blood
of the old Puritan Endicotts running like fire through his veins despite
his New England bringing-up--ran his knife into a shipmate's heart and
fled for ever from all white associations. Over a woman it was, and only
a copper-coloured one at that; but then she was young and beautiful,
with dreamy, glistening eyes, and black, wavy hair, ornamented with a
wreath of orange-flowers and coil upon coil of bright-hued _seã seã_
berries strung together, hanging from her neck and resting upon her
dainty bosom.

*****

Standing at the doorway of his house, looking over the placid waters
at the rising sun, Kennedy folds his brawny arms across his bare,
sun-tanned chest and mutters to himself, in his almost forgotten
mother-tongue: “Twenty years, twenty years ago! Who would know me there
now? Even if I placarded my name on my back and what I did, 'taint
likely I'd have to face a grand jury for running a knife into a mongrel
Portuguee, way out in the South Seas a score of years ago.... Poor
little Talamãlu! I paid a big price for her--twenty years of wandering
from Wallis Island to the Bonins; and wherever I go that infernal story
follows me up. Well, I'll risk it anyhow, and the first chance that
comes along I'll cut Kanaka life and drinking ship's rum and go see
old dad and mum to home. Here, Tikena, you Tokelau devil, bring me my
toddy.”

A native, clad in his grass _titi_, takes from a wooden peg in the house
wall two shells of toddy, and the white wanderer takes one and drinks.
He is about to return the other to the man when two girls come up from
the beach with their arms around each other's waists, Tahiti fashion,
and one calls out with a laugh to “leave some in the shell.” This is
Laumanu, and if there is one thing in the world that Jake Kennedy cares
for above himself it is this tall girl with the soft eyes and lithe
figure. And he dreams of her pretty often, and curses fluently to think
that she is beyond his reach and is never likely to fill the place of
Talamãlu and her many successors. For Laumanu is _tabu_ to a Nuitao
chief--that is, she has been betrothed, but the Nuitao man is sixty
miles away at his own island, and no one knows when he will claim his
_avaga_. Then the girl gives him back the empty toddy-shell, and, slyly
pinching his hand, sails away with her mate, whereupon the susceptible
Kennedy, furious with long disappointment, flings himself down on his
bed of mats, curses his luck and his unsuspecting rival at Nuitao, and
finally decides not to spring a surprise on “dad and mum” by going “hum”
 for a considerable number of years to come.

*****

Mr. Jake Kennedy at this time was again a widower--in the widest sense
of the word. The last native girl who had occupied the proud position of
_Te avaga te papalagi_ (the white man's wife) was a native of the
island of Maraki--a dark-skinned, passionately jealous creature, who had
followed his fortunes for three years to his present location, and then
developed _mal-du-pays_ to such an extent that the local priest and
devil-catcher, one Pare-vaka, was sent for by her female attendants.
Pare-vaka was not long in making his diagnosis. A little devil in the
shape of an octopus was in Tene-napa's brain. And he gave instructions
how to get the fiend out, and also further instructions to one of the
girl attendants to fix, point-upwards, in the sick woman's mat the
_foto_, or barb of the sting-ray. So when Kennedy, who, in his rough,
careless way, had some feint fondness for the woman who three years
ago he went mad over, heard a loud cry in the night and was told that
Tenenapa was dead, he did not know that as the sick woman lay on her
side the watchers had quietly turned her with her face to the roof,
and with the needle pointed _foto_ pierced her to the heart. And old
Pare-vaka rejoiced, for he had a daughter who, in his opinion, should
be _avaga_ to the wealthy and clever white man, who could _tori nui_ and
_sisi atu_ (pull cocoanuts and catch bonito) like any native; and this
Tenenapa--who was she but a dog-eating stranger from Maraki only fit
for shark's meat? So the people came and brought Kennedy the “gifts of
affliction” to show their sympathy, and asked him to take a wife from
their own people. And he asked for Laumanu.

*****

There was a dead silence awhile, and then a wild-looking creature with
long white hair falling around his shoulders like a cloak, dreading to
shame the _papalagi_ before so many, rose to his feet and motioned them
away. Then he spoke: “Forget the words you have said, and take for a
wife the girl from the house of Pare-vaka. Laumanu is _tabu_ and death
walks behind her.” But Kennedy sulked and wanted Laumanu or none.

And this is why he feels so bad to-day, and the rum-keg gives him no
consolation. For the sweet-voiced Laumanu always runs away from him
when he steps out from his dark little trade-room into the light,
with unsteady steps and a peculiar gleam in his black eye, that means
mischief--rude love to a woman and challenge to fight to a man.

Lying there on his mat, plotting how to get possession of the girl,
there comes to him a faint cry, gradually swelling in volume until every
voice in the village, from the full, sonorous tones of the men to the
shrill treble of the children, blend together: “_Te vaka motul! Te vaka
motu!_” (a ship! a ship!). Springing up, he strides out, and there,
slowly lumbering round the south-west end of the little island, under
cruising canvas only, he sees her. One quick glance shows her to be a
whaler.

In ten minutes Kennedy is in a canoe, flying over the reef, and in as
many more alongside and on deck. The captain is an old acquaintance, and
while the boats are sent ashore to buy pigs and poultry, Kennedy and
he have a long talk in the cabin. Then the skipper says, as he rises,
“Well, it's risky, but it's a smart way of earning five hundred dollars,
and I'll land you and the creature somewhere in the Carolines.”

The whaler was to lie off and on all night, or until such time as
Kennedy and the girl came aboard in a canoe. To avert suspicion, the
captain was to remain ashore with his boat's crew to witness a dance,
and, if all went well, the white man was to be aboard before him with
Laumanu and stow her away, in case any canoes came off with the boat.

*****

The dance was in full swing when Kennedy, stripped to the waist, with
a heavy bag of money in his left hand and a knife in his right, took
a long farewell of his house and stepped out into the silent groves of
coco-palms. A short walk brought him to a salt lagoon. On the brink he
stood and waited, until a trembling, voiceless figure joined him from
out the depths of the thick mangroves. Hand-in-hand they fled along
the narrow, sandy path till they reached the beach, just where a few
untenanted thatched huts stood on the shingle. Between these, covered
over with cocoanut branches, lay a canoe. Deftly the two raised the
light craft and carried it down to the water that broke in tender,
rippling murmurs on the white sand. And with Laumanu seated for'ard,
gazing out beyond into the blackness before them, he urged the canoe
seawards with quick, nervous strokes. Far away to the westward he could
see the dull glimmer of the whaleship's lights.

*****

The mate of the _Essex_ was leaning over the rail, drowsily watching
the phosphorescence in the water as the ship rolled gently to the ocean
swell, when a cry came from for'ard: “A heavy squall coming down, sir,
from the land!” And it did come, with a swift, fierce rush, and so
strong that it nearly threw the old whaler over on her beam-ends. In
the midst of the hum and roar of the squall some one in the waist of
the ship called out something about a canoe being alongside. The mate's
comment was brief but vigorous, and the matter was speedily forgotten.
Then the rain fell in torrents, and as the ship was made snug the watch
got under shelter and the mate went below to get a drink of rum, and
curse his captain for loafing ashore, watching naked women dancing.

***** Three miles further out a canoe was drifting and tossing about
with outrigger carried away. Now and then, as a big sea lifted her, the
stern would rise high out of the water and the sharp-nosed whaleback
for'ard go down as if weighted heavily. And it was--with a bag of
dollars lashed underneath. When in the early morning the whaleship
sighted the drifting speck, floating on the bosom of a now placid sea,
the thoughtful Down-East skipper--observant of the canoe's bows being
under water--lowered a boat and pulled over to it. He took the bag of
dollars and muttering something about “rather thinking he was kinder
acquainted with the poor man's people,” went back to the ship and stood
away on his course in pursuit of his greasy vocation.

*****

And Kennedy and the girl! Go some night and watch the dark-skinned
people catching flying-fish by the light of _au lama_ torches. Look over
the side of the canoe and see those swarms of grim, grey devils of the
tropic seas that ever and anon dart to the surface as the paddlers'
hands come perilously near the water, and wonder no longer as to the
fete of Kennedy the Boatsteerer and his Laumanu.




A DEAD LOSS

Denison, the supercargo of the _Indiana_, was sent by his “owners” to an
island in the S.W. Pacific where they had a trading business, the man
in charge or which had, it was believed, got into trouble by shooting
a native. His instructions were to investigate the rumour, and, if
the business was suffering in any way, to take away the trader and put
another man in his place. The incident here related is well within the
memory of some very worthy men who still dwell under the roofs of thatch
in the Western Pacific.

*****

The name of the island was--well, say Nukupapau.

The _Indiana_ sailed from Auckland in December, and made a smart run
till the blue peaks of Tutuila were sighted, when the trades foiled
and heavy weather came on from the westward. Up to this time Denison's
duties as supercargo had kept him busy in the trade-room, and he had had
no time to study his new captain, for, although they met at table three
times a day, beyond a few civilities they had done no talking. Captain
Chaplin was young--about thirty--and one of the most taciturn persons
Denison had ever met. The mate, who, having served the owners for about
twenty years, felt himself privileged, one night at supper asked him
point-blank, in his Irish fashion _apropos_ of nothing: “An' phwat part
av the wurruld may yez come from, captain?”

There were but the five of them present--the skipper, two mates,
boatswain, and Denison. Laying down his knife and fork and stirring his
tea, he fixed his eyes coldly on the inquisitive sub's face.

“From the same God-forsaken hole as you do, sir--Ireland. My name isn't
Chaplin, but as I'm the captain of this rotten old hooker I want you to
understand that if you ask me another such d------d impertinent question
you'll find it a risky business for you--or any one else!”

The quick blood mounted up to the old mate's forehead, and it looked
like as if a fight was coming, but the captain had resumed his supper
and the matter ended. But it showed us that he meant to keep to himself.

*****

The _Indiana_ made the low-lying atoll at last and lay-to outside. Those
on board could see the trader's house close to, but instead of being
surrounded by a swarm of eager and excited natives there was not one
to be seen. Nor could they even see a canoe coming off. Denison pointed
this out to the captain. Although of an evidently savage and morose
temperament he was always pleasant enough to Denison in his capacity
of supercargo, and inquired of him if he thought the trader had been
killed.

“No,” Denison said, “I don't think the people here would ever kill
Martin; but something is wrong. He has not hoisted his flag, and that is
very queer. I can see no natives about his place--which also is curious;
and the village just there seems to be deserted. If you will lower the
boat I'll soon see what's wrong.”

*****

The skipper called out to lower the whaleboat, put four Rotumah boys in
her, and then offered to accompany the supercargo. As he was a new man,
Denison naturally was surprised at his wanting to leave his ship at a
strange place.

“Glad enough,” he said, “the landing here is beastly--lucky if we escape
getting stove-in going over the reef. Martin knows the passage well and
tackles it in any surf--wish he were here now!”

Captain Chaplin soon took that off his mind. Unconsciously Denison gave
him the steer-oar, and in a few minutes they were flying over the reef
at a half-tide, and never touched anywhere.

“Why,” said Denison, “you seem to know the place.”

“I do,” he answered, quietly, “know it well, and know Martin, too.
You'll find him drunk.”

They walked up the white path of broken coral and stood in the doorway
of the big front room. At the far end, on a native sofa, lay Martin; by
his side sat a young native girl fanning him. No one else.

The gaunt black-whiskered trader tried to rise, but with a varied string
of oaths lashed together he fell back, waving his hand to Denison in
recognition. The girl was not a native of the island--that could be seen
at a glance. She was as handsome as a picture, and after giving the two
white men a dignified greeting, in the Yap (Caroline Islands) dialect,
she resumed her fanning and smoking her cigarette.

“Martin,” said the supercargo, “shake yourself together. What is the
matter? Are you sick, or is it only the usual drunk?”

“Both,” came in tones that sounded as if his inside were lined with
cotton wool; “got a knife in my ribs six months back; never got well;
and I've been drinking all the time “--and then, with a silly smile of
childish vanity, “all over _her_. She's my new girl--wot d'ye think of
her? Ain't she a star?”

*****

All this time Chaplin stood back until Denison called him up and said to
the trader, “Our new captain, Martin!”

“By God,” said the trader, slowly, “if he ain't the image of that ------
nigger-catching skipper that was here from Honolulu four years ago.”

“That's me!” said Chaplin, coolly puffing away at his cigar, and taking
a seat near the sofa, with one swift glance of admiration at the face of
the girl.

In a few minutes Martin told his troubles. Some seven months previously
a ship had called at the island. He boarded her. She was a whaler making
south to the Kermadecs “sperming.” The captain told Martin he had come
through the Pelews and picked up a big canoe with a chiefs retinue on
board, nearly dead from starvation. Many of them did die on board. Among
those left were two women, the wife and daughter of the chief--who was
the first to die. Making a long story short, Martin gave the captain
trade and cash to the tune of five hundred dollars for the two women,
and came ashore. Pensioning off his other wife, he took the young girl
himself and sold the mother to the local chief for a ton of copra.

A week afterwards a young native came outside his house, cutlass in
hand. He was a brother of the dismissed wife and meant fighting. Martin
darted out, his new love standing calmly in the doorway, smoking. There
was a shot, and the native fell with a bullet through his chest, but
raising his voice he called to others and flung them his cutlass; and
then Martin found himself struggling with two or three more and got a
fearful stab. That night the head men of the village came to him and
said that as he had always been a good man to them they would not kill
him, but they then and there tabooed him till he either killed his new
wife or sent her away. And when he looked out in the morning he saw the
whole village going away in canoes to the other side of the lagoon. For
six months neither he nor the girl--Lunumala was her name--had spoken to
a native. And Martin gave himself up to love and drink, and, since the
_fracas_ had not done a cent's worth of trading.

Denison told Martin his instructions. He only nodded, and said something
to the girl, who rose and brought the supercargo his books. A few
minutes' looking through them, and then at his well-filled trade-room,
showed Denison that everything was right, except that all the liquor was
gone.

“Martin,” the supercargo said, “this won't do. I've got another man
aboard, and I'll put him here and take you to Rotumah.”

But he swore violently. He couldn't go anywhere else. This island was
his home. The natives would give in some day. He'd rather cut his throat
than leave.

“Well,” said Denison, calmly, “it's one of two things. You know as well
as I do that a _tabu_ like this is a serious business. I know you are the
best man for the place; but, if you won't leave, why not send the girl
away?”

No, he wouldn't send her away. She should stay too.

“All serene,” said the man of business. “Then I'll take stock at once,
and we'll square up and I'll land the other man.”

This was a crusher for poor Martin. Denison felt sorry for him, and had
a hard duty to carry through.

Presently the sick man with a ten-ton oath groaned, “------ you, Mister
Skipper, wot are you a-doin' of there, squeezin' my wife's hand?”

*****

“Well, now,” said the captain, quietly, “look here, Martin. Just put
this in your thick head and think it out in five minutes. You've either
got to give up this girl or get away from the island. Now, I don't want
to make any man feel mean, but she don't particularly care about you,
and----”

The graceful creature nodded her approval or Chaplin's remarks, and
Martin glared at her. Then he took a drink of gin and meditated.

Two minutes passed. Then Martin turned.

“How much?” he said.

“Fifty pounds, sonny. Two hundred and fifty dollars.”

“Easy to see you've been in the business,” mumbled Martin; “why, her
mother's worth that. 'Tain't no deal.”

“Well, then, how much _do_ you want?”

“A hundred.”

“Haven't got it on board, sonny. Take eighty sovereigns and the rest in
trade or liquor?”

“It's a deal,” said Martin; “are you game to part ten sovereigns for the
girl's mother, and I'll get her back from the natives!”

“No,” said Chaplin, rising \ “the girl's enough for me.”

She had risen and was looking at Martin with a pallid face and set
teeth, and then without a word of farewell on either side she picked
up a Panama hat and, fan in hand, walked down to the boat and got in,
waiting for Chaplin.

*****

Presently he came down, and said, “Well, Mr. Denison, I suppose, as
matters are arranged, you'll want to land Martin some trade?”

“Oh, no,” said Denison, “he's got plenty. This _tabu_ on his own
business will teach him a lesson. But I want to send him some provisions
on shore. By the way, captain, that girl's likely to prove expensive to
you. I hope you'll put her ashore at Rotumah till the voyage is nearly
over.”

“No,” said he, “I won't. Of course, I know our godly owners would raise
a deuce of a row about my buying the girl if I couldn't pay for her
keep while she's on board, but I've got a couple of hundred pounds in
Auckland, as they know, besides some cash on board. After I've paid that
thundering blackguard I've still some left, and I mean to put her ashore
at Levuka to live until I can take her to her destination.”

“Why,” Denison queried, “what are you going to do with her?”

“Just this: there's a friend of mine in Honolulu always willing to give
a few thousand dollars for a really handsome girl. And I believe that
girl will bring me nearly about three thousand dollars.”

*****

For three months the girl remained on board, grave, dignified, and
always self-possessed. Chaplin treated her kindly, and it was evident
to all on board that the girl had given him such affection as she was
capable of, and little knew his intentions regarding her future. With
both Chaplin and Denison she would now converse freely in the Pelew
Island dialect. And often pointing to the sinking sun she would
sigh--“There is my land over there behind the sun. When will we get
there?” Laying her hand on Chaplin's she would seek for an answer. And
he would answer--nothing.

*****

After the _Indiana_ had cruised through the Line Islands she headed
back for Rotumah and Fiji. The girl came up on deck after supper. It
was blowing freshly and the barque was slipping through the water fast.
Lunumala walked to the binnacle and looked at the compass, pointing to
S.S.W. She gazed steadily at it awhile and then said to the Rotumah boy
in his own tongue--“Why is the ship going to the South?”

Tom, the Rotuman, grinned--“To Fiji, my white tropic bird.”

Just then Chaplin came on deck, cigar in mouth. The girl and he looked
at each other. He knew by her white, set face that mischief was brewing.

Pointing, with her left hand, to the compass, she said, in a low voice--

“To Fiji?”

“Yes,” said Chaplin, coolly, “to Fiji, where you must remain awhile,
Lunumala.”

“And you?”

“That is my business. Question me no more now. Go below and turn in.”

Standing there before him, she looked again in his hard, unrelenting
face. Then she slowly walked forward.

“Sulky,” said Chaplin to Denison.

Steadily she walked along the deck, and then mounted to the to'gallant
fo'c's'le and stood a second or two by the cathead. Her white dress
flapped and clung to her slender figure as she turned and looked aft at
us, and her long, black hair streamed out like a pall of death. Suddenly
she sprang over.

With a curse Chaplin rushed to the wheel, and in double-quick time
the whaleboat was lowered and search was made. In half an hour Chaplin
returned, and gaining the deck said, in his usual cool way, to the mate:
“Hoist in the boat and fill away again as quick as possible.” Then he
went below.

A few minutes afterwards he was at his accustomed amusement, making
tortoise-shell ornaments with a fret-saw.

“A sad end to the poor girl's life,” said the supercargo.

“Yes,” said the methodical ex-Honolulu black-birder, “and a sad end to
my lovely five hundred dollars.”




HICKSON: A HALF-CASTE

“Mauki” Hickson and I were coming across from the big native town at
Mulinu'u Point to Apia one afternoon when we met a dainty little white
woman, garmented in spotless white. Hickson, touching his hat, walked on
across the narrow bridge that crosses the creek by the French Mission,
and waited for me on the other side.

This tiny lady in white was a lovable little creature. There was not a
man in Samoa but felt proud and pleased if she stopped and spoke to him.
And she could go anywhere on the beach, from respectable Matautu right
down to riotous, dissolute Matafele, and make her purchases at the big
store of Der Deutsche Handels Plantagen und Sud See Inseln Gesellschaft
without even a drunken native daring to look at her. That was because
every one, dissolute native and licentious white, knew she was a good
woman. Perhaps, had she been married, and had she had a yellow, tallowy
skin and the generally acidulated appearance peculiar to white women
long resident in the South Seas, we wouldn't have thought so much of
her, and felt mean and contemptible when she taxed us in her open,
innocent fashion with doing those things that we ought not have done.
But she had a sweet, merry little face, set about with dimples, and soft
cheeks hued like the first flush of a ripening peach; and when she spoke
to us she brought back memories of other faces like hers--far-away faces
that most of us would have liked to have seen again.

*****

Just by the low stone wall, that in those days came close down to the
creek, the little lady stood under the shade of some cocoanuts, and
spoke to me.

“Who is that horrible, sulky-looking half-caste?” she said, jerking her
sunshade towards my late companion.

“That is Hickson, Miss Milly,” I said--a very decent, steady fellow,
with a white man's heart.

“Decent! steady! and with a white man's heart!” and Miss Milly's
pink-and-white cheeks reddened angrily. “How I hate that expression!
No wonder all sorts of horrible things happen in these dreadful islands
when white men will walk down the road with a cruel, remorseless wretch
like Hickson--the man that murdered his sister.”

“You should not say that, Miss Milly,” I said. “Of course that is the
common report, spread about by the captain of the German brig----. But
that is because Hickson nearly killed him for calling him a nigger. And
you must remember, Miss Milly, that I was there at the time. Hickson
was our second mate. His sister was killed, but it is a cruel thing to
accuse him of murdering her; he was very fond of her.”

“Oh dear! I am so glad to hear some one say it isn't true,” and the
bright eyes filled. “They say, too, she was such a pretty little thing.
How ever did she get to such a terrible place as Ponape? Come up and see
uncle and me before you go away again. Good-bye now, I'm going to buy a
water-bag at Goddeffroy's.”

*****

I think that Hickson must have guessed that he had formed the subject
of the conversation between the little lady and myself, for after we had
walked on a bit he said, suddenly--

“I think I'll go aboard the _Menchikoff_ and ship; she wants some hands,
and I would like to clear out of this. Except two or three that have
known me for a long time, like yourself, every one looks crooked at me.”

“I think you are right, Hickson, in going away. Samoa is a bad place
for an idle man. But won't you come another trip with us The old man{*}
thinks a lot of you, and there's always a second mate's berth for you
with him.”

     * The “old man,” i.e., the captain.

Hickson's eyes flashed fire. “No! I'd as lief go to hell as ship again
with a man that once put me in irons, and disgraced me before a lot of
Kanakas. I've got White Blood enough in me to make me remember that.
Good-bye,” and he shook hands with me; “I'll wait here till the
_Menchikoff's_ boat comes ashore and go off and see Bannister.”

Poor Hickson. He was proud of his White Blood, and the incident he
alluded to was a bitter memory to him. Could he ever forget it? I never
could, and thought of it as I was being pulled off on board.

*****

It was at Jakoits Harbour--in Ponape--that it happened. Hickson and I
were going ashore in the long boat to buy a load of yams for our native
crew, when he began to tell me something of his former life.

His had been a strange and chequered career, and in his wanderings as
a trader and as a boatsteerer in a Hobart Town whaler, he had traversed
every league of the wide Pacific. With his father and two sisters he
had, till a few years or so before he joined us, been trading at Yap, in
the Western Carolines. Here the wandering old white man had died. Of his
two sisters, one, the eldest, had perished with her sailor husband by
the capsizing of a schooner which he commanded. The youngest, then
about nine years old, was taken care of by the captain of a whaler that
touched at Yap, until he placed her in charge of the then newly-founded
American Mission at Ponape, and in the same ship, Hickson went on his
wanderings again, joining us at Tahiti. And I could see as he talked to
me that he had a deep affection for her.

“What part of Ponape is she living on?” I asked.

“I don't know, I'm sure. Here, I suppose; and if you don't mind, while
you're weighing the yams, I'll go up to the mission-house and inquire.”

“Right you are, Hickson,” I said, “but don't forget to get back early,
it's a beastly risky pull out to the ship in the dark.”

We went into a little bay, and found the natives waiting for us with the
yams, and Hickson, after inquiring the way to the Mission, left me.

*****

Ponape in those days was a rough place. It was the rendezvous of the
American whaling fleet, that came there for wood and water and “other
supplies,” before they sailed northward along the grim coasts of Japan
and Tchantar Bay to the whale grounds of the Arctic Seas.

And sometimes there would be trouble over the “other supplies” among the
savagely licentious crews of mixed men of all nations, and knives would
flash, and the white sand of the beaches be stuck together in places
with patches and clots of dull red. It was the whalers' paradise--a
paradise of the loveliest tropical beauty, of palm-shaded beach and
verdure-clad mountain imaginable; a paradise of wonderfully beautiful
and utterly, hopelessly immoral native women; and, lastly, a paradise of
cheap native grog, as potent and fiery as if Hell had been boiled down
and concentrated into a small half-pint.

It was dark, and the yams had all been brought and stored in the boat
before Hickson returned. By the flickering light of a native fire in a
house close by I could see that something was the matter with him. His
face was drawn, and his black eyes gleamed out like dully burning coals
from the thick wavy hair that fell about his temples.

“I'm sorry I'm late,” he said, and the moment he had spoken I knew
by the dangerous huskiness of his voice that he had been drinking the
native grog.

Staggering into the boat, he sat down beside me and took the tiller.

“Give way, _fanau seoli_ (children o hell),” he growled to our crew of
Samoans and Rotumah boys, “let us get these yams aboard, and then I'm
coming back to burn the ------ mission-house down.”

Slowly the heavily-laden boat got way on her, and we slid away from the
light of the native fire out into the inky blackness of night. Beyond a
muttered curse at the crew, and keeping up that horrible grinding of
the teeth common enough to men of violent passions when under great
excitement, Hickson said nothing further till I asked--

“Hickson, what's the matter? Couldn't you find your sister?”

He sat up straight, and gripping my knee in his left hand till I winced,
said, with an awful preliminary burst of blasphemy--

“By God, sir, she's gone to hell; I'll never see poor little Kâtia
again. I'm not drunk, don't you think it. I did have a stiff pull of
grog up in the village there, but I'm not drunk; but there's something
running round and round in my head that's drivin' me mad.”

“Where is she?” I asked.

“God knows. I went to the mission-house and asked for the white
missionary. The ------ dog wasn't there. He and his wife are away in
Honolulu, on a dollar-cadging trip. There was about three or four of
them cursed native teachers in the house, and all I could get out of
them was that Kâtia wasn't there now; went away a year ago. 'Where to?'
I said to one fat pig, with a white shirt and no pants on him. 'Don't
know,' says he, in the Ponape lingo; 'she's a bad girl now, and has left
us holy ones of God and gone to the whaleships.'”

Coming from any other man but Hickson I could have laughed at this,
so truly characteristic of the repellent, canting native missionary of
Micronesia, but the quick, gasping breath of Hickson and his trembling
hand showed me how he suffered.

“I grabbed him and choked him till he was near dead, and chucked him in
a heap outside. Then I went all round to the other houses, but every
one ran away from me. I got a swig of grog from a native house and came
right back.” Then he was silent, and fixed his eyes on the ship's lights
seaward.

I could not offer him any sympathy, so said nothing. Lighting our pipes
we gazed out ahead. Far away, nearest the reef, lay our brig, her riding
light just discernible. A mile or two further away were three or four
American whalers, whose black hulls we could just make out through the
darkness. Within five hundred yards of us lay a dismantled and condemned
brig, the _Kamehameha IV._ from whose stern ports came a flood of light
and the sounds of women's voices.

We were just about abeam of her when Hickson suddenly exclaimed--

“Why, sir, the boat is sinking. Pull hard, boys, pull for the brig. The
water's coming in wholesale over the gunwale. Hadn't you fellows enough
sense to leave a place to bale from?” and he slewed the boat's head for
the brig.

She had two boats astern. We were just in time to get alongside one and
pitch about two tons of yams into her, or we would have sunk.

The noise we made was heard on the brig, and a head was put out of
one of the ports, and a voice hailed us. This was the brig's owner and
captain, W------.

“Come on board and have a cigar!” he called out.

Leaving the crew to bale out and re-ship the yams, we clambered on deck.

Now, this brig and her captain had a curious history. She was, two years
before, as well-found a whaleship as ever sailed the Pacific, but by
some extraordinary ill-luck she had never taken a fish during a cruise
of seven months, although in the company of others that were doing well.
The master, one of those fanatically religious New Englanders that
by some strange irony of fate may be often met with commanding vilely
licentious crews of whaleships, was a skilled and hitherto lucky man. On
reaching Ponape the whole of his officers and crew deserted _en masse_
and went off in other ships. Utterly helpless, W------ was left by
himself. There were, of course, plenty of men to be had in Ponape, but
the ship's reputation for bad luck damned his hopes of getting a fresh
crew.

Whether the man's brain was affected by his troubles I know not, but
after living like a hermit for a year, alone on the brig, a sudden
change took place in his character and conduct. Sculling ashore in
one of his boats--she was a four-boat ship--he had an interview with
Nanakin, the chief of the Jakoit's district, and returned on board with
five or six young girls, to whom he gave permanent quarters on board,
selling from time to time his sails, whaling gear, and trade to keep his
harem in luxury. At the end of a year the brig was pretty well stripped
of all of any value; and W------ went utterly, hopelessly mad.

*****

The brig's cabin was large and roomy. The table that had once nearly
filled it had been taken away, and the floor covered with those
peculiarly made Ponape mats which, by rolling up one-half of either end,
forms a combined couch and pillow. As Hickson and I, following the crazy
little captain, made our appearance, some four young girls, who were
lolling about on the mats, started up, and looked at us with big,
wondering eyes, ablaze with curiosity.

Both Hickson and myself--and he had roved throughout Polynesia from his
boyhood--were struck by the extraordinary beauty of these four young
creatures; so young and innocent in looks; in sin, as old as Ninon
d'Enclos.

Placing one hand on the shoulder of the girl nearest to him, and fixing
his big, blue, deep-set eyes on us, W------waved the other towards the
girls, and said--

“Welcome, gentlemen, welcome. Behold these little devils, who in the
guise of sunburnt angels are the solace of a man forgotten by his God,
and the father of a family residing in Martha's Vineyard, United States
of America.”

Then he gave us each a cigar and told us to be seated while he got us a
glass of New England rum.

*****

Hickson, with a contemptuous smile, sat with folded arms on a short,
heavy stool. One of the girls, unshipping one of the two lights from the
hook on which it hung, followed W------into a state-room to get the
rum. Presently we heard them coming out, W------ carrying a
wickerwork-covered five-gallon jar; but two girls came out instead of
one. The stranger kept close to W------, one hand holding the sleeve of
his shirt.

Stooping as he set the jar on the floor, I had a good view of the
new-comer, and a deadly fear seized me. I knew at once that she was
Hickson's sister! He was coarse and rough-looking, but yet a handsome
man, and this girl's likeness to him was very striking. Just then
Hickson, not even noticing her, rose and said he was going on deck to
see if the boat was ready, when the strange quavering tones of W------
arrested him.

“Be seated, sir, for another minute. Nijilon, get some glasses. You see
here, gentlemen, the fairest and choicest or all my devil-vestals, one
that------”

Hickson looked at her, and with a terrified wail the girl clutched
W------'s arm, and placed her face against his breast. With lips drawn
back from his white teeth the half-caste sprang up, and his two clenched
hands pawed the air. Then from his throat there came a sound like a
laugh strangled into a groan.

Scarce knowing what I did I got in front of him, He dashed me aside as
if I were a child, and seized the stool. And as he swung it round above
his head the girl raised a face like the hue of death to his; then the
blow fell, and she and W------ went down together.

******

Hickson rushed on deck and tried to spring overboard. I think he must
have struck the main boom, for one of our crew who was on deck heard
him fall. We got a light, and found him lying senseless. Two of the
“vestals” held him up while I went below for some rum and water. W------
was lying where he had fallen, breathing heavily, but not seriously
injured as far as I could see. But one look at the closed eyes of the
girl told me she was past all help. The heavy stool had struck her on
the temple.

Placing Hickson in the boat with two men to mind mm, I took the other
two with me into the cabin of the brig. W------ was seated on the floor,
held up by two of his harem, and muttering unintelligibly to himself.
The other two were bending over the figure on the floor, and placing
their hands on her bosom.

“Come away from here, L------,” said Harry, one of our Rotumah boys, to
me; “if the Ponape men come off, they will kill us all.”

We could do nothing, so we got back into the boat, and with the still
senseless body of Hickson lying at our feet, pulled out to the ship.

******

When he came to he was a madman, and for his own safety our captain
put him in irons. We put to sea next day, our skipper, like a wise man,
saying it would go hard with us if W------ died, and four Yankee whalers
in port.

The day after we got away Hickson was set at liberty, and went about his
duties as usual. At nightfall I went into his deck cabin. He was lying
in his bunk, in the dark, smoking. He put out his hand, and drew me
close up to him.

“Harry says she is dead?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Poor little Kãtia; I never meant to hurt her But I am glad she is
dead.”

And he smoked his pipe in silence.




A BOATING PARTY OF TWO




I.


The prison gate opened, and Number 73 for a minute or so leaned against
the wall to steady himself. The strange clamour of the streets smote
upon his ear like dagger strokes into his heart, and his breath came in
quick, short gasps.

Some one was speaking to him--a little, pale-faced, red-whiskered man
with watery eyes--and Challoner, once “Number 73,” staring stupidly
at him, tried to understand, but foiled. Then, sidling up to him, the
little man took one of Challoner's gaunt and long hands between his
own, and a stout, masculine female in a blue dress and poke bonnet and
spectacles clasped the other and called him “brother.”

A dull gleam shone in his sullen eyes at last, and drawing his hands
away from them, he asked--

“Who are you?”

The stout woman's sharp tongue clattered, and Challoner listened
stolidly. Sometimes a word or two in the volley she fired would cause
him to shake his head wearily--“happiness in the life heternal,” “washed
in the blood of the Lamb,” and “cast yer sins away an' come an' be saved
without money an' without price.”

Then he remembered who he was and who they were--the warders had told
him of the Prison Gate Brigade. He turned to the man and muttered--

“I want to get away from here,” and stepped past them, but the woman
laid her fat, coarse hand on his sleeve.

“Come 'ome with us, brother. P'r'aps yer 'ave a mother or a wife waitin'
to 'ear from yer, an' we----”

He dashed her hand aside savagely--“Blast you, no; let me go!”

Then with awkward, shambling gait he pushed through the curious crowd
at the prison gate, crossed the street, and entered the nearest
public-house.

“Another soul escaped us, Sister Hannah,” squeaked the little man; “but
we'll try and rescue him when he comes out from the house of wickedness
and abomination.”

“Better leave him alone,” said a warder in plain clothes, who just then
came through the gate, “he won't be saved at no price, I can tell yer.”

“Who is the poor man?” asked Sister Hannah, in a plaintive, injured
voice.

“Sh! Mustn't ask them questions,” said the little man.

But he knew, all the same, that the tall, gaunt man with the sallow face
and close-cropped white hair was Harvey Challoner, once chief officer of
the ship _Victory_, sentenced in Melbourne to imprisonment for life for
manslaughter, but released at the end of ten years.

*****

The _Victory_ murder trial had not attracted much public attention, and
the prisoner had been defended at the public expense. On the voyage from
London to Australia the crew had become discontented. They had
reason for their discontent. Captain Cressingham, for all his suave,
gentlemanly shore manners, was an adept at “hazing,” and was proud
of the distinction of making every ship he commanded a hell to the
fo'c's'le hands. Sometimes, with sneering, mocking tongue, he would
compliment Challoner upon the courteous manner in which he “addressed
the gentlemen for'ard.” As for the other two mates, they were equally
as brutal as their captain, but lacked his savage, methodical
vindictiveness.

When only a few weeks out, Harman, the second mate, one day accused
one of the men of “soldiering,” and striking him in the face, broke his
nose, and as the man lay on the deck he kicked him brutally. Challoner,
who was on deck at the time, jumped down off the poop, and seizing
Harman by the arm, called him a cowardly hound.

“And you're a d------d old woman,” was the retort.

Challoner's passion overpowered him, and at the end of five minutes
Harman was carried below badly knocked about, and à stormy scene ensued
between Challoner and the captain.

“You have all but killed Mr. Harman. I could, and should, put you in
irons for the rest of the voyage,” the captain had said.

There was a steely glitter in the mate's dark eyes as he answered--

“In dealing with ruffians such as Harman and yourself one doesn't stop
at an extra blow or two.”

From that time Cressingham was his bitter enemy; but Challoner did
his duty as chief officer too faithfully to give the captain a chance
against him.

Day after day had passed. The sullen discontent of the crew had changed
into outspoken hatred and a thirst for revenge upon the captain and
Harman and Barton--the latter the third mate--and Challoner, who knew
what was brewing, dared not open his mouth to any one of the three upon
the subject. Between himself and Cressingham and the other two there had
now sprung up a silent yet fierce antagonism, which the crew were quick
to perceive, and from which they augured favourably for themselves.

One night, just as Challoner had relieved the second mate, some of the
hands from both watches marched boldly aft and asked him if he would
take command of the ship. He had only to say the word, they said. They
were tired of being “bashed” and starved to death by the skipper and two
mates, and if he would navigate the ship to Melbourne they would keep
him free from interference, and take the consequences, &c.

“Go for'ard, you fools,” said Challoner, with assumed harshness, “don't
talk mutiny to me.”

A step sounded on the deck behind him, and Cressingham's sneering tones
were heard.

“Discussing mutiny, are you, Mr. Challoner? By God, sir, I've suspected
you long enough. Go below, sir; or go for'ard with these fellows. You'll
do no more mate's duty aboard of this ship. Ah, Colliss, you're one of
the ringleaders, are you?” And in an instant he seized a seaman by the
throat, and called loudly for Barton and Harman to help him.

Before they could respond to his call the poop was black with struggling
men. Cressingham, mad with passion, had Colliss down trying to strangle
him, and Challoner, fearing murder would be done, had thrown himself
upon the captain and tried to make him release his grip of the man's
throat. At that moment a sailor called out--

“Stand by, chaps, for Barton and Harman, and drop 'em the moment they
shows up. Mr. Challoner's got the old man safe.”

But Messrs. Harman and Barton were tough customers. The loud cries on
deck and heavy tramping of feet told them that a crisis had occurred,
and they dashed up, each with a revolver in hand--only to be felled from
behind ere they could fire a shot. Challoner, letting the captain free,
sprang to their aid. But he came too late, for before, with blows,
kicks, and curses, he could force his way through the swaying, surging
mass of men that hid the fallen officers from his view, he heard a
sound--the sound of a man's skull as it was smashed in by a heavy blow.

“He's done for,” said a voice, with a savage laugh, “scoot, chaps,
scoot. This shindy will keep the old man quiet a bit, now one of his
fightin' cocks is gone,” and the men tumbled down off the poop as quick
as their legs could carry them, leaving Challoner and the two prone
figures behind them. Cressingham had gone below for his revolver.

“Steward,” called Challoner, “bring a light here, quick, and see where
the captain is,” and, stooping down, he tried to raise Harman, then laid
him down with a shudder--his brains were scattered on the deck. Barton
was alive, but unconscious.

As Challoner was about to rise, Captain Cressingham stood over him and
raised his arm, and dealt him a crashing blow with a belaying pin. When
he regained consciousness he was in irons.

*****

A month later and he stood in the dock charged with murder. The
principal witnesses against him were his captain and Barton, the third
mate. The crew, who, of course, were also witnesses in the case, didn't
worry much about him. It wasn't likely they would run their necks into
a noose if it could be placed round any one else's. And in this
instance--superinduced by a vision of the gallows--fo'c's'le hands stuck
to one another and lied manfully together. None of them “had hurt Mr.
Harman.”

But it was upon Cressingham's evidence that his fate hung; and
Cressingham, suave, handsome, and well-dressed, told the court how
Challoner had once attempted to murder Harman in the earlier part of the
voyage. Barton, with his arm in a sling, corroborated the lie with blunt
cheerfulness.

His Honour summed up dead against the prisoner, and the jury, impressed
by the calm, gentlemanly appearance of Captain Cressingham, and the
haggard, unshaven, and guilty look of the man whose life they held in
their hands, were not long in considering their verdict.

The prisoner was found guilty, but with a recommendation to mercy.

And then the judge, who was cross and tired, made a brief but affecting
speech, and sentenced him to imprisonment for life.

He went into his prison cell with hair as black as night, and came out
again as white as a man of seventy.

******

In a back room of the public-house he sat and waited till he had courage
and strength enough to face the streets again. And as he waited, he gave
himself up to visions of the future--to the day when, with his hand on
Cressingham's lying throat, he would see his face blacken and hear the
rattling agonies of his gasps for breath. He leaned back in his chair
and laughed hoarsely. The unearthly, hideous sound startled him, and he
glanced round nervously as if he feared to betray his secret. Then he
drank another glass of brandy, and with twenty-six shillings of prison
money in his pocket and ten years of the blackest hatred in his heart,
he went out again into the world to begin his search--for Cressingham
and revenge.




II.

The people of Port ------, on the east coast of New Zealand, were
charmed with the handsome commander of the biggest ocean steamer that
had yet visited the port, and on the eve of his departure gave Captain
Cressingham the usual banquet. Banquets to captains of new lines of
steamers are good things to boom the interests of a budding seaport
town, and so a few score of the “warmest” men in the place cheerfully
planked down their guinea each for the occasion.

The _Belted Will_ had hauled out from the wharf and lay a mile or so
from the shore ready for sea, and the captain had told his chief officer
to send a boat ashore for him at twelve o'clock.

Among the crowd that lounged about the entrance to the town hall and
watched for the arrival of the guest of the evening was a tall, dark,
rough-looking man with white curly hair. One or two of those present
seemed to know him, and presently some one addressed him.

“Hallo, Harry! come to have a look at the swells? 'Taint often you come
out o' nights.”

The white-haired man nodded without speaking, and then moved away again.
Presently the man he was looking for was driven up, and the loungers
drew aside to let him pass up the steps into the blaze of light under
the vestibule of the hall, where he was welcomed by half a dozen
effusive citizens. For a moment he stood and chatted, and the man who
watched clenched his brawny hands and ground his teeth. Then Captain
Cressingham disappeared, and the tall man walked slowly away again in
the direction of the wharves.

*****

At eleven o'clock Cressingham's boat came ashore, and the crew as they
made her fast grumbled and cursed in true sailor fashion.

“Are you the chaps from the _Belted Will?_” said a man, who was leaning
against one of the wharf sheds.

“Yes; who are you, mister?” said one of them.

“I'm Harry--one of the hands that was stowing wool aboard. I heard you
was coming ashore for the captain, and as you won't see him for the next
couple of hours, I thought I'd come down and ask you to come up and have
a couple of nips. It's cold loafing about here. I live pretty close.”

“You're one o' the right sort. What say, Peter?” Peter was only too
glad. The prospect of getting into a warm house was enough inducement,
even without the further bliss of a couple of nips.

In half an hour the two men were helplessly drunk in Harry's room, and
their generous host carefully placing another bottle (not doctored this
time) of rum on the table for them when they awoke, quietly went out
and locked the door behind him. Then he walked quickly back to where
the _Belted Will_ boat lay, and descending the steps, got into her and
seemed to busy himself for a while. He soon found what he was looking
for, and then came the sound of inrushing water. Then he drew the boat
up again to the steps, got out, and casting off the painter, slung it
aboard, and shoved her into the darkness.

For another hour he waited patiently, and then came the rattle of
wheels, and loud voices and laughter, as a vehicle drew up at the
deserted wharf.

“Why not stay ashore to-night, captain,” said one of the guest's
champagne-laden companions, “and tell your man to go back?”

“No, no,” laughed Cressingham. “I don't like the look of the weather,
and must get aboard right away. Boat ahoy! Where are you, men?”

“Your boat isn't here, sir,” said a gruff voice, and a tall man advanced
from the darkness of the sheds. “I saw the men up town, both pretty
full, and heard them laughing and say they meant to have a night ashore.
It's my belief they turned her adrift purposely.”

Cressingham cursed them savagely, and then turned to the tall man.

“Can you get me a boat?”

“Well, sir, there's a big heavy boat belonging to my boss that I can
get, and I don't mind putting you aboard. We can sail out with this
breeze in no time. She's lying under the coal-wharf.”

“That'll do. Good-bye, gentlemen. I trust we shall all meet again in
another eight months or so.”

The big man led the way, and in a few minutes they reached the coal
wharf, under which the boat was moored. She was a heavy, clumsily-built
craft, and Cressingham, on getting aboard and striking a match, cursed
her filthy state. The tall man stepped to the mast and hoisted the
lug-sail, and Cressingham, taking the tiller, kept her out towards the
_Belted Will_ whose riding light was discernible right ahead.

“We must look out for the buoys, sir,” said the gruff-voiced man, as the
breeze freshened up and the heavy boat quickened her speed.

“All right,” said Cressingham, and pulling out a cigar from his overcoat
he bent his head and struck a light.

Ere he raised it the white-haired man had sprung upon him like a
tiger, and seized his throat in his brawny hands. For a minute or
so Cressingham struggled in that deadly grip, and then lay limp and
insensible in the bottom of the boat.

Challoner, with malignant joy, leaned over him with a world of hate in
his black eyes, and then proceeded to business.

Lifting the unconscious man he carried him for'ard, and, placing him
upon a thwart, gagged and bound him securely. Then he went aft and,
taking the tiller, hauled the sheet in and kept the boat away again upon
her course for the _Belted Will_.

He passed within a quarter of a mile of the huge, black mass with the
bright riding light shining upon the fore-stay, and the look-out from
the steamer took no notice of the boat as she swept past toward the open
sea.

*****

Daylight at last. For six hours the boat had swept before the strong
northerly wind, and the land lay nearly thirty miles astern, lost in a
sombre bank of heavy clouds and mist. Challoner had taken off his rough
overcoat and thrown it over the figure of his enemy. He did not want him
to perish of cold. And as he steered he fixed his eyes, lighted up with
an unholy joy, upon the bent and crushed figure before him.

Cressingham was conscious now, and stared with horror-filled eyes at the
grim creature in the craft before him--a gaunt, dark-faced man, clad in
a striped guernsey and thin cotton pants, with a worn and ragged woollen
cap stuck upon his thick masses of white curly hair. Who was he? A
madman.

Challoner seemed to take no notice of him, and looked out upon the
threatening aspect of sea and sky with an unconcerned face. Presently he
hauled aft the sheet a bit, and kept the boat on a more westerly course,
and the bound and wondering man on the for'ard thwart watched his
movements intently.

The boat had made a little water, and the white-headed man stooped and
baled it out carefully; then he looked up and caught his prisoner's eye.

“Ha, ha, Cressingham, how are you? Isn't it delightful that we should
meet again?”

A strange inarticulate cry broke from Cressingham.

“Who are you?”

“What! is it possible that you don't remember me? I am afraid that that
banquet champagne has affected you a little. Try back, my dear fellow.
Don't you remember the _Victory?_”

Ah! he remembered now, and a terrible fear chilled his life-blood and
froze his once sneering tongue into silence.

“Ah! I see you do,” and Challoner laughed with Satanic passion. “And so
we meet again--with our positions reversed. Once, unless my memory fails
me, you put me in irons. Now, Captain Cressingham, I have you seized up,
and we can have a quiet little chat--all to ourselves.”

No answer came from Cressingham. With dilated, horror-stricken eyes and
panting breath he was turned into stone. The wretched man's silence at
last broke up the depths of his maddened tormentor's hatred, and with a
bound he sprang to his feet and raised his hand on high.

“Ah! God is good to me at last, Cressingham. For ten years I hungered
and thirsted for the day that would set me free, free to search the
world over for the lying, murderous dog that consigned me, an innocent
man, to a lifelong death. And when the day came, sooner than I thought
or you thought--for I suffered for ten years instead of for life--I
waited, a free man till I got you into my power.”

His hand fell to his side again, and then he leaned forward and laughed.

Cressingham, with death creeping into his heart, at last found his
voice.

“Are you going to murder me?” he said.

“Yes,” said Challoner, slowly, “I am going to murder you. But not
quickly. There would be no joy in that. I want you to taste some of my
hideous past--some little space, if only for a day or two, of that ten
long years of agony I spent in Pentridge.”

Then he sat down again, and opening the locker in the stern sheets, took
out food and water, and placing it beside him, ate and drank. But he
gave none to Cressingham.

He finished his meal, and then looked again at his prisoner, and spoke
calmly again.

“You are comfortable, I trust, Captain Cressingham? Not cold, I am
certain, for you have my overcoat in addition to your own. Do you know
why I gave it to you? Just to keep you nice and warm during the night,
and--alive. But, as I feel chilly myself now, I'll take it from you.
Thanks,” and he laughed mockingly as he leaned over and snatched it
away.

“You see, sir, we are going on a long cruise--down to the Snares,
perhaps--and I must keep warm myself, or else how can I talk to you to
break the monotony of the voyage?... It is no use looking astern, my
friend. There's only one tug in port, and she is not in sea-going trim,
so we've got a good start of any search party. And as I don't want to
die myself, we won't run away from the land altogether.”

And so the day passed, agony and deadly fear blanching the face of one,
and cruel, murderous joy filling the heart of the other. Once, as the
last dying gleams of the wintry sun for a few brief moments shone over
the blackened waters, Challoner saw a long stream of steamer's smoke
between the boat and the misty line of coast, and he lowered the sail
and let the boat drift till darkness enwrapped them again.

Once more he took out food and water, and ate and drank, and then lit
his pipe and smoked, and watched with eyes that glared with the lust of
murder and revenge the motionless being before him.

Only once in all that night of horror to Cressingham did he speak, and
his voice shook and quivered, and came in choking gasps.

“Challoner, for the love of Christ, kill me and end my misery.”

“Ha! still alive, Captain Cressingham! That is very satisfactory--to
me only, of course. Kill you, did you say?” and again his wild demoniac
laugh pealed out through the black loneliness of the night. “No, I don't
intend to kill you. I want to see you suffer and die by inches. I want
you to call upon God to help you, so that I can mock at you, and defy
Him to rob me of my vengeance.”

A shuddering moan, and then silence again.

Again the day broke, and as the ocean mists cleared and rolled away, and
the grey morning light fell upon the chilled and stiffening form of his
enemy, Challoner came up and looked into his face, and spoke to him.

No answer came from his pallid lips, and Challoner thrust his hand under
Cressingham's coat and felt his heart. He was still alive, and presently
the closed and swollen eyelids opened, and as he met the glance of the
man who leaned over him an anguished groan burst from his heart.

Challoner looked at him intently for awhile; then he hoisted the sail
again, and, taking the tiller, headed the boat in for the land. The wind
had hauled round during the night, and although the boat made a lot
of leeway there was no danger now of being blown away from the land
altogether.

As the sun mounted higher, and the grey outlines of the shores darkened,
he glanced carefully over the sea to the north-west. Nothing in sight
there. But as the boat lifted to a sea he saw about five miles to
leeward that a big steamer was coming up. In half an hour, unless she
changed her course, she would be up to the boat and could not fail to
see her.

In five minutes more Cressingham lay in the bottom of the boat unbound,
but dying fast, and Challoner was speaking to him.

“Cressingham, you are dying. You know that, don't you? And you know that
I am not lying when I tell you that there is a steamer within five miles
of us. In less than half an hour she will be up to us.”

One black, swollen hand was raised feebly, and then fell back, and a
hoarse sound came from his throat.

“Well, now listen. I said I wanted to see you die--die as you are dying
now--with my face over yours, watching you die. And you die and I live.
I can live now, Cressingham, and perhaps the memory of those ten years
of death in life that I suffered through you will be easier to bear. And
yet there is one thing more that you must know--something that will make
it harder for you to meet your Maker, but easier for me.... Listen.”
 He knelt beside him and almost shrieked it: “I had no one in the whole
world to care for me when I was tried for my life but my wife--and you,
you fiend, you murderer--you killed her. She died six years ago--starved
and died.”

Cressingham, with closed eyes, lay with his head supported on
Challoner's left arm. Presently a tremor shook his frame, a fleck of
foam bubbled from between his lips, and then the end.

With cold, merciless eyes the other regarded him, with clenched hands
and set teeth. Then he went for'ard and unbent the boat's kedge, and
with the same lashings that had bound the living man to the thwart he
lashed the kedge across the dead man's chest.

He stood up and looked at the approaching steamer, and then he raised
the body in his arms and dropped it over the side.

*****

A few days later the papers said that the steamer _Maungatapu_ had
picked up a man named Harry, who with Captain Cressingham, of the
_Belted Will_ had been blown out to sea from Port ------. It appeared
from the survivor's statement that during a heavy squall the same night
Captain Cressingham had fallen overboard, and his companion was unable
to rescue him.





“THE BEST ASSET IN A FOOL'S ESTATE”

A slight smile lit up the clear-cut, sombre face of Lawson from Safune,
as looking up from his boat at Etheridge's house he saw the glint of
many lights shining through the walls of the roughly-built store. It
was well on towards midnight when he had left Safune and sailed round
to Etheridge's, a distance of twelve or fifteen miles, and as his
boat touched the sand the first streaks of dawn were changing the dead
whiteness of the beach into a dull grey--soon to brighten into a creamy
yellow as the sun pierced the heavy land-mist.

A native or two, wrapped from head to foot in the long _lava lava_ of
white calico, passed him as he followed the windings of the track to
Etheridge's, but gave him no sign of greeting. Had he been any one of
the few other white men living on Savaii the dark men would have stopped
him and, native-like, inquired the reason of his early visit to
their town. But they knew Lawson too well. _Matâaitu_ they called
him--devil-faced. And in this they were not far wrong, for Lawson,
with his dark olive skin, jet black beard, and eyes that belied the
ever-smiling lips, was not a man whom people would be unanimous in
trusting.

The natives knew him better than did his few white acquaintances in
Samoa, for here, among them, the mask that hid his inner nature from
his compeers was sometimes put aside, though never thrown away. But
Etheridge, the hot-blooded young Englishman and friend of six months'
standing, thought and spoke of him as “the best fellow in the world.”

Etheridge had been taking stock, and the wearisome work had paled his
usually florid features. His face flushed with pleasure at Lawson's
quiet voice:--

“Hard at it, Etheridge? I don't know which looks the paler--you or
Lâlia. Why on earth didn't you send for me sooner? Any one would think
you were some poor devil of a fellow trading for the Dutchmen instead of
being an independent man. Now, I'm hungry and want breakfast--that is,
if Lâlia isn't too tired to get it,” and he looked compassionately at
Etheridge's young half-caste wife, sister to his own.

“I'm not tired,” said the girl, quietly. “I've had easy tasks--counting
packets of fish-hooks, grosses of cotton, and things like that. Billy
wouldn't let me help him with the prints and heavy things,” and with
the faintest shadow of a smile on her lips she passed through into the
sitting-room and thence outside to the little thatched cook-house a few
yards away. With ardent infatuation Etheridge rested his blue eyes on
the white-robed, slender figure as she stood at the door and watched the
Niuë cook light his fire for an early cup of coffee--the first overture
to breakfast at Etheridge's.

“By Jove, Lawson, I'm the luckiest man in Samoa to get such a wife as
Lâlia--and I only a new-chum to the Islands. I believe she'd work night
and day if I'd allow it. And if it hadn't been for you I'd never have
met her at all, but would have married some fast creature who'd have
gone through me in a month and left me a dead-broken beachcomber.”

“Yes,” said Lawson, “she _is_ a good girl, and, except her sister, about
the only half-caste I ever knew whom I would trust implicitly. Their
mother was a Hervey Island woman, as I told you, and Lâlia has been with
Terere and me all over Polynesia, and I think I know her nature. She's
fond of you, Etheridge, in her quiet, undemonstrative way, but she's a
bit shy yet. You see, you don't speak either Rarotongan or Samoan, and
half-caste wives hate talking English. Now, tell me, what is it worrying
you? You haven't had another attack?”

“Yes,” said the younger man, “I have--and a bad one, too, and that's why
I sent for you. The stocktaking is nothing; but I was afraid I might get
another that would stiffen me properly. Look here, Lawson, you've been
a true friend to me. You picked me up six months ago a drunken,
half-maddened beast in Apia and saved my life, reason, and money,
and----”

“Bosh!” said Lawson, taking his coffee from the hand of Etheridge's
wife; “don't think of it, my boy. Every man goes a bit crooked
sometimes; so don't thank me too much.”

Etheridge waited till his wife was gone and then resumed: “I've been
horribly scared, Lawson, over this,” and he placed his hand over his
heart, “I was lifting a case of biscuits when I dropped like a pithed
bullock. When I came to, Lâlia was bathing my face.... I feel pretty
shaky still. The doctor at Goddeffroy's warned me, too--said I'd go off
suddenly if I wasn't careful. My father and one brother died like that.
And I want to talk things over with you in case, you know.” Lawson
nodded.

“Everything I have is for her, Lawson--land, house, trade, and money.
You're pretty sure there's no irregularity in that will of mine, aren't
you?”

“Sure. It's very simply written. It's properly witnessed, and would hold
in any court of law if contested. And perhaps your people in Australia
might do that.”

Etheridge reddened. “No; I cut adrift from 'em long ago. Grog, you know.
Beyond yourself and Lâlia, I haven't a soul who'll bother about me.
I think, Lawson, I'll take a run up to Apia and see the Dutch doctor
again. Fearful cur, am I not?”

“Come, Etheridge,” and Lawson laid his smooth, shapely hand--how
dishonest are shapely hands!--on the other's arm. “You're a little
down. Anything wrong with one's heart always gives a man a bad shaking.
There's Lâlia calling us to breakfast, so I won't say any more but this:
Even if Lâlia wasn't my wife's sister, and anything happened to you,
there's always a home for her in my house. I'd do that for your sake
alone, old man, putting aside the principle I go on of showing respect
to any white man's wife, even if she were a Oahu girl and had rickety
ideas of morality.”

When Lawson had first met him and had carried him down to his station on
Savaii, nursed him through his illness, and treated him like a brother,
Etheridge, with the impulsive confidence of his simple nature, poured
out his thanks and told his history, and eagerly accepted Lawson's
suggestion to try his hand at trading, instead of continuing his erratic
wanderings--wanderings which could only end in his “going broke” at
Tahiti or Honolulu, Fifteen miles or so away, Lawson said, there was a
village with a good opening for a trader. How much could he put into
it? Well, he had £500 with him, and there was another thousand in
Sydney--the last of five. Ample, said his host. So one day the land
was bought, a house and store put up, and Etheridge commenced life as a
trader.

The strange tropic beauty of the place and the ways of the people soon
cast their spell over Etheridge's imaginative nature, and he was as
happy as a man possibly could be--with a knowledge that his life hung by
a thread. How slender that thread was Lawson knew, perhaps, better than
he. The German doctor had said, “You must dell him to be gareful, Mr.
Lawson. Any excidemend, any zooden drouble mit anydings; or too much
visky midout any excidemends, and he drop dead. I dell you.”

*****

A month or so after he had settled, Etheridge paid his weekly visit to
Lawson, and met Lâlia.

“This is my wife's sister,” said Lawson; “she has been on a visit to
some friends in Tutuila, and came back in the _Iserbrook?_”

The clear-cut, refined, and beautiful features of the girl did their
work all too quickly on Etheridge. He was not a sensualist, only a
man keenly susceptible to female beauty, and this girl was.
beautiful--perhaps not so beautiful as her sister, Terere, Lawson's
wife, but with a softer and more tender light in her full, dark eyes.
And Lawson smiled to himself when Etheridge asked him to come outside
and smoke when his wife and her sister had said good-night. A student
of human nature, he had long ago read the simple mind of Etheridge as
he would an open book, and knew what was coming. They went outside and
talked--that is, Etheridge did. Lawson listened and smoked. Then he put
a question to the other man.

*****

“Of course I will, Lawson; do you think I'm scoundrel enough to dream
of anything else? We'll go up to Apia and get married by the white
missionary.”

Lawson laughed in his quiet way. “I wouldn't think you a scoundrel
at all, Etheridge. I may as well tell you that I'm not married to her
sister. We neglected doing that when I lived in the eastward groups, and
no one in Samoa is any the wiser, and wouldn't think anything of it if
they were. But although I'm only a poor devil of a trader, I'm a man of
principle in some things. Lâlia is but a child, so to speak, and I'm her
natural protector. Now, you're a fellow of some means, and if anything
did happen to you she wouldn't get a dollar if she wasn't legally
your wife. The consul would claim everything until he heard from your
relatives. And she's very young, Etheridge, and you've told me often
enough that your heart's pretty dicky. Don't think me a brute.”

Etheridge grasped his hand and wrung it. “No, no--a thousand times no.
You're the best-hearted fellow in the world, and I honour you all the
more, Lawson. Will you ask her to-morrow?”

Perhaps if he had heard the manner of Lawson's asking it would have
puzzled his simple brain. And the subdued merriment of the two sisters
might have caused him to wonder still more.

A week or so after, Etheridge and the two sisters went up to Apia.
Lawson was unable to go. Copra was coming in freely, he had said with
a smile, and he was too poor to run away from business--even to the
wedding of his own wife's sister.

*****

As Etheridge and his young wife came out of the mission church some
natives and white loafers stood around and watched them.

“Ho, Mâgalo,” said one, “is not that _teine_, the sister of the wife of
_Matâaitu_ the black-visaged _papalagi?_”

“Aye,” answered a skinny old hag, carrying a basket of water-bottles,
“'tis she, and the other is Terere. I lived with them once at Tutuila.
She who is now made a wife and looketh so good and holy went away but
a year ago with the captain of a ship--a pig of a German--and now, look
you, she marrieth an Englishman.”

The other natives laughed, and then an ugly fat-faced girl with
lime-covered head and painted cheeks called out “_Pâpatetele!_” and
Terere turned round and cursed them in good English.

“What does that mean?” said a white man to Flash Harry from Saleimoa--a
man full of island lore.

“Why, it means as the bride isn't all as she purfesses to be. Them
pretty soft-lookin' ones like her seldom is, in Samoa or anywhere else.”

*****

The day following the stock-taking Etheridge went to Apia--and never
came back.

One night a native tapped gently at Lawson's window and handed him a
note. As he read Terere with a sleepy yawn awoke, and, stretching one
rounded arm out at full length, let it fall lazily on the mat-bed.

“What is it, Harry?”

“Get up, d------ you! Etheridge is dead, and I'm going to take Lâlia up
to Apia as quick as I can. Why the h---- couldn't he die here?”

A rapid vision of unlimited presents from the rich young widow passed
through the mind of Terere--to whom the relations that had formerly
existed between her and Lawson were well known--as she and he sped along
in his boat to Etheridge's. Lâlia received the news with much equanimity
and a few tears, and then leaving Terere in charge, she got into the
boat and rolled a cigarette. Lawson was in feverish haste. He was afraid
the consul would be down and baulk his rapid but carefully arranged
scheme. At Safune he sent his crew of two men ashore to his house for a
breaker of water, and then once they were out of sight he pushed off and
left them. They were in the way and might spoil everything. The breeze
was strong, and that night Lawson and Lâlia, instead of being out in
the open sea beating up to Apia, were ashore in the sitting-room of the
white missionary house on the other side of Savaii.

“I am indeed glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Lawson. Your honourable
impulse deserves commendation. I have always regretted the fact that a
man like you whose reputation as an educated and intelligent person far
above that of most traders here is not unknown to me”--Lawson smiled
sweetly--“should not alone set at defiance the teaching of Holy Writ,
but tacitly mock at _our_ efforts to inculcate a higher code of morality
in these beautiful islands. Ere long I trust I may make the acquaintance
of your brother-in-law, Mr. Etheridge, and his wife.”

Lawson smiled affably, and a slight tinge suffused the creamy cheek of
Lâlia.

“And now, Mr. Lawson, as you are so very anxious to get back home I will
not delay. Here are my wife and my native assistant as witnesses. Stand
up, please.”

*****

“Get in, you little beast,” said Lawson, as he bundled Lâlia into the
boat and started back home, “and don't fall overboard. I don't want to
lose the Best Asset in that Fool's Estate.”

*****

When the consul, a week later, came down to take possession of
Etheridge's “estate,” he called in at Safune to ask Lawson to come and
help him to take an inventory. Terere met him with a languid smile, and,
too lazy perhaps to speak English, answered his questions in Samoan.

“He's married and gone,” she said.

“Married? Aren't _you_ Mrs. Lawson?” said the bewildered consul, in
English.

“Not now, sir; my sister is. Will you take me to Apia in your boat,
please?”

And that is how Lawson, the _papalagi mativa_ (poor white) and “the
best-hearted fellow in the world,” became a _mau aha_--a man of riches,
and went, with the Best Asset in Etheridge's estate, the calm-eyed
Lâlia, to start a hotel in--well, no matter where.




DESCHARD OF ONEAKA




I.

Among the Gilbert Group--that chain of low-lying sandy atolls annexed
by the British Government two years ago--there is one island that may be
said to be both fertile and beautiful; yet for all this Kuria--for so
it is called by the natives of the group generally--has remained almost
uninhabited for the past forty years. Together with the lagoon island
of Aranuka, from which it is distant about six miles, it belongs to the
present King of Apamama, a large and densely populated atoll situated
half a degree to the eastward. Thirty years ago, however, the
grandfather of the lad who is now the nominal ruler of Apamama had cause
to quarrel with the Kurians, and settled the dispute by invading their
island and utterly destroying them, root and branch. To-day it is
tenanted only by the young king's slaves.

Of all the many groups and archipelagoes that stud the North and South
Pacific from the rocky, jungle-covered Bonins to Juan Fernandez,
the islands of the Gilbert Group are--save for this Kuria--the most
uninviting and monotonous in appearance. They are for the most part but
narrow strips of sandy soil, densely clothed, it is true, with countless
thousands of stately cocoanut palms varied with groves of pan-danus and
occasional patches of stunted scrub, but flat and unpleasing to the
eye. Seldom exceeding two miles in width--although, as is the case at
Drummond's Island, or Taputeouea, they sometimes reach forty in the
length of their sweeping curve--but few present a continuous and
unbroken stretch of land, for the greater number consist of perhaps
two or three score of small islands, divided only by narrow and shallow
channels, through which at high water the tide sweeps in from the ocean
to the calm waters of the lagoons with amazing velocity. These strips
of land, whether broken or continuous, form the eastern or windward
boundaries of the lagoons; on the western or lee side lie barrier reefs,
between whose jagged coral walls there are, at intervals widely apart,
passages sufficiently deep for a thousand-ton ship to pass through in
safety, and anchor in the transparent depths of the lagoon within its
protecting arms.

*****

Years ago, in the days when the whaleships from Nantucket, and Salem,
and Martha's Vineyard, and New Bedford cruised northward towards the
cold seas of Japan and Tchantar Bay, and the smoky glare of their
tryworks lit up the ocean at night, the Gilberts were a wild place, and
many a murderous scene was enacted on white beach and shady palm grove.
Time after time some whaler, lying to in fancied security outside the
passage of a lagoon, with half her crew ashore intoxicated with sour
toddy, and the other half on board unsuspicious of danger, would be
attacked by the ferocious brown people. Swimming off at night-time, with
knives held between their teeth, a desperate attempt would be made to
cut off the ship. Sometimes the attempt succeeded; and then canoe after
canoe would put out from the shore, and the wild people, swarming up the
ship's side, would tramp about her ensanguined decks and into the cabins
seeking for plunder and fiery New England rum. Then, after she had been
gutted of everything of value to her captors, as the last canoe pushed
off, smoke and then flames would arise, and the burning ship would
drift away with the westerly current, and the tragedy of her fate, save
to the natives of the island, and perhaps some renegade white man who
had stirred them to the deed, would never be known.

*****

In those days--long ere the advent of the first missionary to the
isolated equatorial atolls of Polynesia and Melanesia--there were
many white men scattered throughout the various islands of the Ellice,
Gilbert, and Marshall groups. Men, these, with a past that they cared
not to speak of to the few strangers they might chance to meet in their
savage retreats. Many were escaped convicts from Van Diemen's Land and
New South Wales, living, not in dread of their wild native associates,
but in secret terror of recapture by a man-of-war and a return to the
horrors of that dreadful past. Casting away the garb of civilisation
and tying around their loins the _airiri_ or grass girdle of the Gilbert
Islanders, they soon became in appearance, manners, language, and
thoughts pure natives. For them the outside world meant a life of
degradation, possibly a shameful death. And as the years went by and
the bitter memories of the black days of old, resonant with the clank
of fetters and the warder's harsh cry, became dulled and faint, so died
away that once for-ever-haunting fear of discovery and recapture. In
Teaké, the bronzed, half-naked savage chief of Maiana, or Mési, the
desperate leader of the natives that cut off the barque _Addie Passmore_
at Marakei, the identity of such men as “Nuggety” Jack West and Macy
O'Shea, once of Van Diemen's Land or Norfolk Island, was lost for ever.




II.

On Kuria, the one beautiful island of the Gilberts, there lived four
such white men as those I speak of. Whence they came they alone knew.
Two of them--a Portuguese deserter from a whaler and a man named
Corton--had been some years on the island when they were joined by two
others who came over from Apamama in a boat. One was called Tamu (Tom)
by the natives, and from the ease with which he spoke the Gilbert Island
dialect and his familiarity with native customs, he had plainly lived
many years among the natives; the other was a tall, dark-skinned,
and morose-looking man of nearly fifty. He was known as Hari to the
natives--once, in that outer world from which some crime had dissevered
him for ever, he was Henry Deschard.

Although not familiar with either the language or the customs of the
ferocious inhabitants of the Gilbert Group, it was soon seen by the ease
with which he acquired both that Hari had spent long years roaming about
the islands of the Pacific. In colour he was darker than the Kurians
themselves; in his love of the bloodshed and slaughter that so often ran
riot in native quarrels he surpassed even the fiercest native; and as
he eagerly espoused the cause of any Kurian chief who sought his aid he
rapidly became a man of note on the island, and dreaded by the natives
elsewhere in the group.

There were then over a thousand people living on Kuria--or rather,
on Kuria and Oneaka, for the island is divided by one of those narrow
channels before mentioned; and at Oneaka Tamu and Deschard lived, while
the Portuguese and the man Corton had long held joint sway with the
native chief of Kuria.

During the time the four renegades had lived on the island two vessels
that had touched there had had narrow escapes from seizure by the
natives. The first of these, a small Hawaiian whaling brig, was
attacked when she was lying becalmed between Kuria and Aranuka. A breeze
springing up, she escaped after the loss of a boat's, crew, who were
entrapped on the latter island. In this affair Deschard and Tamu had
taken part; in the next--an attempt to capture a sandalwooding barque
bound to China--he was leader, with Corton as his associate. The
sandalwooder, however, carried a large and well-armed crew, and the
treacherous surprise so elaborately planned came to ignominious failure.
Deschard accused his fellow-beachcomber of cowardice at a critical
moment. The two men became bitter enemies, and for years never spoke to
each other.




III.

But one afternoon a sail was sighted standing in for the island, and in
their hateful bond of villainy the two men became reconciled, and agreed
with Pedro and Tamu and some hundreds of natives to try to decoy the
vessel to an anchor and cut her off. The beachcombers, who were tired
of living on Kuria, were anxious to get away; the natives desired the
plunder to be obtained from the prize. A compact was then made that the
ship, after the natives had done with her, was not to be burnt, but was
to be handed over to the white men, who were to lead the enterprise.

*****

Sailing slowly along till she came within a mile of the reef, the
vessel hove to and lowered a boat. She was a large brigantine, and the
murderous beings who watched her from the shore saw with cruel pleasure
that she did not appear to carry a large crew.

It had been agreed upon that Corton, who had special aptitude for such
work, should meet the boat and endeavour to lure the crew into the
interior, under the promise of giving them a quantity of fresh-water
fish from the artificial ponds belonging to the chief, while Deschard
and the other two, with their body of native allies, should remain at
the village on Oneaka, and at the proper moment attack the ship.

As the boat drew near, the officer who was in charge saw that although
there were numbers of natives clustered together on the beach, the
greater portion were women and children. He had with him five men, all
armed with muskets and cutlasses, and although extremely anxious to
avoid a collision, he was not at all alarmed. The natives meanwhile
preserved a passive attitude, and when the men in the boat, at a word
from the officer, stopped rowing, backed her in stern first, and then
lay on their oars, they nearly all sat down on the sand and waited for
him to speak.

Standing up in the boat, the officer hailed--

“Hallo there, ashore! Any white men living here?”

For a minute or so there was no answer, and the eyes of the natives
turned in the direction of one of their number who kept well in the
background.

Again the seaman hailed, and then a man, seemingly a native, stout and
muscular, with hair felling down in thick masses upon his reddish-brown
shoulders, walked slowly out from the others, and folding his brawny
arms across his naked chest, he answered--

“Yes; there's some white men here.”

The officer, who was the mate of the brigantine, then spoke for a few
minutes to a young man who pulled bow oar, and who from his dress was
not one of the crew, and said finally, “Well, let us make sure that
there is no danger first, Maurice.”

The young man nodded, and then the mate addressed the seeming native
again:

“There's a young fellow here wants to come ashore; he wants to see one
of the 

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