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-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VAITI OF THE ISLANDS ***
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VAITI OF THE ISLANDS ***
 
 
 
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-.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

-

-.. meta::

-   :PG.Id: 50663

-   :PG.Title: Vaiti of the Islands

-   :PG.Released: 2015-12-10

-   :PG.Rights: Public Domain

-   :PG.Producer: Al Haines

-   :DC.Creator: Beatrice Grimshaw

-   :DC.Title: Vaiti of the Islands

-   :DC.Language: en

-   :DC.Created: 1920

-   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

-

-====================

-VAITI OF THE ISLANDS

-====================

-

-.. clearpage::

-

-.. pgheader::

-

-.. container:: titlepage center white-space-pre-line

-

-   .. vspace:: 4

-

-   .. class:: xx-large bold

-

-      VAITI OF THE ISLANDS

-

-   .. vspace:: 2

-

-   .. class:: medium bold

-

-      BY BEATRICE GRIMSHAW

-

-   .. vspace:: 3

-

-   .. class:: medium

-

-      LONDON

-      GEORGE NEWNES, LIMITED

-      SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND, W.C.

-

-   .. vspace:: 4

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CONTENTS

-

-.. class:: noindent small

-

-   CHAPTER

-

-.. class:: noindent

-

-`Prologue`_

-

-.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

-

-I. `The Pearl Lagoon`_

-II. `A Race for a Fortune`_

-III. `The Flower behind the Ear`_

-IV. `The Black Viri`_

-V. `A Diamond Web`_

-VI. `Marooned`_

-VII. `The Turning of the Tables`_

-VIII. `The White Man of Nalolo`_

-IX. `The Lost Island`_

-X. `What came of the Paris Dress`_

-XI. `A Dead Man's Revenge`_

-XII. `Breaking the Mana`_

-XIII. `The Game Played Out`_

-XIV. `How the Witch-Doctor got his Money back`_

-XV. `The Calamity of Coral Bay`_

-XVI. `The Fate of the Lieutenant`_

-XVII. `Invaders in Tanna`_

-XVIII. `A Cannibal Party`_

-XIX. `The Rival Princesses`_

-XX. `Queen after all`_

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`PROLOGUE`:

-

-.. class:: center x-large bold

-

-   VAITI OF THE ISLANDS

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   PROLOGUE

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-It was in the seventies, long ago.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-Summer—yet a slow grey dawn, lingering long

-in the sky.  August—yet a chilly morning, crisping

-the landlocked waters of the bay with cold knife-edges

-of foam.  Out at sea, the wild white horses plunging

-madly under the whip of the sunrise wind; the bar

-beginning to thunder.  Inshore, beneath the green

-slope of the castle hill, small angry ripples beating and

-fretting the untrampled sand.  Dead rose-leaves from

-the gardens floating among the seaweed; a torn bird's-nest,

-flung down by the wind, lying on the edge of the

-steep cliff pathway....  It was still the time of summer,

-yet, too surely, autumn had come.

-

-The sodden leaves lay thick in the bottom of the

-boat when the man seized it by the gunwale and ran

-it down the beach into the snatching waves....  Oh,

-an autumn day indeed, here in wild Caithness, though

-summer was still at its fairest in kinder lands.  And

-in the heart of the man who was rowing fast through

-the angry dawn light, to the tall schooner yacht that

-swung and tore at her moorings out in the bay, there

-was autumn too, with winter close at hand.

-

-All so long ago! who remembers?

-

-Not the newspapers which, in a day or two after,

-shrieked the scandal broadcast, east and west.  Not

-the guests of the castle house-party—they are dead, or

-old, which is half of death, since then.  Not the Prince

-whose dignity had been insulted by the outbreak of a

-vulgar card scandal in his very presence—he struck

-the titled owner of the house off the list of his intimates

-forthwith, and then forgot about it and him.  Not the

-colonel of the famous regiment, who found out defalcations

-in the funds belonging to the mess, a few days

-after, and knew why his most promising young officer

-had done the unforgiveable thing—for the Ashanti

-spears ended life and memory for him out on the African

-plains, before even Piccadilly had made an end of talking.

-Not the Royal Yacht Squadron—the reported loss of

-the famous *Paquita* at sea, with her disgraced owner

-on board, is a tale that even the oldest *habitue* of Cowes

-could not tell you to-day....  No one remembers.

-When the beautiful white schooner spread her wings

-below the castle wall, and beat her way like a frightened

-butterfly out to the stormy sea, she sailed away in

-silence, and she and hers were known no more.

-

-Yet, but for that stormy day in the Highlands, and

-the boat that fled to sea, these tales of far-off lands had

-never been told.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE PEARL LAGOON`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER I

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE PEARL LAGOON

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-"Where's the old man?"

-

-"Old man drunk," replied Vaiti indifferently.  She

-had learned to play "The Maiden's Prayer," maltreat

-three European languages, and cultivate a waist in her

-Tahitian convent school.  But that was five years ago

-now, and Vaiti's "papalangi" verbs had dropped from

-her quite as soon, and as naturally, as her "Belitani"

-stays.

-

-"Why can't he wake up and give us an observation?"

-commented the mate indignantly.  "It would be hard

-if a man mightn't enjoy himself in port; but we're

-four days out now, and he's as bad as ever, lyin' all the

-time on the settee like a——"

-

-"You better mind too much what you say my father!"  Vaiti

-had set one shapely olive hand on the deck, and

-sprung to her feet like a flying-fish making a leap.  She

-was taller than the sturdy, red-haired mate, as she

-stood up on the poop, her bare feet well apart, her white

-muslin loose gown swelling out as she leaned to the roll

-of the steamer, and her black-brown eyes, deep-set under

-fine brows as straight as a ruler, staring down the blue

-eyes of the man.

-

-"Very sorry, I'm sure; no offence meant," said the

-mate humbly.  "But we want an observation, and he

-ain't no good.  Why, you know as well as me that he'll

-be like this, off and on, all the voyage now; we've both

-of us seen it before."

-

-Vaiti stamped her bare feet on the deck.

-

-"I know—I know!  I try all the way from Apia

-wake him up—no good!  I tell you, Alliti"—the mate's

-name, Harris, usually took this form in the pigeon-English

-of Polynesia—"this very bad time for him to

-get 'quiffy.  Too much bad time.  Never mind.  Get

-the sextan'.  I take sun myself."

-

-The mate ran down the companion and into the

-cabin, where the captain's six feet two of drunken

-ineptitude sprawled over most of the space available

-for passing.  He stopped for a moment to look at the

-heavy, unconscious face—a handsome face, with the

-remains of refinement about it; for Captain Saxon had

-been a gentleman once, and his name (which was certainly

-not Saxon then) had appeared among the lists of

-"members deceased" in the annual reports of all the

-best London clubs of the 'seventies....  Why Saxon

-died, and why he came to life again in the South Pacific

-some years later, is a tale that need not be told, even if

-it is guessed.  Many such substantial ghosts roam the

-South Seas unexorcised—many a man whose name

-adorns a memorial tablet, guarded by weeping marble

-angels, on the walls of some ivied English Church, is

-busy conferring a peculiar fitness upon the

-occupation of those guardian seraphs, down among "The

-Islands," where he and the devil may do as they please.

-

-"'Og!" observed the mate, as he passed through

-to the captain's cabin, and fetched out the sextant.

-"'Alf-caste or quarter-caste, Vaiti's too good a daughter

-for him, by the length of the mainmast and the mizzen

-together.  She's got all his brains—Lord, how she

-learned navigation from him, like a cat lapping up milk,

-when she set her mind to it!—and none of his villainy.

-At least——"  The mate paused on the companion,

-and filled his pipe.

-

-"At least——" he repeated, and broke off the remark

-unfinished.

-

-"Sun coming out nice now," he said, handing the

-sextant to the girl.  Vaiti made her observation with

-the ease of an old sea-captain, and went below to work

-it out.  It was true, as Harris said, that she had plenty

-of brains, though they did not lie along the lines of

-"The Maiden's Prayer" and Dr. Smith's English

-Grammar.  And, whatever the legal status of poor

-derelict Saxon, or the mate, might be, no one who had

-ever climbed the side of the schooner *Sybil* could doubt

-the obvious fact that the real commanding officer of

-that vessel was Vaiti herself.

-

-"What d'ye make it?" asked the mate, looking over

-her shoulder.  Vaiti, always sparing of her words, pointed

-to the figures.  Harris whistled.

-

-"Ain't we off our course, just!" he said, drawing

-his finger down the chart.

-

-"No," said Vaiti.

-

-"Why, hang it all, Cap"—the girl was accorded the

-title, half in fun, half through habit, a good deal oftener

-than her father—"we ain't making for the Delgada

-reefs, are we?  I don't pretend to be any navigator,

-but I do know the course for Papeëte."

-

-"What you think not matter," said Vaiti, rolling

-up the chart.  "Make him eight bell.  You go take

-wheel; I ki-ki [dinner], then I take him."

-

-"What's the course?" demanded the mate eagerly.

-

-"Nor'-west by west," answered Vaiti, going into her

-cabin, and slamming the door against Harris's

-open-mouthed questions.

-

-An Aitutaki boy with a chain of red berries in his

-hair, and a scarlet and yellow "pareo" (kilt) for all

-clothing, brought up the dinner.  Vaiti ate her meal

-alone, and then came on deck to take over the wheel,

-keeping a determined silence that Harris hardly cared

-to break....  And yet—Nor'-west by west, with the

-wind fair for distant Papeëte, and the deadly Delgadas

-lying about a quarter point off their present course, not

-ten miles away!

-

-"She's a hard case, bo'sun," he remarked to that official

-as they sat down together.  "She has me fair scared

-with the course she's steering; and yet, you may sling

-me over the side in a shotted hammock for the sharks'es

-ki-ki, if she don't know a lot more than the old man

-himself.  Ain't she a daisy, too!  Look at her there

-'olding the wheel, as upright as a cocoanut palm, and

-as pretty and plump as a—as a——"

-

-"Porker," concluded the bo'sun, pouring an imperial

-pint of tea into his mug.

-

-"You ain't got no poetry in you," said the mate

-disgustedly.

-

-"Nor nothing else," growled the bo'sun.  "Ain't

-you going to help that curry, and give a man something

-to put in his own inside after stowing the whale-boat

-full of beef and biscuits?"

-

-"The whale-boat?  (That's plenty, bo'sun; I've

-got to live as well as you)."

-

-"Ay, biscuits, beef, and water; compass and sextant.

-She give the order a while ago."

-

-"What's in the wind now?"

-

-"I don't ask questions, so I'm never told no lies."

-

-"I do, though," said the mate, in a spasm of authority,

-deserting his dinner to spring up the companion and

-join Vaiti at the wheel.  The bo'sun's mahogany face

-broke up into a score of curving wrinkles, and his

-shoulders shook a little, as he watched the scene on

-deck.  Quite mechanically he transferred the rest of

-the curry to his plate, and while clearing the dish with

-the precision of a machine, kept an eye on the couple

-at the wheel.  He saw Harris ask an eager question,

-and repeat it more eagerly.  He saw Vaiti jerk a brief

-answer, and the mate speak again.  Then he saw the

-girl swing round on her heel, lift one slender hand, and

-bring it down across Harris's cheek with an emphasis

-that left a crimson mark upon the polished brown.  He

-saw the mate take a step forward, and look at the

-handsome helmswoman as though he were very much minded

-to pay back the correction after the manner of man in

-general where a pretty vixen is concerned.  The two

-figures stared at each other, eye to eye, for a full minute.

-Vaiti's brown eyes, keen as twin swords, never wavered;

-her lip was insolent and unrelenting.  The mate's

-half-angry, half mischievous expression dissolved into an

-embarrassed grin; then he turned tail and hurried down

-the hatch.

-

-"She's a tigress in 'uman form," he declared.  "If

-the old man—or any other—was to lay 'is little finger

-on me—but there! who cares what a scratchin' cat

-does?  I'd as soon marry a shark—I would!"

-

-"You've as much chance," granted the bo'sun.

-

-"Talk of sharks!" said the mate, gazing ruefully at

-the table and the empty dish.

-

-Some two hours later, a milky gleam on the port bow

-attracted the mate's attention as he stood on the poop.

-A Kanaka sailor had just taken the wheel, and Vaiti was

-below.

-

-"Breakers on the port bow!" sang out Harris.

-

-Vaiti was up in a minute.

-

-"I t'row water on my father's head," she said coolly—"but

-no good; he too much sick, he see snake by

-and by, I think.  You and Oki carry him into him

-cabin, and come back pretty quick.  I see this t'rough

-myself."

-

-"See *what*?" demanded the mate, on the last verge

-of frenzy.

-

-"Not know myself yet," answered Vaiti, giving one

-of her rare laughs.  She seemed in a very good humour

-for once.

-

-When the mate came out a little later, and the sailor

-went back to the neglected wheel, Vaiti was standing

-by the whale-boat, wearing an air of perfect self-possession

-and a complete suit of her father's white ducks.

-The sight was no novelty to Harris, but it came

-upon him now, as usually, with a new shock of admiration.

-

-"Isn't she an outrighter!" he observed to the

-unsympathetic bo'sun.

-

-"She certainly is, if outrighter's French for an

-undacent young woman," replied that officer sourly.

-Harris did not hear him, for the significance of the

-morning's mystery had just burst on his mind.  He

-had not spent ten years in the Pacific for nothing and

-the sight of Tai, a diver from Penrhyn, standing beside

-Vaiti, with a water-glass in his hand, spelt "pearl-shell"

-to the eyes of the mate as clearly as if the magic

-word had been printed in letters three feet long.  Vaiti

-flashed her white teeth at him.

-

-"Tai, me, three boys, we go into lagoon," she said.

-"Suppose somethings happen, you find course for Apia

-written out, cabin table; you take ship back, put

-captain in hospital."

-

-"By ——, but you're a corker, Vaiti!" cried Harris

-admiringly.  "Where'd you hear anything about the

-Delgadas?  No ship goes near them that can help it;

-they're a regular ocean cemetery."

-

-"You 'member officer from gun-boat, Apia?"

-

-"Ay!" said Harris.  He did remember the lad, and

-the rather inexplicable friendliness shown him by

-Saxon and Vaiti during the stay in port of the

-*Alligator*.

-

-"He show me photo Delgadas.  *Alligator* he been go

-all round him, mark him right for chart, because he all

-wrong.  Officer give my father bearings; say plenty talk

-and show photo.  He dam fool officer, I think; he not

-know that kind place mean pearl-shell, and we not tell

-anything."

-

-Harris mounted the rigging, and surveyed the reef

-from the main cross-trees.  It was the best part of a

-mile away; a creaming circle of foam on the sea's blue

-surface, enclosing a pallid spot of green.  Vaiti, who had

-followed him, flung one arm round the mast, and, leaning

-outwards towards the horizon, surveyed the reef

-intently.  Within that ring of foam—the grave of many

-a gallant ship that had sailed the fair Pacific as bravely

-as their own little schooner—might lie many thousands

-of pounds.  The repurchase of the *Sybil*, once Saxon's

-sole property, now partly owned by a trading syndicate;

-the regaining of her captain's lost position in decent

-society—perhaps the realisation of half a hundred

-luxurious dreams, dreamed on coral beaches under the

-romance-breeding splendours of the tropic moon—all

-this, and more, hung on the chances of the next few

-hours.

-

-There was silence for the space of a minute or two,

-as the man and woman swung between earth and

-heaven, staring across the sun-dazzled plain of sea.

-Then, in one instant, the dream broke, and the rainbow

-fragments of that bubble of glory scattered themselves

-east and west.  For across the bar of the level horizon

-slipped a small, pointed, pearl-coloured sail, growing as

-they watched it, flying past, and heading all too surely

-for the Delgadas reef.

-

-Vaiti flung herself round a backstay, and slid down

-to the deck, with a word on her lips that would have

-justified the bo'sun's recent judgment, could he have

-caught it.  Harris followed, swearing fully and freely.

-It was evident to both that the newcomer had special

-business with the reef as well as themselves; and they

-wasted no time, acting in concord, and without dispute,

-after a fashion that was new on board the *Sybil*.  Within

-half an hour they had reduced the distance between

-the ship and the reef to a quarter of a mile; nearer

-than that even Vaiti did not care to go, for the weather

-looked unsettled, though the wind was off the reef.

-The whale-boat, with a picked crew, was lowered, and

-sent flying towards the break in the reef, while the

-mate, burning to be in her, but conscious that his

-duty must keep him on the ship, paced excitedly up and

-down the deck, glass in hand, watching the advance of

-the stranger ship from time to time.  She was a good

-two hours' sail away as yet; and surely first possession

-was worth something, even out here in the lawless South

-Seas!

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`A RACE FOR A FORTUNE`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER II

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   A RACE FOR A FORTUNE

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-Before an hour was over, the wind had freshened

-considerably, and the mate began to feel anxious for the

-safety of the boat, in case he should be obliged to run

-for it from the neighbourhood of the treacherous reef.

-That Vaiti would return an instant sooner because

-of the threatening weather he did not expect, knowing

-the dare-devil recklessness of her character too well.

-It was certain, however, that he might lose the ship,

-and incidentally himself, by waiting too long; and it

-was equally certain that Saxon, once recovered, would

-put a bullet through his mate's head if Vaiti came to

-harm.  And all the time that threatening sail was

-growing larger and larger.

-

-It was an unspeakable relief, though no less of a

-surprise, when he saw that the boat was actually heading

-towards the ship again, the sail up and every oar hard

-at work.  He did not remember having seen Tai go

-down, in any of his hurried inspections through the glass,

-and the time was certainly short.  What did it all

-mean?

-

-The meaning became sufficiently clear as soon as the

-boat approached the ship, but not through the medium

-of eye or ear.  A strong stench of rotting fish struck

-the mate's nostrils almost before the boat was within

-hail, and instantly enlightened him.  No one who has

-ever smelt the terrible smell of the pearl-oyster removed

-from its ocean bed, and left to putrefy in a tropical sun,

-can mistake the odour.  Harris understood at once that

-the strange ship had been there before, and that Vaiti was

-bringing back a sample of the last catch, left out to rot

-during the vessel's temporary absence.

-

-The *Sybil* was leaping dangerously when the boat came

-alongside, but Vaiti snatched at the lowered rope, and

-swung herself up over the bulwarks before any of the

-native crew.  Tai, following her, brought a sack of

-hideously smelling carrion, and dumped it down on the

-deck.  The mate's eyes glistened.

-

-"I find great lot lying on reef," said Vaiti, with an

-apparent calmness that might have deceived any one

-who knew her less accurately than the mate.  "I think

-been there two week.  C'lismas Island, he one week

-away, good weather.  Papalangi C'lismas Island belong

-plenty diving gear.  You see?"

-

-"Rather!" said Harris gloomily.  "Game up, eh?"

-

-"I think you no man at all," spat Vaiti suddenly,

-swinging into the cabin.  Harris, not especially put out,

-gave a hand to hauling in the boat, remarking to the

-bo'sun, who was picking over the heap of decaying

-pearl-shell, "Don't know as one could say the same about her,

-lump of solid devilment that she is!  But this looks

-like the end of all our 'opes, as they say in the plays;

-don't it?"

-

-In a minute or two Vaiti appeared again, wearing a

-dignified muslin gown with three frills on its tail, and

-holding a chart in her hands.  She eyed the horizon

-narrowly, and ordered the ship to be put about, a

-manoeuvre which headed the *Sybil* straight for the

-oncoming sail.  It was now evident that the stranger

-ship was a schooner of some eighty or ninety tons,

-rather larger than the *Sybil*, and nearly as fast.  No one

-on board had the smallest doubt of her mission, even

-had that rotting heap of shell not been there to offer

-evidence.  Pearl-shell lagoons, with their shell worth

-£100 to £200 per ton, and their pearls (if any are found,

-which is not always certain) worth a fortune for half a

-handful, are the gold mines of the South Sea world;

-the very birds of the sea seem at times to carry the news

-of such a discovery, and spread it far and wide.

-

-The *Sybil* gathered way, and sped fast towards the

-stranger ship.  The sea was blackening and rising, but

-there was not very much wind as yet.  Vaiti sat

-cross-legged on the deck, studying her chart in the waning

-light of the gusty afternoon.  It was some minutes

-before she laid it down and stood up to speak, steadying

-herself with one hand against the deck-house, for the

-schooner was now rolling heavily.

-

-"Alliti," she said, "suppose you got heart one small

-fowl inside you, I get captain's Winchester, my levolver,

-you and bosun's levolver, and we send that people Davy

-Jones, or go ourself, pretty quick.  But you not got heart,

-though you big man, and old man he all time sick.  Now,

-you listen too much what I tell you.  You run alongside

-ship, you go on board.  You say captain sick, no

-one take sun, we get off course, nearly wreck on Delgadas.

-Then you ask captain give bearings reef, and you look

-at him chart too much careful, see if this line mark—here."

-

-She put the point of her small forefinger on the chart

-she held, and showed two or three newly-ruled lines in

-red ink, enclosing a large space east and south of Samoa.

-These were the boundaries of the area lately annexed

-by New Zealand, and she was exceedingly anxious to

-know if the stranger knew as much about the significance

-of that matter as she did.

-

-"Then," she went on, "you ask him if he been Wellington,

-say we wanting news——"

-

-"What the (adjective noun) for?" demanded the mate.

-

-"Because I say, pauki!" (pig) flashed Vaiti.  "No!—you

-got head of pig, heart of fowl.  You bo'sun, you

-know I get you through this all right, suppose you

-trusting me—you come here."

-

-Harris, shaking his great shoulders in an easy laugh,

-swung down on to the main deck, and began ordering

-about the crew.  He had an enormous admiration for

-Vaiti, even when she boxed his ears, but he thought her

-special peculiarities of character rather a trying obstacle

-in the way of his enjoying the easy life beloved of South

-Sea mates.

-

-The acidulous bo'sun rose from his seat on deck, holding

-out an unclean palm, in the midst of which glittered two

-fine pearls.

-

-"I've been through that little lot, and got these, which

-do look like biz, ma'am," he observed.  "As to people

-havin' fowls' hearts, or pigs' heads, I'm not prepared to

-pass judgment.  But I don't own to neither myself,

-and if you say it's a fight, a fight it is.  Or if you've got

-a better plan in that uncommon level 'ead of yours, I'm

-ready to stand by."

-

-"You something like a man," pronounced the

-commanding officer in the muslin skirt.  "You listen.

-I tell him all again."

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

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-

-An hour later the bo'sun, very wet and draggled,

-climbed over the bulwarks of the *Sybil*, and the schooner

-*Margaret Macintyre*, of Sydney, slipped behind into the

-falling dusk.

-

-"Said he was thirteen weeks out from Sydney, ma'am,"

-reported the ambassador.  "Four weeks out from Apia,

-gettin' copra round here and there, and there wasn't

-no Wellington news anywhere, as he remembered.  Nice

-new chart, with no lines of that kind ruled on it

-anywhere.  As to where he got the divin' gear that

-was in the cabin, or what kind of copra he reckoned

-to pick up on the Delgadas, he didn't say, not bein'

-asked."

-

-Vaiti stood still to consider, a beautifully poised black

-silhouette against the yellow oblong of the lamp-lit

-cabin door.

-

-"I think it all right; he not been near Wellington,"

-she pronounced at last.  "Alliti!  How her head?"

-

-"Sou'-west by south," answered the mate from the wheel.

-

-"Keep her so."

-

-"Ay, ay, sir!" laughed the mate.

-

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-

-

-Every one in the South Pacific knew that the *Sybil*

-was a marvel of speed, and that she had not been originally

-built for trading, though nobody could tell exactly how

-Saxon had acquired such a clipper.  It was a popular

-theory that she was a millionaire's yacht from San

-Francisco, which he had stolen and subsequently

-disguised.  He was known, however, to have possessed her

-for more than twenty years, and was now as completely

-identified with her as her own mainmast; so that any

-doubts as to the honesty of the way by which he might

-originally have obtained her were now of a purely

-academic nature.

-

-Famous as she was for speed, the record of her passage

-from the Delgadas to Wellington fairly astonished the

-Islands, when it came to be told.  They had a fair wind

-almost all the way, with two or three lively nights when

-the little vessel, hard driven under the utmost pressure

-of the canvas, piled up the knots like a liner.  Saxon

-continued delirious, but was fortunately quiet.  Harris,

-and Gray the boatswain, though unenlightened as to

-the cause of the *Sybil's* sudden southward flight, fully

-understood that the possession of the pearl lagoon

-hung in the balance, and worked like half-a-dozen

-to supplement the efforts of the scanty Kanaka crew.

-

-Vaiti interfered little with the working of the ship,

-but she kept a look-out that hardly left her time for sleep

-or food; although the *Sybil*, like most Pacific ships,

-was allowed, under ordinary circumstances, to chance

-it, day and night.  Hour after hour she sat cross-legged

-on deck, watching the unbroken rim of the black horizon,

-or paced up and down the poop, silent and grave, in her

-lace and muslin fripperies, as a naval officer on the bridge.

-What she was looking for no one knew, but during that

-wild ten days of foam and smother, cracking sails and

-straining sheets, her silent watchfulness infected the

-men themselves, and eyes were constantly turned to

-scan the empty, seething plain over which they flew.

-

-It was drawing on towards dusk of the tenth day, and

-the sky was beginning to light fires of angry copper-purple,

-high in the storm-driven west, when Vaiti, of

-a sudden, stopped dead in her endless walk, and looked

-with lips apart and eyes narrowed deep beneath her

-brows over the weather rail.  All this time they had not

-sighted a single sail or a solitary funnel.  They had

-been well off the track of New Zealand bound ships,

-and the Pacific waters are wide.  But now they were

-drawing near to Wellington, and there was nothing to

-be astonished at in the sight of another sail creeping up

-over the horizon, except, indeed, the fact that it was

-momentarily growing larger and gaining on the *Sybil*.

-There was scarce another schooner afloat from New

-Guinea to the Paumotus that could have done as

-much.

-

-The mate came up behind Vaiti, and handed her a

-glass.  She looked through it, lowered it, raised it, and

-looked again with a steady gaze, and suddenly flung it

-out of her hand across the deck.

-

-Harris caught it deftly and asked, with the

-constitutional calm that alone saved his reason when Vaiti

-took over command, "What's to pay now?"

-

-"She got auxiliary," said Vaiti, with a note of agony

-in her voice.

-

-"What if she has?  Isn't any vessel free to carry an

-auxiliary that can stand the stink of the oil and the

-cussedness of the injin?"

-

-"I go see captain," said Vaiti, flashing down the

-companion.

-

-Saxon was better to-day, and almost in full possession

-of his senses.  Vaiti went to the medicine chest; took

-out a hypodermic syringe, filled it with careful accuracy

-from a tiny dark blue bottle, and lifted her father's

-arm as he lay limp and weak, but mending fast, in his bunk.

-

-"Good girl, take care of your old father," he murmured

-in island Maori as she slipped the needle-point painlessly

-under the skin, and the powerful drug began to race

-through every vein of the inert body.  The effect was

-rapid and decisive.  Saxon sat up against his pillows

-in five minutes, clear-headed though weak, and asked if

-the *Sybil* had not sighted the Delgadas yet.

-

-"Listen, father," said Vaiti, speaking fluently in the

-low, soft tongue that the two had used together all

-her life—the Maori language Saxon had first learned

-from the pretty brown girl, dead this many years, whom

-he had stolen from her South Sea island to sail the blue

-Pacific at his side in the days of long ago.  "Listen.

-There is little time, and we are in great need.  We came

-to the reef, and the shell was there truly, but a strange

-ship had been before us.  Even as we lay there she

-returned from Christmas Island with diving gear.  I

-sent Gray on board to look at her chart and find out if

-she had been to Wellington; and it seemed that she

-had not the new line of annexation marked on the chart,

-where New Zealand this year added to herself all that

-lay within a certain space of the sea; also she had not

-been south of Auckland.  So then, knowing that we,

-if we asked the Government, might have the atoll

-granted us for twenty years and take possession above

-the people of the other ship, I made sail for Wellington;

-and we are now but one day away when this ship

-appears again, chasing us.  Where the suspicion has

-waked in their hearts, or when, is nothing; but that

-they have thought and discovered our desire, that is

-certain."

-

-"Give the *Sybil* all sail, daughter, and she will leave

-the other.  What is this talk?" asked Saxon, raising

-himself on his elbow to look out of the glooming circle

-of the port.

-

-"But the ship has 'auxiliary,' my father, and she

-will have passed out of sight before the morning."

-

-"Oh, she has, has she?" grunted the captain, dropping

-back into his native tongue.  "What are you going to

-do about it?"

-

-He had noted a glimmer in Vaiti's eye that told him

-that she was not yet at the end of her resources.  The

-Maori guile and the English daring were united to some

-purpose in this strange creature that he had given to the

-world.

-

-"I will tell," she said, standing up to her full height.

-"But you must give the order, my father, for Alliti

-drags on the rein these days.  Let the bale of trawl-net,

-and the Manila rope, be taken from the cargo, and let us

-cross the bows of this ship, and drop them across her

-path.  The keel will run clean, but the screw will foul,

-and they will creep like a bird with a broken wing till

-daylight.  Then, if the sea has grown less, they will

-send down a diver and clear the screws; but we

-shall be almost into Wellington, and the lagoon is ours."

-

-"You are worthy to be the daughter of a brave man,"

-answered Saxon in Maori, sinking back wearily on his

-pillow.  "Go, then; and if we lose the ship, we lose

-her; there is great wealth to gain, and a man must die

-at one time, if not another.  I am tired.  I will sleep."

-

-Vaiti left him, and hurried back on deck.  The purple

-dusk was already beginning to gather, and the green

-starboard light of the *Margaret Macintyre* gleamed like

-a glow-worm a mile or so behind.  She was drawing

-very near; there was no time to lose.

-

-"Alliti!" called Vaiti.  "My father he better; he

-send word to take trawl-net and Malila out of hold,

-make come across that ship him path, foul him sclew.

-Suppose you not afraid, you bring us close, drop net and

-Malila."

-

-Harris's hide was thick, but Vaiti knew how to pierce

-it when she chose; and the man had courage enough,

-in streaks.  Vaiti had hit the mark when she called

-him chicken-hearted in fighting, but there was no

-manoeuvre of the ship too risky for him to undertake

-and carry through with perfect coolness.

-

-"All right, my lady," he nodded.  "Don't forget me

-and Gray when it comes to sharing out the swag, that's

-all."

-

-The net and the rope were brought up, and the latter

-knotted here and there to make a hideous tangle of it.

-Then the *Sybil's* lights were put out, even the cabin lamp

-being extinguished.  The stars pricked themselves out

-in sudden sharpness on the great blue chart of heaven

-above, and the waste of dark rolling water all around

-grew large and lonely.

-

-You are not to suppose that Saxon's daughter did

-not see and feel these things—did not hear the voiceless

-talk of the great seas on starry evenings, or feel her mortal

-body almost rapt away in the ecstasy of a black midnight

-and a shrieking storm; just as you, perhaps, who think

-that no one ever shared such experiences with yourself,

-may feel.  It is not only the blameless tourist, with his

-daily diary, and his books of travel teaching him how

-and when to "enthuse," who enjoys the splendid

-pageant of the seas.  Vaiti, as the most indulgent

-chronicler must confess, had more than a spice of her

-father's villainy in her composition, not to speak of

-whatever devilry her Maori forebears might have bequeathed

-to her.  She was unscrupulous, ruthless, and crafty

-as a general rule; she was engaged in a deed of the very

-shadiest description to-night—yet, as she stood with

-her hands on the wheel, and her eyes on the green

-starboard light of the oncoming ship, steering the *Sybil*

-to something extremely like certain destruction, she

-knew that the Southern Cross was rising, clear and

-beautiful, above its gem-like pointers, just ahead; and

-that a little sliver of young moon, crystal-silver against

-the dark, was slipping up the sky to her left.  The thought

-just grazed her mind that this might be the last time

-the moon would ever rise over the Pacific for her.  She

-smiled a little in the dusk, and steered steadily ahead.

-There were no "streaks" in the composition of Vaiti's

-spirit.

-

-A short tack to the starboard became necessary.

-Harris put the ship about at a lift of Vaiti's hand.  It

-grew very dark; a cloud was over the moon, and the

-stars were dimmed by driving vapour.  The wind was

-increasing; the schooner lay over with its weight, and

-the foam gurgled along her clean-ran sides.  Still the

-*Margaret Macintyre* came on, stately and unsuspicious,

-all sail set, and the beat of the little screw distinctly

-audible through the night.

-

-Vaiti signalled again to put the ship about, and as

-soon as the great booms had creaked across the deck.

-gave over the wheel to Harris.

-

-"Run him just as he head now," she said softly, "and

-bring him too much close; so (double adjective) close

-to ship he scrape the (qualified) paint off him.  I go do

-rest."

-

-Harris, humming "Good-bye, Dolly Gray," took

-the wheel over.  If he had any doubts as to Vaiti's

-purpose, the vigour of her language would have

-dispersed them.  Vaiti never swore unless she was

-exceedingly in earnest.

-

-The trawl-net and the tangle of Manila were hanging

-over the stern, held up by a single rope.  Vaiti glided

-to the rail, holding a sharp knife in her hand—("I

-always *did* think she kept one somewhere among her

-frilligigs," commented Harris silently, as he caught the

-flash of the steel)—and waited, still as a statue.

-

-Presently out of the darkness shot a hail, accompanied

-by a perfect constellation of oaths.  Its apparent object

-was to ascertain the *Sybil's* reason for steering such a

-course.  The *Sybil* answered not a word, but steered

-the course some more.

-

-The hail, at the second time of repeating, became a

-yell, with a strong note of terror in it.  On came the

-*Sybil*, a dim, unlit tower of blackness, taking as much

-notice of the shouts as the *Flying Dutchman*.  Those on

-board the *Margaret Macintyre* gave themselves up for

-lost.  There was even a rush made for one of the boats.

-But the threatening shape swept past her bows, so near

-that the furious captain could have tossed a biscuit

-on board—so near that the *Sybil's* Kanaka crew, thinking

-the "papalangi" officers meant to ram the stranger,

-uttered war-cries wherein pure delight was mingled with

-overjoyed surprise.

-

-It was all over in a minute, and the *Sybil* was well

-away on the *Margaret Macintyre's* port side before

-the latter vessel discovered, through the medium of a

-horrible jar from the engine-room and a powerful odour

-of oil, that the screw was badly fouled, leaving them,

-like St. Paul with nothing to do but make the best of

-circumstances, and "wish that it were day."

-

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-

-

-December weather is hot in Wellington, and it was

-now close to Christmas.  Perhaps that was why the

-senior member of the trading firm that had taken over

-part ownership of the *Sybil* for an unpaid debt thought

-his eyes were deceived by the glare of the sun when

-he saw a white schooner of singularly graceful lines

-lying alongside one of the wharves on a date when

-her engagements plainly demanded her presence in

-Tahiti.

-

-When, however, he met Saxon and his daughter, a

-few minutes afterwards, on Lambton Quay, he understood

-that his eyes were in excellent order.  So, it soon

-appeared, was his tongue.  He was a gentleman of

-Scottish extraction, and it hurt him badly to see possible

-profits thrown away.

-

-Saxon let him have his say, and merely laughed for

-answer.

-

-"Come into the Occidental, and Vaiti and I'll tell you

-something worth all the trade that you'd take out of

-Papeëte in ten years," he said.  "I'm going to own the

-ship again before New Year's Day, and paint this good

-old town scarlet as well.  You'll see."

-

-And the man of money-bags, anxious to see, went into

-the hotel.

-

-Vaiti, in a fit of perversity, declined to come in.  She

-knew only too well that, in Saxon's impecunious

-condition, there was no hope of getting their discovery

-effectively worked save at a price that would leave very

-little change over for the present possessors of the

-lagoon—even if the captain had been quite sober, which he

-was not.  They had got the grant, and had furthermore

-had the satisfaction of noting that, day after day,

-Wellington Harbour remained empty of the hardly-used

-*Margaret Macintyre*.  It was evident that her

-people, whoever they were, had tamely accepted defeat.

-There was no standing against a grant from the

-Government of New Zealand—no matter how acquired.

-But all this did not alter the fact that there was not going

-to be a great deal for the *Sybil*, and her captain, and her

-captain's daughter—especially the latter.  It was there

-that the sting lay.  Vaiti had had dreams—oh, but

-dreams! oh, such dreams! before solid common-sense

-had brought her down to earth, and made her

-realise that Saxon's unlucky state, and the eminently

-Scottish firm who held the destinies of the *Sybil* in their

-hands, were quite certain to stand in the way of

-realisation.  To make a fortune, you must first have one,

-generally speaking.  And it was the canny Glasgow men

-who had it.

-

-So, because she did not want to hear with her own

-ears what she knew very well must take place, she

-refused to come into the hotel, and wandered off alone

-down the quays, in the warm December sun, which yet

-was cool compared to the burning heats of the island

-world.  She was dressed in a long, waistless muslin

-gown, as usual, but her shady Niué hat and white deck

-shoes—not to speak of a pair of kid gloves that caused

-her horrible discomfort and a parasol that embarrassed

-her extremely—spoke of a respect for certain of the

-conventions that might have astonished people who knew,

-or thought they knew, Vaiti of the Islands.  Of course,

-the loungers on the quays looked admiringly after her—she

-would have liked to see them dare to omit that tribute

-to her fiery charms—and some of them freely spoke to

-her, calling her Mary and Polly, offering her hearts and

-drinks and new bonnets, and asking her for kisses or

-jobs on the schooner, just as it occurred to them, after

-the simple fashion of the sea.  Some of them knew her,

-and some of them did not.  It was the latter who asked

-for jobs.  The men who did know the *Sybil* and her

-"Kapitani" asked for kisses, which they did not expect

-to get.  That was safer.

-

-Vaiti, quite accustomed to this sort of demonstration,

-and enjoying it in a languid way as she strolled along

-under the annoying parasol, covered half a mile or so

-of the quay at her own leisurely pace, and then sat down

-on a coil of rope in a quiet place, to stare across the water

-and think.

-

-She wanted something, and she did not see her way

-to get it.

-

-To disentangle the dreams and hopes, wild fancies,

-and wilder aspirations of the half-caste mind when that

-mind, puzzling and elusive enough to the pure white

-in any case, is further complicated with a touch of

-genius, would be a task worthy of a whole academy of

-science.  This much alone can the necessarily

-all-knowing biographer of Vaiti say—that she wanted to

-be someone, and wanted it so badly that nothing

-else in life seemed worth having, or even existent,

-She was a princess of Atiu on her mother's side, and

-on her father's (though Saxon's past was as much a

-mystery as the origin of the yacht-like *Sybil* herself)

-Vaiti felt that she had every right to claim high

-standing.

-

-Doubly dowered, therefore, with the instinct of rule,

-the actual command of the schooner had fallen into her

-capable hands quite naturally.  Left to herself, she

-would probably have made the *Sybil* pay in a way

-unknown before to the easy-going island world.  But

-the useless, dissipated Saxon had to be counted on.  She

-liked him in her own way, such as it was, but she despised

-him also.  And it was an undoubted fact that he

-hampered everything.  This bargain with M'Coy and

-Co., for instance—it was useless for her to attempt to

-put a finger on it.  Saxon had got drunk the night

-before, as soon as the matter of the grant had been

-finally decided, at the end of some anxious days of

-waiting; and in the morning the numerous "hairs"

-that he had taken to restore him had left him in a

-condition of hopeless obstinacy and self-sufficiency.  In

-such a state he was as certain to be over-reached as a

-stranded jelly-fish is certain to be licked up by the

-sun.  And this was bitter to Vaiti.

-

-For, sitting there motionless under the parasol (which

-was serving a useful purpose at last, in shading her

-handsome face from observation and comment by the

-passers-by), Vaiti had arrived at something rather like

-a conclusion, and a conclusion, too, that was likely to

-shape most of her thoughts and acts henceforward.

-

-Money was the thing.

-

-She did not care for money in itself, and none of the

-things it could bring really interested her, except pretty

-clothes.

-

-But money was importance, money was power; money

-was the freedom to do exactly what you wanted, and

-make other people do it too.  She did not think it out

-in words, like a European.  Pictures passed before her

-mind, more vivid by far than the glittering water and

-flashing sea-gull wings in front of her bodily eyes.  She

-saw captains of great ships, giving orders like kings,

-and obeyed by the promptest and smartest of slaves.

-She saw owners of big stores entertaining half the

-island on their verandahs, paid court to by wandering

-beach-combers, going out to ships in beautiful boats

-manned by their own uniformed crews, who bent their

-backs double at a word.  She saw "Tusitala," of Samoa,

-the great English story-teller, living in his splendid

-house outside Apia, surrounded by a humble clan of

-native followers wearing wonderful lava-lavas of a

-foreign stuff they called "tatani" (tartan)—Tusitala,

-who was as great a chief as Mataafa himself, and had

-spoken to her, Vaiti, as one worthy of all honour....

-Her pictures were almost all of the islands, for the

-islands were in her blood; but something, too, she

-saw of Auckland—the merchant M'Coy, old and so

-ugly, and of the commonest birth, yet reverenced like

-the greatest of chiefs, because he had money....

-

-The afternoon rays grew blinding hot on the water

-as the sun sank down.  The sea-gulls dipped and

-screamed.  Steamers glided away from the wharves

-with long hooting cries that somehow seemed to embody

-all the melancholy of the homeless sea.  Steam cranes

-chattered ceaselessly above the yawning holds of

-discharging ships.  Behind, the tramcars hummed in the

-street, and people hurried up and down.

-

-And at last the western sky began to burn with

-sultry red, and Vaiti went home.

-

-Something had taken root in her mind that afternoon

-that struck down and shot up, in the days to come, and

-led her into ways and places wilder even than the

-adventure of the pearl lagoon.  As children string

-berries on a straw, so upon the stem that grew from

-that seed were strung the strange events that followed,

-one by one.

-

-

-

-

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-.. _`THE FLOWER BEHIND THE EAR`:

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-   CHAPTER III

-

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-   THE FLOWER BEHIND THE EAR

-

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-

-As Vaiti, Cassandra-wise, had prophesied about the

-pearl lagoon, so indeed it fell out.

-

-It takes money to exploit even the smallest

-discovery of this kind, and the canny M'Coy made the

-most of the fact.  Delgadas Reef was too risky a

-neighbourhood to be worked by any vessel unprovided with

-an auxiliary engine, so a cranky little schooner of some

-forty tons, owning a tiny oil engine that sometimes

-worked and sometimes did not—more commonly the

-latter—was chartered; also a couple of boats for

-diving work, and two sets of diving dresses; and a

-cheap crew was picked up somewhere, and some poor

-provisions laid in.  Everything was done on the most

-economical scale possible—yet the Scotchman grumbled

-and lamented, and declared he would never see his

-money back.  The shares had been fixed at a wickedly

-low figure for Saxon and there were, furthermore,

-clauses in the agreement concerning expenses which

-made that unlucky derelict swear fiercely when he read

-them after he was sober.  It was too late to complain

-then, however, for he had signed everything he was

-asked, under the influence of the good whisky to which

-M'Coy—liberal for once—had freely treated him.  Nor

-did he get any sympathy from Vaiti.  She merely

-laughed when he complained, and told him frankly

-that he would have done better to stay in his cabin

-and drink there, if he liked, leaving her to finish what

-she had begun.

-

-So the pearling ship sailed off, and Saxon, who could

-not afford to stay in port, went another voyage.  And

-some months later, when he came back, it was to find

-that Delgadas Reef was cleaned out.  It had held not

-much after all, said the Glasgow man, and shell was

-down, and the pearls had been few and off colour.  But

-there was enough to pay Saxon's debt and leave him

-owner and master of the *Sybil* once more.  And there

-might be a few pounds in addition—not much; but

-there, he was an honest man, and he would rather ruin

-himself than let Saxon and the charming Miss Vaiti

-feel they were badly treated.  And if Saxon would

-kindly sign this paper releasing him from all further

-claims, he would be happy to give over all claim in

-the ship.  Otherwise—money was tight, and that

-little matter between them had been owing so long

-that——

-

-Saxon interrupted with a statement to the effect that

-he knew blank well he had been blank well had, and

-for the sum of two sanguinary sixpences he would be

-prepared to knock Mr. M'Coy's doubly condemned head

-off his unpleasantly qualified shoulders—only, luckily

-for Mr. M'Coy, he was sick of him and the like of him,

-and merely wanted to get out of his way as soon as

-he possibly could.  With which concise summing up of

-facts he signed the paper, picked up the cheque, and

-went out to spend it after his own fashion.  Vaiti

-secured half of it at the bank where he cashed it, and

-went off with the money done up in her hair, to keep

-house by herself on the schooner until her father should

-turn up again.  She knew him too well to expect that

-that would come about immediately.

-

-Meanwhile, there were banks in which she could

-deposit her own share, and thus feel herself a step

-nearer to her goal—that dim, undefined goal that was

-to be reached somehow, some time, through the possession

-of the precious bits of paper and coin without

-which all pleasant things were impossible.  She did not

-decide at once where the money should go, but hid it

-in her cabin, and day by day walked the pavements of

-Wellington, delighting her eyes with the shop-window

-beauties which she had so seldom seen.  Thus came her

-undoing.  Vaiti had never heard the saying, "We are

-none of us infallible, even the youngest," or she might

-have been less certain of herself before it came about,

-and less bitter afterwards.

-

-For was it not natural that when Saxon unexpectedly

-reappeared at the Constantinople Hotel with a good

-deal of his money still left, and sent for Vaiti to join

-him and "live like a lady while she could," the

-improvident island blood should all unbidden well up and

-smother everything else?  Why go on?  There are

-shops in Wellington—there are as many ways of getting

-fifteen shillings' worth out of a sovereign, and repeating

-the process a great deal oftener than one means, as in

-any other of the world's big ports....  The end was

-that, after ten delirious days of glorious spending.

-Captain Saxon and his daughter set sail for Tahiti with

-a general cargo, a complete set of empty pockets between

-them, and, on the part of Vaiti, a glad remembrance

-more than half stifled by angry regret for the cost.  Yet,

-and yet, what a lovely thing money was, and what a

-pity that one could not both spend and keep it!  If

-you did the one, you were happy, but no one thought

-anything of you.  If you did the other, everyone paid

-court to you, but you didn't get the fun.  Yes, that

-was true of money—and of other things.  Girls who

-had been brought up at convent schools understood a

-lot that the ignorant beach girls didn't....  And, *bon

-Dieu!* as they used to say in Papeëte, when the Sisters

-couldn't hear—what a headache it gave her to think,

-and what a fool she was to do it!

-

-"Ruru!" she called in Maori to a native sleeping

-peacefully on the deck.  "Wake up, pig-face, son of a

-fruit-bat, and make me kava immediately.  I am

-weary."

-

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-

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-

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-

-

-

-It was many weeks after, and the hot season had come

-round once more.

-

-The schooner was slamming helplessly about on a

-huge glassy swell.  Everything on board that could

-rattle, rattled; everything in the cabins that could

-break loose and take charge, did so, sending up a

-melancholy chorus of crashes with every wallow of the ship.

-The great mizzen sail slatted about above the poop,

-offering and then instantly withdrawing a promise of

-cooling shade, in a manner that was little short of

-maddening, seeing that the hour was three o'clock,

-and the latitude not four degrees south.  Friday Island

-looking like a small blue flower on the rim of a crystal

-dish, hovered tantalisingly on the extreme verge of

-the horizon, as unattainable as Sydney Heads or

-heaven.  For the *Sybil* was becalmed, a week's

-from anywhere in particular, and there seemed no

-chance of a breeze.

-

-"Lord," said the mate, dropping the marlinspike

-with which he was splicing a rope, and mopping his

-forehead with his rolled-up sleeve, "I wonder 'ow many

-thousand miles we are from an iced beer!"

-

-"Turtle!" said Vaiti, taking a slim brown cigar out

-of her mouth, and looking down from her seat on

-the top of the deck-house.  "Only nine hundred

-and eighty-seven.  You not remember Charley's in Apia?"

-

-"I'd forgotten Samoa," said Harris, in a more cheerful

-tone, picking up the marlinspike, and going to work

-again, as if revived by Vaiti's arithmetic.

-

-"A miss is as good as a mile, for all me, specially when

-it's nine hundred mile," remarked the gloomy boatswain.

-"Couldn't you manage to talk about something

-rather less 'arrowing to a man's insides?"

-

-"I'd like to know why she's going skull-huntin' to

-Friday Island, then," said the mate, casting a cautious

-glance at Vaiti, who was scarcely out of ear-shot, up on

-the deck-house.

-

-"Trade I can understand," he went on, "and

-shell-huntin'—we haven't done too bad all round over that

-last little job, and the old man's a sight more sober

-since he's owned the ship again.  But skulls—and old

-skulls at that—filthy natives' bones that's been lyin'

-in the caves since Heaven knows when!  Besides, they

-ain't our skulls, however you may look at it——"

-

-"Nor I hope they won't be," said the boatswain

-darkly.  "In no way, I mean.  The Friday Islanders

-aren't people to ask out to an afternoon tea-party

-without you've got your knuckle-duster on underneath

-your voylet kid gloves.  And you know what natives

-are about their old bones and graves."

-

-"I do.  What I don't know is how she thinks she's

-going to make anything out of a proper nasty job like

-that."

-

-"Oh, she's on the make, is she!"

-

-"Did you ever know her anything else, bless her?"

-asked the mate.  "She wants sixty pounds, havin'

-spent all the old man give her out of the shell business

-in Wellington, takin' boxes at the theaytres and halls,

-and buyin' women's gear, and staying at the Constantinople,

-where she wore two new 'ats a day for a week;

-and other games of a similar kind.  Pity you was sick,

-and not there to see the fun.  I tell you, she made the

-town look silly."

-

-"What's the sixty pound for?" asked the boatswain,

-chewing fondly on his quid.

-

-Harris giggled explosively, and whispered:

-

-"She wants a Dozey dress!"

-

-"What in ——'s that?  It don't sound respectable,"

-virtuously observed the boatswain, who had never heard

-of the famous French dressmaker.

-

-"You bet it is, then.  Dozey's a regular bang-up

-swell in Paris, who makes the most expensive gownds in

-the world, and every one in them parts treats him just

-the same as a baronight or a duke.  You can't get so

-much as a jumper from him for less than sixty pound,

-and Vaiti she says every woman in Papeëte or Aucklan'

-or Sydney who saw one of his dresses would spot it

-right away, and go and throw herself over the Heads.

-She read about his things in a piece in one of them

-female papers in the hotel, and she saw an actress

-wearin' of one, and she's been layin' out to get one

-ever since, somethin' awful.  Seems when a woman in

-London, or Paris, or Yarmouth gets a Dozey dress,

-and takes to standin' off and on before the others,

-who's only got new velveteens with musling frills or

-such-like it just makes them other women drag their

-anchors and run head-on to the shore.  So Vaiti,

-she——"

-

-"Hold on," interrupted the boatswain.  "Why, if

-she 'ad one of those gownds, she couldn't bend it on to

-her yards, not if it cost a million.  Man alive, she ain't

-laid down on the same lines as them Frenchwomen,

-anyway."

-

-"You let her alone for that," chuckled Harris.  "But

-what beats me is *who* she's going to do with them skulls,

-and *how*.  We won't know in a hurry, either, because

-she and Pita's fixed it up between them to do the job

-alone.  Thank 'eaven for small mercies, says I.  'Er

-on the war-path's rather more than I care for; and this

-isn't going to be any picnic, if I know anything of

-natives."

-

-"Pita!" whistled the boatswain.  "The old man

-will 'ave 'is gore before the voyage is out, if Vaiti goes

-on like this.  It's Ritter, that fat German trader in

-Papeëte, that he's wanting to marry her to; and as

-for natives, it's 'ands off for them, if she is 'alf of one

-'erself."

-

-"Well, she and Pita was planning it all out in the

-fore-top last night.  I heard them, when she thought

-I was sleeping on the top of the galley.  And the old

-man came out and roared at her like a Marquesas bull

-to come down; so down she came, laughing at him,

-like the devil she is.  There's no one else on this ship

-would laugh, without it was on the wrong side of his

-mouth, when the old man gets ratty.  Coming!  All

-right!"

-

-The mate jumped to his feet, and answered Vaiti's

-sharp hail in person, a deprecating smile spreading like

-spilt treacle all over his face as he came up to her, cap

-in hand.  Vaiti took her cigar out of her mouth, and

-looked at him for a minute without speaking.  The

-*Sybil* rolled on the towering swell like a captured beast

-trying to beat its brains out against a wall, but Saxon's

-Maori daughter stood as steady as the slender main-mast

-upon the reeling deck.  Harris smiled more than ever,

-and turned the marlinspike about in his hands, looking

-a little foolish.

-

-"You wanting Captain Saxon come and lay you out

-in the scupper pretty soon?" inquired Vaiti presently.

-

-"Not particular," answered the mate, the smile

-sliding slowly off his face.

-

-"Then I think perhaps you keep your mouth more

-better shut," said Vaiti, walking off with a contemptuous

-swing in the very fall of her laced muslin skirts.  And

-Pita of Atiu, as if in defiance of the captain, the mate,

-and every one else but his cousin Vaiti, pulled a mouth-organ

-out of his shirt and began to play it triumphantly

-and frantically, making a noise exactly like the buzzing

-of a mad bluebottle on a warm window-pane.  Further,

-he plucked a frangipani flower out of the wreath—a good

-deal the worse for wear—that hung round his neck,

-and stuck the blossom behind his ear.  Now, every one

-who has ever been in the Islands knows that these two

-actions are significant of courtship.  Pita was courting

-Vaiti, as everybody knew—Pita, a mere deck hand,

-who had been taken on at wild Atiu, in the Cook Islands,

-because he was a relation of Saxon's dead native wife.

-Very handsome was Pita, very young and tall and

-broad-shouldered, wily and fierce like all the Atiuans,

-but smooth and pleasant of countenance.  Were not the

-men of Atiu nicknamed "meek-faced Atiuans," even in

-the days, only a generation gone, when they were the

-cruellest and most warlike of cannibals and pirates?

-

-Needless to say, Captain Saxon, who had always had

-"views" for Vaiti, ever since she left the Tahitian

-convent school that had given her such fragments of

-civilisation as she possessed, did not favour the

-compromising attentions of Pita.  As for Vaiti, her father's

-prohibitions neither piqued her into noticing the

-handsome Atiuan more, nor alarmed her into favouring him

-less, than she found agreeable.  At present there was

-rather more than less about the matter, because Saxon

-was in one of his fits of gloomy depression, and Vaiti

-foresaw the usual result.  It was not at all likely that

-her father would be able to help her in her forthcoming

-raid.  Harris she did not choose to rely on at a pinch;

-Gray was old; the crew were far and away too superstitious

-to aid in such a sacrilege as she proposed.  There

-remained Pita, who, if he was a wild Atiuan, was at

-least "misinari" after a fashion, had been educated,

-more or less, in Raratonga, and was most certainly in

-love with herself....  Yes, Pita would do.

-

-That night, when the second dog-watch had commenced,

-and a lew large crystal stars were just beginning

-to glimmer through the pink of the ocean sunset, Vaiti

-descended to the cabin, looked into Gray and Harris's

-berths to make sure that they were both on deck, and

-then sat down on the cushioned locker opposite her

-father.

-

-"What is it?" asked Saxon, raising his heavy blue

-eyes.  He had been sitting with his head propped in

-the corner of the cabin, silent as a fish, since the clearing

-away of tea an hour before.  You might have thought

-him asleep, or, if you knew him intimately, drunk.  He

-was neither; but dead and drowned things were rising

-up from the black sea caverns of his heart to-night, and

-their bones showed white and ghastly upon the desert

-shores of his life.  So he sat silent, with his face turned

-to the darkening porthole and to the night that was

-striding down upon the sea.

-

-Through the port he saw the shining harbour of

-Papeëte as it looked a week or two ago—a tall grey

-British war-ship lying at anchor, the *Sybil's* dinghy,

-small and crank and unclean, creeping up to the

-man-of-war's accommodation-ladder, himself, a

-weather-scarred, red-faced figure, in a worn duck suit and

-bulging shoes, sitting in the boat, and waiting patiently

-until the Governor's steam-launch should have passed

-in front of him and discharged its freight of visitors.

-

-He saw the captain of the great Queen's ship standing

-at the top of the ladder, slight and trig and trim, all

-white and gold from top to toe, all smiling self-possession

-and cool command.

-

-He saw ladies, immaculately coiffed and daintily shod;

-tall, clean, grey-moustached men following them; a

-cordial welcome on the deck; a flutter of light drapery

-and a glimpse of lounging masculine figures afterwards,

-framed by the great open gun-ports of the captain's

-cabin in the stern.  They were laughing and talking,

-and he could hear the clink of cups and glasses.  After—a

-long time after—he could see his own shabby little

-boat creeping up to the ladder; the captain, cold and

-business-like, and more than a little brusque, speaking

-to him on the deck about a certain anchorage in the

-Cook Islands group, concerning which he was known to

-have information; himself, burningly conscious of his

-shoes and his finger-nails, answering shortly and with

-some embarrassment, and feeling, of a sudden, very

-shabby, very broken, very old....  Was it twenty-five

-years, or two thousand, since the Admiral of the Fleet,

-and the Prince of Saxe-Brandenburg, with half the

-mess of his own regiment, had dined on board his biggest

-yacht at Cowes a week before—it—happened? ... Now

-a mere commander left him standing on the deck,

-and spoke to him like a native or a dog.  Well, what

-did it all matter to a dead man?  Was not his name of

-those days carved on the family monument in letters

-half an inch deep, and was not he, Edward Saxon,

-whom nobody knew, out here in the living death of the

-farthermost islands, a thousand miles from anywhere? ...

-

-"Father," said Vaiti.

-

-"What is it?" answered Saxon's voice dully, as

-befitted a dead man.

-

-"The wind is rising at last," said the girl in Maori,

-"We shall be off the island by morning.  Will you, or

-will you not, go with me into this cave of death, where

-I have told you that I shall find what is worth finding?"

-

-"I have no heart.  I will not."

-

-"Then I and Pita will go," said Vaiti, fixing the

-Englishman's blue eyes with her own black, stabbing

-and savagely unfathomable, yet set in Saxon's very

-own narrow high-bred face.

-

-The captain's dark mood was on him, and he turned

-his face to the wall, with a Maori oath consigning Vaiti

-and Pita to a cannibal end.

-

-"I go; stay you there," said Vaiti, using the quaintly

-courteous native form of farewell, barbed with a little

-sneer unknown to the original.  Then she went to her

-cabin.  And Saxon turned in his seat, and reached for

-the brandy bottle at last.

-

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-

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-

-

-

-Handsome Pita had a great awe for Vaiti, for she

-was a princess of Atiu by her mother's side.  But she

-was beautiful, and he admired her—also he hoped that

-her imperious soul harboured one soft spot for him.

-It seemed good, on the whole, when they were pulling

-the dinghy over the reef next morning, to ask Vaiti

-openly where the value of the booty came in—with a

-secret hope in the background of securing as much as

-possible for a certain very deserving, more or less

-Christian youth of Atiu.

-

-Vaiti, her white dress girded up high over her scarlet

-pareo, waded through the last yard or two of the emerald

-lagoon before she answered.  The boat being safe on

-shore, she stood up and looked sharply about her.  They

-had chosen a quiet spot at the back of the island for

-landing, all the natives being down at the harbour

-loading copra.  The weird pandanus trees, standing on

-their high wooden stilts at the verge of the shore, the

-rustling coco-palms swinging their great fronds far over

-the water, the golden and pink-flowered vines trailing

-yard on yard of green garlandry over the paper-white sand,

-could carry no tales, and they were the only witnesses.

-

-Vaiti looked at Pita up and down, from head to foot,

-and Pita gave the flower behind his ear a knowing cock,

-and set one hand saucily on his hip.  He knew that he

-was the handsomest man in the Cook archipelago, and he

-felt that the way his pareo was tied that day was a pure

-inspiration.  So he shut up his mouth very tight, and

-made play with his burning black eyes as only a South

-Sea Islander can, waiting confidently the while for the

-information that the whole ship's company of the

-*Sybil* could not have extracted from Vaiti in a week.

-

-The girl stepped forward, and with a commanding

-finger tapped Pita's biggest dimple, as if he had been

-a baby.

-

-"Suppose I tell you, then you know too much, you

-plenty frighten, go back to ship," she laughed.

-

-"Speak Maori, high chieftainess!" implored Pita.

-

-"No fee-ah!" answered Saxon's daughter succinctly.

-Pita understood at once that Vaiti was unwilling to use

-a language that gave free rein to her tongue and his,

-and the knowledge elated him.

-

-"Perhaps I tell you," went on Vaiti, watching him

-narrowly.  "I think you got heart in belly belong you,

-more better than Alliti.  I tell you, you want plenty

-heart by-and-by."

-

-"High chieftainess, Vaiti, speak Maori!" was Pita's

-answer, linked to an attempted embrace that only fell

-short of its main object because Vaiti quite calmly

-pulled a seaman's knife out of her dress and laid it edge

-upwards across her lips.  Pita, who had learned the

-real European kiss during his visits to civilisation, and

-wanted very much to show it off, felt disappointed,

-although there was a smile behind the blade that almost

-out-dazzled the steel.

-

-"Maori!" he persisted, putting his arm round her

-waist, with a cool disregard of her well-known readiness

-with the knife that won Vaiti's admiration a step

-further than before.  She laughed, wavered, and then,

-still playing with the keen, bright blade, she lowered it

-a little, and spoke in the soft language of the Islands

-at last.

-

-It was a fairly long tale that she had to tell.  When

-last the *Sybil* had been in the Society Islands, some

-weeks before, there had been a German man of science

-in the group, collecting native skulls for museums at

-home.  The grizzly old gentleman and his pursuits had

-not troubled Vaiti's mind particularly until her chief

-admirer, Ritter, a Papeëte trader, happened to drop a

-remark one day about the amount of money some of

-these old skulls were worth.  Vaiti's sharp intelligence

-linked on the casual saying at once to certain other

-wandering rumours she remembered, and she decided

-to find out something more.  She did not ask Ritter,

-for he was no talker, even to a handsome girl whom he

-admired; and the German was his compatriot, in

-any case.  But when the schooner reached Raiatea,

-where Professor Spricht was staying, Vaiti drifted off

-among the native huts, and squatted for an hour or

-two on the mats of the second chief's wife's mother's

-cousin's house, smoking a great deal, talking very little,

-and listening quietly.  By degrees the house filled up

-with interested natives all eager for gossip and chatter;

-and to Vaiti, pulling steadily at her cigar, and maintaining

-the grave, unsmiling demeanour proper to a princess

-of Atiu and a great Belitani chieftain's daughter, the

-drawing out of the secret she wanted was as easy as

-spinning sinnet out of cocoanut husk.

-

-Nothing is private in the Eastern Pacific, and it was

-not long before all the professor's personal affairs were

-tossing about like seaweed on the flood of general

-gossip—mostly unfit for publication—that surged about

-the apparently uninterested ears of the silent, splendid

-sea-queen throned on the pile of pandanus mats....

-The Siamani (German) had got skulls in Niué, in Uea,

-in Mangaia, and was now collecting them about the

-Society group....  He was an ugly, grey-snouted pig

-to look at, and rooted in the earth like any pig; still,

-Taous and Mahina, daughters of Falani, seemed to think

-that—(details lost in a heated argument about the

-personal characteristics of the ladies)....  Anyhow,

-Vekia from the hills said he was going to buy her two

-silk dresses from San Francisco when he came back

-from Falaite Island; so he was not as mean as he

-looked.  Yes, he was going to Falaite Island in a great

-hurry; he would not even take time to finish his

-pig-rooting in Raiatea, on account of something he had heard

-from an old man who had once lived up in Falaite....

-What fools the papalangi (whites) were.  Did not every

-one in the Islands know about the old, old people that

-used to live on Falaite, hundreds of moons before the

-days of Tuti (Cook), and how they all died, and nobody

-lived there for very, very long, until some people

-wandered up from Niué in Tuti's time; and how the skulls

-of the old, old people were still there, buried in a cave

-that was a hundred miles long, and guarded by as many

-devils as would fill twenty war canoes?  Of course,

-these things were known, and always had been—but

-when would any man of Tahiti or Raiatea have thought

-of such folly as travelling more than a thousand miles

-to fight the devils and take away the skulls?  What

-if they were worth money enough to buy a big schooner,

-as the old grey pig had told Vekia when he promised

-her those dresses?  Would a whole schooner, loaded

-down with dollars, be any good to a man after the devils

-had killed him?  Vekia would never get her trade

-finery, for all her airs; and Jacky Te Vaka, whose

-schooner was to be hired to take the Siamani up to

-Falaite, would never come back from such a sacrilegious

-journey....  Why could he not wait, and go by

-Kapitani Satoni's schooner when she made her yearly

-trip by and by?  Every one knew that the *Sipila* was

-under a charm, and no harm could come to any one on

-board her.  But he would not wait, and just as soon as

-Jacky's boat came back from Bora-Bora, next week,

-they were to go....  Ahi! and Jacky was such a

-handsome man—it was a great pity!

-

-Such was the substance of the information gathered

-by Vaiti.  It resulted in her ordering the course of the

-ship to be changed, and heading direct for Friday

-Island, instead of going down to Auckland.  Friday

-Island—out of the way, infertile, uninteresting, and

-little known—had been one of Saxon's private preserves

-for some years.  He touched there once a year,

-purchased all the copra that the little place produced at

-his own price, and paid for it in cheap tinned meat,

-boxes of damaged biscuit, and tins of imitation salmon

-instead of cash.  He seldom went ashore, and certainly

-did not waste his time cave-hunting, if he did chance

-to set foot on the beach.  Vaiti, with her odd faculty

-for acquiring miscellaneous information, had known

-since the first time the *Sybil* called that there were great

-caves on the island, and that a devil of unusual quality

-and size guarded them.  So much might have been

-said of a hundred similar islands, however, and she had

-not troubled herself about either caves or devils until

-the German professor's secret set her on the alert for

-something that looked like a dangerous, exciting, and

-profitable adventure.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE BLACK VIRI`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER IV

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE BLACK VIRI

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-Moreover, as Harris had said, she had been devoured

-with desire of a real Paris dress ever since her stay in

-the Wellington hotel.  There had been a famous actress

-there at the same time, and all her garments had been

-freely paragraphed in the ladies' column of the local

-press.  When she swam languidly through the hall of

-the Constantinople, shining mystic and wonderful out

-of a cloud of rainbow silks and chiffons that had cost

-a formidable row of figures in the Rue de la Paix, all

-the women caught their breath, looked once, and then

-gazed determinedly out of the windows, pretending that

-they had noticed nothing.  When she came in to a late

-supper, floating in spangled mists and sparkling with

-constellations of diamonds, every head was turned her

-way, and half the heads—the short-cropped ones—stayed

-turned, in more senses than one.  It was a

-revelation and a martyrdom to Vaiti.  What were her muslin

-frocks and her ten new hats at a whole pound apiece

-compared to this?  And the vision of money saved up

-faded away for the time being before the vision of one

-such frock—only one—belonging to her.  Life could

-surely offer nothing more.

-

-Of this, naturally, she said nothing to Pita, merely

-relating the matter of the skulls in as few words as

-possible.  Pita, for his part, made no comment, but

-took a couple of revolvers out of the boat and thrust

-one into his belt, handing the other to the girl.  Then

-he girded up his pareo—a significant action among

-islanders—and felt the handle of his knife to see that it

-was loose in the sheath.  There was a large sack in the

-boat containing candles and food, and leaving ample

-space for other filling later on.  Vaiti tossed it to Pita,

-and the two began their walk, barefoot, swift and silent,

-casting a quick glance every now and then among the

-weirdly stilted stems of the lonely pandanus groves as

-they went.

-

-"They are all down with the *Sybil*—it is safer now

-than it would be at night," said Pita.  "Vaiti, if we

-get these things, and sell them for much money in

-Sitani, you and I will leave the *Sybil* when she next

-goes to Atiu; and you shall be queen of Atiu and I

-shall be king, and we shall eat roast pork and 'uakari'

-every day."

-

-"My father would burn the villages and kill the

-chiefs, and hang your head on the bowsprit of the ship,"

-replied Vaiti conversationally.  "Besides, I like Sitani,

-and I will buy myself a wonder dress from Palisi town

-there."

-

-"Then we will leave at Sitani, and be great chiefs

-there, if these old bones indeed sell for so much money.

-And we will buy a little schooner for ourselves, and

-you shall be the real captain, and there will be four gold

-bands on your sleeve and one on the peak of your cap;

-and you shall get a *sitificati* from the chiefs of the great

-harbour, and take the schooner out of Sitani Heads

-yourself.  And every one shall be afraid of me and you,

-and they will say——"

-

-Vaiti had been listening as she swung along, now casting

-a glance of approval at the handsome lad while he spoke

-cunningly of the schooner she should command, now

-shooting out her lip a little, and slashing impatiently

-with her knife at the young cocoanut fronds.  Suddenly,

-looking very straight ahead, she interrupted.

-

-"Pita, you talk too fast.  There are things you do

-not know.  Tell me, is your heart strong within you?"

-

-"It is strong," answered the island Maori.

-

-"Then listen.  There is a devil in the cave."

-

-"I do not believe in devils.  I am misinari, and go

-to church five times on Sundays; also I have a black

-coat and two boots very nearly the same as each other

-to wear on collection days."

-

-"There is a devil all the same; you do not know

-everything that is in the world, little Pita," replied

-Vaiti.  "There is something bad there.  I do not

-believe in native devils, for I am 'papa-langi'; but I

-know there is—a thing of some kind—there.  A bad

-thing.  A black viri, they say, but I do not understand

-that."

-

-"A black viri is nothing.  You and I do not mind

-such things.  See—there will perhaps be one in this

-rotten wood."  Pita struck and kicked at a mass of

-decaying cocoanut wood, and hunted out one of the

-great black centipedes that are common in the equatorial

-islands.

-

-There is nothing on the bosom of Mother Earth more

-loathly than the centipede, and Pita's quarry—nearly

-a foot long, as thick as a sausage, scarlet feelers on its

-hideous head, and scarlet legs fringing its long lithe

-body—was as hideous a specimen as ever jerked itself

-lightning-wise across a forest path.  Pita, however,

-with swift dexterity, seized the horrible beast by the

-neck and tail, holding it so that it could neither bite

-nor sting, and lifted it up to his companion.  Vaiti's

-eyes dilated ever so little.  She drew her knife and

-slashed the creature in two; then, stooping down, she

-struck at the flying halves as they ran away in opposite

-directions, and cut them up into mincemeat.  Leaving

-the red fragments still wriggling in the track amidst an

-unsavoury, snaky smell, she stepped swiftly on.

-

-"It is no matter," she said.  "We two shall see what

-we shall see.  Keep your heart warm within you."

-

-"And if we come back safe?" cried the impetuous

-Pita, catching the girl's warm round arms in his two

-sinewy hands, and letting his black eyes gaze into hers.

-

-Vaiti stood very still for a moment, looking out to sea.

-The spell of her stillness fell on Pita, and he remained

-as if frozen.  Far away the surf hummed on the reef,

-and a sea-bird cried.  Above the two beautiful,

-motionless young figures the palms rustled endlessly in the

-long trade wind.

-

-"... If we come back" ... said Vaiti at last, her

-eyes still fixed on the far-off line of the outer sea—"if

-we come back—we will go away together, you and I."

-

-She looked so like a witch in a trance (such things are

-not unknown even now, in strange Atiu) that Pita's hands

-dropped from her arms, and he felt half frightened in

-the moment of his triumph.  But Vaiti recalled him to

-himself by starting her steady swing again, and saying

-with a laugh, as they footed it through the dry,

-sun-struck woods side by side:

-

-"I think some day my father will make a parrot cage

-to hang a green Atiu parrot in, and it will be made of

-your ribs and breast-bone, little Pita—all the same as

-my grandfather did in the islands to the man who stole

-his wife."

-

-At that moment the woods opened out and the cave

-came into view—a velvet-dark blot in the dazzling

-glare of greenery that tangled itself about the shoreward

-cliffs.

-

-Pita's hand sprang to his revolver, and he uttered an

-exclamation of angry surprise.  Beside the cave stood

-a tall, brown, naked figure painted like a witch-doctor

-and armed with a spear.

-

-"Do not shoot," said Vaiti quickly.  "It will do no

-good.  Let me look to him myself."

-

-She walked right up to the native, stood within a

-yard of him, and stared at him, in a silence that somehow

-managed to express unflattering things.  The man,

-stamping the butt of his spear on the ground, turned

-away from her and addressed Pita.

-

-"I have nothing to do with this woman of yours,"

-he said.  "It is with men I would speak."

-

-"Speak, then, pig-face," said Pita insolently, hoping

-to provoke a fight, since the man seemed to be alone.

-

-"Enter if you wish," replied the other.  "We have

-sent no fighting-men to hinder you; the way is clear.

-Yet if you think the hot sun on the pleasant land is good

-to see, and the beating of the warm heart in the living

-breast is sweet to feel, go not into our sacred caves, to

-lay evil hands upon the holy bones of Falaiti.  Enough."

-

-The man's words were strangely void of heat or anger,

-and he held his spear loosely, Vaiti did not suspect an

-ambush, for she knew that no native would enter the

-cave.  Yet in that moment her quick mind leaped to

-the knowledge of some unknown danger threatening

-herself and Pita from out the cold-breathing world of

-darkness that lay within that rugged arch, and for one

-prophetic instant she could smell the very smell of

-death.

-

-But Vaiti's courage was of the kind that rises, wave

-by wave, the higher for all obstacle, and her spirit swelled

-within her to flood-tide in that moment.  She turned

-upon the witch-doctor and laughed in his face.  Then

-she stretched out her hand, and Pita's leaped into it,

-warm and strong, and together they stepped over the

-threshold of the cave.

-

-The man outside cursed them, slowly and with relish.

-

-"Shall we not kill him?" asked Pita.

-

-"There is no use," said Vaiti.  "It is plain to me

-that all the tribe know, and they trust to the dangers of

-the place, whatever these may be.  This island is at

-the very end of the world, it is true, and strange things

-may happen here."

-

-"Yes, there is nothing that one might not believe

-in this place," said Pita, looking back.  Already the

-gloom of Hades itself was winding about them, and the

-air struck gravelike and cold.  In the distance the mouth

-of the cave cast a brief glow of emerald light upon the

-dewy ferns and mosses close to the threshold, so that

-they shone like the jewelled foliage of some magic forest

-in a fairy play.  Then came the dripping roof, the

-enormous stalactite buttresses of the cave, dimly edged

-with light; the oozing floor, and the lifeless dark.

-

-Vaiti spoke not at all, as they walked side by side

-down dark tunnel after dark tunnel, across empty,

-thunderous-echoing black halls and archways—their

-little candles flitting like fireflies through a dim world

-of unconquerable gloom.  Pita, however, was strangely

-gay.  He yelled aloud to set the echoes booming in the

-black domes above, when they crossed some invisible

-great goblin market-place, full of hollow sounds and

-half-glimpsed monstrosities.  He sang when the way

-along the endless corridors grew tedious, and the glistening

-stalactite candelabra succeeded one another, thick

-as forest branches, for mile after mile unchanged.  When

-the path was barred by inky lakes of unknown depth

-and ghastly chill, and the two explorers had to tie their

-lights on their heads and swim for it, he pretended to

-cry at the cold, and played tricks on Vaiti by slipping

-behind her and catching her feet in his teeth.  So they

-went on, one in wild spirits, the other silent and grave.

-And the hours of the sunny day slipped by dark and

-changeless, as they passed farther and farther away

-life and light into the cold black depths of the cave.

-

-When it was about noon, as near as they could guess,

-Vaiti took the biscuits and tinned meat out of the sack,

-and they ate, squatting on the wet floor of the tunnel.

-They knew that the journey was a long one, and that

-the way could not well be missed, yet they were

-beginning to feel a little uneasy now.  Did this cave

-go on for ever?

-

-Somehow, the food did not cheer them and when

-they rose and went on again they did not talk.  And

-now a worse difficulty than any they had yet encountered

-suddenly barred the way.  The winding tunnel along

-which they were walking turned sharp round a corner,

-and then ended to all appearance in nothing.  They

-stood at the edge of an empty gulf, black as a starless

-sky and of depth unknowable.  Thin trickles of light.

-from the candles wavered faintly about its edges, and

-showed that the colossal crack had a farther side, but

-it was impossible to see what lay beyond, and the depth

-below cast back the candle rays as an armoured hull

-throws off a rifle bullet.

-

-Pita detached a lump of rock and threw it over the

-edge.  Vaiti watched him with sombre eyes.  "There

-is no bottom there," she said.  "It goes through the

-earth, and out on the other side; that is what I think."

-

-"Children's talk," said Pita, listening intently.

-There was an echoing rattle as the stone bounded from

-side to side on its way down.  The rattle grew fainter

-and fainter, diminished to a sound like the ticking of a

-watch, faded to an almost imperceptible vibration, and

-then seemed to die out.  Seemed—for although there

-was nothing left for the ear to catch, the sharpened

-sensory nerves of the body still responded to a faint

-tingle, somewhere, somehow, long after the actual sound

-had faded away.

-

-"I told you," said Vaiti.  "There is no bottom."  Pita

-did not answer; he was measuring the narrowest

-part of the gulf with his eye, and estimating the value

-of the three short steps of a run that were possible before

-taking off.

-

-"It is not two fathoms wide here," he said, throwing

-the provision sack across to judge his distance better in

-the uncertain light.  Yet, despite the three steps of a

-run, there was not an inch to spare when he landed on

-the other side, with an effort that strained every muscle

-of his powerful young body.

-

-"Can you jump it?" he called to Vaiti—without

-any particular anxiety, for the Maori has no nerves,

-and he knew what the girl could do aloft on the schooner.

-

-To his astonishment, Vaiti made no answer, but

-stood leaning up against the wall of the tunnel, both

-hands pressed against her chest.  In a moment more

-she was violently sick.

-

-"The smell!" she said presently, turning a ghastly

-face towards the light of Pita's candle.

-

-"I smell nothing," said Pita, puzzled.  "The wind

-blows your way.  There is perhaps some dead thing

-down there."

-

-Vaiti shook her head, and Pita saw that her eyes

-seemed to fill half her face as she looked down into

-the gulf.  Suddenly she sprang, her white drapery

-flying behind her, and landed half a yard behind Pita,

-with a leap that drew a cry of wonder from the Atiuan.

-"Come, come," she said, taking his hand and fairly

-dragging him on.

-

-They had little farther to go.  The tunnel wound

-on for perhaps another hundred yards, and then stopped.

-They found themselves in a low-roofed circular chamber,

-such as is often met with at the end of long underground

-passages—a small, insignificant place, roofed with

-drooping green stalactites and floored with shapeless,

-slimy hummocks of stalagmite.  Numbers of deep

-shelves were quarried out in the rocky sides, and in

-these lay, row on row, the bare, mouldering skulls

-of Falaite's long-ago chiefs—many of them cracked

-and split, and not a few fallen into shapeless fragments,

-though there were a score or two in excellent condition.

-They were curious skulls indeed, had their discoverers

-been able to understand them.  In the projecting jaws,

-huge canines, strangely high cranium, and oddly

-developed ridges near the opening of the ear were the

-materials of a problem contradictory and complicated

-enough to occupy the wits of a whole college of science.

-But Vaiti and Pita saw none of these things.  They

-only noted with disappointment, that most of the skulls

-had gone to decay—picked out the best of the unbroken

-specimens, packed the great sack full of them,

-and turned homewards.

-

-"Vaiti," said Pita, as they walked down the rocky

-tunnel, and felt the slope of the gulf beginning under

-their feet.  "Vaiti, what did you——"

-

-Her face, turned back upon him, slew the still-born

-question on his lips.

-

-It was scarce a minute before the chasm gaped in

-their path yet again.  The leap was worse on this side,

-for the clustered cones of stalagmite did not allow a

-fair take-off.  Pita looked calculatingly at the farther

-side, very dimly visible in the faint candle-light, and

-picked up a fallen stalactite to throw across.

-

-"Do not throw!" said Vaiti, in a breathless whisper.

-

-"Why not?  I can jump better if I hear where it

-hits," replied Pita, casting the stone before Vaiti had

-time to snatch at his hand.  It fell short, and rolled

-down into the chasm with a loud, crashing noise.

-

-"Fool! fool!  Jump quickly!" exclaimed Vaiti,

-in the same strained, horrible whisper....  Just for

-a second before he sprang, Pita looked down into the

-black pit beneath, and it seemed to him that the

-darkness shirred and shivered below the farther edge of the

-crevasse—that for the fragment of a second something

-long, red, whiplike, vibrated high up in the light of the

-candles, and then was gone....  There was a sickening

-odour in the air—a living smell, not a dead one;

-there was a sliding, rustling sound....

-

-"Jump!" shrieked Vaiti.

-

-They leaped through the air as one, but it was only

-Vaiti who landed on the farther side.  Behind her, as

-she touched the rock, rose a shriek that blasted the

-leaden air into red-hot drops of horror—that went on

-and on and on, tearing upwards to the vaulted roof

-like a rocket fired from the mouth of hell; breaking

-at last into a gasping bellow, and snapping off into

-grisly silence on the very crest of a long, choking roar,

-in which there was nothing left of human.

-

-... Pita had jumped short.  Falling on the far side,

-with his legs half over the abyss, he had grasped for an

-instant at Vaiti's outstretched hands, and in the very

-act had been snatched away—snatched by a long,

-ghastly head, armed with poisoned jaws and quivering

-red antennas, that shot with the speed of a bullet out

-from the depths of the chasm, and back again with its

-prey....  The head was a foot long at least, the

-horrible winnowing feelers more than a yard, the black

-and red body, that just flashed into view for a second,

-was as thick as a man's thigh.  It was a nightmare, an

-impossibility, and yet ... it was, beyond doubt, the

-Black Viri.

-

-For a little while it seemed to Vaiti that she went

-mad, and then that the world went out and she died.

-A long time after, she found  herself sitting on  the

-floor of the tunnel, her head badly bruised and cut

-where she had dashed it against the rock, her candle

-guttering down towards extinction, her revolver empty

-and smelling of powder—she did not remember in the

-least how it had become so—and the whole black,

-horrible place still and silent as the bottom of the sea.

-Pita was gone.  The bag of skulls had disappeared—fallen,

-no doubt, into the abyss.  There was not a movement

-or a sound, save the whisper of the water—drops

-trickling ceaselessly from the roof into the dark pools

-upon the ground.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-That evening, when the early starlight was beginning

-to shine down upon the creepers veiling the mouth

-of the tunnel, Saxon, sober at last, and rushing like a

-madman to the cave to find his daughter, met Vaiti

-herself coming down the rocks at the entrance, haggard,

-trembling, and almost old.  He asked for Pita, and was

-answered only by a shuddering gesture of the hands.

-Questioning no more, he carried the girl down to the

-beach and brought her on board the schooner.  There,

-when they had sailed, he left her undisturbed in her

-cabin for many days, while they ran steadily southward

-to pleasant Auckland and the temperate latitudes,

-farther and farther away from lonely, sun-smitten

-Falaite.  The story of the day in the cave was known

-to him, as to every one on the island, for the

-witch-doctor of Falaite had told it far and wide, reserving

-only the one interesting fact—how he became possessed

-of the information.  And as no one else alive on Falaite

-knew that there were two ways of reaching the

-skull-chamber, and more than one place where a man could

-hide unseen, the witch-doctor's reputation as a prophet

-and a clairvoyant was greatly increased; so that he

-suffered continually from a happily-acquired indigestion,

-and his dogs grew fat on bones of pig and fowl.  And

-no one came ever any more into the sacred caves of

-Falaite Island.

-

-Saxon declared plumply that he did not believe the

-tale, opining rather that the "blanked old wizard

-Johnnie had shoved Pita into the hole himself, and

-good riddance of bad rubbish, too."

-

-None the less, he was uneasy at Vaiti's rather prolonged

-depression, and though he dared not break in upon

-her solitude further than to hand her in her meals

-and ask her how she felt, now and then, he listened

-almost constantly at her state-room door, and gave up

-whisky for at least ten days.

-

-About the eleventh day, Te Ai, a young Samoan

-A.B., sat upon the main hatch in the pleasant coolness

-of the second dog-watch, and sang the farewell song of

-sweet Samoa, "Good-bye, my F'lennie"—the song

-that plucks so surely at the heartstrings of all who

-have ever loved and sailed away among the far-off fairy

-islands of the wide South Seas.

-

-   |  "Good-bye, my F'lennie (friend)—o le a o tea,

-   |  Efau lau le va'a, o le alii pule i ..."

-

-he sang, beating time with his knees on the hatch....

-Then suddenly he stopped, and the little group

-of mates and captain on the poop did not see why.

-

-Later on, Harris, his face stiff with suppressed

-laughter, knocked at the captain's door.

-

-"Can you oblige me with a piece of sticking-plaster,

-sir?" he said.

-

-"Who for?" asked Saxon, reaching for the yellow

-roll that lies handy in every shipmaster's cabin about

-the peaceful Pacific.

-

-"Te Ai, sir.  He's been knocked down, and his head

-got cut against the pump."

-

-"Who did it?" bristled Saxon, ready to uphold his

-own peculiar privileges, at once.

-

-"She did, sir," said Harris, nearly choking.  "Te

-Ai, he was singin' 'Good-bye, my F'lennie,' on the main

-'atch and out she come from the deck cabin like a—like

-a nurricane, begging your pardon, sir—and she ups

-with a belayin' pin from the rail, an——"

-

-"All right, all right; there's your plaster,"

-interrupted Saxon.  "Harris!  Here."

-

-"Yes, sir!"

-

-"Give this to Te Ai."

-

-"Lor' bless you, sir, 'e don't mind; 'e's a——"

-

-"You do what you're told.  Stop.  Where's my

-daughter?"

-

-"Walkin' on the poop, sir, uncommon lively, and

-looking like dirty weather ahead."

-

-"That's all right," sighed the captain, with an air

-of infinite relief.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`A DIAMOND WEB`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER V

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   A DIAMOND WEB

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-It was six o'clock in Apia, and the round sun was

-hanging low above the rim of the level sea, like a burning

-coal ready to drop down upon a breadth of hyacinth

-silk.  The stores were closed along the straggling

-beach street, where the sand was white under foot,

-and parrakeets tweedled cheerily in the scarlet-flowered

-flamboyant trees.  Native dandies, greatly oiled and

-dyed, and wearing a bright hibiscus blossom over each

-ear, swung past with the inimitable Samoan roll, their

-golden brown limbs gay with the red-and-white English

-bath-towel that is popular as full dress for steamer

-days in the little island capital.  Girls with

-high-coiffed yellow heads and pink or green tunics wandered

-lazily home to the cool, dark-domed native houses

-open all round to the sunset sky.  They went in groups,

-and sang as they walked—windy, fitful gusts of strange

-island melody, breaking out and dying away like the

-evening breeze among the heavy-headed palms.  Smells

-of yam and breadfruit, brown from the baking pits, of

-fish cooked in green, savoury leaves, and taro spinach

-stewed with cocoanut cream, crept out upon the cooling

-air.  The long, hot day was done, and Apia rested and ate.

-

-In "Charley's"—the least reputable of Apia's

-tavern-hotels—the egregious *table d'hôte* was in full

-progress out in the green-shuttered verandah.  Charley

-himself, an oily, flashy New Caledonian half-caste,

-dressed in striped pyjamas, was eating curried

-tin—nature unknown—with a knife and two fingers, at the

-head of the table.  A corpse-faced Chinese was shuffling

-round with the inevitable Pacific fowl, cut up in a watery

-soup.  The table-cloth was of linoleum, the swinging

-lamp guttered and smoked, the cutlery was dislocated

-and black.  But there was English beer on the bar

-counter, and plenty of broken ice; and the whisky

-that mounted high in each man's smeary tumbler was

-good of its kind.  Charley knew his customers, and

-sought first the essential.

-

-Captain Saxon, his schooner safe at anchor outside,

-and his copra advantageously sold to an Auckland

-agent, sat eating at the table, heavy-faced, a little

-intoxicated, and almost absolutely blank in mind.  This

-was his nearest approach to happiness, and one that

-he enjoyed often enough, for, since thought meant

-pain to him, he had managed to acquire a wonderful

-agility in avoiding it, and to live for the most

-part almost as purely by instinct and impulse as a dog.

-

-It was perhaps for this reason that he did not notice

-anything unusual in the demeanour of that singularly

-unknown quantity, Vaiti, his daughter.  And yet

-Vaiti—sombre and sparkling in a dress of vaporous

-red, with a handful of star stephanotis from the verandah

-thrust into the marvellous waves of her hair—was

-evidently not quite herself.  She sat a little apart from

-the noisy company that sprawled about the table,

-looked at no one, ate her food absent-mindedly and

-pulled little strips off the decaying oilcloth of the

-table-cover with a steady industry that made Charley

-wriggle in his seat, although he did not dare to

-remonstrate.

-

-Some one else was watching her, if Saxon was not.

-A short, stocky man, with burning grey eyes, a fiery

-red beard, and a sharp furrow between the eyebrows,

-that somehow suggested belaying-pins and rope's ends,

-was looking at her every now and then as he noisily

-sucked in his soup.  The inspection did not appear to

-please him altogether.  He finished his dinner quickly,

-took the current glass of whisky in his hand, and

-rolled off to the dark end of the verandah, followed by

-a grey-haired, greasy-faced mate who had been sitting

-beside him.

-

-"Still on for it, cap?" asked the latter, leaning over

-the railing with an air of careless ease that contrasted

-oddly with his watchful eye.

-

-"Yes, blank asterisk your condemned foolishness,

-sure I am on for it!" replied the captain, betraying

-his nationality by a slight touch of brogue.

-

-There is no nation that swings so high and so low

-between opposite extremes of character as the impetuous

-race that is handcuffed, by an odd freak of geography,

-to steady, serious England.  Great saints and great

-rogues are commoner in Ireland than ordinary people,

-and each displays the fullest flavour of his kind.

-Donahue, master of the island schooner *Ikurangi*, was, or

-had been, Irish; and it was assuredly not the company

-of the saints that claimed his membership.

-

-The two spoke together for a little while in level

-tones that sounded loud and careless enough, yet

-somehow did not carry.  One learns these things by

-practice.

-

-"She smells a rat, I'm thinking," said the old mate,

-looking critically the while at Charley, as if he were

-valuing the half-caste's clothes for pawn.

-

-"Let her.  You and I are apt to be a match for her,

-for all that," answered the captain.  He looked at

-Charley also.  You would have sworn the two were

-discussing him, and rather unfavourably.  Charley

-himself shifted in his seat, and showed his magnificent

-teeth uncomfortably.

-

-"Think she'll come on board?"

-

-Vaiti was watching them, her chin on her hand.

-Her expression was not to be read.

-

-"I'll get her on board all right," answered the

-captain, keeping his eyes away from the girl with an

-effort.  "You play up, that's all."

-

-"'Jer think you're a match for that weasel in a

-woman's skin—you or any of us?"

-

-"I do, then.  Forty's a match for twenty any day

-in the year, if the heads of them comes anything near

-equal.  Cunnin' as Old Nick she is, but I've been cunnin'

-twenty years longer than her."

-

-"You pitched her a good yarn, I'll lay."

-

-"I did that—about the derelick we boarded nor'-east

-of the Paumotus, and the Spanish ladies' clothes and

-cases of goods that was lying about, and how we took

-what there was, includin' of a di'mond necklashe that

-was sittin' all its lone on the table in the old man's

-cabin (Be minding me, now, or you'll be making mistakes),

-and the way a gale riz on us before we was through,

-and hurried us back to the *Ikurangi*, so that we lost the

-derelick, and didn't see no more of her; and how we

-heard in Noumea afterwards that there was like to be

-joolery on boord her, so that we're all on to go and find

-her again."

-

-"Straight fact up to finding the di'monds, and gory

-lyin' after that, I see.  But how d'ye make out the

-people that deserted the ship was such fat-headed idiots

-as to leave the joolery?"

-

-"Why, they was fat-headed idiots right enough;

-they did leave a good lot of saleable stuff, as you and

-I knows; and it's only addin' on a bit to say that the

-ship had been on fire and made them clear for their

-lives, so that they didn't think of the valuables.  There's

-the necklashe I have for proof.  And, mind me now,

-what we heard was that the people of the ship knows

-now that she didn't go down, and will be out after her

-themselves when they can raise the cash, so that hurry's

-the word."

-

-"How much of that's true?"

-

-"Not a —— bit.  The people was drowned, I allow.

-But it hangs well, and don't you go and forget none of

-it.  I pitched the yarn that way because of that bit of

-pashtry joolery I got hould of in mistake for goods

-down Melbourne way....  I misremember if I tould you."

-

-"You did, more nor once, and you was jolly well

-served right by her," candidly replied the mate.

-"The yarn's all right, I suppose, and the paste

-necklace is good business; but where does this Vaiti

-come in?"

-

-"Quit lookin' at her, ye —— fool, and give me a

-light for me poipe.  Talk easy, can't you....  Why,

-she knows more navigation than most men that's got

-a master's ticket, and she's as vain of it as a paycock.

-And that's how I'll have her.  Always get a woman

-t'rough her consate, me boy, especially if her eyes are

-too sharp in common.  That'll pull the wool over them

-when nothing else will."

-

-"When I was in Callao——" began the mate, with

-an evil chuckle.

-

-"Leave Callao be now; you can tell me about her

-another time.  Well, you understand about Saxon's

-girl, I hope?  She's to navigate us on the trip, because

-nayther you nor I knows enough for a cruisin' job like

-this, and the old chap himself is pretty general

-drunk—that's the way I put it—and shares with what we find,

-and the ould divil himself to come along, just for

-propriety, and in case of a fight with the owners.  Oh,

-a nate yarn, and she shwallowed it down like a cat

-atin' butter.  She's comin' on boord to-night, to see

-the necklashe and look over the chart I've marked.

-She'll not bring ould Saxon, for she's feared of nayther

-man nor divil, and I'll bet she thinks to get the bearin's

-of the place off of me and chate me out of it after all."

-

-"And how the h—— do you think she's going to

-believe that you give the show away before the ship

-sails?  Her teeth wasn't cut yesterday, by all we know."

-

-"Faith, and we do know!" muttered the captain,

-with a horrible undercurrent of oaths.  "And she'll

-know, by —— she will!  I'd slit the throat of her,

-if it wasn't for the other bit of divarsion we've

-planned."

-

-"Say you've planned," interrupted the mate darkly.

-"I call it bad work, whether she was man, woman, or

-child; but you're my master."

-

-"And you're a plashter saint, ain't you?" sneered

-the captain.  "Let's have no more of your chat; we

-know each other a —— sight too well.  As for the

-chart, she'll think we don't mean to give it away till

-she and her father is under sail with us, but she'll come

-on the chance of sneaking it out somehow.  And when

-we've got her aboard, why—lave it to me!  Ould

-Saxon's hell-cat daughter won't take no more

-pearl-shell beds from us or any one else."

-

-"You ain't afraid of her knowing who we are?"

-

-"How would she, then?  The *Ikurangi* isn't the

-*Margaret Macintyre*—bad luck to her who brought me

-down to such a tub, after ownin' the finest auxiliary

-in Auckland!—and she never seen you or me till to-day.

-No, it's all right.  That's enough jaw; you go aboard,

-and attend to you know what, and then send off the boat

-for her and me."

-

-Vaiti, curly classic head on slender hand, still watched

-from her corner.

-

-Did she suspect?  There was nothing for suspicion

-to lay hold of.  Donahue was one of the acutest villains

-under the Southern Cross, and he did not make clumsy

-mistakes.  The story of the derelict, of the valuables

-abandoned on board, of the necessity for finding the

-ship soon and secretly, might have sounded far-fetched

-to city-dwelling folk, but out in the wild South Seas

-stranger things may happen any day.  The plan was

-neat and plausible from every point of view, and Vaiti

-had taken the bait readily enough that afternoon.

-Yet Donahue felt—as the two walked silently down the

-dim, perfumed beach street, all ablow with vagrant

-sea winds and wandering wafts of song—that he would

-have given a good deal for just one peep into his

-handsome companion's mind.

-

-Vaiti walked beside him, looking straight ahead.

-Had Donahue's wish been granted, he would have

-thought somewhat less of his own acuteness.  She did

-suspect.  A man, in her case, would have been

-convinced by the reasonable aspect of the whole affair.

-Vaiti, being a woman, with sea-anemone tentacles of

-instinct floating and tingling all about the steady

-centres of reason in her mind, was convinced, and vet

-not convinced.  She thought it was all right, yet she

-knew it was not—after a woman's way.

-

-In any case, however, it was an adventure, and there

-was a mystery to fathom.  So she put on a more

-substantial dress than the gauzy draperies she had been

-wearing, hung the neatest possible little pearl-handled

-Smith and Wesson round her neck, under the swelling

-folds of her frock, by means of an innocent-looking thin

-gold neck-chain that would snap with a tug; put her

-long-bladed knife in her pocket, with the sheath sewn

-to the dress, so that a pull would bring out the blade,

-and joined Donahue an hour after dinner, on the verandah

-steps, confident of her ability to see the thing through,

-whatever it might be.

-

-She looked sharply about her, as she stepped over

-the low bulwarks of the *Ikurangi* and dropped down

-on to the encumbered, untidy deck.  No one about.

-Nothing to be seen but a dirty little main deck, with

-rusty pumps and a yawning hatch, and a poop that

-even in the pallid light just beginning to tremble up

-from the rising moon showed neglect of the sacred

-ceremony of daily deck-washing.

-

-Now, any decent ship's captain will attend to his

-deck-washing, even if he doesn't shave or wash himself

-from port to port.  Vaiti did not like that unscrupulous,

-dirty poop.  But she was already up on it, and Donahue

-was bowing her down the cabin companion, with a jarring

-smile and a good deal of over-fluent blarney.  The

-cabin was small and smelly; it had an oblong table

-in the middle, surrounded by cushioned lockers, and an

-open door at the end facing the companion.  This door

-evidently opened into Donahue's own cabin, for a rough

-wash-stand and a looking-glass, the latter hung high

-on the bulkhead, were plainly visible.  There was a

-lamp nailed above the glass, and the two together shone

-brightly out into the rather ill-lit main cabin.

-

-"What'll you take?" asked Donahue, with his

-unpleasant smile.  "I've got some sweet sherry wine,

-just the thing for ladies—or wouldn't ye put your lips

-to a taste of peach brandy?"

-

-Vaiti shook her head.

-

-"No good drink, suppose talk business," she said.

-She would not have swallowed a glass of water on the

-*Ikurangi* for a dozen Virot hats.

-

-Donahue had not expected to catch her so easily;

-still, he cast a thought of regret to his nicely-doctored

-liquors.  She evidently meant what she said—and the

-other way Was harder.

-

-"Well, thin, darlin', we'll have a look at the cha-art,"

-he observed, producing a roll of paper.  "It's yourself

-that can help us t'rough this business—you and the

-ould man—better than any one from Calloa to Sydney

-if only yez are raisonable about terms."

-

-He spread the chart out on the table, and weighted

-it down with a couple of tumblers.

-

-Vaiti, her mind charged full with watchful suspicion,

-felt that sudden small, sick thrill that is the forerunner

-of the thought—"I wish I hadn't!"  Afterwards,

-when she came to think matters over, she knew that it

-was because Donahue had made the mistake of bringing

-out the chart before the terms had been discussed,

-which was an improbable sort of thing to do.  In

-such moments, however, one does not think, one only

-feels.  Still, the warning was unmistakable, and Vaiti

-made as if to rise, intending to plead sudden illness and

-get out on deck.  But Donahue, sharp as a snake, saw

-the movement, and brought out his trump card at once.

-

-"Sure, I'm a —— fool, I am, to forget the necklashe!

-You haven't seen that yet," he said, whipping a stream

-of white fire out of his pocket and letting it fall across

-the dark wood of the table.  It was a magnificent piece

-of paste-work, and had taken in Donahue himself,

-some few weeks ago, after a fashion that made him sore

-enough to remember.  Vaiti gasped when she saw it,

-and laid both her pretty olive hands upon it at once.

-Her suspicions were not exactly killed, but they had

-for the moment no room to live with the passionate

-feeling aroused by the gems.  Donahue, with his

-unspeakable experience of the sex, had calculated rightly

-when he classified her among the women who would

-almost do murder for a diamond....  Such jewels! and

-she had never had one in her hand before,

-though her eyes had often filled and her heart

-ached with hopeless desire before the maddening

-glories of the jewellers' windows in Auckland and

-Sydney.

-

-She hugged the necklace to her breast like a baby,

-she shook it, she danced it in the light....  And

-then, was it in woman's nature to refrain from

-snapping the clasp about her neck, and feeling the

-dear touch of those cold drops and pendants on her

-bosom?

-

-"Ah, now, but you're the beauty wit' them little

-jokers round your neck!  And the lovely neck you

-have, darlin'!" blarneyed Donahue.  He had better

-have been silent, for Vaiti, used to admiration of every

-kind and degree as to daily bread, felt the falseness

-of the tone.  If all other men admired her beauty,

-this one did not, though he said so.  His grey,

-goat-like eyes looked something more like hate across the

-narrow table, under the ill-smelling oily lamp, and Vaiti

-saw they did.

-

-Donahue, taught by twenty years of active villainy,

-was quick to feel the necessity for the next move.

-He went into his own cabin and turned up the

-lamp.  The looking-glass shone out brightly under its

-rays.

-

-"Come and look at yourself, me beauty," he said;

-"and let me ould shavin'-glass see the handsomest girl

-in the islands wearin' what she ought to wear every

-day of her life, if she'd her rights."

-

-For the moment, Vaiti was not herself.  She was

-drunk with the jewels; she was crazed with the desire

-to see herself in them.  If heaven and hell had stood

-between her and the looking-glass, she was bound

-to go to it, and Donahue knew it, as surely as he knew

-that the moon would set that night.

-

-Vaiti—still sensing the danger that she would not

-heed, through all the intoxication of the jewels—thought,

-in a cinematographic flash, that one was safe

-before a glass, at all events....  No one could come

-up behind you....  Besides, there was the little

-revolver, hanging on the chain that would snap with

-a tug....

-

-And then, for the space of a full minute, she saw

-nothing, knew nothing, lived for nothing but the sight

-of her own dark, beautiful face in the glass, lit up into

-surpassing loveliness by the scintillating fires about her

-neck.  There was no movement in the mirror behind

-her.  Donahue sat motionless at the table, and the cabin

-was very still.

-

-... The first ecstasy subsided, and she turned her

-head a little to see the diamonds twinkle....

-

-Donahue's elbow knocked a glass off the table with

-a sharp crash.  Almost at the same instant two powerful

-hands closed on each of Vaiti's ankles, and snatched

-her feet from under her.  She plucked out the revolver

-as she fell, but her hands were caught, whisked behind

-her, and securely tied, with a prompt swiftness that

-told of frequent experience.  In another minute her

-ankles were lashed together, none too gently; she

-was carried into a small state-room, thrown down

-upon the bunk, and left alone in the dark, with the

-slam of the door and snap of the lock resounding in her

-ears.

-

-Most women would have screamed.  Vaiti remembered

-that they were out in the middle of a wide harbour,

-and decided not to risk the infliction of a gag for such

-a slight chance of rescue....  Certain ugly scenes on

-the *Sybil* rose up before her eyes.  No; decidedly it

-was her only policy to keep quiet.

-

-Outside there was the thud of bare feet running

-about the deck, the creak of the booms rising on the

-masts, the slatting of loose sails—loud orders, long yells

-from the native crew, as they pulled and hauled.  The

-*Ikurangi* was making sail.

-

-Then sudden silence, slow heeling over of the cabin,

-lip-lap of hurrying water along the hull.  They were off.

-Where?  God—or the devil—only knew!

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`MAROONED`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER VI

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   MAROONED

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-There was plenty of time for reflection in the long

-days that followed.  The greasy-faced old mate came

-in and cut the lashings off Vaiti's ankles and wrists,

-a few hours after sailing, and she was left free to move

-about the cabin, which offered a promenade of exactly

-seven feet by three.  Meals were handed in to her three

-times daily—the usual black tea, tinned meat, and

-weevily biscuit of second-class island schooners—and

-she was not in any way molested, though the door

-was always kept locked.  Donahue put in his head once

-or twice to look at her, as she sat cross-legged on her

-bunk, staring out through the port at the tumbling seas.

-He generally had something to say—a jarring, mocking

-compliment, or a remark about the time they were

-likely to make Sydney Heads—knowing all the time that

-Vaiti could estimate the general direction of their

-course by the sun, and that there was no southing in it.

-If she had ever feared any one, she feared this man—almost.

-

-It was not difficult to understand how the capture

-had been brought about.  A man under the bunk,

-another under the sofa opposite—her own eyes watching

-only the upper part of the cabin as reflected in the

-glass—nothing could be simpler or better planned.  The

-affair was none the less ugly on that account.  Perhaps

-it was only Vaiti's burning anger at her utter rout

-and defeat in her own business of plotting and intrigue

-that saved her from something very like despair, as

-the schooner ploughed steadily on, day after day,

-carrying her into the great unknown, farther and farther

-away from all who could defend her.  Yet, despairing

-or not, Saxon's daughter never lost her courage.  They

-had taken her weapons from her as they carried her

-into the cabin, but they could not take away her

-undaunted spirit.  She waited her time.

-

-As to the meaning of the business, she trusted, again,

-to time's enlightenment.  Saxon had many enemies;

-so had she.  It would all come out by-and-by.

-Meantime, it was clear that no one meant to murder her.

-What else might be meant she could not tell, and she

-did not care to speculate overmuch.  Under such

-circumstances one does best to save one's nerve against

-the time it may be wanted.

-

-It was on the twenty-third day out from Apia, bearing,

-as far as she could discover, in a north-westerly direction,

-that she first noted the approach of land.  Nothing

-could be seen from her side of the ship, but she heard

-the long, excited cries of the island crew, and the

-thundering of their feet, as they began putting the ship

-about with unwonted vigour, to a chorus of native

-songs.  She strained her eyes eagerly when the ship

-came about on the other tack, but the line of the horizon

-was unbroken; and it was not for another hour that

-she saw, from her low elevation, what the look-out

-in the crow's nest had sighted long before—a line of

-small black bristles pricking the edge of the horizon

-several miles away.

-

-Vaiti knew the sight at once for the palms of a

-low atoll island—evidently some barren, sun-smitten

-spot close up to the line—and a ready solution of

-the whole puzzling affair at once sprang into her mind.

-

-Marooning!

-

-Most people know the meaning of this term; nearly

-every one has heard of sailors captured by pirates in

-old days, and left on lonely islands, or even deserted

-by their own comrades on some isolated spot, with just

-enough food and water to save the marooners'

-consciences from the guilt of actual murder.  Vaiti knew

-both the word and the thing very well-indeed, and she

-was almost certain that the *Ikurangi* had gone off the

-course on the way to some South American port with

-the view of hiding her where she would not easily be

-found again.  There are many islands in the wastes

-of the vast Pacific where a ship may not pass once in

-half a century, and these—unlike the typical "desert"

-island of stories—are almost always barren, hungry,

-shadeless spots, where Crusoe himself would have been

-hard put to it to make a decent living.  The fertile,

-mountainous, well-watered isle is never without a

-native population, permanent or occasional, and is very

-seldom indeed, in these days, without a trader as well,

-and a regularly calling schooner.  As for the breadfruit,

-oranges, pineapples, the pigs and goats, the sugarcane

-and maize of uninhabited islands as known to

-fiction, they have no counterpart in real life.  All the

-valuable food plants and all useful animals are the

-product of importation and cultivation, ancient or

-modern.  It follows, that where there are no people

-and no ships, there is nothing worth having.

-

-Vaiti knew this very well, and decided that if she was

-going to be marooned, she might as well make such

-provision as circumstances allowed.  She had hunted

-over every inch of the cabin—which seemed to belong

-to the mate—during the long days of the voyage, and

-she knew exactly what it contained.  From the stores

-put away under the bunk she selected a large new sheet,

-which she concealed under her dress; a small stock

-of needles and thread, a box or two of matches, some

-hooks and line, and a stick of dynamite, evidently

-meant for some forgotten fishing purpose.  There was

-nothing in the shape of a knife, much to her regret;

-and there was a good deal of clothing that she would

-have liked to carry away; but it would not do to take

-more than she could easily conceal.  So she made an

-end of her preparations, and sat down to wait once more.

-

-There was no moon that night until very late,

-and darkness came down so close on the stroke of

-four bells that Vaiti felt sure they were very near the

-equator.  No one came near her, and tea seemed to

-be unusually late.  The anchor-chain roared home

-soon after dark, the ship lay very still, and there was a

-good deal of running about on deck.  Vaiti was

-confirmed in her anticipations of an uninhabited island

-by the fact that no boat was to be heard coming off

-from shore.  Not a sound of any kind, indeed, came

-from the island, and there were no lights on the beach.

-Some one handed her in her tea by-and-by, and a

-little later her door was flung open again by the mate.

-

-"Come on out," he said.

-

-Vaiti followed the mate out of the cabin at once,

-rather to his surprise.  She had made up her mind

-that anything was better than the *Ikurangi*, and she

-was looking out sharply for a chance—any chance—of

-turning the tables.

-

-It did not look at first as if she were to have one.

-The dinghy had been swung out when she got on deck,

-and a couple of men were standing ready to lower away.

-They were islanders, and she knew that they would

-befriend her if they could—indeed, their glances showed

-as much—yet what could they do?

-

-Donahue was nowhere visible.  He had planned

-this business with some forethought, and he wanted

-to have a chance of casting blame on his subordinate

-if any inquisitive Government official should incline

-to look the matter up later on.  So he stayed down

-in his own cabin, pretending to be asleep, and the mate,

-rather against his will, had to carry out orders alone.

-

-Just as the boat was ready to lower away, one of

-the men let her go with a run, and she struck the water

-stern first, with a terrible splash.  The mate, screaming

-curses, ran over to the falls and began to abuse the crew.

-The dinghy was injured, and they had to haul her up

-and swing out the whaleboat instead.

-

-This took some little time, and Vaiti was forgotten

-for the moment—a chance that made her heart beat

-with eagerness to profit by it.

-

-Two ideas held possession of her—that she must

-plan to secure a boat, and that she must manage to do

-the *Ikurangi* some sort of mischief.  Was it to be borne

-that Donahue should go unpaid?  The blood of a

-hundred fierce Island chiefs made answer.

-

-Concerning the boat, she thought she saw a chance.

-They were bound to stay a day for wood and water,

-and that should furnish an opportunity.  But the other

-matter?

-

-If she could only get hold of the ship's papers and

-destroy them!  That would be satisfactory.  She knew,

-none better, that a ship's papers are her character, her

-"marriage-lines" of respectability.  Without them a

-vessel is an illegitimate, furtive creature, every man's

-hand against her, every official eye turned coldly upon

-her.  Vaiti would have liked very well to get hold of

-the *Ikurangi's*.

-

-But, careless as Donahue was, the papers were not

-to be found in the little deck cabin which he used as

-a chart-room.  Vaiti, disappointed, took one of the

-charts and began studying the position of the ship,

-with a view to finding out the name of the island off

-which they were lying.  The chart was almost a blank,

-nothing being marked upon its wide expanse but a

-number of reefs and two or three atolls—Bilboa Island,

-Vaka, Ngamaru—dotted hundreds of miles apart in

-a naked waste of white.  Bilboa, an abandoned guano

-island, of which she had heard something, seemed to

-Vaiti the most likely of the three spots.  Ngamaru,

-she knew, had a native population, and about Vaka

-she could for the moment remember nothing, although

-she knew she had heard something once upon a time.

-All this part of the Pacific was far removed from the

-*Sybil's* haunts, and indeed from the haunts of any

-other ship of which Vaiti had ever heard.

-

-It did not seem to be a healthy place for schooners;

-the reefs round both Vaka and Bilboa were many,

-and most were marked "Position doubtful."  Donahue

-was evidently not familiar with either place, for the

-chart was freshly pencilled over with notes and

-corrections.  Vaiti's heart leaped up as she looked at the

-careless work....  She saw a way.

-

-They were still clearing the lumber out of the whaleboat

-on deck.  No one was watching.

-

-Vaiti took a pencil and rubber, and began to do some

-artistic alterations on the chart, helped by her

-knowledge of seamanship.  In ten minutes she had converted

-the innocent piece of parchment into a perfect death-trap,

-rolled it up and replaced it, put back the rubber

-and pencil, and slipped out again on deck, where she

-sat down on a coil of rope and waited.

-

-In another couple of minutes the boat was in the

-water, and the mate called rudely to Vaiti.  She came

-without a word, covering her face with her dress, and

-sobbing bitterly.  She stumbled as she walked; you

-would have sworn she was weak, broken in spirit, and

-utterly helpless.

-

-If the mate felt any compassion, he did not dare to

-show it.  They shoved off, two natives at the oars.

-Vaiti, sobbing effectively behind her hands, kept a sharp

-look-out with the corner of one eye as they slid across

-the dark water, but she could see nothing save a faintly

-glimmering line of grey shore, and hear nothing but the

-humming of the surf on the reef.

-

-As soon as they reached the shallow water near the

-shore, the mate took Vaiti by her arm and roared,

-"Out you go!"

-

-Sobbing afresh, in the most natural and convincing

-manner in the world, she obeyed....  It was dark, and

-the native who rowed bow oar never knew that she

-whipped his knife dexterously out of his belt as she

-passed him.

-

-"Why are you marooning me?" she wailed, as she

-waded through the warm, shallow water towards the

-shore.

-

-The mate leaned out of the boat, now fading fast away

-into the starry gloom, and shouted as he disappeared:

-

-"To pay for Delgadas Reef and the *Margaret Macintyre*!"

-

-Vaiti, who had reached the shore, almost sat down with

-the shock.  So that was it! that was it! The pearl-shell

-lagoon out of which she, almost unaided, had

-"jockeyed" the schooner *Margaret Macintyre*, some

-months before, was bringing in a crop other than pearls—of

-which last, indeed, the canny Scot who had financed

-the working of the place had had very much the larger

-share.

-

-Well, things must be taken as they were found.  The

-soft tropic night stirred gently round her.  The stars

-were large and golden; they shone in the still lagoon

-like little moons.  Palm trees waved somewhere up in

-the dusk above, striking their huge rattling vanes together

-with the swing of the night-breeze.  It was land, safe,

-solid land, and the sand was warm and soft, and Vaiti

-was tired.  She walked a little way up the beach,

-stretched herself under a pandanus tree, and went to

-sleep....

-

-Some hours later she woke, with the dim, mysterious

-volcano-glow of the tropic dawn in her eyes, and a curious

-feeling of disquiet about her heart.  Still half asleep,

-she saw the long grey shore sloping down to the silent

-lagoon, the ink-coloured pandanus trees standing up

-against the dull orange sky, the leaning stems and stumps

-of coco-palms, dark and formless in the shadow.  She

-shut her eyes and tried to sleep again.

-

-No use.  That nameless disquiet—now almost fear—still

-stirred at her heart.  She opened her eyes once

-more, and looked about.  A little more light—the touch

-of a glowing finger away in the east—a clearer defining

-of the cocoanut stumps, snapped off near their roots in

-the last great hurricane....  One of the stumps was

-oddly shaped—almost like a human figure.  She could

-have fancied it was a rude image of a sitting man, only

-that the profile, against the lightening east, was

-featureless, and there was nothing to represent the hands.

-

-"I will not be frightened by a rotten cocoanut tree,"

-thought Vaiti.  "I will sleep again till it is light.  Am I

-not a sea-captain's daughter, and the descendant of

-great Island chiefs, and shall I fear the fancies of my own

-mind?"

-

-Determinedly she closed her eyes again, and lay very

-still.  The dawn wind began to stir; the ripples crisped

-upon the beach; the locusts in the trees broke out into

-a loud chirr-ing chorus.  And as the day broke silver-clear

-upon the shore, Vaiti, still lying on the sand, felt

-that some one, in the gathering light, was watching her

-as she lay.

-

-Wary as a fox, she opened her dark, keen eyes without

-stirring her body ... and looked straight into a face

-that was bending almost over her ... a face hooded

-by a black cloth that hid the head and brow, and only

-left to view ... O God!  O God! what was it?

-

-The thing was featureless.  Nose, eyes, and mouth

-were gone.  In the midst of a cavern of unspeakable

-ruin the ghastly throat gaped vacant.  Two handless,

-rotting stumps of arms waved blindly

-about—feeling—feeling....

-

-Could it hear?  Some instinct told the girl that it

-could.  Softly as a snake she writhed out of the reach

-of those terrible groping arms.

-

-It did hear.  It sprang blindly forward—it snatched.

-

-With one leap Vaiti was on her feet.  Never looking

-back, she fled down the open beach, the sand spurting

-behind her as she ran.  She heard a dull padding in her

-rear at first; it soon grew faint, but she ran on blindly,

-long after it had died away—ran, while the sun climbed

-over the horizon and cast down handfuls of burning gold

-on her uncovered head—ran, while the beach grew

-parchment-white and dazzled back the heat into her face like

-an open furnace—ran till at last her over-driven body

-gave way, and the sand spun round and the sky turned

-red before her eyes.  Then only she staggered into the

-shade and dropped down upon a green mattress of

-convolvulus creeper to rest.

-

-And now, when she had leisure to think and strength

-to cast off the haunting horror of that inhuman face,

-she knew what Donahue had done.

-

-This was not Bilboa, the uninhabited guano island

-that she had feared.  This was infinitely worse—it was

-Vaka, the leper isle!

-

-She remembered that she had once heard a dim

-rumour of Vaka and its ghastly leper people—the remnant

-of a plague-smitten tribe long ago forcibly exiled there

-from one of the fierce western groups.  No ships ever

-called at this graveyard of the living; it was supposed

-that the cocoanuts and fish of the island provided

-sufficient food for the people, and no one cared to run the

-chance of their stowing away and escaping, especially

-as they were known to be both daring and treacherous

-on occasion.  Donahue had indeed laid his plans well for

-the most hideous revenge that the heart of man or devil

-could conceive.  A few weeks or months in this charnel-house

-of horrors, where the very air must reek of contagion,

-and what would it avail her if, after all, some

-stray, storm-driven vessel should rescue the castaway?

-Better, then, that she should stay and die among the

-other nameless nightmare horrors that walked these

-stricken shores.

-

-No!  Vaiti, sitting cross-legged on the netted vines

-and staring grimly out to sea, then and there took resolve

-that such a fate should not be hers....  Sharks were

-uncertain, if you really wanted them; but the stick of

-dynamite she had taken from the mate's cabin was safe

-and sure.  If she failed in using it for the special purpose

-she had planned, she would put it in her mouth and

-light the fuse....  There would be no more trouble after

-that.  And as for the flies—one did not feel them, of

-course, when one was dead.

-

-All the same, she did not mean to die if she could

-avoid it, and, as the first step towards helping herself,

-she knocked some nuts off a young palm, and took her

-breakfast off the refreshing water and juicy meat.  Then

-she cut a length of bush rope, looped it round the tallest

-palm in sight, and set her feet inside the loop, so that

-she could work herself up to the top of the tree,

-monkey-on-stick fashion, leaning against the rope.  When she

-got into the crown of the palm she knelt among the

-leaves, holding on tightly, and looked right and left over

-the island.

-

-It was a pure atoll, an irregular circle of feather palms

-lying on the sea like a great green garland set afloat.

-The inner lagoon was several square miles in extent, but

-the land was not more than a few hundred yards wide

-at any point, and there was no soil to speak of.  The

-palms, the scanty, pale green scrub, the mop-headed

-pandanus trees, the trailing creepers, all sprang out of

-pure white coral gravel and sand.  The scene was lovely

-as only a coral atoll can be—the jewel-green water of the

-inner lagoon, shaded with vivid reflections of lilac and

-pale turquoise, the stately circled palms, the wide, white

-beach enclasping all the island like a frame of purest

-pearl, the burning blue of the surrounding sea, all

-combined to form a picture bright as fairyland and sparkling

-as an enamelled gem set upon a velvet shield.

-

-But Vaiti, while she saw and admired the loveliness

-of the scene, also recognised its barrenness as only an

-islander could.  No fruit, no roots, little fresh

-water—nothing, in fact, but cocoanut and pandanus kernels,

-eked out by a little fish....  The lepers must often go

-hungry.

-

-The hot day turned suddenly chill as Vaiti recalled

-those blind, snatching, handless arms.  They came of a

-cannibal race, these Vaka folk.  What if she had not

-waked?  What if, wearied as she well might be, she

-slept too long and too soundly in the night that was to

-come?

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE TURNING OF THE TABLES`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER VII

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE TURNING OF THE TABLES

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-She looked narrowly about the island, hoping to discover

-the place where the lepers lived.  A cluster of small,

-miserable huts, on the far side of the lagoon, attracted

-her attention.  It seemed not more than half a mile

-from the spot where she had spent the night.  The best

-fishing grounds she judged, by the look of the shore, to

-be near the village.  She was therefore, no doubt, several

-miles from their usual haunts.

-

-So far, so good.  Where was the schooner?  It lay

-to her left about a mile out at sea, close to a small,

-uninhabited, sandy islet.  Vaiti supposed that the men were

-cutting wood and looking for water.  She saw one or

-two black dots on the shore, recognisable by their blue

-dungaree clothing, and strained her eyes eagerly to see

-if the dinghy had been pulled up on the sand, for in

-this lay her only chance.  If they brought the boat up

-on the beach, to repair her where wood could be had

-without going to the atoll itself (Vaiti would have wagered

-that the *Ikurangi* did not carry a splinter outside of the

-galley fuel), then the schooner would probably stop

-overnight.  In that case she could carry out her plans.

-Otherwise ... there was always the dynamite.

-

-The dinghy was ashore, drawn well up on the beach.

-

-She drew a breath of relief, and slid down the tree

-again.  Now she could wait till night with an easy

-mind.

-

-All day she hid in the tangle of young palm and low-growing

-scrub that clustered about the foot of the loftier

-trees.  Once she saw a couple of the lepers pass by in

-the distance, evidently looking for something.  These

-had eyes, and she crept closer into the shelter of the

-scrub till they were gone.  Then she came cautiously

-out, and plucked long sheets of the fine pale-brown

-natural matting that protects the young shoot of the

-cocoanut, to cover up her white dress, for the scrub was

-dangerously thin, in that staring overhead sun.  She did

-not venture down to the sea to fish, but fed upon

-cocoanuts during the day.

-

-Night came at last—night and coolness, with big stars

-shining in the lagoon, and a gentle breeze stirring among

-the palms.  About midnight, as near as she could

-guess, Vaiti came out of her shelter and prepared for

-action.

-

-She took off her clothes, and fastened about her waist

-a petticoat of the dark-coloured cocoanut matting which

-she had stitched together during the day.  So habited,

-with her olive skin and black hair, she knew that she

-was invisible in the darkness of the night.  She fastened

-the dynamite, and a box of matches, into the coil of

-hair on the top of her head, stuck her knife into the

-waist of her petticoat, and walked down the beach into

-the warm, dark sea.

-

-She knew very well that the outer side of an atoll

-commonly swarms with sharks, but the risk did not

-trouble her.  There was something a good deal worse to

-face on the island than any number of sharks.  Heading

-for the distant light of the schooner, she swam through

-the starry water with the low, dog-like island paddle that

-can cover such marvellous distances—keeping her head

-well out, and quietly taking her time.

-

-It was a long swim, but it ended at last, and the

-schooner rose up before her in the water, black and silent,

-and shifting ever so little upon the swell of the incoming

-tide.  The stars made little trickles of light upon her

-wet, dark hull.  Two boats lay alongside—the dinghy,

-freshly mended and watertight, and the whaleboat,

-loaded with wood and cocoanuts.  After the slovenly

-fashion of the *Ikurangi*, they had left the boats until the

-morning to hoist inboard, seeing that it was dead calm

-in the lee of the islet.

-

-This was more than Vaiti had hoped for, and it made

-her task easy.  She cut the dinghy's painter, got into

-the boat, and muffled the oars with a strip or two torn

-from her petticoat.  Then she put the dynamite into

-the whaleboat, cut and attached a good long fuse, set

-a match to it, and saw that the tiny red spark was steadily

-eating its way along, before she pulled off from the ship.

-She towed the whaleboat after her a little way, and then

-let it go thirty or forty yards from the ship.  It was not

-her desire to wreck the schooner at Vaka Island, and

-possibly let loose her enemies upon the atoll; rather

-she wished the ship well out of the way before any

-disaster should overtake her.  The charts would most

-probably ensure that matter.  The destruction of the

-boat was only intended to secure her own possession of

-the dinghy.

-

-She had scarcely reached the shore before a loud

-explosion boomed out across the water, and immediately

-after lights began to stir on board the schooner.  Vaiti

-worked with coolness and speed, knowing that it was

-not likely, though possible, that any one would swim

-ashore.  From her eyrie in the coco-palm she had noted

-a deep, narrow creek running up from the lagoon—a

-mere crack in the coral, but wide enough to admit a small

-boat, taken in with care.  There was just enough light

-from the stars to enable her to find the place, and

-run the boat up on the sand at the end, into the heart

-of a tangle of leaves and creepers that entirely concealed

-it.  For safety's sake, she cut a few more armfuls of

-trailing vines from the shore, and buried the boat two

-or three feet deep, so that neither from the sea nor the

-land could it possibly be seen.

-

-As she worked, she could hear shouts and cries, made

-faint by distance, coming across the water from the

-schooner.  She could imagine the scene that would take

-place on board when they found themselves boatless.

-Some of the native crew—not Donahue or the mate;

-they would never face the sharks—would probably

-swim ashore to-morrow to investigate.  Well, let them!

-

-Having finished the concealing of the dinghy, she got

-into it herself, put on her clothes again, drew the tangled

-creepers well over her, and went calmly to sleep, secure

-that no one could find her unless she chose to be

-found.

-

-All the same, she was very cautious about getting up

-the next morning, and looked carefully between the

-leaves before she ventured out of her hiding-place.  She

-covered up her light dress with the cocoanut canvas, and

-then climbed a palm to look about.

-

-People were moving hurriedly about the decks of the

-schooner; something seemed to be going on.  As she

-watched, she saw two natives, clad only in loin-cloths,

-stand up on the bulwarks, ready to dive.  In another

-moment they had flashed down into the sea, small as

-ants to sight at that distance, but perfectly clear to

-Vaiti's sea-trained eyes.  Then the dark specks began

-to make their way across the water.  The sun was newly

-risen, the sea was still a mirror of molten gold, and the

-tiny black heads stood out sharply on its surface.  Vaiti

-set her teeth as she watched them creeping on.  They

-were island men, of her mother's own race, and they had

-done her no harm.  And ... the longer a vessel lies

-at anchor in equatorial latitudes, the more certain it is

-that sharks will gather round her—even if there has been

-no explosion in the water alongside to kill the fish and

-collect the tigers of the sea from far and near.

-

-Vaiti looked away, and began desperately to count

-the nuts clustered among the palm-fronds at her

-feet....  How many were there?  Ten—fifteen—twenty——

-

-A long, despairing shriek tore across the water.  She

-put her fingers in her ears and buried her face in the

-leaves.  Yet, all the same, she heard a second cry,

-short and sudden, and quickly ended.  There was

-nothing more.  She lifted her face again, her teeth set

-tight into her lower lip.  The two black heads were

-gone.

-

-"No one will come ashore to-day," she said, with a

-shiver.  Something seemed to stab her, as she thought

-of that doctored chart in the schooner's deck cabin.

-The reefs on the course to South America were hundreds

-of miles from shore—the ship had no boats—and the

-native crew must suffer with the villainous captain and

-mate, if the disaster that she had plotted so carefully

-should come about....  There would be sharks there,

-too, when the ship broke up....

-

-The crystal-gold of the sea turned dim before Vaiti's

-eyes.  It was only a mist of tears that lay between, but

-to the girl's excited imagination it seemed like the

-spreading and darkening stain of blood.

-

-Careless of whether she was seen or not, she slid down

-the tree and rushed into the scrub, where she sat down

-upon the sand and cried like a mere nervous schoolgirl.

-The sun was past the zenith when she lifted her head

-again; the schooner had put out to sea, and lay, a far-off

-snowy speck, upon the blue horizon.

-

-Vaiti stood up, flung back her hair, and cast the

-trouble from her.  She could not afford to grieve over

-the inevitable now; there was too much to do.  The

-boat had to be prepared and provisioned, and that was

-not the work of a moment.

-

-She husked and opened a number of large cocoanuts,

-and removed the insides.  She then cut a quantity of

-young palm-leaves, and plaited them into baskets, which

-she filled with the cocoanut meat.  Afterwards she cut

-down dozens of young green nuts for drinking, husked

-them to save space, and slung them together in bunches

-with strips of their own fibre.  This done, she hid the

-provisions in the boat, and set about her own supper,

-as it was almost dark.

-

-Nourishing food she felt she must have, if she was to

-get through with her enterprise, but she dared not

-attract attention to herself by going out torch-fishing on

-the reef.  However, there were certain holes in the

-ground about the roots of the palms that to her

-experienced eye promised something better than fish.

-

-She dug a fire-hole in the gravel at the end of the gully

-where she had hidden the boat, lined it with stones, and

-made a fire, looking well to it that no gleam should be

-visible from above.  When the stones were beginning to

-heat, she took a piece of palms-leaf in her hand, hid herself

-in the bush, and waited, still as a rock.

-

-By-and-by there was a faint scuffling among the roots

-of the trees, and a shadowy thing began climbing up

-the trunk of a palm.  Vaiti waited till it had disappeared

-in the crown of the tree, and then climbed after it to a

-point about ten feet from the top, where she tied

-her strip of leaf round the trunk and came down

-again.

-

-Thump! thump!  Two cocoanuts fell to the earth.

-The crab (for it was a cocoanut crab of the biggest and

-fiercest kind) was getting his supper.  Now he would

-come down the tree, rip open the nuts with his formidable

-claws, and enjoy the contents.

-

-Slowly he began to back down the palm, his sensitive

-tail ready to tell him when he had touched earth and

-might safely let go.  And now it was that Vaiti's trap

-(a well-known native trick) proved his undoing.  The

-belt of dry leaflets round the tree tickled his tail, he

-promptly let go, and fell with a crash seventy feet through

-air on to the pile of coral lumps that Vaiti had heaped

-up at the foot of the tree.

-

-The girl picked him up, badly injured and unable to

-use his claws (which were big enough to crack her ankle),

-and put an end to him with a clever stroke of her knife.

-He proved to be two feet long in the body alone, and of

-a fine blue and red colour, as seen in the dim light of the

-fire.  She put him on the heated stones, wrapped in

-leaves, buried him until cooked, and then enjoyed a hot

-supper that an epicure might have envied.

-

-Strengthened by the good food, she worked on late

-into the night, catching more crabs, whose meat she

-hoped she could dry in the sun, making a rough sail out

-of the bed-sheet she had carried away from the schooner,

-twisting sinnet plait out of cocoanut husk for ropes,

-cutting and trimming a small pandanus for the mast.

-She had all her plans laid, and knew what she meant to

-do.  Her present position was about five hundred miles

-from the Marquesas, and the south-east trades would be

-in her favour.  With lines for fishing, a beaker full of

-fresh water on board (she had found that in the dinghy

-when she took it away), cocoanuts to help out with, and

-plenty of crab to dry, she hoped that she might manage

-to reach the islands before her strength or her food gave

-out.  Greater voyages had been done many a time in

-mere canoes, and the dinghy was a large boat of its kind,

-strong, well built, and new.  If she failed—well, any

-death, any horror that the wide seas could hold was better

-than Vaka Island.

-

-All being ready, she lay down and slept till dawn—a

-somewhat restless sleep, for it was full of wandering

-dreams, and all the dreams took one shape: Donahue's

-schooner, snared by the lying chart, rushing helpless

-to her end, with the green-eyed tigers of the sea hovering

-ever about the reefs, and waiting ... waiting....

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-"I don't think the patient can see any one," said the

-nurse doubtfully.

-

-The big, yellow-haired sailor took off his hat and

-stepped up on to the verandah.  It was a very beautiful

-verandah.  You could see most of Suva Bay from it,

-and half the tumbled purple peaks of Fiji's wonderful

-mountains lying across the harbour.

-

-"If you could stretch a point, ma'am," said the

-sailor, "it might be as well for him.  I've got good

-news."

-

-"About his daughter?" asked the nurse.  She, like

-every one else in Suva, was deeply interested in this

-especial patient's story.  He had come to Suva in his

-own schooner, the *Sybil*, several weeks before, furious

-with rage and despair at the loss of his daughter, and

-eager to demand assistance from the High Commissioner

-of the Western Pacific, although it seemed by no means

-clear in what manner Her Majesty's representative could

-aid him.  Before the matter had even been discussed,

-however, he had fallen seriously ill of sunstroke and

-excitement combined, and had been sent to hospital,

-with rather a bad chance of recovery.  He was just

-turning the corner now, and the nurse—who could not

-but admire his rather weather-beaten good looks and

-romantic history—regarded him as her most interesting

-patient.

-

-"Yes, it's about his daughter," answered the sailor.

-"I'm the mate of the *Sybil*, ma'am; Harris is my name.

-Perhaps you'd kindly read this."

-

-He held out a long slip of printed paper, containing

-a *résumé* of the cables for the day—Suva's substitute

-for a daily paper.

-

-The nurse took it, and read:

-

-"The missing daughter of Edward Saxon, owner and

-master of the trading schooner *Sybil*, has at last

-reappeared.  Her fate has excited much interest and

-conjecture all over the Pacific.  She arrived in Sydney

-yesterday on board the cable-ship *Clotho*, by which

-she was picked up on the 2nd instant, in an open boat,

-alone, and two hundred miles from any land.  She had

-experienced bad weather, and was much exhausted

-for want of food, but declared herself capable, if it had

-been necessary, of reaching the nearest island group

-unaided.  She had been carried away, as was surmised,

-by the captain of the island schooner *Ikurangi*, who

-marooned her on a remote leper island, Vaka, and then

-sailed for South America.  Revenge for the loss of a

-pearl-shell bed of disputed ownership is said to have been

-the motive of this unparalleled outrage."

-

-"He shall have it at once," said the nurse cordially.

-"It'll do him more good than our medicines."

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-The story was a popular one in the hospital for months

-after, and it had not been quite forgotten when, towards

-the close of the hot season, a Sydney paper furnished

-the last chapter of the tale.  Saxon's late nurse read it

-aloud to the others at afternoon tea, and they all agreed

-(not knowing how Vaiti's fingers had cogged the dice of

-chance) that it was a wonderful Providence and a real

-judgment.  The item read:

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-.. class:: center

-

-   "THE LAST OF AN OCEAN ROMANCE.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-"News comes via Tahiti from Nukahiva, Marquesas

-Islands, of the arrival of a shipwrecked crew on a raft,

-six weeks ago.  They were the survivors of a disaster

-that destroyed the notorious schooner *Ikurangi* whose

-master, it will be remembered, kidnapped and marooned

-the daughter of a British captain some months ago.  The

-schooner, after leaving the island, sailed for Callao, but

-was wrecked on an uncharted reef three days east of

-Vaka, and went to pieces.  The crew escaped on a raft,

-and underwent great suffering in their efforts to reach

-land.  The captain and mate were drowned."

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-"And serve them right, too!" said the audience.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE WHITE MAN OF NALOLO`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER VIII

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE WHITE MAN OF NALOLO

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-"By Jove! it's a white man," said Saxon, checking

-like a pointer on the threshold of the low dark doorway.

-

-"Certainly.  Very pleased to meet you," observed

-the figure on the mats.  It was sitting cross-legged, clad

-only in a waist-cloth, and the house was a Fijian

-chief-house in a mountain village three days' journey from the

-nearest white settlement—but the thing squatted on

-the mats was undoubtedly white, and—English?  Well,

-no; Saxon thought no.  The phrase was American in

-flavour.  He stepped across the threshold, and came a

-little way in, relieved in mind.  When you have been

-dead and buried among the islands for a quarter of a

-century it is much pleasanter not to run the risk of

-meeting other ghosts (with university accents, tea-coloured

-families, and a preference for modest retirement on

-steamer days) who may possibly have been alive together

-with you before...

-

-Before....  The word means much in that vast

-Pacific world, sepulchre of so many lost hopes and

-forgotten lives.  We do not, in the Islands, cultivate

-curiosity as a virtue, since it would be likely to bring

-rather more than virtue's own reward after it.  We do

-not ask cross questions, because the crooked answers

-might involve questions of another sort.  And when

-overfed, sanguineous passengers from smart liners

-happen along and tell us, as a new and excellent joke,

-that the proper formula for receiving an introduction

-in the Islands is: "Glad to meet you, Mr. So-and-so;

-what were you called *before*?" we smile an acid smile,

-and pretend we are amused....

-

-Saxon was very tired, having walked thirty miles

-that day, and very hungry, being out of luck, and more

-or less on the tramp.  But I think, tired as he was, he

-would have found another village to rest in if the derelict

-white on the mats had spoken with the shibboleth of his

-own class and country.

-

-As things were, the look of the house pleased him,

-and he came in and folded himself up on the mats.  The

-other man noted that he selected a "tabu kaisi" mat

-(a kind strictly forbidden to all but chiefs or whites),

-and that he looked hopefully towards the kava bowl.

-

-"Not the first time you've stopped under a pandanus

-roof, I guess?" he remarked.

-

-"No," said Saxon.  "Whose house is this?"

-

-"Mine," said the stranger.  "Make yourself at home."

-

-It was a handsome chief-house of the best Fijian

-type, forty feet from mats to ridge-pole, the walls

-covered with beautifully inlaid and interwoven reeds,

-the roof bound together with exquisite sinnet work in

-artistic patterns, of red, black, and yellow, and towering

-up into a dark, cool cavern of pleasant gloom.  The

-floor was overlaid with fine parquetry of split bamboo

-at the "kasii" or common-folk end, and piled deep

-with fine mats in the "chief" part.  A Fijian bed, ten

-feet wide and three feet high, ran like a dais right across

-the end of the house.  It was covered by mats prettily

-fringed with coloured parrot feathers.  There were three

-great doors, east, west, and south, each framing in its

-dark-set opening a different picture of surpassing

-loveliness.  Nalolo town (its name is on the map of Fiji, but

-it reads otherwise) stands very high on the sheer crest

-of a pointed green hill that is just like the enchanted

-hill in the pictures of a fairy tale.  There is a little

-round green lawn on the top, and all about it stand the

-high, pointed beehive houses of the town, each perched

-on its own tiny mound like a toy on a stand.  Sloped

-cocoanut logs run up to the doors of the houses, and

-quaintly coloured crotons cluster about them.  In the

-deep, soft grass golden eggs from the guava trees lie

-tumbled about among fallen stars of orange and lemon

-blossom, and everywhere the red hibiscus shakes its

-splendid bells in the soft hill-winds.  About the foot

-of the peak a wide blue river wanders, singing all day

-long; and from every door of every house, high perched

-above the cloudy valleys and hyacinth hill ranges, one

-can see pictures, and pictures, and pictures almost too

-lovely to be true.  There are not two places in the world

-like Nalolo.

-

-The White Man of Nalolo, however, was only interested

-in the fact that the river provided excellent crayfish;

-and that taro grew very well indeed on the slopes below

-the town.  He had once been young, but he was not

-young now, and did not matter any longer.  Therefore

-he had become particular about his dinner and indifferent

-to scenery.  I will not tell you the story of the White

-Man of Nalolo, or why he, of all men, rebelled so fiercely

-against the common lot of "not mattering any more,"

-that he came away to the wilds of the Pacific and the

-highlands of Fiji, and never went back again, because,

-like many true stories, it cannot be believed, and therefore

-had better not be told.  Besides, this is the story

-of Saxon and his daughter.

-

-Saxon was down on his luck.  He had a charter for

-the *Sybil*, but she was not able to undertake it at present,

-for, trying to pilot her into Suva harbour himself, he had

-contrived to run her on a reef, and damaged her so

-seriously that she was at present careened on the beach

-in front of the local boat-builder's, undergoing repairs.

-The builder, knowing something of Saxon's reputation,

-had insisted on cash in advance, and the captain, in

-consequence, found himself so nearly out of funds that

-he was unable to stay in Suva pending the repairs to

-his ship.  He had therefore started with Vaiti for the

-interior of the great island of Viti Levu, intending to

-live on the real hospitality of the natives for a few weeks,

-and tramp from village to village.

-

-He explained something of this as he sat on the mats

-enjoying the grateful coolness of the house.  The other

-man nodded gravely, watching the door.  He offered

-a curious contrast to the Englishman's coarse red fairness,

-being lean, sundried, and grizzled, with expressionless,

-boot-buttoned eyes, and a straggling "goatee" beard

-that dated his exile from America back to long-ago days.

-

-"Where's your daughter?" he asked.

-

-"Coming.  She stopped to tidy up at the river."

-

-The doorway was darkened at that moment by Vaiti

-herself, balancing lightly up the cocoanut log to the

-threshold.  She wore a white tunic over a scarlet

-"pareo," her wavy curls, sparkling with the water of

-the stream, fell loose upon her shoulders; her lips were

-as red as the freshly-plucked pomegranate blossom behind

-her ear.  Something like life stirred in the boot-button

-eyes of the White Man of Nalolo as he looked at her.

-

-"Afi!" he called to a Fijian woman who was sleeping

-on the mats at the "kaisi" end of the house, "go and

-hurry the girls with the supper, and make tea for the

-marama (lady).  Quick!"

-

-Then he turned to Saxon.

-

-"Stay here as long as you like, both of you," he said.

-"Let her sit there sometimes, where I can see her and

-fancy....  I'll show you something."

-

-He rose slowly and stiffly, and limped across to a

-Chinese camphorwood box that stood in the corner.

-In a minute he returned with a faded photograph in a

-gaudy frame.

-

-"My daughter," he said.  "The only child I ever

-had.  She was Afi's.  She died a long time ago.  Afi's

-a chief woman: she was as handsome as Andi Thakombau

-when she was young, and the girl took after her.  Your

-girl's mother was chief too, I guess.  Do you see any

-likeness?"

-

-Vaiti and her father craned over the photograph.

-The pretty half-caste girl, was certainly like the

-stately, slender creature who gazed at her pictured

-face, though the fire and spirit of Vaiti's expression

-were wanting.

-

-"I'm growing old," went on the White Man.  "I've

-no children.  Stay a bit.  I'll be glad to have you."

-

-"Thank you; delighted, I'm sure," drawled Saxon,

-with a pathetic resurrection of his long-forgotten "grand

-manner," And so it was settled.

-

-Vaiti, listening and thinking as usual, with her chin

-in her slender fingers, approved of what she heard, and

-smiled very pleasantly at her host.  It seemed to her

-that he could be very useful just now.

-

-The four weeks that followed after glided away

-agreeably enough in the silent hills.  Nothing happened;

-no one came or went—the Fijians, men and women,

-went out to the yam and taro fields in the morning, and

-returned in the afternoon; and after dark there would

-be long, monotonous chanting, and interminable sitting

-dances, on the mats inside the high-roofed houses.  Saxon

-stupefied himself with kava most of the time, in the

-absence of stronger drink, and almost got himself clubbed

-once or twice on account of his too impulsive admiration

-for the beauties of the village.  His host, however, was

-no censor of morals, and troubled very little about him.

-On Sundays the Fijians dressed themselves in their

-brightest cottons, stuck up their hair in huge halos, and

-went five times to church, under the auspices of the

-native Wesleyan teacher; while Saxon and his host

-smoked, slept, drank kava, and played cards.  The

-village provided plenty of yam and taro, kumara,

-cocoanut, and fish; and there was tea and sugar in

-the Chinese box, and now and then the White Man

-killed a pig or a fowl.  It was very pleasant on the

-whole.

-

-In a month's time, however, Saxon girded up his loins

-to leave this mountain Capua and descend to Suva once

-more.  The *Sybil* would be ready, and his charter to

-convey ornamental Fiji woods to San Francisco would

-not wait.

-

-They said good-bye to their host, and walked a mile

-or two across the river-flats below the town before either

-spoke.  Then Vaiti put her hand into her sash, and drew

-out something small and shining.

-

-"See, father, what the White Man gave me, because

-I was like his daughter," she said.

-

-Saxon took the object, and turned it over in his fingers.

-It was a small seal, shaped like an eagle standing on a

-rock.  The eagle was gold, the rock amethyst.

-

-"A pretty thing, but not worth more than two or

-three pounds," he said.

-

-Then he turned it over and looked at the device.

-There was a curious crest on the face of the seal—a wolf

-with a crescent moon in his jaws; underneath, a motto

-in a strange foreign character.

-

-Saxon's red complexion paled as he examined the crest.

-In other days and scenes, among ice-bound rivers and

-grim mediæval fortress-castles, he had seen that crest

-light up the crimson panes of old armorial windows—had

-read the motto underneath—"What I have, I hold"—of

-nights when he and the wildest young nobles of the

-Russian court were dining together under the splendid

-roof of one of Moscow's greatest banqueting halls.  For

-a moment he felt the keen cold air of the ice-bound streets

-blow sharp on his cheek; heard the jingle of the sleigh-bells,

-drawing up before the marble steps where the

-yellow lamplight streamed out across the snow.

-The fancy faded, swift as a passing lantern picture that

-flashes out for a moment and then sweeps away into

-darkness.  He saw the burning sky and the crackling

-palms again, felt the furnace-heated wind, and knew that

-it was all over long ago, and that he was ruined, exiled,

-and old.  Yet there remained a thread of indefinite

-recollection, a suggestion of something half-remembered,

-that was not all unconnected with the present day.

-What was the story belonging to that crest—the story

-that the whole world knew?

-

-"Where did the fellow get the thing?" he asked his

-daughter.

-

-Vaiti told him.

-

-The White Man of Nalolo, it seemed, was one of the

-numerous South Sea wanderers who believe in the

-existence of various undiscovered islands, hidden here

-and there in the vast, untravelled wastes of sea that lie

-off the track of ships.  Thirty years before, there had

-been wondering rumours of an island of this kind, touched

-at once by a ship that no one could name, found to be

-uninhabited, and never revisited; indeed, no one was

-sure where it was within a few hundred miles.  Years

-went by, and the White Man, who had always taken a

-special interest in the story, found himself

-shipwrecked—the sole survivor of a boatful of castaways—on the

-very island itself.  But fortune was unkind, for the

-morning after his arrival, when he was trying to sail

-round the island, a sudden storm blew him out to sea

-again, and he had drifted for many days, and all but

-perished, in spite of the fish and nuts he had obtained

-from the island, before a mission schooner happened to

-see him and pick him up.  He had examined most of

-the island while ashore, and had seen no inhabitants

-or traces of cultivation.  Nevertheless he had always

-been convinced that there was something mysterious

-about the place, for two reasons.  One was the presence

-of common house-flies, which he had never seen far away

-from the haunts of human beings.  The other was the

-discovery of an amethyst seal, lying under a stone on the

-shore.  It was dirty and discoloured, but he did not think

-so small and heavy an object could have been washed

-up on the shore from a wreck.

-

-Where mystery is in the air, most men's minds turn

-naturally to thoughts of hidden treasure, and the White

-Man of Nalolo had ever since cherished a hope that there

-was treasure on the island.  For several years he had

-fully intended to go and look—some day—but as he

-could only guess at the latitude and longitude, and as

-he had little money to spare, he never succeeded either

-in hunting the place up himself or in persuading any one

-else to do so.  Now he was old and half-crippled, and

-did not care any more about anything; so he wanted

-Vaiti, who reminded him so much of his dead daughter,

-to have the seal.  It was a pretty thing, and perhaps

-it would make her think sometimes of the poor old White

-Man of Nalolo.

-

-Saxon listened attentively to the story, and heaved

-a sigh of disappointment at the end.

-

-"There's nothing in it, my girl," he said.  "No proof

-of treasure there, eh?"

-

-"No; no treasure," said Vaiti, looking at the ground

-as she walked.

-

-"What then?" asked Saxon curiously.  He saw she

-had something in reserve.

-

-Vaiti suddenly flamed out in eloquent Maori.

-

-"What then, my father?  Am I one who sees through

-men's heads, that I can tell what was in the mind of you

-as you looked at the jewel, and turned yellow and green

-like a parrot, only to see it?  What then?  I do not

-know.  I walk in the dark, and the light is in your hand,

-not in mine.  As for you, you have made your brain dull

-with the brandy and the kava, so that you cannot see

-at all.  What then?  Tell me yourself, for I do not know.

-I know only that there is something to be told."

-

-"Don't be rough on your poor old father," said Saxon

-pathetically.  "I'd have knocked the stuffing out of

-any man who said half as much, but I spoil you, by Gad,

-I do.  I don't know—I can't think, somehow or other.

-But there was a story about the Vasilieffs—the johnnies

-who had that crest—people I used to stay with when I

-went to——"

-

-He broke off, smashed a spider-lily bloom with his

-stick, and began afresh.

-

-"Junia Vasilieff—what was it she did?  Big princes

-they were, and much too close to the throne to be safe

-company....  Junia Vasili—I have it!  Yes—the end

-of the story was in the Sydney papers, time you were a

-little kid.  I remember.  They were to have married

-her to the Czarewitch, just to make things safe.  Her

-claim to the throne was big enough to have started a

-revolution any day, if it had been asserted....  Poor

-little Junia!—only sixteen when I knew—when the

-marriage was talked of—and such golden hair as she

-had!  She hated the whole thing; courts and ceremony

-weren't in her line.  But she was a gentle little creature,

-and I never thought she'd have had the spirit to do as

-she did."

-

-He turned the seal over in his fingers, as if reading the

-past from its glittering surface.

-

-"There was a young lieutenant of Hussars, a Pole—you

-don't know what that is, but the Russians don't

-like them, I can tell you—a noble, but a very small one;

-not fit to black Junia's boots, according to their notions.

-Well, he bolted with her.  It was in the Sydney papers,

-time I was in the Solomons; the paper came up to

-Guadalcanar....  She must have been twenty then;

-just the year the marriage to the Czarewitch was to have

-come off....  They bolted—cleared out—never seen

-again.  All Russia on the boil about it; no one knew

-but what they'd hatch up plots against the throne, she

-having a better claim than any one else, if it hadn't

-been for the law against empresses.  The secret police

-were after them for years, but they were never traced,

-though most people knew Russia'd give a pretty penny

-to know where they were——"

-

-"O man with the head of a fruit-bat, do you not see?"

-interrupted Vaiti at this juncture.  "They hid on that

-island—they may be there still.  It is worth a hundred

-treasures!"

-

-"The Pole was a great traveller, and had a sort of a

-little yacht," said Saxon thoughtfully.  "It might be

-true, of course—if there is an island, and if the Nalolo

-Johnnie had any idea of where it was, and if nobody

-found them out and split years ago.  Plenty of 'ifs.'"

-

-"I think him all-right good enough," averred Vaiti,

-returning to English and prose.  "By'n-by we finish

-F'lisco, then we go see, me and you."

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE LOST ISLAND`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER IX

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE LOST ISLAND

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-Some two or three months later, the schooner

-might have been seen, like a white-winged butterfly lost

-at sea, beating up and down before a solitary, low,

-green island lying far east of the lonely Paumotus.

-Vaiti, sitting on the top of the deck-house, was examining

-the land through a glass.  The native crew were all on

-deck; also Harris and Gray, the mate and bo'sun.

-Captain Saxon was not to be seen.

-

-"The old man always do get squiffy at the wrong

-time, don't he?" commented Harris, rather gleefully.

-

-Gray spat over the rail for reply.

-

-"You're ratty because you don't know nothing,

-ain't you?" he said.

-

-"Do you?" asked the mate curiously.  Harris had

-not much notion of the dignity of his office, and dearly

-loved a gossip at all times.

-

-"More nor you, havin' eyes and ears that's of use to

-me occasionally," replied the bo'sun dryly.

-

-Harris considered.

-

-"I'll give you my grey shirt to tell," he said

-persuasively.  "There's sure to be something up."

-

-"'Ow much does we ever get out of it when there

-is?" asked Gray sourly.  "I could do with that shirt

-very well, though.  There ain't much to tell, except

-that the old man he thought there was an island

-hereabouts not marked on the chart that nobody knew

-about; and Vaiti she allowed that was all —— rot,

-because, says she, this part's been surveyed, and though

-the Admiralty surveys isn't the for-ever-'n-ever-Amen

-dead certainties the little brassbound officers thinks

-them, still they don't leave whole islands out on the

-loose without a collar and a name round their necks, so

-to say.  So, says she, let me work out the length of time

-they ran before the hurricane, says she, and the d'rection

-of the wind, which the old boy remembered right enough,

-says she; and then look it up on the chart, and I'll be

-blowed, says she, if you don't find something for a guide

-like.  So by-and-by she looks, and says she, ''Ere's

-something; 'ere's a reef marked P.D., and it is P.D.,'

-says she, 'for you and I knows there's nothin' there,'

-she says.  'But we'll look a bit more to the north'ard,'

-she says, 'where it's right off the' track of ships, and

-maybe we'll find somethin' and maybe we won't,' she

-says.  'But I think,' she says, 'that somewheres not

-too far off from that P.D. reef we'll maybe get a sight

-of what we're lookin' for,' she says, 'because sometimes

-reefs is put down for bigger things by mistake,' she says,

-'especially if you 'aven't been to see.'  Then she comes

-on deck, and I makes myself scarce, for it ain't healthy

-on this ship to listen at no cabin skylights, not if she

-knows you're there."

-

-"Well, whatever the game is, I don't suppose it'll

-line our little insides any fatter, bo'sun.  We don't

-count on this ship anything like as we ought to when

-there's shares goin'.  I wonder that I stick to her, I do!

-Old man as drunk as a lord half the time—me doin' his

-work as well as my own—a blessed she-cat running the

-blooming show——"

-

-"Ready about!" sang Vaiti from the deck-house,

-and the mate and bo'sun sprang across the deck.  There

-was something about the orders of the "she-cat" that

-enforced a smartness on the *Sybil* rare on an island

-schooner, even when heavy-fisted Saxon was not about.

-

-Half an hour later, Vaiti had rowed herself ashore,

-curtly declining Harris's polite offers of assistance, and

-had landed on the beach.  As she did not know who she

-might be going to see, she had provided for all emergencies.

-Her revolver was in her pocket, and she wore a flowing

-sacque of lace-trimmed white silk that made her feel she

-was fit to meet any Russian princess, if such were indeed

-on the island.  It was a gratifying thought that the said

-princess, if she had been a celebrated beauty, must now

-be well into the forties, and consequently beneath all

-contempt as a rival belle.

-

-Her father's absence did not trouble her.  He had a

-nasty trick of starting a drinking bout just when he

-was most needed—in fact, it was the one point in

-Saxon's character on which you could absolutely rely.

-Vaiti, therefore, had grown used to doing without him,

-and rather liked to have a perfectly free hand.

-

-She had fully grasped the bearings of the case.  There

-was possibly a very great chief's daughter from Europe,

-with a rather insignificant chief who had stolen her

-away, living there in hiding.  The people of her country

-would pay a great deal to know where she was and

-bring her back.  Or, if there seemed any lack of safety

-about this proceeding (Vaiti had long ago learned that

-her father was not fond of putting himself within the

-reach of principalities and powers of any kind), the

-couple themselves must be made to pay for silence.

-It was all very simple.

-

-The fact that the island was supposed to be uninhabited

-did not trouble her.  She meant to investigate

-that matter after her own fashion.

-

-She walked all round it first of all.  It took her about

-an hour.  There was a nice, white, sandy beach, with

-straggling bush behind it.  There were a good many

-cocoanuts—all young ones—also a large number of

-broken trunks, apparently snapped off by a hurricane.

-

-This set Vaiti thinking.  It seemed to her that the

-damage was rather too universal and even to be natural.

-Yet why should any sane human cut short all his

-full-grown cocoanuts?

-

-She crossed the island twice at the ends, noting

-everything with a keen and wary eye.  Fairly good soil;

-nothing growing on it, however, but low scrub and a

-few berries.  In the centre of the island the scrub

-thickened into dense bush, impenetrable without an

-axe.  No sign of life anywhere.

-

-Vaiti stamped her foot.  Was it possible she had

-been mistaken?  Was this indeed just what it seemed,

-a commonplace, infertile, useless, little mid-ocean islet,

-let alone because it was worth nothing, and incorrectly

-described as a reef because no one had ever troubled

-to examine it?  Things began to look like it.

-

-And yet ... she thought—she did not quite know

-what, but she was very sure that she did not want to

-leave the island just yet.  She would at least climb a

-tall tree and take a general survey before she gave

-it up.

-

-Nothing simpler—but there was no such tree.

-

-All the palms were young, or broken off short; all the

-pandanus trees were in the same condition.  There was

-no rock, no commanding height.  She could not get a

-view.

-

-Vaiti's cheek flushed crimson under its olive brown.

-The spark was struck at last!

-

-Somebody had cut short those trees—to prevent

-anyone from climbing up and overlooking the island.

-The encircling reef would not allow any ship to approach

-close enough for a look-out at the mast-head to see over

-the island, except in a very general way.  There was

-something to conceal.  What, and where?

-

-Only one answer was possible.  The mass of apparently

-virgin bush in the centre of the island—several acres in

-extent—was the only spot where a cat could have

-concealed itself.  The scent was growing hot.

-

-With sparkling eyes Vaiti began to circle the wood,

-watching narrowly for the smallest trace of a pathway.

-The branches were interlocked and knitted together as

-only tropical bush can be.  Many were set with huge

-thorns; all were laced and twined with bush ropes and

-lianas of every kind.

-

-Nothing larger than a rat could have won its way

-through such a rampart.  Vaiti walked swiftly on and

-on, striking the bushes now and then with a stick, to

-make sure that there were no loose masses of stuff

-masking a concealed entrance, and keeping a sharp

-eye for traces of footsteps....  It was with a

-heart-sinking shock that she found herself once more beside

-the low white coral rock that had marked the commencement

-of her journey, and realised that she had

-been all round, and that there was most certainly no

-opening.

-

-The sun was slipping down the heavens now.  She

-had been exploring half the day, but she was not beaten

-yet.  The unexpected difficulties she had met with only

-sharpened her determination to enter the thicket at all

-costs.  Harris, suffering acutely, as usual, from

-suppressed curiosity, was nearly driven mad by the sight

-of the "she-cat" suddenly reappearing on the ship,

-picking up an axe, and departing as silently as she had

-come, with a countenance that did not invite questions.

-She had taken off her smart silk dress, and was in her

-chemise and petticoat, arms and feet bare, and waist

-girdled with a sash into which she had stuck her revolver.

-She dropped the axe into her boat, rowed silently away,

-and disappeared on the other side of the island.

-

-The sun was still some distance above the sea when

-she let the axe slip from her torn, scratched, and aching

-hands, and stood at last, tired but triumphant, in the

-heart of the mysterious island's mystery.  She had won

-her way, with the woodcraft that was in her island

-blood, through the dense belt of bush, hacking and

-slashing here, stooping and writhing there, until the

-light began to show through the tangled stems in front,

-and a few swift strokes cleared the way into the open.

-Yes! there was a space in the centre, after all—a

-clearing over an acre in extent.  There was grass here,

-and a few overgrown bananas, and a tangle of yam and

-pumpkin vines.  Passion fruit ran in a tangle of wild

-luxuriance over the inner wall of the thicket;

-pine-apples rotted on the ground and fig-trees spread their

-wide leaves unchecked and unpruned....  In the middle

-of all was a house—a one-storied little bungalow,

-iron-roofed, with a tank to catch the rain.  There was a

-long, low store behind it, and something that looked

-like a pig-sty, and something that might have been a

-fowl-run.  But....

-

-But everything was rotten, ruined, overgrown, hardly

-to be distinguished in the thick tangle of vegetation

-that had overflowed the little retreat like a great green

-wave let loose upon a low-lying shore.  Vaiti knew what

-she was going to see before she had reached the door

-of the bungalow—a rotten floor, with green vines

-shooting up between the crevices, and bush rats scuffling

-and squeaking under the boards—a rusted iron roof,

-where pink convolvulus bloom peeped in under the

-rafters, and lizards sunned themselves in the airy blue

-furniture unglued and decayed fast sinking into one

-common mass of ruin—door aslant, and thresholds

-sunken.  Everywhere silence, emptiness, decay.  There

-needed no explanation of the vanished pathway.

-

-The Maori blood owns strange instincts.  Again Vaiti

-knew what she was going to see before it came—knew,

-and walked straight over to a certain corner of the

-enclosure, as if she had been there before....  It was

-under a scarlet-flowered hibiscus tree that she found

-it—a long, low grave, fenced round with a wall of coral

-slabs, so that the overflowing bush had surged less

-thickly here, and one could see that there was something

-lying on the mound, only half hidden by creeping

-vines—something long and white and slender.

-

-Vaiti dragged away the creepers....  Yes, it was a

-skeleton, bare and fleshless, with bony fingers and black,

-empty eyes.  There was a splintered gap in one temple,

-and close to one of the hands lay a mass of rusted steel

-that had once been a revolver.

-

-On a flat white stone, standing at the head of the

-grave, a long inscription had been carved with infinite

-care in three different languages.  Two of them Vaiti

-did not understand, but the third was English.  She

-pulled the growing ferns off the stone, and, wiping its

-surface, read:

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   "Here is buried Junia, of the race of Vasilieff.

-   Died 20th June, 1889.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   "Here is buried Anton, son of Junia Vasilieff

-   and her husband, Alexis, Baron Varsovi,

-   Born 20th June, died 21st June,

-   1889.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   "Here rests Alexis, Baron Varsovi.  Into the

-   unknown thou didst follow me: into the

-   Great Unknown I follow thee.

-   Reunited 21st June, 1889."

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-Vaiti, descendant of cannibal chiefs and lawless

-soldiers, more than half a pirate herself, and hard of

-nature as a beautiful flinty coral flower, was yet at

-bottom a woman after all.  What passed in the breast

-of this dark, wild daughter of the southern seas, as she

-stood above the strange, sad record of loves and lives

-unknown, cannot be told.  But in a little while, with

-some dim recollection of the long-ago, gentle, pious days

-of her convent school, she knelt down beside tie lonely

-grave, and, crossing herself, said something as near to

-a prayer as she could remember.  Then, still kneeling,

-she cut and tied two sticks into the form of a cross,

-and set them upright in the earth of the mound.  The

-sun was slanting low and red across the grave as she

-turned away.

-

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-

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-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-"What'd she give you?" asked Harris eagerly, as

-the bo'sun stepped across the gang-plank on to the

-quay.  The lights of San Francisco were blazing all

-about, the cars roared past, there was a piano-organ

-jangling joyously at the corner.

-

-"Fifty dollars for the two of us," said Gray, his acid

-face sweetened with unwonted smiles.

-

-"Crikey!  Honest men is riz in the market at last!

-What in h—— can she have got herself?"

-

-"Might as well arst me what she got it for.  Don't

-know, and don't care, so long as we've got the makings

-of a spree like this out of it.  I see her comin' out of

-the Rooshian Consulate this mornin' lookin' like as if

-some one 'ad been standin' treat to her."

-

-"You know she don't touch anything."

-

-"I'm speaking figuryative; she looked that sort of

-way.  And coming' back to the ship, she says to the

-old man, she says: 'Why, dad, better dead than alive!'

-she says.  And he laughs."

-

-"Don't sound 'olesome," observed Harris thoughtfully.

-

-"Now, don't you get to thinkin', for you ain't built

-that way, and you'll do yourself a mischief," said the

-boatswain warningly.  "And let's be thankful to

-'eaven for all its mercies, say I, that we've got such a

-nice, warm, dry, convenient night for to go and get

-drunk in."

-

-

-

-

-

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-

-.. _`WHAT CAME OF THE PARIS DRESS`:

-

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-

-   CHAPTER X

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   WHAT CAME OF THE PARIS DRESS

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-The effects of Saxon's illness in Fiji were a long time

-in wearing off.  It was many weeks after Vaiti had come

-back to the *Sybil*, flushed with importance and with

-the lionising she had received on the cable-ship—many

-weeks after the voyage to the unknown island and the

-visit to San Francisco—that he took ill again; not very

-seriously, but badly enough to prevent his going to sea.

-Of course, the time was an awkward one.  They were

-off Niué, and there was copra waiting to be taken to

-Raratonga for the steamer—copra which would certainly

-be secured by some other schooner if Saxon did not

-take it at the promised date.  Neither Harris nor Gray

-knew enough to be trusted with the ship, and he did

-not much care about letting Vaiti sail her—not because

-he doubted his fiery daughter's ability or desire, but

-because, rash as he was himself at times, he knew her

-to be still worse.  He had seen her run the *Sybil* in the

-trough of the very last swell alongside a barrier reef for

-miles, sailing all the time so close to the wind that the

-shifting of a single point would have meant destruction.

-He had heard her raving about the deck in half a gale

-as they swept up to the iron-bound coast of Niué,

-abusing Harris in the strongest of beach talk because

-he had not another main topsail in the locker to replace

-the two that had just carried away one after the other

-and battered themselves to ribbons—the principal

-ground of her complaint being apparently the fact that

-she considered herself labouring under a social

-disadvantage of the most mortifying kind because the

-schooner was obliged to come up to Niué for the very

-first time without all sails set.  He had seen her perform

-tricks of steering, getting in and out of Avarua in

-Raratonga (a perfect death-trap of a port at times, as

-all old islanders know), that "fairly gave him the

-jim-jams," to use his own phraseology....  No, on

-the whole he thought he would rather miss that fright

-than lie idle in the trader's house at Avatele, and think

-daily and nightly of the cranky though light-heeled

-*Sybil* out upon the high seas in Vaiti's sole command.

-

-This being so, it was natural and inevitable that Vaiti

-should set her heart upon going and carry out her

-desire.  She did not make any trouble about the matter;

-neither was she at all unkind to the invalided owner of

-the ship.  On the contrary, she paid the trader's wife

-more than that kindly woman wanted, to take good

-care of her father while she should be away, bought him

-everything decent to eat that the island contained

-(which was saying very little), indulgently presented

-him with a demijohn of whisky, and then informed him,

-in the coolest manner in the world, that the copra was

-all loaded, the stores and water on board, and the

-schooner ready to sail next day, under her command.

-

-Saxon swore at large first of all, then stormed at

-Vaiti, and finally began a pathetic lament over his own

-helpless position and the heartlessness of his only child.

-Vaiti, sitting cross-legged on the end of his bed, smoked

-a big cigar through it all and looked out of the window.

-When he stopped at last, fairly run out, she laughed

-and handed him a weed out of her own case and a match.

-

-"You take'm that, no speak nonsense.  You know

-me, what?" she demanded; and Saxon, who was not

-in reality nearly as ill as he thought himself, laughed,

-and allowed himself to be won over.

-

-Having gained her point, Vaiti went off again to the

-schooner through the wonderful pink dusk that wraps

-a South Sea island at sunset, and left the captain to hold

-commune with his demijohn and sleep.

-

-As she walked down to the shore, she heard a sound

-of laughing and the rustle of many dresses among the

-palms close at hand.  Now in Niué it is an important

-matter that brings people out of evenings, because,

-although the island has been Christianised long ago,

-like all the rest of the Eastern Pacific, it still suffers from

-a perfect plague of heathen ghosts that no amount of

-Sunday church-goings and week-day pious exercises

-seem to affect in the least.  So the natives are afraid

-to go out of their houses after sunset, lest uncanny

-things should rise out of the forest to spring upon the

-wayfarer's back unseen and choke him.  This Vaiti

-knew, so she suspected something of interest in the little

-crowd, and turned aside to look.  If she had not, there

-had been no story to tell about Niué and the happenings

-there.

-

-She saw a curious scene, so nearly hidden by the

-growing dark that no one but an island resident could

-have taken in its full significance.  A group of islanders,

-men and women stood round the door of a big white

-concrete house with a pandanus roof—the finest native

-house in the village.  They seemed to be waiting for

-something—something both amusing and exciting, to

-judge by the explosions of giggles that continually burst

-through the dusk.

-

-Presently the door of the house swung open with

-considerable violence, and a large mat was thrown out

-by an invisible hand.  Then the door was slammed,

-and the giggles redoubled.  Within the house now

-sounded something very like a struggle.  There were

-loud sobs and cries of a shrill, theatrical kind, scuffling.

-banging, and a dragging sound.

-

-"Tck, tck, tck," went the tongues of the outsiders

-delightedly.  The interesting moment was at hand.

-

-It came without warning.  The door burst open with

-still more violence than before, and out upon the mat

-was shot by some invisible agency a very solid young

-woman in a white loose gown, weeping somewhat

-mechanically, but with much effect.  She fairly rolled

-over with the force of the shock that had ejected her,

-and before she could pick herself up the door was closed

-once more with a slam that shook the whole house.

-Then the waiting group rushed upon her with cries of

-joy, and bore her away in their midst, singing as they

-went.

-

-"A wedding," said Vaiti to herself.  "It must be

-Mata's; that is their house.  And it will be a big

-wedding, too.  I did not know that it was to be so

-soon."

-

-She fell into a fit of musing as she wandered

-shorewards among the leaning palms....  The palms of

-Niué sweep downwards to the gleaming sea like a band

-of lovely maidens hurrying with sweet impatience to

-meet their lovers on the coral shore.  Of a moonlight

-night, when all things are possible, and nothing seems

-too wonderful in an air that itself is wonder, it needs

-but little for those white, slender stems, and tossing,

-plumy crowns, poised high above the shadowy beach

-they curve to meet, to change themselves into South

-Sea dryads of a new and lovely race, and rush down,

-at long last, upon the calling sea, where Tangaroa, the

-king of ocean, has his dwelling.  Under the palms of

-Niué, when the blazing white moon has risen so high

-in the heavens that a perfect star of jetty shadow is

-rayed about the base of every tree—when the wandering

-sea winds are held close by the breathless spell of

-midnight and nothing wakes on all the lonely shore but the

-long, long song of the droning coral reef—under the

-wonderful palms of Niué, loveliest and strangest of all

-the islands in that dreamy world of "perilous seas and

-fairylands forlorn"—nothing is too strange to be true,

-no fancy too wild to hold, when the moon is up and the

-palms are alone with the sea....

-

-Was Vaiti thinking of visionary palm-maidens and

-sea-foam kings as she went down the winding path to

-the bay, through a wondrous afterglow of russet-rose

-laced through with opal moonrays?  Perhaps—or of

-kindred fancies.  I who knew her cannot say, for no

-one ever knew her altogether.  It is more likely,

-however, that less poetic thoughts were in her mind just

-then.  The scene she had witnessed in the palm-grove

-was the usual ceremony that takes place in Niué the

-night before a wedding, when the friends of the

-bridegroom come to the house of the bride's parents, and

-the latter go through the symbolical form of casting her

-out and closing the door, so that the bridegroom's people

-may take her over and guard her until the wedding

-morning.  Vaiti liked a wedding above all things (next

-to a funeral), and the hint of great doings on the morrow,

-offered by the ceremony she had witnessed, decided her

-to stay another day.  Why not?  The copra was

-loaded, and no rivals were in sight.  Besides, she had

-a motive for staying—the strongest possible motive.

-She wanted to wear her Paris dress.

-

-Yes, it had been acquired at last.  That day in San

-Francisco, when she had come out of the Russian

-Consulate with more money in her pocket than any one

-of her adventures had ever brought before, she had been

-able to restrain herself no longer.  And thereafter, in

-Madame Retaillaud's elegant and exclusive Parisian

-emporium, replete with the choicest imported wares

-(I quote the lady's own description of her goods), there

-took place a scene that is remembered to the present

-day by those of Madame Retaillaud's young ladies who

-survived the earthquake year.

-

-Vaiti, dressed in one of her waistless muslin gowns,

-with a broad-leafed island hat on her head, a long-bladed

-sheath-knife stuck quite visibly in the breast

-of her dress, and her wavy hair falling loose over her

-shoulders, stalked into the shop among the smartly-gowned

-San Francisco ladies who were turning over

-Madame's stock, and demanded to see—

-

-"One dress belong Palisi, pretty dam quick."

-

-They are used to all sorts of strange nationalities along

-the water-front in San Francisco, but not, as a rule, in

-the milliners' and modistes' well-bred establishments.

-Vaiti concentrated the whole attention of the place upon

-herself at a single stroke.  She did not care about that

-in the least, but Madame's hesitation stung her, and she

-pulled out a thick wad of notes.

-

-"Look 'em alive, my hearties!" she ordered

-impatiently in her quarter-deck voice.  "Lay aft here

-with that goods.  I want um Palisi model, all sort."

-

-The customers were nearly in hysterics by this time,

-and the assistants were all a-giggle.  Madame herself,

-however, grasped the situation in a twinkling, and

-frowned down the girls.  Whoever and whatever this

-pirate queen might be, she certainly had money, and

-Madame would have welcomed Lucrezia Borgia or the

-Witch of Endor, under like circumstances, as pleasantly

-as an Anglo-American duchess.

-

-"Perhaps Madame will come into a private room.

-Madame would like, no doubt, to look at our most

-exclusive goods, and we do not bring them into the

-outer shop," she said in her most honeyed voice.  And

-the door of the lift closed upon the pair.

-

-What Vaiti underwent in that fitting-room in the

-course of getting into Madame's latest model promenade

-gown, built for a typical French figure, will never be

-told.  Early in the proceedings a message came down

-to the showroom for the strongest pair of Paris corsets

-in stock, and a little later Madame herself, very red and

-overheated, ran down to select a fresh silk lace.

-

-"Ah, but she has courage, that one!" she declared,

-as the lift received her again.  "Never, no,

-never!—jamais de la vie! ..."

-

-The lift went up.

-

-It was almost an hour before a wonderful vision sailed

-slowly through the show-room and out into the street—slowly,

-not alone for pride, but also because it could

-scarcely move or draw its breath.  The vision, as

-described in the receipted bill that went with it, was

-made up of the following elements:

-

-"One promenade costume (model, Doucet & Cie.)

-composed of chiffon velours, couleur poussière de roses,

-inlet with motifs of point d'Alençon, hand-embroidered

-with lilies of the valley in French paste.  Mounted on

-chiffon bleu-de-ciel, with full volants edged lace and

-chiffon ruching.  Made over foundation of glacé silk,

-couleur citron d'or.

-

-"One set silk underclothing to match.

-

-"One Corset Ecraseur, patent laces.

-

-"One pair bronze promenade shoes, Louis XV. heels,

-extra height.  Stockings to match.

-

-"One parasol composed peau-de-soie rose fanée and

-chiffon bleu-de-ciel."

-

-To which may be added—one young woman, suffering

-horrible agony and quite intoxicated with happiness.

-

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-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-It was this marvellous possession that Vaiti yearned

-to show off at the wedding.  She had not had a chance

-to wear it since the day when she had walked through

-the streets of San Francisco, with an admiring and

-amused crowd at her rear, and found it quite impossible

-to get on board the schooner, when she reached the water

-front, until she took off her voluminous skirt and handed

-it up over the side—afterwards climbing the rope-ladder

-in a storm of applause and a pink silk petticoat.

-Now the occasion for getting full value out of the

-wonderful thing had come at last, and she could not—no,

-she really could not—miss it.

-

-Rather late next morning, when the bride and

-bridegroom—the former in a gorgeous gown of yellow curtain

-muslin, the latter in a thick tweed suit from Auckland

-that caused him to stream at every pore—were sitting

-on opposite sides of the little white church, enthroned

-on chairs all by themselves, and listening decorously to

-a long preliminary address from the native pastor—Vaiti

-swept in, and at once brought the ceremony to a

-momentary pause.  The pastor stopped in his address

-and gaped, the women exclaimed audibly, the bridegroom

-fixed his eyes on the apparition and sighed in a manner

-that the bride evidently resented as a personal slight,

-for she grew still darker in the face than nature had made

-her, and stared penknives and scissors at Vaiti.  Wild

-titters of delight swept indecorously through the church.

-The entry was indeed a success—the native pastor

-found it necessary to address his flock directly, and to

-tell them that they would undoubtedly all go to hell

-if they did not behave better in church, before order

-was restored.

-

-It is not necessary to relate at length how Mata and

-Ivi were made one, how they walked out of the church

-nonchalantly by different doors, and were subsequently

-so deeply interested in the killing of the pigs for the

-marriage feast, and the preparing of the various cooking-pots,

-that they did not meet again all afternoon.  It

-was a commonplace wedding enough, and this history

-is not interested in it, other than as it concerned the

-affairs of Vaiti.  These, indeed, were fairly notable.

-

-For with Vaiti pride very literally brought about a

-fall that day.

-

-She had had a terrible time getting into her dress, and

-the whole ship's company had shared in the trouble.

-First, the native A.B.'s had to fetch her a big looking-glass

-from the nearest trader's, and secure it to the

-bulkhead of her cabin.  Then the cook had to deliver

-up all the hot water in the galley—at seven bells, with

-dinner just coming on!—and the boatswain must needs

-broach the cargo for some special scented soap.  Matters

-were only beginning, however.  When the dress was

-disinterred from its many wrappings and finally put on

-it became immediately apparent that the bodice could

-not possibly be made to meet.  Perhaps the coming of

-the bread-fruit season had caused the young lady's

-waist to expand—perhaps the practised art of Madame

-Retaillaud had exceeded anything that a mere amateur

-could compass in the way of lacing.  At any rate, it

-was not till Vaiti had passed her corset laces out through

-the port and ordered two of the strongest sailors to tail

-on to them—not till Harris, agonising with laughter,

-had directed this novel evolution from the poop for at

-least five delirious minutes, during which Vaiti several

-times thought she was dying, but remained none the

-less determined to die rather than give in, that the

-deed was accomplished at last, and the "Kapitani" of

-*Sybil* was enabled to look at herself in the glass and

-know heavenly certainty that she was the best

-dressed woman in the Pacific at that instant, whoever

-saw or did not see.

-

-The natural result of all this was that in the very

-hour of her triumph she fainted dead away in the

-church, for the first time in her life, and had to be

-carried out.

-

-The ceremony was just over by now, and the bride,

-still burning with jealousy of the woman who had dared

-to eclipse her on her wedding day, was among the first

-of those who crowded round like bees going after honey,

-to stare at the beautiful creature lying senseless on the

-sunburnt grass.  The bridegroom had sped away hot-foot

-in the direction of the village, whence certain

-enticing yells indicated that the pig-slaughter was now

-going on; but Mata was not a bit appeased by his

-indifference to the visitor.  That dress—and oh, how

-wonderful it was!—still rankled in her soul.

-

-Mata was a teacher's daughter, and she knew something

-of white people's lore.  A brilliant thought darted into

-her mind as she pressed and struggled in the crowd

-about the deathly form on the grass....

-

-"Ai, ai! she is surely dead!" wailed the people.

-"Ai! the-great chieftainess will rise no more!"

-

-"Daughters of a turtle!" said Mata contemptuously.

-"I will show you if she is dead.  It is nothing at all but

-that she is vain, and wanted to make herself a middle

-like the 'papalangi' women, who all look like stinging

-hornets.  Give me a knife, someone."

-

-A knife was given, and Mata, with horrid joy, half

-lifted Vaiti and slipped the keen point into the back of

-the dress.

-

-Rip went the silk with a hideous splitting noise, and

-the delicate underwear swelled out through the opening

-like a bush lily bursting its sheath.  Mata felt for

-the stay-lace, and cut that too.  The tension on the

-bodice increased frightfully—the seams gaped and

-strained....

-

-"She will die, I think, if I do not cut it off," said

-Mata hastily, feeling Vaiti reviving under her hand, and

-anxious to finish her work.  Two more cuts of the knife

-did it.  The Paris dress was, speaking sartorially, no

-more; the owner, lying on the ground, was opening her

-eyes to the outrage that had been done; and Mata,

-shrieking with malign laughter, was fleeing wildly through

-the palms in the direction of the pig-killing, peace in her

-heart again.

-

-Peace was very far indeed from Vaiti's heart when

-she revived and found out what had been done.  The

-crowd drew away from her in fear when they saw her

-flashing eyes and set, furious mouth, though she said

-never a word.  Confronted by that Medusa-head, they

-were almost too terrified to find words; but one or two

-stammered out a hasty explanation that freed the

-present company from blame by inculpating Mata.

-

-Vaiti did not doubt it—she had seen the bride's face

-during the ceremony.  Still silent, but flashing looks of

-sheet-lightning all about her, she drew together her

-garments as best she could, and walked off in the direction

-of the ship.  As she did so, a little ugly man with red

-hair slipped out from behind the trees, and looked

-narrowly at her retreating figure.

-

-"It is the white man from the bush!" cried the

-girls.  "White man of ours, why did you not come

-down for the wedding?"

-

-"Because I didn't, my little dears," replied the

-newcomer in English, still looking after Vaiti.  He stood

-well in the shade, and did not make himself unnecessarily

-conspicuous.

-

-"That's a fine girl, that Mata," he added by and by.

-"A smart girl.  I should like to know Mata."

-

-Vaiti put off her going for yet another day.  She had

-business to attend to.

-

-It was very simple business, and it was characterised

-by the directness that attended all the proceedings of

-Saxon's daughter.  She merely went up to the bride's

-new home, that was so handsomely stocked with trade

-goods and imported furniture, while the wedding party

-were making merry in the village after dark, and set

-fire to it with a torch in about a dozen places.  It was

-very dry weather, and there was a strong wind.

-

-There was scarce a stick of the cottage left when she

-marched into the village with a blazing torch in her

-hand, and calmly told the assembled revellers what

-she had done.  Then she left them, seething in a tumult

-of excitement that almost drowned the hysteric screams

-of Mata, and went to bed and to sleep with a quiet

-mind, ready for an early start next morning.

-

-The men came on board late and very drunk, but

-they did come.  They were afraid of Vaiti, and so was

-Harris, who would very well have liked to extend his

-revels in the village for another twelve hours, but did

-not dare to do so.  He thought, as he stumbled into his

-bunk, that the sounds proceeding from the forecastle

-were a good deal odder than usual—he could almost

-have sworn that there was one person, if not several,

-crying in there.  But he had good reason for mistrusting

-the evidence of his senses just then, so he flung himself

-down and went to sleep.

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`A DEAD MAN'S REVENGE`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XI

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   A DEAD MAN'S REVENGE

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-When one is well on the right side of five-and-twenty,

-with a good ship underfoot, a fair breeze setting steadily

-from the right quarter, and a pleasant goal ahead, it is

-hard to be unhappy.  Vaiti's sense of bereavement at

-the loss of her cherished dress faded considerably before

-the *Sybil* had fairly cleared the land, and was gone

-altogether by the next day.  She had done what she felt

-to be the right thing by Mata; the score was even.

-Vaiti did not like loose ends of any kind, and she had

-not left any behind her.  She smiled as she thought of

-it, and paused in her official-looking walk across and

-across the poop, to revile a native A.B. for leaving the

-end of a halyard trailing on deck.

-

-"You d—— lazy nigger," she said.  "What sort

-ship you thinking you stop?  You thinking one mud

-scow" (*Mud cow* was her pronunciation), "one pig-boat,

-one canoe belong dam man-eating Solomon boy?  I

-teaching you some other thing pretty quick.  Suppose

-you no flemish-coil that halyard, keep him coil all-a-time,

-I let 'em daylight inside that black hide belong you,

-knock 'em two ugly eye into one."

-

-She plucked a belaying-pin out of the rail and sent it

-flying at the sailor's ear.  Vaiti was a straight thrower,

-but the crew seldom failed to dodge; they had every

-opportunity of becoming proficient.  On this occasion,

-however, the sailor made not the least attempt to escape,

-and the pin struck him fair and square at the angle of

-the jaw, and knocked him over.  He was hurt, but not

-stunned, and sat up immediately on the deck, gazing at

-the tall white figure on the poop with lack-lustre eyes

-that scarcely seemed to comprehend what they saw.

-

-"Bring 'em that pin," commanded Vaiti, still in what

-stood for English with her.  She never addressed the

-crew in the tongue that was native to both.

-

-The man crept slowly aft, and handed it to her.  She

-motioned to him to replace it neatly in the rail, and

-then pointed to the trailing halyard.  It did not escape

-her, as the sailor made his way down to the main deck,

-that there were tears in his large black eyes, and that

-his pareo was tied with a carelessness unusual among

-Polynesians, and significant of trouble and depression

-when seen.  But she put the one down to the swelled

-and reddening bruise that marked all one side of his face

-and the other to the orgies of the previous night.  If

-the men chose to make brutes of themselves on bush-beer,

-they need not expect that she was going to slacken

-their work for them on that account.  No, not if she

-broke the head of every man in the ship.  She was

-not Saxon's daughter for nothing, as they very well knew.

-

-It was small wonder that Vaiti was not popular with crews.

-

-She went on pacing the deck, in the joyous crystal-clear

-sunlight of the sea.  The trade wind ran through

-the sky like a warm, blue river, the rigging sang, the sails

-drew steadily.  It was a good day, a happy day, a

-pleasant day to be alive.  The girl felt pleased with

-the world.  She took the wheel from the sailor who

-held it, for the sheer pleasure of feeling the flying vessel

-answer to the touch of her own light hand.  All the

-force and fury of those roaring sails overhead seemed to

-concentrate itself here in her fingers, as the power of a

-great dynamo passes through a single wire.  It was

-almost as if she drove the ship herself.  The *Sybil*

-went as steady as an albatross; once or twice the

-spokes fairly shook in her hands.

-

-"The wheel is laughing to-day," she said in Maori,

-using the island sailor's expression.

-

-Dinner-time came round soon, and she descended

-to eat with Harris alone.  Saxon himself did not

-particularly care whether he dined with his bo'sun or not,

-if it happened to be convenient to leave Harris on

-deck; but Vaiti would have run the ship as strictly

-as a man-of-war at all times, if she could have had her

-way.  Indeed, she would have liked to dine in solitary

-state, like the captain of a cruiser, had she not had too

-much good sense to fly in the face of merchant service

-custom by excluding the mate.

-

-As things were, she graciously condescended to order

-Harris down to the cabin with her, and they discussed

-together the inevitable curried tin of Pacific cookery.

-It was wonderfully light and bright in the little cabin,

-which was large for the size of the ship, and had plenty

-of berth and locker space, besides its neatly fitted trade

-shelves.  The bulkheads were painted white picked out

-with blue (they were satinwood and bird's-eye maple

-underneath the paint, a thing which had astonished

-and perplexed more than one ship's carpenter in the

-past quarter of a century), and there was a pretty

-bird's-nest fern in a basket hanging from the skylight, and the

-seats were covered with the neatest thing in blue and

-white trade prints that Auckland could produce.  Vaiti's

-taste was evident everywhere, and Vaiti herself, hair

-freshly combed and held back with a bright ribbon, laces

-and frills dainty and immaculate as ever, looked, as she

-demurely poured out tea (you will seldom find the teapot

-absent from the table of a colonial ship), quite the last

-sort of person by whom a native A.B. might expect

-to be knocked into the scuppers.  Yet, truth to tell,

-the unlicked Harris, wolfing his food at the opposite

-side of the table, was very much better liked by the crew,

-even though he was heavy-handed enough at times;

-and he certainly understood more about the five A.B.'s

-and one ordinary seaman who inhabited the forecastle

-than did Vaiti, who was half one of themselves, and

-therefore thought them beneath consideration as a rule.

-

-Of this fact he proceeded to give an illustration when

-the curry and the tea and the fried bananas were almost

-done, and nobody's dinner could be spoilt by unpleasant

-news.

-

-"Think you're in for a good time, don't you, Cap?"

-he said.

-

-Vaiti, the economical of words, merely nodded.  But

-her face spoke for her.

-

-Harris was never quite sure whether he liked Vaiti

-in an uncomfortable, indefinite way, or heartily hated

-her.  To-day the balance perhaps inclined in the latter

-direction.  He watched her face with some interest

-as he said:

-

-"That's where you spoils yourself, Cap.  You ain't.

-And if you want my advice, which you never do, I'd

-tell you that the sooner you 'bouts ship and back to

-Niué the better."

-

-Vaiti bit slowly through the piece of bread she was

-eating and deliberately chewed it, eyeing the mate all

-the time, before she condescended to answer.

-

-"Mph!" was all she said at last.  She had never

-studied diplomacy, but she knew how much more you

-learn in general by letting the other person lead the

-conversation than by talking yourself.  And it occurred

-to her that Harris wanted to make himself important

-by hinting and patronising over some ship business

-which might, or might not, be in his department.  Well,

-let him.  She would not give him a lead.

-

-Harris, on his part, got angry at once, and blurted

-out what he had meant to keep a good deal longer.

-

-"Oh, very well," he said.  "You can do just as

-you likes, of course, but where you'll find yourself

-when it comes to a question of mutiny, that's another

-two-and-six.  Musling curtains on the ports, and white

-table-cloths, and ropes all flemish-coiled on deck is

-going to help you a lot then, ain't they?  And if ever

-I've seen signs of trouble in a crew, I seen them to-day,

-and you knows it—ma'am."

-

-The last word came with a jerk, screwed out, as it

-were, by an ominous flash of Vaiti's eye.

-

-Vaiti herself was thinking very quickly indeed, but

-you would not have imagined it if you had seen her

-slowly scooping out the inside of a mummy-apple, and

-as slowly eating it.  She was obliged to acknowledge

-to herself, now Harris had spoken, that there had been

-something unusual about the demeanour of more than

-one of the men since their departure yesterday.  But

-mutiny?  Nonsense!  Indigestion from too much pork,

-more likely.  She did not believe for an instant that any

-crew once handled by her father and herself would have

-an ounce of mutiny left in the lot, if you ran them

-through a stamp-mill and assayed the result three times

-over.

-

-So she merely remarked, between spoonfuls:

-

-"You talk plenty nonsense.  You keep those men

-work, they no squeak.  Suppose you finish eat, you go

-tell Gray he come down ki-ki."

-

-"All right!" said Harris meaningly, trying to make

-an effective and tragic exit.  He was really not at all

-easy in his mind, and Vaiti's attitude did nothing to

-relieve his apprehension of what might be about to

-follow.  The men had never dragged on the rein as

-they had done these two days past, and he felt it in his

-bones that there was more than met the eye in the

-matter.

-

-Vaiti, for her part, was so much incensed by the tone

-of his remonstrance that she would not even listen to

-the conviction which began to force itself upon her own

-mind, next day, that there was really something astray.

-Luck in general seemed to have deserted them.  With

-a fair wind the schooner should have made the run to

-Raratonga in three days, but on the afternoon of the

-second day a dead calm had fallen, and they lay helpless

-in the trough of the sea by four o'clock, three hundred

-miles from anywhere.

-

-"All-a-time I saying no good trust those trade winds,

-when that (adjective) Cook Islands be near," sighed

-Vaiti, scanning the horizon vainly right and left.  Like

-a true sailor, she was generally cross in a calm.

-

-"I wish we was out of this, ma'am, I do," remarked

-Gray, who was busy spinning sinnet at her feet on the

-deck.  For some odd reason, the sour old bo'sun generally

-found her more approachable than the others.

-

-"Why?" asked Vaiti, almost amiably.

-

-"Because, ma'am, of that, for one thing.  And hothers."

-

-He pointed forward, and Vaiti saw what she had

-not noticed before, the ship's carpenter, a powerful

-young Mangaian, lying flat on the foc'sle head and

-obviously weeping.

-

-"They've been at that game, one and another, off

-and on, ma'am, all to-day," he said.  "And you know

-yourself 'ow we've been put to it to get the work out of

-them.  Darned if I knows what monkey tricks they's

-up to, but I allow we're liable to understand all about

-it before very long, for that sea-lawyer of a fellow,

-Shalli, he's bin speechifyin' down in the foc'sle 'alf

-of this watch, like a bloomin' 'Yde Park sosherlist,

-he has."

-

-Vaiti glanced at her watch.

-

-"Make him eight bell," she ordered, scanning the

-foc'sle hatch.

-

-"Ay, ay, ma'am," said Gray readily, passing on the order.

-

-The watch below were prompt enough about turning

-out, but Shalli the forlorn could not, it seemed, find

-energy enough to get up and turn in.  Instead, he beat

-his curly head upon the planks and began to sob.  Vaiti

-took no notice of him whatever, but just strolled

-nonchalantly for a minute into her cabin, and reappeared

-with a slight projection in the bosom of her muslin

-dress that had not been there before.  Harris and Gray

-looked at each other significantly, and the former cast

-a swift glance about the vacant horizon.  No, not a

-shred of sail, not a trail of smoke.  Only the glancing

-flying-fish, and the oily, glittering swell, and the hard,

-pale, empty sky.

-

-The men, who had all been standing in a bunch by

-the hatch, now signalled to Shalli, who put off the rest

-of his weeping to a more convenient season, and got

-upon his feet.  Then the six began advancing slowly

-and uncertainly to the break of the poop.  They were a

-good-looking crew in their way, all Eastern Pacific men,

-with bright eyes and well-featured brown faces, and

-their dress—the brilliant red or yellow "pareo" of

-the islands, gaily figured with enormous white flowers,

-and the bright cotton shirt or coloured jersey—lent a

-distinctly operatic air to the little scene.  Vaiti and

-her officers, however (like Molière's *bourgeois* who had

-talked prose all his life without knowing it), had lived

-in the midst of picturesque and extraordinary things

-most of their lives, and therefore took no interest, as

-a rule, in anything save the sternest practicalities.

-

-And it was stern enough in all conscience, this fact

-with which they were confronted.  The men were

-mutinous, beyond doubt.

-

-Vaiti's mind rapidly ran over all possible causes

-for the trouble, even while Shalli was stepping forward

-and opening his mouth to speak.  It could not be rough

-treatment, because, as a matter of fact, the men were

-no worse handled on the *Sybil* than on most other

-island schooners, and an occasional knock-down blow

-is not the sort of thing that a Pacific native will

-seriously resent.  It could not be any objection to go

-to Raratonga—the crew were mostly Cook Islanders

-themselves, and glad of a chance of seeing their homes.

-Nor could it be dislike to her command, for a chief

-rank counts tremendously among Polynesians; and

-islanders who were ruled at home by a queen of her

-family would be most unlikely to strike against the

-authority of one of the Makea race, unless for some

-very grave cause.  It was, of course, possible that they

-had planned to seize the schooner and run off with it....

-She put her hand up to her bosom, and played

-with the laces that lay over that hard substance under

-the dress....

-

-But Shalli was speaking now, in answer to her sharp

-query as to what they wanted there.

-

-He had a good deal to say, and he said it with flashing

-eyes and much eloquence, using his slender, pointed,

-brown fingers a good deal to emphasise his remarks,

-and turning dramatically from his mates to Vaiti,

-and back to his mates again.  Harris listened anxiously,

-catching only a stray word here and there, for his

-knowledge of Maori was confined to the few phrases

-used in running the ship.  Shalli was certainly saying

-that somebody was going to die—that somebody had

-got to die, and immediately—to judge by the emphasis

-with which he spoke....  The mate was, as Vaiti had

-once told him, rather chicken-hearted underneath his

-great bulk and strength.  He felt himself turning

-chilly, for all the burning sky.  What the devil did that

-fiend of a Vaiti mean by standing there listening as

-calmly as if they were paying her compliments on her

-eyes?  Perhaps there was no particular trouble after

-all; but her demeanour was no guarantee, for she would

-have looked like that if they had all been on the verge

-of drowning, or burning, or hanging together, any day

-of the week.

-

-Gray, on the other hand, did not trouble to try and

-make out anything, but cut a large quid and chewed

-it at leisure, idly looking on.  He did not know if the

-men meant mutiny or not, and he did not particularly

-care.  They were three whites against six niggers,

-and there were firearms on their side.  And he had seen

-mutinies in his time beside which any little amusement

-that could be got up by half a dozen amiable Cook

-Islanders would seem a mere Sunday-school tea-party.

-Let them mutiny if they liked.  It would not mean

-the interruption of the work for half a watch.

-

-And Shalli went on talking as if he never would stop,

-and the *Sybil* rolled ceaselessly on the idle swell, and

-the useless sails slapped rhythmically upon the mast.

-And Vaiti, standing on the poop above the group

-of men on the main-deck, listened with an unmoved

-countenance until quite the end of Shalli's long

-speech.

-

-When he had finished he turned his face away, and

-instantly began to weep.  And the five other men,

-exactly as if a tap had been turned on, also began to

-weep at the same moment, howling loudly and lifting

-their hands to heaven.

-

-"If this isn't a bloomin' mutiny, it's a bloomin'

-lunatic asylum," declared Harris quite inaudibly in

-the midst of the hideous noise from the main-deck.

-It is not a common thing, even in that world where all

-things are possible, the wide, strange Pacific Ocean,

-to see a whole ship's company shedding tears in concert

-on a calm and peaceful afternoon, with nothing more

-alarming in sight than a handsome young woman in

-an expensively pretty frock.

-

-"Ow-ow-ow!" went Shalli, getting quite beyond

-his own control.

-

-"Ey-ah, eyah!" screamed a plump lad from Aitutaki,

-fluttering his hands like frantic pigeons.

-

-"For God's sake, Vaiti, tell us what's up," called

-Harris, sending his bull-like tones through the confusion.

-

-And then Vaiti spoke, shrieking at the top of her voice

-in order to be heard.  Her face, its hard calm broken

-up at last, was black with rage, and she had pulled out

-her revolver, and was holding it in her hand, though,

-strange to say, none of the men took the least notice of it.

-

-"That ——, —— witch-man belong Niué, he curse

-them, they say they die!" she screamed.  "By'n-by

-I cut him liver out!"

-

-"What witch-man?" bellowed Harris.  "Don't

-understand.  That white bloke—him with the red hair

-and the scar on his nose—who dresses native, and lives

-native up in the bush?  Saw him lookin' at you like as

-if he'd like to knife you, from behind Mata's house."

-

-"No, pig-head! no white man got 'mana' for make

-die that way," shrieked Vaiti, shaking her revolver

-without effect at the men.  "Niué witch-man.  What

-man you mean?  I not see——"

-

-But she did see at that moment, and to Harris's

-utter dismay she dropped the revolver on the deck and

-flung her skirt over her head.

-

-"My Gord! she's mad now," cried Harris.  The

-crew paid not the least attention, but continued to

-weep with lungs of brass.  The mate's head went round.

-He felt as if he was going out of his senses, too.  Gray,

-who seemed to be the only normal person left on board,

-went up to Vaiti and plucked her dress off her face.

-

-"Now, ma'am, keep 'er 'ead to wind," he remonstrated.

-"What's got 'old of the Capting?  Blest if

-we ever saw you afraid before."

-

-Vaiti turned on him like a tigress.

-

-"You think me frighten, you parrot-face, bal'-head,

-humpback pig-monkey!  Think some more those thing,

-and I shoot some hole in you lie-making tongue, learn

-you talk to me.  I tell you——"

-

-The hubbub on deck was calming down a little now,

-and subsiding into lost and homeless wails.  It was

-possible to make oneself heard.

-

-"I tell you, that thing Alliti see 'long Niué, he one

-dead man.  Captain schooner *Ikurangi*—same I making

-tart [chart] all wrong, so he go drown, he and him mate.

-You think it good thing one dead man he go walk along

-Niué, looking me?"

-

-"A cat may look at a king," said Harris, who had

-realised that no fighting was afoot, and therefore was

-very brave just now.  "Besides, that red-head man

-wasn't no ghost—he borrowed a pouchful of tobacco

-off of me, and never paid it back."

-

-"What sort that man?" demanded Vaiti.  "He

-small, all same Gray, he ugly all same you, got red hair,

-cut 'long him nose, tooth all break?"

-

-"That's him," agreed Harris.

-

-Vaiti took a turn across the deck, and fell silent,

-angrily chewing a lock of her hair.  The horrid vision

-of Donahue risen from his ocean grave, and wandering

-about the islands as a malignant ghost, bent on avenging

-his death, had struck her as such a fancy could only strike

-an islander, and almost paralysed her active mind.

-Now she realised that it was merely a case of mistaken

-newspaper report, and that Donahue had somehow

-escaped from the wreck of his schooner, and was once

-more roaming the islands in the flesh—at the very lowest

-ebb of fortune, it was evident, but probably none the

-less dangerous for that.  She was quite certain that he

-was in some way at the bottom of this business of

-cursing the crew, although no doubt the witch-doctor

-and Mata had been intermediary.  And it was no trifle.

-Sheer mutiny she would have much preferred.

-

-"Wot's it all about?" asked Gray, who had not

-been so long in the islands as the mate.  "Wot's the

-odds if a lot of bally niggers thinks they've been cursed?

-Seems to me anythin' the witch-doctor could do wouldn't

-be likely to harm a crew that's been salted by our old

-man in the cursin' way.  There ain't no witch-what-d'ye-call-'em

-about the islands that can lay over 'im

-for language."

-

-"Oh, shut up!  You don't know anything about it,"

-said Harris with irritation.

-

-"Suppose you tells me," suggested Gray, tucking

-another quid into his cheek, and looking dispassionately

-at the crew, who were now lying on deck rolling about

-with the motion of the vessel, and looking half dead

-already.  "Doesn't seem as if we was goin' to have

-much bother with that lot....  And you gettin' as

-white at the gills as a flounder, thinkin' they was goin'

-to take charge.  Go 'ome and learn a ladies' dancin'-class,

-Mr. 'Arris; you ain't fit to 'andle men."

-

-"I'll handle you if——" Harris was beginning

-roughly, when Vaiti, whose temper had been badly

-ruffled by the events of the last half-hour, stepped across

-the deck and delivered two stinging blows, one on

-Harris's right ear and one on Gray's left.

-

-"You take'm that," she said.  "Alliti, you speak

-bo'sun about Maori 'mana.'  Glay, you lemember

-Alliti mate, no give cheek."

-

-"Want to know if I've got any left for myself, before

-I start givin' it away," observed the bo'sun ruefully,

-rubbing his face.  "But better be slapped nor neglected

-by a pretty girl, hany day, says I."

-

-Vaiti did not smile, but leaned over the rail, and

-began staring at the crew.  She was in no mood for

-flattery.

-

-"Well, if you want to know, it's like this," said

-Harris.  "These native blokes, they thinks some of

-their chiefs has got what they call 'mana.'"

-

-"Wot's that mean?"

-

-"Pretty near any thin', take it by and large, but

-one meanin's all we want, and that's the notion they

-have that these chiefs can sort of blast 'em with a

-curse, so's they'll go away and die.  Like as if I was a

-chief, and you was a common man, same as you are,

-anyhow, and I was to say, 'Gray, you go off out of this

-and die next Thursday at four bells in the afternoon

-watch.'  And you says to me, says you, 'Ay, ay, sir,'

-says you."

-

-"Blowed if I would," ejaculated the bo'sun.

-

-"Yes, you would, you chump, because you'd be a

-bloomin' native, and they always does.  So off you'd

-go, and when Thursday come you'd lie down and die

-at four bells, wherever you happened to be."

-

-"Wot of?"

-

-"Nothin'—you'd run down like a watch—sort of

-'stop short never to go again' business, like the

-grandfather's clock—and when you was dead you'd stay

-dead.  That's all."

-

-"And I never 'eard worse rot in all me days," said

-the bo'sun disgustedly.  "Think I'm going to believe all

-that?"

-

-"Who cares what you believes or what you don't?"

-demanded Harris, "You'll —— well see all about it

-soon enough.  Vaiti she says they says Mata went to

-the witch-doctor, who they're as much afraid of as any

-chief in Niué, for all they're by way of bein' Christian, and

-he cursed them up and down and inside and out, worst

-style, and says they're all to die by sunset, to-night.

-And if I knows anything of natives they'll do it.  I'll

-lay you, we got to work the ship up to Raratonga

-ourselves—if we ever get there.  Of all the low-down,

-mean skinks that ever walked, them natives are the

-worst.  They haven't a blessed scrap of consideration

-in them for anyone but themselves.  Here we are with

-every man-jack of these fellows got an advance on his

-wages, and they says they're going to die!  Die!  I've

-no patience with them.  I do hate selfishness and

-meanness."

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`BREAKING THE MANA`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XII

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   BREAKING THE MANA

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-Vaiti all this time had been steadily watching the

-men as they lay about on the main-deck in various

-attitudes of limp resignation.  One or two—notably the

-emotional Shalli—were already beginning to look ill.

-Matters looked badly enough for the *Sybil*.  It was in

-the hurricane season, and signs were not wanting that

-the calm would break up with energy when it did

-break.  If the crew persisted in their dying, other

-people who had not been in any way subjected to the

-witch-doctor's operations might find it incumbent on

-them to die too.  She did not for a moment doubt

-the Niuéan's power to slay.  Had she not more than

-once seen the queen, who was her own cousin, politely

-dismiss some offender with the significant remark,

-"I wish I may never see you again after to-morrow"

-(for the queen was always courteous, and would never

-have used the crude terms of a Niuéan witch-doctor);

-and had not every one on the island known that with

-the next evening's sunset the wretch would lay him

-down and die as surely as the dark would fall?  These

-men were doomed, and the ship would miss the steamer

-and the cargo would not be sold, and possibly the

-schooner would be lost in the blow that was creeping

-up, and none of them would ever go home any more.

-

-Thus the native side of Vaiti spoke.  But now the

-white side woke up and demanded its innings too.

-Was it endurable that the red-headed rat of a Donahue

-(for she was as certain that he had been at the bottom

-of the matter as only a woman with no direct evidence

-to go on can be) should win the last move in the deadly

-game they had been playing this year and more.

-Was she to get into difficulties, and perhaps lose the

-ship, the very first time that she had taken off the *Sybil*

-all alone?  The fact that such a disaster would include

-the losing of herself did not trouble, as it did not console,

-her.  She would leave her reputation behind her, and

-people, when they spoke of Vaiti of the Islands, would

-say——

-

-No, they wouldn't, and they shouldn't.  The white

-blood was up now.  It was impossible to prevent the

-"mana" from working.  Well, let it be.  She would

-do the impossible.  She had done the impossible before,

-in many ways; it was the only sort of thing really

-very well worth doing, in the opinion of Vaiti of the

-Islands.

-

-Whatever was to be done must be done quickly.

-The storm was not far away, and the *Sybil* was rolling

-in the trough of the increasing swell with every rag of

-sail set.

-

-"What you goin' to do?" asked Harris hopelessly,

-as he saw her move.  "Give them medicine?  It

-ain't any good."

-

-"Yes, give 'em medicine—you and Gray, you giving

-it plenty by'n-by," said Vaiti calmly, beckoning the two

-men over to her.  The crew continued to lie on the deck,

-giving no sign of life but an occasional groan.  The wind

-was beginning to cry a little among the rigging, just

-whimpering, like a chidden child.  A glassy tinkling of

-foam sounded about the keel.  The sun was almost down.

-

-"You listen me," said the girl, her handsome,

-hawk-like features looking curiously sombre in the orange

-light.  "I speak those men in Maori.  I tell them some

-thing—thing not belong 'papalangi.'  You no

-understan'.  Wait."

-

-Then, with a look on her face that the white men

-had never seen there before, and were never to see

-again, she stepped swiftly down the ladder, crossed

-the main-deck, and stood in the midst of the prostrate

-crew.

-

-As though struck themselves by a spell, Harris and

-Gray remained motionless on the poop, only swaying

-with the unconscious movement of the sailor to the roll

-of his ship, while they watched with fascinated eyes

-the scene upon the lower deck.  The crew at first lay

-still as logs, while Vaiti stood and looked at them—only

-looked.  Presently they began to open their eyes

-and roll over, and the weeping, which had apparently

-ceased, began again.

-

-Then Vaiti, suddenly flinging her arms high above

-her head, with her light muslin dress fluttering in the

-wind and all her magnificent hair falling to her knees,

-burst into such a flood of speech as made the two

-hard-bitten Englishmen on the poop open eyes of stolid

-amaze.  There is no language in the world so full of

-eloquent possibilities as the Maori tongue—even in the

-somewhat debased and altered type that is current

-among the islands.  And, hidden away somewhere in

-the strange nature of this strange thing in woman's

-shape, there was more than a touch of the true witch

-wildness and fire.

-

-"Lord!" said Harris, in a tone of awe.  "She's the

-devil himself!"

-

-She looked it, as she stood there in that livid light,

-her arms stretched high to heaven, her voice—was there

-ever a voice so full of passion, prophecy, command?—ringing

-out, now high, now low, now in tones vibrating

-with some subtle suggestion of horror that caused even

-the uncomprehending whites upon the poop to feel a

-cold shudder about the region of the spine.  Upon the

-crew the effect was marvellous, yet, from Gray's and

-Harris's point of view, unsatisfactory as well.  The

-limp figures sat up, it was true, wept afresh, and even

-rose to their feet before long; but it was only to rush

-wildly up and down the heaving deck, driven, it seemed,

-by the sting of an agony greater than any they had

-suffered yet.  Above the loose sails thundered and the

-wind wailed wickedly.

-

-Gray, at a motion from the mate, went to the idle

-wheel and grasped the spokes.  The *Sybil* would want

-watching soon.

-

-"Strike me pink if this isn't the craziest ship's

-company outside a lunertic asylum from Yokohama to

-the 'Orn," muttered the bo'sun to himself.  "Now,

-what the 'ell is *that*?  Ho, Jemmy Gray, why don't

-you look for a berth as a bally stoker in a bally Red Sea

-liner, or a supercargo on a Chinese pirate junk, and

-'ave a quiet life at your age?  Here, Mr. 'Arris, you

-going to let 'er shoot 'erself before your heyes?"

-

-Vaiti had plucked out her revolver again, but instead

-of threatening the crew with it, she was holding it close

-to her own curly head, all the time pouring forth a

-river of eloquent Maori, strongly charged with adjurations

-and threats.  It needed no translation to understand

-so much, not to see the abject if inexplicable

-terror of the crew, who cowered and howled in an

-extremity of distress every time she raised the pistol to

-her head.

-

-"Vaiti, Vaiti!  What're you doing, Cap?" yelled

-Harris.  "You'll shoot yourself!  Are you crazy?

-What are you givin' 'em, for Cord's sake?"

-

-Vaiti turned round, and cried angrily at him:

-

-"Hold 'm tongue!  You no leave me myself, very

-quick I shooting you.  I tell those men I great chief,

-no one can take 'um curse away, but can come 'long

-all those men myself, suppose they die—go Raratonga

-when 'um night come, an' all those man soul he running

-quick, quick, all a-cold, 'long those mountains top

-Raratonga where 'um dead man he go to jumping-off

-place.  A—a—h!  I put one bullet in head belong me,

-very quick, suppose those men they got dam cheek go

-an' die.  I coming, very dead, very angry, I go 'long

-that soul, all a-time; no let 'um rest, no let 'um see

-woman fliend, die long time ago—I take big club belong

-chief, make 'um run, cry, all-a-time—no sleep, no eat,

-no lie down!  A—a—h! no go heaven, no go hell,

-all-a-time, for ever'n ever, Amen.  I pay him out for

-going die!"

-

-She stormed through the brief speech like a hot-season

-squall, and instantly returned to the natives.

-Harris, struck dumb by the entirely unprecedented

-nature of the situation, could find no vent for his feelings

-save in plucking off his cap and casting it under his feet.

-She was threatening the crew that she would kill herself

-if they died; follow them to the land of shades (the

-entrance to which was popularly supposed to be over

-the edge of a certain desolate, far-up mountain precipice

-in Raratonga), and make it so hot for them in the

-"otherwhere" that they would certainly wish they

-hadn't dared to die....  What on earth was a man to

-do in a ship commanded by a thing—he could not call

-it a woman—that talked like that—with night coming

-on, too, and something very like a bad blow unpleasantly

-near?

-

-Vaiti did not leave him long in doubt as to what he

-was to do.  The crew, driven previously to the verge

-of frenzy by her gruesome threats, became entirely

-frantic during the eloquent peroration that followed

-her address to Harris.  They ran up and down the deck;

-they shrieked, they prayed, they besought.  Vaiti, with

-the eye of a hunter watching a quarry almost driven to

-bay, kept a keen look-out through all her fiery eloquence,

-and just at the moment when the men seamed driven

-to the highest point of human endurance, turned to the

-mate with a triumphant cry.

-

-"Now, Alliti! he all right by'n-by: I no shoot

-myself, I think.  You and bo'sun you get rope's end very

-quick, give 'um order shorten sail, make 'um go.  I

-think he go; he too much plenty frighten die 'long me."

-

-"Too much plenty frighten" the men were indeed.

-The threat that Vaiti had made—for the carrying out

-of which they doubted neither her ability nor her will,

-any more than she did herself—was so much more potent

-than the curse of the witch-doctor that the terror of

-the one paled before the terror of the other.  For the

-moment, they felt that they might not be able to live,

-but they certainly must not die; and it was right in

-the middle of this illogical state of mind that the mate

-and bo'sun came in with their rope's ends and settled

-the matter once for all.  An hour ago, red-hot irons

-only would have moved them to hurry up with their

-dying.  Now a couple of ropes' ends, laid about among

-the six with a will, drove them howling up the masts

-and out along the yards, where, with Gray and Harris

-still after them, and Vaiti threatening from below,

-they succeeded in getting the sails stowed and the vessel

-snug in very little over the ordinary time.  The blow

-that followed kept all hands busy the night through,

-but it came from the right quarter, and the *Sybil* fled

-before it at such a speed that morning found her only

-half a day's run from Raratonga, with the wind quieting

-down to a pleasant breeze, the schooner uninjured, and

-the crew as cheerful and busy as they had ever been

-in their lives.

-

-Vaiti caught the steamer, sold her copra, and saw it

-on the wharf ready to load.  Then she went back to

-the schooner, and waited till the last of the men

-returned.

-

-"Suppose you like go die now, plenty time for you,"

-she said.  "Plenty good sailor-man stop Raratonga.

-You go 'long die; I no want."

-

-The men looked at her sheepishly, and Shalli, the

-spokesman, scratched his head and surveyed a heap of

-tributary pigs, fowls, and fruit that lay on the deck of

-the schooner before he answered.  The crew had many

-relations about Raratonga, and the relations had done

-them very well this trip.

-

-"Many thanks, great chieftainess," he said at last,

-in his own tongue.  "We are much obliged to you, but

-we have changed our minds, and now we do not ever

-mean to die at all."

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE GAME PLAYED OUT`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XIII

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE GAME PLAYED OUT

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-Every one in the trader's had gone to bed, and Vaiti,

-barefoot and dressed in dark cotton, had just got out

-of her room by the window, and was gliding noiselessly

-down the back verandah.

-

-The moon was down, and the thick darkness under

-the trees of the village covered her safely as she slipped

-along at the backs of the little white, palm-thatched

-houses.  It was not at all likely that any native would

-be about in the middle of the night, but one could never

-reckon on white men, of whom there were several in

-the little town—and Vaiti, being engaged as usual on

-"urgent private affairs," did not want any inquiries.

-

-She got away from the village without remark, and

-then struck into one of the narrow grass roads penetrating

-the bush.  Everything was asleep.  The little green

-parrots were hidden deep under heavy leaves, each

-with its noisy head tucked under its wing.  The lizards

-that had been darting and flickering all day long about

-the path now slept, chill as little stones, among the roots

-of the trees.  There was a cold, dewy smell in the air,

-and the palm-tree plumes were motionless as drawings

-in Indian ink against the violet gloom of the sky.  Very

-far away the immemorial music of the reef beat softly

-in the dark.

-

-Vaiti girded her dress high, and walked swiftly.  She

-had a long way to go, and she wanted to be back in her

-neat, white, mosquito-curtained bed, sleeping the sleep

-of the innocent, before the trader's wife should come in

-with her morning cup of tea.  Vaiti was a past mistress

-in the art of avoiding useless comment.

-

-Three miles, five miles, seven miles....  It was

-right at the other side of the island, past mile after mile

-of tangled bush, acre after acre of sparsely planted,

-rocky, open ground, grove after grove of tall, plumy

-cocoanut, heavy with fruit.  Oranges grew by the track

-here and there; broad green banners of banana leaf

-blotted out whole sections of the stars, and slim, quaint

-mummy-apple trees stood up among the prickly coral

-rocks.  Vaiti had no time to stop, but she snatched a

-little refreshment on her way from time to time, as the

-wayfarer may always do in the kindly South Sea climate.

-

-She struck at last into a narrow track leading off

-the main pathway—so small that in the dusk of the

-starry night it must have been invisible save for a mass

-of pointed rocks that stood up just beside the overgrown

-entrance and made a landmark.  Afterwards came a mile

-or two of tangled walking among clumps of pink and

-scarlet and yellow hibiscus, all reduced to a common

-blackness by the levelling night, and through thorny

-lemon-trees, and over rocky knolls where there was

-scarce footing for a goat....  A lonely God-forsaken

-region this; not a village, nor even the gleam of a

-solitary white-washed hut.  What had the "Kapitani"

-of the *Sybil* to do with such a place?

-

-Vaiti knew very well indeed what she had to do.  She

-had gathered in the town that the mysterious white

-man who "lived native" in the bush had his dwelling

-about this lonely neighbourhood.  It was very well

-known to her, and she meant to find the man's

-dwelling-place, and see him with her own eyes before...

-

-Well, that was still to come.

-

-It took her rather longer than she had expected, but

-she did at last succeed in finding the tumble-down little

-palm-leaf shanty, built against the side of a rock, that

-she had heard described.  It was a miserable place,

-so far as her cat-like eyes could judge it in the purple

-gloom, not more than three or four yards long, and

-looking like nothing so much as a heap of dead leaves

-and rubbish piled against the rock.  She trod noiselessly

-round its three sides, and listened here and there.

-The door, as she ascertained by feeling, was a heavy mat

-hung up from the eaves, and it was tightly fastened across

-the opening.  There was a faint sound of slow, heavy

-breathing from within.  The man was evidently asleep.

-

-Vaiti climbed up on the rock above the hut, and pulled

-away a piece of the loose grey coral of which it was

-composed.  Then, sheltering herself behind a clump

-of hibiscus growing in a cleft, she raised her voice in

-a fearful squealing cry, exactly reproducing the yell

-of a wild pig wandering in the bush at night.  At the

-same time she cast a lump of coral with all her strength

-down the side of the big rock, whence it landed with a

-crash in the middle of a mass of brushwood, burying

-itself completely.

-

-The double noise, as she had anticipated, brought

-out the owner of the hut, very cross and sleepy, clad

-only in a pareo, and angrily anxious for the safety of

-his patch of yams.  He carried a torch in his hand,

-made of blazing candlenuts strung on a stick ("Must

-have run out every bit of credit at the stores," thought

-Vaiti parenthetically), and he was, beyond all shadow

-of doubt, against all common probability, the

-red-haired master of the *Ikurangi*.

-

-If looks could ever blast, those black eyes behind

-the hibiscus boughs would have slain him where he

-stood.  Vaiti quivered with rage as she watched him

-shambling sleepily about, looking, with his long, matted

-red hair, bloated, evil face, and half naked body, infinitely

-lower than any coloured native on the island....  He

-had not prospered since he escaped the wreck of the

-*Ikurangi*—how or where she did not care to know.

-He looked as if he had been living on the natives

-and half drinking himself to death, as was indeed the case.

-

-But Vaiti was not in the least mollified by his

-unprosperous case.  In her opinion, he ought to have been

-dead long ago.  There could be no peace of mind for

-her while he was still drifting about the Pacific, ever

-on the alert to do her an evil turn.  She was not equal

-to actual murder, and, in any case, Niué was a

-British-owned island, with a resident Commissioner and a

-regular nest of missionaries, where you had to be very

-careful of what you did.  But if any accident—a safe,

-convenient accident—should befall him by-and-by,

-why, it would certainly be an advantage to the *Sybil*

-and her owners.  Well, that might come about, and

-without introducing Saxon into it either.  In such a

-delicate matter Saxon's interference would very likely

-have acted much as a charge of dynamite might act

-in the destruction of a wasps' nest—something more

-than the wasps would probably come to grief.

-

-She waited until the ugly creature had rolled back

-into his cottage and shut the make-shift door.  Then she

-slipped down from the rock once more, and began

-the second part of her errand.  Neither then, nor at

-any other time, did she trouble to find out the manner

-of Donahue's escape.  If she had, she would have heard

-that he had been picked up by a native canoe, floating

-about on a piece of wreck the day after the disaster

-that destroyed the *Ikurangi*, and that, he had spent a

-good many months on a neighbouring island before a

-stray schooner had consented to accept his watch for

-passage money and convey him as far as Niué—the

-only place near their course where a penniless

-beachcomber would have been allowed to land.  As things

-were, he was more or less smuggled off, and thought

-best to take refuge in the bush at once.  The moneyless

-adventurer is not encouraged in islands belonging to

-the British Crown.

-

-It is easy, therefore, to understand why Donahue,

-living under an assumed name in the far interior of

-the island, had not been recognised, and was not likely

-to be, by any one save the person whom his presence

-most concerned.  His malice against Vaiti had by no

-means evaporated with the events that took place on

-Vaka.  He did not, as it happened, suspect her of having

-actually caused the loss of the *Ikurangi*, but he was of a

-darkly superstitious nature, and laid down his ill-luck,

-first, last, and all through, to the fact of her influence.

-She had been a "Jonah" of the worst kind to him, and

-he would have been very glad indeed to serve her any ill

-turn of any kind that might be possible.  But only the

-small piece of spite compassed through Mata had, so far,

-lain within his power.

-

-Vaiti had still a mile or two to go, and it was waxing

-very late, or rather, early.  She almost ran along the

-winding rocky path, following it as easily as if broad

-day or full moon had surrounded her instead of star-lit

-dark.  Now the sound of the sea, unheard for the last

-hour, broke out again, and a cold salt breath from the

-beach cut through the heavy perfume of the forest track.

-In another minute she was out of the wood and fairly

-running down a sloping, sandy track that led to a little

-white house standing alone on the shore....  She

-laughed as she ran—it was such a soft, clear night, and

-the sea called so pleasantly down in the dark, and she

-did so dearly love an adventure—especially when all

-the world imagined her to be sleeping quietly in her

-mosquito-netted bed.

-

-There was no secrecy about this matter apparently.

-The house had a good wooden door, and she rapped

-loudly on it with a stone, calling at the same time,

-"Sona!  Sona!  Wake up!"

-

-There was a brief interval, in which the rollers tore

-at the beach and the palms swung and crashed overhead,

-uninterrupted by other sound.  Sona was evidently

-asleep.  She struck loudly on the door again.  This

-time some one answered in a drowsy voice, and a slow,

-shuffling foot came to the door.  The hinges creaked,

-and in another minute a small, bent, feeble figure appeared

-on the threshold.

-

-"Tck! tck!" it clucked.  "Is there magic in

-the air, and have I grown fifty years younger, that the

-lovely maidens come to my door in the starlight once

-more?  Is it my beauty that has struck you to the

-heart, chieftainess Vaiti; or do you want a charm

-to catch the love of some one less deserving than

-myself?"

-

-A fit of coughing interrupted him; he crept out to

-the open air, and clung to the door-post, shaking all over

-with the violence of the paroxysm.  There was more

-light here, down by the foaming rollers; one could see,

-if one had been walking half the night in the dark bush,

-that the man was very small and hairy, very decrepit,

-and very, very old.  Indeed, the personal appearance of

-Sona, solitary recluse of the Avarangi beach, good

-Nonconformist Christian on Sundays, and heathen

-witch-doctor out of business hours, was a very important

-item of his stock-in-trade.  He looked his part to

-perfection, and knew it.  His very name was a piece of

-business, even though, rightly pronounced and written.

-it was that of the godly man of Nineveh.  When Shark-Tooth

-of Avarangi had consented, largely for reasons of

-policy, to join the mission fold a good many years

-before—the last straggling heathens on the island having

-been then "brought in" by the exertions of a determined

-and energetic missionary—he had selected the

-name of Jonah for his baptismal title solely because, so

-far as he could ascertain, the original bearer of the name

-was proverbial for bringing bad luck to his enemies—and

-that was the sort of reputation that Shark-Tooth

-especially coveted.

-

-Vaiti had not met him before, but she knew him well

-by reputation, and was very sure that he knew all he

-cared to know—probably a good deal—about her.

-It was, she thought, a case for going straight to the point,

-so she went very straight indeed.

-

-"Let me in, Sona," she said in his own tongue.  "I

-want to talk with you, and I want to buy you; for you

-and I are wise people, and I know that there is nothing

-that may not be bought."

-

-"Crah—crah—crah!" cackled Sona, in a feeble

-old man's laugh, tacking a joke to the end of it that

-might well have raised a blush on Vaiti's cheek if she

-had been capable of such a weakness.  He led the way

-into the house, still cackling, lit an ill-smelling kerosene

-lamp, and sank down upon the mats, a mere heap of

-crumpled cotton clothes, old bones, and ancient wickedness.

-

-Vaiti pulled out her cigar-case, tossed the old creature

-a cigar, which he clutched at eagerly, and lit one for

-herself.  Then she squatted down on the mats, her back

-against the wall, and puffed for a minute or two in

-silence.  Old Sona watched her eagerly with his glassy

-little eyes.  He saw that she was not angry at the part

-he had played in the late unpleasant occurrence upon the

-schooner, or at least that she did not mean to resent it.

-He had heard all about the strange happenings of the

-voyage, and was a good deal awed at the power of the

-woman who had actually broken the spell of his curse—in

-which, be it observed, he believed most fully himself,

-with excellent reasons for doing so.  And he was really

-very anxious to know what she wanted now, and

-especially what he was going to make by it.

-

-Vaiti pulled at her cigar vigorously for a minute to

-make it draw well, and then, with a leisurely puff,

-remarked in Sona's own tongue:

-

-"Mata gave you a gold ring to curse my sailors

-that they should die—all the village knows of it, so

-you need not deny it, old man with the face of a scavenger-crab.

-Was it not foolish of you to set yourself against

-Vaiti, the great sea-princess—very foolish to run into

-danger, and for so little?"

-

-"Yes, yes, so little," repeated Sona, in a kind of

-wail.

-

-"Now I come to buy you for myself," went on Vaiti,

-puffing between words (she smoked like most women,

-very hard and fast).  "I buy like a great chief's daughter,

-and you shall feed and drink well for a long time if you

-are faithful to me.  If not, I shall split you open with

-my knife as one splits open a fish on the beach, and

-leave you out on the strand, so that the crabs may come

-and eat you before you are dead.  That is what I shall

-do to you."

-

-"I belong to the high chieftainess, soul and liver,"

-quavered Sona nervously.  Vaiti, hardly looking at

-him, pulled something out of her dress and flung it

-down carelessly on the mat between the two.  Sona's

-eyes glittered, for he heard the chink of gold.

-

-"Take it, old pig of the woods," said Vaiti

-contemptuously, and he clutched eagerly at the little

-parcel of rag.  It contained a roll of gold coins.  Sona,

-panting with mingled delight and fear lest his visitor

-should change her mind, scuttled away to some hiding-hole

-in an inner room, and concealed the packet with

-breathless haste.  Then he returned to the lamp-lit

-room, where Vaiti sat smoking and waiting.

-

-"I am yours, high chieftainess; I am yours," he

-repeated, rubbing his hands together and cackling.

-

-"What is this thing they tell about a devil that

-stays upon the road to Mua, and comes out at night-time?"

-asked Vaiti carelessly, looking over Sona's

-head at the wall.

-

-Sona shut up his eyes very tight, and shook his shaggy

-little head from side to side.

-

-"If you ask the good misinari doctor, he will tell

-you," he answered.  "As for me, I have nothing to do with

-devils.  I am a very old man, and I want to go to heaven.

-

-"You will go to-night, old scorpion-head, if you do

-not tell me everything I want to know," remarked

-Vaiti.  Her tone was pleasant, but there was a flavour

-of something else below the pleasantness that caused

-Sona, literally and figuratively, to sit up.

-

-"I tell, I tell, high chieftainess," he stammered

-eagerly.  "The thing is known to all the people on the

-island—even the white people.  It happened only last

-year, and it is as true as the Good Book.  It was the

-foolish man from Mua way, whom they called a

-witch-doctor—and every one knows that such a thing does not

-exist, high chieftainess; but they said he was that thing,

-and he said so himself, because he was proud and mad.

-Now, we all know that there are many devils on Niué,

-and that the misinaris never were able to drive them

-all away.  And there is a very bad devil on that road

-to Mua, right where the six palm-trees stand up by

-themselves among the graves.  It is powerless in the

-day, but at night there is no Niué man who would dare

-to go there.  Sometimes the white traders will ride

-past the place coming home in the dark, but it is a true

-thing that their horses will often shy and bolt when

-they come near to the home of the devil, and no man

-can say why; indeed, the devils, for the most part, do

-not have power over the 'papalangi.'

-

-"So this witch-doctor, as he called himself, said that

-he did not fear the devil, and he would go and stay the

-night among the graves, thinking that because of that

-all the people in the island would believe in him, and

-give him many pigs and yams for fear of his 'mana.'  So

-he went to the devil-place, and all night he stayed,

-but in the morning he did not come back at all.  And

-by-and-by all the people of his village went together

-to look for him.  And they found him lying on the

-road, all dead, and his face was black and his body

-twisted up.  So the people brought him to the misinari

-doctor, and he said that he could not make him alive

-again.  And the traders said, 'What is the kind of this

-death?  We do not know it, though we are white men

-and know everything.'  But the misinari doctor did

-not know.  And they buried him, and that is all, high

-chieftainess."

-

-Vaiti smoked thoughtfully.  She had heard something

-of the tale before, and Sona's story did not vary from

-the version that was generally current about the island.

-She thought, on the whole, that she believed in it.

-There was no doubt that many of the white people gave

-it credit, though a few of them declared the man must

-have died in a drunken fit.  A paper in Australia had

-published an account of the mysterious incident, and

-the spiritualistic set in Sydney were so deeply interested

-in it that a letter of inquiry from a psychical research

-society had been sent up to the island, inquiring into

-the matter.  But it happened that the trader to whom

-the letter was addressed had committed suicide a good

-many months earlier, and excellent onions and pumpkins

-(much appreciated by his successor) were growing green

-upon his grave by the time the letter reached the island.

-So the inquiry was never answered.

-

-Yes, on the whole, Vaiti thought she believed the

-story.  That a similar result would follow in the case of

-a "papalangi" (white man) who followed the deceased

-magician's example she did not, however, believe.

-She thought it very likely, however, that mischief of

-one kind or another would result....  And if the worst

-should chance to come about....

-

-Vaiti took another cigar.

-

-"What does your misinari say?" she asked.  "He

-is not the right sort of misinari, it is true, but still,

-he should know more about devils than the traders."

-

-"Our good misinari was not here when it happened,"

-replied Sona in a pious tone.  "It was the doctor

-misinari.  Our own good misinari says that devils

-cannot do harm to any but bad men."

-

-Vaiti reflected, her eyes on the floor.  She really

-had some respect, in an odd, upside-down kind of way,

-for missionary opinion.  It is bred in the bone with the

-younger generation of Eastern Pacific islanders.

-

-Donahue was certainly a very bad man.  She did not

-think she had ever met any one much worse.  Perhaps

-the badness, balanced against the whiteness, might

-swing down the scale.  At any rate....

-

-"Hear me, Sona!" she said, in a voice of command.

-"I have bought you to-night, and you belong to me.

-There will be more to pay by-and-by if you do as I tell

-you.  But I would warn you to be careful, for you will

-not find it pleasant lying on the shore down there, with

-your inside hanging out like a gutted fish, and the crabs

-coming running to eat you before you are dead, as you

-will if you make any mistakes.  Listen, then, very

-carefully."

-

-"I listen, I listen!" cried Sona.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`HOW THE WITCH-DOCTOR GOT HIS MONEY BACK`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XIV

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   HOW THE WITCH-DOCTOR GOT HIS MONEY BACK

-

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-

-When the trader's wife came in next morning with

-Vaiti's cup of tea, she was touched to see how deeply

-her pretty lodger was sleeping.

-

-"Poor young dear," said the good woman, "lying

-there so sweet and innocent, sleeping like a baby!

-It's only the good heart that rests like that.  I don't

-believe a word of the silly lies they tell about her.  Here,

-dear, wake up," she called gently.  "Your good papa

-is ever so much better this morning, and looking for

-you to come in.  And it is Sunday morning, and a nice

-cool day."

-

-"Thank you, Mrs. Smith," said Vaiti politely, broad

-awake at once.  "May I asking you one little hot

-water?  I like get up and go to turch."

-

-Church, attended for reasons religious or otherwise,

-was not one of the amusements patronised by the

-nameless white man of the bush.  Indeed, his amusements,

-such as they were, were so far confined to the

-native villages of the interior that very few of the other

-whites had seen him.  He was not good for trade,

-having no money and possessing no credit—that was all

-they knew, or for the most part wanted to know, about

-him.

-

-There was all the more astonishment, therefore, in

-the shanty owned by the Mua trader, away up in the

-bush, when the unknown man walked into the store

-that Sunday night, and demanded some tobacco, at the

-same time showing a sovereign he held in his hand.  He

-was dressed in a pitiful mass of rags, none too clean,

-but he looked well pleased with himself, and was more

-than half drunk.  Fortune had apparently found him

-out at last.

-

-The Mua trader was an honest man, but he did not

-see why he should not have a share in anything good

-that happened to be available about that lonely and

-unprofitable district.  So he welcomed the stranger in

-with much cordiality, and asked him to stop for supper.

-

-The newcomer had no objection in the world to come

-in and share the trader's good tinned meats and new

-yeast bread, and he made himself very much at home

-without pressing.  The trader, who had a private

-store of consolation in his own back kitchen, plied the

-spirits freely.  He was curious, and he believed in the

-old saw of "Wine in, truth out."  A couple of friends

-who had ridden over from Alofi, the capital, and were

-equally curious about the derelict's sudden access to

-fortune, did their disinterested best to help, and the

-bottle went merrily round.  The Niué traders are a

-sober, decent set of people enough, but Donahue had

-mixed with them so little that he did not know this,

-and consequently was not put on his guard by the unusual

-conviviality.  Indeed, he was by no means the same

-active, crafty villain who had set that successful snare

-of the diamond necklace in Apia many months ago.  A

-white man cannot "live native" without going downhill

-very fast, and Donahue was nearly at the bottom.

-

-So he drank, and laughed, and told evil tales, and grew

-quarrelsome, and pathetic, and finally affectionate and

-confidential, in well-defined stages, while all the time

-the other men kept sober, or nearly so.  The Mua

-trader in particular hardly touched his glass.  But

-Donahue, once so wary, never saw, and chattered on.

-

-Before midnight the trader had sold him some gay

-calico for the native' girls, and a little tinned meat and

-flour, and half-a-dozen various trifles that brought

-the score up to about a pound.  Here the guest came

-to a pause and fingered his coin.

-

-"Oh, well, if that's all you have, you won't get any

-more goods to-night.  Thanks," said the trader, putting

-out his hand.

-

-The visitor, however, declined to hand over the money.

-He would pay to-morrow, he said.  He was not going

-to leave himself without money again—not if he knew

-it—and he would have lots to-morrow: and if the trader

-wouldn't send up the goods without the cash to-night,

-why, he might keep his condemned rubbish, and his

-customer would go elsewhere.

-

-Rather than lose the order, the other gave in, and

-sent a boy away with the stuff.  It would always be

-easy to bully him out of it afterwards, he thought, and

-there was no arguing with a drunken man's whim.

-

-Then he set himself, in company with all the rest, to

-find out where the money had come from.

-

-Donahue, who by now was far gone, responded

-readily.  It was the silly old chap who lived down on

-Avarangi beach, he said; an old fool who was an uncle

-of a girl who was a friend of his.  The old chap had a

-notion that there were some Spanish doubloons hidden

-somewhere on the island, but in a place he was afraid

-to touch, so he had forked out a good British sovereign,

-and offered it to Donahue to go in his place, and share

-the money with him.  Donahue was to keep the earnest

-money for his trouble, if nothing came of it, and if

-anything did turn up he was to take half.  So he was

-going, that very night—the sooner the better.  Natives

-were—well, natives; but as for him, he was afraid of

-nothing.

-

-"Thasser-sort-er-man I am," he finished thickly,

-looking round for applause.

-

-He did not get it.  The traders one and all burst

-out laughing.  The story of the doubloons, they told

-him, was a very old one in the island, and only the

-newest of new chums thought of believing it.  It was

-quite true that the natives, who were perfect magpies

-for hoarding, did possess among them a certain number

-of doubloons, which came from God-knows-where—for

-the coinage used in the island was British—and true

-also that the trader would get a doubloon from one of

-them every now and then in the course of business,

-always with some mystery attached to it, and some

-reluctance to part with the coin.  But the Resident

-Commissioner, who knew the island pretty well, and the

-missionary too, had long been certain that the store was

-merely the remains of some ship-wrecking raid of past

-days, about which the Niuéans were now ashamed to

-speak.  They were great misers, and it would like enough

-be another generation before all the hoarded coins

-had come to light and passed through the traders'

-hands.  But hidden treasure in Niué!  Pf!  If old

-Sona had been giving away money, he must be either

-going mad with age or (more likely) up to something.

-He was the cutest old fox on Niué, and that was saying

-something.  Why, when he had come into that very store

-to buy a darning-needle a few hours ago (what a man

-who lived in a waist-cloth and nothing else wanted

-with a darning-needle he hadn't explained), it had

-been all the trader could do to prevent his picking up

-half-a-dozen odds and ends.  That was what he was

-like if one ever took an eye off him; and he wouldn't

-even pay for the needle, either, till the trader had

-threatened to hammer him unless he forked out.  Take

-his word for it, if Sona had been giving away money,

-he meant to have it back—somehow.  And the treasure

-was poppy-cock.

-

-Donahue had now passed into the quarrelsome stage,

-and he rose with tipsy dignity from his seat.

-

-"I considdle you no gennlemen," he said scornfully.

-"For half a Chile dorrer I'd" ... He mentioned

-what he would do, in gross and in detail, to the assembled

-company for the small sum mentioned.

-

-"Kick the dirty brute out," said the Alofi trader

-disgustedly.  "It's easy to see what sort of company

-that carrion has kept."

-

-Donahue was gone, however—gone with surprising

-agility, and lurching rapidly up the forest pathway

-towards his house.  His legs were always the last thing

-to fail him.

-

-He knew very well that he had had too much, and

-when he reached his hut he proceeded to sober himself

-by dipping his head repeatedly in a bucket of water.

-Then he brewed himself a powerful jorum of black tea,

-drank it, and set off considerably sobered.

-

-It was a long way to the clump of palms, and he

-stumbled badly now and then as he went over the

-graves that lay thick about the edges of the path.

-Burial along the high-road is very popular in Niué,

-where they like to keep an eye on their dead and see

-that they are lying quiet in their graves—a thing that

-no one considers at all a matter of course.  Some of

-the graves that Donahue passed had felt hats laid upon

-them; others had plates, bowls, bottles of hair-oil,

-fans—all to amuse the ghost and keep it quiet; and one

-or two looked ghostly enough to scare a nervous person

-as it was, with the wraith-like mosquito curtains

-thoughtfully suspended over the tomb by mourning and anxious

-relatives.  Every grave was completed by a solid mass

-of concrete, weighing anything from several hundredweight

-to a ton.  It was not the fault of any Niuéan

-if his dead relatives "walked."

-

-Donahue as he went chuckled to himself at the

-thought of his keenness in over-reaching the old

-witch-doctor.  He had used him for his own purposes through

-the girl Mata before, and though that had not worked

-out too well, it was the witch-doctor who bore the

-discredit, not he.  He would use him again now, and in

-another way.  It was in the daytime that Sona had

-arranged to meet him at the palm-tree clump.  At night,

-he said, it would be certain death; and even in daylight

-no one would linger there who could help it.  He at

-least would never dare to disturb the big tomb in which

-the money was hidden and call down the anger of the

-devils on himself, unless he had a white man with him

-who feared nothing.  So next morning, very early, the

-white man who was so brave would meet him, and they

-would open the big, cracked tomb together—the tomb

-that no Niuéan had ever dared to lay a finger on before,

-though there were one or two besides himself who

-suspected that it was just there the mysterious foreign

-coins had come from years ago, and that there were a

-good many left.

-

-Thus the witch-doctor.  And Donahue had assented

-eagerly, and gone off with his earnest money.  And,

-on arriving at his hut, he had looked out an old axe

-that he possessed, and cleaned up his lamp, and begged

-a drop of oil from the nearest native house.  For he

-meant to go that very night, and take everything there

-was for himself.  Who was to prove it?

-

-Which was just the course of action that Sona had

-calculated very confidently on his taking.

-

-It poured furiously in an hour or two, for it was in

-the hot season, and the great rains were out.  Donahue

-could not light his lamp when he came to the clump

-of palms, which he knew well enough to recognise almost

-in the pitch dark.  It thundered soon after, and the

-sky was split from pole to pole by corpse-blue flashes of

-lightning.  In one of these, Donahue, feeling about

-the cracks of the tomb, thought he saw something

-moving against the gloom of the bush near at hand.

-It made his throat turn dry, for all the wet, and he felt

-his hair prickle curiously.  But he went on groping.

-Another flash ripped up the sky; it was a smaller one,

-but for one horrible moment he thought he had been

-struck, for something stinging streaked across his face

-and gave him an ugly thrill.  But it passed immediately,

-and he began groping again—groping with both hands,

-in a frantic hurry, trying to make out the best place to

-apply the axe—tearing and grasping and scuffling like

-some deadly graveyard mole, breathless, with beads of

-warm sweat coursing down his face through the streams

-of chilly rain....  He was fighting—fighting he knew

-not what and knew not why—but he was fighting,

-for all that, fighting hard, with the stone falling away

-from his nerveless hands, and the breath in his body

-sinking down under some nightmare oppression, and

-the sound of the thunder now almost continuous, blending

-itself with another and far louder sound that was

-battering madly in his ears.  He was fighting

-with——  Christ!—it was Death!

-

-The thunder passed, as tropic storms do pass, suddenly

-and completely.  The dawn shot up in the east, wet

-and red, and cast long, black, ghostly shadows, set

-shaking by an icy wind, low down upon the

-palm-trunks and the grave.  But Donahue did not want

-the light.  The axe lay untouched beside him; and

-he lay over the tomb, dead.  And his face was black

-and his body was all contorted.

-

-It was barely daylight yet when something small

-and slow crept out of the bush, and began hunting

-carefully near the corpse.  It could not find what it

-wanted, seemingly, and this distressed it, for it whimpered

-pitifully in a thin old voice, and looked long before

-it desisted.  Then it put its claws into the dead man's

-pockets, and hunted through them, before it finally

-disappeared down the road.

-

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-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

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-

-

-

-The Mua trader was at his door when a howling

-procession of natives came into the village, carrying the

-white man's corpse to his home.  The Alofi trader,

-who had found the body, stepped aside to speak.  After

-the tale of the finding had been told, the Mua trader

-asked slowly:

-

-"Did you think of searching his pockets?  A dead

-man's a dead man—and I'd not be sorry to have the

-money he owed me, for the natives will have taken the

-goods by this time."

-

-"They were empty when I found him.  Queer, for

-I was the first to see him," said the other.  "I found

-this thing on the road close by, though.  Do you

-recognise it?"

-

-It was the trader's darning-needle, stuck neatly into

-the end of a tiny, arrow-like reed, and stained at the

-point with some dark sticky stuff.

-

-The Mua trader took it in his hand, smelt it and looked

-at it closely.  Then he walked to his kitchen, and,

-watched by the Alofi trader, threw the thing into the

-fire.

-

-"That's what I think of it," he said.  "My boy, I

-traded in the worst of the Solomons for three years.

-I'm the only man on the island that knows that thing,

-bar one—and he was a plantation hand in the Solomons,

-in the black-birding days.  There's no wanderers like

-the Nuié men."

-

-"Do you think——" began the other.

-

-"I think," said the Mua trader, "that old Sona has

-got his money back."

-

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-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

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-

-

-

-The schooner *Sybil* had no reason for staying longer

-in Niué, for the business of the ship was done, and the

-captain was quite well again.  A picture of perfect

-beauty the *Sybil* made, as she stood out of Alofi roads

-in the golden afternoon, every sail set and every inch

-of cloth straining to the merry breeze.  Niué was sorry

-to part with Vaiti, for she had interested the island

-considerably, and her beauty had, as usual, won her more

-admiration than her temper deserved.  Every one, on

-parting, expressed a courteous wish to see the *Sybil* and

-her owners again.

-

-For all that, and all that, the schooner came back

-no more.  Vaiti had won the game at last, but she never

-willingly mentioned Niué again.

-

-

-

-

-

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-

-.. _`THE CALAMITY OF CORAL BAY`:

-

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-

-   CHAPTER XV

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE CALAMITY OF CORAL BAY

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-The wide, still waters of Coral Bay were turning glassy

-pink under the sunset afterglow.  The *Sybil's* boat,

-rowing rapidly towards the schooner, left as it went

-a long, ugly flaw upon the stainless crystal of the

-sea.  It was very still, and the night was coming

-down.

-

-Even in that uncertain twilight the colour of the boat

-as it cut through the pale-hued water stood out strange

-and sinister.  Most boats are white in tropic seas: the

-*Sybil's* had always been snowy as her own graceful hull.

-Now they were vivid scarlet, and the ship herself had a

-wide band of scarlet round her counter and flew a scarlet

-flag at her masthead.

-

-Any islander could have told you at a glance what

-these things meant.  The schooner was "recruiting"—conveying

-natives from the wild cannibal islands of

-the New Hebrides to the Queensland sugar plantations.

-Ten pounds a head was paid for the men on their arrival,

-and it was politely supposed that these ignorant heathen

-had one and all been duly engaged under a contract

-to serve three years, at a wage of five pounds a year.

-How much they understood of contracts, times, and

-wages—where and what they thought Australia might

-be—and what were the means employed to get them on

-board the ship, nobody asked.  Saxon was not the man

-to answer, if any one had.

-

-Why he had temporarily deserted the pleasant, peaceful

-islands of the Eastern Pacific, and gone "black-birding"

-in the wild and wicked and fever-smitten groups of the

-West, was Saxon's own affair.  Doubtless he had his

-reasons; possibly they were satisfactory.  But there is

-reason to believe that about Apia and Papeëte at this

-time he was characterised as a (double-adjectived)

-liar, and an (impolite expression) villain, who was running

-away because it was (adverbially) unsafe for him to

-stay and risk his (past participled) neck among (adjective)

-men.  This is not the history of Captain Saxon; at

-least, not all of it—from such a recital as that may the

-eleven thousand virgins of Saint Mudie, and the Blessed

-Young Person of Sixteen, deliver us!  It must therefore

-be enough to say that, for sufficient reasons,

-he decided to shift his headquarters to the New

-Hebrides, and immediately did so, leaving behind him

-certain unsettled scores with which this tale has nothing

-to do.

-

-He was not new to the islands or the natives, having

-been one of the most notorious of the sandal-wood traders

-in years gone by.  The sandal-wood was gone, and

-of the money he had made by it not even the memory

-remained.  But there was still something in the labour

-trade, and Saxon liked the lawless atmosphere of the

-place.

-

-Vaiti remembered the islands well, though she had

-only been there as a child, and she was glad to have the

-excitement of the change.  When the recruiting boat

-left the schooner (guarded by a companion, full of armed

-men) and drew up on the beach to negotiate with the

-islanders, she always sat in the stern, with a very smart

-little Winchester rifle across her knees, and took

-command, if her father was not there.  Very often he was

-not; for the New Hebrideans have long memories,

-and there was many a spot where Saxon had run up

-so many bad, black scores in the sandal-wood days that

-he could not hope for success—or safety, if he had

-minded that—in going ashore.  Harris usually took

-command of the covering boat, a post of comparative

-security that suited him very well, while the dauntless

-Vaiti managed all the real business, and seldom came

-back with an empty bag.

-

-They had good luck, on the whole, and not many

-narrow escapes.  Coasting round the notorious island

-of Mallicolo, or Malekula, they succeeded in obtaining

-about forty natives in a week or two.  Saxon was well

-pleased, and began to count up his profits.  Also he

-began to drink again.

-

-Then it was that trouble came, as trouble generally

-does, out of a fair-seeming sky.

-

-Half-a-dozen natives had been given up to the missionaries

-on the far side of Malekula, to hand over to the

-British gunboat *Alligator*, which at that time was

-cruising about the islands, intent on punishing the

-Malekulans for a more than usually atrocious murder of

-whites.  The tribes to whom the culprits belonged had

-taken fright, and were anxious to save themselves at

-any cost.  The missionaries, when asked by them,

-consented to take charge of the prisoners, but refused to

-keep them any longer than could possibly be helped,

-since they did not consider themselves judges or gaolers.

-At this point the *Sybil* turned up, and the missionaries,

-hearing she was bound for Parrot Harbour, where the

-*Alligator* was certain to call, put the men on board,

-and engaged Saxon to hand them over to the Parrot

-Harbour mission, receiving from the missionaries there

-the price of their passage, which the man-of-war would

-doubtless refund.

-

-Saxon, understanding that he had not to meet the

-*Alligator*, undertook the job at a rather excessive rate,

-and brought the prisoners over as agreed.  But, finding

-that the Parrot Harbour mission refused to pay the

-passage money until the man-of-war arrived, he went

-into a towering rage and abused everybody.  Wait for

-the *Alligator*?  Not he!  He had something else to

-do, and he wouldn't have any condemned gunboat

-that ever sailed the sanguinary waters of the Pacific

-poking her nose into any of his business.  He had been

-promised the money as soon as he arrived, and the money

-or its equivalent he meant to have or know the reason

-why.  Off he went, with much more whisky in his brain

-than was compatible with sober judgment—off out to

-sea again, taking with him the whole six prisoners,

-and openly declaring his intention either to hold them

-for ransom or run them down to the Queensland

-plantations, as seemed most convenient.

-

-Next day the *Alligator* appeared, and her commander

-was informed of the occurrence.  Saxon, master of a

-miserable labour schooner, had run off with prisoners

-of war belonging to a British gunboat, defied the Imperial

-Government, and offered open disrespect to the Crown!

-The commander, an iron-faced, flinty-eyed disciplinarian

-of the toughest school, and a first-class pepper-pot into

-the bargain, nearly choked with rage and indignation.

-Out went the *Alligator* again, full steam ahead, making

-the captain's dainty suite of cabins tremble like an

-ill-set jelly in the stern as the ship forged along at thirteen

-knots an hour, blackening the crystal sky with trails

-of smoke, and looking implacably about for the offending

-*Sybil*.  That delinquent of the high seas was farther

-off than might have been supposed.  The wind, though

-light, was in her favour, and she had managed to get

-round the far end of the island, and down the other side

-to Coral Bay, eighty miles off, before the *Alligator* came

-up with her, late in the afternoon.  Once caught, her

-shrift was short.  The prisoners were at once transferred;

-Saxon was arrested and taken, still half drunk,

-on board the man-of-war, and his ship was confiscated,

-"just to learn him," as Gray (who had viewed his

-captain's proceedings with sour and silent disapproval

-throughout) was heard to remark, not without a little

-I-told-you-so satisfaction.

-

-And so it came about that Vaiti, returning with

-the boat from an unsuccessful recruiting expedition,

-and not in the best of humours to begin with,

-was met on her arrival with extremely unpleasant

-news.

-

-"We're took, cap'n; we're took, ma'am!" shouted

-Gray over the bulwarks, as the boat nosed along the

-side of the schooner.  He added a rapid account of

-the calamity, in which he was careful to suppress his

-personal feelings of triumph.

-

-The smart young lieutenant who had been left in

-charge of the ship came and looked down at the boat.

-He wanted to know what sort of person it might be

-who was addressed with this extraordinary hail.  He

-had been under the impression that the "captain"

-of the *Sybil* had been left two hours ago—sullen,

-swearing, and not at all sober—in the cells of

-H.M.S. *Alligator*.

-

-What he saw was a red-painted boat, manned by four

-stalwart native seamen, and steered by an extremely

-handsome, olive-faced young woman, who looked up

-at him with eyes that seemed to dart black lightning

-under their beautifully drawn brows as she listened to the

-boatswain's story.  She wore a dainty, lacy white

-muslin frock, and carried a Winchester rifle in her

-lap.

-

-Second Lieutenant Tempest, who had been cursing

-his luck up to that moment, suddenly became reconciled

-to the uninteresting job in which he was engaged.  It is

-just conceivable that his commander might have selected

-another officer to perform the duty if he had been aware

-of its possible alleviations; for Mr. Tempest was

-notoriously given to scrapes with a *soupçon* of petticoat

-in them, and had already imperilled his career more

-than once after this fashion.  But Commander the

-Hon. Francis St. John Raleigh had not seen "Captain"

-Vaiti; so he sent Mr. Tempest to take possession of the

-*Sybil*, and slept the sleep of the well-conscienced and

-well-dined, that evening, in his velvet armchair....  It

-might have seemed somewhat less perfectly stuffed to

-him, had his dreams been concerned with what was

-happening a few hundred yards away.

-

-Mr. Tempest, smiling like the godmother beast of

-his own ship, offered his hand to the sullen beauty as she

-swung herself up the *Sybil's* side.  Vaiti tossed it

-indignantly away, favoured him with another black-lightning

-glance that reduced his susceptible sailor

-heart to pulp, and stalked aft like an offended Cleopatra.

-Tempest, persistently following, poured out explanations,

-apologies, smiles, consolations, promises.  Vaiti

-began to think that civility might possibly avail her

-something, and began to melt by carefully calculated

-degrees.  Before very long she was sitting on the main

-hatch, with Tempest beside her, holding her hand

-unreproved and continuing his consolations.  The

-commander was very angry, no doubt, but he was a

-good sort at bottom, and perhaps he would not really

-seize the ship.  She would be sent to Fiji, no doubt,

-and Saxon might possibly be imprisoned, but it would

-all come out all right, trust him!  And he would

-take very good care of the *Sybil* and her charming

-"captain."

-

-Vaiti, still smiling sweetly, dug her nails into wood

-of the hatch at her side.  Underneath all this verbiage

-she foresaw the reality of serious trouble.  Why had

-her father been such a fool?  What could be done to

-save the ship?  There seemed no way of helping Saxon

-himself.  If the commander proved implacable, to

-prison he must go.  Well, that would not break any

-bones; but the loss of the *Sybil*—if such a disaster was

-indeed possible—must be averted at any cost.  She did

-not believe Mr. Tempest's smiling assertion.  The

-commander had threatened to confiscate the ship, and

-most probably he would.  At any rate, the risk was

-too great to face.  The schooner must not be taken to Fiji.

-

-The wily brain was hard at work, as she sat on the

-hatch, listening, with a gentle smile and soft, downcast,

-maidenly eyes, to Tempest's love-making, and answering

-now and then in her pretty Polynesian "pigeon-English"—so

-much simpler and less grotesque than the *bêche-de-mer*

-talk of the Melanesian Islands....  If he could be

-got out of the way, and the marines suddenly

-overpowered, the schooner might slip off round the corner

-of the headland in the dark, and get nearly a hundred

-miles away before daylight, with the steady wind that

-was blowing outside the glassy, landlocked harbour of

-Coral Bay.  There was just enough air stirring at this

-farthest point to allow her to get out, and once off, she

-could show her heels in a way that would astonish

-even a British gunboat.  Of course, the latter would

-easily overhaul her in an open chase, but Vaiti did not

-propose any such folly.  There was many a perilous

-inlet and passage among those dangerous, ill-surveyed

-islands where the *Sybil* could safely go, but where the

-*Alligator* could not venture.  Let them only gain a day,

-and who was to say whither they had flown into the

-wide wastes of the Pacific?  Once beyond pursuit,

-paint and other disguises would so alter the ship that

-no one could identify her; her name could be changed,

-and the *Mary Ann* or the *Nautilus* would innocently

-sail the seas formerly polluted by the presence

-of the naughty *Sybil*....  It was certainly worth

-trying.

-

-As for Tempest, she had a plan concocted to get rid

-of him almost as soon as the matter entered her mind.

-She left him, by and by, solacing himself with fresh

-turtle steak and excellent champagne in the cabin for

-the loss of his own dinner, while she went into the bows

-with Harris and Gray, and rapidly explained her plans.

-The marines had been accommodated with eatables

-and drinkables after their own hearts, on the cover of the

-main hatch, and were too much engaged to notice

-anything in the thick darkness that was now lying

-heavily on Coral Bay.

-

-Vaiti's plan was simple and effective.  Tempest was

-to be enticed into leaving his duty and going ashore—she

-would see to that.  Four of the New Hebridean

-crew, stripped of their ship clothes, and attired in their

-aboriginal paint and plumes, were to be concealed on

-the beach.  They would capture him, and carry him

-off to a bush village near the coast, where the people

-were not ill disposed to the whites, and leave him there,

-scared no doubt, but safe until the morning, when he

-would be let go.  Vaiti would come back to the ship as

-soon as the capture was effected, and the four native

-sailors would hurry down from the village as quickly

-as possible.  Meantime, it would be easy for Harris

-to drug the marines' drink and make them helpless.

-They would be set adrift in one of the boats, as soon as

-the schooner was clear of the land, so that they should

-tell no tales.  With good luck, everything should be

-over, and the *Sybil* far out to sea, in less than a couple

-of hours.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-Of the disgrace of Lieutenant Tempest—of his temptation,

-his struggle, and his fall—there is no need to tell

-at length.  The decline of a British officer from duty

-and honour—his desertion of a post which every

-professional instinct should have compelled him to keep

-is not a happy subject, as (fortunately) it is not a common

-one.  Vaiti, in brief, invited the officer to leave the ship

-unguarded, and slip ashore with her, to sup at a

-neighbouring trader's shanty, where she said there would be

-drink and dancing, and every kind of fun.  There was

-no such place, but Tempest did not know that; and if

-he had known, he might not have cared.  Half-crazed

-with love and champagne, he thought only of the beautiful

-half-caste girl, and was ready to follow her to the

-mouth of hell, if she had asked him.  The dinghy was

-got out softly and cautiously, and, with muffled oars,

-they slipped away unheard.  So far out of his mind

-was the lieutenant that he did not even note the

-disappearance of his men, who were all lying, very ably and

-completely Shanghai'ed, in the hold.

-

-In less than half an hour Vaiti came back, swimming

-the stretch of black water that lay between the *Sybil*

-and the shore, to leave the boat ready for the men.

-Dripping, sparkling, and laughing, she stood up in the

-dim light of the deck lantern and told the mate and

-boatswain how the capture had been managed.  Tempest,

-with a sack over his head and his hands and feet bound

-to a pole, was at that moment being carried up in the

-dark to the bush village.  The inhabitants of the place

-were to have ten pounds' worth of trade goods promised

-them to keep him there all night and let him escape

-in the morning, when they themselves would go off

-and hide in the impenetrable forests until the man-of-war

-had sailed away again.  In half an hour or so the

-four natives would be back on board, and they would

-all sail away round the headland, and leave no evidence

-of any kind to connect the *Sybil* with this last

-unpardonable outrage; for Tempest could not but suppose that

-the natives who so neatly bagged him as he was philandering

-along the dark beach with the innocent Vaiti were

-ordinary hill tribesmen.  And, in any case, his sacred

-person would be taken good care of.

-

-"Then he ain't to be damaged, the little darlin'?"

-inquired Harris.  The question was not an idle one.

-Every one on board the schooner knew that Vaiti was

-capable of ugly things at her worst.

-

-The girl laughed—a low, gurgling laugh.

-

-"No.  No kill him, no hurt him.  I not like," she

-said, tossing back her wet, wavy hair, with a coquettish

-gesture that told Harris the woman in Vaiti was fully

-awake that night, despite the rough and ready adventure

-on which she was engaged.  Harris was no fool, if he

-was something unsteady in character, and more or less

-he admired Vaiti himself, which tended to sharpen his

-sight.

-

-"Good job the dandy leftenant *is* out of the way,"

-he growled as Vaiti disappeared into the cabin to

-change.  "'Twouldn't take much for 'er to get fancyin'

-his silly face, after all, and then the fat would be in the

-fire."

-

-"Well, if you hask me, I don't like none of the 'ole

-thing from beginnin' to hend," declared the bo'sun,

-jamming a wad of tobacco viciously into his pipe.  "Not

-the keepin' of the bloomin' niggers, not again runnin'

-to Coral Bay, nor again this business.  Wy?  Because

-I don't, and because it make me smell dirty weather.

-Give us a light."

-

-Overhead the stars in the velvet sky began to twinkle

-here and there as the breeze rose and the clouds melted

-away.  An odour of hot, wet jungle drifted out across

-the bay from the invisible land, and a locust with a

-rattle exactly like a policeman's whistle burred loudly

-among the trees.  It might have been half an hour, and it

-might have been more, before something else became

-audible—something that sounded like a frightened

-wailing on the shore.

-

-"A—wé!  A—a—wé!"

-

-Vaiti came out of her cabin and stood on deck,

-listening intently.

-

-The sound went on.

-

-"A—wé!  A—wé!  A—wa—wé!"

-

-Harris, watching Vaiti's face in the light of the

-lantern, saw it change and harden, but she said nothing.

-There was another sound now—a dinghy shoving off

-from the beach and the rattle of carelessly handled oars.

-

-"What's the —— fools makin' such a —— row

-for?" asked Gray.  "They'll 'ave the *Halligator* on

-to us."

-

-Still Vaiti said nothing, but stood like a statue on

-the deck, listening and looking into the darkness.

-

-The boat rammed the *Sybil* in another minute with a

-shock that made her quiver, and then drifted aimlessly

-along her sides.  Three brown naked figures lifted up

-their arms from below, and cried despairingly:

-

-"Kapitani!  Kapitani!  A—wé!  A—wé!"

-

-"Get those fellows on board, too much quick, and

-bring him cabin," ordered Vaiti.  Harris and Gray

-hauled them in with small ceremony, and dumped them

-down the companion into the cabin, where they stood

-in the light of the lamp, painted, feather-bedecked

-creatures, fierce enough in appearance, but in reality

-abjectly frightened and a-shiver.

-

-"What thing you been do?" demanded Vaiti sharply.

-"Where you make other sailor-man?  What you do

-Tempesi?"

-

-One of the men was beginning his wail again.  She

-seized him by the shoulder, pulled a pistol from among

-her draperies, and shook it in his face.  The man,

-with a yell of terror, twisted himself out of her hold.

-Harris, who was rather frightened at her demeanour,

-got him away, forced a dram of spirits into his mouth,

-and tried to extract the terrified creature's story from

-him by degrees.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE FATE OF THE LIEUTENANT`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XVI

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE FATE OF THE LIEUTENANT

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-It was not a gratifying tale.  Half a mile from the beach,

-the captors had been overtaken by a party of wild

-hillmen from Ranaar, one of the worst of the inland

-cannibal towns, and had been set upon fiercely in the

-dark.  Aki, one of their own party, had been clubbed,

-and his body carried off.  The other natives had escaped.

-As for the lieutenant, the Ranaar men had seized on

-him with cries of joy, exclaiming that now indeed they

-had a chance of "making themselves strong" before all

-Malekula.  Then they had carried him away, slung

-on a pole between two men, and the *Sybil's* people,

-half dead with fright, had run down to the beach again;

-and here they were, begging the Kapitani to have mercy

-on them, for indeed it was not their fault, and no one

-could have known that the Ranaar men would venture

-so near the coast.

-

-Vaiti, Harris, and Gray all looked grave at this

-recital.  They knew only too well what was implied

-by the phrase "making strong," and what virtues

-the hill tribes of Malekula ascribed to the eating of

-white man's flesh.  The rude play of the capture had

-turned into most serious earnest, and Tempest's life

-was worth just so many hours as it might take the

-cannibals to reach their mountain stronghold and go

-through the preliminary ceremonies of the feast.  No more.

-

-There was silence for a minute or two, while the

-schooner rolled gently on the swell of the incoming

-tide, and the smoky kerosene light flickered to and fro

-upon the strange, wild scene: Vaiti's beautiful, angry

-head standing out above the weather-beaten faces of

-the two English sailors, the three naked New Hebrideans,

-squalid and monkey-faced, cowering before her; the

-remnants of Tempest's dinner, some one's greasy pack

-of cards, and a couple of Saxon's empty whisky bottles

-decorating the table.  The natives were badly frightened

-still.  They did not understand that the Kapitani's

-plans had been entangled beyond all hope of setting

-right by this disaster, or that the *Alligator* must have

-been alarmed by their noisy return; but Vaiti's

-countenance was enough to warn any one who had ever seen

-the unpleasant things that happened at times on board

-the *Sybil* that hurricane weather was ahead.  But

-before she had time to speak again, a loud hail from

-outside made every one look towards the deck.  In

-another moment the first lieutenant of the *Alligator*

-had framed his smart white and gold personality in the

-dark oblong of the companion, and demanded, loudly,

-and authoritatively, to know where Mr. Tempest was,

-where the marines were, and what the deuce was the

-meaning of all this.

-

-Vaiti, motioning aside the mate and bo'sun, swept

-to the front and spoke straight out.

-

-"All your sailor, he too much drunk, sleep 'long hold.

-Tempesi, he been go shore.  Men belong Ranaar, they

-catch him, take him away.  Pretty dam quick they eat him."

-

-"Great Scott!" said the officer.  Facts were falling

-very thick and fast, and there were evidently more

-facts behind them which for the present he felt

-obliged—most reluctantly—to neglect.  People think quickly

-in the navy, and Lieutenant Darcy realised instantly

-that this strange, wild, handsome creature was speaking

-the truth, and that it must be acted on without delay.

-

-He stepped out on deck, and gave certain orders to

-his men.  A sharp little midshipman and half the boat's

-crew followed him on board, and planted themselves

-about the ship.  The rest remained in the boat.

-

-"This officer will stay here and take charge, and you

-will come with me to the *Alligator*," said the lieutenant,

-addressing Vaiti.

-

-"Yes, I speak captain.  Very good you let me see

-him quick," said the girl imperiously; and the

-lieutenant, guessing that there was more still to be told,

-hurried the boat away.

-

-He delivered his report to the commander, and

-concluded by saying that the girl was in waiting, and had,

-in his opinion, something more to say about the matter.

-

-"Bring her in," said the commander shortly.  The

-gravity of the affair had darkened his face a trifle, but

-he made no comment.  It was not a time for talk.

-

-Vaiti entered with the light step and carriage of the

-woman who wears neither shoes nor stays, and stood

-silently before the commander, fixing his hard grey

-eyes with her inscrutable dark stare.

-

-"You can sit down," said the officer.  "I want to

-ask you some questions."

-

-Vaiti drew herself up a little higher.

-

-"No time for sit," she said curtly.  "Suppose you

-no want Tempesi ki-ki [eaten] pretty quick, you listen me."

-

-"Young woman!" began Commander the Hon. Francis

-St. John Raleigh sternly.

-

-"I tell you, no time talk!" interrupted Vaiti.  "I

-savvy all right you very big sea-chief; I savvy my

-father been made bad work, made bad work myself.

-Let him go all-a-same that; by-'n-by we talk those

-thing.  Now you listen me."

-

-"All right; sit down," said the officer in a more

-conciliatory tone.  Vaiti sat, and leaning across the

-table with her chin in one slender hand, and her eyes

-blazing out from under the mass of damp waves on her

-forehead, she said her say.

-

-"You no savvy Malekula man; I savvy plenty.

-Suppose you do what I telling you, Tempesi he come

-back, I think.  Suppose not, Tempesi he eat.  Ranaar,

-he ten, eleven mile up 'long bush, plenty bad way.

-You take some sailor; he go too much sof', too much

-quiet, all-a-same cat.  Time we coming along Ranaar,

-one half-mile, sailor he all stop.  I go myself Ranaar.

-Maybe I get Tempesi; we coming back to sailor, go

-home all right."

-

-"Oh, nonsense! how are you going to get him, if

-the men can't?" demanded the commander.  He

-saw that he had a remarkable personality to deal with

-in this strange half-caste beauty, but he did not

-comprehend her very clearly, and he thought she was

-"gassing" a little.

-

-Vaiti frowned.

-

-"I tell you, you no savvy Malekula," she said scornfully.

-"Sailor belong you, all the man hear him when

-he walk 'long bush.  Ranaar man he hear; he run away."

-

-"Well, so long as we rescue Mr. Tempest——"

-

-"No you talk, I say; you listen, you Kapitani with

-um wooden face!" spat Vaiti.

-

-The lieutenant turned his head away, and choked a

-little in his pocket-handkerchief.  The commander

-stared, then burst out laughing.

-

-"Go on, you she-cat," he said.

-

-"Ranaar man he run away; very good.  He leave

-Tempesi; very good.  No want Tempesi tell some tale,

-so he leave him dead.  Break him head, all same pig,

-very quick, then run away.  Now what you think?"

-

-"I think you are a very plucky young lady, and that

-you have something more to say about it," replied the

-commander politely.

-

-"Very good.  Suppose I going 'long bush; savvy

-plenty the way.  I been 'long Ranaar recruit; savvy

-all-a-road.  No walking all same white man, walking

-all same one snake, all same one mice.  No white man

-he walk that way.  I come up Ranaar, all-a-dark,

-I stop 'long one small place; see the man he dance, he

-sing, he make ki-ki.  Bushman, he plenty frighten

-something he no savvy.  Savvy gun, dynamite, but

-no savvy big blue-light signal thing you got 'long ship.

-I take one, two blue-light thing; I throw.  Bushman

-he think one big devil stop, no think man-of-war come;

-run away too much dam quick, not stop kill Tempesi.

-By'n-by he coming back, but I cut rope before he come.

-I bring Tempesi 'long me, 'long sailor-man; we go back

-quick.  Tempesi all right.  Savvy?"

-

-"Yes, I do savvy; seems a neat plan, on the whole.

-But what's going to happen to you if they catch you?"

-

-"Eat," said Vaiti succinctly.  "Now you listen me.

-I no do all this thing for nothing, see?"

-

-"H'm; yes, I do see.  How much do you want?"

-

-"Two thing," said Vaiti, eyeing him narrowly.

-"One.  My father say he plenty sorry, no do any more

-bad thing.  You let him go, let schooner go."

-

-"Well—yes, I'll promise that," answered the

-commander rather stiffly.  The girl was taking her life in

-her hand to serve the interests of the British Crown,

-and it was not a time to stick at trifles, or, indeed,

-larger things.

-

-"Two," went on Vaiti.  "Tempesi he seen leave

-ship, go 'long shore with me.  You tell him all right,

-you no punish."

-

-"Oh, by Jove! that's too much," snapped out the

-commander.  "No, Miss—Miss What's-your-name, I

-can't promise any such thing.  I can't have you or

-any one else interfering with the discipline of my ship.

-Mr. Tempest's conduct is a very serious matter, and

-he must take the consequences, by Gad he must, if he

-comes back alive to take them."

-

-Vaiti had had a good deal to do with men-of-war,

-and their officers, during the course of the schooner's

-many wanderings.  She did not need to be told that

-Tempest's career might be ended, and his life disgraced,

-if naval justice took its course.  A few hours ago she

-would not have cared.  But Mr. Tempest, like all men

-notorious for getting into scrapes with a petticoat at

-the bottom of them, had a "way with him," and it

-happened to be a way that appealed to this daughter

-of the Islands more than she would have cared to allow.

-Besides, it was not her custom to give in to a defeat.

-

-"All right," she said calmly.  "I savvy all thing

-about Englis' officer.  Tempesi he no like court-mars'al,

-make break, make longshoreman, all the people laugh.

-Tempesi, he like die, I think.  All right.  I let him.

-Good night."

-

-The commander held out his hand.

-

-"Good night," he said politely.  "Mr. Darcy, you will

-see about getting a native guide who can show the way to

-Ranaar, at once.  We will do our best to surprise them."

-

-A low, sarcastic laugh came from Vaiti.

-

-"You wooden-faced Kapitani, you think you savvy

-Malekula!" she said.  "Where you get guide?"

-

-Mr. Darcy did know a little about the New Hebrides,

-and he saw that they were beaten.

-

-"She's right, sir," he said.  "Take my word for it,

-no native would dare to guide you.  There's no mission

-here; they're a very bad lot, and all at war."

-

-It was a bitter moment for the commander, but he

-surrendered like a gentleman.

-

-"You've got the best of me, Miss—Miss Saxon,"

-he said.  "Very well.  You have my promise.

-Mr. Tempest shall be pardoned, if we get him back alive.

-You know nothing about this matter, you will remember,

-Mr. Darcy.  Miss Saxon, you're a very brave young

-lady, and I wish I had met you in circumstances of

-which I could more honestly approve."

-

-"No one need tell me," he said afterwards, "that

-that old vagabond we had in the cells wasn't a gentleman

-once.  It comes out in the girl; blood will tell, even in

-a half-caste.  But Providence ought rightly to have

-a down on the man who is responsible for any one of

-them, for there seems no right place for them, either in

-heaven or earth."

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-Neither the bluejackets of the *Alligator*, nor the

-officer appointed to command the column, ever forgot

-that night's march through the mountain bush of

-Malekula.  The air was like hot water, and not a breath

-of wind was stirring.  The track was but a few inches

-wide, and as slippery as butter, so that the men slid

-and fell continually when struggling up the endless

-sides of the innumerable gullies.  Mosquitoes settled in

-bloodthirsty hordes upon their faces and hands, roots

-tripped them up, saw-edged reeds slapped them in the

-eyes, and thorny tangles of bush-lawyers fished for and

-successfully hooked them.  At any moment a huge

-soft-nosed bullet, cruel as a shell, might come singing

-out of the darkness; or a poisoned arrow, freighted with

-sure and agonising death, might whirr across their

-path.  When the officer in command, irritated by the

-stumbling and falling of the men, ordered them to

-remove their boots and march barefoot, Vaiti told him

-that nothing of the kind must be done, for poisoned

-spear-heads were in all probability set here and there

-in unsuspected places, ready to pierce the unwary foot.

-She herself seemed invulnerable and untiring; she led

-the column at a pace that caused more than one to fall

-out, and never hesitated nor faltered through all the

-three hours of the worst and most intricate march that

-the *Alligator* men had ever known.

-

-At last she told the officer to call a halt, and on no

-account to make the slightest noise or advance his men

-until he should see a blue light burning about half a mile

-ahead.  Then she vanished into the darkness, lithe and

-noiseless as a lizard, and silence, dead and oppressive,

-settled down upon the bush.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-Lieutenant Tempest was a man and a British sailor,

-and he was not afraid of death.  But he thought there

-might be pleasanter ways of dying than that which

-actually stared him in the face.

-

-Memory plays strange tricks when the dark is closing

-down about her doors.  Lying there on the damp

-earth, bound hand and foot to a pole, with the hideous

-howls of the cannibal dancers in his ears and the glare

-of the cooking-pits in his eyes.  Tempest could think of

-nothing but a fragment of verse out of a half-forgotten

-poem read somewhere long ago:

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-..

-

-   |  "It isn't the fact that you're dead that counts.

-   |  But only—how did you die?"

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-How was he dying?  Not as an English officer might

-gladly die in the cause of his country and in loyal

-obedience to orders.  Not even as a man, with a sword

-in his hand, facing the foe.  He was dying an unfaithful

-servant, false to his trust, and suffering because of

-that falseness, as a slaughtered brute struck down with

-a club like a bullock, and afterwards....

-

-The red remains of the luckless Aki, jointed and piled

-in a ghastly heap, told the rest.

-

-Tempest did not look at that ugly pile any more than

-he could help.  He wanted all the nerve he could muster

-for he was haunted by a deadly fear that he might cry

-out for mercy when it came to the last, and he did not

-want to add cowardice to the tale of his many

-shortcomings.  If he could have died here as a prisoner of

-war—as a captured scout, a fighting enemy, taken in a

-skirmish—the death, hideous as it was, would have

-been honourable, and his pride of country would have

-upheld him.  But it seemed as if his courage had

-nothing to stand on now, and he was almost—almost, but,

-thank God! not quite—afraid.

-

-The Malekulans had been dancing for full two hours,

-ever since they had brought him to the valley and flung

-him down upon the ground.  In the middle of the open

-village square were three huge idols, carved out of

-entire tree-trunks set upright.  They had black, empty

-sockets for eyes; their mouths were curved upwards into

-a ghastly wrinkled grin, and their tongues hung

-mockingly out.  On the head of each was perched a huge

-black wooden bird, with beak bent down and gloomy

-wings outspread—the very spirit of Nightmare herself.

-Round and round these devilish things, in the red glow

-of the fires, danced the cannibals ceaselessly and

-untiringly, fleeing with heads down and outspread hands,

-wheeling and turning, circling with measured steps; and

-all the time the huge hollow idols, beaten with heavy

-clubs "to make the spirits speak," thundered death

-and doom.  It was plainly a religious ceremony which

-must be fully enacted down to the last detail; but

-Tempest thought, as clearly as he could think in such a

-place and at such a time, that it could not last much

-longer.

-

-"A fellow ought to say his prayers," he thought;

-but the thunder of the drums and the wild, shrieking

-song of the dancers bewildered him, and his swollen

-wrists and ankles hurt him so much as almost to confuse

-his mind....  What could he say?  Only one prayer

-remained clear in the turmoil of his brain—just the

-old, old prayer that he had prayed at his mother's

-knee.  Well, it would serve—and up above he hoped

-they'd understand how sorry he was ... for lots of

-things....

-

-"Our Father Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy

-name.  Thy kingdom come...."

-

-It was coming, indeed!  The dance had stopped.

-

-"Thy will be done...."

-

-What came next?  He could not remember—and

-the savages were advancing across the square.

-

-"Forgive us our trespasses ... and lead us not into

-temptation, but deliver us from evil...."

-

-It was *now*!  The women were hiding themselves in

-the houses, and two of the men, armed with clubs, were

-stepping forward.

-

-He was only conscious of one feeling—joy that he

-had the courage to look the cannibals in the face as

-they advanced, and meet his fate "game."  He hardly

-knew that he was still praying—

-

-"... For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and

-the glory...."

-

-Death!

-

-It came with a blaze of light—a sound as of a wild,

-deep shout and the rushing of many waters—then——

-

-Was this the end?  Was it indeed death?  He had

-felt nothing—but a man does not feel the blow that

-kills—and his eyes were so dazzled with a strange, blue

-glory that he could not see....  The rushing sound

-continued; it was like the thunder of hundreds of

-flying feet....  The light burst forth again, and yet

-again, and then died away, and there was a great

-silence.  Tempest saw the hideous faces of the idols

-standing out in the empty square, and began to

-understand.  He was not dead—but something had

-happened.  What was it?  He tried to break loose and sit

-up so as to see all round.

-

-"Stop um little bit," said a voice, and some one drew

-a sharp knife across the lashings that bound his limbs,

-and lifted him into a sitting position.

-

-The blinding light had almost died away now, and he

-could see the whole square.  There was no one in it.

-The cannibals were gone, and the beautiful half-caste

-girl who had brought about his downfall—innocently,

-as Tempest of course supposed—was squatting beside

-him and putting a flask to his lips.

-

-"Drink a little bit whisky," she said.  "Good

-whisky; he make strong.  No good stop here, you

-Belitani sailor-man; more better we go away too much

-quick."

-

-The spirit cleared Tempest's head and put some life

-into his limbs.  Vaiti poked him unceremoniously in

-the ribs as soon as she saw that he was reviving.

-

-"Show um leg there, lively!" she ordered, dragging

-him by the arms.  Rather to his surprise, Tempest found

-that he could walk, once on his feet.  He wasted no

-time in getting away, after Vaiti's brief explanation

-of the blue-light stratagem, and the probable return of

-his enemies before very long.  At something as near a

-run as his cramped limbs would allow, he followed

-her down the pathway that led away from the village—narrow,

-wet, and dark as a wolf's gullet—and into the

-comparative security of the bush, towards the advancing

-relief column from the *Alligator*.

-

-It would have been no more than fitting if Vaiti,

-like a true heroine of romance, had vanished silently

-into the forest when they encountered the man-of-war's

-men, leaving Tempest to "turn to thank his preserver,"

-and "find that she had disappeared."  But Vaiti,

-as it happened, was born under the Southern Cross,

-where the poetry of the footlights does not flourish.

-So she gave the men her company on the way down

-as a matter of course, asked the officer in command for a

-cigar, smoked it and accepted half a dozen more out

-of his case, and made herself wonderfully pleasant—for

-Vaiti.  She had further driven Tempest to distraction

-by starting a flirtation with a handsome petty

-officer, eaten up two emergency rations, "borrowed"

-some one's gold tie-pin, and very soundly boxed the

-ears of a leading seaman who tried to kiss her in the

-dark, before the long roll of the surf on the barrier reef,

-and the welcome glimmer of the *Alligator's* riding lights,

-told the tired-out party that they were safe back again.

-Then, like the mysterious heroine, at last she disappeared,

-and slipped off to the *Sybil* in a native canoe, for the

-reason that she did not want to be seen on board the

-man-of-war in a very untidy and dirty dress, without

-any flowers in her hair, or fresh scent on her laces.

-Tempest had found time to "thank his preserver" on

-the way down, haltingly enough; but the preserver,

-instead of accepting his thanks after the fashion he

-would have preferred, had laughed wildly and somewhat

-wickedly, and gone on walking right in the middle of

-the column, without a glance to spare for him....

-Still—he thought he knew women—and....  Time

-would show.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-The rest of the wardroom did not envy Mr. Tempest

-his interview with the commander.  It took place

-immediately after his return to the ship, and he came

-out from it with a countenance of entire inexpressiveness

-and extreme whiteness.  One sentence—the last—was

-unavoidably heard by the lieutenant who followed

-immediately after Tempest, to deliver his report.

-

-"Finally, Mr. Tempest—this Miss—a—Saxon—has

-risked her life to save your life and reputation.  I think

-there is only one way in which you can repay her—by

-never seeing her again."

-

-Tempest's answer was inaudible.  But—he never did.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`INVADERS IN TANNA`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XVII

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   INVADERS IN TANNA

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-"What a beautiful girl!  Is she one of the heathens,

-I wonder?" said Lady Victoria Jenkins, leaning on the

-rail of her yacht.

-

-The *Alcyone* floated on a sea of living silver.  The

-coral reefs forty feet before her keel showed like a

-pavement of pale turquoise in the searching splendour

-of the tropic moon.  Close at hand loomed the dark

-woods and cliffs of Tanna, and above them, blotting out

-half the crystal broidery of the stars, rose the cone of

-the great volcano, crowned by a canopy of fire.  So, in

-the days of Bougainville and of Cook, stood this

-southward sentinel of the wild New Hebrides, a pillar of

-cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.  So it stands

-yet, its deathless fires unquenched, its awful voice

-breaking the forest silences hour by hour—as the dead

-and gone discoverers of these distant lands saw and

-heard it long ago, and as those who follow us will find

-it in the days to come, when we and our thoughts and

-hopes, and adventures and loves are but a whisper in the

-homeless winds and a handful of dust blowing about

-on long-forgotten graves.

-

-There are few volcanoes in the southern hemisphere

-more famous, and none less frequently visited, than

-the fiery cone of Tanna.  The island lies thousands of

-miles away from everywhere, and the inhabitants are

-known to be almost all heathen, cannibal, and hostile

-to whites, although the expression of their hostility

-has been kept considerably in check of late years.  But

-Lady Victoria Jenkins, daughter of the late Earl of

-Wessex, and wife of Mr. Abel Jenkins ("Jenkins's

-Perfect Pills"), is well known as a romanticist and a

-lover of all things unusual and strange.  Mr. Abel

-Jenkins's income is only exceeded by that of two other

-commoners in England, and Mr. Abel Jenkins's ugliness

-and ill-temper are not exceeded by the ugliness and

-ill-temper of any one known to polite society.  If the

-reader will piece these detached facts together, and

-consider them, he will readily understand why Lady

-Victoria was enjoying a tour round the world in her

-celebrated steam-yacht, the *Alcyone*, why she had

-come to look at Tanna, and why, including a good deal

-of miscellaneous company, the travelling party somehow

-was not miscellaneous enough to include Lady Victoria's

-husband.

-

-The yacht had come in that afternoon after a

-somewhat stormy voyage from Sydney ("They call it the

-Pacific Ocean," said Lady Victoria plaintively, "instead

-of which, I have not really enjoyed a meal since we

-cleared the Heads"), and had instantly, by the mere

-fact of her dropping anchor in Sulphur Bay, denuded

-the whole seaboard of its population.  This was because

-the conscience of Tanna is never quite clear, and the

-Tannese, struck by the conviction of sin, thought the

-*Alcyone* was a man-of-war.  Only two kinds of ships

-were known to the islands, outside trading schooners:

-British and French warships, and the lazy little monthly

-steamers from Sydney, which strolled round the group

-once a month, picking up copra, and conveying missionaries

-and traders about.  The *Alcyone* was not a schooner;

-she was certainly not the well-known "B.P." steamer;

-therefore she must be some new variety of man-of-war.

-As it happened, there was a little matter of a murdered

-trader on the conscience of Tanna just at that time—he

-had been very annoying, but a British man-of-war

-is prejudiced about these affairs.  So the Tannese of

-the coast, like the modest violet of the poem, concealed

-their drooping heads in the shady vales of the interior,

-and coyly hid from view.  Like the modest violet,

-too—only with a difference—you might, if you wished,

-have located them by their——  But no; this is a

-polite history, and the Tannese are a very impolite

-people.  Let us change carriages.

-

-Vaiti and her father, who had come up from Queensland

-with an empty ship and a full money-bag, and

-were just starting a fresh recruiting trip, regarded the

-appearance of the yacht with hearty disgust.  What

-were the good old islands coming to if this sort of thing

-was to be permitted?  Not a bushman would come

-near the beach as long as the *Alcyone* stayed, and the

-sprinkling of mission natives who were not afraid of

-the yacht were worse than useless, for they neither

-recruited nor encouraged their heathen friends to do so.

-Besides, the airs and graces of the *Alcyone* were sickening.

-Late dinner with low dresses and jewels; piano tinkling

-all the evening; clothes that looked as if they had been

-run hot on to the wearers, as icing is run on to a cake;

-sparkling glass and brasswork all over the ship, and

-dainty brass signal cannons, pretty as toys, and a little

-funnel all cream-colour and blue, and great sails white

-as trade-wind clouds, and a hull that sat the water like

-a beautiful sea-bird settled down to rest—all these

-unnecessary and disgusting affectations made a smart

-schooner like the *Sybil* look no better than a mud-scow

-in a marsh, for all that she was the beauty of the South

-Seas and the most famous ocean adventuress from

-'Frisco to Hobart Town.  Besides, Saxon would not

-stir out of his cabin while the yacht was there, having

-developed the lumbago that always attacked him

-whenever English society folk loomed on the horizon—Vaiti

-knew that lumbago!—and he might really have

-been of use about Sulphur Bay, where, for a wonder, no

-one had any old scores against him.

-

-It was all most abominable, thought the "Kapitani,"

-and she cast an unfriendly glance on the luxurious

-*Alcyone*, as her boat shot past the yacht in the moonlight,

-returning from a fruitless hunt along the coast for any

-stray bushman who might have heard the recruiting

-signal—a stick or two of dynamite set afloat on a board

-and exploded—and come down to the coast.

-

-Lady Victoria's comment on the "beautiful girl"

-did not soften her in the least, coupled as it was with

-the unspeakable assumption that she was "a heathen."  Probably

-she was, in one sense, having long ago given

-up all but the merest rags of religion, but it was not the

-accusation of moral deficiencies that galled her: it

-was the idea that she, Vaiti, daughter of a great

-Polynesian princess and a white sea-captain, should have

-been "evened" to the black, monkey-like, naked hags

-of Tanna.  The resentful spirit of the half-caste burned

-hot within her as she steered the boat through the moonlit

-water.  She could see Lady Victoria and her friends, a

-brilliant flower-show of coloured dresses and sparkling

-gems, leaning over the rail, and watching her as

-impersonally as if she were a porpoise or a shark.  She

-could catch their comments, loudly and carelessly

-spoken.

-

-"I suppose she is one of them.  But she looks quite

-nice.  See her pretty dress.  She is quite decently

-clothed, isn't she?"

-

-"I wonder is she a cannibal?  She does not look

-dangerous.  I would like to ask her on board, and give

-her some tea and cake, and things of that kind, and talk

-to her.  Just to try and reform her from their own

-horrible food, you know," said Lady Victoria angelically.

-

-"That would be so dear of you," chimed in her special

-sycophant and foil, a plain and elderly young woman

-who knew when her bread was buttered on both sides,

-and why.

-

-But here the rowers—urged by a signal from Vaiti

-who thought she had heard about as much as she could

-stand without exploding—gave way vigorously, and

-pulled the boat out of earshot.

-

-That was not a happy evening for any one on board

-the *Sybil*.  Vaiti would not give out any grog for supper

-though it was a settled custom on the ship; would not

-have singing in the cabin, gloomed like a hurricane sky

-over the mate and boatswain's sociable game of cards

-until Gray, out of pure nervousness, dropped a greasy

-ace upon his knee, and was thereupon accused by Harris

-of cheating, and coarsely threatened by him with an

-operation usually confined to sufferers from appendicitis.

-At this Vaiti rose and walked out of the cabin with the

-air of a convent-bred princess who had never so much as

-heard a jibbing donkey "confounded"; and went to sit

-on deck near the wheel, where she stayed so long, smoking

-so many thin black cigars, that every one but the night

-watchman turned in and left her, and only the dead,

-dark hour of two o'clock, when the spongy heat of the

-island night stiffens for a while into fever-bringing chill,

-shook her out of her sulks and into her cabin.

-

-When Vaiti sulked it was usually observed that things

-happened before very long.  But on this occasion the

-exception seemed to rule.  The disgusting yacht stayed

-all the next day, and the *Sybil* lay quietly at anchor on

-the other side of the bay.  Some of the yacht people

-went ashore in the afternoon, and roamed timorously

-about the beach, wondering at the hot springs and tasting

-everything in the way of fruit they happened to see.

-(It was nearly all inedible, but none of it, by a fortunate

-chance, happened to be poisonous.)  Lady Victoria was

-disappointed with her day on the whole.  The natives

-from the mission, who had officiously attended them all

-day long, were unromantically clothed, clean, and

-English-speaking.  The wild savages did not appear;

-and there were one or two other mishaps of an entirely

-unromantic kind.

-

-"How did you enjoy it, darling?" asked the plain

-young woman of Lady Victoria, when the daring

-pioneers returned.

-

-Mr. Jenkins's partner shook out her soiled tussore

-silk disgustedly.

-

-"It was untidy and ugly and nasty," she declared;

-"and when I sat down under a great pineapple tree all

-covered with fruit, and said that I was realising one of

-my dreams, Jack de Coverley laughed at me, and said it

-was only a pandamn-us, or something else profane, and

-that pineapples grew on the ground.  And when we

-started to walk among the palms, and I was saying that

-I had always dreamed of wandering softly by a coral

-strand and seeing the cocoanuts drop into my hands,

-something as big as a horse's head suddenly thundered

-down like a bombshell from a hundred feet high, and

-buried itself in the sand at my feet with such a fearful

-shock that I jumped a yard away and screamed like

-anything!  So then the missionary came out, and said

-he wondered I wasn't killed; and if you'll believe me,

-it was nothing but a horrible nut!  And the coral

-strand was pretty enough, all over little bits of branching

-coral stuff; but why doesn't anyone ever tell you that

-coral strands burn all the skin off your nose and blacken

-you into a nigger?  We're going up the volcano

-tomorrow—the missionary says it's quite safe—and I'm

-sure I hope it's true, but one never knows.  Darling,

-if I die, see that the new Lafayette photo is sent to the

-papers—not on any account the other; and I like

-Latin crosses on graves, I think; Carrara marble, very

-thick, and just one short text, something nice, like

-'They were lovely and pleasant in their lives'—you

-know."

-

-... "'And in death they were not divided,'"

-finished the plain young woman with mechanical piety....

-"Darling! dearest! what have I said?  What is

-the matter?"

-

-"Now you *have* done it!" roared Mr. de Coverley,

-who was rather a well-bred, but sometimes rather a

-vulgar young man.  "Not divided!  Oh, great Scott!

-Oh, my eye!  Oh, I'll die of laughing!  Hold me up!

-Never mind, Vic; I'll see you aren't divided, or cooked

-either—trust to me!"

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-Vaiti was still in a speechless state of sulks when she

-started off the next morning into the interior, to recruit

-on her own account.  It was not a very safe thing to

-do, but the bushmen would not come down to the coast,

-and the *Sybil* could not hang out indefinitely, since the

-doubtful character of her methods had given the French

-and English Commissioners of the islands a nasty habit

-of asking questions about her.  Saxon, who had

-relinquished his lumbago to go off into the hills at a safe

-distance from the yacht, wanted to make his daughter

-accompany him; but Vaiti simply laughed at him, and

-departed with a guide seduced from the mission towards

-a village lying a mile or two above the volcano.  She

-preferred the glory of working on her own account, and

-besides, it doubled the chances of recruits.

-

-She knew the Tannese nature well, so she dressed

-herself for her part in a robe of scarlet sateen, with

-liberal necklaces of different coloured trade beads, and

-stuck a couple of tomahawks in her sash, besides an

-ornamented sheath-knife.  Across her splendid young

-bosom she slung an incongruous-looking bandolier of

-cartridges, designed apparently for the slaughter of

-elephants; and a smart magazine rifle, carried over her

-shoulder, completed the outfit.  All these valuables,

-though designed to assist her plans by suggesting the

-enormous store of desirable goods possessed by the

-recruiters, were almost as likely to assist her to a sudden

-and unprovided end, by reason of the natives' covetousness.

-She took her chance of this, however; Vaiti was

-used to taking chances.  It is easier than most people

-suppose to take the risk of being killed every day of your

-life.  In the strange places of the earth, where such

-things are a common happening, men do not look upon

-the inevitable end after the pursy, secretive,

-never-mention-it fashion of Peckham and Brixton.  Death is

-just death in the earth's wild places—yours to-day,

-mine to-morrow—a thing to walk with shoulder to

-shoulder, to meet face to face at noonday; in any case,

-to make no bones of it until it makes bones of you; and

-after that circumstances will keep you from complaining

-if you feel like it.

-

-It was a long, hot walk up to the village.  A "walk"

-is mostly a scramble about the uncleared New Hebrides,

-where roads are mere foot-wide cracks and canyons in

-the dense forest growth, and level ground apparently

-does not exist.  Besides, a bandolier of cartridges and

-an assortment of small arms are rather heavy jewellery

-for such a climate.  Vaiti, however, possessed the

-enviable gift of never looking, or apparently feeling, hot

-or tired; and she swung along at an unvarying pace that

-caused the unlawfully enticed mission native, who had

-waxed fat and lazy, to regret his enticement and wish

-himself back in the mission school writing copies, instead

-of slaving up and down precipitous gullies in the rear of

-a woman-devil who did not know what it was to want a

-rest.

-

-At long last, however, the reedwork fence of the village

-came in sight, and they entered the open square, shaded

-by an immense banyan tree and surrounded by low,

-ugly huts, all roof and no wall, like all the mountain

-villages of Tanna.  There were sentries perched up in

-the trees outside the gate, and others squatted on the

-ground at every entrance, their rifles ready in the crook

-of the elbow.  Within, the dusty tan-coloured square,

-quivering under the pitiless fire of the white-hot sky, was

-all alive with moving figures—ugly women in brief

-grass skirts humped out into swaying bustles; young

-boys with murderous little faces, and full-sized rifles;

-wild-looking men, with thick hair twined into myriads

-of tiny strings ending in a great bush on the shoulders,

-stripes of scarlet paint on their faces, and no clothing save

-their native impudence and a cartridge belt—all seething

-about in a very bee-hive of excitement and alarm.  As

-for the rifle-barrels, they were bobbing about like

-piano-jumpers all over the square, and every weapon was cocked

-and loaded.

-

-Vaiti saw at a glance that they were expecting an

-attack, and picking out a native who could speak English,

-asked what the trouble was.  The man replied that they

-feared the little man-of-war down below, but that they

-were entirely innocent.  Questioned further, they said

-naïvely that they had never eaten a white man, and that

-none of them were low cannibals in any case.  Vaiti,

-who had not heard of this little affair before, saw her

-chance.

-

-"No good you speak alonga that fellow way," she

-said, using the *bêche-de-mer* talk that some of the Tannese

-understood; for Vaiti, like many half-castes, could

-handle almost any dialect or corruption of a dialect,

-though she could not speak decent English or French.

-"I savvy plenty, you eatum one fellow white man.

-By'n by, big fellow man-of-war come, shoot you all-a-same

-one pig, all-a-same one blind box [flying fox],

-burn altogether house belong you.  Very good you

-come alonga Saxon ship, go Queensland; then you all right."

-

-"No eatum," persisted the man (who was the professional

-talking-man or orator of the village), with a

-coy smile.

-

-Vaiti's nose was keen, and she had already guessed

-something by its aid.  She marched straight across the

-square into a little yam-house, and pointed to a small

-parcel done up in green banana-leaf and tied with

-cocoanut sinnet.  Five toes and an instep protruded

-from one end.  The game had been well hung, as the

-Tannaman likes it to be, and there was no mistaking the

-fact of its presence in any sense.

-

-The talking-man giggled like a school-girl caught

-consuming surreptitious chocolates.

-

-"Eatum jus' little-fellow bit," he allowed, with a

-bad-child chuckle.  The other men took up the laugh,

-and the village resounded with a roar like the bellowing

-of a herd of bulls.

-

-Vaiti, seeing her advantage, stepped out into the

-square and began to talk, marching to and fro in Tannese

-fashion as she spoke.  The sun cast dancing spangles

-on her many-coloured beads as she moved, and threw

-back darts of fire from her heavy bandolier.  One arm

-emphasised her remarks with sweeping gesture; in the

-other the tall rifle pounded the earth with its stock,

-marking the points of her discourse.  The fat, stolid

-mission native watched her with staring eyes and open

-mouth, and the chiefs gloomed at her under sullen

-savage brows, evidently impressed, but restive.

-

-The sum of her discourse was that they and their

-women would do well to come down with her to the

-schooner, recruit at once, and fly to a land of safety

-where men-of-war never came, where Tanna people

-reclined all day under the shade of banyan and banana,

-picked a little cane for their employers occasionally,

-lived upon tinned meat and sugared tea, and eventually

-returned loaded with riches in the shape of rifles,

-cartridges, cotton, and knives.  There was a good deal

-more of the same highly-coloured stuff.  This was old

-business to the people of the *Sybil*.

-

-The talking-man, also strutting backwards and

-forwards, Tanna fashion, in a kind of continual country

-dance with the glittering vision from the ship, answered

-now and then.  It was very well to talk about recruiting,

-and perhaps some of them might go if they got lots of

-tinned salmon and "bisketti" to eat before they went on

-board, and promise of rifles to be paid the tribe when

-the bargain was complete.  But they did not believe

-that the new ship was not a little man-of war, and until

-she was gone they would not go down to the coast—no,

-not even to bathe, although they had all decided to

-have a bath soon, for the weather was hot and their

-skins were like the bark of trees, and it was now about

-ten moons since they had had their last bath.

-

-At this Vaiti's eyes lit up, for she suddenly saw a plan,

-a plan which might give her a score of recruits, drive

-the objectionable yacht out of Sulphur Bay, and pay off

-every rankling insult inflicted by the *Alcyone* and her

-people.  But the savages were watching her, so she

-veiled her eyes with her long lashes, and replied

-carelessly:

-

-"All that very good.  To-morrow, small-fellow

-man-of-war he go 'way; then you coming longa schooner.

-To-day, what name [why?] you no go wash big water

-'long place one-fellow-fire stop?  Very good place that.

-Suppose you going, I come up from schooner, bring

-plenty-plenty tucker.  Plenty-plenty bulimacow [beef],

-bisketti, tucker belong white man, cost ten rifle.  All the

-Tannaman he eat; by'n-by he stop lie down, he break, so

-much he eat."

-

-This tempting picture had its effect, backed up by a

-few presents of beads and cartridges.  The Tannamen

-agreed that the plain below the burning mountain,

-where a wide, stagnant lake spread out its dull expanse,

-would do for a bathing place, short of the impossible

-shore, and they chuckled with joyous anticipation of

-the feast.  They also agreed, rather doubtfully, to

-embark as soon as the "man-of-war" was gone; and it

-seemed evident that a fair number would at least come

-down and negotiate on board the schooner after which—well,

-the *Sybil's* smart heels would do the rest.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`A CANNIBAL PARTY`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XVIII

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   A CANNIBAL PARTY

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-Vaiti went off to get ready the feast, telling the natives

-that they might follow her before long, as everything

-would be ready soon; and they might trust her, the

-great Kapitani, that it would be a feast such as no

-Tannaman, not even of those who had served in

-Queensland, had ever witnessed in his wildest dreams.

-

-The mission native being a rather weak-kneed convert,

-and anxious to enjoy a good heathen gossip with his old

-companions, wanted very much to stay on in the village.

-But that was just what Vaiti did not want, so she drove

-him out in front of her like a fat and nervous sheep,

-hastening his movements all the way down with

-occasional reminders from the butt of her rifle.  He had

-given her certain information about a picnic at the foot

-of the volcano, arranged by the people of the yacht for

-that afternoon, and she did not want him to share his

-news with the men of the village and cause them, perhaps,

-to put two and two together where he himself had failed

-to do so.  She despatched him therefore to his own

-town on the coast, and saw that he went, before herself

-turning off in the direction of the track that led to the

-volcano.

-

-Near to the lake there lies a curious little valley with

-a soft, clean flooring of black volcanic sand and sheltering

-walls of green pandanus.  Here, shaded from the burning

-heat, yet close to the volcano plain, was the only possible

-place for the picnickers to enjoy their meal.  Beyond

-lay only a lurid plateau of red and yellow lava beds,

-curdled and coiled as they had flowed down from the

-crater lip long ago; a desert of black ash and sand,

-and a dark, wicked, smoking, rumbling cone in the

-centre of all.  Not a native would have climbed the

-cone for all the goods in the *Sybil's* hold; it was the

-mouth of hell, they said, and full of devils of every kind.

-But they were not afraid of the valley below, within

-safe limits, and even if they had been, the feast and the

-bathe after it were attractive enough to conquer a little

-nervousness.

-

-As Vaiti had anticipated, there were several picnic

-baskets stowed under a tree in the valley, and a big

-wine hamper as well.  Four mission natives, who had

-acted as guides and carried up the provisions, were

-lying on their stomachs in the shade, smoking and

-talking.

-

-It was essential to get them out of the way, and time

-was short.  Vaiti did not waste any unnecessary words.

-She simply pointed her rifle at the men and told them to

-clear.  They cleared, howling, and she was left alone.

-

-With quick, neat hands she unpacked the hampers,

-spread the cloth, and laid out the food.  It was a goodly

-display—hams and tongues and fowls, cold meats, pies,

-cakes, tarts, fruits, and tinned dainties of every kind.

-There was plenty of champagne, also a supply of whisky

-and soda.  She set all the bottles in a row, and looked

-with satisfaction upon the glittering array.  Then she

-went up to the edge of the plain and looked at the

-crater.  No one was yet in sight.  The exploring

-party at that moment were on the other side of the cone,

-standing on the black lip of an appalling gulf eight

-hundred feet deep and half a mile across; looking down,

-awe-struck and amazed, upon colossal fire fountains that

-uplifted their gory spray three hundred feet in the air,

-and listening to the heart-shaking thunders of the

-volcano's awful voice, as from time to time that terrifying

-note of illimitable force and fury made the whole plain

-tremble and echoed far out to sea....  It was indeed

-no wonder that the ignorant Tannamen feared to ascend

-the cone.

-

-Vaiti sat down at the edge of the plain, and watched

-till she saw a number of many-coloured dots creeping

-down the black pyramid in its centre.  Then she suddenly

-lay down upon the ashy ground, and writhed with silent

-laughter.  People were in the habit of saying that Vaiti

-had no more sense of humour than the jibboom of her

-father's ship.  They might have modified that

-judgment, could they have seen her now.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-Lady Victoria Jenkins had enjoyed her morning

-very much indeed.  She had dressed for the ascent in

-a mountaineering costume that combined equal

-suggestions of "Carmen" and the Alpine Club, and gave

-great opportunities to her ankles.  She had been helped

-up the cone by four devoted admirers, all at once, and

-had come down it at a wild running slide, ably braked by

-two strong hands of two or three others who wanted to

-have their turn.  The other women had trodden on their

-skirts, and torn them, burned and cut their foolish boots,

-and also got unbecomingly hot and out of breath,

-because there was not nearly one man apiece to help them

-up, after Lady Victoria had annexed all the best.  It

-must be allowed that the men were the weak point

-of the *Alcyone's* travelling party.  Mr. de Coverley and

-his set were "dear boys" and charming companions, no

-doubt, but they were not quite as manly as some of

-the ladies.  Lady Vic and her companions did not

-attract the best sort of men, as a rule.

-

-They were all very hungry when they reached the

-plain, and thirsty with a thirst unknown outside the

-tropics.  All the way across the baking black sand and

-the tinkling lava beds, "one fair vision ever fled" before

-the eyes of the party—vision of gold-necked champagne

-bottles lying coolly embedded in icebaskets; of

-topaz-coloured jellies, trembling on silver dishes; of flaky,

-savoury pies, and delicate cold meats, and crisp green

-salads concocted as only the hand of the *Alcyone's* *chef*

-could concoct them.

-

-It seemed as if that plain would never end, but it did

-end at last, and a green fringe of pandanus announced

-the beginning of the bush.  The elderly young lady and

-most of the others were making excellent time ahead,

-and they reached the verge of the plain some little while

-before Lady Victoria and Mr. de Coverley came to it.

-The latter pair, as it happened, were really not thinking

-very much about their lunch, because a still more

-interesting matter absorbed their attention.

-

-"Not understood!" Mr. de Coverley was saying

-bitterly.  "And so we die and go down to the

-grave—not understood!  The pathos of it!"

-

-"We are never understood," sighed Lady Victoria,

-patting the side waves of her "transformation" to

-see that it was on straight.  "We women, especially.

-And those who should understand us best of all are so

-often——"

-

-"Exactly—so they are.  But, Lady Victoria—Victoria!—there

-are some who are different; there are

-men, rare souls, who——"

-

-"What in Heaven's name is the matter?" interrupted

-the misunderstood one, stopping dead in her

-tracks (literally, for the sand was deep) and staring at

-the edge of the bush.

-

-From the valley below the plain had just risen a long,

-loud shriek, followed by another and another, and then

-by a burst of laughter that sounded scarcely human.

-The other members of the party had disappeared, but it

-was clear that something had happened.

-

-"Good God, the savages!" exclaimed Lady Victoria;

-and she began to run.  Let it be stated, for the credit

-of her race and name, that she ran towards the sound.

-As for Mr. de Coverley....

-

-But this story is not about Mr. de Coverley.  If it

-were, it would be interesting to tell why the Sydney

-steamer that called at Sulphur Bay two days later found

-an unexpected passenger waiting at the trader's, and why

-Lady Victoria and Mr. Abel Jenkins, of Jenkins's Perfect

-Pills, became eventually reconciled and lived the life

-of a model couple.  As things are, it must be enough to

-state that Mr. Jack de Coverley turned and ran away at

-the sound of the shouts—ran right across the plain into

-the bush at the other side—ran as far as he could get, and

-did not come back at all—and thereby ran once and for

-ever out of the life of the lady whom he "understood."

-

-Lady Victoria, speeding in the opposite direction,

-reached the edge of the little valley in a very few minutes,

-and, looking over, beheld what was certainly the strangest

-sight she had encountered in all her varied life.

-

-Round about the elaborately-laid luncheon were

-squatting a dozen or so of naked brown savages, painted,

-feathered, and slashed with ornamental scars.  A few

-women, clad only in a six-inch fringe of grass, stood

-behind them, eyeing the eatables eagerly, but not daring

-to touch them while their masters fed.  The talking-man,

-a big, hulking savage with a huge bush of hair, and a

-match-box stuck in each ear-lobe, had buried his face

-in the savoury interior of a boned turkey, and was

-gnawing out the stuffing.  The principal chief, one

-hand in a dish of Spanish cream and the other in a

-chicken curry, was casting double supplies into his

-mouth with the regularity of a patent feed-machine.

-A fat young fighting man, with nose and forehead

-painted scarlet, and white ashes in his hair, had tucked

-a ham under one arm, and was sitting on a peach pie,

-with intent to secure as many good things as possible,

-while he hastily worried large mouthfuls off the

-forequarter of lamb he was holding in both hands.  Another

-man was drinking mint sauce out of the silver sauceboat

-with horrible grimaces; his neighbour, having

-captured a handful of maraschino jelly, fast melting

-in the sun, was industriously rubbing it on his hair;

-and a grizzly old fellow, with a monkey-like face, was

-half-choking himself over a soufflé, which he was trying

-to swallow case and all.  The necks of the champagne

-bottles were all knocked off, and from engraved

-wine-cases, empty entrée-dishes, and dredged-out tins the

-savages were drinking Lady Victoria's excellent wines

-with every appearance of satisfaction.  Between mouthfuls

-they stopped to look at the party from the yacht,

-and to roar with laughter at their evident fright.  Too

-terrified even to run away, the voyagers, in their dainty

-frocks and smart white suits, stood huddling together

-for protection, the women crying, the men looking rather

-white and foolish, for every Tannaman had a loaded rifle

-slung to his side, and there was not so much as a saloon

-pistol among the whites.  A few yards off Vaiti stood,

-regarding the whole scene with an expressionless

-countenance that covered a good deal of quiet enjoyment.

-She knew, if the visitors did not, that the cannibal

-bushmen were really not at all a bad lot of fellows when

-you knew them, and that the yacht party, against whom

-they had no grudge, were perfectly safe.  In fact, the

-Tannamen merely thought these oddly-behaved whites

-were a new party of missionaries, and were quite ready

-to be civil to them, since they thought all the mission

-people harmless, if eccentric.

-

-But the true inwardness of the situation not being

-apparent, the *Alcyone's* guests were very frightened indeed.

-

-"P-perhaps if we go away very quietly, they won't

-f-follow us," said a wealthy young stockbroker, who had

-retained a little presence of mind, though his teeth were

-chattering in his head.

-

-"Oh, let us!  Victoria, save me!  Oh, what shall

-we do?" wailed the elderly young lady, rushing up the

-bank and flinging her arms round the mistress of the

-violated feast.  Lady Victoria, though white as her own

-Belfast linen collar, kept her head fairly well.  She saw

-that Vaiti was not one of the invaders, and called to

-her.  "Do you speak English?  What are we to do?

-Will they kill us?" she asked.

-

-Vaiti walked over to her with the bearing of a stage

-duchess, and favoured her with a fashionable high

-handshake that was the one thing wanting to complete the

-insanity of the whole impossible scene.  A new idea

-had suddenly struck her—a fresh spark of mischief was

-lit.  With an immovable countenance she replied:

-

-"No kill you, I think.  Suppose you want go 'way all

-right by'n-by, very good I think you sit down, eatum

-dinner alonga those fellow—then they think you all

-right, let you go home, no kill."

-

-"Oh, Victoria, anything to please them!" sobbed

-the elderly young lady.

-

-"Yes—a—I think we'd better do anything we can to

-get into their good graces, since we're not armed,"

-submitted the stockbroker.

-

-Vaiti exchanged a few words with the Tannese.  She

-explained that these white people had come a long way,

-and were very hungry.  The Melanesian has not many

-virtues, but hospitality is certainly one of them; and a

-man who may be planning to dine off you himself

-tomorrow will certainly not refuse you half of his own

-leaf of yams to-day.  The Tannese were delighted at the

-chance of sharing their good fortune with the white

-chiefs, even in spite of the latter's extremely silly

-manners, and they beckoned to them at once to come and

-sit down.

-

-Thereafter took place a scene incapable of description

-by mortal pen.  The chief took his head out of the turkey,

-chewed off a leg, and grinningly handed it to Lady

-Victoria.  The young warrior got off the pie,

-disembowelled it with one scoop of the hand that had not

-known water "for ten moons," and laid its interior in

-the elderly young lady's lap.  Another knowingly

-poured out a champagne glass of Worcester sauce and

-handed it to the stockbroker, while the much-bitten

-lump of mutton that was at that moment circling

-from mouth to mouth, native-fashion, was hospitably

-passed on to all the whites.  Driven by fear, they tried

-to swallow something; choked in the effort, made

-futile remarks to each other, laughed nervous laughs,

-and all the time watched with eyes of utmost apprehension

-the dusky hosts who were thus entertaining them

-with their own audaciously ravished goods.  And above

-the crazy party the burning Tanna sun beat down, and

-the great volcano-cone far across the plain smoked and

-thundered.

-

-It had been Vaiti's design to dismiss them in peace

-by and by, assured that their compliance had saved their

-lives, and anxious to make steam out of Sulphur Bay as

-soon as was reasonably possible.  Fate, however,

-reserved a more dramatic ending to the entertainment,

-And it was "all along of" that talking-man.

-

-The cannibal native is invariably shy of displaying

-his tastes before whites, since people who do not share

-the "point of view" are so frequently prejudiced.

-Therefore the talking-man did not open a certain small

-green parcel tied up with sinnet string, which he had

-brought down with him from the mountain village.

-A feast in the hand is worth two in the pandanus-bush,

-thought the talking-man, so he brought his *bonne bouche*

-with him for dessert and said nothing about it.  And

-thereby came the end.

-

-For Lady Victoria, unable to swallow the clawed and

-chewed morsels pressed upon her by dirt-encrusted

-hands, began to hunt despairingly about for something

-that she could really eat, so that she should not offend

-the dangerous monsters who surrounded her.

-

-"Isn't there anything clean to be had?" she asked

-the stockbroker anxiously.  "I can't eat—and yet we

-must!  What are we to do?"

-

-The stockbroker, who had once been to Honolulu,

-and thought he knew something about native foods,

-spied the packet of green banana-leaf, and reached out

-for it.

-

-"This'll be some of their own boiled yam," he said.

-"Natives always do it up like this.  You can eat it all

-right if you scrape it with a knife.  Allow me."

-

-Before the talking-man could stretch out his filthy

-claw to stop him, the Englishman had cut the sinnet

-string, the parcel had burst open, and right into the

-middle of a half-demolished chicken pie fell a large

-white foot, cut off at the ankle, nicely browned across

-the instep and all crackled on the toes.

-

-There was a wild shriek from the women, a splutter

-of horrified exclamations from the men, a boiling up of

-white petticoats like to the breaking of a wave on a

-pebbly shore, and then nothing but a diminishing string

-of rapidly trotting figures, each woman hand in hand with

-a man who was dragging her along far away, farther and

-farther, down the long, black, sandy path into the bush.

-Then ... they were gone.

-

-Vaiti stood on the bank to look after them, and

-laughed quietly.

-

-"Now I think we keep Sulphur Bay all our own self,"

-she said.

-

-As for the Tannamen, they rolled on the ground with

-laughter, and then picked the dainty morsel out of the

-chicken pie and ate it up.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE RIVAL PRINCESSES`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XIX

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE RIVAL PRINCESSES

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-It was full mid-day when the schooner *Sybil* dropped

-anchor off Liali Island.  The hot season was at its

-height.  The long, white coral strand blazed in the sun,

-the moated lagoon was raw emerald, the waveless outer

-sea blue fire.  Beyond the beach stretched a green,

-grassy lawn, dotted with quaintly-shaped Norfolk pines,

-tall palms, and feather-tressed ironwood trees; and

-against its enamelled background rose a palace like a

-picture in a fairy-tale—white, long-windowed,

-lofty-towered, and crowned with a crimson flag set below a

-gilded vane.

-

-Vaiti, standing on the break of the poop, with the

-inevitable cigar between her fingers, looked critically

-at the island, and liked it well.  A mere little matter

-of kidnapping somebody's indentured labourers—the

-sort of thing that any gentleman with an extensive

-island practice might easily find himself obliged to

-do—had brought about her father's expulsion from the New

-Hebrides labour trade, and obliged him to seek new fields

-for the activities of the notorious and naughty *Sybil*.

-Saxon himself was virtuously indignant, Vaiti not

-particularly sorry.  She was getting tired of the gloomy

-feverish New Hebrides and their ugly savages.  The

-Eastern Pacific was her heart's home after all,

-semi-Polynesian as she was; and even the wild excitement

-of the cruel western isles could not hold her away very

-long.  So when Saxon was wavering between the advantages

-of strictly illegal gun-running in the Solomons

-and honest trading about the Liali group (which had just

-wrecked its native schooner, and was open to employ a

-successor), Vaiti's influence went for once on the side of

-peace and virtue, and the course was set for Liali.  The

-group was new to both father and daughter, but was

-none the less attractive on that account, since all over

-the wide island world the *Sybil* and her owners were best

-loved and most warmly welcomed where they were least

-known.

-

-The Liali group, as many people in the Southern

-hemisphere agree, offers the nearest possible approach

-to comic opera known off the actual stage.  Liali itself,

-the chief island, is as pretty as a toy-box, and quite

-extraordinarily theatrical in appearance.  Its handsome,

-merry, brown people wear the most picturesque costume

-in the Pacific—a knee-length kilt of fine cashmere,

-girded by a deep sash of pure silk, and worn with a silken

-or cashmere shirt or a graceful sleeveless tunic, according

-to sex—all in the most vivid of sea- and flower-colour.

-Liali is civilised after a fashion.  It goes barefoot and

-barelegged, sits on mats, lives in reed-woven houses

-devoid of furniture, worships a sacred lizard on the sly,

-and sometimes breaks out openly into club-fights and

-devil-dances.  But it has a king, and a palace and a

-Parliament, a brass band, and quite a number of very

-active Nonconformist churches, run by white missionaries,

-who find that "labouring" among the well-off

-and amiable Lialians is a task in which the meritorious

-martyrdom of missionary life can be combined with

-quite a number of pleasant alleviations.

-

-Nothing in Liali is entirely what it seems.  The palace,

-when one comes close to it, is perceived to be built

-of painted wood, like a "practicable" scene in a theatre.

-The Parliament never passes any laws, because the

-Lords, who are chiefs, always on principle throw out

-every bill introduced by the vulgar Commons, just to

-"teach" them.  The Prime Minister is oftener in prison

-for *lése majestè* than out of it, and several Chancellors

-of the Exchequer have been transported to the Colonies

-for theft.  But there is a real throne in the palace, all

-crimson velvet and gilt wood, and a wonderful gold

-crown (the verdigris is cleaned off it with a wad of

-cocoanut husks by the Chief Equerry every Saturday

-afternoon), and when the King goes out in state he wears

-a purple velvet train, held up by two pages in tights

-and plumes, and a marvellous ermined robe, all exactly

-like the Savoy Theatre in the consulship of Gilbert and

-Sullivan.  On occasions not of state he sits cross-legged

-upon the palace parquet, clad in a shirt and a

-kilt, and plays *écarté* with his native guards.

-

-There are a few colonial traders in Liali, and a dozen

-or so of the English "legion that never was listed"—just

-such as one finds in all the odd corners of the

-Pacific—talkative, plausible, thin and nervous, given to avoid

-home topics and discourse with awful fluency upon

-small local politics; hospitable, restless and lazy, and

-usually married more or less to some dark beauty of the

-islands, who has grown as fat as a feather bed and spends

-a fortune on store muslins.

-

-These, as a matter of course, took possession of the

-*Sybil's* people at once, hardly waiting for the schooner to

-cast anchor before they were alongside with their boats.

-Saxon and Vaiti were swept ashore immediately, and

-begged to make their home in half-a-dozen different

-houses.  With a fine sense of the fitting, Saxon selected

-Bob Peter's public-house, misnamed hotel, and

-immediately held a *levée* in the bar, wearing his smartest

-Auckland suit (not paid for, and not likely to be) and

-looking, with his heavy, old-fashioned cavalry moustache,

-blonde-grey hair, and well set-up though rather bloated

-figure, quite like a somewhat seedy Milor on his travels.

-(And, as a matter of fact....  But that was Saxon's

-long-buried secret, and must not be told.)

-

-Vaiti, splendidly attired in a flowing island robe of

-yellow silk, with a gold chain twisted through her misty

-black hair, sat in the midst of a court of her own, and

-drank expensive pink lemonade to her soul's content.

-She was revelling in the sights, the sounds, the smells of

-the dear eastern islands once more.  She had a necklace

-of perfumed red berries round her neck, and white

-"tieré" flowers behind each ear, and the well-remembered

-scent almost intoxicated her.  Outside she

-could hear the boom of a dancing-chant, broken by

-interludes of clapping; and from the very next house, a big

-native reed-built structure, came now and then in the

-quieter moments the sonorous voice of a Lialian man

-calling out the names at a kava-drinking.

-

-The double soul that is the curse of the half-caste

-surged within the girl....  This, this, this, and all

-it meant—how she loved it!  And yet, the wild, fierce

-life of the western islands; the chance, the risk, the

-strong wine of danger, adventure, power!  The two

-natures of the soldier of fortune and the sensuous island

-princess who had given her birth, fought together in

-her heart....  If one could eat one's cake and have it!

-If one could sleep all day, crowned with flowers, under

-the singing casuarina trees, and yet be the daring

-sea-queen, the "Kapitani" of the *Sybil*, if only...

-

-Vaiti shook herself impatiently in her hammock

-chair, and asked for ginger beer with sugar in it.  She

-hated thinking, and felt as if she were going mad when

-the half-white brain in her pretty dusky head took a

-strange fit of sober industry.  Swift, instinctive plotting

-and planning were one thing, deliberate reflection quite

-another....  Ugh! she must be sick....  And for

-once the temperate Vaiti said yes to the inevitable offer

-of "a stick in it," as her ginger beer was handed to her

-by an eager admirer.

-

-The "sickness" passed away, and she began to listen

-and watch in her old fashion, smiling all the time to the

-compliments and sweet sayings that were being poured

-into her ears.  A trader was telling her father all about

-the latest dynastic crisis in the monarchy, and Saxon

-was not even pretending to listen.  The affairs of

-"niggers" never interested him, unless there was a

-question of immediate profit ahead.

-

-"You see," said the trader, "King Napoleon Timothy

-Te Paea III., which is his full title, wants for to get

-married.  He's thirty, and there's no heir.  And there

-being just the two Lialian princesses that wasn't his

-sisters—Mahina and Litia—what does he do but go and

-propose to both of them, and, of course, gets snapped up

-like winkin' by the two.  It's no small potatoes being

-Queen of Liali, mind you.  Te Paea gets lots of money

-out of the fruit, and copra taxes, and then the Crown

-lands is half the island, there's presents besides.  And

-he's a real king if he is coffee-coloured—why, the kings

-of Liali goes back hundreds of years before Captain Cook,

-and he was in Henry Eighth's time, wasn't he?  And if

-you was to see the pink satin chairs in the throne-room,

-and the phonographs, and musical-boxes, and albums,

-and lookin'-glasses, and the lovely wax flowers in cases,

-and real hand-painted oil pictures—ah! it's a good

-job, is Te Paea's, and either Mahina or Litia's going to

-be a very lucky girl.  What he'd like, you see, is to marry

-both of them, same as his old grandfather—only he

-married nine, he did.  But the King's a Methody, good

-as they make them—when he don't forget, or want a

-spree—and of course the missionaries won't hear of his

-havin' two queens.  And, says he, Mahina's real fat;

-there's nothing mean about Mahina; she fills the eye,

-says he, and that's what a Lialian likes, for they don't

-hold with any sort of stinginess, says he.  But Litia, he

-says, has eyes like the buttons on his Auckland boots,

-they're so round and black and bright, says he, and

-she walks for all the world like a lovely young mutton-bird,

-says he.  And what's a king to do, with both the

-girls' relations fighting and squabbling over him like

-land-crabs fighting over a bit of fish, and he himself

-liking them both, and the girls clean mad for

-him—because, you see, Te Paea he's a handsome fellow, and

-when he's got his military uniform on, and all his orders

-and medals what he drew out himself on paper, and got

-made in Sydney, he's a fancy man, he is.  The wedding's

-to be in three weeks, and the invites is being printed

-down in Auckland all in silver, with a blank to write the

-bride's name in—and the House of Lords has bought

-the bride's dress for her, which is what the Kings says

-it's their right to do, according to custom,—and no

-one knows which he's going to marry, and no more

-does he.  And it's my belief that there'll be war over it,

-before all's said and done, for Mahina's people say they'll

-burn down every village belonging to Litia's tribe, and

-Litia's folks say they'll kill Mahina's people's cattle and

-cut up their gardens.  That's the way things are, and you

-may take my word it's a pretty kettle of fish."

-

-"What are you giving for copra at present?" asked

-Saxon, yawning unrestrainedly.  And the conversation

-turned at once to the inevitable trading "shop."

-

-A few days afterwards the *Sybil* spread her wings and

-started for Waiwai, the outermost of the Liali islands.

-She was to make the whole round of the group afterwards,

-and might not be back for some weeks, so that it seemed

-likely that Saxon would miss the festivities of the King's

-wedding.  This Vaiti declared was no reason why she

-should miss them, and she insisted on being left behind.

-Saxon was not too well pleased, for if he had a remnant

-of conscience left, it was connected with the care of his

-daughter, and he did not quite care about leaving her

-alone in a group to which they were both strangers.  But

-Vaiti promised to behave like a saint, and furthermore

-said that she would stay with one of the married traders,

-and not in the native villages.  She also added that she

-meant to stay anyhow, and that it was no use making

-a fuss.

-

-So the *Sybil* sailed away out of Liali harbour, and

-became a little pearl-coloured pinhead on the blue

-horizon, and then melted quite away.  And Vaiti went

-to the tin-roofed shanty belonging to Neumann, the fat

-German trader, who had married a Lialian wife, and was

-received with the unquestioning hospitality of the

-islands.

-

-Nobody, among either whites or natives, could talk

-of anything but the King's matrimonial affairs.

-Mahina and Litia both appeared in Neumann's parlour

-more than once, sat on the floor, drank black tea with a

-handful of sugar in it, and related their several woes at

-length.  They did not come together, except once, when

-Litia, walking in unexpectedly, found Mahina there,

-crying into her teacup, and telling Neumann's wife that

-the King had given Litia a beautiful chemise, all trimmed

-with lace, only the day before, and that in consequence

-she considered him a monster and a perjured villain,

-although she knew perfectly well that he meant nothing

-whatever by it.  What was a chemise?  He had sent

-her two pounds of stick tobacco the Sunday before last.

-She would show Litia yet that the King was her King,

-and nobody else's.

-

-Litia, entering at this point, wasted no words, but

-simply buried her hands in Mahina's curly black masses

-of hair, and dragged her, shrieking, across the floor.

-Neumann interfered, and parted them; but Mahina

-flew at Litia immediately after, ripped open her dress

-with one clutch, and disclosed the royal gift chastely

-embracing Litia's lovely form.  With a howl of anger,

-the rival seized the chemise in both hands; there was a

-scuffle, a scream, a rending noise, and Litia stood up in

-the middle of the room, a gold-bronze statue, shedding

-tears of rage, while Mahina, running out on to the

-verandah, tore the offending garment into strips and

-rags, and cast them upon the road.  Litia, rushing out

-after her, stood upon the steps clad with wrath as with

-a garment (and with extremely little else), explaining

-her wrongs to an interested and sympathetic native

-crowd, until the Methodist missionary happened to come

-by, and told her that unless she went in and dressed

-herself at once, she might safely count upon eventually

-finding herself in a place where dress would be very

-much at a discount ... or words to that effect.  So

-Litia went in, and Mahina went away, escorted by a

-strong cousinly "tail"; and afterwards Neumann,

-enveloped in oracular clouds of smoke, remarked sleepily

-that the princesses were the greatest nuisance on the

-island, and that he believed the King would run away

-from the whole set if he could, for he was "by-nearly

-mad-driven on account of their so-tiresome ways, and

-feared-himself to choose, because the one that he not

-married had would cause to make war by her people

-against the one he married should."

-

-During the whole of the fight, Vaiti remained

-perfectly unmoved on a cane lounge in the corner of the

-room, uninterruptedly puffing rings of blue smoke at

-the ceiling.  Not a detail had escaped her, all the same,

-nor did she miss a word of Neumann's remarks.  And

-they made her think.

-

-In the afternoon, the dull thud of galloping hoofs

-along the grass street made Mrs. Neumann run to the

-door.  She called loudly to Vaiti to come.

-

-"It is the King," she said.

-

-A small victoria, drawn by two spirited blacks, was

-tearing up the street.  Seated alone in it was an

-extraordinary and notable figure—Napoleon Timothy Te

-Paea III., King of Liali.  He was six feet four inches in

-height, and over eighteen stone in weight.  He wore

-a scarlet cloth uniform coat, blazing with gold, and his

-heavy, handsome brown face, with its weak, small mouth,

-and black eyes almost too large and soft for a man, was

-shaded by a white sun helmet with a wide gold band.

-

-He drove furiously, looking neither to right nor to left,

-and, passing the house like a gorgeous whirlwind, was

-instantly lost in the casuarina forest beyond.

-

-"That is the King, then?" said Vaiti.  The Lialian

-language came almost as easily to her as her own, being

-only one of the dialects of the great Maori tongue that

-covers a good two-thirds of the island world.

-

-"Yes," said Neumann's wife, "that is the King.

-And very little any of us have seen of him lately.  He

-is afraid of the trouble he has got himself into; he shuts

-himself up all the time, and sees no one but his guards,

-and just sends a present now and then, first to one girl

-then to the other.  And when he drives to take the air,

-he flies along like that, so that no one can stop and speak

-to him.  He is terribly shy of strangers; I think it was

-because the *Sipila* was here that he did not come out at

-all last week."

-

-"Is it such a very good thing for the princess he will

-marry?" asked Vaiti, playing with a yellow alamanda

-flower.

-

-"Very, very good indeed," replied the Lialian

-impressively.  "She will have a gold crown to wear on

-her head, and sit on a red velvet and gold throne beside

-the King, and have the most beautiful satin dresses from

-Sydney, and all her chemises will have lace and ribbons

-on them.  And as soon as the King buys another

-schooner for himself and Liali, she will travel in it with

-him whenever she likes, for sometimes he will go to

-Samoa, to stay with King Malietoa, or he will sail a whole

-week to Mbau in Fiji, and then Princess Thakombau and

-the Prince of Kandavu make feasts and dances for

-him, and the Kovana [governor] gives a real 'papalangi'

-dinner for him, with champagne and a band.  And as

-for what she will have to eat at home, it is past telling,

-for in the palace there is no count whatever made of

-tinned salmon and biscuit, and she may have a sackful

-of sugar at every meal, and a whole roast pig every day.

-She may eat till she falls asleep, and then wake up to

-eat.  Ah, it is a good thing for the princess who marries

-the King, whichever she may be!"

-

-"I think you will be thirsty if you talk so much,"

-said Vaiti rather rudely.  "I am thirsty myself with

-only listening to you.  Go and make some kava for me."

-

-Mrs. Neumann, who had been rather proud to have

-Vaiti staying with her—since her rank as a princess of

-Atiu counted for a good deal among the island races—began

-to dislike her visitor soon after this, and to wish

-her well away.  Vaiti was not an angel in the house at

-the best of times, and she did not trouble to make

-herself pleasant just then.  Indeed, one would almost have

-thought she was trying to pick a quarrel.  And, as

-that sort of effort rarely goes unrewarded, it is not

-astonishing to learn that the quarrel came before long—a

-bitter, loud-tongued dispute that left Mrs. Neumann

-sobbing in a fat, frightened heap on the floor, and

-Vaiti, silent but stormy, packing up her camphorwood

-box to depart.

-

-Neumann, being afraid of Saxon's possible anger,

-tried to keep her, but she laughed in his face, and went

-on packing.  There was an empty native house—little

-more than a palm-leaf hut, once tenanted by a Chinese

-trader—standing by the road about halfway through

-the great casuarina forest; a lonely, ramshackle place,

-used and wanted by nobody.  There and there only

-Vaiti would go, taking mats and cooking pots with

-her, to stay until her father came back.  When some

-of the islanders betrayed meddlesome curiosity as to

-her motives, and the missionaries declared they scented

-scandal, Vaiti silenced and terrified the one, and

-convinced the others that she was hopelessly beyond the

-pale, by giving out that she was something of a witch,

-and meant to go into the forest to gather and prepare

-certain powerful charms.  These, she said, would injure

-only her enemies, but were altogether powerless to hurt

-anyone who spoke well of her.  In consequence, the

-evil tongues of Liali received a sudden check.

-

-Furthermore, Vaiti, neglecting the half-castes and

-the whites, began with considerable art to make herself

-popular among the natives.  She dressed herself Liali

-fashion, and arranged her hair after the island modes.

-She joined in all their interminable boating journeys and

-picnics, and was never tired of sitting cross-legged on

-the ground, waving her arms and head in time with

-a hundred others, and chanting Lialian songs that lasted

-an afternoon apiece.  After dark, she was often to be

-seen out on the reef, with a torch and a fishing spear

-making an exhibition of piscatorial skill that astonished

-even the Lialians themselves.  When there was an

-unmissionary dance in some big chief-house, Vaiti was

-always there, decked with wreaths and flower necklaces,

-and polished with cocoanut oil, turning the heads of

-all the young men by the grace of her dancing, and

-winning the astonished approval of the women by the

-cool reserve with which she received every advance of

-a sentimental nature.  Both Mahina and Litia took

-jealous fancies to her—thus acquiring yet one more

-cause of mutual dissension—and separately poured all

-their woes into her ear.  She was wonderfully sympathetic,

-and urged each one on to assert her rights and stand

-no nonsense; insomuch that before very long the island

-was fairly ringing with what Litia's people meant

-to do to Mahina's, and what Mahina's would certainly

-do to Litia's, in the event of the King selecting one or

-the other.

-

-Somebody about this time—it was never ascertained

-who—spread a report that Captain Saxon of the *Sybil*

-had a number of trade rifles on board his ship, and several

-cases of cartridges.  The talk began to take a more

-dangerous turn.  The schooner would not be back till

-the wedding was over, it was said, but let the winning

-party look out for themselves when she did come!  The

-Lialians, under missionary rule, had been peaceful and

-law-abiding people for almost a whole generation; but

-they had not yet forgotten that they were once the

-masters of the Pacific, and that of all the warlike island

-races, none had been such fighters as they....  The

-older men began to snuff battle in the air, walked about

-with their chests flung out, and told bloodthirsty ancient

-stories to the younger Lialians.  The women sang war

-songs at the evening gatherings in the chief-houses, and

-Mahina and Litia began to go about followed by bands

-of eager partisans.  Liali was certainly warming up.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`QUEEN AFTER ALL`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XX

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   QUEEN AFTER ALL

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-News of all these things came duly to the King through

-his faithful spies, and his Majesty Napoleon Timothy Te

-Paea III. went nearly frantic.  He actually began to lose

-weight—a consummation that all the skill of his European

-court doctor had hitherto failed to bring about—and

-day by day he drove more wildly behind his famous

-blacks, covering mile after mile of lonely forest roads

-at a pace that brought the horses home all in a lather

-and the yellow satin cushions grimed with dust.  The

-wedding approached within ten days: the triumphal

-arches were being erected; the Queen Consort's throne

-came back from the carpenter, freshly gilded and

-upholstered; and the band were hard at work practising

-the strange conglomeration of shrieks and wails that

-make up the Lialian National Anthem.  The bride's

-dress, provided, according to usage, by the House of

-Lords, arrived at the palace in a palm-leaf basket.

-It was a very gorgeous affair—a long, loose robe of orange

-satin, embroidered in scarlet by a few of the cleverest

-mission-school girls—and it was of a usefully indefinite

-size, since the difference between the massive Mahina

-and the waspish little Litia was almost as great as the

-difference (of another kind) between their respective

-parties.  The silver-printed invitations for the white

-people and the chiefs—"To be present at the wedding

-of His Majesty King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. with

-Princess——," came up by a whale-ship from

-Auckland, and so did the wedding cake, largely plaster of

-Paris.  And still the wretched King, lashed by the

-scourge of his own light-hearted follies, sent pacificating

-presents to both girls, and put off the dire decision.

-

-It was about this time that any wayfarer passing

-through the casuarina forest "might have observed"

-a light in Vaiti's cottage late one night.  There was no

-one to observe, however, for the wood was supposed to

-be devil-haunted, and no native ever passed through

-it save in broad daylight.  When it grew toward sunset

-the only Lialian who would brave its dangers so far as to

-rush across it in the red evening light was the King

-himself, who had been educated in Sydney, and did

-not believe in devils—much.  The forest road was the

-shortest way home from his usual circular drive, and he

-frequently passed by the cottage just before sunset,

-driving like Jehu the son of Nimshi, and looking neither

-to right nor to left.  He had never noticed Vaiti as he

-passed, for she was always within the house, looking out

-between the cracks of the palm-leaves, where she could

-see without being seen.

-

-This evening, long after the King had passed by and

-the dark had come down, Vaiti sat on the floor of the

-hut, looking very thoughtful, as she turned out the

-contents of her big camphorwood box by the light of a

-ship's hurricane lantern.  She was all alone, as usual,

-and smoking, also as usual.  There was no sound in

-the solitary little house but the sighing of the wind in

-the casuarina trees and the steady puff of the girl's cigar.

-Papers, letters, packets of lace, odd bits of jewellery,

-silk dresses, pistols, knives, collections of rope and twine,

-laced underclothing, cartridges, feathers, shells, cigars,

-pearl-inlaid boxes, revareva plumes, and a miscellaneous

-collection of odds and ends garnered from all the four

-corners of the South Seas, strewed the floor, and the box

-was still half full.  By-and-by she came upon what she

-wanted—a roll of stuff done up in waxed paper.  She

-unfastened it, and let the contents fall out across the mats

-under the rays of the lantern.  It was a web of pure

-gold tissue, bright as a summer sunrise and fine as a

-fairy's wing—an exquisite piece of stuff, which she had

-acquired from a Chinese trader in Honolulu by means

-none too scrupulous, and hoarded away for years.

-

-Vaiti looked at it thoughtfully, and then opened a

-little tortoise-shell and silver box, and spilled its

-contents—a shower of photographs—into her lap.  They were

-an exceedingly various collection—naval, military,

-British, French, native and half-caste—but most were

-men, and many were young and handsome.  Perhaps

-the best-looking of the collection was that of a young

-English naval officer, signed across the corner

-"R. Tempest," with a Sydney address, and "Must it be

-good-bye?" written in tiny letters under the signature.

-Vaiti took the picture in her hand, and looked at it

-so long and earnestly that her cigar went out while she

-gazed.  She lit another, put down the photograph, and

-sat smoking and thinking for quite a long time....  The

-world was still all before her ... and the whaling ship

-had said that another vessel was almost sure to touch, on

-her way to Sydney next week.

-

-Once in Vaiti's many-coloured history a

-looking-glass had proved her undoing.  It was a looking-glass

-that proved her salvation now, at the parting of the

-ways.  For, as she sat thinking, a brilliant picture

-caught her eye—her own proud, lovely head, crowned

-regally with a wreath of flowers, reflected in the mirror

-inside the lid of the box.  She smiled, stretched out

-her hand—letting the photograph fall unnoticed to the

-floor from her lap—and placed a fold of the golden tissue

-across her head....  Yes, it looked quite like a

-crown—a Queen Consort's crown ... the glass gave back a

-truly royal picture.

-

-Vaiti's cheeks flushed as she looked.  She could

-hardly turn away.  But the golden fold slipped off her

-hair, and the queenly picture was gone.

-

-She shut the box, and with set lips took a match, lit

-it, and set fire to the photograph.  It burned very slowly,

-and the flame seemed to lick sympathetically round her

-own heart as it crawled about the handsome, debonair,

-but sensual face, lit up, and then put out, the laughing

-eyes, crackled through the curly hair and the white

-naval cap, and at last reduced the whole bright picture

-to a little pile of feathery black ash—dead, dead, dead!

-

-Vaiti dropped the charred fragments from her hands,

-and then put her head down upon the mats and lay very

-still....

-

-When morning broke through the narrow door of

-the hut, the rays of the rising sun fell upon the figure

-of a girl with a cold, expressionless face, sitting upon the

-threshold, hard at work with needle and thread.  Upon

-her lap lay a pile of golden gauze.

-

-That afternoon the King drove late in the forest.

-The sun was near setting, and the rays were slanting long

-and low among the red trunks of the gloomy casuarina

-trees, when the spirited blacks came galloping up to the

-cottage.  Every day they had passed it by, a still,

-brown nest in the shadows, where nothing moved,

-but this evening, as they reached the spot, something

-caused them to check and shy, and the King, splendid

-driver as he was, had some difficulty in pulling them in.

-When he had succeeded, he glanced at the object that

-had caused their fright, and saw a vision startling

-enough to astonish even himself.

-

-A stranger girl of exceeding beauty stood in the

-midst of the forest clearing.  She was dressed in a robe

-of magnificent golden tissue, from which the level rays

-of the westering sun sparkled back in a halo of almost

-supernatural glory.  On her head was a wreath of blood-red

-hibiscus flowers, and her exquisite right arm, bare

-except for a twisted chain of gold, held up an island

-kava cup of carved cocoanut shell.  When she saw that

-the King observed her, she sank on her knees, bent her

-neck, and raised the cup higher in both hands above her

-head.

-

-It was an invitation, and one that no Lialian could

-possibly have refused, for the drink brewed from the

-kava root, and the ceremonies connected with the

-brewing, tasting, and giving round, are almost a religion

-in those islands, and many a man, in the old wild days,

-has died for the insult of putting aside the proffered

-cup.  Therefore the King descended at once, tied his

-horses to a tree, and advanced to take the cup from the

-hands of this unknown woman who understood royal

-etiquette so well.  It was his Majesty's right to have

-his kava, and indeed all his food and drink, proffered

-in this especial attitude; but half-castes and whites

-were sometimes careless enough to forget the honour.

-

-He drank the great bowlful at a draught, as a king

-should, and, sending the cup with a twirl to the ground,

-according to etiquette, cast a side glance at the beautiful

-cup-bearer.  He hated strangers and distrusted foreigners,

-still...

-

-"Will you not come in and rest, O Great Chief?"

-asked Vaiti in Lialian.

-

-"Who are you?" said the King, still looking half

-away—but only half.

-

-"Princess of Atiu, and daughter of the great English

-sea-captain Saxon," replied Vaiti, drawing herself up

-to her full height, and looking him straight in the eyes.

-The King met the look full this time, and thought that

-Litia's eyes, Lialian though she was, were not so bright

-by half.  And if Mahina was fatter—as she certainly

-was—she never had such hair, or such a coral-red mouth.

-And what a magnificent dress the magnificent creature

-wore!

-

-He knew at once who Vaiti was, when she mentioned

-her rank in Atiu, for the chocolate-coloured island

-kings and queens understand each other's complicated

-genealogies quite as clearly as do their white compeers

-on the other side of the world—and though Atiu was a

-broken, half-depopulated place, annexed to the British

-Crown, its chiefs were of ancient lineage and high repute.

-Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. hesitated a moment—stretched

-out his hand—withdrew it—then stretched

-it out again, and graciously offered it to Vaiti, as to

-an equal in blood.

-

-Vaiti, glowing with gratification, yet had the happy

-intuition of dropping on one knee and kissing the royal

-hand, European fashion.  The King understood it, and

-swelled with pleasure, remembering how Mahina had had

-the impudence to chuck him under the chin when he

-bestowed a gracious salute upon her inferior lips, and

-how Litia had objected altogether to get off her horse

-when he was passing by, as Lialian royal customs

-enjoined upon all riders ... What a nuisance they

-had both grown to be, crying and battering at the

-palace gates, fighting over his gifts, getting up trouble

-among their relatives—trouble that he now began to

-fear might become so serious as to bring down the

-interference of the British Crown.  And every Pacific monarch

-knew what was the inevitable next move, when that game

-had once begun!  Good-bye to his kingship, if once the

-British Lion laid a claw on Lialia.

-

-"Will you not come in and rest, Great Chief?" said

-the humble voice of the stranger again.  And the King,

-still shy and distrustful, and looking at Vaiti only out of

-the corners of his eyes, did condescend to come in.

-

-And the next day he rested again, and the day after

-that.  It was astonishing how easily driving seemed to

-tire his Majesty at this period.  And all the time the

-wedding preparations went forward, while Mahina and

-Litia, with their respective factions, grew more and more

-jealous of each other, and more and more enraged.

-

-But there came a day at last, four days from the

-wedding, when the King declared that he would make

-his final choice on the evening before the marriage day,

-and would send a herald on that night to proclaim it

-through the capital.

-

-Ruru, the royal herald, who had never before had a

-chance to exercise his office or wear his uniform, was

-extremely pleased.  He got out his finery at once—a

-Beefeater cap and tabard of crimson silk, worn with a

-large silk sash, and bare legs—and began a dress

-rehearsal that lasted, with intervals for food and sleep,

-until the evening of the proclamation.  At sunset he

-went up to the palace, received the paper that

-contained the message, and strutting like a turkey, came out

-on to the open green in front, where at least a thousand

-Lialians—half of them Litia's friends, and half of them

-Mahina's—were collected.  Mahina and Litia themselves,

-each defiantly dressed in all the bridal finery

-she could muster, stood in the forefront of the crowd,

-exchanging looks of death and hatred.  It had come to

-this with the two women now, that either would have

-cheerfully died a death of slow torture, if by so doing

-only she could have prevented the other from winning.

-That she might miss the glories of the throne was not

-the prominent thought in Litia's mind—only that

-Mahina might secure them and triumph over her; and

-the self-same fancy agitated the ample breast of her

-rival, as the two stood in the cool twilight, within

-sound of the breakers on the reef, waiting with choking

-anxiety for Ruru's words.

-

-"People of Liali!" read the herald impressively,

-striking an attitude, with one bare leg advanced: "His

-Majesty King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. of

-Liali, being sovereign by right divine, and the Lord's

-Anointed, also High Chief of all the Liali Islands as

-descendant of the Sacred Lizard, has decided to marry,

-according to the custom of his forefathers, and give the

-land of Liali an heir to our mighty crown.  The wedding

-will take place in the mission church to-morrow, at noon

-and there will be a collection afterwards for expenses!

-If anyone comes drunk to church, or puts nothing in

-the plate, he will be turned out.  His Majesty hereby

-announces that, in order to save war and dissension

-among his loyal subjects, and to teach some princesses

-to pay him proper respect, he has decided to give the

-honour of his hand to Princess Vaiti, daughter of Princess

-Rangi of Atiu, deceased, and Captain Saxon, of the

-schooner *Sybil*.  God save the King, and you are all to

-go home without making a row."

-

-It was a fine proclamation, but assuredly the order

-in the last clause asked too much of Lialian humanity.

-No one attempted to obey it.  The news was received

-first in a dead silence of amazement, and then by a storm

-of shrieks, howls, questions, a wild trampling and rushing

-to and fro, and, last of all, by a Homeric roar of

-laughter.  The Lialian possesses a rough but reliable

-sense of humour, practical joking being his especial

-delight; and it suddenly dawned upon the populace

-of Liali that the King had played the most stupendous

-practical joke upon them ever known in the history of

-the islands.  Therefore these light-hearted children of

-the sun, instead of raiding the palace in two separate

-factions, lay down and rolled upon the grass, or held

-helplessly on to one another, roaring with laughter.

-The utter disconcerting of Mahina and Litia, now that

-all party feeling was removed from the matter, further

-appealed to them as a jest of the finest sort, and

-witticisms that would have made a trooper blush were hurled

-upon the disconsolate maidens from all sides.  Some

-few there were who frowned at the triumph of a foreigner

-and a stranger; but Vaiti's arts had succeeded in making

-her popular, and the malcontents were borne down by

-the roar of public amusement and assent.  Vaiti herself,

-safely hidden in the Methodist mission house, listened

-to the laughter far off, and felt well pleased.  She had

-not been very sure how matters might go, and had

-therefore, at a bold stroke, won the favour of the Church

-by approaching the missionary, and assuring him of the

-extreme purity of her Methodism (she was, if anything,

-a pure heathen) and, in confidence, of the honour awaiting

-her.  The reverend gentleman, who had long sat on

-thorns by reason of the power of the Seventh Day

-Adventist, Christian Science, and Original Shaker

-missions in the islands, received her with delight, and

-handed her over to the care of his wife, who shortly

-afterwards informed him that the new light of the Church

-was, in her opinion, a "perfect minx"—but that she

-supposed it was as well, under the circumstances, to

-make to herself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness,

-as the Bible enjoined, and remain on intimate

-visiting terms with the palace.  So Vaiti spent the

-fateful evening under the secure protection of the

-Church itself, and claimed the same creditable patronage

-for the day of the wedding.

-

-What of Mahina and Litia?  The disappointed

-princesses, when the proclamation was read out, turned

-and stared at each other like tigresses robbed of a meal.

-Neither was going to be Queen of Liali—neither was

-going to scratch her rival's eyes out, and root up her hair,

-for the crime of securing the coveted honour.  The very

-bottom of the world had dropped out—what was to

-follow?

-

-For a moment they continued to stare, each scanning

-the other's face under a new light—the light of common

-feeling.  Litia remembered that she and Mahina had

-been brought up almost as sisters in the palace of the

-late Queen.  Mahina recalled the time when she had

-almost died of measles, and Litia had nursed her through.

-They were both deceived, both deserted, and the friends

-of one could never crow offensively over the other now.

-The thought was mingled bitter-sweet, and the two

-burst out crying, and dropped into each other's arms,

-simultaneously vowing threats of vengeance against the

-treacherous interloper, which—unbacked by their

-war-like following of friends—they knew very well they

-would never be able to execute.  And the crowd dispersed

-as the sun went down.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-The *Sybil* made better time than was expected, after

-all.  Her white sails lifted against the blue, from behind

-the nearest island, just as the royal wedding party

-commenced its gorgeous procession to the church.  Before

-the ceremony was ended, the schooner had made the

-harbour and Saxon was ashore.  He came upon an

-utterly deserted town, and saw not a human being

-until he was halfway up to the church, outside of which

-he perceived an immense crowd, unable to enter.  Under

-a tree by the wayside sat one of the English traders

-who had failed to get a place.  He greeted Saxon

-uproariously, and asked him if this wasn't a proper go.

-

-"What?" asked Saxon.  "Which is he marrying?"

-

-"Oh, crikey! he doesn't know!" roared the trader—and

-fell back against the tree, suffocating with laughter,

-and utterly declining to explain.

-

-Saxon, cursing him for a silly fool, tramped on towards

-the church.  The procession was coming out now, and

-he wanted to see the show, for though he might call the

-coffee-coloured Lialians niggers, he quite understood the

-position of King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., and

-the importance to all the islands of his choice.

-

-He got upon a bank to see the better, fixed his

-long-sighted sailor eyes upon the chapel door, and saw a

-glittering vision emerge into the sunlight, amidst the

-cries and cheers of the people.  That was the King, in

-a gorgeous uniform, with his crown on his head and a

-long velvet mantle sweeping behind him ... and at

-his left hand stepped a tall, stately, slender figure, also

-crowned, and dazzlingly dressed all in glittering gold....

-Not Mahina, certainly; not Litia either—Who was

-it, then?  It could never be—but it was—Vaiti!

-

-Saxon staggered off the bank, sat down, jumped up

-again, and clapped his hands.

-

-"By ——, if it isn't like her, through and through!"

-he cried.  "By ——, I'm proud of her!  Queen of

-Liali!  Queen of Liali!  But——"

-

-He stopped, and shook his head with a knowing

-laugh.  He was not very sober.

-

-"But—God help the King!" he said.

-

-.. vspace:: 3

-

-.. class:: center

-

-   THE END

-

-.. vspace:: 3

-

-.. class:: center small

-

-   PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND ECCLES.

-

-.. vspace:: 6

-

-.. pgfooter::

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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #50663 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50663)
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-                          VAITI OF THE ISLANDS
-
-
-
-
-This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at
-http://www.gutenberg.org/license. If you are not located in the United
-States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are
-located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: Vaiti of the Islands
-Author: Beatrice Grimshaw
-Release Date: December 10, 2015 [EBook #50663]
-Language: English
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VAITI OF THE ISLANDS ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Al Haines.
-
-
-
-
-
-                         *VAITI OF THE ISLANDS*
-
-
-                         *BY BEATRICE GRIMSHAW*
-
-
-
-                                 LONDON
-                         GEORGE NEWNES, LIMITED
-                    SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND, W.C.
-
-
-
-
-                               *CONTENTS*
-
-CHAPTER
-
-Prologue
-
-      I. The Pearl Lagoon
-     II. A Race for a Fortune
-    III. The Flower behind the Ear
-     IV. The Black Viri
-      V. A Diamond Web
-     VI. Marooned
-    VII. The Turning of the Tables
-   VIII. The White Man of Nalolo
-     IX. The Lost Island
-      X. What came of the Paris Dress
-     XI. A Dead Man’s Revenge
-    XII. Breaking the Mana
-   XIII. The Game Played Out
-    XIV. How the Witch-Doctor got his Money back
-     XV. The Calamity of Coral Bay
-    XVI. The Fate of the Lieutenant
-   XVII. Invaders in Tanna
-  XVIII. A Cannibal Party
-    XIX. The Rival Princesses
-     XX. Queen after all
-
-
-
-
-                         *VAITI OF THE ISLANDS*
-
-
-                               *PROLOGUE*
-
-
-It was in the seventies, long ago.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Summer—yet a slow grey dawn, lingering long in the sky.  August—yet a
-chilly morning, crisping the landlocked waters of the bay with cold
-knife-edges of foam.  Out at sea, the wild white horses plunging madly
-under the whip of the sunrise wind; the bar beginning to thunder.
-Inshore, beneath the green slope of the castle hill, small angry ripples
-beating and fretting the untrampled sand.  Dead rose-leaves from the
-gardens floating among the seaweed; a torn bird’s-nest, flung down by
-the wind, lying on the edge of the steep cliff pathway....  It was still
-the time of summer, yet, too surely, autumn had come.
-
-The sodden leaves lay thick in the bottom of the boat when the man
-seized it by the gunwale and ran it down the beach into the snatching
-waves....  Oh, an autumn day indeed, here in wild Caithness, though
-summer was still at its fairest in kinder lands.  And in the heart of
-the man who was rowing fast through the angry dawn light, to the tall
-schooner yacht that swung and tore at her moorings out in the bay, there
-was autumn too, with winter close at hand.
-
-All so long ago! who remembers?
-
-Not the newspapers which, in a day or two after, shrieked the scandal
-broadcast, east and west.  Not the guests of the castle house-party—they
-are dead, or old, which is half of death, since then.  Not the Prince
-whose dignity had been insulted by the outbreak of a vulgar card scandal
-in his very presence—he struck the titled owner of the house off the
-list of his intimates forthwith, and then forgot about it and him.  Not
-the colonel of the famous regiment, who found out defalcations in the
-funds belonging to the mess, a few days after, and knew why his most
-promising young officer had done the unforgiveable thing—for the Ashanti
-spears ended life and memory for him out on the African plains, before
-even Piccadilly had made an end of talking. Not the Royal Yacht
-Squadron—the reported loss of the famous _Paquita_ at sea, with her
-disgraced owner on board, is a tale that even the oldest _habitue_ of
-Cowes could not tell you to-day....  No one remembers. When the
-beautiful white schooner spread her wings below the castle wall, and
-beat her way like a frightened butterfly out to the stormy sea, she
-sailed away in silence, and she and hers were known no more.
-
-Yet, but for that stormy day in the Highlands, and the boat that fled to
-sea, these tales of far-off lands had never been told.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER I*
-
-                           *THE PEARL LAGOON*
-
-
-"Where’s the old man?"
-
-"Old man drunk," replied Vaiti indifferently.  She had learned to play
-"The Maiden’s Prayer," maltreat three European languages, and cultivate
-a waist in her Tahitian convent school.  But that was five years ago
-now, and Vaiti’s "papalangi" verbs had dropped from her quite as soon,
-and as naturally, as her "Belitani" stays.
-
-"Why can’t he wake up and give us an observation?" commented the mate
-indignantly.  "It would be hard if a man mightn’t enjoy himself in port;
-but we’re four days out now, and he’s as bad as ever, lyin’ all the time
-on the settee like a——"
-
-"You better mind too much what you say my father!"  Vaiti had set one
-shapely olive hand on the deck, and sprung to her feet like a
-flying-fish making a leap.  She was taller than the sturdy, red-haired
-mate, as she stood up on the poop, her bare feet well apart, her white
-muslin loose gown swelling out as she leaned to the roll of the steamer,
-and her black-brown eyes, deep-set under fine brows as straight as a
-ruler, staring down the blue eyes of the man.
-
-"Very sorry, I’m sure; no offence meant," said the mate humbly.  "But we
-want an observation, and he ain’t no good.  Why, you know as well as me
-that he’ll be like this, off and on, all the voyage now; we’ve both of
-us seen it before."
-
-Vaiti stamped her bare feet on the deck.
-
-"I know—I know!  I try all the way from Apia wake him up—no good!  I
-tell you, Alliti"—the mate’s name, Harris, usually took this form in the
-pigeon-English of Polynesia—"this very bad time for him to get ’quiffy.
-Too much bad time.  Never mind.  Get the sextan’.  I take sun myself."
-
-The mate ran down the companion and into the cabin, where the captain’s
-six feet two of drunken ineptitude sprawled over most of the space
-available for passing.  He stopped for a moment to look at the heavy,
-unconscious face—a handsome face, with the remains of refinement about
-it; for Captain Saxon had been a gentleman once, and his name (which was
-certainly not Saxon then) had appeared among the lists of "members
-deceased" in the annual reports of all the best London clubs of the
-’seventies....  Why Saxon died, and why he came to life again in the
-South Pacific some years later, is a tale that need not be told, even if
-it is guessed.  Many such substantial ghosts roam the South Seas
-unexorcised—many a man whose name adorns a memorial tablet, guarded by
-weeping marble angels, on the walls of some ivied English Church, is
-busy conferring a peculiar fitness upon the occupation of those guardian
-seraphs, down among "The Islands," where he and the devil may do as they
-please.
-
-"’Og!" observed the mate, as he passed through to the captain’s cabin,
-and fetched out the sextant. "’Alf-caste or quarter-caste, Vaiti’s too
-good a daughter for him, by the length of the mainmast and the mizzen
-together.  She’s got all his brains—Lord, how she learned navigation
-from him, like a cat lapping up milk, when she set her mind to it!—and
-none of his villainy. At least——"  The mate paused on the companion, and
-filled his pipe.
-
-"At least——" he repeated, and broke off the remark unfinished.
-
-"Sun coming out nice now," he said, handing the sextant to the girl.
-Vaiti made her observation with the ease of an old sea-captain, and went
-below to work it out.  It was true, as Harris said, that she had plenty
-of brains, though they did not lie along the lines of "The Maiden’s
-Prayer" and Dr. Smith’s English Grammar.  And, whatever the legal status
-of poor derelict Saxon, or the mate, might be, no one who had ever
-climbed the side of the schooner _Sybil_ could doubt the obvious fact
-that the real commanding officer of that vessel was Vaiti herself.
-
-"What d’ye make it?" asked the mate, looking over her shoulder.  Vaiti,
-always sparing of her words, pointed to the figures.  Harris whistled.
-
-"Ain’t we off our course, just!" he said, drawing his finger down the
-chart.
-
-"No," said Vaiti.
-
-"Why, hang it all, Cap"—the girl was accorded the title, half in fun,
-half through habit, a good deal oftener than her father—"we ain’t making
-for the Delgada reefs, are we?  I don’t pretend to be any navigator, but
-I do know the course for Papeëte."
-
-"What you think not matter," said Vaiti, rolling up the chart.  "Make
-him eight bell.  You go take wheel; I ki-ki [dinner], then I take him."
-
-"What’s the course?" demanded the mate eagerly.
-
-"Nor’-west by west," answered Vaiti, going into her cabin, and slamming
-the door against Harris’s open-mouthed questions.
-
-An Aitutaki boy with a chain of red berries in his hair, and a scarlet
-and yellow "pareo" (kilt) for all clothing, brought up the dinner.
-Vaiti ate her meal alone, and then came on deck to take over the wheel,
-keeping a determined silence that Harris hardly cared to break....  And
-yet—Nor’-west by west, with the wind fair for distant Papeëte, and the
-deadly Delgadas lying about a quarter point off their present course,
-not ten miles away!
-
-"She’s a hard case, bo’sun," he remarked to that official as they sat
-down together.  "She has me fair scared with the course she’s steering;
-and yet, you may sling me over the side in a shotted hammock for the
-sharks’es ki-ki, if she don’t know a lot more than the old man himself.
-Ain’t she a daisy, too!  Look at her there ’olding the wheel, as upright
-as a cocoanut palm, and as pretty and plump as a—as a——"
-
-"Porker," concluded the bo’sun, pouring an imperial pint of tea into his
-mug.
-
-"You ain’t got no poetry in you," said the mate disgustedly.
-
-"Nor nothing else," growled the bo’sun.  "Ain’t you going to help that
-curry, and give a man something to put in his own inside after stowing
-the whale-boat full of beef and biscuits?"
-
-"The whale-boat?  (That’s plenty, bo’sun; I’ve got to live as well as
-you)."
-
-"Ay, biscuits, beef, and water; compass and sextant. She give the order
-a while ago."
-
-"What’s in the wind now?"
-
-"I don’t ask questions, so I’m never told no lies."
-
-"I do, though," said the mate, in a spasm of authority, deserting his
-dinner to spring up the companion and join Vaiti at the wheel.  The
-bo’sun’s mahogany face broke up into a score of curving wrinkles, and
-his shoulders shook a little, as he watched the scene on deck.  Quite
-mechanically he transferred the rest of the curry to his plate, and
-while clearing the dish with the precision of a machine, kept an eye on
-the couple at the wheel.  He saw Harris ask an eager question, and
-repeat it more eagerly.  He saw Vaiti jerk a brief answer, and the mate
-speak again.  Then he saw the girl swing round on her heel, lift one
-slender hand, and bring it down across Harris’s cheek with an emphasis
-that left a crimson mark upon the polished brown.  He saw the mate take
-a step forward, and look at the handsome helmswoman as though he were
-very much minded to pay back the correction after the manner of man in
-general where a pretty vixen is concerned.  The two figures stared at
-each other, eye to eye, for a full minute. Vaiti’s brown eyes, keen as
-twin swords, never wavered; her lip was insolent and unrelenting.  The
-mate’s half-angry, half mischievous expression dissolved into an
-embarrassed grin; then he turned tail and hurried down the hatch.
-
-"She’s a tigress in ’uman form," he declared.  "If the old man—or any
-other—was to lay ’is little finger on me—but there! who cares what a
-scratchin’ cat does?  I’d as soon marry a shark—I would!"
-
-"You’ve as much chance," granted the bo’sun.
-
-"Talk of sharks!" said the mate, gazing ruefully at the table and the
-empty dish.
-
-Some two hours later, a milky gleam on the port bow attracted the mate’s
-attention as he stood on the poop. A Kanaka sailor had just taken the
-wheel, and Vaiti was below.
-
-"Breakers on the port bow!" sang out Harris.
-
-Vaiti was up in a minute.
-
-"I t’row water on my father’s head," she said coolly—"but no good; he
-too much sick, he see snake by and by, I think.  You and Oki carry him
-into him cabin, and come back pretty quick.  I see this t’rough myself."
-
-"See _what_?" demanded the mate, on the last verge of frenzy.
-
-"Not know myself yet," answered Vaiti, giving one of her rare laughs.
-She seemed in a very good humour for once.
-
-When the mate came out a little later, and the sailor went back to the
-neglected wheel, Vaiti was standing by the whale-boat, wearing an air of
-perfect self-possession and a complete suit of her father’s white ducks.
-The sight was no novelty to Harris, but it came upon him now, as
-usually, with a new shock of admiration.
-
-"Isn’t she an outrighter!" he observed to the unsympathetic bo’sun.
-
-"She certainly is, if outrighter’s French for an undacent young woman,"
-replied that officer sourly. Harris did not hear him, for the
-significance of the morning’s mystery had just burst on his mind.  He
-had not spent ten years in the Pacific for nothing and the sight of Tai,
-a diver from Penrhyn, standing beside Vaiti, with a water-glass in his
-hand, spelt "pearl-shell" to the eyes of the mate as clearly as if the
-magic word had been printed in letters three feet long.  Vaiti flashed
-her white teeth at him.
-
-"Tai, me, three boys, we go into lagoon," she said. "Suppose somethings
-happen, you find course for Apia written out, cabin table; you take ship
-back, put captain in hospital."
-
-"By ——, but you’re a corker, Vaiti!" cried Harris admiringly.  "Where’d
-you hear anything about the Delgadas?  No ship goes near them that can
-help it; they’re a regular ocean cemetery."
-
-"You ’member officer from gun-boat, Apia?"
-
-"Ay!" said Harris.  He did remember the lad, and the rather inexplicable
-friendliness shown him by Saxon and Vaiti during the stay in port of the
-_Alligator_.
-
-"He show me photo Delgadas.  _Alligator_ he been go all round him, mark
-him right for chart, because he all wrong.  Officer give my father
-bearings; say plenty talk and show photo.  He dam fool officer, I think;
-he not know that kind place mean pearl-shell, and we not tell anything."
-
-Harris mounted the rigging, and surveyed the reef from the main
-cross-trees.  It was the best part of a mile away; a creaming circle of
-foam on the sea’s blue surface, enclosing a pallid spot of green.
-Vaiti, who had followed him, flung one arm round the mast, and, leaning
-outwards towards the horizon, surveyed the reef intently.  Within that
-ring of foam—the grave of many a gallant ship that had sailed the fair
-Pacific as bravely as their own little schooner—might lie many thousands
-of pounds.  The repurchase of the _Sybil_, once Saxon’s sole property,
-now partly owned by a trading syndicate; the regaining of her captain’s
-lost position in decent society—perhaps the realisation of half a
-hundred luxurious dreams, dreamed on coral beaches under the
-romance-breeding splendours of the tropic moon—all this, and more, hung
-on the chances of the next few hours.
-
-There was silence for the space of a minute or two, as the man and woman
-swung between earth and heaven, staring across the sun-dazzled plain of
-sea. Then, in one instant, the dream broke, and the rainbow fragments of
-that bubble of glory scattered themselves east and west.  For across the
-bar of the level horizon slipped a small, pointed, pearl-coloured sail,
-growing as they watched it, flying past, and heading all too surely for
-the Delgadas reef.
-
-Vaiti flung herself round a backstay, and slid down to the deck, with a
-word on her lips that would have justified the bo’sun’s recent judgment,
-could he have caught it.  Harris followed, swearing fully and freely. It
-was evident to both that the newcomer had special business with the reef
-as well as themselves; and they wasted no time, acting in concord, and
-without dispute, after a fashion that was new on board the _Sybil_.
-Within half an hour they had reduced the distance between the ship and
-the reef to a quarter of a mile; nearer than that even Vaiti did not
-care to go, for the weather looked unsettled, though the wind was off
-the reef. The whale-boat, with a picked crew, was lowered, and sent
-flying towards the break in the reef, while the mate, burning to be in
-her, but conscious that his duty must keep him on the ship, paced
-excitedly up and down the deck, glass in hand, watching the advance of
-the stranger ship from time to time.  She was a good two hours’ sail
-away as yet; and surely first possession was worth something, even out
-here in the lawless South Seas!
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER II*
-
-                         *A RACE FOR A FORTUNE*
-
-
-Before an hour was over, the wind had freshened considerably, and the
-mate began to feel anxious for the safety of the boat, in case he should
-be obliged to run for it from the neighbourhood of the treacherous reef.
-That Vaiti would return an instant sooner because of the threatening
-weather he did not expect, knowing the dare-devil recklessness of her
-character too well. It was certain, however, that he might lose the
-ship, and incidentally himself, by waiting too long; and it was equally
-certain that Saxon, once recovered, would put a bullet through his
-mate’s head if Vaiti came to harm.  And all the time that threatening
-sail was growing larger and larger.
-
-It was an unspeakable relief, though no less of a surprise, when he saw
-that the boat was actually heading towards the ship again, the sail up
-and every oar hard at work.  He did not remember having seen Tai go
-down, in any of his hurried inspections through the glass, and the time
-was certainly short.  What did it all mean?
-
-The meaning became sufficiently clear as soon as the boat approached the
-ship, but not through the medium of eye or ear.  A strong stench of
-rotting fish struck the mate’s nostrils almost before the boat was
-within hail, and instantly enlightened him.  No one who has ever smelt
-the terrible smell of the pearl-oyster removed from its ocean bed, and
-left to putrefy in a tropical sun, can mistake the odour.  Harris
-understood at once that the strange ship had been there before, and that
-Vaiti was bringing back a sample of the last catch, left out to rot
-during the vessel’s temporary absence.
-
-The _Sybil_ was leaping dangerously when the boat came alongside, but
-Vaiti snatched at the lowered rope, and swung herself up over the
-bulwarks before any of the native crew.  Tai, following her, brought a
-sack of hideously smelling carrion, and dumped it down on the deck.  The
-mate’s eyes glistened.
-
-"I find great lot lying on reef," said Vaiti, with an apparent calmness
-that might have deceived any one who knew her less accurately than the
-mate.  "I think been there two week.  C’lismas Island, he one week away,
-good weather.  Papalangi C’lismas Island belong plenty diving gear.  You
-see?"
-
-"Rather!" said Harris gloomily.  "Game up, eh?"
-
-"I think you no man at all," spat Vaiti suddenly, swinging into the
-cabin.  Harris, not especially put out, gave a hand to hauling in the
-boat, remarking to the bo’sun, who was picking over the heap of decaying
-pearl-shell, "Don’t know as one could say the same about her, lump of
-solid devilment that she is!  But this looks like the end of all our
-’opes, as they say in the plays; don’t it?"
-
-In a minute or two Vaiti appeared again, wearing a dignified muslin gown
-with three frills on its tail, and holding a chart in her hands.  She
-eyed the horizon narrowly, and ordered the ship to be put about, a
-manoeuvre which headed the _Sybil_ straight for the oncoming sail.  It
-was now evident that the stranger ship was a schooner of some eighty or
-ninety tons, rather larger than the _Sybil_, and nearly as fast.  No one
-on board had the smallest doubt of her mission, even had that rotting
-heap of shell not been there to offer evidence.  Pearl-shell lagoons,
-with their shell worth £100 to £200 per ton, and their pearls (if any
-are found, which is not always certain) worth a fortune for half a
-handful, are the gold mines of the South Sea world; the very birds of
-the sea seem at times to carry the news of such a discovery, and spread
-it far and wide.
-
-The _Sybil_ gathered way, and sped fast towards the stranger ship.  The
-sea was blackening and rising, but there was not very much wind as yet.
-Vaiti sat cross-legged on the deck, studying her chart in the waning
-light of the gusty afternoon.  It was some minutes before she laid it
-down and stood up to speak, steadying herself with one hand against the
-deck-house, for the schooner was now rolling heavily.
-
-"Alliti," she said, "suppose you got heart one small fowl inside you, I
-get captain’s Winchester, my levolver, you and bosun’s levolver, and we
-send that people Davy Jones, or go ourself, pretty quick.  But you not
-got heart, though you big man, and old man he all time sick.  Now, you
-listen too much what I tell you.  You run alongside ship, you go on
-board.  You say captain sick, no one take sun, we get off course, nearly
-wreck on Delgadas. Then you ask captain give bearings reef, and you look
-at him chart too much careful, see if this line mark—here."
-
-She put the point of her small forefinger on the chart she held, and
-showed two or three newly-ruled lines in red ink, enclosing a large
-space east and south of Samoa. These were the boundaries of the area
-lately annexed by New Zealand, and she was exceedingly anxious to know
-if the stranger knew as much about the significance of that matter as
-she did.
-
-"Then," she went on, "you ask him if he been Wellington, say we wanting
-news——"
-
-"What the (adjective noun) for?" demanded the mate.
-
-"Because I say, pauki!" (pig) flashed Vaiti.  "No!—you got head of pig,
-heart of fowl.  You bo’sun, you know I get you through this all right,
-suppose you trusting me—you come here."
-
-Harris, shaking his great shoulders in an easy laugh, swung down on to
-the main deck, and began ordering about the crew.  He had an enormous
-admiration for Vaiti, even when she boxed his ears, but he thought her
-special peculiarities of character rather a trying obstacle in the way
-of his enjoying the easy life beloved of South Sea mates.
-
-The acidulous bo’sun rose from his seat on deck, holding out an unclean
-palm, in the midst of which glittered two fine pearls.
-
-"I’ve been through that little lot, and got these, which do look like
-biz, ma’am," he observed.  "As to people havin’ fowls’ hearts, or pigs’
-heads, I’m not prepared to pass judgment.  But I don’t own to neither
-myself, and if you say it’s a fight, a fight it is.  Or if you’ve got a
-better plan in that uncommon level ’ead of yours, I’m ready to stand
-by."
-
-"You something like a man," pronounced the commanding officer in the
-muslin skirt.  "You listen. I tell him all again."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-An hour later the bo’sun, very wet and draggled, climbed over the
-bulwarks of the _Sybil_, and the schooner _Margaret Macintyre_, of
-Sydney, slipped behind into the falling dusk.
-
-"Said he was thirteen weeks out from Sydney, ma’am," reported the
-ambassador.  "Four weeks out from Apia, gettin’ copra round here and
-there, and there wasn’t no Wellington news anywhere, as he remembered.
-Nice new chart, with no lines of that kind ruled on it anywhere.  As to
-where he got the divin’ gear that was in the cabin, or what kind of
-copra he reckoned to pick up on the Delgadas, he didn’t say, not bein’
-asked."
-
-Vaiti stood still to consider, a beautifully poised black silhouette
-against the yellow oblong of the lamp-lit cabin door.
-
-"I think it all right; he not been near Wellington," she pronounced at
-last.  "Alliti!  How her head?"
-
-"Sou’-west by south," answered the mate from the wheel.
-
-"Keep her so."
-
-"Ay, ay, sir!" laughed the mate.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Every one in the South Pacific knew that the _Sybil_ was a marvel of
-speed, and that she had not been originally built for trading, though
-nobody could tell exactly how Saxon had acquired such a clipper.  It was
-a popular theory that she was a millionaire’s yacht from San Francisco,
-which he had stolen and subsequently disguised.  He was known, however,
-to have possessed her for more than twenty years, and was now as
-completely identified with her as her own mainmast; so that any doubts
-as to the honesty of the way by which he might originally have obtained
-her were now of a purely academic nature.
-
-Famous as she was for speed, the record of her passage from the Delgadas
-to Wellington fairly astonished the Islands, when it came to be told.
-They had a fair wind almost all the way, with two or three lively nights
-when the little vessel, hard driven under the utmost pressure of the
-canvas, piled up the knots like a liner.  Saxon continued delirious, but
-was fortunately quiet.  Harris, and Gray the boatswain, though
-unenlightened as to the cause of the _Sybil’s_ sudden southward flight,
-fully understood that the possession of the pearl lagoon hung in the
-balance, and worked like half-a-dozen to supplement the efforts of the
-scanty Kanaka crew.
-
-Vaiti interfered little with the working of the ship, but she kept a
-look-out that hardly left her time for sleep or food; although the
-_Sybil_, like most Pacific ships, was allowed, under ordinary
-circumstances, to chance it, day and night.  Hour after hour she sat
-cross-legged on deck, watching the unbroken rim of the black horizon, or
-paced up and down the poop, silent and grave, in her lace and muslin
-fripperies, as a naval officer on the bridge. What she was looking for
-no one knew, but during that wild ten days of foam and smother, cracking
-sails and straining sheets, her silent watchfulness infected the men
-themselves, and eyes were constantly turned to scan the empty, seething
-plain over which they flew.
-
-It was drawing on towards dusk of the tenth day, and the sky was
-beginning to light fires of angry copper-purple, high in the
-storm-driven west, when Vaiti, of a sudden, stopped dead in her endless
-walk, and looked with lips apart and eyes narrowed deep beneath her
-brows over the weather rail.  All this time they had not sighted a
-single sail or a solitary funnel.  They had been well off the track of
-New Zealand bound ships, and the Pacific waters are wide.  But now they
-were drawing near to Wellington, and there was nothing to be astonished
-at in the sight of another sail creeping up over the horizon, except,
-indeed, the fact that it was momentarily growing larger and gaining on
-the _Sybil_. There was scarce another schooner afloat from New Guinea to
-the Paumotus that could have done as much.
-
-The mate came up behind Vaiti, and handed her a glass.  She looked
-through it, lowered it, raised it, and looked again with a steady gaze,
-and suddenly flung it out of her hand across the deck.
-
-Harris caught it deftly and asked, with the constitutional calm that
-alone saved his reason when Vaiti took over command, "What’s to pay
-now?"
-
-"She got auxiliary," said Vaiti, with a note of agony in her voice.
-
-"What if she has?  Isn’t any vessel free to carry an auxiliary that can
-stand the stink of the oil and the cussedness of the injin?"
-
-"I go see captain," said Vaiti, flashing down the companion.
-
-Saxon was better to-day, and almost in full possession of his senses.
-Vaiti went to the medicine chest; took out a hypodermic syringe, filled
-it with careful accuracy from a tiny dark blue bottle, and lifted her
-father’s arm as he lay limp and weak, but mending fast, in his bunk.
-
-"Good girl, take care of your old father," he murmured in island Maori
-as she slipped the needle-point painlessly under the skin, and the
-powerful drug began to race through every vein of the inert body.  The
-effect was rapid and decisive.  Saxon sat up against his pillows in five
-minutes, clear-headed though weak, and asked if the _Sybil_ had not
-sighted the Delgadas yet.
-
-"Listen, father," said Vaiti, speaking fluently in the low, soft tongue
-that the two had used together all her life—the Maori language Saxon had
-first learned from the pretty brown girl, dead this many years, whom he
-had stolen from her South Sea island to sail the blue Pacific at his
-side in the days of long ago.  "Listen. There is little time, and we are
-in great need.  We came to the reef, and the shell was there truly, but
-a strange ship had been before us.  Even as we lay there she returned
-from Christmas Island with diving gear.  I sent Gray on board to look at
-her chart and find out if she had been to Wellington; and it seemed that
-she had not the new line of annexation marked on the chart, where New
-Zealand this year added to herself all that lay within a certain space
-of the sea; also she had not been south of Auckland.  So then, knowing
-that we, if we asked the Government, might have the atoll granted us for
-twenty years and take possession above the people of the other ship, I
-made sail for Wellington; and we are now but one day away when this ship
-appears again, chasing us.  Where the suspicion has waked in their
-hearts, or when, is nothing; but that they have thought and discovered
-our desire, that is certain."
-
-"Give the _Sybil_ all sail, daughter, and she will leave the other.
-What is this talk?" asked Saxon, raising himself on his elbow to look
-out of the glooming circle of the port.
-
-"But the ship has ’auxiliary,’ my father, and she will have passed out
-of sight before the morning."
-
-"Oh, she has, has she?" grunted the captain, dropping back into his
-native tongue.  "What are you going to do about it?"
-
-He had noted a glimmer in Vaiti’s eye that told him that she was not yet
-at the end of her resources.  The Maori guile and the English daring
-were united to some purpose in this strange creature that he had given
-to the world.
-
-"I will tell," she said, standing up to her full height. "But you must
-give the order, my father, for Alliti drags on the rein these days.  Let
-the bale of trawl-net, and the Manila rope, be taken from the cargo, and
-let us cross the bows of this ship, and drop them across her path.  The
-keel will run clean, but the screw will foul, and they will creep like a
-bird with a broken wing till daylight.  Then, if the sea has grown less,
-they will send down a diver and clear the screws; but we shall be almost
-into Wellington, and the lagoon is ours."
-
-"You are worthy to be the daughter of a brave man," answered Saxon in
-Maori, sinking back wearily on his pillow.  "Go, then; and if we lose
-the ship, we lose her; there is great wealth to gain, and a man must die
-at one time, if not another.  I am tired.  I will sleep."
-
-Vaiti left him, and hurried back on deck.  The purple dusk was already
-beginning to gather, and the green starboard light of the _Margaret
-Macintyre_ gleamed like a glow-worm a mile or so behind.  She was
-drawing very near; there was no time to lose.
-
-"Alliti!" called Vaiti.  "My father he better; he send word to take
-trawl-net and Malila out of hold, make come across that ship him path,
-foul him sclew. Suppose you not afraid, you bring us close, drop net and
-Malila."
-
-Harris’s hide was thick, but Vaiti knew how to pierce it when she chose;
-and the man had courage enough, in streaks.  Vaiti had hit the mark when
-she called him chicken-hearted in fighting, but there was no manoeuvre
-of the ship too risky for him to undertake and carry through with
-perfect coolness.
-
-"All right, my lady," he nodded.  "Don’t forget me and Gray when it
-comes to sharing out the swag, that’s all."
-
-The net and the rope were brought up, and the latter knotted here and
-there to make a hideous tangle of it. Then the _Sybil’s_ lights were put
-out, even the cabin lamp being extinguished.  The stars pricked
-themselves out in sudden sharpness on the great blue chart of heaven
-above, and the waste of dark rolling water all around grew large and
-lonely.
-
-You are not to suppose that Saxon’s daughter did not see and feel these
-things—did not hear the voiceless talk of the great seas on starry
-evenings, or feel her mortal body almost rapt away in the ecstasy of a
-black midnight and a shrieking storm; just as you, perhaps, who think
-that no one ever shared such experiences with yourself, may feel.  It is
-not only the blameless tourist, with his daily diary, and his books of
-travel teaching him how and when to "enthuse," who enjoys the splendid
-pageant of the seas.  Vaiti, as the most indulgent chronicler must
-confess, had more than a spice of her father’s villainy in her
-composition, not to speak of whatever devilry her Maori forebears might
-have bequeathed to her.  She was unscrupulous, ruthless, and crafty as a
-general rule; she was engaged in a deed of the very shadiest description
-to-night—yet, as she stood with her hands on the wheel, and her eyes on
-the green starboard light of the oncoming ship, steering the _Sybil_ to
-something extremely like certain destruction, she knew that the Southern
-Cross was rising, clear and beautiful, above its gem-like pointers, just
-ahead; and that a little sliver of young moon, crystal-silver against
-the dark, was slipping up the sky to her left.  The thought just grazed
-her mind that this might be the last time the moon would ever rise over
-the Pacific for her.  She smiled a little in the dusk, and steered
-steadily ahead. There were no "streaks" in the composition of Vaiti’s
-spirit.
-
-A short tack to the starboard became necessary. Harris put the ship
-about at a lift of Vaiti’s hand.  It grew very dark; a cloud was over
-the moon, and the stars were dimmed by driving vapour.  The wind was
-increasing; the schooner lay over with its weight, and the foam gurgled
-along her clean-ran sides.  Still the _Margaret Macintyre_ came on,
-stately and unsuspicious, all sail set, and the beat of the little screw
-distinctly audible through the night.
-
-Vaiti signalled again to put the ship about, and as soon as the great
-booms had creaked across the deck. gave over the wheel to Harris.
-
-"Run him just as he head now," she said softly, "and bring him too much
-close; so (double adjective) close to ship he scrape the (qualified)
-paint off him.  I go do rest."
-
-Harris, humming "Good-bye, Dolly Gray," took the wheel over.  If he had
-any doubts as to Vaiti’s purpose, the vigour of her language would have
-dispersed them.  Vaiti never swore unless she was exceedingly in
-earnest.
-
-The trawl-net and the tangle of Manila were hanging over the stern, held
-up by a single rope.  Vaiti glided to the rail, holding a sharp knife in
-her hand—("I always _did_ think she kept one somewhere among her
-frilligigs," commented Harris silently, as he caught the flash of the
-steel)—and waited, still as a statue.
-
-Presently out of the darkness shot a hail, accompanied by a perfect
-constellation of oaths.  Its apparent object was to ascertain the
-_Sybil’s_ reason for steering such a course.  The _Sybil_ answered not a
-word, but steered the course some more.
-
-The hail, at the second time of repeating, became a yell, with a strong
-note of terror in it.  On came the _Sybil_, a dim, unlit tower of
-blackness, taking as much notice of the shouts as the _Flying Dutchman_.
-Those on board the _Margaret Macintyre_ gave themselves up for lost.
-There was even a rush made for one of the boats. But the threatening
-shape swept past her bows, so near that the furious captain could have
-tossed a biscuit on board—so near that the _Sybil’s_ Kanaka crew,
-thinking the "papalangi" officers meant to ram the stranger, uttered
-war-cries wherein pure delight was mingled with overjoyed surprise.
-
-It was all over in a minute, and the _Sybil_ was well away on the
-_Margaret Macintyre’s_ port side before the latter vessel discovered,
-through the medium of a horrible jar from the engine-room and a powerful
-odour of oil, that the screw was badly fouled, leaving them, like St.
-Paul with nothing to do but make the best of circumstances, and "wish
-that it were day."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-December weather is hot in Wellington, and it was now close to
-Christmas.  Perhaps that was why the senior member of the trading firm
-that had taken over part ownership of the _Sybil_ for an unpaid debt
-thought his eyes were deceived by the glare of the sun when he saw a
-white schooner of singularly graceful lines lying alongside one of the
-wharves on a date when her engagements plainly demanded her presence in
-Tahiti.
-
-When, however, he met Saxon and his daughter, a few minutes afterwards,
-on Lambton Quay, he understood that his eyes were in excellent order.
-So, it soon appeared, was his tongue.  He was a gentleman of Scottish
-extraction, and it hurt him badly to see possible profits thrown away.
-
-Saxon let him have his say, and merely laughed for answer.
-
-"Come into the Occidental, and Vaiti and I’ll tell you something worth
-all the trade that you’d take out of Papeëte in ten years," he said.
-"I’m going to own the ship again before New Year’s Day, and paint this
-good old town scarlet as well.  You’ll see."
-
-And the man of money-bags, anxious to see, went into the hotel.
-
-Vaiti, in a fit of perversity, declined to come in.  She knew only too
-well that, in Saxon’s impecunious condition, there was no hope of
-getting their discovery effectively worked save at a price that would
-leave very little change over for the present possessors of the
-lagoon—even if the captain had been quite sober, which he was not.  They
-had got the grant, and had furthermore had the satisfaction of noting
-that, day after day, Wellington Harbour remained empty of the
-hardly-used _Margaret Macintyre_.  It was evident that her people,
-whoever they were, had tamely accepted defeat. There was no standing
-against a grant from the Government of New Zealand—no matter how
-acquired. But all this did not alter the fact that there was not going
-to be a great deal for the _Sybil_, and her captain, and her captain’s
-daughter—especially the latter.  It was there that the sting lay.  Vaiti
-had had dreams—oh, but dreams! oh, such dreams! before solid
-common-sense had brought her down to earth, and made her realise that
-Saxon’s unlucky state, and the eminently Scottish firm who held the
-destinies of the _Sybil_ in their hands, were quite certain to stand in
-the way of realisation.  To make a fortune, you must first have one,
-generally speaking.  And it was the canny Glasgow men who had it.
-
-So, because she did not want to hear with her own ears what she knew
-very well must take place, she refused to come into the hotel, and
-wandered off alone down the quays, in the warm December sun, which yet
-was cool compared to the burning heats of the island world.  She was
-dressed in a long, waistless muslin gown, as usual, but her shady Niué
-hat and white deck shoes—not to speak of a pair of kid gloves that
-caused her horrible discomfort and a parasol that embarrassed her
-extremely—spoke of a respect for certain of the conventions that might
-have astonished people who knew, or thought they knew, Vaiti of the
-Islands.  Of course, the loungers on the quays looked admiringly after
-her—she would have liked to see them dare to omit that tribute to her
-fiery charms—and some of them freely spoke to her, calling her Mary and
-Polly, offering her hearts and drinks and new bonnets, and asking her
-for kisses or jobs on the schooner, just as it occurred to them, after
-the simple fashion of the sea.  Some of them knew her, and some of them
-did not.  It was the latter who asked for jobs.  The men who did know
-the _Sybil_ and her "Kapitani" asked for kisses, which they did not
-expect to get.  That was safer.
-
-Vaiti, quite accustomed to this sort of demonstration, and enjoying it
-in a languid way as she strolled along under the annoying parasol,
-covered half a mile or so of the quay at her own leisurely pace, and
-then sat down on a coil of rope in a quiet place, to stare across the
-water and think.
-
-She wanted something, and she did not see her way to get it.
-
-To disentangle the dreams and hopes, wild fancies, and wilder
-aspirations of the half-caste mind when that mind, puzzling and elusive
-enough to the pure white in any case, is further complicated with a
-touch of genius, would be a task worthy of a whole academy of science.
-This much alone can the necessarily all-knowing biographer of Vaiti
-say—that she wanted to be someone, and wanted it so badly that nothing
-else in life seemed worth having, or even existent, She was a princess
-of Atiu on her mother’s side, and on her father’s (though Saxon’s past
-was as much a mystery as the origin of the yacht-like _Sybil_ herself)
-Vaiti felt that she had every right to claim high standing.
-
-Doubly dowered, therefore, with the instinct of rule, the actual command
-of the schooner had fallen into her capable hands quite naturally.  Left
-to herself, she would probably have made the _Sybil_ pay in a way
-unknown before to the easy-going island world.  But the useless,
-dissipated Saxon had to be counted on.  She liked him in her own way,
-such as it was, but she despised him also.  And it was an undoubted fact
-that he hampered everything.  This bargain with M’Coy and Co., for
-instance—it was useless for her to attempt to put a finger on it.  Saxon
-had got drunk the night before, as soon as the matter of the grant had
-been finally decided, at the end of some anxious days of waiting; and in
-the morning the numerous "hairs" that he had taken to restore him had
-left him in a condition of hopeless obstinacy and self-sufficiency.  In
-such a state he was as certain to be over-reached as a stranded
-jelly-fish is certain to be licked up by the sun.  And this was bitter
-to Vaiti.
-
-For, sitting there motionless under the parasol (which was serving a
-useful purpose at last, in shading her handsome face from observation
-and comment by the passers-by), Vaiti had arrived at something rather
-like a conclusion, and a conclusion, too, that was likely to shape most
-of her thoughts and acts henceforward.
-
-Money was the thing.
-
-She did not care for money in itself, and none of the things it could
-bring really interested her, except pretty clothes.
-
-But money was importance, money was power; money was the freedom to do
-exactly what you wanted, and make other people do it too.  She did not
-think it out in words, like a European.  Pictures passed before her
-mind, more vivid by far than the glittering water and flashing sea-gull
-wings in front of her bodily eyes.  She saw captains of great ships,
-giving orders like kings, and obeyed by the promptest and smartest of
-slaves. She saw owners of big stores entertaining half the island on
-their verandahs, paid court to by wandering beach-combers, going out to
-ships in beautiful boats manned by their own uniformed crews, who bent
-their backs double at a word.  She saw "Tusitala," of Samoa, the great
-English story-teller, living in his splendid house outside Apia,
-surrounded by a humble clan of native followers wearing wonderful
-lava-lavas of a foreign stuff they called "tatani" (tartan)—Tusitala,
-who was as great a chief as Mataafa himself, and had spoken to her,
-Vaiti, as one worthy of all honour.... Her pictures were almost all of
-the islands, for the islands were in her blood; but something, too, she
-saw of Auckland—the merchant M’Coy, old and so ugly, and of the
-commonest birth, yet reverenced like the greatest of chiefs, because he
-had money....
-
-The afternoon rays grew blinding hot on the water as the sun sank down.
-The sea-gulls dipped and screamed.  Steamers glided away from the
-wharves with long hooting cries that somehow seemed to embody all the
-melancholy of the homeless sea.  Steam cranes chattered ceaselessly
-above the yawning holds of discharging ships.  Behind, the tramcars
-hummed in the street, and people hurried up and down.
-
-And at last the western sky began to burn with sultry red, and Vaiti
-went home.
-
-Something had taken root in her mind that afternoon that struck down and
-shot up, in the days to come, and led her into ways and places wilder
-even than the adventure of the pearl lagoon.  As children string berries
-on a straw, so upon the stem that grew from that seed were strung the
-strange events that followed, one by one.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER III*
-
-                      *THE FLOWER BEHIND THE EAR*
-
-
-As Vaiti, Cassandra-wise, had prophesied about the pearl lagoon, so
-indeed it fell out.
-
-It takes money to exploit even the smallest discovery of this kind, and
-the canny M’Coy made the most of the fact.  Delgadas Reef was too risky
-a neighbourhood to be worked by any vessel unprovided with an auxiliary
-engine, so a cranky little schooner of some forty tons, owning a tiny
-oil engine that sometimes worked and sometimes did not—more commonly the
-latter—was chartered; also a couple of boats for diving work, and two
-sets of diving dresses; and a cheap crew was picked up somewhere, and
-some poor provisions laid in.  Everything was done on the most
-economical scale possible—yet the Scotchman grumbled and lamented, and
-declared he would never see his money back.  The shares had been fixed
-at a wickedly low figure for Saxon and there were, furthermore, clauses
-in the agreement concerning expenses which made that unlucky derelict
-swear fiercely when he read them after he was sober.  It was too late to
-complain then, however, for he had signed everything he was asked, under
-the influence of the good whisky to which M’Coy—liberal for once—had
-freely treated him.  Nor did he get any sympathy from Vaiti.  She merely
-laughed when he complained, and told him frankly that he would have done
-better to stay in his cabin and drink there, if he liked, leaving her to
-finish what she had begun.
-
-So the pearling ship sailed off, and Saxon, who could not afford to stay
-in port, went another voyage.  And some months later, when he came back,
-it was to find that Delgadas Reef was cleaned out.  It had held not much
-after all, said the Glasgow man, and shell was down, and the pearls had
-been few and off colour.  But there was enough to pay Saxon’s debt and
-leave him owner and master of the _Sybil_ once more.  And there might be
-a few pounds in addition—not much; but there, he was an honest man, and
-he would rather ruin himself than let Saxon and the charming Miss Vaiti
-feel they were badly treated.  And if Saxon would kindly sign this paper
-releasing him from all further claims, he would be happy to give over
-all claim in the ship.  Otherwise—money was tight, and that little
-matter between them had been owing so long that——
-
-Saxon interrupted with a statement to the effect that he knew blank well
-he had been blank well had, and for the sum of two sanguinary sixpences
-he would be prepared to knock Mr. M’Coy’s doubly condemned head off his
-unpleasantly qualified shoulders—only, luckily for Mr. M’Coy, he was
-sick of him and the like of him, and merely wanted to get out of his way
-as soon as he possibly could.  With which concise summing up of facts he
-signed the paper, picked up the cheque, and went out to spend it after
-his own fashion.  Vaiti secured half of it at the bank where he cashed
-it, and went off with the money done up in her hair, to keep house by
-herself on the schooner until her father should turn up again.  She knew
-him too well to expect that that would come about immediately.
-
-Meanwhile, there were banks in which she could deposit her own share,
-and thus feel herself a step nearer to her goal—that dim, undefined goal
-that was to be reached somehow, some time, through the possession of the
-precious bits of paper and coin without which all pleasant things were
-impossible.  She did not decide at once where the money should go, but
-hid it in her cabin, and day by day walked the pavements of Wellington,
-delighting her eyes with the shop-window beauties which she had so
-seldom seen.  Thus came her undoing.  Vaiti had never heard the saying,
-"We are none of us infallible, even the youngest," or she might have
-been less certain of herself before it came about, and less bitter
-afterwards.
-
-For was it not natural that when Saxon unexpectedly reappeared at the
-Constantinople Hotel with a good deal of his money still left, and sent
-for Vaiti to join him and "live like a lady while she could," the
-improvident island blood should all unbidden well up and smother
-everything else?  Why go on?  There are shops in Wellington—there are as
-many ways of getting fifteen shillings’ worth out of a sovereign, and
-repeating the process a great deal oftener than one means, as in any
-other of the world’s big ports....  The end was that, after ten
-delirious days of glorious spending. Captain Saxon and his daughter set
-sail for Tahiti with a general cargo, a complete set of empty pockets
-between them, and, on the part of Vaiti, a glad remembrance more than
-half stifled by angry regret for the cost.  Yet, and yet, what a lovely
-thing money was, and what a pity that one could not both spend and keep
-it!  If you did the one, you were happy, but no one thought anything of
-you.  If you did the other, everyone paid court to you, but you didn’t
-get the fun.  Yes, that was true of money—and of other things.  Girls
-who had been brought up at convent schools understood a lot that the
-ignorant beach girls didn’t....  And, _bon Dieu!_ as they used to say in
-Papeëte, when the Sisters couldn’t hear—what a headache it gave her to
-think, and what a fool she was to do it!
-
-"Ruru!" she called in Maori to a native sleeping peacefully on the deck.
-"Wake up, pig-face, son of a fruit-bat, and make me kava immediately.  I
-am weary."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-It was many weeks after, and the hot season had come round once more.
-
-The schooner was slamming helplessly about on a huge glassy swell.
-Everything on board that could rattle, rattled; everything in the cabins
-that could break loose and take charge, did so, sending up a melancholy
-chorus of crashes with every wallow of the ship. The great mizzen sail
-slatted about above the poop, offering and then instantly withdrawing a
-promise of cooling shade, in a manner that was little short of
-maddening, seeing that the hour was three o’clock, and the latitude not
-four degrees south.  Friday Island looking like a small blue flower on
-the rim of a crystal dish, hovered tantalisingly on the extreme verge of
-the horizon, as unattainable as Sydney Heads or heaven.  For the _Sybil_
-was becalmed, a week’s from anywhere in particular, and there seemed no
-chance of a breeze.
-
-"Lord," said the mate, dropping the marlinspike with which he was
-splicing a rope, and mopping his forehead with his rolled-up sleeve, "I
-wonder ’ow many thousand miles we are from an iced beer!"
-
-"Turtle!" said Vaiti, taking a slim brown cigar out of her mouth, and
-looking down from her seat on the top of the deck-house.  "Only nine
-hundred and eighty-seven.  You not remember Charley’s in Apia?"
-
-"I’d forgotten Samoa," said Harris, in a more cheerful tone, picking up
-the marlinspike, and going to work again, as if revived by Vaiti’s
-arithmetic.
-
-"A miss is as good as a mile, for all me, specially when it’s nine
-hundred mile," remarked the gloomy boatswain. "Couldn’t you manage to
-talk about something rather less ’arrowing to a man’s insides?"
-
-"I’d like to know why she’s going skull-huntin’ to Friday Island, then,"
-said the mate, casting a cautious glance at Vaiti, who was scarcely out
-of ear-shot, up on the deck-house.
-
-"Trade I can understand," he went on, "and shell-huntin’—we haven’t done
-too bad all round over that last little job, and the old man’s a sight
-more sober since he’s owned the ship again.  But skulls—and old skulls
-at that—filthy natives’ bones that’s been lyin’ in the caves since
-Heaven knows when!  Besides, they ain’t our skulls, however you may look
-at it——"
-
-"Nor I hope they won’t be," said the boatswain darkly.  "In no way, I
-mean.  The Friday Islanders aren’t people to ask out to an afternoon
-tea-party without you’ve got your knuckle-duster on underneath your
-voylet kid gloves.  And you know what natives are about their old bones
-and graves."
-
-"I do.  What I don’t know is how she thinks she’s going to make anything
-out of a proper nasty job like that."
-
-"Oh, she’s on the make, is she!"
-
-"Did you ever know her anything else, bless her?" asked the mate.  "She
-wants sixty pounds, havin’ spent all the old man give her out of the
-shell business in Wellington, takin’ boxes at the theaytres and halls,
-and buyin’ women’s gear, and staying at the Constantinople, where she
-wore two new ’ats a day for a week; and other games of a similar kind.
-Pity you was sick, and not there to see the fun.  I tell you, she made
-the town look silly."
-
-"What’s the sixty pound for?" asked the boatswain, chewing fondly on his
-quid.
-
-Harris giggled explosively, and whispered:
-
-"She wants a Dozey dress!"
-
-"What in ——’s that?  It don’t sound respectable," virtuously observed
-the boatswain, who had never heard of the famous French dressmaker.
-
-"You bet it is, then.  Dozey’s a regular bang-up swell in Paris, who
-makes the most expensive gownds in the world, and every one in them
-parts treats him just the same as a baronight or a duke.  You can’t get
-so much as a jumper from him for less than sixty pound, and Vaiti she
-says every woman in Papeëte or Aucklan’ or Sydney who saw one of his
-dresses would spot it right away, and go and throw herself over the
-Heads. She read about his things in a piece in one of them female papers
-in the hotel, and she saw an actress wearin’ of one, and she’s been
-layin’ out to get one ever since, somethin’ awful.  Seems when a woman
-in London, or Paris, or Yarmouth gets a Dozey dress, and takes to
-standin’ off and on before the others, who’s only got new velveteens
-with musling frills or such-like it just makes them other women drag
-their anchors and run head-on to the shore.  So Vaiti, she——"
-
-"Hold on," interrupted the boatswain.  "Why, if she ’ad one of those
-gownds, she couldn’t bend it on to her yards, not if it cost a million.
-Man alive, she ain’t laid down on the same lines as them Frenchwomen,
-anyway."
-
-"You let her alone for that," chuckled Harris.  "But what beats me is
-_who_ she’s going to do with them skulls, and _how_.  We won’t know in a
-hurry, either, because she and Pita’s fixed it up between them to do the
-job alone.  Thank ’eaven for small mercies, says I.  ’Er on the
-war-path’s rather more than I care for; and this isn’t going to be any
-picnic, if I know anything of natives."
-
-"Pita!" whistled the boatswain.  "The old man will ’ave ’is gore before
-the voyage is out, if Vaiti goes on like this.  It’s Ritter, that fat
-German trader in Papeëte, that he’s wanting to marry her to; and as for
-natives, it’s ’ands off for them, if she is ’alf of one ’erself."
-
-"Well, she and Pita was planning it all out in the fore-top last night.
-I heard them, when she thought I was sleeping on the top of the galley.
-And the old man came out and roared at her like a Marquesas bull to come
-down; so down she came, laughing at him, like the devil she is.  There’s
-no one else on this ship would laugh, without it was on the wrong side
-of his mouth, when the old man gets ratty.  Coming!  All right!"
-
-The mate jumped to his feet, and answered Vaiti’s sharp hail in person,
-a deprecating smile spreading like spilt treacle all over his face as he
-came up to her, cap in hand.  Vaiti took her cigar out of her mouth, and
-looked at him for a minute without speaking.  The _Sybil_ rolled on the
-towering swell like a captured beast trying to beat its brains out
-against a wall, but Saxon’s Maori daughter stood as steady as the
-slender main-mast upon the reeling deck.  Harris smiled more than ever,
-and turned the marlinspike about in his hands, looking a little foolish.
-
-"You wanting Captain Saxon come and lay you out in the scupper pretty
-soon?" inquired Vaiti presently.
-
-"Not particular," answered the mate, the smile sliding slowly off his
-face.
-
-"Then I think perhaps you keep your mouth more better shut," said Vaiti,
-walking off with a contemptuous swing in the very fall of her laced
-muslin skirts.  And Pita of Atiu, as if in defiance of the captain, the
-mate, and every one else but his cousin Vaiti, pulled a mouth-organ out
-of his shirt and began to play it triumphantly and frantically, making a
-noise exactly like the buzzing of a mad bluebottle on a warm
-window-pane.  Further, he plucked a frangipani flower out of the
-wreath—a good deal the worse for wear—that hung round his neck, and
-stuck the blossom behind his ear.  Now, every one who has ever been in
-the Islands knows that these two actions are significant of courtship.
-Pita was courting Vaiti, as everybody knew—Pita, a mere deck hand, who
-had been taken on at wild Atiu, in the Cook Islands, because he was a
-relation of Saxon’s dead native wife. Very handsome was Pita, very young
-and tall and broad-shouldered, wily and fierce like all the Atiuans, but
-smooth and pleasant of countenance.  Were not the men of Atiu nicknamed
-"meek-faced Atiuans," even in the days, only a generation gone, when
-they were the cruellest and most warlike of cannibals and pirates?
-
-Needless to say, Captain Saxon, who had always had "views" for Vaiti,
-ever since she left the Tahitian convent school that had given her such
-fragments of civilisation as she possessed, did not favour the
-compromising attentions of Pita.  As for Vaiti, her father’s
-prohibitions neither piqued her into noticing the handsome Atiuan more,
-nor alarmed her into favouring him less, than she found agreeable.  At
-present there was rather more than less about the matter, because Saxon
-was in one of his fits of gloomy depression, and Vaiti foresaw the usual
-result.  It was not at all likely that her father would be able to help
-her in her forthcoming raid.  Harris she did not choose to rely on at a
-pinch; Gray was old; the crew were far and away too superstitious to aid
-in such a sacrilege as she proposed.  There remained Pita, who, if he
-was a wild Atiuan, was at least "misinari" after a fashion, had been
-educated, more or less, in Raratonga, and was most certainly in love
-with herself....  Yes, Pita would do.
-
-That night, when the second dog-watch had commenced, and a lew large
-crystal stars were just beginning to glimmer through the pink of the
-ocean sunset, Vaiti descended to the cabin, looked into Gray and
-Harris’s berths to make sure that they were both on deck, and then sat
-down on the cushioned locker opposite her father.
-
-"What is it?" asked Saxon, raising his heavy blue eyes.  He had been
-sitting with his head propped in the corner of the cabin, silent as a
-fish, since the clearing away of tea an hour before.  You might have
-thought him asleep, or, if you knew him intimately, drunk.  He was
-neither; but dead and drowned things were rising up from the black sea
-caverns of his heart to-night, and their bones showed white and ghastly
-upon the desert shores of his life.  So he sat silent, with his face
-turned to the darkening porthole and to the night that was striding down
-upon the sea.
-
-Through the port he saw the shining harbour of Papeëte as it looked a
-week or two ago—a tall grey British war-ship lying at anchor, the
-_Sybil’s_ dinghy, small and crank and unclean, creeping up to the
-man-of-war’s accommodation-ladder, himself, a weather-scarred, red-faced
-figure, in a worn duck suit and bulging shoes, sitting in the boat, and
-waiting patiently until the Governor’s steam-launch should have passed
-in front of him and discharged its freight of visitors.
-
-He saw the captain of the great Queen’s ship standing at the top of the
-ladder, slight and trig and trim, all white and gold from top to toe,
-all smiling self-possession and cool command.
-
-He saw ladies, immaculately coiffed and daintily shod; tall, clean,
-grey-moustached men following them; a cordial welcome on the deck; a
-flutter of light drapery and a glimpse of lounging masculine figures
-afterwards, framed by the great open gun-ports of the captain’s cabin in
-the stern.  They were laughing and talking, and he could hear the clink
-of cups and glasses.  After—a long time after—he could see his own
-shabby little boat creeping up to the ladder; the captain, cold and
-business-like, and more than a little brusque, speaking to him on the
-deck about a certain anchorage in the Cook Islands group, concerning
-which he was known to have information; himself, burningly conscious of
-his shoes and his finger-nails, answering shortly and with some
-embarrassment, and feeling, of a sudden, very shabby, very broken, very
-old....  Was it twenty-five years, or two thousand, since the Admiral of
-the Fleet, and the Prince of Saxe-Brandenburg, with half the mess of his
-own regiment, had dined on board his biggest yacht at Cowes a week
-before—it—happened? ... Now a mere commander left him standing on the
-deck, and spoke to him like a native or a dog.  Well, what did it all
-matter to a dead man?  Was not his name of those days carved on the
-family monument in letters half an inch deep, and was not he, Edward
-Saxon, whom nobody knew, out here in the living death of the farthermost
-islands, a thousand miles from anywhere? ...
-
-"Father," said Vaiti.
-
-"What is it?" answered Saxon’s voice dully, as befitted a dead man.
-
-"The wind is rising at last," said the girl in Maori, "We shall be off
-the island by morning.  Will you, or will you not, go with me into this
-cave of death, where I have told you that I shall find what is worth
-finding?"
-
-"I have no heart.  I will not."
-
-"Then I and Pita will go," said Vaiti, fixing the Englishman’s blue eyes
-with her own black, stabbing and savagely unfathomable, yet set in
-Saxon’s very own narrow high-bred face.
-
-The captain’s dark mood was on him, and he turned his face to the wall,
-with a Maori oath consigning Vaiti and Pita to a cannibal end.
-
-"I go; stay you there," said Vaiti, using the quaintly courteous native
-form of farewell, barbed with a little sneer unknown to the original.
-Then she went to her cabin.  And Saxon turned in his seat, and reached
-for the brandy bottle at last.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Handsome Pita had a great awe for Vaiti, for she was a princess of Atiu
-by her mother’s side.  But she was beautiful, and he admired her—also he
-hoped that her imperious soul harboured one soft spot for him. It seemed
-good, on the whole, when they were pulling the dinghy over the reef next
-morning, to ask Vaiti openly where the value of the booty came in—with a
-secret hope in the background of securing as much as possible for a
-certain very deserving, more or less Christian youth of Atiu.
-
-Vaiti, her white dress girded up high over her scarlet pareo, waded
-through the last yard or two of the emerald lagoon before she answered.
-The boat being safe on shore, she stood up and looked sharply about her.
-They had chosen a quiet spot at the back of the island for landing, all
-the natives being down at the harbour loading copra.  The weird pandanus
-trees, standing on their high wooden stilts at the verge of the shore,
-the rustling coco-palms swinging their great fronds far over the water,
-the golden and pink-flowered vines trailing yard on yard of green
-garlandry over the paper-white sand, could carry no tales, and they were
-the only witnesses.
-
-Vaiti looked at Pita up and down, from head to foot, and Pita gave the
-flower behind his ear a knowing cock, and set one hand saucily on his
-hip.  He knew that he was the handsomest man in the Cook archipelago,
-and he felt that the way his pareo was tied that day was a pure
-inspiration.  So he shut up his mouth very tight, and made play with his
-burning black eyes as only a South Sea Islander can, waiting confidently
-the while for the information that the whole ship’s company of the
-_Sybil_ could not have extracted from Vaiti in a week.
-
-The girl stepped forward, and with a commanding finger tapped Pita’s
-biggest dimple, as if he had been a baby.
-
-"Suppose I tell you, then you know too much, you plenty frighten, go
-back to ship," she laughed.
-
-"Speak Maori, high chieftainess!" implored Pita.
-
-"No fee-ah!" answered Saxon’s daughter succinctly. Pita understood at
-once that Vaiti was unwilling to use a language that gave free rein to
-her tongue and his, and the knowledge elated him.
-
-"Perhaps I tell you," went on Vaiti, watching him narrowly.  "I think
-you got heart in belly belong you, more better than Alliti.  I tell you,
-you want plenty heart by-and-by."
-
-"High chieftainess, Vaiti, speak Maori!" was Pita’s answer, linked to an
-attempted embrace that only fell short of its main object because Vaiti
-quite calmly pulled a seaman’s knife out of her dress and laid it edge
-upwards across her lips.  Pita, who had learned the real European kiss
-during his visits to civilisation, and wanted very much to show it off,
-felt disappointed, although there was a smile behind the blade that
-almost out-dazzled the steel.
-
-"Maori!" he persisted, putting his arm round her waist, with a cool
-disregard of her well-known readiness with the knife that won Vaiti’s
-admiration a step further than before.  She laughed, wavered, and then,
-still playing with the keen, bright blade, she lowered it a little, and
-spoke in the soft language of the Islands at last.
-
-It was a fairly long tale that she had to tell.  When last the _Sybil_
-had been in the Society Islands, some weeks before, there had been a
-German man of science in the group, collecting native skulls for museums
-at home.  The grizzly old gentleman and his pursuits had not troubled
-Vaiti’s mind particularly until her chief admirer, Ritter, a Papeëte
-trader, happened to drop a remark one day about the amount of money some
-of these old skulls were worth.  Vaiti’s sharp intelligence linked on
-the casual saying at once to certain other wandering rumours she
-remembered, and she decided to find out something more.  She did not ask
-Ritter, for he was no talker, even to a handsome girl whom he admired;
-and the German was his compatriot, in any case.  But when the schooner
-reached Raiatea, where Professor Spricht was staying, Vaiti drifted off
-among the native huts, and squatted for an hour or two on the mats of
-the second chief’s wife’s mother’s cousin’s house, smoking a great deal,
-talking very little, and listening quietly.  By degrees the house filled
-up with interested natives all eager for gossip and chatter; and to
-Vaiti, pulling steadily at her cigar, and maintaining the grave,
-unsmiling demeanour proper to a princess of Atiu and a great Belitani
-chieftain’s daughter, the drawing out of the secret she wanted was as
-easy as spinning sinnet out of cocoanut husk.
-
-Nothing is private in the Eastern Pacific, and it was not long before
-all the professor’s personal affairs were tossing about like seaweed on
-the flood of general gossip—mostly unfit for publication—that surged
-about the apparently uninterested ears of the silent, splendid sea-queen
-throned on the pile of pandanus mats.... The Siamani (German) had got
-skulls in Niué, in Uea, in Mangaia, and was now collecting them about
-the Society group....  He was an ugly, grey-snouted pig to look at, and
-rooted in the earth like any pig; still, Taous and Mahina, daughters of
-Falani, seemed to think that—(details lost in a heated argument about
-the personal characteristics of the ladies)....  Anyhow, Vekia from the
-hills said he was going to buy her two silk dresses from San Francisco
-when he came back from Falaite Island; so he was not as mean as he
-looked.  Yes, he was going to Falaite Island in a great hurry; he would
-not even take time to finish his pig-rooting in Raiatea, on account of
-something he had heard from an old man who had once lived up in
-Falaite.... What fools the papalangi (whites) were.  Did not every one
-in the Islands know about the old, old people that used to live on
-Falaite, hundreds of moons before the days of Tuti (Cook), and how they
-all died, and nobody lived there for very, very long, until some people
-wandered up from Niué in Tuti’s time; and how the skulls of the old, old
-people were still there, buried in a cave that was a hundred miles long,
-and guarded by as many devils as would fill twenty war canoes?  Of
-course, these things were known, and always had been—but when would any
-man of Tahiti or Raiatea have thought of such folly as travelling more
-than a thousand miles to fight the devils and take away the skulls?
-What if they were worth money enough to buy a big schooner, as the old
-grey pig had told Vekia when he promised her those dresses?  Would a
-whole schooner, loaded down with dollars, be any good to a man after the
-devils had killed him?  Vekia would never get her trade finery, for all
-her airs; and Jacky Te Vaka, whose schooner was to be hired to take the
-Siamani up to Falaite, would never come back from such a sacrilegious
-journey....  Why could he not wait, and go by Kapitani Satoni’s schooner
-when she made her yearly trip by and by?  Every one knew that the
-_Sipila_ was under a charm, and no harm could come to any one on board
-her.  But he would not wait, and just as soon as Jacky’s boat came back
-from Bora-Bora, next week, they were to go....  Ahi! and Jacky was such
-a handsome man—it was a great pity!
-
-Such was the substance of the information gathered by Vaiti.  It
-resulted in her ordering the course of the ship to be changed, and
-heading direct for Friday Island, instead of going down to Auckland.
-Friday Island—out of the way, infertile, uninteresting, and little
-known—had been one of Saxon’s private preserves for some years.  He
-touched there once a year, purchased all the copra that the little place
-produced at his own price, and paid for it in cheap tinned meat, boxes
-of damaged biscuit, and tins of imitation salmon instead of cash.  He
-seldom went ashore, and certainly did not waste his time cave-hunting,
-if he did chance to set foot on the beach.  Vaiti, with her odd faculty
-for acquiring miscellaneous information, had known since the first time
-the _Sybil_ called that there were great caves on the island, and that a
-devil of unusual quality and size guarded them.  So much might have been
-said of a hundred similar islands, however, and she had not troubled
-herself about either caves or devils until the German professor’s secret
-set her on the alert for something that looked like a dangerous,
-exciting, and profitable adventure.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER IV*
-
-                            *THE BLACK VIRI*
-
-
-Moreover, as Harris had said, she had been devoured with desire of a
-real Paris dress ever since her stay in the Wellington hotel.  There had
-been a famous actress there at the same time, and all her garments had
-been freely paragraphed in the ladies’ column of the local press.  When
-she swam languidly through the hall of the Constantinople, shining
-mystic and wonderful out of a cloud of rainbow silks and chiffons that
-had cost a formidable row of figures in the Rue de la Paix, all the
-women caught their breath, looked once, and then gazed determinedly out
-of the windows, pretending that they had noticed nothing.  When she came
-in to a late supper, floating in spangled mists and sparkling with
-constellations of diamonds, every head was turned her way, and half the
-heads—the short-cropped ones—stayed turned, in more senses than one.  It
-was a revelation and a martyrdom to Vaiti.  What were her muslin frocks
-and her ten new hats at a whole pound apiece compared to this?  And the
-vision of money saved up faded away for the time being before the vision
-of one such frock—only one—belonging to her.  Life could surely offer
-nothing more.
-
-Of this, naturally, she said nothing to Pita, merely relating the matter
-of the skulls in as few words as possible.  Pita, for his part, made no
-comment, but took a couple of revolvers out of the boat and thrust one
-into his belt, handing the other to the girl.  Then he girded up his
-pareo—a significant action among islanders—and felt the handle of his
-knife to see that it was loose in the sheath.  There was a large sack in
-the boat containing candles and food, and leaving ample space for other
-filling later on.  Vaiti tossed it to Pita, and the two began their
-walk, barefoot, swift and silent, casting a quick glance every now and
-then among the weirdly stilted stems of the lonely pandanus groves as
-they went.
-
-"They are all down with the _Sybil_—it is safer now than it would be at
-night," said Pita.  "Vaiti, if we get these things, and sell them for
-much money in Sitani, you and I will leave the _Sybil_ when she next
-goes to Atiu; and you shall be queen of Atiu and I shall be king, and we
-shall eat roast pork and ’uakari’ every day."
-
-"My father would burn the villages and kill the chiefs, and hang your
-head on the bowsprit of the ship," replied Vaiti conversationally.
-"Besides, I like Sitani, and I will buy myself a wonder dress from
-Palisi town there."
-
-"Then we will leave at Sitani, and be great chiefs there, if these old
-bones indeed sell for so much money. And we will buy a little schooner
-for ourselves, and you shall be the real captain, and there will be four
-gold bands on your sleeve and one on the peak of your cap; and you shall
-get a _sitificati_ from the chiefs of the great harbour, and take the
-schooner out of Sitani Heads yourself.  And every one shall be afraid of
-me and you, and they will say——"
-
-Vaiti had been listening as she swung along, now casting a glance of
-approval at the handsome lad while he spoke cunningly of the schooner
-she should command, now shooting out her lip a little, and slashing
-impatiently with her knife at the young cocoanut fronds.  Suddenly,
-looking very straight ahead, she interrupted.
-
-"Pita, you talk too fast.  There are things you do not know.  Tell me,
-is your heart strong within you?"
-
-"It is strong," answered the island Maori.
-
-"Then listen.  There is a devil in the cave."
-
-"I do not believe in devils.  I am misinari, and go to church five times
-on Sundays; also I have a black coat and two boots very nearly the same
-as each other to wear on collection days."
-
-"There is a devil all the same; you do not know everything that is in
-the world, little Pita," replied Vaiti.  "There is something bad there.
-I do not believe in native devils, for I am ’papa-langi’; but I know
-there is—a thing of some kind—there.  A bad thing.  A black viri, they
-say, but I do not understand that."
-
-"A black viri is nothing.  You and I do not mind such things.  See—there
-will perhaps be one in this rotten wood."  Pita struck and kicked at a
-mass of decaying cocoanut wood, and hunted out one of the great black
-centipedes that are common in the equatorial islands.
-
-There is nothing on the bosom of Mother Earth more loathly than the
-centipede, and Pita’s quarry—nearly a foot long, as thick as a sausage,
-scarlet feelers on its hideous head, and scarlet legs fringing its long
-lithe body—was as hideous a specimen as ever jerked itself
-lightning-wise across a forest path.  Pita, however, with swift
-dexterity, seized the horrible beast by the neck and tail, holding it so
-that it could neither bite nor sting, and lifted it up to his companion.
-Vaiti’s eyes dilated ever so little.  She drew her knife and slashed the
-creature in two; then, stooping down, she struck at the flying halves as
-they ran away in opposite directions, and cut them up into mincemeat.
-Leaving the red fragments still wriggling in the track amidst an
-unsavoury, snaky smell, she stepped swiftly on.
-
-"It is no matter," she said.  "We two shall see what we shall see.  Keep
-your heart warm within you."
-
-"And if we come back safe?" cried the impetuous Pita, catching the
-girl’s warm round arms in his two sinewy hands, and letting his black
-eyes gaze into hers.
-
-Vaiti stood very still for a moment, looking out to sea. The spell of
-her stillness fell on Pita, and he remained as if frozen.  Far away the
-surf hummed on the reef, and a sea-bird cried.  Above the two beautiful,
-motionless young figures the palms rustled endlessly in the long trade
-wind.
-
-"... If we come back" ... said Vaiti at last, her eyes still fixed on
-the far-off line of the outer sea—"if we come back—we will go away
-together, you and I."
-
-She looked so like a witch in a trance (such things are not unknown even
-now, in strange Atiu) that Pita’s hands dropped from her arms, and he
-felt half frightened in the moment of his triumph.  But Vaiti recalled
-him to himself by starting her steady swing again, and saying with a
-laugh, as they footed it through the dry, sun-struck woods side by side:
-
-"I think some day my father will make a parrot cage to hang a green Atiu
-parrot in, and it will be made of your ribs and breast-bone, little
-Pita—all the same as my grandfather did in the islands to the man who
-stole his wife."
-
-At that moment the woods opened out and the cave came into view—a
-velvet-dark blot in the dazzling glare of greenery that tangled itself
-about the shoreward cliffs.
-
-Pita’s hand sprang to his revolver, and he uttered an exclamation of
-angry surprise.  Beside the cave stood a tall, brown, naked figure
-painted like a witch-doctor and armed with a spear.
-
-"Do not shoot," said Vaiti quickly.  "It will do no good.  Let me look
-to him myself."
-
-She walked right up to the native, stood within a yard of him, and
-stared at him, in a silence that somehow managed to express unflattering
-things.  The man, stamping the butt of his spear on the ground, turned
-away from her and addressed Pita.
-
-"I have nothing to do with this woman of yours," he said.  "It is with
-men I would speak."
-
-"Speak, then, pig-face," said Pita insolently, hoping to provoke a
-fight, since the man seemed to be alone.
-
-"Enter if you wish," replied the other.  "We have sent no fighting-men
-to hinder you; the way is clear. Yet if you think the hot sun on the
-pleasant land is good to see, and the beating of the warm heart in the
-living breast is sweet to feel, go not into our sacred caves, to lay
-evil hands upon the holy bones of Falaiti.  Enough."
-
-The man’s words were strangely void of heat or anger, and he held his
-spear loosely, Vaiti did not suspect an ambush, for she knew that no
-native would enter the cave.  Yet in that moment her quick mind leaped
-to the knowledge of some unknown danger threatening herself and Pita
-from out the cold-breathing world of darkness that lay within that
-rugged arch, and for one prophetic instant she could smell the very
-smell of death.
-
-But Vaiti’s courage was of the kind that rises, wave by wave, the higher
-for all obstacle, and her spirit swelled within her to flood-tide in
-that moment.  She turned upon the witch-doctor and laughed in his face.
-Then she stretched out her hand, and Pita’s leaped into it, warm and
-strong, and together they stepped over the threshold of the cave.
-
-The man outside cursed them, slowly and with relish.
-
-"Shall we not kill him?" asked Pita.
-
-"There is no use," said Vaiti.  "It is plain to me that all the tribe
-know, and they trust to the dangers of the place, whatever these may be.
-This island is at the very end of the world, it is true, and strange
-things may happen here."
-
-"Yes, there is nothing that one might not believe in this place," said
-Pita, looking back.  Already the gloom of Hades itself was winding about
-them, and the air struck gravelike and cold.  In the distance the mouth
-of the cave cast a brief glow of emerald light upon the dewy ferns and
-mosses close to the threshold, so that they shone like the jewelled
-foliage of some magic forest in a fairy play.  Then came the dripping
-roof, the enormous stalactite buttresses of the cave, dimly edged with
-light; the oozing floor, and the lifeless dark.
-
-Vaiti spoke not at all, as they walked side by side down dark tunnel
-after dark tunnel, across empty, thunderous-echoing black halls and
-archways—their little candles flitting like fireflies through a dim
-world of unconquerable gloom.  Pita, however, was strangely gay.  He
-yelled aloud to set the echoes booming in the black domes above, when
-they crossed some invisible great goblin market-place, full of hollow
-sounds and half-glimpsed monstrosities.  He sang when the way along the
-endless corridors grew tedious, and the glistening stalactite candelabra
-succeeded one another, thick as forest branches, for mile after mile
-unchanged.  When the path was barred by inky lakes of unknown depth and
-ghastly chill, and the two explorers had to tie their lights on their
-heads and swim for it, he pretended to cry at the cold, and played
-tricks on Vaiti by slipping behind her and catching her feet in his
-teeth.  So they went on, one in wild spirits, the other silent and
-grave. And the hours of the sunny day slipped by dark and changeless, as
-they passed farther and farther away life and light into the cold black
-depths of the cave.
-
-When it was about noon, as near as they could guess, Vaiti took the
-biscuits and tinned meat out of the sack, and they ate, squatting on the
-wet floor of the tunnel. They knew that the journey was a long one, and
-that the way could not well be missed, yet they were beginning to feel a
-little uneasy now.  Did this cave go on for ever?
-
-Somehow, the food did not cheer them and when they rose and went on
-again they did not talk.  And now a worse difficulty than any they had
-yet encountered suddenly barred the way.  The winding tunnel along which
-they were walking turned sharp round a corner, and then ended to all
-appearance in nothing.  They stood at the edge of an empty gulf, black
-as a starless sky and of depth unknowable.  Thin trickles of light. from
-the candles wavered faintly about its edges, and showed that the
-colossal crack had a farther side, but it was impossible to see what lay
-beyond, and the depth below cast back the candle rays as an armoured
-hull throws off a rifle bullet.
-
-Pita detached a lump of rock and threw it over the edge.  Vaiti watched
-him with sombre eyes.  "There is no bottom there," she said.  "It goes
-through the earth, and out on the other side; that is what I think."
-
-"Children’s talk," said Pita, listening intently. There was an echoing
-rattle as the stone bounded from side to side on its way down.  The
-rattle grew fainter and fainter, diminished to a sound like the ticking
-of a watch, faded to an almost imperceptible vibration, and then seemed
-to die out.  Seemed—for although there was nothing left for the ear to
-catch, the sharpened sensory nerves of the body still responded to a
-faint tingle, somewhere, somehow, long after the actual sound had faded
-away.
-
-"I told you," said Vaiti.  "There is no bottom."  Pita did not answer;
-he was measuring the narrowest part of the gulf with his eye, and
-estimating the value of the three short steps of a run that were
-possible before taking off.
-
-"It is not two fathoms wide here," he said, throwing the provision sack
-across to judge his distance better in the uncertain light.  Yet,
-despite the three steps of a run, there was not an inch to spare when he
-landed on the other side, with an effort that strained every muscle of
-his powerful young body.
-
-"Can you jump it?" he called to Vaiti—without any particular anxiety,
-for the Maori has no nerves, and he knew what the girl could do aloft on
-the schooner.
-
-To his astonishment, Vaiti made no answer, but stood leaning up against
-the wall of the tunnel, both hands pressed against her chest.  In a
-moment more she was violently sick.
-
-"The smell!" she said presently, turning a ghastly face towards the
-light of Pita’s candle.
-
-"I smell nothing," said Pita, puzzled.  "The wind blows your way.  There
-is perhaps some dead thing down there."
-
-Vaiti shook her head, and Pita saw that her eyes seemed to fill half her
-face as she looked down into the gulf.  Suddenly she sprang, her white
-drapery flying behind her, and landed half a yard behind Pita, with a
-leap that drew a cry of wonder from the Atiuan. "Come, come," she said,
-taking his hand and fairly dragging him on.
-
-They had little farther to go.  The tunnel wound on for perhaps another
-hundred yards, and then stopped. They found themselves in a low-roofed
-circular chamber, such as is often met with at the end of long
-underground passages—a small, insignificant place, roofed with drooping
-green stalactites and floored with shapeless, slimy hummocks of
-stalagmite.  Numbers of deep shelves were quarried out in the rocky
-sides, and in these lay, row on row, the bare, mouldering skulls of
-Falaite’s long-ago chiefs—many of them cracked and split, and not a few
-fallen into shapeless fragments, though there were a score or two in
-excellent condition. They were curious skulls indeed, had their
-discoverers been able to understand them.  In the projecting jaws, huge
-canines, strangely high cranium, and oddly developed ridges near the
-opening of the ear were the materials of a problem contradictory and
-complicated enough to occupy the wits of a whole college of science. But
-Vaiti and Pita saw none of these things.  They only noted with
-disappointment, that most of the skulls had gone to decay—picked out the
-best of the unbroken specimens, packed the great sack full of them, and
-turned homewards.
-
-"Vaiti," said Pita, as they walked down the rocky tunnel, and felt the
-slope of the gulf beginning under their feet.  "Vaiti, what did you——"
-
-Her face, turned back upon him, slew the still-born question on his
-lips.
-
-It was scarce a minute before the chasm gaped in their path yet again.
-The leap was worse on this side, for the clustered cones of stalagmite
-did not allow a fair take-off.  Pita looked calculatingly at the farther
-side, very dimly visible in the faint candle-light, and picked up a
-fallen stalactite to throw across.
-
-"Do not throw!" said Vaiti, in a breathless whisper.
-
-"Why not?  I can jump better if I hear where it hits," replied Pita,
-casting the stone before Vaiti had time to snatch at his hand.  It fell
-short, and rolled down into the chasm with a loud, crashing noise.
-
-"Fool! fool!  Jump quickly!" exclaimed Vaiti, in the same strained,
-horrible whisper....  Just for a second before he sprang, Pita looked
-down into the black pit beneath, and it seemed to him that the darkness
-shirred and shivered below the farther edge of the crevasse—that for the
-fragment of a second something long, red, whiplike, vibrated high up in
-the light of the candles, and then was gone....  There was a sickening
-odour in the air—a living smell, not a dead one; there was a sliding,
-rustling sound....
-
-"Jump!" shrieked Vaiti.
-
-They leaped through the air as one, but it was only Vaiti who landed on
-the farther side.  Behind her, as she touched the rock, rose a shriek
-that blasted the leaden air into red-hot drops of horror—that went on
-and on and on, tearing upwards to the vaulted roof like a rocket fired
-from the mouth of hell; breaking at last into a gasping bellow, and
-snapping off into grisly silence on the very crest of a long, choking
-roar, in which there was nothing left of human.
-
-... Pita had jumped short.  Falling on the far side, with his legs half
-over the abyss, he had grasped for an instant at Vaiti’s outstretched
-hands, and in the very act had been snatched away—snatched by a long,
-ghastly head, armed with poisoned jaws and quivering red antennas, that
-shot with the speed of a bullet out from the depths of the chasm, and
-back again with its prey....  The head was a foot long at least, the
-horrible winnowing feelers more than a yard, the black and red body,
-that just flashed into view for a second, was as thick as a man’s thigh.
-It was a nightmare, an impossibility, and yet ... it was, beyond doubt,
-the Black Viri.
-
-For a little while it seemed to Vaiti that she went mad, and then that
-the world went out and she died. A long time after, she found  herself
-sitting on  the floor of the tunnel, her head badly bruised and cut
-where she had dashed it against the rock, her candle guttering down
-towards extinction, her revolver empty and smelling of powder—she did
-not remember in the least how it had become so—and the whole black,
-horrible place still and silent as the bottom of the sea. Pita was gone.
-The bag of skulls had disappeared—fallen, no doubt, into the abyss.
-There was not a movement or a sound, save the whisper of the water—drops
-trickling ceaselessly from the roof into the dark pools upon the ground.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-That evening, when the early starlight was beginning to shine down upon
-the creepers veiling the mouth of the tunnel, Saxon, sober at last, and
-rushing like a madman to the cave to find his daughter, met Vaiti
-herself coming down the rocks at the entrance, haggard, trembling, and
-almost old.  He asked for Pita, and was answered only by a shuddering
-gesture of the hands. Questioning no more, he carried the girl down to
-the beach and brought her on board the schooner.  There, when they had
-sailed, he left her undisturbed in her cabin for many days, while they
-ran steadily southward to pleasant Auckland and the temperate latitudes,
-farther and farther away from lonely, sun-smitten Falaite.  The story of
-the day in the cave was known to him, as to every one on the island, for
-the witch-doctor of Falaite had told it far and wide, reserving only the
-one interesting fact—how he became possessed of the information.  And as
-no one else alive on Falaite knew that there were two ways of reaching
-the skull-chamber, and more than one place where a man could hide
-unseen, the witch-doctor’s reputation as a prophet and a clairvoyant was
-greatly increased; so that he suffered continually from a
-happily-acquired indigestion, and his dogs grew fat on bones of pig and
-fowl.  And no one came ever any more into the sacred caves of Falaite
-Island.
-
-Saxon declared plumply that he did not believe the tale, opining rather
-that the "blanked old wizard Johnnie had shoved Pita into the hole
-himself, and good riddance of bad rubbish, too."
-
-None the less, he was uneasy at Vaiti’s rather prolonged depression, and
-though he dared not break in upon her solitude further than to hand her
-in her meals and ask her how she felt, now and then, he listened almost
-constantly at her state-room door, and gave up whisky for at least ten
-days.
-
-About the eleventh day, Te Ai, a young Samoan A.B., sat upon the main
-hatch in the pleasant coolness of the second dog-watch, and sang the
-farewell song of sweet Samoa, "Good-bye, my F’lennie"—the song that
-plucks so surely at the heartstrings of all who have ever loved and
-sailed away among the far-off fairy islands of the wide South Seas.
-
-    "Good-bye, my F’lennie (friend)—o le a o tea,
-    Efau lau le va’a, o le alii pule i ..."
-
-he sang, beating time with his knees on the hatch.... Then suddenly he
-stopped, and the little group of mates and captain on the poop did not
-see why.
-
-Later on, Harris, his face stiff with suppressed laughter, knocked at
-the captain’s door.
-
-"Can you oblige me with a piece of sticking-plaster, sir?" he said.
-
-"Who for?" asked Saxon, reaching for the yellow roll that lies handy in
-every shipmaster’s cabin about the peaceful Pacific.
-
-"Te Ai, sir.  He’s been knocked down, and his head got cut against the
-pump."
-
-"Who did it?" bristled Saxon, ready to uphold his own peculiar
-privileges, at once.
-
-"She did, sir," said Harris, nearly choking.  "Te Ai, he was singin’
-’Good-bye, my F’lennie,’ on the main ’atch and out she come from the
-deck cabin like a—like a nurricane, begging your pardon, sir—and she ups
-with a belayin’ pin from the rail, an——"
-
-"All right, all right; there’s your plaster," interrupted Saxon.
-"Harris!  Here."
-
-"Yes, sir!"
-
-"Give this to Te Ai."
-
-"Lor’ bless you, sir, ’e don’t mind; ’e’s a——"
-
-"You do what you’re told.  Stop.  Where’s my daughter?"
-
-"Walkin’ on the poop, sir, uncommon lively, and looking like dirty
-weather ahead."
-
-"That’s all right," sighed the captain, with an air of infinite relief.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER V*
-
-                            *A DIAMOND WEB*
-
-
-It was six o’clock in Apia, and the round sun was hanging low above the
-rim of the level sea, like a burning coal ready to drop down upon a
-breadth of hyacinth silk.  The stores were closed along the straggling
-beach street, where the sand was white under foot, and parrakeets
-tweedled cheerily in the scarlet-flowered flamboyant trees.  Native
-dandies, greatly oiled and dyed, and wearing a bright hibiscus blossom
-over each ear, swung past with the inimitable Samoan roll, their golden
-brown limbs gay with the red-and-white English bath-towel that is
-popular as full dress for steamer days in the little island capital.
-Girls with high-coiffed yellow heads and pink or green tunics wandered
-lazily home to the cool, dark-domed native houses open all round to the
-sunset sky.  They went in groups, and sang as they walked—windy, fitful
-gusts of strange island melody, breaking out and dying away like the
-evening breeze among the heavy-headed palms.  Smells of yam and
-breadfruit, brown from the baking pits, of fish cooked in green, savoury
-leaves, and taro spinach stewed with cocoanut cream, crept out upon the
-cooling air.  The long, hot day was done, and Apia rested and ate.
-
-In "Charley’s"—the least reputable of Apia’s tavern-hotels—the egregious
-_table d’hôte_ was in full progress out in the green-shuttered verandah.
-Charley himself, an oily, flashy New Caledonian half-caste, dressed in
-striped pyjamas, was eating curried tin—nature unknown—with a knife and
-two fingers, at the head of the table.  A corpse-faced Chinese was
-shuffling round with the inevitable Pacific fowl, cut up in a watery
-soup.  The table-cloth was of linoleum, the swinging lamp guttered and
-smoked, the cutlery was dislocated and black.  But there was English
-beer on the bar counter, and plenty of broken ice; and the whisky that
-mounted high in each man’s smeary tumbler was good of its kind.  Charley
-knew his customers, and sought first the essential.
-
-Captain Saxon, his schooner safe at anchor outside, and his copra
-advantageously sold to an Auckland agent, sat eating at the table,
-heavy-faced, a little intoxicated, and almost absolutely blank in mind.
-This was his nearest approach to happiness, and one that he enjoyed
-often enough, for, since thought meant pain to him, he had managed to
-acquire a wonderful agility in avoiding it, and to live for the most
-part almost as purely by instinct and impulse as a dog.
-
-It was perhaps for this reason that he did not notice anything unusual
-in the demeanour of that singularly unknown quantity, Vaiti, his
-daughter.  And yet Vaiti—sombre and sparkling in a dress of vaporous
-red, with a handful of star stephanotis from the verandah thrust into
-the marvellous waves of her hair—was evidently not quite herself.  She
-sat a little apart from the noisy company that sprawled about the table,
-looked at no one, ate her food absent-mindedly and pulled little strips
-off the decaying oilcloth of the table-cover with a steady industry that
-made Charley wriggle in his seat, although he did not dare to
-remonstrate.
-
-Some one else was watching her, if Saxon was not. A short, stocky man,
-with burning grey eyes, a fiery red beard, and a sharp furrow between
-the eyebrows, that somehow suggested belaying-pins and rope’s ends, was
-looking at her every now and then as he noisily sucked in his soup.  The
-inspection did not appear to please him altogether.  He finished his
-dinner quickly, took the current glass of whisky in his hand, and rolled
-off to the dark end of the verandah, followed by a grey-haired,
-greasy-faced mate who had been sitting beside him.
-
-"Still on for it, cap?" asked the latter, leaning over the railing with
-an air of careless ease that contrasted oddly with his watchful eye.
-
-"Yes, blank asterisk your condemned foolishness, sure I am on for it!"
-replied the captain, betraying his nationality by a slight touch of
-brogue.
-
-There is no nation that swings so high and so low between opposite
-extremes of character as the impetuous race that is handcuffed, by an
-odd freak of geography, to steady, serious England.  Great saints and
-great rogues are commoner in Ireland than ordinary people, and each
-displays the fullest flavour of his kind. Donahue, master of the island
-schooner _Ikurangi_, was, or had been, Irish; and it was assuredly not
-the company of the saints that claimed his membership.
-
-The two spoke together for a little while in level tones that sounded
-loud and careless enough, yet somehow did not carry.  One learns these
-things by practice.
-
-"She smells a rat, I’m thinking," said the old mate, looking critically
-the while at Charley, as if he were valuing the half-caste’s clothes for
-pawn.
-
-"Let her.  You and I are apt to be a match for her, for all that,"
-answered the captain.  He looked at Charley also.  You would have sworn
-the two were discussing him, and rather unfavourably.  Charley himself
-shifted in his seat, and showed his magnificent teeth uncomfortably.
-
-"Think she’ll come on board?"
-
-Vaiti was watching them, her chin on her hand. Her expression was not to
-be read.
-
-"I’ll get her on board all right," answered the captain, keeping his
-eyes away from the girl with an effort.  "You play up, that’s all."
-
-"’Jer think you’re a match for that weasel in a woman’s skin—you or any
-of us?"
-
-"I do, then.  Forty’s a match for twenty any day in the year, if the
-heads of them comes anything near equal.  Cunnin’ as Old Nick she is,
-but I’ve been cunnin’ twenty years longer than her."
-
-"You pitched her a good yarn, I’ll lay."
-
-"I did that—about the derelick we boarded nor’-east of the Paumotus, and
-the Spanish ladies’ clothes and cases of goods that was lying about, and
-how we took what there was, includin’ of a di’mond necklashe that was
-sittin’ all its lone on the table in the old man’s cabin (Be minding me,
-now, or you’ll be making mistakes), and the way a gale riz on us before
-we was through, and hurried us back to the _Ikurangi_, so that we lost
-the derelick, and didn’t see no more of her; and how we heard in Noumea
-afterwards that there was like to be joolery on boord her, so that we’re
-all on to go and find her again."
-
-"Straight fact up to finding the di’monds, and gory lyin’ after that, I
-see.  But how d’ye make out the people that deserted the ship was such
-fat-headed idiots as to leave the joolery?"
-
-"Why, they was fat-headed idiots right enough; they did leave a good lot
-of saleable stuff, as you and I knows; and it’s only addin’ on a bit to
-say that the ship had been on fire and made them clear for their lives,
-so that they didn’t think of the valuables.  There’s the necklashe I
-have for proof.  And, mind me now, what we heard was that the people of
-the ship knows now that she didn’t go down, and will be out after her
-themselves when they can raise the cash, so that hurry’s the word."
-
-"How much of that’s true?"
-
-"Not a —— bit.  The people was drowned, I allow. But it hangs well, and
-don’t you go and forget none of it.  I pitched the yarn that way because
-of that bit of pashtry joolery I got hould of in mistake for goods down
-Melbourne way....  I misremember if I tould you."
-
-"You did, more nor once, and you was jolly well served right by her,"
-candidly replied the mate. "The yarn’s all right, I suppose, and the
-paste necklace is good business; but where does this Vaiti come in?"
-
-"Quit lookin’ at her, ye —— fool, and give me a light for me poipe.
-Talk easy, can’t you....  Why, she knows more navigation than most men
-that’s got a master’s ticket, and she’s as vain of it as a paycock. And
-that’s how I’ll have her.  Always get a woman t’rough her consate, me
-boy, especially if her eyes are too sharp in common.  That’ll pull the
-wool over them when nothing else will."
-
-"When I was in Callao——" began the mate, with an evil chuckle.
-
-"Leave Callao be now; you can tell me about her another time.  Well, you
-understand about Saxon’s girl, I hope?  She’s to navigate us on the
-trip, because nayther you nor I knows enough for a cruisin’ job like
-this, and the old chap himself is pretty general drunk—that’s the way I
-put it—and shares with what we find, and the ould divil himself to come
-along, just for propriety, and in case of a fight with the owners.  Oh,
-a nate yarn, and she shwallowed it down like a cat atin’ butter.  She’s
-comin’ on boord to-night, to see the necklashe and look over the chart
-I’ve marked. She’ll not bring ould Saxon, for she’s feared of nayther
-man nor divil, and I’ll bet she thinks to get the bearin’s of the place
-off of me and chate me out of it after all."
-
-"And how the h—— do you think she’s going to believe that you give the
-show away before the ship sails?  Her teeth wasn’t cut yesterday, by all
-we know."
-
-"Faith, and we do know!" muttered the captain, with a horrible
-undercurrent of oaths.  "And she’ll know, by —— she will!  I’d slit the
-throat of her, if it wasn’t for the other bit of divarsion we’ve
-planned."
-
-"Say you’ve planned," interrupted the mate darkly. "I call it bad work,
-whether she was man, woman, or child; but you’re my master."
-
-"And you’re a plashter saint, ain’t you?" sneered the captain.  "Let’s
-have no more of your chat; we know each other a —— sight too well.  As
-for the chart, she’ll think we don’t mean to give it away till she and
-her father is under sail with us, but she’ll come on the chance of
-sneaking it out somehow.  And when we’ve got her aboard, why—lave it to
-me!  Ould Saxon’s hell-cat daughter won’t take no more pearl-shell beds
-from us or any one else."
-
-"You ain’t afraid of her knowing who we are?"
-
-"How would she, then?  The _Ikurangi_ isn’t the _Margaret Macintyre_—bad
-luck to her who brought me down to such a tub, after ownin’ the finest
-auxiliary in Auckland!—and she never seen you or me till to-day. No,
-it’s all right.  That’s enough jaw; you go aboard, and attend to you
-know what, and then send off the boat for her and me."
-
-Vaiti, curly classic head on slender hand, still watched from her
-corner.
-
-Did she suspect?  There was nothing for suspicion to lay hold of.
-Donahue was one of the acutest villains under the Southern Cross, and he
-did not make clumsy mistakes.  The story of the derelict, of the
-valuables abandoned on board, of the necessity for finding the ship soon
-and secretly, might have sounded far-fetched to city-dwelling folk, but
-out in the wild South Seas stranger things may happen any day.  The plan
-was neat and plausible from every point of view, and Vaiti had taken the
-bait readily enough that afternoon. Yet Donahue felt—as the two walked
-silently down the dim, perfumed beach street, all ablow with vagrant sea
-winds and wandering wafts of song—that he would have given a good deal
-for just one peep into his handsome companion’s mind.
-
-Vaiti walked beside him, looking straight ahead. Had Donahue’s wish been
-granted, he would have thought somewhat less of his own acuteness.  She
-did suspect.  A man, in her case, would have been convinced by the
-reasonable aspect of the whole affair. Vaiti, being a woman, with
-sea-anemone tentacles of instinct floating and tingling all about the
-steady centres of reason in her mind, was convinced, and vet not
-convinced.  She thought it was all right, yet she knew it was not—after
-a woman’s way.
-
-In any case, however, it was an adventure, and there was a mystery to
-fathom.  So she put on a more substantial dress than the gauzy draperies
-she had been wearing, hung the neatest possible little pearl-handled
-Smith and Wesson round her neck, under the swelling folds of her frock,
-by means of an innocent-looking thin gold neck-chain that would snap
-with a tug; put her long-bladed knife in her pocket, with the sheath
-sewn to the dress, so that a pull would bring out the blade, and joined
-Donahue an hour after dinner, on the verandah steps, confident of her
-ability to see the thing through, whatever it might be.
-
-She looked sharply about her, as she stepped over the low bulwarks of
-the _Ikurangi_ and dropped down on to the encumbered, untidy deck.  No
-one about. Nothing to be seen but a dirty little main deck, with rusty
-pumps and a yawning hatch, and a poop that even in the pallid light just
-beginning to tremble up from the rising moon showed neglect of the
-sacred ceremony of daily deck-washing.
-
-Now, any decent ship’s captain will attend to his deck-washing, even if
-he doesn’t shave or wash himself from port to port.  Vaiti did not like
-that unscrupulous, dirty poop.  But she was already up on it, and
-Donahue was bowing her down the cabin companion, with a jarring smile
-and a good deal of over-fluent blarney.  The cabin was small and smelly;
-it had an oblong table in the middle, surrounded by cushioned lockers,
-and an open door at the end facing the companion.  This door evidently
-opened into Donahue’s own cabin, for a rough wash-stand and a
-looking-glass, the latter hung high on the bulkhead, were plainly
-visible.  There was a lamp nailed above the glass, and the two together
-shone brightly out into the rather ill-lit main cabin.
-
-"What’ll you take?" asked Donahue, with his unpleasant smile.  "I’ve got
-some sweet sherry wine, just the thing for ladies—or wouldn’t ye put
-your lips to a taste of peach brandy?"
-
-Vaiti shook her head.
-
-"No good drink, suppose talk business," she said. She would not have
-swallowed a glass of water on the _Ikurangi_ for a dozen Virot hats.
-
-Donahue had not expected to catch her so easily; still, he cast a
-thought of regret to his nicely-doctored liquors.  She evidently meant
-what she said—and the other way Was harder.
-
-"Well, thin, darlin’, we’ll have a look at the cha-art," he observed,
-producing a roll of paper.  "It’s yourself that can help us t’rough this
-business—you and the ould man—better than any one from Calloa to Sydney
-if only yez are raisonable about terms."
-
-He spread the chart out on the table, and weighted it down with a couple
-of tumblers.
-
-Vaiti, her mind charged full with watchful suspicion, felt that sudden
-small, sick thrill that is the forerunner of the thought—"I wish I
-hadn’t!"  Afterwards, when she came to think matters over, she knew that
-it was because Donahue had made the mistake of bringing out the chart
-before the terms had been discussed, which was an improbable sort of
-thing to do.  In such moments, however, one does not think, one only
-feels.  Still, the warning was unmistakable, and Vaiti made as if to
-rise, intending to plead sudden illness and get out on deck.  But
-Donahue, sharp as a snake, saw the movement, and brought out his trump
-card at once.
-
-"Sure, I’m a —— fool, I am, to forget the necklashe! You haven’t seen
-that yet," he said, whipping a stream of white fire out of his pocket
-and letting it fall across the dark wood of the table.  It was a
-magnificent piece of paste-work, and had taken in Donahue himself, some
-few weeks ago, after a fashion that made him sore enough to remember.
-Vaiti gasped when she saw it, and laid both her pretty olive hands upon
-it at once. Her suspicions were not exactly killed, but they had for the
-moment no room to live with the passionate feeling aroused by the gems.
-Donahue, with his unspeakable experience of the sex, had calculated
-rightly when he classified her among the women who would almost do
-murder for a diamond....  Such jewels! and she had never had one in her
-hand before, though her eyes had often filled and her heart ached with
-hopeless desire before the maddening glories of the jewellers’ windows
-in Auckland and Sydney.
-
-She hugged the necklace to her breast like a baby, she shook it, she
-danced it in the light....  And then, was it in woman’s nature to
-refrain from snapping the clasp about her neck, and feeling the dear
-touch of those cold drops and pendants on her bosom?
-
-"Ah, now, but you’re the beauty wit’ them little jokers round your neck!
-And the lovely neck you have, darlin’!" blarneyed Donahue.  He had
-better have been silent, for Vaiti, used to admiration of every kind and
-degree as to daily bread, felt the falseness of the tone.  If all other
-men admired her beauty, this one did not, though he said so.  His grey,
-goat-like eyes looked something more like hate across the narrow table,
-under the ill-smelling oily lamp, and Vaiti saw they did.
-
-Donahue, taught by twenty years of active villainy, was quick to feel
-the necessity for the next move. He went into his own cabin and turned
-up the lamp.  The looking-glass shone out brightly under its rays.
-
-"Come and look at yourself, me beauty," he said; "and let me ould
-shavin’-glass see the handsomest girl in the islands wearin’ what she
-ought to wear every day of her life, if she’d her rights."
-
-For the moment, Vaiti was not herself.  She was drunk with the jewels;
-she was crazed with the desire to see herself in them.  If heaven and
-hell had stood between her and the looking-glass, she was bound to go to
-it, and Donahue knew it, as surely as he knew that the moon would set
-that night.
-
-Vaiti—still sensing the danger that she would not heed, through all the
-intoxication of the jewels—thought, in a cinematographic flash, that one
-was safe before a glass, at all events....  No one could come up behind
-you....  Besides, there was the little revolver, hanging on the chain
-that would snap with a tug....
-
-And then, for the space of a full minute, she saw nothing, knew nothing,
-lived for nothing but the sight of her own dark, beautiful face in the
-glass, lit up into surpassing loveliness by the scintillating fires
-about her neck.  There was no movement in the mirror behind her.
-Donahue sat motionless at the table, and the cabin was very still.
-
-... The first ecstasy subsided, and she turned her head a little to see
-the diamonds twinkle....
-
-Donahue’s elbow knocked a glass off the table with a sharp crash.
-Almost at the same instant two powerful hands closed on each of Vaiti’s
-ankles, and snatched her feet from under her.  She plucked out the
-revolver as she fell, but her hands were caught, whisked behind her, and
-securely tied, with a prompt swiftness that told of frequent experience.
-In another minute her ankles were lashed together, none too gently; she
-was carried into a small state-room, thrown down upon the bunk, and left
-alone in the dark, with the slam of the door and snap of the lock
-resounding in her ears.
-
-Most women would have screamed.  Vaiti remembered that they were out in
-the middle of a wide harbour, and decided not to risk the infliction of
-a gag for such a slight chance of rescue....  Certain ugly scenes on the
-_Sybil_ rose up before her eyes.  No; decidedly it was her only policy
-to keep quiet.
-
-Outside there was the thud of bare feet running about the deck, the
-creak of the booms rising on the masts, the slatting of loose sails—loud
-orders, long yells from the native crew, as they pulled and hauled.  The
-_Ikurangi_ was making sail.
-
-Then sudden silence, slow heeling over of the cabin, lip-lap of hurrying
-water along the hull.  They were off. Where?  God—or the devil—only
-knew!
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER VI*
-
-                               *MAROONED*
-
-
-There was plenty of time for reflection in the long days that followed.
-The greasy-faced old mate came in and cut the lashings off Vaiti’s
-ankles and wrists, a few hours after sailing, and she was left free to
-move about the cabin, which offered a promenade of exactly seven feet by
-three.  Meals were handed in to her three times daily—the usual black
-tea, tinned meat, and weevily biscuit of second-class island
-schooners—and she was not in any way molested, though the door was
-always kept locked.  Donahue put in his head once or twice to look at
-her, as she sat cross-legged on her bunk, staring out through the port
-at the tumbling seas. He generally had something to say—a jarring,
-mocking compliment, or a remark about the time they were likely to make
-Sydney Heads—knowing all the time that Vaiti could estimate the general
-direction of their course by the sun, and that there was no southing in
-it. If she had ever feared any one, she feared this man—almost.
-
-It was not difficult to understand how the capture had been brought
-about.  A man under the bunk, another under the sofa opposite—her own
-eyes watching only the upper part of the cabin as reflected in the
-glass—nothing could be simpler or better planned.  The affair was none
-the less ugly on that account.  Perhaps it was only Vaiti’s burning
-anger at her utter rout and defeat in her own business of plotting and
-intrigue that saved her from something very like despair, as the
-schooner ploughed steadily on, day after day, carrying her into the
-great unknown, farther and farther away from all who could defend her.
-Yet, despairing or not, Saxon’s daughter never lost her courage.  They
-had taken her weapons from her as they carried her into the cabin, but
-they could not take away her undaunted spirit.  She waited her time.
-
-As to the meaning of the business, she trusted, again, to time’s
-enlightenment.  Saxon had many enemies; so had she.  It would all come
-out by-and-by. Meantime, it was clear that no one meant to murder her.
-What else might be meant she could not tell, and she did not care to
-speculate overmuch.  Under such circumstances one does best to save
-one’s nerve against the time it may be wanted.
-
-It was on the twenty-third day out from Apia, bearing, as far as she
-could discover, in a north-westerly direction, that she first noted the
-approach of land.  Nothing could be seen from her side of the ship, but
-she heard the long, excited cries of the island crew, and the thundering
-of their feet, as they began putting the ship about with unwonted
-vigour, to a chorus of native songs.  She strained her eyes eagerly when
-the ship came about on the other tack, but the line of the horizon was
-unbroken; and it was not for another hour that she saw, from her low
-elevation, what the look-out in the crow’s nest had sighted long
-before—a line of small black bristles pricking the edge of the horizon
-several miles away.
-
-Vaiti knew the sight at once for the palms of a low atoll
-island—evidently some barren, sun-smitten spot close up to the line—and
-a ready solution of the whole puzzling affair at once sprang into her
-mind.
-
-Marooning!
-
-Most people know the meaning of this term; nearly every one has heard of
-sailors captured by pirates in old days, and left on lonely islands, or
-even deserted by their own comrades on some isolated spot, with just
-enough food and water to save the marooners’ consciences from the guilt
-of actual murder.  Vaiti knew both the word and the thing very
-well-indeed, and she was almost certain that the _Ikurangi_ had gone off
-the course on the way to some South American port with the view of
-hiding her where she would not easily be found again.  There are many
-islands in the wastes of the vast Pacific where a ship may not pass once
-in half a century, and these—unlike the typical "desert" island of
-stories—are almost always barren, hungry, shadeless spots, where Crusoe
-himself would have been hard put to it to make a decent living.  The
-fertile, mountainous, well-watered isle is never without a native
-population, permanent or occasional, and is very seldom indeed, in these
-days, without a trader as well, and a regularly calling schooner.  As
-for the breadfruit, oranges, pineapples, the pigs and goats, the
-sugarcane and maize of uninhabited islands as known to fiction, they
-have no counterpart in real life.  All the valuable food plants and all
-useful animals are the product of importation and cultivation, ancient
-or modern.  It follows, that where there are no people and no ships,
-there is nothing worth having.
-
-Vaiti knew this very well, and decided that if she was going to be
-marooned, she might as well make such provision as circumstances
-allowed.  She had hunted over every inch of the cabin—which seemed to
-belong to the mate—during the long days of the voyage, and she knew
-exactly what it contained.  From the stores put away under the bunk she
-selected a large new sheet, which she concealed under her dress; a small
-stock of needles and thread, a box or two of matches, some hooks and
-line, and a stick of dynamite, evidently meant for some forgotten
-fishing purpose.  There was nothing in the shape of a knife, much to her
-regret; and there was a good deal of clothing that she would have liked
-to carry away; but it would not do to take more than she could easily
-conceal.  So she made an end of her preparations, and sat down to wait
-once more.
-
-There was no moon that night until very late, and darkness came down so
-close on the stroke of four bells that Vaiti felt sure they were very
-near the equator.  No one came near her, and tea seemed to be unusually
-late.  The anchor-chain roared home soon after dark, the ship lay very
-still, and there was a good deal of running about on deck.  Vaiti was
-confirmed in her anticipations of an uninhabited island by the fact that
-no boat was to be heard coming off from shore.  Not a sound of any kind,
-indeed, came from the island, and there were no lights on the beach.
-Some one handed her in her tea by-and-by, and a little later her door
-was flung open again by the mate.
-
-"Come on out," he said.
-
-Vaiti followed the mate out of the cabin at once, rather to his
-surprise.  She had made up her mind that anything was better than the
-_Ikurangi_, and she was looking out sharply for a chance—any chance—of
-turning the tables.
-
-It did not look at first as if she were to have one. The dinghy had been
-swung out when she got on deck, and a couple of men were standing ready
-to lower away. They were islanders, and she knew that they would
-befriend her if they could—indeed, their glances showed as much—yet what
-could they do?
-
-Donahue was nowhere visible.  He had planned this business with some
-forethought, and he wanted to have a chance of casting blame on his
-subordinate if any inquisitive Government official should incline to
-look the matter up later on.  So he stayed down in his own cabin,
-pretending to be asleep, and the mate, rather against his will, had to
-carry out orders alone.
-
-Just as the boat was ready to lower away, one of the men let her go with
-a run, and she struck the water stern first, with a terrible splash.
-The mate, screaming curses, ran over to the falls and began to abuse the
-crew. The dinghy was injured, and they had to haul her up and swing out
-the whaleboat instead.
-
-This took some little time, and Vaiti was forgotten for the moment—a
-chance that made her heart beat with eagerness to profit by it.
-
-Two ideas held possession of her—that she must plan to secure a boat,
-and that she must manage to do the _Ikurangi_ some sort of mischief.
-Was it to be borne that Donahue should go unpaid?  The blood of a
-hundred fierce Island chiefs made answer.
-
-Concerning the boat, she thought she saw a chance. They were bound to
-stay a day for wood and water, and that should furnish an opportunity.
-But the other matter?
-
-If she could only get hold of the ship’s papers and destroy them!  That
-would be satisfactory.  She knew, none better, that a ship’s papers are
-her character, her "marriage-lines" of respectability.  Without them a
-vessel is an illegitimate, furtive creature, every man’s hand against
-her, every official eye turned coldly upon her.  Vaiti would have liked
-very well to get hold of the _Ikurangi’s_.
-
-But, careless as Donahue was, the papers were not to be found in the
-little deck cabin which he used as a chart-room.  Vaiti, disappointed,
-took one of the charts and began studying the position of the ship, with
-a view to finding out the name of the island off which they were lying.
-The chart was almost a blank, nothing being marked upon its wide expanse
-but a number of reefs and two or three atolls—Bilboa Island, Vaka,
-Ngamaru—dotted hundreds of miles apart in a naked waste of white.
-Bilboa, an abandoned guano island, of which she had heard something,
-seemed to Vaiti the most likely of the three spots.  Ngamaru, she knew,
-had a native population, and about Vaka she could for the moment
-remember nothing, although she knew she had heard something once upon a
-time. All this part of the Pacific was far removed from the _Sybil’s_
-haunts, and indeed from the haunts of any other ship of which Vaiti had
-ever heard.
-
-It did not seem to be a healthy place for schooners; the reefs round
-both Vaka and Bilboa were many, and most were marked "Position
-doubtful."  Donahue was evidently not familiar with either place, for
-the chart was freshly pencilled over with notes and corrections.
-Vaiti’s heart leaped up as she looked at the careless work....  She saw
-a way.
-
-They were still clearing the lumber out of the whaleboat on deck.  No
-one was watching.
-
-Vaiti took a pencil and rubber, and began to do some artistic
-alterations on the chart, helped by her knowledge of seamanship.  In ten
-minutes she had converted the innocent piece of parchment into a perfect
-death-trap, rolled it up and replaced it, put back the rubber and
-pencil, and slipped out again on deck, where she sat down on a coil of
-rope and waited.
-
-In another couple of minutes the boat was in the water, and the mate
-called rudely to Vaiti.  She came without a word, covering her face with
-her dress, and sobbing bitterly.  She stumbled as she walked; you would
-have sworn she was weak, broken in spirit, and utterly helpless.
-
-If the mate felt any compassion, he did not dare to show it.  They
-shoved off, two natives at the oars. Vaiti, sobbing effectively behind
-her hands, kept a sharp look-out with the corner of one eye as they slid
-across the dark water, but she could see nothing save a faintly
-glimmering line of grey shore, and hear nothing but the humming of the
-surf on the reef.
-
-As soon as they reached the shallow water near the shore, the mate took
-Vaiti by her arm and roared, "Out you go!"
-
-Sobbing afresh, in the most natural and convincing manner in the world,
-she obeyed....  It was dark, and the native who rowed bow oar never knew
-that she whipped his knife dexterously out of his belt as she passed
-him.
-
-"Why are you marooning me?" she wailed, as she waded through the warm,
-shallow water towards the shore.
-
-The mate leaned out of the boat, now fading fast away into the starry
-gloom, and shouted as he disappeared:
-
-"To pay for Delgadas Reef and the _Margaret Macintyre_!"
-
-Vaiti, who had reached the shore, almost sat down with the shock.  So
-that was it! that was it! The pearl-shell lagoon out of which she,
-almost unaided, had "jockeyed" the schooner _Margaret Macintyre_, some
-months before, was bringing in a crop other than pearls—of which last,
-indeed, the canny Scot who had financed the working of the place had had
-very much the larger share.
-
-Well, things must be taken as they were found.  The soft tropic night
-stirred gently round her.  The stars were large and golden; they shone
-in the still lagoon like little moons.  Palm trees waved somewhere up in
-the dusk above, striking their huge rattling vanes together with the
-swing of the night-breeze.  It was land, safe, solid land, and the sand
-was warm and soft, and Vaiti was tired.  She walked a little way up the
-beach, stretched herself under a pandanus tree, and went to sleep....
-
-Some hours later she woke, with the dim, mysterious volcano-glow of the
-tropic dawn in her eyes, and a curious feeling of disquiet about her
-heart.  Still half asleep, she saw the long grey shore sloping down to
-the silent lagoon, the ink-coloured pandanus trees standing up against
-the dull orange sky, the leaning stems and stumps of coco-palms, dark
-and formless in the shadow.  She shut her eyes and tried to sleep again.
-
-No use.  That nameless disquiet—now almost fear—still stirred at her
-heart.  She opened her eyes once more, and looked about.  A little more
-light—the touch of a glowing finger away in the east—a clearer defining
-of the cocoanut stumps, snapped off near their roots in the last great
-hurricane....  One of the stumps was oddly shaped—almost like a human
-figure.  She could have fancied it was a rude image of a sitting man,
-only that the profile, against the lightening east, was featureless, and
-there was nothing to represent the hands.
-
-"I will not be frightened by a rotten cocoanut tree," thought Vaiti.  "I
-will sleep again till it is light.  Am I not a sea-captain’s daughter,
-and the descendant of great Island chiefs, and shall I fear the fancies
-of my own mind?"
-
-Determinedly she closed her eyes again, and lay very still.  The dawn
-wind began to stir; the ripples crisped upon the beach; the locusts in
-the trees broke out into a loud chirr-ing chorus.  And as the day broke
-silver-clear upon the shore, Vaiti, still lying on the sand, felt that
-some one, in the gathering light, was watching her as she lay.
-
-Wary as a fox, she opened her dark, keen eyes without stirring her body
-... and looked straight into a face that was bending almost over her ...
-a face hooded by a black cloth that hid the head and brow, and only left
-to view ... O God!  O God! what was it?
-
-The thing was featureless.  Nose, eyes, and mouth were gone.  In the
-midst of a cavern of unspeakable ruin the ghastly throat gaped vacant.
-Two handless, rotting stumps of arms waved blindly
-about—feeling—feeling....
-
-Could it hear?  Some instinct told the girl that it could.  Softly as a
-snake she writhed out of the reach of those terrible groping arms.
-
-It did hear.  It sprang blindly forward—it snatched.
-
-With one leap Vaiti was on her feet.  Never looking back, she fled down
-the open beach, the sand spurting behind her as she ran.  She heard a
-dull padding in her rear at first; it soon grew faint, but she ran on
-blindly, long after it had died away—ran, while the sun climbed over the
-horizon and cast down handfuls of burning gold on her uncovered
-head—ran, while the beach grew parchment-white and dazzled back the heat
-into her face like an open furnace—ran till at last her over-driven body
-gave way, and the sand spun round and the sky turned red before her
-eyes.  Then only she staggered into the shade and dropped down upon a
-green mattress of convolvulus creeper to rest.
-
-And now, when she had leisure to think and strength to cast off the
-haunting horror of that inhuman face, she knew what Donahue had done.
-
-This was not Bilboa, the uninhabited guano island that she had feared.
-This was infinitely worse—it was Vaka, the leper isle!
-
-She remembered that she had once heard a dim rumour of Vaka and its
-ghastly leper people—the remnant of a plague-smitten tribe long ago
-forcibly exiled there from one of the fierce western groups.  No ships
-ever called at this graveyard of the living; it was supposed that the
-cocoanuts and fish of the island provided sufficient food for the
-people, and no one cared to run the chance of their stowing away and
-escaping, especially as they were known to be both daring and
-treacherous on occasion.  Donahue had indeed laid his plans well for the
-most hideous revenge that the heart of man or devil could conceive.  A
-few weeks or months in this charnel-house of horrors, where the very air
-must reek of contagion, and what would it avail her if, after all, some
-stray, storm-driven vessel should rescue the castaway? Better, then,
-that she should stay and die among the other nameless nightmare horrors
-that walked these stricken shores.
-
-No!  Vaiti, sitting cross-legged on the netted vines and staring grimly
-out to sea, then and there took resolve that such a fate should not be
-hers....  Sharks were uncertain, if you really wanted them; but the
-stick of dynamite she had taken from the mate’s cabin was safe and sure.
-If she failed in using it for the special purpose she had planned, she
-would put it in her mouth and light the fuse....  There would be no more
-trouble after that.  And as for the flies—one did not feel them, of
-course, when one was dead.
-
-All the same, she did not mean to die if she could avoid it, and, as the
-first step towards helping herself, she knocked some nuts off a young
-palm, and took her breakfast off the refreshing water and juicy meat.
-Then she cut a length of bush rope, looped it round the tallest palm in
-sight, and set her feet inside the loop, so that she could work herself
-up to the top of the tree, monkey-on-stick fashion, leaning against the
-rope.  When she got into the crown of the palm she knelt among the
-leaves, holding on tightly, and looked right and left over the island.
-
-It was a pure atoll, an irregular circle of feather palms lying on the
-sea like a great green garland set afloat. The inner lagoon was several
-square miles in extent, but the land was not more than a few hundred
-yards wide at any point, and there was no soil to speak of.  The palms,
-the scanty, pale green scrub, the mop-headed pandanus trees, the
-trailing creepers, all sprang out of pure white coral gravel and sand.
-The scene was lovely as only a coral atoll can be—the jewel-green water
-of the inner lagoon, shaded with vivid reflections of lilac and pale
-turquoise, the stately circled palms, the wide, white beach enclasping
-all the island like a frame of purest pearl, the burning blue of the
-surrounding sea, all combined to form a picture bright as fairyland and
-sparkling as an enamelled gem set upon a velvet shield.
-
-But Vaiti, while she saw and admired the loveliness of the scene, also
-recognised its barrenness as only an islander could.  No fruit, no
-roots, little fresh water—nothing, in fact, but cocoanut and pandanus
-kernels, eked out by a little fish....  The lepers must often go hungry.
-
-The hot day turned suddenly chill as Vaiti recalled those blind,
-snatching, handless arms.  They came of a cannibal race, these Vaka
-folk.  What if she had not waked?  What if, wearied as she well might
-be, she slept too long and too soundly in the night that was to come?
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER VII*
-
-                      *THE TURNING OF THE TABLES*
-
-
-She looked narrowly about the island, hoping to discover the place where
-the lepers lived.  A cluster of small, miserable huts, on the far side
-of the lagoon, attracted her attention.  It seemed not more than half a
-mile from the spot where she had spent the night.  The best fishing
-grounds she judged, by the look of the shore, to be near the village.
-She was therefore, no doubt, several miles from their usual haunts.
-
-So far, so good.  Where was the schooner?  It lay to her left about a
-mile out at sea, close to a small, uninhabited, sandy islet.  Vaiti
-supposed that the men were cutting wood and looking for water.  She saw
-one or two black dots on the shore, recognisable by their blue dungaree
-clothing, and strained her eyes eagerly to see if the dinghy had been
-pulled up on the sand, for in this lay her only chance.  If they brought
-the boat up on the beach, to repair her where wood could be had without
-going to the atoll itself (Vaiti would have wagered that the _Ikurangi_
-did not carry a splinter outside of the galley fuel), then the schooner
-would probably stop overnight.  In that case she could carry out her
-plans. Otherwise ... there was always the dynamite.
-
-The dinghy was ashore, drawn well up on the beach.
-
-She drew a breath of relief, and slid down the tree again.  Now she
-could wait till night with an easy mind.
-
-All day she hid in the tangle of young palm and low-growing scrub that
-clustered about the foot of the loftier trees.  Once she saw a couple of
-the lepers pass by in the distance, evidently looking for something.
-These had eyes, and she crept closer into the shelter of the scrub till
-they were gone.  Then she came cautiously out, and plucked long sheets
-of the fine pale-brown natural matting that protects the young shoot of
-the cocoanut, to cover up her white dress, for the scrub was dangerously
-thin, in that staring overhead sun.  She did not venture down to the sea
-to fish, but fed upon cocoanuts during the day.
-
-Night came at last—night and coolness, with big stars shining in the
-lagoon, and a gentle breeze stirring among the palms.  About midnight,
-as near as she could guess, Vaiti came out of her shelter and prepared
-for action.
-
-She took off her clothes, and fastened about her waist a petticoat of
-the dark-coloured cocoanut matting which she had stitched together
-during the day.  So habited, with her olive skin and black hair, she
-knew that she was invisible in the darkness of the night.  She fastened
-the dynamite, and a box of matches, into the coil of hair on the top of
-her head, stuck her knife into the waist of her petticoat, and walked
-down the beach into the warm, dark sea.
-
-She knew very well that the outer side of an atoll commonly swarms with
-sharks, but the risk did not trouble her.  There was something a good
-deal worse to face on the island than any number of sharks.  Heading for
-the distant light of the schooner, she swam through the starry water
-with the low, dog-like island paddle that can cover such marvellous
-distances—keeping her head well out, and quietly taking her time.
-
-It was a long swim, but it ended at last, and the schooner rose up
-before her in the water, black and silent, and shifting ever so little
-upon the swell of the incoming tide.  The stars made little trickles of
-light upon her wet, dark hull.  Two boats lay alongside—the dinghy,
-freshly mended and watertight, and the whaleboat, loaded with wood and
-cocoanuts.  After the slovenly fashion of the _Ikurangi_, they had left
-the boats until the morning to hoist inboard, seeing that it was dead
-calm in the lee of the islet.
-
-This was more than Vaiti had hoped for, and it made her task easy.  She
-cut the dinghy’s painter, got into the boat, and muffled the oars with a
-strip or two torn from her petticoat.  Then she put the dynamite into
-the whaleboat, cut and attached a good long fuse, set a match to it, and
-saw that the tiny red spark was steadily eating its way along, before
-she pulled off from the ship. She towed the whaleboat after her a little
-way, and then let it go thirty or forty yards from the ship.  It was not
-her desire to wreck the schooner at Vaka Island, and possibly let loose
-her enemies upon the atoll; rather she wished the ship well out of the
-way before any disaster should overtake her.  The charts would most
-probably ensure that matter.  The destruction of the boat was only
-intended to secure her own possession of the dinghy.
-
-She had scarcely reached the shore before a loud explosion boomed out
-across the water, and immediately after lights began to stir on board
-the schooner.  Vaiti worked with coolness and speed, knowing that it was
-not likely, though possible, that any one would swim ashore.  From her
-eyrie in the coco-palm she had noted a deep, narrow creek running up
-from the lagoon—a mere crack in the coral, but wide enough to admit a
-small boat, taken in with care.  There was just enough light from the
-stars to enable her to find the place, and run the boat up on the sand
-at the end, into the heart of a tangle of leaves and creepers that
-entirely concealed it.  For safety’s sake, she cut a few more armfuls of
-trailing vines from the shore, and buried the boat two or three feet
-deep, so that neither from the sea nor the land could it possibly be
-seen.
-
-As she worked, she could hear shouts and cries, made faint by distance,
-coming across the water from the schooner.  She could imagine the scene
-that would take place on board when they found themselves boatless. Some
-of the native crew—not Donahue or the mate; they would never face the
-sharks—would probably swim ashore to-morrow to investigate.  Well, let
-them!
-
-Having finished the concealing of the dinghy, she got into it herself,
-put on her clothes again, drew the tangled creepers well over her, and
-went calmly to sleep, secure that no one could find her unless she chose
-to be found.
-
-All the same, she was very cautious about getting up the next morning,
-and looked carefully between the leaves before she ventured out of her
-hiding-place.  She covered up her light dress with the cocoanut canvas,
-and then climbed a palm to look about.
-
-People were moving hurriedly about the decks of the schooner; something
-seemed to be going on.  As she watched, she saw two natives, clad only
-in loin-cloths, stand up on the bulwarks, ready to dive.  In another
-moment they had flashed down into the sea, small as ants to sight at
-that distance, but perfectly clear to Vaiti’s sea-trained eyes.  Then
-the dark specks began to make their way across the water.  The sun was
-newly risen, the sea was still a mirror of molten gold, and the tiny
-black heads stood out sharply on its surface.  Vaiti set her teeth as
-she watched them creeping on.  They were island men, of her mother’s own
-race, and they had done her no harm.  And ... the longer a vessel lies
-at anchor in equatorial latitudes, the more certain it is that sharks
-will gather round her—even if there has been no explosion in the water
-alongside to kill the fish and collect the tigers of the sea from far
-and near.
-
-Vaiti looked away, and began desperately to count the nuts clustered
-among the palm-fronds at her feet....  How many were there?
-Ten—fifteen—twenty——
-
-A long, despairing shriek tore across the water.  She put her fingers in
-her ears and buried her face in the leaves.  Yet, all the same, she
-heard a second cry, short and sudden, and quickly ended.  There was
-nothing more.  She lifted her face again, her teeth set tight into her
-lower lip.  The two black heads were gone.
-
-"No one will come ashore to-day," she said, with a shiver.  Something
-seemed to stab her, as she thought of that doctored chart in the
-schooner’s deck cabin. The reefs on the course to South America were
-hundreds of miles from shore—the ship had no boats—and the native crew
-must suffer with the villainous captain and mate, if the disaster that
-she had plotted so carefully should come about....  There would be
-sharks there, too, when the ship broke up....
-
-The crystal-gold of the sea turned dim before Vaiti’s eyes.  It was only
-a mist of tears that lay between, but to the girl’s excited imagination
-it seemed like the spreading and darkening stain of blood.
-
-Careless of whether she was seen or not, she slid down the tree and
-rushed into the scrub, where she sat down upon the sand and cried like a
-mere nervous schoolgirl. The sun was past the zenith when she lifted her
-head again; the schooner had put out to sea, and lay, a far-off snowy
-speck, upon the blue horizon.
-
-Vaiti stood up, flung back her hair, and cast the trouble from her.  She
-could not afford to grieve over the inevitable now; there was too much
-to do.  The boat had to be prepared and provisioned, and that was not
-the work of a moment.
-
-She husked and opened a number of large cocoanuts, and removed the
-insides.  She then cut a quantity of young palm-leaves, and plaited them
-into baskets, which she filled with the cocoanut meat.  Afterwards she
-cut down dozens of young green nuts for drinking, husked them to save
-space, and slung them together in bunches with strips of their own
-fibre.  This done, she hid the provisions in the boat, and set about her
-own supper, as it was almost dark.
-
-Nourishing food she felt she must have, if she was to get through with
-her enterprise, but she dared not attract attention to herself by going
-out torch-fishing on the reef.  However, there were certain holes in the
-ground about the roots of the palms that to her experienced eye promised
-something better than fish.
-
-She dug a fire-hole in the gravel at the end of the gully where she had
-hidden the boat, lined it with stones, and made a fire, looking well to
-it that no gleam should be visible from above.  When the stones were
-beginning to heat, she took a piece of palms-leaf in her hand, hid
-herself in the bush, and waited, still as a rock.
-
-By-and-by there was a faint scuffling among the roots of the trees, and
-a shadowy thing began climbing up the trunk of a palm.  Vaiti waited
-till it had disappeared in the crown of the tree, and then climbed after
-it to a point about ten feet from the top, where she tied her strip of
-leaf round the trunk and came down again.
-
-Thump! thump!  Two cocoanuts fell to the earth. The crab (for it was a
-cocoanut crab of the biggest and fiercest kind) was getting his supper.
-Now he would come down the tree, rip open the nuts with his formidable
-claws, and enjoy the contents.
-
-Slowly he began to back down the palm, his sensitive tail ready to tell
-him when he had touched earth and might safely let go.  And now it was
-that Vaiti’s trap (a well-known native trick) proved his undoing.  The
-belt of dry leaflets round the tree tickled his tail, he promptly let
-go, and fell with a crash seventy feet through air on to the pile of
-coral lumps that Vaiti had heaped up at the foot of the tree.
-
-The girl picked him up, badly injured and unable to use his claws (which
-were big enough to crack her ankle), and put an end to him with a clever
-stroke of her knife. He proved to be two feet long in the body alone,
-and of a fine blue and red colour, as seen in the dim light of the fire.
-She put him on the heated stones, wrapped in leaves, buried him until
-cooked, and then enjoyed a hot supper that an epicure might have envied.
-
-Strengthened by the good food, she worked on late into the night,
-catching more crabs, whose meat she hoped she could dry in the sun,
-making a rough sail out of the bed-sheet she had carried away from the
-schooner, twisting sinnet plait out of cocoanut husk for ropes, cutting
-and trimming a small pandanus for the mast. She had all her plans laid,
-and knew what she meant to do.  Her present position was about five
-hundred miles from the Marquesas, and the south-east trades would be in
-her favour.  With lines for fishing, a beaker full of fresh water on
-board (she had found that in the dinghy when she took it away),
-cocoanuts to help out with, and plenty of crab to dry, she hoped that
-she might manage to reach the islands before her strength or her food
-gave out.  Greater voyages had been done many a time in mere canoes, and
-the dinghy was a large boat of its kind, strong, well built, and new.
-If she failed—well, any death, any horror that the wide seas could hold
-was better than Vaka Island.
-
-All being ready, she lay down and slept till dawn—a somewhat restless
-sleep, for it was full of wandering dreams, and all the dreams took one
-shape: Donahue’s schooner, snared by the lying chart, rushing helpless
-to her end, with the green-eyed tigers of the sea hovering ever about
-the reefs, and waiting ... waiting....
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-"I don’t think the patient can see any one," said the nurse doubtfully.
-
-The big, yellow-haired sailor took off his hat and stepped up on to the
-verandah.  It was a very beautiful verandah.  You could see most of Suva
-Bay from it, and half the tumbled purple peaks of Fiji’s wonderful
-mountains lying across the harbour.
-
-"If you could stretch a point, ma’am," said the sailor, "it might be as
-well for him.  I’ve got good news."
-
-"About his daughter?" asked the nurse.  She, like every one else in
-Suva, was deeply interested in this especial patient’s story.  He had
-come to Suva in his own schooner, the _Sybil_, several weeks before,
-furious with rage and despair at the loss of his daughter, and eager to
-demand assistance from the High Commissioner of the Western Pacific,
-although it seemed by no means clear in what manner Her Majesty’s
-representative could aid him.  Before the matter had even been
-discussed, however, he had fallen seriously ill of sunstroke and
-excitement combined, and had been sent to hospital, with rather a bad
-chance of recovery.  He was just turning the corner now, and the
-nurse—who could not but admire his rather weather-beaten good looks and
-romantic history—regarded him as her most interesting patient.
-
-"Yes, it’s about his daughter," answered the sailor. "I’m the mate of
-the _Sybil_, ma’am; Harris is my name. Perhaps you’d kindly read this."
-
-He held out a long slip of printed paper, containing a _résumé_ of the
-cables for the day—Suva’s substitute for a daily paper.
-
-The nurse took it, and read:
-
-"The missing daughter of Edward Saxon, owner and master of the trading
-schooner _Sybil_, has at last reappeared.  Her fate has excited much
-interest and conjecture all over the Pacific.  She arrived in Sydney
-yesterday on board the cable-ship _Clotho_, by which she was picked up
-on the 2nd instant, in an open boat, alone, and two hundred miles from
-any land.  She had experienced bad weather, and was much exhausted for
-want of food, but declared herself capable, if it had been necessary, of
-reaching the nearest island group unaided.  She had been carried away,
-as was surmised, by the captain of the island schooner _Ikurangi_, who
-marooned her on a remote leper island, Vaka, and then sailed for South
-America.  Revenge for the loss of a pearl-shell bed of disputed
-ownership is said to have been the motive of this unparalleled outrage."
-
-"He shall have it at once," said the nurse cordially. "It’ll do him more
-good than our medicines."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-The story was a popular one in the hospital for months after, and it had
-not been quite forgotten when, towards the close of the hot season, a
-Sydney paper furnished the last chapter of the tale.  Saxon’s late nurse
-read it aloud to the others at afternoon tea, and they all agreed (not
-knowing how Vaiti’s fingers had cogged the dice of chance) that it was a
-wonderful Providence and a real judgment.  The item read:
-
-
-                     "THE LAST OF AN OCEAN ROMANCE.
-
-"News comes via Tahiti from Nukahiva, Marquesas Islands, of the arrival
-of a shipwrecked crew on a raft, six weeks ago.  They were the survivors
-of a disaster that destroyed the notorious schooner _Ikurangi_ whose
-master, it will be remembered, kidnapped and marooned the daughter of a
-British captain some months ago.  The schooner, after leaving the
-island, sailed for Callao, but was wrecked on an uncharted reef three
-days east of Vaka, and went to pieces.  The crew escaped on a raft, and
-underwent great suffering in their efforts to reach land.  The captain
-and mate were drowned."
-
-
-"And serve them right, too!" said the audience.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER VIII*
-
-                       *THE WHITE MAN OF NALOLO*
-
-
-"By Jove! it’s a white man," said Saxon, checking like a pointer on the
-threshold of the low dark doorway.
-
-"Certainly.  Very pleased to meet you," observed the figure on the mats.
-It was sitting cross-legged, clad only in a waist-cloth, and the house
-was a Fijian chief-house in a mountain village three days’ journey from
-the nearest white settlement—but the thing squatted on the mats was
-undoubtedly white, and—English?  Well, no; Saxon thought no.  The phrase
-was American in flavour.  He stepped across the threshold, and came a
-little way in, relieved in mind.  When you have been dead and buried
-among the islands for a quarter of a century it is much pleasanter not
-to run the risk of meeting other ghosts (with university accents,
-tea-coloured families, and a preference for modest retirement on steamer
-days) who may possibly have been alive together with you before...
-
-Before....  The word means much in that vast Pacific world, sepulchre of
-so many lost hopes and forgotten lives.  We do not, in the Islands,
-cultivate curiosity as a virtue, since it would be likely to bring
-rather more than virtue’s own reward after it.  We do not ask cross
-questions, because the crooked answers might involve questions of
-another sort.  And when overfed, sanguineous passengers from smart
-liners happen along and tell us, as a new and excellent joke, that the
-proper formula for receiving an introduction in the Islands is: "Glad to
-meet you, Mr. So-and-so; what were you called _before_?" we smile an
-acid smile, and pretend we are amused....
-
-Saxon was very tired, having walked thirty miles that day, and very
-hungry, being out of luck, and more or less on the tramp.  But I think,
-tired as he was, he would have found another village to rest in if the
-derelict white on the mats had spoken with the shibboleth of his own
-class and country.
-
-As things were, the look of the house pleased him, and he came in and
-folded himself up on the mats.  The other man noted that he selected a
-"tabu kaisi" mat (a kind strictly forbidden to all but chiefs or
-whites), and that he looked hopefully towards the kava bowl.
-
-"Not the first time you’ve stopped under a pandanus roof, I guess?" he
-remarked.
-
-"No," said Saxon.  "Whose house is this?"
-
-"Mine," said the stranger.  "Make yourself at home."
-
-It was a handsome chief-house of the best Fijian type, forty feet from
-mats to ridge-pole, the walls covered with beautifully inlaid and
-interwoven reeds, the roof bound together with exquisite sinnet work in
-artistic patterns, of red, black, and yellow, and towering up into a
-dark, cool cavern of pleasant gloom.  The floor was overlaid with fine
-parquetry of split bamboo at the "kasii" or common-folk end, and piled
-deep with fine mats in the "chief" part.  A Fijian bed, ten feet wide
-and three feet high, ran like a dais right across the end of the house.
-It was covered by mats prettily fringed with coloured parrot feathers.
-There were three great doors, east, west, and south, each framing in its
-dark-set opening a different picture of surpassing loveliness.  Nalolo
-town (its name is on the map of Fiji, but it reads otherwise) stands
-very high on the sheer crest of a pointed green hill that is just like
-the enchanted hill in the pictures of a fairy tale.  There is a little
-round green lawn on the top, and all about it stand the high, pointed
-beehive houses of the town, each perched on its own tiny mound like a
-toy on a stand.  Sloped cocoanut logs run up to the doors of the houses,
-and quaintly coloured crotons cluster about them.  In the deep, soft
-grass golden eggs from the guava trees lie tumbled about among fallen
-stars of orange and lemon blossom, and everywhere the red hibiscus
-shakes its splendid bells in the soft hill-winds.  About the foot of the
-peak a wide blue river wanders, singing all day long; and from every
-door of every house, high perched above the cloudy valleys and hyacinth
-hill ranges, one can see pictures, and pictures, and pictures almost too
-lovely to be true.  There are not two places in the world like Nalolo.
-
-The White Man of Nalolo, however, was only interested in the fact that
-the river provided excellent crayfish; and that taro grew very well
-indeed on the slopes below the town.  He had once been young, but he was
-not young now, and did not matter any longer.  Therefore he had become
-particular about his dinner and indifferent to scenery.  I will not tell
-you the story of the White Man of Nalolo, or why he, of all men,
-rebelled so fiercely against the common lot of "not mattering any more,"
-that he came away to the wilds of the Pacific and the highlands of Fiji,
-and never went back again, because, like many true stories, it cannot be
-believed, and therefore had better not be told.  Besides, this is the
-story of Saxon and his daughter.
-
-Saxon was down on his luck.  He had a charter for the _Sybil_, but she
-was not able to undertake it at present, for, trying to pilot her into
-Suva harbour himself, he had contrived to run her on a reef, and damaged
-her so seriously that she was at present careened on the beach in front
-of the local boat-builder’s, undergoing repairs. The builder, knowing
-something of Saxon’s reputation, had insisted on cash in advance, and
-the captain, in consequence, found himself so nearly out of funds that
-he was unable to stay in Suva pending the repairs to his ship.  He had
-therefore started with Vaiti for the interior of the great island of
-Viti Levu, intending to live on the real hospitality of the natives for
-a few weeks, and tramp from village to village.
-
-He explained something of this as he sat on the mats enjoying the
-grateful coolness of the house.  The other man nodded gravely, watching
-the door.  He offered a curious contrast to the Englishman’s coarse red
-fairness, being lean, sundried, and grizzled, with expressionless,
-boot-buttoned eyes, and a straggling "goatee" beard that dated his exile
-from America back to long-ago days.
-
-"Where’s your daughter?" he asked.
-
-"Coming.  She stopped to tidy up at the river."
-
-The doorway was darkened at that moment by Vaiti herself, balancing
-lightly up the cocoanut log to the threshold.  She wore a white tunic
-over a scarlet "pareo," her wavy curls, sparkling with the water of the
-stream, fell loose upon her shoulders; her lips were as red as the
-freshly-plucked pomegranate blossom behind her ear.  Something like life
-stirred in the boot-button eyes of the White Man of Nalolo as he looked
-at her.
-
-"Afi!" he called to a Fijian woman who was sleeping on the mats at the
-"kaisi" end of the house, "go and hurry the girls with the supper, and
-make tea for the marama (lady).  Quick!"
-
-Then he turned to Saxon.
-
-"Stay here as long as you like, both of you," he said. "Let her sit
-there sometimes, where I can see her and fancy....  I’ll show you
-something."
-
-He rose slowly and stiffly, and limped across to a Chinese camphorwood
-box that stood in the corner. In a minute he returned with a faded
-photograph in a gaudy frame.
-
-"My daughter," he said.  "The only child I ever had.  She was Afi’s.
-She died a long time ago.  Afi’s a chief woman: she was as handsome as
-Andi Thakombau when she was young, and the girl took after her.  Your
-girl’s mother was chief too, I guess.  Do you see any likeness?"
-
-Vaiti and her father craned over the photograph. The pretty half-caste
-girl, was certainly like the stately, slender creature who gazed at her
-pictured face, though the fire and spirit of Vaiti’s expression were
-wanting.
-
-"I’m growing old," went on the White Man.  "I’ve no children.  Stay a
-bit.  I’ll be glad to have you."
-
-"Thank you; delighted, I’m sure," drawled Saxon, with a pathetic
-resurrection of his long-forgotten "grand manner," And so it was
-settled.
-
-Vaiti, listening and thinking as usual, with her chin in her slender
-fingers, approved of what she heard, and smiled very pleasantly at her
-host.  It seemed to her that he could be very useful just now.
-
-The four weeks that followed after glided away agreeably enough in the
-silent hills.  Nothing happened; no one came or went—the Fijians, men
-and women, went out to the yam and taro fields in the morning, and
-returned in the afternoon; and after dark there would be long,
-monotonous chanting, and interminable sitting dances, on the mats inside
-the high-roofed houses.  Saxon stupefied himself with kava most of the
-time, in the absence of stronger drink, and almost got himself clubbed
-once or twice on account of his too impulsive admiration for the
-beauties of the village.  His host, however, was no censor of morals,
-and troubled very little about him. On Sundays the Fijians dressed
-themselves in their brightest cottons, stuck up their hair in huge
-halos, and went five times to church, under the auspices of the native
-Wesleyan teacher; while Saxon and his host smoked, slept, drank kava,
-and played cards.  The village provided plenty of yam and taro, kumara,
-cocoanut, and fish; and there was tea and sugar in the Chinese box, and
-now and then the White Man killed a pig or a fowl.  It was very pleasant
-on the whole.
-
-In a month’s time, however, Saxon girded up his loins to leave this
-mountain Capua and descend to Suva once more.  The _Sybil_ would be
-ready, and his charter to convey ornamental Fiji woods to San Francisco
-would not wait.
-
-They said good-bye to their host, and walked a mile or two across the
-river-flats below the town before either spoke.  Then Vaiti put her hand
-into her sash, and drew out something small and shining.
-
-"See, father, what the White Man gave me, because I was like his
-daughter," she said.
-
-Saxon took the object, and turned it over in his fingers. It was a small
-seal, shaped like an eagle standing on a rock.  The eagle was gold, the
-rock amethyst.
-
-"A pretty thing, but not worth more than two or three pounds," he said.
-
-Then he turned it over and looked at the device. There was a curious
-crest on the face of the seal—a wolf with a crescent moon in his jaws;
-underneath, a motto in a strange foreign character.
-
-Saxon’s red complexion paled as he examined the crest. In other days and
-scenes, among ice-bound rivers and grim mediæval fortress-castles, he
-had seen that crest light up the crimson panes of old armorial
-windows—had read the motto underneath—"What I have, I hold"—of nights
-when he and the wildest young nobles of the Russian court were dining
-together under the splendid roof of one of Moscow’s greatest banqueting
-halls.  For a moment he felt the keen cold air of the ice-bound streets
-blow sharp on his cheek; heard the jingle of the sleigh-bells, drawing
-up before the marble steps where the yellow lamplight streamed out
-across the snow. The fancy faded, swift as a passing lantern picture
-that flashes out for a moment and then sweeps away into darkness.  He
-saw the burning sky and the crackling palms again, felt the
-furnace-heated wind, and knew that it was all over long ago, and that he
-was ruined, exiled, and old.  Yet there remained a thread of indefinite
-recollection, a suggestion of something half-remembered, that was not
-all unconnected with the present day. What was the story belonging to
-that crest—the story that the whole world knew?
-
-"Where did the fellow get the thing?" he asked his daughter.
-
-Vaiti told him.
-
-The White Man of Nalolo, it seemed, was one of the numerous South Sea
-wanderers who believe in the existence of various undiscovered islands,
-hidden here and there in the vast, untravelled wastes of sea that lie
-off the track of ships.  Thirty years before, there had been wondering
-rumours of an island of this kind, touched at once by a ship that no one
-could name, found to be uninhabited, and never revisited; indeed, no one
-was sure where it was within a few hundred miles.  Years went by, and
-the White Man, who had always taken a special interest in the story,
-found himself shipwrecked—the sole survivor of a boatful of castaways—on
-the very island itself.  But fortune was unkind, for the morning after
-his arrival, when he was trying to sail round the island, a sudden storm
-blew him out to sea again, and he had drifted for many days, and all but
-perished, in spite of the fish and nuts he had obtained from the island,
-before a mission schooner happened to see him and pick him up.  He had
-examined most of the island while ashore, and had seen no inhabitants or
-traces of cultivation.  Nevertheless he had always been convinced that
-there was something mysterious about the place, for two reasons.  One
-was the presence of common house-flies, which he had never seen far away
-from the haunts of human beings.  The other was the discovery of an
-amethyst seal, lying under a stone on the shore.  It was dirty and
-discoloured, but he did not think so small and heavy an object could
-have been washed up on the shore from a wreck.
-
-Where mystery is in the air, most men’s minds turn naturally to thoughts
-of hidden treasure, and the White Man of Nalolo had ever since cherished
-a hope that there was treasure on the island.  For several years he had
-fully intended to go and look—some day—but as he could only guess at the
-latitude and longitude, and as he had little money to spare, he never
-succeeded either in hunting the place up himself or in persuading any
-one else to do so.  Now he was old and half-crippled, and did not care
-any more about anything; so he wanted Vaiti, who reminded him so much of
-his dead daughter, to have the seal.  It was a pretty thing, and perhaps
-it would make her think sometimes of the poor old White Man of Nalolo.
-
-Saxon listened attentively to the story, and heaved a sigh of
-disappointment at the end.
-
-"There’s nothing in it, my girl," he said.  "No proof of treasure there,
-eh?"
-
-"No; no treasure," said Vaiti, looking at the ground as she walked.
-
-"What then?" asked Saxon curiously.  He saw she had something in
-reserve.
-
-Vaiti suddenly flamed out in eloquent Maori.
-
-"What then, my father?  Am I one who sees through men’s heads, that I
-can tell what was in the mind of you as you looked at the jewel, and
-turned yellow and green like a parrot, only to see it?  What then?  I do
-not know.  I walk in the dark, and the light is in your hand, not in
-mine.  As for you, you have made your brain dull with the brandy and the
-kava, so that you cannot see at all.  What then?  Tell me yourself, for
-I do not know. I know only that there is something to be told."
-
-"Don’t be rough on your poor old father," said Saxon pathetically.  "I’d
-have knocked the stuffing out of any man who said half as much, but I
-spoil you, by Gad, I do.  I don’t know—I can’t think, somehow or other.
-But there was a story about the Vasilieffs—the johnnies who had that
-crest—people I used to stay with when I went to——"
-
-He broke off, smashed a spider-lily bloom with his stick, and began
-afresh.
-
-"Junia Vasilieff—what was it she did?  Big princes they were, and much
-too close to the throne to be safe company....  Junia Vasili—I have it!
-Yes—the end of the story was in the Sydney papers, time you were a
-little kid.  I remember.  They were to have married her to the
-Czarewitch, just to make things safe.  Her claim to the throne was big
-enough to have started a revolution any day, if it had been asserted....
-Poor little Junia!—only sixteen when I knew—when the marriage was talked
-of—and such golden hair as she had!  She hated the whole thing; courts
-and ceremony weren’t in her line.  But she was a gentle little creature,
-and I never thought she’d have had the spirit to do as she did."
-
-He turned the seal over in his fingers, as if reading the past from its
-glittering surface.
-
-"There was a young lieutenant of Hussars, a Pole—you don’t know what
-that is, but the Russians don’t like them, I can tell you—a noble, but a
-very small one; not fit to black Junia’s boots, according to their
-notions. Well, he bolted with her.  It was in the Sydney papers, time I
-was in the Solomons; the paper came up to Guadalcanar....  She must have
-been twenty then; just the year the marriage to the Czarewitch was to
-have come off....  They bolted—cleared out—never seen again.  All Russia
-on the boil about it; no one knew but what they’d hatch up plots against
-the throne, she having a better claim than any one else, if it hadn’t
-been for the law against empresses.  The secret police were after them
-for years, but they were never traced, though most people knew Russia’d
-give a pretty penny to know where they were——"
-
-"O man with the head of a fruit-bat, do you not see?" interrupted Vaiti
-at this juncture.  "They hid on that island—they may be there still.  It
-is worth a hundred treasures!"
-
-"The Pole was a great traveller, and had a sort of a little yacht," said
-Saxon thoughtfully.  "It might be true, of course—if there is an island,
-and if the Nalolo Johnnie had any idea of where it was, and if nobody
-found them out and split years ago.  Plenty of ’ifs.’"
-
-"I think him all-right good enough," averred Vaiti, returning to English
-and prose.  "By’n-by we finish F’lisco, then we go see, me and you."
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER IX*
-
-                           *THE LOST ISLAND*
-
-
-Some two or three months later, the schooner might have been seen, like
-a white-winged butterfly lost at sea, beating up and down before a
-solitary, low, green island lying far east of the lonely Paumotus.
-Vaiti, sitting on the top of the deck-house, was examining the land
-through a glass.  The native crew were all on deck; also Harris and
-Gray, the mate and bo’sun. Captain Saxon was not to be seen.
-
-"The old man always do get squiffy at the wrong time, don’t he?"
-commented Harris, rather gleefully.
-
-Gray spat over the rail for reply.
-
-"You’re ratty because you don’t know nothing, ain’t you?" he said.
-
-"Do you?" asked the mate curiously.  Harris had not much notion of the
-dignity of his office, and dearly loved a gossip at all times.
-
-"More nor you, havin’ eyes and ears that’s of use to me occasionally,"
-replied the bo’sun dryly.
-
-Harris considered.
-
-"I’ll give you my grey shirt to tell," he said persuasively.  "There’s
-sure to be something up."
-
-"’Ow much does we ever get out of it when there is?" asked Gray sourly.
-"I could do with that shirt very well, though.  There ain’t much to
-tell, except that the old man he thought there was an island hereabouts
-not marked on the chart that nobody knew about; and Vaiti she allowed
-that was all —— rot, because, says she, this part’s been surveyed, and
-though the Admiralty surveys isn’t the for-ever-’n-ever-Amen dead
-certainties the little brassbound officers thinks them, still they don’t
-leave whole islands out on the loose without a collar and a name round
-their necks, so to say.  So, says she, let me work out the length of
-time they ran before the hurricane, says she, and the d’rection of the
-wind, which the old boy remembered right enough, says she; and then look
-it up on the chart, and I’ll be blowed, says she, if you don’t find
-something for a guide like.  So by-and-by she looks, and says she,
-’’Ere’s something; ’ere’s a reef marked P.D., and it is P.D.,’ says she,
-’for you and I knows there’s nothin’ there,’ she says.  ’But we’ll look
-a bit more to the north’ard,’ she says, ’where it’s right off the’ track
-of ships, and maybe we’ll find somethin’ and maybe we won’t,’ she says.
-’But I think,’ she says, ’that somewheres not too far off from that P.D.
-reef we’ll maybe get a sight of what we’re lookin’ for,’ she says,
-’because sometimes reefs is put down for bigger things by mistake,’ she
-says, ’especially if you ’aven’t been to see.’  Then she comes on deck,
-and I makes myself scarce, for it ain’t healthy on this ship to listen
-at no cabin skylights, not if she knows you’re there."
-
-"Well, whatever the game is, I don’t suppose it’ll line our little
-insides any fatter, bo’sun.  We don’t count on this ship anything like
-as we ought to when there’s shares goin’.  I wonder that I stick to her,
-I do! Old man as drunk as a lord half the time—me doin’ his work as well
-as my own—a blessed she-cat running the blooming show——"
-
-"Ready about!" sang Vaiti from the deck-house, and the mate and bo’sun
-sprang across the deck.  There was something about the orders of the
-"she-cat" that enforced a smartness on the _Sybil_ rare on an island
-schooner, even when heavy-fisted Saxon was not about.
-
-Half an hour later, Vaiti had rowed herself ashore, curtly declining
-Harris’s polite offers of assistance, and had landed on the beach.  As
-she did not know who she might be going to see, she had provided for all
-emergencies. Her revolver was in her pocket, and she wore a flowing
-sacque of lace-trimmed white silk that made her feel she was fit to meet
-any Russian princess, if such were indeed on the island.  It was a
-gratifying thought that the said princess, if she had been a celebrated
-beauty, must now be well into the forties, and consequently beneath all
-contempt as a rival belle.
-
-Her father’s absence did not trouble her.  He had a nasty trick of
-starting a drinking bout just when he was most needed—in fact, it was
-the one point in Saxon’s character on which you could absolutely rely.
-Vaiti, therefore, had grown used to doing without him, and rather liked
-to have a perfectly free hand.
-
-She had fully grasped the bearings of the case.  There was possibly a
-very great chief’s daughter from Europe, with a rather insignificant
-chief who had stolen her away, living there in hiding.  The people of
-her country would pay a great deal to know where she was and bring her
-back.  Or, if there seemed any lack of safety about this proceeding
-(Vaiti had long ago learned that her father was not fond of putting
-himself within the reach of principalities and powers of any kind), the
-couple themselves must be made to pay for silence. It was all very
-simple.
-
-The fact that the island was supposed to be uninhabited did not trouble
-her.  She meant to investigate that matter after her own fashion.
-
-She walked all round it first of all.  It took her about an hour.  There
-was a nice, white, sandy beach, with straggling bush behind it.  There
-were a good many cocoanuts—all young ones—also a large number of broken
-trunks, apparently snapped off by a hurricane.
-
-This set Vaiti thinking.  It seemed to her that the damage was rather
-too universal and even to be natural. Yet why should any sane human cut
-short all his full-grown cocoanuts?
-
-She crossed the island twice at the ends, noting everything with a keen
-and wary eye.  Fairly good soil; nothing growing on it, however, but low
-scrub and a few berries.  In the centre of the island the scrub
-thickened into dense bush, impenetrable without an axe.  No sign of life
-anywhere.
-
-Vaiti stamped her foot.  Was it possible she had been mistaken?  Was
-this indeed just what it seemed, a commonplace, infertile, useless,
-little mid-ocean islet, let alone because it was worth nothing, and
-incorrectly described as a reef because no one had ever troubled to
-examine it?  Things began to look like it.
-
-And yet ... she thought—she did not quite know what, but she was very
-sure that she did not want to leave the island just yet.  She would at
-least climb a tall tree and take a general survey before she gave it up.
-
-Nothing simpler—but there was no such tree.
-
-All the palms were young, or broken off short; all the pandanus trees
-were in the same condition.  There was no rock, no commanding height.
-She could not get a view.
-
-Vaiti’s cheek flushed crimson under its olive brown. The spark was
-struck at last!
-
-Somebody had cut short those trees—to prevent anyone from climbing up
-and overlooking the island. The encircling reef would not allow any ship
-to approach close enough for a look-out at the mast-head to see over the
-island, except in a very general way.  There was something to conceal.
-What, and where?
-
-Only one answer was possible.  The mass of apparently virgin bush in the
-centre of the island—several acres in extent—was the only spot where a
-cat could have concealed itself.  The scent was growing hot.
-
-With sparkling eyes Vaiti began to circle the wood, watching narrowly
-for the smallest trace of a pathway. The branches were interlocked and
-knitted together as only tropical bush can be.  Many were set with huge
-thorns; all were laced and twined with bush ropes and lianas of every
-kind.
-
-Nothing larger than a rat could have won its way through such a rampart.
-Vaiti walked swiftly on and on, striking the bushes now and then with a
-stick, to make sure that there were no loose masses of stuff masking a
-concealed entrance, and keeping a sharp eye for traces of footsteps....
-It was with a heart-sinking shock that she found herself once more
-beside the low white coral rock that had marked the commencement of her
-journey, and realised that she had been all round, and that there was
-most certainly no opening.
-
-The sun was slipping down the heavens now.  She had been exploring half
-the day, but she was not beaten yet.  The unexpected difficulties she
-had met with only sharpened her determination to enter the thicket at
-all costs.  Harris, suffering acutely, as usual, from suppressed
-curiosity, was nearly driven mad by the sight of the "she-cat" suddenly
-reappearing on the ship, picking up an axe, and departing as silently as
-she had come, with a countenance that did not invite questions. She had
-taken off her smart silk dress, and was in her chemise and petticoat,
-arms and feet bare, and waist girdled with a sash into which she had
-stuck her revolver. She dropped the axe into her boat, rowed silently
-away, and disappeared on the other side of the island.
-
-The sun was still some distance above the sea when she let the axe slip
-from her torn, scratched, and aching hands, and stood at last, tired but
-triumphant, in the heart of the mysterious island’s mystery.  She had
-won her way, with the woodcraft that was in her island blood, through
-the dense belt of bush, hacking and slashing here, stooping and writhing
-there, until the light began to show through the tangled stems in front,
-and a few swift strokes cleared the way into the open. Yes! there was a
-space in the centre, after all—a clearing over an acre in extent.  There
-was grass here, and a few overgrown bananas, and a tangle of yam and
-pumpkin vines.  Passion fruit ran in a tangle of wild luxuriance over
-the inner wall of the thicket; pine-apples rotted on the ground and
-fig-trees spread their wide leaves unchecked and unpruned....  In the
-middle of all was a house—a one-storied little bungalow, iron-roofed,
-with a tank to catch the rain.  There was a long, low store behind it,
-and something that looked like a pig-sty, and something that might have
-been a fowl-run.  But....
-
-But everything was rotten, ruined, overgrown, hardly to be distinguished
-in the thick tangle of vegetation that had overflowed the little retreat
-like a great green wave let loose upon a low-lying shore.  Vaiti knew
-what she was going to see before she had reached the door of the
-bungalow—a rotten floor, with green vines shooting up between the
-crevices, and bush rats scuffling and squeaking under the boards—a
-rusted iron roof, where pink convolvulus bloom peeped in under the
-rafters, and lizards sunned themselves in the airy blue furniture
-unglued and decayed fast sinking into one common mass of ruin—door
-aslant, and thresholds sunken.  Everywhere silence, emptiness, decay.
-There needed no explanation of the vanished pathway.
-
-The Maori blood owns strange instincts.  Again Vaiti knew what she was
-going to see before it came—knew, and walked straight over to a certain
-corner of the enclosure, as if she had been there before....  It was
-under a scarlet-flowered hibiscus tree that she found it—a long, low
-grave, fenced round with a wall of coral slabs, so that the overflowing
-bush had surged less thickly here, and one could see that there was
-something lying on the mound, only half hidden by creeping
-vines—something long and white and slender.
-
-Vaiti dragged away the creepers....  Yes, it was a skeleton, bare and
-fleshless, with bony fingers and black, empty eyes.  There was a
-splintered gap in one temple, and close to one of the hands lay a mass
-of rusted steel that had once been a revolver.
-
-On a flat white stone, standing at the head of the grave, a long
-inscription had been carved with infinite care in three different
-languages.  Two of them Vaiti did not understand, but the third was
-English.  She pulled the growing ferns off the stone, and, wiping its
-surface, read:
-
-
-            "Here is buried Junia, of the race of Vasilieff.
-                         Died 20th June, 1889.
-
-             "Here is buried Anton, son of Junia Vasilieff
-                and her husband, Alexis, Baron Varsovi,
-                    Born 20th June, died 21st June,
-                                 1889.
-
-              "Here rests Alexis, Baron Varsovi.  Into the
-                 unknown thou didst follow me: into the
-                      Great Unknown I follow thee.
-                       Reunited 21st June, 1889."
-
-
-Vaiti, descendant of cannibal chiefs and lawless soldiers, more than
-half a pirate herself, and hard of nature as a beautiful flinty coral
-flower, was yet at bottom a woman after all.  What passed in the breast
-of this dark, wild daughter of the southern seas, as she stood above the
-strange, sad record of loves and lives unknown, cannot be told.  But in
-a little while, with some dim recollection of the long-ago, gentle,
-pious days of her convent school, she knelt down beside tie lonely
-grave, and, crossing herself, said something as near to a prayer as she
-could remember.  Then, still kneeling, she cut and tied two sticks into
-the form of a cross, and set them upright in the earth of the mound.
-The sun was slanting low and red across the grave as she turned away.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-"What’d she give you?" asked Harris eagerly, as the bo’sun stepped
-across the gang-plank on to the quay.  The lights of San Francisco were
-blazing all about, the cars roared past, there was a piano-organ
-jangling joyously at the corner.
-
-"Fifty dollars for the two of us," said Gray, his acid face sweetened
-with unwonted smiles.
-
-"Crikey!  Honest men is riz in the market at last! What in h—— can she
-have got herself?"
-
-"Might as well arst me what she got it for.  Don’t know, and don’t care,
-so long as we’ve got the makings of a spree like this out of it.  I see
-her comin’ out of the Rooshian Consulate this mornin’ lookin’ like as if
-some one ’ad been standin’ treat to her."
-
-"You know she don’t touch anything."
-
-"I’m speaking figuryative; she looked that sort of way.  And coming’
-back to the ship, she says to the old man, she says: ’Why, dad, better
-dead than alive!’ she says.  And he laughs."
-
-"Don’t sound ’olesome," observed Harris thoughtfully.
-
-"Now, don’t you get to thinkin’, for you ain’t built that way, and
-you’ll do yourself a mischief," said the boatswain warningly.  "And
-let’s be thankful to ’eaven for all its mercies, say I, that we’ve got
-such a nice, warm, dry, convenient night for to go and get drunk in."
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER X*
-
-                     *WHAT CAME OF THE PARIS DRESS*
-
-
-The effects of Saxon’s illness in Fiji were a long time in wearing off.
-It was many weeks after Vaiti had come back to the _Sybil_, flushed with
-importance and with the lionising she had received on the
-cable-ship—many weeks after the voyage to the unknown island and the
-visit to San Francisco—that he took ill again; not very seriously, but
-badly enough to prevent his going to sea. Of course, the time was an
-awkward one.  They were off Niué, and there was copra waiting to be
-taken to Raratonga for the steamer—copra which would certainly be
-secured by some other schooner if Saxon did not take it at the promised
-date.  Neither Harris nor Gray knew enough to be trusted with the ship,
-and he did not much care about letting Vaiti sail her—not because he
-doubted his fiery daughter’s ability or desire, but because, rash as he
-was himself at times, he knew her to be still worse.  He had seen her
-run the _Sybil_ in the trough of the very last swell alongside a barrier
-reef for miles, sailing all the time so close to the wind that the
-shifting of a single point would have meant destruction. He had heard
-her raving about the deck in half a gale as they swept up to the
-iron-bound coast of Niué, abusing Harris in the strongest of beach talk
-because he had not another main topsail in the locker to replace the two
-that had just carried away one after the other and battered themselves
-to ribbons—the principal ground of her complaint being apparently the
-fact that she considered herself labouring under a social disadvantage
-of the most mortifying kind because the schooner was obliged to come up
-to Niué for the very first time without all sails set.  He had seen her
-perform tricks of steering, getting in and out of Avarua in Raratonga (a
-perfect death-trap of a port at times, as all old islanders know), that
-"fairly gave him the jim-jams," to use his own phraseology....  No, on
-the whole he thought he would rather miss that fright than lie idle in
-the trader’s house at Avatele, and think daily and nightly of the cranky
-though light-heeled _Sybil_ out upon the high seas in Vaiti’s sole
-command.
-
-This being so, it was natural and inevitable that Vaiti should set her
-heart upon going and carry out her desire.  She did not make any trouble
-about the matter; neither was she at all unkind to the invalided owner
-of the ship.  On the contrary, she paid the trader’s wife more than that
-kindly woman wanted, to take good care of her father while she should be
-away, bought him everything decent to eat that the island contained
-(which was saying very little), indulgently presented him with a
-demijohn of whisky, and then informed him, in the coolest manner in the
-world, that the copra was all loaded, the stores and water on board, and
-the schooner ready to sail next day, under her command.
-
-Saxon swore at large first of all, then stormed at Vaiti, and finally
-began a pathetic lament over his own helpless position and the
-heartlessness of his only child. Vaiti, sitting cross-legged on the end
-of his bed, smoked a big cigar through it all and looked out of the
-window. When he stopped at last, fairly run out, she laughed and handed
-him a weed out of her own case and a match.
-
-"You take’m that, no speak nonsense.  You know me, what?" she demanded;
-and Saxon, who was not in reality nearly as ill as he thought himself,
-laughed, and allowed himself to be won over.
-
-Having gained her point, Vaiti went off again to the schooner through
-the wonderful pink dusk that wraps a South Sea island at sunset, and
-left the captain to hold commune with his demijohn and sleep.
-
-As she walked down to the shore, she heard a sound of laughing and the
-rustle of many dresses among the palms close at hand.  Now in Niué it is
-an important matter that brings people out of evenings, because,
-although the island has been Christianised long ago, like all the rest
-of the Eastern Pacific, it still suffers from a perfect plague of
-heathen ghosts that no amount of Sunday church-goings and week-day pious
-exercises seem to affect in the least.  So the natives are afraid to go
-out of their houses after sunset, lest uncanny things should rise out of
-the forest to spring upon the wayfarer’s back unseen and choke him.
-This Vaiti knew, so she suspected something of interest in the little
-crowd, and turned aside to look.  If she had not, there had been no
-story to tell about Niué and the happenings there.
-
-She saw a curious scene, so nearly hidden by the growing dark that no
-one but an island resident could have taken in its full significance.  A
-group of islanders, men and women stood round the door of a big white
-concrete house with a pandanus roof—the finest native house in the
-village.  They seemed to be waiting for something—something both amusing
-and exciting, to judge by the explosions of giggles that continually
-burst through the dusk.
-
-Presently the door of the house swung open with considerable violence,
-and a large mat was thrown out by an invisible hand.  Then the door was
-slammed, and the giggles redoubled.  Within the house now sounded
-something very like a struggle.  There were loud sobs and cries of a
-shrill, theatrical kind, scuffling. banging, and a dragging sound.
-
-"Tck, tck, tck," went the tongues of the outsiders delightedly.  The
-interesting moment was at hand.
-
-It came without warning.  The door burst open with still more violence
-than before, and out upon the mat was shot by some invisible agency a
-very solid young woman in a white loose gown, weeping somewhat
-mechanically, but with much effect.  She fairly rolled over with the
-force of the shock that had ejected her, and before she could pick
-herself up the door was closed once more with a slam that shook the
-whole house. Then the waiting group rushed upon her with cries of joy,
-and bore her away in their midst, singing as they went.
-
-"A wedding," said Vaiti to herself.  "It must be Mata’s; that is their
-house.  And it will be a big wedding, too.  I did not know that it was
-to be so soon."
-
-She fell into a fit of musing as she wandered shorewards among the
-leaning palms....  The palms of Niué sweep downwards to the gleaming sea
-like a band of lovely maidens hurrying with sweet impatience to meet
-their lovers on the coral shore.  Of a moonlight night, when all things
-are possible, and nothing seems too wonderful in an air that itself is
-wonder, it needs but little for those white, slender stems, and tossing,
-plumy crowns, poised high above the shadowy beach they curve to meet, to
-change themselves into South Sea dryads of a new and lovely race, and
-rush down, at long last, upon the calling sea, where Tangaroa, the king
-of ocean, has his dwelling.  Under the palms of Niué, when the blazing
-white moon has risen so high in the heavens that a perfect star of jetty
-shadow is rayed about the base of every tree—when the wandering sea
-winds are held close by the breathless spell of midnight and nothing
-wakes on all the lonely shore but the long, long song of the droning
-coral reef—under the wonderful palms of Niué, loveliest and strangest of
-all the islands in that dreamy world of "perilous seas and fairylands
-forlorn"—nothing is too strange to be true, no fancy too wild to hold,
-when the moon is up and the palms are alone with the sea....
-
-Was Vaiti thinking of visionary palm-maidens and sea-foam kings as she
-went down the winding path to the bay, through a wondrous afterglow of
-russet-rose laced through with opal moonrays?  Perhaps—or of kindred
-fancies.  I who knew her cannot say, for no one ever knew her
-altogether.  It is more likely, however, that less poetic thoughts were
-in her mind just then.  The scene she had witnessed in the palm-grove
-was the usual ceremony that takes place in Niué the night before a
-wedding, when the friends of the bridegroom come to the house of the
-bride’s parents, and the latter go through the symbolical form of
-casting her out and closing the door, so that the bridegroom’s people
-may take her over and guard her until the wedding morning.  Vaiti liked
-a wedding above all things (next to a funeral), and the hint of great
-doings on the morrow, offered by the ceremony she had witnessed, decided
-her to stay another day.  Why not?  The copra was loaded, and no rivals
-were in sight.  Besides, she had a motive for staying—the strongest
-possible motive. She wanted to wear her Paris dress.
-
-Yes, it had been acquired at last.  That day in San Francisco, when she
-had come out of the Russian Consulate with more money in her pocket than
-any one of her adventures had ever brought before, she had been able to
-restrain herself no longer.  And thereafter, in Madame Retaillaud’s
-elegant and exclusive Parisian emporium, replete with the choicest
-imported wares (I quote the lady’s own description of her goods), there
-took place a scene that is remembered to the present day by those of
-Madame Retaillaud’s young ladies who survived the earthquake year.
-
-Vaiti, dressed in one of her waistless muslin gowns, with a broad-leafed
-island hat on her head, a long-bladed sheath-knife stuck quite visibly
-in the breast of her dress, and her wavy hair falling loose over her
-shoulders, stalked into the shop among the smartly-gowned San Francisco
-ladies who were turning over Madame’s stock, and demanded to see—
-
-"One dress belong Palisi, pretty dam quick."
-
-They are used to all sorts of strange nationalities along the
-water-front in San Francisco, but not, as a rule, in the milliners’ and
-modistes’ well-bred establishments. Vaiti concentrated the whole
-attention of the place upon herself at a single stroke.  She did not
-care about that in the least, but Madame’s hesitation stung her, and she
-pulled out a thick wad of notes.
-
-"Look ’em alive, my hearties!" she ordered impatiently in her
-quarter-deck voice.  "Lay aft here with that goods.  I want um Palisi
-model, all sort."
-
-The customers were nearly in hysterics by this time, and the assistants
-were all a-giggle.  Madame herself, however, grasped the situation in a
-twinkling, and frowned down the girls.  Whoever and whatever this pirate
-queen might be, she certainly had money, and Madame would have welcomed
-Lucrezia Borgia or the Witch of Endor, under like circumstances, as
-pleasantly as an Anglo-American duchess.
-
-"Perhaps Madame will come into a private room. Madame would like, no
-doubt, to look at our most exclusive goods, and we do not bring them
-into the outer shop," she said in her most honeyed voice.  And the door
-of the lift closed upon the pair.
-
-What Vaiti underwent in that fitting-room in the course of getting into
-Madame’s latest model promenade gown, built for a typical French figure,
-will never be told.  Early in the proceedings a message came down to the
-showroom for the strongest pair of Paris corsets in stock, and a little
-later Madame herself, very red and overheated, ran down to select a
-fresh silk lace.
-
-"Ah, but she has courage, that one!" she declared, as the lift received
-her again.  "Never, no, never!—jamais de la vie! ..."
-
-The lift went up.
-
-It was almost an hour before a wonderful vision sailed slowly through
-the show-room and out into the street—slowly, not alone for pride, but
-also because it could scarcely move or draw its breath.  The vision, as
-described in the receipted bill that went with it, was made up of the
-following elements:
-
-"One promenade costume (model, Doucet & Cie.) composed of chiffon
-velours, couleur poussière de roses, inlet with motifs of point
-d’Alençon, hand-embroidered with lilies of the valley in French paste.
-Mounted on chiffon bleu-de-ciel, with full volants edged lace and
-chiffon ruching.  Made over foundation of glacé silk, couleur citron
-d’or.
-
-"One set silk underclothing to match.
-
-"One Corset Ecraseur, patent laces.
-
-"One pair bronze promenade shoes, Louis XV. heels, extra height.
-Stockings to match.
-
-"One parasol composed peau-de-soie rose fanée and chiffon bleu-de-ciel."
-
-To which may be added—one young woman, suffering horrible agony and
-quite intoxicated with happiness.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-It was this marvellous possession that Vaiti yearned to show off at the
-wedding.  She had not had a chance to wear it since the day when she had
-walked through the streets of San Francisco, with an admiring and amused
-crowd at her rear, and found it quite impossible to get on board the
-schooner, when she reached the water front, until she took off her
-voluminous skirt and handed it up over the side—afterwards climbing the
-rope-ladder in a storm of applause and a pink silk petticoat. Now the
-occasion for getting full value out of the wonderful thing had come at
-last, and she could not—no, she really could not—miss it.
-
-Rather late next morning, when the bride and bridegroom—the former in a
-gorgeous gown of yellow curtain muslin, the latter in a thick tweed suit
-from Auckland that caused him to stream at every pore—were sitting on
-opposite sides of the little white church, enthroned on chairs all by
-themselves, and listening decorously to a long preliminary address from
-the native pastor—Vaiti swept in, and at once brought the ceremony to a
-momentary pause.  The pastor stopped in his address and gaped, the women
-exclaimed audibly, the bridegroom fixed his eyes on the apparition and
-sighed in a manner that the bride evidently resented as a personal
-slight, for she grew still darker in the face than nature had made her,
-and stared penknives and scissors at Vaiti.  Wild titters of delight
-swept indecorously through the church. The entry was indeed a
-success—the native pastor found it necessary to address his flock
-directly, and to tell them that they would undoubtedly all go to hell if
-they did not behave better in church, before order was restored.
-
-It is not necessary to relate at length how Mata and Ivi were made one,
-how they walked out of the church nonchalantly by different doors, and
-were subsequently so deeply interested in the killing of the pigs for
-the marriage feast, and the preparing of the various cooking-pots, that
-they did not meet again all afternoon.  It was a commonplace wedding
-enough, and this history is not interested in it, other than as it
-concerned the affairs of Vaiti.  These, indeed, were fairly notable.
-
-For with Vaiti pride very literally brought about a fall that day.
-
-She had had a terrible time getting into her dress, and the whole ship’s
-company had shared in the trouble. First, the native A.B.’s had to fetch
-her a big looking-glass from the nearest trader’s, and secure it to the
-bulkhead of her cabin.  Then the cook had to deliver up all the hot
-water in the galley—at seven bells, with dinner just coming on!—and the
-boatswain must needs broach the cargo for some special scented soap.
-Matters were only beginning, however.  When the dress was disinterred
-from its many wrappings and finally put on it became immediately
-apparent that the bodice could not possibly be made to meet.  Perhaps
-the coming of the bread-fruit season had caused the young lady’s waist
-to expand—perhaps the practised art of Madame Retaillaud had exceeded
-anything that a mere amateur could compass in the way of lacing.  At any
-rate, it was not till Vaiti had passed her corset laces out through the
-port and ordered two of the strongest sailors to tail on to them—not
-till Harris, agonising with laughter, had directed this novel evolution
-from the poop for at least five delirious minutes, during which Vaiti
-several times thought she was dying, but remained none the less
-determined to die rather than give in, that the deed was accomplished at
-last, and the "Kapitani" of _Sybil_ was enabled to look at herself in
-the glass and know heavenly certainty that she was the best dressed
-woman in the Pacific at that instant, whoever saw or did not see.
-
-The natural result of all this was that in the very hour of her triumph
-she fainted dead away in the church, for the first time in her life, and
-had to be carried out.
-
-The ceremony was just over by now, and the bride, still burning with
-jealousy of the woman who had dared to eclipse her on her wedding day,
-was among the first of those who crowded round like bees going after
-honey, to stare at the beautiful creature lying senseless on the
-sunburnt grass.  The bridegroom had sped away hot-foot in the direction
-of the village, whence certain enticing yells indicated that the
-pig-slaughter was now going on; but Mata was not a bit appeased by his
-indifference to the visitor.  That dress—and oh, how wonderful it
-was!—still rankled in her soul.
-
-Mata was a teacher’s daughter, and she knew something of white people’s
-lore.  A brilliant thought darted into her mind as she pressed and
-struggled in the crowd about the deathly form on the grass....
-
-"Ai, ai! she is surely dead!" wailed the people. "Ai! the-great
-chieftainess will rise no more!"
-
-"Daughters of a turtle!" said Mata contemptuously. "I will show you if
-she is dead.  It is nothing at all but that she is vain, and wanted to
-make herself a middle like the ’papalangi’ women, who all look like
-stinging hornets.  Give me a knife, someone."
-
-A knife was given, and Mata, with horrid joy, half lifted Vaiti and
-slipped the keen point into the back of the dress.
-
-Rip went the silk with a hideous splitting noise, and the delicate
-underwear swelled out through the opening like a bush lily bursting its
-sheath.  Mata felt for the stay-lace, and cut that too.  The tension on
-the bodice increased frightfully—the seams gaped and strained....
-
-"She will die, I think, if I do not cut it off," said Mata hastily,
-feeling Vaiti reviving under her hand, and anxious to finish her work.
-Two more cuts of the knife did it.  The Paris dress was, speaking
-sartorially, no more; the owner, lying on the ground, was opening her
-eyes to the outrage that had been done; and Mata, shrieking with malign
-laughter, was fleeing wildly through the palms in the direction of the
-pig-killing, peace in her heart again.
-
-Peace was very far indeed from Vaiti’s heart when she revived and found
-out what had been done.  The crowd drew away from her in fear when they
-saw her flashing eyes and set, furious mouth, though she said never a
-word.  Confronted by that Medusa-head, they were almost too terrified to
-find words; but one or two stammered out a hasty explanation that freed
-the present company from blame by inculpating Mata.
-
-Vaiti did not doubt it—she had seen the bride’s face during the
-ceremony.  Still silent, but flashing looks of sheet-lightning all about
-her, she drew together her garments as best she could, and walked off in
-the direction of the ship.  As she did so, a little ugly man with red
-hair slipped out from behind the trees, and looked narrowly at her
-retreating figure.
-
-"It is the white man from the bush!" cried the girls.  "White man of
-ours, why did you not come down for the wedding?"
-
-"Because I didn’t, my little dears," replied the newcomer in English,
-still looking after Vaiti.  He stood well in the shade, and did not make
-himself unnecessarily conspicuous.
-
-"That’s a fine girl, that Mata," he added by and by. "A smart girl.  I
-should like to know Mata."
-
-Vaiti put off her going for yet another day.  She had business to attend
-to.
-
-It was very simple business, and it was characterised by the directness
-that attended all the proceedings of Saxon’s daughter.  She merely went
-up to the bride’s new home, that was so handsomely stocked with trade
-goods and imported furniture, while the wedding party were making merry
-in the village after dark, and set fire to it with a torch in about a
-dozen places.  It was very dry weather, and there was a strong wind.
-
-There was scarce a stick of the cottage left when she marched into the
-village with a blazing torch in her hand, and calmly told the assembled
-revellers what she had done.  Then she left them, seething in a tumult
-of excitement that almost drowned the hysteric screams of Mata, and went
-to bed and to sleep with a quiet mind, ready for an early start next
-morning.
-
-The men came on board late and very drunk, but they did come.  They were
-afraid of Vaiti, and so was Harris, who would very well have liked to
-extend his revels in the village for another twelve hours, but did not
-dare to do so.  He thought, as he stumbled into his bunk, that the
-sounds proceeding from the forecastle were a good deal odder than
-usual—he could almost have sworn that there was one person, if not
-several, crying in there.  But he had good reason for mistrusting the
-evidence of his senses just then, so he flung himself down and went to
-sleep.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER XI*
-
-                         *A DEAD MAN’S REVENGE*
-
-
-When one is well on the right side of five-and-twenty, with a good ship
-underfoot, a fair breeze setting steadily from the right quarter, and a
-pleasant goal ahead, it is hard to be unhappy.  Vaiti’s sense of
-bereavement at the loss of her cherished dress faded considerably before
-the _Sybil_ had fairly cleared the land, and was gone altogether by the
-next day.  She had done what she felt to be the right thing by Mata; the
-score was even. Vaiti did not like loose ends of any kind, and she had
-not left any behind her.  She smiled as she thought of it, and paused in
-her official-looking walk across and across the poop, to revile a native
-A.B. for leaving the end of a halyard trailing on deck.
-
-"You d—— lazy nigger," she said.  "What sort ship you thinking you stop?
-You thinking one mud scow" (_Mud cow_ was her pronunciation), "one
-pig-boat, one canoe belong dam man-eating Solomon boy?  I teaching you
-some other thing pretty quick.  Suppose you no flemish-coil that
-halyard, keep him coil all-a-time, I let ’em daylight inside that black
-hide belong you, knock ’em two ugly eye into one."
-
-She plucked a belaying-pin out of the rail and sent it flying at the
-sailor’s ear.  Vaiti was a straight thrower, but the crew seldom failed
-to dodge; they had every opportunity of becoming proficient.  On this
-occasion, however, the sailor made not the least attempt to escape, and
-the pin struck him fair and square at the angle of the jaw, and knocked
-him over.  He was hurt, but not stunned, and sat up immediately on the
-deck, gazing at the tall white figure on the poop with lack-lustre eyes
-that scarcely seemed to comprehend what they saw.
-
-"Bring ’em that pin," commanded Vaiti, still in what stood for English
-with her.  She never addressed the crew in the tongue that was native to
-both.
-
-The man crept slowly aft, and handed it to her.  She motioned to him to
-replace it neatly in the rail, and then pointed to the trailing halyard.
-It did not escape her, as the sailor made his way down to the main deck,
-that there were tears in his large black eyes, and that his pareo was
-tied with a carelessness unusual among Polynesians, and significant of
-trouble and depression when seen.  But she put the one down to the
-swelled and reddening bruise that marked all one side of his face and
-the other to the orgies of the previous night.  If the men chose to make
-brutes of themselves on bush-beer, they need not expect that she was
-going to slacken their work for them on that account.  No, not if she
-broke the head of every man in the ship.  She was not Saxon’s daughter
-for nothing, as they very well knew.
-
-It was small wonder that Vaiti was not popular with crews.
-
-She went on pacing the deck, in the joyous crystal-clear sunlight of the
-sea.  The trade wind ran through the sky like a warm, blue river, the
-rigging sang, the sails drew steadily.  It was a good day, a happy day,
-a pleasant day to be alive.  The girl felt pleased with the world.  She
-took the wheel from the sailor who held it, for the sheer pleasure of
-feeling the flying vessel answer to the touch of her own light hand.
-All the force and fury of those roaring sails overhead seemed to
-concentrate itself here in her fingers, as the power of a great dynamo
-passes through a single wire.  It was almost as if she drove the ship
-herself.  The _Sybil_ went as steady as an albatross; once or twice the
-spokes fairly shook in her hands.
-
-"The wheel is laughing to-day," she said in Maori, using the island
-sailor’s expression.
-
-Dinner-time came round soon, and she descended to eat with Harris alone.
-Saxon himself did not particularly care whether he dined with his bo’sun
-or not, if it happened to be convenient to leave Harris on deck; but
-Vaiti would have run the ship as strictly as a man-of-war at all times,
-if she could have had her way.  Indeed, she would have liked to dine in
-solitary state, like the captain of a cruiser, had she not had too much
-good sense to fly in the face of merchant service custom by excluding
-the mate.
-
-As things were, she graciously condescended to order Harris down to the
-cabin with her, and they discussed together the inevitable curried tin
-of Pacific cookery. It was wonderfully light and bright in the little
-cabin, which was large for the size of the ship, and had plenty of berth
-and locker space, besides its neatly fitted trade shelves.  The
-bulkheads were painted white picked out with blue (they were satinwood
-and bird’s-eye maple underneath the paint, a thing which had astonished
-and perplexed more than one ship’s carpenter in the past quarter of a
-century), and there was a pretty bird’s-nest fern in a basket hanging
-from the skylight, and the seats were covered with the neatest thing in
-blue and white trade prints that Auckland could produce.  Vaiti’s taste
-was evident everywhere, and Vaiti herself, hair freshly combed and held
-back with a bright ribbon, laces and frills dainty and immaculate as
-ever, looked, as she demurely poured out tea (you will seldom find the
-teapot absent from the table of a colonial ship), quite the last sort of
-person by whom a native A.B. might expect to be knocked into the
-scuppers.  Yet, truth to tell, the unlicked Harris, wolfing his food at
-the opposite side of the table, was very much better liked by the crew,
-even though he was heavy-handed enough at times; and he certainly
-understood more about the five A.B.’s and one ordinary seaman who
-inhabited the forecastle than did Vaiti, who was half one of themselves,
-and therefore thought them beneath consideration as a rule.
-
-Of this fact he proceeded to give an illustration when the curry and the
-tea and the fried bananas were almost done, and nobody’s dinner could be
-spoilt by unpleasant news.
-
-"Think you’re in for a good time, don’t you, Cap?" he said.
-
-Vaiti, the economical of words, merely nodded.  But her face spoke for
-her.
-
-Harris was never quite sure whether he liked Vaiti in an uncomfortable,
-indefinite way, or heartily hated her.  To-day the balance perhaps
-inclined in the latter direction.  He watched her face with some
-interest as he said:
-
-"That’s where you spoils yourself, Cap.  You ain’t. And if you want my
-advice, which you never do, I’d tell you that the sooner you ’bouts ship
-and back to Niué the better."
-
-Vaiti bit slowly through the piece of bread she was eating and
-deliberately chewed it, eyeing the mate all the time, before she
-condescended to answer.
-
-"Mph!" was all she said at last.  She had never studied diplomacy, but
-she knew how much more you learn in general by letting the other person
-lead the conversation than by talking yourself.  And it occurred to her
-that Harris wanted to make himself important by hinting and patronising
-over some ship business which might, or might not, be in his department.
-Well, let him.  She would not give him a lead.
-
-Harris, on his part, got angry at once, and blurted out what he had
-meant to keep a good deal longer.
-
-"Oh, very well," he said.  "You can do just as you likes, of course, but
-where you’ll find yourself when it comes to a question of mutiny, that’s
-another two-and-six.  Musling curtains on the ports, and white
-table-cloths, and ropes all flemish-coiled on deck is going to help you
-a lot then, ain’t they?  And if ever I’ve seen signs of trouble in a
-crew, I seen them to-day, and you knows it—ma’am."
-
-The last word came with a jerk, screwed out, as it were, by an ominous
-flash of Vaiti’s eye.
-
-Vaiti herself was thinking very quickly indeed, but you would not have
-imagined it if you had seen her slowly scooping out the inside of a
-mummy-apple, and as slowly eating it.  She was obliged to acknowledge to
-herself, now Harris had spoken, that there had been something unusual
-about the demeanour of more than one of the men since their departure
-yesterday.  But mutiny?  Nonsense!  Indigestion from too much pork, more
-likely.  She did not believe for an instant that any crew once handled
-by her father and herself would have an ounce of mutiny left in the lot,
-if you ran them through a stamp-mill and assayed the result three times
-over.
-
-So she merely remarked, between spoonfuls:
-
-"You talk plenty nonsense.  You keep those men work, they no squeak.
-Suppose you finish eat, you go tell Gray he come down ki-ki."
-
-"All right!" said Harris meaningly, trying to make an effective and
-tragic exit.  He was really not at all easy in his mind, and Vaiti’s
-attitude did nothing to relieve his apprehension of what might be about
-to follow.  The men had never dragged on the rein as they had done these
-two days past, and he felt it in his bones that there was more than met
-the eye in the matter.
-
-Vaiti, for her part, was so much incensed by the tone of his
-remonstrance that she would not even listen to the conviction which
-began to force itself upon her own mind, next day, that there was really
-something astray. Luck in general seemed to have deserted them.  With a
-fair wind the schooner should have made the run to Raratonga in three
-days, but on the afternoon of the second day a dead calm had fallen, and
-they lay helpless in the trough of the sea by four o’clock, three
-hundred miles from anywhere.
-
-"All-a-time I saying no good trust those trade winds, when that
-(adjective) Cook Islands be near," sighed Vaiti, scanning the horizon
-vainly right and left.  Like a true sailor, she was generally cross in a
-calm.
-
-"I wish we was out of this, ma’am, I do," remarked Gray, who was busy
-spinning sinnet at her feet on the deck.  For some odd reason, the sour
-old bo’sun generally found her more approachable than the others.
-
-"Why?" asked Vaiti, almost amiably.
-
-"Because, ma’am, of that, for one thing.  And hothers."
-
-He pointed forward, and Vaiti saw what she had not noticed before, the
-ship’s carpenter, a powerful young Mangaian, lying flat on the foc’sle
-head and obviously weeping.
-
-"They’ve been at that game, one and another, off and on, ma’am, all
-to-day," he said.  "And you know yourself ’ow we’ve been put to it to
-get the work out of them.  Darned if I knows what monkey tricks they’s
-up to, but I allow we’re liable to understand all about it before very
-long, for that sea-lawyer of a fellow, Shalli, he’s bin speechifyin’
-down in the foc’sle ’alf of this watch, like a bloomin’ ’Yde Park
-sosherlist, he has."
-
-Vaiti glanced at her watch.
-
-"Make him eight bell," she ordered, scanning the foc’sle hatch.
-
-"Ay, ay, ma’am," said Gray readily, passing on the order.
-
-The watch below were prompt enough about turning out, but Shalli the
-forlorn could not, it seemed, find energy enough to get up and turn in.
-Instead, he beat his curly head upon the planks and began to sob.  Vaiti
-took no notice of him whatever, but just strolled nonchalantly for a
-minute into her cabin, and reappeared with a slight projection in the
-bosom of her muslin dress that had not been there before.  Harris and
-Gray looked at each other significantly, and the former cast a swift
-glance about the vacant horizon.  No, not a shred of sail, not a trail
-of smoke.  Only the glancing flying-fish, and the oily, glittering
-swell, and the hard, pale, empty sky.
-
-The men, who had all been standing in a bunch by the hatch, now
-signalled to Shalli, who put off the rest of his weeping to a more
-convenient season, and got upon his feet.  Then the six began advancing
-slowly and uncertainly to the break of the poop.  They were a
-good-looking crew in their way, all Eastern Pacific men, with bright
-eyes and well-featured brown faces, and their dress—the brilliant red or
-yellow "pareo" of the islands, gaily figured with enormous white
-flowers, and the bright cotton shirt or coloured jersey—lent a
-distinctly operatic air to the little scene.  Vaiti and her officers,
-however (like Molière’s _bourgeois_ who had talked prose all his life
-without knowing it), had lived in the midst of picturesque and
-extraordinary things most of their lives, and therefore took no
-interest, as a rule, in anything save the sternest practicalities.
-
-And it was stern enough in all conscience, this fact with which they
-were confronted.  The men were mutinous, beyond doubt.
-
-Vaiti’s mind rapidly ran over all possible causes for the trouble, even
-while Shalli was stepping forward and opening his mouth to speak.  It
-could not be rough treatment, because, as a matter of fact, the men were
-no worse handled on the _Sybil_ than on most other island schooners, and
-an occasional knock-down blow is not the sort of thing that a Pacific
-native will seriously resent.  It could not be any objection to go to
-Raratonga—the crew were mostly Cook Islanders themselves, and glad of a
-chance of seeing their homes. Nor could it be dislike to her command,
-for a chief rank counts tremendously among Polynesians; and islanders
-who were ruled at home by a queen of her family would be most unlikely
-to strike against the authority of one of the Makea race, unless for
-some very grave cause.  It was, of course, possible that they had
-planned to seize the schooner and run off with it.... She put her hand
-up to her bosom, and played with the laces that lay over that hard
-substance under the dress....
-
-But Shalli was speaking now, in answer to her sharp query as to what
-they wanted there.
-
-He had a good deal to say, and he said it with flashing eyes and much
-eloquence, using his slender, pointed, brown fingers a good deal to
-emphasise his remarks, and turning dramatically from his mates to Vaiti,
-and back to his mates again.  Harris listened anxiously, catching only a
-stray word here and there, for his knowledge of Maori was confined to
-the few phrases used in running the ship.  Shalli was certainly saying
-that somebody was going to die—that somebody had got to die, and
-immediately—to judge by the emphasis with which he spoke....  The mate
-was, as Vaiti had once told him, rather chicken-hearted underneath his
-great bulk and strength.  He felt himself turning chilly, for all the
-burning sky.  What the devil did that fiend of a Vaiti mean by standing
-there listening as calmly as if they were paying her compliments on her
-eyes?  Perhaps there was no particular trouble after all; but her
-demeanour was no guarantee, for she would have looked like that if they
-had all been on the verge of drowning, or burning, or hanging together,
-any day of the week.
-
-Gray, on the other hand, did not trouble to try and make out anything,
-but cut a large quid and chewed it at leisure, idly looking on.  He did
-not know if the men meant mutiny or not, and he did not particularly
-care.  They were three whites against six niggers, and there were
-firearms on their side.  And he had seen mutinies in his time beside
-which any little amusement that could be got up by half a dozen amiable
-Cook Islanders would seem a mere Sunday-school tea-party. Let them
-mutiny if they liked.  It would not mean the interruption of the work
-for half a watch.
-
-And Shalli went on talking as if he never would stop, and the _Sybil_
-rolled ceaselessly on the idle swell, and the useless sails slapped
-rhythmically upon the mast. And Vaiti, standing on the poop above the
-group of men on the main-deck, listened with an unmoved countenance
-until quite the end of Shalli’s long speech.
-
-When he had finished he turned his face away, and instantly began to
-weep.  And the five other men, exactly as if a tap had been turned on,
-also began to weep at the same moment, howling loudly and lifting their
-hands to heaven.
-
-"If this isn’t a bloomin’ mutiny, it’s a bloomin’ lunatic asylum,"
-declared Harris quite inaudibly in the midst of the hideous noise from
-the main-deck. It is not a common thing, even in that world where all
-things are possible, the wide, strange Pacific Ocean, to see a whole
-ship’s company shedding tears in concert on a calm and peaceful
-afternoon, with nothing more alarming in sight than a handsome young
-woman in an expensively pretty frock.
-
-"Ow-ow-ow!" went Shalli, getting quite beyond his own control.
-
-"Ey-ah, eyah!" screamed a plump lad from Aitutaki, fluttering his hands
-like frantic pigeons.
-
-"For God’s sake, Vaiti, tell us what’s up," called Harris, sending his
-bull-like tones through the confusion.
-
-And then Vaiti spoke, shrieking at the top of her voice in order to be
-heard.  Her face, its hard calm broken up at last, was black with rage,
-and she had pulled out her revolver, and was holding it in her hand,
-though, strange to say, none of the men took the least notice of it.
-
-"That ——, —— witch-man belong Niué, he curse them, they say they die!"
-she screamed.  "By’n-by I cut him liver out!"
-
-"What witch-man?" bellowed Harris.  "Don’t understand.  That white
-bloke—him with the red hair and the scar on his nose—who dresses native,
-and lives native up in the bush?  Saw him lookin’ at you like as if he’d
-like to knife you, from behind Mata’s house."
-
-"No, pig-head! no white man got ’mana’ for make die that way," shrieked
-Vaiti, shaking her revolver without effect at the men.  "Niué witch-man.
-What man you mean?  I not see——"
-
-But she did see at that moment, and to Harris’s utter dismay she dropped
-the revolver on the deck and flung her skirt over her head.
-
-"My Gord! she’s mad now," cried Harris.  The crew paid not the least
-attention, but continued to weep with lungs of brass.  The mate’s head
-went round. He felt as if he was going out of his senses, too.  Gray,
-who seemed to be the only normal person left on board, went up to Vaiti
-and plucked her dress off her face.
-
-"Now, ma’am, keep ’er ’ead to wind," he remonstrated. "What’s got ’old
-of the Capting?  Blest if we ever saw you afraid before."
-
-Vaiti turned on him like a tigress.
-
-"You think me frighten, you parrot-face, bal’-head, humpback pig-monkey!
-Think some more those thing, and I shoot some hole in you lie-making
-tongue, learn you talk to me.  I tell you——"
-
-The hubbub on deck was calming down a little now, and subsiding into
-lost and homeless wails.  It was possible to make oneself heard.
-
-"I tell you, that thing Alliti see ’long Niué, he one dead man.  Captain
-schooner _Ikurangi_—same I making tart [chart] all wrong, so he go
-drown, he and him mate. You think it good thing one dead man he go walk
-along Niué, looking me?"
-
-"A cat may look at a king," said Harris, who had realised that no
-fighting was afoot, and therefore was very brave just now.  "Besides,
-that red-head man wasn’t no ghost—he borrowed a pouchful of tobacco off
-of me, and never paid it back."
-
-"What sort that man?" demanded Vaiti.  "He small, all same Gray, he ugly
-all same you, got red hair, cut ’long him nose, tooth all break?"
-
-"That’s him," agreed Harris.
-
-Vaiti took a turn across the deck, and fell silent, angrily chewing a
-lock of her hair.  The horrid vision of Donahue risen from his ocean
-grave, and wandering about the islands as a malignant ghost, bent on
-avenging his death, had struck her as such a fancy could only strike an
-islander, and almost paralysed her active mind. Now she realised that it
-was merely a case of mistaken newspaper report, and that Donahue had
-somehow escaped from the wreck of his schooner, and was once more
-roaming the islands in the flesh—at the very lowest ebb of fortune, it
-was evident, but probably none the less dangerous for that.  She was
-quite certain that he was in some way at the bottom of this business of
-cursing the crew, although no doubt the witch-doctor and Mata had been
-intermediary.  And it was no trifle. Sheer mutiny she would have much
-preferred.
-
-"Wot’s it all about?" asked Gray, who had not been so long in the
-islands as the mate.  "Wot’s the odds if a lot of bally niggers thinks
-they’ve been cursed? Seems to me anythin’ the witch-doctor could do
-wouldn’t be likely to harm a crew that’s been salted by our old man in
-the cursin’ way.  There ain’t no witch-what-d’ye-call-’em about the
-islands that can lay over ’im for language."
-
-"Oh, shut up!  You don’t know anything about it," said Harris with
-irritation.
-
-"Suppose you tells me," suggested Gray, tucking another quid into his
-cheek, and looking dispassionately at the crew, who were now lying on
-deck rolling about with the motion of the vessel, and looking half dead
-already.  "Doesn’t seem as if we was goin’ to have much bother with that
-lot....  And you gettin’ as white at the gills as a flounder, thinkin’
-they was goin’ to take charge.  Go ’ome and learn a ladies’
-dancin’-class, Mr. ’Arris; you ain’t fit to ’andle men."
-
-"I’ll handle you if——" Harris was beginning roughly, when Vaiti, whose
-temper had been badly ruffled by the events of the last half-hour,
-stepped across the deck and delivered two stinging blows, one on
-Harris’s right ear and one on Gray’s left.
-
-"You take’m that," she said.  "Alliti, you speak bo’sun about Maori
-’mana.’  Glay, you lemember Alliti mate, no give cheek."
-
-"Want to know if I’ve got any left for myself, before I start givin’ it
-away," observed the bo’sun ruefully, rubbing his face.  "But better be
-slapped nor neglected by a pretty girl, hany day, says I."
-
-Vaiti did not smile, but leaned over the rail, and began staring at the
-crew.  She was in no mood for flattery.
-
-"Well, if you want to know, it’s like this," said Harris.  "These native
-blokes, they thinks some of their chiefs has got what they call ’mana.’"
-
-"Wot’s that mean?"
-
-"Pretty near any thin’, take it by and large, but one meanin’s all we
-want, and that’s the notion they have that these chiefs can sort of
-blast ’em with a curse, so’s they’ll go away and die.  Like as if I was
-a chief, and you was a common man, same as you are, anyhow, and I was to
-say, ’Gray, you go off out of this and die next Thursday at four bells
-in the afternoon watch.’  And you says to me, says you, ’Ay, ay, sir,’
-says you."
-
-"Blowed if I would," ejaculated the bo’sun.
-
-"Yes, you would, you chump, because you’d be a bloomin’ native, and they
-always does.  So off you’d go, and when Thursday come you’d lie down and
-die at four bells, wherever you happened to be."
-
-"Wot of?"
-
-"Nothin’—you’d run down like a watch—sort of ’stop short never to go
-again’ business, like the grandfather’s clock—and when you was dead
-you’d stay dead.  That’s all."
-
-"And I never ’eard worse rot in all me days," said the bo’sun
-disgustedly.  "Think I’m going to believe all that?"
-
-"Who cares what you believes or what you don’t?" demanded Harris,
-"You’ll —— well see all about it soon enough.  Vaiti she says they says
-Mata went to the witch-doctor, who they’re as much afraid of as any
-chief in Niué, for all they’re by way of bein’ Christian, and he cursed
-them up and down and inside and out, worst style, and says they’re all
-to die by sunset, to-night. And if I knows anything of natives they’ll
-do it.  I’ll lay you, we got to work the ship up to Raratonga
-ourselves—if we ever get there.  Of all the low-down, mean skinks that
-ever walked, them natives are the worst.  They haven’t a blessed scrap
-of consideration in them for anyone but themselves.  Here we are with
-every man-jack of these fellows got an advance on his wages, and they
-says they’re going to die!  Die!  I’ve no patience with them.  I do hate
-selfishness and meanness."
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XII*
-
-                          *BREAKING THE MANA*
-
-
-Vaiti all this time had been steadily watching the men as they lay about
-on the main-deck in various attitudes of limp resignation.  One or
-two—notably the emotional Shalli—were already beginning to look ill.
-Matters looked badly enough for the _Sybil_.  It was in the hurricane
-season, and signs were not wanting that the calm would break up with
-energy when it did break.  If the crew persisted in their dying, other
-people who had not been in any way subjected to the witch-doctor’s
-operations might find it incumbent on them to die too.  She did not for
-a moment doubt the Niuéan’s power to slay.  Had she not more than once
-seen the queen, who was her own cousin, politely dismiss some offender
-with the significant remark, "I wish I may never see you again after
-to-morrow" (for the queen was always courteous, and would never have
-used the crude terms of a Niuéan witch-doctor); and had not every one on
-the island known that with the next evening’s sunset the wretch would
-lay him down and die as surely as the dark would fall?  These men were
-doomed, and the ship would miss the steamer and the cargo would not be
-sold, and possibly the schooner would be lost in the blow that was
-creeping up, and none of them would ever go home any more.
-
-Thus the native side of Vaiti spoke.  But now the white side woke up and
-demanded its innings too. Was it endurable that the red-headed rat of a
-Donahue (for she was as certain that he had been at the bottom of the
-matter as only a woman with no direct evidence to go on can be) should
-win the last move in the deadly game they had been playing this year and
-more. Was she to get into difficulties, and perhaps lose the ship, the
-very first time that she had taken off the _Sybil_ all alone?  The fact
-that such a disaster would include the losing of herself did not
-trouble, as it did not console, her.  She would leave her reputation
-behind her, and people, when they spoke of Vaiti of the Islands, would
-say——
-
-No, they wouldn’t, and they shouldn’t.  The white blood was up now.  It
-was impossible to prevent the "mana" from working.  Well, let it be.
-She would do the impossible.  She had done the impossible before, in
-many ways; it was the only sort of thing really very well worth doing,
-in the opinion of Vaiti of the Islands.
-
-Whatever was to be done must be done quickly. The storm was not far
-away, and the _Sybil_ was rolling in the trough of the increasing swell
-with every rag of sail set.
-
-"What you goin’ to do?" asked Harris hopelessly, as he saw her move.
-"Give them medicine?  It ain’t any good."
-
-"Yes, give ’em medicine—you and Gray, you giving it plenty by’n-by,"
-said Vaiti calmly, beckoning the two men over to her.  The crew
-continued to lie on the deck, giving no sign of life but an occasional
-groan.  The wind was beginning to cry a little among the rigging, just
-whimpering, like a chidden child.  A glassy tinkling of foam sounded
-about the keel.  The sun was almost down.
-
-"You listen me," said the girl, her handsome, hawk-like features looking
-curiously sombre in the orange light.  "I speak those men in Maori.  I
-tell them some thing—thing not belong ’papalangi.’  You no understan’.
-Wait."
-
-Then, with a look on her face that the white men had never seen there
-before, and were never to see again, she stepped swiftly down the
-ladder, crossed the main-deck, and stood in the midst of the prostrate
-crew.
-
-As though struck themselves by a spell, Harris and Gray remained
-motionless on the poop, only swaying with the unconscious movement of
-the sailor to the roll of his ship, while they watched with fascinated
-eyes the scene upon the lower deck.  The crew at first lay still as
-logs, while Vaiti stood and looked at them—only looked.  Presently they
-began to open their eyes and roll over, and the weeping, which had
-apparently ceased, began again.
-
-Then Vaiti, suddenly flinging her arms high above her head, with her
-light muslin dress fluttering in the wind and all her magnificent hair
-falling to her knees, burst into such a flood of speech as made the two
-hard-bitten Englishmen on the poop open eyes of stolid amaze.  There is
-no language in the world so full of eloquent possibilities as the Maori
-tongue—even in the somewhat debased and altered type that is current
-among the islands.  And, hidden away somewhere in the strange nature of
-this strange thing in woman’s shape, there was more than a touch of the
-true witch wildness and fire.
-
-"Lord!" said Harris, in a tone of awe.  "She’s the devil himself!"
-
-She looked it, as she stood there in that livid light, her arms
-stretched high to heaven, her voice—was there ever a voice so full of
-passion, prophecy, command?—ringing out, now high, now low, now in tones
-vibrating with some subtle suggestion of horror that caused even the
-uncomprehending whites upon the poop to feel a cold shudder about the
-region of the spine.  Upon the crew the effect was marvellous, yet, from
-Gray’s and Harris’s point of view, unsatisfactory as well.  The limp
-figures sat up, it was true, wept afresh, and even rose to their feet
-before long; but it was only to rush wildly up and down the heaving
-deck, driven, it seemed, by the sting of an agony greater than any they
-had suffered yet.  Above the loose sails thundered and the wind wailed
-wickedly.
-
-Gray, at a motion from the mate, went to the idle wheel and grasped the
-spokes.  The _Sybil_ would want watching soon.
-
-"Strike me pink if this isn’t the craziest ship’s company outside a
-lunertic asylum from Yokohama to the ’Orn," muttered the bo’sun to
-himself.  "Now, what the ’ell is _that_?  Ho, Jemmy Gray, why don’t you
-look for a berth as a bally stoker in a bally Red Sea liner, or a
-supercargo on a Chinese pirate junk, and ’ave a quiet life at your age?
-Here, Mr. ’Arris, you going to let ’er shoot ’erself before your heyes?"
-
-Vaiti had plucked out her revolver again, but instead of threatening the
-crew with it, she was holding it close to her own curly head, all the
-time pouring forth a river of eloquent Maori, strongly charged with
-adjurations and threats.  It needed no translation to understand so
-much, not to see the abject if inexplicable terror of the crew, who
-cowered and howled in an extremity of distress every time she raised the
-pistol to her head.
-
-"Vaiti, Vaiti!  What’re you doing, Cap?" yelled Harris.  "You’ll shoot
-yourself!  Are you crazy? What are you givin’ ’em, for Cord’s sake?"
-
-Vaiti turned round, and cried angrily at him:
-
-"Hold ’m tongue!  You no leave me myself, very quick I shooting you.  I
-tell those men I great chief, no one can take ’um curse away, but can
-come ’long all those men myself, suppose they die—go Raratonga when ’um
-night come, an’ all those man soul he running quick, quick, all a-cold,
-’long those mountains top Raratonga where ’um dead man he go to
-jumping-off place.  A—a—h!  I put one bullet in head belong me, very
-quick, suppose those men they got dam cheek go an’ die.  I coming, very
-dead, very angry, I go ’long that soul, all a-time; no let ’um rest, no
-let ’um see woman fliend, die long time ago—I take big club belong
-chief, make ’um run, cry, all-a-time—no sleep, no eat, no lie down!
-A—a—h! no go heaven, no go hell, all-a-time, for ever’n ever, Amen.  I
-pay him out for going die!"
-
-She stormed through the brief speech like a hot-season squall, and
-instantly returned to the natives. Harris, struck dumb by the entirely
-unprecedented nature of the situation, could find no vent for his
-feelings save in plucking off his cap and casting it under his feet. She
-was threatening the crew that she would kill herself if they died;
-follow them to the land of shades (the entrance to which was popularly
-supposed to be over the edge of a certain desolate, far-up mountain
-precipice in Raratonga), and make it so hot for them in the "otherwhere"
-that they would certainly wish they hadn’t dared to die....  What on
-earth was a man to do in a ship commanded by a thing—he could not call
-it a woman—that talked like that—with night coming on, too, and
-something very like a bad blow unpleasantly near?
-
-Vaiti did not leave him long in doubt as to what he was to do.  The
-crew, driven previously to the verge of frenzy by her gruesome threats,
-became entirely frantic during the eloquent peroration that followed her
-address to Harris.  They ran up and down the deck; they shrieked, they
-prayed, they besought.  Vaiti, with the eye of a hunter watching a
-quarry almost driven to bay, kept a keen look-out through all her fiery
-eloquence, and just at the moment when the men seamed driven to the
-highest point of human endurance, turned to the mate with a triumphant
-cry.
-
-"Now, Alliti! he all right by’n-by: I no shoot myself, I think.  You and
-bo’sun you get rope’s end very quick, give ’um order shorten sail, make
-’um go.  I think he go; he too much plenty frighten die ’long me."
-
-"Too much plenty frighten" the men were indeed. The threat that Vaiti
-had made—for the carrying out of which they doubted neither her ability
-nor her will, any more than she did herself—was so much more potent than
-the curse of the witch-doctor that the terror of the one paled before
-the terror of the other.  For the moment, they felt that they might not
-be able to live, but they certainly must not die; and it was right in
-the middle of this illogical state of mind that the mate and bo’sun came
-in with their rope’s ends and settled the matter once for all.  An hour
-ago, red-hot irons only would have moved them to hurry up with their
-dying.  Now a couple of ropes’ ends, laid about among the six with a
-will, drove them howling up the masts and out along the yards, where,
-with Gray and Harris still after them, and Vaiti threatening from below,
-they succeeded in getting the sails stowed and the vessel snug in very
-little over the ordinary time.  The blow that followed kept all hands
-busy the night through, but it came from the right quarter, and the
-_Sybil_ fled before it at such a speed that morning found her only half
-a day’s run from Raratonga, with the wind quieting down to a pleasant
-breeze, the schooner uninjured, and the crew as cheerful and busy as
-they had ever been in their lives.
-
-Vaiti caught the steamer, sold her copra, and saw it on the wharf ready
-to load.  Then she went back to the schooner, and waited till the last
-of the men returned.
-
-"Suppose you like go die now, plenty time for you," she said.  "Plenty
-good sailor-man stop Raratonga. You go ’long die; I no want."
-
-The men looked at her sheepishly, and Shalli, the spokesman, scratched
-his head and surveyed a heap of tributary pigs, fowls, and fruit that
-lay on the deck of the schooner before he answered.  The crew had many
-relations about Raratonga, and the relations had done them very well
-this trip.
-
-"Many thanks, great chieftainess," he said at last, in his own tongue.
-"We are much obliged to you, but we have changed our minds, and now we
-do not ever mean to die at all."
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XIII*
-
-                         *THE GAME PLAYED OUT*
-
-
-Every one in the trader’s had gone to bed, and Vaiti, barefoot and
-dressed in dark cotton, had just got out of her room by the window, and
-was gliding noiselessly down the back verandah.
-
-The moon was down, and the thick darkness under the trees of the village
-covered her safely as she slipped along at the backs of the little
-white, palm-thatched houses.  It was not at all likely that any native
-would be about in the middle of the night, but one could never reckon on
-white men, of whom there were several in the little town—and Vaiti,
-being engaged as usual on "urgent private affairs," did not want any
-inquiries.
-
-She got away from the village without remark, and then struck into one
-of the narrow grass roads penetrating the bush.  Everything was asleep.
-The little green parrots were hidden deep under heavy leaves, each with
-its noisy head tucked under its wing.  The lizards that had been darting
-and flickering all day long about the path now slept, chill as little
-stones, among the roots of the trees.  There was a cold, dewy smell in
-the air, and the palm-tree plumes were motionless as drawings in Indian
-ink against the violet gloom of the sky.  Very far away the immemorial
-music of the reef beat softly in the dark.
-
-Vaiti girded her dress high, and walked swiftly.  She had a long way to
-go, and she wanted to be back in her neat, white, mosquito-curtained
-bed, sleeping the sleep of the innocent, before the trader’s wife should
-come in with her morning cup of tea.  Vaiti was a past mistress in the
-art of avoiding useless comment.
-
-Three miles, five miles, seven miles....  It was right at the other side
-of the island, past mile after mile of tangled bush, acre after acre of
-sparsely planted, rocky, open ground, grove after grove of tall, plumy
-cocoanut, heavy with fruit.  Oranges grew by the track here and there;
-broad green banners of banana leaf blotted out whole sections of the
-stars, and slim, quaint mummy-apple trees stood up among the prickly
-coral rocks.  Vaiti had no time to stop, but she snatched a little
-refreshment on her way from time to time, as the wayfarer may always do
-in the kindly South Sea climate.
-
-She struck at last into a narrow track leading off the main pathway—so
-small that in the dusk of the starry night it must have been invisible
-save for a mass of pointed rocks that stood up just beside the overgrown
-entrance and made a landmark.  Afterwards came a mile or two of tangled
-walking among clumps of pink and scarlet and yellow hibiscus, all
-reduced to a common blackness by the levelling night, and through thorny
-lemon-trees, and over rocky knolls where there was scarce footing for a
-goat....  A lonely God-forsaken region this; not a village, nor even the
-gleam of a solitary white-washed hut.  What had the "Kapitani" of the
-_Sybil_ to do with such a place?
-
-Vaiti knew very well indeed what she had to do.  She had gathered in the
-town that the mysterious white man who "lived native" in the bush had
-his dwelling about this lonely neighbourhood.  It was very well known to
-her, and she meant to find the man’s dwelling-place, and see him with
-her own eyes before...
-
-Well, that was still to come.
-
-It took her rather longer than she had expected, but she did at last
-succeed in finding the tumble-down little palm-leaf shanty, built
-against the side of a rock, that she had heard described.  It was a
-miserable place, so far as her cat-like eyes could judge it in the
-purple gloom, not more than three or four yards long, and looking like
-nothing so much as a heap of dead leaves and rubbish piled against the
-rock.  She trod noiselessly round its three sides, and listened here and
-there. The door, as she ascertained by feeling, was a heavy mat hung up
-from the eaves, and it was tightly fastened across the opening.  There
-was a faint sound of slow, heavy breathing from within.  The man was
-evidently asleep.
-
-Vaiti climbed up on the rock above the hut, and pulled away a piece of
-the loose grey coral of which it was composed.  Then, sheltering herself
-behind a clump of hibiscus growing in a cleft, she raised her voice in a
-fearful squealing cry, exactly reproducing the yell of a wild pig
-wandering in the bush at night.  At the same time she cast a lump of
-coral with all her strength down the side of the big rock, whence it
-landed with a crash in the middle of a mass of brushwood, burying itself
-completely.
-
-The double noise, as she had anticipated, brought out the owner of the
-hut, very cross and sleepy, clad only in a pareo, and angrily anxious
-for the safety of his patch of yams.  He carried a torch in his hand,
-made of blazing candlenuts strung on a stick ("Must have run out every
-bit of credit at the stores," thought Vaiti parenthetically), and he
-was, beyond all shadow of doubt, against all common probability, the
-red-haired master of the _Ikurangi_.
-
-If looks could ever blast, those black eyes behind the hibiscus boughs
-would have slain him where he stood.  Vaiti quivered with rage as she
-watched him shambling sleepily about, looking, with his long, matted red
-hair, bloated, evil face, and half naked body, infinitely lower than any
-coloured native on the island....  He had not prospered since he escaped
-the wreck of the _Ikurangi_—how or where she did not care to know. He
-looked as if he had been living on the natives and half drinking himself
-to death, as was indeed the case.
-
-But Vaiti was not in the least mollified by his unprosperous case.  In
-her opinion, he ought to have been dead long ago.  There could be no
-peace of mind for her while he was still drifting about the Pacific,
-ever on the alert to do her an evil turn.  She was not equal to actual
-murder, and, in any case, Niué was a British-owned island, with a
-resident Commissioner and a regular nest of missionaries, where you had
-to be very careful of what you did.  But if any accident—a safe,
-convenient accident—should befall him by-and-by, why, it would certainly
-be an advantage to the _Sybil_ and her owners.  Well, that might come
-about, and without introducing Saxon into it either.  In such a delicate
-matter Saxon’s interference would very likely have acted much as a
-charge of dynamite might act in the destruction of a wasps’
-nest—something more than the wasps would probably come to grief.
-
-She waited until the ugly creature had rolled back into his cottage and
-shut the make-shift door.  Then she slipped down from the rock once
-more, and began the second part of her errand.  Neither then, nor at any
-other time, did she trouble to find out the manner of Donahue’s escape.
-If she had, she would have heard that he had been picked up by a native
-canoe, floating about on a piece of wreck the day after the disaster
-that destroyed the _Ikurangi_, and that, he had spent a good many months
-on a neighbouring island before a stray schooner had consented to accept
-his watch for passage money and convey him as far as Niué—the only place
-near their course where a penniless beachcomber would have been allowed
-to land.  As things were, he was more or less smuggled off, and thought
-best to take refuge in the bush at once.  The moneyless adventurer is
-not encouraged in islands belonging to the British Crown.
-
-It is easy, therefore, to understand why Donahue, living under an
-assumed name in the far interior of the island, had not been recognised,
-and was not likely to be, by any one save the person whom his presence
-most concerned.  His malice against Vaiti had by no means evaporated
-with the events that took place on Vaka.  He did not, as it happened,
-suspect her of having actually caused the loss of the _Ikurangi_, but he
-was of a darkly superstitious nature, and laid down his ill-luck, first,
-last, and all through, to the fact of her influence. She had been a
-"Jonah" of the worst kind to him, and he would have been very glad
-indeed to serve her any ill turn of any kind that might be possible.
-But only the small piece of spite compassed through Mata had, so far,
-lain within his power.
-
-Vaiti had still a mile or two to go, and it was waxing very late, or
-rather, early.  She almost ran along the winding rocky path, following
-it as easily as if broad day or full moon had surrounded her instead of
-star-lit dark.  Now the sound of the sea, unheard for the last hour,
-broke out again, and a cold salt breath from the beach cut through the
-heavy perfume of the forest track. In another minute she was out of the
-wood and fairly running down a sloping, sandy track that led to a little
-white house standing alone on the shore....  She laughed as she ran—it
-was such a soft, clear night, and the sea called so pleasantly down in
-the dark, and she did so dearly love an adventure—especially when all
-the world imagined her to be sleeping quietly in her mosquito-netted
-bed.
-
-There was no secrecy about this matter apparently. The house had a good
-wooden door, and she rapped loudly on it with a stone, calling at the
-same time, "Sona!  Sona!  Wake up!"
-
-There was a brief interval, in which the rollers tore at the beach and
-the palms swung and crashed overhead, uninterrupted by other sound.
-Sona was evidently asleep.  She struck loudly on the door again.  This
-time some one answered in a drowsy voice, and a slow, shuffling foot
-came to the door.  The hinges creaked, and in another minute a small,
-bent, feeble figure appeared on the threshold.
-
-"Tck! tck!" it clucked.  "Is there magic in the air, and have I grown
-fifty years younger, that the lovely maidens come to my door in the
-starlight once more?  Is it my beauty that has struck you to the heart,
-chieftainess Vaiti; or do you want a charm to catch the love of some one
-less deserving than myself?"
-
-A fit of coughing interrupted him; he crept out to the open air, and
-clung to the door-post, shaking all over with the violence of the
-paroxysm.  There was more light here, down by the foaming rollers; one
-could see, if one had been walking half the night in the dark bush, that
-the man was very small and hairy, very decrepit, and very, very old.
-Indeed, the personal appearance of Sona, solitary recluse of the
-Avarangi beach, good Nonconformist Christian on Sundays, and heathen
-witch-doctor out of business hours, was a very important item of his
-stock-in-trade.  He looked his part to perfection, and knew it.  His
-very name was a piece of business, even though, rightly pronounced and
-written. it was that of the godly man of Nineveh.  When Shark-Tooth of
-Avarangi had consented, largely for reasons of policy, to join the
-mission fold a good many years before—the last straggling heathens on
-the island having been then "brought in" by the exertions of a
-determined and energetic missionary—he had selected the name of Jonah
-for his baptismal title solely because, so far as he could ascertain,
-the original bearer of the name was proverbial for bringing bad luck to
-his enemies—and that was the sort of reputation that Shark-Tooth
-especially coveted.
-
-Vaiti had not met him before, but she knew him well by reputation, and
-was very sure that he knew all he cared to know—probably a good
-deal—about her. It was, she thought, a case for going straight to the
-point, so she went very straight indeed.
-
-"Let me in, Sona," she said in his own tongue.  "I want to talk with
-you, and I want to buy you; for you and I are wise people, and I know
-that there is nothing that may not be bought."
-
-"Crah—crah—crah!" cackled Sona, in a feeble old man’s laugh, tacking a
-joke to the end of it that might well have raised a blush on Vaiti’s
-cheek if she had been capable of such a weakness.  He led the way into
-the house, still cackling, lit an ill-smelling kerosene lamp, and sank
-down upon the mats, a mere heap of crumpled cotton clothes, old bones,
-and ancient wickedness.
-
-Vaiti pulled out her cigar-case, tossed the old creature a cigar, which
-he clutched at eagerly, and lit one for herself.  Then she squatted down
-on the mats, her back against the wall, and puffed for a minute or two
-in silence.  Old Sona watched her eagerly with his glassy little eyes.
-He saw that she was not angry at the part he had played in the late
-unpleasant occurrence upon the schooner, or at least that she did not
-mean to resent it. He had heard all about the strange happenings of the
-voyage, and was a good deal awed at the power of the woman who had
-actually broken the spell of his curse—in which, be it observed, he
-believed most fully himself, with excellent reasons for doing so.  And
-he was really very anxious to know what she wanted now, and especially
-what he was going to make by it.
-
-Vaiti pulled at her cigar vigorously for a minute to make it draw well,
-and then, with a leisurely puff, remarked in Sona’s own tongue:
-
-"Mata gave you a gold ring to curse my sailors that they should die—all
-the village knows of it, so you need not deny it, old man with the face
-of a scavenger-crab. Was it not foolish of you to set yourself against
-Vaiti, the great sea-princess—very foolish to run into danger, and for
-so little?"
-
-"Yes, yes, so little," repeated Sona, in a kind of wail.
-
-"Now I come to buy you for myself," went on Vaiti, puffing between words
-(she smoked like most women, very hard and fast).  "I buy like a great
-chief’s daughter, and you shall feed and drink well for a long time if
-you are faithful to me.  If not, I shall split you open with my knife as
-one splits open a fish on the beach, and leave you out on the strand, so
-that the crabs may come and eat you before you are dead.  That is what I
-shall do to you."
-
-"I belong to the high chieftainess, soul and liver," quavered Sona
-nervously.  Vaiti, hardly looking at him, pulled something out of her
-dress and flung it down carelessly on the mat between the two.  Sona’s
-eyes glittered, for he heard the chink of gold.
-
-"Take it, old pig of the woods," said Vaiti contemptuously, and he
-clutched eagerly at the little parcel of rag.  It contained a roll of
-gold coins.  Sona, panting with mingled delight and fear lest his
-visitor should change her mind, scuttled away to some hiding-hole in an
-inner room, and concealed the packet with breathless haste.  Then he
-returned to the lamp-lit room, where Vaiti sat smoking and waiting.
-
-"I am yours, high chieftainess; I am yours," he repeated, rubbing his
-hands together and cackling.
-
-"What is this thing they tell about a devil that stays upon the road to
-Mua, and comes out at night-time?" asked Vaiti carelessly, looking over
-Sona’s head at the wall.
-
-Sona shut up his eyes very tight, and shook his shaggy little head from
-side to side.
-
-"If you ask the good misinari doctor, he will tell you," he answered.
-"As for me, I have nothing to do with devils.  I am a very old man, and
-I want to go to heaven.
-
-"You will go to-night, old scorpion-head, if you do not tell me
-everything I want to know," remarked Vaiti.  Her tone was pleasant, but
-there was a flavour of something else below the pleasantness that caused
-Sona, literally and figuratively, to sit up.
-
-"I tell, I tell, high chieftainess," he stammered eagerly.  "The thing
-is known to all the people on the island—even the white people.  It
-happened only last year, and it is as true as the Good Book.  It was the
-foolish man from Mua way, whom they called a witch-doctor—and every one
-knows that such a thing does not exist, high chieftainess; but they said
-he was that thing, and he said so himself, because he was proud and mad.
-Now, we all know that there are many devils on Niué, and that the
-misinaris never were able to drive them all away.  And there is a very
-bad devil on that road to Mua, right where the six palm-trees stand up
-by themselves among the graves.  It is powerless in the day, but at
-night there is no Niué man who would dare to go there.  Sometimes the
-white traders will ride past the place coming home in the dark, but it
-is a true thing that their horses will often shy and bolt when they come
-near to the home of the devil, and no man can say why; indeed, the
-devils, for the most part, do not have power over the ’papalangi.’
-
-"So this witch-doctor, as he called himself, said that he did not fear
-the devil, and he would go and stay the night among the graves, thinking
-that because of that all the people in the island would believe in him,
-and give him many pigs and yams for fear of his ’mana.’  So he went to
-the devil-place, and all night he stayed, but in the morning he did not
-come back at all.  And by-and-by all the people of his village went
-together to look for him.  And they found him lying on the road, all
-dead, and his face was black and his body twisted up.  So the people
-brought him to the misinari doctor, and he said that he could not make
-him alive again.  And the traders said, ’What is the kind of this death?
-We do not know it, though we are white men and know everything.’  But
-the misinari doctor did not know.  And they buried him, and that is all,
-high chieftainess."
-
-Vaiti smoked thoughtfully.  She had heard something of the tale before,
-and Sona’s story did not vary from the version that was generally
-current about the island. She thought, on the whole, that she believed
-in it. There was no doubt that many of the white people gave it credit,
-though a few of them declared the man must have died in a drunken fit.
-A paper in Australia had published an account of the mysterious
-incident, and the spiritualistic set in Sydney were so deeply interested
-in it that a letter of inquiry from a psychical research society had
-been sent up to the island, inquiring into the matter.  But it happened
-that the trader to whom the letter was addressed had committed suicide a
-good many months earlier, and excellent onions and pumpkins (much
-appreciated by his successor) were growing green upon his grave by the
-time the letter reached the island. So the inquiry was never answered.
-
-Yes, on the whole, Vaiti thought she believed the story.  That a similar
-result would follow in the case of a "papalangi" (white man) who
-followed the deceased magician’s example she did not, however, believe.
-She thought it very likely, however, that mischief of one kind or
-another would result....  And if the worst should chance to come
-about....
-
-Vaiti took another cigar.
-
-"What does your misinari say?" she asked.  "He is not the right sort of
-misinari, it is true, but still, he should know more about devils than
-the traders."
-
-"Our good misinari was not here when it happened," replied Sona in a
-pious tone.  "It was the doctor misinari.  Our own good misinari says
-that devils cannot do harm to any but bad men."
-
-Vaiti reflected, her eyes on the floor.  She really had some respect, in
-an odd, upside-down kind of way, for missionary opinion.  It is bred in
-the bone with the younger generation of Eastern Pacific islanders.
-
-Donahue was certainly a very bad man.  She did not think she had ever
-met any one much worse.  Perhaps the badness, balanced against the
-whiteness, might swing down the scale.  At any rate....
-
-"Hear me, Sona!" she said, in a voice of command. "I have bought you
-to-night, and you belong to me. There will be more to pay by-and-by if
-you do as I tell you.  But I would warn you to be careful, for you will
-not find it pleasant lying on the shore down there, with your inside
-hanging out like a gutted fish, and the crabs coming running to eat you
-before you are dead, as you will if you make any mistakes.  Listen,
-then, very carefully."
-
-"I listen, I listen!" cried Sona.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XIV*
-
-               *HOW THE WITCH-DOCTOR GOT HIS MONEY BACK*
-
-
-When the trader’s wife came in next morning with Vaiti’s cup of tea, she
-was touched to see how deeply her pretty lodger was sleeping.
-
-"Poor young dear," said the good woman, "lying there so sweet and
-innocent, sleeping like a baby! It’s only the good heart that rests like
-that.  I don’t believe a word of the silly lies they tell about her.
-Here, dear, wake up," she called gently.  "Your good papa is ever so
-much better this morning, and looking for you to come in.  And it is
-Sunday morning, and a nice cool day."
-
-"Thank you, Mrs. Smith," said Vaiti politely, broad awake at once.  "May
-I asking you one little hot water?  I like get up and go to turch."
-
-Church, attended for reasons religious or otherwise, was not one of the
-amusements patronised by the nameless white man of the bush.  Indeed,
-his amusements, such as they were, were so far confined to the native
-villages of the interior that very few of the other whites had seen him.
-He was not good for trade, having no money and possessing no credit—that
-was all they knew, or for the most part wanted to know, about him.
-
-There was all the more astonishment, therefore, in the shanty owned by
-the Mua trader, away up in the bush, when the unknown man walked into
-the store that Sunday night, and demanded some tobacco, at the same time
-showing a sovereign he held in his hand.  He was dressed in a pitiful
-mass of rags, none too clean, but he looked well pleased with himself,
-and was more than half drunk.  Fortune had apparently found him out at
-last.
-
-The Mua trader was an honest man, but he did not see why he should not
-have a share in anything good that happened to be available about that
-lonely and unprofitable district.  So he welcomed the stranger in with
-much cordiality, and asked him to stop for supper.
-
-The newcomer had no objection in the world to come in and share the
-trader’s good tinned meats and new yeast bread, and he made himself very
-much at home without pressing.  The trader, who had a private store of
-consolation in his own back kitchen, plied the spirits freely.  He was
-curious, and he believed in the old saw of "Wine in, truth out."  A
-couple of friends who had ridden over from Alofi, the capital, and were
-equally curious about the derelict’s sudden access to fortune, did their
-disinterested best to help, and the bottle went merrily round.  The Niué
-traders are a sober, decent set of people enough, but Donahue had mixed
-with them so little that he did not know this, and consequently was not
-put on his guard by the unusual conviviality.  Indeed, he was by no
-means the same active, crafty villain who had set that successful snare
-of the diamond necklace in Apia many months ago.  A white man cannot
-"live native" without going downhill very fast, and Donahue was nearly
-at the bottom.
-
-So he drank, and laughed, and told evil tales, and grew quarrelsome, and
-pathetic, and finally affectionate and confidential, in well-defined
-stages, while all the time the other men kept sober, or nearly so.  The
-Mua trader in particular hardly touched his glass.  But Donahue, once so
-wary, never saw, and chattered on.
-
-Before midnight the trader had sold him some gay calico for the native’
-girls, and a little tinned meat and flour, and half-a-dozen various
-trifles that brought the score up to about a pound.  Here the guest came
-to a pause and fingered his coin.
-
-"Oh, well, if that’s all you have, you won’t get any more goods
-to-night.  Thanks," said the trader, putting out his hand.
-
-The visitor, however, declined to hand over the money. He would pay
-to-morrow, he said.  He was not going to leave himself without money
-again—not if he knew it—and he would have lots to-morrow: and if the
-trader wouldn’t send up the goods without the cash to-night, why, he
-might keep his condemned rubbish, and his customer would go elsewhere.
-
-Rather than lose the order, the other gave in, and sent a boy away with
-the stuff.  It would always be easy to bully him out of it afterwards,
-he thought, and there was no arguing with a drunken man’s whim.
-
-Then he set himself, in company with all the rest, to find out where the
-money had come from.
-
-Donahue, who by now was far gone, responded readily.  It was the silly
-old chap who lived down on Avarangi beach, he said; an old fool who was
-an uncle of a girl who was a friend of his.  The old chap had a notion
-that there were some Spanish doubloons hidden somewhere on the island,
-but in a place he was afraid to touch, so he had forked out a good
-British sovereign, and offered it to Donahue to go in his place, and
-share the money with him.  Donahue was to keep the earnest money for his
-trouble, if nothing came of it, and if anything did turn up he was to
-take half.  So he was going, that very night—the sooner the better.
-Natives were—well, natives; but as for him, he was afraid of nothing.
-
-"Thasser-sort-er-man I am," he finished thickly, looking round for
-applause.
-
-He did not get it.  The traders one and all burst out laughing.  The
-story of the doubloons, they told him, was a very old one in the island,
-and only the newest of new chums thought of believing it.  It was quite
-true that the natives, who were perfect magpies for hoarding, did
-possess among them a certain number of doubloons, which came from
-God-knows-where—for the coinage used in the island was British—and true
-also that the trader would get a doubloon from one of them every now and
-then in the course of business, always with some mystery attached to it,
-and some reluctance to part with the coin.  But the Resident
-Commissioner, who knew the island pretty well, and the missionary too,
-had long been certain that the store was merely the remains of some
-ship-wrecking raid of past days, about which the Niuéans were now
-ashamed to speak.  They were great misers, and it would like enough be
-another generation before all the hoarded coins had come to light and
-passed through the traders’ hands.  But hidden treasure in Niué!  Pf!
-If old Sona had been giving away money, he must be either going mad with
-age or (more likely) up to something. He was the cutest old fox on Niué,
-and that was saying something.  Why, when he had come into that very
-store to buy a darning-needle a few hours ago (what a man who lived in a
-waist-cloth and nothing else wanted with a darning-needle he hadn’t
-explained), it had been all the trader could do to prevent his picking
-up half-a-dozen odds and ends.  That was what he was like if one ever
-took an eye off him; and he wouldn’t even pay for the needle, either,
-till the trader had threatened to hammer him unless he forked out.  Take
-his word for it, if Sona had been giving away money, he meant to have it
-back—somehow.  And the treasure was poppy-cock.
-
-Donahue had now passed into the quarrelsome stage, and he rose with
-tipsy dignity from his seat.
-
-"I considdle you no gennlemen," he said scornfully. "For half a Chile
-dorrer I’d" ... He mentioned what he would do, in gross and in detail,
-to the assembled company for the small sum mentioned.
-
-"Kick the dirty brute out," said the Alofi trader disgustedly.  "It’s
-easy to see what sort of company that carrion has kept."
-
-Donahue was gone, however—gone with surprising agility, and lurching
-rapidly up the forest pathway towards his house.  His legs were always
-the last thing to fail him.
-
-He knew very well that he had had too much, and when he reached his hut
-he proceeded to sober himself by dipping his head repeatedly in a bucket
-of water. Then he brewed himself a powerful jorum of black tea, drank
-it, and set off considerably sobered.
-
-It was a long way to the clump of palms, and he stumbled badly now and
-then as he went over the graves that lay thick about the edges of the
-path. Burial along the high-road is very popular in Niué, where they
-like to keep an eye on their dead and see that they are lying quiet in
-their graves—a thing that no one considers at all a matter of course.
-Some of the graves that Donahue passed had felt hats laid upon them;
-others had plates, bowls, bottles of hair-oil, fans—all to amuse the
-ghost and keep it quiet; and one or two looked ghostly enough to scare a
-nervous person as it was, with the wraith-like mosquito curtains
-thoughtfully suspended over the tomb by mourning and anxious relatives.
-Every grave was completed by a solid mass of concrete, weighing anything
-from several hundredweight to a ton.  It was not the fault of any Niuéan
-if his dead relatives "walked."
-
-Donahue as he went chuckled to himself at the thought of his keenness in
-over-reaching the old witch-doctor.  He had used him for his own
-purposes through the girl Mata before, and though that had not worked
-out too well, it was the witch-doctor who bore the discredit, not he.
-He would use him again now, and in another way.  It was in the daytime
-that Sona had arranged to meet him at the palm-tree clump.  At night, he
-said, it would be certain death; and even in daylight no one would
-linger there who could help it.  He at least would never dare to disturb
-the big tomb in which the money was hidden and call down the anger of
-the devils on himself, unless he had a white man with him who feared
-nothing.  So next morning, very early, the white man who was so brave
-would meet him, and they would open the big, cracked tomb together—the
-tomb that no Niuéan had ever dared to lay a finger on before, though
-there were one or two besides himself who suspected that it was just
-there the mysterious foreign coins had come from years ago, and that
-there were a good many left.
-
-Thus the witch-doctor.  And Donahue had assented eagerly, and gone off
-with his earnest money.  And, on arriving at his hut, he had looked out
-an old axe that he possessed, and cleaned up his lamp, and begged a drop
-of oil from the nearest native house.  For he meant to go that very
-night, and take everything there was for himself.  Who was to prove it?
-
-Which was just the course of action that Sona had calculated very
-confidently on his taking.
-
-It poured furiously in an hour or two, for it was in the hot season, and
-the great rains were out.  Donahue could not light his lamp when he came
-to the clump of palms, which he knew well enough to recognise almost in
-the pitch dark.  It thundered soon after, and the sky was split from
-pole to pole by corpse-blue flashes of lightning.  In one of these,
-Donahue, feeling about the cracks of the tomb, thought he saw something
-moving against the gloom of the bush near at hand. It made his throat
-turn dry, for all the wet, and he felt his hair prickle curiously.  But
-he went on groping. Another flash ripped up the sky; it was a smaller
-one, but for one horrible moment he thought he had been struck, for
-something stinging streaked across his face and gave him an ugly thrill.
-But it passed immediately, and he began groping again—groping with both
-hands, in a frantic hurry, trying to make out the best place to apply
-the axe—tearing and grasping and scuffling like some deadly graveyard
-mole, breathless, with beads of warm sweat coursing down his face
-through the streams of chilly rain....  He was fighting—fighting he knew
-not what and knew not why—but he was fighting, for all that, fighting
-hard, with the stone falling away from his nerveless hands, and the
-breath in his body sinking down under some nightmare oppression, and the
-sound of the thunder now almost continuous, blending itself with another
-and far louder sound that was battering madly in his ears.  He was
-fighting with——  Christ!—it was Death!
-
-The thunder passed, as tropic storms do pass, suddenly and completely.
-The dawn shot up in the east, wet and red, and cast long, black, ghostly
-shadows, set shaking by an icy wind, low down upon the palm-trunks and
-the grave.  But Donahue did not want the light.  The axe lay untouched
-beside him; and he lay over the tomb, dead.  And his face was black and
-his body was all contorted.
-
-It was barely daylight yet when something small and slow crept out of
-the bush, and began hunting carefully near the corpse.  It could not
-find what it wanted, seemingly, and this distressed it, for it whimpered
-pitifully in a thin old voice, and looked long before it desisted.  Then
-it put its claws into the dead man’s pockets, and hunted through them,
-before it finally disappeared down the road.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-The Mua trader was at his door when a howling procession of natives came
-into the village, carrying the white man’s corpse to his home.  The
-Alofi trader, who had found the body, stepped aside to speak.  After the
-tale of the finding had been told, the Mua trader asked slowly:
-
-"Did you think of searching his pockets?  A dead man’s a dead man—and
-I’d not be sorry to have the money he owed me, for the natives will have
-taken the goods by this time."
-
-"They were empty when I found him.  Queer, for I was the first to see
-him," said the other.  "I found this thing on the road close by, though.
-Do you recognise it?"
-
-It was the trader’s darning-needle, stuck neatly into the end of a tiny,
-arrow-like reed, and stained at the point with some dark sticky stuff.
-
-The Mua trader took it in his hand, smelt it and looked at it closely.
-Then he walked to his kitchen, and, watched by the Alofi trader, threw
-the thing into the fire.
-
-"That’s what I think of it," he said.  "My boy, I traded in the worst of
-the Solomons for three years. I’m the only man on the island that knows
-that thing, bar one—and he was a plantation hand in the Solomons, in the
-black-birding days.  There’s no wanderers like the Nuié men."
-
-"Do you think——" began the other.
-
-"I think," said the Mua trader, "that old Sona has got his money back."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-The schooner _Sybil_ had no reason for staying longer in Niué, for the
-business of the ship was done, and the captain was quite well again.  A
-picture of perfect beauty the _Sybil_ made, as she stood out of Alofi
-roads in the golden afternoon, every sail set and every inch of cloth
-straining to the merry breeze.  Niué was sorry to part with Vaiti, for
-she had interested the island considerably, and her beauty had, as
-usual, won her more admiration than her temper deserved.  Every one, on
-parting, expressed a courteous wish to see the _Sybil_ and her owners
-again.
-
-For all that, and all that, the schooner came back no more.  Vaiti had
-won the game at last, but she never willingly mentioned Niué again.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER XV*
-
-                      *THE CALAMITY OF CORAL BAY*
-
-
-The wide, still waters of Coral Bay were turning glassy pink under the
-sunset afterglow.  The _Sybil’s_ boat, rowing rapidly towards the
-schooner, left as it went a long, ugly flaw upon the stainless crystal
-of the sea.  It was very still, and the night was coming down.
-
-Even in that uncertain twilight the colour of the boat as it cut through
-the pale-hued water stood out strange and sinister.  Most boats are
-white in tropic seas: the _Sybil’s_ had always been snowy as her own
-graceful hull. Now they were vivid scarlet, and the ship herself had a
-wide band of scarlet round her counter and flew a scarlet flag at her
-masthead.
-
-Any islander could have told you at a glance what these things meant.
-The schooner was "recruiting"—conveying natives from the wild cannibal
-islands of the New Hebrides to the Queensland sugar plantations. Ten
-pounds a head was paid for the men on their arrival, and it was politely
-supposed that these ignorant heathen had one and all been duly engaged
-under a contract to serve three years, at a wage of five pounds a year.
-How much they understood of contracts, times, and wages—where and what
-they thought Australia might be—and what were the means employed to get
-them on board the ship, nobody asked.  Saxon was not the man to answer,
-if any one had.
-
-Why he had temporarily deserted the pleasant, peaceful islands of the
-Eastern Pacific, and gone "black-birding" in the wild and wicked and
-fever-smitten groups of the West, was Saxon’s own affair.  Doubtless he
-had his reasons; possibly they were satisfactory.  But there is reason
-to believe that about Apia and Papeëte at this time he was characterised
-as a (double-adjectived) liar, and an (impolite expression) villain, who
-was running away because it was (adverbially) unsafe for him to stay and
-risk his (past participled) neck among (adjective) men.  This is not the
-history of Captain Saxon; at least, not all of it—from such a recital as
-that may the eleven thousand virgins of Saint Mudie, and the Blessed
-Young Person of Sixteen, deliver us!  It must therefore be enough to say
-that, for sufficient reasons, he decided to shift his headquarters to
-the New Hebrides, and immediately did so, leaving behind him certain
-unsettled scores with which this tale has nothing to do.
-
-He was not new to the islands or the natives, having been one of the
-most notorious of the sandal-wood traders in years gone by.  The
-sandal-wood was gone, and of the money he had made by it not even the
-memory remained.  But there was still something in the labour trade, and
-Saxon liked the lawless atmosphere of the place.
-
-Vaiti remembered the islands well, though she had only been there as a
-child, and she was glad to have the excitement of the change.  When the
-recruiting boat left the schooner (guarded by a companion, full of armed
-men) and drew up on the beach to negotiate with the islanders, she
-always sat in the stern, with a very smart little Winchester rifle
-across her knees, and took command, if her father was not there.  Very
-often he was not; for the New Hebrideans have long memories, and there
-was many a spot where Saxon had run up so many bad, black scores in the
-sandal-wood days that he could not hope for success—or safety, if he had
-minded that—in going ashore.  Harris usually took command of the
-covering boat, a post of comparative security that suited him very well,
-while the dauntless Vaiti managed all the real business, and seldom came
-back with an empty bag.
-
-They had good luck, on the whole, and not many narrow escapes.  Coasting
-round the notorious island of Mallicolo, or Malekula, they succeeded in
-obtaining about forty natives in a week or two.  Saxon was well pleased,
-and began to count up his profits.  Also he began to drink again.
-
-Then it was that trouble came, as trouble generally does, out of a
-fair-seeming sky.
-
-Half-a-dozen natives had been given up to the missionaries on the far
-side of Malekula, to hand over to the British gunboat _Alligator_, which
-at that time was cruising about the islands, intent on punishing the
-Malekulans for a more than usually atrocious murder of whites.  The
-tribes to whom the culprits belonged had taken fright, and were anxious
-to save themselves at any cost.  The missionaries, when asked by them,
-consented to take charge of the prisoners, but refused to keep them any
-longer than could possibly be helped, since they did not consider
-themselves judges or gaolers. At this point the _Sybil_ turned up, and
-the missionaries, hearing she was bound for Parrot Harbour, where the
-_Alligator_ was certain to call, put the men on board, and engaged Saxon
-to hand them over to the Parrot Harbour mission, receiving from the
-missionaries there the price of their passage, which the man-of-war
-would doubtless refund.
-
-Saxon, understanding that he had not to meet the _Alligator_, undertook
-the job at a rather excessive rate, and brought the prisoners over as
-agreed.  But, finding that the Parrot Harbour mission refused to pay the
-passage money until the man-of-war arrived, he went into a towering rage
-and abused everybody.  Wait for the _Alligator_?  Not he!  He had
-something else to do, and he wouldn’t have any condemned gunboat that
-ever sailed the sanguinary waters of the Pacific poking her nose into
-any of his business.  He had been promised the money as soon as he
-arrived, and the money or its equivalent he meant to have or know the
-reason why.  Off he went, with much more whisky in his brain than was
-compatible with sober judgment—off out to sea again, taking with him the
-whole six prisoners, and openly declaring his intention either to hold
-them for ransom or run them down to the Queensland plantations, as
-seemed most convenient.
-
-Next day the _Alligator_ appeared, and her commander was informed of the
-occurrence.  Saxon, master of a miserable labour schooner, had run off
-with prisoners of war belonging to a British gunboat, defied the
-Imperial Government, and offered open disrespect to the Crown! The
-commander, an iron-faced, flinty-eyed disciplinarian of the toughest
-school, and a first-class pepper-pot into the bargain, nearly choked
-with rage and indignation. Out went the _Alligator_ again, full steam
-ahead, making the captain’s dainty suite of cabins tremble like an
-ill-set jelly in the stern as the ship forged along at thirteen knots an
-hour, blackening the crystal sky with trails of smoke, and looking
-implacably about for the offending _Sybil_.  That delinquent of the high
-seas was farther off than might have been supposed.  The wind, though
-light, was in her favour, and she had managed to get round the far end
-of the island, and down the other side to Coral Bay, eighty miles off,
-before the _Alligator_ came up with her, late in the afternoon.  Once
-caught, her shrift was short.  The prisoners were at once transferred;
-Saxon was arrested and taken, still half drunk, on board the man-of-war,
-and his ship was confiscated, "just to learn him," as Gray (who had
-viewed his captain’s proceedings with sour and silent disapproval
-throughout) was heard to remark, not without a little I-told-you-so
-satisfaction.
-
-And so it came about that Vaiti, returning with the boat from an
-unsuccessful recruiting expedition, and not in the best of humours to
-begin with, was met on her arrival with extremely unpleasant news.
-
-"We’re took, cap’n; we’re took, ma’am!" shouted Gray over the bulwarks,
-as the boat nosed along the side of the schooner.  He added a rapid
-account of the calamity, in which he was careful to suppress his
-personal feelings of triumph.
-
-The smart young lieutenant who had been left in charge of the ship came
-and looked down at the boat. He wanted to know what sort of person it
-might be who was addressed with this extraordinary hail.  He had been
-under the impression that the "captain" of the _Sybil_ had been left two
-hours ago—sullen, swearing, and not at all sober—in the cells of H.M.S.
-_Alligator_.
-
-What he saw was a red-painted boat, manned by four stalwart native
-seamen, and steered by an extremely handsome, olive-faced young woman,
-who looked up at him with eyes that seemed to dart black lightning under
-their beautifully drawn brows as she listened to the boatswain’s story.
-She wore a dainty, lacy white muslin frock, and carried a Winchester
-rifle in her lap.
-
-Second Lieutenant Tempest, who had been cursing his luck up to that
-moment, suddenly became reconciled to the uninteresting job in which he
-was engaged.  It is just conceivable that his commander might have
-selected another officer to perform the duty if he had been aware of its
-possible alleviations; for Mr. Tempest was notoriously given to scrapes
-with a _soupçon_ of petticoat in them, and had already imperilled his
-career more than once after this fashion.  But Commander the Hon.
-Francis St. John Raleigh had not seen "Captain" Vaiti; so he sent Mr.
-Tempest to take possession of the _Sybil_, and slept the sleep of the
-well-conscienced and well-dined, that evening, in his velvet
-armchair....  It might have seemed somewhat less perfectly stuffed to
-him, had his dreams been concerned with what was happening a few hundred
-yards away.
-
-Mr. Tempest, smiling like the godmother beast of his own ship, offered
-his hand to the sullen beauty as she swung herself up the _Sybil’s_
-side.  Vaiti tossed it indignantly away, favoured him with another
-black-lightning glance that reduced his susceptible sailor heart to
-pulp, and stalked aft like an offended Cleopatra. Tempest, persistently
-following, poured out explanations, apologies, smiles, consolations,
-promises.  Vaiti began to think that civility might possibly avail her
-something, and began to melt by carefully calculated degrees.  Before
-very long she was sitting on the main hatch, with Tempest beside her,
-holding her hand unreproved and continuing his consolations.  The
-commander was very angry, no doubt, but he was a good sort at bottom,
-and perhaps he would not really seize the ship.  She would be sent to
-Fiji, no doubt, and Saxon might possibly be imprisoned, but it would all
-come out all right, trust him!  And he would take very good care of the
-_Sybil_ and her charming "captain."
-
-Vaiti, still smiling sweetly, dug her nails into wood of the hatch at
-her side.  Underneath all this verbiage she foresaw the reality of
-serious trouble.  Why had her father been such a fool?  What could be
-done to save the ship?  There seemed no way of helping Saxon himself.
-If the commander proved implacable, to prison he must go.  Well, that
-would not break any bones; but the loss of the _Sybil_—if such a
-disaster was indeed possible—must be averted at any cost.  She did not
-believe Mr. Tempest’s smiling assertion.  The commander had threatened
-to confiscate the ship, and most probably he would.  At any rate, the
-risk was too great to face.  The schooner must not be taken to Fiji.
-
-The wily brain was hard at work, as she sat on the hatch, listening,
-with a gentle smile and soft, downcast, maidenly eyes, to Tempest’s
-love-making, and answering now and then in her pretty Polynesian
-"pigeon-English"—so much simpler and less grotesque than the
-_bêche-de-mer_ talk of the Melanesian Islands....  If he could be got
-out of the way, and the marines suddenly overpowered, the schooner might
-slip off round the corner of the headland in the dark, and get nearly a
-hundred miles away before daylight, with the steady wind that was
-blowing outside the glassy, landlocked harbour of Coral Bay.  There was
-just enough air stirring at this farthest point to allow her to get out,
-and once off, she could show her heels in a way that would astonish even
-a British gunboat.  Of course, the latter would easily overhaul her in
-an open chase, but Vaiti did not propose any such folly.  There was many
-a perilous inlet and passage among those dangerous, ill-surveyed islands
-where the _Sybil_ could safely go, but where the _Alligator_ could not
-venture.  Let them only gain a day, and who was to say whither they had
-flown into the wide wastes of the Pacific?  Once beyond pursuit, paint
-and other disguises would so alter the ship that no one could identify
-her; her name could be changed, and the _Mary Ann_ or the _Nautilus_
-would innocently sail the seas formerly polluted by the presence of the
-naughty _Sybil_....  It was certainly worth trying.
-
-As for Tempest, she had a plan concocted to get rid of him almost as
-soon as the matter entered her mind. She left him, by and by, solacing
-himself with fresh turtle steak and excellent champagne in the cabin for
-the loss of his own dinner, while she went into the bows with Harris and
-Gray, and rapidly explained her plans. The marines had been accommodated
-with eatables and drinkables after their own hearts, on the cover of the
-main hatch, and were too much engaged to notice anything in the thick
-darkness that was now lying heavily on Coral Bay.
-
-Vaiti’s plan was simple and effective.  Tempest was to be enticed into
-leaving his duty and going ashore—she would see to that.  Four of the
-New Hebridean crew, stripped of their ship clothes, and attired in their
-aboriginal paint and plumes, were to be concealed on the beach.  They
-would capture him, and carry him off to a bush village near the coast,
-where the people were not ill disposed to the whites, and leave him
-there, scared no doubt, but safe until the morning, when he would be let
-go.  Vaiti would come back to the ship as soon as the capture was
-effected, and the four native sailors would hurry down from the village
-as quickly as possible.  Meantime, it would be easy for Harris to drug
-the marines’ drink and make them helpless. They would be set adrift in
-one of the boats, as soon as the schooner was clear of the land, so that
-they should tell no tales.  With good luck, everything should be over,
-and the _Sybil_ far out to sea, in less than a couple of hours.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Of the disgrace of Lieutenant Tempest—of his temptation, his struggle,
-and his fall—there is no need to tell at length.  The decline of a
-British officer from duty and honour—his desertion of a post which every
-professional instinct should have compelled him to keep is not a happy
-subject, as (fortunately) it is not a common one.  Vaiti, in brief,
-invited the officer to leave the ship unguarded, and slip ashore with
-her, to sup at a neighbouring trader’s shanty, where she said there
-would be drink and dancing, and every kind of fun.  There was no such
-place, but Tempest did not know that; and if he had known, he might not
-have cared.  Half-crazed with love and champagne, he thought only of the
-beautiful half-caste girl, and was ready to follow her to the mouth of
-hell, if she had asked him.  The dinghy was got out softly and
-cautiously, and, with muffled oars, they slipped away unheard.  So far
-out of his mind was the lieutenant that he did not even note the
-disappearance of his men, who were all lying, very ably and completely
-Shanghai’ed, in the hold.
-
-In less than half an hour Vaiti came back, swimming the stretch of black
-water that lay between the _Sybil_ and the shore, to leave the boat
-ready for the men. Dripping, sparkling, and laughing, she stood up in
-the dim light of the deck lantern and told the mate and boatswain how
-the capture had been managed.  Tempest, with a sack over his head and
-his hands and feet bound to a pole, was at that moment being carried up
-in the dark to the bush village.  The inhabitants of the place were to
-have ten pounds’ worth of trade goods promised them to keep him there
-all night and let him escape in the morning, when they themselves would
-go off and hide in the impenetrable forests until the man-of-war had
-sailed away again.  In half an hour or so the four natives would be back
-on board, and they would all sail away round the headland, and leave no
-evidence of any kind to connect the _Sybil_ with this last unpardonable
-outrage; for Tempest could not but suppose that the natives who so
-neatly bagged him as he was philandering along the dark beach with the
-innocent Vaiti were ordinary hill tribesmen.  And, in any case, his
-sacred person would be taken good care of.
-
-"Then he ain’t to be damaged, the little darlin’?" inquired Harris.  The
-question was not an idle one. Every one on board the schooner knew that
-Vaiti was capable of ugly things at her worst.
-
-The girl laughed—a low, gurgling laugh.
-
-"No.  No kill him, no hurt him.  I not like," she said, tossing back her
-wet, wavy hair, with a coquettish gesture that told Harris the woman in
-Vaiti was fully awake that night, despite the rough and ready adventure
-on which she was engaged.  Harris was no fool, if he was something
-unsteady in character, and more or less he admired Vaiti himself, which
-tended to sharpen his sight.
-
-"Good job the dandy leftenant _is_ out of the way," he growled as Vaiti
-disappeared into the cabin to change.  "’Twouldn’t take much for ’er to
-get fancyin’ his silly face, after all, and then the fat would be in the
-fire."
-
-"Well, if you hask me, I don’t like none of the ’ole thing from
-beginnin’ to hend," declared the bo’sun, jamming a wad of tobacco
-viciously into his pipe.  "Not the keepin’ of the bloomin’ niggers, not
-again runnin’ to Coral Bay, nor again this business.  Wy?  Because I
-don’t, and because it make me smell dirty weather. Give us a light."
-
-Overhead the stars in the velvet sky began to twinkle here and there as
-the breeze rose and the clouds melted away.  An odour of hot, wet jungle
-drifted out across the bay from the invisible land, and a locust with a
-rattle exactly like a policeman’s whistle burred loudly among the trees.
-It might have been half an hour, and it might have been more, before
-something else became audible—something that sounded like a frightened
-wailing on the shore.
-
-"A—wé!  A—a—wé!"
-
-Vaiti came out of her cabin and stood on deck, listening intently.
-
-The sound went on.
-
-"A—wé!  A—wé!  A—wa—wé!"
-
-Harris, watching Vaiti’s face in the light of the lantern, saw it change
-and harden, but she said nothing. There was another sound now—a dinghy
-shoving off from the beach and the rattle of carelessly handled oars.
-
-"What’s the —— fools makin’ such a —— row for?" asked Gray.  "They’ll
-’ave the _Halligator_ on to us."
-
-Still Vaiti said nothing, but stood like a statue on the deck, listening
-and looking into the darkness.
-
-The boat rammed the _Sybil_ in another minute with a shock that made her
-quiver, and then drifted aimlessly along her sides.  Three brown naked
-figures lifted up their arms from below, and cried despairingly:
-
-"Kapitani!  Kapitani!  A—wé!  A—wé!"
-
-"Get those fellows on board, too much quick, and bring him cabin,"
-ordered Vaiti.  Harris and Gray hauled them in with small ceremony, and
-dumped them down the companion into the cabin, where they stood in the
-light of the lamp, painted, feather-bedecked creatures, fierce enough in
-appearance, but in reality abjectly frightened and a-shiver.
-
-"What thing you been do?" demanded Vaiti sharply. "Where you make other
-sailor-man?  What you do Tempesi?"
-
-One of the men was beginning his wail again.  She seized him by the
-shoulder, pulled a pistol from among her draperies, and shook it in his
-face.  The man, with a yell of terror, twisted himself out of her hold.
-Harris, who was rather frightened at her demeanour, got him away, forced
-a dram of spirits into his mouth, and tried to extract the terrified
-creature’s story from him by degrees.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XVI*
-
-                      *THE FATE OF THE LIEUTENANT*
-
-
-It was not a gratifying tale.  Half a mile from the beach, the captors
-had been overtaken by a party of wild hillmen from Ranaar, one of the
-worst of the inland cannibal towns, and had been set upon fiercely in
-the dark.  Aki, one of their own party, had been clubbed, and his body
-carried off.  The other natives had escaped. As for the lieutenant, the
-Ranaar men had seized on him with cries of joy, exclaiming that now
-indeed they had a chance of "making themselves strong" before all
-Malekula.  Then they had carried him away, slung on a pole between two
-men, and the _Sybil’s_ people, half dead with fright, had run down to
-the beach again; and here they were, begging the Kapitani to have mercy
-on them, for indeed it was not their fault, and no one could have known
-that the Ranaar men would venture so near the coast.
-
-Vaiti, Harris, and Gray all looked grave at this recital.  They knew
-only too well what was implied by the phrase "making strong," and what
-virtues the hill tribes of Malekula ascribed to the eating of white
-man’s flesh.  The rude play of the capture had turned into most serious
-earnest, and Tempest’s life was worth just so many hours as it might
-take the cannibals to reach their mountain stronghold and go through the
-preliminary ceremonies of the feast.  No more.
-
-There was silence for a minute or two, while the schooner rolled gently
-on the swell of the incoming tide, and the smoky kerosene light
-flickered to and fro upon the strange, wild scene: Vaiti’s beautiful,
-angry head standing out above the weather-beaten faces of the two
-English sailors, the three naked New Hebrideans, squalid and
-monkey-faced, cowering before her; the remnants of Tempest’s dinner,
-some one’s greasy pack of cards, and a couple of Saxon’s empty whisky
-bottles decorating the table.  The natives were badly frightened still.
-They did not understand that the Kapitani’s plans had been entangled
-beyond all hope of setting right by this disaster, or that the
-_Alligator_ must have been alarmed by their noisy return; but Vaiti’s
-countenance was enough to warn any one who had ever seen the unpleasant
-things that happened at times on board the _Sybil_ that hurricane
-weather was ahead.  But before she had time to speak again, a loud hail
-from outside made every one look towards the deck.  In another moment
-the first lieutenant of the _Alligator_ had framed his smart white and
-gold personality in the dark oblong of the companion, and demanded,
-loudly, and authoritatively, to know where Mr. Tempest was, where the
-marines were, and what the deuce was the meaning of all this.
-
-Vaiti, motioning aside the mate and bo’sun, swept to the front and spoke
-straight out.
-
-"All your sailor, he too much drunk, sleep ’long hold. Tempesi, he been
-go shore.  Men belong Ranaar, they catch him, take him away.  Pretty dam
-quick they eat him."
-
-"Great Scott!" said the officer.  Facts were falling very thick and
-fast, and there were evidently more facts behind them which for the
-present he felt obliged—most reluctantly—to neglect.  People think
-quickly in the navy, and Lieutenant Darcy realised instantly that this
-strange, wild, handsome creature was speaking the truth, and that it
-must be acted on without delay.
-
-He stepped out on deck, and gave certain orders to his men.  A sharp
-little midshipman and half the boat’s crew followed him on board, and
-planted themselves about the ship.  The rest remained in the boat.
-
-"This officer will stay here and take charge, and you will come with me
-to the _Alligator_," said the lieutenant, addressing Vaiti.
-
-"Yes, I speak captain.  Very good you let me see him quick," said the
-girl imperiously; and the lieutenant, guessing that there was more still
-to be told, hurried the boat away.
-
-He delivered his report to the commander, and concluded by saying that
-the girl was in waiting, and had, in his opinion, something more to say
-about the matter.
-
-"Bring her in," said the commander shortly.  The gravity of the affair
-had darkened his face a trifle, but he made no comment.  It was not a
-time for talk.
-
-Vaiti entered with the light step and carriage of the woman who wears
-neither shoes nor stays, and stood silently before the commander, fixing
-his hard grey eyes with her inscrutable dark stare.
-
-"You can sit down," said the officer.  "I want to ask you some
-questions."
-
-Vaiti drew herself up a little higher.
-
-"No time for sit," she said curtly.  "Suppose you no want Tempesi ki-ki
-[eaten] pretty quick, you listen me."
-
-"Young woman!" began Commander the Hon. Francis St. John Raleigh
-sternly.
-
-"I tell you, no time talk!" interrupted Vaiti.  "I savvy all right you
-very big sea-chief; I savvy my father been made bad work, made bad work
-myself. Let him go all-a-same that; by-’n-by we talk those thing.  Now
-you listen me."
-
-"All right; sit down," said the officer in a more conciliatory tone.
-Vaiti sat, and leaning across the table with her chin in one slender
-hand, and her eyes blazing out from under the mass of damp waves on her
-forehead, she said her say.
-
-"You no savvy Malekula man; I savvy plenty. Suppose you do what I
-telling you, Tempesi he come back, I think.  Suppose not, Tempesi he
-eat.  Ranaar, he ten, eleven mile up ’long bush, plenty bad way. You
-take some sailor; he go too much sof’, too much quiet, all-a-same cat.
-Time we coming along Ranaar, one half-mile, sailor he all stop.  I go
-myself Ranaar. Maybe I get Tempesi; we coming back to sailor, go home
-all right."
-
-"Oh, nonsense! how are you going to get him, if the men can’t?" demanded
-the commander.  He saw that he had a remarkable personality to deal with
-in this strange half-caste beauty, but he did not comprehend her very
-clearly, and he thought she was "gassing" a little.
-
-Vaiti frowned.
-
-"I tell you, you no savvy Malekula," she said scornfully. "Sailor belong
-you, all the man hear him when he walk ’long bush.  Ranaar man he hear;
-he run away."
-
-"Well, so long as we rescue Mr. Tempest——"
-
-"No you talk, I say; you listen, you Kapitani with um wooden face!" spat
-Vaiti.
-
-The lieutenant turned his head away, and choked a little in his
-pocket-handkerchief.  The commander stared, then burst out laughing.
-
-"Go on, you she-cat," he said.
-
-"Ranaar man he run away; very good.  He leave Tempesi; very good.  No
-want Tempesi tell some tale, so he leave him dead.  Break him head, all
-same pig, very quick, then run away.  Now what you think?"
-
-"I think you are a very plucky young lady, and that you have something
-more to say about it," replied the commander politely.
-
-"Very good.  Suppose I going ’long bush; savvy plenty the way.  I been
-’long Ranaar recruit; savvy all-a-road.  No walking all same white man,
-walking all same one snake, all same one mice.  No white man he walk
-that way.  I come up Ranaar, all-a-dark, I stop ’long one small place;
-see the man he dance, he sing, he make ki-ki.  Bushman, he plenty
-frighten something he no savvy.  Savvy gun, dynamite, but no savvy big
-blue-light signal thing you got ’long ship. I take one, two blue-light
-thing; I throw.  Bushman he think one big devil stop, no think
-man-of-war come; run away too much dam quick, not stop kill Tempesi.
-By’n-by he coming back, but I cut rope before he come. I bring Tempesi
-’long me, ’long sailor-man; we go back quick.  Tempesi all right.
-Savvy?"
-
-"Yes, I do savvy; seems a neat plan, on the whole. But what’s going to
-happen to you if they catch you?"
-
-"Eat," said Vaiti succinctly.  "Now you listen me. I no do all this
-thing for nothing, see?"
-
-"H’m; yes, I do see.  How much do you want?"
-
-"Two thing," said Vaiti, eyeing him narrowly. "One.  My father say he
-plenty sorry, no do any more bad thing.  You let him go, let schooner
-go."
-
-"Well—yes, I’ll promise that," answered the commander rather stiffly.
-The girl was taking her life in her hand to serve the interests of the
-British Crown, and it was not a time to stick at trifles, or, indeed,
-larger things.
-
-"Two," went on Vaiti.  "Tempesi he seen leave ship, go ’long shore with
-me.  You tell him all right, you no punish."
-
-"Oh, by Jove! that’s too much," snapped out the commander.  "No,
-Miss—Miss What’s-your-name, I can’t promise any such thing.  I can’t
-have you or any one else interfering with the discipline of my ship. Mr.
-Tempest’s conduct is a very serious matter, and he must take the
-consequences, by Gad he must, if he comes back alive to take them."
-
-Vaiti had had a good deal to do with men-of-war, and their officers,
-during the course of the schooner’s many wanderings.  She did not need
-to be told that Tempest’s career might be ended, and his life disgraced,
-if naval justice took its course.  A few hours ago she would not have
-cared.  But Mr. Tempest, like all men notorious for getting into scrapes
-with a petticoat at the bottom of them, had a "way with him," and it
-happened to be a way that appealed to this daughter of the Islands more
-than she would have cared to allow. Besides, it was not her custom to
-give in to a defeat.
-
-"All right," she said calmly.  "I savvy all thing about Englis’ officer.
-Tempesi he no like court-mars’al, make break, make longshoreman, all the
-people laugh. Tempesi, he like die, I think.  All right.  I let him.
-Good night."
-
-The commander held out his hand.
-
-"Good night," he said politely.  "Mr. Darcy, you will see about getting
-a native guide who can show the way to Ranaar, at once.  We will do our
-best to surprise them."
-
-A low, sarcastic laugh came from Vaiti.
-
-"You wooden-faced Kapitani, you think you savvy Malekula!" she said.
-"Where you get guide?"
-
-Mr. Darcy did know a little about the New Hebrides, and he saw that they
-were beaten.
-
-"She’s right, sir," he said.  "Take my word for it, no native would dare
-to guide you.  There’s no mission here; they’re a very bad lot, and all
-at war."
-
-It was a bitter moment for the commander, but he surrendered like a
-gentleman.
-
-"You’ve got the best of me, Miss—Miss Saxon," he said.  "Very well.  You
-have my promise. Mr. Tempest shall be pardoned, if we get him back
-alive. You know nothing about this matter, you will remember, Mr. Darcy.
-Miss Saxon, you’re a very brave young lady, and I wish I had met you in
-circumstances of which I could more honestly approve."
-
-"No one need tell me," he said afterwards, "that that old vagabond we
-had in the cells wasn’t a gentleman once.  It comes out in the girl;
-blood will tell, even in a half-caste.  But Providence ought rightly to
-have a down on the man who is responsible for any one of them, for there
-seems no right place for them, either in heaven or earth."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Neither the bluejackets of the _Alligator_, nor the officer appointed to
-command the column, ever forgot that night’s march through the mountain
-bush of Malekula.  The air was like hot water, and not a breath of wind
-was stirring.  The track was but a few inches wide, and as slippery as
-butter, so that the men slid and fell continually when struggling up the
-endless sides of the innumerable gullies.  Mosquitoes settled in
-bloodthirsty hordes upon their faces and hands, roots tripped them up,
-saw-edged reeds slapped them in the eyes, and thorny tangles of
-bush-lawyers fished for and successfully hooked them.  At any moment a
-huge soft-nosed bullet, cruel as a shell, might come singing out of the
-darkness; or a poisoned arrow, freighted with sure and agonising death,
-might whirr across their path.  When the officer in command, irritated
-by the stumbling and falling of the men, ordered them to remove their
-boots and march barefoot, Vaiti told him that nothing of the kind must
-be done, for poisoned spear-heads were in all probability set here and
-there in unsuspected places, ready to pierce the unwary foot. She
-herself seemed invulnerable and untiring; she led the column at a pace
-that caused more than one to fall out, and never hesitated nor faltered
-through all the three hours of the worst and most intricate march that
-the _Alligator_ men had ever known.
-
-At last she told the officer to call a halt, and on no account to make
-the slightest noise or advance his men until he should see a blue light
-burning about half a mile ahead.  Then she vanished into the darkness,
-lithe and noiseless as a lizard, and silence, dead and oppressive,
-settled down upon the bush.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Lieutenant Tempest was a man and a British sailor, and he was not afraid
-of death.  But he thought there might be pleasanter ways of dying than
-that which actually stared him in the face.
-
-Memory plays strange tricks when the dark is closing down about her
-doors.  Lying there on the damp earth, bound hand and foot to a pole,
-with the hideous howls of the cannibal dancers in his ears and the glare
-of the cooking-pits in his eyes.  Tempest could think of nothing but a
-fragment of verse out of a half-forgotten poem read somewhere long ago:
-
-    "It isn’t the fact that you’re dead that counts.
-    But only—how did you die?"
-
-
-How was he dying?  Not as an English officer might gladly die in the
-cause of his country and in loyal obedience to orders.  Not even as a
-man, with a sword in his hand, facing the foe.  He was dying an
-unfaithful servant, false to his trust, and suffering because of that
-falseness, as a slaughtered brute struck down with a club like a
-bullock, and afterwards....
-
-The red remains of the luckless Aki, jointed and piled in a ghastly
-heap, told the rest.
-
-Tempest did not look at that ugly pile any more than he could help.  He
-wanted all the nerve he could muster for he was haunted by a deadly fear
-that he might cry out for mercy when it came to the last, and he did not
-want to add cowardice to the tale of his many shortcomings.  If he could
-have died here as a prisoner of war—as a captured scout, a fighting
-enemy, taken in a skirmish—the death, hideous as it was, would have been
-honourable, and his pride of country would have upheld him.  But it
-seemed as if his courage had nothing to stand on now, and he was
-almost—almost, but, thank God! not quite—afraid.
-
-The Malekulans had been dancing for full two hours, ever since they had
-brought him to the valley and flung him down upon the ground.  In the
-middle of the open village square were three huge idols, carved out of
-entire tree-trunks set upright.  They had black, empty sockets for eyes;
-their mouths were curved upwards into a ghastly wrinkled grin, and their
-tongues hung mockingly out.  On the head of each was perched a huge
-black wooden bird, with beak bent down and gloomy wings outspread—the
-very spirit of Nightmare herself. Round and round these devilish things,
-in the red glow of the fires, danced the cannibals ceaselessly and
-untiringly, fleeing with heads down and outspread hands, wheeling and
-turning, circling with measured steps; and all the time the huge hollow
-idols, beaten with heavy clubs "to make the spirits speak," thundered
-death and doom.  It was plainly a religious ceremony which must be fully
-enacted down to the last detail; but Tempest thought, as clearly as he
-could think in such a place and at such a time, that it could not last
-much longer.
-
-"A fellow ought to say his prayers," he thought; but the thunder of the
-drums and the wild, shrieking song of the dancers bewildered him, and
-his swollen wrists and ankles hurt him so much as almost to confuse his
-mind....  What could he say?  Only one prayer remained clear in the
-turmoil of his brain—just the old, old prayer that he had prayed at his
-mother’s knee.  Well, it would serve—and up above he hoped they’d
-understand how sorry he was ... for lots of things....
-
-"Our Father Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name.  Thy kingdom
-come...."
-
-It was coming, indeed!  The dance had stopped.
-
-"Thy will be done...."
-
-What came next?  He could not remember—and the savages were advancing
-across the square.
-
-"Forgive us our trespasses ... and lead us not into temptation, but
-deliver us from evil...."
-
-It was _now_!  The women were hiding themselves in the houses, and two
-of the men, armed with clubs, were stepping forward.
-
-He was only conscious of one feeling—joy that he had the courage to look
-the cannibals in the face as they advanced, and meet his fate "game."
-He hardly knew that he was still praying—
-
-"... For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory...."
-
-Death!
-
-It came with a blaze of light—a sound as of a wild, deep shout and the
-rushing of many waters—then——
-
-Was this the end?  Was it indeed death?  He had felt nothing—but a man
-does not feel the blow that kills—and his eyes were so dazzled with a
-strange, blue glory that he could not see....  The rushing sound
-continued; it was like the thunder of hundreds of flying feet....  The
-light burst forth again, and yet again, and then died away, and there
-was a great silence.  Tempest saw the hideous faces of the idols
-standing out in the empty square, and began to understand.  He was not
-dead—but something had happened.  What was it?  He tried to break loose
-and sit up so as to see all round.
-
-"Stop um little bit," said a voice, and some one drew a sharp knife
-across the lashings that bound his limbs, and lifted him into a sitting
-position.
-
-The blinding light had almost died away now, and he could see the whole
-square.  There was no one in it. The cannibals were gone, and the
-beautiful half-caste girl who had brought about his downfall—innocently,
-as Tempest of course supposed—was squatting beside him and putting a
-flask to his lips.
-
-"Drink a little bit whisky," she said.  "Good whisky; he make strong.
-No good stop here, you Belitani sailor-man; more better we go away too
-much quick."
-
-The spirit cleared Tempest’s head and put some life into his limbs.
-Vaiti poked him unceremoniously in the ribs as soon as she saw that he
-was reviving.
-
-"Show um leg there, lively!" she ordered, dragging him by the arms.
-Rather to his surprise, Tempest found that he could walk, once on his
-feet.  He wasted no time in getting away, after Vaiti’s brief
-explanation of the blue-light stratagem, and the probable return of his
-enemies before very long.  At something as near a run as his cramped
-limbs would allow, he followed her down the pathway that led away from
-the village—narrow, wet, and dark as a wolf’s gullet—and into the
-comparative security of the bush, towards the advancing relief column
-from the _Alligator_.
-
-It would have been no more than fitting if Vaiti, like a true heroine of
-romance, had vanished silently into the forest when they encountered the
-man-of-war’s men, leaving Tempest to "turn to thank his preserver," and
-"find that she had disappeared."  But Vaiti, as it happened, was born
-under the Southern Cross, where the poetry of the footlights does not
-flourish. So she gave the men her company on the way down as a matter of
-course, asked the officer in command for a cigar, smoked it and accepted
-half a dozen more out of his case, and made herself wonderfully
-pleasant—for Vaiti.  She had further driven Tempest to distraction by
-starting a flirtation with a handsome petty officer, eaten up two
-emergency rations, "borrowed" some one’s gold tie-pin, and very soundly
-boxed the ears of a leading seaman who tried to kiss her in the dark,
-before the long roll of the surf on the barrier reef, and the welcome
-glimmer of the _Alligator’s_ riding lights, told the tired-out party
-that they were safe back again. Then, like the mysterious heroine, at
-last she disappeared, and slipped off to the _Sybil_ in a native canoe,
-for the reason that she did not want to be seen on board the man-of-war
-in a very untidy and dirty dress, without any flowers in her hair, or
-fresh scent on her laces. Tempest had found time to "thank his
-preserver" on the way down, haltingly enough; but the preserver, instead
-of accepting his thanks after the fashion he would have preferred, had
-laughed wildly and somewhat wickedly, and gone on walking right in the
-middle of the column, without a glance to spare for him.... Still—he
-thought he knew women—and....  Time would show.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-The rest of the wardroom did not envy Mr. Tempest his interview with the
-commander.  It took place immediately after his return to the ship, and
-he came out from it with a countenance of entire inexpressiveness and
-extreme whiteness.  One sentence—the last—was unavoidably heard by the
-lieutenant who followed immediately after Tempest, to deliver his
-report.
-
-"Finally, Mr. Tempest—this Miss—a—Saxon—has risked her life to save your
-life and reputation.  I think there is only one way in which you can
-repay her—by never seeing her again."
-
-Tempest’s answer was inaudible.  But—he never did.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XVII*
-
-                          *INVADERS IN TANNA*
-
-
-"What a beautiful girl!  Is she one of the heathens, I wonder?" said
-Lady Victoria Jenkins, leaning on the rail of her yacht.
-
-The _Alcyone_ floated on a sea of living silver.  The coral reefs forty
-feet before her keel showed like a pavement of pale turquoise in the
-searching splendour of the tropic moon.  Close at hand loomed the dark
-woods and cliffs of Tanna, and above them, blotting out half the crystal
-broidery of the stars, rose the cone of the great volcano, crowned by a
-canopy of fire.  So, in the days of Bougainville and of Cook, stood this
-southward sentinel of the wild New Hebrides, a pillar of cloud by day
-and a pillar of fire by night.  So it stands yet, its deathless fires
-unquenched, its awful voice breaking the forest silences hour by hour—as
-the dead and gone discoverers of these distant lands saw and heard it
-long ago, and as those who follow us will find it in the days to come,
-when we and our thoughts and hopes, and adventures and loves are but a
-whisper in the homeless winds and a handful of dust blowing about on
-long-forgotten graves.
-
-There are few volcanoes in the southern hemisphere more famous, and none
-less frequently visited, than the fiery cone of Tanna.  The island lies
-thousands of miles away from everywhere, and the inhabitants are known
-to be almost all heathen, cannibal, and hostile to whites, although the
-expression of their hostility has been kept considerably in check of
-late years.  But Lady Victoria Jenkins, daughter of the late Earl of
-Wessex, and wife of Mr. Abel Jenkins ("Jenkins’s Perfect Pills"), is
-well known as a romanticist and a lover of all things unusual and
-strange.  Mr. Abel Jenkins’s income is only exceeded by that of two
-other commoners in England, and Mr. Abel Jenkins’s ugliness and
-ill-temper are not exceeded by the ugliness and ill-temper of any one
-known to polite society.  If the reader will piece these detached facts
-together, and consider them, he will readily understand why Lady
-Victoria was enjoying a tour round the world in her celebrated
-steam-yacht, the _Alcyone_, why she had come to look at Tanna, and why,
-including a good deal of miscellaneous company, the travelling party
-somehow was not miscellaneous enough to include Lady Victoria’s husband.
-
-The yacht had come in that afternoon after a somewhat stormy voyage from
-Sydney ("They call it the Pacific Ocean," said Lady Victoria
-plaintively, "instead of which, I have not really enjoyed a meal since
-we cleared the Heads"), and had instantly, by the mere fact of her
-dropping anchor in Sulphur Bay, denuded the whole seaboard of its
-population.  This was because the conscience of Tanna is never quite
-clear, and the Tannese, struck by the conviction of sin, thought the
-_Alcyone_ was a man-of-war.  Only two kinds of ships were known to the
-islands, outside trading schooners: British and French warships, and the
-lazy little monthly steamers from Sydney, which strolled round the group
-once a month, picking up copra, and conveying missionaries and traders
-about.  The _Alcyone_ was not a schooner; she was certainly not the
-well-known "B.P." steamer; therefore she must be some new variety of
-man-of-war. As it happened, there was a little matter of a murdered
-trader on the conscience of Tanna just at that time—he had been very
-annoying, but a British man-of-war is prejudiced about these affairs.
-So the Tannese of the coast, like the modest violet of the poem,
-concealed their drooping heads in the shady vales of the interior, and
-coyly hid from view.  Like the modest violet, too—only with a
-difference—you might, if you wished, have located them by their——  But
-no; this is a polite history, and the Tannese are a very impolite
-people.  Let us change carriages.
-
-Vaiti and her father, who had come up from Queensland with an empty ship
-and a full money-bag, and were just starting a fresh recruiting trip,
-regarded the appearance of the yacht with hearty disgust.  What were the
-good old islands coming to if this sort of thing was to be permitted?
-Not a bushman would come near the beach as long as the _Alcyone_ stayed,
-and the sprinkling of mission natives who were not afraid of the yacht
-were worse than useless, for they neither recruited nor encouraged their
-heathen friends to do so. Besides, the airs and graces of the _Alcyone_
-were sickening. Late dinner with low dresses and jewels; piano tinkling
-all the evening; clothes that looked as if they had been run hot on to
-the wearers, as icing is run on to a cake; sparkling glass and brasswork
-all over the ship, and dainty brass signal cannons, pretty as toys, and
-a little funnel all cream-colour and blue, and great sails white as
-trade-wind clouds, and a hull that sat the water like a beautiful
-sea-bird settled down to rest—all these unnecessary and disgusting
-affectations made a smart schooner like the _Sybil_ look no better than
-a mud-scow in a marsh, for all that she was the beauty of the South Seas
-and the most famous ocean adventuress from ’Frisco to Hobart Town.
-Besides, Saxon would not stir out of his cabin while the yacht was
-there, having developed the lumbago that always attacked him whenever
-English society folk loomed on the horizon—Vaiti knew that lumbago!—and
-he might really have been of use about Sulphur Bay, where, for a wonder,
-no one had any old scores against him.
-
-It was all most abominable, thought the "Kapitani," and she cast an
-unfriendly glance on the luxurious _Alcyone_, as her boat shot past the
-yacht in the moonlight, returning from a fruitless hunt along the coast
-for any stray bushman who might have heard the recruiting signal—a stick
-or two of dynamite set afloat on a board and exploded—and come down to
-the coast.
-
-Lady Victoria’s comment on the "beautiful girl" did not soften her in
-the least, coupled as it was with the unspeakable assumption that she
-was "a heathen."  Probably she was, in one sense, having long ago given
-up all but the merest rags of religion, but it was not the accusation of
-moral deficiencies that galled her: it was the idea that she, Vaiti,
-daughter of a great Polynesian princess and a white sea-captain, should
-have been "evened" to the black, monkey-like, naked hags of Tanna.  The
-resentful spirit of the half-caste burned hot within her as she steered
-the boat through the moonlit water.  She could see Lady Victoria and her
-friends, a brilliant flower-show of coloured dresses and sparkling gems,
-leaning over the rail, and watching her as impersonally as if she were a
-porpoise or a shark.  She could catch their comments, loudly and
-carelessly spoken.
-
-"I suppose she is one of them.  But she looks quite nice.  See her
-pretty dress.  She is quite decently clothed, isn’t she?"
-
-"I wonder is she a cannibal?  She does not look dangerous.  I would like
-to ask her on board, and give her some tea and cake, and things of that
-kind, and talk to her.  Just to try and reform her from their own
-horrible food, you know," said Lady Victoria angelically.
-
-"That would be so dear of you," chimed in her special sycophant and
-foil, a plain and elderly young woman who knew when her bread was
-buttered on both sides, and why.
-
-But here the rowers—urged by a signal from Vaiti who thought she had
-heard about as much as she could stand without exploding—gave way
-vigorously, and pulled the boat out of earshot.
-
-That was not a happy evening for any one on board the _Sybil_.  Vaiti
-would not give out any grog for supper though it was a settled custom on
-the ship; would not have singing in the cabin, gloomed like a hurricane
-sky over the mate and boatswain’s sociable game of cards until Gray, out
-of pure nervousness, dropped a greasy ace upon his knee, and was
-thereupon accused by Harris of cheating, and coarsely threatened by him
-with an operation usually confined to sufferers from appendicitis. At
-this Vaiti rose and walked out of the cabin with the air of a
-convent-bred princess who had never so much as heard a jibbing donkey
-"confounded"; and went to sit on deck near the wheel, where she stayed
-so long, smoking so many thin black cigars, that every one but the night
-watchman turned in and left her, and only the dead, dark hour of two
-o’clock, when the spongy heat of the island night stiffens for a while
-into fever-bringing chill, shook her out of her sulks and into her
-cabin.
-
-When Vaiti sulked it was usually observed that things happened before
-very long.  But on this occasion the exception seemed to rule.  The
-disgusting yacht stayed all the next day, and the _Sybil_ lay quietly at
-anchor on the other side of the bay.  Some of the yacht people went
-ashore in the afternoon, and roamed timorously about the beach,
-wondering at the hot springs and tasting everything in the way of fruit
-they happened to see. (It was nearly all inedible, but none of it, by a
-fortunate chance, happened to be poisonous.)  Lady Victoria was
-disappointed with her day on the whole.  The natives from the mission,
-who had officiously attended them all day long, were unromantically
-clothed, clean, and English-speaking.  The wild savages did not appear;
-and there were one or two other mishaps of an entirely unromantic kind.
-
-"How did you enjoy it, darling?" asked the plain young woman of Lady
-Victoria, when the daring pioneers returned.
-
-Mr. Jenkins’s partner shook out her soiled tussore silk disgustedly.
-
-"It was untidy and ugly and nasty," she declared; "and when I sat down
-under a great pineapple tree all covered with fruit, and said that I was
-realising one of my dreams, Jack de Coverley laughed at me, and said it
-was only a pandamn-us, or something else profane, and that pineapples
-grew on the ground.  And when we started to walk among the palms, and I
-was saying that I had always dreamed of wandering softly by a coral
-strand and seeing the cocoanuts drop into my hands, something as big as
-a horse’s head suddenly thundered down like a bombshell from a hundred
-feet high, and buried itself in the sand at my feet with such a fearful
-shock that I jumped a yard away and screamed like anything!  So then the
-missionary came out, and said he wondered I wasn’t killed; and if you’ll
-believe me, it was nothing but a horrible nut!  And the coral strand was
-pretty enough, all over little bits of branching coral stuff; but why
-doesn’t anyone ever tell you that coral strands burn all the skin off
-your nose and blacken you into a nigger?  We’re going up the volcano
-tomorrow—the missionary says it’s quite safe—and I’m sure I hope it’s
-true, but one never knows.  Darling, if I die, see that the new
-Lafayette photo is sent to the papers—not on any account the other; and
-I like Latin crosses on graves, I think; Carrara marble, very thick, and
-just one short text, something nice, like ’They were lovely and pleasant
-in their lives’—you know."
-
-... "’And in death they were not divided,’" finished the plain young
-woman with mechanical piety.... "Darling! dearest! what have I said?
-What is the matter?"
-
-"Now you _have_ done it!" roared Mr. de Coverley, who was rather a
-well-bred, but sometimes rather a vulgar young man.  "Not divided!  Oh,
-great Scott! Oh, my eye!  Oh, I’ll die of laughing!  Hold me up! Never
-mind, Vic; I’ll see you aren’t divided, or cooked either—trust to me!"
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Vaiti was still in a speechless state of sulks when she started off the
-next morning into the interior, to recruit on her own account.  It was
-not a very safe thing to do, but the bushmen would not come down to the
-coast, and the _Sybil_ could not hang out indefinitely, since the
-doubtful character of her methods had given the French and English
-Commissioners of the islands a nasty habit of asking questions about
-her.  Saxon, who had relinquished his lumbago to go off into the hills
-at a safe distance from the yacht, wanted to make his daughter accompany
-him; but Vaiti simply laughed at him, and departed with a guide seduced
-from the mission towards a village lying a mile or two above the
-volcano.  She preferred the glory of working on her own account, and
-besides, it doubled the chances of recruits.
-
-She knew the Tannese nature well, so she dressed herself for her part in
-a robe of scarlet sateen, with liberal necklaces of different coloured
-trade beads, and stuck a couple of tomahawks in her sash, besides an
-ornamented sheath-knife.  Across her splendid young bosom she slung an
-incongruous-looking bandolier of cartridges, designed apparently for the
-slaughter of elephants; and a smart magazine rifle, carried over her
-shoulder, completed the outfit.  All these valuables, though designed to
-assist her plans by suggesting the enormous store of desirable goods
-possessed by the recruiters, were almost as likely to assist her to a
-sudden and unprovided end, by reason of the natives’ covetousness. She
-took her chance of this, however; Vaiti was used to taking chances.  It
-is easier than most people suppose to take the risk of being killed
-every day of your life.  In the strange places of the earth, where such
-things are a common happening, men do not look upon the inevitable end
-after the pursy, secretive, never-mention-it fashion of Peckham and
-Brixton.  Death is just death in the earth’s wild places—yours to-day,
-mine to-morrow—a thing to walk with shoulder to shoulder, to meet face
-to face at noonday; in any case, to make no bones of it until it makes
-bones of you; and after that circumstances will keep you from
-complaining if you feel like it.
-
-It was a long, hot walk up to the village.  A "walk" is mostly a
-scramble about the uncleared New Hebrides, where roads are mere
-foot-wide cracks and canyons in the dense forest growth, and level
-ground apparently does not exist.  Besides, a bandolier of cartridges
-and an assortment of small arms are rather heavy jewellery for such a
-climate.  Vaiti, however, possessed the enviable gift of never looking,
-or apparently feeling, hot or tired; and she swung along at an unvarying
-pace that caused the unlawfully enticed mission native, who had waxed
-fat and lazy, to regret his enticement and wish himself back in the
-mission school writing copies, instead of slaving up and down
-precipitous gullies in the rear of a woman-devil who did not know what
-it was to want a rest.
-
-At long last, however, the reedwork fence of the village came in sight,
-and they entered the open square, shaded by an immense banyan tree and
-surrounded by low, ugly huts, all roof and no wall, like all the
-mountain villages of Tanna.  There were sentries perched up in the trees
-outside the gate, and others squatted on the ground at every entrance,
-their rifles ready in the crook of the elbow.  Within, the dusty
-tan-coloured square, quivering under the pitiless fire of the white-hot
-sky, was all alive with moving figures—ugly women in brief grass skirts
-humped out into swaying bustles; young boys with murderous little faces,
-and full-sized rifles; wild-looking men, with thick hair twined into
-myriads of tiny strings ending in a great bush on the shoulders, stripes
-of scarlet paint on their faces, and no clothing save their native
-impudence and a cartridge belt—all seething about in a very bee-hive of
-excitement and alarm.  As for the rifle-barrels, they were bobbing about
-like piano-jumpers all over the square, and every weapon was cocked and
-loaded.
-
-Vaiti saw at a glance that they were expecting an attack, and picking
-out a native who could speak English, asked what the trouble was.  The
-man replied that they feared the little man-of-war down below, but that
-they were entirely innocent.  Questioned further, they said naïvely that
-they had never eaten a white man, and that none of them were low
-cannibals in any case.  Vaiti, who had not heard of this little affair
-before, saw her chance.
-
-"No good you speak alonga that fellow way," she said, using the
-_bêche-de-mer_ talk that some of the Tannese understood; for Vaiti, like
-many half-castes, could handle almost any dialect or corruption of a
-dialect, though she could not speak decent English or French. "I savvy
-plenty, you eatum one fellow white man. By’n by, big fellow man-of-war
-come, shoot you all-a-same one pig, all-a-same one blind box [flying
-fox], burn altogether house belong you.  Very good you come alonga Saxon
-ship, go Queensland; then you all right."
-
-"No eatum," persisted the man (who was the professional talking-man or
-orator of the village), with a coy smile.
-
-Vaiti’s nose was keen, and she had already guessed something by its aid.
-She marched straight across the square into a little yam-house, and
-pointed to a small parcel done up in green banana-leaf and tied with
-cocoanut sinnet.  Five toes and an instep protruded from one end.  The
-game had been well hung, as the Tannaman likes it to be, and there was
-no mistaking the fact of its presence in any sense.
-
-The talking-man giggled like a school-girl caught consuming
-surreptitious chocolates.
-
-"Eatum jus’ little-fellow bit," he allowed, with a bad-child chuckle.
-The other men took up the laugh, and the village resounded with a roar
-like the bellowing of a herd of bulls.
-
-Vaiti, seeing her advantage, stepped out into the square and began to
-talk, marching to and fro in Tannese fashion as she spoke.  The sun cast
-dancing spangles on her many-coloured beads as she moved, and threw back
-darts of fire from her heavy bandolier.  One arm emphasised her remarks
-with sweeping gesture; in the other the tall rifle pounded the earth
-with its stock, marking the points of her discourse.  The fat, stolid
-mission native watched her with staring eyes and open mouth, and the
-chiefs gloomed at her under sullen savage brows, evidently impressed,
-but restive.
-
-The sum of her discourse was that they and their women would do well to
-come down with her to the schooner, recruit at once, and fly to a land
-of safety where men-of-war never came, where Tanna people reclined all
-day under the shade of banyan and banana, picked a little cane for their
-employers occasionally, lived upon tinned meat and sugared tea, and
-eventually returned loaded with riches in the shape of rifles,
-cartridges, cotton, and knives.  There was a good deal more of the same
-highly-coloured stuff.  This was old business to the people of the
-_Sybil_.
-
-The talking-man, also strutting backwards and forwards, Tanna fashion,
-in a kind of continual country dance with the glittering vision from the
-ship, answered now and then.  It was very well to talk about recruiting,
-and perhaps some of them might go if they got lots of tinned salmon and
-"bisketti" to eat before they went on board, and promise of rifles to be
-paid the tribe when the bargain was complete.  But they did not believe
-that the new ship was not a little man-of war, and until she was gone
-they would not go down to the coast—no, not even to bathe, although they
-had all decided to have a bath soon, for the weather was hot and their
-skins were like the bark of trees, and it was now about ten moons since
-they had had their last bath.
-
-At this Vaiti’s eyes lit up, for she suddenly saw a plan, a plan which
-might give her a score of recruits, drive the objectionable yacht out of
-Sulphur Bay, and pay off every rankling insult inflicted by the
-_Alcyone_ and her people.  But the savages were watching her, so she
-veiled her eyes with her long lashes, and replied carelessly:
-
-"All that very good.  To-morrow, small-fellow man-of-war he go ’way;
-then you coming longa schooner. To-day, what name [why?] you no go wash
-big water ’long place one-fellow-fire stop?  Very good place that.
-Suppose you going, I come up from schooner, bring plenty-plenty tucker.
-Plenty-plenty bulimacow [beef], bisketti, tucker belong white man, cost
-ten rifle.  All the Tannaman he eat; by’n-by he stop lie down, he break,
-so much he eat."
-
-This tempting picture had its effect, backed up by a few presents of
-beads and cartridges.  The Tannamen agreed that the plain below the
-burning mountain, where a wide, stagnant lake spread out its dull
-expanse, would do for a bathing place, short of the impossible shore,
-and they chuckled with joyous anticipation of the feast.  They also
-agreed, rather doubtfully, to embark as soon as the "man-of-war" was
-gone; and it seemed evident that a fair number would at least come down
-and negotiate on board the schooner after which—well, the _Sybil’s_
-smart heels would do the rest.
-
-
-
-
-                            *CHAPTER XVIII*
-
-                           *A CANNIBAL PARTY*
-
-
-Vaiti went off to get ready the feast, telling the natives that they
-might follow her before long, as everything would be ready soon; and
-they might trust her, the great Kapitani, that it would be a feast such
-as no Tannaman, not even of those who had served in Queensland, had ever
-witnessed in his wildest dreams.
-
-The mission native being a rather weak-kneed convert, and anxious to
-enjoy a good heathen gossip with his old companions, wanted very much to
-stay on in the village. But that was just what Vaiti did not want, so
-she drove him out in front of her like a fat and nervous sheep,
-hastening his movements all the way down with occasional reminders from
-the butt of her rifle.  He had given her certain information about a
-picnic at the foot of the volcano, arranged by the people of the yacht
-for that afternoon, and she did not want him to share his news with the
-men of the village and cause them, perhaps, to put two and two together
-where he himself had failed to do so.  She despatched him therefore to
-his own town on the coast, and saw that he went, before herself turning
-off in the direction of the track that led to the volcano.
-
-Near to the lake there lies a curious little valley with a soft, clean
-flooring of black volcanic sand and sheltering walls of green pandanus.
-Here, shaded from the burning heat, yet close to the volcano plain, was
-the only possible place for the picnickers to enjoy their meal.  Beyond
-lay only a lurid plateau of red and yellow lava beds, curdled and coiled
-as they had flowed down from the crater lip long ago; a desert of black
-ash and sand, and a dark, wicked, smoking, rumbling cone in the centre
-of all.  Not a native would have climbed the cone for all the goods in
-the _Sybil’s_ hold; it was the mouth of hell, they said, and full of
-devils of every kind. But they were not afraid of the valley below,
-within safe limits, and even if they had been, the feast and the bathe
-after it were attractive enough to conquer a little nervousness.
-
-As Vaiti had anticipated, there were several picnic baskets stowed under
-a tree in the valley, and a big wine hamper as well.  Four mission
-natives, who had acted as guides and carried up the provisions, were
-lying on their stomachs in the shade, smoking and talking.
-
-It was essential to get them out of the way, and time was short.  Vaiti
-did not waste any unnecessary words. She simply pointed her rifle at the
-men and told them to clear.  They cleared, howling, and she was left
-alone.
-
-With quick, neat hands she unpacked the hampers, spread the cloth, and
-laid out the food.  It was a goodly display—hams and tongues and fowls,
-cold meats, pies, cakes, tarts, fruits, and tinned dainties of every
-kind. There was plenty of champagne, also a supply of whisky and soda.
-She set all the bottles in a row, and looked with satisfaction upon the
-glittering array.  Then she went up to the edge of the plain and looked
-at the crater.  No one was yet in sight.  The exploring party at that
-moment were on the other side of the cone, standing on the black lip of
-an appalling gulf eight hundred feet deep and half a mile across;
-looking down, awe-struck and amazed, upon colossal fire fountains that
-uplifted their gory spray three hundred feet in the air, and listening
-to the heart-shaking thunders of the volcano’s awful voice, as from time
-to time that terrifying note of illimitable force and fury made the
-whole plain tremble and echoed far out to sea....  It was indeed no
-wonder that the ignorant Tannamen feared to ascend the cone.
-
-Vaiti sat down at the edge of the plain, and watched till she saw a
-number of many-coloured dots creeping down the black pyramid in its
-centre.  Then she suddenly lay down upon the ashy ground, and writhed
-with silent laughter.  People were in the habit of saying that Vaiti had
-no more sense of humour than the jibboom of her father’s ship.  They
-might have modified that judgment, could they have seen her now.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Lady Victoria Jenkins had enjoyed her morning very much indeed.  She had
-dressed for the ascent in a mountaineering costume that combined equal
-suggestions of "Carmen" and the Alpine Club, and gave great
-opportunities to her ankles.  She had been helped up the cone by four
-devoted admirers, all at once, and had come down it at a wild running
-slide, ably braked by two strong hands of two or three others who wanted
-to have their turn.  The other women had trodden on their skirts, and
-torn them, burned and cut their foolish boots, and also got unbecomingly
-hot and out of breath, because there was not nearly one man apiece to
-help them up, after Lady Victoria had annexed all the best.  It must be
-allowed that the men were the weak point of the _Alcyone’s_ travelling
-party.  Mr. de Coverley and his set were "dear boys" and charming
-companions, no doubt, but they were not quite as manly as some of the
-ladies.  Lady Vic and her companions did not attract the best sort of
-men, as a rule.
-
-They were all very hungry when they reached the plain, and thirsty with
-a thirst unknown outside the tropics.  All the way across the baking
-black sand and the tinkling lava beds, "one fair vision ever fled"
-before the eyes of the party—vision of gold-necked champagne bottles
-lying coolly embedded in icebaskets; of topaz-coloured jellies,
-trembling on silver dishes; of flaky, savoury pies, and delicate cold
-meats, and crisp green salads concocted as only the hand of the
-_Alcyone’s_ _chef_ could concoct them.
-
-It seemed as if that plain would never end, but it did end at last, and
-a green fringe of pandanus announced the beginning of the bush.  The
-elderly young lady and most of the others were making excellent time
-ahead, and they reached the verge of the plain some little while before
-Lady Victoria and Mr. de Coverley came to it. The latter pair, as it
-happened, were really not thinking very much about their lunch, because
-a still more interesting matter absorbed their attention.
-
-"Not understood!" Mr. de Coverley was saying bitterly.  "And so we die
-and go down to the grave—not understood!  The pathos of it!"
-
-"We are never understood," sighed Lady Victoria, patting the side waves
-of her "transformation" to see that it was on straight.  "We women,
-especially. And those who should understand us best of all are so
-often——"
-
-"Exactly—so they are.  But, Lady Victoria—Victoria!—there are some who
-are different; there are men, rare souls, who——"
-
-"What in Heaven’s name is the matter?" interrupted the misunderstood
-one, stopping dead in her tracks (literally, for the sand was deep) and
-staring at the edge of the bush.
-
-From the valley below the plain had just risen a long, loud shriek,
-followed by another and another, and then by a burst of laughter that
-sounded scarcely human. The other members of the party had disappeared,
-but it was clear that something had happened.
-
-"Good God, the savages!" exclaimed Lady Victoria; and she began to run.
-Let it be stated, for the credit of her race and name, that she ran
-towards the sound. As for Mr. de Coverley....
-
-But this story is not about Mr. de Coverley.  If it were, it would be
-interesting to tell why the Sydney steamer that called at Sulphur Bay
-two days later found an unexpected passenger waiting at the trader’s,
-and why Lady Victoria and Mr. Abel Jenkins, of Jenkins’s Perfect Pills,
-became eventually reconciled and lived the life of a model couple.  As
-things are, it must be enough to state that Mr. Jack de Coverley turned
-and ran away at the sound of the shouts—ran right across the plain into
-the bush at the other side—ran as far as he could get, and did not come
-back at all—and thereby ran once and for ever out of the life of the
-lady whom he "understood."
-
-Lady Victoria, speeding in the opposite direction, reached the edge of
-the little valley in a very few minutes, and, looking over, beheld what
-was certainly the strangest sight she had encountered in all her varied
-life.
-
-Round about the elaborately-laid luncheon were squatting a dozen or so
-of naked brown savages, painted, feathered, and slashed with ornamental
-scars.  A few women, clad only in a six-inch fringe of grass, stood
-behind them, eyeing the eatables eagerly, but not daring to touch them
-while their masters fed.  The talking-man, a big, hulking savage with a
-huge bush of hair, and a match-box stuck in each ear-lobe, had buried
-his face in the savoury interior of a boned turkey, and was gnawing out
-the stuffing.  The principal chief, one hand in a dish of Spanish cream
-and the other in a chicken curry, was casting double supplies into his
-mouth with the regularity of a patent feed-machine. A fat young fighting
-man, with nose and forehead painted scarlet, and white ashes in his
-hair, had tucked a ham under one arm, and was sitting on a peach pie,
-with intent to secure as many good things as possible, while he hastily
-worried large mouthfuls off the forequarter of lamb he was holding in
-both hands.  Another man was drinking mint sauce out of the silver
-sauceboat with horrible grimaces; his neighbour, having captured a
-handful of maraschino jelly, fast melting in the sun, was industriously
-rubbing it on his hair; and a grizzly old fellow, with a monkey-like
-face, was half-choking himself over a soufflé, which he was trying to
-swallow case and all.  The necks of the champagne bottles were all
-knocked off, and from engraved wine-cases, empty entrée-dishes, and
-dredged-out tins the savages were drinking Lady Victoria’s excellent
-wines with every appearance of satisfaction.  Between mouthfuls they
-stopped to look at the party from the yacht, and to roar with laughter
-at their evident fright.  Too terrified even to run away, the voyagers,
-in their dainty frocks and smart white suits, stood huddling together
-for protection, the women crying, the men looking rather white and
-foolish, for every Tannaman had a loaded rifle slung to his side, and
-there was not so much as a saloon pistol among the whites.  A few yards
-off Vaiti stood, regarding the whole scene with an expressionless
-countenance that covered a good deal of quiet enjoyment. She knew, if
-the visitors did not, that the cannibal bushmen were really not at all a
-bad lot of fellows when you knew them, and that the yacht party, against
-whom they had no grudge, were perfectly safe.  In fact, the Tannamen
-merely thought these oddly-behaved whites were a new party of
-missionaries, and were quite ready to be civil to them, since they
-thought all the mission people harmless, if eccentric.
-
-But the true inwardness of the situation not being apparent, the
-_Alcyone’s_ guests were very frightened indeed.
-
-"P-perhaps if we go away very quietly, they won’t f-follow us," said a
-wealthy young stockbroker, who had retained a little presence of mind,
-though his teeth were chattering in his head.
-
-"Oh, let us!  Victoria, save me!  Oh, what shall we do?" wailed the
-elderly young lady, rushing up the bank and flinging her arms round the
-mistress of the violated feast.  Lady Victoria, though white as her own
-Belfast linen collar, kept her head fairly well.  She saw that Vaiti was
-not one of the invaders, and called to her.  "Do you speak English?
-What are we to do? Will they kill us?" she asked.
-
-Vaiti walked over to her with the bearing of a stage duchess, and
-favoured her with a fashionable high handshake that was the one thing
-wanting to complete the insanity of the whole impossible scene.  A new
-idea had suddenly struck her—a fresh spark of mischief was lit.  With an
-immovable countenance she replied:
-
-"No kill you, I think.  Suppose you want go ’way all right by’n-by, very
-good I think you sit down, eatum dinner alonga those fellow—then they
-think you all right, let you go home, no kill."
-
-"Oh, Victoria, anything to please them!" sobbed the elderly young lady.
-
-"Yes—a—I think we’d better do anything we can to get into their good
-graces, since we’re not armed," submitted the stockbroker.
-
-Vaiti exchanged a few words with the Tannese.  She explained that these
-white people had come a long way, and were very hungry.  The Melanesian
-has not many virtues, but hospitality is certainly one of them; and a
-man who may be planning to dine off you himself tomorrow will certainly
-not refuse you half of his own leaf of yams to-day.  The Tannese were
-delighted at the chance of sharing their good fortune with the white
-chiefs, even in spite of the latter’s extremely silly manners, and they
-beckoned to them at once to come and sit down.
-
-Thereafter took place a scene incapable of description by mortal pen.
-The chief took his head out of the turkey, chewed off a leg, and
-grinningly handed it to Lady Victoria.  The young warrior got off the
-pie, disembowelled it with one scoop of the hand that had not known
-water "for ten moons," and laid its interior in the elderly young lady’s
-lap.  Another knowingly poured out a champagne glass of Worcester sauce
-and handed it to the stockbroker, while the much-bitten lump of mutton
-that was at that moment circling from mouth to mouth, native-fashion,
-was hospitably passed on to all the whites.  Driven by fear, they tried
-to swallow something; choked in the effort, made futile remarks to each
-other, laughed nervous laughs, and all the time watched with eyes of
-utmost apprehension the dusky hosts who were thus entertaining them with
-their own audaciously ravished goods.  And above the crazy party the
-burning Tanna sun beat down, and the great volcano-cone far across the
-plain smoked and thundered.
-
-It had been Vaiti’s design to dismiss them in peace by and by, assured
-that their compliance had saved their lives, and anxious to make steam
-out of Sulphur Bay as soon as was reasonably possible.  Fate, however,
-reserved a more dramatic ending to the entertainment, And it was "all
-along of" that talking-man.
-
-The cannibal native is invariably shy of displaying his tastes before
-whites, since people who do not share the "point of view" are so
-frequently prejudiced. Therefore the talking-man did not open a certain
-small green parcel tied up with sinnet string, which he had brought down
-with him from the mountain village. A feast in the hand is worth two in
-the pandanus-bush, thought the talking-man, so he brought his _bonne
-bouche_ with him for dessert and said nothing about it.  And thereby
-came the end.
-
-For Lady Victoria, unable to swallow the clawed and chewed morsels
-pressed upon her by dirt-encrusted hands, began to hunt despairingly
-about for something that she could really eat, so that she should not
-offend the dangerous monsters who surrounded her.
-
-"Isn’t there anything clean to be had?" she asked the stockbroker
-anxiously.  "I can’t eat—and yet we must!  What are we to do?"
-
-The stockbroker, who had once been to Honolulu, and thought he knew
-something about native foods, spied the packet of green banana-leaf, and
-reached out for it.
-
-"This’ll be some of their own boiled yam," he said. "Natives always do
-it up like this.  You can eat it all right if you scrape it with a
-knife.  Allow me."
-
-Before the talking-man could stretch out his filthy claw to stop him,
-the Englishman had cut the sinnet string, the parcel had burst open, and
-right into the middle of a half-demolished chicken pie fell a large
-white foot, cut off at the ankle, nicely browned across the instep and
-all crackled on the toes.
-
-There was a wild shriek from the women, a splutter of horrified
-exclamations from the men, a boiling up of white petticoats like to the
-breaking of a wave on a pebbly shore, and then nothing but a diminishing
-string of rapidly trotting figures, each woman hand in hand with a man
-who was dragging her along far away, farther and farther, down the long,
-black, sandy path into the bush. Then ... they were gone.
-
-Vaiti stood on the bank to look after them, and laughed quietly.
-
-"Now I think we keep Sulphur Bay all our own self," she said.
-
-As for the Tannamen, they rolled on the ground with laughter, and then
-picked the dainty morsel out of the chicken pie and ate it up.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XIX*
-
-                         *THE RIVAL PRINCESSES*
-
-
-It was full mid-day when the schooner _Sybil_ dropped anchor off Liali
-Island.  The hot season was at its height.  The long, white coral strand
-blazed in the sun, the moated lagoon was raw emerald, the waveless outer
-sea blue fire.  Beyond the beach stretched a green, grassy lawn, dotted
-with quaintly-shaped Norfolk pines, tall palms, and feather-tressed
-ironwood trees; and against its enamelled background rose a palace like
-a picture in a fairy-tale—white, long-windowed, lofty-towered, and
-crowned with a crimson flag set below a gilded vane.
-
-Vaiti, standing on the break of the poop, with the inevitable cigar
-between her fingers, looked critically at the island, and liked it well.
-A mere little matter of kidnapping somebody’s indentured labourers—the
-sort of thing that any gentleman with an extensive island practice might
-easily find himself obliged to do—had brought about her father’s
-expulsion from the New Hebrides labour trade, and obliged him to seek
-new fields for the activities of the notorious and naughty _Sybil_.
-Saxon himself was virtuously indignant, Vaiti not particularly sorry.
-She was getting tired of the gloomy feverish New Hebrides and their ugly
-savages.  The Eastern Pacific was her heart’s home after all,
-semi-Polynesian as she was; and even the wild excitement of the cruel
-western isles could not hold her away very long.  So when Saxon was
-wavering between the advantages of strictly illegal gun-running in the
-Solomons and honest trading about the Liali group (which had just
-wrecked its native schooner, and was open to employ a successor),
-Vaiti’s influence went for once on the side of peace and virtue, and the
-course was set for Liali.  The group was new to both father and
-daughter, but was none the less attractive on that account, since all
-over the wide island world the _Sybil_ and her owners were best loved
-and most warmly welcomed where they were least known.
-
-The Liali group, as many people in the Southern hemisphere agree, offers
-the nearest possible approach to comic opera known off the actual stage.
-Liali itself, the chief island, is as pretty as a toy-box, and quite
-extraordinarily theatrical in appearance.  Its handsome, merry, brown
-people wear the most picturesque costume in the Pacific—a knee-length
-kilt of fine cashmere, girded by a deep sash of pure silk, and worn with
-a silken or cashmere shirt or a graceful sleeveless tunic, according to
-sex—all in the most vivid of sea- and flower-colour. Liali is civilised
-after a fashion.  It goes barefoot and barelegged, sits on mats, lives
-in reed-woven houses devoid of furniture, worships a sacred lizard on
-the sly, and sometimes breaks out openly into club-fights and
-devil-dances.  But it has a king, and a palace and a Parliament, a brass
-band, and quite a number of very active Nonconformist churches, run by
-white missionaries, who find that "labouring" among the well-off and
-amiable Lialians is a task in which the meritorious martyrdom of
-missionary life can be combined with quite a number of pleasant
-alleviations.
-
-Nothing in Liali is entirely what it seems.  The palace, when one comes
-close to it, is perceived to be built of painted wood, like a
-"practicable" scene in a theatre. The Parliament never passes any laws,
-because the Lords, who are chiefs, always on principle throw out every
-bill introduced by the vulgar Commons, just to "teach" them.  The Prime
-Minister is oftener in prison for _lése majestè_ than out of it, and
-several Chancellors of the Exchequer have been transported to the
-Colonies for theft.  But there is a real throne in the palace, all
-crimson velvet and gilt wood, and a wonderful gold crown (the verdigris
-is cleaned off it with a wad of cocoanut husks by the Chief Equerry
-every Saturday afternoon), and when the King goes out in state he wears
-a purple velvet train, held up by two pages in tights and plumes, and a
-marvellous ermined robe, all exactly like the Savoy Theatre in the
-consulship of Gilbert and Sullivan.  On occasions not of state he sits
-cross-legged upon the palace parquet, clad in a shirt and a kilt, and
-plays _écarté_ with his native guards.
-
-There are a few colonial traders in Liali, and a dozen or so of the
-English "legion that never was listed"—just such as one finds in all the
-odd corners of the Pacific—talkative, plausible, thin and nervous, given
-to avoid home topics and discourse with awful fluency upon small local
-politics; hospitable, restless and lazy, and usually married more or
-less to some dark beauty of the islands, who has grown as fat as a
-feather bed and spends a fortune on store muslins.
-
-These, as a matter of course, took possession of the _Sybil’s_ people at
-once, hardly waiting for the schooner to cast anchor before they were
-alongside with their boats. Saxon and Vaiti were swept ashore
-immediately, and begged to make their home in half-a-dozen different
-houses.  With a fine sense of the fitting, Saxon selected Bob Peter’s
-public-house, misnamed hotel, and immediately held a _levée_ in the bar,
-wearing his smartest Auckland suit (not paid for, and not likely to be)
-and looking, with his heavy, old-fashioned cavalry moustache,
-blonde-grey hair, and well set-up though rather bloated figure, quite
-like a somewhat seedy Milor on his travels. (And, as a matter of
-fact....  But that was Saxon’s long-buried secret, and must not be
-told.)
-
-Vaiti, splendidly attired in a flowing island robe of yellow silk, with
-a gold chain twisted through her misty black hair, sat in the midst of a
-court of her own, and drank expensive pink lemonade to her soul’s
-content. She was revelling in the sights, the sounds, the smells of the
-dear eastern islands once more.  She had a necklace of perfumed red
-berries round her neck, and white "tieré" flowers behind each ear, and
-the well-remembered scent almost intoxicated her.  Outside she could
-hear the boom of a dancing-chant, broken by interludes of clapping; and
-from the very next house, a big native reed-built structure, came now
-and then in the quieter moments the sonorous voice of a Lialian man
-calling out the names at a kava-drinking.
-
-The double soul that is the curse of the half-caste surged within the
-girl....  This, this, this, and all it meant—how she loved it!  And yet,
-the wild, fierce life of the western islands; the chance, the risk, the
-strong wine of danger, adventure, power!  The two natures of the soldier
-of fortune and the sensuous island princess who had given her birth,
-fought together in her heart....  If one could eat one’s cake and have
-it! If one could sleep all day, crowned with flowers, under the singing
-casuarina trees, and yet be the daring sea-queen, the "Kapitani" of the
-_Sybil_, if only...
-
-Vaiti shook herself impatiently in her hammock chair, and asked for
-ginger beer with sugar in it.  She hated thinking, and felt as if she
-were going mad when the half-white brain in her pretty dusky head took a
-strange fit of sober industry.  Swift, instinctive plotting and planning
-were one thing, deliberate reflection quite another....  Ugh! she must
-be sick....  And for once the temperate Vaiti said yes to the inevitable
-offer of "a stick in it," as her ginger beer was handed to her by an
-eager admirer.
-
-The "sickness" passed away, and she began to listen and watch in her old
-fashion, smiling all the time to the compliments and sweet sayings that
-were being poured into her ears.  A trader was telling her father all
-about the latest dynastic crisis in the monarchy, and Saxon was not even
-pretending to listen.  The affairs of "niggers" never interested him,
-unless there was a question of immediate profit ahead.
-
-"You see," said the trader, "King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., which
-is his full title, wants for to get married.  He’s thirty, and there’s
-no heir.  And there being just the two Lialian princesses that wasn’t
-his sisters—Mahina and Litia—what does he do but go and propose to both
-of them, and, of course, gets snapped up like winkin’ by the two.  It’s
-no small potatoes being Queen of Liali, mind you.  Te Paea gets lots of
-money out of the fruit, and copra taxes, and then the Crown lands is
-half the island, there’s presents besides.  And he’s a real king if he
-is coffee-coloured—why, the kings of Liali goes back hundreds of years
-before Captain Cook, and he was in Henry Eighth’s time, wasn’t he?  And
-if you was to see the pink satin chairs in the throne-room, and the
-phonographs, and musical-boxes, and albums, and lookin’-glasses, and the
-lovely wax flowers in cases, and real hand-painted oil pictures—ah! it’s
-a good job, is Te Paea’s, and either Mahina or Litia’s going to be a
-very lucky girl.  What he’d like, you see, is to marry both of them,
-same as his old grandfather—only he married nine, he did.  But the
-King’s a Methody, good as they make them—when he don’t forget, or want a
-spree—and of course the missionaries won’t hear of his havin’ two
-queens.  And, says he, Mahina’s real fat; there’s nothing mean about
-Mahina; she fills the eye, says he, and that’s what a Lialian likes, for
-they don’t hold with any sort of stinginess, says he.  But Litia, he
-says, has eyes like the buttons on his Auckland boots, they’re so round
-and black and bright, says he, and she walks for all the world like a
-lovely young mutton-bird, says he.  And what’s a king to do, with both
-the girls’ relations fighting and squabbling over him like land-crabs
-fighting over a bit of fish, and he himself liking them both, and the
-girls clean mad for him—because, you see, Te Paea he’s a handsome
-fellow, and when he’s got his military uniform on, and all his orders
-and medals what he drew out himself on paper, and got made in Sydney,
-he’s a fancy man, he is.  The wedding’s to be in three weeks, and the
-invites is being printed down in Auckland all in silver, with a blank to
-write the bride’s name in—and the House of Lords has bought the bride’s
-dress for her, which is what the Kings says it’s their right to do,
-according to custom,—and no one knows which he’s going to marry, and no
-more does he.  And it’s my belief that there’ll be war over it, before
-all’s said and done, for Mahina’s people say they’ll burn down every
-village belonging to Litia’s tribe, and Litia’s folks say they’ll kill
-Mahina’s people’s cattle and cut up their gardens.  That’s the way
-things are, and you may take my word it’s a pretty kettle of fish."
-
-"What are you giving for copra at present?" asked Saxon, yawning
-unrestrainedly.  And the conversation turned at once to the inevitable
-trading "shop."
-
-A few days afterwards the _Sybil_ spread her wings and started for
-Waiwai, the outermost of the Liali islands. She was to make the whole
-round of the group afterwards, and might not be back for some weeks, so
-that it seemed likely that Saxon would miss the festivities of the
-King’s wedding.  This Vaiti declared was no reason why she should miss
-them, and she insisted on being left behind. Saxon was not too well
-pleased, for if he had a remnant of conscience left, it was connected
-with the care of his daughter, and he did not quite care about leaving
-her alone in a group to which they were both strangers.  But Vaiti
-promised to behave like a saint, and furthermore said that she would
-stay with one of the married traders, and not in the native villages.
-She also added that she meant to stay anyhow, and that it was no use
-making a fuss.
-
-So the _Sybil_ sailed away out of Liali harbour, and became a little
-pearl-coloured pinhead on the blue horizon, and then melted quite away.
-And Vaiti went to the tin-roofed shanty belonging to Neumann, the fat
-German trader, who had married a Lialian wife, and was received with the
-unquestioning hospitality of the islands.
-
-Nobody, among either whites or natives, could talk of anything but the
-King’s matrimonial affairs. Mahina and Litia both appeared in Neumann’s
-parlour more than once, sat on the floor, drank black tea with a handful
-of sugar in it, and related their several woes at length.  They did not
-come together, except once, when Litia, walking in unexpectedly, found
-Mahina there, crying into her teacup, and telling Neumann’s wife that
-the King had given Litia a beautiful chemise, all trimmed with lace,
-only the day before, and that in consequence she considered him a
-monster and a perjured villain, although she knew perfectly well that he
-meant nothing whatever by it.  What was a chemise?  He had sent her two
-pounds of stick tobacco the Sunday before last. She would show Litia yet
-that the King was her King, and nobody else’s.
-
-Litia, entering at this point, wasted no words, but simply buried her
-hands in Mahina’s curly black masses of hair, and dragged her,
-shrieking, across the floor. Neumann interfered, and parted them; but
-Mahina flew at Litia immediately after, ripped open her dress with one
-clutch, and disclosed the royal gift chastely embracing Litia’s lovely
-form.  With a howl of anger, the rival seized the chemise in both hands;
-there was a scuffle, a scream, a rending noise, and Litia stood up in
-the middle of the room, a gold-bronze statue, shedding tears of rage,
-while Mahina, running out on to the verandah, tore the offending garment
-into strips and rags, and cast them upon the road.  Litia, rushing out
-after her, stood upon the steps clad with wrath as with a garment (and
-with extremely little else), explaining her wrongs to an interested and
-sympathetic native crowd, until the Methodist missionary happened to
-come by, and told her that unless she went in and dressed herself at
-once, she might safely count upon eventually finding herself in a place
-where dress would be very much at a discount ... or words to that
-effect.  So Litia went in, and Mahina went away, escorted by a strong
-cousinly "tail"; and afterwards Neumann, enveloped in oracular clouds of
-smoke, remarked sleepily that the princesses were the greatest nuisance
-on the island, and that he believed the King would run away from the
-whole set if he could, for he was "by-nearly mad-driven on account of
-their so-tiresome ways, and feared-himself to choose, because the one
-that he not married had would cause to make war by her people against
-the one he married should."
-
-During the whole of the fight, Vaiti remained perfectly unmoved on a
-cane lounge in the corner of the room, uninterruptedly puffing rings of
-blue smoke at the ceiling.  Not a detail had escaped her, all the same,
-nor did she miss a word of Neumann’s remarks.  And they made her think.
-
-In the afternoon, the dull thud of galloping hoofs along the grass
-street made Mrs. Neumann run to the door.  She called loudly to Vaiti to
-come.
-
-"It is the King," she said.
-
-A small victoria, drawn by two spirited blacks, was tearing up the
-street.  Seated alone in it was an extraordinary and notable
-figure—Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., King of Liali.  He was six feet
-four inches in height, and over eighteen stone in weight.  He wore a
-scarlet cloth uniform coat, blazing with gold, and his heavy, handsome
-brown face, with its weak, small mouth, and black eyes almost too large
-and soft for a man, was shaded by a white sun helmet with a wide gold
-band.
-
-He drove furiously, looking neither to right nor to left, and, passing
-the house like a gorgeous whirlwind, was instantly lost in the casuarina
-forest beyond.
-
-"That is the King, then?" said Vaiti.  The Lialian language came almost
-as easily to her as her own, being only one of the dialects of the great
-Maori tongue that covers a good two-thirds of the island world.
-
-"Yes," said Neumann’s wife, "that is the King. And very little any of us
-have seen of him lately.  He is afraid of the trouble he has got himself
-into; he shuts himself up all the time, and sees no one but his guards,
-and just sends a present now and then, first to one girl then to the
-other.  And when he drives to take the air, he flies along like that, so
-that no one can stop and speak to him.  He is terribly shy of strangers;
-I think it was because the _Sipila_ was here that he did not come out at
-all last week."
-
-"Is it such a very good thing for the princess he will marry?" asked
-Vaiti, playing with a yellow alamanda flower.
-
-"Very, very good indeed," replied the Lialian impressively.  "She will
-have a gold crown to wear on her head, and sit on a red velvet and gold
-throne beside the King, and have the most beautiful satin dresses from
-Sydney, and all her chemises will have lace and ribbons on them.  And as
-soon as the King buys another schooner for himself and Liali, she will
-travel in it with him whenever she likes, for sometimes he will go to
-Samoa, to stay with King Malietoa, or he will sail a whole week to Mbau
-in Fiji, and then Princess Thakombau and the Prince of Kandavu make
-feasts and dances for him, and the Kovana [governor] gives a real
-’papalangi’ dinner for him, with champagne and a band.  And as for what
-she will have to eat at home, it is past telling, for in the palace
-there is no count whatever made of tinned salmon and biscuit, and she
-may have a sackful of sugar at every meal, and a whole roast pig every
-day. She may eat till she falls asleep, and then wake up to eat.  Ah, it
-is a good thing for the princess who marries the King, whichever she may
-be!"
-
-"I think you will be thirsty if you talk so much," said Vaiti rather
-rudely.  "I am thirsty myself with only listening to you.  Go and make
-some kava for me."
-
-Mrs. Neumann, who had been rather proud to have Vaiti staying with
-her—since her rank as a princess of Atiu counted for a good deal among
-the island races—began to dislike her visitor soon after this, and to
-wish her well away.  Vaiti was not an angel in the house at the best of
-times, and she did not trouble to make herself pleasant just then.
-Indeed, one would almost have thought she was trying to pick a quarrel.
-And, as that sort of effort rarely goes unrewarded, it is not
-astonishing to learn that the quarrel came before long—a bitter,
-loud-tongued dispute that left Mrs. Neumann sobbing in a fat, frightened
-heap on the floor, and Vaiti, silent but stormy, packing up her
-camphorwood box to depart.
-
-Neumann, being afraid of Saxon’s possible anger, tried to keep her, but
-she laughed in his face, and went on packing.  There was an empty native
-house—little more than a palm-leaf hut, once tenanted by a Chinese
-trader—standing by the road about halfway through the great casuarina
-forest; a lonely, ramshackle place, used and wanted by nobody.  There
-and there only Vaiti would go, taking mats and cooking pots with her, to
-stay until her father came back.  When some of the islanders betrayed
-meddlesome curiosity as to her motives, and the missionaries declared
-they scented scandal, Vaiti silenced and terrified the one, and
-convinced the others that she was hopelessly beyond the pale, by giving
-out that she was something of a witch, and meant to go into the forest
-to gather and prepare certain powerful charms.  These, she said, would
-injure only her enemies, but were altogether powerless to hurt anyone
-who spoke well of her.  In consequence, the evil tongues of Liali
-received a sudden check.
-
-Furthermore, Vaiti, neglecting the half-castes and the whites, began
-with considerable art to make herself popular among the natives.  She
-dressed herself Liali fashion, and arranged her hair after the island
-modes. She joined in all their interminable boating journeys and
-picnics, and was never tired of sitting cross-legged on the ground,
-waving her arms and head in time with a hundred others, and chanting
-Lialian songs that lasted an afternoon apiece.  After dark, she was
-often to be seen out on the reef, with a torch and a fishing spear
-making an exhibition of piscatorial skill that astonished even the
-Lialians themselves.  When there was an unmissionary dance in some big
-chief-house, Vaiti was always there, decked with wreaths and flower
-necklaces, and polished with cocoanut oil, turning the heads of all the
-young men by the grace of her dancing, and winning the astonished
-approval of the women by the cool reserve with which she received every
-advance of a sentimental nature.  Both Mahina and Litia took jealous
-fancies to her—thus acquiring yet one more cause of mutual
-dissension—and separately poured all their woes into her ear.  She was
-wonderfully sympathetic, and urged each one on to assert her rights and
-stand no nonsense; insomuch that before very long the island was fairly
-ringing with what Litia’s people meant to do to Mahina’s, and what
-Mahina’s would certainly do to Litia’s, in the event of the King
-selecting one or the other.
-
-Somebody about this time—it was never ascertained who—spread a report
-that Captain Saxon of the _Sybil_ had a number of trade rifles on board
-his ship, and several cases of cartridges.  The talk began to take a
-more dangerous turn.  The schooner would not be back till the wedding
-was over, it was said, but let the winning party look out for themselves
-when she did come!  The Lialians, under missionary rule, had been
-peaceful and law-abiding people for almost a whole generation; but they
-had not yet forgotten that they were once the masters of the Pacific,
-and that of all the warlike island races, none had been such fighters as
-they....  The older men began to snuff battle in the air, walked about
-with their chests flung out, and told bloodthirsty ancient stories to
-the younger Lialians.  The women sang war songs at the evening
-gatherings in the chief-houses, and Mahina and Litia began to go about
-followed by bands of eager partisans.  Liali was certainly warming up.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER XX*
-
-                           *QUEEN AFTER ALL*
-
-
-News of all these things came duly to the King through his faithful
-spies, and his Majesty Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. went nearly
-frantic.  He actually began to lose weight—a consummation that all the
-skill of his European court doctor had hitherto failed to bring
-about—and day by day he drove more wildly behind his famous blacks,
-covering mile after mile of lonely forest roads at a pace that brought
-the horses home all in a lather and the yellow satin cushions grimed
-with dust.  The wedding approached within ten days: the triumphal arches
-were being erected; the Queen Consort’s throne came back from the
-carpenter, freshly gilded and upholstered; and the band were hard at
-work practising the strange conglomeration of shrieks and wails that
-make up the Lialian National Anthem.  The bride’s dress, provided,
-according to usage, by the House of Lords, arrived at the palace in a
-palm-leaf basket. It was a very gorgeous affair—a long, loose robe of
-orange satin, embroidered in scarlet by a few of the cleverest
-mission-school girls—and it was of a usefully indefinite size, since the
-difference between the massive Mahina and the waspish little Litia was
-almost as great as the difference (of another kind) between their
-respective parties.  The silver-printed invitations for the white people
-and the chiefs—"To be present at the wedding of His Majesty King
-Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. with Princess——," came up by a whale-ship
-from Auckland, and so did the wedding cake, largely plaster of Paris.
-And still the wretched King, lashed by the scourge of his own
-light-hearted follies, sent pacificating presents to both girls, and put
-off the dire decision.
-
-It was about this time that any wayfarer passing through the casuarina
-forest "might have observed" a light in Vaiti’s cottage late one night.
-There was no one to observe, however, for the wood was supposed to be
-devil-haunted, and no native ever passed through it save in broad
-daylight.  When it grew toward sunset the only Lialian who would brave
-its dangers so far as to rush across it in the red evening light was the
-King himself, who had been educated in Sydney, and did not believe in
-devils—much.  The forest road was the shortest way home from his usual
-circular drive, and he frequently passed by the cottage just before
-sunset, driving like Jehu the son of Nimshi, and looking neither to
-right nor to left.  He had never noticed Vaiti as he passed, for she was
-always within the house, looking out between the cracks of the
-palm-leaves, where she could see without being seen.
-
-This evening, long after the King had passed by and the dark had come
-down, Vaiti sat on the floor of the hut, looking very thoughtful, as she
-turned out the contents of her big camphorwood box by the light of a
-ship’s hurricane lantern.  She was all alone, as usual, and smoking,
-also as usual.  There was no sound in the solitary little house but the
-sighing of the wind in the casuarina trees and the steady puff of the
-girl’s cigar. Papers, letters, packets of lace, odd bits of jewellery,
-silk dresses, pistols, knives, collections of rope and twine, laced
-underclothing, cartridges, feathers, shells, cigars, pearl-inlaid boxes,
-revareva plumes, and a miscellaneous collection of odds and ends
-garnered from all the four corners of the South Seas, strewed the floor,
-and the box was still half full.  By-and-by she came upon what she
-wanted—a roll of stuff done up in waxed paper.  She unfastened it, and
-let the contents fall out across the mats under the rays of the lantern.
-It was a web of pure gold tissue, bright as a summer sunrise and fine as
-a fairy’s wing—an exquisite piece of stuff, which she had acquired from
-a Chinese trader in Honolulu by means none too scrupulous, and hoarded
-away for years.
-
-Vaiti looked at it thoughtfully, and then opened a little tortoise-shell
-and silver box, and spilled its contents—a shower of photographs—into
-her lap.  They were an exceedingly various collection—naval, military,
-British, French, native and half-caste—but most were men, and many were
-young and handsome.  Perhaps the best-looking of the collection was that
-of a young English naval officer, signed across the corner "R. Tempest,"
-with a Sydney address, and "Must it be good-bye?" written in tiny
-letters under the signature. Vaiti took the picture in her hand, and
-looked at it so long and earnestly that her cigar went out while she
-gazed.  She lit another, put down the photograph, and sat smoking and
-thinking for quite a long time....  The world was still all before her
-... and the whaling ship had said that another vessel was almost sure to
-touch, on her way to Sydney next week.
-
-Once in Vaiti’s many-coloured history a looking-glass had proved her
-undoing.  It was a looking-glass that proved her salvation now, at the
-parting of the ways.  For, as she sat thinking, a brilliant picture
-caught her eye—her own proud, lovely head, crowned regally with a wreath
-of flowers, reflected in the mirror inside the lid of the box.  She
-smiled, stretched out her hand—letting the photograph fall unnoticed to
-the floor from her lap—and placed a fold of the golden tissue across her
-head....  Yes, it looked quite like a crown—a Queen Consort’s crown ...
-the glass gave back a truly royal picture.
-
-Vaiti’s cheeks flushed as she looked.  She could hardly turn away.  But
-the golden fold slipped off her hair, and the queenly picture was gone.
-
-She shut the box, and with set lips took a match, lit it, and set fire
-to the photograph.  It burned very slowly, and the flame seemed to lick
-sympathetically round her own heart as it crawled about the handsome,
-debonair, but sensual face, lit up, and then put out, the laughing eyes,
-crackled through the curly hair and the white naval cap, and at last
-reduced the whole bright picture to a little pile of feathery black
-ash—dead, dead, dead!
-
-Vaiti dropped the charred fragments from her hands, and then put her
-head down upon the mats and lay very still....
-
-When morning broke through the narrow door of the hut, the rays of the
-rising sun fell upon the figure of a girl with a cold, expressionless
-face, sitting upon the threshold, hard at work with needle and thread.
-Upon her lap lay a pile of golden gauze.
-
-That afternoon the King drove late in the forest. The sun was near
-setting, and the rays were slanting long and low among the red trunks of
-the gloomy casuarina trees, when the spirited blacks came galloping up
-to the cottage.  Every day they had passed it by, a still, brown nest in
-the shadows, where nothing moved, but this evening, as they reached the
-spot, something caused them to check and shy, and the King, splendid
-driver as he was, had some difficulty in pulling them in. When he had
-succeeded, he glanced at the object that had caused their fright, and
-saw a vision startling enough to astonish even himself.
-
-A stranger girl of exceeding beauty stood in the midst of the forest
-clearing.  She was dressed in a robe of magnificent golden tissue, from
-which the level rays of the westering sun sparkled back in a halo of
-almost supernatural glory.  On her head was a wreath of blood-red
-hibiscus flowers, and her exquisite right arm, bare except for a twisted
-chain of gold, held up an island kava cup of carved cocoanut shell.
-When she saw that the King observed her, she sank on her knees, bent her
-neck, and raised the cup higher in both hands above her head.
-
-It was an invitation, and one that no Lialian could possibly have
-refused, for the drink brewed from the kava root, and the ceremonies
-connected with the brewing, tasting, and giving round, are almost a
-religion in those islands, and many a man, in the old wild days, has
-died for the insult of putting aside the proffered cup.  Therefore the
-King descended at once, tied his horses to a tree, and advanced to take
-the cup from the hands of this unknown woman who understood royal
-etiquette so well.  It was his Majesty’s right to have his kava, and
-indeed all his food and drink, proffered in this especial attitude; but
-half-castes and whites were sometimes careless enough to forget the
-honour.
-
-He drank the great bowlful at a draught, as a king should, and, sending
-the cup with a twirl to the ground, according to etiquette, cast a side
-glance at the beautiful cup-bearer.  He hated strangers and distrusted
-foreigners, still...
-
-"Will you not come in and rest, O Great Chief?" asked Vaiti in Lialian.
-
-"Who are you?" said the King, still looking half away—but only half.
-
-"Princess of Atiu, and daughter of the great English sea-captain Saxon,"
-replied Vaiti, drawing herself up to her full height, and looking him
-straight in the eyes. The King met the look full this time, and thought
-that Litia’s eyes, Lialian though she was, were not so bright by half.
-And if Mahina was fatter—as she certainly was—she never had such hair,
-or such a coral-red mouth. And what a magnificent dress the magnificent
-creature wore!
-
-He knew at once who Vaiti was, when she mentioned her rank in Atiu, for
-the chocolate-coloured island kings and queens understand each other’s
-complicated genealogies quite as clearly as do their white compeers on
-the other side of the world—and though Atiu was a broken,
-half-depopulated place, annexed to the British Crown, its chiefs were of
-ancient lineage and high repute. Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. hesitated
-a moment—stretched out his hand—withdrew it—then stretched it out again,
-and graciously offered it to Vaiti, as to an equal in blood.
-
-Vaiti, glowing with gratification, yet had the happy intuition of
-dropping on one knee and kissing the royal hand, European fashion.  The
-King understood it, and swelled with pleasure, remembering how Mahina
-had had the impudence to chuck him under the chin when he bestowed a
-gracious salute upon her inferior lips, and how Litia had objected
-altogether to get off her horse when he was passing by, as Lialian royal
-customs enjoined upon all riders ... What a nuisance they had both grown
-to be, crying and battering at the palace gates, fighting over his
-gifts, getting up trouble among their relatives—trouble that he now
-began to fear might become so serious as to bring down the interference
-of the British Crown.  And every Pacific monarch knew what was the
-inevitable next move, when that game had once begun!  Good-bye to his
-kingship, if once the British Lion laid a claw on Lialia.
-
-"Will you not come in and rest, Great Chief?" said the humble voice of
-the stranger again.  And the King, still shy and distrustful, and
-looking at Vaiti only out of the corners of his eyes, did condescend to
-come in.
-
-And the next day he rested again, and the day after that.  It was
-astonishing how easily driving seemed to tire his Majesty at this
-period.  And all the time the wedding preparations went forward, while
-Mahina and Litia, with their respective factions, grew more and more
-jealous of each other, and more and more enraged.
-
-But there came a day at last, four days from the wedding, when the King
-declared that he would make his final choice on the evening before the
-marriage day, and would send a herald on that night to proclaim it
-through the capital.
-
-Ruru, the royal herald, who had never before had a chance to exercise
-his office or wear his uniform, was extremely pleased.  He got out his
-finery at once—a Beefeater cap and tabard of crimson silk, worn with a
-large silk sash, and bare legs—and began a dress rehearsal that lasted,
-with intervals for food and sleep, until the evening of the
-proclamation.  At sunset he went up to the palace, received the paper
-that contained the message, and strutting like a turkey, came out on to
-the open green in front, where at least a thousand Lialians—half of them
-Litia’s friends, and half of them Mahina’s—were collected.  Mahina and
-Litia themselves, each defiantly dressed in all the bridal finery she
-could muster, stood in the forefront of the crowd, exchanging looks of
-death and hatred.  It had come to this with the two women now, that
-either would have cheerfully died a death of slow torture, if by so
-doing only she could have prevented the other from winning. That she
-might miss the glories of the throne was not the prominent thought in
-Litia’s mind—only that Mahina might secure them and triumph over her;
-and the self-same fancy agitated the ample breast of her rival, as the
-two stood in the cool twilight, within sound of the breakers on the
-reef, waiting with choking anxiety for Ruru’s words.
-
-"People of Liali!" read the herald impressively, striking an attitude,
-with one bare leg advanced: "His Majesty King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea
-III. of Liali, being sovereign by right divine, and the Lord’s Anointed,
-also High Chief of all the Liali Islands as descendant of the Sacred
-Lizard, has decided to marry, according to the custom of his
-forefathers, and give the land of Liali an heir to our mighty crown.
-The wedding will take place in the mission church to-morrow, at noon and
-there will be a collection afterwards for expenses! If anyone comes
-drunk to church, or puts nothing in the plate, he will be turned out.
-His Majesty hereby announces that, in order to save war and dissension
-among his loyal subjects, and to teach some princesses to pay him proper
-respect, he has decided to give the honour of his hand to Princess
-Vaiti, daughter of Princess Rangi of Atiu, deceased, and Captain Saxon,
-of the schooner _Sybil_.  God save the King, and you are all to go home
-without making a row."
-
-It was a fine proclamation, but assuredly the order in the last clause
-asked too much of Lialian humanity. No one attempted to obey it.  The
-news was received first in a dead silence of amazement, and then by a
-storm of shrieks, howls, questions, a wild trampling and rushing to and
-fro, and, last of all, by a Homeric roar of laughter.  The Lialian
-possesses a rough but reliable sense of humour, practical joking being
-his especial delight; and it suddenly dawned upon the populace of Liali
-that the King had played the most stupendous practical joke upon them
-ever known in the history of the islands.  Therefore these light-hearted
-children of the sun, instead of raiding the palace in two separate
-factions, lay down and rolled upon the grass, or held helplessly on to
-one another, roaring with laughter. The utter disconcerting of Mahina
-and Litia, now that all party feeling was removed from the matter,
-further appealed to them as a jest of the finest sort, and witticisms
-that would have made a trooper blush were hurled upon the disconsolate
-maidens from all sides.  Some few there were who frowned at the triumph
-of a foreigner and a stranger; but Vaiti’s arts had succeeded in making
-her popular, and the malcontents were borne down by the roar of public
-amusement and assent.  Vaiti herself, safely hidden in the Methodist
-mission house, listened to the laughter far off, and felt well pleased.
-She had not been very sure how matters might go, and had therefore, at a
-bold stroke, won the favour of the Church by approaching the missionary,
-and assuring him of the extreme purity of her Methodism (she was, if
-anything, a pure heathen) and, in confidence, of the honour awaiting
-her.  The reverend gentleman, who had long sat on thorns by reason of
-the power of the Seventh Day Adventist, Christian Science, and Original
-Shaker missions in the islands, received her with delight, and handed
-her over to the care of his wife, who shortly afterwards informed him
-that the new light of the Church was, in her opinion, a "perfect
-minx"—but that she supposed it was as well, under the circumstances, to
-make to herself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, as the Bible
-enjoined, and remain on intimate visiting terms with the palace.  So
-Vaiti spent the fateful evening under the secure protection of the
-Church itself, and claimed the same creditable patronage for the day of
-the wedding.
-
-What of Mahina and Litia?  The disappointed princesses, when the
-proclamation was read out, turned and stared at each other like
-tigresses robbed of a meal. Neither was going to be Queen of
-Liali—neither was going to scratch her rival’s eyes out, and root up her
-hair, for the crime of securing the coveted honour.  The very bottom of
-the world had dropped out—what was to follow?
-
-For a moment they continued to stare, each scanning the other’s face
-under a new light—the light of common feeling.  Litia remembered that
-she and Mahina had been brought up almost as sisters in the palace of
-the late Queen.  Mahina recalled the time when she had almost died of
-measles, and Litia had nursed her through. They were both deceived, both
-deserted, and the friends of one could never crow offensively over the
-other now. The thought was mingled bitter-sweet, and the two burst out
-crying, and dropped into each other’s arms, simultaneously vowing
-threats of vengeance against the treacherous interloper, which—unbacked
-by their war-like following of friends—they knew very well they would
-never be able to execute.  And the crowd dispersed as the sun went down.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-The _Sybil_ made better time than was expected, after all.  Her white
-sails lifted against the blue, from behind the nearest island, just as
-the royal wedding party commenced its gorgeous procession to the church.
-Before the ceremony was ended, the schooner had made the harbour and
-Saxon was ashore.  He came upon an utterly deserted town, and saw not a
-human being until he was halfway up to the church, outside of which he
-perceived an immense crowd, unable to enter.  Under a tree by the
-wayside sat one of the English traders who had failed to get a place.
-He greeted Saxon uproariously, and asked him if this wasn’t a proper go.
-
-"What?" asked Saxon.  "Which is he marrying?"
-
-"Oh, crikey! he doesn’t know!" roared the trader—and fell back against
-the tree, suffocating with laughter, and utterly declining to explain.
-
-Saxon, cursing him for a silly fool, tramped on towards the church.  The
-procession was coming out now, and he wanted to see the show, for though
-he might call the coffee-coloured Lialians niggers, he quite understood
-the position of King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., and the importance
-to all the islands of his choice.
-
-He got upon a bank to see the better, fixed his long-sighted sailor eyes
-upon the chapel door, and saw a glittering vision emerge into the
-sunlight, amidst the cries and cheers of the people.  That was the King,
-in a gorgeous uniform, with his crown on his head and a long velvet
-mantle sweeping behind him ... and at his left hand stepped a tall,
-stately, slender figure, also crowned, and dazzlingly dressed all in
-glittering gold.... Not Mahina, certainly; not Litia either—Who was it,
-then?  It could never be—but it was—Vaiti!
-
-Saxon staggered off the bank, sat down, jumped up again, and clapped his
-hands.
-
-"By ——, if it isn’t like her, through and through!" he cried.  "By ——,
-I’m proud of her!  Queen of Liali!  Queen of Liali!  But——"
-
-He stopped, and shook his head with a knowing laugh.  He was not very
-sober.
-
-"But—God help the King!" he said.
-
-
-
-                                THE END
-
-
-
-    PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND ECCLES.
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-                          VAITI OF THE ISLANDS
-
-
-
-
-This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at
-http://www.gutenberg.org/license. If you are not located in the United
-States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are
-located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: Vaiti of the Islands
-Author: Beatrice Grimshaw
-Release Date: December 10, 2015 [EBook #50663]
-Language: English
-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
-
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VAITI OF THE ISLANDS ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Al Haines.
-
-
-
-
-
-                         *VAITI OF THE ISLANDS*
-
-
-                         *BY BEATRICE GRIMSHAW*
-
-
-
-                                 LONDON
-                         GEORGE NEWNES, LIMITED
-                    SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND, W.C.
-
-
-
-
-                               *CONTENTS*
-
-CHAPTER
-
-Prologue
-
-      I. The Pearl Lagoon
-     II. A Race for a Fortune
-    III. The Flower behind the Ear
-     IV. The Black Viri
-      V. A Diamond Web
-     VI. Marooned
-    VII. The Turning of the Tables
-   VIII. The White Man of Nalolo
-     IX. The Lost Island
-      X. What came of the Paris Dress
-     XI. A Dead Man's Revenge
-    XII. Breaking the Mana
-   XIII. The Game Played Out
-    XIV. How the Witch-Doctor got his Money back
-     XV. The Calamity of Coral Bay
-    XVI. The Fate of the Lieutenant
-   XVII. Invaders in Tanna
-  XVIII. A Cannibal Party
-    XIX. The Rival Princesses
-     XX. Queen after all
-
-
-
-
-                         *VAITI OF THE ISLANDS*
-
-
-                               *PROLOGUE*
-
-
-It was in the seventies, long ago.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Summer--yet a slow grey dawn, lingering long in the sky.  August--yet a
-chilly morning, crisping the landlocked waters of the bay with cold
-knife-edges of foam.  Out at sea, the wild white horses plunging madly
-under the whip of the sunrise wind; the bar beginning to thunder.
-Inshore, beneath the green slope of the castle hill, small angry ripples
-beating and fretting the untrampled sand.  Dead rose-leaves from the
-gardens floating among the seaweed; a torn bird's-nest, flung down by
-the wind, lying on the edge of the steep cliff pathway....  It was still
-the time of summer, yet, too surely, autumn had come.
-
-The sodden leaves lay thick in the bottom of the boat when the man
-seized it by the gunwale and ran it down the beach into the snatching
-waves....  Oh, an autumn day indeed, here in wild Caithness, though
-summer was still at its fairest in kinder lands.  And in the heart of
-the man who was rowing fast through the angry dawn light, to the tall
-schooner yacht that swung and tore at her moorings out in the bay, there
-was autumn too, with winter close at hand.
-
-All so long ago! who remembers?
-
-Not the newspapers which, in a day or two after, shrieked the scandal
-broadcast, east and west.  Not the guests of the castle
-house-party--they are dead, or old, which is half of death, since then.
-Not the Prince whose dignity had been insulted by the outbreak of a
-vulgar card scandal in his very presence--he struck the titled owner of
-the house off the list of his intimates forthwith, and then forgot about
-it and him.  Not the colonel of the famous regiment, who found out
-defalcations in the funds belonging to the mess, a few days after, and
-knew why his most promising young officer had done the unforgiveable
-thing--for the Ashanti spears ended life and memory for him out on the
-African plains, before even Piccadilly had made an end of talking. Not
-the Royal Yacht Squadron--the reported loss of the famous _Paquita_ at
-sea, with her disgraced owner on board, is a tale that even the oldest
-_habitue_ of Cowes could not tell you to-day....  No one remembers. When
-the beautiful white schooner spread her wings below the castle wall, and
-beat her way like a frightened butterfly out to the stormy sea, she
-sailed away in silence, and she and hers were known no more.
-
-Yet, but for that stormy day in the Highlands, and the boat that fled to
-sea, these tales of far-off lands had never been told.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER I*
-
-                           *THE PEARL LAGOON*
-
-
-"Where's the old man?"
-
-"Old man drunk," replied Vaiti indifferently.  She had learned to play
-"The Maiden's Prayer," maltreat three European languages, and cultivate
-a waist in her Tahitian convent school.  But that was five years ago
-now, and Vaiti's "papalangi" verbs had dropped from her quite as soon,
-and as naturally, as her "Belitani" stays.
-
-"Why can't he wake up and give us an observation?" commented the mate
-indignantly.  "It would be hard if a man mightn't enjoy himself in port;
-but we're four days out now, and he's as bad as ever, lyin' all the time
-on the settee like a----"
-
-"You better mind too much what you say my father!"  Vaiti had set one
-shapely olive hand on the deck, and sprung to her feet like a
-flying-fish making a leap.  She was taller than the sturdy, red-haired
-mate, as she stood up on the poop, her bare feet well apart, her white
-muslin loose gown swelling out as she leaned to the roll of the steamer,
-and her black-brown eyes, deep-set under fine brows as straight as a
-ruler, staring down the blue eyes of the man.
-
-"Very sorry, I'm sure; no offence meant," said the mate humbly.  "But we
-want an observation, and he ain't no good.  Why, you know as well as me
-that he'll be like this, off and on, all the voyage now; we've both of
-us seen it before."
-
-Vaiti stamped her bare feet on the deck.
-
-"I know--I know!  I try all the way from Apia wake him up--no good!  I
-tell you, Alliti"--the mate's name, Harris, usually took this form in
-the pigeon-English of Polynesia--"this very bad time for him to get
-'quiffy.  Too much bad time.  Never mind.  Get the sextan'.  I take sun
-myself."
-
-The mate ran down the companion and into the cabin, where the captain's
-six feet two of drunken ineptitude sprawled over most of the space
-available for passing.  He stopped for a moment to look at the heavy,
-unconscious face--a handsome face, with the remains of refinement about
-it; for Captain Saxon had been a gentleman once, and his name (which was
-certainly not Saxon then) had appeared among the lists of "members
-deceased" in the annual reports of all the best London clubs of the
-'seventies....  Why Saxon died, and why he came to life again in the
-South Pacific some years later, is a tale that need not be told, even if
-it is guessed.  Many such substantial ghosts roam the South Seas
-unexorcised--many a man whose name adorns a memorial tablet, guarded by
-weeping marble angels, on the walls of some ivied English Church, is
-busy conferring a peculiar fitness upon the occupation of those guardian
-seraphs, down among "The Islands," where he and the devil may do as they
-please.
-
-"'Og!" observed the mate, as he passed through to the captain's cabin,
-and fetched out the sextant. "'Alf-caste or quarter-caste, Vaiti's too
-good a daughter for him, by the length of the mainmast and the mizzen
-together.  She's got all his brains--Lord, how she learned navigation
-from him, like a cat lapping up milk, when she set her mind to it!--and
-none of his villainy. At least----"  The mate paused on the companion,
-and filled his pipe.
-
-"At least----" he repeated, and broke off the remark unfinished.
-
-"Sun coming out nice now," he said, handing the sextant to the girl.
-Vaiti made her observation with the ease of an old sea-captain, and went
-below to work it out.  It was true, as Harris said, that she had plenty
-of brains, though they did not lie along the lines of "The Maiden's
-Prayer" and Dr. Smith's English Grammar.  And, whatever the legal status
-of poor derelict Saxon, or the mate, might be, no one who had ever
-climbed the side of the schooner _Sybil_ could doubt the obvious fact
-that the real commanding officer of that vessel was Vaiti herself.
-
-"What d'ye make it?" asked the mate, looking over her shoulder.  Vaiti,
-always sparing of her words, pointed to the figures.  Harris whistled.
-
-"Ain't we off our course, just!" he said, drawing his finger down the
-chart.
-
-"No," said Vaiti.
-
-"Why, hang it all, Cap"--the girl was accorded the title, half in fun,
-half through habit, a good deal oftener than her father--"we ain't
-making for the Delgada reefs, are we?  I don't pretend to be any
-navigator, but I do know the course for Pape�te."
-
-"What you think not matter," said Vaiti, rolling up the chart.  "Make
-him eight bell.  You go take wheel; I ki-ki [dinner], then I take him."
-
-"What's the course?" demanded the mate eagerly.
-
-"Nor'-west by west," answered Vaiti, going into her cabin, and slamming
-the door against Harris's open-mouthed questions.
-
-An Aitutaki boy with a chain of red berries in his hair, and a scarlet
-and yellow "pareo" (kilt) for all clothing, brought up the dinner.
-Vaiti ate her meal alone, and then came on deck to take over the wheel,
-keeping a determined silence that Harris hardly cared to break....  And
-yet--Nor'-west by west, with the wind fair for distant Pape�te, and the
-deadly Delgadas lying about a quarter point off their present course,
-not ten miles away!
-
-"She's a hard case, bo'sun," he remarked to that official as they sat
-down together.  "She has me fair scared with the course she's steering;
-and yet, you may sling me over the side in a shotted hammock for the
-sharks'es ki-ki, if she don't know a lot more than the old man himself.
-Ain't she a daisy, too!  Look at her there 'olding the wheel, as upright
-as a cocoanut palm, and as pretty and plump as a--as a----"
-
-"Porker," concluded the bo'sun, pouring an imperial pint of tea into his
-mug.
-
-"You ain't got no poetry in you," said the mate disgustedly.
-
-"Nor nothing else," growled the bo'sun.  "Ain't you going to help that
-curry, and give a man something to put in his own inside after stowing
-the whale-boat full of beef and biscuits?"
-
-"The whale-boat?  (That's plenty, bo'sun; I've got to live as well as
-you)."
-
-"Ay, biscuits, beef, and water; compass and sextant. She give the order
-a while ago."
-
-"What's in the wind now?"
-
-"I don't ask questions, so I'm never told no lies."
-
-"I do, though," said the mate, in a spasm of authority, deserting his
-dinner to spring up the companion and join Vaiti at the wheel.  The
-bo'sun's mahogany face broke up into a score of curving wrinkles, and
-his shoulders shook a little, as he watched the scene on deck.  Quite
-mechanically he transferred the rest of the curry to his plate, and
-while clearing the dish with the precision of a machine, kept an eye on
-the couple at the wheel.  He saw Harris ask an eager question, and
-repeat it more eagerly.  He saw Vaiti jerk a brief answer, and the mate
-speak again.  Then he saw the girl swing round on her heel, lift one
-slender hand, and bring it down across Harris's cheek with an emphasis
-that left a crimson mark upon the polished brown.  He saw the mate take
-a step forward, and look at the handsome helmswoman as though he were
-very much minded to pay back the correction after the manner of man in
-general where a pretty vixen is concerned.  The two figures stared at
-each other, eye to eye, for a full minute. Vaiti's brown eyes, keen as
-twin swords, never wavered; her lip was insolent and unrelenting.  The
-mate's half-angry, half mischievous expression dissolved into an
-embarrassed grin; then he turned tail and hurried down the hatch.
-
-"She's a tigress in 'uman form," he declared.  "If the old man--or any
-other--was to lay 'is little finger on me--but there! who cares what a
-scratchin' cat does?  I'd as soon marry a shark--I would!"
-
-"You've as much chance," granted the bo'sun.
-
-"Talk of sharks!" said the mate, gazing ruefully at the table and the
-empty dish.
-
-Some two hours later, a milky gleam on the port bow attracted the mate's
-attention as he stood on the poop. A Kanaka sailor had just taken the
-wheel, and Vaiti was below.
-
-"Breakers on the port bow!" sang out Harris.
-
-Vaiti was up in a minute.
-
-"I t'row water on my father's head," she said coolly--"but no good; he
-too much sick, he see snake by and by, I think.  You and Oki carry him
-into him cabin, and come back pretty quick.  I see this t'rough myself."
-
-"See _what_?" demanded the mate, on the last verge of frenzy.
-
-"Not know myself yet," answered Vaiti, giving one of her rare laughs.
-She seemed in a very good humour for once.
-
-When the mate came out a little later, and the sailor went back to the
-neglected wheel, Vaiti was standing by the whale-boat, wearing an air of
-perfect self-possession and a complete suit of her father's white ducks.
-The sight was no novelty to Harris, but it came upon him now, as
-usually, with a new shock of admiration.
-
-"Isn't she an outrighter!" he observed to the unsympathetic bo'sun.
-
-"She certainly is, if outrighter's French for an undacent young woman,"
-replied that officer sourly. Harris did not hear him, for the
-significance of the morning's mystery had just burst on his mind.  He
-had not spent ten years in the Pacific for nothing and the sight of Tai,
-a diver from Penrhyn, standing beside Vaiti, with a water-glass in his
-hand, spelt "pearl-shell" to the eyes of the mate as clearly as if the
-magic word had been printed in letters three feet long.  Vaiti flashed
-her white teeth at him.
-
-"Tai, me, three boys, we go into lagoon," she said. "Suppose somethings
-happen, you find course for Apia written out, cabin table; you take ship
-back, put captain in hospital."
-
-"By ----, but you're a corker, Vaiti!" cried Harris admiringly.
-"Where'd you hear anything about the Delgadas?  No ship goes near them
-that can help it; they're a regular ocean cemetery."
-
-"You 'member officer from gun-boat, Apia?"
-
-"Ay!" said Harris.  He did remember the lad, and the rather inexplicable
-friendliness shown him by Saxon and Vaiti during the stay in port of the
-_Alligator_.
-
-"He show me photo Delgadas.  _Alligator_ he been go all round him, mark
-him right for chart, because he all wrong.  Officer give my father
-bearings; say plenty talk and show photo.  He dam fool officer, I think;
-he not know that kind place mean pearl-shell, and we not tell anything."
-
-Harris mounted the rigging, and surveyed the reef from the main
-cross-trees.  It was the best part of a mile away; a creaming circle of
-foam on the sea's blue surface, enclosing a pallid spot of green.
-Vaiti, who had followed him, flung one arm round the mast, and, leaning
-outwards towards the horizon, surveyed the reef intently.  Within that
-ring of foam--the grave of many a gallant ship that had sailed the fair
-Pacific as bravely as their own little schooner--might lie many
-thousands of pounds.  The repurchase of the _Sybil_, once Saxon's sole
-property, now partly owned by a trading syndicate; the regaining of her
-captain's lost position in decent society--perhaps the realisation of
-half a hundred luxurious dreams, dreamed on coral beaches under the
-romance-breeding splendours of the tropic moon--all this, and more, hung
-on the chances of the next few hours.
-
-There was silence for the space of a minute or two, as the man and woman
-swung between earth and heaven, staring across the sun-dazzled plain of
-sea. Then, in one instant, the dream broke, and the rainbow fragments of
-that bubble of glory scattered themselves east and west.  For across the
-bar of the level horizon slipped a small, pointed, pearl-coloured sail,
-growing as they watched it, flying past, and heading all too surely for
-the Delgadas reef.
-
-Vaiti flung herself round a backstay, and slid down to the deck, with a
-word on her lips that would have justified the bo'sun's recent judgment,
-could he have caught it.  Harris followed, swearing fully and freely. It
-was evident to both that the newcomer had special business with the reef
-as well as themselves; and they wasted no time, acting in concord, and
-without dispute, after a fashion that was new on board the _Sybil_.
-Within half an hour they had reduced the distance between the ship and
-the reef to a quarter of a mile; nearer than that even Vaiti did not
-care to go, for the weather looked unsettled, though the wind was off
-the reef. The whale-boat, with a picked crew, was lowered, and sent
-flying towards the break in the reef, while the mate, burning to be in
-her, but conscious that his duty must keep him on the ship, paced
-excitedly up and down the deck, glass in hand, watching the advance of
-the stranger ship from time to time.  She was a good two hours' sail
-away as yet; and surely first possession was worth something, even out
-here in the lawless South Seas!
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER II*
-
-                         *A RACE FOR A FORTUNE*
-
-
-Before an hour was over, the wind had freshened considerably, and the
-mate began to feel anxious for the safety of the boat, in case he should
-be obliged to run for it from the neighbourhood of the treacherous reef.
-That Vaiti would return an instant sooner because of the threatening
-weather he did not expect, knowing the dare-devil recklessness of her
-character too well. It was certain, however, that he might lose the
-ship, and incidentally himself, by waiting too long; and it was equally
-certain that Saxon, once recovered, would put a bullet through his
-mate's head if Vaiti came to harm.  And all the time that threatening
-sail was growing larger and larger.
-
-It was an unspeakable relief, though no less of a surprise, when he saw
-that the boat was actually heading towards the ship again, the sail up
-and every oar hard at work.  He did not remember having seen Tai go
-down, in any of his hurried inspections through the glass, and the time
-was certainly short.  What did it all mean?
-
-The meaning became sufficiently clear as soon as the boat approached the
-ship, but not through the medium of eye or ear.  A strong stench of
-rotting fish struck the mate's nostrils almost before the boat was
-within hail, and instantly enlightened him.  No one who has ever smelt
-the terrible smell of the pearl-oyster removed from its ocean bed, and
-left to putrefy in a tropical sun, can mistake the odour.  Harris
-understood at once that the strange ship had been there before, and that
-Vaiti was bringing back a sample of the last catch, left out to rot
-during the vessel's temporary absence.
-
-The _Sybil_ was leaping dangerously when the boat came alongside, but
-Vaiti snatched at the lowered rope, and swung herself up over the
-bulwarks before any of the native crew.  Tai, following her, brought a
-sack of hideously smelling carrion, and dumped it down on the deck.  The
-mate's eyes glistened.
-
-"I find great lot lying on reef," said Vaiti, with an apparent calmness
-that might have deceived any one who knew her less accurately than the
-mate.  "I think been there two week.  C'lismas Island, he one week away,
-good weather.  Papalangi C'lismas Island belong plenty diving gear.  You
-see?"
-
-"Rather!" said Harris gloomily.  "Game up, eh?"
-
-"I think you no man at all," spat Vaiti suddenly, swinging into the
-cabin.  Harris, not especially put out, gave a hand to hauling in the
-boat, remarking to the bo'sun, who was picking over the heap of decaying
-pearl-shell, "Don't know as one could say the same about her, lump of
-solid devilment that she is!  But this looks like the end of all our
-'opes, as they say in the plays; don't it?"
-
-In a minute or two Vaiti appeared again, wearing a dignified muslin gown
-with three frills on its tail, and holding a chart in her hands.  She
-eyed the horizon narrowly, and ordered the ship to be put about, a
-manoeuvre which headed the _Sybil_ straight for the oncoming sail.  It
-was now evident that the stranger ship was a schooner of some eighty or
-ninety tons, rather larger than the _Sybil_, and nearly as fast.  No one
-on board had the smallest doubt of her mission, even had that rotting
-heap of shell not been there to offer evidence.  Pearl-shell lagoons,
-with their shell worth �100 to �200 per ton, and their pearls (if any
-are found, which is not always certain) worth a fortune for half a
-handful, are the gold mines of the South Sea world; the very birds of
-the sea seem at times to carry the news of such a discovery, and spread
-it far and wide.
-
-The _Sybil_ gathered way, and sped fast towards the stranger ship.  The
-sea was blackening and rising, but there was not very much wind as yet.
-Vaiti sat cross-legged on the deck, studying her chart in the waning
-light of the gusty afternoon.  It was some minutes before she laid it
-down and stood up to speak, steadying herself with one hand against the
-deck-house, for the schooner was now rolling heavily.
-
-"Alliti," she said, "suppose you got heart one small fowl inside you, I
-get captain's Winchester, my levolver, you and bosun's levolver, and we
-send that people Davy Jones, or go ourself, pretty quick.  But you not
-got heart, though you big man, and old man he all time sick.  Now, you
-listen too much what I tell you.  You run alongside ship, you go on
-board.  You say captain sick, no one take sun, we get off course, nearly
-wreck on Delgadas. Then you ask captain give bearings reef, and you look
-at him chart too much careful, see if this line mark--here."
-
-She put the point of her small forefinger on the chart she held, and
-showed two or three newly-ruled lines in red ink, enclosing a large
-space east and south of Samoa. These were the boundaries of the area
-lately annexed by New Zealand, and she was exceedingly anxious to know
-if the stranger knew as much about the significance of that matter as
-she did.
-
-"Then," she went on, "you ask him if he been Wellington, say we wanting
-news----"
-
-"What the (adjective noun) for?" demanded the mate.
-
-"Because I say, pauki!" (pig) flashed Vaiti.  "No!--you got head of pig,
-heart of fowl.  You bo'sun, you know I get you through this all right,
-suppose you trusting me--you come here."
-
-Harris, shaking his great shoulders in an easy laugh, swung down on to
-the main deck, and began ordering about the crew.  He had an enormous
-admiration for Vaiti, even when she boxed his ears, but he thought her
-special peculiarities of character rather a trying obstacle in the way
-of his enjoying the easy life beloved of South Sea mates.
-
-The acidulous bo'sun rose from his seat on deck, holding out an unclean
-palm, in the midst of which glittered two fine pearls.
-
-"I've been through that little lot, and got these, which do look like
-biz, ma'am," he observed.  "As to people havin' fowls' hearts, or pigs'
-heads, I'm not prepared to pass judgment.  But I don't own to neither
-myself, and if you say it's a fight, a fight it is.  Or if you've got a
-better plan in that uncommon level 'ead of yours, I'm ready to stand
-by."
-
-"You something like a man," pronounced the commanding officer in the
-muslin skirt.  "You listen. I tell him all again."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-An hour later the bo'sun, very wet and draggled, climbed over the
-bulwarks of the _Sybil_, and the schooner _Margaret Macintyre_, of
-Sydney, slipped behind into the falling dusk.
-
-"Said he was thirteen weeks out from Sydney, ma'am," reported the
-ambassador.  "Four weeks out from Apia, gettin' copra round here and
-there, and there wasn't no Wellington news anywhere, as he remembered.
-Nice new chart, with no lines of that kind ruled on it anywhere.  As to
-where he got the divin' gear that was in the cabin, or what kind of
-copra he reckoned to pick up on the Delgadas, he didn't say, not bein'
-asked."
-
-Vaiti stood still to consider, a beautifully poised black silhouette
-against the yellow oblong of the lamp-lit cabin door.
-
-"I think it all right; he not been near Wellington," she pronounced at
-last.  "Alliti!  How her head?"
-
-"Sou'-west by south," answered the mate from the wheel.
-
-"Keep her so."
-
-"Ay, ay, sir!" laughed the mate.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Every one in the South Pacific knew that the _Sybil_ was a marvel of
-speed, and that she had not been originally built for trading, though
-nobody could tell exactly how Saxon had acquired such a clipper.  It was
-a popular theory that she was a millionaire's yacht from San Francisco,
-which he had stolen and subsequently disguised.  He was known, however,
-to have possessed her for more than twenty years, and was now as
-completely identified with her as her own mainmast; so that any doubts
-as to the honesty of the way by which he might originally have obtained
-her were now of a purely academic nature.
-
-Famous as she was for speed, the record of her passage from the Delgadas
-to Wellington fairly astonished the Islands, when it came to be told.
-They had a fair wind almost all the way, with two or three lively nights
-when the little vessel, hard driven under the utmost pressure of the
-canvas, piled up the knots like a liner.  Saxon continued delirious, but
-was fortunately quiet.  Harris, and Gray the boatswain, though
-unenlightened as to the cause of the _Sybil's_ sudden southward flight,
-fully understood that the possession of the pearl lagoon hung in the
-balance, and worked like half-a-dozen to supplement the efforts of the
-scanty Kanaka crew.
-
-Vaiti interfered little with the working of the ship, but she kept a
-look-out that hardly left her time for sleep or food; although the
-_Sybil_, like most Pacific ships, was allowed, under ordinary
-circumstances, to chance it, day and night.  Hour after hour she sat
-cross-legged on deck, watching the unbroken rim of the black horizon, or
-paced up and down the poop, silent and grave, in her lace and muslin
-fripperies, as a naval officer on the bridge. What she was looking for
-no one knew, but during that wild ten days of foam and smother, cracking
-sails and straining sheets, her silent watchfulness infected the men
-themselves, and eyes were constantly turned to scan the empty, seething
-plain over which they flew.
-
-It was drawing on towards dusk of the tenth day, and the sky was
-beginning to light fires of angry copper-purple, high in the
-storm-driven west, when Vaiti, of a sudden, stopped dead in her endless
-walk, and looked with lips apart and eyes narrowed deep beneath her
-brows over the weather rail.  All this time they had not sighted a
-single sail or a solitary funnel.  They had been well off the track of
-New Zealand bound ships, and the Pacific waters are wide.  But now they
-were drawing near to Wellington, and there was nothing to be astonished
-at in the sight of another sail creeping up over the horizon, except,
-indeed, the fact that it was momentarily growing larger and gaining on
-the _Sybil_. There was scarce another schooner afloat from New Guinea to
-the Paumotus that could have done as much.
-
-The mate came up behind Vaiti, and handed her a glass.  She looked
-through it, lowered it, raised it, and looked again with a steady gaze,
-and suddenly flung it out of her hand across the deck.
-
-Harris caught it deftly and asked, with the constitutional calm that
-alone saved his reason when Vaiti took over command, "What's to pay
-now?"
-
-"She got auxiliary," said Vaiti, with a note of agony in her voice.
-
-"What if she has?  Isn't any vessel free to carry an auxiliary that can
-stand the stink of the oil and the cussedness of the injin?"
-
-"I go see captain," said Vaiti, flashing down the companion.
-
-Saxon was better to-day, and almost in full possession of his senses.
-Vaiti went to the medicine chest; took out a hypodermic syringe, filled
-it with careful accuracy from a tiny dark blue bottle, and lifted her
-father's arm as he lay limp and weak, but mending fast, in his bunk.
-
-"Good girl, take care of your old father," he murmured in island Maori
-as she slipped the needle-point painlessly under the skin, and the
-powerful drug began to race through every vein of the inert body.  The
-effect was rapid and decisive.  Saxon sat up against his pillows in five
-minutes, clear-headed though weak, and asked if the _Sybil_ had not
-sighted the Delgadas yet.
-
-"Listen, father," said Vaiti, speaking fluently in the low, soft tongue
-that the two had used together all her life--the Maori language Saxon
-had first learned from the pretty brown girl, dead this many years, whom
-he had stolen from her South Sea island to sail the blue Pacific at his
-side in the days of long ago.  "Listen. There is little time, and we are
-in great need.  We came to the reef, and the shell was there truly, but
-a strange ship had been before us.  Even as we lay there she returned
-from Christmas Island with diving gear.  I sent Gray on board to look at
-her chart and find out if she had been to Wellington; and it seemed that
-she had not the new line of annexation marked on the chart, where New
-Zealand this year added to herself all that lay within a certain space
-of the sea; also she had not been south of Auckland.  So then, knowing
-that we, if we asked the Government, might have the atoll granted us for
-twenty years and take possession above the people of the other ship, I
-made sail for Wellington; and we are now but one day away when this ship
-appears again, chasing us.  Where the suspicion has waked in their
-hearts, or when, is nothing; but that they have thought and discovered
-our desire, that is certain."
-
-"Give the _Sybil_ all sail, daughter, and she will leave the other.
-What is this talk?" asked Saxon, raising himself on his elbow to look
-out of the glooming circle of the port.
-
-"But the ship has 'auxiliary,' my father, and she will have passed out
-of sight before the morning."
-
-"Oh, she has, has she?" grunted the captain, dropping back into his
-native tongue.  "What are you going to do about it?"
-
-He had noted a glimmer in Vaiti's eye that told him that she was not yet
-at the end of her resources.  The Maori guile and the English daring
-were united to some purpose in this strange creature that he had given
-to the world.
-
-"I will tell," she said, standing up to her full height. "But you must
-give the order, my father, for Alliti drags on the rein these days.  Let
-the bale of trawl-net, and the Manila rope, be taken from the cargo, and
-let us cross the bows of this ship, and drop them across her path.  The
-keel will run clean, but the screw will foul, and they will creep like a
-bird with a broken wing till daylight.  Then, if the sea has grown less,
-they will send down a diver and clear the screws; but we shall be almost
-into Wellington, and the lagoon is ours."
-
-"You are worthy to be the daughter of a brave man," answered Saxon in
-Maori, sinking back wearily on his pillow.  "Go, then; and if we lose
-the ship, we lose her; there is great wealth to gain, and a man must die
-at one time, if not another.  I am tired.  I will sleep."
-
-Vaiti left him, and hurried back on deck.  The purple dusk was already
-beginning to gather, and the green starboard light of the _Margaret
-Macintyre_ gleamed like a glow-worm a mile or so behind.  She was
-drawing very near; there was no time to lose.
-
-"Alliti!" called Vaiti.  "My father he better; he send word to take
-trawl-net and Malila out of hold, make come across that ship him path,
-foul him sclew. Suppose you not afraid, you bring us close, drop net and
-Malila."
-
-Harris's hide was thick, but Vaiti knew how to pierce it when she chose;
-and the man had courage enough, in streaks.  Vaiti had hit the mark when
-she called him chicken-hearted in fighting, but there was no manoeuvre
-of the ship too risky for him to undertake and carry through with
-perfect coolness.
-
-"All right, my lady," he nodded.  "Don't forget me and Gray when it
-comes to sharing out the swag, that's all."
-
-The net and the rope were brought up, and the latter knotted here and
-there to make a hideous tangle of it. Then the _Sybil's_ lights were put
-out, even the cabin lamp being extinguished.  The stars pricked
-themselves out in sudden sharpness on the great blue chart of heaven
-above, and the waste of dark rolling water all around grew large and
-lonely.
-
-You are not to suppose that Saxon's daughter did not see and feel these
-things--did not hear the voiceless talk of the great seas on starry
-evenings, or feel her mortal body almost rapt away in the ecstasy of a
-black midnight and a shrieking storm; just as you, perhaps, who think
-that no one ever shared such experiences with yourself, may feel.  It is
-not only the blameless tourist, with his daily diary, and his books of
-travel teaching him how and when to "enthuse," who enjoys the splendid
-pageant of the seas.  Vaiti, as the most indulgent chronicler must
-confess, had more than a spice of her father's villainy in her
-composition, not to speak of whatever devilry her Maori forebears might
-have bequeathed to her.  She was unscrupulous, ruthless, and crafty as a
-general rule; she was engaged in a deed of the very shadiest description
-to-night--yet, as she stood with her hands on the wheel, and her eyes on
-the green starboard light of the oncoming ship, steering the _Sybil_ to
-something extremely like certain destruction, she knew that the Southern
-Cross was rising, clear and beautiful, above its gem-like pointers, just
-ahead; and that a little sliver of young moon, crystal-silver against
-the dark, was slipping up the sky to her left.  The thought just grazed
-her mind that this might be the last time the moon would ever rise over
-the Pacific for her.  She smiled a little in the dusk, and steered
-steadily ahead. There were no "streaks" in the composition of Vaiti's
-spirit.
-
-A short tack to the starboard became necessary. Harris put the ship
-about at a lift of Vaiti's hand.  It grew very dark; a cloud was over
-the moon, and the stars were dimmed by driving vapour.  The wind was
-increasing; the schooner lay over with its weight, and the foam gurgled
-along her clean-ran sides.  Still the _Margaret Macintyre_ came on,
-stately and unsuspicious, all sail set, and the beat of the little screw
-distinctly audible through the night.
-
-Vaiti signalled again to put the ship about, and as soon as the great
-booms had creaked across the deck. gave over the wheel to Harris.
-
-"Run him just as he head now," she said softly, "and bring him too much
-close; so (double adjective) close to ship he scrape the (qualified)
-paint off him.  I go do rest."
-
-Harris, humming "Good-bye, Dolly Gray," took the wheel over.  If he had
-any doubts as to Vaiti's purpose, the vigour of her language would have
-dispersed them.  Vaiti never swore unless she was exceedingly in
-earnest.
-
-The trawl-net and the tangle of Manila were hanging over the stern, held
-up by a single rope.  Vaiti glided to the rail, holding a sharp knife in
-her hand--("I always _did_ think she kept one somewhere among her
-frilligigs," commented Harris silently, as he caught the flash of the
-steel)--and waited, still as a statue.
-
-Presently out of the darkness shot a hail, accompanied by a perfect
-constellation of oaths.  Its apparent object was to ascertain the
-_Sybil's_ reason for steering such a course.  The _Sybil_ answered not a
-word, but steered the course some more.
-
-The hail, at the second time of repeating, became a yell, with a strong
-note of terror in it.  On came the _Sybil_, a dim, unlit tower of
-blackness, taking as much notice of the shouts as the _Flying Dutchman_.
-Those on board the _Margaret Macintyre_ gave themselves up for lost.
-There was even a rush made for one of the boats. But the threatening
-shape swept past her bows, so near that the furious captain could have
-tossed a biscuit on board--so near that the _Sybil's_ Kanaka crew,
-thinking the "papalangi" officers meant to ram the stranger, uttered
-war-cries wherein pure delight was mingled with overjoyed surprise.
-
-It was all over in a minute, and the _Sybil_ was well away on the
-_Margaret Macintyre's_ port side before the latter vessel discovered,
-through the medium of a horrible jar from the engine-room and a powerful
-odour of oil, that the screw was badly fouled, leaving them, like St.
-Paul with nothing to do but make the best of circumstances, and "wish
-that it were day."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-December weather is hot in Wellington, and it was now close to
-Christmas.  Perhaps that was why the senior member of the trading firm
-that had taken over part ownership of the _Sybil_ for an unpaid debt
-thought his eyes were deceived by the glare of the sun when he saw a
-white schooner of singularly graceful lines lying alongside one of the
-wharves on a date when her engagements plainly demanded her presence in
-Tahiti.
-
-When, however, he met Saxon and his daughter, a few minutes afterwards,
-on Lambton Quay, he understood that his eyes were in excellent order.
-So, it soon appeared, was his tongue.  He was a gentleman of Scottish
-extraction, and it hurt him badly to see possible profits thrown away.
-
-Saxon let him have his say, and merely laughed for answer.
-
-"Come into the Occidental, and Vaiti and I'll tell you something worth
-all the trade that you'd take out of Pape�te in ten years," he said.
-"I'm going to own the ship again before New Year's Day, and paint this
-good old town scarlet as well.  You'll see."
-
-And the man of money-bags, anxious to see, went into the hotel.
-
-Vaiti, in a fit of perversity, declined to come in.  She knew only too
-well that, in Saxon's impecunious condition, there was no hope of
-getting their discovery effectively worked save at a price that would
-leave very little change over for the present possessors of the
-lagoon--even if the captain had been quite sober, which he was not.
-They had got the grant, and had furthermore had the satisfaction of
-noting that, day after day, Wellington Harbour remained empty of the
-hardly-used _Margaret Macintyre_.  It was evident that her people,
-whoever they were, had tamely accepted defeat. There was no standing
-against a grant from the Government of New Zealand--no matter how
-acquired. But all this did not alter the fact that there was not going
-to be a great deal for the _Sybil_, and her captain, and her captain's
-daughter--especially the latter.  It was there that the sting lay.
-Vaiti had had dreams--oh, but dreams! oh, such dreams! before solid
-common-sense had brought her down to earth, and made her realise that
-Saxon's unlucky state, and the eminently Scottish firm who held the
-destinies of the _Sybil_ in their hands, were quite certain to stand in
-the way of realisation.  To make a fortune, you must first have one,
-generally speaking.  And it was the canny Glasgow men who had it.
-
-So, because she did not want to hear with her own ears what she knew
-very well must take place, she refused to come into the hotel, and
-wandered off alone down the quays, in the warm December sun, which yet
-was cool compared to the burning heats of the island world.  She was
-dressed in a long, waistless muslin gown, as usual, but her shady Niu�
-hat and white deck shoes--not to speak of a pair of kid gloves that
-caused her horrible discomfort and a parasol that embarrassed her
-extremely--spoke of a respect for certain of the conventions that might
-have astonished people who knew, or thought they knew, Vaiti of the
-Islands.  Of course, the loungers on the quays looked admiringly after
-her--she would have liked to see them dare to omit that tribute to her
-fiery charms--and some of them freely spoke to her, calling her Mary and
-Polly, offering her hearts and drinks and new bonnets, and asking her
-for kisses or jobs on the schooner, just as it occurred to them, after
-the simple fashion of the sea.  Some of them knew her, and some of them
-did not.  It was the latter who asked for jobs.  The men who did know
-the _Sybil_ and her "Kapitani" asked for kisses, which they did not
-expect to get.  That was safer.
-
-Vaiti, quite accustomed to this sort of demonstration, and enjoying it
-in a languid way as she strolled along under the annoying parasol,
-covered half a mile or so of the quay at her own leisurely pace, and
-then sat down on a coil of rope in a quiet place, to stare across the
-water and think.
-
-She wanted something, and she did not see her way to get it.
-
-To disentangle the dreams and hopes, wild fancies, and wilder
-aspirations of the half-caste mind when that mind, puzzling and elusive
-enough to the pure white in any case, is further complicated with a
-touch of genius, would be a task worthy of a whole academy of science.
-This much alone can the necessarily all-knowing biographer of Vaiti
-say--that she wanted to be someone, and wanted it so badly that nothing
-else in life seemed worth having, or even existent, She was a princess
-of Atiu on her mother's side, and on her father's (though Saxon's past
-was as much a mystery as the origin of the yacht-like _Sybil_ herself)
-Vaiti felt that she had every right to claim high standing.
-
-Doubly dowered, therefore, with the instinct of rule, the actual command
-of the schooner had fallen into her capable hands quite naturally.  Left
-to herself, she would probably have made the _Sybil_ pay in a way
-unknown before to the easy-going island world.  But the useless,
-dissipated Saxon had to be counted on.  She liked him in her own way,
-such as it was, but she despised him also.  And it was an undoubted fact
-that he hampered everything.  This bargain with M'Coy and Co., for
-instance--it was useless for her to attempt to put a finger on it.
-Saxon had got drunk the night before, as soon as the matter of the grant
-had been finally decided, at the end of some anxious days of waiting;
-and in the morning the numerous "hairs" that he had taken to restore him
-had left him in a condition of hopeless obstinacy and self-sufficiency.
-In such a state he was as certain to be over-reached as a stranded
-jelly-fish is certain to be licked up by the sun.  And this was bitter
-to Vaiti.
-
-For, sitting there motionless under the parasol (which was serving a
-useful purpose at last, in shading her handsome face from observation
-and comment by the passers-by), Vaiti had arrived at something rather
-like a conclusion, and a conclusion, too, that was likely to shape most
-of her thoughts and acts henceforward.
-
-Money was the thing.
-
-She did not care for money in itself, and none of the things it could
-bring really interested her, except pretty clothes.
-
-But money was importance, money was power; money was the freedom to do
-exactly what you wanted, and make other people do it too.  She did not
-think it out in words, like a European.  Pictures passed before her
-mind, more vivid by far than the glittering water and flashing sea-gull
-wings in front of her bodily eyes.  She saw captains of great ships,
-giving orders like kings, and obeyed by the promptest and smartest of
-slaves. She saw owners of big stores entertaining half the island on
-their verandahs, paid court to by wandering beach-combers, going out to
-ships in beautiful boats manned by their own uniformed crews, who bent
-their backs double at a word.  She saw "Tusitala," of Samoa, the great
-English story-teller, living in his splendid house outside Apia,
-surrounded by a humble clan of native followers wearing wonderful
-lava-lavas of a foreign stuff they called "tatani" (tartan)--Tusitala,
-who was as great a chief as Mataafa himself, and had spoken to her,
-Vaiti, as one worthy of all honour.... Her pictures were almost all of
-the islands, for the islands were in her blood; but something, too, she
-saw of Auckland--the merchant M'Coy, old and so ugly, and of the
-commonest birth, yet reverenced like the greatest of chiefs, because he
-had money....
-
-The afternoon rays grew blinding hot on the water as the sun sank down.
-The sea-gulls dipped and screamed.  Steamers glided away from the
-wharves with long hooting cries that somehow seemed to embody all the
-melancholy of the homeless sea.  Steam cranes chattered ceaselessly
-above the yawning holds of discharging ships.  Behind, the tramcars
-hummed in the street, and people hurried up and down.
-
-And at last the western sky began to burn with sultry red, and Vaiti
-went home.
-
-Something had taken root in her mind that afternoon that struck down and
-shot up, in the days to come, and led her into ways and places wilder
-even than the adventure of the pearl lagoon.  As children string berries
-on a straw, so upon the stem that grew from that seed were strung the
-strange events that followed, one by one.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER III*
-
-                      *THE FLOWER BEHIND THE EAR*
-
-
-As Vaiti, Cassandra-wise, had prophesied about the pearl lagoon, so
-indeed it fell out.
-
-It takes money to exploit even the smallest discovery of this kind, and
-the canny M'Coy made the most of the fact.  Delgadas Reef was too risky
-a neighbourhood to be worked by any vessel unprovided with an auxiliary
-engine, so a cranky little schooner of some forty tons, owning a tiny
-oil engine that sometimes worked and sometimes did not--more commonly
-the latter--was chartered; also a couple of boats for diving work, and
-two sets of diving dresses; and a cheap crew was picked up somewhere,
-and some poor provisions laid in.  Everything was done on the most
-economical scale possible--yet the Scotchman grumbled and lamented, and
-declared he would never see his money back.  The shares had been fixed
-at a wickedly low figure for Saxon and there were, furthermore, clauses
-in the agreement concerning expenses which made that unlucky derelict
-swear fiercely when he read them after he was sober.  It was too late to
-complain then, however, for he had signed everything he was asked, under
-the influence of the good whisky to which M'Coy--liberal for once--had
-freely treated him.  Nor did he get any sympathy from Vaiti.  She merely
-laughed when he complained, and told him frankly that he would have done
-better to stay in his cabin and drink there, if he liked, leaving her to
-finish what she had begun.
-
-So the pearling ship sailed off, and Saxon, who could not afford to stay
-in port, went another voyage.  And some months later, when he came back,
-it was to find that Delgadas Reef was cleaned out.  It had held not much
-after all, said the Glasgow man, and shell was down, and the pearls had
-been few and off colour.  But there was enough to pay Saxon's debt and
-leave him owner and master of the _Sybil_ once more.  And there might be
-a few pounds in addition--not much; but there, he was an honest man, and
-he would rather ruin himself than let Saxon and the charming Miss Vaiti
-feel they were badly treated.  And if Saxon would kindly sign this paper
-releasing him from all further claims, he would be happy to give over
-all claim in the ship.  Otherwise--money was tight, and that little
-matter between them had been owing so long that----
-
-Saxon interrupted with a statement to the effect that he knew blank well
-he had been blank well had, and for the sum of two sanguinary sixpences
-he would be prepared to knock Mr. M'Coy's doubly condemned head off his
-unpleasantly qualified shoulders--only, luckily for Mr. M'Coy, he was
-sick of him and the like of him, and merely wanted to get out of his way
-as soon as he possibly could.  With which concise summing up of facts he
-signed the paper, picked up the cheque, and went out to spend it after
-his own fashion.  Vaiti secured half of it at the bank where he cashed
-it, and went off with the money done up in her hair, to keep house by
-herself on the schooner until her father should turn up again.  She knew
-him too well to expect that that would come about immediately.
-
-Meanwhile, there were banks in which she could deposit her own share,
-and thus feel herself a step nearer to her goal--that dim, undefined
-goal that was to be reached somehow, some time, through the possession
-of the precious bits of paper and coin without which all pleasant things
-were impossible.  She did not decide at once where the money should go,
-but hid it in her cabin, and day by day walked the pavements of
-Wellington, delighting her eyes with the shop-window beauties which she
-had so seldom seen.  Thus came her undoing.  Vaiti had never heard the
-saying, "We are none of us infallible, even the youngest," or she might
-have been less certain of herself before it came about, and less bitter
-afterwards.
-
-For was it not natural that when Saxon unexpectedly reappeared at the
-Constantinople Hotel with a good deal of his money still left, and sent
-for Vaiti to join him and "live like a lady while she could," the
-improvident island blood should all unbidden well up and smother
-everything else?  Why go on?  There are shops in Wellington--there are
-as many ways of getting fifteen shillings' worth out of a sovereign, and
-repeating the process a great deal oftener than one means, as in any
-other of the world's big ports....  The end was that, after ten
-delirious days of glorious spending. Captain Saxon and his daughter set
-sail for Tahiti with a general cargo, a complete set of empty pockets
-between them, and, on the part of Vaiti, a glad remembrance more than
-half stifled by angry regret for the cost.  Yet, and yet, what a lovely
-thing money was, and what a pity that one could not both spend and keep
-it!  If you did the one, you were happy, but no one thought anything of
-you.  If you did the other, everyone paid court to you, but you didn't
-get the fun.  Yes, that was true of money--and of other things.  Girls
-who had been brought up at convent schools understood a lot that the
-ignorant beach girls didn't....  And, _bon Dieu!_ as they used to say in
-Pape�te, when the Sisters couldn't hear--what a headache it gave her to
-think, and what a fool she was to do it!
-
-"Ruru!" she called in Maori to a native sleeping peacefully on the deck.
-"Wake up, pig-face, son of a fruit-bat, and make me kava immediately.  I
-am weary."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-It was many weeks after, and the hot season had come round once more.
-
-The schooner was slamming helplessly about on a huge glassy swell.
-Everything on board that could rattle, rattled; everything in the cabins
-that could break loose and take charge, did so, sending up a melancholy
-chorus of crashes with every wallow of the ship. The great mizzen sail
-slatted about above the poop, offering and then instantly withdrawing a
-promise of cooling shade, in a manner that was little short of
-maddening, seeing that the hour was three o'clock, and the latitude not
-four degrees south.  Friday Island looking like a small blue flower on
-the rim of a crystal dish, hovered tantalisingly on the extreme verge of
-the horizon, as unattainable as Sydney Heads or heaven.  For the _Sybil_
-was becalmed, a week's from anywhere in particular, and there seemed no
-chance of a breeze.
-
-"Lord," said the mate, dropping the marlinspike with which he was
-splicing a rope, and mopping his forehead with his rolled-up sleeve, "I
-wonder 'ow many thousand miles we are from an iced beer!"
-
-"Turtle!" said Vaiti, taking a slim brown cigar out of her mouth, and
-looking down from her seat on the top of the deck-house.  "Only nine
-hundred and eighty-seven.  You not remember Charley's in Apia?"
-
-"I'd forgotten Samoa," said Harris, in a more cheerful tone, picking up
-the marlinspike, and going to work again, as if revived by Vaiti's
-arithmetic.
-
-"A miss is as good as a mile, for all me, specially when it's nine
-hundred mile," remarked the gloomy boatswain. "Couldn't you manage to
-talk about something rather less 'arrowing to a man's insides?"
-
-"I'd like to know why she's going skull-huntin' to Friday Island, then,"
-said the mate, casting a cautious glance at Vaiti, who was scarcely out
-of ear-shot, up on the deck-house.
-
-"Trade I can understand," he went on, "and shell-huntin'--we haven't
-done too bad all round over that last little job, and the old man's a
-sight more sober since he's owned the ship again.  But skulls--and old
-skulls at that--filthy natives' bones that's been lyin' in the caves
-since Heaven knows when!  Besides, they ain't our skulls, however you
-may look at it----"
-
-"Nor I hope they won't be," said the boatswain darkly.  "In no way, I
-mean.  The Friday Islanders aren't people to ask out to an afternoon
-tea-party without you've got your knuckle-duster on underneath your
-voylet kid gloves.  And you know what natives are about their old bones
-and graves."
-
-"I do.  What I don't know is how she thinks she's going to make anything
-out of a proper nasty job like that."
-
-"Oh, she's on the make, is she!"
-
-"Did you ever know her anything else, bless her?" asked the mate.  "She
-wants sixty pounds, havin' spent all the old man give her out of the
-shell business in Wellington, takin' boxes at the theaytres and halls,
-and buyin' women's gear, and staying at the Constantinople, where she
-wore two new 'ats a day for a week; and other games of a similar kind.
-Pity you was sick, and not there to see the fun.  I tell you, she made
-the town look silly."
-
-"What's the sixty pound for?" asked the boatswain, chewing fondly on his
-quid.
-
-Harris giggled explosively, and whispered:
-
-"She wants a Dozey dress!"
-
-"What in ----'s that?  It don't sound respectable," virtuously observed
-the boatswain, who had never heard of the famous French dressmaker.
-
-"You bet it is, then.  Dozey's a regular bang-up swell in Paris, who
-makes the most expensive gownds in the world, and every one in them
-parts treats him just the same as a baronight or a duke.  You can't get
-so much as a jumper from him for less than sixty pound, and Vaiti she
-says every woman in Pape�te or Aucklan' or Sydney who saw one of his
-dresses would spot it right away, and go and throw herself over the
-Heads. She read about his things in a piece in one of them female papers
-in the hotel, and she saw an actress wearin' of one, and she's been
-layin' out to get one ever since, somethin' awful.  Seems when a woman
-in London, or Paris, or Yarmouth gets a Dozey dress, and takes to
-standin' off and on before the others, who's only got new velveteens
-with musling frills or such-like it just makes them other women drag
-their anchors and run head-on to the shore.  So Vaiti, she----"
-
-"Hold on," interrupted the boatswain.  "Why, if she 'ad one of those
-gownds, she couldn't bend it on to her yards, not if it cost a million.
-Man alive, she ain't laid down on the same lines as them Frenchwomen,
-anyway."
-
-"You let her alone for that," chuckled Harris.  "But what beats me is
-_who_ she's going to do with them skulls, and _how_.  We won't know in a
-hurry, either, because she and Pita's fixed it up between them to do the
-job alone.  Thank 'eaven for small mercies, says I.  'Er on the
-war-path's rather more than I care for; and this isn't going to be any
-picnic, if I know anything of natives."
-
-"Pita!" whistled the boatswain.  "The old man will 'ave 'is gore before
-the voyage is out, if Vaiti goes on like this.  It's Ritter, that fat
-German trader in Pape�te, that he's wanting to marry her to; and as for
-natives, it's 'ands off for them, if she is 'alf of one 'erself."
-
-"Well, she and Pita was planning it all out in the fore-top last night.
-I heard them, when she thought I was sleeping on the top of the galley.
-And the old man came out and roared at her like a Marquesas bull to come
-down; so down she came, laughing at him, like the devil she is.  There's
-no one else on this ship would laugh, without it was on the wrong side
-of his mouth, when the old man gets ratty.  Coming!  All right!"
-
-The mate jumped to his feet, and answered Vaiti's sharp hail in person,
-a deprecating smile spreading like spilt treacle all over his face as he
-came up to her, cap in hand.  Vaiti took her cigar out of her mouth, and
-looked at him for a minute without speaking.  The _Sybil_ rolled on the
-towering swell like a captured beast trying to beat its brains out
-against a wall, but Saxon's Maori daughter stood as steady as the
-slender main-mast upon the reeling deck.  Harris smiled more than ever,
-and turned the marlinspike about in his hands, looking a little foolish.
-
-"You wanting Captain Saxon come and lay you out in the scupper pretty
-soon?" inquired Vaiti presently.
-
-"Not particular," answered the mate, the smile sliding slowly off his
-face.
-
-"Then I think perhaps you keep your mouth more better shut," said Vaiti,
-walking off with a contemptuous swing in the very fall of her laced
-muslin skirts.  And Pita of Atiu, as if in defiance of the captain, the
-mate, and every one else but his cousin Vaiti, pulled a mouth-organ out
-of his shirt and began to play it triumphantly and frantically, making a
-noise exactly like the buzzing of a mad bluebottle on a warm
-window-pane.  Further, he plucked a frangipani flower out of the
-wreath--a good deal the worse for wear--that hung round his neck, and
-stuck the blossom behind his ear.  Now, every one who has ever been in
-the Islands knows that these two actions are significant of courtship.
-Pita was courting Vaiti, as everybody knew--Pita, a mere deck hand, who
-had been taken on at wild Atiu, in the Cook Islands, because he was a
-relation of Saxon's dead native wife. Very handsome was Pita, very young
-and tall and broad-shouldered, wily and fierce like all the Atiuans, but
-smooth and pleasant of countenance.  Were not the men of Atiu nicknamed
-"meek-faced Atiuans," even in the days, only a generation gone, when
-they were the cruellest and most warlike of cannibals and pirates?
-
-Needless to say, Captain Saxon, who had always had "views" for Vaiti,
-ever since she left the Tahitian convent school that had given her such
-fragments of civilisation as she possessed, did not favour the
-compromising attentions of Pita.  As for Vaiti, her father's
-prohibitions neither piqued her into noticing the handsome Atiuan more,
-nor alarmed her into favouring him less, than she found agreeable.  At
-present there was rather more than less about the matter, because Saxon
-was in one of his fits of gloomy depression, and Vaiti foresaw the usual
-result.  It was not at all likely that her father would be able to help
-her in her forthcoming raid.  Harris she did not choose to rely on at a
-pinch; Gray was old; the crew were far and away too superstitious to aid
-in such a sacrilege as she proposed.  There remained Pita, who, if he
-was a wild Atiuan, was at least "misinari" after a fashion, had been
-educated, more or less, in Raratonga, and was most certainly in love
-with herself....  Yes, Pita would do.
-
-That night, when the second dog-watch had commenced, and a lew large
-crystal stars were just beginning to glimmer through the pink of the
-ocean sunset, Vaiti descended to the cabin, looked into Gray and
-Harris's berths to make sure that they were both on deck, and then sat
-down on the cushioned locker opposite her father.
-
-"What is it?" asked Saxon, raising his heavy blue eyes.  He had been
-sitting with his head propped in the corner of the cabin, silent as a
-fish, since the clearing away of tea an hour before.  You might have
-thought him asleep, or, if you knew him intimately, drunk.  He was
-neither; but dead and drowned things were rising up from the black sea
-caverns of his heart to-night, and their bones showed white and ghastly
-upon the desert shores of his life.  So he sat silent, with his face
-turned to the darkening porthole and to the night that was striding down
-upon the sea.
-
-Through the port he saw the shining harbour of Pape�te as it looked a
-week or two ago--a tall grey British war-ship lying at anchor, the
-_Sybil's_ dinghy, small and crank and unclean, creeping up to the
-man-of-war's accommodation-ladder, himself, a weather-scarred, red-faced
-figure, in a worn duck suit and bulging shoes, sitting in the boat, and
-waiting patiently until the Governor's steam-launch should have passed
-in front of him and discharged its freight of visitors.
-
-He saw the captain of the great Queen's ship standing at the top of the
-ladder, slight and trig and trim, all white and gold from top to toe,
-all smiling self-possession and cool command.
-
-He saw ladies, immaculately coiffed and daintily shod; tall, clean,
-grey-moustached men following them; a cordial welcome on the deck; a
-flutter of light drapery and a glimpse of lounging masculine figures
-afterwards, framed by the great open gun-ports of the captain's cabin in
-the stern.  They were laughing and talking, and he could hear the clink
-of cups and glasses.  After--a long time after--he could see his own
-shabby little boat creeping up to the ladder; the captain, cold and
-business-like, and more than a little brusque, speaking to him on the
-deck about a certain anchorage in the Cook Islands group, concerning
-which he was known to have information; himself, burningly conscious of
-his shoes and his finger-nails, answering shortly and with some
-embarrassment, and feeling, of a sudden, very shabby, very broken, very
-old....  Was it twenty-five years, or two thousand, since the Admiral of
-the Fleet, and the Prince of Saxe-Brandenburg, with half the mess of his
-own regiment, had dined on board his biggest yacht at Cowes a week
-before--it--happened? ... Now a mere commander left him standing on the
-deck, and spoke to him like a native or a dog.  Well, what did it all
-matter to a dead man?  Was not his name of those days carved on the
-family monument in letters half an inch deep, and was not he, Edward
-Saxon, whom nobody knew, out here in the living death of the farthermost
-islands, a thousand miles from anywhere? ...
-
-"Father," said Vaiti.
-
-"What is it?" answered Saxon's voice dully, as befitted a dead man.
-
-"The wind is rising at last," said the girl in Maori, "We shall be off
-the island by morning.  Will you, or will you not, go with me into this
-cave of death, where I have told you that I shall find what is worth
-finding?"
-
-"I have no heart.  I will not."
-
-"Then I and Pita will go," said Vaiti, fixing the Englishman's blue eyes
-with her own black, stabbing and savagely unfathomable, yet set in
-Saxon's very own narrow high-bred face.
-
-The captain's dark mood was on him, and he turned his face to the wall,
-with a Maori oath consigning Vaiti and Pita to a cannibal end.
-
-"I go; stay you there," said Vaiti, using the quaintly courteous native
-form of farewell, barbed with a little sneer unknown to the original.
-Then she went to her cabin.  And Saxon turned in his seat, and reached
-for the brandy bottle at last.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Handsome Pita had a great awe for Vaiti, for she was a princess of Atiu
-by her mother's side.  But she was beautiful, and he admired her--also
-he hoped that her imperious soul harboured one soft spot for him. It
-seemed good, on the whole, when they were pulling the dinghy over the
-reef next morning, to ask Vaiti openly where the value of the booty came
-in--with a secret hope in the background of securing as much as possible
-for a certain very deserving, more or less Christian youth of Atiu.
-
-Vaiti, her white dress girded up high over her scarlet pareo, waded
-through the last yard or two of the emerald lagoon before she answered.
-The boat being safe on shore, she stood up and looked sharply about her.
-They had chosen a quiet spot at the back of the island for landing, all
-the natives being down at the harbour loading copra.  The weird pandanus
-trees, standing on their high wooden stilts at the verge of the shore,
-the rustling coco-palms swinging their great fronds far over the water,
-the golden and pink-flowered vines trailing yard on yard of green
-garlandry over the paper-white sand, could carry no tales, and they were
-the only witnesses.
-
-Vaiti looked at Pita up and down, from head to foot, and Pita gave the
-flower behind his ear a knowing cock, and set one hand saucily on his
-hip.  He knew that he was the handsomest man in the Cook archipelago,
-and he felt that the way his pareo was tied that day was a pure
-inspiration.  So he shut up his mouth very tight, and made play with his
-burning black eyes as only a South Sea Islander can, waiting confidently
-the while for the information that the whole ship's company of the
-_Sybil_ could not have extracted from Vaiti in a week.
-
-The girl stepped forward, and with a commanding finger tapped Pita's
-biggest dimple, as if he had been a baby.
-
-"Suppose I tell you, then you know too much, you plenty frighten, go
-back to ship," she laughed.
-
-"Speak Maori, high chieftainess!" implored Pita.
-
-"No fee-ah!" answered Saxon's daughter succinctly. Pita understood at
-once that Vaiti was unwilling to use a language that gave free rein to
-her tongue and his, and the knowledge elated him.
-
-"Perhaps I tell you," went on Vaiti, watching him narrowly.  "I think
-you got heart in belly belong you, more better than Alliti.  I tell you,
-you want plenty heart by-and-by."
-
-"High chieftainess, Vaiti, speak Maori!" was Pita's answer, linked to an
-attempted embrace that only fell short of its main object because Vaiti
-quite calmly pulled a seaman's knife out of her dress and laid it edge
-upwards across her lips.  Pita, who had learned the real European kiss
-during his visits to civilisation, and wanted very much to show it off,
-felt disappointed, although there was a smile behind the blade that
-almost out-dazzled the steel.
-
-"Maori!" he persisted, putting his arm round her waist, with a cool
-disregard of her well-known readiness with the knife that won Vaiti's
-admiration a step further than before.  She laughed, wavered, and then,
-still playing with the keen, bright blade, she lowered it a little, and
-spoke in the soft language of the Islands at last.
-
-It was a fairly long tale that she had to tell.  When last the _Sybil_
-had been in the Society Islands, some weeks before, there had been a
-German man of science in the group, collecting native skulls for museums
-at home.  The grizzly old gentleman and his pursuits had not troubled
-Vaiti's mind particularly until her chief admirer, Ritter, a Pape�te
-trader, happened to drop a remark one day about the amount of money some
-of these old skulls were worth.  Vaiti's sharp intelligence linked on
-the casual saying at once to certain other wandering rumours she
-remembered, and she decided to find out something more.  She did not ask
-Ritter, for he was no talker, even to a handsome girl whom he admired;
-and the German was his compatriot, in any case.  But when the schooner
-reached Raiatea, where Professor Spricht was staying, Vaiti drifted off
-among the native huts, and squatted for an hour or two on the mats of
-the second chief's wife's mother's cousin's house, smoking a great deal,
-talking very little, and listening quietly.  By degrees the house filled
-up with interested natives all eager for gossip and chatter; and to
-Vaiti, pulling steadily at her cigar, and maintaining the grave,
-unsmiling demeanour proper to a princess of Atiu and a great Belitani
-chieftain's daughter, the drawing out of the secret she wanted was as
-easy as spinning sinnet out of cocoanut husk.
-
-Nothing is private in the Eastern Pacific, and it was not long before
-all the professor's personal affairs were tossing about like seaweed on
-the flood of general gossip--mostly unfit for publication--that surged
-about the apparently uninterested ears of the silent, splendid sea-queen
-throned on the pile of pandanus mats.... The Siamani (German) had got
-skulls in Niu�, in Uea, in Mangaia, and was now collecting them about
-the Society group....  He was an ugly, grey-snouted pig to look at, and
-rooted in the earth like any pig; still, Taous and Mahina, daughters of
-Falani, seemed to think that--(details lost in a heated argument about
-the personal characteristics of the ladies)....  Anyhow, Vekia from the
-hills said he was going to buy her two silk dresses from San Francisco
-when he came back from Falaite Island; so he was not as mean as he
-looked.  Yes, he was going to Falaite Island in a great hurry; he would
-not even take time to finish his pig-rooting in Raiatea, on account of
-something he had heard from an old man who had once lived up in
-Falaite.... What fools the papalangi (whites) were.  Did not every one
-in the Islands know about the old, old people that used to live on
-Falaite, hundreds of moons before the days of Tuti (Cook), and how they
-all died, and nobody lived there for very, very long, until some people
-wandered up from Niu� in Tuti's time; and how the skulls of the old, old
-people were still there, buried in a cave that was a hundred miles long,
-and guarded by as many devils as would fill twenty war canoes?  Of
-course, these things were known, and always had been--but when would any
-man of Tahiti or Raiatea have thought of such folly as travelling more
-than a thousand miles to fight the devils and take away the skulls?
-What if they were worth money enough to buy a big schooner, as the old
-grey pig had told Vekia when he promised her those dresses?  Would a
-whole schooner, loaded down with dollars, be any good to a man after the
-devils had killed him?  Vekia would never get her trade finery, for all
-her airs; and Jacky Te Vaka, whose schooner was to be hired to take the
-Siamani up to Falaite, would never come back from such a sacrilegious
-journey....  Why could he not wait, and go by Kapitani Satoni's schooner
-when she made her yearly trip by and by?  Every one knew that the
-_Sipila_ was under a charm, and no harm could come to any one on board
-her.  But he would not wait, and just as soon as Jacky's boat came back
-from Bora-Bora, next week, they were to go....  Ahi! and Jacky was such
-a handsome man--it was a great pity!
-
-Such was the substance of the information gathered by Vaiti.  It
-resulted in her ordering the course of the ship to be changed, and
-heading direct for Friday Island, instead of going down to Auckland.
-Friday Island--out of the way, infertile, uninteresting, and little
-known--had been one of Saxon's private preserves for some years.  He
-touched there once a year, purchased all the copra that the little place
-produced at his own price, and paid for it in cheap tinned meat, boxes
-of damaged biscuit, and tins of imitation salmon instead of cash.  He
-seldom went ashore, and certainly did not waste his time cave-hunting,
-if he did chance to set foot on the beach.  Vaiti, with her odd faculty
-for acquiring miscellaneous information, had known since the first time
-the _Sybil_ called that there were great caves on the island, and that a
-devil of unusual quality and size guarded them.  So much might have been
-said of a hundred similar islands, however, and she had not troubled
-herself about either caves or devils until the German professor's secret
-set her on the alert for something that looked like a dangerous,
-exciting, and profitable adventure.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER IV*
-
-                            *THE BLACK VIRI*
-
-
-Moreover, as Harris had said, she had been devoured with desire of a
-real Paris dress ever since her stay in the Wellington hotel.  There had
-been a famous actress there at the same time, and all her garments had
-been freely paragraphed in the ladies' column of the local press.  When
-she swam languidly through the hall of the Constantinople, shining
-mystic and wonderful out of a cloud of rainbow silks and chiffons that
-had cost a formidable row of figures in the Rue de la Paix, all the
-women caught their breath, looked once, and then gazed determinedly out
-of the windows, pretending that they had noticed nothing.  When she came
-in to a late supper, floating in spangled mists and sparkling with
-constellations of diamonds, every head was turned her way, and half the
-heads--the short-cropped ones--stayed turned, in more senses than one.
-It was a revelation and a martyrdom to Vaiti.  What were her muslin
-frocks and her ten new hats at a whole pound apiece compared to this?
-And the vision of money saved up faded away for the time being before
-the vision of one such frock--only one--belonging to her.  Life could
-surely offer nothing more.
-
-Of this, naturally, she said nothing to Pita, merely relating the matter
-of the skulls in as few words as possible.  Pita, for his part, made no
-comment, but took a couple of revolvers out of the boat and thrust one
-into his belt, handing the other to the girl.  Then he girded up his
-pareo--a significant action among islanders--and felt the handle of his
-knife to see that it was loose in the sheath.  There was a large sack in
-the boat containing candles and food, and leaving ample space for other
-filling later on.  Vaiti tossed it to Pita, and the two began their
-walk, barefoot, swift and silent, casting a quick glance every now and
-then among the weirdly stilted stems of the lonely pandanus groves as
-they went.
-
-"They are all down with the _Sybil_--it is safer now than it would be at
-night," said Pita.  "Vaiti, if we get these things, and sell them for
-much money in Sitani, you and I will leave the _Sybil_ when she next
-goes to Atiu; and you shall be queen of Atiu and I shall be king, and we
-shall eat roast pork and 'uakari' every day."
-
-"My father would burn the villages and kill the chiefs, and hang your
-head on the bowsprit of the ship," replied Vaiti conversationally.
-"Besides, I like Sitani, and I will buy myself a wonder dress from
-Palisi town there."
-
-"Then we will leave at Sitani, and be great chiefs there, if these old
-bones indeed sell for so much money. And we will buy a little schooner
-for ourselves, and you shall be the real captain, and there will be four
-gold bands on your sleeve and one on the peak of your cap; and you shall
-get a _sitificati_ from the chiefs of the great harbour, and take the
-schooner out of Sitani Heads yourself.  And every one shall be afraid of
-me and you, and they will say----"
-
-Vaiti had been listening as she swung along, now casting a glance of
-approval at the handsome lad while he spoke cunningly of the schooner
-she should command, now shooting out her lip a little, and slashing
-impatiently with her knife at the young cocoanut fronds.  Suddenly,
-looking very straight ahead, she interrupted.
-
-"Pita, you talk too fast.  There are things you do not know.  Tell me,
-is your heart strong within you?"
-
-"It is strong," answered the island Maori.
-
-"Then listen.  There is a devil in the cave."
-
-"I do not believe in devils.  I am misinari, and go to church five times
-on Sundays; also I have a black coat and two boots very nearly the same
-as each other to wear on collection days."
-
-"There is a devil all the same; you do not know everything that is in
-the world, little Pita," replied Vaiti.  "There is something bad there.
-I do not believe in native devils, for I am 'papa-langi'; but I know
-there is--a thing of some kind--there.  A bad thing.  A black viri, they
-say, but I do not understand that."
-
-"A black viri is nothing.  You and I do not mind such things.
-See--there will perhaps be one in this rotten wood."  Pita struck and
-kicked at a mass of decaying cocoanut wood, and hunted out one of the
-great black centipedes that are common in the equatorial islands.
-
-There is nothing on the bosom of Mother Earth more loathly than the
-centipede, and Pita's quarry--nearly a foot long, as thick as a sausage,
-scarlet feelers on its hideous head, and scarlet legs fringing its long
-lithe body--was as hideous a specimen as ever jerked itself
-lightning-wise across a forest path.  Pita, however, with swift
-dexterity, seized the horrible beast by the neck and tail, holding it so
-that it could neither bite nor sting, and lifted it up to his companion.
-Vaiti's eyes dilated ever so little.  She drew her knife and slashed the
-creature in two; then, stooping down, she struck at the flying halves as
-they ran away in opposite directions, and cut them up into mincemeat.
-Leaving the red fragments still wriggling in the track amidst an
-unsavoury, snaky smell, she stepped swiftly on.
-
-"It is no matter," she said.  "We two shall see what we shall see.  Keep
-your heart warm within you."
-
-"And if we come back safe?" cried the impetuous Pita, catching the
-girl's warm round arms in his two sinewy hands, and letting his black
-eyes gaze into hers.
-
-Vaiti stood very still for a moment, looking out to sea. The spell of
-her stillness fell on Pita, and he remained as if frozen.  Far away the
-surf hummed on the reef, and a sea-bird cried.  Above the two beautiful,
-motionless young figures the palms rustled endlessly in the long trade
-wind.
-
-"... If we come back" ... said Vaiti at last, her eyes still fixed on
-the far-off line of the outer sea--"if we come back--we will go away
-together, you and I."
-
-She looked so like a witch in a trance (such things are not unknown even
-now, in strange Atiu) that Pita's hands dropped from her arms, and he
-felt half frightened in the moment of his triumph.  But Vaiti recalled
-him to himself by starting her steady swing again, and saying with a
-laugh, as they footed it through the dry, sun-struck woods side by side:
-
-"I think some day my father will make a parrot cage to hang a green Atiu
-parrot in, and it will be made of your ribs and breast-bone, little
-Pita--all the same as my grandfather did in the islands to the man who
-stole his wife."
-
-At that moment the woods opened out and the cave came into view--a
-velvet-dark blot in the dazzling glare of greenery that tangled itself
-about the shoreward cliffs.
-
-Pita's hand sprang to his revolver, and he uttered an exclamation of
-angry surprise.  Beside the cave stood a tall, brown, naked figure
-painted like a witch-doctor and armed with a spear.
-
-"Do not shoot," said Vaiti quickly.  "It will do no good.  Let me look
-to him myself."
-
-She walked right up to the native, stood within a yard of him, and
-stared at him, in a silence that somehow managed to express unflattering
-things.  The man, stamping the butt of his spear on the ground, turned
-away from her and addressed Pita.
-
-"I have nothing to do with this woman of yours," he said.  "It is with
-men I would speak."
-
-"Speak, then, pig-face," said Pita insolently, hoping to provoke a
-fight, since the man seemed to be alone.
-
-"Enter if you wish," replied the other.  "We have sent no fighting-men
-to hinder you; the way is clear. Yet if you think the hot sun on the
-pleasant land is good to see, and the beating of the warm heart in the
-living breast is sweet to feel, go not into our sacred caves, to lay
-evil hands upon the holy bones of Falaiti.  Enough."
-
-The man's words were strangely void of heat or anger, and he held his
-spear loosely, Vaiti did not suspect an ambush, for she knew that no
-native would enter the cave.  Yet in that moment her quick mind leaped
-to the knowledge of some unknown danger threatening herself and Pita
-from out the cold-breathing world of darkness that lay within that
-rugged arch, and for one prophetic instant she could smell the very
-smell of death.
-
-But Vaiti's courage was of the kind that rises, wave by wave, the higher
-for all obstacle, and her spirit swelled within her to flood-tide in
-that moment.  She turned upon the witch-doctor and laughed in his face.
-Then she stretched out her hand, and Pita's leaped into it, warm and
-strong, and together they stepped over the threshold of the cave.
-
-The man outside cursed them, slowly and with relish.
-
-"Shall we not kill him?" asked Pita.
-
-"There is no use," said Vaiti.  "It is plain to me that all the tribe
-know, and they trust to the dangers of the place, whatever these may be.
-This island is at the very end of the world, it is true, and strange
-things may happen here."
-
-"Yes, there is nothing that one might not believe in this place," said
-Pita, looking back.  Already the gloom of Hades itself was winding about
-them, and the air struck gravelike and cold.  In the distance the mouth
-of the cave cast a brief glow of emerald light upon the dewy ferns and
-mosses close to the threshold, so that they shone like the jewelled
-foliage of some magic forest in a fairy play.  Then came the dripping
-roof, the enormous stalactite buttresses of the cave, dimly edged with
-light; the oozing floor, and the lifeless dark.
-
-Vaiti spoke not at all, as they walked side by side down dark tunnel
-after dark tunnel, across empty, thunderous-echoing black halls and
-archways--their little candles flitting like fireflies through a dim
-world of unconquerable gloom.  Pita, however, was strangely gay.  He
-yelled aloud to set the echoes booming in the black domes above, when
-they crossed some invisible great goblin market-place, full of hollow
-sounds and half-glimpsed monstrosities.  He sang when the way along the
-endless corridors grew tedious, and the glistening stalactite candelabra
-succeeded one another, thick as forest branches, for mile after mile
-unchanged.  When the path was barred by inky lakes of unknown depth and
-ghastly chill, and the two explorers had to tie their lights on their
-heads and swim for it, he pretended to cry at the cold, and played
-tricks on Vaiti by slipping behind her and catching her feet in his
-teeth.  So they went on, one in wild spirits, the other silent and
-grave. And the hours of the sunny day slipped by dark and changeless, as
-they passed farther and farther away life and light into the cold black
-depths of the cave.
-
-When it was about noon, as near as they could guess, Vaiti took the
-biscuits and tinned meat out of the sack, and they ate, squatting on the
-wet floor of the tunnel. They knew that the journey was a long one, and
-that the way could not well be missed, yet they were beginning to feel a
-little uneasy now.  Did this cave go on for ever?
-
-Somehow, the food did not cheer them and when they rose and went on
-again they did not talk.  And now a worse difficulty than any they had
-yet encountered suddenly barred the way.  The winding tunnel along which
-they were walking turned sharp round a corner, and then ended to all
-appearance in nothing.  They stood at the edge of an empty gulf, black
-as a starless sky and of depth unknowable.  Thin trickles of light. from
-the candles wavered faintly about its edges, and showed that the
-colossal crack had a farther side, but it was impossible to see what lay
-beyond, and the depth below cast back the candle rays as an armoured
-hull throws off a rifle bullet.
-
-Pita detached a lump of rock and threw it over the edge.  Vaiti watched
-him with sombre eyes.  "There is no bottom there," she said.  "It goes
-through the earth, and out on the other side; that is what I think."
-
-"Children's talk," said Pita, listening intently. There was an echoing
-rattle as the stone bounded from side to side on its way down.  The
-rattle grew fainter and fainter, diminished to a sound like the ticking
-of a watch, faded to an almost imperceptible vibration, and then seemed
-to die out.  Seemed--for although there was nothing left for the ear to
-catch, the sharpened sensory nerves of the body still responded to a
-faint tingle, somewhere, somehow, long after the actual sound had faded
-away.
-
-"I told you," said Vaiti.  "There is no bottom."  Pita did not answer;
-he was measuring the narrowest part of the gulf with his eye, and
-estimating the value of the three short steps of a run that were
-possible before taking off.
-
-"It is not two fathoms wide here," he said, throwing the provision sack
-across to judge his distance better in the uncertain light.  Yet,
-despite the three steps of a run, there was not an inch to spare when he
-landed on the other side, with an effort that strained every muscle of
-his powerful young body.
-
-"Can you jump it?" he called to Vaiti--without any particular anxiety,
-for the Maori has no nerves, and he knew what the girl could do aloft on
-the schooner.
-
-To his astonishment, Vaiti made no answer, but stood leaning up against
-the wall of the tunnel, both hands pressed against her chest.  In a
-moment more she was violently sick.
-
-"The smell!" she said presently, turning a ghastly face towards the
-light of Pita's candle.
-
-"I smell nothing," said Pita, puzzled.  "The wind blows your way.  There
-is perhaps some dead thing down there."
-
-Vaiti shook her head, and Pita saw that her eyes seemed to fill half her
-face as she looked down into the gulf.  Suddenly she sprang, her white
-drapery flying behind her, and landed half a yard behind Pita, with a
-leap that drew a cry of wonder from the Atiuan. "Come, come," she said,
-taking his hand and fairly dragging him on.
-
-They had little farther to go.  The tunnel wound on for perhaps another
-hundred yards, and then stopped. They found themselves in a low-roofed
-circular chamber, such as is often met with at the end of long
-underground passages--a small, insignificant place, roofed with drooping
-green stalactites and floored with shapeless, slimy hummocks of
-stalagmite.  Numbers of deep shelves were quarried out in the rocky
-sides, and in these lay, row on row, the bare, mouldering skulls of
-Falaite's long-ago chiefs--many of them cracked and split, and not a few
-fallen into shapeless fragments, though there were a score or two in
-excellent condition. They were curious skulls indeed, had their
-discoverers been able to understand them.  In the projecting jaws, huge
-canines, strangely high cranium, and oddly developed ridges near the
-opening of the ear were the materials of a problem contradictory and
-complicated enough to occupy the wits of a whole college of science. But
-Vaiti and Pita saw none of these things.  They only noted with
-disappointment, that most of the skulls had gone to decay--picked out
-the best of the unbroken specimens, packed the great sack full of them,
-and turned homewards.
-
-"Vaiti," said Pita, as they walked down the rocky tunnel, and felt the
-slope of the gulf beginning under their feet.  "Vaiti, what did you----"
-
-Her face, turned back upon him, slew the still-born question on his
-lips.
-
-It was scarce a minute before the chasm gaped in their path yet again.
-The leap was worse on this side, for the clustered cones of stalagmite
-did not allow a fair take-off.  Pita looked calculatingly at the farther
-side, very dimly visible in the faint candle-light, and picked up a
-fallen stalactite to throw across.
-
-"Do not throw!" said Vaiti, in a breathless whisper.
-
-"Why not?  I can jump better if I hear where it hits," replied Pita,
-casting the stone before Vaiti had time to snatch at his hand.  It fell
-short, and rolled down into the chasm with a loud, crashing noise.
-
-"Fool! fool!  Jump quickly!" exclaimed Vaiti, in the same strained,
-horrible whisper....  Just for a second before he sprang, Pita looked
-down into the black pit beneath, and it seemed to him that the darkness
-shirred and shivered below the farther edge of the crevasse--that for
-the fragment of a second something long, red, whiplike, vibrated high up
-in the light of the candles, and then was gone....  There was a
-sickening odour in the air--a living smell, not a dead one; there was a
-sliding, rustling sound....
-
-"Jump!" shrieked Vaiti.
-
-They leaped through the air as one, but it was only Vaiti who landed on
-the farther side.  Behind her, as she touched the rock, rose a shriek
-that blasted the leaden air into red-hot drops of horror--that went on
-and on and on, tearing upwards to the vaulted roof like a rocket fired
-from the mouth of hell; breaking at last into a gasping bellow, and
-snapping off into grisly silence on the very crest of a long, choking
-roar, in which there was nothing left of human.
-
-... Pita had jumped short.  Falling on the far side, with his legs half
-over the abyss, he had grasped for an instant at Vaiti's outstretched
-hands, and in the very act had been snatched away--snatched by a long,
-ghastly head, armed with poisoned jaws and quivering red antennas, that
-shot with the speed of a bullet out from the depths of the chasm, and
-back again with its prey....  The head was a foot long at least, the
-horrible winnowing feelers more than a yard, the black and red body,
-that just flashed into view for a second, was as thick as a man's thigh.
-It was a nightmare, an impossibility, and yet ... it was, beyond doubt,
-the Black Viri.
-
-For a little while it seemed to Vaiti that she went mad, and then that
-the world went out and she died. A long time after, she found  herself
-sitting on  the floor of the tunnel, her head badly bruised and cut
-where she had dashed it against the rock, her candle guttering down
-towards extinction, her revolver empty and smelling of powder--she did
-not remember in the least how it had become so--and the whole black,
-horrible place still and silent as the bottom of the sea. Pita was gone.
-The bag of skulls had disappeared--fallen, no doubt, into the abyss.
-There was not a movement or a sound, save the whisper of the
-water--drops trickling ceaselessly from the roof into the dark pools
-upon the ground.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-That evening, when the early starlight was beginning to shine down upon
-the creepers veiling the mouth of the tunnel, Saxon, sober at last, and
-rushing like a madman to the cave to find his daughter, met Vaiti
-herself coming down the rocks at the entrance, haggard, trembling, and
-almost old.  He asked for Pita, and was answered only by a shuddering
-gesture of the hands. Questioning no more, he carried the girl down to
-the beach and brought her on board the schooner.  There, when they had
-sailed, he left her undisturbed in her cabin for many days, while they
-ran steadily southward to pleasant Auckland and the temperate latitudes,
-farther and farther away from lonely, sun-smitten Falaite.  The story of
-the day in the cave was known to him, as to every one on the island, for
-the witch-doctor of Falaite had told it far and wide, reserving only the
-one interesting fact--how he became possessed of the information.  And
-as no one else alive on Falaite knew that there were two ways of
-reaching the skull-chamber, and more than one place where a man could
-hide unseen, the witch-doctor's reputation as a prophet and a
-clairvoyant was greatly increased; so that he suffered continually from
-a happily-acquired indigestion, and his dogs grew fat on bones of pig
-and fowl.  And no one came ever any more into the sacred caves of
-Falaite Island.
-
-Saxon declared plumply that he did not believe the tale, opining rather
-that the "blanked old wizard Johnnie had shoved Pita into the hole
-himself, and good riddance of bad rubbish, too."
-
-None the less, he was uneasy at Vaiti's rather prolonged depression, and
-though he dared not break in upon her solitude further than to hand her
-in her meals and ask her how she felt, now and then, he listened almost
-constantly at her state-room door, and gave up whisky for at least ten
-days.
-
-About the eleventh day, Te Ai, a young Samoan A.B., sat upon the main
-hatch in the pleasant coolness of the second dog-watch, and sang the
-farewell song of sweet Samoa, "Good-bye, my F'lennie"--the song that
-plucks so surely at the heartstrings of all who have ever loved and
-sailed away among the far-off fairy islands of the wide South Seas.
-
-    "Good-bye, my F'lennie (friend)--o le a o tea,
-    Efau lau le va'a, o le alii pule i ..."
-
-he sang, beating time with his knees on the hatch.... Then suddenly he
-stopped, and the little group of mates and captain on the poop did not
-see why.
-
-Later on, Harris, his face stiff with suppressed laughter, knocked at
-the captain's door.
-
-"Can you oblige me with a piece of sticking-plaster, sir?" he said.
-
-"Who for?" asked Saxon, reaching for the yellow roll that lies handy in
-every shipmaster's cabin about the peaceful Pacific.
-
-"Te Ai, sir.  He's been knocked down, and his head got cut against the
-pump."
-
-"Who did it?" bristled Saxon, ready to uphold his own peculiar
-privileges, at once.
-
-"She did, sir," said Harris, nearly choking.  "Te Ai, he was singin'
-'Good-bye, my F'lennie,' on the main 'atch and out she come from the
-deck cabin like a--like a nurricane, begging your pardon, sir--and she
-ups with a belayin' pin from the rail, an----"
-
-"All right, all right; there's your plaster," interrupted Saxon.
-"Harris!  Here."
-
-"Yes, sir!"
-
-"Give this to Te Ai."
-
-"Lor' bless you, sir, 'e don't mind; 'e's a----"
-
-"You do what you're told.  Stop.  Where's my daughter?"
-
-"Walkin' on the poop, sir, uncommon lively, and looking like dirty
-weather ahead."
-
-"That's all right," sighed the captain, with an air of infinite relief.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER V*
-
-                            *A DIAMOND WEB*
-
-
-It was six o'clock in Apia, and the round sun was hanging low above the
-rim of the level sea, like a burning coal ready to drop down upon a
-breadth of hyacinth silk.  The stores were closed along the straggling
-beach street, where the sand was white under foot, and parrakeets
-tweedled cheerily in the scarlet-flowered flamboyant trees.  Native
-dandies, greatly oiled and dyed, and wearing a bright hibiscus blossom
-over each ear, swung past with the inimitable Samoan roll, their golden
-brown limbs gay with the red-and-white English bath-towel that is
-popular as full dress for steamer days in the little island capital.
-Girls with high-coiffed yellow heads and pink or green tunics wandered
-lazily home to the cool, dark-domed native houses open all round to the
-sunset sky.  They went in groups, and sang as they walked--windy, fitful
-gusts of strange island melody, breaking out and dying away like the
-evening breeze among the heavy-headed palms.  Smells of yam and
-breadfruit, brown from the baking pits, of fish cooked in green, savoury
-leaves, and taro spinach stewed with cocoanut cream, crept out upon the
-cooling air.  The long, hot day was done, and Apia rested and ate.
-
-In "Charley's"--the least reputable of Apia's tavern-hotels--the
-egregious _table d'h�te_ was in full progress out in the green-shuttered
-verandah.  Charley himself, an oily, flashy New Caledonian half-caste,
-dressed in striped pyjamas, was eating curried tin--nature unknown--with
-a knife and two fingers, at the head of the table.  A corpse-faced
-Chinese was shuffling round with the inevitable Pacific fowl, cut up in
-a watery soup.  The table-cloth was of linoleum, the swinging lamp
-guttered and smoked, the cutlery was dislocated and black.  But there
-was English beer on the bar counter, and plenty of broken ice; and the
-whisky that mounted high in each man's smeary tumbler was good of its
-kind.  Charley knew his customers, and sought first the essential.
-
-Captain Saxon, his schooner safe at anchor outside, and his copra
-advantageously sold to an Auckland agent, sat eating at the table,
-heavy-faced, a little intoxicated, and almost absolutely blank in mind.
-This was his nearest approach to happiness, and one that he enjoyed
-often enough, for, since thought meant pain to him, he had managed to
-acquire a wonderful agility in avoiding it, and to live for the most
-part almost as purely by instinct and impulse as a dog.
-
-It was perhaps for this reason that he did not notice anything unusual
-in the demeanour of that singularly unknown quantity, Vaiti, his
-daughter.  And yet Vaiti--sombre and sparkling in a dress of vaporous
-red, with a handful of star stephanotis from the verandah thrust into
-the marvellous waves of her hair--was evidently not quite herself.  She
-sat a little apart from the noisy company that sprawled about the table,
-looked at no one, ate her food absent-mindedly and pulled little strips
-off the decaying oilcloth of the table-cover with a steady industry that
-made Charley wriggle in his seat, although he did not dare to
-remonstrate.
-
-Some one else was watching her, if Saxon was not. A short, stocky man,
-with burning grey eyes, a fiery red beard, and a sharp furrow between
-the eyebrows, that somehow suggested belaying-pins and rope's ends, was
-looking at her every now and then as he noisily sucked in his soup.  The
-inspection did not appear to please him altogether.  He finished his
-dinner quickly, took the current glass of whisky in his hand, and rolled
-off to the dark end of the verandah, followed by a grey-haired,
-greasy-faced mate who had been sitting beside him.
-
-"Still on for it, cap?" asked the latter, leaning over the railing with
-an air of careless ease that contrasted oddly with his watchful eye.
-
-"Yes, blank asterisk your condemned foolishness, sure I am on for it!"
-replied the captain, betraying his nationality by a slight touch of
-brogue.
-
-There is no nation that swings so high and so low between opposite
-extremes of character as the impetuous race that is handcuffed, by an
-odd freak of geography, to steady, serious England.  Great saints and
-great rogues are commoner in Ireland than ordinary people, and each
-displays the fullest flavour of his kind. Donahue, master of the island
-schooner _Ikurangi_, was, or had been, Irish; and it was assuredly not
-the company of the saints that claimed his membership.
-
-The two spoke together for a little while in level tones that sounded
-loud and careless enough, yet somehow did not carry.  One learns these
-things by practice.
-
-"She smells a rat, I'm thinking," said the old mate, looking critically
-the while at Charley, as if he were valuing the half-caste's clothes for
-pawn.
-
-"Let her.  You and I are apt to be a match for her, for all that,"
-answered the captain.  He looked at Charley also.  You would have sworn
-the two were discussing him, and rather unfavourably.  Charley himself
-shifted in his seat, and showed his magnificent teeth uncomfortably.
-
-"Think she'll come on board?"
-
-Vaiti was watching them, her chin on her hand. Her expression was not to
-be read.
-
-"I'll get her on board all right," answered the captain, keeping his
-eyes away from the girl with an effort.  "You play up, that's all."
-
-"'Jer think you're a match for that weasel in a woman's skin--you or any
-of us?"
-
-"I do, then.  Forty's a match for twenty any day in the year, if the
-heads of them comes anything near equal.  Cunnin' as Old Nick she is,
-but I've been cunnin' twenty years longer than her."
-
-"You pitched her a good yarn, I'll lay."
-
-"I did that--about the derelick we boarded nor'-east of the Paumotus,
-and the Spanish ladies' clothes and cases of goods that was lying about,
-and how we took what there was, includin' of a di'mond necklashe that
-was sittin' all its lone on the table in the old man's cabin (Be minding
-me, now, or you'll be making mistakes), and the way a gale riz on us
-before we was through, and hurried us back to the _Ikurangi_, so that we
-lost the derelick, and didn't see no more of her; and how we heard in
-Noumea afterwards that there was like to be joolery on boord her, so
-that we're all on to go and find her again."
-
-"Straight fact up to finding the di'monds, and gory lyin' after that, I
-see.  But how d'ye make out the people that deserted the ship was such
-fat-headed idiots as to leave the joolery?"
-
-"Why, they was fat-headed idiots right enough; they did leave a good lot
-of saleable stuff, as you and I knows; and it's only addin' on a bit to
-say that the ship had been on fire and made them clear for their lives,
-so that they didn't think of the valuables.  There's the necklashe I
-have for proof.  And, mind me now, what we heard was that the people of
-the ship knows now that she didn't go down, and will be out after her
-themselves when they can raise the cash, so that hurry's the word."
-
-"How much of that's true?"
-
-"Not a ---- bit.  The people was drowned, I allow. But it hangs well,
-and don't you go and forget none of it.  I pitched the yarn that way
-because of that bit of pashtry joolery I got hould of in mistake for
-goods down Melbourne way....  I misremember if I tould you."
-
-"You did, more nor once, and you was jolly well served right by her,"
-candidly replied the mate. "The yarn's all right, I suppose, and the
-paste necklace is good business; but where does this Vaiti come in?"
-
-"Quit lookin' at her, ye ---- fool, and give me a light for me poipe.
-Talk easy, can't you....  Why, she knows more navigation than most men
-that's got a master's ticket, and she's as vain of it as a paycock. And
-that's how I'll have her.  Always get a woman t'rough her consate, me
-boy, especially if her eyes are too sharp in common.  That'll pull the
-wool over them when nothing else will."
-
-"When I was in Callao----" began the mate, with an evil chuckle.
-
-"Leave Callao be now; you can tell me about her another time.  Well, you
-understand about Saxon's girl, I hope?  She's to navigate us on the
-trip, because nayther you nor I knows enough for a cruisin' job like
-this, and the old chap himself is pretty general drunk--that's the way I
-put it--and shares with what we find, and the ould divil himself to come
-along, just for propriety, and in case of a fight with the owners.  Oh,
-a nate yarn, and she shwallowed it down like a cat atin' butter.  She's
-comin' on boord to-night, to see the necklashe and look over the chart
-I've marked. She'll not bring ould Saxon, for she's feared of nayther
-man nor divil, and I'll bet she thinks to get the bearin's of the place
-off of me and chate me out of it after all."
-
-"And how the h---- do you think she's going to believe that you give the
-show away before the ship sails?  Her teeth wasn't cut yesterday, by all
-we know."
-
-"Faith, and we do know!" muttered the captain, with a horrible
-undercurrent of oaths.  "And she'll know, by ---- she will!  I'd slit
-the throat of her, if it wasn't for the other bit of divarsion we've
-planned."
-
-"Say you've planned," interrupted the mate darkly. "I call it bad work,
-whether she was man, woman, or child; but you're my master."
-
-"And you're a plashter saint, ain't you?" sneered the captain.  "Let's
-have no more of your chat; we know each other a ---- sight too well.  As
-for the chart, she'll think we don't mean to give it away till she and
-her father is under sail with us, but she'll come on the chance of
-sneaking it out somehow.  And when we've got her aboard, why--lave it to
-me!  Ould Saxon's hell-cat daughter won't take no more pearl-shell beds
-from us or any one else."
-
-"You ain't afraid of her knowing who we are?"
-
-"How would she, then?  The _Ikurangi_ isn't the _Margaret
-Macintyre_--bad luck to her who brought me down to such a tub, after
-ownin' the finest auxiliary in Auckland!--and she never seen you or me
-till to-day. No, it's all right.  That's enough jaw; you go aboard, and
-attend to you know what, and then send off the boat for her and me."
-
-Vaiti, curly classic head on slender hand, still watched from her
-corner.
-
-Did she suspect?  There was nothing for suspicion to lay hold of.
-Donahue was one of the acutest villains under the Southern Cross, and he
-did not make clumsy mistakes.  The story of the derelict, of the
-valuables abandoned on board, of the necessity for finding the ship soon
-and secretly, might have sounded far-fetched to city-dwelling folk, but
-out in the wild South Seas stranger things may happen any day.  The plan
-was neat and plausible from every point of view, and Vaiti had taken the
-bait readily enough that afternoon. Yet Donahue felt--as the two walked
-silently down the dim, perfumed beach street, all ablow with vagrant sea
-winds and wandering wafts of song--that he would have given a good deal
-for just one peep into his handsome companion's mind.
-
-Vaiti walked beside him, looking straight ahead. Had Donahue's wish been
-granted, he would have thought somewhat less of his own acuteness.  She
-did suspect.  A man, in her case, would have been convinced by the
-reasonable aspect of the whole affair. Vaiti, being a woman, with
-sea-anemone tentacles of instinct floating and tingling all about the
-steady centres of reason in her mind, was convinced, and vet not
-convinced.  She thought it was all right, yet she knew it was not--after
-a woman's way.
-
-In any case, however, it was an adventure, and there was a mystery to
-fathom.  So she put on a more substantial dress than the gauzy draperies
-she had been wearing, hung the neatest possible little pearl-handled
-Smith and Wesson round her neck, under the swelling folds of her frock,
-by means of an innocent-looking thin gold neck-chain that would snap
-with a tug; put her long-bladed knife in her pocket, with the sheath
-sewn to the dress, so that a pull would bring out the blade, and joined
-Donahue an hour after dinner, on the verandah steps, confident of her
-ability to see the thing through, whatever it might be.
-
-She looked sharply about her, as she stepped over the low bulwarks of
-the _Ikurangi_ and dropped down on to the encumbered, untidy deck.  No
-one about. Nothing to be seen but a dirty little main deck, with rusty
-pumps and a yawning hatch, and a poop that even in the pallid light just
-beginning to tremble up from the rising moon showed neglect of the
-sacred ceremony of daily deck-washing.
-
-Now, any decent ship's captain will attend to his deck-washing, even if
-he doesn't shave or wash himself from port to port.  Vaiti did not like
-that unscrupulous, dirty poop.  But she was already up on it, and
-Donahue was bowing her down the cabin companion, with a jarring smile
-and a good deal of over-fluent blarney.  The cabin was small and smelly;
-it had an oblong table in the middle, surrounded by cushioned lockers,
-and an open door at the end facing the companion.  This door evidently
-opened into Donahue's own cabin, for a rough wash-stand and a
-looking-glass, the latter hung high on the bulkhead, were plainly
-visible.  There was a lamp nailed above the glass, and the two together
-shone brightly out into the rather ill-lit main cabin.
-
-"What'll you take?" asked Donahue, with his unpleasant smile.  "I've got
-some sweet sherry wine, just the thing for ladies--or wouldn't ye put
-your lips to a taste of peach brandy?"
-
-Vaiti shook her head.
-
-"No good drink, suppose talk business," she said. She would not have
-swallowed a glass of water on the _Ikurangi_ for a dozen Virot hats.
-
-Donahue had not expected to catch her so easily; still, he cast a
-thought of regret to his nicely-doctored liquors.  She evidently meant
-what she said--and the other way Was harder.
-
-"Well, thin, darlin', we'll have a look at the cha-art," he observed,
-producing a roll of paper.  "It's yourself that can help us t'rough this
-business--you and the ould man--better than any one from Calloa to
-Sydney if only yez are raisonable about terms."
-
-He spread the chart out on the table, and weighted it down with a couple
-of tumblers.
-
-Vaiti, her mind charged full with watchful suspicion, felt that sudden
-small, sick thrill that is the forerunner of the thought--"I wish I
-hadn't!"  Afterwards, when she came to think matters over, she knew that
-it was because Donahue had made the mistake of bringing out the chart
-before the terms had been discussed, which was an improbable sort of
-thing to do.  In such moments, however, one does not think, one only
-feels.  Still, the warning was unmistakable, and Vaiti made as if to
-rise, intending to plead sudden illness and get out on deck.  But
-Donahue, sharp as a snake, saw the movement, and brought out his trump
-card at once.
-
-"Sure, I'm a ---- fool, I am, to forget the necklashe! You haven't seen
-that yet," he said, whipping a stream of white fire out of his pocket
-and letting it fall across the dark wood of the table.  It was a
-magnificent piece of paste-work, and had taken in Donahue himself, some
-few weeks ago, after a fashion that made him sore enough to remember.
-Vaiti gasped when she saw it, and laid both her pretty olive hands upon
-it at once. Her suspicions were not exactly killed, but they had for the
-moment no room to live with the passionate feeling aroused by the gems.
-Donahue, with his unspeakable experience of the sex, had calculated
-rightly when he classified her among the women who would almost do
-murder for a diamond....  Such jewels! and she had never had one in her
-hand before, though her eyes had often filled and her heart ached with
-hopeless desire before the maddening glories of the jewellers' windows
-in Auckland and Sydney.
-
-She hugged the necklace to her breast like a baby, she shook it, she
-danced it in the light....  And then, was it in woman's nature to
-refrain from snapping the clasp about her neck, and feeling the dear
-touch of those cold drops and pendants on her bosom?
-
-"Ah, now, but you're the beauty wit' them little jokers round your neck!
-And the lovely neck you have, darlin'!" blarneyed Donahue.  He had
-better have been silent, for Vaiti, used to admiration of every kind and
-degree as to daily bread, felt the falseness of the tone.  If all other
-men admired her beauty, this one did not, though he said so.  His grey,
-goat-like eyes looked something more like hate across the narrow table,
-under the ill-smelling oily lamp, and Vaiti saw they did.
-
-Donahue, taught by twenty years of active villainy, was quick to feel
-the necessity for the next move. He went into his own cabin and turned
-up the lamp.  The looking-glass shone out brightly under its rays.
-
-"Come and look at yourself, me beauty," he said; "and let me ould
-shavin'-glass see the handsomest girl in the islands wearin' what she
-ought to wear every day of her life, if she'd her rights."
-
-For the moment, Vaiti was not herself.  She was drunk with the jewels;
-she was crazed with the desire to see herself in them.  If heaven and
-hell had stood between her and the looking-glass, she was bound to go to
-it, and Donahue knew it, as surely as he knew that the moon would set
-that night.
-
-Vaiti--still sensing the danger that she would not heed, through all the
-intoxication of the jewels--thought, in a cinematographic flash, that
-one was safe before a glass, at all events....  No one could come up
-behind you....  Besides, there was the little revolver, hanging on the
-chain that would snap with a tug....
-
-And then, for the space of a full minute, she saw nothing, knew nothing,
-lived for nothing but the sight of her own dark, beautiful face in the
-glass, lit up into surpassing loveliness by the scintillating fires
-about her neck.  There was no movement in the mirror behind her.
-Donahue sat motionless at the table, and the cabin was very still.
-
-... The first ecstasy subsided, and she turned her head a little to see
-the diamonds twinkle....
-
-Donahue's elbow knocked a glass off the table with a sharp crash.
-Almost at the same instant two powerful hands closed on each of Vaiti's
-ankles, and snatched her feet from under her.  She plucked out the
-revolver as she fell, but her hands were caught, whisked behind her, and
-securely tied, with a prompt swiftness that told of frequent experience.
-In another minute her ankles were lashed together, none too gently; she
-was carried into a small state-room, thrown down upon the bunk, and left
-alone in the dark, with the slam of the door and snap of the lock
-resounding in her ears.
-
-Most women would have screamed.  Vaiti remembered that they were out in
-the middle of a wide harbour, and decided not to risk the infliction of
-a gag for such a slight chance of rescue....  Certain ugly scenes on the
-_Sybil_ rose up before her eyes.  No; decidedly it was her only policy
-to keep quiet.
-
-Outside there was the thud of bare feet running about the deck, the
-creak of the booms rising on the masts, the slatting of loose
-sails--loud orders, long yells from the native crew, as they pulled and
-hauled.  The _Ikurangi_ was making sail.
-
-Then sudden silence, slow heeling over of the cabin, lip-lap of hurrying
-water along the hull.  They were off. Where?  God--or the devil--only
-knew!
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER VI*
-
-                               *MAROONED*
-
-
-There was plenty of time for reflection in the long days that followed.
-The greasy-faced old mate came in and cut the lashings off Vaiti's
-ankles and wrists, a few hours after sailing, and she was left free to
-move about the cabin, which offered a promenade of exactly seven feet by
-three.  Meals were handed in to her three times daily--the usual black
-tea, tinned meat, and weevily biscuit of second-class island
-schooners--and she was not in any way molested, though the door was
-always kept locked.  Donahue put in his head once or twice to look at
-her, as she sat cross-legged on her bunk, staring out through the port
-at the tumbling seas. He generally had something to say--a jarring,
-mocking compliment, or a remark about the time they were likely to make
-Sydney Heads--knowing all the time that Vaiti could estimate the general
-direction of their course by the sun, and that there was no southing in
-it. If she had ever feared any one, she feared this man--almost.
-
-It was not difficult to understand how the capture had been brought
-about.  A man under the bunk, another under the sofa opposite--her own
-eyes watching only the upper part of the cabin as reflected in the
-glass--nothing could be simpler or better planned.  The affair was none
-the less ugly on that account.  Perhaps it was only Vaiti's burning
-anger at her utter rout and defeat in her own business of plotting and
-intrigue that saved her from something very like despair, as the
-schooner ploughed steadily on, day after day, carrying her into the
-great unknown, farther and farther away from all who could defend her.
-Yet, despairing or not, Saxon's daughter never lost her courage.  They
-had taken her weapons from her as they carried her into the cabin, but
-they could not take away her undaunted spirit.  She waited her time.
-
-As to the meaning of the business, she trusted, again, to time's
-enlightenment.  Saxon had many enemies; so had she.  It would all come
-out by-and-by. Meantime, it was clear that no one meant to murder her.
-What else might be meant she could not tell, and she did not care to
-speculate overmuch.  Under such circumstances one does best to save
-one's nerve against the time it may be wanted.
-
-It was on the twenty-third day out from Apia, bearing, as far as she
-could discover, in a north-westerly direction, that she first noted the
-approach of land.  Nothing could be seen from her side of the ship, but
-she heard the long, excited cries of the island crew, and the thundering
-of their feet, as they began putting the ship about with unwonted
-vigour, to a chorus of native songs.  She strained her eyes eagerly when
-the ship came about on the other tack, but the line of the horizon was
-unbroken; and it was not for another hour that she saw, from her low
-elevation, what the look-out in the crow's nest had sighted long
-before--a line of small black bristles pricking the edge of the horizon
-several miles away.
-
-Vaiti knew the sight at once for the palms of a low atoll
-island--evidently some barren, sun-smitten spot close up to the
-line--and a ready solution of the whole puzzling affair at once sprang
-into her mind.
-
-Marooning!
-
-Most people know the meaning of this term; nearly every one has heard of
-sailors captured by pirates in old days, and left on lonely islands, or
-even deserted by their own comrades on some isolated spot, with just
-enough food and water to save the marooners' consciences from the guilt
-of actual murder.  Vaiti knew both the word and the thing very
-well-indeed, and she was almost certain that the _Ikurangi_ had gone off
-the course on the way to some South American port with the view of
-hiding her where she would not easily be found again.  There are many
-islands in the wastes of the vast Pacific where a ship may not pass once
-in half a century, and these--unlike the typical "desert" island of
-stories--are almost always barren, hungry, shadeless spots, where Crusoe
-himself would have been hard put to it to make a decent living.  The
-fertile, mountainous, well-watered isle is never without a native
-population, permanent or occasional, and is very seldom indeed, in these
-days, without a trader as well, and a regularly calling schooner.  As
-for the breadfruit, oranges, pineapples, the pigs and goats, the
-sugarcane and maize of uninhabited islands as known to fiction, they
-have no counterpart in real life.  All the valuable food plants and all
-useful animals are the product of importation and cultivation, ancient
-or modern.  It follows, that where there are no people and no ships,
-there is nothing worth having.
-
-Vaiti knew this very well, and decided that if she was going to be
-marooned, she might as well make such provision as circumstances
-allowed.  She had hunted over every inch of the cabin--which seemed to
-belong to the mate--during the long days of the voyage, and she knew
-exactly what it contained.  From the stores put away under the bunk she
-selected a large new sheet, which she concealed under her dress; a small
-stock of needles and thread, a box or two of matches, some hooks and
-line, and a stick of dynamite, evidently meant for some forgotten
-fishing purpose.  There was nothing in the shape of a knife, much to her
-regret; and there was a good deal of clothing that she would have liked
-to carry away; but it would not do to take more than she could easily
-conceal.  So she made an end of her preparations, and sat down to wait
-once more.
-
-There was no moon that night until very late, and darkness came down so
-close on the stroke of four bells that Vaiti felt sure they were very
-near the equator.  No one came near her, and tea seemed to be unusually
-late.  The anchor-chain roared home soon after dark, the ship lay very
-still, and there was a good deal of running about on deck.  Vaiti was
-confirmed in her anticipations of an uninhabited island by the fact that
-no boat was to be heard coming off from shore.  Not a sound of any kind,
-indeed, came from the island, and there were no lights on the beach.
-Some one handed her in her tea by-and-by, and a little later her door
-was flung open again by the mate.
-
-"Come on out," he said.
-
-Vaiti followed the mate out of the cabin at once, rather to his
-surprise.  She had made up her mind that anything was better than the
-_Ikurangi_, and she was looking out sharply for a chance--any chance--of
-turning the tables.
-
-It did not look at first as if she were to have one. The dinghy had been
-swung out when she got on deck, and a couple of men were standing ready
-to lower away. They were islanders, and she knew that they would
-befriend her if they could--indeed, their glances showed as much--yet
-what could they do?
-
-Donahue was nowhere visible.  He had planned this business with some
-forethought, and he wanted to have a chance of casting blame on his
-subordinate if any inquisitive Government official should incline to
-look the matter up later on.  So he stayed down in his own cabin,
-pretending to be asleep, and the mate, rather against his will, had to
-carry out orders alone.
-
-Just as the boat was ready to lower away, one of the men let her go with
-a run, and she struck the water stern first, with a terrible splash.
-The mate, screaming curses, ran over to the falls and began to abuse the
-crew. The dinghy was injured, and they had to haul her up and swing out
-the whaleboat instead.
-
-This took some little time, and Vaiti was forgotten for the moment--a
-chance that made her heart beat with eagerness to profit by it.
-
-Two ideas held possession of her--that she must plan to secure a boat,
-and that she must manage to do the _Ikurangi_ some sort of mischief.
-Was it to be borne that Donahue should go unpaid?  The blood of a
-hundred fierce Island chiefs made answer.
-
-Concerning the boat, she thought she saw a chance. They were bound to
-stay a day for wood and water, and that should furnish an opportunity.
-But the other matter?
-
-If she could only get hold of the ship's papers and destroy them!  That
-would be satisfactory.  She knew, none better, that a ship's papers are
-her character, her "marriage-lines" of respectability.  Without them a
-vessel is an illegitimate, furtive creature, every man's hand against
-her, every official eye turned coldly upon her.  Vaiti would have liked
-very well to get hold of the _Ikurangi's_.
-
-But, careless as Donahue was, the papers were not to be found in the
-little deck cabin which he used as a chart-room.  Vaiti, disappointed,
-took one of the charts and began studying the position of the ship, with
-a view to finding out the name of the island off which they were lying.
-The chart was almost a blank, nothing being marked upon its wide expanse
-but a number of reefs and two or three atolls--Bilboa Island, Vaka,
-Ngamaru--dotted hundreds of miles apart in a naked waste of white.
-Bilboa, an abandoned guano island, of which she had heard something,
-seemed to Vaiti the most likely of the three spots.  Ngamaru, she knew,
-had a native population, and about Vaka she could for the moment
-remember nothing, although she knew she had heard something once upon a
-time. All this part of the Pacific was far removed from the _Sybil's_
-haunts, and indeed from the haunts of any other ship of which Vaiti had
-ever heard.
-
-It did not seem to be a healthy place for schooners; the reefs round
-both Vaka and Bilboa were many, and most were marked "Position
-doubtful."  Donahue was evidently not familiar with either place, for
-the chart was freshly pencilled over with notes and corrections.
-Vaiti's heart leaped up as she looked at the careless work....  She saw
-a way.
-
-They were still clearing the lumber out of the whaleboat on deck.  No
-one was watching.
-
-Vaiti took a pencil and rubber, and began to do some artistic
-alterations on the chart, helped by her knowledge of seamanship.  In ten
-minutes she had converted the innocent piece of parchment into a perfect
-death-trap, rolled it up and replaced it, put back the rubber and
-pencil, and slipped out again on deck, where she sat down on a coil of
-rope and waited.
-
-In another couple of minutes the boat was in the water, and the mate
-called rudely to Vaiti.  She came without a word, covering her face with
-her dress, and sobbing bitterly.  She stumbled as she walked; you would
-have sworn she was weak, broken in spirit, and utterly helpless.
-
-If the mate felt any compassion, he did not dare to show it.  They
-shoved off, two natives at the oars. Vaiti, sobbing effectively behind
-her hands, kept a sharp look-out with the corner of one eye as they slid
-across the dark water, but she could see nothing save a faintly
-glimmering line of grey shore, and hear nothing but the humming of the
-surf on the reef.
-
-As soon as they reached the shallow water near the shore, the mate took
-Vaiti by her arm and roared, "Out you go!"
-
-Sobbing afresh, in the most natural and convincing manner in the world,
-she obeyed....  It was dark, and the native who rowed bow oar never knew
-that she whipped his knife dexterously out of his belt as she passed
-him.
-
-"Why are you marooning me?" she wailed, as she waded through the warm,
-shallow water towards the shore.
-
-The mate leaned out of the boat, now fading fast away into the starry
-gloom, and shouted as he disappeared:
-
-"To pay for Delgadas Reef and the _Margaret Macintyre_!"
-
-Vaiti, who had reached the shore, almost sat down with the shock.  So
-that was it! that was it! The pearl-shell lagoon out of which she,
-almost unaided, had "jockeyed" the schooner _Margaret Macintyre_, some
-months before, was bringing in a crop other than pearls--of which last,
-indeed, the canny Scot who had financed the working of the place had had
-very much the larger share.
-
-Well, things must be taken as they were found.  The soft tropic night
-stirred gently round her.  The stars were large and golden; they shone
-in the still lagoon like little moons.  Palm trees waved somewhere up in
-the dusk above, striking their huge rattling vanes together with the
-swing of the night-breeze.  It was land, safe, solid land, and the sand
-was warm and soft, and Vaiti was tired.  She walked a little way up the
-beach, stretched herself under a pandanus tree, and went to sleep....
-
-Some hours later she woke, with the dim, mysterious volcano-glow of the
-tropic dawn in her eyes, and a curious feeling of disquiet about her
-heart.  Still half asleep, she saw the long grey shore sloping down to
-the silent lagoon, the ink-coloured pandanus trees standing up against
-the dull orange sky, the leaning stems and stumps of coco-palms, dark
-and formless in the shadow.  She shut her eyes and tried to sleep again.
-
-No use.  That nameless disquiet--now almost fear--still stirred at her
-heart.  She opened her eyes once more, and looked about.  A little more
-light--the touch of a glowing finger away in the east--a clearer
-defining of the cocoanut stumps, snapped off near their roots in the
-last great hurricane....  One of the stumps was oddly shaped--almost
-like a human figure.  She could have fancied it was a rude image of a
-sitting man, only that the profile, against the lightening east, was
-featureless, and there was nothing to represent the hands.
-
-"I will not be frightened by a rotten cocoanut tree," thought Vaiti.  "I
-will sleep again till it is light.  Am I not a sea-captain's daughter,
-and the descendant of great Island chiefs, and shall I fear the fancies
-of my own mind?"
-
-Determinedly she closed her eyes again, and lay very still.  The dawn
-wind began to stir; the ripples crisped upon the beach; the locusts in
-the trees broke out into a loud chirr-ing chorus.  And as the day broke
-silver-clear upon the shore, Vaiti, still lying on the sand, felt that
-some one, in the gathering light, was watching her as she lay.
-
-Wary as a fox, she opened her dark, keen eyes without stirring her body
-... and looked straight into a face that was bending almost over her ...
-a face hooded by a black cloth that hid the head and brow, and only left
-to view ... O God!  O God! what was it?
-
-The thing was featureless.  Nose, eyes, and mouth were gone.  In the
-midst of a cavern of unspeakable ruin the ghastly throat gaped vacant.
-Two handless, rotting stumps of arms waved blindly
-about--feeling--feeling....
-
-Could it hear?  Some instinct told the girl that it could.  Softly as a
-snake she writhed out of the reach of those terrible groping arms.
-
-It did hear.  It sprang blindly forward--it snatched.
-
-With one leap Vaiti was on her feet.  Never looking back, she fled down
-the open beach, the sand spurting behind her as she ran.  She heard a
-dull padding in her rear at first; it soon grew faint, but she ran on
-blindly, long after it had died away--ran, while the sun climbed over
-the horizon and cast down handfuls of burning gold on her uncovered
-head--ran, while the beach grew parchment-white and dazzled back the
-heat into her face like an open furnace--ran till at last her
-over-driven body gave way, and the sand spun round and the sky turned
-red before her eyes.  Then only she staggered into the shade and dropped
-down upon a green mattress of convolvulus creeper to rest.
-
-And now, when she had leisure to think and strength to cast off the
-haunting horror of that inhuman face, she knew what Donahue had done.
-
-This was not Bilboa, the uninhabited guano island that she had feared.
-This was infinitely worse--it was Vaka, the leper isle!
-
-She remembered that she had once heard a dim rumour of Vaka and its
-ghastly leper people--the remnant of a plague-smitten tribe long ago
-forcibly exiled there from one of the fierce western groups.  No ships
-ever called at this graveyard of the living; it was supposed that the
-cocoanuts and fish of the island provided sufficient food for the
-people, and no one cared to run the chance of their stowing away and
-escaping, especially as they were known to be both daring and
-treacherous on occasion.  Donahue had indeed laid his plans well for the
-most hideous revenge that the heart of man or devil could conceive.  A
-few weeks or months in this charnel-house of horrors, where the very air
-must reek of contagion, and what would it avail her if, after all, some
-stray, storm-driven vessel should rescue the castaway? Better, then,
-that she should stay and die among the other nameless nightmare horrors
-that walked these stricken shores.
-
-No!  Vaiti, sitting cross-legged on the netted vines and staring grimly
-out to sea, then and there took resolve that such a fate should not be
-hers....  Sharks were uncertain, if you really wanted them; but the
-stick of dynamite she had taken from the mate's cabin was safe and sure.
-If she failed in using it for the special purpose she had planned, she
-would put it in her mouth and light the fuse....  There would be no more
-trouble after that.  And as for the flies--one did not feel them, of
-course, when one was dead.
-
-All the same, she did not mean to die if she could avoid it, and, as the
-first step towards helping herself, she knocked some nuts off a young
-palm, and took her breakfast off the refreshing water and juicy meat.
-Then she cut a length of bush rope, looped it round the tallest palm in
-sight, and set her feet inside the loop, so that she could work herself
-up to the top of the tree, monkey-on-stick fashion, leaning against the
-rope.  When she got into the crown of the palm she knelt among the
-leaves, holding on tightly, and looked right and left over the island.
-
-It was a pure atoll, an irregular circle of feather palms lying on the
-sea like a great green garland set afloat. The inner lagoon was several
-square miles in extent, but the land was not more than a few hundred
-yards wide at any point, and there was no soil to speak of.  The palms,
-the scanty, pale green scrub, the mop-headed pandanus trees, the
-trailing creepers, all sprang out of pure white coral gravel and sand.
-The scene was lovely as only a coral atoll can be--the jewel-green water
-of the inner lagoon, shaded with vivid reflections of lilac and pale
-turquoise, the stately circled palms, the wide, white beach enclasping
-all the island like a frame of purest pearl, the burning blue of the
-surrounding sea, all combined to form a picture bright as fairyland and
-sparkling as an enamelled gem set upon a velvet shield.
-
-But Vaiti, while she saw and admired the loveliness of the scene, also
-recognised its barrenness as only an islander could.  No fruit, no
-roots, little fresh water--nothing, in fact, but cocoanut and pandanus
-kernels, eked out by a little fish....  The lepers must often go hungry.
-
-The hot day turned suddenly chill as Vaiti recalled those blind,
-snatching, handless arms.  They came of a cannibal race, these Vaka
-folk.  What if she had not waked?  What if, wearied as she well might
-be, she slept too long and too soundly in the night that was to come?
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER VII*
-
-                      *THE TURNING OF THE TABLES*
-
-
-She looked narrowly about the island, hoping to discover the place where
-the lepers lived.  A cluster of small, miserable huts, on the far side
-of the lagoon, attracted her attention.  It seemed not more than half a
-mile from the spot where she had spent the night.  The best fishing
-grounds she judged, by the look of the shore, to be near the village.
-She was therefore, no doubt, several miles from their usual haunts.
-
-So far, so good.  Where was the schooner?  It lay to her left about a
-mile out at sea, close to a small, uninhabited, sandy islet.  Vaiti
-supposed that the men were cutting wood and looking for water.  She saw
-one or two black dots on the shore, recognisable by their blue dungaree
-clothing, and strained her eyes eagerly to see if the dinghy had been
-pulled up on the sand, for in this lay her only chance.  If they brought
-the boat up on the beach, to repair her where wood could be had without
-going to the atoll itself (Vaiti would have wagered that the _Ikurangi_
-did not carry a splinter outside of the galley fuel), then the schooner
-would probably stop overnight.  In that case she could carry out her
-plans. Otherwise ... there was always the dynamite.
-
-The dinghy was ashore, drawn well up on the beach.
-
-She drew a breath of relief, and slid down the tree again.  Now she
-could wait till night with an easy mind.
-
-All day she hid in the tangle of young palm and low-growing scrub that
-clustered about the foot of the loftier trees.  Once she saw a couple of
-the lepers pass by in the distance, evidently looking for something.
-These had eyes, and she crept closer into the shelter of the scrub till
-they were gone.  Then she came cautiously out, and plucked long sheets
-of the fine pale-brown natural matting that protects the young shoot of
-the cocoanut, to cover up her white dress, for the scrub was dangerously
-thin, in that staring overhead sun.  She did not venture down to the sea
-to fish, but fed upon cocoanuts during the day.
-
-Night came at last--night and coolness, with big stars shining in the
-lagoon, and a gentle breeze stirring among the palms.  About midnight,
-as near as she could guess, Vaiti came out of her shelter and prepared
-for action.
-
-She took off her clothes, and fastened about her waist a petticoat of
-the dark-coloured cocoanut matting which she had stitched together
-during the day.  So habited, with her olive skin and black hair, she
-knew that she was invisible in the darkness of the night.  She fastened
-the dynamite, and a box of matches, into the coil of hair on the top of
-her head, stuck her knife into the waist of her petticoat, and walked
-down the beach into the warm, dark sea.
-
-She knew very well that the outer side of an atoll commonly swarms with
-sharks, but the risk did not trouble her.  There was something a good
-deal worse to face on the island than any number of sharks.  Heading for
-the distant light of the schooner, she swam through the starry water
-with the low, dog-like island paddle that can cover such marvellous
-distances--keeping her head well out, and quietly taking her time.
-
-It was a long swim, but it ended at last, and the schooner rose up
-before her in the water, black and silent, and shifting ever so little
-upon the swell of the incoming tide.  The stars made little trickles of
-light upon her wet, dark hull.  Two boats lay alongside--the dinghy,
-freshly mended and watertight, and the whaleboat, loaded with wood and
-cocoanuts.  After the slovenly fashion of the _Ikurangi_, they had left
-the boats until the morning to hoist inboard, seeing that it was dead
-calm in the lee of the islet.
-
-This was more than Vaiti had hoped for, and it made her task easy.  She
-cut the dinghy's painter, got into the boat, and muffled the oars with a
-strip or two torn from her petticoat.  Then she put the dynamite into
-the whaleboat, cut and attached a good long fuse, set a match to it, and
-saw that the tiny red spark was steadily eating its way along, before
-she pulled off from the ship. She towed the whaleboat after her a little
-way, and then let it go thirty or forty yards from the ship.  It was not
-her desire to wreck the schooner at Vaka Island, and possibly let loose
-her enemies upon the atoll; rather she wished the ship well out of the
-way before any disaster should overtake her.  The charts would most
-probably ensure that matter.  The destruction of the boat was only
-intended to secure her own possession of the dinghy.
-
-She had scarcely reached the shore before a loud explosion boomed out
-across the water, and immediately after lights began to stir on board
-the schooner.  Vaiti worked with coolness and speed, knowing that it was
-not likely, though possible, that any one would swim ashore.  From her
-eyrie in the coco-palm she had noted a deep, narrow creek running up
-from the lagoon--a mere crack in the coral, but wide enough to admit a
-small boat, taken in with care.  There was just enough light from the
-stars to enable her to find the place, and run the boat up on the sand
-at the end, into the heart of a tangle of leaves and creepers that
-entirely concealed it.  For safety's sake, she cut a few more armfuls of
-trailing vines from the shore, and buried the boat two or three feet
-deep, so that neither from the sea nor the land could it possibly be
-seen.
-
-As she worked, she could hear shouts and cries, made faint by distance,
-coming across the water from the schooner.  She could imagine the scene
-that would take place on board when they found themselves boatless. Some
-of the native crew--not Donahue or the mate; they would never face the
-sharks--would probably swim ashore to-morrow to investigate.  Well, let
-them!
-
-Having finished the concealing of the dinghy, she got into it herself,
-put on her clothes again, drew the tangled creepers well over her, and
-went calmly to sleep, secure that no one could find her unless she chose
-to be found.
-
-All the same, she was very cautious about getting up the next morning,
-and looked carefully between the leaves before she ventured out of her
-hiding-place.  She covered up her light dress with the cocoanut canvas,
-and then climbed a palm to look about.
-
-People were moving hurriedly about the decks of the schooner; something
-seemed to be going on.  As she watched, she saw two natives, clad only
-in loin-cloths, stand up on the bulwarks, ready to dive.  In another
-moment they had flashed down into the sea, small as ants to sight at
-that distance, but perfectly clear to Vaiti's sea-trained eyes.  Then
-the dark specks began to make their way across the water.  The sun was
-newly risen, the sea was still a mirror of molten gold, and the tiny
-black heads stood out sharply on its surface.  Vaiti set her teeth as
-she watched them creeping on.  They were island men, of her mother's own
-race, and they had done her no harm.  And ... the longer a vessel lies
-at anchor in equatorial latitudes, the more certain it is that sharks
-will gather round her--even if there has been no explosion in the water
-alongside to kill the fish and collect the tigers of the sea from far
-and near.
-
-Vaiti looked away, and began desperately to count the nuts clustered
-among the palm-fronds at her feet....  How many were there?
-Ten--fifteen--twenty----
-
-A long, despairing shriek tore across the water.  She put her fingers in
-her ears and buried her face in the leaves.  Yet, all the same, she
-heard a second cry, short and sudden, and quickly ended.  There was
-nothing more.  She lifted her face again, her teeth set tight into her
-lower lip.  The two black heads were gone.
-
-"No one will come ashore to-day," she said, with a shiver.  Something
-seemed to stab her, as she thought of that doctored chart in the
-schooner's deck cabin. The reefs on the course to South America were
-hundreds of miles from shore--the ship had no boats--and the native crew
-must suffer with the villainous captain and mate, if the disaster that
-she had plotted so carefully should come about....  There would be
-sharks there, too, when the ship broke up....
-
-The crystal-gold of the sea turned dim before Vaiti's eyes.  It was only
-a mist of tears that lay between, but to the girl's excited imagination
-it seemed like the spreading and darkening stain of blood.
-
-Careless of whether she was seen or not, she slid down the tree and
-rushed into the scrub, where she sat down upon the sand and cried like a
-mere nervous schoolgirl. The sun was past the zenith when she lifted her
-head again; the schooner had put out to sea, and lay, a far-off snowy
-speck, upon the blue horizon.
-
-Vaiti stood up, flung back her hair, and cast the trouble from her.  She
-could not afford to grieve over the inevitable now; there was too much
-to do.  The boat had to be prepared and provisioned, and that was not
-the work of a moment.
-
-She husked and opened a number of large cocoanuts, and removed the
-insides.  She then cut a quantity of young palm-leaves, and plaited them
-into baskets, which she filled with the cocoanut meat.  Afterwards she
-cut down dozens of young green nuts for drinking, husked them to save
-space, and slung them together in bunches with strips of their own
-fibre.  This done, she hid the provisions in the boat, and set about her
-own supper, as it was almost dark.
-
-Nourishing food she felt she must have, if she was to get through with
-her enterprise, but she dared not attract attention to herself by going
-out torch-fishing on the reef.  However, there were certain holes in the
-ground about the roots of the palms that to her experienced eye promised
-something better than fish.
-
-She dug a fire-hole in the gravel at the end of the gully where she had
-hidden the boat, lined it with stones, and made a fire, looking well to
-it that no gleam should be visible from above.  When the stones were
-beginning to heat, she took a piece of palms-leaf in her hand, hid
-herself in the bush, and waited, still as a rock.
-
-By-and-by there was a faint scuffling among the roots of the trees, and
-a shadowy thing began climbing up the trunk of a palm.  Vaiti waited
-till it had disappeared in the crown of the tree, and then climbed after
-it to a point about ten feet from the top, where she tied her strip of
-leaf round the trunk and came down again.
-
-Thump! thump!  Two cocoanuts fell to the earth. The crab (for it was a
-cocoanut crab of the biggest and fiercest kind) was getting his supper.
-Now he would come down the tree, rip open the nuts with his formidable
-claws, and enjoy the contents.
-
-Slowly he began to back down the palm, his sensitive tail ready to tell
-him when he had touched earth and might safely let go.  And now it was
-that Vaiti's trap (a well-known native trick) proved his undoing.  The
-belt of dry leaflets round the tree tickled his tail, he promptly let
-go, and fell with a crash seventy feet through air on to the pile of
-coral lumps that Vaiti had heaped up at the foot of the tree.
-
-The girl picked him up, badly injured and unable to use his claws (which
-were big enough to crack her ankle), and put an end to him with a clever
-stroke of her knife. He proved to be two feet long in the body alone,
-and of a fine blue and red colour, as seen in the dim light of the fire.
-She put him on the heated stones, wrapped in leaves, buried him until
-cooked, and then enjoyed a hot supper that an epicure might have envied.
-
-Strengthened by the good food, she worked on late into the night,
-catching more crabs, whose meat she hoped she could dry in the sun,
-making a rough sail out of the bed-sheet she had carried away from the
-schooner, twisting sinnet plait out of cocoanut husk for ropes, cutting
-and trimming a small pandanus for the mast. She had all her plans laid,
-and knew what she meant to do.  Her present position was about five
-hundred miles from the Marquesas, and the south-east trades would be in
-her favour.  With lines for fishing, a beaker full of fresh water on
-board (she had found that in the dinghy when she took it away),
-cocoanuts to help out with, and plenty of crab to dry, she hoped that
-she might manage to reach the islands before her strength or her food
-gave out.  Greater voyages had been done many a time in mere canoes, and
-the dinghy was a large boat of its kind, strong, well built, and new.
-If she failed--well, any death, any horror that the wide seas could hold
-was better than Vaka Island.
-
-All being ready, she lay down and slept till dawn--a somewhat restless
-sleep, for it was full of wandering dreams, and all the dreams took one
-shape: Donahue's schooner, snared by the lying chart, rushing helpless
-to her end, with the green-eyed tigers of the sea hovering ever about
-the reefs, and waiting ... waiting....
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-"I don't think the patient can see any one," said the nurse doubtfully.
-
-The big, yellow-haired sailor took off his hat and stepped up on to the
-verandah.  It was a very beautiful verandah.  You could see most of Suva
-Bay from it, and half the tumbled purple peaks of Fiji's wonderful
-mountains lying across the harbour.
-
-"If you could stretch a point, ma'am," said the sailor, "it might be as
-well for him.  I've got good news."
-
-"About his daughter?" asked the nurse.  She, like every one else in
-Suva, was deeply interested in this especial patient's story.  He had
-come to Suva in his own schooner, the _Sybil_, several weeks before,
-furious with rage and despair at the loss of his daughter, and eager to
-demand assistance from the High Commissioner of the Western Pacific,
-although it seemed by no means clear in what manner Her Majesty's
-representative could aid him.  Before the matter had even been
-discussed, however, he had fallen seriously ill of sunstroke and
-excitement combined, and had been sent to hospital, with rather a bad
-chance of recovery.  He was just turning the corner now, and the
-nurse--who could not but admire his rather weather-beaten good looks and
-romantic history--regarded him as her most interesting patient.
-
-"Yes, it's about his daughter," answered the sailor. "I'm the mate of
-the _Sybil_, ma'am; Harris is my name. Perhaps you'd kindly read this."
-
-He held out a long slip of printed paper, containing a _r�sum�_ of the
-cables for the day--Suva's substitute for a daily paper.
-
-The nurse took it, and read:
-
-"The missing daughter of Edward Saxon, owner and master of the trading
-schooner _Sybil_, has at last reappeared.  Her fate has excited much
-interest and conjecture all over the Pacific.  She arrived in Sydney
-yesterday on board the cable-ship _Clotho_, by which she was picked up
-on the 2nd instant, in an open boat, alone, and two hundred miles from
-any land.  She had experienced bad weather, and was much exhausted for
-want of food, but declared herself capable, if it had been necessary, of
-reaching the nearest island group unaided.  She had been carried away,
-as was surmised, by the captain of the island schooner _Ikurangi_, who
-marooned her on a remote leper island, Vaka, and then sailed for South
-America.  Revenge for the loss of a pearl-shell bed of disputed
-ownership is said to have been the motive of this unparalleled outrage."
-
-"He shall have it at once," said the nurse cordially. "It'll do him more
-good than our medicines."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-The story was a popular one in the hospital for months after, and it had
-not been quite forgotten when, towards the close of the hot season, a
-Sydney paper furnished the last chapter of the tale.  Saxon's late nurse
-read it aloud to the others at afternoon tea, and they all agreed (not
-knowing how Vaiti's fingers had cogged the dice of chance) that it was a
-wonderful Providence and a real judgment.  The item read:
-
-
-                     "THE LAST OF AN OCEAN ROMANCE.
-
-"News comes via Tahiti from Nukahiva, Marquesas Islands, of the arrival
-of a shipwrecked crew on a raft, six weeks ago.  They were the survivors
-of a disaster that destroyed the notorious schooner _Ikurangi_ whose
-master, it will be remembered, kidnapped and marooned the daughter of a
-British captain some months ago.  The schooner, after leaving the
-island, sailed for Callao, but was wrecked on an uncharted reef three
-days east of Vaka, and went to pieces.  The crew escaped on a raft, and
-underwent great suffering in their efforts to reach land.  The captain
-and mate were drowned."
-
-
-"And serve them right, too!" said the audience.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER VIII*
-
-                       *THE WHITE MAN OF NALOLO*
-
-
-"By Jove! it's a white man," said Saxon, checking like a pointer on the
-threshold of the low dark doorway.
-
-"Certainly.  Very pleased to meet you," observed the figure on the mats.
-It was sitting cross-legged, clad only in a waist-cloth, and the house
-was a Fijian chief-house in a mountain village three days' journey from
-the nearest white settlement--but the thing squatted on the mats was
-undoubtedly white, and--English?  Well, no; Saxon thought no.  The
-phrase was American in flavour.  He stepped across the threshold, and
-came a little way in, relieved in mind.  When you have been dead and
-buried among the islands for a quarter of a century it is much
-pleasanter not to run the risk of meeting other ghosts (with university
-accents, tea-coloured families, and a preference for modest retirement
-on steamer days) who may possibly have been alive together with you
-before...
-
-Before....  The word means much in that vast Pacific world, sepulchre of
-so many lost hopes and forgotten lives.  We do not, in the Islands,
-cultivate curiosity as a virtue, since it would be likely to bring
-rather more than virtue's own reward after it.  We do not ask cross
-questions, because the crooked answers might involve questions of
-another sort.  And when overfed, sanguineous passengers from smart
-liners happen along and tell us, as a new and excellent joke, that the
-proper formula for receiving an introduction in the Islands is: "Glad to
-meet you, Mr. So-and-so; what were you called _before_?" we smile an
-acid smile, and pretend we are amused....
-
-Saxon was very tired, having walked thirty miles that day, and very
-hungry, being out of luck, and more or less on the tramp.  But I think,
-tired as he was, he would have found another village to rest in if the
-derelict white on the mats had spoken with the shibboleth of his own
-class and country.
-
-As things were, the look of the house pleased him, and he came in and
-folded himself up on the mats.  The other man noted that he selected a
-"tabu kaisi" mat (a kind strictly forbidden to all but chiefs or
-whites), and that he looked hopefully towards the kava bowl.
-
-"Not the first time you've stopped under a pandanus roof, I guess?" he
-remarked.
-
-"No," said Saxon.  "Whose house is this?"
-
-"Mine," said the stranger.  "Make yourself at home."
-
-It was a handsome chief-house of the best Fijian type, forty feet from
-mats to ridge-pole, the walls covered with beautifully inlaid and
-interwoven reeds, the roof bound together with exquisite sinnet work in
-artistic patterns, of red, black, and yellow, and towering up into a
-dark, cool cavern of pleasant gloom.  The floor was overlaid with fine
-parquetry of split bamboo at the "kasii" or common-folk end, and piled
-deep with fine mats in the "chief" part.  A Fijian bed, ten feet wide
-and three feet high, ran like a dais right across the end of the house.
-It was covered by mats prettily fringed with coloured parrot feathers.
-There were three great doors, east, west, and south, each framing in its
-dark-set opening a different picture of surpassing loveliness.  Nalolo
-town (its name is on the map of Fiji, but it reads otherwise) stands
-very high on the sheer crest of a pointed green hill that is just like
-the enchanted hill in the pictures of a fairy tale.  There is a little
-round green lawn on the top, and all about it stand the high, pointed
-beehive houses of the town, each perched on its own tiny mound like a
-toy on a stand.  Sloped cocoanut logs run up to the doors of the houses,
-and quaintly coloured crotons cluster about them.  In the deep, soft
-grass golden eggs from the guava trees lie tumbled about among fallen
-stars of orange and lemon blossom, and everywhere the red hibiscus
-shakes its splendid bells in the soft hill-winds.  About the foot of the
-peak a wide blue river wanders, singing all day long; and from every
-door of every house, high perched above the cloudy valleys and hyacinth
-hill ranges, one can see pictures, and pictures, and pictures almost too
-lovely to be true.  There are not two places in the world like Nalolo.
-
-The White Man of Nalolo, however, was only interested in the fact that
-the river provided excellent crayfish; and that taro grew very well
-indeed on the slopes below the town.  He had once been young, but he was
-not young now, and did not matter any longer.  Therefore he had become
-particular about his dinner and indifferent to scenery.  I will not tell
-you the story of the White Man of Nalolo, or why he, of all men,
-rebelled so fiercely against the common lot of "not mattering any more,"
-that he came away to the wilds of the Pacific and the highlands of Fiji,
-and never went back again, because, like many true stories, it cannot be
-believed, and therefore had better not be told.  Besides, this is the
-story of Saxon and his daughter.
-
-Saxon was down on his luck.  He had a charter for the _Sybil_, but she
-was not able to undertake it at present, for, trying to pilot her into
-Suva harbour himself, he had contrived to run her on a reef, and damaged
-her so seriously that she was at present careened on the beach in front
-of the local boat-builder's, undergoing repairs. The builder, knowing
-something of Saxon's reputation, had insisted on cash in advance, and
-the captain, in consequence, found himself so nearly out of funds that
-he was unable to stay in Suva pending the repairs to his ship.  He had
-therefore started with Vaiti for the interior of the great island of
-Viti Levu, intending to live on the real hospitality of the natives for
-a few weeks, and tramp from village to village.
-
-He explained something of this as he sat on the mats enjoying the
-grateful coolness of the house.  The other man nodded gravely, watching
-the door.  He offered a curious contrast to the Englishman's coarse red
-fairness, being lean, sundried, and grizzled, with expressionless,
-boot-buttoned eyes, and a straggling "goatee" beard that dated his exile
-from America back to long-ago days.
-
-"Where's your daughter?" he asked.
-
-"Coming.  She stopped to tidy up at the river."
-
-The doorway was darkened at that moment by Vaiti herself, balancing
-lightly up the cocoanut log to the threshold.  She wore a white tunic
-over a scarlet "pareo," her wavy curls, sparkling with the water of the
-stream, fell loose upon her shoulders; her lips were as red as the
-freshly-plucked pomegranate blossom behind her ear.  Something like life
-stirred in the boot-button eyes of the White Man of Nalolo as he looked
-at her.
-
-"Afi!" he called to a Fijian woman who was sleeping on the mats at the
-"kaisi" end of the house, "go and hurry the girls with the supper, and
-make tea for the marama (lady).  Quick!"
-
-Then he turned to Saxon.
-
-"Stay here as long as you like, both of you," he said. "Let her sit
-there sometimes, where I can see her and fancy....  I'll show you
-something."
-
-He rose slowly and stiffly, and limped across to a Chinese camphorwood
-box that stood in the corner. In a minute he returned with a faded
-photograph in a gaudy frame.
-
-"My daughter," he said.  "The only child I ever had.  She was Afi's.
-She died a long time ago.  Afi's a chief woman: she was as handsome as
-Andi Thakombau when she was young, and the girl took after her.  Your
-girl's mother was chief too, I guess.  Do you see any likeness?"
-
-Vaiti and her father craned over the photograph. The pretty half-caste
-girl, was certainly like the stately, slender creature who gazed at her
-pictured face, though the fire and spirit of Vaiti's expression were
-wanting.
-
-"I'm growing old," went on the White Man.  "I've no children.  Stay a
-bit.  I'll be glad to have you."
-
-"Thank you; delighted, I'm sure," drawled Saxon, with a pathetic
-resurrection of his long-forgotten "grand manner," And so it was
-settled.
-
-Vaiti, listening and thinking as usual, with her chin in her slender
-fingers, approved of what she heard, and smiled very pleasantly at her
-host.  It seemed to her that he could be very useful just now.
-
-The four weeks that followed after glided away agreeably enough in the
-silent hills.  Nothing happened; no one came or went--the Fijians, men
-and women, went out to the yam and taro fields in the morning, and
-returned in the afternoon; and after dark there would be long,
-monotonous chanting, and interminable sitting dances, on the mats inside
-the high-roofed houses.  Saxon stupefied himself with kava most of the
-time, in the absence of stronger drink, and almost got himself clubbed
-once or twice on account of his too impulsive admiration for the
-beauties of the village.  His host, however, was no censor of morals,
-and troubled very little about him. On Sundays the Fijians dressed
-themselves in their brightest cottons, stuck up their hair in huge
-halos, and went five times to church, under the auspices of the native
-Wesleyan teacher; while Saxon and his host smoked, slept, drank kava,
-and played cards.  The village provided plenty of yam and taro, kumara,
-cocoanut, and fish; and there was tea and sugar in the Chinese box, and
-now and then the White Man killed a pig or a fowl.  It was very pleasant
-on the whole.
-
-In a month's time, however, Saxon girded up his loins to leave this
-mountain Capua and descend to Suva once more.  The _Sybil_ would be
-ready, and his charter to convey ornamental Fiji woods to San Francisco
-would not wait.
-
-They said good-bye to their host, and walked a mile or two across the
-river-flats below the town before either spoke.  Then Vaiti put her hand
-into her sash, and drew out something small and shining.
-
-"See, father, what the White Man gave me, because I was like his
-daughter," she said.
-
-Saxon took the object, and turned it over in his fingers. It was a small
-seal, shaped like an eagle standing on a rock.  The eagle was gold, the
-rock amethyst.
-
-"A pretty thing, but not worth more than two or three pounds," he said.
-
-Then he turned it over and looked at the device. There was a curious
-crest on the face of the seal--a wolf with a crescent moon in his jaws;
-underneath, a motto in a strange foreign character.
-
-Saxon's red complexion paled as he examined the crest. In other days and
-scenes, among ice-bound rivers and grim medi�val fortress-castles, he
-had seen that crest light up the crimson panes of old armorial
-windows--had read the motto underneath--"What I have, I hold"--of nights
-when he and the wildest young nobles of the Russian court were dining
-together under the splendid roof of one of Moscow's greatest banqueting
-halls.  For a moment he felt the keen cold air of the ice-bound streets
-blow sharp on his cheek; heard the jingle of the sleigh-bells, drawing
-up before the marble steps where the yellow lamplight streamed out
-across the snow. The fancy faded, swift as a passing lantern picture
-that flashes out for a moment and then sweeps away into darkness.  He
-saw the burning sky and the crackling palms again, felt the
-furnace-heated wind, and knew that it was all over long ago, and that he
-was ruined, exiled, and old.  Yet there remained a thread of indefinite
-recollection, a suggestion of something half-remembered, that was not
-all unconnected with the present day. What was the story belonging to
-that crest--the story that the whole world knew?
-
-"Where did the fellow get the thing?" he asked his daughter.
-
-Vaiti told him.
-
-The White Man of Nalolo, it seemed, was one of the numerous South Sea
-wanderers who believe in the existence of various undiscovered islands,
-hidden here and there in the vast, untravelled wastes of sea that lie
-off the track of ships.  Thirty years before, there had been wondering
-rumours of an island of this kind, touched at once by a ship that no one
-could name, found to be uninhabited, and never revisited; indeed, no one
-was sure where it was within a few hundred miles.  Years went by, and
-the White Man, who had always taken a special interest in the story,
-found himself shipwrecked--the sole survivor of a boatful of
-castaways--on the very island itself.  But fortune was unkind, for the
-morning after his arrival, when he was trying to sail round the island,
-a sudden storm blew him out to sea again, and he had drifted for many
-days, and all but perished, in spite of the fish and nuts he had
-obtained from the island, before a mission schooner happened to see him
-and pick him up.  He had examined most of the island while ashore, and
-had seen no inhabitants or traces of cultivation.  Nevertheless he had
-always been convinced that there was something mysterious about the
-place, for two reasons.  One was the presence of common house-flies,
-which he had never seen far away from the haunts of human beings.  The
-other was the discovery of an amethyst seal, lying under a stone on the
-shore.  It was dirty and discoloured, but he did not think so small and
-heavy an object could have been washed up on the shore from a wreck.
-
-Where mystery is in the air, most men's minds turn naturally to thoughts
-of hidden treasure, and the White Man of Nalolo had ever since cherished
-a hope that there was treasure on the island.  For several years he had
-fully intended to go and look--some day--but as he could only guess at
-the latitude and longitude, and as he had little money to spare, he
-never succeeded either in hunting the place up himself or in persuading
-any one else to do so.  Now he was old and half-crippled, and did not
-care any more about anything; so he wanted Vaiti, who reminded him so
-much of his dead daughter, to have the seal.  It was a pretty thing, and
-perhaps it would make her think sometimes of the poor old White Man of
-Nalolo.
-
-Saxon listened attentively to the story, and heaved a sigh of
-disappointment at the end.
-
-"There's nothing in it, my girl," he said.  "No proof of treasure there,
-eh?"
-
-"No; no treasure," said Vaiti, looking at the ground as she walked.
-
-"What then?" asked Saxon curiously.  He saw she had something in
-reserve.
-
-Vaiti suddenly flamed out in eloquent Maori.
-
-"What then, my father?  Am I one who sees through men's heads, that I
-can tell what was in the mind of you as you looked at the jewel, and
-turned yellow and green like a parrot, only to see it?  What then?  I do
-not know.  I walk in the dark, and the light is in your hand, not in
-mine.  As for you, you have made your brain dull with the brandy and the
-kava, so that you cannot see at all.  What then?  Tell me yourself, for
-I do not know. I know only that there is something to be told."
-
-"Don't be rough on your poor old father," said Saxon pathetically.  "I'd
-have knocked the stuffing out of any man who said half as much, but I
-spoil you, by Gad, I do.  I don't know--I can't think, somehow or other.
-But there was a story about the Vasilieffs--the johnnies who had that
-crest--people I used to stay with when I went to----"
-
-He broke off, smashed a spider-lily bloom with his stick, and began
-afresh.
-
-"Junia Vasilieff--what was it she did?  Big princes they were, and much
-too close to the throne to be safe company....  Junia Vasili--I have it!
-Yes--the end of the story was in the Sydney papers, time you were a
-little kid.  I remember.  They were to have married her to the
-Czarewitch, just to make things safe.  Her claim to the throne was big
-enough to have started a revolution any day, if it had been asserted....
-Poor little Junia!--only sixteen when I knew--when the marriage was
-talked of--and such golden hair as she had!  She hated the whole thing;
-courts and ceremony weren't in her line.  But she was a gentle little
-creature, and I never thought she'd have had the spirit to do as she
-did."
-
-He turned the seal over in his fingers, as if reading the past from its
-glittering surface.
-
-"There was a young lieutenant of Hussars, a Pole--you don't know what
-that is, but the Russians don't like them, I can tell you--a noble, but
-a very small one; not fit to black Junia's boots, according to their
-notions. Well, he bolted with her.  It was in the Sydney papers, time I
-was in the Solomons; the paper came up to Guadalcanar....  She must have
-been twenty then; just the year the marriage to the Czarewitch was to
-have come off....  They bolted--cleared out--never seen again.  All
-Russia on the boil about it; no one knew but what they'd hatch up plots
-against the throne, she having a better claim than any one else, if it
-hadn't been for the law against empresses.  The secret police were after
-them for years, but they were never traced, though most people knew
-Russia'd give a pretty penny to know where they were----"
-
-"O man with the head of a fruit-bat, do you not see?" interrupted Vaiti
-at this juncture.  "They hid on that island--they may be there still.
-It is worth a hundred treasures!"
-
-"The Pole was a great traveller, and had a sort of a little yacht," said
-Saxon thoughtfully.  "It might be true, of course--if there is an
-island, and if the Nalolo Johnnie had any idea of where it was, and if
-nobody found them out and split years ago.  Plenty of 'ifs.'"
-
-"I think him all-right good enough," averred Vaiti, returning to English
-and prose.  "By'n-by we finish F'lisco, then we go see, me and you."
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER IX*
-
-                           *THE LOST ISLAND*
-
-
-Some two or three months later, the schooner might have been seen, like
-a white-winged butterfly lost at sea, beating up and down before a
-solitary, low, green island lying far east of the lonely Paumotus.
-Vaiti, sitting on the top of the deck-house, was examining the land
-through a glass.  The native crew were all on deck; also Harris and
-Gray, the mate and bo'sun. Captain Saxon was not to be seen.
-
-"The old man always do get squiffy at the wrong time, don't he?"
-commented Harris, rather gleefully.
-
-Gray spat over the rail for reply.
-
-"You're ratty because you don't know nothing, ain't you?" he said.
-
-"Do you?" asked the mate curiously.  Harris had not much notion of the
-dignity of his office, and dearly loved a gossip at all times.
-
-"More nor you, havin' eyes and ears that's of use to me occasionally,"
-replied the bo'sun dryly.
-
-Harris considered.
-
-"I'll give you my grey shirt to tell," he said persuasively.  "There's
-sure to be something up."
-
-"'Ow much does we ever get out of it when there is?" asked Gray sourly.
-"I could do with that shirt very well, though.  There ain't much to
-tell, except that the old man he thought there was an island hereabouts
-not marked on the chart that nobody knew about; and Vaiti she allowed
-that was all ---- rot, because, says she, this part's been surveyed, and
-though the Admiralty surveys isn't the for-ever-'n-ever-Amen dead
-certainties the little brassbound officers thinks them, still they don't
-leave whole islands out on the loose without a collar and a name round
-their necks, so to say.  So, says she, let me work out the length of
-time they ran before the hurricane, says she, and the d'rection of the
-wind, which the old boy remembered right enough, says she; and then look
-it up on the chart, and I'll be blowed, says she, if you don't find
-something for a guide like.  So by-and-by she looks, and says she,
-''Ere's something; 'ere's a reef marked P.D., and it is P.D.,' says she,
-'for you and I knows there's nothin' there,' she says.  'But we'll look
-a bit more to the north'ard,' she says, 'where it's right off the' track
-of ships, and maybe we'll find somethin' and maybe we won't,' she says.
-'But I think,' she says, 'that somewheres not too far off from that P.D.
-reef we'll maybe get a sight of what we're lookin' for,' she says,
-'because sometimes reefs is put down for bigger things by mistake,' she
-says, 'especially if you 'aven't been to see.'  Then she comes on deck,
-and I makes myself scarce, for it ain't healthy on this ship to listen
-at no cabin skylights, not if she knows you're there."
-
-"Well, whatever the game is, I don't suppose it'll line our little
-insides any fatter, bo'sun.  We don't count on this ship anything like
-as we ought to when there's shares goin'.  I wonder that I stick to her,
-I do! Old man as drunk as a lord half the time--me doin' his work as
-well as my own--a blessed she-cat running the blooming show----"
-
-"Ready about!" sang Vaiti from the deck-house, and the mate and bo'sun
-sprang across the deck.  There was something about the orders of the
-"she-cat" that enforced a smartness on the _Sybil_ rare on an island
-schooner, even when heavy-fisted Saxon was not about.
-
-Half an hour later, Vaiti had rowed herself ashore, curtly declining
-Harris's polite offers of assistance, and had landed on the beach.  As
-she did not know who she might be going to see, she had provided for all
-emergencies. Her revolver was in her pocket, and she wore a flowing
-sacque of lace-trimmed white silk that made her feel she was fit to meet
-any Russian princess, if such were indeed on the island.  It was a
-gratifying thought that the said princess, if she had been a celebrated
-beauty, must now be well into the forties, and consequently beneath all
-contempt as a rival belle.
-
-Her father's absence did not trouble her.  He had a nasty trick of
-starting a drinking bout just when he was most needed--in fact, it was
-the one point in Saxon's character on which you could absolutely rely.
-Vaiti, therefore, had grown used to doing without him, and rather liked
-to have a perfectly free hand.
-
-She had fully grasped the bearings of the case.  There was possibly a
-very great chief's daughter from Europe, with a rather insignificant
-chief who had stolen her away, living there in hiding.  The people of
-her country would pay a great deal to know where she was and bring her
-back.  Or, if there seemed any lack of safety about this proceeding
-(Vaiti had long ago learned that her father was not fond of putting
-himself within the reach of principalities and powers of any kind), the
-couple themselves must be made to pay for silence. It was all very
-simple.
-
-The fact that the island was supposed to be uninhabited did not trouble
-her.  She meant to investigate that matter after her own fashion.
-
-She walked all round it first of all.  It took her about an hour.  There
-was a nice, white, sandy beach, with straggling bush behind it.  There
-were a good many cocoanuts--all young ones--also a large number of
-broken trunks, apparently snapped off by a hurricane.
-
-This set Vaiti thinking.  It seemed to her that the damage was rather
-too universal and even to be natural. Yet why should any sane human cut
-short all his full-grown cocoanuts?
-
-She crossed the island twice at the ends, noting everything with a keen
-and wary eye.  Fairly good soil; nothing growing on it, however, but low
-scrub and a few berries.  In the centre of the island the scrub
-thickened into dense bush, impenetrable without an axe.  No sign of life
-anywhere.
-
-Vaiti stamped her foot.  Was it possible she had been mistaken?  Was
-this indeed just what it seemed, a commonplace, infertile, useless,
-little mid-ocean islet, let alone because it was worth nothing, and
-incorrectly described as a reef because no one had ever troubled to
-examine it?  Things began to look like it.
-
-And yet ... she thought--she did not quite know what, but she was very
-sure that she did not want to leave the island just yet.  She would at
-least climb a tall tree and take a general survey before she gave it up.
-
-Nothing simpler--but there was no such tree.
-
-All the palms were young, or broken off short; all the pandanus trees
-were in the same condition.  There was no rock, no commanding height.
-She could not get a view.
-
-Vaiti's cheek flushed crimson under its olive brown. The spark was
-struck at last!
-
-Somebody had cut short those trees--to prevent anyone from climbing up
-and overlooking the island. The encircling reef would not allow any ship
-to approach close enough for a look-out at the mast-head to see over the
-island, except in a very general way.  There was something to conceal.
-What, and where?
-
-Only one answer was possible.  The mass of apparently virgin bush in the
-centre of the island--several acres in extent--was the only spot where a
-cat could have concealed itself.  The scent was growing hot.
-
-With sparkling eyes Vaiti began to circle the wood, watching narrowly
-for the smallest trace of a pathway. The branches were interlocked and
-knitted together as only tropical bush can be.  Many were set with huge
-thorns; all were laced and twined with bush ropes and lianas of every
-kind.
-
-Nothing larger than a rat could have won its way through such a rampart.
-Vaiti walked swiftly on and on, striking the bushes now and then with a
-stick, to make sure that there were no loose masses of stuff masking a
-concealed entrance, and keeping a sharp eye for traces of footsteps....
-It was with a heart-sinking shock that she found herself once more
-beside the low white coral rock that had marked the commencement of her
-journey, and realised that she had been all round, and that there was
-most certainly no opening.
-
-The sun was slipping down the heavens now.  She had been exploring half
-the day, but she was not beaten yet.  The unexpected difficulties she
-had met with only sharpened her determination to enter the thicket at
-all costs.  Harris, suffering acutely, as usual, from suppressed
-curiosity, was nearly driven mad by the sight of the "she-cat" suddenly
-reappearing on the ship, picking up an axe, and departing as silently as
-she had come, with a countenance that did not invite questions. She had
-taken off her smart silk dress, and was in her chemise and petticoat,
-arms and feet bare, and waist girdled with a sash into which she had
-stuck her revolver. She dropped the axe into her boat, rowed silently
-away, and disappeared on the other side of the island.
-
-The sun was still some distance above the sea when she let the axe slip
-from her torn, scratched, and aching hands, and stood at last, tired but
-triumphant, in the heart of the mysterious island's mystery.  She had
-won her way, with the woodcraft that was in her island blood, through
-the dense belt of bush, hacking and slashing here, stooping and writhing
-there, until the light began to show through the tangled stems in front,
-and a few swift strokes cleared the way into the open. Yes! there was a
-space in the centre, after all--a clearing over an acre in extent.
-There was grass here, and a few overgrown bananas, and a tangle of yam
-and pumpkin vines.  Passion fruit ran in a tangle of wild luxuriance
-over the inner wall of the thicket; pine-apples rotted on the ground and
-fig-trees spread their wide leaves unchecked and unpruned....  In the
-middle of all was a house--a one-storied little bungalow, iron-roofed,
-with a tank to catch the rain.  There was a long, low store behind it,
-and something that looked like a pig-sty, and something that might have
-been a fowl-run.  But....
-
-But everything was rotten, ruined, overgrown, hardly to be distinguished
-in the thick tangle of vegetation that had overflowed the little retreat
-like a great green wave let loose upon a low-lying shore.  Vaiti knew
-what she was going to see before she had reached the door of the
-bungalow--a rotten floor, with green vines shooting up between the
-crevices, and bush rats scuffling and squeaking under the boards--a
-rusted iron roof, where pink convolvulus bloom peeped in under the
-rafters, and lizards sunned themselves in the airy blue furniture
-unglued and decayed fast sinking into one common mass of ruin--door
-aslant, and thresholds sunken.  Everywhere silence, emptiness, decay.
-There needed no explanation of the vanished pathway.
-
-The Maori blood owns strange instincts.  Again Vaiti knew what she was
-going to see before it came--knew, and walked straight over to a certain
-corner of the enclosure, as if she had been there before....  It was
-under a scarlet-flowered hibiscus tree that she found it--a long, low
-grave, fenced round with a wall of coral slabs, so that the overflowing
-bush had surged less thickly here, and one could see that there was
-something lying on the mound, only half hidden by creeping
-vines--something long and white and slender.
-
-Vaiti dragged away the creepers....  Yes, it was a skeleton, bare and
-fleshless, with bony fingers and black, empty eyes.  There was a
-splintered gap in one temple, and close to one of the hands lay a mass
-of rusted steel that had once been a revolver.
-
-On a flat white stone, standing at the head of the grave, a long
-inscription had been carved with infinite care in three different
-languages.  Two of them Vaiti did not understand, but the third was
-English.  She pulled the growing ferns off the stone, and, wiping its
-surface, read:
-
-
-            "Here is buried Junia, of the race of Vasilieff.
-                         Died 20th June, 1889.
-
-             "Here is buried Anton, son of Junia Vasilieff
-                and her husband, Alexis, Baron Varsovi,
-                    Born 20th June, died 21st June,
-                                 1889.
-
-              "Here rests Alexis, Baron Varsovi.  Into the
-                 unknown thou didst follow me: into the
-                      Great Unknown I follow thee.
-                       Reunited 21st June, 1889."
-
-
-Vaiti, descendant of cannibal chiefs and lawless soldiers, more than
-half a pirate herself, and hard of nature as a beautiful flinty coral
-flower, was yet at bottom a woman after all.  What passed in the breast
-of this dark, wild daughter of the southern seas, as she stood above the
-strange, sad record of loves and lives unknown, cannot be told.  But in
-a little while, with some dim recollection of the long-ago, gentle,
-pious days of her convent school, she knelt down beside tie lonely
-grave, and, crossing herself, said something as near to a prayer as she
-could remember.  Then, still kneeling, she cut and tied two sticks into
-the form of a cross, and set them upright in the earth of the mound.
-The sun was slanting low and red across the grave as she turned away.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-"What'd she give you?" asked Harris eagerly, as the bo'sun stepped
-across the gang-plank on to the quay.  The lights of San Francisco were
-blazing all about, the cars roared past, there was a piano-organ
-jangling joyously at the corner.
-
-"Fifty dollars for the two of us," said Gray, his acid face sweetened
-with unwonted smiles.
-
-"Crikey!  Honest men is riz in the market at last! What in h---- can she
-have got herself?"
-
-"Might as well arst me what she got it for.  Don't know, and don't care,
-so long as we've got the makings of a spree like this out of it.  I see
-her comin' out of the Rooshian Consulate this mornin' lookin' like as if
-some one 'ad been standin' treat to her."
-
-"You know she don't touch anything."
-
-"I'm speaking figuryative; she looked that sort of way.  And coming'
-back to the ship, she says to the old man, she says: 'Why, dad, better
-dead than alive!' she says.  And he laughs."
-
-"Don't sound 'olesome," observed Harris thoughtfully.
-
-"Now, don't you get to thinkin', for you ain't built that way, and
-you'll do yourself a mischief," said the boatswain warningly.  "And
-let's be thankful to 'eaven for all its mercies, say I, that we've got
-such a nice, warm, dry, convenient night for to go and get drunk in."
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER X*
-
-                     *WHAT CAME OF THE PARIS DRESS*
-
-
-The effects of Saxon's illness in Fiji were a long time in wearing off.
-It was many weeks after Vaiti had come back to the _Sybil_, flushed with
-importance and with the lionising she had received on the
-cable-ship--many weeks after the voyage to the unknown island and the
-visit to San Francisco--that he took ill again; not very seriously, but
-badly enough to prevent his going to sea. Of course, the time was an
-awkward one.  They were off Niu�, and there was copra waiting to be
-taken to Raratonga for the steamer--copra which would certainly be
-secured by some other schooner if Saxon did not take it at the promised
-date.  Neither Harris nor Gray knew enough to be trusted with the ship,
-and he did not much care about letting Vaiti sail her--not because he
-doubted his fiery daughter's ability or desire, but because, rash as he
-was himself at times, he knew her to be still worse.  He had seen her
-run the _Sybil_ in the trough of the very last swell alongside a barrier
-reef for miles, sailing all the time so close to the wind that the
-shifting of a single point would have meant destruction. He had heard
-her raving about the deck in half a gale as they swept up to the
-iron-bound coast of Niu�, abusing Harris in the strongest of beach talk
-because he had not another main topsail in the locker to replace the two
-that had just carried away one after the other and battered themselves
-to ribbons--the principal ground of her complaint being apparently the
-fact that she considered herself labouring under a social disadvantage
-of the most mortifying kind because the schooner was obliged to come up
-to Niu� for the very first time without all sails set.  He had seen her
-perform tricks of steering, getting in and out of Avarua in Raratonga (a
-perfect death-trap of a port at times, as all old islanders know), that
-"fairly gave him the jim-jams," to use his own phraseology....  No, on
-the whole he thought he would rather miss that fright than lie idle in
-the trader's house at Avatele, and think daily and nightly of the cranky
-though light-heeled _Sybil_ out upon the high seas in Vaiti's sole
-command.
-
-This being so, it was natural and inevitable that Vaiti should set her
-heart upon going and carry out her desire.  She did not make any trouble
-about the matter; neither was she at all unkind to the invalided owner
-of the ship.  On the contrary, she paid the trader's wife more than that
-kindly woman wanted, to take good care of her father while she should be
-away, bought him everything decent to eat that the island contained
-(which was saying very little), indulgently presented him with a
-demijohn of whisky, and then informed him, in the coolest manner in the
-world, that the copra was all loaded, the stores and water on board, and
-the schooner ready to sail next day, under her command.
-
-Saxon swore at large first of all, then stormed at Vaiti, and finally
-began a pathetic lament over his own helpless position and the
-heartlessness of his only child. Vaiti, sitting cross-legged on the end
-of his bed, smoked a big cigar through it all and looked out of the
-window. When he stopped at last, fairly run out, she laughed and handed
-him a weed out of her own case and a match.
-
-"You take'm that, no speak nonsense.  You know me, what?" she demanded;
-and Saxon, who was not in reality nearly as ill as he thought himself,
-laughed, and allowed himself to be won over.
-
-Having gained her point, Vaiti went off again to the schooner through
-the wonderful pink dusk that wraps a South Sea island at sunset, and
-left the captain to hold commune with his demijohn and sleep.
-
-As she walked down to the shore, she heard a sound of laughing and the
-rustle of many dresses among the palms close at hand.  Now in Niu� it is
-an important matter that brings people out of evenings, because,
-although the island has been Christianised long ago, like all the rest
-of the Eastern Pacific, it still suffers from a perfect plague of
-heathen ghosts that no amount of Sunday church-goings and week-day pious
-exercises seem to affect in the least.  So the natives are afraid to go
-out of their houses after sunset, lest uncanny things should rise out of
-the forest to spring upon the wayfarer's back unseen and choke him.
-This Vaiti knew, so she suspected something of interest in the little
-crowd, and turned aside to look.  If she had not, there had been no
-story to tell about Niu� and the happenings there.
-
-She saw a curious scene, so nearly hidden by the growing dark that no
-one but an island resident could have taken in its full significance.  A
-group of islanders, men and women stood round the door of a big white
-concrete house with a pandanus roof--the finest native house in the
-village.  They seemed to be waiting for something--something both
-amusing and exciting, to judge by the explosions of giggles that
-continually burst through the dusk.
-
-Presently the door of the house swung open with considerable violence,
-and a large mat was thrown out by an invisible hand.  Then the door was
-slammed, and the giggles redoubled.  Within the house now sounded
-something very like a struggle.  There were loud sobs and cries of a
-shrill, theatrical kind, scuffling. banging, and a dragging sound.
-
-"Tck, tck, tck," went the tongues of the outsiders delightedly.  The
-interesting moment was at hand.
-
-It came without warning.  The door burst open with still more violence
-than before, and out upon the mat was shot by some invisible agency a
-very solid young woman in a white loose gown, weeping somewhat
-mechanically, but with much effect.  She fairly rolled over with the
-force of the shock that had ejected her, and before she could pick
-herself up the door was closed once more with a slam that shook the
-whole house. Then the waiting group rushed upon her with cries of joy,
-and bore her away in their midst, singing as they went.
-
-"A wedding," said Vaiti to herself.  "It must be Mata's; that is their
-house.  And it will be a big wedding, too.  I did not know that it was
-to be so soon."
-
-She fell into a fit of musing as she wandered shorewards among the
-leaning palms....  The palms of Niu� sweep downwards to the gleaming sea
-like a band of lovely maidens hurrying with sweet impatience to meet
-their lovers on the coral shore.  Of a moonlight night, when all things
-are possible, and nothing seems too wonderful in an air that itself is
-wonder, it needs but little for those white, slender stems, and tossing,
-plumy crowns, poised high above the shadowy beach they curve to meet, to
-change themselves into South Sea dryads of a new and lovely race, and
-rush down, at long last, upon the calling sea, where Tangaroa, the king
-of ocean, has his dwelling.  Under the palms of Niu�, when the blazing
-white moon has risen so high in the heavens that a perfect star of jetty
-shadow is rayed about the base of every tree--when the wandering sea
-winds are held close by the breathless spell of midnight and nothing
-wakes on all the lonely shore but the long, long song of the droning
-coral reef--under the wonderful palms of Niu�, loveliest and strangest
-of all the islands in that dreamy world of "perilous seas and fairylands
-forlorn"--nothing is too strange to be true, no fancy too wild to hold,
-when the moon is up and the palms are alone with the sea....
-
-Was Vaiti thinking of visionary palm-maidens and sea-foam kings as she
-went down the winding path to the bay, through a wondrous afterglow of
-russet-rose laced through with opal moonrays?  Perhaps--or of kindred
-fancies.  I who knew her cannot say, for no one ever knew her
-altogether.  It is more likely, however, that less poetic thoughts were
-in her mind just then.  The scene she had witnessed in the palm-grove
-was the usual ceremony that takes place in Niu� the night before a
-wedding, when the friends of the bridegroom come to the house of the
-bride's parents, and the latter go through the symbolical form of
-casting her out and closing the door, so that the bridegroom's people
-may take her over and guard her until the wedding morning.  Vaiti liked
-a wedding above all things (next to a funeral), and the hint of great
-doings on the morrow, offered by the ceremony she had witnessed, decided
-her to stay another day.  Why not?  The copra was loaded, and no rivals
-were in sight.  Besides, she had a motive for staying--the strongest
-possible motive. She wanted to wear her Paris dress.
-
-Yes, it had been acquired at last.  That day in San Francisco, when she
-had come out of the Russian Consulate with more money in her pocket than
-any one of her adventures had ever brought before, she had been able to
-restrain herself no longer.  And thereafter, in Madame Retaillaud's
-elegant and exclusive Parisian emporium, replete with the choicest
-imported wares (I quote the lady's own description of her goods), there
-took place a scene that is remembered to the present day by those of
-Madame Retaillaud's young ladies who survived the earthquake year.
-
-Vaiti, dressed in one of her waistless muslin gowns, with a broad-leafed
-island hat on her head, a long-bladed sheath-knife stuck quite visibly
-in the breast of her dress, and her wavy hair falling loose over her
-shoulders, stalked into the shop among the smartly-gowned San Francisco
-ladies who were turning over Madame's stock, and demanded to see--
-
-"One dress belong Palisi, pretty dam quick."
-
-They are used to all sorts of strange nationalities along the
-water-front in San Francisco, but not, as a rule, in the milliners' and
-modistes' well-bred establishments. Vaiti concentrated the whole
-attention of the place upon herself at a single stroke.  She did not
-care about that in the least, but Madame's hesitation stung her, and she
-pulled out a thick wad of notes.
-
-"Look 'em alive, my hearties!" she ordered impatiently in her
-quarter-deck voice.  "Lay aft here with that goods.  I want um Palisi
-model, all sort."
-
-The customers were nearly in hysterics by this time, and the assistants
-were all a-giggle.  Madame herself, however, grasped the situation in a
-twinkling, and frowned down the girls.  Whoever and whatever this pirate
-queen might be, she certainly had money, and Madame would have welcomed
-Lucrezia Borgia or the Witch of Endor, under like circumstances, as
-pleasantly as an Anglo-American duchess.
-
-"Perhaps Madame will come into a private room. Madame would like, no
-doubt, to look at our most exclusive goods, and we do not bring them
-into the outer shop," she said in her most honeyed voice.  And the door
-of the lift closed upon the pair.
-
-What Vaiti underwent in that fitting-room in the course of getting into
-Madame's latest model promenade gown, built for a typical French figure,
-will never be told.  Early in the proceedings a message came down to the
-showroom for the strongest pair of Paris corsets in stock, and a little
-later Madame herself, very red and overheated, ran down to select a
-fresh silk lace.
-
-"Ah, but she has courage, that one!" she declared, as the lift received
-her again.  "Never, no, never!--jamais de la vie! ..."
-
-The lift went up.
-
-It was almost an hour before a wonderful vision sailed slowly through
-the show-room and out into the street--slowly, not alone for pride, but
-also because it could scarcely move or draw its breath.  The vision, as
-described in the receipted bill that went with it, was made up of the
-following elements:
-
-"One promenade costume (model, Doucet & Cie.) composed of chiffon
-velours, couleur poussi�re de roses, inlet with motifs of point
-d'Alen�on, hand-embroidered with lilies of the valley in French paste.
-Mounted on chiffon bleu-de-ciel, with full volants edged lace and
-chiffon ruching.  Made over foundation of glac� silk, couleur citron
-d'or.
-
-"One set silk underclothing to match.
-
-"One Corset Ecraseur, patent laces.
-
-"One pair bronze promenade shoes, Louis XV. heels, extra height.
-Stockings to match.
-
-"One parasol composed peau-de-soie rose fan�e and chiffon bleu-de-ciel."
-
-To which may be added--one young woman, suffering horrible agony and
-quite intoxicated with happiness.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-It was this marvellous possession that Vaiti yearned to show off at the
-wedding.  She had not had a chance to wear it since the day when she had
-walked through the streets of San Francisco, with an admiring and amused
-crowd at her rear, and found it quite impossible to get on board the
-schooner, when she reached the water front, until she took off her
-voluminous skirt and handed it up over the side--afterwards climbing the
-rope-ladder in a storm of applause and a pink silk petticoat. Now the
-occasion for getting full value out of the wonderful thing had come at
-last, and she could not--no, she really could not--miss it.
-
-Rather late next morning, when the bride and bridegroom--the former in a
-gorgeous gown of yellow curtain muslin, the latter in a thick tweed suit
-from Auckland that caused him to stream at every pore--were sitting on
-opposite sides of the little white church, enthroned on chairs all by
-themselves, and listening decorously to a long preliminary address from
-the native pastor--Vaiti swept in, and at once brought the ceremony to a
-momentary pause.  The pastor stopped in his address and gaped, the women
-exclaimed audibly, the bridegroom fixed his eyes on the apparition and
-sighed in a manner that the bride evidently resented as a personal
-slight, for she grew still darker in the face than nature had made her,
-and stared penknives and scissors at Vaiti.  Wild titters of delight
-swept indecorously through the church. The entry was indeed a
-success--the native pastor found it necessary to address his flock
-directly, and to tell them that they would undoubtedly all go to hell if
-they did not behave better in church, before order was restored.
-
-It is not necessary to relate at length how Mata and Ivi were made one,
-how they walked out of the church nonchalantly by different doors, and
-were subsequently so deeply interested in the killing of the pigs for
-the marriage feast, and the preparing of the various cooking-pots, that
-they did not meet again all afternoon.  It was a commonplace wedding
-enough, and this history is not interested in it, other than as it
-concerned the affairs of Vaiti.  These, indeed, were fairly notable.
-
-For with Vaiti pride very literally brought about a fall that day.
-
-She had had a terrible time getting into her dress, and the whole ship's
-company had shared in the trouble. First, the native A.B.'s had to fetch
-her a big looking-glass from the nearest trader's, and secure it to the
-bulkhead of her cabin.  Then the cook had to deliver up all the hot
-water in the galley--at seven bells, with dinner just coming on!--and
-the boatswain must needs broach the cargo for some special scented soap.
-Matters were only beginning, however.  When the dress was disinterred
-from its many wrappings and finally put on it became immediately
-apparent that the bodice could not possibly be made to meet.  Perhaps
-the coming of the bread-fruit season had caused the young lady's waist
-to expand--perhaps the practised art of Madame Retaillaud had exceeded
-anything that a mere amateur could compass in the way of lacing.  At any
-rate, it was not till Vaiti had passed her corset laces out through the
-port and ordered two of the strongest sailors to tail on to them--not
-till Harris, agonising with laughter, had directed this novel evolution
-from the poop for at least five delirious minutes, during which Vaiti
-several times thought she was dying, but remained none the less
-determined to die rather than give in, that the deed was accomplished at
-last, and the "Kapitani" of _Sybil_ was enabled to look at herself in
-the glass and know heavenly certainty that she was the best dressed
-woman in the Pacific at that instant, whoever saw or did not see.
-
-The natural result of all this was that in the very hour of her triumph
-she fainted dead away in the church, for the first time in her life, and
-had to be carried out.
-
-The ceremony was just over by now, and the bride, still burning with
-jealousy of the woman who had dared to eclipse her on her wedding day,
-was among the first of those who crowded round like bees going after
-honey, to stare at the beautiful creature lying senseless on the
-sunburnt grass.  The bridegroom had sped away hot-foot in the direction
-of the village, whence certain enticing yells indicated that the
-pig-slaughter was now going on; but Mata was not a bit appeased by his
-indifference to the visitor.  That dress--and oh, how wonderful it
-was!--still rankled in her soul.
-
-Mata was a teacher's daughter, and she knew something of white people's
-lore.  A brilliant thought darted into her mind as she pressed and
-struggled in the crowd about the deathly form on the grass....
-
-"Ai, ai! she is surely dead!" wailed the people. "Ai! the-great
-chieftainess will rise no more!"
-
-"Daughters of a turtle!" said Mata contemptuously. "I will show you if
-she is dead.  It is nothing at all but that she is vain, and wanted to
-make herself a middle like the 'papalangi' women, who all look like
-stinging hornets.  Give me a knife, someone."
-
-A knife was given, and Mata, with horrid joy, half lifted Vaiti and
-slipped the keen point into the back of the dress.
-
-Rip went the silk with a hideous splitting noise, and the delicate
-underwear swelled out through the opening like a bush lily bursting its
-sheath.  Mata felt for the stay-lace, and cut that too.  The tension on
-the bodice increased frightfully--the seams gaped and strained....
-
-"She will die, I think, if I do not cut it off," said Mata hastily,
-feeling Vaiti reviving under her hand, and anxious to finish her work.
-Two more cuts of the knife did it.  The Paris dress was, speaking
-sartorially, no more; the owner, lying on the ground, was opening her
-eyes to the outrage that had been done; and Mata, shrieking with malign
-laughter, was fleeing wildly through the palms in the direction of the
-pig-killing, peace in her heart again.
-
-Peace was very far indeed from Vaiti's heart when she revived and found
-out what had been done.  The crowd drew away from her in fear when they
-saw her flashing eyes and set, furious mouth, though she said never a
-word.  Confronted by that Medusa-head, they were almost too terrified to
-find words; but one or two stammered out a hasty explanation that freed
-the present company from blame by inculpating Mata.
-
-Vaiti did not doubt it--she had seen the bride's face during the
-ceremony.  Still silent, but flashing looks of sheet-lightning all about
-her, she drew together her garments as best she could, and walked off in
-the direction of the ship.  As she did so, a little ugly man with red
-hair slipped out from behind the trees, and looked narrowly at her
-retreating figure.
-
-"It is the white man from the bush!" cried the girls.  "White man of
-ours, why did you not come down for the wedding?"
-
-"Because I didn't, my little dears," replied the newcomer in English,
-still looking after Vaiti.  He stood well in the shade, and did not make
-himself unnecessarily conspicuous.
-
-"That's a fine girl, that Mata," he added by and by. "A smart girl.  I
-should like to know Mata."
-
-Vaiti put off her going for yet another day.  She had business to attend
-to.
-
-It was very simple business, and it was characterised by the directness
-that attended all the proceedings of Saxon's daughter.  She merely went
-up to the bride's new home, that was so handsomely stocked with trade
-goods and imported furniture, while the wedding party were making merry
-in the village after dark, and set fire to it with a torch in about a
-dozen places.  It was very dry weather, and there was a strong wind.
-
-There was scarce a stick of the cottage left when she marched into the
-village with a blazing torch in her hand, and calmly told the assembled
-revellers what she had done.  Then she left them, seething in a tumult
-of excitement that almost drowned the hysteric screams of Mata, and went
-to bed and to sleep with a quiet mind, ready for an early start next
-morning.
-
-The men came on board late and very drunk, but they did come.  They were
-afraid of Vaiti, and so was Harris, who would very well have liked to
-extend his revels in the village for another twelve hours, but did not
-dare to do so.  He thought, as he stumbled into his bunk, that the
-sounds proceeding from the forecastle were a good deal odder than
-usual--he could almost have sworn that there was one person, if not
-several, crying in there.  But he had good reason for mistrusting the
-evidence of his senses just then, so he flung himself down and went to
-sleep.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER XI*
-
-                         *A DEAD MAN'S REVENGE*
-
-
-When one is well on the right side of five-and-twenty, with a good ship
-underfoot, a fair breeze setting steadily from the right quarter, and a
-pleasant goal ahead, it is hard to be unhappy.  Vaiti's sense of
-bereavement at the loss of her cherished dress faded considerably before
-the _Sybil_ had fairly cleared the land, and was gone altogether by the
-next day.  She had done what she felt to be the right thing by Mata; the
-score was even. Vaiti did not like loose ends of any kind, and she had
-not left any behind her.  She smiled as she thought of it, and paused in
-her official-looking walk across and across the poop, to revile a native
-A.B. for leaving the end of a halyard trailing on deck.
-
-"You d---- lazy nigger," she said.  "What sort ship you thinking you
-stop?  You thinking one mud scow" (_Mud cow_ was her pronunciation),
-"one pig-boat, one canoe belong dam man-eating Solomon boy?  I teaching
-you some other thing pretty quick.  Suppose you no flemish-coil that
-halyard, keep him coil all-a-time, I let 'em daylight inside that black
-hide belong you, knock 'em two ugly eye into one."
-
-She plucked a belaying-pin out of the rail and sent it flying at the
-sailor's ear.  Vaiti was a straight thrower, but the crew seldom failed
-to dodge; they had every opportunity of becoming proficient.  On this
-occasion, however, the sailor made not the least attempt to escape, and
-the pin struck him fair and square at the angle of the jaw, and knocked
-him over.  He was hurt, but not stunned, and sat up immediately on the
-deck, gazing at the tall white figure on the poop with lack-lustre eyes
-that scarcely seemed to comprehend what they saw.
-
-"Bring 'em that pin," commanded Vaiti, still in what stood for English
-with her.  She never addressed the crew in the tongue that was native to
-both.
-
-The man crept slowly aft, and handed it to her.  She motioned to him to
-replace it neatly in the rail, and then pointed to the trailing halyard.
-It did not escape her, as the sailor made his way down to the main deck,
-that there were tears in his large black eyes, and that his pareo was
-tied with a carelessness unusual among Polynesians, and significant of
-trouble and depression when seen.  But she put the one down to the
-swelled and reddening bruise that marked all one side of his face and
-the other to the orgies of the previous night.  If the men chose to make
-brutes of themselves on bush-beer, they need not expect that she was
-going to slacken their work for them on that account.  No, not if she
-broke the head of every man in the ship.  She was not Saxon's daughter
-for nothing, as they very well knew.
-
-It was small wonder that Vaiti was not popular with crews.
-
-She went on pacing the deck, in the joyous crystal-clear sunlight of the
-sea.  The trade wind ran through the sky like a warm, blue river, the
-rigging sang, the sails drew steadily.  It was a good day, a happy day,
-a pleasant day to be alive.  The girl felt pleased with the world.  She
-took the wheel from the sailor who held it, for the sheer pleasure of
-feeling the flying vessel answer to the touch of her own light hand.
-All the force and fury of those roaring sails overhead seemed to
-concentrate itself here in her fingers, as the power of a great dynamo
-passes through a single wire.  It was almost as if she drove the ship
-herself.  The _Sybil_ went as steady as an albatross; once or twice the
-spokes fairly shook in her hands.
-
-"The wheel is laughing to-day," she said in Maori, using the island
-sailor's expression.
-
-Dinner-time came round soon, and she descended to eat with Harris alone.
-Saxon himself did not particularly care whether he dined with his bo'sun
-or not, if it happened to be convenient to leave Harris on deck; but
-Vaiti would have run the ship as strictly as a man-of-war at all times,
-if she could have had her way.  Indeed, she would have liked to dine in
-solitary state, like the captain of a cruiser, had she not had too much
-good sense to fly in the face of merchant service custom by excluding
-the mate.
-
-As things were, she graciously condescended to order Harris down to the
-cabin with her, and they discussed together the inevitable curried tin
-of Pacific cookery. It was wonderfully light and bright in the little
-cabin, which was large for the size of the ship, and had plenty of berth
-and locker space, besides its neatly fitted trade shelves.  The
-bulkheads were painted white picked out with blue (they were satinwood
-and bird's-eye maple underneath the paint, a thing which had astonished
-and perplexed more than one ship's carpenter in the past quarter of a
-century), and there was a pretty bird's-nest fern in a basket hanging
-from the skylight, and the seats were covered with the neatest thing in
-blue and white trade prints that Auckland could produce.  Vaiti's taste
-was evident everywhere, and Vaiti herself, hair freshly combed and held
-back with a bright ribbon, laces and frills dainty and immaculate as
-ever, looked, as she demurely poured out tea (you will seldom find the
-teapot absent from the table of a colonial ship), quite the last sort of
-person by whom a native A.B. might expect to be knocked into the
-scuppers.  Yet, truth to tell, the unlicked Harris, wolfing his food at
-the opposite side of the table, was very much better liked by the crew,
-even though he was heavy-handed enough at times; and he certainly
-understood more about the five A.B.'s and one ordinary seaman who
-inhabited the forecastle than did Vaiti, who was half one of themselves,
-and therefore thought them beneath consideration as a rule.
-
-Of this fact he proceeded to give an illustration when the curry and the
-tea and the fried bananas were almost done, and nobody's dinner could be
-spoilt by unpleasant news.
-
-"Think you're in for a good time, don't you, Cap?" he said.
-
-Vaiti, the economical of words, merely nodded.  But her face spoke for
-her.
-
-Harris was never quite sure whether he liked Vaiti in an uncomfortable,
-indefinite way, or heartily hated her.  To-day the balance perhaps
-inclined in the latter direction.  He watched her face with some
-interest as he said:
-
-"That's where you spoils yourself, Cap.  You ain't. And if you want my
-advice, which you never do, I'd tell you that the sooner you 'bouts ship
-and back to Niu� the better."
-
-Vaiti bit slowly through the piece of bread she was eating and
-deliberately chewed it, eyeing the mate all the time, before she
-condescended to answer.
-
-"Mph!" was all she said at last.  She had never studied diplomacy, but
-she knew how much more you learn in general by letting the other person
-lead the conversation than by talking yourself.  And it occurred to her
-that Harris wanted to make himself important by hinting and patronising
-over some ship business which might, or might not, be in his department.
-Well, let him.  She would not give him a lead.
-
-Harris, on his part, got angry at once, and blurted out what he had
-meant to keep a good deal longer.
-
-"Oh, very well," he said.  "You can do just as you likes, of course, but
-where you'll find yourself when it comes to a question of mutiny, that's
-another two-and-six.  Musling curtains on the ports, and white
-table-cloths, and ropes all flemish-coiled on deck is going to help you
-a lot then, ain't they?  And if ever I've seen signs of trouble in a
-crew, I seen them to-day, and you knows it--ma'am."
-
-The last word came with a jerk, screwed out, as it were, by an ominous
-flash of Vaiti's eye.
-
-Vaiti herself was thinking very quickly indeed, but you would not have
-imagined it if you had seen her slowly scooping out the inside of a
-mummy-apple, and as slowly eating it.  She was obliged to acknowledge to
-herself, now Harris had spoken, that there had been something unusual
-about the demeanour of more than one of the men since their departure
-yesterday.  But mutiny?  Nonsense!  Indigestion from too much pork, more
-likely.  She did not believe for an instant that any crew once handled
-by her father and herself would have an ounce of mutiny left in the lot,
-if you ran them through a stamp-mill and assayed the result three times
-over.
-
-So she merely remarked, between spoonfuls:
-
-"You talk plenty nonsense.  You keep those men work, they no squeak.
-Suppose you finish eat, you go tell Gray he come down ki-ki."
-
-"All right!" said Harris meaningly, trying to make an effective and
-tragic exit.  He was really not at all easy in his mind, and Vaiti's
-attitude did nothing to relieve his apprehension of what might be about
-to follow.  The men had never dragged on the rein as they had done these
-two days past, and he felt it in his bones that there was more than met
-the eye in the matter.
-
-Vaiti, for her part, was so much incensed by the tone of his
-remonstrance that she would not even listen to the conviction which
-began to force itself upon her own mind, next day, that there was really
-something astray. Luck in general seemed to have deserted them.  With a
-fair wind the schooner should have made the run to Raratonga in three
-days, but on the afternoon of the second day a dead calm had fallen, and
-they lay helpless in the trough of the sea by four o'clock, three
-hundred miles from anywhere.
-
-"All-a-time I saying no good trust those trade winds, when that
-(adjective) Cook Islands be near," sighed Vaiti, scanning the horizon
-vainly right and left.  Like a true sailor, she was generally cross in a
-calm.
-
-"I wish we was out of this, ma'am, I do," remarked Gray, who was busy
-spinning sinnet at her feet on the deck.  For some odd reason, the sour
-old bo'sun generally found her more approachable than the others.
-
-"Why?" asked Vaiti, almost amiably.
-
-"Because, ma'am, of that, for one thing.  And hothers."
-
-He pointed forward, and Vaiti saw what she had not noticed before, the
-ship's carpenter, a powerful young Mangaian, lying flat on the foc'sle
-head and obviously weeping.
-
-"They've been at that game, one and another, off and on, ma'am, all
-to-day," he said.  "And you know yourself 'ow we've been put to it to
-get the work out of them.  Darned if I knows what monkey tricks they's
-up to, but I allow we're liable to understand all about it before very
-long, for that sea-lawyer of a fellow, Shalli, he's bin speechifyin'
-down in the foc'sle 'alf of this watch, like a bloomin' 'Yde Park
-sosherlist, he has."
-
-Vaiti glanced at her watch.
-
-"Make him eight bell," she ordered, scanning the foc'sle hatch.
-
-"Ay, ay, ma'am," said Gray readily, passing on the order.
-
-The watch below were prompt enough about turning out, but Shalli the
-forlorn could not, it seemed, find energy enough to get up and turn in.
-Instead, he beat his curly head upon the planks and began to sob.  Vaiti
-took no notice of him whatever, but just strolled nonchalantly for a
-minute into her cabin, and reappeared with a slight projection in the
-bosom of her muslin dress that had not been there before.  Harris and
-Gray looked at each other significantly, and the former cast a swift
-glance about the vacant horizon.  No, not a shred of sail, not a trail
-of smoke.  Only the glancing flying-fish, and the oily, glittering
-swell, and the hard, pale, empty sky.
-
-The men, who had all been standing in a bunch by the hatch, now
-signalled to Shalli, who put off the rest of his weeping to a more
-convenient season, and got upon his feet.  Then the six began advancing
-slowly and uncertainly to the break of the poop.  They were a
-good-looking crew in their way, all Eastern Pacific men, with bright
-eyes and well-featured brown faces, and their dress--the brilliant red
-or yellow "pareo" of the islands, gaily figured with enormous white
-flowers, and the bright cotton shirt or coloured jersey--lent a
-distinctly operatic air to the little scene.  Vaiti and her officers,
-however (like Moli�re's _bourgeois_ who had talked prose all his life
-without knowing it), had lived in the midst of picturesque and
-extraordinary things most of their lives, and therefore took no
-interest, as a rule, in anything save the sternest practicalities.
-
-And it was stern enough in all conscience, this fact with which they
-were confronted.  The men were mutinous, beyond doubt.
-
-Vaiti's mind rapidly ran over all possible causes for the trouble, even
-while Shalli was stepping forward and opening his mouth to speak.  It
-could not be rough treatment, because, as a matter of fact, the men were
-no worse handled on the _Sybil_ than on most other island schooners, and
-an occasional knock-down blow is not the sort of thing that a Pacific
-native will seriously resent.  It could not be any objection to go to
-Raratonga--the crew were mostly Cook Islanders themselves, and glad of a
-chance of seeing their homes. Nor could it be dislike to her command,
-for a chief rank counts tremendously among Polynesians; and islanders
-who were ruled at home by a queen of her family would be most unlikely
-to strike against the authority of one of the Makea race, unless for
-some very grave cause.  It was, of course, possible that they had
-planned to seize the schooner and run off with it.... She put her hand
-up to her bosom, and played with the laces that lay over that hard
-substance under the dress....
-
-But Shalli was speaking now, in answer to her sharp query as to what
-they wanted there.
-
-He had a good deal to say, and he said it with flashing eyes and much
-eloquence, using his slender, pointed, brown fingers a good deal to
-emphasise his remarks, and turning dramatically from his mates to Vaiti,
-and back to his mates again.  Harris listened anxiously, catching only a
-stray word here and there, for his knowledge of Maori was confined to
-the few phrases used in running the ship.  Shalli was certainly saying
-that somebody was going to die--that somebody had got to die, and
-immediately--to judge by the emphasis with which he spoke....  The mate
-was, as Vaiti had once told him, rather chicken-hearted underneath his
-great bulk and strength.  He felt himself turning chilly, for all the
-burning sky.  What the devil did that fiend of a Vaiti mean by standing
-there listening as calmly as if they were paying her compliments on her
-eyes?  Perhaps there was no particular trouble after all; but her
-demeanour was no guarantee, for she would have looked like that if they
-had all been on the verge of drowning, or burning, or hanging together,
-any day of the week.
-
-Gray, on the other hand, did not trouble to try and make out anything,
-but cut a large quid and chewed it at leisure, idly looking on.  He did
-not know if the men meant mutiny or not, and he did not particularly
-care.  They were three whites against six niggers, and there were
-firearms on their side.  And he had seen mutinies in his time beside
-which any little amusement that could be got up by half a dozen amiable
-Cook Islanders would seem a mere Sunday-school tea-party. Let them
-mutiny if they liked.  It would not mean the interruption of the work
-for half a watch.
-
-And Shalli went on talking as if he never would stop, and the _Sybil_
-rolled ceaselessly on the idle swell, and the useless sails slapped
-rhythmically upon the mast. And Vaiti, standing on the poop above the
-group of men on the main-deck, listened with an unmoved countenance
-until quite the end of Shalli's long speech.
-
-When he had finished he turned his face away, and instantly began to
-weep.  And the five other men, exactly as if a tap had been turned on,
-also began to weep at the same moment, howling loudly and lifting their
-hands to heaven.
-
-"If this isn't a bloomin' mutiny, it's a bloomin' lunatic asylum,"
-declared Harris quite inaudibly in the midst of the hideous noise from
-the main-deck. It is not a common thing, even in that world where all
-things are possible, the wide, strange Pacific Ocean, to see a whole
-ship's company shedding tears in concert on a calm and peaceful
-afternoon, with nothing more alarming in sight than a handsome young
-woman in an expensively pretty frock.
-
-"Ow-ow-ow!" went Shalli, getting quite beyond his own control.
-
-"Ey-ah, eyah!" screamed a plump lad from Aitutaki, fluttering his hands
-like frantic pigeons.
-
-"For God's sake, Vaiti, tell us what's up," called Harris, sending his
-bull-like tones through the confusion.
-
-And then Vaiti spoke, shrieking at the top of her voice in order to be
-heard.  Her face, its hard calm broken up at last, was black with rage,
-and she had pulled out her revolver, and was holding it in her hand,
-though, strange to say, none of the men took the least notice of it.
-
-"That ----, ---- witch-man belong Niu�, he curse them, they say they
-die!" she screamed.  "By'n-by I cut him liver out!"
-
-"What witch-man?" bellowed Harris.  "Don't understand.  That white
-bloke--him with the red hair and the scar on his nose--who dresses
-native, and lives native up in the bush?  Saw him lookin' at you like as
-if he'd like to knife you, from behind Mata's house."
-
-"No, pig-head! no white man got 'mana' for make die that way," shrieked
-Vaiti, shaking her revolver without effect at the men.  "Niu� witch-man.
-What man you mean?  I not see----"
-
-But she did see at that moment, and to Harris's utter dismay she dropped
-the revolver on the deck and flung her skirt over her head.
-
-"My Gord! she's mad now," cried Harris.  The crew paid not the least
-attention, but continued to weep with lungs of brass.  The mate's head
-went round. He felt as if he was going out of his senses, too.  Gray,
-who seemed to be the only normal person left on board, went up to Vaiti
-and plucked her dress off her face.
-
-"Now, ma'am, keep 'er 'ead to wind," he remonstrated. "What's got 'old
-of the Capting?  Blest if we ever saw you afraid before."
-
-Vaiti turned on him like a tigress.
-
-"You think me frighten, you parrot-face, bal'-head, humpback pig-monkey!
-Think some more those thing, and I shoot some hole in you lie-making
-tongue, learn you talk to me.  I tell you----"
-
-The hubbub on deck was calming down a little now, and subsiding into
-lost and homeless wails.  It was possible to make oneself heard.
-
-"I tell you, that thing Alliti see 'long Niu�, he one dead man.  Captain
-schooner _Ikurangi_--same I making tart [chart] all wrong, so he go
-drown, he and him mate. You think it good thing one dead man he go walk
-along Niu�, looking me?"
-
-"A cat may look at a king," said Harris, who had realised that no
-fighting was afoot, and therefore was very brave just now.  "Besides,
-that red-head man wasn't no ghost--he borrowed a pouchful of tobacco off
-of me, and never paid it back."
-
-"What sort that man?" demanded Vaiti.  "He small, all same Gray, he ugly
-all same you, got red hair, cut 'long him nose, tooth all break?"
-
-"That's him," agreed Harris.
-
-Vaiti took a turn across the deck, and fell silent, angrily chewing a
-lock of her hair.  The horrid vision of Donahue risen from his ocean
-grave, and wandering about the islands as a malignant ghost, bent on
-avenging his death, had struck her as such a fancy could only strike an
-islander, and almost paralysed her active mind. Now she realised that it
-was merely a case of mistaken newspaper report, and that Donahue had
-somehow escaped from the wreck of his schooner, and was once more
-roaming the islands in the flesh--at the very lowest ebb of fortune, it
-was evident, but probably none the less dangerous for that.  She was
-quite certain that he was in some way at the bottom of this business of
-cursing the crew, although no doubt the witch-doctor and Mata had been
-intermediary.  And it was no trifle. Sheer mutiny she would have much
-preferred.
-
-"Wot's it all about?" asked Gray, who had not been so long in the
-islands as the mate.  "Wot's the odds if a lot of bally niggers thinks
-they've been cursed? Seems to me anythin' the witch-doctor could do
-wouldn't be likely to harm a crew that's been salted by our old man in
-the cursin' way.  There ain't no witch-what-d'ye-call-'em about the
-islands that can lay over 'im for language."
-
-"Oh, shut up!  You don't know anything about it," said Harris with
-irritation.
-
-"Suppose you tells me," suggested Gray, tucking another quid into his
-cheek, and looking dispassionately at the crew, who were now lying on
-deck rolling about with the motion of the vessel, and looking half dead
-already.  "Doesn't seem as if we was goin' to have much bother with that
-lot....  And you gettin' as white at the gills as a flounder, thinkin'
-they was goin' to take charge.  Go 'ome and learn a ladies'
-dancin'-class, Mr. 'Arris; you ain't fit to 'andle men."
-
-"I'll handle you if----" Harris was beginning roughly, when Vaiti, whose
-temper had been badly ruffled by the events of the last half-hour,
-stepped across the deck and delivered two stinging blows, one on
-Harris's right ear and one on Gray's left.
-
-"You take'm that," she said.  "Alliti, you speak bo'sun about Maori
-'mana.'  Glay, you lemember Alliti mate, no give cheek."
-
-"Want to know if I've got any left for myself, before I start givin' it
-away," observed the bo'sun ruefully, rubbing his face.  "But better be
-slapped nor neglected by a pretty girl, hany day, says I."
-
-Vaiti did not smile, but leaned over the rail, and began staring at the
-crew.  She was in no mood for flattery.
-
-"Well, if you want to know, it's like this," said Harris.  "These native
-blokes, they thinks some of their chiefs has got what they call 'mana.'"
-
-"Wot's that mean?"
-
-"Pretty near any thin', take it by and large, but one meanin's all we
-want, and that's the notion they have that these chiefs can sort of
-blast 'em with a curse, so's they'll go away and die.  Like as if I was
-a chief, and you was a common man, same as you are, anyhow, and I was to
-say, 'Gray, you go off out of this and die next Thursday at four bells
-in the afternoon watch.'  And you says to me, says you, 'Ay, ay, sir,'
-says you."
-
-"Blowed if I would," ejaculated the bo'sun.
-
-"Yes, you would, you chump, because you'd be a bloomin' native, and they
-always does.  So off you'd go, and when Thursday come you'd lie down and
-die at four bells, wherever you happened to be."
-
-"Wot of?"
-
-"Nothin'--you'd run down like a watch--sort of 'stop short never to go
-again' business, like the grandfather's clock--and when you was dead
-you'd stay dead.  That's all."
-
-"And I never 'eard worse rot in all me days," said the bo'sun
-disgustedly.  "Think I'm going to believe all that?"
-
-"Who cares what you believes or what you don't?" demanded Harris,
-"You'll ---- well see all about it soon enough.  Vaiti she says they
-says Mata went to the witch-doctor, who they're as much afraid of as any
-chief in Niu�, for all they're by way of bein' Christian, and he cursed
-them up and down and inside and out, worst style, and says they're all
-to die by sunset, to-night. And if I knows anything of natives they'll
-do it.  I'll lay you, we got to work the ship up to Raratonga
-ourselves--if we ever get there.  Of all the low-down, mean skinks that
-ever walked, them natives are the worst.  They haven't a blessed scrap
-of consideration in them for anyone but themselves.  Here we are with
-every man-jack of these fellows got an advance on his wages, and they
-says they're going to die!  Die!  I've no patience with them.  I do hate
-selfishness and meanness."
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XII*
-
-                          *BREAKING THE MANA*
-
-
-Vaiti all this time had been steadily watching the men as they lay about
-on the main-deck in various attitudes of limp resignation.  One or
-two--notably the emotional Shalli--were already beginning to look ill.
-Matters looked badly enough for the _Sybil_.  It was in the hurricane
-season, and signs were not wanting that the calm would break up with
-energy when it did break.  If the crew persisted in their dying, other
-people who had not been in any way subjected to the witch-doctor's
-operations might find it incumbent on them to die too.  She did not for
-a moment doubt the Niu�an's power to slay.  Had she not more than once
-seen the queen, who was her own cousin, politely dismiss some offender
-with the significant remark, "I wish I may never see you again after
-to-morrow" (for the queen was always courteous, and would never have
-used the crude terms of a Niu�an witch-doctor); and had not every one on
-the island known that with the next evening's sunset the wretch would
-lay him down and die as surely as the dark would fall?  These men were
-doomed, and the ship would miss the steamer and the cargo would not be
-sold, and possibly the schooner would be lost in the blow that was
-creeping up, and none of them would ever go home any more.
-
-Thus the native side of Vaiti spoke.  But now the white side woke up and
-demanded its innings too. Was it endurable that the red-headed rat of a
-Donahue (for she was as certain that he had been at the bottom of the
-matter as only a woman with no direct evidence to go on can be) should
-win the last move in the deadly game they had been playing this year and
-more. Was she to get into difficulties, and perhaps lose the ship, the
-very first time that she had taken off the _Sybil_ all alone?  The fact
-that such a disaster would include the losing of herself did not
-trouble, as it did not console, her.  She would leave her reputation
-behind her, and people, when they spoke of Vaiti of the Islands, would
-say----
-
-No, they wouldn't, and they shouldn't.  The white blood was up now.  It
-was impossible to prevent the "mana" from working.  Well, let it be.
-She would do the impossible.  She had done the impossible before, in
-many ways; it was the only sort of thing really very well worth doing,
-in the opinion of Vaiti of the Islands.
-
-Whatever was to be done must be done quickly. The storm was not far
-away, and the _Sybil_ was rolling in the trough of the increasing swell
-with every rag of sail set.
-
-"What you goin' to do?" asked Harris hopelessly, as he saw her move.
-"Give them medicine?  It ain't any good."
-
-"Yes, give 'em medicine--you and Gray, you giving it plenty by'n-by,"
-said Vaiti calmly, beckoning the two men over to her.  The crew
-continued to lie on the deck, giving no sign of life but an occasional
-groan.  The wind was beginning to cry a little among the rigging, just
-whimpering, like a chidden child.  A glassy tinkling of foam sounded
-about the keel.  The sun was almost down.
-
-"You listen me," said the girl, her handsome, hawk-like features looking
-curiously sombre in the orange light.  "I speak those men in Maori.  I
-tell them some thing--thing not belong 'papalangi.'  You no understan'.
-Wait."
-
-Then, with a look on her face that the white men had never seen there
-before, and were never to see again, she stepped swiftly down the
-ladder, crossed the main-deck, and stood in the midst of the prostrate
-crew.
-
-As though struck themselves by a spell, Harris and Gray remained
-motionless on the poop, only swaying with the unconscious movement of
-the sailor to the roll of his ship, while they watched with fascinated
-eyes the scene upon the lower deck.  The crew at first lay still as
-logs, while Vaiti stood and looked at them--only looked.  Presently they
-began to open their eyes and roll over, and the weeping, which had
-apparently ceased, began again.
-
-Then Vaiti, suddenly flinging her arms high above her head, with her
-light muslin dress fluttering in the wind and all her magnificent hair
-falling to her knees, burst into such a flood of speech as made the two
-hard-bitten Englishmen on the poop open eyes of stolid amaze.  There is
-no language in the world so full of eloquent possibilities as the Maori
-tongue--even in the somewhat debased and altered type that is current
-among the islands.  And, hidden away somewhere in the strange nature of
-this strange thing in woman's shape, there was more than a touch of the
-true witch wildness and fire.
-
-"Lord!" said Harris, in a tone of awe.  "She's the devil himself!"
-
-She looked it, as she stood there in that livid light, her arms
-stretched high to heaven, her voice--was there ever a voice so full of
-passion, prophecy, command?--ringing out, now high, now low, now in
-tones vibrating with some subtle suggestion of horror that caused even
-the uncomprehending whites upon the poop to feel a cold shudder about
-the region of the spine.  Upon the crew the effect was marvellous, yet,
-from Gray's and Harris's point of view, unsatisfactory as well.  The
-limp figures sat up, it was true, wept afresh, and even rose to their
-feet before long; but it was only to rush wildly up and down the heaving
-deck, driven, it seemed, by the sting of an agony greater than any they
-had suffered yet.  Above the loose sails thundered and the wind wailed
-wickedly.
-
-Gray, at a motion from the mate, went to the idle wheel and grasped the
-spokes.  The _Sybil_ would want watching soon.
-
-"Strike me pink if this isn't the craziest ship's company outside a
-lunertic asylum from Yokohama to the 'Orn," muttered the bo'sun to
-himself.  "Now, what the 'ell is _that_?  Ho, Jemmy Gray, why don't you
-look for a berth as a bally stoker in a bally Red Sea liner, or a
-supercargo on a Chinese pirate junk, and 'ave a quiet life at your age?
-Here, Mr. 'Arris, you going to let 'er shoot 'erself before your heyes?"
-
-Vaiti had plucked out her revolver again, but instead of threatening the
-crew with it, she was holding it close to her own curly head, all the
-time pouring forth a river of eloquent Maori, strongly charged with
-adjurations and threats.  It needed no translation to understand so
-much, not to see the abject if inexplicable terror of the crew, who
-cowered and howled in an extremity of distress every time she raised the
-pistol to her head.
-
-"Vaiti, Vaiti!  What're you doing, Cap?" yelled Harris.  "You'll shoot
-yourself!  Are you crazy? What are you givin' 'em, for Cord's sake?"
-
-Vaiti turned round, and cried angrily at him:
-
-"Hold 'm tongue!  You no leave me myself, very quick I shooting you.  I
-tell those men I great chief, no one can take 'um curse away, but can
-come 'long all those men myself, suppose they die--go Raratonga when 'um
-night come, an' all those man soul he running quick, quick, all a-cold,
-'long those mountains top Raratonga where 'um dead man he go to
-jumping-off place.  A--a--h!  I put one bullet in head belong me, very
-quick, suppose those men they got dam cheek go an' die.  I coming, very
-dead, very angry, I go 'long that soul, all a-time; no let 'um rest, no
-let 'um see woman fliend, die long time ago--I take big club belong
-chief, make 'um run, cry, all-a-time--no sleep, no eat, no lie down!
-A--a--h! no go heaven, no go hell, all-a-time, for ever'n ever, Amen.  I
-pay him out for going die!"
-
-She stormed through the brief speech like a hot-season squall, and
-instantly returned to the natives. Harris, struck dumb by the entirely
-unprecedented nature of the situation, could find no vent for his
-feelings save in plucking off his cap and casting it under his feet. She
-was threatening the crew that she would kill herself if they died;
-follow them to the land of shades (the entrance to which was popularly
-supposed to be over the edge of a certain desolate, far-up mountain
-precipice in Raratonga), and make it so hot for them in the "otherwhere"
-that they would certainly wish they hadn't dared to die....  What on
-earth was a man to do in a ship commanded by a thing--he could not call
-it a woman--that talked like that--with night coming on, too, and
-something very like a bad blow unpleasantly near?
-
-Vaiti did not leave him long in doubt as to what he was to do.  The
-crew, driven previously to the verge of frenzy by her gruesome threats,
-became entirely frantic during the eloquent peroration that followed her
-address to Harris.  They ran up and down the deck; they shrieked, they
-prayed, they besought.  Vaiti, with the eye of a hunter watching a
-quarry almost driven to bay, kept a keen look-out through all her fiery
-eloquence, and just at the moment when the men seamed driven to the
-highest point of human endurance, turned to the mate with a triumphant
-cry.
-
-"Now, Alliti! he all right by'n-by: I no shoot myself, I think.  You and
-bo'sun you get rope's end very quick, give 'um order shorten sail, make
-'um go.  I think he go; he too much plenty frighten die 'long me."
-
-"Too much plenty frighten" the men were indeed. The threat that Vaiti
-had made--for the carrying out of which they doubted neither her ability
-nor her will, any more than she did herself--was so much more potent
-than the curse of the witch-doctor that the terror of the one paled
-before the terror of the other.  For the moment, they felt that they
-might not be able to live, but they certainly must not die; and it was
-right in the middle of this illogical state of mind that the mate and
-bo'sun came in with their rope's ends and settled the matter once for
-all.  An hour ago, red-hot irons only would have moved them to hurry up
-with their dying.  Now a couple of ropes' ends, laid about among the six
-with a will, drove them howling up the masts and out along the yards,
-where, with Gray and Harris still after them, and Vaiti threatening from
-below, they succeeded in getting the sails stowed and the vessel snug in
-very little over the ordinary time.  The blow that followed kept all
-hands busy the night through, but it came from the right quarter, and
-the _Sybil_ fled before it at such a speed that morning found her only
-half a day's run from Raratonga, with the wind quieting down to a
-pleasant breeze, the schooner uninjured, and the crew as cheerful and
-busy as they had ever been in their lives.
-
-Vaiti caught the steamer, sold her copra, and saw it on the wharf ready
-to load.  Then she went back to the schooner, and waited till the last
-of the men returned.
-
-"Suppose you like go die now, plenty time for you," she said.  "Plenty
-good sailor-man stop Raratonga. You go 'long die; I no want."
-
-The men looked at her sheepishly, and Shalli, the spokesman, scratched
-his head and surveyed a heap of tributary pigs, fowls, and fruit that
-lay on the deck of the schooner before he answered.  The crew had many
-relations about Raratonga, and the relations had done them very well
-this trip.
-
-"Many thanks, great chieftainess," he said at last, in his own tongue.
-"We are much obliged to you, but we have changed our minds, and now we
-do not ever mean to die at all."
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XIII*
-
-                         *THE GAME PLAYED OUT*
-
-
-Every one in the trader's had gone to bed, and Vaiti, barefoot and
-dressed in dark cotton, had just got out of her room by the window, and
-was gliding noiselessly down the back verandah.
-
-The moon was down, and the thick darkness under the trees of the village
-covered her safely as she slipped along at the backs of the little
-white, palm-thatched houses.  It was not at all likely that any native
-would be about in the middle of the night, but one could never reckon on
-white men, of whom there were several in the little town--and Vaiti,
-being engaged as usual on "urgent private affairs," did not want any
-inquiries.
-
-She got away from the village without remark, and then struck into one
-of the narrow grass roads penetrating the bush.  Everything was asleep.
-The little green parrots were hidden deep under heavy leaves, each with
-its noisy head tucked under its wing.  The lizards that had been darting
-and flickering all day long about the path now slept, chill as little
-stones, among the roots of the trees.  There was a cold, dewy smell in
-the air, and the palm-tree plumes were motionless as drawings in Indian
-ink against the violet gloom of the sky.  Very far away the immemorial
-music of the reef beat softly in the dark.
-
-Vaiti girded her dress high, and walked swiftly.  She had a long way to
-go, and she wanted to be back in her neat, white, mosquito-curtained
-bed, sleeping the sleep of the innocent, before the trader's wife should
-come in with her morning cup of tea.  Vaiti was a past mistress in the
-art of avoiding useless comment.
-
-Three miles, five miles, seven miles....  It was right at the other side
-of the island, past mile after mile of tangled bush, acre after acre of
-sparsely planted, rocky, open ground, grove after grove of tall, plumy
-cocoanut, heavy with fruit.  Oranges grew by the track here and there;
-broad green banners of banana leaf blotted out whole sections of the
-stars, and slim, quaint mummy-apple trees stood up among the prickly
-coral rocks.  Vaiti had no time to stop, but she snatched a little
-refreshment on her way from time to time, as the wayfarer may always do
-in the kindly South Sea climate.
-
-She struck at last into a narrow track leading off the main pathway--so
-small that in the dusk of the starry night it must have been invisible
-save for a mass of pointed rocks that stood up just beside the overgrown
-entrance and made a landmark.  Afterwards came a mile or two of tangled
-walking among clumps of pink and scarlet and yellow hibiscus, all
-reduced to a common blackness by the levelling night, and through thorny
-lemon-trees, and over rocky knolls where there was scarce footing for a
-goat....  A lonely God-forsaken region this; not a village, nor even the
-gleam of a solitary white-washed hut.  What had the "Kapitani" of the
-_Sybil_ to do with such a place?
-
-Vaiti knew very well indeed what she had to do.  She had gathered in the
-town that the mysterious white man who "lived native" in the bush had
-his dwelling about this lonely neighbourhood.  It was very well known to
-her, and she meant to find the man's dwelling-place, and see him with
-her own eyes before...
-
-Well, that was still to come.
-
-It took her rather longer than she had expected, but she did at last
-succeed in finding the tumble-down little palm-leaf shanty, built
-against the side of a rock, that she had heard described.  It was a
-miserable place, so far as her cat-like eyes could judge it in the
-purple gloom, not more than three or four yards long, and looking like
-nothing so much as a heap of dead leaves and rubbish piled against the
-rock.  She trod noiselessly round its three sides, and listened here and
-there. The door, as she ascertained by feeling, was a heavy mat hung up
-from the eaves, and it was tightly fastened across the opening.  There
-was a faint sound of slow, heavy breathing from within.  The man was
-evidently asleep.
-
-Vaiti climbed up on the rock above the hut, and pulled away a piece of
-the loose grey coral of which it was composed.  Then, sheltering herself
-behind a clump of hibiscus growing in a cleft, she raised her voice in a
-fearful squealing cry, exactly reproducing the yell of a wild pig
-wandering in the bush at night.  At the same time she cast a lump of
-coral with all her strength down the side of the big rock, whence it
-landed with a crash in the middle of a mass of brushwood, burying itself
-completely.
-
-The double noise, as she had anticipated, brought out the owner of the
-hut, very cross and sleepy, clad only in a pareo, and angrily anxious
-for the safety of his patch of yams.  He carried a torch in his hand,
-made of blazing candlenuts strung on a stick ("Must have run out every
-bit of credit at the stores," thought Vaiti parenthetically), and he
-was, beyond all shadow of doubt, against all common probability, the
-red-haired master of the _Ikurangi_.
-
-If looks could ever blast, those black eyes behind the hibiscus boughs
-would have slain him where he stood.  Vaiti quivered with rage as she
-watched him shambling sleepily about, looking, with his long, matted red
-hair, bloated, evil face, and half naked body, infinitely lower than any
-coloured native on the island....  He had not prospered since he escaped
-the wreck of the _Ikurangi_--how or where she did not care to know. He
-looked as if he had been living on the natives and half drinking himself
-to death, as was indeed the case.
-
-But Vaiti was not in the least mollified by his unprosperous case.  In
-her opinion, he ought to have been dead long ago.  There could be no
-peace of mind for her while he was still drifting about the Pacific,
-ever on the alert to do her an evil turn.  She was not equal to actual
-murder, and, in any case, Niu� was a British-owned island, with a
-resident Commissioner and a regular nest of missionaries, where you had
-to be very careful of what you did.  But if any accident--a safe,
-convenient accident--should befall him by-and-by, why, it would
-certainly be an advantage to the _Sybil_ and her owners.  Well, that
-might come about, and without introducing Saxon into it either.  In such
-a delicate matter Saxon's interference would very likely have acted much
-as a charge of dynamite might act in the destruction of a wasps'
-nest--something more than the wasps would probably come to grief.
-
-She waited until the ugly creature had rolled back into his cottage and
-shut the make-shift door.  Then she slipped down from the rock once
-more, and began the second part of her errand.  Neither then, nor at any
-other time, did she trouble to find out the manner of Donahue's escape.
-If she had, she would have heard that he had been picked up by a native
-canoe, floating about on a piece of wreck the day after the disaster
-that destroyed the _Ikurangi_, and that, he had spent a good many months
-on a neighbouring island before a stray schooner had consented to accept
-his watch for passage money and convey him as far as Niu�--the only
-place near their course where a penniless beachcomber would have been
-allowed to land.  As things were, he was more or less smuggled off, and
-thought best to take refuge in the bush at once.  The moneyless
-adventurer is not encouraged in islands belonging to the British Crown.
-
-It is easy, therefore, to understand why Donahue, living under an
-assumed name in the far interior of the island, had not been recognised,
-and was not likely to be, by any one save the person whom his presence
-most concerned.  His malice against Vaiti had by no means evaporated
-with the events that took place on Vaka.  He did not, as it happened,
-suspect her of having actually caused the loss of the _Ikurangi_, but he
-was of a darkly superstitious nature, and laid down his ill-luck, first,
-last, and all through, to the fact of her influence. She had been a
-"Jonah" of the worst kind to him, and he would have been very glad
-indeed to serve her any ill turn of any kind that might be possible.
-But only the small piece of spite compassed through Mata had, so far,
-lain within his power.
-
-Vaiti had still a mile or two to go, and it was waxing very late, or
-rather, early.  She almost ran along the winding rocky path, following
-it as easily as if broad day or full moon had surrounded her instead of
-star-lit dark.  Now the sound of the sea, unheard for the last hour,
-broke out again, and a cold salt breath from the beach cut through the
-heavy perfume of the forest track. In another minute she was out of the
-wood and fairly running down a sloping, sandy track that led to a little
-white house standing alone on the shore....  She laughed as she ran--it
-was such a soft, clear night, and the sea called so pleasantly down in
-the dark, and she did so dearly love an adventure--especially when all
-the world imagined her to be sleeping quietly in her mosquito-netted
-bed.
-
-There was no secrecy about this matter apparently. The house had a good
-wooden door, and she rapped loudly on it with a stone, calling at the
-same time, "Sona!  Sona!  Wake up!"
-
-There was a brief interval, in which the rollers tore at the beach and
-the palms swung and crashed overhead, uninterrupted by other sound.
-Sona was evidently asleep.  She struck loudly on the door again.  This
-time some one answered in a drowsy voice, and a slow, shuffling foot
-came to the door.  The hinges creaked, and in another minute a small,
-bent, feeble figure appeared on the threshold.
-
-"Tck! tck!" it clucked.  "Is there magic in the air, and have I grown
-fifty years younger, that the lovely maidens come to my door in the
-starlight once more?  Is it my beauty that has struck you to the heart,
-chieftainess Vaiti; or do you want a charm to catch the love of some one
-less deserving than myself?"
-
-A fit of coughing interrupted him; he crept out to the open air, and
-clung to the door-post, shaking all over with the violence of the
-paroxysm.  There was more light here, down by the foaming rollers; one
-could see, if one had been walking half the night in the dark bush, that
-the man was very small and hairy, very decrepit, and very, very old.
-Indeed, the personal appearance of Sona, solitary recluse of the
-Avarangi beach, good Nonconformist Christian on Sundays, and heathen
-witch-doctor out of business hours, was a very important item of his
-stock-in-trade.  He looked his part to perfection, and knew it.  His
-very name was a piece of business, even though, rightly pronounced and
-written. it was that of the godly man of Nineveh.  When Shark-Tooth of
-Avarangi had consented, largely for reasons of policy, to join the
-mission fold a good many years before--the last straggling heathens on
-the island having been then "brought in" by the exertions of a
-determined and energetic missionary--he had selected the name of Jonah
-for his baptismal title solely because, so far as he could ascertain,
-the original bearer of the name was proverbial for bringing bad luck to
-his enemies--and that was the sort of reputation that Shark-Tooth
-especially coveted.
-
-Vaiti had not met him before, but she knew him well by reputation, and
-was very sure that he knew all he cared to know--probably a good
-deal--about her. It was, she thought, a case for going straight to the
-point, so she went very straight indeed.
-
-"Let me in, Sona," she said in his own tongue.  "I want to talk with
-you, and I want to buy you; for you and I are wise people, and I know
-that there is nothing that may not be bought."
-
-"Crah--crah--crah!" cackled Sona, in a feeble old man's laugh, tacking a
-joke to the end of it that might well have raised a blush on Vaiti's
-cheek if she had been capable of such a weakness.  He led the way into
-the house, still cackling, lit an ill-smelling kerosene lamp, and sank
-down upon the mats, a mere heap of crumpled cotton clothes, old bones,
-and ancient wickedness.
-
-Vaiti pulled out her cigar-case, tossed the old creature a cigar, which
-he clutched at eagerly, and lit one for herself.  Then she squatted down
-on the mats, her back against the wall, and puffed for a minute or two
-in silence.  Old Sona watched her eagerly with his glassy little eyes.
-He saw that she was not angry at the part he had played in the late
-unpleasant occurrence upon the schooner, or at least that she did not
-mean to resent it. He had heard all about the strange happenings of the
-voyage, and was a good deal awed at the power of the woman who had
-actually broken the spell of his curse--in which, be it observed, he
-believed most fully himself, with excellent reasons for doing so.  And
-he was really very anxious to know what she wanted now, and especially
-what he was going to make by it.
-
-Vaiti pulled at her cigar vigorously for a minute to make it draw well,
-and then, with a leisurely puff, remarked in Sona's own tongue:
-
-"Mata gave you a gold ring to curse my sailors that they should die--all
-the village knows of it, so you need not deny it, old man with the face
-of a scavenger-crab. Was it not foolish of you to set yourself against
-Vaiti, the great sea-princess--very foolish to run into danger, and for
-so little?"
-
-"Yes, yes, so little," repeated Sona, in a kind of wail.
-
-"Now I come to buy you for myself," went on Vaiti, puffing between words
-(she smoked like most women, very hard and fast).  "I buy like a great
-chief's daughter, and you shall feed and drink well for a long time if
-you are faithful to me.  If not, I shall split you open with my knife as
-one splits open a fish on the beach, and leave you out on the strand, so
-that the crabs may come and eat you before you are dead.  That is what I
-shall do to you."
-
-"I belong to the high chieftainess, soul and liver," quavered Sona
-nervously.  Vaiti, hardly looking at him, pulled something out of her
-dress and flung it down carelessly on the mat between the two.  Sona's
-eyes glittered, for he heard the chink of gold.
-
-"Take it, old pig of the woods," said Vaiti contemptuously, and he
-clutched eagerly at the little parcel of rag.  It contained a roll of
-gold coins.  Sona, panting with mingled delight and fear lest his
-visitor should change her mind, scuttled away to some hiding-hole in an
-inner room, and concealed the packet with breathless haste.  Then he
-returned to the lamp-lit room, where Vaiti sat smoking and waiting.
-
-"I am yours, high chieftainess; I am yours," he repeated, rubbing his
-hands together and cackling.
-
-"What is this thing they tell about a devil that stays upon the road to
-Mua, and comes out at night-time?" asked Vaiti carelessly, looking over
-Sona's head at the wall.
-
-Sona shut up his eyes very tight, and shook his shaggy little head from
-side to side.
-
-"If you ask the good misinari doctor, he will tell you," he answered.
-"As for me, I have nothing to do with devils.  I am a very old man, and
-I want to go to heaven.
-
-"You will go to-night, old scorpion-head, if you do not tell me
-everything I want to know," remarked Vaiti.  Her tone was pleasant, but
-there was a flavour of something else below the pleasantness that caused
-Sona, literally and figuratively, to sit up.
-
-"I tell, I tell, high chieftainess," he stammered eagerly.  "The thing
-is known to all the people on the island--even the white people.  It
-happened only last year, and it is as true as the Good Book.  It was the
-foolish man from Mua way, whom they called a witch-doctor--and every one
-knows that such a thing does not exist, high chieftainess; but they said
-he was that thing, and he said so himself, because he was proud and mad.
-Now, we all know that there are many devils on Niu�, and that the
-misinaris never were able to drive them all away.  And there is a very
-bad devil on that road to Mua, right where the six palm-trees stand up
-by themselves among the graves.  It is powerless in the day, but at
-night there is no Niu� man who would dare to go there.  Sometimes the
-white traders will ride past the place coming home in the dark, but it
-is a true thing that their horses will often shy and bolt when they come
-near to the home of the devil, and no man can say why; indeed, the
-devils, for the most part, do not have power over the 'papalangi.'
-
-"So this witch-doctor, as he called himself, said that he did not fear
-the devil, and he would go and stay the night among the graves, thinking
-that because of that all the people in the island would believe in him,
-and give him many pigs and yams for fear of his 'mana.'  So he went to
-the devil-place, and all night he stayed, but in the morning he did not
-come back at all.  And by-and-by all the people of his village went
-together to look for him.  And they found him lying on the road, all
-dead, and his face was black and his body twisted up.  So the people
-brought him to the misinari doctor, and he said that he could not make
-him alive again.  And the traders said, 'What is the kind of this death?
-We do not know it, though we are white men and know everything.'  But
-the misinari doctor did not know.  And they buried him, and that is all,
-high chieftainess."
-
-Vaiti smoked thoughtfully.  She had heard something of the tale before,
-and Sona's story did not vary from the version that was generally
-current about the island. She thought, on the whole, that she believed
-in it. There was no doubt that many of the white people gave it credit,
-though a few of them declared the man must have died in a drunken fit.
-A paper in Australia had published an account of the mysterious
-incident, and the spiritualistic set in Sydney were so deeply interested
-in it that a letter of inquiry from a psychical research society had
-been sent up to the island, inquiring into the matter.  But it happened
-that the trader to whom the letter was addressed had committed suicide a
-good many months earlier, and excellent onions and pumpkins (much
-appreciated by his successor) were growing green upon his grave by the
-time the letter reached the island. So the inquiry was never answered.
-
-Yes, on the whole, Vaiti thought she believed the story.  That a similar
-result would follow in the case of a "papalangi" (white man) who
-followed the deceased magician's example she did not, however, believe.
-She thought it very likely, however, that mischief of one kind or
-another would result....  And if the worst should chance to come
-about....
-
-Vaiti took another cigar.
-
-"What does your misinari say?" she asked.  "He is not the right sort of
-misinari, it is true, but still, he should know more about devils than
-the traders."
-
-"Our good misinari was not here when it happened," replied Sona in a
-pious tone.  "It was the doctor misinari.  Our own good misinari says
-that devils cannot do harm to any but bad men."
-
-Vaiti reflected, her eyes on the floor.  She really had some respect, in
-an odd, upside-down kind of way, for missionary opinion.  It is bred in
-the bone with the younger generation of Eastern Pacific islanders.
-
-Donahue was certainly a very bad man.  She did not think she had ever
-met any one much worse.  Perhaps the badness, balanced against the
-whiteness, might swing down the scale.  At any rate....
-
-"Hear me, Sona!" she said, in a voice of command. "I have bought you
-to-night, and you belong to me. There will be more to pay by-and-by if
-you do as I tell you.  But I would warn you to be careful, for you will
-not find it pleasant lying on the shore down there, with your inside
-hanging out like a gutted fish, and the crabs coming running to eat you
-before you are dead, as you will if you make any mistakes.  Listen,
-then, very carefully."
-
-"I listen, I listen!" cried Sona.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XIV*
-
-               *HOW THE WITCH-DOCTOR GOT HIS MONEY BACK*
-
-
-When the trader's wife came in next morning with Vaiti's cup of tea, she
-was touched to see how deeply her pretty lodger was sleeping.
-
-"Poor young dear," said the good woman, "lying there so sweet and
-innocent, sleeping like a baby! It's only the good heart that rests like
-that.  I don't believe a word of the silly lies they tell about her.
-Here, dear, wake up," she called gently.  "Your good papa is ever so
-much better this morning, and looking for you to come in.  And it is
-Sunday morning, and a nice cool day."
-
-"Thank you, Mrs. Smith," said Vaiti politely, broad awake at once.  "May
-I asking you one little hot water?  I like get up and go to turch."
-
-Church, attended for reasons religious or otherwise, was not one of the
-amusements patronised by the nameless white man of the bush.  Indeed,
-his amusements, such as they were, were so far confined to the native
-villages of the interior that very few of the other whites had seen him.
-He was not good for trade, having no money and possessing no
-credit--that was all they knew, or for the most part wanted to know,
-about him.
-
-There was all the more astonishment, therefore, in the shanty owned by
-the Mua trader, away up in the bush, when the unknown man walked into
-the store that Sunday night, and demanded some tobacco, at the same time
-showing a sovereign he held in his hand.  He was dressed in a pitiful
-mass of rags, none too clean, but he looked well pleased with himself,
-and was more than half drunk.  Fortune had apparently found him out at
-last.
-
-The Mua trader was an honest man, but he did not see why he should not
-have a share in anything good that happened to be available about that
-lonely and unprofitable district.  So he welcomed the stranger in with
-much cordiality, and asked him to stop for supper.
-
-The newcomer had no objection in the world to come in and share the
-trader's good tinned meats and new yeast bread, and he made himself very
-much at home without pressing.  The trader, who had a private store of
-consolation in his own back kitchen, plied the spirits freely.  He was
-curious, and he believed in the old saw of "Wine in, truth out."  A
-couple of friends who had ridden over from Alofi, the capital, and were
-equally curious about the derelict's sudden access to fortune, did their
-disinterested best to help, and the bottle went merrily round.  The Niu�
-traders are a sober, decent set of people enough, but Donahue had mixed
-with them so little that he did not know this, and consequently was not
-put on his guard by the unusual conviviality.  Indeed, he was by no
-means the same active, crafty villain who had set that successful snare
-of the diamond necklace in Apia many months ago.  A white man cannot
-"live native" without going downhill very fast, and Donahue was nearly
-at the bottom.
-
-So he drank, and laughed, and told evil tales, and grew quarrelsome, and
-pathetic, and finally affectionate and confidential, in well-defined
-stages, while all the time the other men kept sober, or nearly so.  The
-Mua trader in particular hardly touched his glass.  But Donahue, once so
-wary, never saw, and chattered on.
-
-Before midnight the trader had sold him some gay calico for the native'
-girls, and a little tinned meat and flour, and half-a-dozen various
-trifles that brought the score up to about a pound.  Here the guest came
-to a pause and fingered his coin.
-
-"Oh, well, if that's all you have, you won't get any more goods
-to-night.  Thanks," said the trader, putting out his hand.
-
-The visitor, however, declined to hand over the money. He would pay
-to-morrow, he said.  He was not going to leave himself without money
-again--not if he knew it--and he would have lots to-morrow: and if the
-trader wouldn't send up the goods without the cash to-night, why, he
-might keep his condemned rubbish, and his customer would go elsewhere.
-
-Rather than lose the order, the other gave in, and sent a boy away with
-the stuff.  It would always be easy to bully him out of it afterwards,
-he thought, and there was no arguing with a drunken man's whim.
-
-Then he set himself, in company with all the rest, to find out where the
-money had come from.
-
-Donahue, who by now was far gone, responded readily.  It was the silly
-old chap who lived down on Avarangi beach, he said; an old fool who was
-an uncle of a girl who was a friend of his.  The old chap had a notion
-that there were some Spanish doubloons hidden somewhere on the island,
-but in a place he was afraid to touch, so he had forked out a good
-British sovereign, and offered it to Donahue to go in his place, and
-share the money with him.  Donahue was to keep the earnest money for his
-trouble, if nothing came of it, and if anything did turn up he was to
-take half.  So he was going, that very night--the sooner the better.
-Natives were--well, natives; but as for him, he was afraid of nothing.
-
-"Thasser-sort-er-man I am," he finished thickly, looking round for
-applause.
-
-He did not get it.  The traders one and all burst out laughing.  The
-story of the doubloons, they told him, was a very old one in the island,
-and only the newest of new chums thought of believing it.  It was quite
-true that the natives, who were perfect magpies for hoarding, did
-possess among them a certain number of doubloons, which came from
-God-knows-where--for the coinage used in the island was British--and
-true also that the trader would get a doubloon from one of them every
-now and then in the course of business, always with some mystery
-attached to it, and some reluctance to part with the coin.  But the
-Resident Commissioner, who knew the island pretty well, and the
-missionary too, had long been certain that the store was merely the
-remains of some ship-wrecking raid of past days, about which the Niu�ans
-were now ashamed to speak.  They were great misers, and it would like
-enough be another generation before all the hoarded coins had come to
-light and passed through the traders' hands.  But hidden treasure in
-Niu�!  Pf!  If old Sona had been giving away money, he must be either
-going mad with age or (more likely) up to something. He was the cutest
-old fox on Niu�, and that was saying something.  Why, when he had come
-into that very store to buy a darning-needle a few hours ago (what a man
-who lived in a waist-cloth and nothing else wanted with a darning-needle
-he hadn't explained), it had been all the trader could do to prevent his
-picking up half-a-dozen odds and ends.  That was what he was like if one
-ever took an eye off him; and he wouldn't even pay for the needle,
-either, till the trader had threatened to hammer him unless he forked
-out.  Take his word for it, if Sona had been giving away money, he meant
-to have it back--somehow.  And the treasure was poppy-cock.
-
-Donahue had now passed into the quarrelsome stage, and he rose with
-tipsy dignity from his seat.
-
-"I considdle you no gennlemen," he said scornfully. "For half a Chile
-dorrer I'd" ... He mentioned what he would do, in gross and in detail,
-to the assembled company for the small sum mentioned.
-
-"Kick the dirty brute out," said the Alofi trader disgustedly.  "It's
-easy to see what sort of company that carrion has kept."
-
-Donahue was gone, however--gone with surprising agility, and lurching
-rapidly up the forest pathway towards his house.  His legs were always
-the last thing to fail him.
-
-He knew very well that he had had too much, and when he reached his hut
-he proceeded to sober himself by dipping his head repeatedly in a bucket
-of water. Then he brewed himself a powerful jorum of black tea, drank
-it, and set off considerably sobered.
-
-It was a long way to the clump of palms, and he stumbled badly now and
-then as he went over the graves that lay thick about the edges of the
-path. Burial along the high-road is very popular in Niu�, where they
-like to keep an eye on their dead and see that they are lying quiet in
-their graves--a thing that no one considers at all a matter of course.
-Some of the graves that Donahue passed had felt hats laid upon them;
-others had plates, bowls, bottles of hair-oil, fans--all to amuse the
-ghost and keep it quiet; and one or two looked ghostly enough to scare a
-nervous person as it was, with the wraith-like mosquito curtains
-thoughtfully suspended over the tomb by mourning and anxious relatives.
-Every grave was completed by a solid mass of concrete, weighing anything
-from several hundredweight to a ton.  It was not the fault of any Niu�an
-if his dead relatives "walked."
-
-Donahue as he went chuckled to himself at the thought of his keenness in
-over-reaching the old witch-doctor.  He had used him for his own
-purposes through the girl Mata before, and though that had not worked
-out too well, it was the witch-doctor who bore the discredit, not he.
-He would use him again now, and in another way.  It was in the daytime
-that Sona had arranged to meet him at the palm-tree clump.  At night, he
-said, it would be certain death; and even in daylight no one would
-linger there who could help it.  He at least would never dare to disturb
-the big tomb in which the money was hidden and call down the anger of
-the devils on himself, unless he had a white man with him who feared
-nothing.  So next morning, very early, the white man who was so brave
-would meet him, and they would open the big, cracked tomb together--the
-tomb that no Niu�an had ever dared to lay a finger on before, though
-there were one or two besides himself who suspected that it was just
-there the mysterious foreign coins had come from years ago, and that
-there were a good many left.
-
-Thus the witch-doctor.  And Donahue had assented eagerly, and gone off
-with his earnest money.  And, on arriving at his hut, he had looked out
-an old axe that he possessed, and cleaned up his lamp, and begged a drop
-of oil from the nearest native house.  For he meant to go that very
-night, and take everything there was for himself.  Who was to prove it?
-
-Which was just the course of action that Sona had calculated very
-confidently on his taking.
-
-It poured furiously in an hour or two, for it was in the hot season, and
-the great rains were out.  Donahue could not light his lamp when he came
-to the clump of palms, which he knew well enough to recognise almost in
-the pitch dark.  It thundered soon after, and the sky was split from
-pole to pole by corpse-blue flashes of lightning.  In one of these,
-Donahue, feeling about the cracks of the tomb, thought he saw something
-moving against the gloom of the bush near at hand. It made his throat
-turn dry, for all the wet, and he felt his hair prickle curiously.  But
-he went on groping. Another flash ripped up the sky; it was a smaller
-one, but for one horrible moment he thought he had been struck, for
-something stinging streaked across his face and gave him an ugly thrill.
-But it passed immediately, and he began groping again--groping with both
-hands, in a frantic hurry, trying to make out the best place to apply
-the axe--tearing and grasping and scuffling like some deadly graveyard
-mole, breathless, with beads of warm sweat coursing down his face
-through the streams of chilly rain....  He was fighting--fighting he
-knew not what and knew not why--but he was fighting, for all that,
-fighting hard, with the stone falling away from his nerveless hands, and
-the breath in his body sinking down under some nightmare oppression, and
-the sound of the thunder now almost continuous, blending itself with
-another and far louder sound that was battering madly in his ears.  He
-was fighting with----  Christ!--it was Death!
-
-The thunder passed, as tropic storms do pass, suddenly and completely.
-The dawn shot up in the east, wet and red, and cast long, black, ghostly
-shadows, set shaking by an icy wind, low down upon the palm-trunks and
-the grave.  But Donahue did not want the light.  The axe lay untouched
-beside him; and he lay over the tomb, dead.  And his face was black and
-his body was all contorted.
-
-It was barely daylight yet when something small and slow crept out of
-the bush, and began hunting carefully near the corpse.  It could not
-find what it wanted, seemingly, and this distressed it, for it whimpered
-pitifully in a thin old voice, and looked long before it desisted.  Then
-it put its claws into the dead man's pockets, and hunted through them,
-before it finally disappeared down the road.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-The Mua trader was at his door when a howling procession of natives came
-into the village, carrying the white man's corpse to his home.  The
-Alofi trader, who had found the body, stepped aside to speak.  After the
-tale of the finding had been told, the Mua trader asked slowly:
-
-"Did you think of searching his pockets?  A dead man's a dead man--and
-I'd not be sorry to have the money he owed me, for the natives will have
-taken the goods by this time."
-
-"They were empty when I found him.  Queer, for I was the first to see
-him," said the other.  "I found this thing on the road close by, though.
-Do you recognise it?"
-
-It was the trader's darning-needle, stuck neatly into the end of a tiny,
-arrow-like reed, and stained at the point with some dark sticky stuff.
-
-The Mua trader took it in his hand, smelt it and looked at it closely.
-Then he walked to his kitchen, and, watched by the Alofi trader, threw
-the thing into the fire.
-
-"That's what I think of it," he said.  "My boy, I traded in the worst of
-the Solomons for three years. I'm the only man on the island that knows
-that thing, bar one--and he was a plantation hand in the Solomons, in
-the black-birding days.  There's no wanderers like the Nui� men."
-
-"Do you think----" began the other.
-
-"I think," said the Mua trader, "that old Sona has got his money back."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-The schooner _Sybil_ had no reason for staying longer in Niu�, for the
-business of the ship was done, and the captain was quite well again.  A
-picture of perfect beauty the _Sybil_ made, as she stood out of Alofi
-roads in the golden afternoon, every sail set and every inch of cloth
-straining to the merry breeze.  Niu� was sorry to part with Vaiti, for
-she had interested the island considerably, and her beauty had, as
-usual, won her more admiration than her temper deserved.  Every one, on
-parting, expressed a courteous wish to see the _Sybil_ and her owners
-again.
-
-For all that, and all that, the schooner came back no more.  Vaiti had
-won the game at last, but she never willingly mentioned Niu� again.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER XV*
-
-                      *THE CALAMITY OF CORAL BAY*
-
-
-The wide, still waters of Coral Bay were turning glassy pink under the
-sunset afterglow.  The _Sybil's_ boat, rowing rapidly towards the
-schooner, left as it went a long, ugly flaw upon the stainless crystal
-of the sea.  It was very still, and the night was coming down.
-
-Even in that uncertain twilight the colour of the boat as it cut through
-the pale-hued water stood out strange and sinister.  Most boats are
-white in tropic seas: the _Sybil's_ had always been snowy as her own
-graceful hull. Now they were vivid scarlet, and the ship herself had a
-wide band of scarlet round her counter and flew a scarlet flag at her
-masthead.
-
-Any islander could have told you at a glance what these things meant.
-The schooner was "recruiting"--conveying natives from the wild cannibal
-islands of the New Hebrides to the Queensland sugar plantations. Ten
-pounds a head was paid for the men on their arrival, and it was politely
-supposed that these ignorant heathen had one and all been duly engaged
-under a contract to serve three years, at a wage of five pounds a year.
-How much they understood of contracts, times, and wages--where and what
-they thought Australia might be--and what were the means employed to get
-them on board the ship, nobody asked.  Saxon was not the man to answer,
-if any one had.
-
-Why he had temporarily deserted the pleasant, peaceful islands of the
-Eastern Pacific, and gone "black-birding" in the wild and wicked and
-fever-smitten groups of the West, was Saxon's own affair.  Doubtless he
-had his reasons; possibly they were satisfactory.  But there is reason
-to believe that about Apia and Pape�te at this time he was characterised
-as a (double-adjectived) liar, and an (impolite expression) villain, who
-was running away because it was (adverbially) unsafe for him to stay and
-risk his (past participled) neck among (adjective) men.  This is not the
-history of Captain Saxon; at least, not all of it--from such a recital
-as that may the eleven thousand virgins of Saint Mudie, and the Blessed
-Young Person of Sixteen, deliver us!  It must therefore be enough to say
-that, for sufficient reasons, he decided to shift his headquarters to
-the New Hebrides, and immediately did so, leaving behind him certain
-unsettled scores with which this tale has nothing to do.
-
-He was not new to the islands or the natives, having been one of the
-most notorious of the sandal-wood traders in years gone by.  The
-sandal-wood was gone, and of the money he had made by it not even the
-memory remained.  But there was still something in the labour trade, and
-Saxon liked the lawless atmosphere of the place.
-
-Vaiti remembered the islands well, though she had only been there as a
-child, and she was glad to have the excitement of the change.  When the
-recruiting boat left the schooner (guarded by a companion, full of armed
-men) and drew up on the beach to negotiate with the islanders, she
-always sat in the stern, with a very smart little Winchester rifle
-across her knees, and took command, if her father was not there.  Very
-often he was not; for the New Hebrideans have long memories, and there
-was many a spot where Saxon had run up so many bad, black scores in the
-sandal-wood days that he could not hope for success--or safety, if he
-had minded that--in going ashore.  Harris usually took command of the
-covering boat, a post of comparative security that suited him very well,
-while the dauntless Vaiti managed all the real business, and seldom came
-back with an empty bag.
-
-They had good luck, on the whole, and not many narrow escapes.  Coasting
-round the notorious island of Mallicolo, or Malekula, they succeeded in
-obtaining about forty natives in a week or two.  Saxon was well pleased,
-and began to count up his profits.  Also he began to drink again.
-
-Then it was that trouble came, as trouble generally does, out of a
-fair-seeming sky.
-
-Half-a-dozen natives had been given up to the missionaries on the far
-side of Malekula, to hand over to the British gunboat _Alligator_, which
-at that time was cruising about the islands, intent on punishing the
-Malekulans for a more than usually atrocious murder of whites.  The
-tribes to whom the culprits belonged had taken fright, and were anxious
-to save themselves at any cost.  The missionaries, when asked by them,
-consented to take charge of the prisoners, but refused to keep them any
-longer than could possibly be helped, since they did not consider
-themselves judges or gaolers. At this point the _Sybil_ turned up, and
-the missionaries, hearing she was bound for Parrot Harbour, where the
-_Alligator_ was certain to call, put the men on board, and engaged Saxon
-to hand them over to the Parrot Harbour mission, receiving from the
-missionaries there the price of their passage, which the man-of-war
-would doubtless refund.
-
-Saxon, understanding that he had not to meet the _Alligator_, undertook
-the job at a rather excessive rate, and brought the prisoners over as
-agreed.  But, finding that the Parrot Harbour mission refused to pay the
-passage money until the man-of-war arrived, he went into a towering rage
-and abused everybody.  Wait for the _Alligator_?  Not he!  He had
-something else to do, and he wouldn't have any condemned gunboat that
-ever sailed the sanguinary waters of the Pacific poking her nose into
-any of his business.  He had been promised the money as soon as he
-arrived, and the money or its equivalent he meant to have or know the
-reason why.  Off he went, with much more whisky in his brain than was
-compatible with sober judgment--off out to sea again, taking with him
-the whole six prisoners, and openly declaring his intention either to
-hold them for ransom or run them down to the Queensland plantations, as
-seemed most convenient.
-
-Next day the _Alligator_ appeared, and her commander was informed of the
-occurrence.  Saxon, master of a miserable labour schooner, had run off
-with prisoners of war belonging to a British gunboat, defied the
-Imperial Government, and offered open disrespect to the Crown! The
-commander, an iron-faced, flinty-eyed disciplinarian of the toughest
-school, and a first-class pepper-pot into the bargain, nearly choked
-with rage and indignation. Out went the _Alligator_ again, full steam
-ahead, making the captain's dainty suite of cabins tremble like an
-ill-set jelly in the stern as the ship forged along at thirteen knots an
-hour, blackening the crystal sky with trails of smoke, and looking
-implacably about for the offending _Sybil_.  That delinquent of the high
-seas was farther off than might have been supposed.  The wind, though
-light, was in her favour, and she had managed to get round the far end
-of the island, and down the other side to Coral Bay, eighty miles off,
-before the _Alligator_ came up with her, late in the afternoon.  Once
-caught, her shrift was short.  The prisoners were at once transferred;
-Saxon was arrested and taken, still half drunk, on board the man-of-war,
-and his ship was confiscated, "just to learn him," as Gray (who had
-viewed his captain's proceedings with sour and silent disapproval
-throughout) was heard to remark, not without a little I-told-you-so
-satisfaction.
-
-And so it came about that Vaiti, returning with the boat from an
-unsuccessful recruiting expedition, and not in the best of humours to
-begin with, was met on her arrival with extremely unpleasant news.
-
-"We're took, cap'n; we're took, ma'am!" shouted Gray over the bulwarks,
-as the boat nosed along the side of the schooner.  He added a rapid
-account of the calamity, in which he was careful to suppress his
-personal feelings of triumph.
-
-The smart young lieutenant who had been left in charge of the ship came
-and looked down at the boat. He wanted to know what sort of person it
-might be who was addressed with this extraordinary hail.  He had been
-under the impression that the "captain" of the _Sybil_ had been left two
-hours ago--sullen, swearing, and not at all sober--in the cells of
-H.M.S. _Alligator_.
-
-What he saw was a red-painted boat, manned by four stalwart native
-seamen, and steered by an extremely handsome, olive-faced young woman,
-who looked up at him with eyes that seemed to dart black lightning under
-their beautifully drawn brows as she listened to the boatswain's story.
-She wore a dainty, lacy white muslin frock, and carried a Winchester
-rifle in her lap.
-
-Second Lieutenant Tempest, who had been cursing his luck up to that
-moment, suddenly became reconciled to the uninteresting job in which he
-was engaged.  It is just conceivable that his commander might have
-selected another officer to perform the duty if he had been aware of its
-possible alleviations; for Mr. Tempest was notoriously given to scrapes
-with a _soup�on_ of petticoat in them, and had already imperilled his
-career more than once after this fashion.  But Commander the Hon.
-Francis St. John Raleigh had not seen "Captain" Vaiti; so he sent Mr.
-Tempest to take possession of the _Sybil_, and slept the sleep of the
-well-conscienced and well-dined, that evening, in his velvet
-armchair....  It might have seemed somewhat less perfectly stuffed to
-him, had his dreams been concerned with what was happening a few hundred
-yards away.
-
-Mr. Tempest, smiling like the godmother beast of his own ship, offered
-his hand to the sullen beauty as she swung herself up the _Sybil's_
-side.  Vaiti tossed it indignantly away, favoured him with another
-black-lightning glance that reduced his susceptible sailor heart to
-pulp, and stalked aft like an offended Cleopatra. Tempest, persistently
-following, poured out explanations, apologies, smiles, consolations,
-promises.  Vaiti began to think that civility might possibly avail her
-something, and began to melt by carefully calculated degrees.  Before
-very long she was sitting on the main hatch, with Tempest beside her,
-holding her hand unreproved and continuing his consolations.  The
-commander was very angry, no doubt, but he was a good sort at bottom,
-and perhaps he would not really seize the ship.  She would be sent to
-Fiji, no doubt, and Saxon might possibly be imprisoned, but it would all
-come out all right, trust him!  And he would take very good care of the
-_Sybil_ and her charming "captain."
-
-Vaiti, still smiling sweetly, dug her nails into wood of the hatch at
-her side.  Underneath all this verbiage she foresaw the reality of
-serious trouble.  Why had her father been such a fool?  What could be
-done to save the ship?  There seemed no way of helping Saxon himself.
-If the commander proved implacable, to prison he must go.  Well, that
-would not break any bones; but the loss of the _Sybil_--if such a
-disaster was indeed possible--must be averted at any cost.  She did not
-believe Mr. Tempest's smiling assertion.  The commander had threatened
-to confiscate the ship, and most probably he would.  At any rate, the
-risk was too great to face.  The schooner must not be taken to Fiji.
-
-The wily brain was hard at work, as she sat on the hatch, listening,
-with a gentle smile and soft, downcast, maidenly eyes, to Tempest's
-love-making, and answering now and then in her pretty Polynesian
-"pigeon-English"--so much simpler and less grotesque than the
-_b�che-de-mer_ talk of the Melanesian Islands....  If he could be got
-out of the way, and the marines suddenly overpowered, the schooner might
-slip off round the corner of the headland in the dark, and get nearly a
-hundred miles away before daylight, with the steady wind that was
-blowing outside the glassy, landlocked harbour of Coral Bay.  There was
-just enough air stirring at this farthest point to allow her to get out,
-and once off, she could show her heels in a way that would astonish even
-a British gunboat.  Of course, the latter would easily overhaul her in
-an open chase, but Vaiti did not propose any such folly.  There was many
-a perilous inlet and passage among those dangerous, ill-surveyed islands
-where the _Sybil_ could safely go, but where the _Alligator_ could not
-venture.  Let them only gain a day, and who was to say whither they had
-flown into the wide wastes of the Pacific?  Once beyond pursuit, paint
-and other disguises would so alter the ship that no one could identify
-her; her name could be changed, and the _Mary Ann_ or the _Nautilus_
-would innocently sail the seas formerly polluted by the presence of the
-naughty _Sybil_....  It was certainly worth trying.
-
-As for Tempest, she had a plan concocted to get rid of him almost as
-soon as the matter entered her mind. She left him, by and by, solacing
-himself with fresh turtle steak and excellent champagne in the cabin for
-the loss of his own dinner, while she went into the bows with Harris and
-Gray, and rapidly explained her plans. The marines had been accommodated
-with eatables and drinkables after their own hearts, on the cover of the
-main hatch, and were too much engaged to notice anything in the thick
-darkness that was now lying heavily on Coral Bay.
-
-Vaiti's plan was simple and effective.  Tempest was to be enticed into
-leaving his duty and going ashore--she would see to that.  Four of the
-New Hebridean crew, stripped of their ship clothes, and attired in their
-aboriginal paint and plumes, were to be concealed on the beach.  They
-would capture him, and carry him off to a bush village near the coast,
-where the people were not ill disposed to the whites, and leave him
-there, scared no doubt, but safe until the morning, when he would be let
-go.  Vaiti would come back to the ship as soon as the capture was
-effected, and the four native sailors would hurry down from the village
-as quickly as possible.  Meantime, it would be easy for Harris to drug
-the marines' drink and make them helpless. They would be set adrift in
-one of the boats, as soon as the schooner was clear of the land, so that
-they should tell no tales.  With good luck, everything should be over,
-and the _Sybil_ far out to sea, in less than a couple of hours.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Of the disgrace of Lieutenant Tempest--of his temptation, his struggle,
-and his fall--there is no need to tell at length.  The decline of a
-British officer from duty and honour--his desertion of a post which
-every professional instinct should have compelled him to keep is not a
-happy subject, as (fortunately) it is not a common one.  Vaiti, in
-brief, invited the officer to leave the ship unguarded, and slip ashore
-with her, to sup at a neighbouring trader's shanty, where she said there
-would be drink and dancing, and every kind of fun.  There was no such
-place, but Tempest did not know that; and if he had known, he might not
-have cared.  Half-crazed with love and champagne, he thought only of the
-beautiful half-caste girl, and was ready to follow her to the mouth of
-hell, if she had asked him.  The dinghy was got out softly and
-cautiously, and, with muffled oars, they slipped away unheard.  So far
-out of his mind was the lieutenant that he did not even note the
-disappearance of his men, who were all lying, very ably and completely
-Shanghai'ed, in the hold.
-
-In less than half an hour Vaiti came back, swimming the stretch of black
-water that lay between the _Sybil_ and the shore, to leave the boat
-ready for the men. Dripping, sparkling, and laughing, she stood up in
-the dim light of the deck lantern and told the mate and boatswain how
-the capture had been managed.  Tempest, with a sack over his head and
-his hands and feet bound to a pole, was at that moment being carried up
-in the dark to the bush village.  The inhabitants of the place were to
-have ten pounds' worth of trade goods promised them to keep him there
-all night and let him escape in the morning, when they themselves would
-go off and hide in the impenetrable forests until the man-of-war had
-sailed away again.  In half an hour or so the four natives would be back
-on board, and they would all sail away round the headland, and leave no
-evidence of any kind to connect the _Sybil_ with this last unpardonable
-outrage; for Tempest could not but suppose that the natives who so
-neatly bagged him as he was philandering along the dark beach with the
-innocent Vaiti were ordinary hill tribesmen.  And, in any case, his
-sacred person would be taken good care of.
-
-"Then he ain't to be damaged, the little darlin'?" inquired Harris.  The
-question was not an idle one. Every one on board the schooner knew that
-Vaiti was capable of ugly things at her worst.
-
-The girl laughed--a low, gurgling laugh.
-
-"No.  No kill him, no hurt him.  I not like," she said, tossing back her
-wet, wavy hair, with a coquettish gesture that told Harris the woman in
-Vaiti was fully awake that night, despite the rough and ready adventure
-on which she was engaged.  Harris was no fool, if he was something
-unsteady in character, and more or less he admired Vaiti himself, which
-tended to sharpen his sight.
-
-"Good job the dandy leftenant _is_ out of the way," he growled as Vaiti
-disappeared into the cabin to change.  "'Twouldn't take much for 'er to
-get fancyin' his silly face, after all, and then the fat would be in the
-fire."
-
-"Well, if you hask me, I don't like none of the 'ole thing from
-beginnin' to hend," declared the bo'sun, jamming a wad of tobacco
-viciously into his pipe.  "Not the keepin' of the bloomin' niggers, not
-again runnin' to Coral Bay, nor again this business.  Wy?  Because I
-don't, and because it make me smell dirty weather. Give us a light."
-
-Overhead the stars in the velvet sky began to twinkle here and there as
-the breeze rose and the clouds melted away.  An odour of hot, wet jungle
-drifted out across the bay from the invisible land, and a locust with a
-rattle exactly like a policeman's whistle burred loudly among the trees.
-It might have been half an hour, and it might have been more, before
-something else became audible--something that sounded like a frightened
-wailing on the shore.
-
-"A--w�!  A--a--w�!"
-
-Vaiti came out of her cabin and stood on deck, listening intently.
-
-The sound went on.
-
-"A--w�!  A--w�!  A--wa--w�!"
-
-Harris, watching Vaiti's face in the light of the lantern, saw it change
-and harden, but she said nothing. There was another sound now--a dinghy
-shoving off from the beach and the rattle of carelessly handled oars.
-
-"What's the ---- fools makin' such a ---- row for?" asked Gray.
-"They'll 'ave the _Halligator_ on to us."
-
-Still Vaiti said nothing, but stood like a statue on the deck, listening
-and looking into the darkness.
-
-The boat rammed the _Sybil_ in another minute with a shock that made her
-quiver, and then drifted aimlessly along her sides.  Three brown naked
-figures lifted up their arms from below, and cried despairingly:
-
-"Kapitani!  Kapitani!  A--w�!  A--w�!"
-
-"Get those fellows on board, too much quick, and bring him cabin,"
-ordered Vaiti.  Harris and Gray hauled them in with small ceremony, and
-dumped them down the companion into the cabin, where they stood in the
-light of the lamp, painted, feather-bedecked creatures, fierce enough in
-appearance, but in reality abjectly frightened and a-shiver.
-
-"What thing you been do?" demanded Vaiti sharply. "Where you make other
-sailor-man?  What you do Tempesi?"
-
-One of the men was beginning his wail again.  She seized him by the
-shoulder, pulled a pistol from among her draperies, and shook it in his
-face.  The man, with a yell of terror, twisted himself out of her hold.
-Harris, who was rather frightened at her demeanour, got him away, forced
-a dram of spirits into his mouth, and tried to extract the terrified
-creature's story from him by degrees.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XVI*
-
-                      *THE FATE OF THE LIEUTENANT*
-
-
-It was not a gratifying tale.  Half a mile from the beach, the captors
-had been overtaken by a party of wild hillmen from Ranaar, one of the
-worst of the inland cannibal towns, and had been set upon fiercely in
-the dark.  Aki, one of their own party, had been clubbed, and his body
-carried off.  The other natives had escaped. As for the lieutenant, the
-Ranaar men had seized on him with cries of joy, exclaiming that now
-indeed they had a chance of "making themselves strong" before all
-Malekula.  Then they had carried him away, slung on a pole between two
-men, and the _Sybil's_ people, half dead with fright, had run down to
-the beach again; and here they were, begging the Kapitani to have mercy
-on them, for indeed it was not their fault, and no one could have known
-that the Ranaar men would venture so near the coast.
-
-Vaiti, Harris, and Gray all looked grave at this recital.  They knew
-only too well what was implied by the phrase "making strong," and what
-virtues the hill tribes of Malekula ascribed to the eating of white
-man's flesh.  The rude play of the capture had turned into most serious
-earnest, and Tempest's life was worth just so many hours as it might
-take the cannibals to reach their mountain stronghold and go through the
-preliminary ceremonies of the feast.  No more.
-
-There was silence for a minute or two, while the schooner rolled gently
-on the swell of the incoming tide, and the smoky kerosene light
-flickered to and fro upon the strange, wild scene: Vaiti's beautiful,
-angry head standing out above the weather-beaten faces of the two
-English sailors, the three naked New Hebrideans, squalid and
-monkey-faced, cowering before her; the remnants of Tempest's dinner,
-some one's greasy pack of cards, and a couple of Saxon's empty whisky
-bottles decorating the table.  The natives were badly frightened still.
-They did not understand that the Kapitani's plans had been entangled
-beyond all hope of setting right by this disaster, or that the
-_Alligator_ must have been alarmed by their noisy return; but Vaiti's
-countenance was enough to warn any one who had ever seen the unpleasant
-things that happened at times on board the _Sybil_ that hurricane
-weather was ahead.  But before she had time to speak again, a loud hail
-from outside made every one look towards the deck.  In another moment
-the first lieutenant of the _Alligator_ had framed his smart white and
-gold personality in the dark oblong of the companion, and demanded,
-loudly, and authoritatively, to know where Mr. Tempest was, where the
-marines were, and what the deuce was the meaning of all this.
-
-Vaiti, motioning aside the mate and bo'sun, swept to the front and spoke
-straight out.
-
-"All your sailor, he too much drunk, sleep 'long hold. Tempesi, he been
-go shore.  Men belong Ranaar, they catch him, take him away.  Pretty dam
-quick they eat him."
-
-"Great Scott!" said the officer.  Facts were falling very thick and
-fast, and there were evidently more facts behind them which for the
-present he felt obliged--most reluctantly--to neglect.  People think
-quickly in the navy, and Lieutenant Darcy realised instantly that this
-strange, wild, handsome creature was speaking the truth, and that it
-must be acted on without delay.
-
-He stepped out on deck, and gave certain orders to his men.  A sharp
-little midshipman and half the boat's crew followed him on board, and
-planted themselves about the ship.  The rest remained in the boat.
-
-"This officer will stay here and take charge, and you will come with me
-to the _Alligator_," said the lieutenant, addressing Vaiti.
-
-"Yes, I speak captain.  Very good you let me see him quick," said the
-girl imperiously; and the lieutenant, guessing that there was more still
-to be told, hurried the boat away.
-
-He delivered his report to the commander, and concluded by saying that
-the girl was in waiting, and had, in his opinion, something more to say
-about the matter.
-
-"Bring her in," said the commander shortly.  The gravity of the affair
-had darkened his face a trifle, but he made no comment.  It was not a
-time for talk.
-
-Vaiti entered with the light step and carriage of the woman who wears
-neither shoes nor stays, and stood silently before the commander, fixing
-his hard grey eyes with her inscrutable dark stare.
-
-"You can sit down," said the officer.  "I want to ask you some
-questions."
-
-Vaiti drew herself up a little higher.
-
-"No time for sit," she said curtly.  "Suppose you no want Tempesi ki-ki
-[eaten] pretty quick, you listen me."
-
-"Young woman!" began Commander the Hon. Francis St. John Raleigh
-sternly.
-
-"I tell you, no time talk!" interrupted Vaiti.  "I savvy all right you
-very big sea-chief; I savvy my father been made bad work, made bad work
-myself. Let him go all-a-same that; by-'n-by we talk those thing.  Now
-you listen me."
-
-"All right; sit down," said the officer in a more conciliatory tone.
-Vaiti sat, and leaning across the table with her chin in one slender
-hand, and her eyes blazing out from under the mass of damp waves on her
-forehead, she said her say.
-
-"You no savvy Malekula man; I savvy plenty. Suppose you do what I
-telling you, Tempesi he come back, I think.  Suppose not, Tempesi he
-eat.  Ranaar, he ten, eleven mile up 'long bush, plenty bad way. You
-take some sailor; he go too much sof', too much quiet, all-a-same cat.
-Time we coming along Ranaar, one half-mile, sailor he all stop.  I go
-myself Ranaar. Maybe I get Tempesi; we coming back to sailor, go home
-all right."
-
-"Oh, nonsense! how are you going to get him, if the men can't?" demanded
-the commander.  He saw that he had a remarkable personality to deal with
-in this strange half-caste beauty, but he did not comprehend her very
-clearly, and he thought she was "gassing" a little.
-
-Vaiti frowned.
-
-"I tell you, you no savvy Malekula," she said scornfully. "Sailor belong
-you, all the man hear him when he walk 'long bush.  Ranaar man he hear;
-he run away."
-
-"Well, so long as we rescue Mr. Tempest----"
-
-"No you talk, I say; you listen, you Kapitani with um wooden face!" spat
-Vaiti.
-
-The lieutenant turned his head away, and choked a little in his
-pocket-handkerchief.  The commander stared, then burst out laughing.
-
-"Go on, you she-cat," he said.
-
-"Ranaar man he run away; very good.  He leave Tempesi; very good.  No
-want Tempesi tell some tale, so he leave him dead.  Break him head, all
-same pig, very quick, then run away.  Now what you think?"
-
-"I think you are a very plucky young lady, and that you have something
-more to say about it," replied the commander politely.
-
-"Very good.  Suppose I going 'long bush; savvy plenty the way.  I been
-'long Ranaar recruit; savvy all-a-road.  No walking all same white man,
-walking all same one snake, all same one mice.  No white man he walk
-that way.  I come up Ranaar, all-a-dark, I stop 'long one small place;
-see the man he dance, he sing, he make ki-ki.  Bushman, he plenty
-frighten something he no savvy.  Savvy gun, dynamite, but no savvy big
-blue-light signal thing you got 'long ship. I take one, two blue-light
-thing; I throw.  Bushman he think one big devil stop, no think
-man-of-war come; run away too much dam quick, not stop kill Tempesi.
-By'n-by he coming back, but I cut rope before he come. I bring Tempesi
-'long me, 'long sailor-man; we go back quick.  Tempesi all right.
-Savvy?"
-
-"Yes, I do savvy; seems a neat plan, on the whole. But what's going to
-happen to you if they catch you?"
-
-"Eat," said Vaiti succinctly.  "Now you listen me. I no do all this
-thing for nothing, see?"
-
-"H'm; yes, I do see.  How much do you want?"
-
-"Two thing," said Vaiti, eyeing him narrowly. "One.  My father say he
-plenty sorry, no do any more bad thing.  You let him go, let schooner
-go."
-
-"Well--yes, I'll promise that," answered the commander rather stiffly.
-The girl was taking her life in her hand to serve the interests of the
-British Crown, and it was not a time to stick at trifles, or, indeed,
-larger things.
-
-"Two," went on Vaiti.  "Tempesi he seen leave ship, go 'long shore with
-me.  You tell him all right, you no punish."
-
-"Oh, by Jove! that's too much," snapped out the commander.  "No,
-Miss--Miss What's-your-name, I can't promise any such thing.  I can't
-have you or any one else interfering with the discipline of my ship. Mr.
-Tempest's conduct is a very serious matter, and he must take the
-consequences, by Gad he must, if he comes back alive to take them."
-
-Vaiti had had a good deal to do with men-of-war, and their officers,
-during the course of the schooner's many wanderings.  She did not need
-to be told that Tempest's career might be ended, and his life disgraced,
-if naval justice took its course.  A few hours ago she would not have
-cared.  But Mr. Tempest, like all men notorious for getting into scrapes
-with a petticoat at the bottom of them, had a "way with him," and it
-happened to be a way that appealed to this daughter of the Islands more
-than she would have cared to allow. Besides, it was not her custom to
-give in to a defeat.
-
-"All right," she said calmly.  "I savvy all thing about Englis' officer.
-Tempesi he no like court-mars'al, make break, make longshoreman, all the
-people laugh. Tempesi, he like die, I think.  All right.  I let him.
-Good night."
-
-The commander held out his hand.
-
-"Good night," he said politely.  "Mr. Darcy, you will see about getting
-a native guide who can show the way to Ranaar, at once.  We will do our
-best to surprise them."
-
-A low, sarcastic laugh came from Vaiti.
-
-"You wooden-faced Kapitani, you think you savvy Malekula!" she said.
-"Where you get guide?"
-
-Mr. Darcy did know a little about the New Hebrides, and he saw that they
-were beaten.
-
-"She's right, sir," he said.  "Take my word for it, no native would dare
-to guide you.  There's no mission here; they're a very bad lot, and all
-at war."
-
-It was a bitter moment for the commander, but he surrendered like a
-gentleman.
-
-"You've got the best of me, Miss--Miss Saxon," he said.  "Very well.
-You have my promise. Mr. Tempest shall be pardoned, if we get him back
-alive. You know nothing about this matter, you will remember, Mr. Darcy.
-Miss Saxon, you're a very brave young lady, and I wish I had met you in
-circumstances of which I could more honestly approve."
-
-"No one need tell me," he said afterwards, "that that old vagabond we
-had in the cells wasn't a gentleman once.  It comes out in the girl;
-blood will tell, even in a half-caste.  But Providence ought rightly to
-have a down on the man who is responsible for any one of them, for there
-seems no right place for them, either in heaven or earth."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Neither the bluejackets of the _Alligator_, nor the officer appointed to
-command the column, ever forgot that night's march through the mountain
-bush of Malekula.  The air was like hot water, and not a breath of wind
-was stirring.  The track was but a few inches wide, and as slippery as
-butter, so that the men slid and fell continually when struggling up the
-endless sides of the innumerable gullies.  Mosquitoes settled in
-bloodthirsty hordes upon their faces and hands, roots tripped them up,
-saw-edged reeds slapped them in the eyes, and thorny tangles of
-bush-lawyers fished for and successfully hooked them.  At any moment a
-huge soft-nosed bullet, cruel as a shell, might come singing out of the
-darkness; or a poisoned arrow, freighted with sure and agonising death,
-might whirr across their path.  When the officer in command, irritated
-by the stumbling and falling of the men, ordered them to remove their
-boots and march barefoot, Vaiti told him that nothing of the kind must
-be done, for poisoned spear-heads were in all probability set here and
-there in unsuspected places, ready to pierce the unwary foot. She
-herself seemed invulnerable and untiring; she led the column at a pace
-that caused more than one to fall out, and never hesitated nor faltered
-through all the three hours of the worst and most intricate march that
-the _Alligator_ men had ever known.
-
-At last she told the officer to call a halt, and on no account to make
-the slightest noise or advance his men until he should see a blue light
-burning about half a mile ahead.  Then she vanished into the darkness,
-lithe and noiseless as a lizard, and silence, dead and oppressive,
-settled down upon the bush.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Lieutenant Tempest was a man and a British sailor, and he was not afraid
-of death.  But he thought there might be pleasanter ways of dying than
-that which actually stared him in the face.
-
-Memory plays strange tricks when the dark is closing down about her
-doors.  Lying there on the damp earth, bound hand and foot to a pole,
-with the hideous howls of the cannibal dancers in his ears and the glare
-of the cooking-pits in his eyes.  Tempest could think of nothing but a
-fragment of verse out of a half-forgotten poem read somewhere long ago:
-
-    "It isn't the fact that you're dead that counts.
-    But only--how did you die?"
-
-
-How was he dying?  Not as an English officer might gladly die in the
-cause of his country and in loyal obedience to orders.  Not even as a
-man, with a sword in his hand, facing the foe.  He was dying an
-unfaithful servant, false to his trust, and suffering because of that
-falseness, as a slaughtered brute struck down with a club like a
-bullock, and afterwards....
-
-The red remains of the luckless Aki, jointed and piled in a ghastly
-heap, told the rest.
-
-Tempest did not look at that ugly pile any more than he could help.  He
-wanted all the nerve he could muster for he was haunted by a deadly fear
-that he might cry out for mercy when it came to the last, and he did not
-want to add cowardice to the tale of his many shortcomings.  If he could
-have died here as a prisoner of war--as a captured scout, a fighting
-enemy, taken in a skirmish--the death, hideous as it was, would have
-been honourable, and his pride of country would have upheld him.  But it
-seemed as if his courage had nothing to stand on now, and he was
-almost--almost, but, thank God! not quite--afraid.
-
-The Malekulans had been dancing for full two hours, ever since they had
-brought him to the valley and flung him down upon the ground.  In the
-middle of the open village square were three huge idols, carved out of
-entire tree-trunks set upright.  They had black, empty sockets for eyes;
-their mouths were curved upwards into a ghastly wrinkled grin, and their
-tongues hung mockingly out.  On the head of each was perched a huge
-black wooden bird, with beak bent down and gloomy wings outspread--the
-very spirit of Nightmare herself. Round and round these devilish things,
-in the red glow of the fires, danced the cannibals ceaselessly and
-untiringly, fleeing with heads down and outspread hands, wheeling and
-turning, circling with measured steps; and all the time the huge hollow
-idols, beaten with heavy clubs "to make the spirits speak," thundered
-death and doom.  It was plainly a religious ceremony which must be fully
-enacted down to the last detail; but Tempest thought, as clearly as he
-could think in such a place and at such a time, that it could not last
-much longer.
-
-"A fellow ought to say his prayers," he thought; but the thunder of the
-drums and the wild, shrieking song of the dancers bewildered him, and
-his swollen wrists and ankles hurt him so much as almost to confuse his
-mind....  What could he say?  Only one prayer remained clear in the
-turmoil of his brain--just the old, old prayer that he had prayed at his
-mother's knee.  Well, it would serve--and up above he hoped they'd
-understand how sorry he was ... for lots of things....
-
-"Our Father Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name.  Thy kingdom
-come...."
-
-It was coming, indeed!  The dance had stopped.
-
-"Thy will be done...."
-
-What came next?  He could not remember--and the savages were advancing
-across the square.
-
-"Forgive us our trespasses ... and lead us not into temptation, but
-deliver us from evil...."
-
-It was _now_!  The women were hiding themselves in the houses, and two
-of the men, armed with clubs, were stepping forward.
-
-He was only conscious of one feeling--joy that he had the courage to
-look the cannibals in the face as they advanced, and meet his fate
-"game."  He hardly knew that he was still praying--
-
-"... For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory...."
-
-Death!
-
-It came with a blaze of light--a sound as of a wild, deep shout and the
-rushing of many waters--then----
-
-Was this the end?  Was it indeed death?  He had felt nothing--but a man
-does not feel the blow that kills--and his eyes were so dazzled with a
-strange, blue glory that he could not see....  The rushing sound
-continued; it was like the thunder of hundreds of flying feet....  The
-light burst forth again, and yet again, and then died away, and there
-was a great silence.  Tempest saw the hideous faces of the idols
-standing out in the empty square, and began to understand.  He was not
-dead--but something had happened.  What was it?  He tried to break loose
-and sit up so as to see all round.
-
-"Stop um little bit," said a voice, and some one drew a sharp knife
-across the lashings that bound his limbs, and lifted him into a sitting
-position.
-
-The blinding light had almost died away now, and he could see the whole
-square.  There was no one in it. The cannibals were gone, and the
-beautiful half-caste girl who had brought about his
-downfall--innocently, as Tempest of course supposed--was squatting
-beside him and putting a flask to his lips.
-
-"Drink a little bit whisky," she said.  "Good whisky; he make strong.
-No good stop here, you Belitani sailor-man; more better we go away too
-much quick."
-
-The spirit cleared Tempest's head and put some life into his limbs.
-Vaiti poked him unceremoniously in the ribs as soon as she saw that he
-was reviving.
-
-"Show um leg there, lively!" she ordered, dragging him by the arms.
-Rather to his surprise, Tempest found that he could walk, once on his
-feet.  He wasted no time in getting away, after Vaiti's brief
-explanation of the blue-light stratagem, and the probable return of his
-enemies before very long.  At something as near a run as his cramped
-limbs would allow, he followed her down the pathway that led away from
-the village--narrow, wet, and dark as a wolf's gullet--and into the
-comparative security of the bush, towards the advancing relief column
-from the _Alligator_.
-
-It would have been no more than fitting if Vaiti, like a true heroine of
-romance, had vanished silently into the forest when they encountered the
-man-of-war's men, leaving Tempest to "turn to thank his preserver," and
-"find that she had disappeared."  But Vaiti, as it happened, was born
-under the Southern Cross, where the poetry of the footlights does not
-flourish. So she gave the men her company on the way down as a matter of
-course, asked the officer in command for a cigar, smoked it and accepted
-half a dozen more out of his case, and made herself wonderfully
-pleasant--for Vaiti.  She had further driven Tempest to distraction by
-starting a flirtation with a handsome petty officer, eaten up two
-emergency rations, "borrowed" some one's gold tie-pin, and very soundly
-boxed the ears of a leading seaman who tried to kiss her in the dark,
-before the long roll of the surf on the barrier reef, and the welcome
-glimmer of the _Alligator's_ riding lights, told the tired-out party
-that they were safe back again. Then, like the mysterious heroine, at
-last she disappeared, and slipped off to the _Sybil_ in a native canoe,
-for the reason that she did not want to be seen on board the man-of-war
-in a very untidy and dirty dress, without any flowers in her hair, or
-fresh scent on her laces. Tempest had found time to "thank his
-preserver" on the way down, haltingly enough; but the preserver, instead
-of accepting his thanks after the fashion he would have preferred, had
-laughed wildly and somewhat wickedly, and gone on walking right in the
-middle of the column, without a glance to spare for him.... Still--he
-thought he knew women--and....  Time would show.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-The rest of the wardroom did not envy Mr. Tempest his interview with the
-commander.  It took place immediately after his return to the ship, and
-he came out from it with a countenance of entire inexpressiveness and
-extreme whiteness.  One sentence--the last--was unavoidably heard by the
-lieutenant who followed immediately after Tempest, to deliver his
-report.
-
-"Finally, Mr. Tempest--this Miss--a--Saxon--has risked her life to save
-your life and reputation.  I think there is only one way in which you
-can repay her--by never seeing her again."
-
-Tempest's answer was inaudible.  But--he never did.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XVII*
-
-                          *INVADERS IN TANNA*
-
-
-"What a beautiful girl!  Is she one of the heathens, I wonder?" said
-Lady Victoria Jenkins, leaning on the rail of her yacht.
-
-The _Alcyone_ floated on a sea of living silver.  The coral reefs forty
-feet before her keel showed like a pavement of pale turquoise in the
-searching splendour of the tropic moon.  Close at hand loomed the dark
-woods and cliffs of Tanna, and above them, blotting out half the crystal
-broidery of the stars, rose the cone of the great volcano, crowned by a
-canopy of fire.  So, in the days of Bougainville and of Cook, stood this
-southward sentinel of the wild New Hebrides, a pillar of cloud by day
-and a pillar of fire by night.  So it stands yet, its deathless fires
-unquenched, its awful voice breaking the forest silences hour by
-hour--as the dead and gone discoverers of these distant lands saw and
-heard it long ago, and as those who follow us will find it in the days
-to come, when we and our thoughts and hopes, and adventures and loves
-are but a whisper in the homeless winds and a handful of dust blowing
-about on long-forgotten graves.
-
-There are few volcanoes in the southern hemisphere more famous, and none
-less frequently visited, than the fiery cone of Tanna.  The island lies
-thousands of miles away from everywhere, and the inhabitants are known
-to be almost all heathen, cannibal, and hostile to whites, although the
-expression of their hostility has been kept considerably in check of
-late years.  But Lady Victoria Jenkins, daughter of the late Earl of
-Wessex, and wife of Mr. Abel Jenkins ("Jenkins's Perfect Pills"), is
-well known as a romanticist and a lover of all things unusual and
-strange.  Mr. Abel Jenkins's income is only exceeded by that of two
-other commoners in England, and Mr. Abel Jenkins's ugliness and
-ill-temper are not exceeded by the ugliness and ill-temper of any one
-known to polite society.  If the reader will piece these detached facts
-together, and consider them, he will readily understand why Lady
-Victoria was enjoying a tour round the world in her celebrated
-steam-yacht, the _Alcyone_, why she had come to look at Tanna, and why,
-including a good deal of miscellaneous company, the travelling party
-somehow was not miscellaneous enough to include Lady Victoria's husband.
-
-The yacht had come in that afternoon after a somewhat stormy voyage from
-Sydney ("They call it the Pacific Ocean," said Lady Victoria
-plaintively, "instead of which, I have not really enjoyed a meal since
-we cleared the Heads"), and had instantly, by the mere fact of her
-dropping anchor in Sulphur Bay, denuded the whole seaboard of its
-population.  This was because the conscience of Tanna is never quite
-clear, and the Tannese, struck by the conviction of sin, thought the
-_Alcyone_ was a man-of-war.  Only two kinds of ships were known to the
-islands, outside trading schooners: British and French warships, and the
-lazy little monthly steamers from Sydney, which strolled round the group
-once a month, picking up copra, and conveying missionaries and traders
-about.  The _Alcyone_ was not a schooner; she was certainly not the
-well-known "B.P." steamer; therefore she must be some new variety of
-man-of-war. As it happened, there was a little matter of a murdered
-trader on the conscience of Tanna just at that time--he had been very
-annoying, but a British man-of-war is prejudiced about these affairs.
-So the Tannese of the coast, like the modest violet of the poem,
-concealed their drooping heads in the shady vales of the interior, and
-coyly hid from view.  Like the modest violet, too--only with a
-difference--you might, if you wished, have located them by their----
-But no; this is a polite history, and the Tannese are a very impolite
-people.  Let us change carriages.
-
-Vaiti and her father, who had come up from Queensland with an empty ship
-and a full money-bag, and were just starting a fresh recruiting trip,
-regarded the appearance of the yacht with hearty disgust.  What were the
-good old islands coming to if this sort of thing was to be permitted?
-Not a bushman would come near the beach as long as the _Alcyone_ stayed,
-and the sprinkling of mission natives who were not afraid of the yacht
-were worse than useless, for they neither recruited nor encouraged their
-heathen friends to do so. Besides, the airs and graces of the _Alcyone_
-were sickening. Late dinner with low dresses and jewels; piano tinkling
-all the evening; clothes that looked as if they had been run hot on to
-the wearers, as icing is run on to a cake; sparkling glass and brasswork
-all over the ship, and dainty brass signal cannons, pretty as toys, and
-a little funnel all cream-colour and blue, and great sails white as
-trade-wind clouds, and a hull that sat the water like a beautiful
-sea-bird settled down to rest--all these unnecessary and disgusting
-affectations made a smart schooner like the _Sybil_ look no better than
-a mud-scow in a marsh, for all that she was the beauty of the South Seas
-and the most famous ocean adventuress from 'Frisco to Hobart Town.
-Besides, Saxon would not stir out of his cabin while the yacht was
-there, having developed the lumbago that always attacked him whenever
-English society folk loomed on the horizon--Vaiti knew that
-lumbago!--and he might really have been of use about Sulphur Bay, where,
-for a wonder, no one had any old scores against him.
-
-It was all most abominable, thought the "Kapitani," and she cast an
-unfriendly glance on the luxurious _Alcyone_, as her boat shot past the
-yacht in the moonlight, returning from a fruitless hunt along the coast
-for any stray bushman who might have heard the recruiting signal--a
-stick or two of dynamite set afloat on a board and exploded--and come
-down to the coast.
-
-Lady Victoria's comment on the "beautiful girl" did not soften her in
-the least, coupled as it was with the unspeakable assumption that she
-was "a heathen."  Probably she was, in one sense, having long ago given
-up all but the merest rags of religion, but it was not the accusation of
-moral deficiencies that galled her: it was the idea that she, Vaiti,
-daughter of a great Polynesian princess and a white sea-captain, should
-have been "evened" to the black, monkey-like, naked hags of Tanna.  The
-resentful spirit of the half-caste burned hot within her as she steered
-the boat through the moonlit water.  She could see Lady Victoria and her
-friends, a brilliant flower-show of coloured dresses and sparkling gems,
-leaning over the rail, and watching her as impersonally as if she were a
-porpoise or a shark.  She could catch their comments, loudly and
-carelessly spoken.
-
-"I suppose she is one of them.  But she looks quite nice.  See her
-pretty dress.  She is quite decently clothed, isn't she?"
-
-"I wonder is she a cannibal?  She does not look dangerous.  I would like
-to ask her on board, and give her some tea and cake, and things of that
-kind, and talk to her.  Just to try and reform her from their own
-horrible food, you know," said Lady Victoria angelically.
-
-"That would be so dear of you," chimed in her special sycophant and
-foil, a plain and elderly young woman who knew when her bread was
-buttered on both sides, and why.
-
-But here the rowers--urged by a signal from Vaiti who thought she had
-heard about as much as she could stand without exploding--gave way
-vigorously, and pulled the boat out of earshot.
-
-That was not a happy evening for any one on board the _Sybil_.  Vaiti
-would not give out any grog for supper though it was a settled custom on
-the ship; would not have singing in the cabin, gloomed like a hurricane
-sky over the mate and boatswain's sociable game of cards until Gray, out
-of pure nervousness, dropped a greasy ace upon his knee, and was
-thereupon accused by Harris of cheating, and coarsely threatened by him
-with an operation usually confined to sufferers from appendicitis. At
-this Vaiti rose and walked out of the cabin with the air of a
-convent-bred princess who had never so much as heard a jibbing donkey
-"confounded"; and went to sit on deck near the wheel, where she stayed
-so long, smoking so many thin black cigars, that every one but the night
-watchman turned in and left her, and only the dead, dark hour of two
-o'clock, when the spongy heat of the island night stiffens for a while
-into fever-bringing chill, shook her out of her sulks and into her
-cabin.
-
-When Vaiti sulked it was usually observed that things happened before
-very long.  But on this occasion the exception seemed to rule.  The
-disgusting yacht stayed all the next day, and the _Sybil_ lay quietly at
-anchor on the other side of the bay.  Some of the yacht people went
-ashore in the afternoon, and roamed timorously about the beach,
-wondering at the hot springs and tasting everything in the way of fruit
-they happened to see. (It was nearly all inedible, but none of it, by a
-fortunate chance, happened to be poisonous.)  Lady Victoria was
-disappointed with her day on the whole.  The natives from the mission,
-who had officiously attended them all day long, were unromantically
-clothed, clean, and English-speaking.  The wild savages did not appear;
-and there were one or two other mishaps of an entirely unromantic kind.
-
-"How did you enjoy it, darling?" asked the plain young woman of Lady
-Victoria, when the daring pioneers returned.
-
-Mr. Jenkins's partner shook out her soiled tussore silk disgustedly.
-
-"It was untidy and ugly and nasty," she declared; "and when I sat down
-under a great pineapple tree all covered with fruit, and said that I was
-realising one of my dreams, Jack de Coverley laughed at me, and said it
-was only a pandamn-us, or something else profane, and that pineapples
-grew on the ground.  And when we started to walk among the palms, and I
-was saying that I had always dreamed of wandering softly by a coral
-strand and seeing the cocoanuts drop into my hands, something as big as
-a horse's head suddenly thundered down like a bombshell from a hundred
-feet high, and buried itself in the sand at my feet with such a fearful
-shock that I jumped a yard away and screamed like anything!  So then the
-missionary came out, and said he wondered I wasn't killed; and if you'll
-believe me, it was nothing but a horrible nut!  And the coral strand was
-pretty enough, all over little bits of branching coral stuff; but why
-doesn't anyone ever tell you that coral strands burn all the skin off
-your nose and blacken you into a nigger?  We're going up the volcano
-tomorrow--the missionary says it's quite safe--and I'm sure I hope it's
-true, but one never knows.  Darling, if I die, see that the new
-Lafayette photo is sent to the papers--not on any account the other; and
-I like Latin crosses on graves, I think; Carrara marble, very thick, and
-just one short text, something nice, like 'They were lovely and pleasant
-in their lives'--you know."
-
-... "'And in death they were not divided,'" finished the plain young
-woman with mechanical piety.... "Darling! dearest! what have I said?
-What is the matter?"
-
-"Now you _have_ done it!" roared Mr. de Coverley, who was rather a
-well-bred, but sometimes rather a vulgar young man.  "Not divided!  Oh,
-great Scott! Oh, my eye!  Oh, I'll die of laughing!  Hold me up! Never
-mind, Vic; I'll see you aren't divided, or cooked either--trust to me!"
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Vaiti was still in a speechless state of sulks when she started off the
-next morning into the interior, to recruit on her own account.  It was
-not a very safe thing to do, but the bushmen would not come down to the
-coast, and the _Sybil_ could not hang out indefinitely, since the
-doubtful character of her methods had given the French and English
-Commissioners of the islands a nasty habit of asking questions about
-her.  Saxon, who had relinquished his lumbago to go off into the hills
-at a safe distance from the yacht, wanted to make his daughter accompany
-him; but Vaiti simply laughed at him, and departed with a guide seduced
-from the mission towards a village lying a mile or two above the
-volcano.  She preferred the glory of working on her own account, and
-besides, it doubled the chances of recruits.
-
-She knew the Tannese nature well, so she dressed herself for her part in
-a robe of scarlet sateen, with liberal necklaces of different coloured
-trade beads, and stuck a couple of tomahawks in her sash, besides an
-ornamented sheath-knife.  Across her splendid young bosom she slung an
-incongruous-looking bandolier of cartridges, designed apparently for the
-slaughter of elephants; and a smart magazine rifle, carried over her
-shoulder, completed the outfit.  All these valuables, though designed to
-assist her plans by suggesting the enormous store of desirable goods
-possessed by the recruiters, were almost as likely to assist her to a
-sudden and unprovided end, by reason of the natives' covetousness. She
-took her chance of this, however; Vaiti was used to taking chances.  It
-is easier than most people suppose to take the risk of being killed
-every day of your life.  In the strange places of the earth, where such
-things are a common happening, men do not look upon the inevitable end
-after the pursy, secretive, never-mention-it fashion of Peckham and
-Brixton.  Death is just death in the earth's wild places--yours to-day,
-mine to-morrow--a thing to walk with shoulder to shoulder, to meet face
-to face at noonday; in any case, to make no bones of it until it makes
-bones of you; and after that circumstances will keep you from
-complaining if you feel like it.
-
-It was a long, hot walk up to the village.  A "walk" is mostly a
-scramble about the uncleared New Hebrides, where roads are mere
-foot-wide cracks and canyons in the dense forest growth, and level
-ground apparently does not exist.  Besides, a bandolier of cartridges
-and an assortment of small arms are rather heavy jewellery for such a
-climate.  Vaiti, however, possessed the enviable gift of never looking,
-or apparently feeling, hot or tired; and she swung along at an unvarying
-pace that caused the unlawfully enticed mission native, who had waxed
-fat and lazy, to regret his enticement and wish himself back in the
-mission school writing copies, instead of slaving up and down
-precipitous gullies in the rear of a woman-devil who did not know what
-it was to want a rest.
-
-At long last, however, the reedwork fence of the village came in sight,
-and they entered the open square, shaded by an immense banyan tree and
-surrounded by low, ugly huts, all roof and no wall, like all the
-mountain villages of Tanna.  There were sentries perched up in the trees
-outside the gate, and others squatted on the ground at every entrance,
-their rifles ready in the crook of the elbow.  Within, the dusty
-tan-coloured square, quivering under the pitiless fire of the white-hot
-sky, was all alive with moving figures--ugly women in brief grass skirts
-humped out into swaying bustles; young boys with murderous little faces,
-and full-sized rifles; wild-looking men, with thick hair twined into
-myriads of tiny strings ending in a great bush on the shoulders, stripes
-of scarlet paint on their faces, and no clothing save their native
-impudence and a cartridge belt--all seething about in a very bee-hive of
-excitement and alarm.  As for the rifle-barrels, they were bobbing about
-like piano-jumpers all over the square, and every weapon was cocked and
-loaded.
-
-Vaiti saw at a glance that they were expecting an attack, and picking
-out a native who could speak English, asked what the trouble was.  The
-man replied that they feared the little man-of-war down below, but that
-they were entirely innocent.  Questioned further, they said na�vely that
-they had never eaten a white man, and that none of them were low
-cannibals in any case.  Vaiti, who had not heard of this little affair
-before, saw her chance.
-
-"No good you speak alonga that fellow way," she said, using the
-_b�che-de-mer_ talk that some of the Tannese understood; for Vaiti, like
-many half-castes, could handle almost any dialect or corruption of a
-dialect, though she could not speak decent English or French. "I savvy
-plenty, you eatum one fellow white man. By'n by, big fellow man-of-war
-come, shoot you all-a-same one pig, all-a-same one blind box [flying
-fox], burn altogether house belong you.  Very good you come alonga Saxon
-ship, go Queensland; then you all right."
-
-"No eatum," persisted the man (who was the professional talking-man or
-orator of the village), with a coy smile.
-
-Vaiti's nose was keen, and she had already guessed something by its aid.
-She marched straight across the square into a little yam-house, and
-pointed to a small parcel done up in green banana-leaf and tied with
-cocoanut sinnet.  Five toes and an instep protruded from one end.  The
-game had been well hung, as the Tannaman likes it to be, and there was
-no mistaking the fact of its presence in any sense.
-
-The talking-man giggled like a school-girl caught consuming
-surreptitious chocolates.
-
-"Eatum jus' little-fellow bit," he allowed, with a bad-child chuckle.
-The other men took up the laugh, and the village resounded with a roar
-like the bellowing of a herd of bulls.
-
-Vaiti, seeing her advantage, stepped out into the square and began to
-talk, marching to and fro in Tannese fashion as she spoke.  The sun cast
-dancing spangles on her many-coloured beads as she moved, and threw back
-darts of fire from her heavy bandolier.  One arm emphasised her remarks
-with sweeping gesture; in the other the tall rifle pounded the earth
-with its stock, marking the points of her discourse.  The fat, stolid
-mission native watched her with staring eyes and open mouth, and the
-chiefs gloomed at her under sullen savage brows, evidently impressed,
-but restive.
-
-The sum of her discourse was that they and their women would do well to
-come down with her to the schooner, recruit at once, and fly to a land
-of safety where men-of-war never came, where Tanna people reclined all
-day under the shade of banyan and banana, picked a little cane for their
-employers occasionally, lived upon tinned meat and sugared tea, and
-eventually returned loaded with riches in the shape of rifles,
-cartridges, cotton, and knives.  There was a good deal more of the same
-highly-coloured stuff.  This was old business to the people of the
-_Sybil_.
-
-The talking-man, also strutting backwards and forwards, Tanna fashion,
-in a kind of continual country dance with the glittering vision from the
-ship, answered now and then.  It was very well to talk about recruiting,
-and perhaps some of them might go if they got lots of tinned salmon and
-"bisketti" to eat before they went on board, and promise of rifles to be
-paid the tribe when the bargain was complete.  But they did not believe
-that the new ship was not a little man-of war, and until she was gone
-they would not go down to the coast--no, not even to bathe, although
-they had all decided to have a bath soon, for the weather was hot and
-their skins were like the bark of trees, and it was now about ten moons
-since they had had their last bath.
-
-At this Vaiti's eyes lit up, for she suddenly saw a plan, a plan which
-might give her a score of recruits, drive the objectionable yacht out of
-Sulphur Bay, and pay off every rankling insult inflicted by the
-_Alcyone_ and her people.  But the savages were watching her, so she
-veiled her eyes with her long lashes, and replied carelessly:
-
-"All that very good.  To-morrow, small-fellow man-of-war he go 'way;
-then you coming longa schooner. To-day, what name [why?] you no go wash
-big water 'long place one-fellow-fire stop?  Very good place that.
-Suppose you going, I come up from schooner, bring plenty-plenty tucker.
-Plenty-plenty bulimacow [beef], bisketti, tucker belong white man, cost
-ten rifle.  All the Tannaman he eat; by'n-by he stop lie down, he break,
-so much he eat."
-
-This tempting picture had its effect, backed up by a few presents of
-beads and cartridges.  The Tannamen agreed that the plain below the
-burning mountain, where a wide, stagnant lake spread out its dull
-expanse, would do for a bathing place, short of the impossible shore,
-and they chuckled with joyous anticipation of the feast.  They also
-agreed, rather doubtfully, to embark as soon as the "man-of-war" was
-gone; and it seemed evident that a fair number would at least come down
-and negotiate on board the schooner after which--well, the _Sybil's_
-smart heels would do the rest.
-
-
-
-
-                            *CHAPTER XVIII*
-
-                           *A CANNIBAL PARTY*
-
-
-Vaiti went off to get ready the feast, telling the natives that they
-might follow her before long, as everything would be ready soon; and
-they might trust her, the great Kapitani, that it would be a feast such
-as no Tannaman, not even of those who had served in Queensland, had ever
-witnessed in his wildest dreams.
-
-The mission native being a rather weak-kneed convert, and anxious to
-enjoy a good heathen gossip with his old companions, wanted very much to
-stay on in the village. But that was just what Vaiti did not want, so
-she drove him out in front of her like a fat and nervous sheep,
-hastening his movements all the way down with occasional reminders from
-the butt of her rifle.  He had given her certain information about a
-picnic at the foot of the volcano, arranged by the people of the yacht
-for that afternoon, and she did not want him to share his news with the
-men of the village and cause them, perhaps, to put two and two together
-where he himself had failed to do so.  She despatched him therefore to
-his own town on the coast, and saw that he went, before herself turning
-off in the direction of the track that led to the volcano.
-
-Near to the lake there lies a curious little valley with a soft, clean
-flooring of black volcanic sand and sheltering walls of green pandanus.
-Here, shaded from the burning heat, yet close to the volcano plain, was
-the only possible place for the picnickers to enjoy their meal.  Beyond
-lay only a lurid plateau of red and yellow lava beds, curdled and coiled
-as they had flowed down from the crater lip long ago; a desert of black
-ash and sand, and a dark, wicked, smoking, rumbling cone in the centre
-of all.  Not a native would have climbed the cone for all the goods in
-the _Sybil's_ hold; it was the mouth of hell, they said, and full of
-devils of every kind. But they were not afraid of the valley below,
-within safe limits, and even if they had been, the feast and the bathe
-after it were attractive enough to conquer a little nervousness.
-
-As Vaiti had anticipated, there were several picnic baskets stowed under
-a tree in the valley, and a big wine hamper as well.  Four mission
-natives, who had acted as guides and carried up the provisions, were
-lying on their stomachs in the shade, smoking and talking.
-
-It was essential to get them out of the way, and time was short.  Vaiti
-did not waste any unnecessary words. She simply pointed her rifle at the
-men and told them to clear.  They cleared, howling, and she was left
-alone.
-
-With quick, neat hands she unpacked the hampers, spread the cloth, and
-laid out the food.  It was a goodly display--hams and tongues and fowls,
-cold meats, pies, cakes, tarts, fruits, and tinned dainties of every
-kind. There was plenty of champagne, also a supply of whisky and soda.
-She set all the bottles in a row, and looked with satisfaction upon the
-glittering array.  Then she went up to the edge of the plain and looked
-at the crater.  No one was yet in sight.  The exploring party at that
-moment were on the other side of the cone, standing on the black lip of
-an appalling gulf eight hundred feet deep and half a mile across;
-looking down, awe-struck and amazed, upon colossal fire fountains that
-uplifted their gory spray three hundred feet in the air, and listening
-to the heart-shaking thunders of the volcano's awful voice, as from time
-to time that terrifying note of illimitable force and fury made the
-whole plain tremble and echoed far out to sea....  It was indeed no
-wonder that the ignorant Tannamen feared to ascend the cone.
-
-Vaiti sat down at the edge of the plain, and watched till she saw a
-number of many-coloured dots creeping down the black pyramid in its
-centre.  Then she suddenly lay down upon the ashy ground, and writhed
-with silent laughter.  People were in the habit of saying that Vaiti had
-no more sense of humour than the jibboom of her father's ship.  They
-might have modified that judgment, could they have seen her now.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Lady Victoria Jenkins had enjoyed her morning very much indeed.  She had
-dressed for the ascent in a mountaineering costume that combined equal
-suggestions of "Carmen" and the Alpine Club, and gave great
-opportunities to her ankles.  She had been helped up the cone by four
-devoted admirers, all at once, and had come down it at a wild running
-slide, ably braked by two strong hands of two or three others who wanted
-to have their turn.  The other women had trodden on their skirts, and
-torn them, burned and cut their foolish boots, and also got unbecomingly
-hot and out of breath, because there was not nearly one man apiece to
-help them up, after Lady Victoria had annexed all the best.  It must be
-allowed that the men were the weak point of the _Alcyone's_ travelling
-party.  Mr. de Coverley and his set were "dear boys" and charming
-companions, no doubt, but they were not quite as manly as some of the
-ladies.  Lady Vic and her companions did not attract the best sort of
-men, as a rule.
-
-They were all very hungry when they reached the plain, and thirsty with
-a thirst unknown outside the tropics.  All the way across the baking
-black sand and the tinkling lava beds, "one fair vision ever fled"
-before the eyes of the party--vision of gold-necked champagne bottles
-lying coolly embedded in icebaskets; of topaz-coloured jellies,
-trembling on silver dishes; of flaky, savoury pies, and delicate cold
-meats, and crisp green salads concocted as only the hand of the
-_Alcyone's_ _chef_ could concoct them.
-
-It seemed as if that plain would never end, but it did end at last, and
-a green fringe of pandanus announced the beginning of the bush.  The
-elderly young lady and most of the others were making excellent time
-ahead, and they reached the verge of the plain some little while before
-Lady Victoria and Mr. de Coverley came to it. The latter pair, as it
-happened, were really not thinking very much about their lunch, because
-a still more interesting matter absorbed their attention.
-
-"Not understood!" Mr. de Coverley was saying bitterly.  "And so we die
-and go down to the grave--not understood!  The pathos of it!"
-
-"We are never understood," sighed Lady Victoria, patting the side waves
-of her "transformation" to see that it was on straight.  "We women,
-especially. And those who should understand us best of all are so
-often----"
-
-"Exactly--so they are.  But, Lady Victoria--Victoria!--there are some
-who are different; there are men, rare souls, who----"
-
-"What in Heaven's name is the matter?" interrupted the misunderstood
-one, stopping dead in her tracks (literally, for the sand was deep) and
-staring at the edge of the bush.
-
-From the valley below the plain had just risen a long, loud shriek,
-followed by another and another, and then by a burst of laughter that
-sounded scarcely human. The other members of the party had disappeared,
-but it was clear that something had happened.
-
-"Good God, the savages!" exclaimed Lady Victoria; and she began to run.
-Let it be stated, for the credit of her race and name, that she ran
-towards the sound. As for Mr. de Coverley....
-
-But this story is not about Mr. de Coverley.  If it were, it would be
-interesting to tell why the Sydney steamer that called at Sulphur Bay
-two days later found an unexpected passenger waiting at the trader's,
-and why Lady Victoria and Mr. Abel Jenkins, of Jenkins's Perfect Pills,
-became eventually reconciled and lived the life of a model couple.  As
-things are, it must be enough to state that Mr. Jack de Coverley turned
-and ran away at the sound of the shouts--ran right across the plain into
-the bush at the other side--ran as far as he could get, and did not come
-back at all--and thereby ran once and for ever out of the life of the
-lady whom he "understood."
-
-Lady Victoria, speeding in the opposite direction, reached the edge of
-the little valley in a very few minutes, and, looking over, beheld what
-was certainly the strangest sight she had encountered in all her varied
-life.
-
-Round about the elaborately-laid luncheon were squatting a dozen or so
-of naked brown savages, painted, feathered, and slashed with ornamental
-scars.  A few women, clad only in a six-inch fringe of grass, stood
-behind them, eyeing the eatables eagerly, but not daring to touch them
-while their masters fed.  The talking-man, a big, hulking savage with a
-huge bush of hair, and a match-box stuck in each ear-lobe, had buried
-his face in the savoury interior of a boned turkey, and was gnawing out
-the stuffing.  The principal chief, one hand in a dish of Spanish cream
-and the other in a chicken curry, was casting double supplies into his
-mouth with the regularity of a patent feed-machine. A fat young fighting
-man, with nose and forehead painted scarlet, and white ashes in his
-hair, had tucked a ham under one arm, and was sitting on a peach pie,
-with intent to secure as many good things as possible, while he hastily
-worried large mouthfuls off the forequarter of lamb he was holding in
-both hands.  Another man was drinking mint sauce out of the silver
-sauceboat with horrible grimaces; his neighbour, having captured a
-handful of maraschino jelly, fast melting in the sun, was industriously
-rubbing it on his hair; and a grizzly old fellow, with a monkey-like
-face, was half-choking himself over a souffl�, which he was trying to
-swallow case and all.  The necks of the champagne bottles were all
-knocked off, and from engraved wine-cases, empty entr�e-dishes, and
-dredged-out tins the savages were drinking Lady Victoria's excellent
-wines with every appearance of satisfaction.  Between mouthfuls they
-stopped to look at the party from the yacht, and to roar with laughter
-at their evident fright.  Too terrified even to run away, the voyagers,
-in their dainty frocks and smart white suits, stood huddling together
-for protection, the women crying, the men looking rather white and
-foolish, for every Tannaman had a loaded rifle slung to his side, and
-there was not so much as a saloon pistol among the whites.  A few yards
-off Vaiti stood, regarding the whole scene with an expressionless
-countenance that covered a good deal of quiet enjoyment. She knew, if
-the visitors did not, that the cannibal bushmen were really not at all a
-bad lot of fellows when you knew them, and that the yacht party, against
-whom they had no grudge, were perfectly safe.  In fact, the Tannamen
-merely thought these oddly-behaved whites were a new party of
-missionaries, and were quite ready to be civil to them, since they
-thought all the mission people harmless, if eccentric.
-
-But the true inwardness of the situation not being apparent, the
-_Alcyone's_ guests were very frightened indeed.
-
-"P-perhaps if we go away very quietly, they won't f-follow us," said a
-wealthy young stockbroker, who had retained a little presence of mind,
-though his teeth were chattering in his head.
-
-"Oh, let us!  Victoria, save me!  Oh, what shall we do?" wailed the
-elderly young lady, rushing up the bank and flinging her arms round the
-mistress of the violated feast.  Lady Victoria, though white as her own
-Belfast linen collar, kept her head fairly well.  She saw that Vaiti was
-not one of the invaders, and called to her.  "Do you speak English?
-What are we to do? Will they kill us?" she asked.
-
-Vaiti walked over to her with the bearing of a stage duchess, and
-favoured her with a fashionable high handshake that was the one thing
-wanting to complete the insanity of the whole impossible scene.  A new
-idea had suddenly struck her--a fresh spark of mischief was lit.  With
-an immovable countenance she replied:
-
-"No kill you, I think.  Suppose you want go 'way all right by'n-by, very
-good I think you sit down, eatum dinner alonga those fellow--then they
-think you all right, let you go home, no kill."
-
-"Oh, Victoria, anything to please them!" sobbed the elderly young lady.
-
-"Yes--a--I think we'd better do anything we can to get into their good
-graces, since we're not armed," submitted the stockbroker.
-
-Vaiti exchanged a few words with the Tannese.  She explained that these
-white people had come a long way, and were very hungry.  The Melanesian
-has not many virtues, but hospitality is certainly one of them; and a
-man who may be planning to dine off you himself tomorrow will certainly
-not refuse you half of his own leaf of yams to-day.  The Tannese were
-delighted at the chance of sharing their good fortune with the white
-chiefs, even in spite of the latter's extremely silly manners, and they
-beckoned to them at once to come and sit down.
-
-Thereafter took place a scene incapable of description by mortal pen.
-The chief took his head out of the turkey, chewed off a leg, and
-grinningly handed it to Lady Victoria.  The young warrior got off the
-pie, disembowelled it with one scoop of the hand that had not known
-water "for ten moons," and laid its interior in the elderly young lady's
-lap.  Another knowingly poured out a champagne glass of Worcester sauce
-and handed it to the stockbroker, while the much-bitten lump of mutton
-that was at that moment circling from mouth to mouth, native-fashion,
-was hospitably passed on to all the whites.  Driven by fear, they tried
-to swallow something; choked in the effort, made futile remarks to each
-other, laughed nervous laughs, and all the time watched with eyes of
-utmost apprehension the dusky hosts who were thus entertaining them with
-their own audaciously ravished goods.  And above the crazy party the
-burning Tanna sun beat down, and the great volcano-cone far across the
-plain smoked and thundered.
-
-It had been Vaiti's design to dismiss them in peace by and by, assured
-that their compliance had saved their lives, and anxious to make steam
-out of Sulphur Bay as soon as was reasonably possible.  Fate, however,
-reserved a more dramatic ending to the entertainment, And it was "all
-along of" that talking-man.
-
-The cannibal native is invariably shy of displaying his tastes before
-whites, since people who do not share the "point of view" are so
-frequently prejudiced. Therefore the talking-man did not open a certain
-small green parcel tied up with sinnet string, which he had brought down
-with him from the mountain village. A feast in the hand is worth two in
-the pandanus-bush, thought the talking-man, so he brought his _bonne
-bouche_ with him for dessert and said nothing about it.  And thereby
-came the end.
-
-For Lady Victoria, unable to swallow the clawed and chewed morsels
-pressed upon her by dirt-encrusted hands, began to hunt despairingly
-about for something that she could really eat, so that she should not
-offend the dangerous monsters who surrounded her.
-
-"Isn't there anything clean to be had?" she asked the stockbroker
-anxiously.  "I can't eat--and yet we must!  What are we to do?"
-
-The stockbroker, who had once been to Honolulu, and thought he knew
-something about native foods, spied the packet of green banana-leaf, and
-reached out for it.
-
-"This'll be some of their own boiled yam," he said. "Natives always do
-it up like this.  You can eat it all right if you scrape it with a
-knife.  Allow me."
-
-Before the talking-man could stretch out his filthy claw to stop him,
-the Englishman had cut the sinnet string, the parcel had burst open, and
-right into the middle of a half-demolished chicken pie fell a large
-white foot, cut off at the ankle, nicely browned across the instep and
-all crackled on the toes.
-
-There was a wild shriek from the women, a splutter of horrified
-exclamations from the men, a boiling up of white petticoats like to the
-breaking of a wave on a pebbly shore, and then nothing but a diminishing
-string of rapidly trotting figures, each woman hand in hand with a man
-who was dragging her along far away, farther and farther, down the long,
-black, sandy path into the bush. Then ... they were gone.
-
-Vaiti stood on the bank to look after them, and laughed quietly.
-
-"Now I think we keep Sulphur Bay all our own self," she said.
-
-As for the Tannamen, they rolled on the ground with laughter, and then
-picked the dainty morsel out of the chicken pie and ate it up.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XIX*
-
-                         *THE RIVAL PRINCESSES*
-
-
-It was full mid-day when the schooner _Sybil_ dropped anchor off Liali
-Island.  The hot season was at its height.  The long, white coral strand
-blazed in the sun, the moated lagoon was raw emerald, the waveless outer
-sea blue fire.  Beyond the beach stretched a green, grassy lawn, dotted
-with quaintly-shaped Norfolk pines, tall palms, and feather-tressed
-ironwood trees; and against its enamelled background rose a palace like
-a picture in a fairy-tale--white, long-windowed, lofty-towered, and
-crowned with a crimson flag set below a gilded vane.
-
-Vaiti, standing on the break of the poop, with the inevitable cigar
-between her fingers, looked critically at the island, and liked it well.
-A mere little matter of kidnapping somebody's indentured labourers--the
-sort of thing that any gentleman with an extensive island practice might
-easily find himself obliged to do--had brought about her father's
-expulsion from the New Hebrides labour trade, and obliged him to seek
-new fields for the activities of the notorious and naughty _Sybil_.
-Saxon himself was virtuously indignant, Vaiti not particularly sorry.
-She was getting tired of the gloomy feverish New Hebrides and their ugly
-savages.  The Eastern Pacific was her heart's home after all,
-semi-Polynesian as she was; and even the wild excitement of the cruel
-western isles could not hold her away very long.  So when Saxon was
-wavering between the advantages of strictly illegal gun-running in the
-Solomons and honest trading about the Liali group (which had just
-wrecked its native schooner, and was open to employ a successor),
-Vaiti's influence went for once on the side of peace and virtue, and the
-course was set for Liali.  The group was new to both father and
-daughter, but was none the less attractive on that account, since all
-over the wide island world the _Sybil_ and her owners were best loved
-and most warmly welcomed where they were least known.
-
-The Liali group, as many people in the Southern hemisphere agree, offers
-the nearest possible approach to comic opera known off the actual stage.
-Liali itself, the chief island, is as pretty as a toy-box, and quite
-extraordinarily theatrical in appearance.  Its handsome, merry, brown
-people wear the most picturesque costume in the Pacific--a knee-length
-kilt of fine cashmere, girded by a deep sash of pure silk, and worn with
-a silken or cashmere shirt or a graceful sleeveless tunic, according to
-sex--all in the most vivid of sea- and flower-colour. Liali is civilised
-after a fashion.  It goes barefoot and barelegged, sits on mats, lives
-in reed-woven houses devoid of furniture, worships a sacred lizard on
-the sly, and sometimes breaks out openly into club-fights and
-devil-dances.  But it has a king, and a palace and a Parliament, a brass
-band, and quite a number of very active Nonconformist churches, run by
-white missionaries, who find that "labouring" among the well-off and
-amiable Lialians is a task in which the meritorious martyrdom of
-missionary life can be combined with quite a number of pleasant
-alleviations.
-
-Nothing in Liali is entirely what it seems.  The palace, when one comes
-close to it, is perceived to be built of painted wood, like a
-"practicable" scene in a theatre. The Parliament never passes any laws,
-because the Lords, who are chiefs, always on principle throw out every
-bill introduced by the vulgar Commons, just to "teach" them.  The Prime
-Minister is oftener in prison for _l�se majest�_ than out of it, and
-several Chancellors of the Exchequer have been transported to the
-Colonies for theft.  But there is a real throne in the palace, all
-crimson velvet and gilt wood, and a wonderful gold crown (the verdigris
-is cleaned off it with a wad of cocoanut husks by the Chief Equerry
-every Saturday afternoon), and when the King goes out in state he wears
-a purple velvet train, held up by two pages in tights and plumes, and a
-marvellous ermined robe, all exactly like the Savoy Theatre in the
-consulship of Gilbert and Sullivan.  On occasions not of state he sits
-cross-legged upon the palace parquet, clad in a shirt and a kilt, and
-plays _�cart�_ with his native guards.
-
-There are a few colonial traders in Liali, and a dozen or so of the
-English "legion that never was listed"--just such as one finds in all
-the odd corners of the Pacific--talkative, plausible, thin and nervous,
-given to avoid home topics and discourse with awful fluency upon small
-local politics; hospitable, restless and lazy, and usually married more
-or less to some dark beauty of the islands, who has grown as fat as a
-feather bed and spends a fortune on store muslins.
-
-These, as a matter of course, took possession of the _Sybil's_ people at
-once, hardly waiting for the schooner to cast anchor before they were
-alongside with their boats. Saxon and Vaiti were swept ashore
-immediately, and begged to make their home in half-a-dozen different
-houses.  With a fine sense of the fitting, Saxon selected Bob Peter's
-public-house, misnamed hotel, and immediately held a _lev�e_ in the bar,
-wearing his smartest Auckland suit (not paid for, and not likely to be)
-and looking, with his heavy, old-fashioned cavalry moustache,
-blonde-grey hair, and well set-up though rather bloated figure, quite
-like a somewhat seedy Milor on his travels. (And, as a matter of
-fact....  But that was Saxon's long-buried secret, and must not be
-told.)
-
-Vaiti, splendidly attired in a flowing island robe of yellow silk, with
-a gold chain twisted through her misty black hair, sat in the midst of a
-court of her own, and drank expensive pink lemonade to her soul's
-content. She was revelling in the sights, the sounds, the smells of the
-dear eastern islands once more.  She had a necklace of perfumed red
-berries round her neck, and white "tier�" flowers behind each ear, and
-the well-remembered scent almost intoxicated her.  Outside she could
-hear the boom of a dancing-chant, broken by interludes of clapping; and
-from the very next house, a big native reed-built structure, came now
-and then in the quieter moments the sonorous voice of a Lialian man
-calling out the names at a kava-drinking.
-
-The double soul that is the curse of the half-caste surged within the
-girl....  This, this, this, and all it meant--how she loved it!  And
-yet, the wild, fierce life of the western islands; the chance, the risk,
-the strong wine of danger, adventure, power!  The two natures of the
-soldier of fortune and the sensuous island princess who had given her
-birth, fought together in her heart....  If one could eat one's cake and
-have it! If one could sleep all day, crowned with flowers, under the
-singing casuarina trees, and yet be the daring sea-queen, the "Kapitani"
-of the _Sybil_, if only...
-
-Vaiti shook herself impatiently in her hammock chair, and asked for
-ginger beer with sugar in it.  She hated thinking, and felt as if she
-were going mad when the half-white brain in her pretty dusky head took a
-strange fit of sober industry.  Swift, instinctive plotting and planning
-were one thing, deliberate reflection quite another....  Ugh! she must
-be sick....  And for once the temperate Vaiti said yes to the inevitable
-offer of "a stick in it," as her ginger beer was handed to her by an
-eager admirer.
-
-The "sickness" passed away, and she began to listen and watch in her old
-fashion, smiling all the time to the compliments and sweet sayings that
-were being poured into her ears.  A trader was telling her father all
-about the latest dynastic crisis in the monarchy, and Saxon was not even
-pretending to listen.  The affairs of "niggers" never interested him,
-unless there was a question of immediate profit ahead.
-
-"You see," said the trader, "King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., which
-is his full title, wants for to get married.  He's thirty, and there's
-no heir.  And there being just the two Lialian princesses that wasn't
-his sisters--Mahina and Litia--what does he do but go and propose to
-both of them, and, of course, gets snapped up like winkin' by the two.
-It's no small potatoes being Queen of Liali, mind you.  Te Paea gets
-lots of money out of the fruit, and copra taxes, and then the Crown
-lands is half the island, there's presents besides.  And he's a real
-king if he is coffee-coloured--why, the kings of Liali goes back
-hundreds of years before Captain Cook, and he was in Henry Eighth's
-time, wasn't he?  And if you was to see the pink satin chairs in the
-throne-room, and the phonographs, and musical-boxes, and albums, and
-lookin'-glasses, and the lovely wax flowers in cases, and real
-hand-painted oil pictures--ah! it's a good job, is Te Paea's, and either
-Mahina or Litia's going to be a very lucky girl.  What he'd like, you
-see, is to marry both of them, same as his old grandfather--only he
-married nine, he did.  But the King's a Methody, good as they make
-them--when he don't forget, or want a spree--and of course the
-missionaries won't hear of his havin' two queens.  And, says he,
-Mahina's real fat; there's nothing mean about Mahina; she fills the eye,
-says he, and that's what a Lialian likes, for they don't hold with any
-sort of stinginess, says he.  But Litia, he says, has eyes like the
-buttons on his Auckland boots, they're so round and black and bright,
-says he, and she walks for all the world like a lovely young
-mutton-bird, says he.  And what's a king to do, with both the girls'
-relations fighting and squabbling over him like land-crabs fighting over
-a bit of fish, and he himself liking them both, and the girls clean mad
-for him--because, you see, Te Paea he's a handsome fellow, and when he's
-got his military uniform on, and all his orders and medals what he drew
-out himself on paper, and got made in Sydney, he's a fancy man, he is.
-The wedding's to be in three weeks, and the invites is being printed
-down in Auckland all in silver, with a blank to write the bride's name
-in--and the House of Lords has bought the bride's dress for her, which
-is what the Kings says it's their right to do, according to custom,--and
-no one knows which he's going to marry, and no more does he.  And it's
-my belief that there'll be war over it, before all's said and done, for
-Mahina's people say they'll burn down every village belonging to Litia's
-tribe, and Litia's folks say they'll kill Mahina's people's cattle and
-cut up their gardens.  That's the way things are, and you may take my
-word it's a pretty kettle of fish."
-
-"What are you giving for copra at present?" asked Saxon, yawning
-unrestrainedly.  And the conversation turned at once to the inevitable
-trading "shop."
-
-A few days afterwards the _Sybil_ spread her wings and started for
-Waiwai, the outermost of the Liali islands. She was to make the whole
-round of the group afterwards, and might not be back for some weeks, so
-that it seemed likely that Saxon would miss the festivities of the
-King's wedding.  This Vaiti declared was no reason why she should miss
-them, and she insisted on being left behind. Saxon was not too well
-pleased, for if he had a remnant of conscience left, it was connected
-with the care of his daughter, and he did not quite care about leaving
-her alone in a group to which they were both strangers.  But Vaiti
-promised to behave like a saint, and furthermore said that she would
-stay with one of the married traders, and not in the native villages.
-She also added that she meant to stay anyhow, and that it was no use
-making a fuss.
-
-So the _Sybil_ sailed away out of Liali harbour, and became a little
-pearl-coloured pinhead on the blue horizon, and then melted quite away.
-And Vaiti went to the tin-roofed shanty belonging to Neumann, the fat
-German trader, who had married a Lialian wife, and was received with the
-unquestioning hospitality of the islands.
-
-Nobody, among either whites or natives, could talk of anything but the
-King's matrimonial affairs. Mahina and Litia both appeared in Neumann's
-parlour more than once, sat on the floor, drank black tea with a handful
-of sugar in it, and related their several woes at length.  They did not
-come together, except once, when Litia, walking in unexpectedly, found
-Mahina there, crying into her teacup, and telling Neumann's wife that
-the King had given Litia a beautiful chemise, all trimmed with lace,
-only the day before, and that in consequence she considered him a
-monster and a perjured villain, although she knew perfectly well that he
-meant nothing whatever by it.  What was a chemise?  He had sent her two
-pounds of stick tobacco the Sunday before last. She would show Litia yet
-that the King was her King, and nobody else's.
-
-Litia, entering at this point, wasted no words, but simply buried her
-hands in Mahina's curly black masses of hair, and dragged her,
-shrieking, across the floor. Neumann interfered, and parted them; but
-Mahina flew at Litia immediately after, ripped open her dress with one
-clutch, and disclosed the royal gift chastely embracing Litia's lovely
-form.  With a howl of anger, the rival seized the chemise in both hands;
-there was a scuffle, a scream, a rending noise, and Litia stood up in
-the middle of the room, a gold-bronze statue, shedding tears of rage,
-while Mahina, running out on to the verandah, tore the offending garment
-into strips and rags, and cast them upon the road.  Litia, rushing out
-after her, stood upon the steps clad with wrath as with a garment (and
-with extremely little else), explaining her wrongs to an interested and
-sympathetic native crowd, until the Methodist missionary happened to
-come by, and told her that unless she went in and dressed herself at
-once, she might safely count upon eventually finding herself in a place
-where dress would be very much at a discount ... or words to that
-effect.  So Litia went in, and Mahina went away, escorted by a strong
-cousinly "tail"; and afterwards Neumann, enveloped in oracular clouds of
-smoke, remarked sleepily that the princesses were the greatest nuisance
-on the island, and that he believed the King would run away from the
-whole set if he could, for he was "by-nearly mad-driven on account of
-their so-tiresome ways, and feared-himself to choose, because the one
-that he not married had would cause to make war by her people against
-the one he married should."
-
-During the whole of the fight, Vaiti remained perfectly unmoved on a
-cane lounge in the corner of the room, uninterruptedly puffing rings of
-blue smoke at the ceiling.  Not a detail had escaped her, all the same,
-nor did she miss a word of Neumann's remarks.  And they made her think.
-
-In the afternoon, the dull thud of galloping hoofs along the grass
-street made Mrs. Neumann run to the door.  She called loudly to Vaiti to
-come.
-
-"It is the King," she said.
-
-A small victoria, drawn by two spirited blacks, was tearing up the
-street.  Seated alone in it was an extraordinary and notable
-figure--Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., King of Liali.  He was six feet
-four inches in height, and over eighteen stone in weight.  He wore a
-scarlet cloth uniform coat, blazing with gold, and his heavy, handsome
-brown face, with its weak, small mouth, and black eyes almost too large
-and soft for a man, was shaded by a white sun helmet with a wide gold
-band.
-
-He drove furiously, looking neither to right nor to left, and, passing
-the house like a gorgeous whirlwind, was instantly lost in the casuarina
-forest beyond.
-
-"That is the King, then?" said Vaiti.  The Lialian language came almost
-as easily to her as her own, being only one of the dialects of the great
-Maori tongue that covers a good two-thirds of the island world.
-
-"Yes," said Neumann's wife, "that is the King. And very little any of us
-have seen of him lately.  He is afraid of the trouble he has got himself
-into; he shuts himself up all the time, and sees no one but his guards,
-and just sends a present now and then, first to one girl then to the
-other.  And when he drives to take the air, he flies along like that, so
-that no one can stop and speak to him.  He is terribly shy of strangers;
-I think it was because the _Sipila_ was here that he did not come out at
-all last week."
-
-"Is it such a very good thing for the princess he will marry?" asked
-Vaiti, playing with a yellow alamanda flower.
-
-"Very, very good indeed," replied the Lialian impressively.  "She will
-have a gold crown to wear on her head, and sit on a red velvet and gold
-throne beside the King, and have the most beautiful satin dresses from
-Sydney, and all her chemises will have lace and ribbons on them.  And as
-soon as the King buys another schooner for himself and Liali, she will
-travel in it with him whenever she likes, for sometimes he will go to
-Samoa, to stay with King Malietoa, or he will sail a whole week to Mbau
-in Fiji, and then Princess Thakombau and the Prince of Kandavu make
-feasts and dances for him, and the Kovana [governor] gives a real
-'papalangi' dinner for him, with champagne and a band.  And as for what
-she will have to eat at home, it is past telling, for in the palace
-there is no count whatever made of tinned salmon and biscuit, and she
-may have a sackful of sugar at every meal, and a whole roast pig every
-day. She may eat till she falls asleep, and then wake up to eat.  Ah, it
-is a good thing for the princess who marries the King, whichever she may
-be!"
-
-"I think you will be thirsty if you talk so much," said Vaiti rather
-rudely.  "I am thirsty myself with only listening to you.  Go and make
-some kava for me."
-
-Mrs. Neumann, who had been rather proud to have Vaiti staying with
-her--since her rank as a princess of Atiu counted for a good deal among
-the island races--began to dislike her visitor soon after this, and to
-wish her well away.  Vaiti was not an angel in the house at the best of
-times, and she did not trouble to make herself pleasant just then.
-Indeed, one would almost have thought she was trying to pick a quarrel.
-And, as that sort of effort rarely goes unrewarded, it is not
-astonishing to learn that the quarrel came before long--a bitter,
-loud-tongued dispute that left Mrs. Neumann sobbing in a fat, frightened
-heap on the floor, and Vaiti, silent but stormy, packing up her
-camphorwood box to depart.
-
-Neumann, being afraid of Saxon's possible anger, tried to keep her, but
-she laughed in his face, and went on packing.  There was an empty native
-house--little more than a palm-leaf hut, once tenanted by a Chinese
-trader--standing by the road about halfway through the great casuarina
-forest; a lonely, ramshackle place, used and wanted by nobody.  There
-and there only Vaiti would go, taking mats and cooking pots with her, to
-stay until her father came back.  When some of the islanders betrayed
-meddlesome curiosity as to her motives, and the missionaries declared
-they scented scandal, Vaiti silenced and terrified the one, and
-convinced the others that she was hopelessly beyond the pale, by giving
-out that she was something of a witch, and meant to go into the forest
-to gather and prepare certain powerful charms.  These, she said, would
-injure only her enemies, but were altogether powerless to hurt anyone
-who spoke well of her.  In consequence, the evil tongues of Liali
-received a sudden check.
-
-Furthermore, Vaiti, neglecting the half-castes and the whites, began
-with considerable art to make herself popular among the natives.  She
-dressed herself Liali fashion, and arranged her hair after the island
-modes. She joined in all their interminable boating journeys and
-picnics, and was never tired of sitting cross-legged on the ground,
-waving her arms and head in time with a hundred others, and chanting
-Lialian songs that lasted an afternoon apiece.  After dark, she was
-often to be seen out on the reef, with a torch and a fishing spear
-making an exhibition of piscatorial skill that astonished even the
-Lialians themselves.  When there was an unmissionary dance in some big
-chief-house, Vaiti was always there, decked with wreaths and flower
-necklaces, and polished with cocoanut oil, turning the heads of all the
-young men by the grace of her dancing, and winning the astonished
-approval of the women by the cool reserve with which she received every
-advance of a sentimental nature.  Both Mahina and Litia took jealous
-fancies to her--thus acquiring yet one more cause of mutual
-dissension--and separately poured all their woes into her ear.  She was
-wonderfully sympathetic, and urged each one on to assert her rights and
-stand no nonsense; insomuch that before very long the island was fairly
-ringing with what Litia's people meant to do to Mahina's, and what
-Mahina's would certainly do to Litia's, in the event of the King
-selecting one or the other.
-
-Somebody about this time--it was never ascertained who--spread a report
-that Captain Saxon of the _Sybil_ had a number of trade rifles on board
-his ship, and several cases of cartridges.  The talk began to take a
-more dangerous turn.  The schooner would not be back till the wedding
-was over, it was said, but let the winning party look out for themselves
-when she did come!  The Lialians, under missionary rule, had been
-peaceful and law-abiding people for almost a whole generation; but they
-had not yet forgotten that they were once the masters of the Pacific,
-and that of all the warlike island races, none had been such fighters as
-they....  The older men began to snuff battle in the air, walked about
-with their chests flung out, and told bloodthirsty ancient stories to
-the younger Lialians.  The women sang war songs at the evening
-gatherings in the chief-houses, and Mahina and Litia began to go about
-followed by bands of eager partisans.  Liali was certainly warming up.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER XX*
-
-                           *QUEEN AFTER ALL*
-
-
-News of all these things came duly to the King through his faithful
-spies, and his Majesty Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. went nearly
-frantic.  He actually began to lose weight--a consummation that all the
-skill of his European court doctor had hitherto failed to bring
-about--and day by day he drove more wildly behind his famous blacks,
-covering mile after mile of lonely forest roads at a pace that brought
-the horses home all in a lather and the yellow satin cushions grimed
-with dust.  The wedding approached within ten days: the triumphal arches
-were being erected; the Queen Consort's throne came back from the
-carpenter, freshly gilded and upholstered; and the band were hard at
-work practising the strange conglomeration of shrieks and wails that
-make up the Lialian National Anthem.  The bride's dress, provided,
-according to usage, by the House of Lords, arrived at the palace in a
-palm-leaf basket. It was a very gorgeous affair--a long, loose robe of
-orange satin, embroidered in scarlet by a few of the cleverest
-mission-school girls--and it was of a usefully indefinite size, since
-the difference between the massive Mahina and the waspish little Litia
-was almost as great as the difference (of another kind) between their
-respective parties.  The silver-printed invitations for the white people
-and the chiefs--"To be present at the wedding of His Majesty King
-Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. with Princess----," came up by a
-whale-ship from Auckland, and so did the wedding cake, largely plaster
-of Paris.  And still the wretched King, lashed by the scourge of his own
-light-hearted follies, sent pacificating presents to both girls, and put
-off the dire decision.
-
-It was about this time that any wayfarer passing through the casuarina
-forest "might have observed" a light in Vaiti's cottage late one night.
-There was no one to observe, however, for the wood was supposed to be
-devil-haunted, and no native ever passed through it save in broad
-daylight.  When it grew toward sunset the only Lialian who would brave
-its dangers so far as to rush across it in the red evening light was the
-King himself, who had been educated in Sydney, and did not believe in
-devils--much.  The forest road was the shortest way home from his usual
-circular drive, and he frequently passed by the cottage just before
-sunset, driving like Jehu the son of Nimshi, and looking neither to
-right nor to left.  He had never noticed Vaiti as he passed, for she was
-always within the house, looking out between the cracks of the
-palm-leaves, where she could see without being seen.
-
-This evening, long after the King had passed by and the dark had come
-down, Vaiti sat on the floor of the hut, looking very thoughtful, as she
-turned out the contents of her big camphorwood box by the light of a
-ship's hurricane lantern.  She was all alone, as usual, and smoking,
-also as usual.  There was no sound in the solitary little house but the
-sighing of the wind in the casuarina trees and the steady puff of the
-girl's cigar. Papers, letters, packets of lace, odd bits of jewellery,
-silk dresses, pistols, knives, collections of rope and twine, laced
-underclothing, cartridges, feathers, shells, cigars, pearl-inlaid boxes,
-revareva plumes, and a miscellaneous collection of odds and ends
-garnered from all the four corners of the South Seas, strewed the floor,
-and the box was still half full.  By-and-by she came upon what she
-wanted--a roll of stuff done up in waxed paper.  She unfastened it, and
-let the contents fall out across the mats under the rays of the lantern.
-It was a web of pure gold tissue, bright as a summer sunrise and fine as
-a fairy's wing--an exquisite piece of stuff, which she had acquired from
-a Chinese trader in Honolulu by means none too scrupulous, and hoarded
-away for years.
-
-Vaiti looked at it thoughtfully, and then opened a little tortoise-shell
-and silver box, and spilled its contents--a shower of photographs--into
-her lap.  They were an exceedingly various collection--naval, military,
-British, French, native and half-caste--but most were men, and many were
-young and handsome.  Perhaps the best-looking of the collection was that
-of a young English naval officer, signed across the corner "R. Tempest,"
-with a Sydney address, and "Must it be good-bye?" written in tiny
-letters under the signature. Vaiti took the picture in her hand, and
-looked at it so long and earnestly that her cigar went out while she
-gazed.  She lit another, put down the photograph, and sat smoking and
-thinking for quite a long time....  The world was still all before her
-... and the whaling ship had said that another vessel was almost sure to
-touch, on her way to Sydney next week.
-
-Once in Vaiti's many-coloured history a looking-glass had proved her
-undoing.  It was a looking-glass that proved her salvation now, at the
-parting of the ways.  For, as she sat thinking, a brilliant picture
-caught her eye--her own proud, lovely head, crowned regally with a
-wreath of flowers, reflected in the mirror inside the lid of the box.
-She smiled, stretched out her hand--letting the photograph fall
-unnoticed to the floor from her lap--and placed a fold of the golden
-tissue across her head....  Yes, it looked quite like a crown--a Queen
-Consort's crown ... the glass gave back a truly royal picture.
-
-Vaiti's cheeks flushed as she looked.  She could hardly turn away.  But
-the golden fold slipped off her hair, and the queenly picture was gone.
-
-She shut the box, and with set lips took a match, lit it, and set fire
-to the photograph.  It burned very slowly, and the flame seemed to lick
-sympathetically round her own heart as it crawled about the handsome,
-debonair, but sensual face, lit up, and then put out, the laughing eyes,
-crackled through the curly hair and the white naval cap, and at last
-reduced the whole bright picture to a little pile of feathery black
-ash--dead, dead, dead!
-
-Vaiti dropped the charred fragments from her hands, and then put her
-head down upon the mats and lay very still....
-
-When morning broke through the narrow door of the hut, the rays of the
-rising sun fell upon the figure of a girl with a cold, expressionless
-face, sitting upon the threshold, hard at work with needle and thread.
-Upon her lap lay a pile of golden gauze.
-
-That afternoon the King drove late in the forest. The sun was near
-setting, and the rays were slanting long and low among the red trunks of
-the gloomy casuarina trees, when the spirited blacks came galloping up
-to the cottage.  Every day they had passed it by, a still, brown nest in
-the shadows, where nothing moved, but this evening, as they reached the
-spot, something caused them to check and shy, and the King, splendid
-driver as he was, had some difficulty in pulling them in. When he had
-succeeded, he glanced at the object that had caused their fright, and
-saw a vision startling enough to astonish even himself.
-
-A stranger girl of exceeding beauty stood in the midst of the forest
-clearing.  She was dressed in a robe of magnificent golden tissue, from
-which the level rays of the westering sun sparkled back in a halo of
-almost supernatural glory.  On her head was a wreath of blood-red
-hibiscus flowers, and her exquisite right arm, bare except for a twisted
-chain of gold, held up an island kava cup of carved cocoanut shell.
-When she saw that the King observed her, she sank on her knees, bent her
-neck, and raised the cup higher in both hands above her head.
-
-It was an invitation, and one that no Lialian could possibly have
-refused, for the drink brewed from the kava root, and the ceremonies
-connected with the brewing, tasting, and giving round, are almost a
-religion in those islands, and many a man, in the old wild days, has
-died for the insult of putting aside the proffered cup.  Therefore the
-King descended at once, tied his horses to a tree, and advanced to take
-the cup from the hands of this unknown woman who understood royal
-etiquette so well.  It was his Majesty's right to have his kava, and
-indeed all his food and drink, proffered in this especial attitude; but
-half-castes and whites were sometimes careless enough to forget the
-honour.
-
-He drank the great bowlful at a draught, as a king should, and, sending
-the cup with a twirl to the ground, according to etiquette, cast a side
-glance at the beautiful cup-bearer.  He hated strangers and distrusted
-foreigners, still...
-
-"Will you not come in and rest, O Great Chief?" asked Vaiti in Lialian.
-
-"Who are you?" said the King, still looking half away--but only half.
-
-"Princess of Atiu, and daughter of the great English sea-captain Saxon,"
-replied Vaiti, drawing herself up to her full height, and looking him
-straight in the eyes. The King met the look full this time, and thought
-that Litia's eyes, Lialian though she was, were not so bright by half.
-And if Mahina was fatter--as she certainly was--she never had such hair,
-or such a coral-red mouth. And what a magnificent dress the magnificent
-creature wore!
-
-He knew at once who Vaiti was, when she mentioned her rank in Atiu, for
-the chocolate-coloured island kings and queens understand each other's
-complicated genealogies quite as clearly as do their white compeers on
-the other side of the world--and though Atiu was a broken,
-half-depopulated place, annexed to the British Crown, its chiefs were of
-ancient lineage and high repute. Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. hesitated
-a moment--stretched out his hand--withdrew it--then stretched it out
-again, and graciously offered it to Vaiti, as to an equal in blood.
-
-Vaiti, glowing with gratification, yet had the happy intuition of
-dropping on one knee and kissing the royal hand, European fashion.  The
-King understood it, and swelled with pleasure, remembering how Mahina
-had had the impudence to chuck him under the chin when he bestowed a
-gracious salute upon her inferior lips, and how Litia had objected
-altogether to get off her horse when he was passing by, as Lialian royal
-customs enjoined upon all riders ... What a nuisance they had both grown
-to be, crying and battering at the palace gates, fighting over his
-gifts, getting up trouble among their relatives--trouble that he now
-began to fear might become so serious as to bring down the interference
-of the British Crown.  And every Pacific monarch knew what was the
-inevitable next move, when that game had once begun!  Good-bye to his
-kingship, if once the British Lion laid a claw on Lialia.
-
-"Will you not come in and rest, Great Chief?" said the humble voice of
-the stranger again.  And the King, still shy and distrustful, and
-looking at Vaiti only out of the corners of his eyes, did condescend to
-come in.
-
-And the next day he rested again, and the day after that.  It was
-astonishing how easily driving seemed to tire his Majesty at this
-period.  And all the time the wedding preparations went forward, while
-Mahina and Litia, with their respective factions, grew more and more
-jealous of each other, and more and more enraged.
-
-But there came a day at last, four days from the wedding, when the King
-declared that he would make his final choice on the evening before the
-marriage day, and would send a herald on that night to proclaim it
-through the capital.
-
-Ruru, the royal herald, who had never before had a chance to exercise
-his office or wear his uniform, was extremely pleased.  He got out his
-finery at once--a Beefeater cap and tabard of crimson silk, worn with a
-large silk sash, and bare legs--and began a dress rehearsal that lasted,
-with intervals for food and sleep, until the evening of the
-proclamation.  At sunset he went up to the palace, received the paper
-that contained the message, and strutting like a turkey, came out on to
-the open green in front, where at least a thousand Lialians--half of
-them Litia's friends, and half of them Mahina's--were collected.  Mahina
-and Litia themselves, each defiantly dressed in all the bridal finery
-she could muster, stood in the forefront of the crowd, exchanging looks
-of death and hatred.  It had come to this with the two women now, that
-either would have cheerfully died a death of slow torture, if by so
-doing only she could have prevented the other from winning. That she
-might miss the glories of the throne was not the prominent thought in
-Litia's mind--only that Mahina might secure them and triumph over her;
-and the self-same fancy agitated the ample breast of her rival, as the
-two stood in the cool twilight, within sound of the breakers on the
-reef, waiting with choking anxiety for Ruru's words.
-
-"People of Liali!" read the herald impressively, striking an attitude,
-with one bare leg advanced: "His Majesty King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea
-III. of Liali, being sovereign by right divine, and the Lord's Anointed,
-also High Chief of all the Liali Islands as descendant of the Sacred
-Lizard, has decided to marry, according to the custom of his
-forefathers, and give the land of Liali an heir to our mighty crown.
-The wedding will take place in the mission church to-morrow, at noon and
-there will be a collection afterwards for expenses! If anyone comes
-drunk to church, or puts nothing in the plate, he will be turned out.
-His Majesty hereby announces that, in order to save war and dissension
-among his loyal subjects, and to teach some princesses to pay him proper
-respect, he has decided to give the honour of his hand to Princess
-Vaiti, daughter of Princess Rangi of Atiu, deceased, and Captain Saxon,
-of the schooner _Sybil_.  God save the King, and you are all to go home
-without making a row."
-
-It was a fine proclamation, but assuredly the order in the last clause
-asked too much of Lialian humanity. No one attempted to obey it.  The
-news was received first in a dead silence of amazement, and then by a
-storm of shrieks, howls, questions, a wild trampling and rushing to and
-fro, and, last of all, by a Homeric roar of laughter.  The Lialian
-possesses a rough but reliable sense of humour, practical joking being
-his especial delight; and it suddenly dawned upon the populace of Liali
-that the King had played the most stupendous practical joke upon them
-ever known in the history of the islands.  Therefore these light-hearted
-children of the sun, instead of raiding the palace in two separate
-factions, lay down and rolled upon the grass, or held helplessly on to
-one another, roaring with laughter. The utter disconcerting of Mahina
-and Litia, now that all party feeling was removed from the matter,
-further appealed to them as a jest of the finest sort, and witticisms
-that would have made a trooper blush were hurled upon the disconsolate
-maidens from all sides.  Some few there were who frowned at the triumph
-of a foreigner and a stranger; but Vaiti's arts had succeeded in making
-her popular, and the malcontents were borne down by the roar of public
-amusement and assent.  Vaiti herself, safely hidden in the Methodist
-mission house, listened to the laughter far off, and felt well pleased.
-She had not been very sure how matters might go, and had therefore, at a
-bold stroke, won the favour of the Church by approaching the missionary,
-and assuring him of the extreme purity of her Methodism (she was, if
-anything, a pure heathen) and, in confidence, of the honour awaiting
-her.  The reverend gentleman, who had long sat on thorns by reason of
-the power of the Seventh Day Adventist, Christian Science, and Original
-Shaker missions in the islands, received her with delight, and handed
-her over to the care of his wife, who shortly afterwards informed him
-that the new light of the Church was, in her opinion, a "perfect
-minx"--but that she supposed it was as well, under the circumstances, to
-make to herself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, as the Bible
-enjoined, and remain on intimate visiting terms with the palace.  So
-Vaiti spent the fateful evening under the secure protection of the
-Church itself, and claimed the same creditable patronage for the day of
-the wedding.
-
-What of Mahina and Litia?  The disappointed princesses, when the
-proclamation was read out, turned and stared at each other like
-tigresses robbed of a meal. Neither was going to be Queen of
-Liali--neither was going to scratch her rival's eyes out, and root up
-her hair, for the crime of securing the coveted honour.  The very bottom
-of the world had dropped out--what was to follow?
-
-For a moment they continued to stare, each scanning the other's face
-under a new light--the light of common feeling.  Litia remembered that
-she and Mahina had been brought up almost as sisters in the palace of
-the late Queen.  Mahina recalled the time when she had almost died of
-measles, and Litia had nursed her through. They were both deceived, both
-deserted, and the friends of one could never crow offensively over the
-other now. The thought was mingled bitter-sweet, and the two burst out
-crying, and dropped into each other's arms, simultaneously vowing
-threats of vengeance against the treacherous interloper, which--unbacked
-by their war-like following of friends--they knew very well they would
-never be able to execute.  And the crowd dispersed as the sun went down.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-The _Sybil_ made better time than was expected, after all.  Her white
-sails lifted against the blue, from behind the nearest island, just as
-the royal wedding party commenced its gorgeous procession to the church.
-Before the ceremony was ended, the schooner had made the harbour and
-Saxon was ashore.  He came upon an utterly deserted town, and saw not a
-human being until he was halfway up to the church, outside of which he
-perceived an immense crowd, unable to enter.  Under a tree by the
-wayside sat one of the English traders who had failed to get a place.
-He greeted Saxon uproariously, and asked him if this wasn't a proper go.
-
-"What?" asked Saxon.  "Which is he marrying?"
-
-"Oh, crikey! he doesn't know!" roared the trader--and fell back against
-the tree, suffocating with laughter, and utterly declining to explain.
-
-Saxon, cursing him for a silly fool, tramped on towards the church.  The
-procession was coming out now, and he wanted to see the show, for though
-he might call the coffee-coloured Lialians niggers, he quite understood
-the position of King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., and the importance
-to all the islands of his choice.
-
-He got upon a bank to see the better, fixed his long-sighted sailor eyes
-upon the chapel door, and saw a glittering vision emerge into the
-sunlight, amidst the cries and cheers of the people.  That was the King,
-in a gorgeous uniform, with his crown on his head and a long velvet
-mantle sweeping behind him ... and at his left hand stepped a tall,
-stately, slender figure, also crowned, and dazzlingly dressed all in
-glittering gold.... Not Mahina, certainly; not Litia either--Who was it,
-then?  It could never be--but it was--Vaiti!
-
-Saxon staggered off the bank, sat down, jumped up again, and clapped his
-hands.
-
-"By ----, if it isn't like her, through and through!" he cried.  "By
-----, I'm proud of her!  Queen of Liali!  Queen of Liali!  But----"
-
-He stopped, and shook his head with a knowing laugh.  He was not very
-sober.
-
-"But--God help the King!" he said.
-
-
-
-                                THE END
-
-
-
-    PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND ECCLES.
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-<title>VAITI OF THE ISLANDS</title>
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-<div class="document" id="vaiti-of-the-islands">
-<h1 class="center document-title level-1 pfirst title"><span class="x-large">VAITI OF THE ISLANDS</span></h1>
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-<div class="container language-en pgheader" id="pg-header" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
-<p class="noindent pfirst"><span>This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
-and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
-restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
-under the terms of the </span><a class="reference internal" href="#project-gutenberg-license">Project Gutenberg License</a><span> included with
-this ebook or online at </span><a class="reference external" href="http://www.gutenberg.org/license">http://www.gutenberg.org/license</a><span>. If you
-are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws
-of the country where you are located before using this ebook.</span></p>
-<p class="noindent pnext"></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<div class="container" id="pg-machine-header">
-<p class="noindent pfirst"><span>Title: Vaiti of the Islands
-<br />
-<br />Author: Beatrice Grimshaw
-<br />
-<br />Release Date: December 10, 2015 [EBook #50663]
-<br />
-<br />Language: English
-<br />
-<br />Character set encoding: UTF-8</span></p>
-</div>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="noindent pfirst" id="pg-start-line"><span>*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK </span><span>VAITI OF THE ISLANDS</span><span> ***</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="noindent pfirst" id="pg-produced-by"><span>Produced by Al Haines.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="noindent pfirst"><span></span></p>
-</div>
-<div class="container titlepage">
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span class="bold xx-large">VAITI OF THE ISLANDS</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span class="bold medium">BY BEATRICE GRIMSHAW</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 3em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span class="medium">LONDON
-<br />GEORGE NEWNES, LIMITED
-<br />SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND, W.C.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span class="bold large">CONTENTS</span></p>
-<p class="noindent pnext"><span class="small">CHAPTER</span></p>
-<p class="noindent pnext"><a class="reference internal" href="#prologue">Prologue</a></p>
-<ol class="upperroman simple">
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#the-pearl-lagoon">The Pearl Lagoon</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#a-race-for-a-fortune">A Race for a Fortune</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#the-flower-behind-the-ear">The Flower behind the Ear</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#the-black-viri">The Black Viri</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#a-diamond-web">A Diamond Web</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#marooned">Marooned</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#the-turning-of-the-tables">The Turning of the Tables</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#the-white-man-of-nalolo">The White Man of Nalolo</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#the-lost-island">The Lost Island</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#what-came-of-the-paris-dress">What came of the Paris Dress</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#a-dead-man-s-revenge">A Dead Man's Revenge</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#breaking-the-mana">Breaking the Mana</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#the-game-played-out">The Game Played Out</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#how-the-witch-doctor-got-his-money-back">How the Witch-Doctor got his Money back</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#the-calamity-of-coral-bay">The Calamity of Coral Bay</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#the-fate-of-the-lieutenant">The Fate of the Lieutenant</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#invaders-in-tanna">Invaders in Tanna</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#a-cannibal-party">A Cannibal Party</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#the-rival-princesses">The Rival Princesses</a></p>
-</li>
-<li><p class="first noindent pfirst"><a class="reference internal" href="#queen-after-all">Queen after all</a></p>
-</li>
-</ol>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="prologue"><span class="bold x-large">VAITI OF THE ISLANDS</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span class="bold medium">PROLOGUE</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>It was in the seventies, long ago.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>Summer—yet a slow grey dawn, lingering long
-in the sky.  August—yet a chilly morning, crisping
-the landlocked waters of the bay with cold knife-edges
-of foam.  Out at sea, the wild white horses plunging
-madly under the whip of the sunrise wind; the bar
-beginning to thunder.  Inshore, beneath the green
-slope of the castle hill, small angry ripples beating and
-fretting the untrampled sand.  Dead rose-leaves from
-the gardens floating among the seaweed; a torn bird's-nest,
-flung down by the wind, lying on the edge of the
-steep cliff pathway....  It was still the time of summer,
-yet, too surely, autumn had come.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The sodden leaves lay thick in the bottom of the
-boat when the man seized it by the gunwale and ran
-it down the beach into the snatching waves....  Oh,
-an autumn day indeed, here in wild Caithness, though
-summer was still at its fairest in kinder lands.  And
-in the heart of the man who was rowing fast through
-the angry dawn light, to the tall schooner yacht that
-swung and tore at her moorings out in the bay, there
-was autumn too, with winter close at hand.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>All so long ago! who remembers?</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Not the newspapers which, in a day or two after,
-shrieked the scandal broadcast, east and west.  Not
-the guests of the castle house-party—they are dead, or
-old, which is half of death, since then.  Not the Prince
-whose dignity had been insulted by the outbreak of a
-vulgar card scandal in his very presence—he struck
-the titled owner of the house off the list of his intimates
-forthwith, and then forgot about it and him.  Not the
-colonel of the famous regiment, who found out defalcations
-in the funds belonging to the mess, a few days
-after, and knew why his most promising young officer
-had done the unforgiveable thing—for the Ashanti
-spears ended life and memory for him out on the African
-plains, before even Piccadilly had made an end of talking.
-Not the Royal Yacht Squadron—the reported loss of
-the famous </span><em class="italics">Paquita</em><span> at sea, with her disgraced owner
-on board, is a tale that even the oldest </span><em class="italics">habitue</em><span> of Cowes
-could not tell you to-day....  No one remembers.
-When the beautiful white schooner spread her wings
-below the castle wall, and beat her way like a frightened
-butterfly out to the stormy sea, she sailed away in
-silence, and she and hers were known no more.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Yet, but for that stormy day in the Highlands, and
-the boat that fled to sea, these tales of far-off lands had
-never been told.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="the-pearl-lagoon"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER I</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">THE PEARL LAGOON</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>"Where's the old man?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Old man drunk," replied Vaiti indifferently.  She
-had learned to play "The Maiden's Prayer," maltreat
-three European languages, and cultivate a waist in her
-Tahitian convent school.  But that was five years ago
-now, and Vaiti's "papalangi" verbs had dropped from
-her quite as soon, and as naturally, as her "Belitani"
-stays.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Why can't he wake up and give us an observation?"
-commented the mate indignantly.  "It would be hard
-if a man mightn't enjoy himself in port; but we're
-four days out now, and he's as bad as ever, lyin' all the
-time on the settee like a——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You better mind too much what you say my father!"  Vaiti
-had set one shapely olive hand on the deck, and
-sprung to her feet like a flying-fish making a leap.  She
-was taller than the sturdy, red-haired mate, as she
-stood up on the poop, her bare feet well apart, her white
-muslin loose gown swelling out as she leaned to the roll
-of the steamer, and her black-brown eyes, deep-set under
-fine brows as straight as a ruler, staring down the blue
-eyes of the man.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Very sorry, I'm sure; no offence meant," said the
-mate humbly.  "But we want an observation, and he
-ain't no good.  Why, you know as well as me that he'll
-be like this, off and on, all the voyage now; we've both
-of us seen it before."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti stamped her bare feet on the deck.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I know—I know!  I try all the way from Apia
-wake him up—no good!  I tell you, Alliti"—the mate's
-name, Harris, usually took this form in the pigeon-English
-of Polynesia—"this very bad time for him to
-get 'quiffy.  Too much bad time.  Never mind.  Get
-the sextan'.  I take sun myself."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The mate ran down the companion and into the
-cabin, where the captain's six feet two of drunken
-ineptitude sprawled over most of the space available
-for passing.  He stopped for a moment to look at the
-heavy, unconscious face—a handsome face, with the
-remains of refinement about it; for Captain Saxon had
-been a gentleman once, and his name (which was certainly
-not Saxon then) had appeared among the lists of
-"members deceased" in the annual reports of all the
-best London clubs of the 'seventies....  Why Saxon
-died, and why he came to life again in the South Pacific
-some years later, is a tale that need not be told, even if
-it is guessed.  Many such substantial ghosts roam the
-South Seas unexorcised—many a man whose name
-adorns a memorial tablet, guarded by weeping marble
-angels, on the walls of some ivied English Church, is
-busy conferring a peculiar fitness upon the
-occupation of those guardian seraphs, down among "The
-Islands," where he and the devil may do as they please.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"'Og!" observed the mate, as he passed through
-to the captain's cabin, and fetched out the sextant.
-"'Alf-caste or quarter-caste, Vaiti's too good a daughter
-for him, by the length of the mainmast and the mizzen
-together.  She's got all his brains—Lord, how she
-learned navigation from him, like a cat lapping up milk,
-when she set her mind to it!—and none of his villainy.
-At least——"  The mate paused on the companion,
-and filled his pipe.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"At least——" he repeated, and broke off the remark
-unfinished.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Sun coming out nice now," he said, handing the
-sextant to the girl.  Vaiti made her observation with
-the ease of an old sea-captain, and went below to work
-it out.  It was true, as Harris said, that she had plenty
-of brains, though they did not lie along the lines of
-"The Maiden's Prayer" and Dr. Smith's English
-Grammar.  And, whatever the legal status of poor
-derelict Saxon, or the mate, might be, no one who had
-ever climbed the side of the schooner </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> could doubt
-the obvious fact that the real commanding officer of
-that vessel was Vaiti herself.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What d'ye make it?" asked the mate, looking over
-her shoulder.  Vaiti, always sparing of her words, pointed
-to the figures.  Harris whistled.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Ain't we off our course, just!" he said, drawing
-his finger down the chart.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"No," said Vaiti.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Why, hang it all, Cap"—the girl was accorded the
-title, half in fun, half through habit, a good deal oftener
-than her father—"we ain't making for the Delgada
-reefs, are we?  I don't pretend to be any navigator,
-but I do know the course for Papeëte."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What you think not matter," said Vaiti, rolling
-up the chart.  "Make him eight bell.  You go take
-wheel; I ki-ki [dinner], then I take him."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What's the course?" demanded the mate eagerly.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Nor'-west by west," answered Vaiti, going into her
-cabin, and slamming the door against Harris's
-open-mouthed questions.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>An Aitutaki boy with a chain of red berries in his
-hair, and a scarlet and yellow "pareo" (kilt) for all
-clothing, brought up the dinner.  Vaiti ate her meal
-alone, and then came on deck to take over the wheel,
-keeping a determined silence that Harris hardly cared
-to break....  And yet—Nor'-west by west, with the
-wind fair for distant Papeëte, and the deadly Delgadas
-lying about a quarter point off their present course, not
-ten miles away!</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"She's a hard case, bo'sun," he remarked to that official
-as they sat down together.  "She has me fair scared
-with the course she's steering; and yet, you may sling
-me over the side in a shotted hammock for the sharks'es
-ki-ki, if she don't know a lot more than the old man
-himself.  Ain't she a daisy, too!  Look at her there
-'olding the wheel, as upright as a cocoanut palm, and
-as pretty and plump as a—as a——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Porker," concluded the bo'sun, pouring an imperial
-pint of tea into his mug.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You ain't got no poetry in you," said the mate
-disgustedly.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Nor nothing else," growled the bo'sun.  "Ain't
-you going to help that curry, and give a man something
-to put in his own inside after stowing the whale-boat
-full of beef and biscuits?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"The whale-boat?  (That's plenty, bo'sun; I've
-got to live as well as you)."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Ay, biscuits, beef, and water; compass and sextant.
-She give the order a while ago."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What's in the wind now?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I don't ask questions, so I'm never told no lies."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I do, though," said the mate, in a spasm of authority,
-deserting his dinner to spring up the companion and
-join Vaiti at the wheel.  The bo'sun's mahogany face
-broke up into a score of curving wrinkles, and his
-shoulders shook a little, as he watched the scene on
-deck.  Quite mechanically he transferred the rest of
-the curry to his plate, and while clearing the dish with
-the precision of a machine, kept an eye on the couple
-at the wheel.  He saw Harris ask an eager question,
-and repeat it more eagerly.  He saw Vaiti jerk a brief
-answer, and the mate speak again.  Then he saw the
-girl swing round on her heel, lift one slender hand, and
-bring it down across Harris's cheek with an emphasis
-that left a crimson mark upon the polished brown.  He
-saw the mate take a step forward, and look at the
-handsome helmswoman as though he were very much minded
-to pay back the correction after the manner of man in
-general where a pretty vixen is concerned.  The two
-figures stared at each other, eye to eye, for a full minute.
-Vaiti's brown eyes, keen as twin swords, never wavered;
-her lip was insolent and unrelenting.  The mate's
-half-angry, half mischievous expression dissolved into an
-embarrassed grin; then he turned tail and hurried down
-the hatch.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"She's a tigress in 'uman form," he declared.  "If
-the old man—or any other—was to lay 'is little finger
-on me—but there! who cares what a scratchin' cat
-does?  I'd as soon marry a shark—I would!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You've as much chance," granted the bo'sun.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Talk of sharks!" said the mate, gazing ruefully at
-the table and the empty dish.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Some two hours later, a milky gleam on the port bow
-attracted the mate's attention as he stood on the poop.
-A Kanaka sailor had just taken the wheel, and Vaiti was
-below.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Breakers on the port bow!" sang out Harris.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti was up in a minute.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I t'row water on my father's head," she said coolly—"but
-no good; he too much sick, he see snake by
-and by, I think.  You and Oki carry him into him
-cabin, and come back pretty quick.  I see this t'rough
-myself."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"See </span><em class="italics">what</em><span>?" demanded the mate, on the last verge
-of frenzy.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Not know myself yet," answered Vaiti, giving one
-of her rare laughs.  She seemed in a very good humour
-for once.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>When the mate came out a little later, and the sailor
-went back to the neglected wheel, Vaiti was standing
-by the whale-boat, wearing an air of perfect self-possession
-and a complete suit of her father's white ducks.
-The sight was no novelty to Harris, but it came
-upon him now, as usually, with a new shock of admiration.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Isn't she an outrighter!" he observed to the
-unsympathetic bo'sun.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"She certainly is, if outrighter's French for an
-undacent young woman," replied that officer sourly.
-Harris did not hear him, for the significance of the
-morning's mystery had just burst on his mind.  He
-had not spent ten years in the Pacific for nothing and
-the sight of Tai, a diver from Penrhyn, standing beside
-Vaiti, with a water-glass in his hand, spelt "pearl-shell"
-to the eyes of the mate as clearly as if the magic
-word had been printed in letters three feet long.  Vaiti
-flashed her white teeth at him.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Tai, me, three boys, we go into lagoon," she said.
-"Suppose somethings happen, you find course for Apia
-written out, cabin table; you take ship back, put
-captain in hospital."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"By ——, but you're a corker, Vaiti!" cried Harris
-admiringly.  "Where'd you hear anything about the
-Delgadas?  No ship goes near them that can help it;
-they're a regular ocean cemetery."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You 'member officer from gun-boat, Apia?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Ay!" said Harris.  He did remember the lad, and
-the rather inexplicable friendliness shown him by
-Saxon and Vaiti during the stay in port of the
-</span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span>.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"He show me photo Delgadas.  </span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span> he been go
-all round him, mark him right for chart, because he all
-wrong.  Officer give my father bearings; say plenty talk
-and show photo.  He dam fool officer, I think; he not
-know that kind place mean pearl-shell, and we not tell
-anything."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Harris mounted the rigging, and surveyed the reef
-from the main cross-trees.  It was the best part of a
-mile away; a creaming circle of foam on the sea's blue
-surface, enclosing a pallid spot of green.  Vaiti, who had
-followed him, flung one arm round the mast, and, leaning
-outwards towards the horizon, surveyed the reef
-intently.  Within that ring of foam—the grave of many
-a gallant ship that had sailed the fair Pacific as bravely
-as their own little schooner—might lie many thousands
-of pounds.  The repurchase of the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>, once Saxon's
-sole property, now partly owned by a trading syndicate;
-the regaining of her captain's lost position in decent
-society—perhaps the realisation of half a hundred
-luxurious dreams, dreamed on coral beaches under the
-romance-breeding splendours of the tropic moon—all
-this, and more, hung on the chances of the next few
-hours.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>There was silence for the space of a minute or two,
-as the man and woman swung between earth and
-heaven, staring across the sun-dazzled plain of sea.
-Then, in one instant, the dream broke, and the rainbow
-fragments of that bubble of glory scattered themselves
-east and west.  For across the bar of the level horizon
-slipped a small, pointed, pearl-coloured sail, growing as
-they watched it, flying past, and heading all too surely
-for the Delgadas reef.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti flung herself round a backstay, and slid down
-to the deck, with a word on her lips that would have
-justified the bo'sun's recent judgment, could he have
-caught it.  Harris followed, swearing fully and freely.
-It was evident to both that the newcomer had special
-business with the reef as well as themselves; and they
-wasted no time, acting in concord, and without dispute,
-after a fashion that was new on board the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>.  Within
-half an hour they had reduced the distance between
-the ship and the reef to a quarter of a mile; nearer
-than that even Vaiti did not care to go, for the weather
-looked unsettled, though the wind was off the reef.
-The whale-boat, with a picked crew, was lowered, and
-sent flying towards the break in the reef, while the
-mate, burning to be in her, but conscious that his
-duty must keep him on the ship, paced excitedly up and
-down the deck, glass in hand, watching the advance of
-the stranger ship from time to time.  She was a good
-two hours' sail away as yet; and surely first possession
-was worth something, even out here in the lawless South
-Seas!</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="a-race-for-a-fortune"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER II</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">A RACE FOR A FORTUNE</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>Before an hour was over, the wind had freshened
-considerably, and the mate began to feel anxious for the
-safety of the boat, in case he should be obliged to run
-for it from the neighbourhood of the treacherous reef.
-That Vaiti would return an instant sooner because
-of the threatening weather he did not expect, knowing
-the dare-devil recklessness of her character too well.
-It was certain, however, that he might lose the ship,
-and incidentally himself, by waiting too long; and it
-was equally certain that Saxon, once recovered, would
-put a bullet through his mate's head if Vaiti came to
-harm.  And all the time that threatening sail was
-growing larger and larger.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was an unspeakable relief, though no less of a
-surprise, when he saw that the boat was actually heading
-towards the ship again, the sail up and every oar hard
-at work.  He did not remember having seen Tai go
-down, in any of his hurried inspections through the glass,
-and the time was certainly short.  What did it all
-mean?</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The meaning became sufficiently clear as soon as the
-boat approached the ship, but not through the medium
-of eye or ear.  A strong stench of rotting fish struck
-the mate's nostrils almost before the boat was within
-hail, and instantly enlightened him.  No one who has
-ever smelt the terrible smell of the pearl-oyster removed
-from its ocean bed, and left to putrefy in a tropical sun,
-can mistake the odour.  Harris understood at once that
-the strange ship had been there before, and that Vaiti was
-bringing back a sample of the last catch, left out to rot
-during the vessel's temporary absence.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> was leaping dangerously when the boat came
-alongside, but Vaiti snatched at the lowered rope, and
-swung herself up over the bulwarks before any of the
-native crew.  Tai, following her, brought a sack of
-hideously smelling carrion, and dumped it down on the
-deck.  The mate's eyes glistened.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I find great lot lying on reef," said Vaiti, with an
-apparent calmness that might have deceived any one
-who knew her less accurately than the mate.  "I think
-been there two week.  C'lismas Island, he one week
-away, good weather.  Papalangi C'lismas Island belong
-plenty diving gear.  You see?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Rather!" said Harris gloomily.  "Game up, eh?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I think you no man at all," spat Vaiti suddenly,
-swinging into the cabin.  Harris, not especially put out,
-gave a hand to hauling in the boat, remarking to the
-bo'sun, who was picking over the heap of decaying
-pearl-shell, "Don't know as one could say the same about her,
-lump of solid devilment that she is!  But this looks
-like the end of all our 'opes, as they say in the plays;
-don't it?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>In a minute or two Vaiti appeared again, wearing a
-dignified muslin gown with three frills on its tail, and
-holding a chart in her hands.  She eyed the horizon
-narrowly, and ordered the ship to be put about, a
-manoeuvre which headed the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> straight for the
-oncoming sail.  It was now evident that the stranger
-ship was a schooner of some eighty or ninety tons,
-rather larger than the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>, and nearly as fast.  No one
-on board had the smallest doubt of her mission, even
-had that rotting heap of shell not been there to offer
-evidence.  Pearl-shell lagoons, with their shell worth
-£100 to £200 per ton, and their pearls (if any are found,
-which is not always certain) worth a fortune for half a
-handful, are the gold mines of the South Sea world;
-the very birds of the sea seem at times to carry the news
-of such a discovery, and spread it far and wide.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> gathered way, and sped fast towards the
-stranger ship.  The sea was blackening and rising, but
-there was not very much wind as yet.  Vaiti sat
-cross-legged on the deck, studying her chart in the waning
-light of the gusty afternoon.  It was some minutes
-before she laid it down and stood up to speak, steadying
-herself with one hand against the deck-house, for the
-schooner was now rolling heavily.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Alliti," she said, "suppose you got heart one small
-fowl inside you, I get captain's Winchester, my levolver,
-you and bosun's levolver, and we send that people Davy
-Jones, or go ourself, pretty quick.  But you not got heart,
-though you big man, and old man he all time sick.  Now,
-you listen too much what I tell you.  You run alongside
-ship, you go on board.  You say captain sick, no
-one take sun, we get off course, nearly wreck on Delgadas.
-Then you ask captain give bearings reef, and you look
-at him chart too much careful, see if this line mark—here."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She put the point of her small forefinger on the chart
-she held, and showed two or three newly-ruled lines in
-red ink, enclosing a large space east and south of Samoa.
-These were the boundaries of the area lately annexed
-by New Zealand, and she was exceedingly anxious to
-know if the stranger knew as much about the significance
-of that matter as she did.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Then," she went on, "you ask him if he been Wellington,
-say we wanting news——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What the (adjective noun) for?" demanded the mate.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Because I say, pauki!" (pig) flashed Vaiti.  "No!—you
-got head of pig, heart of fowl.  You bo'sun, you
-know I get you through this all right, suppose you
-trusting me—you come here."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Harris, shaking his great shoulders in an easy laugh,
-swung down on to the main deck, and began ordering
-about the crew.  He had an enormous admiration for
-Vaiti, even when she boxed his ears, but he thought her
-special peculiarities of character rather a trying obstacle
-in the way of his enjoying the easy life beloved of South
-Sea mates.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The acidulous bo'sun rose from his seat on deck, holding
-out an unclean palm, in the midst of which glittered two
-fine pearls.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I've been through that little lot, and got these, which
-do look like biz, ma'am," he observed.  "As to people
-havin' fowls' hearts, or pigs' heads, I'm not prepared to
-pass judgment.  But I don't own to neither myself,
-and if you say it's a fight, a fight it is.  Or if you've got
-a better plan in that uncommon level 'ead of yours, I'm
-ready to stand by."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You something like a man," pronounced the
-commanding officer in the muslin skirt.  "You listen.
-I tell him all again."</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>An hour later the bo'sun, very wet and draggled,
-climbed over the bulwarks of the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>, and the schooner
-</span><em class="italics">Margaret Macintyre</em><span>, of Sydney, slipped behind into the
-falling dusk.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Said he was thirteen weeks out from Sydney, ma'am,"
-reported the ambassador.  "Four weeks out from Apia,
-gettin' copra round here and there, and there wasn't
-no Wellington news anywhere, as he remembered.  Nice
-new chart, with no lines of that kind ruled on it
-anywhere.  As to where he got the divin' gear that
-was in the cabin, or what kind of copra he reckoned
-to pick up on the Delgadas, he didn't say, not bein'
-asked."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti stood still to consider, a beautifully poised black
-silhouette against the yellow oblong of the lamp-lit
-cabin door.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I think it all right; he not been near Wellington,"
-she pronounced at last.  "Alliti!  How her head?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Sou'-west by south," answered the mate from the wheel.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Keep her so."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Ay, ay, sir!" laughed the mate.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>Every one in the South Pacific knew that the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>
-was a marvel of speed, and that she had not been originally
-built for trading, though nobody could tell exactly how
-Saxon had acquired such a clipper.  It was a popular
-theory that she was a millionaire's yacht from San
-Francisco, which he had stolen and subsequently
-disguised.  He was known, however, to have possessed her
-for more than twenty years, and was now as completely
-identified with her as her own mainmast; so that any
-doubts as to the honesty of the way by which he might
-originally have obtained her were now of a purely
-academic nature.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Famous as she was for speed, the record of her passage
-from the Delgadas to Wellington fairly astonished the
-Islands, when it came to be told.  They had a fair wind
-almost all the way, with two or three lively nights when
-the little vessel, hard driven under the utmost pressure
-of the canvas, piled up the knots like a liner.  Saxon
-continued delirious, but was fortunately quiet.  Harris,
-and Gray the boatswain, though unenlightened as to
-the cause of the </span><em class="italics">Sybil's</em><span> sudden southward flight, fully
-understood that the possession of the pearl lagoon
-hung in the balance, and worked like half-a-dozen
-to supplement the efforts of the scanty Kanaka crew.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti interfered little with the working of the ship,
-but she kept a look-out that hardly left her time for sleep
-or food; although the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>, like most Pacific ships,
-was allowed, under ordinary circumstances, to chance
-it, day and night.  Hour after hour she sat cross-legged
-on deck, watching the unbroken rim of the black horizon,
-or paced up and down the poop, silent and grave, in her
-lace and muslin fripperies, as a naval officer on the bridge.
-What she was looking for no one knew, but during that
-wild ten days of foam and smother, cracking sails and
-straining sheets, her silent watchfulness infected the
-men themselves, and eyes were constantly turned to
-scan the empty, seething plain over which they flew.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was drawing on towards dusk of the tenth day, and
-the sky was beginning to light fires of angry copper-purple,
-high in the storm-driven west, when Vaiti, of
-a sudden, stopped dead in her endless walk, and looked
-with lips apart and eyes narrowed deep beneath her
-brows over the weather rail.  All this time they had not
-sighted a single sail or a solitary funnel.  They had
-been well off the track of New Zealand bound ships,
-and the Pacific waters are wide.  But now they were
-drawing near to Wellington, and there was nothing to
-be astonished at in the sight of another sail creeping up
-over the horizon, except, indeed, the fact that it was
-momentarily growing larger and gaining on the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>.
-There was scarce another schooner afloat from New
-Guinea to the Paumotus that could have done as
-much.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The mate came up behind Vaiti, and handed her a
-glass.  She looked through it, lowered it, raised it, and
-looked again with a steady gaze, and suddenly flung it
-out of her hand across the deck.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Harris caught it deftly and asked, with the
-constitutional calm that alone saved his reason when Vaiti
-took over command, "What's to pay now?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"She got auxiliary," said Vaiti, with a note of agony
-in her voice.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What if she has?  Isn't any vessel free to carry an
-auxiliary that can stand the stink of the oil and the
-cussedness of the injin?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I go see captain," said Vaiti, flashing down the
-companion.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Saxon was better to-day, and almost in full possession
-of his senses.  Vaiti went to the medicine chest; took
-out a hypodermic syringe, filled it with careful accuracy
-from a tiny dark blue bottle, and lifted her father's
-arm as he lay limp and weak, but mending fast, in his bunk.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Good girl, take care of your old father," he murmured
-in island Maori as she slipped the needle-point painlessly
-under the skin, and the powerful drug began to race
-through every vein of the inert body.  The effect was
-rapid and decisive.  Saxon sat up against his pillows
-in five minutes, clear-headed though weak, and asked if
-the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> had not sighted the Delgadas yet.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Listen, father," said Vaiti, speaking fluently in the
-low, soft tongue that the two had used together all
-her life—the Maori language Saxon had first learned
-from the pretty brown girl, dead this many years, whom
-he had stolen from her South Sea island to sail the blue
-Pacific at his side in the days of long ago.  "Listen.
-There is little time, and we are in great need.  We came
-to the reef, and the shell was there truly, but a strange
-ship had been before us.  Even as we lay there she
-returned from Christmas Island with diving gear.  I
-sent Gray on board to look at her chart and find out if
-she had been to Wellington; and it seemed that she
-had not the new line of annexation marked on the chart,
-where New Zealand this year added to herself all that
-lay within a certain space of the sea; also she had not
-been south of Auckland.  So then, knowing that we,
-if we asked the Government, might have the atoll
-granted us for twenty years and take possession above
-the people of the other ship, I made sail for Wellington;
-and we are now but one day away when this ship
-appears again, chasing us.  Where the suspicion has
-waked in their hearts, or when, is nothing; but that
-they have thought and discovered our desire, that is
-certain."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Give the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> all sail, daughter, and she will leave
-the other.  What is this talk?" asked Saxon, raising
-himself on his elbow to look out of the glooming circle
-of the port.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"But the ship has 'auxiliary,' my father, and she
-will have passed out of sight before the morning."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Oh, she has, has she?" grunted the captain, dropping
-back into his native tongue.  "What are you going to
-do about it?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He had noted a glimmer in Vaiti's eye that told him
-that she was not yet at the end of her resources.  The
-Maori guile and the English daring were united to some
-purpose in this strange creature that he had given to the
-world.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I will tell," she said, standing up to her full height.
-"But you must give the order, my father, for Alliti
-drags on the rein these days.  Let the bale of trawl-net,
-and the Manila rope, be taken from the cargo, and let us
-cross the bows of this ship, and drop them across her
-path.  The keel will run clean, but the screw will foul,
-and they will creep like a bird with a broken wing till
-daylight.  Then, if the sea has grown less, they will
-send down a diver and clear the screws; but we
-shall be almost into Wellington, and the lagoon is ours."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You are worthy to be the daughter of a brave man,"
-answered Saxon in Maori, sinking back wearily on his
-pillow.  "Go, then; and if we lose the ship, we lose
-her; there is great wealth to gain, and a man must die
-at one time, if not another.  I am tired.  I will sleep."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti left him, and hurried back on deck.  The purple
-dusk was already beginning to gather, and the green
-starboard light of the </span><em class="italics">Margaret Macintyre</em><span> gleamed like
-a glow-worm a mile or so behind.  She was drawing
-very near; there was no time to lose.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Alliti!" called Vaiti.  "My father he better; he
-send word to take trawl-net and Malila out of hold,
-make come across that ship him path, foul him sclew.
-Suppose you not afraid, you bring us close, drop net and
-Malila."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Harris's hide was thick, but Vaiti knew how to pierce
-it when she chose; and the man had courage enough,
-in streaks.  Vaiti had hit the mark when she called
-him chicken-hearted in fighting, but there was no
-manoeuvre of the ship too risky for him to undertake
-and carry through with perfect coolness.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"All right, my lady," he nodded.  "Don't forget me
-and Gray when it comes to sharing out the swag, that's
-all."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The net and the rope were brought up, and the latter
-knotted here and there to make a hideous tangle of it.
-Then the </span><em class="italics">Sybil's</em><span> lights were put out, even the cabin lamp
-being extinguished.  The stars pricked themselves out
-in sudden sharpness on the great blue chart of heaven
-above, and the waste of dark rolling water all around
-grew large and lonely.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>You are not to suppose that Saxon's daughter did
-not see and feel these things—did not hear the voiceless
-talk of the great seas on starry evenings, or feel her mortal
-body almost rapt away in the ecstasy of a black midnight
-and a shrieking storm; just as you, perhaps, who think
-that no one ever shared such experiences with yourself,
-may feel.  It is not only the blameless tourist, with his
-daily diary, and his books of travel teaching him how
-and when to "enthuse," who enjoys the splendid
-pageant of the seas.  Vaiti, as the most indulgent
-chronicler must confess, had more than a spice of her
-father's villainy in her composition, not to speak of
-whatever devilry her Maori forebears might have bequeathed
-to her.  She was unscrupulous, ruthless, and crafty
-as a general rule; she was engaged in a deed of the very
-shadiest description to-night—yet, as she stood with
-her hands on the wheel, and her eyes on the green
-starboard light of the oncoming ship, steering the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>
-to something extremely like certain destruction, she
-knew that the Southern Cross was rising, clear and
-beautiful, above its gem-like pointers, just ahead; and
-that a little sliver of young moon, crystal-silver against
-the dark, was slipping up the sky to her left.  The thought
-just grazed her mind that this might be the last time
-the moon would ever rise over the Pacific for her.  She
-smiled a little in the dusk, and steered steadily ahead.
-There were no "streaks" in the composition of Vaiti's
-spirit.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>A short tack to the starboard became necessary.
-Harris put the ship about at a lift of Vaiti's hand.  It
-grew very dark; a cloud was over the moon, and the
-stars were dimmed by driving vapour.  The wind was
-increasing; the schooner lay over with its weight, and
-the foam gurgled along her clean-ran sides.  Still the
-</span><em class="italics">Margaret Macintyre</em><span> came on, stately and unsuspicious,
-all sail set, and the beat of the little screw distinctly
-audible through the night.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti signalled again to put the ship about, and as
-soon as the great booms had creaked across the deck.
-gave over the wheel to Harris.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Run him just as he head now," she said softly, "and
-bring him too much close; so (double adjective) close
-to ship he scrape the (qualified) paint off him.  I go do
-rest."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Harris, humming "Good-bye, Dolly Gray," took
-the wheel over.  If he had any doubts as to Vaiti's
-purpose, the vigour of her language would have
-dispersed them.  Vaiti never swore unless she was
-exceedingly in earnest.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The trawl-net and the tangle of Manila were hanging
-over the stern, held up by a single rope.  Vaiti glided
-to the rail, holding a sharp knife in her hand—("I
-always </span><em class="italics">did</em><span> think she kept one somewhere among her
-frilligigs," commented Harris silently, as he caught the
-flash of the steel)—and waited, still as a statue.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Presently out of the darkness shot a hail, accompanied
-by a perfect constellation of oaths.  Its apparent object
-was to ascertain the </span><em class="italics">Sybil's</em><span> reason for steering such a
-course.  The </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> answered not a word, but steered
-the course some more.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The hail, at the second time of repeating, became a
-yell, with a strong note of terror in it.  On came the
-</span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>, a dim, unlit tower of blackness, taking as much
-notice of the shouts as the </span><em class="italics">Flying Dutchman</em><span>.  Those on
-board the </span><em class="italics">Margaret Macintyre</em><span> gave themselves up for
-lost.  There was even a rush made for one of the boats.
-But the threatening shape swept past her bows, so near
-that the furious captain could have tossed a biscuit
-on board—so near that the </span><em class="italics">Sybil's</em><span> Kanaka crew, thinking
-the "papalangi" officers meant to ram the stranger,
-uttered war-cries wherein pure delight was mingled with
-overjoyed surprise.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was all over in a minute, and the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> was well
-away on the </span><em class="italics">Margaret Macintyre's</em><span> port side before
-the latter vessel discovered, through the medium of a
-horrible jar from the engine-room and a powerful odour
-of oil, that the screw was badly fouled, leaving them,
-like St. Paul with nothing to do but make the best of
-circumstances, and "wish that it were day."</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>December weather is hot in Wellington, and it was
-now close to Christmas.  Perhaps that was why the
-senior member of the trading firm that had taken over
-part ownership of the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> for an unpaid debt thought
-his eyes were deceived by the glare of the sun when
-he saw a white schooner of singularly graceful lines
-lying alongside one of the wharves on a date when
-her engagements plainly demanded her presence in
-Tahiti.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>When, however, he met Saxon and his daughter, a
-few minutes afterwards, on Lambton Quay, he understood
-that his eyes were in excellent order.  So, it soon
-appeared, was his tongue.  He was a gentleman of
-Scottish extraction, and it hurt him badly to see possible
-profits thrown away.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Saxon let him have his say, and merely laughed for
-answer.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Come into the Occidental, and Vaiti and I'll tell you
-something worth all the trade that you'd take out of
-Papeëte in ten years," he said.  "I'm going to own the
-ship again before New Year's Day, and paint this good
-old town scarlet as well.  You'll see."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>And the man of money-bags, anxious to see, went into
-the hotel.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, in a fit of perversity, declined to come in.  She
-knew only too well that, in Saxon's impecunious
-condition, there was no hope of getting their discovery
-effectively worked save at a price that would leave very
-little change over for the present possessors of the
-lagoon—even if the captain had been quite sober, which he
-was not.  They had got the grant, and had furthermore
-had the satisfaction of noting that, day after day,
-Wellington Harbour remained empty of the hardly-used
-</span><em class="italics">Margaret Macintyre</em><span>.  It was evident that her
-people, whoever they were, had tamely accepted defeat.
-There was no standing against a grant from the
-Government of New Zealand—no matter how acquired.
-But all this did not alter the fact that there was not going
-to be a great deal for the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>, and her captain, and her
-captain's daughter—especially the latter.  It was there
-that the sting lay.  Vaiti had had dreams—oh, but
-dreams! oh, such dreams! before solid common-sense
-had brought her down to earth, and made her
-realise that Saxon's unlucky state, and the eminently
-Scottish firm who held the destinies of the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> in their
-hands, were quite certain to stand in the way of
-realisation.  To make a fortune, you must first have one,
-generally speaking.  And it was the canny Glasgow men
-who had it.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>So, because she did not want to hear with her own
-ears what she knew very well must take place, she
-refused to come into the hotel, and wandered off alone
-down the quays, in the warm December sun, which yet
-was cool compared to the burning heats of the island
-world.  She was dressed in a long, waistless muslin
-gown, as usual, but her shady Niué hat and white deck
-shoes—not to speak of a pair of kid gloves that caused
-her horrible discomfort and a parasol that embarrassed
-her extremely—spoke of a respect for certain of the
-conventions that might have astonished people who knew,
-or thought they knew, Vaiti of the Islands.  Of course,
-the loungers on the quays looked admiringly after her—she
-would have liked to see them dare to omit that tribute
-to her fiery charms—and some of them freely spoke to
-her, calling her Mary and Polly, offering her hearts and
-drinks and new bonnets, and asking her for kisses or
-jobs on the schooner, just as it occurred to them, after
-the simple fashion of the sea.  Some of them knew her,
-and some of them did not.  It was the latter who asked
-for jobs.  The men who did know the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> and her
-"Kapitani" asked for kisses, which they did not expect
-to get.  That was safer.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, quite accustomed to this sort of demonstration,
-and enjoying it in a languid way as she strolled along
-under the annoying parasol, covered half a mile or so
-of the quay at her own leisurely pace, and then sat down
-on a coil of rope in a quiet place, to stare across the water
-and think.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She wanted something, and she did not see her way
-to get it.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>To disentangle the dreams and hopes, wild fancies,
-and wilder aspirations of the half-caste mind when that
-mind, puzzling and elusive enough to the pure white
-in any case, is further complicated with a touch of
-genius, would be a task worthy of a whole academy of
-science.  This much alone can the necessarily
-all-knowing biographer of Vaiti say—that she wanted to
-be someone, and wanted it so badly that nothing
-else in life seemed worth having, or even existent,
-She was a princess of Atiu on her mother's side, and
-on her father's (though Saxon's past was as much a
-mystery as the origin of the yacht-like </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> herself)
-Vaiti felt that she had every right to claim high
-standing.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Doubly dowered, therefore, with the instinct of rule,
-the actual command of the schooner had fallen into her
-capable hands quite naturally.  Left to herself, she
-would probably have made the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> pay in a way
-unknown before to the easy-going island world.  But
-the useless, dissipated Saxon had to be counted on.  She
-liked him in her own way, such as it was, but she despised
-him also.  And it was an undoubted fact that he
-hampered everything.  This bargain with M'Coy and
-Co., for instance—it was useless for her to attempt to
-put a finger on it.  Saxon had got drunk the night
-before, as soon as the matter of the grant had been
-finally decided, at the end of some anxious days of
-waiting; and in the morning the numerous "hairs"
-that he had taken to restore him had left him in a
-condition of hopeless obstinacy and self-sufficiency.  In
-such a state he was as certain to be over-reached as a
-stranded jelly-fish is certain to be licked up by the
-sun.  And this was bitter to Vaiti.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>For, sitting there motionless under the parasol (which
-was serving a useful purpose at last, in shading her
-handsome face from observation and comment by the
-passers-by), Vaiti had arrived at something rather like
-a conclusion, and a conclusion, too, that was likely to
-shape most of her thoughts and acts henceforward.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Money was the thing.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She did not care for money in itself, and none of the
-things it could bring really interested her, except pretty
-clothes.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>But money was importance, money was power; money
-was the freedom to do exactly what you wanted, and
-make other people do it too.  She did not think it out
-in words, like a European.  Pictures passed before her
-mind, more vivid by far than the glittering water and
-flashing sea-gull wings in front of her bodily eyes.  She
-saw captains of great ships, giving orders like kings,
-and obeyed by the promptest and smartest of slaves.
-She saw owners of big stores entertaining half the
-island on their verandahs, paid court to by wandering
-beach-combers, going out to ships in beautiful boats
-manned by their own uniformed crews, who bent their
-backs double at a word.  She saw "Tusitala," of Samoa,
-the great English story-teller, living in his splendid
-house outside Apia, surrounded by a humble clan of
-native followers wearing wonderful lava-lavas of a
-foreign stuff they called "tatani" (tartan)—Tusitala,
-who was as great a chief as Mataafa himself, and had
-spoken to her, Vaiti, as one worthy of all honour....
-Her pictures were almost all of the islands, for the
-islands were in her blood; but something, too, she
-saw of Auckland—the merchant M'Coy, old and so
-ugly, and of the commonest birth, yet reverenced like
-the greatest of chiefs, because he had money....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The afternoon rays grew blinding hot on the water
-as the sun sank down.  The sea-gulls dipped and
-screamed.  Steamers glided away from the wharves
-with long hooting cries that somehow seemed to embody
-all the melancholy of the homeless sea.  Steam cranes
-chattered ceaselessly above the yawning holds of
-discharging ships.  Behind, the tramcars hummed in the
-street, and people hurried up and down.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>And at last the western sky began to burn with
-sultry red, and Vaiti went home.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Something had taken root in her mind that afternoon
-that struck down and shot up, in the days to come, and
-led her into ways and places wilder even than the
-adventure of the pearl lagoon.  As children string
-berries on a straw, so upon the stem that grew from
-that seed were strung the strange events that followed,
-one by one.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="the-flower-behind-the-ear"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER III</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">THE FLOWER BEHIND THE EAR</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>As Vaiti, Cassandra-wise, had prophesied about the
-pearl lagoon, so indeed it fell out.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It takes money to exploit even the smallest
-discovery of this kind, and the canny M'Coy made the
-most of the fact.  Delgadas Reef was too risky a
-neighbourhood to be worked by any vessel unprovided with
-an auxiliary engine, so a cranky little schooner of some
-forty tons, owning a tiny oil engine that sometimes
-worked and sometimes did not—more commonly the
-latter—was chartered; also a couple of boats for
-diving work, and two sets of diving dresses; and a
-cheap crew was picked up somewhere, and some poor
-provisions laid in.  Everything was done on the most
-economical scale possible—yet the Scotchman grumbled
-and lamented, and declared he would never see his
-money back.  The shares had been fixed at a wickedly
-low figure for Saxon and there were, furthermore,
-clauses in the agreement concerning expenses which
-made that unlucky derelict swear fiercely when he read
-them after he was sober.  It was too late to complain
-then, however, for he had signed everything he was
-asked, under the influence of the good whisky to which
-M'Coy—liberal for once—had freely treated him.  Nor
-did he get any sympathy from Vaiti.  She merely
-laughed when he complained, and told him frankly
-that he would have done better to stay in his cabin
-and drink there, if he liked, leaving her to finish what
-she had begun.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>So the pearling ship sailed off, and Saxon, who could
-not afford to stay in port, went another voyage.  And
-some months later, when he came back, it was to find
-that Delgadas Reef was cleaned out.  It had held not
-much after all, said the Glasgow man, and shell was
-down, and the pearls had been few and off colour.  But
-there was enough to pay Saxon's debt and leave him
-owner and master of the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> once more.  And there
-might be a few pounds in addition—not much; but
-there, he was an honest man, and he would rather ruin
-himself than let Saxon and the charming Miss Vaiti
-feel they were badly treated.  And if Saxon would
-kindly sign this paper releasing him from all further
-claims, he would be happy to give over all claim in
-the ship.  Otherwise—money was tight, and that
-little matter between them had been owing so long
-that——</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Saxon interrupted with a statement to the effect that
-he knew blank well he had been blank well had, and
-for the sum of two sanguinary sixpences he would be
-prepared to knock Mr. M'Coy's doubly condemned head
-off his unpleasantly qualified shoulders—only, luckily
-for Mr. M'Coy, he was sick of him and the like of him,
-and merely wanted to get out of his way as soon as
-he possibly could.  With which concise summing up of
-facts he signed the paper, picked up the cheque, and
-went out to spend it after his own fashion.  Vaiti
-secured half of it at the bank where he cashed it, and
-went off with the money done up in her hair, to keep
-house by herself on the schooner until her father should
-turn up again.  She knew him too well to expect that
-that would come about immediately.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Meanwhile, there were banks in which she could
-deposit her own share, and thus feel herself a step
-nearer to her goal—that dim, undefined goal that was
-to be reached somehow, some time, through the possession
-of the precious bits of paper and coin without
-which all pleasant things were impossible.  She did not
-decide at once where the money should go, but hid it
-in her cabin, and day by day walked the pavements of
-Wellington, delighting her eyes with the shop-window
-beauties which she had so seldom seen.  Thus came her
-undoing.  Vaiti had never heard the saying, "We are
-none of us infallible, even the youngest," or she might
-have been less certain of herself before it came about,
-and less bitter afterwards.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>For was it not natural that when Saxon unexpectedly
-reappeared at the Constantinople Hotel with a good
-deal of his money still left, and sent for Vaiti to join
-him and "live like a lady while she could," the
-improvident island blood should all unbidden well up and
-smother everything else?  Why go on?  There are
-shops in Wellington—there are as many ways of getting
-fifteen shillings' worth out of a sovereign, and repeating
-the process a great deal oftener than one means, as in
-any other of the world's big ports....  The end was
-that, after ten delirious days of glorious spending.
-Captain Saxon and his daughter set sail for Tahiti with
-a general cargo, a complete set of empty pockets between
-them, and, on the part of Vaiti, a glad remembrance
-more than half stifled by angry regret for the cost.  Yet,
-and yet, what a lovely thing money was, and what a
-pity that one could not both spend and keep it!  If
-you did the one, you were happy, but no one thought
-anything of you.  If you did the other, everyone paid
-court to you, but you didn't get the fun.  Yes, that
-was true of money—and of other things.  Girls who
-had been brought up at convent schools understood a
-lot that the ignorant beach girls didn't....  And, </span><em class="italics">bon
-Dieu!</em><span> as they used to say in Papeëte, when the Sisters
-couldn't hear—what a headache it gave her to think,
-and what a fool she was to do it!</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Ruru!" she called in Maori to a native sleeping
-peacefully on the deck.  "Wake up, pig-face, son of a
-fruit-bat, and make me kava immediately.  I am
-weary."</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>It was many weeks after, and the hot season had come
-round once more.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The schooner was slamming helplessly about on a
-huge glassy swell.  Everything on board that could
-rattle, rattled; everything in the cabins that could
-break loose and take charge, did so, sending up a
-melancholy chorus of crashes with every wallow of the ship.
-The great mizzen sail slatted about above the poop,
-offering and then instantly withdrawing a promise of
-cooling shade, in a manner that was little short of
-maddening, seeing that the hour was three o'clock,
-and the latitude not four degrees south.  Friday Island
-looking like a small blue flower on the rim of a crystal
-dish, hovered tantalisingly on the extreme verge of
-the horizon, as unattainable as Sydney Heads or
-heaven.  For the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> was becalmed, a week's
-from anywhere in particular, and there seemed no
-chance of a breeze.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Lord," said the mate, dropping the marlinspike
-with which he was splicing a rope, and mopping his
-forehead with his rolled-up sleeve, "I wonder 'ow many
-thousand miles we are from an iced beer!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Turtle!" said Vaiti, taking a slim brown cigar out
-of her mouth, and looking down from her seat on
-the top of the deck-house.  "Only nine hundred
-and eighty-seven.  You not remember Charley's in Apia?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I'd forgotten Samoa," said Harris, in a more cheerful
-tone, picking up the marlinspike, and going to work
-again, as if revived by Vaiti's arithmetic.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"A miss is as good as a mile, for all me, specially when
-it's nine hundred mile," remarked the gloomy boatswain.
-"Couldn't you manage to talk about something
-rather less 'arrowing to a man's insides?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I'd like to know why she's going skull-huntin' to
-Friday Island, then," said the mate, casting a cautious
-glance at Vaiti, who was scarcely out of ear-shot, up on
-the deck-house.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Trade I can understand," he went on, "and
-shell-huntin'—we haven't done too bad all round over that
-last little job, and the old man's a sight more sober
-since he's owned the ship again.  But skulls—and old
-skulls at that—filthy natives' bones that's been lyin'
-in the caves since Heaven knows when!  Besides, they
-ain't our skulls, however you may look at it——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Nor I hope they won't be," said the boatswain
-darkly.  "In no way, I mean.  The Friday Islanders
-aren't people to ask out to an afternoon tea-party
-without you've got your knuckle-duster on underneath
-your voylet kid gloves.  And you know what natives
-are about their old bones and graves."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I do.  What I don't know is how she thinks she's
-going to make anything out of a proper nasty job like
-that."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Oh, she's on the make, is she!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Did you ever know her anything else, bless her?"
-asked the mate.  "She wants sixty pounds, havin'
-spent all the old man give her out of the shell business
-in Wellington, takin' boxes at the theaytres and halls,
-and buyin' women's gear, and staying at the Constantinople,
-where she wore two new 'ats a day for a week;
-and other games of a similar kind.  Pity you was sick,
-and not there to see the fun.  I tell you, she made the
-town look silly."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What's the sixty pound for?" asked the boatswain,
-chewing fondly on his quid.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Harris giggled explosively, and whispered:</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"She wants a Dozey dress!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What in ——'s that?  It don't sound respectable,"
-virtuously observed the boatswain, who had never heard
-of the famous French dressmaker.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You bet it is, then.  Dozey's a regular bang-up
-swell in Paris, who makes the most expensive gownds in
-the world, and every one in them parts treats him just
-the same as a baronight or a duke.  You can't get so
-much as a jumper from him for less than sixty pound,
-and Vaiti she says every woman in Papeëte or Aucklan'
-or Sydney who saw one of his dresses would spot it
-right away, and go and throw herself over the Heads.
-She read about his things in a piece in one of them
-female papers in the hotel, and she saw an actress
-wearin' of one, and she's been layin' out to get one
-ever since, somethin' awful.  Seems when a woman in
-London, or Paris, or Yarmouth gets a Dozey dress,
-and takes to standin' off and on before the others,
-who's only got new velveteens with musling frills or
-such-like it just makes them other women drag their
-anchors and run head-on to the shore.  So Vaiti,
-she——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Hold on," interrupted the boatswain.  "Why, if
-she 'ad one of those gownds, she couldn't bend it on to
-her yards, not if it cost a million.  Man alive, she ain't
-laid down on the same lines as them Frenchwomen,
-anyway."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You let her alone for that," chuckled Harris.  "But
-what beats me is </span><em class="italics">who</em><span> she's going to do with them skulls,
-and </span><em class="italics">how</em><span>.  We won't know in a hurry, either, because
-she and Pita's fixed it up between them to do the job
-alone.  Thank 'eaven for small mercies, says I.  'Er
-on the war-path's rather more than I care for; and this
-isn't going to be any picnic, if I know anything of
-natives."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Pita!" whistled the boatswain.  "The old man
-will 'ave 'is gore before the voyage is out, if Vaiti goes
-on like this.  It's Ritter, that fat German trader in
-Papeëte, that he's wanting to marry her to; and as
-for natives, it's 'ands off for them, if she is 'alf of one
-'erself."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Well, she and Pita was planning it all out in the
-fore-top last night.  I heard them, when she thought
-I was sleeping on the top of the galley.  And the old
-man came out and roared at her like a Marquesas bull
-to come down; so down she came, laughing at him,
-like the devil she is.  There's no one else on this ship
-would laugh, without it was on the wrong side of his
-mouth, when the old man gets ratty.  Coming!  All
-right!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The mate jumped to his feet, and answered Vaiti's
-sharp hail in person, a deprecating smile spreading like
-spilt treacle all over his face as he came up to her, cap
-in hand.  Vaiti took her cigar out of her mouth, and
-looked at him for a minute without speaking.  The
-</span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> rolled on the towering swell like a captured beast
-trying to beat its brains out against a wall, but Saxon's
-Maori daughter stood as steady as the slender main-mast
-upon the reeling deck.  Harris smiled more than ever,
-and turned the marlinspike about in his hands, looking
-a little foolish.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You wanting Captain Saxon come and lay you out
-in the scupper pretty soon?" inquired Vaiti presently.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Not particular," answered the mate, the smile
-sliding slowly off his face.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Then I think perhaps you keep your mouth more
-better shut," said Vaiti, walking off with a contemptuous
-swing in the very fall of her laced muslin skirts.  And
-Pita of Atiu, as if in defiance of the captain, the mate,
-and every one else but his cousin Vaiti, pulled a mouth-organ
-out of his shirt and began to play it triumphantly
-and frantically, making a noise exactly like the buzzing
-of a mad bluebottle on a warm window-pane.  Further,
-he plucked a frangipani flower out of the wreath—a good
-deal the worse for wear—that hung round his neck,
-and stuck the blossom behind his ear.  Now, every one
-who has ever been in the Islands knows that these two
-actions are significant of courtship.  Pita was courting
-Vaiti, as everybody knew—Pita, a mere deck hand,
-who had been taken on at wild Atiu, in the Cook Islands,
-because he was a relation of Saxon's dead native wife.
-Very handsome was Pita, very young and tall and
-broad-shouldered, wily and fierce like all the Atiuans,
-but smooth and pleasant of countenance.  Were not the
-men of Atiu nicknamed "meek-faced Atiuans," even in
-the days, only a generation gone, when they were the
-cruellest and most warlike of cannibals and pirates?</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Needless to say, Captain Saxon, who had always had
-"views" for Vaiti, ever since she left the Tahitian
-convent school that had given her such fragments of
-civilisation as she possessed, did not favour the
-compromising attentions of Pita.  As for Vaiti, her father's
-prohibitions neither piqued her into noticing the
-handsome Atiuan more, nor alarmed her into favouring him
-less, than she found agreeable.  At present there was
-rather more than less about the matter, because Saxon
-was in one of his fits of gloomy depression, and Vaiti
-foresaw the usual result.  It was not at all likely that
-her father would be able to help her in her forthcoming
-raid.  Harris she did not choose to rely on at a pinch;
-Gray was old; the crew were far and away too superstitious
-to aid in such a sacrilege as she proposed.  There
-remained Pita, who, if he was a wild Atiuan, was at
-least "misinari" after a fashion, had been educated,
-more or less, in Raratonga, and was most certainly in
-love with herself....  Yes, Pita would do.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>That night, when the second dog-watch had commenced,
-and a lew large crystal stars were just beginning
-to glimmer through the pink of the ocean sunset, Vaiti
-descended to the cabin, looked into Gray and Harris's
-berths to make sure that they were both on deck, and
-then sat down on the cushioned locker opposite her
-father.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What is it?" asked Saxon, raising his heavy blue
-eyes.  He had been sitting with his head propped in
-the corner of the cabin, silent as a fish, since the clearing
-away of tea an hour before.  You might have thought
-him asleep, or, if you knew him intimately, drunk.  He
-was neither; but dead and drowned things were rising
-up from the black sea caverns of his heart to-night, and
-their bones showed white and ghastly upon the desert
-shores of his life.  So he sat silent, with his face turned
-to the darkening porthole and to the night that was
-striding down upon the sea.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Through the port he saw the shining harbour of
-Papeëte as it looked a week or two ago—a tall grey
-British war-ship lying at anchor, the </span><em class="italics">Sybil's</em><span> dinghy,
-small and crank and unclean, creeping up to the
-man-of-war's accommodation-ladder, himself, a
-weather-scarred, red-faced figure, in a worn duck suit and
-bulging shoes, sitting in the boat, and waiting patiently
-until the Governor's steam-launch should have passed
-in front of him and discharged its freight of visitors.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He saw the captain of the great Queen's ship standing
-at the top of the ladder, slight and trig and trim, all
-white and gold from top to toe, all smiling self-possession
-and cool command.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He saw ladies, immaculately coiffed and daintily shod;
-tall, clean, grey-moustached men following them; a
-cordial welcome on the deck; a flutter of light drapery
-and a glimpse of lounging masculine figures afterwards,
-framed by the great open gun-ports of the captain's
-cabin in the stern.  They were laughing and talking,
-and he could hear the clink of cups and glasses.  After—a
-long time after—he could see his own shabby little
-boat creeping up to the ladder; the captain, cold and
-business-like, and more than a little brusque, speaking
-to him on the deck about a certain anchorage in the
-Cook Islands group, concerning which he was known to
-have information; himself, burningly conscious of his
-shoes and his finger-nails, answering shortly and with
-some embarrassment, and feeling, of a sudden, very
-shabby, very broken, very old....  Was it twenty-five
-years, or two thousand, since the Admiral of the Fleet,
-and the Prince of Saxe-Brandenburg, with half the
-mess of his own regiment, had dined on board his biggest
-yacht at Cowes a week before—it—happened? ... Now
-a mere commander left him standing on the deck,
-and spoke to him like a native or a dog.  Well, what
-did it all matter to a dead man?  Was not his name of
-those days carved on the family monument in letters
-half an inch deep, and was not he, Edward Saxon,
-whom nobody knew, out here in the living death of the
-farthermost islands, a thousand miles from anywhere? ...</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Father," said Vaiti.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What is it?" answered Saxon's voice dully, as
-befitted a dead man.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"The wind is rising at last," said the girl in Maori,
-"We shall be off the island by morning.  Will you, or
-will you not, go with me into this cave of death, where
-I have told you that I shall find what is worth finding?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I have no heart.  I will not."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Then I and Pita will go," said Vaiti, fixing the
-Englishman's blue eyes with her own black, stabbing
-and savagely unfathomable, yet set in Saxon's very
-own narrow high-bred face.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The captain's dark mood was on him, and he turned
-his face to the wall, with a Maori oath consigning Vaiti
-and Pita to a cannibal end.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I go; stay you there," said Vaiti, using the quaintly
-courteous native form of farewell, barbed with a little
-sneer unknown to the original.  Then she went to her
-cabin.  And Saxon turned in his seat, and reached for
-the brandy bottle at last.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>Handsome Pita had a great awe for Vaiti, for she
-was a princess of Atiu by her mother's side.  But she
-was beautiful, and he admired her—also he hoped that
-her imperious soul harboured one soft spot for him.
-It seemed good, on the whole, when they were pulling
-the dinghy over the reef next morning, to ask Vaiti
-openly where the value of the booty came in—with a
-secret hope in the background of securing as much as
-possible for a certain very deserving, more or less
-Christian youth of Atiu.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, her white dress girded up high over her scarlet
-pareo, waded through the last yard or two of the emerald
-lagoon before she answered.  The boat being safe on
-shore, she stood up and looked sharply about her.  They
-had chosen a quiet spot at the back of the island for
-landing, all the natives being down at the harbour
-loading copra.  The weird pandanus trees, standing on
-their high wooden stilts at the verge of the shore, the
-rustling coco-palms swinging their great fronds far over
-the water, the golden and pink-flowered vines trailing
-yard on yard of green garlandry over the paper-white sand,
-could carry no tales, and they were the only witnesses.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti looked at Pita up and down, from head to foot,
-and Pita gave the flower behind his ear a knowing cock,
-and set one hand saucily on his hip.  He knew that he
-was the handsomest man in the Cook archipelago, and he
-felt that the way his pareo was tied that day was a pure
-inspiration.  So he shut up his mouth very tight, and
-made play with his burning black eyes as only a South
-Sea Islander can, waiting confidently the while for the
-information that the whole ship's company of the
-</span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> could not have extracted from Vaiti in a week.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The girl stepped forward, and with a commanding
-finger tapped Pita's biggest dimple, as if he had been
-a baby.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Suppose I tell you, then you know too much, you
-plenty frighten, go back to ship," she laughed.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Speak Maori, high chieftainess!" implored Pita.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"No fee-ah!" answered Saxon's daughter succinctly.
-Pita understood at once that Vaiti was unwilling to use
-a language that gave free rein to her tongue and his,
-and the knowledge elated him.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Perhaps I tell you," went on Vaiti, watching him
-narrowly.  "I think you got heart in belly belong you,
-more better than Alliti.  I tell you, you want plenty
-heart by-and-by."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"High chieftainess, Vaiti, speak Maori!" was Pita's
-answer, linked to an attempted embrace that only fell
-short of its main object because Vaiti quite calmly
-pulled a seaman's knife out of her dress and laid it edge
-upwards across her lips.  Pita, who had learned the
-real European kiss during his visits to civilisation, and
-wanted very much to show it off, felt disappointed,
-although there was a smile behind the blade that almost
-out-dazzled the steel.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Maori!" he persisted, putting his arm round her
-waist, with a cool disregard of her well-known readiness
-with the knife that won Vaiti's admiration a step
-further than before.  She laughed, wavered, and then,
-still playing with the keen, bright blade, she lowered it
-a little, and spoke in the soft language of the Islands
-at last.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was a fairly long tale that she had to tell.  When
-last the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> had been in the Society Islands, some
-weeks before, there had been a German man of science
-in the group, collecting native skulls for museums at
-home.  The grizzly old gentleman and his pursuits had
-not troubled Vaiti's mind particularly until her chief
-admirer, Ritter, a Papeëte trader, happened to drop a
-remark one day about the amount of money some of
-these old skulls were worth.  Vaiti's sharp intelligence
-linked on the casual saying at once to certain other
-wandering rumours she remembered, and she decided
-to find out something more.  She did not ask Ritter,
-for he was no talker, even to a handsome girl whom he
-admired; and the German was his compatriot, in
-any case.  But when the schooner reached Raiatea,
-where Professor Spricht was staying, Vaiti drifted off
-among the native huts, and squatted for an hour or
-two on the mats of the second chief's wife's mother's
-cousin's house, smoking a great deal, talking very little,
-and listening quietly.  By degrees the house filled up
-with interested natives all eager for gossip and chatter;
-and to Vaiti, pulling steadily at her cigar, and maintaining
-the grave, unsmiling demeanour proper to a princess
-of Atiu and a great Belitani chieftain's daughter, the
-drawing out of the secret she wanted was as easy as
-spinning sinnet out of cocoanut husk.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Nothing is private in the Eastern Pacific, and it was
-not long before all the professor's personal affairs were
-tossing about like seaweed on the flood of general
-gossip—mostly unfit for publication—that surged about
-the apparently uninterested ears of the silent, splendid
-sea-queen throned on the pile of pandanus mats....
-The Siamani (German) had got skulls in Niué, in Uea,
-in Mangaia, and was now collecting them about the
-Society group....  He was an ugly, grey-snouted pig
-to look at, and rooted in the earth like any pig; still,
-Taous and Mahina, daughters of Falani, seemed to think
-that—(details lost in a heated argument about the
-personal characteristics of the ladies)....  Anyhow,
-Vekia from the hills said he was going to buy her two
-silk dresses from San Francisco when he came back
-from Falaite Island; so he was not as mean as he
-looked.  Yes, he was going to Falaite Island in a great
-hurry; he would not even take time to finish his
-pig-rooting in Raiatea, on account of something he had heard
-from an old man who had once lived up in Falaite....
-What fools the papalangi (whites) were.  Did not every
-one in the Islands know about the old, old people that
-used to live on Falaite, hundreds of moons before the
-days of Tuti (Cook), and how they all died, and nobody
-lived there for very, very long, until some people
-wandered up from Niué in Tuti's time; and how the skulls
-of the old, old people were still there, buried in a cave
-that was a hundred miles long, and guarded by as many
-devils as would fill twenty war canoes?  Of course,
-these things were known, and always had been—but
-when would any man of Tahiti or Raiatea have thought
-of such folly as travelling more than a thousand miles
-to fight the devils and take away the skulls?  What
-if they were worth money enough to buy a big schooner,
-as the old grey pig had told Vekia when he promised
-her those dresses?  Would a whole schooner, loaded
-down with dollars, be any good to a man after the devils
-had killed him?  Vekia would never get her trade
-finery, for all her airs; and Jacky Te Vaka, whose
-schooner was to be hired to take the Siamani up to
-Falaite, would never come back from such a sacrilegious
-journey....  Why could he not wait, and go by
-Kapitani Satoni's schooner when she made her yearly
-trip by and by?  Every one knew that the </span><em class="italics">Sipila</em><span> was
-under a charm, and no harm could come to any one on
-board her.  But he would not wait, and just as soon as
-Jacky's boat came back from Bora-Bora, next week,
-they were to go....  Ahi! and Jacky was such a
-handsome man—it was a great pity!</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Such was the substance of the information gathered
-by Vaiti.  It resulted in her ordering the course of the
-ship to be changed, and heading direct for Friday
-Island, instead of going down to Auckland.  Friday
-Island—out of the way, infertile, uninteresting, and
-little known—had been one of Saxon's private preserves
-for some years.  He touched there once a year,
-purchased all the copra that the little place produced at
-his own price, and paid for it in cheap tinned meat,
-boxes of damaged biscuit, and tins of imitation salmon
-instead of cash.  He seldom went ashore, and certainly
-did not waste his time cave-hunting, if he did chance
-to set foot on the beach.  Vaiti, with her odd faculty
-for acquiring miscellaneous information, had known
-since the first time the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> called that there were great
-caves on the island, and that a devil of unusual quality
-and size guarded them.  So much might have been
-said of a hundred similar islands, however, and she had
-not troubled herself about either caves or devils until
-the German professor's secret set her on the alert for
-something that looked like a dangerous, exciting, and
-profitable adventure.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="the-black-viri"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER IV</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">THE BLACK VIRI</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>Moreover, as Harris had said, she had been devoured
-with desire of a real Paris dress ever since her stay in
-the Wellington hotel.  There had been a famous actress
-there at the same time, and all her garments had been
-freely paragraphed in the ladies' column of the local
-press.  When she swam languidly through the hall of
-the Constantinople, shining mystic and wonderful out
-of a cloud of rainbow silks and chiffons that had cost
-a formidable row of figures in the Rue de la Paix, all
-the women caught their breath, looked once, and then
-gazed determinedly out of the windows, pretending that
-they had noticed nothing.  When she came in to a late
-supper, floating in spangled mists and sparkling with
-constellations of diamonds, every head was turned her
-way, and half the heads—the short-cropped ones—stayed
-turned, in more senses than one.  It was a
-revelation and a martyrdom to Vaiti.  What were her muslin
-frocks and her ten new hats at a whole pound apiece
-compared to this?  And the vision of money saved up
-faded away for the time being before the vision of one
-such frock—only one—belonging to her.  Life could
-surely offer nothing more.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Of this, naturally, she said nothing to Pita, merely
-relating the matter of the skulls in as few words as
-possible.  Pita, for his part, made no comment, but
-took a couple of revolvers out of the boat and thrust
-one into his belt, handing the other to the girl.  Then
-he girded up his pareo—a significant action among
-islanders—and felt the handle of his knife to see that it
-was loose in the sheath.  There was a large sack in the
-boat containing candles and food, and leaving ample
-space for other filling later on.  Vaiti tossed it to Pita,
-and the two began their walk, barefoot, swift and silent,
-casting a quick glance every now and then among the
-weirdly stilted stems of the lonely pandanus groves as
-they went.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"They are all down with the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>—it is safer now
-than it would be at night," said Pita.  "Vaiti, if we
-get these things, and sell them for much money in
-Sitani, you and I will leave the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> when she next
-goes to Atiu; and you shall be queen of Atiu and I
-shall be king, and we shall eat roast pork and 'uakari'
-every day."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"My father would burn the villages and kill the
-chiefs, and hang your head on the bowsprit of the ship,"
-replied Vaiti conversationally.  "Besides, I like Sitani,
-and I will buy myself a wonder dress from Palisi town
-there."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Then we will leave at Sitani, and be great chiefs
-there, if these old bones indeed sell for so much money.
-And we will buy a little schooner for ourselves, and
-you shall be the real captain, and there will be four gold
-bands on your sleeve and one on the peak of your cap;
-and you shall get a </span><em class="italics">sitificati</em><span> from the chiefs of the great
-harbour, and take the schooner out of Sitani Heads
-yourself.  And every one shall be afraid of me and you,
-and they will say——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti had been listening as she swung along, now casting
-a glance of approval at the handsome lad while he spoke
-cunningly of the schooner she should command, now
-shooting out her lip a little, and slashing impatiently
-with her knife at the young cocoanut fronds.  Suddenly,
-looking very straight ahead, she interrupted.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Pita, you talk too fast.  There are things you do
-not know.  Tell me, is your heart strong within you?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"It is strong," answered the island Maori.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Then listen.  There is a devil in the cave."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I do not believe in devils.  I am misinari, and go
-to church five times on Sundays; also I have a black
-coat and two boots very nearly the same as each other
-to wear on collection days."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"There is a devil all the same; you do not know
-everything that is in the world, little Pita," replied
-Vaiti.  "There is something bad there.  I do not
-believe in native devils, for I am 'papa-langi'; but I
-know there is—a thing of some kind—there.  A bad
-thing.  A black viri, they say, but I do not understand
-that."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"A black viri is nothing.  You and I do not mind
-such things.  See—there will perhaps be one in this
-rotten wood."  Pita struck and kicked at a mass of
-decaying cocoanut wood, and hunted out one of the
-great black centipedes that are common in the equatorial
-islands.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>There is nothing on the bosom of Mother Earth more
-loathly than the centipede, and Pita's quarry—nearly
-a foot long, as thick as a sausage, scarlet feelers on its
-hideous head, and scarlet legs fringing its long lithe
-body—was as hideous a specimen as ever jerked itself
-lightning-wise across a forest path.  Pita, however,
-with swift dexterity, seized the horrible beast by the
-neck and tail, holding it so that it could neither bite
-nor sting, and lifted it up to his companion.  Vaiti's
-eyes dilated ever so little.  She drew her knife and
-slashed the creature in two; then, stooping down, she
-struck at the flying halves as they ran away in opposite
-directions, and cut them up into mincemeat.  Leaving
-the red fragments still wriggling in the track amidst an
-unsavoury, snaky smell, she stepped swiftly on.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"It is no matter," she said.  "We two shall see what
-we shall see.  Keep your heart warm within you."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"And if we come back safe?" cried the impetuous
-Pita, catching the girl's warm round arms in his two
-sinewy hands, and letting his black eyes gaze into hers.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti stood very still for a moment, looking out to sea.
-The spell of her stillness fell on Pita, and he remained
-as if frozen.  Far away the surf hummed on the reef,
-and a sea-bird cried.  Above the two beautiful,
-motionless young figures the palms rustled endlessly in the
-long trade wind.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"... If we come back" ... said Vaiti at last, her
-eyes still fixed on the far-off line of the outer sea—"if
-we come back—we will go away together, you and I."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She looked so like a witch in a trance (such things are
-not unknown even now, in strange Atiu) that Pita's hands
-dropped from her arms, and he felt half frightened in
-the moment of his triumph.  But Vaiti recalled him to
-himself by starting her steady swing again, and saying
-with a laugh, as they footed it through the dry,
-sun-struck woods side by side:</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I think some day my father will make a parrot cage
-to hang a green Atiu parrot in, and it will be made of
-your ribs and breast-bone, little Pita—all the same as
-my grandfather did in the islands to the man who stole
-his wife."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>At that moment the woods opened out and the cave
-came into view—a velvet-dark blot in the dazzling
-glare of greenery that tangled itself about the shoreward
-cliffs.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Pita's hand sprang to his revolver, and he uttered an
-exclamation of angry surprise.  Beside the cave stood
-a tall, brown, naked figure painted like a witch-doctor
-and armed with a spear.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Do not shoot," said Vaiti quickly.  "It will do no
-good.  Let me look to him myself."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She walked right up to the native, stood within a
-yard of him, and stared at him, in a silence that somehow
-managed to express unflattering things.  The man,
-stamping the butt of his spear on the ground, turned
-away from her and addressed Pita.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I have nothing to do with this woman of yours,"
-he said.  "It is with men I would speak."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Speak, then, pig-face," said Pita insolently, hoping
-to provoke a fight, since the man seemed to be alone.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Enter if you wish," replied the other.  "We have
-sent no fighting-men to hinder you; the way is clear.
-Yet if you think the hot sun on the pleasant land is good
-to see, and the beating of the warm heart in the living
-breast is sweet to feel, go not into our sacred caves, to
-lay evil hands upon the holy bones of Falaiti.  Enough."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The man's words were strangely void of heat or anger,
-and he held his spear loosely, Vaiti did not suspect an
-ambush, for she knew that no native would enter the
-cave.  Yet in that moment her quick mind leaped to
-the knowledge of some unknown danger threatening
-herself and Pita from out the cold-breathing world of
-darkness that lay within that rugged arch, and for one
-prophetic instant she could smell the very smell of
-death.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>But Vaiti's courage was of the kind that rises, wave
-by wave, the higher for all obstacle, and her spirit swelled
-within her to flood-tide in that moment.  She turned
-upon the witch-doctor and laughed in his face.  Then
-she stretched out her hand, and Pita's leaped into it,
-warm and strong, and together they stepped over the
-threshold of the cave.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The man outside cursed them, slowly and with relish.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Shall we not kill him?" asked Pita.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"There is no use," said Vaiti.  "It is plain to me
-that all the tribe know, and they trust to the dangers of
-the place, whatever these may be.  This island is at
-the very end of the world, it is true, and strange things
-may happen here."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Yes, there is nothing that one might not believe
-in this place," said Pita, looking back.  Already the
-gloom of Hades itself was winding about them, and the
-air struck gravelike and cold.  In the distance the mouth
-of the cave cast a brief glow of emerald light upon the
-dewy ferns and mosses close to the threshold, so that
-they shone like the jewelled foliage of some magic forest
-in a fairy play.  Then came the dripping roof, the
-enormous stalactite buttresses of the cave, dimly edged
-with light; the oozing floor, and the lifeless dark.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti spoke not at all, as they walked side by side
-down dark tunnel after dark tunnel, across empty,
-thunderous-echoing black halls and archways—their
-little candles flitting like fireflies through a dim world
-of unconquerable gloom.  Pita, however, was strangely
-gay.  He yelled aloud to set the echoes booming in the
-black domes above, when they crossed some invisible
-great goblin market-place, full of hollow sounds and
-half-glimpsed monstrosities.  He sang when the way
-along the endless corridors grew tedious, and the glistening
-stalactite candelabra succeeded one another, thick
-as forest branches, for mile after mile unchanged.  When
-the path was barred by inky lakes of unknown depth
-and ghastly chill, and the two explorers had to tie their
-lights on their heads and swim for it, he pretended to
-cry at the cold, and played tricks on Vaiti by slipping
-behind her and catching her feet in his teeth.  So they
-went on, one in wild spirits, the other silent and grave.
-And the hours of the sunny day slipped by dark and
-changeless, as they passed farther and farther away
-life and light into the cold black depths of the cave.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>When it was about noon, as near as they could guess,
-Vaiti took the biscuits and tinned meat out of the sack,
-and they ate, squatting on the wet floor of the tunnel.
-They knew that the journey was a long one, and that
-the way could not well be missed, yet they were
-beginning to feel a little uneasy now.  Did this cave
-go on for ever?</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Somehow, the food did not cheer them and when
-they rose and went on again they did not talk.  And
-now a worse difficulty than any they had yet encountered
-suddenly barred the way.  The winding tunnel along
-which they were walking turned sharp round a corner,
-and then ended to all appearance in nothing.  They
-stood at the edge of an empty gulf, black as a starless
-sky and of depth unknowable.  Thin trickles of light.
-from the candles wavered faintly about its edges, and
-showed that the colossal crack had a farther side, but
-it was impossible to see what lay beyond, and the depth
-below cast back the candle rays as an armoured hull
-throws off a rifle bullet.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Pita detached a lump of rock and threw it over the
-edge.  Vaiti watched him with sombre eyes.  "There
-is no bottom there," she said.  "It goes through the
-earth, and out on the other side; that is what I think."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Children's talk," said Pita, listening intently.
-There was an echoing rattle as the stone bounded from
-side to side on its way down.  The rattle grew fainter
-and fainter, diminished to a sound like the ticking of a
-watch, faded to an almost imperceptible vibration, and
-then seemed to die out.  Seemed—for although there
-was nothing left for the ear to catch, the sharpened
-sensory nerves of the body still responded to a faint
-tingle, somewhere, somehow, long after the actual sound
-had faded away.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I told you," said Vaiti.  "There is no bottom."  Pita
-did not answer; he was measuring the narrowest
-part of the gulf with his eye, and estimating the value
-of the three short steps of a run that were possible before
-taking off.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"It is not two fathoms wide here," he said, throwing
-the provision sack across to judge his distance better in
-the uncertain light.  Yet, despite the three steps of a
-run, there was not an inch to spare when he landed on
-the other side, with an effort that strained every muscle
-of his powerful young body.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Can you jump it?" he called to Vaiti—without
-any particular anxiety, for the Maori has no nerves,
-and he knew what the girl could do aloft on the schooner.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>To his astonishment, Vaiti made no answer, but
-stood leaning up against the wall of the tunnel, both
-hands pressed against her chest.  In a moment more
-she was violently sick.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"The smell!" she said presently, turning a ghastly
-face towards the light of Pita's candle.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I smell nothing," said Pita, puzzled.  "The wind
-blows your way.  There is perhaps some dead thing
-down there."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti shook her head, and Pita saw that her eyes
-seemed to fill half her face as she looked down into
-the gulf.  Suddenly she sprang, her white drapery
-flying behind her, and landed half a yard behind Pita,
-with a leap that drew a cry of wonder from the Atiuan.
-"Come, come," she said, taking his hand and fairly
-dragging him on.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>They had little farther to go.  The tunnel wound
-on for perhaps another hundred yards, and then stopped.
-They found themselves in a low-roofed circular chamber,
-such as is often met with at the end of long underground
-passages—a small, insignificant place, roofed with
-drooping green stalactites and floored with shapeless,
-slimy hummocks of stalagmite.  Numbers of deep
-shelves were quarried out in the rocky sides, and in
-these lay, row on row, the bare, mouldering skulls
-of Falaite's long-ago chiefs—many of them cracked
-and split, and not a few fallen into shapeless fragments,
-though there were a score or two in excellent condition.
-They were curious skulls indeed, had their discoverers
-been able to understand them.  In the projecting jaws,
-huge canines, strangely high cranium, and oddly
-developed ridges near the opening of the ear were the
-materials of a problem contradictory and complicated
-enough to occupy the wits of a whole college of science.
-But Vaiti and Pita saw none of these things.  They
-only noted with disappointment, that most of the skulls
-had gone to decay—picked out the best of the unbroken
-specimens, packed the great sack full of them,
-and turned homewards.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Vaiti," said Pita, as they walked down the rocky
-tunnel, and felt the slope of the gulf beginning under
-their feet.  "Vaiti, what did you——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Her face, turned back upon him, slew the still-born
-question on his lips.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was scarce a minute before the chasm gaped in
-their path yet again.  The leap was worse on this side,
-for the clustered cones of stalagmite did not allow a
-fair take-off.  Pita looked calculatingly at the farther
-side, very dimly visible in the faint candle-light, and
-picked up a fallen stalactite to throw across.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Do not throw!" said Vaiti, in a breathless whisper.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Why not?  I can jump better if I hear where it
-hits," replied Pita, casting the stone before Vaiti had
-time to snatch at his hand.  It fell short, and rolled
-down into the chasm with a loud, crashing noise.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Fool! fool!  Jump quickly!" exclaimed Vaiti,
-in the same strained, horrible whisper....  Just for
-a second before he sprang, Pita looked down into the
-black pit beneath, and it seemed to him that the
-darkness shirred and shivered below the farther edge of the
-crevasse—that for the fragment of a second something
-long, red, whiplike, vibrated high up in the light of the
-candles, and then was gone....  There was a sickening
-odour in the air—a living smell, not a dead one;
-there was a sliding, rustling sound....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Jump!" shrieked Vaiti.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>They leaped through the air as one, but it was only
-Vaiti who landed on the farther side.  Behind her, as
-she touched the rock, rose a shriek that blasted the
-leaden air into red-hot drops of horror—that went on
-and on and on, tearing upwards to the vaulted roof
-like a rocket fired from the mouth of hell; breaking
-at last into a gasping bellow, and snapping off into
-grisly silence on the very crest of a long, choking roar,
-in which there was nothing left of human.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>... Pita had jumped short.  Falling on the far side,
-with his legs half over the abyss, he had grasped for an
-instant at Vaiti's outstretched hands, and in the very
-act had been snatched away—snatched by a long,
-ghastly head, armed with poisoned jaws and quivering
-red antennas, that shot with the speed of a bullet out
-from the depths of the chasm, and back again with its
-prey....  The head was a foot long at least, the
-horrible winnowing feelers more than a yard, the black
-and red body, that just flashed into view for a second,
-was as thick as a man's thigh.  It was a nightmare, an
-impossibility, and yet ... it was, beyond doubt, the
-Black Viri.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>For a little while it seemed to Vaiti that she went
-mad, and then that the world went out and she died.
-A long time after, she found  herself sitting on  the
-floor of the tunnel, her head badly bruised and cut
-where she had dashed it against the rock, her candle
-guttering down towards extinction, her revolver empty
-and smelling of powder—she did not remember in the
-least how it had become so—and the whole black,
-horrible place still and silent as the bottom of the sea.
-Pita was gone.  The bag of skulls had disappeared—fallen,
-no doubt, into the abyss.  There was not a movement
-or a sound, save the whisper of the water—drops
-trickling ceaselessly from the roof into the dark pools
-upon the ground.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>That evening, when the early starlight was beginning
-to shine down upon the creepers veiling the mouth
-of the tunnel, Saxon, sober at last, and rushing like a
-madman to the cave to find his daughter, met Vaiti
-herself coming down the rocks at the entrance, haggard,
-trembling, and almost old.  He asked for Pita, and was
-answered only by a shuddering gesture of the hands.
-Questioning no more, he carried the girl down to the
-beach and brought her on board the schooner.  There,
-when they had sailed, he left her undisturbed in her
-cabin for many days, while they ran steadily southward
-to pleasant Auckland and the temperate latitudes,
-farther and farther away from lonely, sun-smitten
-Falaite.  The story of the day in the cave was known
-to him, as to every one on the island, for the
-witch-doctor of Falaite had told it far and wide, reserving
-only the one interesting fact—how he became possessed
-of the information.  And as no one else alive on Falaite
-knew that there were two ways of reaching the
-skull-chamber, and more than one place where a man could
-hide unseen, the witch-doctor's reputation as a prophet
-and a clairvoyant was greatly increased; so that he
-suffered continually from a happily-acquired indigestion,
-and his dogs grew fat on bones of pig and fowl.  And
-no one came ever any more into the sacred caves of
-Falaite Island.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Saxon declared plumply that he did not believe the
-tale, opining rather that the "blanked old wizard
-Johnnie had shoved Pita into the hole himself, and
-good riddance of bad rubbish, too."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>None the less, he was uneasy at Vaiti's rather prolonged
-depression, and though he dared not break in upon
-her solitude further than to hand her in her meals
-and ask her how she felt, now and then, he listened
-almost constantly at her state-room door, and gave up
-whisky for at least ten days.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>About the eleventh day, Te Ai, a young Samoan
-A.B., sat upon the main hatch in the pleasant coolness
-of the second dog-watch, and sang the farewell song of
-sweet Samoa, "Good-bye, my F'lennie"—the song
-that plucks so surely at the heartstrings of all who
-have ever loved and sailed away among the far-off fairy
-islands of the wide South Seas.</span></p>
-<blockquote>
-<div>
-<div class="line-block outermost">
-<div class="line"><span>"Good-bye, my F'lennie (friend)—o le a o tea,</span></div>
-<div class="line"><span>Efau lau le va'a, o le alii pule i ..."</span></div>
-</div>
-</div>
-</blockquote>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>he sang, beating time with his knees on the hatch....
-Then suddenly he stopped, and the little group
-of mates and captain on the poop did not see why.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Later on, Harris, his face stiff with suppressed
-laughter, knocked at the captain's door.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Can you oblige me with a piece of sticking-plaster,
-sir?" he said.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Who for?" asked Saxon, reaching for the yellow
-roll that lies handy in every shipmaster's cabin about
-the peaceful Pacific.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Te Ai, sir.  He's been knocked down, and his head
-got cut against the pump."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Who did it?" bristled Saxon, ready to uphold his
-own peculiar privileges, at once.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"She did, sir," said Harris, nearly choking.  "Te
-Ai, he was singin' 'Good-bye, my F'lennie,' on the main
-'atch and out she come from the deck cabin like a—like
-a nurricane, begging your pardon, sir—and she ups
-with a belayin' pin from the rail, an——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"All right, all right; there's your plaster,"
-interrupted Saxon.  "Harris!  Here."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Yes, sir!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Give this to Te Ai."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Lor' bless you, sir, 'e don't mind; 'e's a——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You do what you're told.  Stop.  Where's my
-daughter?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Walkin' on the poop, sir, uncommon lively, and
-looking like dirty weather ahead."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"That's all right," sighed the captain, with an air
-of infinite relief.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="a-diamond-web"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER V</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">A DIAMOND WEB</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>It was six o'clock in Apia, and the round sun was
-hanging low above the rim of the level sea, like a burning
-coal ready to drop down upon a breadth of hyacinth
-silk.  The stores were closed along the straggling
-beach street, where the sand was white under foot,
-and parrakeets tweedled cheerily in the scarlet-flowered
-flamboyant trees.  Native dandies, greatly oiled and
-dyed, and wearing a bright hibiscus blossom over each
-ear, swung past with the inimitable Samoan roll, their
-golden brown limbs gay with the red-and-white English
-bath-towel that is popular as full dress for steamer
-days in the little island capital.  Girls with
-high-coiffed yellow heads and pink or green tunics wandered
-lazily home to the cool, dark-domed native houses
-open all round to the sunset sky.  They went in groups,
-and sang as they walked—windy, fitful gusts of strange
-island melody, breaking out and dying away like the
-evening breeze among the heavy-headed palms.  Smells
-of yam and breadfruit, brown from the baking pits, of
-fish cooked in green, savoury leaves, and taro spinach
-stewed with cocoanut cream, crept out upon the cooling
-air.  The long, hot day was done, and Apia rested and ate.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>In "Charley's"—the least reputable of Apia's
-tavern-hotels—the egregious </span><em class="italics">table d'hôte</em><span> was in full
-progress out in the green-shuttered verandah.  Charley
-himself, an oily, flashy New Caledonian half-caste,
-dressed in striped pyjamas, was eating curried
-tin—nature unknown—with a knife and two fingers, at the
-head of the table.  A corpse-faced Chinese was shuffling
-round with the inevitable Pacific fowl, cut up in a watery
-soup.  The table-cloth was of linoleum, the swinging
-lamp guttered and smoked, the cutlery was dislocated
-and black.  But there was English beer on the bar
-counter, and plenty of broken ice; and the whisky
-that mounted high in each man's smeary tumbler was
-good of its kind.  Charley knew his customers, and
-sought first the essential.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Captain Saxon, his schooner safe at anchor outside,
-and his copra advantageously sold to an Auckland
-agent, sat eating at the table, heavy-faced, a little
-intoxicated, and almost absolutely blank in mind.  This
-was his nearest approach to happiness, and one that
-he enjoyed often enough, for, since thought meant
-pain to him, he had managed to acquire a wonderful
-agility in avoiding it, and to live for the most
-part almost as purely by instinct and impulse as a dog.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was perhaps for this reason that he did not notice
-anything unusual in the demeanour of that singularly
-unknown quantity, Vaiti, his daughter.  And yet
-Vaiti—sombre and sparkling in a dress of vaporous
-red, with a handful of star stephanotis from the verandah
-thrust into the marvellous waves of her hair—was
-evidently not quite herself.  She sat a little apart from
-the noisy company that sprawled about the table,
-looked at no one, ate her food absent-mindedly and
-pulled little strips off the decaying oilcloth of the
-table-cover with a steady industry that made Charley
-wriggle in his seat, although he did not dare to
-remonstrate.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Some one else was watching her, if Saxon was not.
-A short, stocky man, with burning grey eyes, a fiery
-red beard, and a sharp furrow between the eyebrows,
-that somehow suggested belaying-pins and rope's ends,
-was looking at her every now and then as he noisily
-sucked in his soup.  The inspection did not appear to
-please him altogether.  He finished his dinner quickly,
-took the current glass of whisky in his hand, and
-rolled off to the dark end of the verandah, followed by
-a grey-haired, greasy-faced mate who had been sitting
-beside him.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Still on for it, cap?" asked the latter, leaning over
-the railing with an air of careless ease that contrasted
-oddly with his watchful eye.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Yes, blank asterisk your condemned foolishness,
-sure I am on for it!" replied the captain, betraying
-his nationality by a slight touch of brogue.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>There is no nation that swings so high and so low
-between opposite extremes of character as the impetuous
-race that is handcuffed, by an odd freak of geography,
-to steady, serious England.  Great saints and great
-rogues are commoner in Ireland than ordinary people,
-and each displays the fullest flavour of his kind.
-Donahue, master of the island schooner </span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span>, was, or
-had been, Irish; and it was assuredly not the company
-of the saints that claimed his membership.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The two spoke together for a little while in level
-tones that sounded loud and careless enough, yet
-somehow did not carry.  One learns these things by
-practice.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"She smells a rat, I'm thinking," said the old mate,
-looking critically the while at Charley, as if he were
-valuing the half-caste's clothes for pawn.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Let her.  You and I are apt to be a match for her,
-for all that," answered the captain.  He looked at
-Charley also.  You would have sworn the two were
-discussing him, and rather unfavourably.  Charley
-himself shifted in his seat, and showed his magnificent
-teeth uncomfortably.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Think she'll come on board?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti was watching them, her chin on her hand.
-Her expression was not to be read.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I'll get her on board all right," answered the
-captain, keeping his eyes away from the girl with an
-effort.  "You play up, that's all."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"'Jer think you're a match for that weasel in a
-woman's skin—you or any of us?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I do, then.  Forty's a match for twenty any day
-in the year, if the heads of them comes anything near
-equal.  Cunnin' as Old Nick she is, but I've been cunnin'
-twenty years longer than her."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You pitched her a good yarn, I'll lay."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I did that—about the derelick we boarded nor'-east
-of the Paumotus, and the Spanish ladies' clothes and
-cases of goods that was lying about, and how we took
-what there was, includin' of a di'mond necklashe that
-was sittin' all its lone on the table in the old man's
-cabin (Be minding me, now, or you'll be making mistakes),
-and the way a gale riz on us before we was through,
-and hurried us back to the </span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span>, so that we lost the
-derelick, and didn't see no more of her; and how we
-heard in Noumea afterwards that there was like to be
-joolery on boord her, so that we're all on to go and find
-her again."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Straight fact up to finding the di'monds, and gory
-lyin' after that, I see.  But how d'ye make out the
-people that deserted the ship was such fat-headed idiots
-as to leave the joolery?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Why, they was fat-headed idiots right enough;
-they did leave a good lot of saleable stuff, as you and
-I knows; and it's only addin' on a bit to say that the
-ship had been on fire and made them clear for their
-lives, so that they didn't think of the valuables.  There's
-the necklashe I have for proof.  And, mind me now,
-what we heard was that the people of the ship knows
-now that she didn't go down, and will be out after her
-themselves when they can raise the cash, so that hurry's
-the word."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"How much of that's true?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Not a —— bit.  The people was drowned, I allow.
-But it hangs well, and don't you go and forget none of
-it.  I pitched the yarn that way because of that bit of
-pashtry joolery I got hould of in mistake for goods
-down Melbourne way....  I misremember if I tould you."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You did, more nor once, and you was jolly well
-served right by her," candidly replied the mate.
-"The yarn's all right, I suppose, and the paste
-necklace is good business; but where does this Vaiti
-come in?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Quit lookin' at her, ye —— fool, and give me a
-light for me poipe.  Talk easy, can't you....  Why,
-she knows more navigation than most men that's got
-a master's ticket, and she's as vain of it as a paycock.
-And that's how I'll have her.  Always get a woman
-t'rough her consate, me boy, especially if her eyes are
-too sharp in common.  That'll pull the wool over them
-when nothing else will."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"When I was in Callao——" began the mate, with
-an evil chuckle.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Leave Callao be now; you can tell me about her
-another time.  Well, you understand about Saxon's
-girl, I hope?  She's to navigate us on the trip, because
-nayther you nor I knows enough for a cruisin' job like
-this, and the old chap himself is pretty general
-drunk—that's the way I put it—and shares with what we find,
-and the ould divil himself to come along, just for
-propriety, and in case of a fight with the owners.  Oh,
-a nate yarn, and she shwallowed it down like a cat
-atin' butter.  She's comin' on boord to-night, to see
-the necklashe and look over the chart I've marked.
-She'll not bring ould Saxon, for she's feared of nayther
-man nor divil, and I'll bet she thinks to get the bearin's
-of the place off of me and chate me out of it after all."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"And how the h—— do you think she's going to
-believe that you give the show away before the ship
-sails?  Her teeth wasn't cut yesterday, by all we know."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Faith, and we do know!" muttered the captain,
-with a horrible undercurrent of oaths.  "And she'll
-know, by —— she will!  I'd slit the throat of her,
-if it wasn't for the other bit of divarsion we've
-planned."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Say you've planned," interrupted the mate darkly.
-"I call it bad work, whether she was man, woman, or
-child; but you're my master."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"And you're a plashter saint, ain't you?" sneered
-the captain.  "Let's have no more of your chat; we
-know each other a —— sight too well.  As for the
-chart, she'll think we don't mean to give it away till
-she and her father is under sail with us, but she'll come
-on the chance of sneaking it out somehow.  And when
-we've got her aboard, why—lave it to me!  Ould
-Saxon's hell-cat daughter won't take no more
-pearl-shell beds from us or any one else."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You ain't afraid of her knowing who we are?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"How would she, then?  The </span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span> isn't the
-</span><em class="italics">Margaret Macintyre</em><span>—bad luck to her who brought me
-down to such a tub, after ownin' the finest auxiliary
-in Auckland!—and she never seen you or me till to-day.
-No, it's all right.  That's enough jaw; you go aboard,
-and attend to you know what, and then send off the boat
-for her and me."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, curly classic head on slender hand, still watched
-from her corner.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Did she suspect?  There was nothing for suspicion
-to lay hold of.  Donahue was one of the acutest villains
-under the Southern Cross, and he did not make clumsy
-mistakes.  The story of the derelict, of the valuables
-abandoned on board, of the necessity for finding the
-ship soon and secretly, might have sounded far-fetched
-to city-dwelling folk, but out in the wild South Seas
-stranger things may happen any day.  The plan was
-neat and plausible from every point of view, and Vaiti
-had taken the bait readily enough that afternoon.
-Yet Donahue felt—as the two walked silently down the
-dim, perfumed beach street, all ablow with vagrant
-sea winds and wandering wafts of song—that he would
-have given a good deal for just one peep into his
-handsome companion's mind.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti walked beside him, looking straight ahead.
-Had Donahue's wish been granted, he would have
-thought somewhat less of his own acuteness.  She did
-suspect.  A man, in her case, would have been
-convinced by the reasonable aspect of the whole affair.
-Vaiti, being a woman, with sea-anemone tentacles of
-instinct floating and tingling all about the steady
-centres of reason in her mind, was convinced, and vet
-not convinced.  She thought it was all right, yet she
-knew it was not—after a woman's way.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>In any case, however, it was an adventure, and there
-was a mystery to fathom.  So she put on a more
-substantial dress than the gauzy draperies she had been
-wearing, hung the neatest possible little pearl-handled
-Smith and Wesson round her neck, under the swelling
-folds of her frock, by means of an innocent-looking thin
-gold neck-chain that would snap with a tug; put her
-long-bladed knife in her pocket, with the sheath sewn
-to the dress, so that a pull would bring out the blade,
-and joined Donahue an hour after dinner, on the verandah
-steps, confident of her ability to see the thing through,
-whatever it might be.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She looked sharply about her, as she stepped over
-the low bulwarks of the </span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span> and dropped down
-on to the encumbered, untidy deck.  No one about.
-Nothing to be seen but a dirty little main deck, with
-rusty pumps and a yawning hatch, and a poop that
-even in the pallid light just beginning to tremble up
-from the rising moon showed neglect of the sacred
-ceremony of daily deck-washing.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Now, any decent ship's captain will attend to his
-deck-washing, even if he doesn't shave or wash himself
-from port to port.  Vaiti did not like that unscrupulous,
-dirty poop.  But she was already up on it, and Donahue
-was bowing her down the cabin companion, with a jarring
-smile and a good deal of over-fluent blarney.  The
-cabin was small and smelly; it had an oblong table
-in the middle, surrounded by cushioned lockers, and an
-open door at the end facing the companion.  This door
-evidently opened into Donahue's own cabin, for a rough
-wash-stand and a looking-glass, the latter hung high
-on the bulkhead, were plainly visible.  There was a
-lamp nailed above the glass, and the two together shone
-brightly out into the rather ill-lit main cabin.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What'll you take?" asked Donahue, with his
-unpleasant smile.  "I've got some sweet sherry wine,
-just the thing for ladies—or wouldn't ye put your lips
-to a taste of peach brandy?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti shook her head.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"No good drink, suppose talk business," she said.
-She would not have swallowed a glass of water on the
-</span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span> for a dozen Virot hats.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Donahue had not expected to catch her so easily;
-still, he cast a thought of regret to his nicely-doctored
-liquors.  She evidently meant what she said—and the
-other way Was harder.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Well, thin, darlin', we'll have a look at the cha-art,"
-he observed, producing a roll of paper.  "It's yourself
-that can help us t'rough this business—you and the
-ould man—better than any one from Calloa to Sydney
-if only yez are raisonable about terms."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He spread the chart out on the table, and weighted
-it down with a couple of tumblers.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, her mind charged full with watchful suspicion,
-felt that sudden small, sick thrill that is the forerunner
-of the thought—"I wish I hadn't!"  Afterwards,
-when she came to think matters over, she knew that it
-was because Donahue had made the mistake of bringing
-out the chart before the terms had been discussed,
-which was an improbable sort of thing to do.  In
-such moments, however, one does not think, one only
-feels.  Still, the warning was unmistakable, and Vaiti
-made as if to rise, intending to plead sudden illness and
-get out on deck.  But Donahue, sharp as a snake, saw
-the movement, and brought out his trump card at once.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Sure, I'm a —— fool, I am, to forget the necklashe!
-You haven't seen that yet," he said, whipping a stream
-of white fire out of his pocket and letting it fall across
-the dark wood of the table.  It was a magnificent piece
-of paste-work, and had taken in Donahue himself,
-some few weeks ago, after a fashion that made him sore
-enough to remember.  Vaiti gasped when she saw it,
-and laid both her pretty olive hands upon it at once.
-Her suspicions were not exactly killed, but they had
-for the moment no room to live with the passionate
-feeling aroused by the gems.  Donahue, with his
-unspeakable experience of the sex, had calculated rightly
-when he classified her among the women who would
-almost do murder for a diamond....  Such jewels! and
-she had never had one in her hand before,
-though her eyes had often filled and her heart
-ached with hopeless desire before the maddening
-glories of the jewellers' windows in Auckland and
-Sydney.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She hugged the necklace to her breast like a baby,
-she shook it, she danced it in the light....  And
-then, was it in woman's nature to refrain from
-snapping the clasp about her neck, and feeling the
-dear touch of those cold drops and pendants on her
-bosom?</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Ah, now, but you're the beauty wit' them little
-jokers round your neck!  And the lovely neck you
-have, darlin'!" blarneyed Donahue.  He had better
-have been silent, for Vaiti, used to admiration of every
-kind and degree as to daily bread, felt the falseness
-of the tone.  If all other men admired her beauty,
-this one did not, though he said so.  His grey,
-goat-like eyes looked something more like hate across the
-narrow table, under the ill-smelling oily lamp, and Vaiti
-saw they did.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Donahue, taught by twenty years of active villainy,
-was quick to feel the necessity for the next move.
-He went into his own cabin and turned up the
-lamp.  The looking-glass shone out brightly under its
-rays.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Come and look at yourself, me beauty," he said;
-"and let me ould shavin'-glass see the handsomest girl
-in the islands wearin' what she ought to wear every
-day of her life, if she'd her rights."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>For the moment, Vaiti was not herself.  She was
-drunk with the jewels; she was crazed with the desire
-to see herself in them.  If heaven and hell had stood
-between her and the looking-glass, she was bound
-to go to it, and Donahue knew it, as surely as he knew
-that the moon would set that night.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti—still sensing the danger that she would not
-heed, through all the intoxication of the jewels—thought,
-in a cinematographic flash, that one was safe
-before a glass, at all events....  No one could come
-up behind you....  Besides, there was the little
-revolver, hanging on the chain that would snap with
-a tug....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>And then, for the space of a full minute, she saw
-nothing, knew nothing, lived for nothing but the sight
-of her own dark, beautiful face in the glass, lit up into
-surpassing loveliness by the scintillating fires about her
-neck.  There was no movement in the mirror behind
-her.  Donahue sat motionless at the table, and the cabin
-was very still.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>... The first ecstasy subsided, and she turned her
-head a little to see the diamonds twinkle....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Donahue's elbow knocked a glass off the table with
-a sharp crash.  Almost at the same instant two powerful
-hands closed on each of Vaiti's ankles, and snatched
-her feet from under her.  She plucked out the revolver
-as she fell, but her hands were caught, whisked behind
-her, and securely tied, with a prompt swiftness that
-told of frequent experience.  In another minute her
-ankles were lashed together, none too gently; she
-was carried into a small state-room, thrown down
-upon the bunk, and left alone in the dark, with the
-slam of the door and snap of the lock resounding in her
-ears.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Most women would have screamed.  Vaiti remembered
-that they were out in the middle of a wide harbour,
-and decided not to risk the infliction of a gag for such
-a slight chance of rescue....  Certain ugly scenes on
-the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> rose up before her eyes.  No; decidedly it
-was her only policy to keep quiet.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Outside there was the thud of bare feet running
-about the deck, the creak of the booms rising on the
-masts, the slatting of loose sails—loud orders, long yells
-from the native crew, as they pulled and hauled.  The
-</span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span> was making sail.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Then sudden silence, slow heeling over of the cabin,
-lip-lap of hurrying water along the hull.  They were off.
-Where?  God—or the devil—only knew!</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="marooned"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER VI</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">MAROONED</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>There was plenty of time for reflection in the long
-days that followed.  The greasy-faced old mate came
-in and cut the lashings off Vaiti's ankles and wrists,
-a few hours after sailing, and she was left free to move
-about the cabin, which offered a promenade of exactly
-seven feet by three.  Meals were handed in to her three
-times daily—the usual black tea, tinned meat, and
-weevily biscuit of second-class island schooners—and
-she was not in any way molested, though the door
-was always kept locked.  Donahue put in his head once
-or twice to look at her, as she sat cross-legged on her
-bunk, staring out through the port at the tumbling seas.
-He generally had something to say—a jarring, mocking
-compliment, or a remark about the time they were
-likely to make Sydney Heads—knowing all the time that
-Vaiti could estimate the general direction of their
-course by the sun, and that there was no southing in it.
-If she had ever feared any one, she feared this man—almost.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was not difficult to understand how the capture
-had been brought about.  A man under the bunk,
-another under the sofa opposite—her own eyes watching
-only the upper part of the cabin as reflected in the
-glass—nothing could be simpler or better planned.  The
-affair was none the less ugly on that account.  Perhaps
-it was only Vaiti's burning anger at her utter rout
-and defeat in her own business of plotting and intrigue
-that saved her from something very like despair, as
-the schooner ploughed steadily on, day after day,
-carrying her into the great unknown, farther and farther
-away from all who could defend her.  Yet, despairing
-or not, Saxon's daughter never lost her courage.  They
-had taken her weapons from her as they carried her
-into the cabin, but they could not take away her
-undaunted spirit.  She waited her time.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>As to the meaning of the business, she trusted, again,
-to time's enlightenment.  Saxon had many enemies;
-so had she.  It would all come out by-and-by.
-Meantime, it was clear that no one meant to murder her.
-What else might be meant she could not tell, and she
-did not care to speculate overmuch.  Under such
-circumstances one does best to save one's nerve against
-the time it may be wanted.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was on the twenty-third day out from Apia, bearing,
-as far as she could discover, in a north-westerly direction,
-that she first noted the approach of land.  Nothing
-could be seen from her side of the ship, but she heard
-the long, excited cries of the island crew, and the
-thundering of their feet, as they began putting the ship
-about with unwonted vigour, to a chorus of native
-songs.  She strained her eyes eagerly when the ship
-came about on the other tack, but the line of the horizon
-was unbroken; and it was not for another hour that
-she saw, from her low elevation, what the look-out
-in the crow's nest had sighted long before—a line of
-small black bristles pricking the edge of the horizon
-several miles away.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti knew the sight at once for the palms of a
-low atoll island—evidently some barren, sun-smitten
-spot close up to the line—and a ready solution of
-the whole puzzling affair at once sprang into her mind.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Marooning!</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Most people know the meaning of this term; nearly
-every one has heard of sailors captured by pirates in
-old days, and left on lonely islands, or even deserted
-by their own comrades on some isolated spot, with just
-enough food and water to save the marooners'
-consciences from the guilt of actual murder.  Vaiti knew
-both the word and the thing very well-indeed, and she
-was almost certain that the </span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span> had gone off the
-course on the way to some South American port with
-the view of hiding her where she would not easily be
-found again.  There are many islands in the wastes
-of the vast Pacific where a ship may not pass once in
-half a century, and these—unlike the typical "desert"
-island of stories—are almost always barren, hungry,
-shadeless spots, where Crusoe himself would have been
-hard put to it to make a decent living.  The fertile,
-mountainous, well-watered isle is never without a
-native population, permanent or occasional, and is very
-seldom indeed, in these days, without a trader as well,
-and a regularly calling schooner.  As for the breadfruit,
-oranges, pineapples, the pigs and goats, the sugarcane
-and maize of uninhabited islands as known to
-fiction, they have no counterpart in real life.  All the
-valuable food plants and all useful animals are the
-product of importation and cultivation, ancient or
-modern.  It follows, that where there are no people
-and no ships, there is nothing worth having.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti knew this very well, and decided that if she was
-going to be marooned, she might as well make such
-provision as circumstances allowed.  She had hunted
-over every inch of the cabin—which seemed to belong
-to the mate—during the long days of the voyage, and
-she knew exactly what it contained.  From the stores
-put away under the bunk she selected a large new sheet,
-which she concealed under her dress; a small stock
-of needles and thread, a box or two of matches, some
-hooks and line, and a stick of dynamite, evidently
-meant for some forgotten fishing purpose.  There was
-nothing in the shape of a knife, much to her regret;
-and there was a good deal of clothing that she would
-have liked to carry away; but it would not do to take
-more than she could easily conceal.  So she made an
-end of her preparations, and sat down to wait once more.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>There was no moon that night until very late,
-and darkness came down so close on the stroke of
-four bells that Vaiti felt sure they were very near the
-equator.  No one came near her, and tea seemed to
-be unusually late.  The anchor-chain roared home
-soon after dark, the ship lay very still, and there was a
-good deal of running about on deck.  Vaiti was
-confirmed in her anticipations of an uninhabited island
-by the fact that no boat was to be heard coming off
-from shore.  Not a sound of any kind, indeed, came
-from the island, and there were no lights on the beach.
-Some one handed her in her tea by-and-by, and a
-little later her door was flung open again by the mate.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Come on out," he said.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti followed the mate out of the cabin at once,
-rather to his surprise.  She had made up her mind
-that anything was better than the </span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span>, and she
-was looking out sharply for a chance—any chance—of
-turning the tables.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It did not look at first as if she were to have one.
-The dinghy had been swung out when she got on deck,
-and a couple of men were standing ready to lower away.
-They were islanders, and she knew that they would
-befriend her if they could—indeed, their glances showed
-as much—yet what could they do?</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Donahue was nowhere visible.  He had planned
-this business with some forethought, and he wanted
-to have a chance of casting blame on his subordinate
-if any inquisitive Government official should incline
-to look the matter up later on.  So he stayed down
-in his own cabin, pretending to be asleep, and the mate,
-rather against his will, had to carry out orders alone.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Just as the boat was ready to lower away, one of
-the men let her go with a run, and she struck the water
-stern first, with a terrible splash.  The mate, screaming
-curses, ran over to the falls and began to abuse the crew.
-The dinghy was injured, and they had to haul her up
-and swing out the whaleboat instead.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>This took some little time, and Vaiti was forgotten
-for the moment—a chance that made her heart beat
-with eagerness to profit by it.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Two ideas held possession of her—that she must
-plan to secure a boat, and that she must manage to do
-the </span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span> some sort of mischief.  Was it to be borne
-that Donahue should go unpaid?  The blood of a
-hundred fierce Island chiefs made answer.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Concerning the boat, she thought she saw a chance.
-They were bound to stay a day for wood and water,
-and that should furnish an opportunity.  But the other
-matter?</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>If she could only get hold of the ship's papers and
-destroy them!  That would be satisfactory.  She knew,
-none better, that a ship's papers are her character, her
-"marriage-lines" of respectability.  Without them a
-vessel is an illegitimate, furtive creature, every man's
-hand against her, every official eye turned coldly upon
-her.  Vaiti would have liked very well to get hold of
-the </span><em class="italics">Ikurangi's</em><span>.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>But, careless as Donahue was, the papers were not
-to be found in the little deck cabin which he used as
-a chart-room.  Vaiti, disappointed, took one of the
-charts and began studying the position of the ship,
-with a view to finding out the name of the island off
-which they were lying.  The chart was almost a blank,
-nothing being marked upon its wide expanse but a
-number of reefs and two or three atolls—Bilboa Island,
-Vaka, Ngamaru—dotted hundreds of miles apart in
-a naked waste of white.  Bilboa, an abandoned guano
-island, of which she had heard something, seemed to
-Vaiti the most likely of the three spots.  Ngamaru,
-she knew, had a native population, and about Vaka
-she could for the moment remember nothing, although
-she knew she had heard something once upon a time.
-All this part of the Pacific was far removed from the
-</span><em class="italics">Sybil's</em><span> haunts, and indeed from the haunts of any
-other ship of which Vaiti had ever heard.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It did not seem to be a healthy place for schooners;
-the reefs round both Vaka and Bilboa were many,
-and most were marked "Position doubtful."  Donahue
-was evidently not familiar with either place, for the
-chart was freshly pencilled over with notes and
-corrections.  Vaiti's heart leaped up as she looked at the
-careless work....  She saw a way.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>They were still clearing the lumber out of the whaleboat
-on deck.  No one was watching.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti took a pencil and rubber, and began to do some
-artistic alterations on the chart, helped by her
-knowledge of seamanship.  In ten minutes she had converted
-the innocent piece of parchment into a perfect death-trap,
-rolled it up and replaced it, put back the rubber
-and pencil, and slipped out again on deck, where she
-sat down on a coil of rope and waited.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>In another couple of minutes the boat was in the
-water, and the mate called rudely to Vaiti.  She came
-without a word, covering her face with her dress, and
-sobbing bitterly.  She stumbled as she walked; you
-would have sworn she was weak, broken in spirit, and
-utterly helpless.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>If the mate felt any compassion, he did not dare to
-show it.  They shoved off, two natives at the oars.
-Vaiti, sobbing effectively behind her hands, kept a sharp
-look-out with the corner of one eye as they slid across
-the dark water, but she could see nothing save a faintly
-glimmering line of grey shore, and hear nothing but the
-humming of the surf on the reef.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>As soon as they reached the shallow water near the
-shore, the mate took Vaiti by her arm and roared,
-"Out you go!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Sobbing afresh, in the most natural and convincing
-manner in the world, she obeyed....  It was dark, and
-the native who rowed bow oar never knew that she
-whipped his knife dexterously out of his belt as she
-passed him.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Why are you marooning me?" she wailed, as she
-waded through the warm, shallow water towards the
-shore.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The mate leaned out of the boat, now fading fast away
-into the starry gloom, and shouted as he disappeared:</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"To pay for Delgadas Reef and the </span><em class="italics">Margaret Macintyre</em><span>!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, who had reached the shore, almost sat down with
-the shock.  So that was it! that was it! The pearl-shell
-lagoon out of which she, almost unaided, had
-"jockeyed" the schooner </span><em class="italics">Margaret Macintyre</em><span>, some
-months before, was bringing in a crop other than pearls—of
-which last, indeed, the canny Scot who had financed
-the working of the place had had very much the larger
-share.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Well, things must be taken as they were found.  The
-soft tropic night stirred gently round her.  The stars
-were large and golden; they shone in the still lagoon
-like little moons.  Palm trees waved somewhere up in
-the dusk above, striking their huge rattling vanes together
-with the swing of the night-breeze.  It was land, safe,
-solid land, and the sand was warm and soft, and Vaiti
-was tired.  She walked a little way up the beach,
-stretched herself under a pandanus tree, and went to
-sleep....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Some hours later she woke, with the dim, mysterious
-volcano-glow of the tropic dawn in her eyes, and a curious
-feeling of disquiet about her heart.  Still half asleep,
-she saw the long grey shore sloping down to the silent
-lagoon, the ink-coloured pandanus trees standing up
-against the dull orange sky, the leaning stems and stumps
-of coco-palms, dark and formless in the shadow.  She
-shut her eyes and tried to sleep again.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>No use.  That nameless disquiet—now almost fear—still
-stirred at her heart.  She opened her eyes once
-more, and looked about.  A little more light—the touch
-of a glowing finger away in the east—a clearer defining
-of the cocoanut stumps, snapped off near their roots in
-the last great hurricane....  One of the stumps was
-oddly shaped—almost like a human figure.  She could
-have fancied it was a rude image of a sitting man, only
-that the profile, against the lightening east, was
-featureless, and there was nothing to represent the hands.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I will not be frightened by a rotten cocoanut tree,"
-thought Vaiti.  "I will sleep again till it is light.  Am I
-not a sea-captain's daughter, and the descendant of
-great Island chiefs, and shall I fear the fancies of my own
-mind?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Determinedly she closed her eyes again, and lay very
-still.  The dawn wind began to stir; the ripples crisped
-upon the beach; the locusts in the trees broke out into
-a loud chirr-ing chorus.  And as the day broke silver-clear
-upon the shore, Vaiti, still lying on the sand, felt
-that some one, in the gathering light, was watching her
-as she lay.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Wary as a fox, she opened her dark, keen eyes without
-stirring her body ... and looked straight into a face
-that was bending almost over her ... a face hooded
-by a black cloth that hid the head and brow, and only
-left to view ... O God!  O God! what was it?</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The thing was featureless.  Nose, eyes, and mouth
-were gone.  In the midst of a cavern of unspeakable
-ruin the ghastly throat gaped vacant.  Two handless,
-rotting stumps of arms waved blindly
-about—feeling—feeling....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Could it hear?  Some instinct told the girl that it
-could.  Softly as a snake she writhed out of the reach
-of those terrible groping arms.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It did hear.  It sprang blindly forward—it snatched.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>With one leap Vaiti was on her feet.  Never looking
-back, she fled down the open beach, the sand spurting
-behind her as she ran.  She heard a dull padding in her
-rear at first; it soon grew faint, but she ran on blindly,
-long after it had died away—ran, while the sun climbed
-over the horizon and cast down handfuls of burning gold
-on her uncovered head—ran, while the beach grew
-parchment-white and dazzled back the heat into her face like
-an open furnace—ran till at last her over-driven body
-gave way, and the sand spun round and the sky turned
-red before her eyes.  Then only she staggered into the
-shade and dropped down upon a green mattress of
-convolvulus creeper to rest.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>And now, when she had leisure to think and strength
-to cast off the haunting horror of that inhuman face,
-she knew what Donahue had done.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>This was not Bilboa, the uninhabited guano island
-that she had feared.  This was infinitely worse—it was
-Vaka, the leper isle!</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She remembered that she had once heard a dim
-rumour of Vaka and its ghastly leper people—the remnant
-of a plague-smitten tribe long ago forcibly exiled there
-from one of the fierce western groups.  No ships ever
-called at this graveyard of the living; it was supposed
-that the cocoanuts and fish of the island provided
-sufficient food for the people, and no one cared to run the
-chance of their stowing away and escaping, especially
-as they were known to be both daring and treacherous
-on occasion.  Donahue had indeed laid his plans well for
-the most hideous revenge that the heart of man or devil
-could conceive.  A few weeks or months in this charnel-house
-of horrors, where the very air must reek of contagion,
-and what would it avail her if, after all, some
-stray, storm-driven vessel should rescue the castaway?
-Better, then, that she should stay and die among the
-other nameless nightmare horrors that walked these
-stricken shores.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>No!  Vaiti, sitting cross-legged on the netted vines
-and staring grimly out to sea, then and there took resolve
-that such a fate should not be hers....  Sharks were
-uncertain, if you really wanted them; but the stick of
-dynamite she had taken from the mate's cabin was safe
-and sure.  If she failed in using it for the special purpose
-she had planned, she would put it in her mouth and
-light the fuse....  There would be no more trouble after
-that.  And as for the flies—one did not feel them, of
-course, when one was dead.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>All the same, she did not mean to die if she could
-avoid it, and, as the first step towards helping herself,
-she knocked some nuts off a young palm, and took her
-breakfast off the refreshing water and juicy meat.  Then
-she cut a length of bush rope, looped it round the tallest
-palm in sight, and set her feet inside the loop, so that
-she could work herself up to the top of the tree,
-monkey-on-stick fashion, leaning against the rope.  When she
-got into the crown of the palm she knelt among the
-leaves, holding on tightly, and looked right and left over
-the island.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was a pure atoll, an irregular circle of feather palms
-lying on the sea like a great green garland set afloat.
-The inner lagoon was several square miles in extent, but
-the land was not more than a few hundred yards wide
-at any point, and there was no soil to speak of.  The
-palms, the scanty, pale green scrub, the mop-headed
-pandanus trees, the trailing creepers, all sprang out of
-pure white coral gravel and sand.  The scene was lovely
-as only a coral atoll can be—the jewel-green water of the
-inner lagoon, shaded with vivid reflections of lilac and
-pale turquoise, the stately circled palms, the wide, white
-beach enclasping all the island like a frame of purest
-pearl, the burning blue of the surrounding sea, all
-combined to form a picture bright as fairyland and sparkling
-as an enamelled gem set upon a velvet shield.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>But Vaiti, while she saw and admired the loveliness
-of the scene, also recognised its barrenness as only an
-islander could.  No fruit, no roots, little fresh
-water—nothing, in fact, but cocoanut and pandanus kernels,
-eked out by a little fish....  The lepers must often go
-hungry.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The hot day turned suddenly chill as Vaiti recalled
-those blind, snatching, handless arms.  They came of a
-cannibal race, these Vaka folk.  What if she had not
-waked?  What if, wearied as she well might be, she
-slept too long and too soundly in the night that was to
-come?</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="the-turning-of-the-tables"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER VII</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">THE TURNING OF THE TABLES</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>She looked narrowly about the island, hoping to discover
-the place where the lepers lived.  A cluster of small,
-miserable huts, on the far side of the lagoon, attracted
-her attention.  It seemed not more than half a mile
-from the spot where she had spent the night.  The best
-fishing grounds she judged, by the look of the shore, to
-be near the village.  She was therefore, no doubt, several
-miles from their usual haunts.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>So far, so good.  Where was the schooner?  It lay
-to her left about a mile out at sea, close to a small,
-uninhabited, sandy islet.  Vaiti supposed that the men were
-cutting wood and looking for water.  She saw one or
-two black dots on the shore, recognisable by their blue
-dungaree clothing, and strained her eyes eagerly to see
-if the dinghy had been pulled up on the sand, for in
-this lay her only chance.  If they brought the boat up
-on the beach, to repair her where wood could be had
-without going to the atoll itself (Vaiti would have wagered
-that the </span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span> did not carry a splinter outside of the
-galley fuel), then the schooner would probably stop
-overnight.  In that case she could carry out her plans.
-Otherwise ... there was always the dynamite.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The dinghy was ashore, drawn well up on the beach.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She drew a breath of relief, and slid down the tree
-again.  Now she could wait till night with an easy
-mind.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>All day she hid in the tangle of young palm and low-growing
-scrub that clustered about the foot of the loftier
-trees.  Once she saw a couple of the lepers pass by in
-the distance, evidently looking for something.  These
-had eyes, and she crept closer into the shelter of the
-scrub till they were gone.  Then she came cautiously
-out, and plucked long sheets of the fine pale-brown
-natural matting that protects the young shoot of the
-cocoanut, to cover up her white dress, for the scrub was
-dangerously thin, in that staring overhead sun.  She did
-not venture down to the sea to fish, but fed upon
-cocoanuts during the day.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Night came at last—night and coolness, with big stars
-shining in the lagoon, and a gentle breeze stirring among
-the palms.  About midnight, as near as she could
-guess, Vaiti came out of her shelter and prepared for
-action.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She took off her clothes, and fastened about her waist
-a petticoat of the dark-coloured cocoanut matting which
-she had stitched together during the day.  So habited,
-with her olive skin and black hair, she knew that she
-was invisible in the darkness of the night.  She fastened
-the dynamite, and a box of matches, into the coil of
-hair on the top of her head, stuck her knife into the
-waist of her petticoat, and walked down the beach into
-the warm, dark sea.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She knew very well that the outer side of an atoll
-commonly swarms with sharks, but the risk did not
-trouble her.  There was something a good deal worse to
-face on the island than any number of sharks.  Heading
-for the distant light of the schooner, she swam through
-the starry water with the low, dog-like island paddle that
-can cover such marvellous distances—keeping her head
-well out, and quietly taking her time.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was a long swim, but it ended at last, and the
-schooner rose up before her in the water, black and silent,
-and shifting ever so little upon the swell of the incoming
-tide.  The stars made little trickles of light upon her
-wet, dark hull.  Two boats lay alongside—the dinghy,
-freshly mended and watertight, and the whaleboat,
-loaded with wood and cocoanuts.  After the slovenly
-fashion of the </span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span>, they had left the boats until the
-morning to hoist inboard, seeing that it was dead calm
-in the lee of the islet.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>This was more than Vaiti had hoped for, and it made
-her task easy.  She cut the dinghy's painter, got into
-the boat, and muffled the oars with a strip or two torn
-from her petticoat.  Then she put the dynamite into
-the whaleboat, cut and attached a good long fuse, set
-a match to it, and saw that the tiny red spark was steadily
-eating its way along, before she pulled off from the ship.
-She towed the whaleboat after her a little way, and then
-let it go thirty or forty yards from the ship.  It was not
-her desire to wreck the schooner at Vaka Island, and
-possibly let loose her enemies upon the atoll; rather
-she wished the ship well out of the way before any
-disaster should overtake her.  The charts would most
-probably ensure that matter.  The destruction of the
-boat was only intended to secure her own possession of
-the dinghy.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She had scarcely reached the shore before a loud
-explosion boomed out across the water, and immediately
-after lights began to stir on board the schooner.  Vaiti
-worked with coolness and speed, knowing that it was
-not likely, though possible, that any one would swim
-ashore.  From her eyrie in the coco-palm she had noted
-a deep, narrow creek running up from the lagoon—a
-mere crack in the coral, but wide enough to admit a small
-boat, taken in with care.  There was just enough light
-from the stars to enable her to find the place, and
-run the boat up on the sand at the end, into the heart
-of a tangle of leaves and creepers that entirely concealed
-it.  For safety's sake, she cut a few more armfuls of
-trailing vines from the shore, and buried the boat two
-or three feet deep, so that neither from the sea nor the
-land could it possibly be seen.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>As she worked, she could hear shouts and cries, made
-faint by distance, coming across the water from the
-schooner.  She could imagine the scene that would take
-place on board when they found themselves boatless.
-Some of the native crew—not Donahue or the mate;
-they would never face the sharks—would probably
-swim ashore to-morrow to investigate.  Well, let them!</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Having finished the concealing of the dinghy, she got
-into it herself, put on her clothes again, drew the tangled
-creepers well over her, and went calmly to sleep, secure
-that no one could find her unless she chose to be
-found.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>All the same, she was very cautious about getting up
-the next morning, and looked carefully between the
-leaves before she ventured out of her hiding-place.  She
-covered up her light dress with the cocoanut canvas, and
-then climbed a palm to look about.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>People were moving hurriedly about the decks of the
-schooner; something seemed to be going on.  As she
-watched, she saw two natives, clad only in loin-cloths,
-stand up on the bulwarks, ready to dive.  In another
-moment they had flashed down into the sea, small as
-ants to sight at that distance, but perfectly clear to
-Vaiti's sea-trained eyes.  Then the dark specks began
-to make their way across the water.  The sun was newly
-risen, the sea was still a mirror of molten gold, and the
-tiny black heads stood out sharply on its surface.  Vaiti
-set her teeth as she watched them creeping on.  They
-were island men, of her mother's own race, and they had
-done her no harm.  And ... the longer a vessel lies
-at anchor in equatorial latitudes, the more certain it is
-that sharks will gather round her—even if there has been
-no explosion in the water alongside to kill the fish and
-collect the tigers of the sea from far and near.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti looked away, and began desperately to count
-the nuts clustered among the palm-fronds at her
-feet....  How many were there?  Ten—fifteen—twenty——</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>A long, despairing shriek tore across the water.  She
-put her fingers in her ears and buried her face in the
-leaves.  Yet, all the same, she heard a second cry,
-short and sudden, and quickly ended.  There was
-nothing more.  She lifted her face again, her teeth set
-tight into her lower lip.  The two black heads were
-gone.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"No one will come ashore to-day," she said, with a
-shiver.  Something seemed to stab her, as she thought
-of that doctored chart in the schooner's deck cabin.
-The reefs on the course to South America were hundreds
-of miles from shore—the ship had no boats—and the
-native crew must suffer with the villainous captain and
-mate, if the disaster that she had plotted so carefully
-should come about....  There would be sharks there,
-too, when the ship broke up....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The crystal-gold of the sea turned dim before Vaiti's
-eyes.  It was only a mist of tears that lay between, but
-to the girl's excited imagination it seemed like the
-spreading and darkening stain of blood.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Careless of whether she was seen or not, she slid down
-the tree and rushed into the scrub, where she sat down
-upon the sand and cried like a mere nervous schoolgirl.
-The sun was past the zenith when she lifted her head
-again; the schooner had put out to sea, and lay, a far-off
-snowy speck, upon the blue horizon.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti stood up, flung back her hair, and cast the
-trouble from her.  She could not afford to grieve over
-the inevitable now; there was too much to do.  The
-boat had to be prepared and provisioned, and that was
-not the work of a moment.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She husked and opened a number of large cocoanuts,
-and removed the insides.  She then cut a quantity of
-young palm-leaves, and plaited them into baskets, which
-she filled with the cocoanut meat.  Afterwards she cut
-down dozens of young green nuts for drinking, husked
-them to save space, and slung them together in bunches
-with strips of their own fibre.  This done, she hid the
-provisions in the boat, and set about her own supper,
-as it was almost dark.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Nourishing food she felt she must have, if she was to
-get through with her enterprise, but she dared not
-attract attention to herself by going out torch-fishing on
-the reef.  However, there were certain holes in the
-ground about the roots of the palms that to her
-experienced eye promised something better than fish.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She dug a fire-hole in the gravel at the end of the gully
-where she had hidden the boat, lined it with stones, and
-made a fire, looking well to it that no gleam should be
-visible from above.  When the stones were beginning to
-heat, she took a piece of palms-leaf in her hand, hid herself
-in the bush, and waited, still as a rock.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>By-and-by there was a faint scuffling among the roots
-of the trees, and a shadowy thing began climbing up
-the trunk of a palm.  Vaiti waited till it had disappeared
-in the crown of the tree, and then climbed after it to a
-point about ten feet from the top, where she tied
-her strip of leaf round the trunk and came down
-again.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Thump! thump!  Two cocoanuts fell to the earth.
-The crab (for it was a cocoanut crab of the biggest and
-fiercest kind) was getting his supper.  Now he would
-come down the tree, rip open the nuts with his formidable
-claws, and enjoy the contents.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Slowly he began to back down the palm, his sensitive
-tail ready to tell him when he had touched earth and
-might safely let go.  And now it was that Vaiti's trap
-(a well-known native trick) proved his undoing.  The
-belt of dry leaflets round the tree tickled his tail, he
-promptly let go, and fell with a crash seventy feet through
-air on to the pile of coral lumps that Vaiti had heaped
-up at the foot of the tree.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The girl picked him up, badly injured and unable to
-use his claws (which were big enough to crack her ankle),
-and put an end to him with a clever stroke of her knife.
-He proved to be two feet long in the body alone, and of
-a fine blue and red colour, as seen in the dim light of the
-fire.  She put him on the heated stones, wrapped in
-leaves, buried him until cooked, and then enjoyed a hot
-supper that an epicure might have envied.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Strengthened by the good food, she worked on late
-into the night, catching more crabs, whose meat she
-hoped she could dry in the sun, making a rough sail out
-of the bed-sheet she had carried away from the schooner,
-twisting sinnet plait out of cocoanut husk for ropes,
-cutting and trimming a small pandanus for the mast.
-She had all her plans laid, and knew what she meant to
-do.  Her present position was about five hundred miles
-from the Marquesas, and the south-east trades would be
-in her favour.  With lines for fishing, a beaker full of
-fresh water on board (she had found that in the dinghy
-when she took it away), cocoanuts to help out with, and
-plenty of crab to dry, she hoped that she might manage
-to reach the islands before her strength or her food gave
-out.  Greater voyages had been done many a time in
-mere canoes, and the dinghy was a large boat of its kind,
-strong, well built, and new.  If she failed—well, any
-death, any horror that the wide seas could hold was better
-than Vaka Island.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>All being ready, she lay down and slept till dawn—a
-somewhat restless sleep, for it was full of wandering
-dreams, and all the dreams took one shape: Donahue's
-schooner, snared by the lying chart, rushing helpless
-to her end, with the green-eyed tigers of the sea hovering
-ever about the reefs, and waiting ... waiting....</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>"I don't think the patient can see any one," said the
-nurse doubtfully.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The big, yellow-haired sailor took off his hat and
-stepped up on to the verandah.  It was a very beautiful
-verandah.  You could see most of Suva Bay from it,
-and half the tumbled purple peaks of Fiji's wonderful
-mountains lying across the harbour.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"If you could stretch a point, ma'am," said the
-sailor, "it might be as well for him.  I've got good
-news."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"About his daughter?" asked the nurse.  She, like
-every one else in Suva, was deeply interested in this
-especial patient's story.  He had come to Suva in his
-own schooner, the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>, several weeks before, furious
-with rage and despair at the loss of his daughter, and
-eager to demand assistance from the High Commissioner
-of the Western Pacific, although it seemed by no means
-clear in what manner Her Majesty's representative could
-aid him.  Before the matter had even been discussed,
-however, he had fallen seriously ill of sunstroke and
-excitement combined, and had been sent to hospital,
-with rather a bad chance of recovery.  He was just
-turning the corner now, and the nurse—who could not
-but admire his rather weather-beaten good looks and
-romantic history—regarded him as her most interesting
-patient.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Yes, it's about his daughter," answered the sailor.
-"I'm the mate of the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>, ma'am; Harris is my name.
-Perhaps you'd kindly read this."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He held out a long slip of printed paper, containing
-a </span><em class="italics">résumé</em><span> of the cables for the day—Suva's substitute
-for a daily paper.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The nurse took it, and read:</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"The missing daughter of Edward Saxon, owner and
-master of the trading schooner </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>, has at last
-reappeared.  Her fate has excited much interest and
-conjecture all over the Pacific.  She arrived in Sydney
-yesterday on board the cable-ship </span><em class="italics">Clotho</em><span>, by which
-she was picked up on the 2nd instant, in an open boat,
-alone, and two hundred miles from any land.  She had
-experienced bad weather, and was much exhausted
-for want of food, but declared herself capable, if it had
-been necessary, of reaching the nearest island group
-unaided.  She had been carried away, as was surmised,
-by the captain of the island schooner </span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span>, who
-marooned her on a remote leper island, Vaka, and then
-sailed for South America.  Revenge for the loss of a
-pearl-shell bed of disputed ownership is said to have been
-the motive of this unparalleled outrage."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"He shall have it at once," said the nurse cordially.
-"It'll do him more good than our medicines."</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>The story was a popular one in the hospital for months
-after, and it had not been quite forgotten when, towards
-the close of the hot season, a Sydney paper furnished
-the last chapter of the tale.  Saxon's late nurse read it
-aloud to the others at afternoon tea, and they all agreed
-(not knowing how Vaiti's fingers had cogged the dice of
-chance) that it was a wonderful Providence and a real
-judgment.  The item read:</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>"THE LAST OF AN OCEAN ROMANCE.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>"News comes via Tahiti from Nukahiva, Marquesas
-Islands, of the arrival of a shipwrecked crew on a raft,
-six weeks ago.  They were the survivors of a disaster
-that destroyed the notorious schooner </span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span> whose
-master, it will be remembered, kidnapped and marooned
-the daughter of a British captain some months ago.  The
-schooner, after leaving the island, sailed for Callao, but
-was wrecked on an uncharted reef three days east of
-Vaka, and went to pieces.  The crew escaped on a raft,
-and underwent great suffering in their efforts to reach
-land.  The captain and mate were drowned."</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>"And serve them right, too!" said the audience.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="the-white-man-of-nalolo"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER VIII</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">THE WHITE MAN OF NALOLO</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>"By Jove! it's a white man," said Saxon, checking
-like a pointer on the threshold of the low dark doorway.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Certainly.  Very pleased to meet you," observed
-the figure on the mats.  It was sitting cross-legged, clad
-only in a waist-cloth, and the house was a Fijian
-chief-house in a mountain village three days' journey from the
-nearest white settlement—but the thing squatted on
-the mats was undoubtedly white, and—English?  Well,
-no; Saxon thought no.  The phrase was American in
-flavour.  He stepped across the threshold, and came a
-little way in, relieved in mind.  When you have been
-dead and buried among the islands for a quarter of a
-century it is much pleasanter not to run the risk of
-meeting other ghosts (with university accents, tea-coloured
-families, and a preference for modest retirement on
-steamer days) who may possibly have been alive together
-with you before...</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Before....  The word means much in that vast
-Pacific world, sepulchre of so many lost hopes and
-forgotten lives.  We do not, in the Islands, cultivate
-curiosity as a virtue, since it would be likely to bring
-rather more than virtue's own reward after it.  We do
-not ask cross questions, because the crooked answers
-might involve questions of another sort.  And when
-overfed, sanguineous passengers from smart liners
-happen along and tell us, as a new and excellent joke,
-that the proper formula for receiving an introduction
-in the Islands is: "Glad to meet you, Mr. So-and-so;
-what were you called </span><em class="italics">before</em><span>?" we smile an acid smile,
-and pretend we are amused....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Saxon was very tired, having walked thirty miles
-that day, and very hungry, being out of luck, and more
-or less on the tramp.  But I think, tired as he was, he
-would have found another village to rest in if the derelict
-white on the mats had spoken with the shibboleth of his
-own class and country.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>As things were, the look of the house pleased him,
-and he came in and folded himself up on the mats.  The
-other man noted that he selected a "tabu kaisi" mat
-(a kind strictly forbidden to all but chiefs or whites),
-and that he looked hopefully towards the kava bowl.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Not the first time you've stopped under a pandanus
-roof, I guess?" he remarked.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"No," said Saxon.  "Whose house is this?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Mine," said the stranger.  "Make yourself at home."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was a handsome chief-house of the best Fijian
-type, forty feet from mats to ridge-pole, the walls
-covered with beautifully inlaid and interwoven reeds,
-the roof bound together with exquisite sinnet work in
-artistic patterns, of red, black, and yellow, and towering
-up into a dark, cool cavern of pleasant gloom.  The
-floor was overlaid with fine parquetry of split bamboo
-at the "kasii" or common-folk end, and piled deep
-with fine mats in the "chief" part.  A Fijian bed, ten
-feet wide and three feet high, ran like a dais right across
-the end of the house.  It was covered by mats prettily
-fringed with coloured parrot feathers.  There were three
-great doors, east, west, and south, each framing in its
-dark-set opening a different picture of surpassing
-loveliness.  Nalolo town (its name is on the map of Fiji, but
-it reads otherwise) stands very high on the sheer crest
-of a pointed green hill that is just like the enchanted
-hill in the pictures of a fairy tale.  There is a little
-round green lawn on the top, and all about it stand the
-high, pointed beehive houses of the town, each perched
-on its own tiny mound like a toy on a stand.  Sloped
-cocoanut logs run up to the doors of the houses, and
-quaintly coloured crotons cluster about them.  In the
-deep, soft grass golden eggs from the guava trees lie
-tumbled about among fallen stars of orange and lemon
-blossom, and everywhere the red hibiscus shakes its
-splendid bells in the soft hill-winds.  About the foot
-of the peak a wide blue river wanders, singing all day
-long; and from every door of every house, high perched
-above the cloudy valleys and hyacinth hill ranges, one
-can see pictures, and pictures, and pictures almost too
-lovely to be true.  There are not two places in the world
-like Nalolo.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The White Man of Nalolo, however, was only interested
-in the fact that the river provided excellent crayfish;
-and that taro grew very well indeed on the slopes below
-the town.  He had once been young, but he was not
-young now, and did not matter any longer.  Therefore
-he had become particular about his dinner and indifferent
-to scenery.  I will not tell you the story of the White
-Man of Nalolo, or why he, of all men, rebelled so fiercely
-against the common lot of "not mattering any more,"
-that he came away to the wilds of the Pacific and the
-highlands of Fiji, and never went back again, because,
-like many true stories, it cannot be believed, and therefore
-had better not be told.  Besides, this is the story
-of Saxon and his daughter.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Saxon was down on his luck.  He had a charter for
-the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>, but she was not able to undertake it at present,
-for, trying to pilot her into Suva harbour himself, he had
-contrived to run her on a reef, and damaged her so
-seriously that she was at present careened on the beach
-in front of the local boat-builder's, undergoing repairs.
-The builder, knowing something of Saxon's reputation,
-had insisted on cash in advance, and the captain, in
-consequence, found himself so nearly out of funds that
-he was unable to stay in Suva pending the repairs to
-his ship.  He had therefore started with Vaiti for the
-interior of the great island of Viti Levu, intending to
-live on the real hospitality of the natives for a few weeks,
-and tramp from village to village.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He explained something of this as he sat on the mats
-enjoying the grateful coolness of the house.  The other
-man nodded gravely, watching the door.  He offered
-a curious contrast to the Englishman's coarse red fairness,
-being lean, sundried, and grizzled, with expressionless,
-boot-buttoned eyes, and a straggling "goatee" beard
-that dated his exile from America back to long-ago days.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Where's your daughter?" he asked.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Coming.  She stopped to tidy up at the river."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The doorway was darkened at that moment by Vaiti
-herself, balancing lightly up the cocoanut log to the
-threshold.  She wore a white tunic over a scarlet
-"pareo," her wavy curls, sparkling with the water of
-the stream, fell loose upon her shoulders; her lips were
-as red as the freshly-plucked pomegranate blossom behind
-her ear.  Something like life stirred in the boot-button
-eyes of the White Man of Nalolo as he looked at her.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Afi!" he called to a Fijian woman who was sleeping
-on the mats at the "kaisi" end of the house, "go and
-hurry the girls with the supper, and make tea for the
-marama (lady).  Quick!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Then he turned to Saxon.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Stay here as long as you like, both of you," he said.
-"Let her sit there sometimes, where I can see her and
-fancy....  I'll show you something."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He rose slowly and stiffly, and limped across to a
-Chinese camphorwood box that stood in the corner.
-In a minute he returned with a faded photograph in a
-gaudy frame.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"My daughter," he said.  "The only child I ever
-had.  She was Afi's.  She died a long time ago.  Afi's
-a chief woman: she was as handsome as Andi Thakombau
-when she was young, and the girl took after her.  Your
-girl's mother was chief too, I guess.  Do you see any
-likeness?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti and her father craned over the photograph.
-The pretty half-caste girl, was certainly like the
-stately, slender creature who gazed at her pictured
-face, though the fire and spirit of Vaiti's expression
-were wanting.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I'm growing old," went on the White Man.  "I've
-no children.  Stay a bit.  I'll be glad to have you."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Thank you; delighted, I'm sure," drawled Saxon,
-with a pathetic resurrection of his long-forgotten "grand
-manner," And so it was settled.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, listening and thinking as usual, with her chin
-in her slender fingers, approved of what she heard, and
-smiled very pleasantly at her host.  It seemed to her
-that he could be very useful just now.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The four weeks that followed after glided away
-agreeably enough in the silent hills.  Nothing happened;
-no one came or went—the Fijians, men and women,
-went out to the yam and taro fields in the morning, and
-returned in the afternoon; and after dark there would
-be long, monotonous chanting, and interminable sitting
-dances, on the mats inside the high-roofed houses.  Saxon
-stupefied himself with kava most of the time, in the
-absence of stronger drink, and almost got himself clubbed
-once or twice on account of his too impulsive admiration
-for the beauties of the village.  His host, however, was
-no censor of morals, and troubled very little about him.
-On Sundays the Fijians dressed themselves in their
-brightest cottons, stuck up their hair in huge halos, and
-went five times to church, under the auspices of the
-native Wesleyan teacher; while Saxon and his host
-smoked, slept, drank kava, and played cards.  The
-village provided plenty of yam and taro, kumara,
-cocoanut, and fish; and there was tea and sugar in
-the Chinese box, and now and then the White Man
-killed a pig or a fowl.  It was very pleasant on the
-whole.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>In a month's time, however, Saxon girded up his loins
-to leave this mountain Capua and descend to Suva once
-more.  The </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> would be ready, and his charter to
-convey ornamental Fiji woods to San Francisco would
-not wait.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>They said good-bye to their host, and walked a mile
-or two across the river-flats below the town before either
-spoke.  Then Vaiti put her hand into her sash, and drew
-out something small and shining.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"See, father, what the White Man gave me, because
-I was like his daughter," she said.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Saxon took the object, and turned it over in his fingers.
-It was a small seal, shaped like an eagle standing on a
-rock.  The eagle was gold, the rock amethyst.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"A pretty thing, but not worth more than two or
-three pounds," he said.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Then he turned it over and looked at the device.
-There was a curious crest on the face of the seal—a wolf
-with a crescent moon in his jaws; underneath, a motto
-in a strange foreign character.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Saxon's red complexion paled as he examined the crest.
-In other days and scenes, among ice-bound rivers and
-grim mediæval fortress-castles, he had seen that crest
-light up the crimson panes of old armorial windows—had
-read the motto underneath—"What I have, I hold"—of
-nights when he and the wildest young nobles of the
-Russian court were dining together under the splendid
-roof of one of Moscow's greatest banqueting halls.  For
-a moment he felt the keen cold air of the ice-bound streets
-blow sharp on his cheek; heard the jingle of the sleigh-bells,
-drawing up before the marble steps where the
-yellow lamplight streamed out across the snow.
-The fancy faded, swift as a passing lantern picture that
-flashes out for a moment and then sweeps away into
-darkness.  He saw the burning sky and the crackling
-palms again, felt the furnace-heated wind, and knew that
-it was all over long ago, and that he was ruined, exiled,
-and old.  Yet there remained a thread of indefinite
-recollection, a suggestion of something half-remembered,
-that was not all unconnected with the present day.
-What was the story belonging to that crest—the story
-that the whole world knew?</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Where did the fellow get the thing?" he asked his
-daughter.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti told him.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The White Man of Nalolo, it seemed, was one of the
-numerous South Sea wanderers who believe in the
-existence of various undiscovered islands, hidden here
-and there in the vast, untravelled wastes of sea that lie
-off the track of ships.  Thirty years before, there had
-been wondering rumours of an island of this kind, touched
-at once by a ship that no one could name, found to be
-uninhabited, and never revisited; indeed, no one was
-sure where it was within a few hundred miles.  Years
-went by, and the White Man, who had always taken a
-special interest in the story, found himself
-shipwrecked—the sole survivor of a boatful of castaways—on the
-very island itself.  But fortune was unkind, for the
-morning after his arrival, when he was trying to sail
-round the island, a sudden storm blew him out to sea
-again, and he had drifted for many days, and all but
-perished, in spite of the fish and nuts he had obtained
-from the island, before a mission schooner happened to
-see him and pick him up.  He had examined most of
-the island while ashore, and had seen no inhabitants
-or traces of cultivation.  Nevertheless he had always
-been convinced that there was something mysterious
-about the place, for two reasons.  One was the presence
-of common house-flies, which he had never seen far away
-from the haunts of human beings.  The other was the
-discovery of an amethyst seal, lying under a stone on the
-shore.  It was dirty and discoloured, but he did not think
-so small and heavy an object could have been washed
-up on the shore from a wreck.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Where mystery is in the air, most men's minds turn
-naturally to thoughts of hidden treasure, and the White
-Man of Nalolo had ever since cherished a hope that there
-was treasure on the island.  For several years he had
-fully intended to go and look—some day—but as he
-could only guess at the latitude and longitude, and as
-he had little money to spare, he never succeeded either
-in hunting the place up himself or in persuading any one
-else to do so.  Now he was old and half-crippled, and
-did not care any more about anything; so he wanted
-Vaiti, who reminded him so much of his dead daughter,
-to have the seal.  It was a pretty thing, and perhaps
-it would make her think sometimes of the poor old White
-Man of Nalolo.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Saxon listened attentively to the story, and heaved
-a sigh of disappointment at the end.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"There's nothing in it, my girl," he said.  "No proof
-of treasure there, eh?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"No; no treasure," said Vaiti, looking at the ground
-as she walked.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What then?" asked Saxon curiously.  He saw she
-had something in reserve.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti suddenly flamed out in eloquent Maori.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What then, my father?  Am I one who sees through
-men's heads, that I can tell what was in the mind of you
-as you looked at the jewel, and turned yellow and green
-like a parrot, only to see it?  What then?  I do not
-know.  I walk in the dark, and the light is in your hand,
-not in mine.  As for you, you have made your brain dull
-with the brandy and the kava, so that you cannot see
-at all.  What then?  Tell me yourself, for I do not know.
-I know only that there is something to be told."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Don't be rough on your poor old father," said Saxon
-pathetically.  "I'd have knocked the stuffing out of
-any man who said half as much, but I spoil you, by Gad,
-I do.  I don't know—I can't think, somehow or other.
-But there was a story about the Vasilieffs—the johnnies
-who had that crest—people I used to stay with when I
-went to——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He broke off, smashed a spider-lily bloom with his
-stick, and began afresh.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Junia Vasilieff—what was it she did?  Big princes
-they were, and much too close to the throne to be safe
-company....  Junia Vasili—I have it!  Yes—the end
-of the story was in the Sydney papers, time you were a
-little kid.  I remember.  They were to have married
-her to the Czarewitch, just to make things safe.  Her
-claim to the throne was big enough to have started a
-revolution any day, if it had been asserted....  Poor
-little Junia!—only sixteen when I knew—when the
-marriage was talked of—and such golden hair as she
-had!  She hated the whole thing; courts and ceremony
-weren't in her line.  But she was a gentle little creature,
-and I never thought she'd have had the spirit to do as
-she did."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He turned the seal over in his fingers, as if reading the
-past from its glittering surface.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"There was a young lieutenant of Hussars, a Pole—you
-don't know what that is, but the Russians don't
-like them, I can tell you—a noble, but a very small one;
-not fit to black Junia's boots, according to their notions.
-Well, he bolted with her.  It was in the Sydney papers,
-time I was in the Solomons; the paper came up to
-Guadalcanar....  She must have been twenty then;
-just the year the marriage to the Czarewitch was to have
-come off....  They bolted—cleared out—never seen
-again.  All Russia on the boil about it; no one knew
-but what they'd hatch up plots against the throne, she
-having a better claim than any one else, if it hadn't
-been for the law against empresses.  The secret police
-were after them for years, but they were never traced,
-though most people knew Russia'd give a pretty penny
-to know where they were——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"O man with the head of a fruit-bat, do you not see?"
-interrupted Vaiti at this juncture.  "They hid on that
-island—they may be there still.  It is worth a hundred
-treasures!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"The Pole was a great traveller, and had a sort of a
-little yacht," said Saxon thoughtfully.  "It might be
-true, of course—if there is an island, and if the Nalolo
-Johnnie had any idea of where it was, and if nobody
-found them out and split years ago.  Plenty of 'ifs.'"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I think him all-right good enough," averred Vaiti,
-returning to English and prose.  "By'n-by we finish
-F'lisco, then we go see, me and you."</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="the-lost-island"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER IX</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">THE LOST ISLAND</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>Some two or three months later, the schooner
-might have been seen, like a white-winged butterfly lost
-at sea, beating up and down before a solitary, low,
-green island lying far east of the lonely Paumotus.
-Vaiti, sitting on the top of the deck-house, was examining
-the land through a glass.  The native crew were all on
-deck; also Harris and Gray, the mate and bo'sun.
-Captain Saxon was not to be seen.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"The old man always do get squiffy at the wrong
-time, don't he?" commented Harris, rather gleefully.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Gray spat over the rail for reply.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You're ratty because you don't know nothing,
-ain't you?" he said.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Do you?" asked the mate curiously.  Harris had
-not much notion of the dignity of his office, and dearly
-loved a gossip at all times.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"More nor you, havin' eyes and ears that's of use to
-me occasionally," replied the bo'sun dryly.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Harris considered.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I'll give you my grey shirt to tell," he said
-persuasively.  "There's sure to be something up."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"'Ow much does we ever get out of it when there
-is?" asked Gray sourly.  "I could do with that shirt
-very well, though.  There ain't much to tell, except
-that the old man he thought there was an island
-hereabouts not marked on the chart that nobody knew
-about; and Vaiti she allowed that was all —— rot,
-because, says she, this part's been surveyed, and though
-the Admiralty surveys isn't the for-ever-'n-ever-Amen
-dead certainties the little brassbound officers thinks
-them, still they don't leave whole islands out on the
-loose without a collar and a name round their necks, so
-to say.  So, says she, let me work out the length of time
-they ran before the hurricane, says she, and the d'rection
-of the wind, which the old boy remembered right enough,
-says she; and then look it up on the chart, and I'll be
-blowed, says she, if you don't find something for a guide
-like.  So by-and-by she looks, and says she, ''Ere's
-something; 'ere's a reef marked P.D., and it is P.D.,'
-says she, 'for you and I knows there's nothin' there,'
-she says.  'But we'll look a bit more to the north'ard,'
-she says, 'where it's right off the' track of ships, and
-maybe we'll find somethin' and maybe we won't,' she
-says.  'But I think,' she says, 'that somewheres not
-too far off from that P.D. reef we'll maybe get a sight
-of what we're lookin' for,' she says, 'because sometimes
-reefs is put down for bigger things by mistake,' she says,
-'especially if you 'aven't been to see.'  Then she comes
-on deck, and I makes myself scarce, for it ain't healthy
-on this ship to listen at no cabin skylights, not if she
-knows you're there."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Well, whatever the game is, I don't suppose it'll
-line our little insides any fatter, bo'sun.  We don't
-count on this ship anything like as we ought to when
-there's shares goin'.  I wonder that I stick to her, I do!
-Old man as drunk as a lord half the time—me doin' his
-work as well as my own—a blessed she-cat running the
-blooming show——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Ready about!" sang Vaiti from the deck-house,
-and the mate and bo'sun sprang across the deck.  There
-was something about the orders of the "she-cat" that
-enforced a smartness on the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> rare on an island
-schooner, even when heavy-fisted Saxon was not about.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Half an hour later, Vaiti had rowed herself ashore,
-curtly declining Harris's polite offers of assistance, and
-had landed on the beach.  As she did not know who she
-might be going to see, she had provided for all emergencies.
-Her revolver was in her pocket, and she wore a flowing
-sacque of lace-trimmed white silk that made her feel she
-was fit to meet any Russian princess, if such were indeed
-on the island.  It was a gratifying thought that the said
-princess, if she had been a celebrated beauty, must now
-be well into the forties, and consequently beneath all
-contempt as a rival belle.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Her father's absence did not trouble her.  He had a
-nasty trick of starting a drinking bout just when he
-was most needed—in fact, it was the one point in
-Saxon's character on which you could absolutely rely.
-Vaiti, therefore, had grown used to doing without him,
-and rather liked to have a perfectly free hand.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She had fully grasped the bearings of the case.  There
-was possibly a very great chief's daughter from Europe,
-with a rather insignificant chief who had stolen her
-away, living there in hiding.  The people of her country
-would pay a great deal to know where she was and
-bring her back.  Or, if there seemed any lack of safety
-about this proceeding (Vaiti had long ago learned that
-her father was not fond of putting himself within the
-reach of principalities and powers of any kind), the
-couple themselves must be made to pay for silence.
-It was all very simple.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The fact that the island was supposed to be uninhabited
-did not trouble her.  She meant to investigate
-that matter after her own fashion.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She walked all round it first of all.  It took her about
-an hour.  There was a nice, white, sandy beach, with
-straggling bush behind it.  There were a good many
-cocoanuts—all young ones—also a large number of
-broken trunks, apparently snapped off by a hurricane.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>This set Vaiti thinking.  It seemed to her that the
-damage was rather too universal and even to be natural.
-Yet why should any sane human cut short all his
-full-grown cocoanuts?</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She crossed the island twice at the ends, noting
-everything with a keen and wary eye.  Fairly good soil;
-nothing growing on it, however, but low scrub and a
-few berries.  In the centre of the island the scrub
-thickened into dense bush, impenetrable without an
-axe.  No sign of life anywhere.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti stamped her foot.  Was it possible she had
-been mistaken?  Was this indeed just what it seemed,
-a commonplace, infertile, useless, little mid-ocean islet,
-let alone because it was worth nothing, and incorrectly
-described as a reef because no one had ever troubled
-to examine it?  Things began to look like it.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>And yet ... she thought—she did not quite know
-what, but she was very sure that she did not want to
-leave the island just yet.  She would at least climb a
-tall tree and take a general survey before she gave
-it up.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Nothing simpler—but there was no such tree.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>All the palms were young, or broken off short; all the
-pandanus trees were in the same condition.  There was
-no rock, no commanding height.  She could not get a
-view.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti's cheek flushed crimson under its olive brown.
-The spark was struck at last!</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Somebody had cut short those trees—to prevent
-anyone from climbing up and overlooking the island.
-The encircling reef would not allow any ship to approach
-close enough for a look-out at the mast-head to see over
-the island, except in a very general way.  There was
-something to conceal.  What, and where?</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Only one answer was possible.  The mass of apparently
-virgin bush in the centre of the island—several acres in
-extent—was the only spot where a cat could have
-concealed itself.  The scent was growing hot.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>With sparkling eyes Vaiti began to circle the wood,
-watching narrowly for the smallest trace of a pathway.
-The branches were interlocked and knitted together as
-only tropical bush can be.  Many were set with huge
-thorns; all were laced and twined with bush ropes and
-lianas of every kind.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Nothing larger than a rat could have won its way
-through such a rampart.  Vaiti walked swiftly on and
-on, striking the bushes now and then with a stick, to
-make sure that there were no loose masses of stuff
-masking a concealed entrance, and keeping a sharp
-eye for traces of footsteps....  It was with a
-heart-sinking shock that she found herself once more beside
-the low white coral rock that had marked the commencement
-of her journey, and realised that she had
-been all round, and that there was most certainly no
-opening.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The sun was slipping down the heavens now.  She
-had been exploring half the day, but she was not beaten
-yet.  The unexpected difficulties she had met with only
-sharpened her determination to enter the thicket at all
-costs.  Harris, suffering acutely, as usual, from
-suppressed curiosity, was nearly driven mad by the sight
-of the "she-cat" suddenly reappearing on the ship,
-picking up an axe, and departing as silently as she had
-come, with a countenance that did not invite questions.
-She had taken off her smart silk dress, and was in her
-chemise and petticoat, arms and feet bare, and waist
-girdled with a sash into which she had stuck her revolver.
-She dropped the axe into her boat, rowed silently away,
-and disappeared on the other side of the island.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The sun was still some distance above the sea when
-she let the axe slip from her torn, scratched, and aching
-hands, and stood at last, tired but triumphant, in the
-heart of the mysterious island's mystery.  She had won
-her way, with the woodcraft that was in her island
-blood, through the dense belt of bush, hacking and
-slashing here, stooping and writhing there, until the
-light began to show through the tangled stems in front,
-and a few swift strokes cleared the way into the open.
-Yes! there was a space in the centre, after all—a
-clearing over an acre in extent.  There was grass here,
-and a few overgrown bananas, and a tangle of yam and
-pumpkin vines.  Passion fruit ran in a tangle of wild
-luxuriance over the inner wall of the thicket;
-pine-apples rotted on the ground and fig-trees spread their
-wide leaves unchecked and unpruned....  In the middle
-of all was a house—a one-storied little bungalow,
-iron-roofed, with a tank to catch the rain.  There was a
-long, low store behind it, and something that looked
-like a pig-sty, and something that might have been a
-fowl-run.  But....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>But everything was rotten, ruined, overgrown, hardly
-to be distinguished in the thick tangle of vegetation
-that had overflowed the little retreat like a great green
-wave let loose upon a low-lying shore.  Vaiti knew what
-she was going to see before she had reached the door
-of the bungalow—a rotten floor, with green vines
-shooting up between the crevices, and bush rats scuffling
-and squeaking under the boards—a rusted iron roof,
-where pink convolvulus bloom peeped in under the
-rafters, and lizards sunned themselves in the airy blue
-furniture unglued and decayed fast sinking into one
-common mass of ruin—door aslant, and thresholds
-sunken.  Everywhere silence, emptiness, decay.  There
-needed no explanation of the vanished pathway.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The Maori blood owns strange instincts.  Again Vaiti
-knew what she was going to see before it came—knew,
-and walked straight over to a certain corner of the
-enclosure, as if she had been there before....  It was
-under a scarlet-flowered hibiscus tree that she found
-it—a long, low grave, fenced round with a wall of coral
-slabs, so that the overflowing bush had surged less
-thickly here, and one could see that there was something
-lying on the mound, only half hidden by creeping
-vines—something long and white and slender.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti dragged away the creepers....  Yes, it was a
-skeleton, bare and fleshless, with bony fingers and black,
-empty eyes.  There was a splintered gap in one temple,
-and close to one of the hands lay a mass of rusted steel
-that had once been a revolver.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>On a flat white stone, standing at the head of the
-grave, a long inscription had been carved with infinite
-care in three different languages.  Two of them Vaiti
-did not understand, but the third was English.  She
-pulled the growing ferns off the stone, and, wiping its
-surface, read:</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>"Here is buried Junia, of the race of Vasilieff.
-<br />Died 20th June, 1889.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>"Here is buried Anton, son of Junia Vasilieff
-<br />and her husband, Alexis, Baron Varsovi,
-<br />Born 20th June, died 21st June,
-<br />1889.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>"Here rests Alexis, Baron Varsovi.  Into the
-<br />unknown thou didst follow me: into the
-<br />Great Unknown I follow thee.
-<br />Reunited 21st June, 1889."</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>Vaiti, descendant of cannibal chiefs and lawless
-soldiers, more than half a pirate herself, and hard of
-nature as a beautiful flinty coral flower, was yet at
-bottom a woman after all.  What passed in the breast
-of this dark, wild daughter of the southern seas, as she
-stood above the strange, sad record of loves and lives
-unknown, cannot be told.  But in a little while, with
-some dim recollection of the long-ago, gentle, pious days
-of her convent school, she knelt down beside tie lonely
-grave, and, crossing herself, said something as near to
-a prayer as she could remember.  Then, still kneeling,
-she cut and tied two sticks into the form of a cross,
-and set them upright in the earth of the mound.  The
-sun was slanting low and red across the grave as she
-turned away.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>"What'd she give you?" asked Harris eagerly, as
-the bo'sun stepped across the gang-plank on to the
-quay.  The lights of San Francisco were blazing all
-about, the cars roared past, there was a piano-organ
-jangling joyously at the corner.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Fifty dollars for the two of us," said Gray, his acid
-face sweetened with unwonted smiles.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Crikey!  Honest men is riz in the market at last!
-What in h—— can she have got herself?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Might as well arst me what she got it for.  Don't
-know, and don't care, so long as we've got the makings
-of a spree like this out of it.  I see her comin' out of
-the Rooshian Consulate this mornin' lookin' like as if
-some one 'ad been standin' treat to her."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You know she don't touch anything."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I'm speaking figuryative; she looked that sort of
-way.  And coming' back to the ship, she says to the
-old man, she says: 'Why, dad, better dead than alive!'
-she says.  And he laughs."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Don't sound 'olesome," observed Harris thoughtfully.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Now, don't you get to thinkin', for you ain't built
-that way, and you'll do yourself a mischief," said the
-boatswain warningly.  "And let's be thankful to
-'eaven for all its mercies, say I, that we've got such a
-nice, warm, dry, convenient night for to go and get
-drunk in."</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="what-came-of-the-paris-dress"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER X</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">WHAT CAME OF THE PARIS DRESS</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>The effects of Saxon's illness in Fiji were a long time
-in wearing off.  It was many weeks after Vaiti had come
-back to the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>, flushed with importance and with
-the lionising she had received on the cable-ship—many
-weeks after the voyage to the unknown island and the
-visit to San Francisco—that he took ill again; not very
-seriously, but badly enough to prevent his going to sea.
-Of course, the time was an awkward one.  They were
-off Niué, and there was copra waiting to be taken to
-Raratonga for the steamer—copra which would certainly
-be secured by some other schooner if Saxon did not
-take it at the promised date.  Neither Harris nor Gray
-knew enough to be trusted with the ship, and he did
-not much care about letting Vaiti sail her—not because
-he doubted his fiery daughter's ability or desire, but
-because, rash as he was himself at times, he knew her
-to be still worse.  He had seen her run the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> in the
-trough of the very last swell alongside a barrier reef for
-miles, sailing all the time so close to the wind that the
-shifting of a single point would have meant destruction.
-He had heard her raving about the deck in half a gale
-as they swept up to the iron-bound coast of Niué,
-abusing Harris in the strongest of beach talk because
-he had not another main topsail in the locker to replace
-the two that had just carried away one after the other
-and battered themselves to ribbons—the principal
-ground of her complaint being apparently the fact that
-she considered herself labouring under a social
-disadvantage of the most mortifying kind because the
-schooner was obliged to come up to Niué for the very
-first time without all sails set.  He had seen her perform
-tricks of steering, getting in and out of Avarua in
-Raratonga (a perfect death-trap of a port at times, as
-all old islanders know), that "fairly gave him the
-jim-jams," to use his own phraseology....  No, on
-the whole he thought he would rather miss that fright
-than lie idle in the trader's house at Avatele, and think
-daily and nightly of the cranky though light-heeled
-</span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> out upon the high seas in Vaiti's sole command.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>This being so, it was natural and inevitable that Vaiti
-should set her heart upon going and carry out her
-desire.  She did not make any trouble about the matter;
-neither was she at all unkind to the invalided owner of
-the ship.  On the contrary, she paid the trader's wife
-more than that kindly woman wanted, to take good
-care of her father while she should be away, bought him
-everything decent to eat that the island contained
-(which was saying very little), indulgently presented
-him with a demijohn of whisky, and then informed him,
-in the coolest manner in the world, that the copra was
-all loaded, the stores and water on board, and the
-schooner ready to sail next day, under her command.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Saxon swore at large first of all, then stormed at
-Vaiti, and finally began a pathetic lament over his own
-helpless position and the heartlessness of his only child.
-Vaiti, sitting cross-legged on the end of his bed, smoked
-a big cigar through it all and looked out of the window.
-When he stopped at last, fairly run out, she laughed
-and handed him a weed out of her own case and a match.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You take'm that, no speak nonsense.  You know
-me, what?" she demanded; and Saxon, who was not
-in reality nearly as ill as he thought himself, laughed,
-and allowed himself to be won over.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Having gained her point, Vaiti went off again to the
-schooner through the wonderful pink dusk that wraps
-a South Sea island at sunset, and left the captain to hold
-commune with his demijohn and sleep.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>As she walked down to the shore, she heard a sound
-of laughing and the rustle of many dresses among the
-palms close at hand.  Now in Niué it is an important
-matter that brings people out of evenings, because,
-although the island has been Christianised long ago,
-like all the rest of the Eastern Pacific, it still suffers from
-a perfect plague of heathen ghosts that no amount of
-Sunday church-goings and week-day pious exercises
-seem to affect in the least.  So the natives are afraid
-to go out of their houses after sunset, lest uncanny
-things should rise out of the forest to spring upon the
-wayfarer's back unseen and choke him.  This Vaiti
-knew, so she suspected something of interest in the little
-crowd, and turned aside to look.  If she had not, there
-had been no story to tell about Niué and the happenings
-there.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She saw a curious scene, so nearly hidden by the
-growing dark that no one but an island resident could
-have taken in its full significance.  A group of islanders,
-men and women stood round the door of a big white
-concrete house with a pandanus roof—the finest native
-house in the village.  They seemed to be waiting for
-something—something both amusing and exciting, to
-judge by the explosions of giggles that continually burst
-through the dusk.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Presently the door of the house swung open with
-considerable violence, and a large mat was thrown out
-by an invisible hand.  Then the door was slammed,
-and the giggles redoubled.  Within the house now
-sounded something very like a struggle.  There were
-loud sobs and cries of a shrill, theatrical kind, scuffling.
-banging, and a dragging sound.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Tck, tck, tck," went the tongues of the outsiders
-delightedly.  The interesting moment was at hand.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It came without warning.  The door burst open with
-still more violence than before, and out upon the mat
-was shot by some invisible agency a very solid young
-woman in a white loose gown, weeping somewhat
-mechanically, but with much effect.  She fairly rolled
-over with the force of the shock that had ejected her,
-and before she could pick herself up the door was closed
-once more with a slam that shook the whole house.
-Then the waiting group rushed upon her with cries of
-joy, and bore her away in their midst, singing as they
-went.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"A wedding," said Vaiti to herself.  "It must be
-Mata's; that is their house.  And it will be a big
-wedding, too.  I did not know that it was to be so
-soon."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She fell into a fit of musing as she wandered
-shorewards among the leaning palms....  The palms of
-Niué sweep downwards to the gleaming sea like a band
-of lovely maidens hurrying with sweet impatience to
-meet their lovers on the coral shore.  Of a moonlight
-night, when all things are possible, and nothing seems
-too wonderful in an air that itself is wonder, it needs
-but little for those white, slender stems, and tossing,
-plumy crowns, poised high above the shadowy beach
-they curve to meet, to change themselves into South
-Sea dryads of a new and lovely race, and rush down,
-at long last, upon the calling sea, where Tangaroa, the
-king of ocean, has his dwelling.  Under the palms of
-Niué, when the blazing white moon has risen so high
-in the heavens that a perfect star of jetty shadow is
-rayed about the base of every tree—when the wandering
-sea winds are held close by the breathless spell of
-midnight and nothing wakes on all the lonely shore but the
-long, long song of the droning coral reef—under the
-wonderful palms of Niué, loveliest and strangest of all
-the islands in that dreamy world of "perilous seas and
-fairylands forlorn"—nothing is too strange to be true,
-no fancy too wild to hold, when the moon is up and the
-palms are alone with the sea....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Was Vaiti thinking of visionary palm-maidens and
-sea-foam kings as she went down the winding path to
-the bay, through a wondrous afterglow of russet-rose
-laced through with opal moonrays?  Perhaps—or of
-kindred fancies.  I who knew her cannot say, for no
-one ever knew her altogether.  It is more likely,
-however, that less poetic thoughts were in her mind just
-then.  The scene she had witnessed in the palm-grove
-was the usual ceremony that takes place in Niué the
-night before a wedding, when the friends of the
-bridegroom come to the house of the bride's parents, and
-the latter go through the symbolical form of casting her
-out and closing the door, so that the bridegroom's people
-may take her over and guard her until the wedding
-morning.  Vaiti liked a wedding above all things (next
-to a funeral), and the hint of great doings on the morrow,
-offered by the ceremony she had witnessed, decided her
-to stay another day.  Why not?  The copra was
-loaded, and no rivals were in sight.  Besides, she had
-a motive for staying—the strongest possible motive.
-She wanted to wear her Paris dress.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Yes, it had been acquired at last.  That day in San
-Francisco, when she had come out of the Russian
-Consulate with more money in her pocket than any one
-of her adventures had ever brought before, she had been
-able to restrain herself no longer.  And thereafter, in
-Madame Retaillaud's elegant and exclusive Parisian
-emporium, replete with the choicest imported wares
-(I quote the lady's own description of her goods), there
-took place a scene that is remembered to the present
-day by those of Madame Retaillaud's young ladies who
-survived the earthquake year.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, dressed in one of her waistless muslin gowns,
-with a broad-leafed island hat on her head, a long-bladed
-sheath-knife stuck quite visibly in the breast
-of her dress, and her wavy hair falling loose over her
-shoulders, stalked into the shop among the smartly-gowned
-San Francisco ladies who were turning over
-Madame's stock, and demanded to see—</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"One dress belong Palisi, pretty dam quick."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>They are used to all sorts of strange nationalities along
-the water-front in San Francisco, but not, as a rule, in
-the milliners' and modistes' well-bred establishments.
-Vaiti concentrated the whole attention of the place upon
-herself at a single stroke.  She did not care about that
-in the least, but Madame's hesitation stung her, and she
-pulled out a thick wad of notes.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Look 'em alive, my hearties!" she ordered
-impatiently in her quarter-deck voice.  "Lay aft here
-with that goods.  I want um Palisi model, all sort."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The customers were nearly in hysterics by this time,
-and the assistants were all a-giggle.  Madame herself,
-however, grasped the situation in a twinkling, and
-frowned down the girls.  Whoever and whatever this
-pirate queen might be, she certainly had money, and
-Madame would have welcomed Lucrezia Borgia or the
-Witch of Endor, under like circumstances, as pleasantly
-as an Anglo-American duchess.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Perhaps Madame will come into a private room.
-Madame would like, no doubt, to look at our most
-exclusive goods, and we do not bring them into the
-outer shop," she said in her most honeyed voice.  And
-the door of the lift closed upon the pair.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>What Vaiti underwent in that fitting-room in the
-course of getting into Madame's latest model promenade
-gown, built for a typical French figure, will never be
-told.  Early in the proceedings a message came down
-to the showroom for the strongest pair of Paris corsets
-in stock, and a little later Madame herself, very red and
-overheated, ran down to select a fresh silk lace.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Ah, but she has courage, that one!" she declared,
-as the lift received her again.  "Never, no,
-never!—jamais de la vie! ..."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The lift went up.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was almost an hour before a wonderful vision sailed
-slowly through the show-room and out into the street—slowly,
-not alone for pride, but also because it could
-scarcely move or draw its breath.  The vision, as
-described in the receipted bill that went with it, was
-made up of the following elements:</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"One promenade costume (model, Doucet &amp; Cie.)
-composed of chiffon velours, couleur poussière de roses,
-inlet with motifs of point d'Alençon, hand-embroidered
-with lilies of the valley in French paste.  Mounted on
-chiffon bleu-de-ciel, with full volants edged lace and
-chiffon ruching.  Made over foundation of glacé silk,
-couleur citron d'or.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"One set silk underclothing to match.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"One Corset Ecraseur, patent laces.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"One pair bronze promenade shoes, Louis XV. heels,
-extra height.  Stockings to match.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"One parasol composed peau-de-soie rose fanée and
-chiffon bleu-de-ciel."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>To which may be added—one young woman, suffering
-horrible agony and quite intoxicated with happiness.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>It was this marvellous possession that Vaiti yearned
-to show off at the wedding.  She had not had a chance
-to wear it since the day when she had walked through
-the streets of San Francisco, with an admiring and
-amused crowd at her rear, and found it quite impossible
-to get on board the schooner, when she reached the water
-front, until she took off her voluminous skirt and handed
-it up over the side—afterwards climbing the rope-ladder
-in a storm of applause and a pink silk petticoat.
-Now the occasion for getting full value out of the
-wonderful thing had come at last, and she could not—no,
-she really could not—miss it.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Rather late next morning, when the bride and
-bridegroom—the former in a gorgeous gown of yellow curtain
-muslin, the latter in a thick tweed suit from Auckland
-that caused him to stream at every pore—were sitting
-on opposite sides of the little white church, enthroned
-on chairs all by themselves, and listening decorously to
-a long preliminary address from the native pastor—Vaiti
-swept in, and at once brought the ceremony to a
-momentary pause.  The pastor stopped in his address
-and gaped, the women exclaimed audibly, the bridegroom
-fixed his eyes on the apparition and sighed in a manner
-that the bride evidently resented as a personal slight,
-for she grew still darker in the face than nature had made
-her, and stared penknives and scissors at Vaiti.  Wild
-titters of delight swept indecorously through the church.
-The entry was indeed a success—the native pastor
-found it necessary to address his flock directly, and to
-tell them that they would undoubtedly all go to hell
-if they did not behave better in church, before order
-was restored.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It is not necessary to relate at length how Mata and
-Ivi were made one, how they walked out of the church
-nonchalantly by different doors, and were subsequently
-so deeply interested in the killing of the pigs for the
-marriage feast, and the preparing of the various cooking-pots,
-that they did not meet again all afternoon.  It
-was a commonplace wedding enough, and this history
-is not interested in it, other than as it concerned the
-affairs of Vaiti.  These, indeed, were fairly notable.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>For with Vaiti pride very literally brought about a
-fall that day.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She had had a terrible time getting into her dress, and
-the whole ship's company had shared in the trouble.
-First, the native A.B.'s had to fetch her a big looking-glass
-from the nearest trader's, and secure it to the
-bulkhead of her cabin.  Then the cook had to deliver
-up all the hot water in the galley—at seven bells, with
-dinner just coming on!—and the boatswain must needs
-broach the cargo for some special scented soap.  Matters
-were only beginning, however.  When the dress was
-disinterred from its many wrappings and finally put on
-it became immediately apparent that the bodice could
-not possibly be made to meet.  Perhaps the coming of
-the bread-fruit season had caused the young lady's
-waist to expand—perhaps the practised art of Madame
-Retaillaud had exceeded anything that a mere amateur
-could compass in the way of lacing.  At any rate, it
-was not till Vaiti had passed her corset laces out through
-the port and ordered two of the strongest sailors to tail
-on to them—not till Harris, agonising with laughter,
-had directed this novel evolution from the poop for at
-least five delirious minutes, during which Vaiti several
-times thought she was dying, but remained none the
-less determined to die rather than give in, that the
-deed was accomplished at last, and the "Kapitani" of
-</span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> was enabled to look at herself in the glass and
-know heavenly certainty that she was the best
-dressed woman in the Pacific at that instant, whoever
-saw or did not see.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The natural result of all this was that in the very
-hour of her triumph she fainted dead away in the
-church, for the first time in her life, and had to be
-carried out.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The ceremony was just over by now, and the bride,
-still burning with jealousy of the woman who had dared
-to eclipse her on her wedding day, was among the first
-of those who crowded round like bees going after honey,
-to stare at the beautiful creature lying senseless on the
-sunburnt grass.  The bridegroom had sped away hot-foot
-in the direction of the village, whence certain
-enticing yells indicated that the pig-slaughter was now
-going on; but Mata was not a bit appeased by his
-indifference to the visitor.  That dress—and oh, how
-wonderful it was!—still rankled in her soul.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Mata was a teacher's daughter, and she knew something
-of white people's lore.  A brilliant thought darted into
-her mind as she pressed and struggled in the crowd
-about the deathly form on the grass....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Ai, ai! she is surely dead!" wailed the people.
-"Ai! the-great chieftainess will rise no more!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Daughters of a turtle!" said Mata contemptuously.
-"I will show you if she is dead.  It is nothing at all but
-that she is vain, and wanted to make herself a middle
-like the 'papalangi' women, who all look like stinging
-hornets.  Give me a knife, someone."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>A knife was given, and Mata, with horrid joy, half
-lifted Vaiti and slipped the keen point into the back of
-the dress.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Rip went the silk with a hideous splitting noise, and
-the delicate underwear swelled out through the opening
-like a bush lily bursting its sheath.  Mata felt for
-the stay-lace, and cut that too.  The tension on the
-bodice increased frightfully—the seams gaped and
-strained....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"She will die, I think, if I do not cut it off," said
-Mata hastily, feeling Vaiti reviving under her hand, and
-anxious to finish her work.  Two more cuts of the knife
-did it.  The Paris dress was, speaking sartorially, no
-more; the owner, lying on the ground, was opening her
-eyes to the outrage that had been done; and Mata,
-shrieking with malign laughter, was fleeing wildly through
-the palms in the direction of the pig-killing, peace in her
-heart again.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Peace was very far indeed from Vaiti's heart when
-she revived and found out what had been done.  The
-crowd drew away from her in fear when they saw her
-flashing eyes and set, furious mouth, though she said
-never a word.  Confronted by that Medusa-head, they
-were almost too terrified to find words; but one or two
-stammered out a hasty explanation that freed the
-present company from blame by inculpating Mata.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti did not doubt it—she had seen the bride's face
-during the ceremony.  Still silent, but flashing looks of
-sheet-lightning all about her, she drew together her
-garments as best she could, and walked off in the direction
-of the ship.  As she did so, a little ugly man with red
-hair slipped out from behind the trees, and looked
-narrowly at her retreating figure.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"It is the white man from the bush!" cried the
-girls.  "White man of ours, why did you not come
-down for the wedding?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Because I didn't, my little dears," replied the
-newcomer in English, still looking after Vaiti.  He stood
-well in the shade, and did not make himself unnecessarily
-conspicuous.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"That's a fine girl, that Mata," he added by and by.
-"A smart girl.  I should like to know Mata."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti put off her going for yet another day.  She had
-business to attend to.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was very simple business, and it was characterised
-by the directness that attended all the proceedings of
-Saxon's daughter.  She merely went up to the bride's
-new home, that was so handsomely stocked with trade
-goods and imported furniture, while the wedding party
-were making merry in the village after dark, and set
-fire to it with a torch in about a dozen places.  It was
-very dry weather, and there was a strong wind.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>There was scarce a stick of the cottage left when she
-marched into the village with a blazing torch in her
-hand, and calmly told the assembled revellers what
-she had done.  Then she left them, seething in a tumult
-of excitement that almost drowned the hysteric screams
-of Mata, and went to bed and to sleep with a quiet
-mind, ready for an early start next morning.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The men came on board late and very drunk, but
-they did come.  They were afraid of Vaiti, and so was
-Harris, who would very well have liked to extend his
-revels in the village for another twelve hours, but did
-not dare to do so.  He thought, as he stumbled into his
-bunk, that the sounds proceeding from the forecastle
-were a good deal odder than usual—he could almost
-have sworn that there was one person, if not several,
-crying in there.  But he had good reason for mistrusting
-the evidence of his senses just then, so he flung himself
-down and went to sleep.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="a-dead-man-s-revenge"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER XI</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">A DEAD MAN'S REVENGE</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>When one is well on the right side of five-and-twenty,
-with a good ship underfoot, a fair breeze setting steadily
-from the right quarter, and a pleasant goal ahead, it is
-hard to be unhappy.  Vaiti's sense of bereavement at
-the loss of her cherished dress faded considerably before
-the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> had fairly cleared the land, and was gone
-altogether by the next day.  She had done what she felt
-to be the right thing by Mata; the score was even.
-Vaiti did not like loose ends of any kind, and she had
-not left any behind her.  She smiled as she thought of
-it, and paused in her official-looking walk across and
-across the poop, to revile a native A.B. for leaving the
-end of a halyard trailing on deck.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You d—— lazy nigger," she said.  "What sort
-ship you thinking you stop?  You thinking one mud
-scow" (</span><em class="italics">Mud cow</em><span> was her pronunciation), "one pig-boat,
-one canoe belong dam man-eating Solomon boy?  I
-teaching you some other thing pretty quick.  Suppose
-you no flemish-coil that halyard, keep him coil all-a-time,
-I let 'em daylight inside that black hide belong you,
-knock 'em two ugly eye into one."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She plucked a belaying-pin out of the rail and sent it
-flying at the sailor's ear.  Vaiti was a straight thrower,
-but the crew seldom failed to dodge; they had every
-opportunity of becoming proficient.  On this occasion,
-however, the sailor made not the least attempt to escape,
-and the pin struck him fair and square at the angle of
-the jaw, and knocked him over.  He was hurt, but not
-stunned, and sat up immediately on the deck, gazing at
-the tall white figure on the poop with lack-lustre eyes
-that scarcely seemed to comprehend what they saw.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Bring 'em that pin," commanded Vaiti, still in what
-stood for English with her.  She never addressed the
-crew in the tongue that was native to both.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The man crept slowly aft, and handed it to her.  She
-motioned to him to replace it neatly in the rail, and
-then pointed to the trailing halyard.  It did not escape
-her, as the sailor made his way down to the main deck,
-that there were tears in his large black eyes, and that
-his pareo was tied with a carelessness unusual among
-Polynesians, and significant of trouble and depression
-when seen.  But she put the one down to the swelled
-and reddening bruise that marked all one side of his face
-and the other to the orgies of the previous night.  If
-the men chose to make brutes of themselves on bush-beer,
-they need not expect that she was going to slacken
-their work for them on that account.  No, not if she
-broke the head of every man in the ship.  She was
-not Saxon's daughter for nothing, as they very well knew.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was small wonder that Vaiti was not popular with crews.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She went on pacing the deck, in the joyous crystal-clear
-sunlight of the sea.  The trade wind ran through
-the sky like a warm, blue river, the rigging sang, the sails
-drew steadily.  It was a good day, a happy day, a
-pleasant day to be alive.  The girl felt pleased with
-the world.  She took the wheel from the sailor who
-held it, for the sheer pleasure of feeling the flying vessel
-answer to the touch of her own light hand.  All the
-force and fury of those roaring sails overhead seemed to
-concentrate itself here in her fingers, as the power of a
-great dynamo passes through a single wire.  It was
-almost as if she drove the ship herself.  The </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>
-went as steady as an albatross; once or twice the
-spokes fairly shook in her hands.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"The wheel is laughing to-day," she said in Maori,
-using the island sailor's expression.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Dinner-time came round soon, and she descended
-to eat with Harris alone.  Saxon himself did not
-particularly care whether he dined with his bo'sun or not,
-if it happened to be convenient to leave Harris on
-deck; but Vaiti would have run the ship as strictly
-as a man-of-war at all times, if she could have had her
-way.  Indeed, she would have liked to dine in solitary
-state, like the captain of a cruiser, had she not had too
-much good sense to fly in the face of merchant service
-custom by excluding the mate.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>As things were, she graciously condescended to order
-Harris down to the cabin with her, and they discussed
-together the inevitable curried tin of Pacific cookery.
-It was wonderfully light and bright in the little cabin,
-which was large for the size of the ship, and had plenty
-of berth and locker space, besides its neatly fitted trade
-shelves.  The bulkheads were painted white picked out
-with blue (they were satinwood and bird's-eye maple
-underneath the paint, a thing which had astonished
-and perplexed more than one ship's carpenter in the
-past quarter of a century), and there was a pretty
-bird's-nest fern in a basket hanging from the skylight, and the
-seats were covered with the neatest thing in blue and
-white trade prints that Auckland could produce.  Vaiti's
-taste was evident everywhere, and Vaiti herself, hair
-freshly combed and held back with a bright ribbon, laces
-and frills dainty and immaculate as ever, looked, as she
-demurely poured out tea (you will seldom find the teapot
-absent from the table of a colonial ship), quite the last
-sort of person by whom a native A.B. might expect
-to be knocked into the scuppers.  Yet, truth to tell,
-the unlicked Harris, wolfing his food at the opposite
-side of the table, was very much better liked by the crew,
-even though he was heavy-handed enough at times;
-and he certainly understood more about the five A.B.'s
-and one ordinary seaman who inhabited the forecastle
-than did Vaiti, who was half one of themselves, and
-therefore thought them beneath consideration as a rule.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Of this fact he proceeded to give an illustration when
-the curry and the tea and the fried bananas were almost
-done, and nobody's dinner could be spoilt by unpleasant
-news.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Think you're in for a good time, don't you, Cap?"
-he said.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, the economical of words, merely nodded.  But
-her face spoke for her.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Harris was never quite sure whether he liked Vaiti
-in an uncomfortable, indefinite way, or heartily hated
-her.  To-day the balance perhaps inclined in the latter
-direction.  He watched her face with some interest
-as he said:</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"That's where you spoils yourself, Cap.  You ain't.
-And if you want my advice, which you never do, I'd
-tell you that the sooner you 'bouts ship and back to
-Niué the better."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti bit slowly through the piece of bread she was
-eating and deliberately chewed it, eyeing the mate all
-the time, before she condescended to answer.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Mph!" was all she said at last.  She had never
-studied diplomacy, but she knew how much more you
-learn in general by letting the other person lead the
-conversation than by talking yourself.  And it occurred
-to her that Harris wanted to make himself important
-by hinting and patronising over some ship business
-which might, or might not, be in his department.  Well,
-let him.  She would not give him a lead.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Harris, on his part, got angry at once, and blurted
-out what he had meant to keep a good deal longer.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Oh, very well," he said.  "You can do just as
-you likes, of course, but where you'll find yourself
-when it comes to a question of mutiny, that's another
-two-and-six.  Musling curtains on the ports, and white
-table-cloths, and ropes all flemish-coiled on deck is
-going to help you a lot then, ain't they?  And if ever
-I've seen signs of trouble in a crew, I seen them to-day,
-and you knows it—ma'am."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The last word came with a jerk, screwed out, as it
-were, by an ominous flash of Vaiti's eye.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti herself was thinking very quickly indeed, but
-you would not have imagined it if you had seen her
-slowly scooping out the inside of a mummy-apple, and
-as slowly eating it.  She was obliged to acknowledge
-to herself, now Harris had spoken, that there had been
-something unusual about the demeanour of more than
-one of the men since their departure yesterday.  But
-mutiny?  Nonsense!  Indigestion from too much pork,
-more likely.  She did not believe for an instant that any
-crew once handled by her father and herself would have
-an ounce of mutiny left in the lot, if you ran them
-through a stamp-mill and assayed the result three times
-over.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>So she merely remarked, between spoonfuls:</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You talk plenty nonsense.  You keep those men
-work, they no squeak.  Suppose you finish eat, you go
-tell Gray he come down ki-ki."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"All right!" said Harris meaningly, trying to make
-an effective and tragic exit.  He was really not at all
-easy in his mind, and Vaiti's attitude did nothing to
-relieve his apprehension of what might be about to
-follow.  The men had never dragged on the rein as
-they had done these two days past, and he felt it in his
-bones that there was more than met the eye in the
-matter.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, for her part, was so much incensed by the tone
-of his remonstrance that she would not even listen to
-the conviction which began to force itself upon her own
-mind, next day, that there was really something astray.
-Luck in general seemed to have deserted them.  With
-a fair wind the schooner should have made the run to
-Raratonga in three days, but on the afternoon of the
-second day a dead calm had fallen, and they lay helpless
-in the trough of the sea by four o'clock, three hundred
-miles from anywhere.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"All-a-time I saying no good trust those trade winds,
-when that (adjective) Cook Islands be near," sighed
-Vaiti, scanning the horizon vainly right and left.  Like
-a true sailor, she was generally cross in a calm.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I wish we was out of this, ma'am, I do," remarked
-Gray, who was busy spinning sinnet at her feet on the
-deck.  For some odd reason, the sour old bo'sun generally
-found her more approachable than the others.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Why?" asked Vaiti, almost amiably.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Because, ma'am, of that, for one thing.  And hothers."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He pointed forward, and Vaiti saw what she had
-not noticed before, the ship's carpenter, a powerful
-young Mangaian, lying flat on the foc'sle head and
-obviously weeping.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"They've been at that game, one and another, off
-and on, ma'am, all to-day," he said.  "And you know
-yourself 'ow we've been put to it to get the work out of
-them.  Darned if I knows what monkey tricks they's
-up to, but I allow we're liable to understand all about
-it before very long, for that sea-lawyer of a fellow,
-Shalli, he's bin speechifyin' down in the foc'sle 'alf
-of this watch, like a bloomin' 'Yde Park sosherlist,
-he has."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti glanced at her watch.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Make him eight bell," she ordered, scanning the
-foc'sle hatch.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Ay, ay, ma'am," said Gray readily, passing on the order.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The watch below were prompt enough about turning
-out, but Shalli the forlorn could not, it seemed, find
-energy enough to get up and turn in.  Instead, he beat
-his curly head upon the planks and began to sob.  Vaiti
-took no notice of him whatever, but just strolled
-nonchalantly for a minute into her cabin, and reappeared
-with a slight projection in the bosom of her muslin
-dress that had not been there before.  Harris and Gray
-looked at each other significantly, and the former cast
-a swift glance about the vacant horizon.  No, not a
-shred of sail, not a trail of smoke.  Only the glancing
-flying-fish, and the oily, glittering swell, and the hard,
-pale, empty sky.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The men, who had all been standing in a bunch by
-the hatch, now signalled to Shalli, who put off the rest
-of his weeping to a more convenient season, and got
-upon his feet.  Then the six began advancing slowly
-and uncertainly to the break of the poop.  They were a
-good-looking crew in their way, all Eastern Pacific men,
-with bright eyes and well-featured brown faces, and
-their dress—the brilliant red or yellow "pareo" of
-the islands, gaily figured with enormous white flowers,
-and the bright cotton shirt or coloured jersey—lent a
-distinctly operatic air to the little scene.  Vaiti and
-her officers, however (like Molière's </span><em class="italics">bourgeois</em><span> who had
-talked prose all his life without knowing it), had lived
-in the midst of picturesque and extraordinary things
-most of their lives, and therefore took no interest, as
-a rule, in anything save the sternest practicalities.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>And it was stern enough in all conscience, this fact
-with which they were confronted.  The men were
-mutinous, beyond doubt.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti's mind rapidly ran over all possible causes
-for the trouble, even while Shalli was stepping forward
-and opening his mouth to speak.  It could not be rough
-treatment, because, as a matter of fact, the men were
-no worse handled on the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> than on most other
-island schooners, and an occasional knock-down blow
-is not the sort of thing that a Pacific native will
-seriously resent.  It could not be any objection to go
-to Raratonga—the crew were mostly Cook Islanders
-themselves, and glad of a chance of seeing their homes.
-Nor could it be dislike to her command, for a chief
-rank counts tremendously among Polynesians; and
-islanders who were ruled at home by a queen of her
-family would be most unlikely to strike against the
-authority of one of the Makea race, unless for some
-very grave cause.  It was, of course, possible that they
-had planned to seize the schooner and run off with it....
-She put her hand up to her bosom, and played
-with the laces that lay over that hard substance under
-the dress....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>But Shalli was speaking now, in answer to her sharp
-query as to what they wanted there.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He had a good deal to say, and he said it with flashing
-eyes and much eloquence, using his slender, pointed,
-brown fingers a good deal to emphasise his remarks,
-and turning dramatically from his mates to Vaiti,
-and back to his mates again.  Harris listened anxiously,
-catching only a stray word here and there, for his
-knowledge of Maori was confined to the few phrases
-used in running the ship.  Shalli was certainly saying
-that somebody was going to die—that somebody had
-got to die, and immediately—to judge by the emphasis
-with which he spoke....  The mate was, as Vaiti had
-once told him, rather chicken-hearted underneath his
-great bulk and strength.  He felt himself turning
-chilly, for all the burning sky.  What the devil did that
-fiend of a Vaiti mean by standing there listening as
-calmly as if they were paying her compliments on her
-eyes?  Perhaps there was no particular trouble after
-all; but her demeanour was no guarantee, for she would
-have looked like that if they had all been on the verge
-of drowning, or burning, or hanging together, any day
-of the week.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Gray, on the other hand, did not trouble to try and
-make out anything, but cut a large quid and chewed
-it at leisure, idly looking on.  He did not know if the
-men meant mutiny or not, and he did not particularly
-care.  They were three whites against six niggers,
-and there were firearms on their side.  And he had seen
-mutinies in his time beside which any little amusement
-that could be got up by half a dozen amiable Cook
-Islanders would seem a mere Sunday-school tea-party.
-Let them mutiny if they liked.  It would not mean
-the interruption of the work for half a watch.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>And Shalli went on talking as if he never would stop,
-and the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> rolled ceaselessly on the idle swell, and
-the useless sails slapped rhythmically upon the mast.
-And Vaiti, standing on the poop above the group
-of men on the main-deck, listened with an unmoved
-countenance until quite the end of Shalli's long
-speech.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>When he had finished he turned his face away, and
-instantly began to weep.  And the five other men,
-exactly as if a tap had been turned on, also began to
-weep at the same moment, howling loudly and lifting
-their hands to heaven.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"If this isn't a bloomin' mutiny, it's a bloomin'
-lunatic asylum," declared Harris quite inaudibly in
-the midst of the hideous noise from the main-deck.
-It is not a common thing, even in that world where all
-things are possible, the wide, strange Pacific Ocean,
-to see a whole ship's company shedding tears in concert
-on a calm and peaceful afternoon, with nothing more
-alarming in sight than a handsome young woman in
-an expensively pretty frock.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Ow-ow-ow!" went Shalli, getting quite beyond
-his own control.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Ey-ah, eyah!" screamed a plump lad from Aitutaki,
-fluttering his hands like frantic pigeons.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"For God's sake, Vaiti, tell us what's up," called
-Harris, sending his bull-like tones through the confusion.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>And then Vaiti spoke, shrieking at the top of her voice
-in order to be heard.  Her face, its hard calm broken
-up at last, was black with rage, and she had pulled out
-her revolver, and was holding it in her hand, though,
-strange to say, none of the men took the least notice of it.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"That ——, —— witch-man belong Niué, he curse
-them, they say they die!" she screamed.  "By'n-by
-I cut him liver out!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What witch-man?" bellowed Harris.  "Don't
-understand.  That white bloke—him with the red hair
-and the scar on his nose—who dresses native, and lives
-native up in the bush?  Saw him lookin' at you like as
-if he'd like to knife you, from behind Mata's house."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"No, pig-head! no white man got 'mana' for make
-die that way," shrieked Vaiti, shaking her revolver
-without effect at the men.  "Niué witch-man.  What
-man you mean?  I not see——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>But she did see at that moment, and to Harris's
-utter dismay she dropped the revolver on the deck and
-flung her skirt over her head.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"My Gord! she's mad now," cried Harris.  The
-crew paid not the least attention, but continued to
-weep with lungs of brass.  The mate's head went round.
-He felt as if he was going out of his senses, too.  Gray,
-who seemed to be the only normal person left on board,
-went up to Vaiti and plucked her dress off her face.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Now, ma'am, keep 'er 'ead to wind," he remonstrated.
-"What's got 'old of the Capting?  Blest if
-we ever saw you afraid before."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti turned on him like a tigress.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You think me frighten, you parrot-face, bal'-head,
-humpback pig-monkey!  Think some more those thing,
-and I shoot some hole in you lie-making tongue, learn
-you talk to me.  I tell you——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The hubbub on deck was calming down a little now,
-and subsiding into lost and homeless wails.  It was
-possible to make oneself heard.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I tell you, that thing Alliti see 'long Niué, he one
-dead man.  Captain schooner </span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span>—same I making
-tart [chart] all wrong, so he go drown, he and him mate.
-You think it good thing one dead man he go walk along
-Niué, looking me?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"A cat may look at a king," said Harris, who had
-realised that no fighting was afoot, and therefore was
-very brave just now.  "Besides, that red-head man
-wasn't no ghost—he borrowed a pouchful of tobacco
-off of me, and never paid it back."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What sort that man?" demanded Vaiti.  "He
-small, all same Gray, he ugly all same you, got red hair,
-cut 'long him nose, tooth all break?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"That's him," agreed Harris.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti took a turn across the deck, and fell silent,
-angrily chewing a lock of her hair.  The horrid vision
-of Donahue risen from his ocean grave, and wandering
-about the islands as a malignant ghost, bent on avenging
-his death, had struck her as such a fancy could only strike
-an islander, and almost paralysed her active mind.
-Now she realised that it was merely a case of mistaken
-newspaper report, and that Donahue had somehow
-escaped from the wreck of his schooner, and was once
-more roaming the islands in the flesh—at the very lowest
-ebb of fortune, it was evident, but probably none the
-less dangerous for that.  She was quite certain that he
-was in some way at the bottom of this business of
-cursing the crew, although no doubt the witch-doctor
-and Mata had been intermediary.  And it was no trifle.
-Sheer mutiny she would have much preferred.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Wot's it all about?" asked Gray, who had not
-been so long in the islands as the mate.  "Wot's the
-odds if a lot of bally niggers thinks they've been cursed?
-Seems to me anythin' the witch-doctor could do wouldn't
-be likely to harm a crew that's been salted by our old
-man in the cursin' way.  There ain't no witch-what-d'ye-call-'em
-about the islands that can lay over 'im
-for language."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Oh, shut up!  You don't know anything about it,"
-said Harris with irritation.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Suppose you tells me," suggested Gray, tucking
-another quid into his cheek, and looking dispassionately
-at the crew, who were now lying on deck rolling about
-with the motion of the vessel, and looking half dead
-already.  "Doesn't seem as if we was goin' to have
-much bother with that lot....  And you gettin' as
-white at the gills as a flounder, thinkin' they was goin'
-to take charge.  Go 'ome and learn a ladies' dancin'-class,
-Mr. 'Arris; you ain't fit to 'andle men."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I'll handle you if——" Harris was beginning
-roughly, when Vaiti, whose temper had been badly
-ruffled by the events of the last half-hour, stepped across
-the deck and delivered two stinging blows, one on
-Harris's right ear and one on Gray's left.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You take'm that," she said.  "Alliti, you speak
-bo'sun about Maori 'mana.'  Glay, you lemember
-Alliti mate, no give cheek."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Want to know if I've got any left for myself, before
-I start givin' it away," observed the bo'sun ruefully,
-rubbing his face.  "But better be slapped nor neglected
-by a pretty girl, hany day, says I."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti did not smile, but leaned over the rail, and
-began staring at the crew.  She was in no mood for
-flattery.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Well, if you want to know, it's like this," said
-Harris.  "These native blokes, they thinks some of
-their chiefs has got what they call 'mana.'"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Wot's that mean?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Pretty near any thin', take it by and large, but
-one meanin's all we want, and that's the notion they
-have that these chiefs can sort of blast 'em with a
-curse, so's they'll go away and die.  Like as if I was a
-chief, and you was a common man, same as you are,
-anyhow, and I was to say, 'Gray, you go off out of this
-and die next Thursday at four bells in the afternoon
-watch.'  And you says to me, says you, 'Ay, ay, sir,'
-says you."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Blowed if I would," ejaculated the bo'sun.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Yes, you would, you chump, because you'd be a
-bloomin' native, and they always does.  So off you'd
-go, and when Thursday come you'd lie down and die
-at four bells, wherever you happened to be."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Wot of?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Nothin'—you'd run down like a watch—sort of
-'stop short never to go again' business, like the
-grandfather's clock—and when you was dead you'd stay
-dead.  That's all."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"And I never 'eard worse rot in all me days," said
-the bo'sun disgustedly.  "Think I'm going to believe all
-that?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Who cares what you believes or what you don't?"
-demanded Harris, "You'll —— well see all about it
-soon enough.  Vaiti she says they says Mata went to
-the witch-doctor, who they're as much afraid of as any
-chief in Niué, for all they're by way of bein' Christian, and
-he cursed them up and down and inside and out, worst
-style, and says they're all to die by sunset, to-night.
-And if I knows anything of natives they'll do it.  I'll
-lay you, we got to work the ship up to Raratonga
-ourselves—if we ever get there.  Of all the low-down,
-mean skinks that ever walked, them natives are the
-worst.  They haven't a blessed scrap of consideration
-in them for anyone but themselves.  Here we are with
-every man-jack of these fellows got an advance on his
-wages, and they says they're going to die!  Die!  I've
-no patience with them.  I do hate selfishness and
-meanness."</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="breaking-the-mana"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER XII</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">BREAKING THE MANA</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>Vaiti all this time had been steadily watching the
-men as they lay about on the main-deck in various
-attitudes of limp resignation.  One or two—notably the
-emotional Shalli—were already beginning to look ill.
-Matters looked badly enough for the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>.  It was in
-the hurricane season, and signs were not wanting that
-the calm would break up with energy when it did
-break.  If the crew persisted in their dying, other
-people who had not been in any way subjected to the
-witch-doctor's operations might find it incumbent on
-them to die too.  She did not for a moment doubt
-the Niuéan's power to slay.  Had she not more than
-once seen the queen, who was her own cousin, politely
-dismiss some offender with the significant remark,
-"I wish I may never see you again after to-morrow"
-(for the queen was always courteous, and would never
-have used the crude terms of a Niuéan witch-doctor);
-and had not every one on the island known that with
-the next evening's sunset the wretch would lay him
-down and die as surely as the dark would fall?  These
-men were doomed, and the ship would miss the steamer
-and the cargo would not be sold, and possibly the
-schooner would be lost in the blow that was creeping
-up, and none of them would ever go home any more.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Thus the native side of Vaiti spoke.  But now the
-white side woke up and demanded its innings too.
-Was it endurable that the red-headed rat of a Donahue
-(for she was as certain that he had been at the bottom
-of the matter as only a woman with no direct evidence
-to go on can be) should win the last move in the deadly
-game they had been playing this year and more.
-Was she to get into difficulties, and perhaps lose the
-ship, the very first time that she had taken off the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>
-all alone?  The fact that such a disaster would include
-the losing of herself did not trouble, as it did not console,
-her.  She would leave her reputation behind her, and
-people, when they spoke of Vaiti of the Islands, would
-say——</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>No, they wouldn't, and they shouldn't.  The white
-blood was up now.  It was impossible to prevent the
-"mana" from working.  Well, let it be.  She would
-do the impossible.  She had done the impossible before,
-in many ways; it was the only sort of thing really
-very well worth doing, in the opinion of Vaiti of the
-Islands.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Whatever was to be done must be done quickly.
-The storm was not far away, and the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> was rolling
-in the trough of the increasing swell with every rag of
-sail set.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What you goin' to do?" asked Harris hopelessly,
-as he saw her move.  "Give them medicine?  It
-ain't any good."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Yes, give 'em medicine—you and Gray, you giving
-it plenty by'n-by," said Vaiti calmly, beckoning the two
-men over to her.  The crew continued to lie on the deck,
-giving no sign of life but an occasional groan.  The wind
-was beginning to cry a little among the rigging, just
-whimpering, like a chidden child.  A glassy tinkling of
-foam sounded about the keel.  The sun was almost down.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You listen me," said the girl, her handsome,
-hawk-like features looking curiously sombre in the orange
-light.  "I speak those men in Maori.  I tell them some
-thing—thing not belong 'papalangi.'  You no
-understan'.  Wait."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Then, with a look on her face that the white men
-had never seen there before, and were never to see
-again, she stepped swiftly down the ladder, crossed
-the main-deck, and stood in the midst of the prostrate
-crew.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>As though struck themselves by a spell, Harris and
-Gray remained motionless on the poop, only swaying
-with the unconscious movement of the sailor to the roll
-of his ship, while they watched with fascinated eyes
-the scene upon the lower deck.  The crew at first lay
-still as logs, while Vaiti stood and looked at them—only
-looked.  Presently they began to open their eyes
-and roll over, and the weeping, which had apparently
-ceased, began again.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Then Vaiti, suddenly flinging her arms high above
-her head, with her light muslin dress fluttering in the
-wind and all her magnificent hair falling to her knees,
-burst into such a flood of speech as made the two
-hard-bitten Englishmen on the poop open eyes of stolid
-amaze.  There is no language in the world so full of
-eloquent possibilities as the Maori tongue—even in the
-somewhat debased and altered type that is current
-among the islands.  And, hidden away somewhere in
-the strange nature of this strange thing in woman's
-shape, there was more than a touch of the true witch
-wildness and fire.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Lord!" said Harris, in a tone of awe.  "She's the
-devil himself!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She looked it, as she stood there in that livid light,
-her arms stretched high to heaven, her voice—was there
-ever a voice so full of passion, prophecy, command?—ringing
-out, now high, now low, now in tones vibrating
-with some subtle suggestion of horror that caused even
-the uncomprehending whites upon the poop to feel a
-cold shudder about the region of the spine.  Upon the
-crew the effect was marvellous, yet, from Gray's and
-Harris's point of view, unsatisfactory as well.  The
-limp figures sat up, it was true, wept afresh, and even
-rose to their feet before long; but it was only to rush
-wildly up and down the heaving deck, driven, it seemed,
-by the sting of an agony greater than any they had
-suffered yet.  Above the loose sails thundered and the
-wind wailed wickedly.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Gray, at a motion from the mate, went to the idle
-wheel and grasped the spokes.  The </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> would want
-watching soon.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Strike me pink if this isn't the craziest ship's
-company outside a lunertic asylum from Yokohama to
-the 'Orn," muttered the bo'sun to himself.  "Now,
-what the 'ell is </span><em class="italics">that</em><span>?  Ho, Jemmy Gray, why don't
-you look for a berth as a bally stoker in a bally Red Sea
-liner, or a supercargo on a Chinese pirate junk, and
-'ave a quiet life at your age?  Here, Mr. 'Arris, you
-going to let 'er shoot 'erself before your heyes?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti had plucked out her revolver again, but instead
-of threatening the crew with it, she was holding it close
-to her own curly head, all the time pouring forth a
-river of eloquent Maori, strongly charged with adjurations
-and threats.  It needed no translation to understand
-so much, not to see the abject if inexplicable
-terror of the crew, who cowered and howled in an
-extremity of distress every time she raised the pistol to
-her head.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Vaiti, Vaiti!  What're you doing, Cap?" yelled
-Harris.  "You'll shoot yourself!  Are you crazy?
-What are you givin' 'em, for Cord's sake?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti turned round, and cried angrily at him:</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Hold 'm tongue!  You no leave me myself, very
-quick I shooting you.  I tell those men I great chief,
-no one can take 'um curse away, but can come 'long
-all those men myself, suppose they die—go Raratonga
-when 'um night come, an' all those man soul he running
-quick, quick, all a-cold, 'long those mountains top
-Raratonga where 'um dead man he go to jumping-off
-place.  A—a—h!  I put one bullet in head belong me,
-very quick, suppose those men they got dam cheek go
-an' die.  I coming, very dead, very angry, I go 'long
-that soul, all a-time; no let 'um rest, no let 'um see
-woman fliend, die long time ago—I take big club belong
-chief, make 'um run, cry, all-a-time—no sleep, no eat,
-no lie down!  A—a—h! no go heaven, no go hell,
-all-a-time, for ever'n ever, Amen.  I pay him out for
-going die!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She stormed through the brief speech like a hot-season
-squall, and instantly returned to the natives.
-Harris, struck dumb by the entirely unprecedented
-nature of the situation, could find no vent for his feelings
-save in plucking off his cap and casting it under his feet.
-She was threatening the crew that she would kill herself
-if they died; follow them to the land of shades (the
-entrance to which was popularly supposed to be over
-the edge of a certain desolate, far-up mountain precipice
-in Raratonga), and make it so hot for them in the
-"otherwhere" that they would certainly wish they
-hadn't dared to die....  What on earth was a man to
-do in a ship commanded by a thing—he could not call
-it a woman—that talked like that—with night coming
-on, too, and something very like a bad blow unpleasantly
-near?</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti did not leave him long in doubt as to what he
-was to do.  The crew, driven previously to the verge
-of frenzy by her gruesome threats, became entirely
-frantic during the eloquent peroration that followed
-her address to Harris.  They ran up and down the deck;
-they shrieked, they prayed, they besought.  Vaiti, with
-the eye of a hunter watching a quarry almost driven to
-bay, kept a keen look-out through all her fiery eloquence,
-and just at the moment when the men seamed driven
-to the highest point of human endurance, turned to the
-mate with a triumphant cry.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Now, Alliti! he all right by'n-by: I no shoot
-myself, I think.  You and bo'sun you get rope's end very
-quick, give 'um order shorten sail, make 'um go.  I
-think he go; he too much plenty frighten die 'long me."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Too much plenty frighten" the men were indeed.
-The threat that Vaiti had made—for the carrying out
-of which they doubted neither her ability nor her will,
-any more than she did herself—was so much more potent
-than the curse of the witch-doctor that the terror of
-the one paled before the terror of the other.  For the
-moment, they felt that they might not be able to live,
-but they certainly must not die; and it was right in
-the middle of this illogical state of mind that the mate
-and bo'sun came in with their rope's ends and settled
-the matter once for all.  An hour ago, red-hot irons
-only would have moved them to hurry up with their
-dying.  Now a couple of ropes' ends, laid about among
-the six with a will, drove them howling up the masts
-and out along the yards, where, with Gray and Harris
-still after them, and Vaiti threatening from below,
-they succeeded in getting the sails stowed and the vessel
-snug in very little over the ordinary time.  The blow
-that followed kept all hands busy the night through,
-but it came from the right quarter, and the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> fled
-before it at such a speed that morning found her only
-half a day's run from Raratonga, with the wind quieting
-down to a pleasant breeze, the schooner uninjured, and
-the crew as cheerful and busy as they had ever been
-in their lives.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti caught the steamer, sold her copra, and saw it
-on the wharf ready to load.  Then she went back to
-the schooner, and waited till the last of the men
-returned.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Suppose you like go die now, plenty time for you,"
-she said.  "Plenty good sailor-man stop Raratonga.
-You go 'long die; I no want."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The men looked at her sheepishly, and Shalli, the
-spokesman, scratched his head and surveyed a heap of
-tributary pigs, fowls, and fruit that lay on the deck of
-the schooner before he answered.  The crew had many
-relations about Raratonga, and the relations had done
-them very well this trip.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Many thanks, great chieftainess," he said at last,
-in his own tongue.  "We are much obliged to you, but
-we have changed our minds, and now we do not ever
-mean to die at all."</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="the-game-played-out"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER XIII</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">THE GAME PLAYED OUT</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>Every one in the trader's had gone to bed, and Vaiti,
-barefoot and dressed in dark cotton, had just got out
-of her room by the window, and was gliding noiselessly
-down the back verandah.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The moon was down, and the thick darkness under
-the trees of the village covered her safely as she slipped
-along at the backs of the little white, palm-thatched
-houses.  It was not at all likely that any native would
-be about in the middle of the night, but one could never
-reckon on white men, of whom there were several in
-the little town—and Vaiti, being engaged as usual on
-"urgent private affairs," did not want any inquiries.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She got away from the village without remark, and
-then struck into one of the narrow grass roads penetrating
-the bush.  Everything was asleep.  The little green
-parrots were hidden deep under heavy leaves, each
-with its noisy head tucked under its wing.  The lizards
-that had been darting and flickering all day long about
-the path now slept, chill as little stones, among the roots
-of the trees.  There was a cold, dewy smell in the air,
-and the palm-tree plumes were motionless as drawings
-in Indian ink against the violet gloom of the sky.  Very
-far away the immemorial music of the reef beat softly
-in the dark.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti girded her dress high, and walked swiftly.  She
-had a long way to go, and she wanted to be back in her
-neat, white, mosquito-curtained bed, sleeping the sleep
-of the innocent, before the trader's wife should come in
-with her morning cup of tea.  Vaiti was a past mistress
-in the art of avoiding useless comment.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Three miles, five miles, seven miles....  It was
-right at the other side of the island, past mile after mile
-of tangled bush, acre after acre of sparsely planted,
-rocky, open ground, grove after grove of tall, plumy
-cocoanut, heavy with fruit.  Oranges grew by the track
-here and there; broad green banners of banana leaf
-blotted out whole sections of the stars, and slim, quaint
-mummy-apple trees stood up among the prickly coral
-rocks.  Vaiti had no time to stop, but she snatched a
-little refreshment on her way from time to time, as the
-wayfarer may always do in the kindly South Sea climate.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She struck at last into a narrow track leading off
-the main pathway—so small that in the dusk of the
-starry night it must have been invisible save for a mass
-of pointed rocks that stood up just beside the overgrown
-entrance and made a landmark.  Afterwards came a mile
-or two of tangled walking among clumps of pink and
-scarlet and yellow hibiscus, all reduced to a common
-blackness by the levelling night, and through thorny
-lemon-trees, and over rocky knolls where there was
-scarce footing for a goat....  A lonely God-forsaken
-region this; not a village, nor even the gleam of a
-solitary white-washed hut.  What had the "Kapitani"
-of the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> to do with such a place?</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti knew very well indeed what she had to do.  She
-had gathered in the town that the mysterious white
-man who "lived native" in the bush had his dwelling
-about this lonely neighbourhood.  It was very well
-known to her, and she meant to find the man's
-dwelling-place, and see him with her own eyes before...</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Well, that was still to come.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It took her rather longer than she had expected, but
-she did at last succeed in finding the tumble-down little
-palm-leaf shanty, built against the side of a rock, that
-she had heard described.  It was a miserable place,
-so far as her cat-like eyes could judge it in the purple
-gloom, not more than three or four yards long, and
-looking like nothing so much as a heap of dead leaves
-and rubbish piled against the rock.  She trod noiselessly
-round its three sides, and listened here and there.
-The door, as she ascertained by feeling, was a heavy mat
-hung up from the eaves, and it was tightly fastened across
-the opening.  There was a faint sound of slow, heavy
-breathing from within.  The man was evidently asleep.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti climbed up on the rock above the hut, and pulled
-away a piece of the loose grey coral of which it was
-composed.  Then, sheltering herself behind a clump
-of hibiscus growing in a cleft, she raised her voice in
-a fearful squealing cry, exactly reproducing the yell
-of a wild pig wandering in the bush at night.  At the
-same time she cast a lump of coral with all her strength
-down the side of the big rock, whence it landed with a
-crash in the middle of a mass of brushwood, burying
-itself completely.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The double noise, as she had anticipated, brought
-out the owner of the hut, very cross and sleepy, clad
-only in a pareo, and angrily anxious for the safety of
-his patch of yams.  He carried a torch in his hand,
-made of blazing candlenuts strung on a stick ("Must
-have run out every bit of credit at the stores," thought
-Vaiti parenthetically), and he was, beyond all shadow
-of doubt, against all common probability, the
-red-haired master of the </span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span>.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>If looks could ever blast, those black eyes behind
-the hibiscus boughs would have slain him where he
-stood.  Vaiti quivered with rage as she watched him
-shambling sleepily about, looking, with his long, matted
-red hair, bloated, evil face, and half naked body, infinitely
-lower than any coloured native on the island....  He
-had not prospered since he escaped the wreck of the
-</span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span>—how or where she did not care to know.
-He looked as if he had been living on the natives
-and half drinking himself to death, as was indeed the case.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>But Vaiti was not in the least mollified by his
-unprosperous case.  In her opinion, he ought to have been
-dead long ago.  There could be no peace of mind for
-her while he was still drifting about the Pacific, ever
-on the alert to do her an evil turn.  She was not equal
-to actual murder, and, in any case, Niué was a
-British-owned island, with a resident Commissioner and a
-regular nest of missionaries, where you had to be very
-careful of what you did.  But if any accident—a safe,
-convenient accident—should befall him by-and-by,
-why, it would certainly be an advantage to the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>
-and her owners.  Well, that might come about, and
-without introducing Saxon into it either.  In such a
-delicate matter Saxon's interference would very likely
-have acted much as a charge of dynamite might act
-in the destruction of a wasps' nest—something more
-than the wasps would probably come to grief.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She waited until the ugly creature had rolled back
-into his cottage and shut the make-shift door.  Then she
-slipped down from the rock once more, and began
-the second part of her errand.  Neither then, nor at
-any other time, did she trouble to find out the manner
-of Donahue's escape.  If she had, she would have heard
-that he had been picked up by a native canoe, floating
-about on a piece of wreck the day after the disaster
-that destroyed the </span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span>, and that, he had spent a
-good many months on a neighbouring island before a
-stray schooner had consented to accept his watch for
-passage money and convey him as far as Niué—the
-only place near their course where a penniless
-beachcomber would have been allowed to land.  As things
-were, he was more or less smuggled off, and thought
-best to take refuge in the bush at once.  The moneyless
-adventurer is not encouraged in islands belonging to
-the British Crown.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It is easy, therefore, to understand why Donahue,
-living under an assumed name in the far interior of
-the island, had not been recognised, and was not likely
-to be, by any one save the person whom his presence
-most concerned.  His malice against Vaiti had by no
-means evaporated with the events that took place on
-Vaka.  He did not, as it happened, suspect her of having
-actually caused the loss of the </span><em class="italics">Ikurangi</em><span>, but he was of a
-darkly superstitious nature, and laid down his ill-luck,
-first, last, and all through, to the fact of her influence.
-She had been a "Jonah" of the worst kind to him, and
-he would have been very glad indeed to serve her any ill
-turn of any kind that might be possible.  But only the
-small piece of spite compassed through Mata had, so far,
-lain within his power.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti had still a mile or two to go, and it was waxing
-very late, or rather, early.  She almost ran along the
-winding rocky path, following it as easily as if broad
-day or full moon had surrounded her instead of star-lit
-dark.  Now the sound of the sea, unheard for the last
-hour, broke out again, and a cold salt breath from the
-beach cut through the heavy perfume of the forest track.
-In another minute she was out of the wood and fairly
-running down a sloping, sandy track that led to a little
-white house standing alone on the shore....  She
-laughed as she ran—it was such a soft, clear night, and
-the sea called so pleasantly down in the dark, and she
-did so dearly love an adventure—especially when all
-the world imagined her to be sleeping quietly in her
-mosquito-netted bed.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>There was no secrecy about this matter apparently.
-The house had a good wooden door, and she rapped
-loudly on it with a stone, calling at the same time,
-"Sona!  Sona!  Wake up!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>There was a brief interval, in which the rollers tore
-at the beach and the palms swung and crashed overhead,
-uninterrupted by other sound.  Sona was evidently
-asleep.  She struck loudly on the door again.  This
-time some one answered in a drowsy voice, and a slow,
-shuffling foot came to the door.  The hinges creaked,
-and in another minute a small, bent, feeble figure appeared
-on the threshold.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Tck! tck!" it clucked.  "Is there magic in
-the air, and have I grown fifty years younger, that the
-lovely maidens come to my door in the starlight once
-more?  Is it my beauty that has struck you to the
-heart, chieftainess Vaiti; or do you want a charm
-to catch the love of some one less deserving than
-myself?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>A fit of coughing interrupted him; he crept out to
-the open air, and clung to the door-post, shaking all over
-with the violence of the paroxysm.  There was more
-light here, down by the foaming rollers; one could see,
-if one had been walking half the night in the dark bush,
-that the man was very small and hairy, very decrepit,
-and very, very old.  Indeed, the personal appearance of
-Sona, solitary recluse of the Avarangi beach, good
-Nonconformist Christian on Sundays, and heathen
-witch-doctor out of business hours, was a very important
-item of his stock-in-trade.  He looked his part to
-perfection, and knew it.  His very name was a piece of
-business, even though, rightly pronounced and written.
-it was that of the godly man of Nineveh.  When Shark-Tooth
-of Avarangi had consented, largely for reasons of
-policy, to join the mission fold a good many years
-before—the last straggling heathens on the island having
-been then "brought in" by the exertions of a determined
-and energetic missionary—he had selected the
-name of Jonah for his baptismal title solely because, so
-far as he could ascertain, the original bearer of the name
-was proverbial for bringing bad luck to his enemies—and
-that was the sort of reputation that Shark-Tooth
-especially coveted.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti had not met him before, but she knew him well
-by reputation, and was very sure that he knew all he
-cared to know—probably a good deal—about her.
-It was, she thought, a case for going straight to the point,
-so she went very straight indeed.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Let me in, Sona," she said in his own tongue.  "I
-want to talk with you, and I want to buy you; for you
-and I are wise people, and I know that there is nothing
-that may not be bought."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Crah—crah—crah!" cackled Sona, in a feeble
-old man's laugh, tacking a joke to the end of it that
-might well have raised a blush on Vaiti's cheek if she
-had been capable of such a weakness.  He led the way
-into the house, still cackling, lit an ill-smelling kerosene
-lamp, and sank down upon the mats, a mere heap of
-crumpled cotton clothes, old bones, and ancient wickedness.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti pulled out her cigar-case, tossed the old creature
-a cigar, which he clutched at eagerly, and lit one for
-herself.  Then she squatted down on the mats, her back
-against the wall, and puffed for a minute or two in
-silence.  Old Sona watched her eagerly with his glassy
-little eyes.  He saw that she was not angry at the part
-he had played in the late unpleasant occurrence upon the
-schooner, or at least that she did not mean to resent it.
-He had heard all about the strange happenings of the
-voyage, and was a good deal awed at the power of the
-woman who had actually broken the spell of his curse—in
-which, be it observed, he believed most fully himself,
-with excellent reasons for doing so.  And he was really
-very anxious to know what she wanted now, and
-especially what he was going to make by it.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti pulled at her cigar vigorously for a minute to
-make it draw well, and then, with a leisurely puff,
-remarked in Sona's own tongue:</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Mata gave you a gold ring to curse my sailors
-that they should die—all the village knows of it, so
-you need not deny it, old man with the face of a scavenger-crab.
-Was it not foolish of you to set yourself against
-Vaiti, the great sea-princess—very foolish to run into
-danger, and for so little?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Yes, yes, so little," repeated Sona, in a kind of
-wail.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Now I come to buy you for myself," went on Vaiti,
-puffing between words (she smoked like most women,
-very hard and fast).  "I buy like a great chief's daughter,
-and you shall feed and drink well for a long time if you
-are faithful to me.  If not, I shall split you open with
-my knife as one splits open a fish on the beach, and
-leave you out on the strand, so that the crabs may come
-and eat you before you are dead.  That is what I shall
-do to you."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I belong to the high chieftainess, soul and liver,"
-quavered Sona nervously.  Vaiti, hardly looking at
-him, pulled something out of her dress and flung it
-down carelessly on the mat between the two.  Sona's
-eyes glittered, for he heard the chink of gold.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Take it, old pig of the woods," said Vaiti
-contemptuously, and he clutched eagerly at the little
-parcel of rag.  It contained a roll of gold coins.  Sona,
-panting with mingled delight and fear lest his visitor
-should change her mind, scuttled away to some hiding-hole
-in an inner room, and concealed the packet with
-breathless haste.  Then he returned to the lamp-lit
-room, where Vaiti sat smoking and waiting.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I am yours, high chieftainess; I am yours," he
-repeated, rubbing his hands together and cackling.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What is this thing they tell about a devil that
-stays upon the road to Mua, and comes out at night-time?"
-asked Vaiti carelessly, looking over Sona's
-head at the wall.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Sona shut up his eyes very tight, and shook his shaggy
-little head from side to side.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"If you ask the good misinari doctor, he will tell
-you," he answered.  "As for me, I have nothing to do with
-devils.  I am a very old man, and I want to go to heaven.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You will go to-night, old scorpion-head, if you do
-not tell me everything I want to know," remarked
-Vaiti.  Her tone was pleasant, but there was a flavour
-of something else below the pleasantness that caused
-Sona, literally and figuratively, to sit up.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I tell, I tell, high chieftainess," he stammered
-eagerly.  "The thing is known to all the people on the
-island—even the white people.  It happened only last
-year, and it is as true as the Good Book.  It was the
-foolish man from Mua way, whom they called a
-witch-doctor—and every one knows that such a thing does not
-exist, high chieftainess; but they said he was that thing,
-and he said so himself, because he was proud and mad.
-Now, we all know that there are many devils on Niué,
-and that the misinaris never were able to drive them
-all away.  And there is a very bad devil on that road
-to Mua, right where the six palm-trees stand up by
-themselves among the graves.  It is powerless in the
-day, but at night there is no Niué man who would dare
-to go there.  Sometimes the white traders will ride
-past the place coming home in the dark, but it is a true
-thing that their horses will often shy and bolt when
-they come near to the home of the devil, and no man
-can say why; indeed, the devils, for the most part, do
-not have power over the 'papalangi.'</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"So this witch-doctor, as he called himself, said that
-he did not fear the devil, and he would go and stay the
-night among the graves, thinking that because of that
-all the people in the island would believe in him, and
-give him many pigs and yams for fear of his 'mana.'  So
-he went to the devil-place, and all night he stayed,
-but in the morning he did not come back at all.  And
-by-and-by all the people of his village went together
-to look for him.  And they found him lying on the
-road, all dead, and his face was black and his body
-twisted up.  So the people brought him to the misinari
-doctor, and he said that he could not make him alive
-again.  And the traders said, 'What is the kind of this
-death?  We do not know it, though we are white men
-and know everything.'  But the misinari doctor did
-not know.  And they buried him, and that is all, high
-chieftainess."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti smoked thoughtfully.  She had heard something
-of the tale before, and Sona's story did not vary from
-the version that was generally current about the island.
-She thought, on the whole, that she believed in it.
-There was no doubt that many of the white people gave
-it credit, though a few of them declared the man must
-have died in a drunken fit.  A paper in Australia had
-published an account of the mysterious incident, and
-the spiritualistic set in Sydney were so deeply interested
-in it that a letter of inquiry from a psychical research
-society had been sent up to the island, inquiring into
-the matter.  But it happened that the trader to whom
-the letter was addressed had committed suicide a good
-many months earlier, and excellent onions and pumpkins
-(much appreciated by his successor) were growing green
-upon his grave by the time the letter reached the island.
-So the inquiry was never answered.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Yes, on the whole, Vaiti thought she believed the
-story.  That a similar result would follow in the case of
-a "papalangi" (white man) who followed the deceased
-magician's example she did not, however, believe.
-She thought it very likely, however, that mischief of
-one kind or another would result....  And if the worst
-should chance to come about....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti took another cigar.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What does your misinari say?" she asked.  "He
-is not the right sort of misinari, it is true, but still,
-he should know more about devils than the traders."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Our good misinari was not here when it happened,"
-replied Sona in a pious tone.  "It was the doctor
-misinari.  Our own good misinari says that devils
-cannot do harm to any but bad men."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti reflected, her eyes on the floor.  She really
-had some respect, in an odd, upside-down kind of way,
-for missionary opinion.  It is bred in the bone with the
-younger generation of Eastern Pacific islanders.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Donahue was certainly a very bad man.  She did not
-think she had ever met any one much worse.  Perhaps
-the badness, balanced against the whiteness, might
-swing down the scale.  At any rate....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Hear me, Sona!" she said, in a voice of command.
-"I have bought you to-night, and you belong to me.
-There will be more to pay by-and-by if you do as I tell
-you.  But I would warn you to be careful, for you will
-not find it pleasant lying on the shore down there, with
-your inside hanging out like a gutted fish, and the crabs
-coming running to eat you before you are dead, as you
-will if you make any mistakes.  Listen, then, very
-carefully."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I listen, I listen!" cried Sona.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="how-the-witch-doctor-got-his-money-back"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER XIV</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">HOW THE WITCH-DOCTOR GOT HIS MONEY BACK</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>When the trader's wife came in next morning with
-Vaiti's cup of tea, she was touched to see how deeply
-her pretty lodger was sleeping.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Poor young dear," said the good woman, "lying
-there so sweet and innocent, sleeping like a baby!
-It's only the good heart that rests like that.  I don't
-believe a word of the silly lies they tell about her.  Here,
-dear, wake up," she called gently.  "Your good papa
-is ever so much better this morning, and looking for
-you to come in.  And it is Sunday morning, and a nice
-cool day."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Thank you, Mrs. Smith," said Vaiti politely, broad
-awake at once.  "May I asking you one little hot
-water?  I like get up and go to turch."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Church, attended for reasons religious or otherwise,
-was not one of the amusements patronised by the
-nameless white man of the bush.  Indeed, his amusements,
-such as they were, were so far confined to the
-native villages of the interior that very few of the other
-whites had seen him.  He was not good for trade,
-having no money and possessing no credit—that was all
-they knew, or for the most part wanted to know, about
-him.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>There was all the more astonishment, therefore, in
-the shanty owned by the Mua trader, away up in the
-bush, when the unknown man walked into the store
-that Sunday night, and demanded some tobacco, at the
-same time showing a sovereign he held in his hand.  He
-was dressed in a pitiful mass of rags, none too clean,
-but he looked well pleased with himself, and was more
-than half drunk.  Fortune had apparently found him
-out at last.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The Mua trader was an honest man, but he did not
-see why he should not have a share in anything good
-that happened to be available about that lonely and
-unprofitable district.  So he welcomed the stranger in
-with much cordiality, and asked him to stop for supper.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The newcomer had no objection in the world to come
-in and share the trader's good tinned meats and new
-yeast bread, and he made himself very much at home
-without pressing.  The trader, who had a private
-store of consolation in his own back kitchen, plied the
-spirits freely.  He was curious, and he believed in the
-old saw of "Wine in, truth out."  A couple of friends
-who had ridden over from Alofi, the capital, and were
-equally curious about the derelict's sudden access to
-fortune, did their disinterested best to help, and the
-bottle went merrily round.  The Niué traders are a
-sober, decent set of people enough, but Donahue had
-mixed with them so little that he did not know this,
-and consequently was not put on his guard by the unusual
-conviviality.  Indeed, he was by no means the same
-active, crafty villain who had set that successful snare
-of the diamond necklace in Apia many months ago.  A
-white man cannot "live native" without going downhill
-very fast, and Donahue was nearly at the bottom.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>So he drank, and laughed, and told evil tales, and grew
-quarrelsome, and pathetic, and finally affectionate and
-confidential, in well-defined stages, while all the time
-the other men kept sober, or nearly so.  The Mua
-trader in particular hardly touched his glass.  But
-Donahue, once so wary, never saw, and chattered on.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Before midnight the trader had sold him some gay
-calico for the native' girls, and a little tinned meat and
-flour, and half-a-dozen various trifles that brought
-the score up to about a pound.  Here the guest came
-to a pause and fingered his coin.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Oh, well, if that's all you have, you won't get any
-more goods to-night.  Thanks," said the trader, putting
-out his hand.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The visitor, however, declined to hand over the money.
-He would pay to-morrow, he said.  He was not going
-to leave himself without money again—not if he knew
-it—and he would have lots to-morrow: and if the trader
-wouldn't send up the goods without the cash to-night,
-why, he might keep his condemned rubbish, and his
-customer would go elsewhere.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Rather than lose the order, the other gave in, and
-sent a boy away with the stuff.  It would always be
-easy to bully him out of it afterwards, he thought, and
-there was no arguing with a drunken man's whim.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Then he set himself, in company with all the rest, to
-find out where the money had come from.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Donahue, who by now was far gone, responded
-readily.  It was the silly old chap who lived down on
-Avarangi beach, he said; an old fool who was an uncle
-of a girl who was a friend of his.  The old chap had a
-notion that there were some Spanish doubloons hidden
-somewhere on the island, but in a place he was afraid
-to touch, so he had forked out a good British sovereign,
-and offered it to Donahue to go in his place, and share
-the money with him.  Donahue was to keep the earnest
-money for his trouble, if nothing came of it, and if
-anything did turn up he was to take half.  So he was
-going, that very night—the sooner the better.  Natives
-were—well, natives; but as for him, he was afraid of
-nothing.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Thasser-sort-er-man I am," he finished thickly,
-looking round for applause.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He did not get it.  The traders one and all burst
-out laughing.  The story of the doubloons, they told
-him, was a very old one in the island, and only the
-newest of new chums thought of believing it.  It was
-quite true that the natives, who were perfect magpies
-for hoarding, did possess among them a certain number
-of doubloons, which came from God-knows-where—for
-the coinage used in the island was British—and true
-also that the trader would get a doubloon from one of
-them every now and then in the course of business,
-always with some mystery attached to it, and some
-reluctance to part with the coin.  But the Resident
-Commissioner, who knew the island pretty well, and the
-missionary too, had long been certain that the store was
-merely the remains of some ship-wrecking raid of past
-days, about which the Niuéans were now ashamed to
-speak.  They were great misers, and it would like enough
-be another generation before all the hoarded coins
-had come to light and passed through the traders'
-hands.  But hidden treasure in Niué!  Pf!  If old
-Sona had been giving away money, he must be either
-going mad with age or (more likely) up to something.
-He was the cutest old fox on Niué, and that was saying
-something.  Why, when he had come into that very store
-to buy a darning-needle a few hours ago (what a man
-who lived in a waist-cloth and nothing else wanted
-with a darning-needle he hadn't explained), it had
-been all the trader could do to prevent his picking up
-half-a-dozen odds and ends.  That was what he was
-like if one ever took an eye off him; and he wouldn't
-even pay for the needle, either, till the trader had
-threatened to hammer him unless he forked out.  Take
-his word for it, if Sona had been giving away money,
-he meant to have it back—somehow.  And the treasure
-was poppy-cock.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Donahue had now passed into the quarrelsome stage,
-and he rose with tipsy dignity from his seat.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I considdle you no gennlemen," he said scornfully.
-"For half a Chile dorrer I'd" ... He mentioned
-what he would do, in gross and in detail, to the assembled
-company for the small sum mentioned.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Kick the dirty brute out," said the Alofi trader
-disgustedly.  "It's easy to see what sort of company
-that carrion has kept."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Donahue was gone, however—gone with surprising
-agility, and lurching rapidly up the forest pathway
-towards his house.  His legs were always the last thing
-to fail him.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He knew very well that he had had too much, and
-when he reached his hut he proceeded to sober himself
-by dipping his head repeatedly in a bucket of water.
-Then he brewed himself a powerful jorum of black tea,
-drank it, and set off considerably sobered.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was a long way to the clump of palms, and he
-stumbled badly now and then as he went over the
-graves that lay thick about the edges of the path.
-Burial along the high-road is very popular in Niué,
-where they like to keep an eye on their dead and see
-that they are lying quiet in their graves—a thing that
-no one considers at all a matter of course.  Some of
-the graves that Donahue passed had felt hats laid upon
-them; others had plates, bowls, bottles of hair-oil,
-fans—all to amuse the ghost and keep it quiet; and one
-or two looked ghostly enough to scare a nervous person
-as it was, with the wraith-like mosquito curtains
-thoughtfully suspended over the tomb by mourning and anxious
-relatives.  Every grave was completed by a solid mass
-of concrete, weighing anything from several hundredweight
-to a ton.  It was not the fault of any Niuéan
-if his dead relatives "walked."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Donahue as he went chuckled to himself at the
-thought of his keenness in over-reaching the old
-witch-doctor.  He had used him for his own purposes through
-the girl Mata before, and though that had not worked
-out too well, it was the witch-doctor who bore the
-discredit, not he.  He would use him again now, and in
-another way.  It was in the daytime that Sona had
-arranged to meet him at the palm-tree clump.  At night,
-he said, it would be certain death; and even in daylight
-no one would linger there who could help it.  He at
-least would never dare to disturb the big tomb in which
-the money was hidden and call down the anger of the
-devils on himself, unless he had a white man with him
-who feared nothing.  So next morning, very early, the
-white man who was so brave would meet him, and they
-would open the big, cracked tomb together—the tomb
-that no Niuéan had ever dared to lay a finger on before,
-though there were one or two besides himself who
-suspected that it was just there the mysterious foreign
-coins had come from years ago, and that there were a
-good many left.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Thus the witch-doctor.  And Donahue had assented
-eagerly, and gone off with his earnest money.  And,
-on arriving at his hut, he had looked out an old axe
-that he possessed, and cleaned up his lamp, and begged
-a drop of oil from the nearest native house.  For he
-meant to go that very night, and take everything there
-was for himself.  Who was to prove it?</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Which was just the course of action that Sona had
-calculated very confidently on his taking.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It poured furiously in an hour or two, for it was in
-the hot season, and the great rains were out.  Donahue
-could not light his lamp when he came to the clump
-of palms, which he knew well enough to recognise almost
-in the pitch dark.  It thundered soon after, and the
-sky was split from pole to pole by corpse-blue flashes of
-lightning.  In one of these, Donahue, feeling about
-the cracks of the tomb, thought he saw something
-moving against the gloom of the bush near at hand.
-It made his throat turn dry, for all the wet, and he felt
-his hair prickle curiously.  But he went on groping.
-Another flash ripped up the sky; it was a smaller one,
-but for one horrible moment he thought he had been
-struck, for something stinging streaked across his face
-and gave him an ugly thrill.  But it passed immediately,
-and he began groping again—groping with both hands,
-in a frantic hurry, trying to make out the best place to
-apply the axe—tearing and grasping and scuffling like
-some deadly graveyard mole, breathless, with beads of
-warm sweat coursing down his face through the streams
-of chilly rain....  He was fighting—fighting he knew
-not what and knew not why—but he was fighting,
-for all that, fighting hard, with the stone falling away
-from his nerveless hands, and the breath in his body
-sinking down under some nightmare oppression, and
-the sound of the thunder now almost continuous, blending
-itself with another and far louder sound that was
-battering madly in his ears.  He was fighting
-with——  Christ!—it was Death!</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The thunder passed, as tropic storms do pass, suddenly
-and completely.  The dawn shot up in the east, wet
-and red, and cast long, black, ghostly shadows, set
-shaking by an icy wind, low down upon the
-palm-trunks and the grave.  But Donahue did not want
-the light.  The axe lay untouched beside him; and
-he lay over the tomb, dead.  And his face was black
-and his body was all contorted.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was barely daylight yet when something small
-and slow crept out of the bush, and began hunting
-carefully near the corpse.  It could not find what it
-wanted, seemingly, and this distressed it, for it whimpered
-pitifully in a thin old voice, and looked long before
-it desisted.  Then it put its claws into the dead man's
-pockets, and hunted through them, before it finally
-disappeared down the road.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>The Mua trader was at his door when a howling
-procession of natives came into the village, carrying the
-white man's corpse to his home.  The Alofi trader,
-who had found the body, stepped aside to speak.  After
-the tale of the finding had been told, the Mua trader
-asked slowly:</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Did you think of searching his pockets?  A dead
-man's a dead man—and I'd not be sorry to have the
-money he owed me, for the natives will have taken the
-goods by this time."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"They were empty when I found him.  Queer, for
-I was the first to see him," said the other.  "I found
-this thing on the road close by, though.  Do you
-recognise it?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was the trader's darning-needle, stuck neatly into
-the end of a tiny, arrow-like reed, and stained at the
-point with some dark sticky stuff.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The Mua trader took it in his hand, smelt it and looked
-at it closely.  Then he walked to his kitchen, and,
-watched by the Alofi trader, threw the thing into the
-fire.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"That's what I think of it," he said.  "My boy, I
-traded in the worst of the Solomons for three years.
-I'm the only man on the island that knows that thing,
-bar one—and he was a plantation hand in the Solomons,
-in the black-birding days.  There's no wanderers like
-the Nuié men."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Do you think——" began the other.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I think," said the Mua trader, "that old Sona has
-got his money back."</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>The schooner </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> had no reason for staying longer
-in Niué, for the business of the ship was done, and the
-captain was quite well again.  A picture of perfect
-beauty the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> made, as she stood out of Alofi roads
-in the golden afternoon, every sail set and every inch
-of cloth straining to the merry breeze.  Niué was sorry
-to part with Vaiti, for she had interested the island
-considerably, and her beauty had, as usual, won her more
-admiration than her temper deserved.  Every one, on
-parting, expressed a courteous wish to see the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> and
-her owners again.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>For all that, and all that, the schooner came back
-no more.  Vaiti had won the game at last, but she never
-willingly mentioned Niué again.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="the-calamity-of-coral-bay"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER XV</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">THE CALAMITY OF CORAL BAY</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>The wide, still waters of Coral Bay were turning glassy
-pink under the sunset afterglow.  The </span><em class="italics">Sybil's</em><span> boat,
-rowing rapidly towards the schooner, left as it went
-a long, ugly flaw upon the stainless crystal of the
-sea.  It was very still, and the night was coming
-down.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Even in that uncertain twilight the colour of the boat
-as it cut through the pale-hued water stood out strange
-and sinister.  Most boats are white in tropic seas: the
-</span><em class="italics">Sybil's</em><span> had always been snowy as her own graceful hull.
-Now they were vivid scarlet, and the ship herself had a
-wide band of scarlet round her counter and flew a scarlet
-flag at her masthead.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Any islander could have told you at a glance what
-these things meant.  The schooner was "recruiting"—conveying
-natives from the wild cannibal islands of
-the New Hebrides to the Queensland sugar plantations.
-Ten pounds a head was paid for the men on their arrival,
-and it was politely supposed that these ignorant heathen
-had one and all been duly engaged under a contract
-to serve three years, at a wage of five pounds a year.
-How much they understood of contracts, times, and
-wages—where and what they thought Australia might
-be—and what were the means employed to get them on
-board the ship, nobody asked.  Saxon was not the man
-to answer, if any one had.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Why he had temporarily deserted the pleasant, peaceful
-islands of the Eastern Pacific, and gone "black-birding"
-in the wild and wicked and fever-smitten groups of the
-West, was Saxon's own affair.  Doubtless he had his
-reasons; possibly they were satisfactory.  But there is
-reason to believe that about Apia and Papeëte at this
-time he was characterised as a (double-adjectived)
-liar, and an (impolite expression) villain, who was running
-away because it was (adverbially) unsafe for him to
-stay and risk his (past participled) neck among (adjective)
-men.  This is not the history of Captain Saxon; at
-least, not all of it—from such a recital as that may the
-eleven thousand virgins of Saint Mudie, and the Blessed
-Young Person of Sixteen, deliver us!  It must therefore
-be enough to say that, for sufficient reasons,
-he decided to shift his headquarters to the New
-Hebrides, and immediately did so, leaving behind him
-certain unsettled scores with which this tale has nothing
-to do.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He was not new to the islands or the natives, having
-been one of the most notorious of the sandal-wood traders
-in years gone by.  The sandal-wood was gone, and
-of the money he had made by it not even the memory
-remained.  But there was still something in the labour
-trade, and Saxon liked the lawless atmosphere of the
-place.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti remembered the islands well, though she had
-only been there as a child, and she was glad to have the
-excitement of the change.  When the recruiting boat
-left the schooner (guarded by a companion, full of armed
-men) and drew up on the beach to negotiate with the
-islanders, she always sat in the stern, with a very smart
-little Winchester rifle across her knees, and took
-command, if her father was not there.  Very often he was
-not; for the New Hebrideans have long memories,
-and there was many a spot where Saxon had run up
-so many bad, black scores in the sandal-wood days that
-he could not hope for success—or safety, if he had
-minded that—in going ashore.  Harris usually took
-command of the covering boat, a post of comparative
-security that suited him very well, while the dauntless
-Vaiti managed all the real business, and seldom came
-back with an empty bag.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>They had good luck, on the whole, and not many
-narrow escapes.  Coasting round the notorious island
-of Mallicolo, or Malekula, they succeeded in obtaining
-about forty natives in a week or two.  Saxon was well
-pleased, and began to count up his profits.  Also he
-began to drink again.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Then it was that trouble came, as trouble generally
-does, out of a fair-seeming sky.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Half-a-dozen natives had been given up to the missionaries
-on the far side of Malekula, to hand over to the
-British gunboat </span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span>, which at that time was
-cruising about the islands, intent on punishing the
-Malekulans for a more than usually atrocious murder of
-whites.  The tribes to whom the culprits belonged had
-taken fright, and were anxious to save themselves at
-any cost.  The missionaries, when asked by them,
-consented to take charge of the prisoners, but refused to
-keep them any longer than could possibly be helped,
-since they did not consider themselves judges or gaolers.
-At this point the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> turned up, and the missionaries,
-hearing she was bound for Parrot Harbour, where the
-</span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span> was certain to call, put the men on board,
-and engaged Saxon to hand them over to the Parrot
-Harbour mission, receiving from the missionaries there
-the price of their passage, which the man-of-war would
-doubtless refund.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Saxon, understanding that he had not to meet the
-</span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span>, undertook the job at a rather excessive rate,
-and brought the prisoners over as agreed.  But, finding
-that the Parrot Harbour mission refused to pay the
-passage money until the man-of-war arrived, he went
-into a towering rage and abused everybody.  Wait for
-the </span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span>?  Not he!  He had something else to
-do, and he wouldn't have any condemned gunboat
-that ever sailed the sanguinary waters of the Pacific
-poking her nose into any of his business.  He had been
-promised the money as soon as he arrived, and the money
-or its equivalent he meant to have or know the reason
-why.  Off he went, with much more whisky in his brain
-than was compatible with sober judgment—off out to
-sea again, taking with him the whole six prisoners,
-and openly declaring his intention either to hold them
-for ransom or run them down to the Queensland
-plantations, as seemed most convenient.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Next day the </span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span> appeared, and her commander
-was informed of the occurrence.  Saxon, master of a
-miserable labour schooner, had run off with prisoners
-of war belonging to a British gunboat, defied the Imperial
-Government, and offered open disrespect to the Crown!
-The commander, an iron-faced, flinty-eyed disciplinarian
-of the toughest school, and a first-class pepper-pot into
-the bargain, nearly choked with rage and indignation.
-Out went the </span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span> again, full steam ahead, making
-the captain's dainty suite of cabins tremble like an
-ill-set jelly in the stern as the ship forged along at thirteen
-knots an hour, blackening the crystal sky with trails
-of smoke, and looking implacably about for the offending
-</span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>.  That delinquent of the high seas was farther
-off than might have been supposed.  The wind, though
-light, was in her favour, and she had managed to get
-round the far end of the island, and down the other side
-to Coral Bay, eighty miles off, before the </span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span> came
-up with her, late in the afternoon.  Once caught, her
-shrift was short.  The prisoners were at once transferred;
-Saxon was arrested and taken, still half drunk,
-on board the man-of-war, and his ship was confiscated,
-"just to learn him," as Gray (who had viewed his
-captain's proceedings with sour and silent disapproval
-throughout) was heard to remark, not without a little
-I-told-you-so satisfaction.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>And so it came about that Vaiti, returning with
-the boat from an unsuccessful recruiting expedition,
-and not in the best of humours to begin with,
-was met on her arrival with extremely unpleasant
-news.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"We're took, cap'n; we're took, ma'am!" shouted
-Gray over the bulwarks, as the boat nosed along the
-side of the schooner.  He added a rapid account of
-the calamity, in which he was careful to suppress his
-personal feelings of triumph.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The smart young lieutenant who had been left in
-charge of the ship came and looked down at the boat.
-He wanted to know what sort of person it might be
-who was addressed with this extraordinary hail.  He
-had been under the impression that the "captain"
-of the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> had been left two hours ago—sullen,
-swearing, and not at all sober—in the cells of
-H.M.S. </span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span>.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>What he saw was a red-painted boat, manned by four
-stalwart native seamen, and steered by an extremely
-handsome, olive-faced young woman, who looked up
-at him with eyes that seemed to dart black lightning
-under their beautifully drawn brows as she listened to the
-boatswain's story.  She wore a dainty, lacy white
-muslin frock, and carried a Winchester rifle in her
-lap.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Second Lieutenant Tempest, who had been cursing
-his luck up to that moment, suddenly became reconciled
-to the uninteresting job in which he was engaged.  It is
-just conceivable that his commander might have selected
-another officer to perform the duty if he had been aware
-of its possible alleviations; for Mr. Tempest was
-notoriously given to scrapes with a </span><em class="italics">soupçon</em><span> of petticoat
-in them, and had already imperilled his career more
-than once after this fashion.  But Commander the
-Hon. Francis St. John Raleigh had not seen "Captain"
-Vaiti; so he sent Mr. Tempest to take possession of the
-</span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>, and slept the sleep of the well-conscienced and
-well-dined, that evening, in his velvet armchair....  It
-might have seemed somewhat less perfectly stuffed to
-him, had his dreams been concerned with what was
-happening a few hundred yards away.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Mr. Tempest, smiling like the godmother beast of
-his own ship, offered his hand to the sullen beauty as she
-swung herself up the </span><em class="italics">Sybil's</em><span> side.  Vaiti tossed it
-indignantly away, favoured him with another black-lightning
-glance that reduced his susceptible sailor
-heart to pulp, and stalked aft like an offended Cleopatra.
-Tempest, persistently following, poured out explanations,
-apologies, smiles, consolations, promises.  Vaiti
-began to think that civility might possibly avail her
-something, and began to melt by carefully calculated
-degrees.  Before very long she was sitting on the main
-hatch, with Tempest beside her, holding her hand
-unreproved and continuing his consolations.  The
-commander was very angry, no doubt, but he was a
-good sort at bottom, and perhaps he would not really
-seize the ship.  She would be sent to Fiji, no doubt,
-and Saxon might possibly be imprisoned, but it would
-all come out all right, trust him!  And he would
-take very good care of the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> and her charming
-"captain."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, still smiling sweetly, dug her nails into wood
-of the hatch at her side.  Underneath all this verbiage
-she foresaw the reality of serious trouble.  Why had
-her father been such a fool?  What could be done to
-save the ship?  There seemed no way of helping Saxon
-himself.  If the commander proved implacable, to
-prison he must go.  Well, that would not break any
-bones; but the loss of the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>—if such a disaster was
-indeed possible—must be averted at any cost.  She did
-not believe Mr. Tempest's smiling assertion.  The
-commander had threatened to confiscate the ship, and
-most probably he would.  At any rate, the risk was
-too great to face.  The schooner must not be taken to Fiji.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The wily brain was hard at work, as she sat on the
-hatch, listening, with a gentle smile and soft, downcast,
-maidenly eyes, to Tempest's love-making, and answering
-now and then in her pretty Polynesian "pigeon-English"—so
-much simpler and less grotesque than the </span><em class="italics">bêche-de-mer</em><span>
-talk of the Melanesian Islands....  If he could be
-got out of the way, and the marines suddenly
-overpowered, the schooner might slip off round the corner
-of the headland in the dark, and get nearly a hundred
-miles away before daylight, with the steady wind that
-was blowing outside the glassy, landlocked harbour of
-Coral Bay.  There was just enough air stirring at this
-farthest point to allow her to get out, and once off, she
-could show her heels in a way that would astonish
-even a British gunboat.  Of course, the latter would
-easily overhaul her in an open chase, but Vaiti did not
-propose any such folly.  There was many a perilous
-inlet and passage among those dangerous, ill-surveyed
-islands where the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> could safely go, but where the
-</span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span> could not venture.  Let them only gain a day,
-and who was to say whither they had flown into the
-wide wastes of the Pacific?  Once beyond pursuit,
-paint and other disguises would so alter the ship that
-no one could identify her; her name could be changed,
-and the </span><em class="italics">Mary Ann</em><span> or the </span><em class="italics">Nautilus</em><span> would innocently
-sail the seas formerly polluted by the presence
-of the naughty </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>....  It was certainly worth
-trying.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>As for Tempest, she had a plan concocted to get rid
-of him almost as soon as the matter entered her mind.
-She left him, by and by, solacing himself with fresh
-turtle steak and excellent champagne in the cabin for
-the loss of his own dinner, while she went into the bows
-with Harris and Gray, and rapidly explained her plans.
-The marines had been accommodated with eatables
-and drinkables after their own hearts, on the cover of the
-main hatch, and were too much engaged to notice
-anything in the thick darkness that was now lying
-heavily on Coral Bay.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti's plan was simple and effective.  Tempest was
-to be enticed into leaving his duty and going ashore—she
-would see to that.  Four of the New Hebridean
-crew, stripped of their ship clothes, and attired in their
-aboriginal paint and plumes, were to be concealed on
-the beach.  They would capture him, and carry him
-off to a bush village near the coast, where the people
-were not ill disposed to the whites, and leave him there,
-scared no doubt, but safe until the morning, when he
-would be let go.  Vaiti would come back to the ship as
-soon as the capture was effected, and the four native
-sailors would hurry down from the village as quickly
-as possible.  Meantime, it would be easy for Harris
-to drug the marines' drink and make them helpless.
-They would be set adrift in one of the boats, as soon as
-the schooner was clear of the land, so that they should
-tell no tales.  With good luck, everything should be
-over, and the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> far out to sea, in less than a couple
-of hours.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>Of the disgrace of Lieutenant Tempest—of his temptation,
-his struggle, and his fall—there is no need to tell
-at length.  The decline of a British officer from duty
-and honour—his desertion of a post which every
-professional instinct should have compelled him to keep
-is not a happy subject, as (fortunately) it is not a common
-one.  Vaiti, in brief, invited the officer to leave the ship
-unguarded, and slip ashore with her, to sup at a
-neighbouring trader's shanty, where she said there would be
-drink and dancing, and every kind of fun.  There was
-no such place, but Tempest did not know that; and if
-he had known, he might not have cared.  Half-crazed
-with love and champagne, he thought only of the beautiful
-half-caste girl, and was ready to follow her to the
-mouth of hell, if she had asked him.  The dinghy was
-got out softly and cautiously, and, with muffled oars,
-they slipped away unheard.  So far out of his mind
-was the lieutenant that he did not even note the
-disappearance of his men, who were all lying, very ably and
-completely Shanghai'ed, in the hold.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>In less than half an hour Vaiti came back, swimming
-the stretch of black water that lay between the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>
-and the shore, to leave the boat ready for the men.
-Dripping, sparkling, and laughing, she stood up in the
-dim light of the deck lantern and told the mate and
-boatswain how the capture had been managed.  Tempest,
-with a sack over his head and his hands and feet bound
-to a pole, was at that moment being carried up in the
-dark to the bush village.  The inhabitants of the place
-were to have ten pounds' worth of trade goods promised
-them to keep him there all night and let him escape
-in the morning, when they themselves would go off
-and hide in the impenetrable forests until the man-of-war
-had sailed away again.  In half an hour or so the
-four natives would be back on board, and they would
-all sail away round the headland, and leave no evidence
-of any kind to connect the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> with this last
-unpardonable outrage; for Tempest could not but suppose that
-the natives who so neatly bagged him as he was philandering
-along the dark beach with the innocent Vaiti were
-ordinary hill tribesmen.  And, in any case, his sacred
-person would be taken good care of.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Then he ain't to be damaged, the little darlin'?"
-inquired Harris.  The question was not an idle one.
-Every one on board the schooner knew that Vaiti was
-capable of ugly things at her worst.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The girl laughed—a low, gurgling laugh.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"No.  No kill him, no hurt him.  I not like," she
-said, tossing back her wet, wavy hair, with a coquettish
-gesture that told Harris the woman in Vaiti was fully
-awake that night, despite the rough and ready adventure
-on which she was engaged.  Harris was no fool, if he
-was something unsteady in character, and more or less
-he admired Vaiti himself, which tended to sharpen his
-sight.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Good job the dandy leftenant </span><em class="italics">is</em><span> out of the way,"
-he growled as Vaiti disappeared into the cabin to
-change.  "'Twouldn't take much for 'er to get fancyin'
-his silly face, after all, and then the fat would be in the
-fire."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Well, if you hask me, I don't like none of the 'ole
-thing from beginnin' to hend," declared the bo'sun,
-jamming a wad of tobacco viciously into his pipe.  "Not
-the keepin' of the bloomin' niggers, not again runnin'
-to Coral Bay, nor again this business.  Wy?  Because
-I don't, and because it make me smell dirty weather.
-Give us a light."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Overhead the stars in the velvet sky began to twinkle
-here and there as the breeze rose and the clouds melted
-away.  An odour of hot, wet jungle drifted out across
-the bay from the invisible land, and a locust with a
-rattle exactly like a policeman's whistle burred loudly
-among the trees.  It might have been half an hour, and it
-might have been more, before something else became
-audible—something that sounded like a frightened
-wailing on the shore.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"A—wé!  A—a—wé!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti came out of her cabin and stood on deck,
-listening intently.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The sound went on.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"A—wé!  A—wé!  A—wa—wé!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Harris, watching Vaiti's face in the light of the
-lantern, saw it change and harden, but she said nothing.
-There was another sound now—a dinghy shoving off
-from the beach and the rattle of carelessly handled oars.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What's the —— fools makin' such a —— row
-for?" asked Gray.  "They'll 'ave the </span><em class="italics">Halligator</em><span> on
-to us."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Still Vaiti said nothing, but stood like a statue on
-the deck, listening and looking into the darkness.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The boat rammed the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> in another minute with a
-shock that made her quiver, and then drifted aimlessly
-along her sides.  Three brown naked figures lifted up
-their arms from below, and cried despairingly:</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Kapitani!  Kapitani!  A—wé!  A—wé!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Get those fellows on board, too much quick, and
-bring him cabin," ordered Vaiti.  Harris and Gray
-hauled them in with small ceremony, and dumped them
-down the companion into the cabin, where they stood
-in the light of the lamp, painted, feather-bedecked
-creatures, fierce enough in appearance, but in reality
-abjectly frightened and a-shiver.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What thing you been do?" demanded Vaiti sharply.
-"Where you make other sailor-man?  What you do
-Tempesi?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>One of the men was beginning his wail again.  She
-seized him by the shoulder, pulled a pistol from among
-her draperies, and shook it in his face.  The man,
-with a yell of terror, twisted himself out of her hold.
-Harris, who was rather frightened at her demeanour,
-got him away, forced a dram of spirits into his mouth,
-and tried to extract the terrified creature's story from
-him by degrees.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="the-fate-of-the-lieutenant"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER XVI</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">THE FATE OF THE LIEUTENANT</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>It was not a gratifying tale.  Half a mile from the beach,
-the captors had been overtaken by a party of wild
-hillmen from Ranaar, one of the worst of the inland
-cannibal towns, and had been set upon fiercely in the
-dark.  Aki, one of their own party, had been clubbed,
-and his body carried off.  The other natives had escaped.
-As for the lieutenant, the Ranaar men had seized on
-him with cries of joy, exclaiming that now indeed they
-had a chance of "making themselves strong" before all
-Malekula.  Then they had carried him away, slung
-on a pole between two men, and the </span><em class="italics">Sybil's</em><span> people,
-half dead with fright, had run down to the beach again;
-and here they were, begging the Kapitani to have mercy
-on them, for indeed it was not their fault, and no one
-could have known that the Ranaar men would venture
-so near the coast.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, Harris, and Gray all looked grave at this
-recital.  They knew only too well what was implied
-by the phrase "making strong," and what virtues
-the hill tribes of Malekula ascribed to the eating of
-white man's flesh.  The rude play of the capture had
-turned into most serious earnest, and Tempest's life
-was worth just so many hours as it might take the
-cannibals to reach their mountain stronghold and go
-through the preliminary ceremonies of the feast.  No more.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>There was silence for a minute or two, while the
-schooner rolled gently on the swell of the incoming
-tide, and the smoky kerosene light flickered to and fro
-upon the strange, wild scene: Vaiti's beautiful, angry
-head standing out above the weather-beaten faces of
-the two English sailors, the three naked New Hebrideans,
-squalid and monkey-faced, cowering before her; the
-remnants of Tempest's dinner, some one's greasy pack
-of cards, and a couple of Saxon's empty whisky bottles
-decorating the table.  The natives were badly frightened
-still.  They did not understand that the Kapitani's
-plans had been entangled beyond all hope of setting
-right by this disaster, or that the </span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span> must have
-been alarmed by their noisy return; but Vaiti's
-countenance was enough to warn any one who had ever seen
-the unpleasant things that happened at times on board
-the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> that hurricane weather was ahead.  But
-before she had time to speak again, a loud hail from
-outside made every one look towards the deck.  In
-another moment the first lieutenant of the </span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span>
-had framed his smart white and gold personality in the
-dark oblong of the companion, and demanded, loudly,
-and authoritatively, to know where Mr. Tempest was,
-where the marines were, and what the deuce was the
-meaning of all this.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, motioning aside the mate and bo'sun, swept
-to the front and spoke straight out.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"All your sailor, he too much drunk, sleep 'long hold.
-Tempesi, he been go shore.  Men belong Ranaar, they
-catch him, take him away.  Pretty dam quick they eat him."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Great Scott!" said the officer.  Facts were falling
-very thick and fast, and there were evidently more
-facts behind them which for the present he felt
-obliged—most reluctantly—to neglect.  People think quickly
-in the navy, and Lieutenant Darcy realised instantly
-that this strange, wild, handsome creature was speaking
-the truth, and that it must be acted on without delay.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He stepped out on deck, and gave certain orders to
-his men.  A sharp little midshipman and half the boat's
-crew followed him on board, and planted themselves
-about the ship.  The rest remained in the boat.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"This officer will stay here and take charge, and you
-will come with me to the </span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span>," said the lieutenant,
-addressing Vaiti.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Yes, I speak captain.  Very good you let me see
-him quick," said the girl imperiously; and the
-lieutenant, guessing that there was more still to be told,
-hurried the boat away.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He delivered his report to the commander, and
-concluded by saying that the girl was in waiting, and had,
-in his opinion, something more to say about the matter.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Bring her in," said the commander shortly.  The
-gravity of the affair had darkened his face a trifle, but
-he made no comment.  It was not a time for talk.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti entered with the light step and carriage of the
-woman who wears neither shoes nor stays, and stood
-silently before the commander, fixing his hard grey
-eyes with her inscrutable dark stare.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You can sit down," said the officer.  "I want to
-ask you some questions."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti drew herself up a little higher.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"No time for sit," she said curtly.  "Suppose you
-no want Tempesi ki-ki [eaten] pretty quick, you listen me."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Young woman!" began Commander the Hon. Francis
-St. John Raleigh sternly.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I tell you, no time talk!" interrupted Vaiti.  "I
-savvy all right you very big sea-chief; I savvy my
-father been made bad work, made bad work myself.
-Let him go all-a-same that; by-'n-by we talk those
-thing.  Now you listen me."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"All right; sit down," said the officer in a more
-conciliatory tone.  Vaiti sat, and leaning across the
-table with her chin in one slender hand, and her eyes
-blazing out from under the mass of damp waves on her
-forehead, she said her say.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You no savvy Malekula man; I savvy plenty.
-Suppose you do what I telling you, Tempesi he come
-back, I think.  Suppose not, Tempesi he eat.  Ranaar,
-he ten, eleven mile up 'long bush, plenty bad way.
-You take some sailor; he go too much sof', too much
-quiet, all-a-same cat.  Time we coming along Ranaar,
-one half-mile, sailor he all stop.  I go myself Ranaar.
-Maybe I get Tempesi; we coming back to sailor, go
-home all right."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Oh, nonsense! how are you going to get him, if
-the men can't?" demanded the commander.  He
-saw that he had a remarkable personality to deal with
-in this strange half-caste beauty, but he did not
-comprehend her very clearly, and he thought she was
-"gassing" a little.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti frowned.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I tell you, you no savvy Malekula," she said scornfully.
-"Sailor belong you, all the man hear him when
-he walk 'long bush.  Ranaar man he hear; he run away."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Well, so long as we rescue Mr. Tempest——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"No you talk, I say; you listen, you Kapitani with
-um wooden face!" spat Vaiti.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The lieutenant turned his head away, and choked a
-little in his pocket-handkerchief.  The commander
-stared, then burst out laughing.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Go on, you she-cat," he said.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Ranaar man he run away; very good.  He leave
-Tempesi; very good.  No want Tempesi tell some tale,
-so he leave him dead.  Break him head, all same pig,
-very quick, then run away.  Now what you think?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I think you are a very plucky young lady, and that
-you have something more to say about it," replied the
-commander politely.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Very good.  Suppose I going 'long bush; savvy
-plenty the way.  I been 'long Ranaar recruit; savvy
-all-a-road.  No walking all same white man, walking
-all same one snake, all same one mice.  No white man
-he walk that way.  I come up Ranaar, all-a-dark,
-I stop 'long one small place; see the man he dance, he
-sing, he make ki-ki.  Bushman, he plenty frighten
-something he no savvy.  Savvy gun, dynamite, but
-no savvy big blue-light signal thing you got 'long ship.
-I take one, two blue-light thing; I throw.  Bushman
-he think one big devil stop, no think man-of-war come;
-run away too much dam quick, not stop kill Tempesi.
-By'n-by he coming back, but I cut rope before he come.
-I bring Tempesi 'long me, 'long sailor-man; we go back
-quick.  Tempesi all right.  Savvy?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Yes, I do savvy; seems a neat plan, on the whole.
-But what's going to happen to you if they catch you?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Eat," said Vaiti succinctly.  "Now you listen me.
-I no do all this thing for nothing, see?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"H'm; yes, I do see.  How much do you want?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Two thing," said Vaiti, eyeing him narrowly.
-"One.  My father say he plenty sorry, no do any more
-bad thing.  You let him go, let schooner go."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Well—yes, I'll promise that," answered the
-commander rather stiffly.  The girl was taking her life in
-her hand to serve the interests of the British Crown,
-and it was not a time to stick at trifles, or, indeed,
-larger things.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Two," went on Vaiti.  "Tempesi he seen leave
-ship, go 'long shore with me.  You tell him all right,
-you no punish."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Oh, by Jove! that's too much," snapped out the
-commander.  "No, Miss—Miss What's-your-name, I
-can't promise any such thing.  I can't have you or
-any one else interfering with the discipline of my ship.
-Mr. Tempest's conduct is a very serious matter, and
-he must take the consequences, by Gad he must, if he
-comes back alive to take them."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti had had a good deal to do with men-of-war,
-and their officers, during the course of the schooner's
-many wanderings.  She did not need to be told that
-Tempest's career might be ended, and his life disgraced,
-if naval justice took its course.  A few hours ago she
-would not have cared.  But Mr. Tempest, like all men
-notorious for getting into scrapes with a petticoat at
-the bottom of them, had a "way with him," and it
-happened to be a way that appealed to this daughter
-of the Islands more than she would have cared to allow.
-Besides, it was not her custom to give in to a defeat.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"All right," she said calmly.  "I savvy all thing
-about Englis' officer.  Tempesi he no like court-mars'al,
-make break, make longshoreman, all the people laugh.
-Tempesi, he like die, I think.  All right.  I let him.
-Good night."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The commander held out his hand.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Good night," he said politely.  "Mr. Darcy, you will
-see about getting a native guide who can show the way to
-Ranaar, at once.  We will do our best to surprise them."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>A low, sarcastic laugh came from Vaiti.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You wooden-faced Kapitani, you think you savvy
-Malekula!" she said.  "Where you get guide?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Mr. Darcy did know a little about the New Hebrides,
-and he saw that they were beaten.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"She's right, sir," he said.  "Take my word for it,
-no native would dare to guide you.  There's no mission
-here; they're a very bad lot, and all at war."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was a bitter moment for the commander, but he
-surrendered like a gentleman.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You've got the best of me, Miss—Miss Saxon,"
-he said.  "Very well.  You have my promise.
-Mr. Tempest shall be pardoned, if we get him back alive.
-You know nothing about this matter, you will remember,
-Mr. Darcy.  Miss Saxon, you're a very brave young
-lady, and I wish I had met you in circumstances of
-which I could more honestly approve."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"No one need tell me," he said afterwards, "that
-that old vagabond we had in the cells wasn't a gentleman
-once.  It comes out in the girl; blood will tell, even in
-a half-caste.  But Providence ought rightly to have
-a down on the man who is responsible for any one of
-them, for there seems no right place for them, either in
-heaven or earth."</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>Neither the bluejackets of the </span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span>, nor the
-officer appointed to command the column, ever forgot
-that night's march through the mountain bush of
-Malekula.  The air was like hot water, and not a breath
-of wind was stirring.  The track was but a few inches
-wide, and as slippery as butter, so that the men slid
-and fell continually when struggling up the endless
-sides of the innumerable gullies.  Mosquitoes settled in
-bloodthirsty hordes upon their faces and hands, roots
-tripped them up, saw-edged reeds slapped them in the
-eyes, and thorny tangles of bush-lawyers fished for and
-successfully hooked them.  At any moment a huge
-soft-nosed bullet, cruel as a shell, might come singing
-out of the darkness; or a poisoned arrow, freighted with
-sure and agonising death, might whirr across their
-path.  When the officer in command, irritated by the
-stumbling and falling of the men, ordered them to
-remove their boots and march barefoot, Vaiti told him
-that nothing of the kind must be done, for poisoned
-spear-heads were in all probability set here and there
-in unsuspected places, ready to pierce the unwary foot.
-She herself seemed invulnerable and untiring; she led
-the column at a pace that caused more than one to fall
-out, and never hesitated nor faltered through all the
-three hours of the worst and most intricate march that
-the </span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span> men had ever known.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>At last she told the officer to call a halt, and on no
-account to make the slightest noise or advance his men
-until he should see a blue light burning about half a mile
-ahead.  Then she vanished into the darkness, lithe and
-noiseless as a lizard, and silence, dead and oppressive,
-settled down upon the bush.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>Lieutenant Tempest was a man and a British sailor,
-and he was not afraid of death.  But he thought there
-might be pleasanter ways of dying than that which
-actually stared him in the face.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Memory plays strange tricks when the dark is closing
-down about her doors.  Lying there on the damp
-earth, bound hand and foot to a pole, with the hideous
-howls of the cannibal dancers in his ears and the glare
-of the cooking-pits in his eyes.  Tempest could think of
-nothing but a fragment of verse out of a half-forgotten
-poem read somewhere long ago:</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<!--  -->
-<blockquote>
-<div>
-<div class="line-block outermost">
-<div class="line"><span>"It isn't the fact that you're dead that counts.</span></div>
-<div class="line"><span>But only—how did you die?"</span></div>
-</div>
-</div>
-</blockquote>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>How was he dying?  Not as an English officer might
-gladly die in the cause of his country and in loyal
-obedience to orders.  Not even as a man, with a sword
-in his hand, facing the foe.  He was dying an unfaithful
-servant, false to his trust, and suffering because of
-that falseness, as a slaughtered brute struck down with
-a club like a bullock, and afterwards....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The red remains of the luckless Aki, jointed and piled
-in a ghastly heap, told the rest.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Tempest did not look at that ugly pile any more than
-he could help.  He wanted all the nerve he could muster
-for he was haunted by a deadly fear that he might cry
-out for mercy when it came to the last, and he did not
-want to add cowardice to the tale of his many
-shortcomings.  If he could have died here as a prisoner of
-war—as a captured scout, a fighting enemy, taken in a
-skirmish—the death, hideous as it was, would have
-been honourable, and his pride of country would have
-upheld him.  But it seemed as if his courage had
-nothing to stand on now, and he was almost—almost, but,
-thank God! not quite—afraid.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The Malekulans had been dancing for full two hours,
-ever since they had brought him to the valley and flung
-him down upon the ground.  In the middle of the open
-village square were three huge idols, carved out of
-entire tree-trunks set upright.  They had black, empty
-sockets for eyes; their mouths were curved upwards into
-a ghastly wrinkled grin, and their tongues hung
-mockingly out.  On the head of each was perched a huge
-black wooden bird, with beak bent down and gloomy
-wings outspread—the very spirit of Nightmare herself.
-Round and round these devilish things, in the red glow
-of the fires, danced the cannibals ceaselessly and
-untiringly, fleeing with heads down and outspread hands,
-wheeling and turning, circling with measured steps; and
-all the time the huge hollow idols, beaten with heavy
-clubs "to make the spirits speak," thundered death
-and doom.  It was plainly a religious ceremony which
-must be fully enacted down to the last detail; but
-Tempest thought, as clearly as he could think in such a
-place and at such a time, that it could not last much
-longer.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"A fellow ought to say his prayers," he thought;
-but the thunder of the drums and the wild, shrieking
-song of the dancers bewildered him, and his swollen
-wrists and ankles hurt him so much as almost to confuse
-his mind....  What could he say?  Only one prayer
-remained clear in the turmoil of his brain—just the
-old, old prayer that he had prayed at his mother's
-knee.  Well, it would serve—and up above he hoped
-they'd understand how sorry he was ... for lots of
-things....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Our Father Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy
-name.  Thy kingdom come...."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was coming, indeed!  The dance had stopped.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Thy will be done...."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>What came next?  He could not remember—and
-the savages were advancing across the square.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Forgive us our trespasses ... and lead us not into
-temptation, but deliver us from evil...."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was </span><em class="italics">now</em><span>!  The women were hiding themselves in
-the houses, and two of the men, armed with clubs, were
-stepping forward.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He was only conscious of one feeling—joy that he
-had the courage to look the cannibals in the face as
-they advanced, and meet his fate "game."  He hardly
-knew that he was still praying—</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"... For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and
-the glory...."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Death!</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It came with a blaze of light—a sound as of a wild,
-deep shout and the rushing of many waters—then——</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Was this the end?  Was it indeed death?  He had
-felt nothing—but a man does not feel the blow that
-kills—and his eyes were so dazzled with a strange, blue
-glory that he could not see....  The rushing sound
-continued; it was like the thunder of hundreds of
-flying feet....  The light burst forth again, and yet
-again, and then died away, and there was a great
-silence.  Tempest saw the hideous faces of the idols
-standing out in the empty square, and began to
-understand.  He was not dead—but something had
-happened.  What was it?  He tried to break loose and sit
-up so as to see all round.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Stop um little bit," said a voice, and some one drew
-a sharp knife across the lashings that bound his limbs,
-and lifted him into a sitting position.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The blinding light had almost died away now, and he
-could see the whole square.  There was no one in it.
-The cannibals were gone, and the beautiful half-caste
-girl who had brought about his downfall—innocently,
-as Tempest of course supposed—was squatting beside
-him and putting a flask to his lips.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Drink a little bit whisky," she said.  "Good
-whisky; he make strong.  No good stop here, you
-Belitani sailor-man; more better we go away too much
-quick."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The spirit cleared Tempest's head and put some life
-into his limbs.  Vaiti poked him unceremoniously in
-the ribs as soon as she saw that he was reviving.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Show um leg there, lively!" she ordered, dragging
-him by the arms.  Rather to his surprise, Tempest found
-that he could walk, once on his feet.  He wasted no
-time in getting away, after Vaiti's brief explanation
-of the blue-light stratagem, and the probable return of
-his enemies before very long.  At something as near a
-run as his cramped limbs would allow, he followed
-her down the pathway that led away from the village—narrow,
-wet, and dark as a wolf's gullet—and into the
-comparative security of the bush, towards the advancing
-relief column from the </span><em class="italics">Alligator</em><span>.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It would have been no more than fitting if Vaiti,
-like a true heroine of romance, had vanished silently
-into the forest when they encountered the man-of-war's
-men, leaving Tempest to "turn to thank his preserver,"
-and "find that she had disappeared."  But Vaiti,
-as it happened, was born under the Southern Cross,
-where the poetry of the footlights does not flourish.
-So she gave the men her company on the way down
-as a matter of course, asked the officer in command for a
-cigar, smoked it and accepted half a dozen more out
-of his case, and made herself wonderfully pleasant—for
-Vaiti.  She had further driven Tempest to distraction
-by starting a flirtation with a handsome petty
-officer, eaten up two emergency rations, "borrowed"
-some one's gold tie-pin, and very soundly boxed the
-ears of a leading seaman who tried to kiss her in the
-dark, before the long roll of the surf on the barrier reef,
-and the welcome glimmer of the </span><em class="italics">Alligator's</em><span> riding lights,
-told the tired-out party that they were safe back again.
-Then, like the mysterious heroine, at last she disappeared,
-and slipped off to the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> in a native canoe, for the
-reason that she did not want to be seen on board the
-man-of-war in a very untidy and dirty dress, without
-any flowers in her hair, or fresh scent on her laces.
-Tempest had found time to "thank his preserver" on
-the way down, haltingly enough; but the preserver,
-instead of accepting his thanks after the fashion he
-would have preferred, had laughed wildly and somewhat
-wickedly, and gone on walking right in the middle of
-the column, without a glance to spare for him....
-Still—he thought he knew women—and....  Time
-would show.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>The rest of the wardroom did not envy Mr. Tempest
-his interview with the commander.  It took place
-immediately after his return to the ship, and he came
-out from it with a countenance of entire inexpressiveness
-and extreme whiteness.  One sentence—the last—was
-unavoidably heard by the lieutenant who followed
-immediately after Tempest, to deliver his report.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Finally, Mr. Tempest—this Miss—a—Saxon—has
-risked her life to save your life and reputation.  I think
-there is only one way in which you can repay her—by
-never seeing her again."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Tempest's answer was inaudible.  But—he never did.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="invaders-in-tanna"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER XVII</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">INVADERS IN TANNA</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>"What a beautiful girl!  Is she one of the heathens,
-I wonder?" said Lady Victoria Jenkins, leaning on the
-rail of her yacht.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The </span><em class="italics">Alcyone</em><span> floated on a sea of living silver.  The
-coral reefs forty feet before her keel showed like a
-pavement of pale turquoise in the searching splendour
-of the tropic moon.  Close at hand loomed the dark
-woods and cliffs of Tanna, and above them, blotting out
-half the crystal broidery of the stars, rose the cone of
-the great volcano, crowned by a canopy of fire.  So, in
-the days of Bougainville and of Cook, stood this
-southward sentinel of the wild New Hebrides, a pillar of
-cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.  So it stands
-yet, its deathless fires unquenched, its awful voice
-breaking the forest silences hour by hour—as the dead
-and gone discoverers of these distant lands saw and
-heard it long ago, and as those who follow us will find
-it in the days to come, when we and our thoughts and
-hopes, and adventures and loves are but a whisper in the
-homeless winds and a handful of dust blowing about
-on long-forgotten graves.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>There are few volcanoes in the southern hemisphere
-more famous, and none less frequently visited, than
-the fiery cone of Tanna.  The island lies thousands of
-miles away from everywhere, and the inhabitants are
-known to be almost all heathen, cannibal, and hostile
-to whites, although the expression of their hostility
-has been kept considerably in check of late years.  But
-Lady Victoria Jenkins, daughter of the late Earl of
-Wessex, and wife of Mr. Abel Jenkins ("Jenkins's
-Perfect Pills"), is well known as a romanticist and a
-lover of all things unusual and strange.  Mr. Abel
-Jenkins's income is only exceeded by that of two other
-commoners in England, and Mr. Abel Jenkins's ugliness
-and ill-temper are not exceeded by the ugliness and
-ill-temper of any one known to polite society.  If the
-reader will piece these detached facts together, and
-consider them, he will readily understand why Lady
-Victoria was enjoying a tour round the world in her
-celebrated steam-yacht, the </span><em class="italics">Alcyone</em><span>, why she had
-come to look at Tanna, and why, including a good deal
-of miscellaneous company, the travelling party somehow
-was not miscellaneous enough to include Lady Victoria's
-husband.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The yacht had come in that afternoon after a
-somewhat stormy voyage from Sydney ("They call it the
-Pacific Ocean," said Lady Victoria plaintively, "instead
-of which, I have not really enjoyed a meal since we
-cleared the Heads"), and had instantly, by the mere
-fact of her dropping anchor in Sulphur Bay, denuded
-the whole seaboard of its population.  This was because
-the conscience of Tanna is never quite clear, and the
-Tannese, struck by the conviction of sin, thought the
-</span><em class="italics">Alcyone</em><span> was a man-of-war.  Only two kinds of ships
-were known to the islands, outside trading schooners:
-British and French warships, and the lazy little monthly
-steamers from Sydney, which strolled round the group
-once a month, picking up copra, and conveying missionaries
-and traders about.  The </span><em class="italics">Alcyone</em><span> was not a schooner;
-she was certainly not the well-known "B.P." steamer;
-therefore she must be some new variety of man-of-war.
-As it happened, there was a little matter of a murdered
-trader on the conscience of Tanna just at that time—he
-had been very annoying, but a British man-of-war
-is prejudiced about these affairs.  So the Tannese of
-the coast, like the modest violet of the poem, concealed
-their drooping heads in the shady vales of the interior,
-and coyly hid from view.  Like the modest violet,
-too—only with a difference—you might, if you wished,
-have located them by their——  But no; this is a
-polite history, and the Tannese are a very impolite
-people.  Let us change carriages.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti and her father, who had come up from Queensland
-with an empty ship and a full money-bag, and
-were just starting a fresh recruiting trip, regarded the
-appearance of the yacht with hearty disgust.  What
-were the good old islands coming to if this sort of thing
-was to be permitted?  Not a bushman would come
-near the beach as long as the </span><em class="italics">Alcyone</em><span> stayed, and the
-sprinkling of mission natives who were not afraid of
-the yacht were worse than useless, for they neither
-recruited nor encouraged their heathen friends to do so.
-Besides, the airs and graces of the </span><em class="italics">Alcyone</em><span> were sickening.
-Late dinner with low dresses and jewels; piano tinkling
-all the evening; clothes that looked as if they had been
-run hot on to the wearers, as icing is run on to a cake;
-sparkling glass and brasswork all over the ship, and
-dainty brass signal cannons, pretty as toys, and a little
-funnel all cream-colour and blue, and great sails white
-as trade-wind clouds, and a hull that sat the water like
-a beautiful sea-bird settled down to rest—all these
-unnecessary and disgusting affectations made a smart
-schooner like the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> look no better than a mud-scow
-in a marsh, for all that she was the beauty of the South
-Seas and the most famous ocean adventuress from
-'Frisco to Hobart Town.  Besides, Saxon would not
-stir out of his cabin while the yacht was there, having
-developed the lumbago that always attacked him
-whenever English society folk loomed on the horizon—Vaiti
-knew that lumbago!—and he might really have
-been of use about Sulphur Bay, where, for a wonder, no
-one had any old scores against him.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was all most abominable, thought the "Kapitani,"
-and she cast an unfriendly glance on the luxurious
-</span><em class="italics">Alcyone</em><span>, as her boat shot past the yacht in the moonlight,
-returning from a fruitless hunt along the coast for any
-stray bushman who might have heard the recruiting
-signal—a stick or two of dynamite set afloat on a board
-and exploded—and come down to the coast.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Lady Victoria's comment on the "beautiful girl"
-did not soften her in the least, coupled as it was with
-the unspeakable assumption that she was "a heathen."  Probably
-she was, in one sense, having long ago given
-up all but the merest rags of religion, but it was not the
-accusation of moral deficiencies that galled her: it
-was the idea that she, Vaiti, daughter of a great
-Polynesian princess and a white sea-captain, should have
-been "evened" to the black, monkey-like, naked hags
-of Tanna.  The resentful spirit of the half-caste burned
-hot within her as she steered the boat through the moonlit
-water.  She could see Lady Victoria and her friends, a
-brilliant flower-show of coloured dresses and sparkling
-gems, leaning over the rail, and watching her as
-impersonally as if she were a porpoise or a shark.  She
-could catch their comments, loudly and carelessly
-spoken.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I suppose she is one of them.  But she looks quite
-nice.  See her pretty dress.  She is quite decently
-clothed, isn't she?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I wonder is she a cannibal?  She does not look
-dangerous.  I would like to ask her on board, and give
-her some tea and cake, and things of that kind, and talk
-to her.  Just to try and reform her from their own
-horrible food, you know," said Lady Victoria angelically.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"That would be so dear of you," chimed in her special
-sycophant and foil, a plain and elderly young woman
-who knew when her bread was buttered on both sides,
-and why.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>But here the rowers—urged by a signal from Vaiti
-who thought she had heard about as much as she could
-stand without exploding—gave way vigorously, and
-pulled the boat out of earshot.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>That was not a happy evening for any one on board
-the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>.  Vaiti would not give out any grog for supper
-though it was a settled custom on the ship; would not
-have singing in the cabin, gloomed like a hurricane sky
-over the mate and boatswain's sociable game of cards
-until Gray, out of pure nervousness, dropped a greasy
-ace upon his knee, and was thereupon accused by Harris
-of cheating, and coarsely threatened by him with an
-operation usually confined to sufferers from appendicitis.
-At this Vaiti rose and walked out of the cabin with the
-air of a convent-bred princess who had never so much as
-heard a jibbing donkey "confounded"; and went to sit
-on deck near the wheel, where she stayed so long, smoking
-so many thin black cigars, that every one but the night
-watchman turned in and left her, and only the dead,
-dark hour of two o'clock, when the spongy heat of the
-island night stiffens for a while into fever-bringing chill,
-shook her out of her sulks and into her cabin.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>When Vaiti sulked it was usually observed that things
-happened before very long.  But on this occasion the
-exception seemed to rule.  The disgusting yacht stayed
-all the next day, and the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> lay quietly at anchor on
-the other side of the bay.  Some of the yacht people
-went ashore in the afternoon, and roamed timorously
-about the beach, wondering at the hot springs and tasting
-everything in the way of fruit they happened to see.
-(It was nearly all inedible, but none of it, by a fortunate
-chance, happened to be poisonous.)  Lady Victoria was
-disappointed with her day on the whole.  The natives
-from the mission, who had officiously attended them all
-day long, were unromantically clothed, clean, and
-English-speaking.  The wild savages did not appear;
-and there were one or two other mishaps of an entirely
-unromantic kind.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"How did you enjoy it, darling?" asked the plain
-young woman of Lady Victoria, when the daring
-pioneers returned.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Mr. Jenkins's partner shook out her soiled tussore
-silk disgustedly.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"It was untidy and ugly and nasty," she declared;
-"and when I sat down under a great pineapple tree all
-covered with fruit, and said that I was realising one of
-my dreams, Jack de Coverley laughed at me, and said it
-was only a pandamn-us, or something else profane, and
-that pineapples grew on the ground.  And when we
-started to walk among the palms, and I was saying that
-I had always dreamed of wandering softly by a coral
-strand and seeing the cocoanuts drop into my hands,
-something as big as a horse's head suddenly thundered
-down like a bombshell from a hundred feet high, and
-buried itself in the sand at my feet with such a fearful
-shock that I jumped a yard away and screamed like
-anything!  So then the missionary came out, and said
-he wondered I wasn't killed; and if you'll believe me,
-it was nothing but a horrible nut!  And the coral
-strand was pretty enough, all over little bits of branching
-coral stuff; but why doesn't anyone ever tell you that
-coral strands burn all the skin off your nose and blacken
-you into a nigger?  We're going up the volcano
-tomorrow—the missionary says it's quite safe—and I'm
-sure I hope it's true, but one never knows.  Darling,
-if I die, see that the new Lafayette photo is sent to the
-papers—not on any account the other; and I like
-Latin crosses on graves, I think; Carrara marble, very
-thick, and just one short text, something nice, like
-'They were lovely and pleasant in their lives'—you
-know."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>... "'And in death they were not divided,'"
-finished the plain young woman with mechanical piety....
-"Darling! dearest! what have I said?  What is
-the matter?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Now you </span><em class="italics">have</em><span> done it!" roared Mr. de Coverley,
-who was rather a well-bred, but sometimes rather a
-vulgar young man.  "Not divided!  Oh, great Scott!
-Oh, my eye!  Oh, I'll die of laughing!  Hold me up!
-Never mind, Vic; I'll see you aren't divided, or cooked
-either—trust to me!"</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>Vaiti was still in a speechless state of sulks when she
-started off the next morning into the interior, to recruit
-on her own account.  It was not a very safe thing to
-do, but the bushmen would not come down to the coast,
-and the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> could not hang out indefinitely, since the
-doubtful character of her methods had given the French
-and English Commissioners of the islands a nasty habit
-of asking questions about her.  Saxon, who had
-relinquished his lumbago to go off into the hills at a safe
-distance from the yacht, wanted to make his daughter
-accompany him; but Vaiti simply laughed at him, and
-departed with a guide seduced from the mission towards
-a village lying a mile or two above the volcano.  She
-preferred the glory of working on her own account, and
-besides, it doubled the chances of recruits.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She knew the Tannese nature well, so she dressed
-herself for her part in a robe of scarlet sateen, with
-liberal necklaces of different coloured trade beads, and
-stuck a couple of tomahawks in her sash, besides an
-ornamented sheath-knife.  Across her splendid young
-bosom she slung an incongruous-looking bandolier of
-cartridges, designed apparently for the slaughter of
-elephants; and a smart magazine rifle, carried over her
-shoulder, completed the outfit.  All these valuables,
-though designed to assist her plans by suggesting the
-enormous store of desirable goods possessed by the
-recruiters, were almost as likely to assist her to a sudden
-and unprovided end, by reason of the natives' covetousness.
-She took her chance of this, however; Vaiti was
-used to taking chances.  It is easier than most people
-suppose to take the risk of being killed every day of your
-life.  In the strange places of the earth, where such
-things are a common happening, men do not look upon
-the inevitable end after the pursy, secretive,
-never-mention-it fashion of Peckham and Brixton.  Death is
-just death in the earth's wild places—yours to-day,
-mine to-morrow—a thing to walk with shoulder to
-shoulder, to meet face to face at noonday; in any case,
-to make no bones of it until it makes bones of you; and
-after that circumstances will keep you from complaining
-if you feel like it.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was a long, hot walk up to the village.  A "walk"
-is mostly a scramble about the uncleared New Hebrides,
-where roads are mere foot-wide cracks and canyons in
-the dense forest growth, and level ground apparently
-does not exist.  Besides, a bandolier of cartridges and
-an assortment of small arms are rather heavy jewellery
-for such a climate.  Vaiti, however, possessed the
-enviable gift of never looking, or apparently feeling, hot
-or tired; and she swung along at an unvarying pace that
-caused the unlawfully enticed mission native, who had
-waxed fat and lazy, to regret his enticement and wish
-himself back in the mission school writing copies, instead
-of slaving up and down precipitous gullies in the rear of
-a woman-devil who did not know what it was to want a
-rest.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>At long last, however, the reedwork fence of the village
-came in sight, and they entered the open square, shaded
-by an immense banyan tree and surrounded by low,
-ugly huts, all roof and no wall, like all the mountain
-villages of Tanna.  There were sentries perched up in
-the trees outside the gate, and others squatted on the
-ground at every entrance, their rifles ready in the crook
-of the elbow.  Within, the dusty tan-coloured square,
-quivering under the pitiless fire of the white-hot sky, was
-all alive with moving figures—ugly women in brief
-grass skirts humped out into swaying bustles; young
-boys with murderous little faces, and full-sized rifles;
-wild-looking men, with thick hair twined into myriads
-of tiny strings ending in a great bush on the shoulders,
-stripes of scarlet paint on their faces, and no clothing save
-their native impudence and a cartridge belt—all seething
-about in a very bee-hive of excitement and alarm.  As
-for the rifle-barrels, they were bobbing about like
-piano-jumpers all over the square, and every weapon was cocked
-and loaded.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti saw at a glance that they were expecting an
-attack, and picking out a native who could speak English,
-asked what the trouble was.  The man replied that they
-feared the little man-of-war down below, but that they
-were entirely innocent.  Questioned further, they said
-naïvely that they had never eaten a white man, and that
-none of them were low cannibals in any case.  Vaiti,
-who had not heard of this little affair before, saw her
-chance.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"No good you speak alonga that fellow way," she
-said, using the </span><em class="italics">bêche-de-mer</em><span> talk that some of the Tannese
-understood; for Vaiti, like many half-castes, could
-handle almost any dialect or corruption of a dialect,
-though she could not speak decent English or French.
-"I savvy plenty, you eatum one fellow white man.
-By'n by, big fellow man-of-war come, shoot you all-a-same
-one pig, all-a-same one blind box [flying fox],
-burn altogether house belong you.  Very good you
-come alonga Saxon ship, go Queensland; then you all right."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"No eatum," persisted the man (who was the professional
-talking-man or orator of the village), with a
-coy smile.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti's nose was keen, and she had already guessed
-something by its aid.  She marched straight across the
-square into a little yam-house, and pointed to a small
-parcel done up in green banana-leaf and tied with
-cocoanut sinnet.  Five toes and an instep protruded
-from one end.  The game had been well hung, as the
-Tannaman likes it to be, and there was no mistaking the
-fact of its presence in any sense.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The talking-man giggled like a school-girl caught
-consuming surreptitious chocolates.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Eatum jus' little-fellow bit," he allowed, with a
-bad-child chuckle.  The other men took up the laugh,
-and the village resounded with a roar like the bellowing
-of a herd of bulls.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, seeing her advantage, stepped out into the
-square and began to talk, marching to and fro in Tannese
-fashion as she spoke.  The sun cast dancing spangles
-on her many-coloured beads as she moved, and threw
-back darts of fire from her heavy bandolier.  One arm
-emphasised her remarks with sweeping gesture; in the
-other the tall rifle pounded the earth with its stock,
-marking the points of her discourse.  The fat, stolid
-mission native watched her with staring eyes and open
-mouth, and the chiefs gloomed at her under sullen
-savage brows, evidently impressed, but restive.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The sum of her discourse was that they and their
-women would do well to come down with her to the
-schooner, recruit at once, and fly to a land of safety
-where men-of-war never came, where Tanna people
-reclined all day under the shade of banyan and banana,
-picked a little cane for their employers occasionally,
-lived upon tinned meat and sugared tea, and eventually
-returned loaded with riches in the shape of rifles,
-cartridges, cotton, and knives.  There was a good deal
-more of the same highly-coloured stuff.  This was old
-business to the people of the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The talking-man, also strutting backwards and
-forwards, Tanna fashion, in a kind of continual country
-dance with the glittering vision from the ship, answered
-now and then.  It was very well to talk about recruiting,
-and perhaps some of them might go if they got lots of
-tinned salmon and "bisketti" to eat before they went on
-board, and promise of rifles to be paid the tribe when
-the bargain was complete.  But they did not believe
-that the new ship was not a little man-of war, and until
-she was gone they would not go down to the coast—no,
-not even to bathe, although they had all decided to
-have a bath soon, for the weather was hot and their
-skins were like the bark of trees, and it was now about
-ten moons since they had had their last bath.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>At this Vaiti's eyes lit up, for she suddenly saw a plan,
-a plan which might give her a score of recruits, drive
-the objectionable yacht out of Sulphur Bay, and pay off
-every rankling insult inflicted by the </span><em class="italics">Alcyone</em><span> and her
-people.  But the savages were watching her, so she
-veiled her eyes with her long lashes, and replied
-carelessly:</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"All that very good.  To-morrow, small-fellow
-man-of-war he go 'way; then you coming longa schooner.
-To-day, what name [why?] you no go wash big water
-'long place one-fellow-fire stop?  Very good place that.
-Suppose you going, I come up from schooner, bring
-plenty-plenty tucker.  Plenty-plenty bulimacow [beef],
-bisketti, tucker belong white man, cost ten rifle.  All the
-Tannaman he eat; by'n-by he stop lie down, he break, so
-much he eat."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>This tempting picture had its effect, backed up by a
-few presents of beads and cartridges.  The Tannamen
-agreed that the plain below the burning mountain,
-where a wide, stagnant lake spread out its dull expanse,
-would do for a bathing place, short of the impossible
-shore, and they chuckled with joyous anticipation of
-the feast.  They also agreed, rather doubtfully, to
-embark as soon as the "man-of-war" was gone; and it
-seemed evident that a fair number would at least come
-down and negotiate on board the schooner after which—well,
-the </span><em class="italics">Sybil's</em><span> smart heels would do the rest.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="a-cannibal-party"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER XVIII</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">A CANNIBAL PARTY</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>Vaiti went off to get ready the feast, telling the natives
-that they might follow her before long, as everything
-would be ready soon; and they might trust her, the
-great Kapitani, that it would be a feast such as no
-Tannaman, not even of those who had served in
-Queensland, had ever witnessed in his wildest dreams.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The mission native being a rather weak-kneed convert,
-and anxious to enjoy a good heathen gossip with his old
-companions, wanted very much to stay on in the village.
-But that was just what Vaiti did not want, so she drove
-him out in front of her like a fat and nervous sheep,
-hastening his movements all the way down with
-occasional reminders from the butt of her rifle.  He had
-given her certain information about a picnic at the foot
-of the volcano, arranged by the people of the yacht for
-that afternoon, and she did not want him to share his
-news with the men of the village and cause them, perhaps,
-to put two and two together where he himself had failed
-to do so.  She despatched him therefore to his own
-town on the coast, and saw that he went, before herself
-turning off in the direction of the track that led to the
-volcano.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Near to the lake there lies a curious little valley with
-a soft, clean flooring of black volcanic sand and sheltering
-walls of green pandanus.  Here, shaded from the burning
-heat, yet close to the volcano plain, was the only possible
-place for the picnickers to enjoy their meal.  Beyond
-lay only a lurid plateau of red and yellow lava beds,
-curdled and coiled as they had flowed down from the
-crater lip long ago; a desert of black ash and sand,
-and a dark, wicked, smoking, rumbling cone in the
-centre of all.  Not a native would have climbed the
-cone for all the goods in the </span><em class="italics">Sybil's</em><span> hold; it was the
-mouth of hell, they said, and full of devils of every kind.
-But they were not afraid of the valley below, within
-safe limits, and even if they had been, the feast and the
-bathe after it were attractive enough to conquer a little
-nervousness.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>As Vaiti had anticipated, there were several picnic
-baskets stowed under a tree in the valley, and a big
-wine hamper as well.  Four mission natives, who had
-acted as guides and carried up the provisions, were
-lying on their stomachs in the shade, smoking and
-talking.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was essential to get them out of the way, and time
-was short.  Vaiti did not waste any unnecessary words.
-She simply pointed her rifle at the men and told them to
-clear.  They cleared, howling, and she was left alone.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>With quick, neat hands she unpacked the hampers,
-spread the cloth, and laid out the food.  It was a goodly
-display—hams and tongues and fowls, cold meats, pies,
-cakes, tarts, fruits, and tinned dainties of every kind.
-There was plenty of champagne, also a supply of whisky
-and soda.  She set all the bottles in a row, and looked
-with satisfaction upon the glittering array.  Then she
-went up to the edge of the plain and looked at the
-crater.  No one was yet in sight.  The exploring
-party at that moment were on the other side of the cone,
-standing on the black lip of an appalling gulf eight
-hundred feet deep and half a mile across; looking down,
-awe-struck and amazed, upon colossal fire fountains that
-uplifted their gory spray three hundred feet in the air,
-and listening to the heart-shaking thunders of the
-volcano's awful voice, as from time to time that terrifying
-note of illimitable force and fury made the whole plain
-tremble and echoed far out to sea....  It was indeed
-no wonder that the ignorant Tannamen feared to ascend
-the cone.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti sat down at the edge of the plain, and watched
-till she saw a number of many-coloured dots creeping
-down the black pyramid in its centre.  Then she suddenly
-lay down upon the ashy ground, and writhed with silent
-laughter.  People were in the habit of saying that Vaiti
-had no more sense of humour than the jibboom of her
-father's ship.  They might have modified that
-judgment, could they have seen her now.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>Lady Victoria Jenkins had enjoyed her morning
-very much indeed.  She had dressed for the ascent in
-a mountaineering costume that combined equal
-suggestions of "Carmen" and the Alpine Club, and gave
-great opportunities to her ankles.  She had been helped
-up the cone by four devoted admirers, all at once, and
-had come down it at a wild running slide, ably braked by
-two strong hands of two or three others who wanted to
-have their turn.  The other women had trodden on their
-skirts, and torn them, burned and cut their foolish boots,
-and also got unbecomingly hot and out of breath,
-because there was not nearly one man apiece to help them
-up, after Lady Victoria had annexed all the best.  It
-must be allowed that the men were the weak point
-of the </span><em class="italics">Alcyone's</em><span> travelling party.  Mr. de Coverley and
-his set were "dear boys" and charming companions, no
-doubt, but they were not quite as manly as some of
-the ladies.  Lady Vic and her companions did not
-attract the best sort of men, as a rule.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>They were all very hungry when they reached the
-plain, and thirsty with a thirst unknown outside the
-tropics.  All the way across the baking black sand and
-the tinkling lava beds, "one fair vision ever fled" before
-the eyes of the party—vision of gold-necked champagne
-bottles lying coolly embedded in icebaskets; of
-topaz-coloured jellies, trembling on silver dishes; of flaky,
-savoury pies, and delicate cold meats, and crisp green
-salads concocted as only the hand of the </span><em class="italics">Alcyone's</em><span> </span><em class="italics">chef</em><span>
-could concoct them.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It seemed as if that plain would never end, but it did
-end at last, and a green fringe of pandanus announced
-the beginning of the bush.  The elderly young lady and
-most of the others were making excellent time ahead,
-and they reached the verge of the plain some little while
-before Lady Victoria and Mr. de Coverley came to it.
-The latter pair, as it happened, were really not thinking
-very much about their lunch, because a still more
-interesting matter absorbed their attention.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Not understood!" Mr. de Coverley was saying
-bitterly.  "And so we die and go down to the
-grave—not understood!  The pathos of it!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"We are never understood," sighed Lady Victoria,
-patting the side waves of her "transformation" to
-see that it was on straight.  "We women, especially.
-And those who should understand us best of all are so
-often——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Exactly—so they are.  But, Lady Victoria—Victoria!—there
-are some who are different; there are
-men, rare souls, who——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What in Heaven's name is the matter?" interrupted
-the misunderstood one, stopping dead in her
-tracks (literally, for the sand was deep) and staring at
-the edge of the bush.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>From the valley below the plain had just risen a long,
-loud shriek, followed by another and another, and then
-by a burst of laughter that sounded scarcely human.
-The other members of the party had disappeared, but it
-was clear that something had happened.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Good God, the savages!" exclaimed Lady Victoria;
-and she began to run.  Let it be stated, for the credit
-of her race and name, that she ran towards the sound.
-As for Mr. de Coverley....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>But this story is not about Mr. de Coverley.  If it
-were, it would be interesting to tell why the Sydney
-steamer that called at Sulphur Bay two days later found
-an unexpected passenger waiting at the trader's, and why
-Lady Victoria and Mr. Abel Jenkins, of Jenkins's Perfect
-Pills, became eventually reconciled and lived the life
-of a model couple.  As things are, it must be enough to
-state that Mr. Jack de Coverley turned and ran away at
-the sound of the shouts—ran right across the plain into
-the bush at the other side—ran as far as he could get, and
-did not come back at all—and thereby ran once and for
-ever out of the life of the lady whom he "understood."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Lady Victoria, speeding in the opposite direction,
-reached the edge of the little valley in a very few minutes,
-and, looking over, beheld what was certainly the strangest
-sight she had encountered in all her varied life.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Round about the elaborately-laid luncheon were
-squatting a dozen or so of naked brown savages, painted,
-feathered, and slashed with ornamental scars.  A few
-women, clad only in a six-inch fringe of grass, stood
-behind them, eyeing the eatables eagerly, but not daring
-to touch them while their masters fed.  The talking-man,
-a big, hulking savage with a huge bush of hair, and a
-match-box stuck in each ear-lobe, had buried his face
-in the savoury interior of a boned turkey, and was
-gnawing out the stuffing.  The principal chief, one
-hand in a dish of Spanish cream and the other in a
-chicken curry, was casting double supplies into his
-mouth with the regularity of a patent feed-machine.
-A fat young fighting man, with nose and forehead
-painted scarlet, and white ashes in his hair, had tucked
-a ham under one arm, and was sitting on a peach pie,
-with intent to secure as many good things as possible,
-while he hastily worried large mouthfuls off the
-forequarter of lamb he was holding in both hands.  Another
-man was drinking mint sauce out of the silver sauceboat
-with horrible grimaces; his neighbour, having
-captured a handful of maraschino jelly, fast melting
-in the sun, was industriously rubbing it on his hair;
-and a grizzly old fellow, with a monkey-like face, was
-half-choking himself over a soufflé, which he was trying
-to swallow case and all.  The necks of the champagne
-bottles were all knocked off, and from engraved
-wine-cases, empty entrée-dishes, and dredged-out tins the
-savages were drinking Lady Victoria's excellent wines
-with every appearance of satisfaction.  Between mouthfuls
-they stopped to look at the party from the yacht,
-and to roar with laughter at their evident fright.  Too
-terrified even to run away, the voyagers, in their dainty
-frocks and smart white suits, stood huddling together
-for protection, the women crying, the men looking rather
-white and foolish, for every Tannaman had a loaded rifle
-slung to his side, and there was not so much as a saloon
-pistol among the whites.  A few yards off Vaiti stood,
-regarding the whole scene with an expressionless
-countenance that covered a good deal of quiet enjoyment.
-She knew, if the visitors did not, that the cannibal
-bushmen were really not at all a bad lot of fellows when
-you knew them, and that the yacht party, against whom
-they had no grudge, were perfectly safe.  In fact, the
-Tannamen merely thought these oddly-behaved whites
-were a new party of missionaries, and were quite ready
-to be civil to them, since they thought all the mission
-people harmless, if eccentric.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>But the true inwardness of the situation not being
-apparent, the </span><em class="italics">Alcyone's</em><span> guests were very frightened indeed.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"P-perhaps if we go away very quietly, they won't
-f-follow us," said a wealthy young stockbroker, who had
-retained a little presence of mind, though his teeth were
-chattering in his head.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Oh, let us!  Victoria, save me!  Oh, what shall
-we do?" wailed the elderly young lady, rushing up the
-bank and flinging her arms round the mistress of the
-violated feast.  Lady Victoria, though white as her own
-Belfast linen collar, kept her head fairly well.  She saw
-that Vaiti was not one of the invaders, and called to
-her.  "Do you speak English?  What are we to do?
-Will they kill us?" she asked.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti walked over to her with the bearing of a stage
-duchess, and favoured her with a fashionable high
-handshake that was the one thing wanting to complete the
-insanity of the whole impossible scene.  A new idea
-had suddenly struck her—a fresh spark of mischief was
-lit.  With an immovable countenance she replied:</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"No kill you, I think.  Suppose you want go 'way all
-right by'n-by, very good I think you sit down, eatum
-dinner alonga those fellow—then they think you all
-right, let you go home, no kill."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Oh, Victoria, anything to please them!" sobbed
-the elderly young lady.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Yes—a—I think we'd better do anything we can to
-get into their good graces, since we're not armed,"
-submitted the stockbroker.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti exchanged a few words with the Tannese.  She
-explained that these white people had come a long way,
-and were very hungry.  The Melanesian has not many
-virtues, but hospitality is certainly one of them; and a
-man who may be planning to dine off you himself
-tomorrow will certainly not refuse you half of his own
-leaf of yams to-day.  The Tannese were delighted at the
-chance of sharing their good fortune with the white
-chiefs, even in spite of the latter's extremely silly
-manners, and they beckoned to them at once to come and
-sit down.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Thereafter took place a scene incapable of description
-by mortal pen.  The chief took his head out of the turkey,
-chewed off a leg, and grinningly handed it to Lady
-Victoria.  The young warrior got off the pie,
-disembowelled it with one scoop of the hand that had not
-known water "for ten moons," and laid its interior in
-the elderly young lady's lap.  Another knowingly
-poured out a champagne glass of Worcester sauce and
-handed it to the stockbroker, while the much-bitten
-lump of mutton that was at that moment circling
-from mouth to mouth, native-fashion, was hospitably
-passed on to all the whites.  Driven by fear, they tried
-to swallow something; choked in the effort, made
-futile remarks to each other, laughed nervous laughs,
-and all the time watched with eyes of utmost apprehension
-the dusky hosts who were thus entertaining them
-with their own audaciously ravished goods.  And above
-the crazy party the burning Tanna sun beat down, and
-the great volcano-cone far across the plain smoked and
-thundered.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It had been Vaiti's design to dismiss them in peace
-by and by, assured that their compliance had saved their
-lives, and anxious to make steam out of Sulphur Bay as
-soon as was reasonably possible.  Fate, however,
-reserved a more dramatic ending to the entertainment,
-And it was "all along of" that talking-man.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The cannibal native is invariably shy of displaying
-his tastes before whites, since people who do not share
-the "point of view" are so frequently prejudiced.
-Therefore the talking-man did not open a certain small
-green parcel tied up with sinnet string, which he had
-brought down with him from the mountain village.
-A feast in the hand is worth two in the pandanus-bush,
-thought the talking-man, so he brought his </span><em class="italics">bonne bouche</em><span>
-with him for dessert and said nothing about it.  And
-thereby came the end.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>For Lady Victoria, unable to swallow the clawed and
-chewed morsels pressed upon her by dirt-encrusted
-hands, began to hunt despairingly about for something
-that she could really eat, so that she should not offend
-the dangerous monsters who surrounded her.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Isn't there anything clean to be had?" she asked
-the stockbroker anxiously.  "I can't eat—and yet we
-must!  What are we to do?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The stockbroker, who had once been to Honolulu,
-and thought he knew something about native foods,
-spied the packet of green banana-leaf, and reached out
-for it.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"This'll be some of their own boiled yam," he said.
-"Natives always do it up like this.  You can eat it all
-right if you scrape it with a knife.  Allow me."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Before the talking-man could stretch out his filthy
-claw to stop him, the Englishman had cut the sinnet
-string, the parcel had burst open, and right into the
-middle of a half-demolished chicken pie fell a large
-white foot, cut off at the ankle, nicely browned across
-the instep and all crackled on the toes.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>There was a wild shriek from the women, a splutter
-of horrified exclamations from the men, a boiling up of
-white petticoats like to the breaking of a wave on a
-pebbly shore, and then nothing but a diminishing string
-of rapidly trotting figures, each woman hand in hand with
-a man who was dragging her along far away, farther and
-farther, down the long, black, sandy path into the bush.
-Then ... they were gone.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti stood on the bank to look after them, and
-laughed quietly.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Now I think we keep Sulphur Bay all our own self,"
-she said.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>As for the Tannamen, they rolled on the ground with
-laughter, and then picked the dainty morsel out of the
-chicken pie and ate it up.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="the-rival-princesses"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER XIX</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">THE RIVAL PRINCESSES</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>It was full mid-day when the schooner </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> dropped
-anchor off Liali Island.  The hot season was at its
-height.  The long, white coral strand blazed in the sun,
-the moated lagoon was raw emerald, the waveless outer
-sea blue fire.  Beyond the beach stretched a green,
-grassy lawn, dotted with quaintly-shaped Norfolk pines,
-tall palms, and feather-tressed ironwood trees; and
-against its enamelled background rose a palace like a
-picture in a fairy-tale—white, long-windowed,
-lofty-towered, and crowned with a crimson flag set below a
-gilded vane.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, standing on the break of the poop, with the
-inevitable cigar between her fingers, looked critically
-at the island, and liked it well.  A mere little matter
-of kidnapping somebody's indentured labourers—the
-sort of thing that any gentleman with an extensive
-island practice might easily find himself obliged to
-do—had brought about her father's expulsion from the New
-Hebrides labour trade, and obliged him to seek new fields
-for the activities of the notorious and naughty </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>.
-Saxon himself was virtuously indignant, Vaiti not
-particularly sorry.  She was getting tired of the gloomy
-feverish New Hebrides and their ugly savages.  The
-Eastern Pacific was her heart's home after all,
-semi-Polynesian as she was; and even the wild excitement
-of the cruel western isles could not hold her away very
-long.  So when Saxon was wavering between the advantages
-of strictly illegal gun-running in the Solomons
-and honest trading about the Liali group (which had just
-wrecked its native schooner, and was open to employ a
-successor), Vaiti's influence went for once on the side of
-peace and virtue, and the course was set for Liali.  The
-group was new to both father and daughter, but was
-none the less attractive on that account, since all over
-the wide island world the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> and her owners were best
-loved and most warmly welcomed where they were least
-known.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The Liali group, as many people in the Southern
-hemisphere agree, offers the nearest possible approach
-to comic opera known off the actual stage.  Liali itself,
-the chief island, is as pretty as a toy-box, and quite
-extraordinarily theatrical in appearance.  Its handsome,
-merry, brown people wear the most picturesque costume
-in the Pacific—a knee-length kilt of fine cashmere,
-girded by a deep sash of pure silk, and worn with a silken
-or cashmere shirt or a graceful sleeveless tunic, according
-to sex—all in the most vivid of sea- and flower-colour.
-Liali is civilised after a fashion.  It goes barefoot and
-barelegged, sits on mats, lives in reed-woven houses
-devoid of furniture, worships a sacred lizard on the sly,
-and sometimes breaks out openly into club-fights and
-devil-dances.  But it has a king, and a palace and a
-Parliament, a brass band, and quite a number of very
-active Nonconformist churches, run by white missionaries,
-who find that "labouring" among the well-off
-and amiable Lialians is a task in which the meritorious
-martyrdom of missionary life can be combined with
-quite a number of pleasant alleviations.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Nothing in Liali is entirely what it seems.  The palace,
-when one comes close to it, is perceived to be built
-of painted wood, like a "practicable" scene in a theatre.
-The Parliament never passes any laws, because the
-Lords, who are chiefs, always on principle throw out
-every bill introduced by the vulgar Commons, just to
-"teach" them.  The Prime Minister is oftener in prison
-for </span><em class="italics">lése majestè</em><span> than out of it, and several Chancellors
-of the Exchequer have been transported to the Colonies
-for theft.  But there is a real throne in the palace, all
-crimson velvet and gilt wood, and a wonderful gold
-crown (the verdigris is cleaned off it with a wad of
-cocoanut husks by the Chief Equerry every Saturday
-afternoon), and when the King goes out in state he wears
-a purple velvet train, held up by two pages in tights
-and plumes, and a marvellous ermined robe, all exactly
-like the Savoy Theatre in the consulship of Gilbert and
-Sullivan.  On occasions not of state he sits cross-legged
-upon the palace parquet, clad in a shirt and a
-kilt, and plays </span><em class="italics">écarté</em><span> with his native guards.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>There are a few colonial traders in Liali, and a dozen
-or so of the English "legion that never was listed"—just
-such as one finds in all the odd corners of the
-Pacific—talkative, plausible, thin and nervous, given to avoid
-home topics and discourse with awful fluency upon
-small local politics; hospitable, restless and lazy, and
-usually married more or less to some dark beauty of the
-islands, who has grown as fat as a feather bed and spends
-a fortune on store muslins.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>These, as a matter of course, took possession of the
-</span><em class="italics">Sybil's</em><span> people at once, hardly waiting for the schooner to
-cast anchor before they were alongside with their boats.
-Saxon and Vaiti were swept ashore immediately, and
-begged to make their home in half-a-dozen different
-houses.  With a fine sense of the fitting, Saxon selected
-Bob Peter's public-house, misnamed hotel, and
-immediately held a </span><em class="italics">levée</em><span> in the bar, wearing his smartest
-Auckland suit (not paid for, and not likely to be) and
-looking, with his heavy, old-fashioned cavalry moustache,
-blonde-grey hair, and well set-up though rather bloated
-figure, quite like a somewhat seedy Milor on his travels.
-(And, as a matter of fact....  But that was Saxon's
-long-buried secret, and must not be told.)</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, splendidly attired in a flowing island robe of
-yellow silk, with a gold chain twisted through her misty
-black hair, sat in the midst of a court of her own, and
-drank expensive pink lemonade to her soul's content.
-She was revelling in the sights, the sounds, the smells of
-the dear eastern islands once more.  She had a necklace
-of perfumed red berries round her neck, and white
-"tieré" flowers behind each ear, and the well-remembered
-scent almost intoxicated her.  Outside she
-could hear the boom of a dancing-chant, broken by
-interludes of clapping; and from the very next house, a big
-native reed-built structure, came now and then in the
-quieter moments the sonorous voice of a Lialian man
-calling out the names at a kava-drinking.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The double soul that is the curse of the half-caste
-surged within the girl....  This, this, this, and all
-it meant—how she loved it!  And yet, the wild, fierce
-life of the western islands; the chance, the risk, the
-strong wine of danger, adventure, power!  The two
-natures of the soldier of fortune and the sensuous island
-princess who had given her birth, fought together in
-her heart....  If one could eat one's cake and have it!
-If one could sleep all day, crowned with flowers, under
-the singing casuarina trees, and yet be the daring
-sea-queen, the "Kapitani" of the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>, if only...</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti shook herself impatiently in her hammock
-chair, and asked for ginger beer with sugar in it.  She
-hated thinking, and felt as if she were going mad when
-the half-white brain in her pretty dusky head took a
-strange fit of sober industry.  Swift, instinctive plotting
-and planning were one thing, deliberate reflection quite
-another....  Ugh! she must be sick....  And for
-once the temperate Vaiti said yes to the inevitable offer
-of "a stick in it," as her ginger beer was handed to her
-by an eager admirer.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>The "sickness" passed away, and she began to listen
-and watch in her old fashion, smiling all the time to the
-compliments and sweet sayings that were being poured
-into her ears.  A trader was telling her father all about
-the latest dynastic crisis in the monarchy, and Saxon
-was not even pretending to listen.  The affairs of
-"niggers" never interested him, unless there was a
-question of immediate profit ahead.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"You see," said the trader, "King Napoleon Timothy
-Te Paea III., which is his full title, wants for to get
-married.  He's thirty, and there's no heir.  And there
-being just the two Lialian princesses that wasn't his
-sisters—Mahina and Litia—what does he do but go and
-propose to both of them, and, of course, gets snapped up
-like winkin' by the two.  It's no small potatoes being
-Queen of Liali, mind you.  Te Paea gets lots of money
-out of the fruit, and copra taxes, and then the Crown
-lands is half the island, there's presents besides.  And
-he's a real king if he is coffee-coloured—why, the kings
-of Liali goes back hundreds of years before Captain Cook,
-and he was in Henry Eighth's time, wasn't he?  And if
-you was to see the pink satin chairs in the throne-room,
-and the phonographs, and musical-boxes, and albums,
-and lookin'-glasses, and the lovely wax flowers in cases,
-and real hand-painted oil pictures—ah! it's a good
-job, is Te Paea's, and either Mahina or Litia's going to
-be a very lucky girl.  What he'd like, you see, is to marry
-both of them, same as his old grandfather—only he
-married nine, he did.  But the King's a Methody, good
-as they make them—when he don't forget, or want a
-spree—and of course the missionaries won't hear of his
-havin' two queens.  And, says he, Mahina's real fat;
-there's nothing mean about Mahina; she fills the eye,
-says he, and that's what a Lialian likes, for they don't
-hold with any sort of stinginess, says he.  But Litia, he
-says, has eyes like the buttons on his Auckland boots,
-they're so round and black and bright, says he, and
-she walks for all the world like a lovely young mutton-bird,
-says he.  And what's a king to do, with both the
-girls' relations fighting and squabbling over him like
-land-crabs fighting over a bit of fish, and he himself
-liking them both, and the girls clean mad for
-him—because, you see, Te Paea he's a handsome fellow, and
-when he's got his military uniform on, and all his orders
-and medals what he drew out himself on paper, and got
-made in Sydney, he's a fancy man, he is.  The wedding's
-to be in three weeks, and the invites is being printed
-down in Auckland all in silver, with a blank to write the
-bride's name in—and the House of Lords has bought
-the bride's dress for her, which is what the Kings says
-it's their right to do, according to custom,—and no
-one knows which he's going to marry, and no more
-does he.  And it's my belief that there'll be war over it,
-before all's said and done, for Mahina's people say they'll
-burn down every village belonging to Litia's tribe, and
-Litia's folks say they'll kill Mahina's people's cattle and
-cut up their gardens.  That's the way things are, and you
-may take my word it's a pretty kettle of fish."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What are you giving for copra at present?" asked
-Saxon, yawning unrestrainedly.  And the conversation
-turned at once to the inevitable trading "shop."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>A few days afterwards the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> spread her wings and
-started for Waiwai, the outermost of the Liali islands.
-She was to make the whole round of the group afterwards,
-and might not be back for some weeks, so that it seemed
-likely that Saxon would miss the festivities of the King's
-wedding.  This Vaiti declared was no reason why she
-should miss them, and she insisted on being left behind.
-Saxon was not too well pleased, for if he had a remnant
-of conscience left, it was connected with the care of his
-daughter, and he did not quite care about leaving her
-alone in a group to which they were both strangers.  But
-Vaiti promised to behave like a saint, and furthermore
-said that she would stay with one of the married traders,
-and not in the native villages.  She also added that she
-meant to stay anyhow, and that it was no use making
-a fuss.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>So the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> sailed away out of Liali harbour, and
-became a little pearl-coloured pinhead on the blue
-horizon, and then melted quite away.  And Vaiti went
-to the tin-roofed shanty belonging to Neumann, the fat
-German trader, who had married a Lialian wife, and was
-received with the unquestioning hospitality of the
-islands.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Nobody, among either whites or natives, could talk
-of anything but the King's matrimonial affairs.
-Mahina and Litia both appeared in Neumann's parlour
-more than once, sat on the floor, drank black tea with a
-handful of sugar in it, and related their several woes at
-length.  They did not come together, except once, when
-Litia, walking in unexpectedly, found Mahina there,
-crying into her teacup, and telling Neumann's wife that
-the King had given Litia a beautiful chemise, all trimmed
-with lace, only the day before, and that in consequence
-she considered him a monster and a perjured villain,
-although she knew perfectly well that he meant nothing
-whatever by it.  What was a chemise?  He had sent
-her two pounds of stick tobacco the Sunday before last.
-She would show Litia yet that the King was her King,
-and nobody else's.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Litia, entering at this point, wasted no words, but
-simply buried her hands in Mahina's curly black masses
-of hair, and dragged her, shrieking, across the floor.
-Neumann interfered, and parted them; but Mahina
-flew at Litia immediately after, ripped open her dress
-with one clutch, and disclosed the royal gift chastely
-embracing Litia's lovely form.  With a howl of anger,
-the rival seized the chemise in both hands; there was a
-scuffle, a scream, a rending noise, and Litia stood up in
-the middle of the room, a gold-bronze statue, shedding
-tears of rage, while Mahina, running out on to the
-verandah, tore the offending garment into strips and
-rags, and cast them upon the road.  Litia, rushing out
-after her, stood upon the steps clad with wrath as with
-a garment (and with extremely little else), explaining
-her wrongs to an interested and sympathetic native
-crowd, until the Methodist missionary happened to come
-by, and told her that unless she went in and dressed
-herself at once, she might safely count upon eventually
-finding herself in a place where dress would be very
-much at a discount ... or words to that effect.  So
-Litia went in, and Mahina went away, escorted by a
-strong cousinly "tail"; and afterwards Neumann,
-enveloped in oracular clouds of smoke, remarked sleepily
-that the princesses were the greatest nuisance on the
-island, and that he believed the King would run away
-from the whole set if he could, for he was "by-nearly
-mad-driven on account of their so-tiresome ways, and
-feared-himself to choose, because the one that he not
-married had would cause to make war by her people
-against the one he married should."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>During the whole of the fight, Vaiti remained
-perfectly unmoved on a cane lounge in the corner of the
-room, uninterruptedly puffing rings of blue smoke at
-the ceiling.  Not a detail had escaped her, all the same,
-nor did she miss a word of Neumann's remarks.  And
-they made her think.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>In the afternoon, the dull thud of galloping hoofs
-along the grass street made Mrs. Neumann run to the
-door.  She called loudly to Vaiti to come.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"It is the King," she said.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>A small victoria, drawn by two spirited blacks, was
-tearing up the street.  Seated alone in it was an
-extraordinary and notable figure—Napoleon Timothy Te
-Paea III., King of Liali.  He was six feet four inches in
-height, and over eighteen stone in weight.  He wore
-a scarlet cloth uniform coat, blazing with gold, and his
-heavy, handsome brown face, with its weak, small mouth,
-and black eyes almost too large and soft for a man, was
-shaded by a white sun helmet with a wide gold band.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He drove furiously, looking neither to right nor to left,
-and, passing the house like a gorgeous whirlwind, was
-instantly lost in the casuarina forest beyond.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"That is the King, then?" said Vaiti.  The Lialian
-language came almost as easily to her as her own, being
-only one of the dialects of the great Maori tongue that
-covers a good two-thirds of the island world.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Yes," said Neumann's wife, "that is the King.
-And very little any of us have seen of him lately.  He
-is afraid of the trouble he has got himself into; he shuts
-himself up all the time, and sees no one but his guards,
-and just sends a present now and then, first to one girl
-then to the other.  And when he drives to take the air,
-he flies along like that, so that no one can stop and speak
-to him.  He is terribly shy of strangers; I think it was
-because the </span><em class="italics">Sipila</em><span> was here that he did not come out at
-all last week."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Is it such a very good thing for the princess he will
-marry?" asked Vaiti, playing with a yellow alamanda
-flower.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Very, very good indeed," replied the Lialian
-impressively.  "She will have a gold crown to wear on
-her head, and sit on a red velvet and gold throne beside
-the King, and have the most beautiful satin dresses from
-Sydney, and all her chemises will have lace and ribbons
-on them.  And as soon as the King buys another
-schooner for himself and Liali, she will travel in it with
-him whenever she likes, for sometimes he will go to
-Samoa, to stay with King Malietoa, or he will sail a whole
-week to Mbau in Fiji, and then Princess Thakombau and
-the Prince of Kandavu make feasts and dances for
-him, and the Kovana [governor] gives a real 'papalangi'
-dinner for him, with champagne and a band.  And as
-for what she will have to eat at home, it is past telling,
-for in the palace there is no count whatever made of
-tinned salmon and biscuit, and she may have a sackful
-of sugar at every meal, and a whole roast pig every day.
-She may eat till she falls asleep, and then wake up to
-eat.  Ah, it is a good thing for the princess who marries
-the King, whichever she may be!"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"I think you will be thirsty if you talk so much,"
-said Vaiti rather rudely.  "I am thirsty myself with
-only listening to you.  Go and make some kava for me."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Mrs. Neumann, who had been rather proud to have
-Vaiti staying with her—since her rank as a princess of
-Atiu counted for a good deal among the island races—began
-to dislike her visitor soon after this, and to wish
-her well away.  Vaiti was not an angel in the house at
-the best of times, and she did not trouble to make
-herself pleasant just then.  Indeed, one would almost have
-thought she was trying to pick a quarrel.  And, as
-that sort of effort rarely goes unrewarded, it is not
-astonishing to learn that the quarrel came before long—a
-bitter, loud-tongued dispute that left Mrs. Neumann
-sobbing in a fat, frightened heap on the floor, and
-Vaiti, silent but stormy, packing up her camphorwood
-box to depart.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Neumann, being afraid of Saxon's possible anger,
-tried to keep her, but she laughed in his face, and went
-on packing.  There was an empty native house—little
-more than a palm-leaf hut, once tenanted by a Chinese
-trader—standing by the road about halfway through
-the great casuarina forest; a lonely, ramshackle place,
-used and wanted by nobody.  There and there only
-Vaiti would go, taking mats and cooking pots with
-her, to stay until her father came back.  When some
-of the islanders betrayed meddlesome curiosity as to
-her motives, and the missionaries declared they scented
-scandal, Vaiti silenced and terrified the one, and
-convinced the others that she was hopelessly beyond the
-pale, by giving out that she was something of a witch,
-and meant to go into the forest to gather and prepare
-certain powerful charms.  These, she said, would injure
-only her enemies, but were altogether powerless to hurt
-anyone who spoke well of her.  In consequence, the
-evil tongues of Liali received a sudden check.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Furthermore, Vaiti, neglecting the half-castes and
-the whites, began with considerable art to make herself
-popular among the natives.  She dressed herself Liali
-fashion, and arranged her hair after the island modes.
-She joined in all their interminable boating journeys and
-picnics, and was never tired of sitting cross-legged on
-the ground, waving her arms and head in time with
-a hundred others, and chanting Lialian songs that lasted
-an afternoon apiece.  After dark, she was often to be
-seen out on the reef, with a torch and a fishing spear
-making an exhibition of piscatorial skill that astonished
-even the Lialians themselves.  When there was an
-unmissionary dance in some big chief-house, Vaiti was
-always there, decked with wreaths and flower necklaces,
-and polished with cocoanut oil, turning the heads of
-all the young men by the grace of her dancing, and
-winning the astonished approval of the women by the
-cool reserve with which she received every advance of
-a sentimental nature.  Both Mahina and Litia took
-jealous fancies to her—thus acquiring yet one more
-cause of mutual dissension—and separately poured all
-their woes into her ear.  She was wonderfully sympathetic,
-and urged each one on to assert her rights and stand
-no nonsense; insomuch that before very long the island
-was fairly ringing with what Litia's people meant
-to do to Mahina's, and what Mahina's would certainly
-do to Litia's, in the event of the King selecting one or
-the other.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Somebody about this time—it was never ascertained
-who—spread a report that Captain Saxon of the </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>
-had a number of trade rifles on board his ship, and several
-cases of cartridges.  The talk began to take a more
-dangerous turn.  The schooner would not be back till
-the wedding was over, it was said, but let the winning
-party look out for themselves when she did come!  The
-Lialians, under missionary rule, had been peaceful and
-law-abiding people for almost a whole generation; but
-they had not yet forgotten that they were once the
-masters of the Pacific, and that of all the warlike island
-races, none had been such fighters as they....  The
-older men began to snuff battle in the air, walked about
-with their chests flung out, and told bloodthirsty ancient
-stories to the younger Lialians.  The women sang war
-songs at the evening gatherings in the chief-houses, and
-Mahina and Litia began to go about followed by bands
-of eager partisans.  Liali was certainly warming up.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 4em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst" id="queen-after-all"><span class="bold large">CHAPTER XX</span></p>
-<p class="center pnext"><span class="bold medium">QUEEN AFTER ALL</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 2em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>News of all these things came duly to the King through
-his faithful spies, and his Majesty Napoleon Timothy Te
-Paea III. went nearly frantic.  He actually began to lose
-weight—a consummation that all the skill of his European
-court doctor had hitherto failed to bring about—and
-day by day he drove more wildly behind his famous
-blacks, covering mile after mile of lonely forest roads
-at a pace that brought the horses home all in a lather
-and the yellow satin cushions grimed with dust.  The
-wedding approached within ten days: the triumphal
-arches were being erected; the Queen Consort's throne
-came back from the carpenter, freshly gilded and
-upholstered; and the band were hard at work practising
-the strange conglomeration of shrieks and wails that
-make up the Lialian National Anthem.  The bride's
-dress, provided, according to usage, by the House of
-Lords, arrived at the palace in a palm-leaf basket.
-It was a very gorgeous affair—a long, loose robe of orange
-satin, embroidered in scarlet by a few of the cleverest
-mission-school girls—and it was of a usefully indefinite
-size, since the difference between the massive Mahina
-and the waspish little Litia was almost as great as the
-difference (of another kind) between their respective
-parties.  The silver-printed invitations for the white
-people and the chiefs—"To be present at the wedding
-of His Majesty King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. with
-Princess——," came up by a whale-ship from
-Auckland, and so did the wedding cake, largely plaster of
-Paris.  And still the wretched King, lashed by the
-scourge of his own light-hearted follies, sent pacificating
-presents to both girls, and put off the dire decision.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was about this time that any wayfarer passing
-through the casuarina forest "might have observed"
-a light in Vaiti's cottage late one night.  There was no
-one to observe, however, for the wood was supposed to
-be devil-haunted, and no native ever passed through
-it save in broad daylight.  When it grew toward sunset
-the only Lialian who would brave its dangers so far as to
-rush across it in the red evening light was the King
-himself, who had been educated in Sydney, and did
-not believe in devils—much.  The forest road was the
-shortest way home from his usual circular drive, and he
-frequently passed by the cottage just before sunset,
-driving like Jehu the son of Nimshi, and looking neither
-to right nor to left.  He had never noticed Vaiti as he
-passed, for she was always within the house, looking out
-between the cracks of the palm-leaves, where she could
-see without being seen.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>This evening, long after the King had passed by and
-the dark had come down, Vaiti sat on the floor of the
-hut, looking very thoughtful, as she turned out the
-contents of her big camphorwood box by the light of a
-ship's hurricane lantern.  She was all alone, as usual,
-and smoking, also as usual.  There was no sound in
-the solitary little house but the sighing of the wind in
-the casuarina trees and the steady puff of the girl's cigar.
-Papers, letters, packets of lace, odd bits of jewellery,
-silk dresses, pistols, knives, collections of rope and twine,
-laced underclothing, cartridges, feathers, shells, cigars,
-pearl-inlaid boxes, revareva plumes, and a miscellaneous
-collection of odds and ends garnered from all the four
-corners of the South Seas, strewed the floor, and the box
-was still half full.  By-and-by she came upon what she
-wanted—a roll of stuff done up in waxed paper.  She
-unfastened it, and let the contents fall out across the mats
-under the rays of the lantern.  It was a web of pure
-gold tissue, bright as a summer sunrise and fine as a
-fairy's wing—an exquisite piece of stuff, which she had
-acquired from a Chinese trader in Honolulu by means
-none too scrupulous, and hoarded away for years.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti looked at it thoughtfully, and then opened a
-little tortoise-shell and silver box, and spilled its
-contents—a shower of photographs—into her lap.  They were
-an exceedingly various collection—naval, military,
-British, French, native and half-caste—but most were
-men, and many were young and handsome.  Perhaps
-the best-looking of the collection was that of a young
-English naval officer, signed across the corner
-"R. Tempest," with a Sydney address, and "Must it be
-good-bye?" written in tiny letters under the signature.
-Vaiti took the picture in her hand, and looked at it
-so long and earnestly that her cigar went out while she
-gazed.  She lit another, put down the photograph, and
-sat smoking and thinking for quite a long time....  The
-world was still all before her ... and the whaling ship
-had said that another vessel was almost sure to touch, on
-her way to Sydney next week.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Once in Vaiti's many-coloured history a
-looking-glass had proved her undoing.  It was a looking-glass
-that proved her salvation now, at the parting of the
-ways.  For, as she sat thinking, a brilliant picture
-caught her eye—her own proud, lovely head, crowned
-regally with a wreath of flowers, reflected in the mirror
-inside the lid of the box.  She smiled, stretched out
-her hand—letting the photograph fall unnoticed to the
-floor from her lap—and placed a fold of the golden tissue
-across her head....  Yes, it looked quite like a
-crown—a Queen Consort's crown ... the glass gave back a
-truly royal picture.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti's cheeks flushed as she looked.  She could
-hardly turn away.  But the golden fold slipped off her
-hair, and the queenly picture was gone.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>She shut the box, and with set lips took a match, lit
-it, and set fire to the photograph.  It burned very slowly,
-and the flame seemed to lick sympathetically round her
-own heart as it crawled about the handsome, debonair,
-but sensual face, lit up, and then put out, the laughing
-eyes, crackled through the curly hair and the white
-naval cap, and at last reduced the whole bright picture
-to a little pile of feathery black ash—dead, dead, dead!</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti dropped the charred fragments from her hands,
-and then put her head down upon the mats and lay very
-still....</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>When morning broke through the narrow door of
-the hut, the rays of the rising sun fell upon the figure
-of a girl with a cold, expressionless face, sitting upon the
-threshold, hard at work with needle and thread.  Upon
-her lap lay a pile of golden gauze.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>That afternoon the King drove late in the forest.
-The sun was near setting, and the rays were slanting long
-and low among the red trunks of the gloomy casuarina
-trees, when the spirited blacks came galloping up to the
-cottage.  Every day they had passed it by, a still,
-brown nest in the shadows, where nothing moved,
-but this evening, as they reached the spot, something
-caused them to check and shy, and the King, splendid
-driver as he was, had some difficulty in pulling them in.
-When he had succeeded, he glanced at the object that
-had caused their fright, and saw a vision startling
-enough to astonish even himself.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>A stranger girl of exceeding beauty stood in the
-midst of the forest clearing.  She was dressed in a robe
-of magnificent golden tissue, from which the level rays
-of the westering sun sparkled back in a halo of almost
-supernatural glory.  On her head was a wreath of blood-red
-hibiscus flowers, and her exquisite right arm, bare
-except for a twisted chain of gold, held up an island
-kava cup of carved cocoanut shell.  When she saw that
-the King observed her, she sank on her knees, bent her
-neck, and raised the cup higher in both hands above her
-head.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was an invitation, and one that no Lialian could
-possibly have refused, for the drink brewed from the
-kava root, and the ceremonies connected with the
-brewing, tasting, and giving round, are almost a religion
-in those islands, and many a man, in the old wild days,
-has died for the insult of putting aside the proffered
-cup.  Therefore the King descended at once, tied his
-horses to a tree, and advanced to take the cup from the
-hands of this unknown woman who understood royal
-etiquette so well.  It was his Majesty's right to have
-his kava, and indeed all his food and drink, proffered
-in this especial attitude; but half-castes and whites
-were sometimes careless enough to forget the honour.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He drank the great bowlful at a draught, as a king
-should, and, sending the cup with a twirl to the ground,
-according to etiquette, cast a side glance at the beautiful
-cup-bearer.  He hated strangers and distrusted foreigners,
-still...</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Will you not come in and rest, O Great Chief?"
-asked Vaiti in Lialian.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Who are you?" said the King, still looking half
-away—but only half.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Princess of Atiu, and daughter of the great English
-sea-captain Saxon," replied Vaiti, drawing herself up
-to her full height, and looking him straight in the eyes.
-The King met the look full this time, and thought that
-Litia's eyes, Lialian though she was, were not so bright
-by half.  And if Mahina was fatter—as she certainly
-was—she never had such hair, or such a coral-red mouth.
-And what a magnificent dress the magnificent creature
-wore!</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He knew at once who Vaiti was, when she mentioned
-her rank in Atiu, for the chocolate-coloured island
-kings and queens understand each other's complicated
-genealogies quite as clearly as do their white compeers
-on the other side of the world—and though Atiu was a
-broken, half-depopulated place, annexed to the British
-Crown, its chiefs were of ancient lineage and high repute.
-Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. hesitated a moment—stretched
-out his hand—withdrew it—then stretched
-it out again, and graciously offered it to Vaiti, as to
-an equal in blood.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Vaiti, glowing with gratification, yet had the happy
-intuition of dropping on one knee and kissing the royal
-hand, European fashion.  The King understood it, and
-swelled with pleasure, remembering how Mahina had had
-the impudence to chuck him under the chin when he
-bestowed a gracious salute upon her inferior lips, and
-how Litia had objected altogether to get off her horse
-when he was passing by, as Lialian royal customs
-enjoined upon all riders ... What a nuisance they
-had both grown to be, crying and battering at the
-palace gates, fighting over his gifts, getting up trouble
-among their relatives—trouble that he now began to
-fear might become so serious as to bring down the
-interference of the British Crown.  And every Pacific monarch
-knew what was the inevitable next move, when that game
-had once begun!  Good-bye to his kingship, if once the
-British Lion laid a claw on Lialia.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Will you not come in and rest, Great Chief?" said
-the humble voice of the stranger again.  And the King,
-still shy and distrustful, and looking at Vaiti only out of
-the corners of his eyes, did condescend to come in.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>And the next day he rested again, and the day after
-that.  It was astonishing how easily driving seemed to
-tire his Majesty at this period.  And all the time the
-wedding preparations went forward, while Mahina and
-Litia, with their respective factions, grew more and more
-jealous of each other, and more and more enraged.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>But there came a day at last, four days from the
-wedding, when the King declared that he would make
-his final choice on the evening before the marriage day,
-and would send a herald on that night to proclaim it
-through the capital.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Ruru, the royal herald, who had never before had a
-chance to exercise his office or wear his uniform, was
-extremely pleased.  He got out his finery at once—a
-Beefeater cap and tabard of crimson silk, worn with a
-large silk sash, and bare legs—and began a dress
-rehearsal that lasted, with intervals for food and sleep,
-until the evening of the proclamation.  At sunset he
-went up to the palace, received the paper that
-contained the message, and strutting like a turkey, came out
-on to the open green in front, where at least a thousand
-Lialians—half of them Litia's friends, and half of them
-Mahina's—were collected.  Mahina and Litia themselves,
-each defiantly dressed in all the bridal finery
-she could muster, stood in the forefront of the crowd,
-exchanging looks of death and hatred.  It had come to
-this with the two women now, that either would have
-cheerfully died a death of slow torture, if by so doing
-only she could have prevented the other from winning.
-That she might miss the glories of the throne was not
-the prominent thought in Litia's mind—only that
-Mahina might secure them and triumph over her; and
-the self-same fancy agitated the ample breast of her
-rival, as the two stood in the cool twilight, within
-sound of the breakers on the reef, waiting with choking
-anxiety for Ruru's words.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"People of Liali!" read the herald impressively,
-striking an attitude, with one bare leg advanced: "His
-Majesty King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. of
-Liali, being sovereign by right divine, and the Lord's
-Anointed, also High Chief of all the Liali Islands as
-descendant of the Sacred Lizard, has decided to marry,
-according to the custom of his forefathers, and give the
-land of Liali an heir to our mighty crown.  The wedding
-will take place in the mission church to-morrow, at noon
-and there will be a collection afterwards for expenses!
-If anyone comes drunk to church, or puts nothing in
-the plate, he will be turned out.  His Majesty hereby
-announces that, in order to save war and dissension
-among his loyal subjects, and to teach some princesses
-to pay him proper respect, he has decided to give the
-honour of his hand to Princess Vaiti, daughter of Princess
-Rangi of Atiu, deceased, and Captain Saxon, of the
-schooner </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span>.  God save the King, and you are all to
-go home without making a row."</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>It was a fine proclamation, but assuredly the order
-in the last clause asked too much of Lialian humanity.
-No one attempted to obey it.  The news was received
-first in a dead silence of amazement, and then by a storm
-of shrieks, howls, questions, a wild trampling and rushing
-to and fro, and, last of all, by a Homeric roar of
-laughter.  The Lialian possesses a rough but reliable
-sense of humour, practical joking being his especial
-delight; and it suddenly dawned upon the populace
-of Liali that the King had played the most stupendous
-practical joke upon them ever known in the history of
-the islands.  Therefore these light-hearted children of
-the sun, instead of raiding the palace in two separate
-factions, lay down and rolled upon the grass, or held
-helplessly on to one another, roaring with laughter.
-The utter disconcerting of Mahina and Litia, now that
-all party feeling was removed from the matter, further
-appealed to them as a jest of the finest sort, and
-witticisms that would have made a trooper blush were hurled
-upon the disconsolate maidens from all sides.  Some
-few there were who frowned at the triumph of a foreigner
-and a stranger; but Vaiti's arts had succeeded in making
-her popular, and the malcontents were borne down by
-the roar of public amusement and assent.  Vaiti herself,
-safely hidden in the Methodist mission house, listened
-to the laughter far off, and felt well pleased.  She had
-not been very sure how matters might go, and had
-therefore, at a bold stroke, won the favour of the Church
-by approaching the missionary, and assuring him of the
-extreme purity of her Methodism (she was, if anything,
-a pure heathen) and, in confidence, of the honour awaiting
-her.  The reverend gentleman, who had long sat on
-thorns by reason of the power of the Seventh Day
-Adventist, Christian Science, and Original Shaker
-missions in the islands, received her with delight, and
-handed her over to the care of his wife, who shortly
-afterwards informed him that the new light of the Church
-was, in her opinion, a "perfect minx"—but that she
-supposed it was as well, under the circumstances, to
-make to herself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness,
-as the Bible enjoined, and remain on intimate
-visiting terms with the palace.  So Vaiti spent the
-fateful evening under the secure protection of the
-Church itself, and claimed the same creditable patronage
-for the day of the wedding.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>What of Mahina and Litia?  The disappointed
-princesses, when the proclamation was read out, turned
-and stared at each other like tigresses robbed of a meal.
-Neither was going to be Queen of Liali—neither was
-going to scratch her rival's eyes out, and root up her hair,
-for the crime of securing the coveted honour.  The very
-bottom of the world had dropped out—what was to
-follow?</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>For a moment they continued to stare, each scanning
-the other's face under a new light—the light of common
-feeling.  Litia remembered that she and Mahina had
-been brought up almost as sisters in the palace of the
-late Queen.  Mahina recalled the time when she had
-almost died of measles, and Litia had nursed her through.
-They were both deceived, both deserted, and the friends
-of one could never crow offensively over the other now.
-The thought was mingled bitter-sweet, and the two
-burst out crying, and dropped into each other's arms,
-simultaneously vowing threats of vengeance against the
-treacherous interloper, which—unbacked by their
-war-like following of friends—they knew very well they
-would never be able to execute.  And the crowd dispersed
-as the sun went down.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>*      *      *      *      *</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 1em">
-</div>
-<p class="pfirst"><span>The </span><em class="italics">Sybil</em><span> made better time than was expected, after
-all.  Her white sails lifted against the blue, from behind
-the nearest island, just as the royal wedding party
-commenced its gorgeous procession to the church.  Before
-the ceremony was ended, the schooner had made the
-harbour and Saxon was ashore.  He came upon an
-utterly deserted town, and saw not a human being
-until he was halfway up to the church, outside of which
-he perceived an immense crowd, unable to enter.  Under
-a tree by the wayside sat one of the English traders
-who had failed to get a place.  He greeted Saxon
-uproariously, and asked him if this wasn't a proper go.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"What?" asked Saxon.  "Which is he marrying?"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"Oh, crikey! he doesn't know!" roared the trader—and
-fell back against the tree, suffocating with laughter,
-and utterly declining to explain.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Saxon, cursing him for a silly fool, tramped on towards
-the church.  The procession was coming out now, and
-he wanted to see the show, for though he might call the
-coffee-coloured Lialians niggers, he quite understood the
-position of King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., and
-the importance to all the islands of his choice.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He got upon a bank to see the better, fixed his
-long-sighted sailor eyes upon the chapel door, and saw a
-glittering vision emerge into the sunlight, amidst the
-cries and cheers of the people.  That was the King, in
-a gorgeous uniform, with his crown on his head and a
-long velvet mantle sweeping behind him ... and at
-his left hand stepped a tall, stately, slender figure, also
-crowned, and dazzlingly dressed all in glittering gold....
-Not Mahina, certainly; not Litia either—Who was
-it, then?  It could never be—but it was—Vaiti!</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>Saxon staggered off the bank, sat down, jumped up
-again, and clapped his hands.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"By ——, if it isn't like her, through and through!"
-he cried.  "By ——, I'm proud of her!  Queen of
-Liali!  Queen of Liali!  But——"</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>He stopped, and shook his head with a knowing
-laugh.  He was not very sober.</span></p>
-<p class="pnext"><span>"But—God help the King!" he said.</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 3em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span>THE END</span></p>
-<div class="vspace" style="height: 3em">
-</div>
-<p class="center pfirst"><span class="small">PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND ECCLES.</span></p>
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-.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

-

-.. meta::

-   :PG.Id: 50663

-   :PG.Title: Vaiti of the Islands

-   :PG.Released: 2015-12-10

-   :PG.Rights: Public Domain

-   :PG.Producer: Al Haines

-   :DC.Creator: Beatrice Grimshaw

-   :DC.Title: Vaiti of the Islands

-   :DC.Language: en

-   :DC.Created: 1920

-   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

-

-====================

-VAITI OF THE ISLANDS

-====================

-

-.. clearpage::

-

-.. pgheader::

-

-.. container:: titlepage center white-space-pre-line

-

-   .. vspace:: 4

-

-   .. class:: xx-large bold

-

-      VAITI OF THE ISLANDS

-

-   .. vspace:: 2

-

-   .. class:: medium bold

-

-      BY BEATRICE GRIMSHAW

-

-   .. vspace:: 3

-

-   .. class:: medium

-

-      LONDON

-      GEORGE NEWNES, LIMITED

-      SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND, W.C.

-

-   .. vspace:: 4

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CONTENTS

-

-.. class:: noindent small

-

-   CHAPTER

-

-.. class:: noindent

-

-`Prologue`_

-

-.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

-

-I. `The Pearl Lagoon`_

-II. `A Race for a Fortune`_

-III. `The Flower behind the Ear`_

-IV. `The Black Viri`_

-V. `A Diamond Web`_

-VI. `Marooned`_

-VII. `The Turning of the Tables`_

-VIII. `The White Man of Nalolo`_

-IX. `The Lost Island`_

-X. `What came of the Paris Dress`_

-XI. `A Dead Man's Revenge`_

-XII. `Breaking the Mana`_

-XIII. `The Game Played Out`_

-XIV. `How the Witch-Doctor got his Money back`_

-XV. `The Calamity of Coral Bay`_

-XVI. `The Fate of the Lieutenant`_

-XVII. `Invaders in Tanna`_

-XVIII. `A Cannibal Party`_

-XIX. `The Rival Princesses`_

-XX. `Queen after all`_

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`PROLOGUE`:

-

-.. class:: center x-large bold

-

-   VAITI OF THE ISLANDS

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   PROLOGUE

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-It was in the seventies, long ago.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-Summer—yet a slow grey dawn, lingering long

-in the sky.  August—yet a chilly morning, crisping

-the landlocked waters of the bay with cold knife-edges

-of foam.  Out at sea, the wild white horses plunging

-madly under the whip of the sunrise wind; the bar

-beginning to thunder.  Inshore, beneath the green

-slope of the castle hill, small angry ripples beating and

-fretting the untrampled sand.  Dead rose-leaves from

-the gardens floating among the seaweed; a torn bird's-nest,

-flung down by the wind, lying on the edge of the

-steep cliff pathway....  It was still the time of summer,

-yet, too surely, autumn had come.

-

-The sodden leaves lay thick in the bottom of the

-boat when the man seized it by the gunwale and ran

-it down the beach into the snatching waves....  Oh,

-an autumn day indeed, here in wild Caithness, though

-summer was still at its fairest in kinder lands.  And

-in the heart of the man who was rowing fast through

-the angry dawn light, to the tall schooner yacht that

-swung and tore at her moorings out in the bay, there

-was autumn too, with winter close at hand.

-

-All so long ago! who remembers?

-

-Not the newspapers which, in a day or two after,

-shrieked the scandal broadcast, east and west.  Not

-the guests of the castle house-party—they are dead, or

-old, which is half of death, since then.  Not the Prince

-whose dignity had been insulted by the outbreak of a

-vulgar card scandal in his very presence—he struck

-the titled owner of the house off the list of his intimates

-forthwith, and then forgot about it and him.  Not the

-colonel of the famous regiment, who found out defalcations

-in the funds belonging to the mess, a few days

-after, and knew why his most promising young officer

-had done the unforgiveable thing—for the Ashanti

-spears ended life and memory for him out on the African

-plains, before even Piccadilly had made an end of talking.

-Not the Royal Yacht Squadron—the reported loss of

-the famous *Paquita* at sea, with her disgraced owner

-on board, is a tale that even the oldest *habitue* of Cowes

-could not tell you to-day....  No one remembers.

-When the beautiful white schooner spread her wings

-below the castle wall, and beat her way like a frightened

-butterfly out to the stormy sea, she sailed away in

-silence, and she and hers were known no more.

-

-Yet, but for that stormy day in the Highlands, and

-the boat that fled to sea, these tales of far-off lands had

-never been told.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE PEARL LAGOON`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER I

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE PEARL LAGOON

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-"Where's the old man?"

-

-"Old man drunk," replied Vaiti indifferently.  She

-had learned to play "The Maiden's Prayer," maltreat

-three European languages, and cultivate a waist in her

-Tahitian convent school.  But that was five years ago

-now, and Vaiti's "papalangi" verbs had dropped from

-her quite as soon, and as naturally, as her "Belitani"

-stays.

-

-"Why can't he wake up and give us an observation?"

-commented the mate indignantly.  "It would be hard

-if a man mightn't enjoy himself in port; but we're

-four days out now, and he's as bad as ever, lyin' all the

-time on the settee like a——"

-

-"You better mind too much what you say my father!"  Vaiti

-had set one shapely olive hand on the deck, and

-sprung to her feet like a flying-fish making a leap.  She

-was taller than the sturdy, red-haired mate, as she

-stood up on the poop, her bare feet well apart, her white

-muslin loose gown swelling out as she leaned to the roll

-of the steamer, and her black-brown eyes, deep-set under

-fine brows as straight as a ruler, staring down the blue

-eyes of the man.

-

-"Very sorry, I'm sure; no offence meant," said the

-mate humbly.  "But we want an observation, and he

-ain't no good.  Why, you know as well as me that he'll

-be like this, off and on, all the voyage now; we've both

-of us seen it before."

-

-Vaiti stamped her bare feet on the deck.

-

-"I know—I know!  I try all the way from Apia

-wake him up—no good!  I tell you, Alliti"—the mate's

-name, Harris, usually took this form in the pigeon-English

-of Polynesia—"this very bad time for him to

-get 'quiffy.  Too much bad time.  Never mind.  Get

-the sextan'.  I take sun myself."

-

-The mate ran down the companion and into the

-cabin, where the captain's six feet two of drunken

-ineptitude sprawled over most of the space available

-for passing.  He stopped for a moment to look at the

-heavy, unconscious face—a handsome face, with the

-remains of refinement about it; for Captain Saxon had

-been a gentleman once, and his name (which was certainly

-not Saxon then) had appeared among the lists of

-"members deceased" in the annual reports of all the

-best London clubs of the 'seventies....  Why Saxon

-died, and why he came to life again in the South Pacific

-some years later, is a tale that need not be told, even if

-it is guessed.  Many such substantial ghosts roam the

-South Seas unexorcised—many a man whose name

-adorns a memorial tablet, guarded by weeping marble

-angels, on the walls of some ivied English Church, is

-busy conferring a peculiar fitness upon the

-occupation of those guardian seraphs, down among "The

-Islands," where he and the devil may do as they please.

-

-"'Og!" observed the mate, as he passed through

-to the captain's cabin, and fetched out the sextant.

-"'Alf-caste or quarter-caste, Vaiti's too good a daughter

-for him, by the length of the mainmast and the mizzen

-together.  She's got all his brains—Lord, how she

-learned navigation from him, like a cat lapping up milk,

-when she set her mind to it!—and none of his villainy.

-At least——"  The mate paused on the companion,

-and filled his pipe.

-

-"At least——" he repeated, and broke off the remark

-unfinished.

-

-"Sun coming out nice now," he said, handing the

-sextant to the girl.  Vaiti made her observation with

-the ease of an old sea-captain, and went below to work

-it out.  It was true, as Harris said, that she had plenty

-of brains, though they did not lie along the lines of

-"The Maiden's Prayer" and Dr. Smith's English

-Grammar.  And, whatever the legal status of poor

-derelict Saxon, or the mate, might be, no one who had

-ever climbed the side of the schooner *Sybil* could doubt

-the obvious fact that the real commanding officer of

-that vessel was Vaiti herself.

-

-"What d'ye make it?" asked the mate, looking over

-her shoulder.  Vaiti, always sparing of her words, pointed

-to the figures.  Harris whistled.

-

-"Ain't we off our course, just!" he said, drawing

-his finger down the chart.

-

-"No," said Vaiti.

-

-"Why, hang it all, Cap"—the girl was accorded the

-title, half in fun, half through habit, a good deal oftener

-than her father—"we ain't making for the Delgada

-reefs, are we?  I don't pretend to be any navigator,

-but I do know the course for Papeëte."

-

-"What you think not matter," said Vaiti, rolling

-up the chart.  "Make him eight bell.  You go take

-wheel; I ki-ki [dinner], then I take him."

-

-"What's the course?" demanded the mate eagerly.

-

-"Nor'-west by west," answered Vaiti, going into her

-cabin, and slamming the door against Harris's

-open-mouthed questions.

-

-An Aitutaki boy with a chain of red berries in his

-hair, and a scarlet and yellow "pareo" (kilt) for all

-clothing, brought up the dinner.  Vaiti ate her meal

-alone, and then came on deck to take over the wheel,

-keeping a determined silence that Harris hardly cared

-to break....  And yet—Nor'-west by west, with the

-wind fair for distant Papeëte, and the deadly Delgadas

-lying about a quarter point off their present course, not

-ten miles away!

-

-"She's a hard case, bo'sun," he remarked to that official

-as they sat down together.  "She has me fair scared

-with the course she's steering; and yet, you may sling

-me over the side in a shotted hammock for the sharks'es

-ki-ki, if she don't know a lot more than the old man

-himself.  Ain't she a daisy, too!  Look at her there

-'olding the wheel, as upright as a cocoanut palm, and

-as pretty and plump as a—as a——"

-

-"Porker," concluded the bo'sun, pouring an imperial

-pint of tea into his mug.

-

-"You ain't got no poetry in you," said the mate

-disgustedly.

-

-"Nor nothing else," growled the bo'sun.  "Ain't

-you going to help that curry, and give a man something

-to put in his own inside after stowing the whale-boat

-full of beef and biscuits?"

-

-"The whale-boat?  (That's plenty, bo'sun; I've

-got to live as well as you)."

-

-"Ay, biscuits, beef, and water; compass and sextant.

-She give the order a while ago."

-

-"What's in the wind now?"

-

-"I don't ask questions, so I'm never told no lies."

-

-"I do, though," said the mate, in a spasm of authority,

-deserting his dinner to spring up the companion and

-join Vaiti at the wheel.  The bo'sun's mahogany face

-broke up into a score of curving wrinkles, and his

-shoulders shook a little, as he watched the scene on

-deck.  Quite mechanically he transferred the rest of

-the curry to his plate, and while clearing the dish with

-the precision of a machine, kept an eye on the couple

-at the wheel.  He saw Harris ask an eager question,

-and repeat it more eagerly.  He saw Vaiti jerk a brief

-answer, and the mate speak again.  Then he saw the

-girl swing round on her heel, lift one slender hand, and

-bring it down across Harris's cheek with an emphasis

-that left a crimson mark upon the polished brown.  He

-saw the mate take a step forward, and look at the

-handsome helmswoman as though he were very much minded

-to pay back the correction after the manner of man in

-general where a pretty vixen is concerned.  The two

-figures stared at each other, eye to eye, for a full minute.

-Vaiti's brown eyes, keen as twin swords, never wavered;

-her lip was insolent and unrelenting.  The mate's

-half-angry, half mischievous expression dissolved into an

-embarrassed grin; then he turned tail and hurried down

-the hatch.

-

-"She's a tigress in 'uman form," he declared.  "If

-the old man—or any other—was to lay 'is little finger

-on me—but there! who cares what a scratchin' cat

-does?  I'd as soon marry a shark—I would!"

-

-"You've as much chance," granted the bo'sun.

-

-"Talk of sharks!" said the mate, gazing ruefully at

-the table and the empty dish.

-

-Some two hours later, a milky gleam on the port bow

-attracted the mate's attention as he stood on the poop.

-A Kanaka sailor had just taken the wheel, and Vaiti was

-below.

-

-"Breakers on the port bow!" sang out Harris.

-

-Vaiti was up in a minute.

-

-"I t'row water on my father's head," she said coolly—"but

-no good; he too much sick, he see snake by

-and by, I think.  You and Oki carry him into him

-cabin, and come back pretty quick.  I see this t'rough

-myself."

-

-"See *what*?" demanded the mate, on the last verge

-of frenzy.

-

-"Not know myself yet," answered Vaiti, giving one

-of her rare laughs.  She seemed in a very good humour

-for once.

-

-When the mate came out a little later, and the sailor

-went back to the neglected wheel, Vaiti was standing

-by the whale-boat, wearing an air of perfect self-possession

-and a complete suit of her father's white ducks.

-The sight was no novelty to Harris, but it came

-upon him now, as usually, with a new shock of admiration.

-

-"Isn't she an outrighter!" he observed to the

-unsympathetic bo'sun.

-

-"She certainly is, if outrighter's French for an

-undacent young woman," replied that officer sourly.

-Harris did not hear him, for the significance of the

-morning's mystery had just burst on his mind.  He

-had not spent ten years in the Pacific for nothing and

-the sight of Tai, a diver from Penrhyn, standing beside

-Vaiti, with a water-glass in his hand, spelt "pearl-shell"

-to the eyes of the mate as clearly as if the magic

-word had been printed in letters three feet long.  Vaiti

-flashed her white teeth at him.

-

-"Tai, me, three boys, we go into lagoon," she said.

-"Suppose somethings happen, you find course for Apia

-written out, cabin table; you take ship back, put

-captain in hospital."

-

-"By ——, but you're a corker, Vaiti!" cried Harris

-admiringly.  "Where'd you hear anything about the

-Delgadas?  No ship goes near them that can help it;

-they're a regular ocean cemetery."

-

-"You 'member officer from gun-boat, Apia?"

-

-"Ay!" said Harris.  He did remember the lad, and

-the rather inexplicable friendliness shown him by

-Saxon and Vaiti during the stay in port of the

-*Alligator*.

-

-"He show me photo Delgadas.  *Alligator* he been go

-all round him, mark him right for chart, because he all

-wrong.  Officer give my father bearings; say plenty talk

-and show photo.  He dam fool officer, I think; he not

-know that kind place mean pearl-shell, and we not tell

-anything."

-

-Harris mounted the rigging, and surveyed the reef

-from the main cross-trees.  It was the best part of a

-mile away; a creaming circle of foam on the sea's blue

-surface, enclosing a pallid spot of green.  Vaiti, who had

-followed him, flung one arm round the mast, and, leaning

-outwards towards the horizon, surveyed the reef

-intently.  Within that ring of foam—the grave of many

-a gallant ship that had sailed the fair Pacific as bravely

-as their own little schooner—might lie many thousands

-of pounds.  The repurchase of the *Sybil*, once Saxon's

-sole property, now partly owned by a trading syndicate;

-the regaining of her captain's lost position in decent

-society—perhaps the realisation of half a hundred

-luxurious dreams, dreamed on coral beaches under the

-romance-breeding splendours of the tropic moon—all

-this, and more, hung on the chances of the next few

-hours.

-

-There was silence for the space of a minute or two,

-as the man and woman swung between earth and

-heaven, staring across the sun-dazzled plain of sea.

-Then, in one instant, the dream broke, and the rainbow

-fragments of that bubble of glory scattered themselves

-east and west.  For across the bar of the level horizon

-slipped a small, pointed, pearl-coloured sail, growing as

-they watched it, flying past, and heading all too surely

-for the Delgadas reef.

-

-Vaiti flung herself round a backstay, and slid down

-to the deck, with a word on her lips that would have

-justified the bo'sun's recent judgment, could he have

-caught it.  Harris followed, swearing fully and freely.

-It was evident to both that the newcomer had special

-business with the reef as well as themselves; and they

-wasted no time, acting in concord, and without dispute,

-after a fashion that was new on board the *Sybil*.  Within

-half an hour they had reduced the distance between

-the ship and the reef to a quarter of a mile; nearer

-than that even Vaiti did not care to go, for the weather

-looked unsettled, though the wind was off the reef.

-The whale-boat, with a picked crew, was lowered, and

-sent flying towards the break in the reef, while the

-mate, burning to be in her, but conscious that his

-duty must keep him on the ship, paced excitedly up and

-down the deck, glass in hand, watching the advance of

-the stranger ship from time to time.  She was a good

-two hours' sail away as yet; and surely first possession

-was worth something, even out here in the lawless South

-Seas!

-

-

-

-

-

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-.. _`A RACE FOR A FORTUNE`:

-

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-

-   CHAPTER II

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   A RACE FOR A FORTUNE

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-Before an hour was over, the wind had freshened

-considerably, and the mate began to feel anxious for the

-safety of the boat, in case he should be obliged to run

-for it from the neighbourhood of the treacherous reef.

-That Vaiti would return an instant sooner because

-of the threatening weather he did not expect, knowing

-the dare-devil recklessness of her character too well.

-It was certain, however, that he might lose the ship,

-and incidentally himself, by waiting too long; and it

-was equally certain that Saxon, once recovered, would

-put a bullet through his mate's head if Vaiti came to

-harm.  And all the time that threatening sail was

-growing larger and larger.

-

-It was an unspeakable relief, though no less of a

-surprise, when he saw that the boat was actually heading

-towards the ship again, the sail up and every oar hard

-at work.  He did not remember having seen Tai go

-down, in any of his hurried inspections through the glass,

-and the time was certainly short.  What did it all

-mean?

-

-The meaning became sufficiently clear as soon as the

-boat approached the ship, but not through the medium

-of eye or ear.  A strong stench of rotting fish struck

-the mate's nostrils almost before the boat was within

-hail, and instantly enlightened him.  No one who has

-ever smelt the terrible smell of the pearl-oyster removed

-from its ocean bed, and left to putrefy in a tropical sun,

-can mistake the odour.  Harris understood at once that

-the strange ship had been there before, and that Vaiti was

-bringing back a sample of the last catch, left out to rot

-during the vessel's temporary absence.

-

-The *Sybil* was leaping dangerously when the boat came

-alongside, but Vaiti snatched at the lowered rope, and

-swung herself up over the bulwarks before any of the

-native crew.  Tai, following her, brought a sack of

-hideously smelling carrion, and dumped it down on the

-deck.  The mate's eyes glistened.

-

-"I find great lot lying on reef," said Vaiti, with an

-apparent calmness that might have deceived any one

-who knew her less accurately than the mate.  "I think

-been there two week.  C'lismas Island, he one week

-away, good weather.  Papalangi C'lismas Island belong

-plenty diving gear.  You see?"

-

-"Rather!" said Harris gloomily.  "Game up, eh?"

-

-"I think you no man at all," spat Vaiti suddenly,

-swinging into the cabin.  Harris, not especially put out,

-gave a hand to hauling in the boat, remarking to the

-bo'sun, who was picking over the heap of decaying

-pearl-shell, "Don't know as one could say the same about her,

-lump of solid devilment that she is!  But this looks

-like the end of all our 'opes, as they say in the plays;

-don't it?"

-

-In a minute or two Vaiti appeared again, wearing a

-dignified muslin gown with three frills on its tail, and

-holding a chart in her hands.  She eyed the horizon

-narrowly, and ordered the ship to be put about, a

-manoeuvre which headed the *Sybil* straight for the

-oncoming sail.  It was now evident that the stranger

-ship was a schooner of some eighty or ninety tons,

-rather larger than the *Sybil*, and nearly as fast.  No one

-on board had the smallest doubt of her mission, even

-had that rotting heap of shell not been there to offer

-evidence.  Pearl-shell lagoons, with their shell worth

-£100 to £200 per ton, and their pearls (if any are found,

-which is not always certain) worth a fortune for half a

-handful, are the gold mines of the South Sea world;

-the very birds of the sea seem at times to carry the news

-of such a discovery, and spread it far and wide.

-

-The *Sybil* gathered way, and sped fast towards the

-stranger ship.  The sea was blackening and rising, but

-there was not very much wind as yet.  Vaiti sat

-cross-legged on the deck, studying her chart in the waning

-light of the gusty afternoon.  It was some minutes

-before she laid it down and stood up to speak, steadying

-herself with one hand against the deck-house, for the

-schooner was now rolling heavily.

-

-"Alliti," she said, "suppose you got heart one small

-fowl inside you, I get captain's Winchester, my levolver,

-you and bosun's levolver, and we send that people Davy

-Jones, or go ourself, pretty quick.  But you not got heart,

-though you big man, and old man he all time sick.  Now,

-you listen too much what I tell you.  You run alongside

-ship, you go on board.  You say captain sick, no

-one take sun, we get off course, nearly wreck on Delgadas.

-Then you ask captain give bearings reef, and you look

-at him chart too much careful, see if this line mark—here."

-

-She put the point of her small forefinger on the chart

-she held, and showed two or three newly-ruled lines in

-red ink, enclosing a large space east and south of Samoa.

-These were the boundaries of the area lately annexed

-by New Zealand, and she was exceedingly anxious to

-know if the stranger knew as much about the significance

-of that matter as she did.

-

-"Then," she went on, "you ask him if he been Wellington,

-say we wanting news——"

-

-"What the (adjective noun) for?" demanded the mate.

-

-"Because I say, pauki!" (pig) flashed Vaiti.  "No!—you

-got head of pig, heart of fowl.  You bo'sun, you

-know I get you through this all right, suppose you

-trusting me—you come here."

-

-Harris, shaking his great shoulders in an easy laugh,

-swung down on to the main deck, and began ordering

-about the crew.  He had an enormous admiration for

-Vaiti, even when she boxed his ears, but he thought her

-special peculiarities of character rather a trying obstacle

-in the way of his enjoying the easy life beloved of South

-Sea mates.

-

-The acidulous bo'sun rose from his seat on deck, holding

-out an unclean palm, in the midst of which glittered two

-fine pearls.

-

-"I've been through that little lot, and got these, which

-do look like biz, ma'am," he observed.  "As to people

-havin' fowls' hearts, or pigs' heads, I'm not prepared to

-pass judgment.  But I don't own to neither myself,

-and if you say it's a fight, a fight it is.  Or if you've got

-a better plan in that uncommon level 'ead of yours, I'm

-ready to stand by."

-

-"You something like a man," pronounced the

-commanding officer in the muslin skirt.  "You listen.

-I tell him all again."

-

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-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

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-

-

-

-An hour later the bo'sun, very wet and draggled,

-climbed over the bulwarks of the *Sybil*, and the schooner

-*Margaret Macintyre*, of Sydney, slipped behind into the

-falling dusk.

-

-"Said he was thirteen weeks out from Sydney, ma'am,"

-reported the ambassador.  "Four weeks out from Apia,

-gettin' copra round here and there, and there wasn't

-no Wellington news anywhere, as he remembered.  Nice

-new chart, with no lines of that kind ruled on it

-anywhere.  As to where he got the divin' gear that

-was in the cabin, or what kind of copra he reckoned

-to pick up on the Delgadas, he didn't say, not bein'

-asked."

-

-Vaiti stood still to consider, a beautifully poised black

-silhouette against the yellow oblong of the lamp-lit

-cabin door.

-

-"I think it all right; he not been near Wellington,"

-she pronounced at last.  "Alliti!  How her head?"

-

-"Sou'-west by south," answered the mate from the wheel.

-

-"Keep her so."

-

-"Ay, ay, sir!" laughed the mate.

-

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-

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-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-Every one in the South Pacific knew that the *Sybil*

-was a marvel of speed, and that she had not been originally

-built for trading, though nobody could tell exactly how

-Saxon had acquired such a clipper.  It was a popular

-theory that she was a millionaire's yacht from San

-Francisco, which he had stolen and subsequently

-disguised.  He was known, however, to have possessed her

-for more than twenty years, and was now as completely

-identified with her as her own mainmast; so that any

-doubts as to the honesty of the way by which he might

-originally have obtained her were now of a purely

-academic nature.

-

-Famous as she was for speed, the record of her passage

-from the Delgadas to Wellington fairly astonished the

-Islands, when it came to be told.  They had a fair wind

-almost all the way, with two or three lively nights when

-the little vessel, hard driven under the utmost pressure

-of the canvas, piled up the knots like a liner.  Saxon

-continued delirious, but was fortunately quiet.  Harris,

-and Gray the boatswain, though unenlightened as to

-the cause of the *Sybil's* sudden southward flight, fully

-understood that the possession of the pearl lagoon

-hung in the balance, and worked like half-a-dozen

-to supplement the efforts of the scanty Kanaka crew.

-

-Vaiti interfered little with the working of the ship,

-but she kept a look-out that hardly left her time for sleep

-or food; although the *Sybil*, like most Pacific ships,

-was allowed, under ordinary circumstances, to chance

-it, day and night.  Hour after hour she sat cross-legged

-on deck, watching the unbroken rim of the black horizon,

-or paced up and down the poop, silent and grave, in her

-lace and muslin fripperies, as a naval officer on the bridge.

-What she was looking for no one knew, but during that

-wild ten days of foam and smother, cracking sails and

-straining sheets, her silent watchfulness infected the

-men themselves, and eyes were constantly turned to

-scan the empty, seething plain over which they flew.

-

-It was drawing on towards dusk of the tenth day, and

-the sky was beginning to light fires of angry copper-purple,

-high in the storm-driven west, when Vaiti, of

-a sudden, stopped dead in her endless walk, and looked

-with lips apart and eyes narrowed deep beneath her

-brows over the weather rail.  All this time they had not

-sighted a single sail or a solitary funnel.  They had

-been well off the track of New Zealand bound ships,

-and the Pacific waters are wide.  But now they were

-drawing near to Wellington, and there was nothing to

-be astonished at in the sight of another sail creeping up

-over the horizon, except, indeed, the fact that it was

-momentarily growing larger and gaining on the *Sybil*.

-There was scarce another schooner afloat from New

-Guinea to the Paumotus that could have done as

-much.

-

-The mate came up behind Vaiti, and handed her a

-glass.  She looked through it, lowered it, raised it, and

-looked again with a steady gaze, and suddenly flung it

-out of her hand across the deck.

-

-Harris caught it deftly and asked, with the

-constitutional calm that alone saved his reason when Vaiti

-took over command, "What's to pay now?"

-

-"She got auxiliary," said Vaiti, with a note of agony

-in her voice.

-

-"What if she has?  Isn't any vessel free to carry an

-auxiliary that can stand the stink of the oil and the

-cussedness of the injin?"

-

-"I go see captain," said Vaiti, flashing down the

-companion.

-

-Saxon was better to-day, and almost in full possession

-of his senses.  Vaiti went to the medicine chest; took

-out a hypodermic syringe, filled it with careful accuracy

-from a tiny dark blue bottle, and lifted her father's

-arm as he lay limp and weak, but mending fast, in his bunk.

-

-"Good girl, take care of your old father," he murmured

-in island Maori as she slipped the needle-point painlessly

-under the skin, and the powerful drug began to race

-through every vein of the inert body.  The effect was

-rapid and decisive.  Saxon sat up against his pillows

-in five minutes, clear-headed though weak, and asked if

-the *Sybil* had not sighted the Delgadas yet.

-

-"Listen, father," said Vaiti, speaking fluently in the

-low, soft tongue that the two had used together all

-her life—the Maori language Saxon had first learned

-from the pretty brown girl, dead this many years, whom

-he had stolen from her South Sea island to sail the blue

-Pacific at his side in the days of long ago.  "Listen.

-There is little time, and we are in great need.  We came

-to the reef, and the shell was there truly, but a strange

-ship had been before us.  Even as we lay there she

-returned from Christmas Island with diving gear.  I

-sent Gray on board to look at her chart and find out if

-she had been to Wellington; and it seemed that she

-had not the new line of annexation marked on the chart,

-where New Zealand this year added to herself all that

-lay within a certain space of the sea; also she had not

-been south of Auckland.  So then, knowing that we,

-if we asked the Government, might have the atoll

-granted us for twenty years and take possession above

-the people of the other ship, I made sail for Wellington;

-and we are now but one day away when this ship

-appears again, chasing us.  Where the suspicion has

-waked in their hearts, or when, is nothing; but that

-they have thought and discovered our desire, that is

-certain."

-

-"Give the *Sybil* all sail, daughter, and she will leave

-the other.  What is this talk?" asked Saxon, raising

-himself on his elbow to look out of the glooming circle

-of the port.

-

-"But the ship has 'auxiliary,' my father, and she

-will have passed out of sight before the morning."

-

-"Oh, she has, has she?" grunted the captain, dropping

-back into his native tongue.  "What are you going to

-do about it?"

-

-He had noted a glimmer in Vaiti's eye that told him

-that she was not yet at the end of her resources.  The

-Maori guile and the English daring were united to some

-purpose in this strange creature that he had given to the

-world.

-

-"I will tell," she said, standing up to her full height.

-"But you must give the order, my father, for Alliti

-drags on the rein these days.  Let the bale of trawl-net,

-and the Manila rope, be taken from the cargo, and let us

-cross the bows of this ship, and drop them across her

-path.  The keel will run clean, but the screw will foul,

-and they will creep like a bird with a broken wing till

-daylight.  Then, if the sea has grown less, they will

-send down a diver and clear the screws; but we

-shall be almost into Wellington, and the lagoon is ours."

-

-"You are worthy to be the daughter of a brave man,"

-answered Saxon in Maori, sinking back wearily on his

-pillow.  "Go, then; and if we lose the ship, we lose

-her; there is great wealth to gain, and a man must die

-at one time, if not another.  I am tired.  I will sleep."

-

-Vaiti left him, and hurried back on deck.  The purple

-dusk was already beginning to gather, and the green

-starboard light of the *Margaret Macintyre* gleamed like

-a glow-worm a mile or so behind.  She was drawing

-very near; there was no time to lose.

-

-"Alliti!" called Vaiti.  "My father he better; he

-send word to take trawl-net and Malila out of hold,

-make come across that ship him path, foul him sclew.

-Suppose you not afraid, you bring us close, drop net and

-Malila."

-

-Harris's hide was thick, but Vaiti knew how to pierce

-it when she chose; and the man had courage enough,

-in streaks.  Vaiti had hit the mark when she called

-him chicken-hearted in fighting, but there was no

-manoeuvre of the ship too risky for him to undertake

-and carry through with perfect coolness.

-

-"All right, my lady," he nodded.  "Don't forget me

-and Gray when it comes to sharing out the swag, that's

-all."

-

-The net and the rope were brought up, and the latter

-knotted here and there to make a hideous tangle of it.

-Then the *Sybil's* lights were put out, even the cabin lamp

-being extinguished.  The stars pricked themselves out

-in sudden sharpness on the great blue chart of heaven

-above, and the waste of dark rolling water all around

-grew large and lonely.

-

-You are not to suppose that Saxon's daughter did

-not see and feel these things—did not hear the voiceless

-talk of the great seas on starry evenings, or feel her mortal

-body almost rapt away in the ecstasy of a black midnight

-and a shrieking storm; just as you, perhaps, who think

-that no one ever shared such experiences with yourself,

-may feel.  It is not only the blameless tourist, with his

-daily diary, and his books of travel teaching him how

-and when to "enthuse," who enjoys the splendid

-pageant of the seas.  Vaiti, as the most indulgent

-chronicler must confess, had more than a spice of her

-father's villainy in her composition, not to speak of

-whatever devilry her Maori forebears might have bequeathed

-to her.  She was unscrupulous, ruthless, and crafty

-as a general rule; she was engaged in a deed of the very

-shadiest description to-night—yet, as she stood with

-her hands on the wheel, and her eyes on the green

-starboard light of the oncoming ship, steering the *Sybil*

-to something extremely like certain destruction, she

-knew that the Southern Cross was rising, clear and

-beautiful, above its gem-like pointers, just ahead; and

-that a little sliver of young moon, crystal-silver against

-the dark, was slipping up the sky to her left.  The thought

-just grazed her mind that this might be the last time

-the moon would ever rise over the Pacific for her.  She

-smiled a little in the dusk, and steered steadily ahead.

-There were no "streaks" in the composition of Vaiti's

-spirit.

-

-A short tack to the starboard became necessary.

-Harris put the ship about at a lift of Vaiti's hand.  It

-grew very dark; a cloud was over the moon, and the

-stars were dimmed by driving vapour.  The wind was

-increasing; the schooner lay over with its weight, and

-the foam gurgled along her clean-ran sides.  Still the

-*Margaret Macintyre* came on, stately and unsuspicious,

-all sail set, and the beat of the little screw distinctly

-audible through the night.

-

-Vaiti signalled again to put the ship about, and as

-soon as the great booms had creaked across the deck.

-gave over the wheel to Harris.

-

-"Run him just as he head now," she said softly, "and

-bring him too much close; so (double adjective) close

-to ship he scrape the (qualified) paint off him.  I go do

-rest."

-

-Harris, humming "Good-bye, Dolly Gray," took

-the wheel over.  If he had any doubts as to Vaiti's

-purpose, the vigour of her language would have

-dispersed them.  Vaiti never swore unless she was

-exceedingly in earnest.

-

-The trawl-net and the tangle of Manila were hanging

-over the stern, held up by a single rope.  Vaiti glided

-to the rail, holding a sharp knife in her hand—("I

-always *did* think she kept one somewhere among her

-frilligigs," commented Harris silently, as he caught the

-flash of the steel)—and waited, still as a statue.

-

-Presently out of the darkness shot a hail, accompanied

-by a perfect constellation of oaths.  Its apparent object

-was to ascertain the *Sybil's* reason for steering such a

-course.  The *Sybil* answered not a word, but steered

-the course some more.

-

-The hail, at the second time of repeating, became a

-yell, with a strong note of terror in it.  On came the

-*Sybil*, a dim, unlit tower of blackness, taking as much

-notice of the shouts as the *Flying Dutchman*.  Those on

-board the *Margaret Macintyre* gave themselves up for

-lost.  There was even a rush made for one of the boats.

-But the threatening shape swept past her bows, so near

-that the furious captain could have tossed a biscuit

-on board—so near that the *Sybil's* Kanaka crew, thinking

-the "papalangi" officers meant to ram the stranger,

-uttered war-cries wherein pure delight was mingled with

-overjoyed surprise.

-

-It was all over in a minute, and the *Sybil* was well

-away on the *Margaret Macintyre's* port side before

-the latter vessel discovered, through the medium of a

-horrible jar from the engine-room and a powerful odour

-of oil, that the screw was badly fouled, leaving them,

-like St. Paul with nothing to do but make the best of

-circumstances, and "wish that it were day."

-

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-

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-

-

-

-December weather is hot in Wellington, and it was

-now close to Christmas.  Perhaps that was why the

-senior member of the trading firm that had taken over

-part ownership of the *Sybil* for an unpaid debt thought

-his eyes were deceived by the glare of the sun when

-he saw a white schooner of singularly graceful lines

-lying alongside one of the wharves on a date when

-her engagements plainly demanded her presence in

-Tahiti.

-

-When, however, he met Saxon and his daughter, a

-few minutes afterwards, on Lambton Quay, he understood

-that his eyes were in excellent order.  So, it soon

-appeared, was his tongue.  He was a gentleman of

-Scottish extraction, and it hurt him badly to see possible

-profits thrown away.

-

-Saxon let him have his say, and merely laughed for

-answer.

-

-"Come into the Occidental, and Vaiti and I'll tell you

-something worth all the trade that you'd take out of

-Papeëte in ten years," he said.  "I'm going to own the

-ship again before New Year's Day, and paint this good

-old town scarlet as well.  You'll see."

-

-And the man of money-bags, anxious to see, went into

-the hotel.

-

-Vaiti, in a fit of perversity, declined to come in.  She

-knew only too well that, in Saxon's impecunious

-condition, there was no hope of getting their discovery

-effectively worked save at a price that would leave very

-little change over for the present possessors of the

-lagoon—even if the captain had been quite sober, which he

-was not.  They had got the grant, and had furthermore

-had the satisfaction of noting that, day after day,

-Wellington Harbour remained empty of the hardly-used

-*Margaret Macintyre*.  It was evident that her

-people, whoever they were, had tamely accepted defeat.

-There was no standing against a grant from the

-Government of New Zealand—no matter how acquired.

-But all this did not alter the fact that there was not going

-to be a great deal for the *Sybil*, and her captain, and her

-captain's daughter—especially the latter.  It was there

-that the sting lay.  Vaiti had had dreams—oh, but

-dreams! oh, such dreams! before solid common-sense

-had brought her down to earth, and made her

-realise that Saxon's unlucky state, and the eminently

-Scottish firm who held the destinies of the *Sybil* in their

-hands, were quite certain to stand in the way of

-realisation.  To make a fortune, you must first have one,

-generally speaking.  And it was the canny Glasgow men

-who had it.

-

-So, because she did not want to hear with her own

-ears what she knew very well must take place, she

-refused to come into the hotel, and wandered off alone

-down the quays, in the warm December sun, which yet

-was cool compared to the burning heats of the island

-world.  She was dressed in a long, waistless muslin

-gown, as usual, but her shady Niué hat and white deck

-shoes—not to speak of a pair of kid gloves that caused

-her horrible discomfort and a parasol that embarrassed

-her extremely—spoke of a respect for certain of the

-conventions that might have astonished people who knew,

-or thought they knew, Vaiti of the Islands.  Of course,

-the loungers on the quays looked admiringly after her—she

-would have liked to see them dare to omit that tribute

-to her fiery charms—and some of them freely spoke to

-her, calling her Mary and Polly, offering her hearts and

-drinks and new bonnets, and asking her for kisses or

-jobs on the schooner, just as it occurred to them, after

-the simple fashion of the sea.  Some of them knew her,

-and some of them did not.  It was the latter who asked

-for jobs.  The men who did know the *Sybil* and her

-"Kapitani" asked for kisses, which they did not expect

-to get.  That was safer.

-

-Vaiti, quite accustomed to this sort of demonstration,

-and enjoying it in a languid way as she strolled along

-under the annoying parasol, covered half a mile or so

-of the quay at her own leisurely pace, and then sat down

-on a coil of rope in a quiet place, to stare across the water

-and think.

-

-She wanted something, and she did not see her way

-to get it.

-

-To disentangle the dreams and hopes, wild fancies,

-and wilder aspirations of the half-caste mind when that

-mind, puzzling and elusive enough to the pure white

-in any case, is further complicated with a touch of

-genius, would be a task worthy of a whole academy of

-science.  This much alone can the necessarily

-all-knowing biographer of Vaiti say—that she wanted to

-be someone, and wanted it so badly that nothing

-else in life seemed worth having, or even existent,

-She was a princess of Atiu on her mother's side, and

-on her father's (though Saxon's past was as much a

-mystery as the origin of the yacht-like *Sybil* herself)

-Vaiti felt that she had every right to claim high

-standing.

-

-Doubly dowered, therefore, with the instinct of rule,

-the actual command of the schooner had fallen into her

-capable hands quite naturally.  Left to herself, she

-would probably have made the *Sybil* pay in a way

-unknown before to the easy-going island world.  But

-the useless, dissipated Saxon had to be counted on.  She

-liked him in her own way, such as it was, but she despised

-him also.  And it was an undoubted fact that he

-hampered everything.  This bargain with M'Coy and

-Co., for instance—it was useless for her to attempt to

-put a finger on it.  Saxon had got drunk the night

-before, as soon as the matter of the grant had been

-finally decided, at the end of some anxious days of

-waiting; and in the morning the numerous "hairs"

-that he had taken to restore him had left him in a

-condition of hopeless obstinacy and self-sufficiency.  In

-such a state he was as certain to be over-reached as a

-stranded jelly-fish is certain to be licked up by the

-sun.  And this was bitter to Vaiti.

-

-For, sitting there motionless under the parasol (which

-was serving a useful purpose at last, in shading her

-handsome face from observation and comment by the

-passers-by), Vaiti had arrived at something rather like

-a conclusion, and a conclusion, too, that was likely to

-shape most of her thoughts and acts henceforward.

-

-Money was the thing.

-

-She did not care for money in itself, and none of the

-things it could bring really interested her, except pretty

-clothes.

-

-But money was importance, money was power; money

-was the freedom to do exactly what you wanted, and

-make other people do it too.  She did not think it out

-in words, like a European.  Pictures passed before her

-mind, more vivid by far than the glittering water and

-flashing sea-gull wings in front of her bodily eyes.  She

-saw captains of great ships, giving orders like kings,

-and obeyed by the promptest and smartest of slaves.

-She saw owners of big stores entertaining half the

-island on their verandahs, paid court to by wandering

-beach-combers, going out to ships in beautiful boats

-manned by their own uniformed crews, who bent their

-backs double at a word.  She saw "Tusitala," of Samoa,

-the great English story-teller, living in his splendid

-house outside Apia, surrounded by a humble clan of

-native followers wearing wonderful lava-lavas of a

-foreign stuff they called "tatani" (tartan)—Tusitala,

-who was as great a chief as Mataafa himself, and had

-spoken to her, Vaiti, as one worthy of all honour....

-Her pictures were almost all of the islands, for the

-islands were in her blood; but something, too, she

-saw of Auckland—the merchant M'Coy, old and so

-ugly, and of the commonest birth, yet reverenced like

-the greatest of chiefs, because he had money....

-

-The afternoon rays grew blinding hot on the water

-as the sun sank down.  The sea-gulls dipped and

-screamed.  Steamers glided away from the wharves

-with long hooting cries that somehow seemed to embody

-all the melancholy of the homeless sea.  Steam cranes

-chattered ceaselessly above the yawning holds of

-discharging ships.  Behind, the tramcars hummed in the

-street, and people hurried up and down.

-

-And at last the western sky began to burn with

-sultry red, and Vaiti went home.

-

-Something had taken root in her mind that afternoon

-that struck down and shot up, in the days to come, and

-led her into ways and places wilder even than the

-adventure of the pearl lagoon.  As children string

-berries on a straw, so upon the stem that grew from

-that seed were strung the strange events that followed,

-one by one.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE FLOWER BEHIND THE EAR`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER III

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE FLOWER BEHIND THE EAR

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-As Vaiti, Cassandra-wise, had prophesied about the

-pearl lagoon, so indeed it fell out.

-

-It takes money to exploit even the smallest

-discovery of this kind, and the canny M'Coy made the

-most of the fact.  Delgadas Reef was too risky a

-neighbourhood to be worked by any vessel unprovided with

-an auxiliary engine, so a cranky little schooner of some

-forty tons, owning a tiny oil engine that sometimes

-worked and sometimes did not—more commonly the

-latter—was chartered; also a couple of boats for

-diving work, and two sets of diving dresses; and a

-cheap crew was picked up somewhere, and some poor

-provisions laid in.  Everything was done on the most

-economical scale possible—yet the Scotchman grumbled

-and lamented, and declared he would never see his

-money back.  The shares had been fixed at a wickedly

-low figure for Saxon and there were, furthermore,

-clauses in the agreement concerning expenses which

-made that unlucky derelict swear fiercely when he read

-them after he was sober.  It was too late to complain

-then, however, for he had signed everything he was

-asked, under the influence of the good whisky to which

-M'Coy—liberal for once—had freely treated him.  Nor

-did he get any sympathy from Vaiti.  She merely

-laughed when he complained, and told him frankly

-that he would have done better to stay in his cabin

-and drink there, if he liked, leaving her to finish what

-she had begun.

-

-So the pearling ship sailed off, and Saxon, who could

-not afford to stay in port, went another voyage.  And

-some months later, when he came back, it was to find

-that Delgadas Reef was cleaned out.  It had held not

-much after all, said the Glasgow man, and shell was

-down, and the pearls had been few and off colour.  But

-there was enough to pay Saxon's debt and leave him

-owner and master of the *Sybil* once more.  And there

-might be a few pounds in addition—not much; but

-there, he was an honest man, and he would rather ruin

-himself than let Saxon and the charming Miss Vaiti

-feel they were badly treated.  And if Saxon would

-kindly sign this paper releasing him from all further

-claims, he would be happy to give over all claim in

-the ship.  Otherwise—money was tight, and that

-little matter between them had been owing so long

-that——

-

-Saxon interrupted with a statement to the effect that

-he knew blank well he had been blank well had, and

-for the sum of two sanguinary sixpences he would be

-prepared to knock Mr. M'Coy's doubly condemned head

-off his unpleasantly qualified shoulders—only, luckily

-for Mr. M'Coy, he was sick of him and the like of him,

-and merely wanted to get out of his way as soon as

-he possibly could.  With which concise summing up of

-facts he signed the paper, picked up the cheque, and

-went out to spend it after his own fashion.  Vaiti

-secured half of it at the bank where he cashed it, and

-went off with the money done up in her hair, to keep

-house by herself on the schooner until her father should

-turn up again.  She knew him too well to expect that

-that would come about immediately.

-

-Meanwhile, there were banks in which she could

-deposit her own share, and thus feel herself a step

-nearer to her goal—that dim, undefined goal that was

-to be reached somehow, some time, through the possession

-of the precious bits of paper and coin without

-which all pleasant things were impossible.  She did not

-decide at once where the money should go, but hid it

-in her cabin, and day by day walked the pavements of

-Wellington, delighting her eyes with the shop-window

-beauties which she had so seldom seen.  Thus came her

-undoing.  Vaiti had never heard the saying, "We are

-none of us infallible, even the youngest," or she might

-have been less certain of herself before it came about,

-and less bitter afterwards.

-

-For was it not natural that when Saxon unexpectedly

-reappeared at the Constantinople Hotel with a good

-deal of his money still left, and sent for Vaiti to join

-him and "live like a lady while she could," the

-improvident island blood should all unbidden well up and

-smother everything else?  Why go on?  There are

-shops in Wellington—there are as many ways of getting

-fifteen shillings' worth out of a sovereign, and repeating

-the process a great deal oftener than one means, as in

-any other of the world's big ports....  The end was

-that, after ten delirious days of glorious spending.

-Captain Saxon and his daughter set sail for Tahiti with

-a general cargo, a complete set of empty pockets between

-them, and, on the part of Vaiti, a glad remembrance

-more than half stifled by angry regret for the cost.  Yet,

-and yet, what a lovely thing money was, and what a

-pity that one could not both spend and keep it!  If

-you did the one, you were happy, but no one thought

-anything of you.  If you did the other, everyone paid

-court to you, but you didn't get the fun.  Yes, that

-was true of money—and of other things.  Girls who

-had been brought up at convent schools understood a

-lot that the ignorant beach girls didn't....  And, *bon

-Dieu!* as they used to say in Papeëte, when the Sisters

-couldn't hear—what a headache it gave her to think,

-and what a fool she was to do it!

-

-"Ruru!" she called in Maori to a native sleeping

-peacefully on the deck.  "Wake up, pig-face, son of a

-fruit-bat, and make me kava immediately.  I am

-weary."

-

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-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-It was many weeks after, and the hot season had come

-round once more.

-

-The schooner was slamming helplessly about on a

-huge glassy swell.  Everything on board that could

-rattle, rattled; everything in the cabins that could

-break loose and take charge, did so, sending up a

-melancholy chorus of crashes with every wallow of the ship.

-The great mizzen sail slatted about above the poop,

-offering and then instantly withdrawing a promise of

-cooling shade, in a manner that was little short of

-maddening, seeing that the hour was three o'clock,

-and the latitude not four degrees south.  Friday Island

-looking like a small blue flower on the rim of a crystal

-dish, hovered tantalisingly on the extreme verge of

-the horizon, as unattainable as Sydney Heads or

-heaven.  For the *Sybil* was becalmed, a week's

-from anywhere in particular, and there seemed no

-chance of a breeze.

-

-"Lord," said the mate, dropping the marlinspike

-with which he was splicing a rope, and mopping his

-forehead with his rolled-up sleeve, "I wonder 'ow many

-thousand miles we are from an iced beer!"

-

-"Turtle!" said Vaiti, taking a slim brown cigar out

-of her mouth, and looking down from her seat on

-the top of the deck-house.  "Only nine hundred

-and eighty-seven.  You not remember Charley's in Apia?"

-

-"I'd forgotten Samoa," said Harris, in a more cheerful

-tone, picking up the marlinspike, and going to work

-again, as if revived by Vaiti's arithmetic.

-

-"A miss is as good as a mile, for all me, specially when

-it's nine hundred mile," remarked the gloomy boatswain.

-"Couldn't you manage to talk about something

-rather less 'arrowing to a man's insides?"

-

-"I'd like to know why she's going skull-huntin' to

-Friday Island, then," said the mate, casting a cautious

-glance at Vaiti, who was scarcely out of ear-shot, up on

-the deck-house.

-

-"Trade I can understand," he went on, "and

-shell-huntin'—we haven't done too bad all round over that

-last little job, and the old man's a sight more sober

-since he's owned the ship again.  But skulls—and old

-skulls at that—filthy natives' bones that's been lyin'

-in the caves since Heaven knows when!  Besides, they

-ain't our skulls, however you may look at it——"

-

-"Nor I hope they won't be," said the boatswain

-darkly.  "In no way, I mean.  The Friday Islanders

-aren't people to ask out to an afternoon tea-party

-without you've got your knuckle-duster on underneath

-your voylet kid gloves.  And you know what natives

-are about their old bones and graves."

-

-"I do.  What I don't know is how she thinks she's

-going to make anything out of a proper nasty job like

-that."

-

-"Oh, she's on the make, is she!"

-

-"Did you ever know her anything else, bless her?"

-asked the mate.  "She wants sixty pounds, havin'

-spent all the old man give her out of the shell business

-in Wellington, takin' boxes at the theaytres and halls,

-and buyin' women's gear, and staying at the Constantinople,

-where she wore two new 'ats a day for a week;

-and other games of a similar kind.  Pity you was sick,

-and not there to see the fun.  I tell you, she made the

-town look silly."

-

-"What's the sixty pound for?" asked the boatswain,

-chewing fondly on his quid.

-

-Harris giggled explosively, and whispered:

-

-"She wants a Dozey dress!"

-

-"What in ——'s that?  It don't sound respectable,"

-virtuously observed the boatswain, who had never heard

-of the famous French dressmaker.

-

-"You bet it is, then.  Dozey's a regular bang-up

-swell in Paris, who makes the most expensive gownds in

-the world, and every one in them parts treats him just

-the same as a baronight or a duke.  You can't get so

-much as a jumper from him for less than sixty pound,

-and Vaiti she says every woman in Papeëte or Aucklan'

-or Sydney who saw one of his dresses would spot it

-right away, and go and throw herself over the Heads.

-She read about his things in a piece in one of them

-female papers in the hotel, and she saw an actress

-wearin' of one, and she's been layin' out to get one

-ever since, somethin' awful.  Seems when a woman in

-London, or Paris, or Yarmouth gets a Dozey dress,

-and takes to standin' off and on before the others,

-who's only got new velveteens with musling frills or

-such-like it just makes them other women drag their

-anchors and run head-on to the shore.  So Vaiti,

-she——"

-

-"Hold on," interrupted the boatswain.  "Why, if

-she 'ad one of those gownds, she couldn't bend it on to

-her yards, not if it cost a million.  Man alive, she ain't

-laid down on the same lines as them Frenchwomen,

-anyway."

-

-"You let her alone for that," chuckled Harris.  "But

-what beats me is *who* she's going to do with them skulls,

-and *how*.  We won't know in a hurry, either, because

-she and Pita's fixed it up between them to do the job

-alone.  Thank 'eaven for small mercies, says I.  'Er

-on the war-path's rather more than I care for; and this

-isn't going to be any picnic, if I know anything of

-natives."

-

-"Pita!" whistled the boatswain.  "The old man

-will 'ave 'is gore before the voyage is out, if Vaiti goes

-on like this.  It's Ritter, that fat German trader in

-Papeëte, that he's wanting to marry her to; and as

-for natives, it's 'ands off for them, if she is 'alf of one

-'erself."

-

-"Well, she and Pita was planning it all out in the

-fore-top last night.  I heard them, when she thought

-I was sleeping on the top of the galley.  And the old

-man came out and roared at her like a Marquesas bull

-to come down; so down she came, laughing at him,

-like the devil she is.  There's no one else on this ship

-would laugh, without it was on the wrong side of his

-mouth, when the old man gets ratty.  Coming!  All

-right!"

-

-The mate jumped to his feet, and answered Vaiti's

-sharp hail in person, a deprecating smile spreading like

-spilt treacle all over his face as he came up to her, cap

-in hand.  Vaiti took her cigar out of her mouth, and

-looked at him for a minute without speaking.  The

-*Sybil* rolled on the towering swell like a captured beast

-trying to beat its brains out against a wall, but Saxon's

-Maori daughter stood as steady as the slender main-mast

-upon the reeling deck.  Harris smiled more than ever,

-and turned the marlinspike about in his hands, looking

-a little foolish.

-

-"You wanting Captain Saxon come and lay you out

-in the scupper pretty soon?" inquired Vaiti presently.

-

-"Not particular," answered the mate, the smile

-sliding slowly off his face.

-

-"Then I think perhaps you keep your mouth more

-better shut," said Vaiti, walking off with a contemptuous

-swing in the very fall of her laced muslin skirts.  And

-Pita of Atiu, as if in defiance of the captain, the mate,

-and every one else but his cousin Vaiti, pulled a mouth-organ

-out of his shirt and began to play it triumphantly

-and frantically, making a noise exactly like the buzzing

-of a mad bluebottle on a warm window-pane.  Further,

-he plucked a frangipani flower out of the wreath—a good

-deal the worse for wear—that hung round his neck,

-and stuck the blossom behind his ear.  Now, every one

-who has ever been in the Islands knows that these two

-actions are significant of courtship.  Pita was courting

-Vaiti, as everybody knew—Pita, a mere deck hand,

-who had been taken on at wild Atiu, in the Cook Islands,

-because he was a relation of Saxon's dead native wife.

-Very handsome was Pita, very young and tall and

-broad-shouldered, wily and fierce like all the Atiuans,

-but smooth and pleasant of countenance.  Were not the

-men of Atiu nicknamed "meek-faced Atiuans," even in

-the days, only a generation gone, when they were the

-cruellest and most warlike of cannibals and pirates?

-

-Needless to say, Captain Saxon, who had always had

-"views" for Vaiti, ever since she left the Tahitian

-convent school that had given her such fragments of

-civilisation as she possessed, did not favour the

-compromising attentions of Pita.  As for Vaiti, her father's

-prohibitions neither piqued her into noticing the

-handsome Atiuan more, nor alarmed her into favouring him

-less, than she found agreeable.  At present there was

-rather more than less about the matter, because Saxon

-was in one of his fits of gloomy depression, and Vaiti

-foresaw the usual result.  It was not at all likely that

-her father would be able to help her in her forthcoming

-raid.  Harris she did not choose to rely on at a pinch;

-Gray was old; the crew were far and away too superstitious

-to aid in such a sacrilege as she proposed.  There

-remained Pita, who, if he was a wild Atiuan, was at

-least "misinari" after a fashion, had been educated,

-more or less, in Raratonga, and was most certainly in

-love with herself....  Yes, Pita would do.

-

-That night, when the second dog-watch had commenced,

-and a lew large crystal stars were just beginning

-to glimmer through the pink of the ocean sunset, Vaiti

-descended to the cabin, looked into Gray and Harris's

-berths to make sure that they were both on deck, and

-then sat down on the cushioned locker opposite her

-father.

-

-"What is it?" asked Saxon, raising his heavy blue

-eyes.  He had been sitting with his head propped in

-the corner of the cabin, silent as a fish, since the clearing

-away of tea an hour before.  You might have thought

-him asleep, or, if you knew him intimately, drunk.  He

-was neither; but dead and drowned things were rising

-up from the black sea caverns of his heart to-night, and

-their bones showed white and ghastly upon the desert

-shores of his life.  So he sat silent, with his face turned

-to the darkening porthole and to the night that was

-striding down upon the sea.

-

-Through the port he saw the shining harbour of

-Papeëte as it looked a week or two ago—a tall grey

-British war-ship lying at anchor, the *Sybil's* dinghy,

-small and crank and unclean, creeping up to the

-man-of-war's accommodation-ladder, himself, a

-weather-scarred, red-faced figure, in a worn duck suit and

-bulging shoes, sitting in the boat, and waiting patiently

-until the Governor's steam-launch should have passed

-in front of him and discharged its freight of visitors.

-

-He saw the captain of the great Queen's ship standing

-at the top of the ladder, slight and trig and trim, all

-white and gold from top to toe, all smiling self-possession

-and cool command.

-

-He saw ladies, immaculately coiffed and daintily shod;

-tall, clean, grey-moustached men following them; a

-cordial welcome on the deck; a flutter of light drapery

-and a glimpse of lounging masculine figures afterwards,

-framed by the great open gun-ports of the captain's

-cabin in the stern.  They were laughing and talking,

-and he could hear the clink of cups and glasses.  After—a

-long time after—he could see his own shabby little

-boat creeping up to the ladder; the captain, cold and

-business-like, and more than a little brusque, speaking

-to him on the deck about a certain anchorage in the

-Cook Islands group, concerning which he was known to

-have information; himself, burningly conscious of his

-shoes and his finger-nails, answering shortly and with

-some embarrassment, and feeling, of a sudden, very

-shabby, very broken, very old....  Was it twenty-five

-years, or two thousand, since the Admiral of the Fleet,

-and the Prince of Saxe-Brandenburg, with half the

-mess of his own regiment, had dined on board his biggest

-yacht at Cowes a week before—it—happened? ... Now

-a mere commander left him standing on the deck,

-and spoke to him like a native or a dog.  Well, what

-did it all matter to a dead man?  Was not his name of

-those days carved on the family monument in letters

-half an inch deep, and was not he, Edward Saxon,

-whom nobody knew, out here in the living death of the

-farthermost islands, a thousand miles from anywhere? ...

-

-"Father," said Vaiti.

-

-"What is it?" answered Saxon's voice dully, as

-befitted a dead man.

-

-"The wind is rising at last," said the girl in Maori,

-"We shall be off the island by morning.  Will you, or

-will you not, go with me into this cave of death, where

-I have told you that I shall find what is worth finding?"

-

-"I have no heart.  I will not."

-

-"Then I and Pita will go," said Vaiti, fixing the

-Englishman's blue eyes with her own black, stabbing

-and savagely unfathomable, yet set in Saxon's very

-own narrow high-bred face.

-

-The captain's dark mood was on him, and he turned

-his face to the wall, with a Maori oath consigning Vaiti

-and Pita to a cannibal end.

-

-"I go; stay you there," said Vaiti, using the quaintly

-courteous native form of farewell, barbed with a little

-sneer unknown to the original.  Then she went to her

-cabin.  And Saxon turned in his seat, and reached for

-the brandy bottle at last.

-

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-

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-

-

-

-Handsome Pita had a great awe for Vaiti, for she

-was a princess of Atiu by her mother's side.  But she

-was beautiful, and he admired her—also he hoped that

-her imperious soul harboured one soft spot for him.

-It seemed good, on the whole, when they were pulling

-the dinghy over the reef next morning, to ask Vaiti

-openly where the value of the booty came in—with a

-secret hope in the background of securing as much as

-possible for a certain very deserving, more or less

-Christian youth of Atiu.

-

-Vaiti, her white dress girded up high over her scarlet

-pareo, waded through the last yard or two of the emerald

-lagoon before she answered.  The boat being safe on

-shore, she stood up and looked sharply about her.  They

-had chosen a quiet spot at the back of the island for

-landing, all the natives being down at the harbour

-loading copra.  The weird pandanus trees, standing on

-their high wooden stilts at the verge of the shore, the

-rustling coco-palms swinging their great fronds far over

-the water, the golden and pink-flowered vines trailing

-yard on yard of green garlandry over the paper-white sand,

-could carry no tales, and they were the only witnesses.

-

-Vaiti looked at Pita up and down, from head to foot,

-and Pita gave the flower behind his ear a knowing cock,

-and set one hand saucily on his hip.  He knew that he

-was the handsomest man in the Cook archipelago, and he

-felt that the way his pareo was tied that day was a pure

-inspiration.  So he shut up his mouth very tight, and

-made play with his burning black eyes as only a South

-Sea Islander can, waiting confidently the while for the

-information that the whole ship's company of the

-*Sybil* could not have extracted from Vaiti in a week.

-

-The girl stepped forward, and with a commanding

-finger tapped Pita's biggest dimple, as if he had been

-a baby.

-

-"Suppose I tell you, then you know too much, you

-plenty frighten, go back to ship," she laughed.

-

-"Speak Maori, high chieftainess!" implored Pita.

-

-"No fee-ah!" answered Saxon's daughter succinctly.

-Pita understood at once that Vaiti was unwilling to use

-a language that gave free rein to her tongue and his,

-and the knowledge elated him.

-

-"Perhaps I tell you," went on Vaiti, watching him

-narrowly.  "I think you got heart in belly belong you,

-more better than Alliti.  I tell you, you want plenty

-heart by-and-by."

-

-"High chieftainess, Vaiti, speak Maori!" was Pita's

-answer, linked to an attempted embrace that only fell

-short of its main object because Vaiti quite calmly

-pulled a seaman's knife out of her dress and laid it edge

-upwards across her lips.  Pita, who had learned the

-real European kiss during his visits to civilisation, and

-wanted very much to show it off, felt disappointed,

-although there was a smile behind the blade that almost

-out-dazzled the steel.

-

-"Maori!" he persisted, putting his arm round her

-waist, with a cool disregard of her well-known readiness

-with the knife that won Vaiti's admiration a step

-further than before.  She laughed, wavered, and then,

-still playing with the keen, bright blade, she lowered it

-a little, and spoke in the soft language of the Islands

-at last.

-

-It was a fairly long tale that she had to tell.  When

-last the *Sybil* had been in the Society Islands, some

-weeks before, there had been a German man of science

-in the group, collecting native skulls for museums at

-home.  The grizzly old gentleman and his pursuits had

-not troubled Vaiti's mind particularly until her chief

-admirer, Ritter, a Papeëte trader, happened to drop a

-remark one day about the amount of money some of

-these old skulls were worth.  Vaiti's sharp intelligence

-linked on the casual saying at once to certain other

-wandering rumours she remembered, and she decided

-to find out something more.  She did not ask Ritter,

-for he was no talker, even to a handsome girl whom he

-admired; and the German was his compatriot, in

-any case.  But when the schooner reached Raiatea,

-where Professor Spricht was staying, Vaiti drifted off

-among the native huts, and squatted for an hour or

-two on the mats of the second chief's wife's mother's

-cousin's house, smoking a great deal, talking very little,

-and listening quietly.  By degrees the house filled up

-with interested natives all eager for gossip and chatter;

-and to Vaiti, pulling steadily at her cigar, and maintaining

-the grave, unsmiling demeanour proper to a princess

-of Atiu and a great Belitani chieftain's daughter, the

-drawing out of the secret she wanted was as easy as

-spinning sinnet out of cocoanut husk.

-

-Nothing is private in the Eastern Pacific, and it was

-not long before all the professor's personal affairs were

-tossing about like seaweed on the flood of general

-gossip—mostly unfit for publication—that surged about

-the apparently uninterested ears of the silent, splendid

-sea-queen throned on the pile of pandanus mats....

-The Siamani (German) had got skulls in Niué, in Uea,

-in Mangaia, and was now collecting them about the

-Society group....  He was an ugly, grey-snouted pig

-to look at, and rooted in the earth like any pig; still,

-Taous and Mahina, daughters of Falani, seemed to think

-that—(details lost in a heated argument about the

-personal characteristics of the ladies)....  Anyhow,

-Vekia from the hills said he was going to buy her two

-silk dresses from San Francisco when he came back

-from Falaite Island; so he was not as mean as he

-looked.  Yes, he was going to Falaite Island in a great

-hurry; he would not even take time to finish his

-pig-rooting in Raiatea, on account of something he had heard

-from an old man who had once lived up in Falaite....

-What fools the papalangi (whites) were.  Did not every

-one in the Islands know about the old, old people that

-used to live on Falaite, hundreds of moons before the

-days of Tuti (Cook), and how they all died, and nobody

-lived there for very, very long, until some people

-wandered up from Niué in Tuti's time; and how the skulls

-of the old, old people were still there, buried in a cave

-that was a hundred miles long, and guarded by as many

-devils as would fill twenty war canoes?  Of course,

-these things were known, and always had been—but

-when would any man of Tahiti or Raiatea have thought

-of such folly as travelling more than a thousand miles

-to fight the devils and take away the skulls?  What

-if they were worth money enough to buy a big schooner,

-as the old grey pig had told Vekia when he promised

-her those dresses?  Would a whole schooner, loaded

-down with dollars, be any good to a man after the devils

-had killed him?  Vekia would never get her trade

-finery, for all her airs; and Jacky Te Vaka, whose

-schooner was to be hired to take the Siamani up to

-Falaite, would never come back from such a sacrilegious

-journey....  Why could he not wait, and go by

-Kapitani Satoni's schooner when she made her yearly

-trip by and by?  Every one knew that the *Sipila* was

-under a charm, and no harm could come to any one on

-board her.  But he would not wait, and just as soon as

-Jacky's boat came back from Bora-Bora, next week,

-they were to go....  Ahi! and Jacky was such a

-handsome man—it was a great pity!

-

-Such was the substance of the information gathered

-by Vaiti.  It resulted in her ordering the course of the

-ship to be changed, and heading direct for Friday

-Island, instead of going down to Auckland.  Friday

-Island—out of the way, infertile, uninteresting, and

-little known—had been one of Saxon's private preserves

-for some years.  He touched there once a year,

-purchased all the copra that the little place produced at

-his own price, and paid for it in cheap tinned meat,

-boxes of damaged biscuit, and tins of imitation salmon

-instead of cash.  He seldom went ashore, and certainly

-did not waste his time cave-hunting, if he did chance

-to set foot on the beach.  Vaiti, with her odd faculty

-for acquiring miscellaneous information, had known

-since the first time the *Sybil* called that there were great

-caves on the island, and that a devil of unusual quality

-and size guarded them.  So much might have been

-said of a hundred similar islands, however, and she had

-not troubled herself about either caves or devils until

-the German professor's secret set her on the alert for

-something that looked like a dangerous, exciting, and

-profitable adventure.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE BLACK VIRI`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER IV

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE BLACK VIRI

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-Moreover, as Harris had said, she had been devoured

-with desire of a real Paris dress ever since her stay in

-the Wellington hotel.  There had been a famous actress

-there at the same time, and all her garments had been

-freely paragraphed in the ladies' column of the local

-press.  When she swam languidly through the hall of

-the Constantinople, shining mystic and wonderful out

-of a cloud of rainbow silks and chiffons that had cost

-a formidable row of figures in the Rue de la Paix, all

-the women caught their breath, looked once, and then

-gazed determinedly out of the windows, pretending that

-they had noticed nothing.  When she came in to a late

-supper, floating in spangled mists and sparkling with

-constellations of diamonds, every head was turned her

-way, and half the heads—the short-cropped ones—stayed

-turned, in more senses than one.  It was a

-revelation and a martyrdom to Vaiti.  What were her muslin

-frocks and her ten new hats at a whole pound apiece

-compared to this?  And the vision of money saved up

-faded away for the time being before the vision of one

-such frock—only one—belonging to her.  Life could

-surely offer nothing more.

-

-Of this, naturally, she said nothing to Pita, merely

-relating the matter of the skulls in as few words as

-possible.  Pita, for his part, made no comment, but

-took a couple of revolvers out of the boat and thrust

-one into his belt, handing the other to the girl.  Then

-he girded up his pareo—a significant action among

-islanders—and felt the handle of his knife to see that it

-was loose in the sheath.  There was a large sack in the

-boat containing candles and food, and leaving ample

-space for other filling later on.  Vaiti tossed it to Pita,

-and the two began their walk, barefoot, swift and silent,

-casting a quick glance every now and then among the

-weirdly stilted stems of the lonely pandanus groves as

-they went.

-

-"They are all down with the *Sybil*—it is safer now

-than it would be at night," said Pita.  "Vaiti, if we

-get these things, and sell them for much money in

-Sitani, you and I will leave the *Sybil* when she next

-goes to Atiu; and you shall be queen of Atiu and I

-shall be king, and we shall eat roast pork and 'uakari'

-every day."

-

-"My father would burn the villages and kill the

-chiefs, and hang your head on the bowsprit of the ship,"

-replied Vaiti conversationally.  "Besides, I like Sitani,

-and I will buy myself a wonder dress from Palisi town

-there."

-

-"Then we will leave at Sitani, and be great chiefs

-there, if these old bones indeed sell for so much money.

-And we will buy a little schooner for ourselves, and

-you shall be the real captain, and there will be four gold

-bands on your sleeve and one on the peak of your cap;

-and you shall get a *sitificati* from the chiefs of the great

-harbour, and take the schooner out of Sitani Heads

-yourself.  And every one shall be afraid of me and you,

-and they will say——"

-

-Vaiti had been listening as she swung along, now casting

-a glance of approval at the handsome lad while he spoke

-cunningly of the schooner she should command, now

-shooting out her lip a little, and slashing impatiently

-with her knife at the young cocoanut fronds.  Suddenly,

-looking very straight ahead, she interrupted.

-

-"Pita, you talk too fast.  There are things you do

-not know.  Tell me, is your heart strong within you?"

-

-"It is strong," answered the island Maori.

-

-"Then listen.  There is a devil in the cave."

-

-"I do not believe in devils.  I am misinari, and go

-to church five times on Sundays; also I have a black

-coat and two boots very nearly the same as each other

-to wear on collection days."

-

-"There is a devil all the same; you do not know

-everything that is in the world, little Pita," replied

-Vaiti.  "There is something bad there.  I do not

-believe in native devils, for I am 'papa-langi'; but I

-know there is—a thing of some kind—there.  A bad

-thing.  A black viri, they say, but I do not understand

-that."

-

-"A black viri is nothing.  You and I do not mind

-such things.  See—there will perhaps be one in this

-rotten wood."  Pita struck and kicked at a mass of

-decaying cocoanut wood, and hunted out one of the

-great black centipedes that are common in the equatorial

-islands.

-

-There is nothing on the bosom of Mother Earth more

-loathly than the centipede, and Pita's quarry—nearly

-a foot long, as thick as a sausage, scarlet feelers on its

-hideous head, and scarlet legs fringing its long lithe

-body—was as hideous a specimen as ever jerked itself

-lightning-wise across a forest path.  Pita, however,

-with swift dexterity, seized the horrible beast by the

-neck and tail, holding it so that it could neither bite

-nor sting, and lifted it up to his companion.  Vaiti's

-eyes dilated ever so little.  She drew her knife and

-slashed the creature in two; then, stooping down, she

-struck at the flying halves as they ran away in opposite

-directions, and cut them up into mincemeat.  Leaving

-the red fragments still wriggling in the track amidst an

-unsavoury, snaky smell, she stepped swiftly on.

-

-"It is no matter," she said.  "We two shall see what

-we shall see.  Keep your heart warm within you."

-

-"And if we come back safe?" cried the impetuous

-Pita, catching the girl's warm round arms in his two

-sinewy hands, and letting his black eyes gaze into hers.

-

-Vaiti stood very still for a moment, looking out to sea.

-The spell of her stillness fell on Pita, and he remained

-as if frozen.  Far away the surf hummed on the reef,

-and a sea-bird cried.  Above the two beautiful,

-motionless young figures the palms rustled endlessly in the

-long trade wind.

-

-"... If we come back" ... said Vaiti at last, her

-eyes still fixed on the far-off line of the outer sea—"if

-we come back—we will go away together, you and I."

-

-She looked so like a witch in a trance (such things are

-not unknown even now, in strange Atiu) that Pita's hands

-dropped from her arms, and he felt half frightened in

-the moment of his triumph.  But Vaiti recalled him to

-himself by starting her steady swing again, and saying

-with a laugh, as they footed it through the dry,

-sun-struck woods side by side:

-

-"I think some day my father will make a parrot cage

-to hang a green Atiu parrot in, and it will be made of

-your ribs and breast-bone, little Pita—all the same as

-my grandfather did in the islands to the man who stole

-his wife."

-

-At that moment the woods opened out and the cave

-came into view—a velvet-dark blot in the dazzling

-glare of greenery that tangled itself about the shoreward

-cliffs.

-

-Pita's hand sprang to his revolver, and he uttered an

-exclamation of angry surprise.  Beside the cave stood

-a tall, brown, naked figure painted like a witch-doctor

-and armed with a spear.

-

-"Do not shoot," said Vaiti quickly.  "It will do no

-good.  Let me look to him myself."

-

-She walked right up to the native, stood within a

-yard of him, and stared at him, in a silence that somehow

-managed to express unflattering things.  The man,

-stamping the butt of his spear on the ground, turned

-away from her and addressed Pita.

-

-"I have nothing to do with this woman of yours,"

-he said.  "It is with men I would speak."

-

-"Speak, then, pig-face," said Pita insolently, hoping

-to provoke a fight, since the man seemed to be alone.

-

-"Enter if you wish," replied the other.  "We have

-sent no fighting-men to hinder you; the way is clear.

-Yet if you think the hot sun on the pleasant land is good

-to see, and the beating of the warm heart in the living

-breast is sweet to feel, go not into our sacred caves, to

-lay evil hands upon the holy bones of Falaiti.  Enough."

-

-The man's words were strangely void of heat or anger,

-and he held his spear loosely, Vaiti did not suspect an

-ambush, for she knew that no native would enter the

-cave.  Yet in that moment her quick mind leaped to

-the knowledge of some unknown danger threatening

-herself and Pita from out the cold-breathing world of

-darkness that lay within that rugged arch, and for one

-prophetic instant she could smell the very smell of

-death.

-

-But Vaiti's courage was of the kind that rises, wave

-by wave, the higher for all obstacle, and her spirit swelled

-within her to flood-tide in that moment.  She turned

-upon the witch-doctor and laughed in his face.  Then

-she stretched out her hand, and Pita's leaped into it,

-warm and strong, and together they stepped over the

-threshold of the cave.

-

-The man outside cursed them, slowly and with relish.

-

-"Shall we not kill him?" asked Pita.

-

-"There is no use," said Vaiti.  "It is plain to me

-that all the tribe know, and they trust to the dangers of

-the place, whatever these may be.  This island is at

-the very end of the world, it is true, and strange things

-may happen here."

-

-"Yes, there is nothing that one might not believe

-in this place," said Pita, looking back.  Already the

-gloom of Hades itself was winding about them, and the

-air struck gravelike and cold.  In the distance the mouth

-of the cave cast a brief glow of emerald light upon the

-dewy ferns and mosses close to the threshold, so that

-they shone like the jewelled foliage of some magic forest

-in a fairy play.  Then came the dripping roof, the

-enormous stalactite buttresses of the cave, dimly edged

-with light; the oozing floor, and the lifeless dark.

-

-Vaiti spoke not at all, as they walked side by side

-down dark tunnel after dark tunnel, across empty,

-thunderous-echoing black halls and archways—their

-little candles flitting like fireflies through a dim world

-of unconquerable gloom.  Pita, however, was strangely

-gay.  He yelled aloud to set the echoes booming in the

-black domes above, when they crossed some invisible

-great goblin market-place, full of hollow sounds and

-half-glimpsed monstrosities.  He sang when the way

-along the endless corridors grew tedious, and the glistening

-stalactite candelabra succeeded one another, thick

-as forest branches, for mile after mile unchanged.  When

-the path was barred by inky lakes of unknown depth

-and ghastly chill, and the two explorers had to tie their

-lights on their heads and swim for it, he pretended to

-cry at the cold, and played tricks on Vaiti by slipping

-behind her and catching her feet in his teeth.  So they

-went on, one in wild spirits, the other silent and grave.

-And the hours of the sunny day slipped by dark and

-changeless, as they passed farther and farther away

-life and light into the cold black depths of the cave.

-

-When it was about noon, as near as they could guess,

-Vaiti took the biscuits and tinned meat out of the sack,

-and they ate, squatting on the wet floor of the tunnel.

-They knew that the journey was a long one, and that

-the way could not well be missed, yet they were

-beginning to feel a little uneasy now.  Did this cave

-go on for ever?

-

-Somehow, the food did not cheer them and when

-they rose and went on again they did not talk.  And

-now a worse difficulty than any they had yet encountered

-suddenly barred the way.  The winding tunnel along

-which they were walking turned sharp round a corner,

-and then ended to all appearance in nothing.  They

-stood at the edge of an empty gulf, black as a starless

-sky and of depth unknowable.  Thin trickles of light.

-from the candles wavered faintly about its edges, and

-showed that the colossal crack had a farther side, but

-it was impossible to see what lay beyond, and the depth

-below cast back the candle rays as an armoured hull

-throws off a rifle bullet.

-

-Pita detached a lump of rock and threw it over the

-edge.  Vaiti watched him with sombre eyes.  "There

-is no bottom there," she said.  "It goes through the

-earth, and out on the other side; that is what I think."

-

-"Children's talk," said Pita, listening intently.

-There was an echoing rattle as the stone bounded from

-side to side on its way down.  The rattle grew fainter

-and fainter, diminished to a sound like the ticking of a

-watch, faded to an almost imperceptible vibration, and

-then seemed to die out.  Seemed—for although there

-was nothing left for the ear to catch, the sharpened

-sensory nerves of the body still responded to a faint

-tingle, somewhere, somehow, long after the actual sound

-had faded away.

-

-"I told you," said Vaiti.  "There is no bottom."  Pita

-did not answer; he was measuring the narrowest

-part of the gulf with his eye, and estimating the value

-of the three short steps of a run that were possible before

-taking off.

-

-"It is not two fathoms wide here," he said, throwing

-the provision sack across to judge his distance better in

-the uncertain light.  Yet, despite the three steps of a

-run, there was not an inch to spare when he landed on

-the other side, with an effort that strained every muscle

-of his powerful young body.

-

-"Can you jump it?" he called to Vaiti—without

-any particular anxiety, for the Maori has no nerves,

-and he knew what the girl could do aloft on the schooner.

-

-To his astonishment, Vaiti made no answer, but

-stood leaning up against the wall of the tunnel, both

-hands pressed against her chest.  In a moment more

-she was violently sick.

-

-"The smell!" she said presently, turning a ghastly

-face towards the light of Pita's candle.

-

-"I smell nothing," said Pita, puzzled.  "The wind

-blows your way.  There is perhaps some dead thing

-down there."

-

-Vaiti shook her head, and Pita saw that her eyes

-seemed to fill half her face as she looked down into

-the gulf.  Suddenly she sprang, her white drapery

-flying behind her, and landed half a yard behind Pita,

-with a leap that drew a cry of wonder from the Atiuan.

-"Come, come," she said, taking his hand and fairly

-dragging him on.

-

-They had little farther to go.  The tunnel wound

-on for perhaps another hundred yards, and then stopped.

-They found themselves in a low-roofed circular chamber,

-such as is often met with at the end of long underground

-passages—a small, insignificant place, roofed with

-drooping green stalactites and floored with shapeless,

-slimy hummocks of stalagmite.  Numbers of deep

-shelves were quarried out in the rocky sides, and in

-these lay, row on row, the bare, mouldering skulls

-of Falaite's long-ago chiefs—many of them cracked

-and split, and not a few fallen into shapeless fragments,

-though there were a score or two in excellent condition.

-They were curious skulls indeed, had their discoverers

-been able to understand them.  In the projecting jaws,

-huge canines, strangely high cranium, and oddly

-developed ridges near the opening of the ear were the

-materials of a problem contradictory and complicated

-enough to occupy the wits of a whole college of science.

-But Vaiti and Pita saw none of these things.  They

-only noted with disappointment, that most of the skulls

-had gone to decay—picked out the best of the unbroken

-specimens, packed the great sack full of them,

-and turned homewards.

-

-"Vaiti," said Pita, as they walked down the rocky

-tunnel, and felt the slope of the gulf beginning under

-their feet.  "Vaiti, what did you——"

-

-Her face, turned back upon him, slew the still-born

-question on his lips.

-

-It was scarce a minute before the chasm gaped in

-their path yet again.  The leap was worse on this side,

-for the clustered cones of stalagmite did not allow a

-fair take-off.  Pita looked calculatingly at the farther

-side, very dimly visible in the faint candle-light, and

-picked up a fallen stalactite to throw across.

-

-"Do not throw!" said Vaiti, in a breathless whisper.

-

-"Why not?  I can jump better if I hear where it

-hits," replied Pita, casting the stone before Vaiti had

-time to snatch at his hand.  It fell short, and rolled

-down into the chasm with a loud, crashing noise.

-

-"Fool! fool!  Jump quickly!" exclaimed Vaiti,

-in the same strained, horrible whisper....  Just for

-a second before he sprang, Pita looked down into the

-black pit beneath, and it seemed to him that the

-darkness shirred and shivered below the farther edge of the

-crevasse—that for the fragment of a second something

-long, red, whiplike, vibrated high up in the light of the

-candles, and then was gone....  There was a sickening

-odour in the air—a living smell, not a dead one;

-there was a sliding, rustling sound....

-

-"Jump!" shrieked Vaiti.

-

-They leaped through the air as one, but it was only

-Vaiti who landed on the farther side.  Behind her, as

-she touched the rock, rose a shriek that blasted the

-leaden air into red-hot drops of horror—that went on

-and on and on, tearing upwards to the vaulted roof

-like a rocket fired from the mouth of hell; breaking

-at last into a gasping bellow, and snapping off into

-grisly silence on the very crest of a long, choking roar,

-in which there was nothing left of human.

-

-... Pita had jumped short.  Falling on the far side,

-with his legs half over the abyss, he had grasped for an

-instant at Vaiti's outstretched hands, and in the very

-act had been snatched away—snatched by a long,

-ghastly head, armed with poisoned jaws and quivering

-red antennas, that shot with the speed of a bullet out

-from the depths of the chasm, and back again with its

-prey....  The head was a foot long at least, the

-horrible winnowing feelers more than a yard, the black

-and red body, that just flashed into view for a second,

-was as thick as a man's thigh.  It was a nightmare, an

-impossibility, and yet ... it was, beyond doubt, the

-Black Viri.

-

-For a little while it seemed to Vaiti that she went

-mad, and then that the world went out and she died.

-A long time after, she found  herself sitting on  the

-floor of the tunnel, her head badly bruised and cut

-where she had dashed it against the rock, her candle

-guttering down towards extinction, her revolver empty

-and smelling of powder—she did not remember in the

-least how it had become so—and the whole black,

-horrible place still and silent as the bottom of the sea.

-Pita was gone.  The bag of skulls had disappeared—fallen,

-no doubt, into the abyss.  There was not a movement

-or a sound, save the whisper of the water—drops

-trickling ceaselessly from the roof into the dark pools

-upon the ground.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-That evening, when the early starlight was beginning

-to shine down upon the creepers veiling the mouth

-of the tunnel, Saxon, sober at last, and rushing like a

-madman to the cave to find his daughter, met Vaiti

-herself coming down the rocks at the entrance, haggard,

-trembling, and almost old.  He asked for Pita, and was

-answered only by a shuddering gesture of the hands.

-Questioning no more, he carried the girl down to the

-beach and brought her on board the schooner.  There,

-when they had sailed, he left her undisturbed in her

-cabin for many days, while they ran steadily southward

-to pleasant Auckland and the temperate latitudes,

-farther and farther away from lonely, sun-smitten

-Falaite.  The story of the day in the cave was known

-to him, as to every one on the island, for the

-witch-doctor of Falaite had told it far and wide, reserving

-only the one interesting fact—how he became possessed

-of the information.  And as no one else alive on Falaite

-knew that there were two ways of reaching the

-skull-chamber, and more than one place where a man could

-hide unseen, the witch-doctor's reputation as a prophet

-and a clairvoyant was greatly increased; so that he

-suffered continually from a happily-acquired indigestion,

-and his dogs grew fat on bones of pig and fowl.  And

-no one came ever any more into the sacred caves of

-Falaite Island.

-

-Saxon declared plumply that he did not believe the

-tale, opining rather that the "blanked old wizard

-Johnnie had shoved Pita into the hole himself, and

-good riddance of bad rubbish, too."

-

-None the less, he was uneasy at Vaiti's rather prolonged

-depression, and though he dared not break in upon

-her solitude further than to hand her in her meals

-and ask her how she felt, now and then, he listened

-almost constantly at her state-room door, and gave up

-whisky for at least ten days.

-

-About the eleventh day, Te Ai, a young Samoan

-A.B., sat upon the main hatch in the pleasant coolness

-of the second dog-watch, and sang the farewell song of

-sweet Samoa, "Good-bye, my F'lennie"—the song

-that plucks so surely at the heartstrings of all who

-have ever loved and sailed away among the far-off fairy

-islands of the wide South Seas.

-

-   |  "Good-bye, my F'lennie (friend)—o le a o tea,

-   |  Efau lau le va'a, o le alii pule i ..."

-

-he sang, beating time with his knees on the hatch....

-Then suddenly he stopped, and the little group

-of mates and captain on the poop did not see why.

-

-Later on, Harris, his face stiff with suppressed

-laughter, knocked at the captain's door.

-

-"Can you oblige me with a piece of sticking-plaster,

-sir?" he said.

-

-"Who for?" asked Saxon, reaching for the yellow

-roll that lies handy in every shipmaster's cabin about

-the peaceful Pacific.

-

-"Te Ai, sir.  He's been knocked down, and his head

-got cut against the pump."

-

-"Who did it?" bristled Saxon, ready to uphold his

-own peculiar privileges, at once.

-

-"She did, sir," said Harris, nearly choking.  "Te

-Ai, he was singin' 'Good-bye, my F'lennie,' on the main

-'atch and out she come from the deck cabin like a—like

-a nurricane, begging your pardon, sir—and she ups

-with a belayin' pin from the rail, an——"

-

-"All right, all right; there's your plaster,"

-interrupted Saxon.  "Harris!  Here."

-

-"Yes, sir!"

-

-"Give this to Te Ai."

-

-"Lor' bless you, sir, 'e don't mind; 'e's a——"

-

-"You do what you're told.  Stop.  Where's my

-daughter?"

-

-"Walkin' on the poop, sir, uncommon lively, and

-looking like dirty weather ahead."

-

-"That's all right," sighed the captain, with an air

-of infinite relief.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`A DIAMOND WEB`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER V

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   A DIAMOND WEB

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-It was six o'clock in Apia, and the round sun was

-hanging low above the rim of the level sea, like a burning

-coal ready to drop down upon a breadth of hyacinth

-silk.  The stores were closed along the straggling

-beach street, where the sand was white under foot,

-and parrakeets tweedled cheerily in the scarlet-flowered

-flamboyant trees.  Native dandies, greatly oiled and

-dyed, and wearing a bright hibiscus blossom over each

-ear, swung past with the inimitable Samoan roll, their

-golden brown limbs gay with the red-and-white English

-bath-towel that is popular as full dress for steamer

-days in the little island capital.  Girls with

-high-coiffed yellow heads and pink or green tunics wandered

-lazily home to the cool, dark-domed native houses

-open all round to the sunset sky.  They went in groups,

-and sang as they walked—windy, fitful gusts of strange

-island melody, breaking out and dying away like the

-evening breeze among the heavy-headed palms.  Smells

-of yam and breadfruit, brown from the baking pits, of

-fish cooked in green, savoury leaves, and taro spinach

-stewed with cocoanut cream, crept out upon the cooling

-air.  The long, hot day was done, and Apia rested and ate.

-

-In "Charley's"—the least reputable of Apia's

-tavern-hotels—the egregious *table d'hôte* was in full

-progress out in the green-shuttered verandah.  Charley

-himself, an oily, flashy New Caledonian half-caste,

-dressed in striped pyjamas, was eating curried

-tin—nature unknown—with a knife and two fingers, at the

-head of the table.  A corpse-faced Chinese was shuffling

-round with the inevitable Pacific fowl, cut up in a watery

-soup.  The table-cloth was of linoleum, the swinging

-lamp guttered and smoked, the cutlery was dislocated

-and black.  But there was English beer on the bar

-counter, and plenty of broken ice; and the whisky

-that mounted high in each man's smeary tumbler was

-good of its kind.  Charley knew his customers, and

-sought first the essential.

-

-Captain Saxon, his schooner safe at anchor outside,

-and his copra advantageously sold to an Auckland

-agent, sat eating at the table, heavy-faced, a little

-intoxicated, and almost absolutely blank in mind.  This

-was his nearest approach to happiness, and one that

-he enjoyed often enough, for, since thought meant

-pain to him, he had managed to acquire a wonderful

-agility in avoiding it, and to live for the most

-part almost as purely by instinct and impulse as a dog.

-

-It was perhaps for this reason that he did not notice

-anything unusual in the demeanour of that singularly

-unknown quantity, Vaiti, his daughter.  And yet

-Vaiti—sombre and sparkling in a dress of vaporous

-red, with a handful of star stephanotis from the verandah

-thrust into the marvellous waves of her hair—was

-evidently not quite herself.  She sat a little apart from

-the noisy company that sprawled about the table,

-looked at no one, ate her food absent-mindedly and

-pulled little strips off the decaying oilcloth of the

-table-cover with a steady industry that made Charley

-wriggle in his seat, although he did not dare to

-remonstrate.

-

-Some one else was watching her, if Saxon was not.

-A short, stocky man, with burning grey eyes, a fiery

-red beard, and a sharp furrow between the eyebrows,

-that somehow suggested belaying-pins and rope's ends,

-was looking at her every now and then as he noisily

-sucked in his soup.  The inspection did not appear to

-please him altogether.  He finished his dinner quickly,

-took the current glass of whisky in his hand, and

-rolled off to the dark end of the verandah, followed by

-a grey-haired, greasy-faced mate who had been sitting

-beside him.

-

-"Still on for it, cap?" asked the latter, leaning over

-the railing with an air of careless ease that contrasted

-oddly with his watchful eye.

-

-"Yes, blank asterisk your condemned foolishness,

-sure I am on for it!" replied the captain, betraying

-his nationality by a slight touch of brogue.

-

-There is no nation that swings so high and so low

-between opposite extremes of character as the impetuous

-race that is handcuffed, by an odd freak of geography,

-to steady, serious England.  Great saints and great

-rogues are commoner in Ireland than ordinary people,

-and each displays the fullest flavour of his kind.

-Donahue, master of the island schooner *Ikurangi*, was, or

-had been, Irish; and it was assuredly not the company

-of the saints that claimed his membership.

-

-The two spoke together for a little while in level

-tones that sounded loud and careless enough, yet

-somehow did not carry.  One learns these things by

-practice.

-

-"She smells a rat, I'm thinking," said the old mate,

-looking critically the while at Charley, as if he were

-valuing the half-caste's clothes for pawn.

-

-"Let her.  You and I are apt to be a match for her,

-for all that," answered the captain.  He looked at

-Charley also.  You would have sworn the two were

-discussing him, and rather unfavourably.  Charley

-himself shifted in his seat, and showed his magnificent

-teeth uncomfortably.

-

-"Think she'll come on board?"

-

-Vaiti was watching them, her chin on her hand.

-Her expression was not to be read.

-

-"I'll get her on board all right," answered the

-captain, keeping his eyes away from the girl with an

-effort.  "You play up, that's all."

-

-"'Jer think you're a match for that weasel in a

-woman's skin—you or any of us?"

-

-"I do, then.  Forty's a match for twenty any day

-in the year, if the heads of them comes anything near

-equal.  Cunnin' as Old Nick she is, but I've been cunnin'

-twenty years longer than her."

-

-"You pitched her a good yarn, I'll lay."

-

-"I did that—about the derelick we boarded nor'-east

-of the Paumotus, and the Spanish ladies' clothes and

-cases of goods that was lying about, and how we took

-what there was, includin' of a di'mond necklashe that

-was sittin' all its lone on the table in the old man's

-cabin (Be minding me, now, or you'll be making mistakes),

-and the way a gale riz on us before we was through,

-and hurried us back to the *Ikurangi*, so that we lost the

-derelick, and didn't see no more of her; and how we

-heard in Noumea afterwards that there was like to be

-joolery on boord her, so that we're all on to go and find

-her again."

-

-"Straight fact up to finding the di'monds, and gory

-lyin' after that, I see.  But how d'ye make out the

-people that deserted the ship was such fat-headed idiots

-as to leave the joolery?"

-

-"Why, they was fat-headed idiots right enough;

-they did leave a good lot of saleable stuff, as you and

-I knows; and it's only addin' on a bit to say that the

-ship had been on fire and made them clear for their

-lives, so that they didn't think of the valuables.  There's

-the necklashe I have for proof.  And, mind me now,

-what we heard was that the people of the ship knows

-now that she didn't go down, and will be out after her

-themselves when they can raise the cash, so that hurry's

-the word."

-

-"How much of that's true?"

-

-"Not a —— bit.  The people was drowned, I allow.

-But it hangs well, and don't you go and forget none of

-it.  I pitched the yarn that way because of that bit of

-pashtry joolery I got hould of in mistake for goods

-down Melbourne way....  I misremember if I tould you."

-

-"You did, more nor once, and you was jolly well

-served right by her," candidly replied the mate.

-"The yarn's all right, I suppose, and the paste

-necklace is good business; but where does this Vaiti

-come in?"

-

-"Quit lookin' at her, ye —— fool, and give me a

-light for me poipe.  Talk easy, can't you....  Why,

-she knows more navigation than most men that's got

-a master's ticket, and she's as vain of it as a paycock.

-And that's how I'll have her.  Always get a woman

-t'rough her consate, me boy, especially if her eyes are

-too sharp in common.  That'll pull the wool over them

-when nothing else will."

-

-"When I was in Callao——" began the mate, with

-an evil chuckle.

-

-"Leave Callao be now; you can tell me about her

-another time.  Well, you understand about Saxon's

-girl, I hope?  She's to navigate us on the trip, because

-nayther you nor I knows enough for a cruisin' job like

-this, and the old chap himself is pretty general

-drunk—that's the way I put it—and shares with what we find,

-and the ould divil himself to come along, just for

-propriety, and in case of a fight with the owners.  Oh,

-a nate yarn, and she shwallowed it down like a cat

-atin' butter.  She's comin' on boord to-night, to see

-the necklashe and look over the chart I've marked.

-She'll not bring ould Saxon, for she's feared of nayther

-man nor divil, and I'll bet she thinks to get the bearin's

-of the place off of me and chate me out of it after all."

-

-"And how the h—— do you think she's going to

-believe that you give the show away before the ship

-sails?  Her teeth wasn't cut yesterday, by all we know."

-

-"Faith, and we do know!" muttered the captain,

-with a horrible undercurrent of oaths.  "And she'll

-know, by —— she will!  I'd slit the throat of her,

-if it wasn't for the other bit of divarsion we've

-planned."

-

-"Say you've planned," interrupted the mate darkly.

-"I call it bad work, whether she was man, woman, or

-child; but you're my master."

-

-"And you're a plashter saint, ain't you?" sneered

-the captain.  "Let's have no more of your chat; we

-know each other a —— sight too well.  As for the

-chart, she'll think we don't mean to give it away till

-she and her father is under sail with us, but she'll come

-on the chance of sneaking it out somehow.  And when

-we've got her aboard, why—lave it to me!  Ould

-Saxon's hell-cat daughter won't take no more

-pearl-shell beds from us or any one else."

-

-"You ain't afraid of her knowing who we are?"

-

-"How would she, then?  The *Ikurangi* isn't the

-*Margaret Macintyre*—bad luck to her who brought me

-down to such a tub, after ownin' the finest auxiliary

-in Auckland!—and she never seen you or me till to-day.

-No, it's all right.  That's enough jaw; you go aboard,

-and attend to you know what, and then send off the boat

-for her and me."

-

-Vaiti, curly classic head on slender hand, still watched

-from her corner.

-

-Did she suspect?  There was nothing for suspicion

-to lay hold of.  Donahue was one of the acutest villains

-under the Southern Cross, and he did not make clumsy

-mistakes.  The story of the derelict, of the valuables

-abandoned on board, of the necessity for finding the

-ship soon and secretly, might have sounded far-fetched

-to city-dwelling folk, but out in the wild South Seas

-stranger things may happen any day.  The plan was

-neat and plausible from every point of view, and Vaiti

-had taken the bait readily enough that afternoon.

-Yet Donahue felt—as the two walked silently down the

-dim, perfumed beach street, all ablow with vagrant

-sea winds and wandering wafts of song—that he would

-have given a good deal for just one peep into his

-handsome companion's mind.

-

-Vaiti walked beside him, looking straight ahead.

-Had Donahue's wish been granted, he would have

-thought somewhat less of his own acuteness.  She did

-suspect.  A man, in her case, would have been

-convinced by the reasonable aspect of the whole affair.

-Vaiti, being a woman, with sea-anemone tentacles of

-instinct floating and tingling all about the steady

-centres of reason in her mind, was convinced, and vet

-not convinced.  She thought it was all right, yet she

-knew it was not—after a woman's way.

-

-In any case, however, it was an adventure, and there

-was a mystery to fathom.  So she put on a more

-substantial dress than the gauzy draperies she had been

-wearing, hung the neatest possible little pearl-handled

-Smith and Wesson round her neck, under the swelling

-folds of her frock, by means of an innocent-looking thin

-gold neck-chain that would snap with a tug; put her

-long-bladed knife in her pocket, with the sheath sewn

-to the dress, so that a pull would bring out the blade,

-and joined Donahue an hour after dinner, on the verandah

-steps, confident of her ability to see the thing through,

-whatever it might be.

-

-She looked sharply about her, as she stepped over

-the low bulwarks of the *Ikurangi* and dropped down

-on to the encumbered, untidy deck.  No one about.

-Nothing to be seen but a dirty little main deck, with

-rusty pumps and a yawning hatch, and a poop that

-even in the pallid light just beginning to tremble up

-from the rising moon showed neglect of the sacred

-ceremony of daily deck-washing.

-

-Now, any decent ship's captain will attend to his

-deck-washing, even if he doesn't shave or wash himself

-from port to port.  Vaiti did not like that unscrupulous,

-dirty poop.  But she was already up on it, and Donahue

-was bowing her down the cabin companion, with a jarring

-smile and a good deal of over-fluent blarney.  The

-cabin was small and smelly; it had an oblong table

-in the middle, surrounded by cushioned lockers, and an

-open door at the end facing the companion.  This door

-evidently opened into Donahue's own cabin, for a rough

-wash-stand and a looking-glass, the latter hung high

-on the bulkhead, were plainly visible.  There was a

-lamp nailed above the glass, and the two together shone

-brightly out into the rather ill-lit main cabin.

-

-"What'll you take?" asked Donahue, with his

-unpleasant smile.  "I've got some sweet sherry wine,

-just the thing for ladies—or wouldn't ye put your lips

-to a taste of peach brandy?"

-

-Vaiti shook her head.

-

-"No good drink, suppose talk business," she said.

-She would not have swallowed a glass of water on the

-*Ikurangi* for a dozen Virot hats.

-

-Donahue had not expected to catch her so easily;

-still, he cast a thought of regret to his nicely-doctored

-liquors.  She evidently meant what she said—and the

-other way Was harder.

-

-"Well, thin, darlin', we'll have a look at the cha-art,"

-he observed, producing a roll of paper.  "It's yourself

-that can help us t'rough this business—you and the

-ould man—better than any one from Calloa to Sydney

-if only yez are raisonable about terms."

-

-He spread the chart out on the table, and weighted

-it down with a couple of tumblers.

-

-Vaiti, her mind charged full with watchful suspicion,

-felt that sudden small, sick thrill that is the forerunner

-of the thought—"I wish I hadn't!"  Afterwards,

-when she came to think matters over, she knew that it

-was because Donahue had made the mistake of bringing

-out the chart before the terms had been discussed,

-which was an improbable sort of thing to do.  In

-such moments, however, one does not think, one only

-feels.  Still, the warning was unmistakable, and Vaiti

-made as if to rise, intending to plead sudden illness and

-get out on deck.  But Donahue, sharp as a snake, saw

-the movement, and brought out his trump card at once.

-

-"Sure, I'm a —— fool, I am, to forget the necklashe!

-You haven't seen that yet," he said, whipping a stream

-of white fire out of his pocket and letting it fall across

-the dark wood of the table.  It was a magnificent piece

-of paste-work, and had taken in Donahue himself,

-some few weeks ago, after a fashion that made him sore

-enough to remember.  Vaiti gasped when she saw it,

-and laid both her pretty olive hands upon it at once.

-Her suspicions were not exactly killed, but they had

-for the moment no room to live with the passionate

-feeling aroused by the gems.  Donahue, with his

-unspeakable experience of the sex, had calculated rightly

-when he classified her among the women who would

-almost do murder for a diamond....  Such jewels! and

-she had never had one in her hand before,

-though her eyes had often filled and her heart

-ached with hopeless desire before the maddening

-glories of the jewellers' windows in Auckland and

-Sydney.

-

-She hugged the necklace to her breast like a baby,

-she shook it, she danced it in the light....  And

-then, was it in woman's nature to refrain from

-snapping the clasp about her neck, and feeling the

-dear touch of those cold drops and pendants on her

-bosom?

-

-"Ah, now, but you're the beauty wit' them little

-jokers round your neck!  And the lovely neck you

-have, darlin'!" blarneyed Donahue.  He had better

-have been silent, for Vaiti, used to admiration of every

-kind and degree as to daily bread, felt the falseness

-of the tone.  If all other men admired her beauty,

-this one did not, though he said so.  His grey,

-goat-like eyes looked something more like hate across the

-narrow table, under the ill-smelling oily lamp, and Vaiti

-saw they did.

-

-Donahue, taught by twenty years of active villainy,

-was quick to feel the necessity for the next move.

-He went into his own cabin and turned up the

-lamp.  The looking-glass shone out brightly under its

-rays.

-

-"Come and look at yourself, me beauty," he said;

-"and let me ould shavin'-glass see the handsomest girl

-in the islands wearin' what she ought to wear every

-day of her life, if she'd her rights."

-

-For the moment, Vaiti was not herself.  She was

-drunk with the jewels; she was crazed with the desire

-to see herself in them.  If heaven and hell had stood

-between her and the looking-glass, she was bound

-to go to it, and Donahue knew it, as surely as he knew

-that the moon would set that night.

-

-Vaiti—still sensing the danger that she would not

-heed, through all the intoxication of the jewels—thought,

-in a cinematographic flash, that one was safe

-before a glass, at all events....  No one could come

-up behind you....  Besides, there was the little

-revolver, hanging on the chain that would snap with

-a tug....

-

-And then, for the space of a full minute, she saw

-nothing, knew nothing, lived for nothing but the sight

-of her own dark, beautiful face in the glass, lit up into

-surpassing loveliness by the scintillating fires about her

-neck.  There was no movement in the mirror behind

-her.  Donahue sat motionless at the table, and the cabin

-was very still.

-

-... The first ecstasy subsided, and she turned her

-head a little to see the diamonds twinkle....

-

-Donahue's elbow knocked a glass off the table with

-a sharp crash.  Almost at the same instant two powerful

-hands closed on each of Vaiti's ankles, and snatched

-her feet from under her.  She plucked out the revolver

-as she fell, but her hands were caught, whisked behind

-her, and securely tied, with a prompt swiftness that

-told of frequent experience.  In another minute her

-ankles were lashed together, none too gently; she

-was carried into a small state-room, thrown down

-upon the bunk, and left alone in the dark, with the

-slam of the door and snap of the lock resounding in her

-ears.

-

-Most women would have screamed.  Vaiti remembered

-that they were out in the middle of a wide harbour,

-and decided not to risk the infliction of a gag for such

-a slight chance of rescue....  Certain ugly scenes on

-the *Sybil* rose up before her eyes.  No; decidedly it

-was her only policy to keep quiet.

-

-Outside there was the thud of bare feet running

-about the deck, the creak of the booms rising on the

-masts, the slatting of loose sails—loud orders, long yells

-from the native crew, as they pulled and hauled.  The

-*Ikurangi* was making sail.

-

-Then sudden silence, slow heeling over of the cabin,

-lip-lap of hurrying water along the hull.  They were off.

-Where?  God—or the devil—only knew!

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`MAROONED`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER VI

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   MAROONED

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-There was plenty of time for reflection in the long

-days that followed.  The greasy-faced old mate came

-in and cut the lashings off Vaiti's ankles and wrists,

-a few hours after sailing, and she was left free to move

-about the cabin, which offered a promenade of exactly

-seven feet by three.  Meals were handed in to her three

-times daily—the usual black tea, tinned meat, and

-weevily biscuit of second-class island schooners—and

-she was not in any way molested, though the door

-was always kept locked.  Donahue put in his head once

-or twice to look at her, as she sat cross-legged on her

-bunk, staring out through the port at the tumbling seas.

-He generally had something to say—a jarring, mocking

-compliment, or a remark about the time they were

-likely to make Sydney Heads—knowing all the time that

-Vaiti could estimate the general direction of their

-course by the sun, and that there was no southing in it.

-If she had ever feared any one, she feared this man—almost.

-

-It was not difficult to understand how the capture

-had been brought about.  A man under the bunk,

-another under the sofa opposite—her own eyes watching

-only the upper part of the cabin as reflected in the

-glass—nothing could be simpler or better planned.  The

-affair was none the less ugly on that account.  Perhaps

-it was only Vaiti's burning anger at her utter rout

-and defeat in her own business of plotting and intrigue

-that saved her from something very like despair, as

-the schooner ploughed steadily on, day after day,

-carrying her into the great unknown, farther and farther

-away from all who could defend her.  Yet, despairing

-or not, Saxon's daughter never lost her courage.  They

-had taken her weapons from her as they carried her

-into the cabin, but they could not take away her

-undaunted spirit.  She waited her time.

-

-As to the meaning of the business, she trusted, again,

-to time's enlightenment.  Saxon had many enemies;

-so had she.  It would all come out by-and-by.

-Meantime, it was clear that no one meant to murder her.

-What else might be meant she could not tell, and she

-did not care to speculate overmuch.  Under such

-circumstances one does best to save one's nerve against

-the time it may be wanted.

-

-It was on the twenty-third day out from Apia, bearing,

-as far as she could discover, in a north-westerly direction,

-that she first noted the approach of land.  Nothing

-could be seen from her side of the ship, but she heard

-the long, excited cries of the island crew, and the

-thundering of their feet, as they began putting the ship

-about with unwonted vigour, to a chorus of native

-songs.  She strained her eyes eagerly when the ship

-came about on the other tack, but the line of the horizon

-was unbroken; and it was not for another hour that

-she saw, from her low elevation, what the look-out

-in the crow's nest had sighted long before—a line of

-small black bristles pricking the edge of the horizon

-several miles away.

-

-Vaiti knew the sight at once for the palms of a

-low atoll island—evidently some barren, sun-smitten

-spot close up to the line—and a ready solution of

-the whole puzzling affair at once sprang into her mind.

-

-Marooning!

-

-Most people know the meaning of this term; nearly

-every one has heard of sailors captured by pirates in

-old days, and left on lonely islands, or even deserted

-by their own comrades on some isolated spot, with just

-enough food and water to save the marooners'

-consciences from the guilt of actual murder.  Vaiti knew

-both the word and the thing very well-indeed, and she

-was almost certain that the *Ikurangi* had gone off the

-course on the way to some South American port with

-the view of hiding her where she would not easily be

-found again.  There are many islands in the wastes

-of the vast Pacific where a ship may not pass once in

-half a century, and these—unlike the typical "desert"

-island of stories—are almost always barren, hungry,

-shadeless spots, where Crusoe himself would have been

-hard put to it to make a decent living.  The fertile,

-mountainous, well-watered isle is never without a

-native population, permanent or occasional, and is very

-seldom indeed, in these days, without a trader as well,

-and a regularly calling schooner.  As for the breadfruit,

-oranges, pineapples, the pigs and goats, the sugarcane

-and maize of uninhabited islands as known to

-fiction, they have no counterpart in real life.  All the

-valuable food plants and all useful animals are the

-product of importation and cultivation, ancient or

-modern.  It follows, that where there are no people

-and no ships, there is nothing worth having.

-

-Vaiti knew this very well, and decided that if she was

-going to be marooned, she might as well make such

-provision as circumstances allowed.  She had hunted

-over every inch of the cabin—which seemed to belong

-to the mate—during the long days of the voyage, and

-she knew exactly what it contained.  From the stores

-put away under the bunk she selected a large new sheet,

-which she concealed under her dress; a small stock

-of needles and thread, a box or two of matches, some

-hooks and line, and a stick of dynamite, evidently

-meant for some forgotten fishing purpose.  There was

-nothing in the shape of a knife, much to her regret;

-and there was a good deal of clothing that she would

-have liked to carry away; but it would not do to take

-more than she could easily conceal.  So she made an

-end of her preparations, and sat down to wait once more.

-

-There was no moon that night until very late,

-and darkness came down so close on the stroke of

-four bells that Vaiti felt sure they were very near the

-equator.  No one came near her, and tea seemed to

-be unusually late.  The anchor-chain roared home

-soon after dark, the ship lay very still, and there was a

-good deal of running about on deck.  Vaiti was

-confirmed in her anticipations of an uninhabited island

-by the fact that no boat was to be heard coming off

-from shore.  Not a sound of any kind, indeed, came

-from the island, and there were no lights on the beach.

-Some one handed her in her tea by-and-by, and a

-little later her door was flung open again by the mate.

-

-"Come on out," he said.

-

-Vaiti followed the mate out of the cabin at once,

-rather to his surprise.  She had made up her mind

-that anything was better than the *Ikurangi*, and she

-was looking out sharply for a chance—any chance—of

-turning the tables.

-

-It did not look at first as if she were to have one.

-The dinghy had been swung out when she got on deck,

-and a couple of men were standing ready to lower away.

-They were islanders, and she knew that they would

-befriend her if they could—indeed, their glances showed

-as much—yet what could they do?

-

-Donahue was nowhere visible.  He had planned

-this business with some forethought, and he wanted

-to have a chance of casting blame on his subordinate

-if any inquisitive Government official should incline

-to look the matter up later on.  So he stayed down

-in his own cabin, pretending to be asleep, and the mate,

-rather against his will, had to carry out orders alone.

-

-Just as the boat was ready to lower away, one of

-the men let her go with a run, and she struck the water

-stern first, with a terrible splash.  The mate, screaming

-curses, ran over to the falls and began to abuse the crew.

-The dinghy was injured, and they had to haul her up

-and swing out the whaleboat instead.

-

-This took some little time, and Vaiti was forgotten

-for the moment—a chance that made her heart beat

-with eagerness to profit by it.

-

-Two ideas held possession of her—that she must

-plan to secure a boat, and that she must manage to do

-the *Ikurangi* some sort of mischief.  Was it to be borne

-that Donahue should go unpaid?  The blood of a

-hundred fierce Island chiefs made answer.

-

-Concerning the boat, she thought she saw a chance.

-They were bound to stay a day for wood and water,

-and that should furnish an opportunity.  But the other

-matter?

-

-If she could only get hold of the ship's papers and

-destroy them!  That would be satisfactory.  She knew,

-none better, that a ship's papers are her character, her

-"marriage-lines" of respectability.  Without them a

-vessel is an illegitimate, furtive creature, every man's

-hand against her, every official eye turned coldly upon

-her.  Vaiti would have liked very well to get hold of

-the *Ikurangi's*.

-

-But, careless as Donahue was, the papers were not

-to be found in the little deck cabin which he used as

-a chart-room.  Vaiti, disappointed, took one of the

-charts and began studying the position of the ship,

-with a view to finding out the name of the island off

-which they were lying.  The chart was almost a blank,

-nothing being marked upon its wide expanse but a

-number of reefs and two or three atolls—Bilboa Island,

-Vaka, Ngamaru—dotted hundreds of miles apart in

-a naked waste of white.  Bilboa, an abandoned guano

-island, of which she had heard something, seemed to

-Vaiti the most likely of the three spots.  Ngamaru,

-she knew, had a native population, and about Vaka

-she could for the moment remember nothing, although

-she knew she had heard something once upon a time.

-All this part of the Pacific was far removed from the

-*Sybil's* haunts, and indeed from the haunts of any

-other ship of which Vaiti had ever heard.

-

-It did not seem to be a healthy place for schooners;

-the reefs round both Vaka and Bilboa were many,

-and most were marked "Position doubtful."  Donahue

-was evidently not familiar with either place, for the

-chart was freshly pencilled over with notes and

-corrections.  Vaiti's heart leaped up as she looked at the

-careless work....  She saw a way.

-

-They were still clearing the lumber out of the whaleboat

-on deck.  No one was watching.

-

-Vaiti took a pencil and rubber, and began to do some

-artistic alterations on the chart, helped by her

-knowledge of seamanship.  In ten minutes she had converted

-the innocent piece of parchment into a perfect death-trap,

-rolled it up and replaced it, put back the rubber

-and pencil, and slipped out again on deck, where she

-sat down on a coil of rope and waited.

-

-In another couple of minutes the boat was in the

-water, and the mate called rudely to Vaiti.  She came

-without a word, covering her face with her dress, and

-sobbing bitterly.  She stumbled as she walked; you

-would have sworn she was weak, broken in spirit, and

-utterly helpless.

-

-If the mate felt any compassion, he did not dare to

-show it.  They shoved off, two natives at the oars.

-Vaiti, sobbing effectively behind her hands, kept a sharp

-look-out with the corner of one eye as they slid across

-the dark water, but she could see nothing save a faintly

-glimmering line of grey shore, and hear nothing but the

-humming of the surf on the reef.

-

-As soon as they reached the shallow water near the

-shore, the mate took Vaiti by her arm and roared,

-"Out you go!"

-

-Sobbing afresh, in the most natural and convincing

-manner in the world, she obeyed....  It was dark, and

-the native who rowed bow oar never knew that she

-whipped his knife dexterously out of his belt as she

-passed him.

-

-"Why are you marooning me?" she wailed, as she

-waded through the warm, shallow water towards the

-shore.

-

-The mate leaned out of the boat, now fading fast away

-into the starry gloom, and shouted as he disappeared:

-

-"To pay for Delgadas Reef and the *Margaret Macintyre*!"

-

-Vaiti, who had reached the shore, almost sat down with

-the shock.  So that was it! that was it! The pearl-shell

-lagoon out of which she, almost unaided, had

-"jockeyed" the schooner *Margaret Macintyre*, some

-months before, was bringing in a crop other than pearls—of

-which last, indeed, the canny Scot who had financed

-the working of the place had had very much the larger

-share.

-

-Well, things must be taken as they were found.  The

-soft tropic night stirred gently round her.  The stars

-were large and golden; they shone in the still lagoon

-like little moons.  Palm trees waved somewhere up in

-the dusk above, striking their huge rattling vanes together

-with the swing of the night-breeze.  It was land, safe,

-solid land, and the sand was warm and soft, and Vaiti

-was tired.  She walked a little way up the beach,

-stretched herself under a pandanus tree, and went to

-sleep....

-

-Some hours later she woke, with the dim, mysterious

-volcano-glow of the tropic dawn in her eyes, and a curious

-feeling of disquiet about her heart.  Still half asleep,

-she saw the long grey shore sloping down to the silent

-lagoon, the ink-coloured pandanus trees standing up

-against the dull orange sky, the leaning stems and stumps

-of coco-palms, dark and formless in the shadow.  She

-shut her eyes and tried to sleep again.

-

-No use.  That nameless disquiet—now almost fear—still

-stirred at her heart.  She opened her eyes once

-more, and looked about.  A little more light—the touch

-of a glowing finger away in the east—a clearer defining

-of the cocoanut stumps, snapped off near their roots in

-the last great hurricane....  One of the stumps was

-oddly shaped—almost like a human figure.  She could

-have fancied it was a rude image of a sitting man, only

-that the profile, against the lightening east, was

-featureless, and there was nothing to represent the hands.

-

-"I will not be frightened by a rotten cocoanut tree,"

-thought Vaiti.  "I will sleep again till it is light.  Am I

-not a sea-captain's daughter, and the descendant of

-great Island chiefs, and shall I fear the fancies of my own

-mind?"

-

-Determinedly she closed her eyes again, and lay very

-still.  The dawn wind began to stir; the ripples crisped

-upon the beach; the locusts in the trees broke out into

-a loud chirr-ing chorus.  And as the day broke silver-clear

-upon the shore, Vaiti, still lying on the sand, felt

-that some one, in the gathering light, was watching her

-as she lay.

-

-Wary as a fox, she opened her dark, keen eyes without

-stirring her body ... and looked straight into a face

-that was bending almost over her ... a face hooded

-by a black cloth that hid the head and brow, and only

-left to view ... O God!  O God! what was it?

-

-The thing was featureless.  Nose, eyes, and mouth

-were gone.  In the midst of a cavern of unspeakable

-ruin the ghastly throat gaped vacant.  Two handless,

-rotting stumps of arms waved blindly

-about—feeling—feeling....

-

-Could it hear?  Some instinct told the girl that it

-could.  Softly as a snake she writhed out of the reach

-of those terrible groping arms.

-

-It did hear.  It sprang blindly forward—it snatched.

-

-With one leap Vaiti was on her feet.  Never looking

-back, she fled down the open beach, the sand spurting

-behind her as she ran.  She heard a dull padding in her

-rear at first; it soon grew faint, but she ran on blindly,

-long after it had died away—ran, while the sun climbed

-over the horizon and cast down handfuls of burning gold

-on her uncovered head—ran, while the beach grew

-parchment-white and dazzled back the heat into her face like

-an open furnace—ran till at last her over-driven body

-gave way, and the sand spun round and the sky turned

-red before her eyes.  Then only she staggered into the

-shade and dropped down upon a green mattress of

-convolvulus creeper to rest.

-

-And now, when she had leisure to think and strength

-to cast off the haunting horror of that inhuman face,

-she knew what Donahue had done.

-

-This was not Bilboa, the uninhabited guano island

-that she had feared.  This was infinitely worse—it was

-Vaka, the leper isle!

-

-She remembered that she had once heard a dim

-rumour of Vaka and its ghastly leper people—the remnant

-of a plague-smitten tribe long ago forcibly exiled there

-from one of the fierce western groups.  No ships ever

-called at this graveyard of the living; it was supposed

-that the cocoanuts and fish of the island provided

-sufficient food for the people, and no one cared to run the

-chance of their stowing away and escaping, especially

-as they were known to be both daring and treacherous

-on occasion.  Donahue had indeed laid his plans well for

-the most hideous revenge that the heart of man or devil

-could conceive.  A few weeks or months in this charnel-house

-of horrors, where the very air must reek of contagion,

-and what would it avail her if, after all, some

-stray, storm-driven vessel should rescue the castaway?

-Better, then, that she should stay and die among the

-other nameless nightmare horrors that walked these

-stricken shores.

-

-No!  Vaiti, sitting cross-legged on the netted vines

-and staring grimly out to sea, then and there took resolve

-that such a fate should not be hers....  Sharks were

-uncertain, if you really wanted them; but the stick of

-dynamite she had taken from the mate's cabin was safe

-and sure.  If she failed in using it for the special purpose

-she had planned, she would put it in her mouth and

-light the fuse....  There would be no more trouble after

-that.  And as for the flies—one did not feel them, of

-course, when one was dead.

-

-All the same, she did not mean to die if she could

-avoid it, and, as the first step towards helping herself,

-she knocked some nuts off a young palm, and took her

-breakfast off the refreshing water and juicy meat.  Then

-she cut a length of bush rope, looped it round the tallest

-palm in sight, and set her feet inside the loop, so that

-she could work herself up to the top of the tree,

-monkey-on-stick fashion, leaning against the rope.  When she

-got into the crown of the palm she knelt among the

-leaves, holding on tightly, and looked right and left over

-the island.

-

-It was a pure atoll, an irregular circle of feather palms

-lying on the sea like a great green garland set afloat.

-The inner lagoon was several square miles in extent, but

-the land was not more than a few hundred yards wide

-at any point, and there was no soil to speak of.  The

-palms, the scanty, pale green scrub, the mop-headed

-pandanus trees, the trailing creepers, all sprang out of

-pure white coral gravel and sand.  The scene was lovely

-as only a coral atoll can be—the jewel-green water of the

-inner lagoon, shaded with vivid reflections of lilac and

-pale turquoise, the stately circled palms, the wide, white

-beach enclasping all the island like a frame of purest

-pearl, the burning blue of the surrounding sea, all

-combined to form a picture bright as fairyland and sparkling

-as an enamelled gem set upon a velvet shield.

-

-But Vaiti, while she saw and admired the loveliness

-of the scene, also recognised its barrenness as only an

-islander could.  No fruit, no roots, little fresh

-water—nothing, in fact, but cocoanut and pandanus kernels,

-eked out by a little fish....  The lepers must often go

-hungry.

-

-The hot day turned suddenly chill as Vaiti recalled

-those blind, snatching, handless arms.  They came of a

-cannibal race, these Vaka folk.  What if she had not

-waked?  What if, wearied as she well might be, she

-slept too long and too soundly in the night that was to

-come?

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE TURNING OF THE TABLES`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER VII

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE TURNING OF THE TABLES

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-She looked narrowly about the island, hoping to discover

-the place where the lepers lived.  A cluster of small,

-miserable huts, on the far side of the lagoon, attracted

-her attention.  It seemed not more than half a mile

-from the spot where she had spent the night.  The best

-fishing grounds she judged, by the look of the shore, to

-be near the village.  She was therefore, no doubt, several

-miles from their usual haunts.

-

-So far, so good.  Where was the schooner?  It lay

-to her left about a mile out at sea, close to a small,

-uninhabited, sandy islet.  Vaiti supposed that the men were

-cutting wood and looking for water.  She saw one or

-two black dots on the shore, recognisable by their blue

-dungaree clothing, and strained her eyes eagerly to see

-if the dinghy had been pulled up on the sand, for in

-this lay her only chance.  If they brought the boat up

-on the beach, to repair her where wood could be had

-without going to the atoll itself (Vaiti would have wagered

-that the *Ikurangi* did not carry a splinter outside of the

-galley fuel), then the schooner would probably stop

-overnight.  In that case she could carry out her plans.

-Otherwise ... there was always the dynamite.

-

-The dinghy was ashore, drawn well up on the beach.

-

-She drew a breath of relief, and slid down the tree

-again.  Now she could wait till night with an easy

-mind.

-

-All day she hid in the tangle of young palm and low-growing

-scrub that clustered about the foot of the loftier

-trees.  Once she saw a couple of the lepers pass by in

-the distance, evidently looking for something.  These

-had eyes, and she crept closer into the shelter of the

-scrub till they were gone.  Then she came cautiously

-out, and plucked long sheets of the fine pale-brown

-natural matting that protects the young shoot of the

-cocoanut, to cover up her white dress, for the scrub was

-dangerously thin, in that staring overhead sun.  She did

-not venture down to the sea to fish, but fed upon

-cocoanuts during the day.

-

-Night came at last—night and coolness, with big stars

-shining in the lagoon, and a gentle breeze stirring among

-the palms.  About midnight, as near as she could

-guess, Vaiti came out of her shelter and prepared for

-action.

-

-She took off her clothes, and fastened about her waist

-a petticoat of the dark-coloured cocoanut matting which

-she had stitched together during the day.  So habited,

-with her olive skin and black hair, she knew that she

-was invisible in the darkness of the night.  She fastened

-the dynamite, and a box of matches, into the coil of

-hair on the top of her head, stuck her knife into the

-waist of her petticoat, and walked down the beach into

-the warm, dark sea.

-

-She knew very well that the outer side of an atoll

-commonly swarms with sharks, but the risk did not

-trouble her.  There was something a good deal worse to

-face on the island than any number of sharks.  Heading

-for the distant light of the schooner, she swam through

-the starry water with the low, dog-like island paddle that

-can cover such marvellous distances—keeping her head

-well out, and quietly taking her time.

-

-It was a long swim, but it ended at last, and the

-schooner rose up before her in the water, black and silent,

-and shifting ever so little upon the swell of the incoming

-tide.  The stars made little trickles of light upon her

-wet, dark hull.  Two boats lay alongside—the dinghy,

-freshly mended and watertight, and the whaleboat,

-loaded with wood and cocoanuts.  After the slovenly

-fashion of the *Ikurangi*, they had left the boats until the

-morning to hoist inboard, seeing that it was dead calm

-in the lee of the islet.

-

-This was more than Vaiti had hoped for, and it made

-her task easy.  She cut the dinghy's painter, got into

-the boat, and muffled the oars with a strip or two torn

-from her petticoat.  Then she put the dynamite into

-the whaleboat, cut and attached a good long fuse, set

-a match to it, and saw that the tiny red spark was steadily

-eating its way along, before she pulled off from the ship.

-She towed the whaleboat after her a little way, and then

-let it go thirty or forty yards from the ship.  It was not

-her desire to wreck the schooner at Vaka Island, and

-possibly let loose her enemies upon the atoll; rather

-she wished the ship well out of the way before any

-disaster should overtake her.  The charts would most

-probably ensure that matter.  The destruction of the

-boat was only intended to secure her own possession of

-the dinghy.

-

-She had scarcely reached the shore before a loud

-explosion boomed out across the water, and immediately

-after lights began to stir on board the schooner.  Vaiti

-worked with coolness and speed, knowing that it was

-not likely, though possible, that any one would swim

-ashore.  From her eyrie in the coco-palm she had noted

-a deep, narrow creek running up from the lagoon—a

-mere crack in the coral, but wide enough to admit a small

-boat, taken in with care.  There was just enough light

-from the stars to enable her to find the place, and

-run the boat up on the sand at the end, into the heart

-of a tangle of leaves and creepers that entirely concealed

-it.  For safety's sake, she cut a few more armfuls of

-trailing vines from the shore, and buried the boat two

-or three feet deep, so that neither from the sea nor the

-land could it possibly be seen.

-

-As she worked, she could hear shouts and cries, made

-faint by distance, coming across the water from the

-schooner.  She could imagine the scene that would take

-place on board when they found themselves boatless.

-Some of the native crew—not Donahue or the mate;

-they would never face the sharks—would probably

-swim ashore to-morrow to investigate.  Well, let them!

-

-Having finished the concealing of the dinghy, she got

-into it herself, put on her clothes again, drew the tangled

-creepers well over her, and went calmly to sleep, secure

-that no one could find her unless she chose to be

-found.

-

-All the same, she was very cautious about getting up

-the next morning, and looked carefully between the

-leaves before she ventured out of her hiding-place.  She

-covered up her light dress with the cocoanut canvas, and

-then climbed a palm to look about.

-

-People were moving hurriedly about the decks of the

-schooner; something seemed to be going on.  As she

-watched, she saw two natives, clad only in loin-cloths,

-stand up on the bulwarks, ready to dive.  In another

-moment they had flashed down into the sea, small as

-ants to sight at that distance, but perfectly clear to

-Vaiti's sea-trained eyes.  Then the dark specks began

-to make their way across the water.  The sun was newly

-risen, the sea was still a mirror of molten gold, and the

-tiny black heads stood out sharply on its surface.  Vaiti

-set her teeth as she watched them creeping on.  They

-were island men, of her mother's own race, and they had

-done her no harm.  And ... the longer a vessel lies

-at anchor in equatorial latitudes, the more certain it is

-that sharks will gather round her—even if there has been

-no explosion in the water alongside to kill the fish and

-collect the tigers of the sea from far and near.

-

-Vaiti looked away, and began desperately to count

-the nuts clustered among the palm-fronds at her

-feet....  How many were there?  Ten—fifteen—twenty——

-

-A long, despairing shriek tore across the water.  She

-put her fingers in her ears and buried her face in the

-leaves.  Yet, all the same, she heard a second cry,

-short and sudden, and quickly ended.  There was

-nothing more.  She lifted her face again, her teeth set

-tight into her lower lip.  The two black heads were

-gone.

-

-"No one will come ashore to-day," she said, with a

-shiver.  Something seemed to stab her, as she thought

-of that doctored chart in the schooner's deck cabin.

-The reefs on the course to South America were hundreds

-of miles from shore—the ship had no boats—and the

-native crew must suffer with the villainous captain and

-mate, if the disaster that she had plotted so carefully

-should come about....  There would be sharks there,

-too, when the ship broke up....

-

-The crystal-gold of the sea turned dim before Vaiti's

-eyes.  It was only a mist of tears that lay between, but

-to the girl's excited imagination it seemed like the

-spreading and darkening stain of blood.

-

-Careless of whether she was seen or not, she slid down

-the tree and rushed into the scrub, where she sat down

-upon the sand and cried like a mere nervous schoolgirl.

-The sun was past the zenith when she lifted her head

-again; the schooner had put out to sea, and lay, a far-off

-snowy speck, upon the blue horizon.

-

-Vaiti stood up, flung back her hair, and cast the

-trouble from her.  She could not afford to grieve over

-the inevitable now; there was too much to do.  The

-boat had to be prepared and provisioned, and that was

-not the work of a moment.

-

-She husked and opened a number of large cocoanuts,

-and removed the insides.  She then cut a quantity of

-young palm-leaves, and plaited them into baskets, which

-she filled with the cocoanut meat.  Afterwards she cut

-down dozens of young green nuts for drinking, husked

-them to save space, and slung them together in bunches

-with strips of their own fibre.  This done, she hid the

-provisions in the boat, and set about her own supper,

-as it was almost dark.

-

-Nourishing food she felt she must have, if she was to

-get through with her enterprise, but she dared not

-attract attention to herself by going out torch-fishing on

-the reef.  However, there were certain holes in the

-ground about the roots of the palms that to her

-experienced eye promised something better than fish.

-

-She dug a fire-hole in the gravel at the end of the gully

-where she had hidden the boat, lined it with stones, and

-made a fire, looking well to it that no gleam should be

-visible from above.  When the stones were beginning to

-heat, she took a piece of palms-leaf in her hand, hid herself

-in the bush, and waited, still as a rock.

-

-By-and-by there was a faint scuffling among the roots

-of the trees, and a shadowy thing began climbing up

-the trunk of a palm.  Vaiti waited till it had disappeared

-in the crown of the tree, and then climbed after it to a

-point about ten feet from the top, where she tied

-her strip of leaf round the trunk and came down

-again.

-

-Thump! thump!  Two cocoanuts fell to the earth.

-The crab (for it was a cocoanut crab of the biggest and

-fiercest kind) was getting his supper.  Now he would

-come down the tree, rip open the nuts with his formidable

-claws, and enjoy the contents.

-

-Slowly he began to back down the palm, his sensitive

-tail ready to tell him when he had touched earth and

-might safely let go.  And now it was that Vaiti's trap

-(a well-known native trick) proved his undoing.  The

-belt of dry leaflets round the tree tickled his tail, he

-promptly let go, and fell with a crash seventy feet through

-air on to the pile of coral lumps that Vaiti had heaped

-up at the foot of the tree.

-

-The girl picked him up, badly injured and unable to

-use his claws (which were big enough to crack her ankle),

-and put an end to him with a clever stroke of her knife.

-He proved to be two feet long in the body alone, and of

-a fine blue and red colour, as seen in the dim light of the

-fire.  She put him on the heated stones, wrapped in

-leaves, buried him until cooked, and then enjoyed a hot

-supper that an epicure might have envied.

-

-Strengthened by the good food, she worked on late

-into the night, catching more crabs, whose meat she

-hoped she could dry in the sun, making a rough sail out

-of the bed-sheet she had carried away from the schooner,

-twisting sinnet plait out of cocoanut husk for ropes,

-cutting and trimming a small pandanus for the mast.

-She had all her plans laid, and knew what she meant to

-do.  Her present position was about five hundred miles

-from the Marquesas, and the south-east trades would be

-in her favour.  With lines for fishing, a beaker full of

-fresh water on board (she had found that in the dinghy

-when she took it away), cocoanuts to help out with, and

-plenty of crab to dry, she hoped that she might manage

-to reach the islands before her strength or her food gave

-out.  Greater voyages had been done many a time in

-mere canoes, and the dinghy was a large boat of its kind,

-strong, well built, and new.  If she failed—well, any

-death, any horror that the wide seas could hold was better

-than Vaka Island.

-

-All being ready, she lay down and slept till dawn—a

-somewhat restless sleep, for it was full of wandering

-dreams, and all the dreams took one shape: Donahue's

-schooner, snared by the lying chart, rushing helpless

-to her end, with the green-eyed tigers of the sea hovering

-ever about the reefs, and waiting ... waiting....

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-"I don't think the patient can see any one," said the

-nurse doubtfully.

-

-The big, yellow-haired sailor took off his hat and

-stepped up on to the verandah.  It was a very beautiful

-verandah.  You could see most of Suva Bay from it,

-and half the tumbled purple peaks of Fiji's wonderful

-mountains lying across the harbour.

-

-"If you could stretch a point, ma'am," said the

-sailor, "it might be as well for him.  I've got good

-news."

-

-"About his daughter?" asked the nurse.  She, like

-every one else in Suva, was deeply interested in this

-especial patient's story.  He had come to Suva in his

-own schooner, the *Sybil*, several weeks before, furious

-with rage and despair at the loss of his daughter, and

-eager to demand assistance from the High Commissioner

-of the Western Pacific, although it seemed by no means

-clear in what manner Her Majesty's representative could

-aid him.  Before the matter had even been discussed,

-however, he had fallen seriously ill of sunstroke and

-excitement combined, and had been sent to hospital,

-with rather a bad chance of recovery.  He was just

-turning the corner now, and the nurse—who could not

-but admire his rather weather-beaten good looks and

-romantic history—regarded him as her most interesting

-patient.

-

-"Yes, it's about his daughter," answered the sailor.

-"I'm the mate of the *Sybil*, ma'am; Harris is my name.

-Perhaps you'd kindly read this."

-

-He held out a long slip of printed paper, containing

-a *résumé* of the cables for the day—Suva's substitute

-for a daily paper.

-

-The nurse took it, and read:

-

-"The missing daughter of Edward Saxon, owner and

-master of the trading schooner *Sybil*, has at last

-reappeared.  Her fate has excited much interest and

-conjecture all over the Pacific.  She arrived in Sydney

-yesterday on board the cable-ship *Clotho*, by which

-she was picked up on the 2nd instant, in an open boat,

-alone, and two hundred miles from any land.  She had

-experienced bad weather, and was much exhausted

-for want of food, but declared herself capable, if it had

-been necessary, of reaching the nearest island group

-unaided.  She had been carried away, as was surmised,

-by the captain of the island schooner *Ikurangi*, who

-marooned her on a remote leper island, Vaka, and then

-sailed for South America.  Revenge for the loss of a

-pearl-shell bed of disputed ownership is said to have been

-the motive of this unparalleled outrage."

-

-"He shall have it at once," said the nurse cordially.

-"It'll do him more good than our medicines."

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-The story was a popular one in the hospital for months

-after, and it had not been quite forgotten when, towards

-the close of the hot season, a Sydney paper furnished

-the last chapter of the tale.  Saxon's late nurse read it

-aloud to the others at afternoon tea, and they all agreed

-(not knowing how Vaiti's fingers had cogged the dice of

-chance) that it was a wonderful Providence and a real

-judgment.  The item read:

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-.. class:: center

-

-   "THE LAST OF AN OCEAN ROMANCE.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-"News comes via Tahiti from Nukahiva, Marquesas

-Islands, of the arrival of a shipwrecked crew on a raft,

-six weeks ago.  They were the survivors of a disaster

-that destroyed the notorious schooner *Ikurangi* whose

-master, it will be remembered, kidnapped and marooned

-the daughter of a British captain some months ago.  The

-schooner, after leaving the island, sailed for Callao, but

-was wrecked on an uncharted reef three days east of

-Vaka, and went to pieces.  The crew escaped on a raft,

-and underwent great suffering in their efforts to reach

-land.  The captain and mate were drowned."

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-"And serve them right, too!" said the audience.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE WHITE MAN OF NALOLO`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER VIII

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE WHITE MAN OF NALOLO

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-"By Jove! it's a white man," said Saxon, checking

-like a pointer on the threshold of the low dark doorway.

-

-"Certainly.  Very pleased to meet you," observed

-the figure on the mats.  It was sitting cross-legged, clad

-only in a waist-cloth, and the house was a Fijian

-chief-house in a mountain village three days' journey from the

-nearest white settlement—but the thing squatted on

-the mats was undoubtedly white, and—English?  Well,

-no; Saxon thought no.  The phrase was American in

-flavour.  He stepped across the threshold, and came a

-little way in, relieved in mind.  When you have been

-dead and buried among the islands for a quarter of a

-century it is much pleasanter not to run the risk of

-meeting other ghosts (with university accents, tea-coloured

-families, and a preference for modest retirement on

-steamer days) who may possibly have been alive together

-with you before...

-

-Before....  The word means much in that vast

-Pacific world, sepulchre of so many lost hopes and

-forgotten lives.  We do not, in the Islands, cultivate

-curiosity as a virtue, since it would be likely to bring

-rather more than virtue's own reward after it.  We do

-not ask cross questions, because the crooked answers

-might involve questions of another sort.  And when

-overfed, sanguineous passengers from smart liners

-happen along and tell us, as a new and excellent joke,

-that the proper formula for receiving an introduction

-in the Islands is: "Glad to meet you, Mr. So-and-so;

-what were you called *before*?" we smile an acid smile,

-and pretend we are amused....

-

-Saxon was very tired, having walked thirty miles

-that day, and very hungry, being out of luck, and more

-or less on the tramp.  But I think, tired as he was, he

-would have found another village to rest in if the derelict

-white on the mats had spoken with the shibboleth of his

-own class and country.

-

-As things were, the look of the house pleased him,

-and he came in and folded himself up on the mats.  The

-other man noted that he selected a "tabu kaisi" mat

-(a kind strictly forbidden to all but chiefs or whites),

-and that he looked hopefully towards the kava bowl.

-

-"Not the first time you've stopped under a pandanus

-roof, I guess?" he remarked.

-

-"No," said Saxon.  "Whose house is this?"

-

-"Mine," said the stranger.  "Make yourself at home."

-

-It was a handsome chief-house of the best Fijian

-type, forty feet from mats to ridge-pole, the walls

-covered with beautifully inlaid and interwoven reeds,

-the roof bound together with exquisite sinnet work in

-artistic patterns, of red, black, and yellow, and towering

-up into a dark, cool cavern of pleasant gloom.  The

-floor was overlaid with fine parquetry of split bamboo

-at the "kasii" or common-folk end, and piled deep

-with fine mats in the "chief" part.  A Fijian bed, ten

-feet wide and three feet high, ran like a dais right across

-the end of the house.  It was covered by mats prettily

-fringed with coloured parrot feathers.  There were three

-great doors, east, west, and south, each framing in its

-dark-set opening a different picture of surpassing

-loveliness.  Nalolo town (its name is on the map of Fiji, but

-it reads otherwise) stands very high on the sheer crest

-of a pointed green hill that is just like the enchanted

-hill in the pictures of a fairy tale.  There is a little

-round green lawn on the top, and all about it stand the

-high, pointed beehive houses of the town, each perched

-on its own tiny mound like a toy on a stand.  Sloped

-cocoanut logs run up to the doors of the houses, and

-quaintly coloured crotons cluster about them.  In the

-deep, soft grass golden eggs from the guava trees lie

-tumbled about among fallen stars of orange and lemon

-blossom, and everywhere the red hibiscus shakes its

-splendid bells in the soft hill-winds.  About the foot

-of the peak a wide blue river wanders, singing all day

-long; and from every door of every house, high perched

-above the cloudy valleys and hyacinth hill ranges, one

-can see pictures, and pictures, and pictures almost too

-lovely to be true.  There are not two places in the world

-like Nalolo.

-

-The White Man of Nalolo, however, was only interested

-in the fact that the river provided excellent crayfish;

-and that taro grew very well indeed on the slopes below

-the town.  He had once been young, but he was not

-young now, and did not matter any longer.  Therefore

-he had become particular about his dinner and indifferent

-to scenery.  I will not tell you the story of the White

-Man of Nalolo, or why he, of all men, rebelled so fiercely

-against the common lot of "not mattering any more,"

-that he came away to the wilds of the Pacific and the

-highlands of Fiji, and never went back again, because,

-like many true stories, it cannot be believed, and therefore

-had better not be told.  Besides, this is the story

-of Saxon and his daughter.

-

-Saxon was down on his luck.  He had a charter for

-the *Sybil*, but she was not able to undertake it at present,

-for, trying to pilot her into Suva harbour himself, he had

-contrived to run her on a reef, and damaged her so

-seriously that she was at present careened on the beach

-in front of the local boat-builder's, undergoing repairs.

-The builder, knowing something of Saxon's reputation,

-had insisted on cash in advance, and the captain, in

-consequence, found himself so nearly out of funds that

-he was unable to stay in Suva pending the repairs to

-his ship.  He had therefore started with Vaiti for the

-interior of the great island of Viti Levu, intending to

-live on the real hospitality of the natives for a few weeks,

-and tramp from village to village.

-

-He explained something of this as he sat on the mats

-enjoying the grateful coolness of the house.  The other

-man nodded gravely, watching the door.  He offered

-a curious contrast to the Englishman's coarse red fairness,

-being lean, sundried, and grizzled, with expressionless,

-boot-buttoned eyes, and a straggling "goatee" beard

-that dated his exile from America back to long-ago days.

-

-"Where's your daughter?" he asked.

-

-"Coming.  She stopped to tidy up at the river."

-

-The doorway was darkened at that moment by Vaiti

-herself, balancing lightly up the cocoanut log to the

-threshold.  She wore a white tunic over a scarlet

-"pareo," her wavy curls, sparkling with the water of

-the stream, fell loose upon her shoulders; her lips were

-as red as the freshly-plucked pomegranate blossom behind

-her ear.  Something like life stirred in the boot-button

-eyes of the White Man of Nalolo as he looked at her.

-

-"Afi!" he called to a Fijian woman who was sleeping

-on the mats at the "kaisi" end of the house, "go and

-hurry the girls with the supper, and make tea for the

-marama (lady).  Quick!"

-

-Then he turned to Saxon.

-

-"Stay here as long as you like, both of you," he said.

-"Let her sit there sometimes, where I can see her and

-fancy....  I'll show you something."

-

-He rose slowly and stiffly, and limped across to a

-Chinese camphorwood box that stood in the corner.

-In a minute he returned with a faded photograph in a

-gaudy frame.

-

-"My daughter," he said.  "The only child I ever

-had.  She was Afi's.  She died a long time ago.  Afi's

-a chief woman: she was as handsome as Andi Thakombau

-when she was young, and the girl took after her.  Your

-girl's mother was chief too, I guess.  Do you see any

-likeness?"

-

-Vaiti and her father craned over the photograph.

-The pretty half-caste girl, was certainly like the

-stately, slender creature who gazed at her pictured

-face, though the fire and spirit of Vaiti's expression

-were wanting.

-

-"I'm growing old," went on the White Man.  "I've

-no children.  Stay a bit.  I'll be glad to have you."

-

-"Thank you; delighted, I'm sure," drawled Saxon,

-with a pathetic resurrection of his long-forgotten "grand

-manner," And so it was settled.

-

-Vaiti, listening and thinking as usual, with her chin

-in her slender fingers, approved of what she heard, and

-smiled very pleasantly at her host.  It seemed to her

-that he could be very useful just now.

-

-The four weeks that followed after glided away

-agreeably enough in the silent hills.  Nothing happened;

-no one came or went—the Fijians, men and women,

-went out to the yam and taro fields in the morning, and

-returned in the afternoon; and after dark there would

-be long, monotonous chanting, and interminable sitting

-dances, on the mats inside the high-roofed houses.  Saxon

-stupefied himself with kava most of the time, in the

-absence of stronger drink, and almost got himself clubbed

-once or twice on account of his too impulsive admiration

-for the beauties of the village.  His host, however, was

-no censor of morals, and troubled very little about him.

-On Sundays the Fijians dressed themselves in their

-brightest cottons, stuck up their hair in huge halos, and

-went five times to church, under the auspices of the

-native Wesleyan teacher; while Saxon and his host

-smoked, slept, drank kava, and played cards.  The

-village provided plenty of yam and taro, kumara,

-cocoanut, and fish; and there was tea and sugar in

-the Chinese box, and now and then the White Man

-killed a pig or a fowl.  It was very pleasant on the

-whole.

-

-In a month's time, however, Saxon girded up his loins

-to leave this mountain Capua and descend to Suva once

-more.  The *Sybil* would be ready, and his charter to

-convey ornamental Fiji woods to San Francisco would

-not wait.

-

-They said good-bye to their host, and walked a mile

-or two across the river-flats below the town before either

-spoke.  Then Vaiti put her hand into her sash, and drew

-out something small and shining.

-

-"See, father, what the White Man gave me, because

-I was like his daughter," she said.

-

-Saxon took the object, and turned it over in his fingers.

-It was a small seal, shaped like an eagle standing on a

-rock.  The eagle was gold, the rock amethyst.

-

-"A pretty thing, but not worth more than two or

-three pounds," he said.

-

-Then he turned it over and looked at the device.

-There was a curious crest on the face of the seal—a wolf

-with a crescent moon in his jaws; underneath, a motto

-in a strange foreign character.

-

-Saxon's red complexion paled as he examined the crest.

-In other days and scenes, among ice-bound rivers and

-grim mediæval fortress-castles, he had seen that crest

-light up the crimson panes of old armorial windows—had

-read the motto underneath—"What I have, I hold"—of

-nights when he and the wildest young nobles of the

-Russian court were dining together under the splendid

-roof of one of Moscow's greatest banqueting halls.  For

-a moment he felt the keen cold air of the ice-bound streets

-blow sharp on his cheek; heard the jingle of the sleigh-bells,

-drawing up before the marble steps where the

-yellow lamplight streamed out across the snow.

-The fancy faded, swift as a passing lantern picture that

-flashes out for a moment and then sweeps away into

-darkness.  He saw the burning sky and the crackling

-palms again, felt the furnace-heated wind, and knew that

-it was all over long ago, and that he was ruined, exiled,

-and old.  Yet there remained a thread of indefinite

-recollection, a suggestion of something half-remembered,

-that was not all unconnected with the present day.

-What was the story belonging to that crest—the story

-that the whole world knew?

-

-"Where did the fellow get the thing?" he asked his

-daughter.

-

-Vaiti told him.

-

-The White Man of Nalolo, it seemed, was one of the

-numerous South Sea wanderers who believe in the

-existence of various undiscovered islands, hidden here

-and there in the vast, untravelled wastes of sea that lie

-off the track of ships.  Thirty years before, there had

-been wondering rumours of an island of this kind, touched

-at once by a ship that no one could name, found to be

-uninhabited, and never revisited; indeed, no one was

-sure where it was within a few hundred miles.  Years

-went by, and the White Man, who had always taken a

-special interest in the story, found himself

-shipwrecked—the sole survivor of a boatful of castaways—on the

-very island itself.  But fortune was unkind, for the

-morning after his arrival, when he was trying to sail

-round the island, a sudden storm blew him out to sea

-again, and he had drifted for many days, and all but

-perished, in spite of the fish and nuts he had obtained

-from the island, before a mission schooner happened to

-see him and pick him up.  He had examined most of

-the island while ashore, and had seen no inhabitants

-or traces of cultivation.  Nevertheless he had always

-been convinced that there was something mysterious

-about the place, for two reasons.  One was the presence

-of common house-flies, which he had never seen far away

-from the haunts of human beings.  The other was the

-discovery of an amethyst seal, lying under a stone on the

-shore.  It was dirty and discoloured, but he did not think

-so small and heavy an object could have been washed

-up on the shore from a wreck.

-

-Where mystery is in the air, most men's minds turn

-naturally to thoughts of hidden treasure, and the White

-Man of Nalolo had ever since cherished a hope that there

-was treasure on the island.  For several years he had

-fully intended to go and look—some day—but as he

-could only guess at the latitude and longitude, and as

-he had little money to spare, he never succeeded either

-in hunting the place up himself or in persuading any one

-else to do so.  Now he was old and half-crippled, and

-did not care any more about anything; so he wanted

-Vaiti, who reminded him so much of his dead daughter,

-to have the seal.  It was a pretty thing, and perhaps

-it would make her think sometimes of the poor old White

-Man of Nalolo.

-

-Saxon listened attentively to the story, and heaved

-a sigh of disappointment at the end.

-

-"There's nothing in it, my girl," he said.  "No proof

-of treasure there, eh?"

-

-"No; no treasure," said Vaiti, looking at the ground

-as she walked.

-

-"What then?" asked Saxon curiously.  He saw she

-had something in reserve.

-

-Vaiti suddenly flamed out in eloquent Maori.

-

-"What then, my father?  Am I one who sees through

-men's heads, that I can tell what was in the mind of you

-as you looked at the jewel, and turned yellow and green

-like a parrot, only to see it?  What then?  I do not

-know.  I walk in the dark, and the light is in your hand,

-not in mine.  As for you, you have made your brain dull

-with the brandy and the kava, so that you cannot see

-at all.  What then?  Tell me yourself, for I do not know.

-I know only that there is something to be told."

-

-"Don't be rough on your poor old father," said Saxon

-pathetically.  "I'd have knocked the stuffing out of

-any man who said half as much, but I spoil you, by Gad,

-I do.  I don't know—I can't think, somehow or other.

-But there was a story about the Vasilieffs—the johnnies

-who had that crest—people I used to stay with when I

-went to——"

-

-He broke off, smashed a spider-lily bloom with his

-stick, and began afresh.

-

-"Junia Vasilieff—what was it she did?  Big princes

-they were, and much too close to the throne to be safe

-company....  Junia Vasili—I have it!  Yes—the end

-of the story was in the Sydney papers, time you were a

-little kid.  I remember.  They were to have married

-her to the Czarewitch, just to make things safe.  Her

-claim to the throne was big enough to have started a

-revolution any day, if it had been asserted....  Poor

-little Junia!—only sixteen when I knew—when the

-marriage was talked of—and such golden hair as she

-had!  She hated the whole thing; courts and ceremony

-weren't in her line.  But she was a gentle little creature,

-and I never thought she'd have had the spirit to do as

-she did."

-

-He turned the seal over in his fingers, as if reading the

-past from its glittering surface.

-

-"There was a young lieutenant of Hussars, a Pole—you

-don't know what that is, but the Russians don't

-like them, I can tell you—a noble, but a very small one;

-not fit to black Junia's boots, according to their notions.

-Well, he bolted with her.  It was in the Sydney papers,

-time I was in the Solomons; the paper came up to

-Guadalcanar....  She must have been twenty then;

-just the year the marriage to the Czarewitch was to have

-come off....  They bolted—cleared out—never seen

-again.  All Russia on the boil about it; no one knew

-but what they'd hatch up plots against the throne, she

-having a better claim than any one else, if it hadn't

-been for the law against empresses.  The secret police

-were after them for years, but they were never traced,

-though most people knew Russia'd give a pretty penny

-to know where they were——"

-

-"O man with the head of a fruit-bat, do you not see?"

-interrupted Vaiti at this juncture.  "They hid on that

-island—they may be there still.  It is worth a hundred

-treasures!"

-

-"The Pole was a great traveller, and had a sort of a

-little yacht," said Saxon thoughtfully.  "It might be

-true, of course—if there is an island, and if the Nalolo

-Johnnie had any idea of where it was, and if nobody

-found them out and split years ago.  Plenty of 'ifs.'"

-

-"I think him all-right good enough," averred Vaiti,

-returning to English and prose.  "By'n-by we finish

-F'lisco, then we go see, me and you."

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE LOST ISLAND`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER IX

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE LOST ISLAND

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-Some two or three months later, the schooner

-might have been seen, like a white-winged butterfly lost

-at sea, beating up and down before a solitary, low,

-green island lying far east of the lonely Paumotus.

-Vaiti, sitting on the top of the deck-house, was examining

-the land through a glass.  The native crew were all on

-deck; also Harris and Gray, the mate and bo'sun.

-Captain Saxon was not to be seen.

-

-"The old man always do get squiffy at the wrong

-time, don't he?" commented Harris, rather gleefully.

-

-Gray spat over the rail for reply.

-

-"You're ratty because you don't know nothing,

-ain't you?" he said.

-

-"Do you?" asked the mate curiously.  Harris had

-not much notion of the dignity of his office, and dearly

-loved a gossip at all times.

-

-"More nor you, havin' eyes and ears that's of use to

-me occasionally," replied the bo'sun dryly.

-

-Harris considered.

-

-"I'll give you my grey shirt to tell," he said

-persuasively.  "There's sure to be something up."

-

-"'Ow much does we ever get out of it when there

-is?" asked Gray sourly.  "I could do with that shirt

-very well, though.  There ain't much to tell, except

-that the old man he thought there was an island

-hereabouts not marked on the chart that nobody knew

-about; and Vaiti she allowed that was all —— rot,

-because, says she, this part's been surveyed, and though

-the Admiralty surveys isn't the for-ever-'n-ever-Amen

-dead certainties the little brassbound officers thinks

-them, still they don't leave whole islands out on the

-loose without a collar and a name round their necks, so

-to say.  So, says she, let me work out the length of time

-they ran before the hurricane, says she, and the d'rection

-of the wind, which the old boy remembered right enough,

-says she; and then look it up on the chart, and I'll be

-blowed, says she, if you don't find something for a guide

-like.  So by-and-by she looks, and says she, ''Ere's

-something; 'ere's a reef marked P.D., and it is P.D.,'

-says she, 'for you and I knows there's nothin' there,'

-she says.  'But we'll look a bit more to the north'ard,'

-she says, 'where it's right off the' track of ships, and

-maybe we'll find somethin' and maybe we won't,' she

-says.  'But I think,' she says, 'that somewheres not

-too far off from that P.D. reef we'll maybe get a sight

-of what we're lookin' for,' she says, 'because sometimes

-reefs is put down for bigger things by mistake,' she says,

-'especially if you 'aven't been to see.'  Then she comes

-on deck, and I makes myself scarce, for it ain't healthy

-on this ship to listen at no cabin skylights, not if she

-knows you're there."

-

-"Well, whatever the game is, I don't suppose it'll

-line our little insides any fatter, bo'sun.  We don't

-count on this ship anything like as we ought to when

-there's shares goin'.  I wonder that I stick to her, I do!

-Old man as drunk as a lord half the time—me doin' his

-work as well as my own—a blessed she-cat running the

-blooming show——"

-

-"Ready about!" sang Vaiti from the deck-house,

-and the mate and bo'sun sprang across the deck.  There

-was something about the orders of the "she-cat" that

-enforced a smartness on the *Sybil* rare on an island

-schooner, even when heavy-fisted Saxon was not about.

-

-Half an hour later, Vaiti had rowed herself ashore,

-curtly declining Harris's polite offers of assistance, and

-had landed on the beach.  As she did not know who she

-might be going to see, she had provided for all emergencies.

-Her revolver was in her pocket, and she wore a flowing

-sacque of lace-trimmed white silk that made her feel she

-was fit to meet any Russian princess, if such were indeed

-on the island.  It was a gratifying thought that the said

-princess, if she had been a celebrated beauty, must now

-be well into the forties, and consequently beneath all

-contempt as a rival belle.

-

-Her father's absence did not trouble her.  He had a

-nasty trick of starting a drinking bout just when he

-was most needed—in fact, it was the one point in

-Saxon's character on which you could absolutely rely.

-Vaiti, therefore, had grown used to doing without him,

-and rather liked to have a perfectly free hand.

-

-She had fully grasped the bearings of the case.  There

-was possibly a very great chief's daughter from Europe,

-with a rather insignificant chief who had stolen her

-away, living there in hiding.  The people of her country

-would pay a great deal to know where she was and

-bring her back.  Or, if there seemed any lack of safety

-about this proceeding (Vaiti had long ago learned that

-her father was not fond of putting himself within the

-reach of principalities and powers of any kind), the

-couple themselves must be made to pay for silence.

-It was all very simple.

-

-The fact that the island was supposed to be uninhabited

-did not trouble her.  She meant to investigate

-that matter after her own fashion.

-

-She walked all round it first of all.  It took her about

-an hour.  There was a nice, white, sandy beach, with

-straggling bush behind it.  There were a good many

-cocoanuts—all young ones—also a large number of

-broken trunks, apparently snapped off by a hurricane.

-

-This set Vaiti thinking.  It seemed to her that the

-damage was rather too universal and even to be natural.

-Yet why should any sane human cut short all his

-full-grown cocoanuts?

-

-She crossed the island twice at the ends, noting

-everything with a keen and wary eye.  Fairly good soil;

-nothing growing on it, however, but low scrub and a

-few berries.  In the centre of the island the scrub

-thickened into dense bush, impenetrable without an

-axe.  No sign of life anywhere.

-

-Vaiti stamped her foot.  Was it possible she had

-been mistaken?  Was this indeed just what it seemed,

-a commonplace, infertile, useless, little mid-ocean islet,

-let alone because it was worth nothing, and incorrectly

-described as a reef because no one had ever troubled

-to examine it?  Things began to look like it.

-

-And yet ... she thought—she did not quite know

-what, but she was very sure that she did not want to

-leave the island just yet.  She would at least climb a

-tall tree and take a general survey before she gave

-it up.

-

-Nothing simpler—but there was no such tree.

-

-All the palms were young, or broken off short; all the

-pandanus trees were in the same condition.  There was

-no rock, no commanding height.  She could not get a

-view.

-

-Vaiti's cheek flushed crimson under its olive brown.

-The spark was struck at last!

-

-Somebody had cut short those trees—to prevent

-anyone from climbing up and overlooking the island.

-The encircling reef would not allow any ship to approach

-close enough for a look-out at the mast-head to see over

-the island, except in a very general way.  There was

-something to conceal.  What, and where?

-

-Only one answer was possible.  The mass of apparently

-virgin bush in the centre of the island—several acres in

-extent—was the only spot where a cat could have

-concealed itself.  The scent was growing hot.

-

-With sparkling eyes Vaiti began to circle the wood,

-watching narrowly for the smallest trace of a pathway.

-The branches were interlocked and knitted together as

-only tropical bush can be.  Many were set with huge

-thorns; all were laced and twined with bush ropes and

-lianas of every kind.

-

-Nothing larger than a rat could have won its way

-through such a rampart.  Vaiti walked swiftly on and

-on, striking the bushes now and then with a stick, to

-make sure that there were no loose masses of stuff

-masking a concealed entrance, and keeping a sharp

-eye for traces of footsteps....  It was with a

-heart-sinking shock that she found herself once more beside

-the low white coral rock that had marked the commencement

-of her journey, and realised that she had

-been all round, and that there was most certainly no

-opening.

-

-The sun was slipping down the heavens now.  She

-had been exploring half the day, but she was not beaten

-yet.  The unexpected difficulties she had met with only

-sharpened her determination to enter the thicket at all

-costs.  Harris, suffering acutely, as usual, from

-suppressed curiosity, was nearly driven mad by the sight

-of the "she-cat" suddenly reappearing on the ship,

-picking up an axe, and departing as silently as she had

-come, with a countenance that did not invite questions.

-She had taken off her smart silk dress, and was in her

-chemise and petticoat, arms and feet bare, and waist

-girdled with a sash into which she had stuck her revolver.

-She dropped the axe into her boat, rowed silently away,

-and disappeared on the other side of the island.

-

-The sun was still some distance above the sea when

-she let the axe slip from her torn, scratched, and aching

-hands, and stood at last, tired but triumphant, in the

-heart of the mysterious island's mystery.  She had won

-her way, with the woodcraft that was in her island

-blood, through the dense belt of bush, hacking and

-slashing here, stooping and writhing there, until the

-light began to show through the tangled stems in front,

-and a few swift strokes cleared the way into the open.

-Yes! there was a space in the centre, after all—a

-clearing over an acre in extent.  There was grass here,

-and a few overgrown bananas, and a tangle of yam and

-pumpkin vines.  Passion fruit ran in a tangle of wild

-luxuriance over the inner wall of the thicket;

-pine-apples rotted on the ground and fig-trees spread their

-wide leaves unchecked and unpruned....  In the middle

-of all was a house—a one-storied little bungalow,

-iron-roofed, with a tank to catch the rain.  There was a

-long, low store behind it, and something that looked

-like a pig-sty, and something that might have been a

-fowl-run.  But....

-

-But everything was rotten, ruined, overgrown, hardly

-to be distinguished in the thick tangle of vegetation

-that had overflowed the little retreat like a great green

-wave let loose upon a low-lying shore.  Vaiti knew what

-she was going to see before she had reached the door

-of the bungalow—a rotten floor, with green vines

-shooting up between the crevices, and bush rats scuffling

-and squeaking under the boards—a rusted iron roof,

-where pink convolvulus bloom peeped in under the

-rafters, and lizards sunned themselves in the airy blue

-furniture unglued and decayed fast sinking into one

-common mass of ruin—door aslant, and thresholds

-sunken.  Everywhere silence, emptiness, decay.  There

-needed no explanation of the vanished pathway.

-

-The Maori blood owns strange instincts.  Again Vaiti

-knew what she was going to see before it came—knew,

-and walked straight over to a certain corner of the

-enclosure, as if she had been there before....  It was

-under a scarlet-flowered hibiscus tree that she found

-it—a long, low grave, fenced round with a wall of coral

-slabs, so that the overflowing bush had surged less

-thickly here, and one could see that there was something

-lying on the mound, only half hidden by creeping

-vines—something long and white and slender.

-

-Vaiti dragged away the creepers....  Yes, it was a

-skeleton, bare and fleshless, with bony fingers and black,

-empty eyes.  There was a splintered gap in one temple,

-and close to one of the hands lay a mass of rusted steel

-that had once been a revolver.

-

-On a flat white stone, standing at the head of the

-grave, a long inscription had been carved with infinite

-care in three different languages.  Two of them Vaiti

-did not understand, but the third was English.  She

-pulled the growing ferns off the stone, and, wiping its

-surface, read:

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   "Here is buried Junia, of the race of Vasilieff.

-   Died 20th June, 1889.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   "Here is buried Anton, son of Junia Vasilieff

-   and her husband, Alexis, Baron Varsovi,

-   Born 20th June, died 21st June,

-   1889.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   "Here rests Alexis, Baron Varsovi.  Into the

-   unknown thou didst follow me: into the

-   Great Unknown I follow thee.

-   Reunited 21st June, 1889."

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-Vaiti, descendant of cannibal chiefs and lawless

-soldiers, more than half a pirate herself, and hard of

-nature as a beautiful flinty coral flower, was yet at

-bottom a woman after all.  What passed in the breast

-of this dark, wild daughter of the southern seas, as she

-stood above the strange, sad record of loves and lives

-unknown, cannot be told.  But in a little while, with

-some dim recollection of the long-ago, gentle, pious days

-of her convent school, she knelt down beside tie lonely

-grave, and, crossing herself, said something as near to

-a prayer as she could remember.  Then, still kneeling,

-she cut and tied two sticks into the form of a cross,

-and set them upright in the earth of the mound.  The

-sun was slanting low and red across the grave as she

-turned away.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-"What'd she give you?" asked Harris eagerly, as

-the bo'sun stepped across the gang-plank on to the

-quay.  The lights of San Francisco were blazing all

-about, the cars roared past, there was a piano-organ

-jangling joyously at the corner.

-

-"Fifty dollars for the two of us," said Gray, his acid

-face sweetened with unwonted smiles.

-

-"Crikey!  Honest men is riz in the market at last!

-What in h—— can she have got herself?"

-

-"Might as well arst me what she got it for.  Don't

-know, and don't care, so long as we've got the makings

-of a spree like this out of it.  I see her comin' out of

-the Rooshian Consulate this mornin' lookin' like as if

-some one 'ad been standin' treat to her."

-

-"You know she don't touch anything."

-

-"I'm speaking figuryative; she looked that sort of

-way.  And coming' back to the ship, she says to the

-old man, she says: 'Why, dad, better dead than alive!'

-she says.  And he laughs."

-

-"Don't sound 'olesome," observed Harris thoughtfully.

-

-"Now, don't you get to thinkin', for you ain't built

-that way, and you'll do yourself a mischief," said the

-boatswain warningly.  "And let's be thankful to

-'eaven for all its mercies, say I, that we've got such a

-nice, warm, dry, convenient night for to go and get

-drunk in."

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`WHAT CAME OF THE PARIS DRESS`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER X

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   WHAT CAME OF THE PARIS DRESS

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-The effects of Saxon's illness in Fiji were a long time

-in wearing off.  It was many weeks after Vaiti had come

-back to the *Sybil*, flushed with importance and with

-the lionising she had received on the cable-ship—many

-weeks after the voyage to the unknown island and the

-visit to San Francisco—that he took ill again; not very

-seriously, but badly enough to prevent his going to sea.

-Of course, the time was an awkward one.  They were

-off Niué, and there was copra waiting to be taken to

-Raratonga for the steamer—copra which would certainly

-be secured by some other schooner if Saxon did not

-take it at the promised date.  Neither Harris nor Gray

-knew enough to be trusted with the ship, and he did

-not much care about letting Vaiti sail her—not because

-he doubted his fiery daughter's ability or desire, but

-because, rash as he was himself at times, he knew her

-to be still worse.  He had seen her run the *Sybil* in the

-trough of the very last swell alongside a barrier reef for

-miles, sailing all the time so close to the wind that the

-shifting of a single point would have meant destruction.

-He had heard her raving about the deck in half a gale

-as they swept up to the iron-bound coast of Niué,

-abusing Harris in the strongest of beach talk because

-he had not another main topsail in the locker to replace

-the two that had just carried away one after the other

-and battered themselves to ribbons—the principal

-ground of her complaint being apparently the fact that

-she considered herself labouring under a social

-disadvantage of the most mortifying kind because the

-schooner was obliged to come up to Niué for the very

-first time without all sails set.  He had seen her perform

-tricks of steering, getting in and out of Avarua in

-Raratonga (a perfect death-trap of a port at times, as

-all old islanders know), that "fairly gave him the

-jim-jams," to use his own phraseology....  No, on

-the whole he thought he would rather miss that fright

-than lie idle in the trader's house at Avatele, and think

-daily and nightly of the cranky though light-heeled

-*Sybil* out upon the high seas in Vaiti's sole command.

-

-This being so, it was natural and inevitable that Vaiti

-should set her heart upon going and carry out her

-desire.  She did not make any trouble about the matter;

-neither was she at all unkind to the invalided owner of

-the ship.  On the contrary, she paid the trader's wife

-more than that kindly woman wanted, to take good

-care of her father while she should be away, bought him

-everything decent to eat that the island contained

-(which was saying very little), indulgently presented

-him with a demijohn of whisky, and then informed him,

-in the coolest manner in the world, that the copra was

-all loaded, the stores and water on board, and the

-schooner ready to sail next day, under her command.

-

-Saxon swore at large first of all, then stormed at

-Vaiti, and finally began a pathetic lament over his own

-helpless position and the heartlessness of his only child.

-Vaiti, sitting cross-legged on the end of his bed, smoked

-a big cigar through it all and looked out of the window.

-When he stopped at last, fairly run out, she laughed

-and handed him a weed out of her own case and a match.

-

-"You take'm that, no speak nonsense.  You know

-me, what?" she demanded; and Saxon, who was not

-in reality nearly as ill as he thought himself, laughed,

-and allowed himself to be won over.

-

-Having gained her point, Vaiti went off again to the

-schooner through the wonderful pink dusk that wraps

-a South Sea island at sunset, and left the captain to hold

-commune with his demijohn and sleep.

-

-As she walked down to the shore, she heard a sound

-of laughing and the rustle of many dresses among the

-palms close at hand.  Now in Niué it is an important

-matter that brings people out of evenings, because,

-although the island has been Christianised long ago,

-like all the rest of the Eastern Pacific, it still suffers from

-a perfect plague of heathen ghosts that no amount of

-Sunday church-goings and week-day pious exercises

-seem to affect in the least.  So the natives are afraid

-to go out of their houses after sunset, lest uncanny

-things should rise out of the forest to spring upon the

-wayfarer's back unseen and choke him.  This Vaiti

-knew, so she suspected something of interest in the little

-crowd, and turned aside to look.  If she had not, there

-had been no story to tell about Niué and the happenings

-there.

-

-She saw a curious scene, so nearly hidden by the

-growing dark that no one but an island resident could

-have taken in its full significance.  A group of islanders,

-men and women stood round the door of a big white

-concrete house with a pandanus roof—the finest native

-house in the village.  They seemed to be waiting for

-something—something both amusing and exciting, to

-judge by the explosions of giggles that continually burst

-through the dusk.

-

-Presently the door of the house swung open with

-considerable violence, and a large mat was thrown out

-by an invisible hand.  Then the door was slammed,

-and the giggles redoubled.  Within the house now

-sounded something very like a struggle.  There were

-loud sobs and cries of a shrill, theatrical kind, scuffling.

-banging, and a dragging sound.

-

-"Tck, tck, tck," went the tongues of the outsiders

-delightedly.  The interesting moment was at hand.

-

-It came without warning.  The door burst open with

-still more violence than before, and out upon the mat

-was shot by some invisible agency a very solid young

-woman in a white loose gown, weeping somewhat

-mechanically, but with much effect.  She fairly rolled

-over with the force of the shock that had ejected her,

-and before she could pick herself up the door was closed

-once more with a slam that shook the whole house.

-Then the waiting group rushed upon her with cries of

-joy, and bore her away in their midst, singing as they

-went.

-

-"A wedding," said Vaiti to herself.  "It must be

-Mata's; that is their house.  And it will be a big

-wedding, too.  I did not know that it was to be so

-soon."

-

-She fell into a fit of musing as she wandered

-shorewards among the leaning palms....  The palms of

-Niué sweep downwards to the gleaming sea like a band

-of lovely maidens hurrying with sweet impatience to

-meet their lovers on the coral shore.  Of a moonlight

-night, when all things are possible, and nothing seems

-too wonderful in an air that itself is wonder, it needs

-but little for those white, slender stems, and tossing,

-plumy crowns, poised high above the shadowy beach

-they curve to meet, to change themselves into South

-Sea dryads of a new and lovely race, and rush down,

-at long last, upon the calling sea, where Tangaroa, the

-king of ocean, has his dwelling.  Under the palms of

-Niué, when the blazing white moon has risen so high

-in the heavens that a perfect star of jetty shadow is

-rayed about the base of every tree—when the wandering

-sea winds are held close by the breathless spell of

-midnight and nothing wakes on all the lonely shore but the

-long, long song of the droning coral reef—under the

-wonderful palms of Niué, loveliest and strangest of all

-the islands in that dreamy world of "perilous seas and

-fairylands forlorn"—nothing is too strange to be true,

-no fancy too wild to hold, when the moon is up and the

-palms are alone with the sea....

-

-Was Vaiti thinking of visionary palm-maidens and

-sea-foam kings as she went down the winding path to

-the bay, through a wondrous afterglow of russet-rose

-laced through with opal moonrays?  Perhaps—or of

-kindred fancies.  I who knew her cannot say, for no

-one ever knew her altogether.  It is more likely,

-however, that less poetic thoughts were in her mind just

-then.  The scene she had witnessed in the palm-grove

-was the usual ceremony that takes place in Niué the

-night before a wedding, when the friends of the

-bridegroom come to the house of the bride's parents, and

-the latter go through the symbolical form of casting her

-out and closing the door, so that the bridegroom's people

-may take her over and guard her until the wedding

-morning.  Vaiti liked a wedding above all things (next

-to a funeral), and the hint of great doings on the morrow,

-offered by the ceremony she had witnessed, decided her

-to stay another day.  Why not?  The copra was

-loaded, and no rivals were in sight.  Besides, she had

-a motive for staying—the strongest possible motive.

-She wanted to wear her Paris dress.

-

-Yes, it had been acquired at last.  That day in San

-Francisco, when she had come out of the Russian

-Consulate with more money in her pocket than any one

-of her adventures had ever brought before, she had been

-able to restrain herself no longer.  And thereafter, in

-Madame Retaillaud's elegant and exclusive Parisian

-emporium, replete with the choicest imported wares

-(I quote the lady's own description of her goods), there

-took place a scene that is remembered to the present

-day by those of Madame Retaillaud's young ladies who

-survived the earthquake year.

-

-Vaiti, dressed in one of her waistless muslin gowns,

-with a broad-leafed island hat on her head, a long-bladed

-sheath-knife stuck quite visibly in the breast

-of her dress, and her wavy hair falling loose over her

-shoulders, stalked into the shop among the smartly-gowned

-San Francisco ladies who were turning over

-Madame's stock, and demanded to see—

-

-"One dress belong Palisi, pretty dam quick."

-

-They are used to all sorts of strange nationalities along

-the water-front in San Francisco, but not, as a rule, in

-the milliners' and modistes' well-bred establishments.

-Vaiti concentrated the whole attention of the place upon

-herself at a single stroke.  She did not care about that

-in the least, but Madame's hesitation stung her, and she

-pulled out a thick wad of notes.

-

-"Look 'em alive, my hearties!" she ordered

-impatiently in her quarter-deck voice.  "Lay aft here

-with that goods.  I want um Palisi model, all sort."

-

-The customers were nearly in hysterics by this time,

-and the assistants were all a-giggle.  Madame herself,

-however, grasped the situation in a twinkling, and

-frowned down the girls.  Whoever and whatever this

-pirate queen might be, she certainly had money, and

-Madame would have welcomed Lucrezia Borgia or the

-Witch of Endor, under like circumstances, as pleasantly

-as an Anglo-American duchess.

-

-"Perhaps Madame will come into a private room.

-Madame would like, no doubt, to look at our most

-exclusive goods, and we do not bring them into the

-outer shop," she said in her most honeyed voice.  And

-the door of the lift closed upon the pair.

-

-What Vaiti underwent in that fitting-room in the

-course of getting into Madame's latest model promenade

-gown, built for a typical French figure, will never be

-told.  Early in the proceedings a message came down

-to the showroom for the strongest pair of Paris corsets

-in stock, and a little later Madame herself, very red and

-overheated, ran down to select a fresh silk lace.

-

-"Ah, but she has courage, that one!" she declared,

-as the lift received her again.  "Never, no,

-never!—jamais de la vie! ..."

-

-The lift went up.

-

-It was almost an hour before a wonderful vision sailed

-slowly through the show-room and out into the street—slowly,

-not alone for pride, but also because it could

-scarcely move or draw its breath.  The vision, as

-described in the receipted bill that went with it, was

-made up of the following elements:

-

-"One promenade costume (model, Doucet & Cie.)

-composed of chiffon velours, couleur poussière de roses,

-inlet with motifs of point d'Alençon, hand-embroidered

-with lilies of the valley in French paste.  Mounted on

-chiffon bleu-de-ciel, with full volants edged lace and

-chiffon ruching.  Made over foundation of glacé silk,

-couleur citron d'or.

-

-"One set silk underclothing to match.

-

-"One Corset Ecraseur, patent laces.

-

-"One pair bronze promenade shoes, Louis XV. heels,

-extra height.  Stockings to match.

-

-"One parasol composed peau-de-soie rose fanée and

-chiffon bleu-de-ciel."

-

-To which may be added—one young woman, suffering

-horrible agony and quite intoxicated with happiness.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

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-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-It was this marvellous possession that Vaiti yearned

-to show off at the wedding.  She had not had a chance

-to wear it since the day when she had walked through

-the streets of San Francisco, with an admiring and

-amused crowd at her rear, and found it quite impossible

-to get on board the schooner, when she reached the water

-front, until she took off her voluminous skirt and handed

-it up over the side—afterwards climbing the rope-ladder

-in a storm of applause and a pink silk petticoat.

-Now the occasion for getting full value out of the

-wonderful thing had come at last, and she could not—no,

-she really could not—miss it.

-

-Rather late next morning, when the bride and

-bridegroom—the former in a gorgeous gown of yellow curtain

-muslin, the latter in a thick tweed suit from Auckland

-that caused him to stream at every pore—were sitting

-on opposite sides of the little white church, enthroned

-on chairs all by themselves, and listening decorously to

-a long preliminary address from the native pastor—Vaiti

-swept in, and at once brought the ceremony to a

-momentary pause.  The pastor stopped in his address

-and gaped, the women exclaimed audibly, the bridegroom

-fixed his eyes on the apparition and sighed in a manner

-that the bride evidently resented as a personal slight,

-for she grew still darker in the face than nature had made

-her, and stared penknives and scissors at Vaiti.  Wild

-titters of delight swept indecorously through the church.

-The entry was indeed a success—the native pastor

-found it necessary to address his flock directly, and to

-tell them that they would undoubtedly all go to hell

-if they did not behave better in church, before order

-was restored.

-

-It is not necessary to relate at length how Mata and

-Ivi were made one, how they walked out of the church

-nonchalantly by different doors, and were subsequently

-so deeply interested in the killing of the pigs for the

-marriage feast, and the preparing of the various cooking-pots,

-that they did not meet again all afternoon.  It

-was a commonplace wedding enough, and this history

-is not interested in it, other than as it concerned the

-affairs of Vaiti.  These, indeed, were fairly notable.

-

-For with Vaiti pride very literally brought about a

-fall that day.

-

-She had had a terrible time getting into her dress, and

-the whole ship's company had shared in the trouble.

-First, the native A.B.'s had to fetch her a big looking-glass

-from the nearest trader's, and secure it to the

-bulkhead of her cabin.  Then the cook had to deliver

-up all the hot water in the galley—at seven bells, with

-dinner just coming on!—and the boatswain must needs

-broach the cargo for some special scented soap.  Matters

-were only beginning, however.  When the dress was

-disinterred from its many wrappings and finally put on

-it became immediately apparent that the bodice could

-not possibly be made to meet.  Perhaps the coming of

-the bread-fruit season had caused the young lady's

-waist to expand—perhaps the practised art of Madame

-Retaillaud had exceeded anything that a mere amateur

-could compass in the way of lacing.  At any rate, it

-was not till Vaiti had passed her corset laces out through

-the port and ordered two of the strongest sailors to tail

-on to them—not till Harris, agonising with laughter,

-had directed this novel evolution from the poop for at

-least five delirious minutes, during which Vaiti several

-times thought she was dying, but remained none the

-less determined to die rather than give in, that the

-deed was accomplished at last, and the "Kapitani" of

-*Sybil* was enabled to look at herself in the glass and

-know heavenly certainty that she was the best

-dressed woman in the Pacific at that instant, whoever

-saw or did not see.

-

-The natural result of all this was that in the very

-hour of her triumph she fainted dead away in the

-church, for the first time in her life, and had to be

-carried out.

-

-The ceremony was just over by now, and the bride,

-still burning with jealousy of the woman who had dared

-to eclipse her on her wedding day, was among the first

-of those who crowded round like bees going after honey,

-to stare at the beautiful creature lying senseless on the

-sunburnt grass.  The bridegroom had sped away hot-foot

-in the direction of the village, whence certain

-enticing yells indicated that the pig-slaughter was now

-going on; but Mata was not a bit appeased by his

-indifference to the visitor.  That dress—and oh, how

-wonderful it was!—still rankled in her soul.

-

-Mata was a teacher's daughter, and she knew something

-of white people's lore.  A brilliant thought darted into

-her mind as she pressed and struggled in the crowd

-about the deathly form on the grass....

-

-"Ai, ai! she is surely dead!" wailed the people.

-"Ai! the-great chieftainess will rise no more!"

-

-"Daughters of a turtle!" said Mata contemptuously.

-"I will show you if she is dead.  It is nothing at all but

-that she is vain, and wanted to make herself a middle

-like the 'papalangi' women, who all look like stinging

-hornets.  Give me a knife, someone."

-

-A knife was given, and Mata, with horrid joy, half

-lifted Vaiti and slipped the keen point into the back of

-the dress.

-

-Rip went the silk with a hideous splitting noise, and

-the delicate underwear swelled out through the opening

-like a bush lily bursting its sheath.  Mata felt for

-the stay-lace, and cut that too.  The tension on the

-bodice increased frightfully—the seams gaped and

-strained....

-

-"She will die, I think, if I do not cut it off," said

-Mata hastily, feeling Vaiti reviving under her hand, and

-anxious to finish her work.  Two more cuts of the knife

-did it.  The Paris dress was, speaking sartorially, no

-more; the owner, lying on the ground, was opening her

-eyes to the outrage that had been done; and Mata,

-shrieking with malign laughter, was fleeing wildly through

-the palms in the direction of the pig-killing, peace in her

-heart again.

-

-Peace was very far indeed from Vaiti's heart when

-she revived and found out what had been done.  The

-crowd drew away from her in fear when they saw her

-flashing eyes and set, furious mouth, though she said

-never a word.  Confronted by that Medusa-head, they

-were almost too terrified to find words; but one or two

-stammered out a hasty explanation that freed the

-present company from blame by inculpating Mata.

-

-Vaiti did not doubt it—she had seen the bride's face

-during the ceremony.  Still silent, but flashing looks of

-sheet-lightning all about her, she drew together her

-garments as best she could, and walked off in the direction

-of the ship.  As she did so, a little ugly man with red

-hair slipped out from behind the trees, and looked

-narrowly at her retreating figure.

-

-"It is the white man from the bush!" cried the

-girls.  "White man of ours, why did you not come

-down for the wedding?"

-

-"Because I didn't, my little dears," replied the

-newcomer in English, still looking after Vaiti.  He stood

-well in the shade, and did not make himself unnecessarily

-conspicuous.

-

-"That's a fine girl, that Mata," he added by and by.

-"A smart girl.  I should like to know Mata."

-

-Vaiti put off her going for yet another day.  She had

-business to attend to.

-

-It was very simple business, and it was characterised

-by the directness that attended all the proceedings of

-Saxon's daughter.  She merely went up to the bride's

-new home, that was so handsomely stocked with trade

-goods and imported furniture, while the wedding party

-were making merry in the village after dark, and set

-fire to it with a torch in about a dozen places.  It was

-very dry weather, and there was a strong wind.

-

-There was scarce a stick of the cottage left when she

-marched into the village with a blazing torch in her

-hand, and calmly told the assembled revellers what

-she had done.  Then she left them, seething in a tumult

-of excitement that almost drowned the hysteric screams

-of Mata, and went to bed and to sleep with a quiet

-mind, ready for an early start next morning.

-

-The men came on board late and very drunk, but

-they did come.  They were afraid of Vaiti, and so was

-Harris, who would very well have liked to extend his

-revels in the village for another twelve hours, but did

-not dare to do so.  He thought, as he stumbled into his

-bunk, that the sounds proceeding from the forecastle

-were a good deal odder than usual—he could almost

-have sworn that there was one person, if not several,

-crying in there.  But he had good reason for mistrusting

-the evidence of his senses just then, so he flung himself

-down and went to sleep.

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`A DEAD MAN'S REVENGE`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XI

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   A DEAD MAN'S REVENGE

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-When one is well on the right side of five-and-twenty,

-with a good ship underfoot, a fair breeze setting steadily

-from the right quarter, and a pleasant goal ahead, it is

-hard to be unhappy.  Vaiti's sense of bereavement at

-the loss of her cherished dress faded considerably before

-the *Sybil* had fairly cleared the land, and was gone

-altogether by the next day.  She had done what she felt

-to be the right thing by Mata; the score was even.

-Vaiti did not like loose ends of any kind, and she had

-not left any behind her.  She smiled as she thought of

-it, and paused in her official-looking walk across and

-across the poop, to revile a native A.B. for leaving the

-end of a halyard trailing on deck.

-

-"You d—— lazy nigger," she said.  "What sort

-ship you thinking you stop?  You thinking one mud

-scow" (*Mud cow* was her pronunciation), "one pig-boat,

-one canoe belong dam man-eating Solomon boy?  I

-teaching you some other thing pretty quick.  Suppose

-you no flemish-coil that halyard, keep him coil all-a-time,

-I let 'em daylight inside that black hide belong you,

-knock 'em two ugly eye into one."

-

-She plucked a belaying-pin out of the rail and sent it

-flying at the sailor's ear.  Vaiti was a straight thrower,

-but the crew seldom failed to dodge; they had every

-opportunity of becoming proficient.  On this occasion,

-however, the sailor made not the least attempt to escape,

-and the pin struck him fair and square at the angle of

-the jaw, and knocked him over.  He was hurt, but not

-stunned, and sat up immediately on the deck, gazing at

-the tall white figure on the poop with lack-lustre eyes

-that scarcely seemed to comprehend what they saw.

-

-"Bring 'em that pin," commanded Vaiti, still in what

-stood for English with her.  She never addressed the

-crew in the tongue that was native to both.

-

-The man crept slowly aft, and handed it to her.  She

-motioned to him to replace it neatly in the rail, and

-then pointed to the trailing halyard.  It did not escape

-her, as the sailor made his way down to the main deck,

-that there were tears in his large black eyes, and that

-his pareo was tied with a carelessness unusual among

-Polynesians, and significant of trouble and depression

-when seen.  But she put the one down to the swelled

-and reddening bruise that marked all one side of his face

-and the other to the orgies of the previous night.  If

-the men chose to make brutes of themselves on bush-beer,

-they need not expect that she was going to slacken

-their work for them on that account.  No, not if she

-broke the head of every man in the ship.  She was

-not Saxon's daughter for nothing, as they very well knew.

-

-It was small wonder that Vaiti was not popular with crews.

-

-She went on pacing the deck, in the joyous crystal-clear

-sunlight of the sea.  The trade wind ran through

-the sky like a warm, blue river, the rigging sang, the sails

-drew steadily.  It was a good day, a happy day, a

-pleasant day to be alive.  The girl felt pleased with

-the world.  She took the wheel from the sailor who

-held it, for the sheer pleasure of feeling the flying vessel

-answer to the touch of her own light hand.  All the

-force and fury of those roaring sails overhead seemed to

-concentrate itself here in her fingers, as the power of a

-great dynamo passes through a single wire.  It was

-almost as if she drove the ship herself.  The *Sybil*

-went as steady as an albatross; once or twice the

-spokes fairly shook in her hands.

-

-"The wheel is laughing to-day," she said in Maori,

-using the island sailor's expression.

-

-Dinner-time came round soon, and she descended

-to eat with Harris alone.  Saxon himself did not

-particularly care whether he dined with his bo'sun or not,

-if it happened to be convenient to leave Harris on

-deck; but Vaiti would have run the ship as strictly

-as a man-of-war at all times, if she could have had her

-way.  Indeed, she would have liked to dine in solitary

-state, like the captain of a cruiser, had she not had too

-much good sense to fly in the face of merchant service

-custom by excluding the mate.

-

-As things were, she graciously condescended to order

-Harris down to the cabin with her, and they discussed

-together the inevitable curried tin of Pacific cookery.

-It was wonderfully light and bright in the little cabin,

-which was large for the size of the ship, and had plenty

-of berth and locker space, besides its neatly fitted trade

-shelves.  The bulkheads were painted white picked out

-with blue (they were satinwood and bird's-eye maple

-underneath the paint, a thing which had astonished

-and perplexed more than one ship's carpenter in the

-past quarter of a century), and there was a pretty

-bird's-nest fern in a basket hanging from the skylight, and the

-seats were covered with the neatest thing in blue and

-white trade prints that Auckland could produce.  Vaiti's

-taste was evident everywhere, and Vaiti herself, hair

-freshly combed and held back with a bright ribbon, laces

-and frills dainty and immaculate as ever, looked, as she

-demurely poured out tea (you will seldom find the teapot

-absent from the table of a colonial ship), quite the last

-sort of person by whom a native A.B. might expect

-to be knocked into the scuppers.  Yet, truth to tell,

-the unlicked Harris, wolfing his food at the opposite

-side of the table, was very much better liked by the crew,

-even though he was heavy-handed enough at times;

-and he certainly understood more about the five A.B.'s

-and one ordinary seaman who inhabited the forecastle

-than did Vaiti, who was half one of themselves, and

-therefore thought them beneath consideration as a rule.

-

-Of this fact he proceeded to give an illustration when

-the curry and the tea and the fried bananas were almost

-done, and nobody's dinner could be spoilt by unpleasant

-news.

-

-"Think you're in for a good time, don't you, Cap?"

-he said.

-

-Vaiti, the economical of words, merely nodded.  But

-her face spoke for her.

-

-Harris was never quite sure whether he liked Vaiti

-in an uncomfortable, indefinite way, or heartily hated

-her.  To-day the balance perhaps inclined in the latter

-direction.  He watched her face with some interest

-as he said:

-

-"That's where you spoils yourself, Cap.  You ain't.

-And if you want my advice, which you never do, I'd

-tell you that the sooner you 'bouts ship and back to

-Niué the better."

-

-Vaiti bit slowly through the piece of bread she was

-eating and deliberately chewed it, eyeing the mate all

-the time, before she condescended to answer.

-

-"Mph!" was all she said at last.  She had never

-studied diplomacy, but she knew how much more you

-learn in general by letting the other person lead the

-conversation than by talking yourself.  And it occurred

-to her that Harris wanted to make himself important

-by hinting and patronising over some ship business

-which might, or might not, be in his department.  Well,

-let him.  She would not give him a lead.

-

-Harris, on his part, got angry at once, and blurted

-out what he had meant to keep a good deal longer.

-

-"Oh, very well," he said.  "You can do just as

-you likes, of course, but where you'll find yourself

-when it comes to a question of mutiny, that's another

-two-and-six.  Musling curtains on the ports, and white

-table-cloths, and ropes all flemish-coiled on deck is

-going to help you a lot then, ain't they?  And if ever

-I've seen signs of trouble in a crew, I seen them to-day,

-and you knows it—ma'am."

-

-The last word came with a jerk, screwed out, as it

-were, by an ominous flash of Vaiti's eye.

-

-Vaiti herself was thinking very quickly indeed, but

-you would not have imagined it if you had seen her

-slowly scooping out the inside of a mummy-apple, and

-as slowly eating it.  She was obliged to acknowledge

-to herself, now Harris had spoken, that there had been

-something unusual about the demeanour of more than

-one of the men since their departure yesterday.  But

-mutiny?  Nonsense!  Indigestion from too much pork,

-more likely.  She did not believe for an instant that any

-crew once handled by her father and herself would have

-an ounce of mutiny left in the lot, if you ran them

-through a stamp-mill and assayed the result three times

-over.

-

-So she merely remarked, between spoonfuls:

-

-"You talk plenty nonsense.  You keep those men

-work, they no squeak.  Suppose you finish eat, you go

-tell Gray he come down ki-ki."

-

-"All right!" said Harris meaningly, trying to make

-an effective and tragic exit.  He was really not at all

-easy in his mind, and Vaiti's attitude did nothing to

-relieve his apprehension of what might be about to

-follow.  The men had never dragged on the rein as

-they had done these two days past, and he felt it in his

-bones that there was more than met the eye in the

-matter.

-

-Vaiti, for her part, was so much incensed by the tone

-of his remonstrance that she would not even listen to

-the conviction which began to force itself upon her own

-mind, next day, that there was really something astray.

-Luck in general seemed to have deserted them.  With

-a fair wind the schooner should have made the run to

-Raratonga in three days, but on the afternoon of the

-second day a dead calm had fallen, and they lay helpless

-in the trough of the sea by four o'clock, three hundred

-miles from anywhere.

-

-"All-a-time I saying no good trust those trade winds,

-when that (adjective) Cook Islands be near," sighed

-Vaiti, scanning the horizon vainly right and left.  Like

-a true sailor, she was generally cross in a calm.

-

-"I wish we was out of this, ma'am, I do," remarked

-Gray, who was busy spinning sinnet at her feet on the

-deck.  For some odd reason, the sour old bo'sun generally

-found her more approachable than the others.

-

-"Why?" asked Vaiti, almost amiably.

-

-"Because, ma'am, of that, for one thing.  And hothers."

-

-He pointed forward, and Vaiti saw what she had

-not noticed before, the ship's carpenter, a powerful

-young Mangaian, lying flat on the foc'sle head and

-obviously weeping.

-

-"They've been at that game, one and another, off

-and on, ma'am, all to-day," he said.  "And you know

-yourself 'ow we've been put to it to get the work out of

-them.  Darned if I knows what monkey tricks they's

-up to, but I allow we're liable to understand all about

-it before very long, for that sea-lawyer of a fellow,

-Shalli, he's bin speechifyin' down in the foc'sle 'alf

-of this watch, like a bloomin' 'Yde Park sosherlist,

-he has."

-

-Vaiti glanced at her watch.

-

-"Make him eight bell," she ordered, scanning the

-foc'sle hatch.

-

-"Ay, ay, ma'am," said Gray readily, passing on the order.

-

-The watch below were prompt enough about turning

-out, but Shalli the forlorn could not, it seemed, find

-energy enough to get up and turn in.  Instead, he beat

-his curly head upon the planks and began to sob.  Vaiti

-took no notice of him whatever, but just strolled

-nonchalantly for a minute into her cabin, and reappeared

-with a slight projection in the bosom of her muslin

-dress that had not been there before.  Harris and Gray

-looked at each other significantly, and the former cast

-a swift glance about the vacant horizon.  No, not a

-shred of sail, not a trail of smoke.  Only the glancing

-flying-fish, and the oily, glittering swell, and the hard,

-pale, empty sky.

-

-The men, who had all been standing in a bunch by

-the hatch, now signalled to Shalli, who put off the rest

-of his weeping to a more convenient season, and got

-upon his feet.  Then the six began advancing slowly

-and uncertainly to the break of the poop.  They were a

-good-looking crew in their way, all Eastern Pacific men,

-with bright eyes and well-featured brown faces, and

-their dress—the brilliant red or yellow "pareo" of

-the islands, gaily figured with enormous white flowers,

-and the bright cotton shirt or coloured jersey—lent a

-distinctly operatic air to the little scene.  Vaiti and

-her officers, however (like Molière's *bourgeois* who had

-talked prose all his life without knowing it), had lived

-in the midst of picturesque and extraordinary things

-most of their lives, and therefore took no interest, as

-a rule, in anything save the sternest practicalities.

-

-And it was stern enough in all conscience, this fact

-with which they were confronted.  The men were

-mutinous, beyond doubt.

-

-Vaiti's mind rapidly ran over all possible causes

-for the trouble, even while Shalli was stepping forward

-and opening his mouth to speak.  It could not be rough

-treatment, because, as a matter of fact, the men were

-no worse handled on the *Sybil* than on most other

-island schooners, and an occasional knock-down blow

-is not the sort of thing that a Pacific native will

-seriously resent.  It could not be any objection to go

-to Raratonga—the crew were mostly Cook Islanders

-themselves, and glad of a chance of seeing their homes.

-Nor could it be dislike to her command, for a chief

-rank counts tremendously among Polynesians; and

-islanders who were ruled at home by a queen of her

-family would be most unlikely to strike against the

-authority of one of the Makea race, unless for some

-very grave cause.  It was, of course, possible that they

-had planned to seize the schooner and run off with it....

-She put her hand up to her bosom, and played

-with the laces that lay over that hard substance under

-the dress....

-

-But Shalli was speaking now, in answer to her sharp

-query as to what they wanted there.

-

-He had a good deal to say, and he said it with flashing

-eyes and much eloquence, using his slender, pointed,

-brown fingers a good deal to emphasise his remarks,

-and turning dramatically from his mates to Vaiti,

-and back to his mates again.  Harris listened anxiously,

-catching only a stray word here and there, for his

-knowledge of Maori was confined to the few phrases

-used in running the ship.  Shalli was certainly saying

-that somebody was going to die—that somebody had

-got to die, and immediately—to judge by the emphasis

-with which he spoke....  The mate was, as Vaiti had

-once told him, rather chicken-hearted underneath his

-great bulk and strength.  He felt himself turning

-chilly, for all the burning sky.  What the devil did that

-fiend of a Vaiti mean by standing there listening as

-calmly as if they were paying her compliments on her

-eyes?  Perhaps there was no particular trouble after

-all; but her demeanour was no guarantee, for she would

-have looked like that if they had all been on the verge

-of drowning, or burning, or hanging together, any day

-of the week.

-

-Gray, on the other hand, did not trouble to try and

-make out anything, but cut a large quid and chewed

-it at leisure, idly looking on.  He did not know if the

-men meant mutiny or not, and he did not particularly

-care.  They were three whites against six niggers,

-and there were firearms on their side.  And he had seen

-mutinies in his time beside which any little amusement

-that could be got up by half a dozen amiable Cook

-Islanders would seem a mere Sunday-school tea-party.

-Let them mutiny if they liked.  It would not mean

-the interruption of the work for half a watch.

-

-And Shalli went on talking as if he never would stop,

-and the *Sybil* rolled ceaselessly on the idle swell, and

-the useless sails slapped rhythmically upon the mast.

-And Vaiti, standing on the poop above the group

-of men on the main-deck, listened with an unmoved

-countenance until quite the end of Shalli's long

-speech.

-

-When he had finished he turned his face away, and

-instantly began to weep.  And the five other men,

-exactly as if a tap had been turned on, also began to

-weep at the same moment, howling loudly and lifting

-their hands to heaven.

-

-"If this isn't a bloomin' mutiny, it's a bloomin'

-lunatic asylum," declared Harris quite inaudibly in

-the midst of the hideous noise from the main-deck.

-It is not a common thing, even in that world where all

-things are possible, the wide, strange Pacific Ocean,

-to see a whole ship's company shedding tears in concert

-on a calm and peaceful afternoon, with nothing more

-alarming in sight than a handsome young woman in

-an expensively pretty frock.

-

-"Ow-ow-ow!" went Shalli, getting quite beyond

-his own control.

-

-"Ey-ah, eyah!" screamed a plump lad from Aitutaki,

-fluttering his hands like frantic pigeons.

-

-"For God's sake, Vaiti, tell us what's up," called

-Harris, sending his bull-like tones through the confusion.

-

-And then Vaiti spoke, shrieking at the top of her voice

-in order to be heard.  Her face, its hard calm broken

-up at last, was black with rage, and she had pulled out

-her revolver, and was holding it in her hand, though,

-strange to say, none of the men took the least notice of it.

-

-"That ——, —— witch-man belong Niué, he curse

-them, they say they die!" she screamed.  "By'n-by

-I cut him liver out!"

-

-"What witch-man?" bellowed Harris.  "Don't

-understand.  That white bloke—him with the red hair

-and the scar on his nose—who dresses native, and lives

-native up in the bush?  Saw him lookin' at you like as

-if he'd like to knife you, from behind Mata's house."

-

-"No, pig-head! no white man got 'mana' for make

-die that way," shrieked Vaiti, shaking her revolver

-without effect at the men.  "Niué witch-man.  What

-man you mean?  I not see——"

-

-But she did see at that moment, and to Harris's

-utter dismay she dropped the revolver on the deck and

-flung her skirt over her head.

-

-"My Gord! she's mad now," cried Harris.  The

-crew paid not the least attention, but continued to

-weep with lungs of brass.  The mate's head went round.

-He felt as if he was going out of his senses, too.  Gray,

-who seemed to be the only normal person left on board,

-went up to Vaiti and plucked her dress off her face.

-

-"Now, ma'am, keep 'er 'ead to wind," he remonstrated.

-"What's got 'old of the Capting?  Blest if

-we ever saw you afraid before."

-

-Vaiti turned on him like a tigress.

-

-"You think me frighten, you parrot-face, bal'-head,

-humpback pig-monkey!  Think some more those thing,

-and I shoot some hole in you lie-making tongue, learn

-you talk to me.  I tell you——"

-

-The hubbub on deck was calming down a little now,

-and subsiding into lost and homeless wails.  It was

-possible to make oneself heard.

-

-"I tell you, that thing Alliti see 'long Niué, he one

-dead man.  Captain schooner *Ikurangi*—same I making

-tart [chart] all wrong, so he go drown, he and him mate.

-You think it good thing one dead man he go walk along

-Niué, looking me?"

-

-"A cat may look at a king," said Harris, who had

-realised that no fighting was afoot, and therefore was

-very brave just now.  "Besides, that red-head man

-wasn't no ghost—he borrowed a pouchful of tobacco

-off of me, and never paid it back."

-

-"What sort that man?" demanded Vaiti.  "He

-small, all same Gray, he ugly all same you, got red hair,

-cut 'long him nose, tooth all break?"

-

-"That's him," agreed Harris.

-

-Vaiti took a turn across the deck, and fell silent,

-angrily chewing a lock of her hair.  The horrid vision

-of Donahue risen from his ocean grave, and wandering

-about the islands as a malignant ghost, bent on avenging

-his death, had struck her as such a fancy could only strike

-an islander, and almost paralysed her active mind.

-Now she realised that it was merely a case of mistaken

-newspaper report, and that Donahue had somehow

-escaped from the wreck of his schooner, and was once

-more roaming the islands in the flesh—at the very lowest

-ebb of fortune, it was evident, but probably none the

-less dangerous for that.  She was quite certain that he

-was in some way at the bottom of this business of

-cursing the crew, although no doubt the witch-doctor

-and Mata had been intermediary.  And it was no trifle.

-Sheer mutiny she would have much preferred.

-

-"Wot's it all about?" asked Gray, who had not

-been so long in the islands as the mate.  "Wot's the

-odds if a lot of bally niggers thinks they've been cursed?

-Seems to me anythin' the witch-doctor could do wouldn't

-be likely to harm a crew that's been salted by our old

-man in the cursin' way.  There ain't no witch-what-d'ye-call-'em

-about the islands that can lay over 'im

-for language."

-

-"Oh, shut up!  You don't know anything about it,"

-said Harris with irritation.

-

-"Suppose you tells me," suggested Gray, tucking

-another quid into his cheek, and looking dispassionately

-at the crew, who were now lying on deck rolling about

-with the motion of the vessel, and looking half dead

-already.  "Doesn't seem as if we was goin' to have

-much bother with that lot....  And you gettin' as

-white at the gills as a flounder, thinkin' they was goin'

-to take charge.  Go 'ome and learn a ladies' dancin'-class,

-Mr. 'Arris; you ain't fit to 'andle men."

-

-"I'll handle you if——" Harris was beginning

-roughly, when Vaiti, whose temper had been badly

-ruffled by the events of the last half-hour, stepped across

-the deck and delivered two stinging blows, one on

-Harris's right ear and one on Gray's left.

-

-"You take'm that," she said.  "Alliti, you speak

-bo'sun about Maori 'mana.'  Glay, you lemember

-Alliti mate, no give cheek."

-

-"Want to know if I've got any left for myself, before

-I start givin' it away," observed the bo'sun ruefully,

-rubbing his face.  "But better be slapped nor neglected

-by a pretty girl, hany day, says I."

-

-Vaiti did not smile, but leaned over the rail, and

-began staring at the crew.  She was in no mood for

-flattery.

-

-"Well, if you want to know, it's like this," said

-Harris.  "These native blokes, they thinks some of

-their chiefs has got what they call 'mana.'"

-

-"Wot's that mean?"

-

-"Pretty near any thin', take it by and large, but

-one meanin's all we want, and that's the notion they

-have that these chiefs can sort of blast 'em with a

-curse, so's they'll go away and die.  Like as if I was a

-chief, and you was a common man, same as you are,

-anyhow, and I was to say, 'Gray, you go off out of this

-and die next Thursday at four bells in the afternoon

-watch.'  And you says to me, says you, 'Ay, ay, sir,'

-says you."

-

-"Blowed if I would," ejaculated the bo'sun.

-

-"Yes, you would, you chump, because you'd be a

-bloomin' native, and they always does.  So off you'd

-go, and when Thursday come you'd lie down and die

-at four bells, wherever you happened to be."

-

-"Wot of?"

-

-"Nothin'—you'd run down like a watch—sort of

-'stop short never to go again' business, like the

-grandfather's clock—and when you was dead you'd stay

-dead.  That's all."

-

-"And I never 'eard worse rot in all me days," said

-the bo'sun disgustedly.  "Think I'm going to believe all

-that?"

-

-"Who cares what you believes or what you don't?"

-demanded Harris, "You'll —— well see all about it

-soon enough.  Vaiti she says they says Mata went to

-the witch-doctor, who they're as much afraid of as any

-chief in Niué, for all they're by way of bein' Christian, and

-he cursed them up and down and inside and out, worst

-style, and says they're all to die by sunset, to-night.

-And if I knows anything of natives they'll do it.  I'll

-lay you, we got to work the ship up to Raratonga

-ourselves—if we ever get there.  Of all the low-down,

-mean skinks that ever walked, them natives are the

-worst.  They haven't a blessed scrap of consideration

-in them for anyone but themselves.  Here we are with

-every man-jack of these fellows got an advance on his

-wages, and they says they're going to die!  Die!  I've

-no patience with them.  I do hate selfishness and

-meanness."

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`BREAKING THE MANA`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XII

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   BREAKING THE MANA

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-Vaiti all this time had been steadily watching the

-men as they lay about on the main-deck in various

-attitudes of limp resignation.  One or two—notably the

-emotional Shalli—were already beginning to look ill.

-Matters looked badly enough for the *Sybil*.  It was in

-the hurricane season, and signs were not wanting that

-the calm would break up with energy when it did

-break.  If the crew persisted in their dying, other

-people who had not been in any way subjected to the

-witch-doctor's operations might find it incumbent on

-them to die too.  She did not for a moment doubt

-the Niuéan's power to slay.  Had she not more than

-once seen the queen, who was her own cousin, politely

-dismiss some offender with the significant remark,

-"I wish I may never see you again after to-morrow"

-(for the queen was always courteous, and would never

-have used the crude terms of a Niuéan witch-doctor);

-and had not every one on the island known that with

-the next evening's sunset the wretch would lay him

-down and die as surely as the dark would fall?  These

-men were doomed, and the ship would miss the steamer

-and the cargo would not be sold, and possibly the

-schooner would be lost in the blow that was creeping

-up, and none of them would ever go home any more.

-

-Thus the native side of Vaiti spoke.  But now the

-white side woke up and demanded its innings too.

-Was it endurable that the red-headed rat of a Donahue

-(for she was as certain that he had been at the bottom

-of the matter as only a woman with no direct evidence

-to go on can be) should win the last move in the deadly

-game they had been playing this year and more.

-Was she to get into difficulties, and perhaps lose the

-ship, the very first time that she had taken off the *Sybil*

-all alone?  The fact that such a disaster would include

-the losing of herself did not trouble, as it did not console,

-her.  She would leave her reputation behind her, and

-people, when they spoke of Vaiti of the Islands, would

-say——

-

-No, they wouldn't, and they shouldn't.  The white

-blood was up now.  It was impossible to prevent the

-"mana" from working.  Well, let it be.  She would

-do the impossible.  She had done the impossible before,

-in many ways; it was the only sort of thing really

-very well worth doing, in the opinion of Vaiti of the

-Islands.

-

-Whatever was to be done must be done quickly.

-The storm was not far away, and the *Sybil* was rolling

-in the trough of the increasing swell with every rag of

-sail set.

-

-"What you goin' to do?" asked Harris hopelessly,

-as he saw her move.  "Give them medicine?  It

-ain't any good."

-

-"Yes, give 'em medicine—you and Gray, you giving

-it plenty by'n-by," said Vaiti calmly, beckoning the two

-men over to her.  The crew continued to lie on the deck,

-giving no sign of life but an occasional groan.  The wind

-was beginning to cry a little among the rigging, just

-whimpering, like a chidden child.  A glassy tinkling of

-foam sounded about the keel.  The sun was almost down.

-

-"You listen me," said the girl, her handsome,

-hawk-like features looking curiously sombre in the orange

-light.  "I speak those men in Maori.  I tell them some

-thing—thing not belong 'papalangi.'  You no

-understan'.  Wait."

-

-Then, with a look on her face that the white men

-had never seen there before, and were never to see

-again, she stepped swiftly down the ladder, crossed

-the main-deck, and stood in the midst of the prostrate

-crew.

-

-As though struck themselves by a spell, Harris and

-Gray remained motionless on the poop, only swaying

-with the unconscious movement of the sailor to the roll

-of his ship, while they watched with fascinated eyes

-the scene upon the lower deck.  The crew at first lay

-still as logs, while Vaiti stood and looked at them—only

-looked.  Presently they began to open their eyes

-and roll over, and the weeping, which had apparently

-ceased, began again.

-

-Then Vaiti, suddenly flinging her arms high above

-her head, with her light muslin dress fluttering in the

-wind and all her magnificent hair falling to her knees,

-burst into such a flood of speech as made the two

-hard-bitten Englishmen on the poop open eyes of stolid

-amaze.  There is no language in the world so full of

-eloquent possibilities as the Maori tongue—even in the

-somewhat debased and altered type that is current

-among the islands.  And, hidden away somewhere in

-the strange nature of this strange thing in woman's

-shape, there was more than a touch of the true witch

-wildness and fire.

-

-"Lord!" said Harris, in a tone of awe.  "She's the

-devil himself!"

-

-She looked it, as she stood there in that livid light,

-her arms stretched high to heaven, her voice—was there

-ever a voice so full of passion, prophecy, command?—ringing

-out, now high, now low, now in tones vibrating

-with some subtle suggestion of horror that caused even

-the uncomprehending whites upon the poop to feel a

-cold shudder about the region of the spine.  Upon the

-crew the effect was marvellous, yet, from Gray's and

-Harris's point of view, unsatisfactory as well.  The

-limp figures sat up, it was true, wept afresh, and even

-rose to their feet before long; but it was only to rush

-wildly up and down the heaving deck, driven, it seemed,

-by the sting of an agony greater than any they had

-suffered yet.  Above the loose sails thundered and the

-wind wailed wickedly.

-

-Gray, at a motion from the mate, went to the idle

-wheel and grasped the spokes.  The *Sybil* would want

-watching soon.

-

-"Strike me pink if this isn't the craziest ship's

-company outside a lunertic asylum from Yokohama to

-the 'Orn," muttered the bo'sun to himself.  "Now,

-what the 'ell is *that*?  Ho, Jemmy Gray, why don't

-you look for a berth as a bally stoker in a bally Red Sea

-liner, or a supercargo on a Chinese pirate junk, and

-'ave a quiet life at your age?  Here, Mr. 'Arris, you

-going to let 'er shoot 'erself before your heyes?"

-

-Vaiti had plucked out her revolver again, but instead

-of threatening the crew with it, she was holding it close

-to her own curly head, all the time pouring forth a

-river of eloquent Maori, strongly charged with adjurations

-and threats.  It needed no translation to understand

-so much, not to see the abject if inexplicable

-terror of the crew, who cowered and howled in an

-extremity of distress every time she raised the pistol to

-her head.

-

-"Vaiti, Vaiti!  What're you doing, Cap?" yelled

-Harris.  "You'll shoot yourself!  Are you crazy?

-What are you givin' 'em, for Cord's sake?"

-

-Vaiti turned round, and cried angrily at him:

-

-"Hold 'm tongue!  You no leave me myself, very

-quick I shooting you.  I tell those men I great chief,

-no one can take 'um curse away, but can come 'long

-all those men myself, suppose they die—go Raratonga

-when 'um night come, an' all those man soul he running

-quick, quick, all a-cold, 'long those mountains top

-Raratonga where 'um dead man he go to jumping-off

-place.  A—a—h!  I put one bullet in head belong me,

-very quick, suppose those men they got dam cheek go

-an' die.  I coming, very dead, very angry, I go 'long

-that soul, all a-time; no let 'um rest, no let 'um see

-woman fliend, die long time ago—I take big club belong

-chief, make 'um run, cry, all-a-time—no sleep, no eat,

-no lie down!  A—a—h! no go heaven, no go hell,

-all-a-time, for ever'n ever, Amen.  I pay him out for

-going die!"

-

-She stormed through the brief speech like a hot-season

-squall, and instantly returned to the natives.

-Harris, struck dumb by the entirely unprecedented

-nature of the situation, could find no vent for his feelings

-save in plucking off his cap and casting it under his feet.

-She was threatening the crew that she would kill herself

-if they died; follow them to the land of shades (the

-entrance to which was popularly supposed to be over

-the edge of a certain desolate, far-up mountain precipice

-in Raratonga), and make it so hot for them in the

-"otherwhere" that they would certainly wish they

-hadn't dared to die....  What on earth was a man to

-do in a ship commanded by a thing—he could not call

-it a woman—that talked like that—with night coming

-on, too, and something very like a bad blow unpleasantly

-near?

-

-Vaiti did not leave him long in doubt as to what he

-was to do.  The crew, driven previously to the verge

-of frenzy by her gruesome threats, became entirely

-frantic during the eloquent peroration that followed

-her address to Harris.  They ran up and down the deck;

-they shrieked, they prayed, they besought.  Vaiti, with

-the eye of a hunter watching a quarry almost driven to

-bay, kept a keen look-out through all her fiery eloquence,

-and just at the moment when the men seamed driven

-to the highest point of human endurance, turned to the

-mate with a triumphant cry.

-

-"Now, Alliti! he all right by'n-by: I no shoot

-myself, I think.  You and bo'sun you get rope's end very

-quick, give 'um order shorten sail, make 'um go.  I

-think he go; he too much plenty frighten die 'long me."

-

-"Too much plenty frighten" the men were indeed.

-The threat that Vaiti had made—for the carrying out

-of which they doubted neither her ability nor her will,

-any more than she did herself—was so much more potent

-than the curse of the witch-doctor that the terror of

-the one paled before the terror of the other.  For the

-moment, they felt that they might not be able to live,

-but they certainly must not die; and it was right in

-the middle of this illogical state of mind that the mate

-and bo'sun came in with their rope's ends and settled

-the matter once for all.  An hour ago, red-hot irons

-only would have moved them to hurry up with their

-dying.  Now a couple of ropes' ends, laid about among

-the six with a will, drove them howling up the masts

-and out along the yards, where, with Gray and Harris

-still after them, and Vaiti threatening from below,

-they succeeded in getting the sails stowed and the vessel

-snug in very little over the ordinary time.  The blow

-that followed kept all hands busy the night through,

-but it came from the right quarter, and the *Sybil* fled

-before it at such a speed that morning found her only

-half a day's run from Raratonga, with the wind quieting

-down to a pleasant breeze, the schooner uninjured, and

-the crew as cheerful and busy as they had ever been

-in their lives.

-

-Vaiti caught the steamer, sold her copra, and saw it

-on the wharf ready to load.  Then she went back to

-the schooner, and waited till the last of the men

-returned.

-

-"Suppose you like go die now, plenty time for you,"

-she said.  "Plenty good sailor-man stop Raratonga.

-You go 'long die; I no want."

-

-The men looked at her sheepishly, and Shalli, the

-spokesman, scratched his head and surveyed a heap of

-tributary pigs, fowls, and fruit that lay on the deck of

-the schooner before he answered.  The crew had many

-relations about Raratonga, and the relations had done

-them very well this trip.

-

-"Many thanks, great chieftainess," he said at last,

-in his own tongue.  "We are much obliged to you, but

-we have changed our minds, and now we do not ever

-mean to die at all."

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE GAME PLAYED OUT`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XIII

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE GAME PLAYED OUT

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-Every one in the trader's had gone to bed, and Vaiti,

-barefoot and dressed in dark cotton, had just got out

-of her room by the window, and was gliding noiselessly

-down the back verandah.

-

-The moon was down, and the thick darkness under

-the trees of the village covered her safely as she slipped

-along at the backs of the little white, palm-thatched

-houses.  It was not at all likely that any native would

-be about in the middle of the night, but one could never

-reckon on white men, of whom there were several in

-the little town—and Vaiti, being engaged as usual on

-"urgent private affairs," did not want any inquiries.

-

-She got away from the village without remark, and

-then struck into one of the narrow grass roads penetrating

-the bush.  Everything was asleep.  The little green

-parrots were hidden deep under heavy leaves, each

-with its noisy head tucked under its wing.  The lizards

-that had been darting and flickering all day long about

-the path now slept, chill as little stones, among the roots

-of the trees.  There was a cold, dewy smell in the air,

-and the palm-tree plumes were motionless as drawings

-in Indian ink against the violet gloom of the sky.  Very

-far away the immemorial music of the reef beat softly

-in the dark.

-

-Vaiti girded her dress high, and walked swiftly.  She

-had a long way to go, and she wanted to be back in her

-neat, white, mosquito-curtained bed, sleeping the sleep

-of the innocent, before the trader's wife should come in

-with her morning cup of tea.  Vaiti was a past mistress

-in the art of avoiding useless comment.

-

-Three miles, five miles, seven miles....  It was

-right at the other side of the island, past mile after mile

-of tangled bush, acre after acre of sparsely planted,

-rocky, open ground, grove after grove of tall, plumy

-cocoanut, heavy with fruit.  Oranges grew by the track

-here and there; broad green banners of banana leaf

-blotted out whole sections of the stars, and slim, quaint

-mummy-apple trees stood up among the prickly coral

-rocks.  Vaiti had no time to stop, but she snatched a

-little refreshment on her way from time to time, as the

-wayfarer may always do in the kindly South Sea climate.

-

-She struck at last into a narrow track leading off

-the main pathway—so small that in the dusk of the

-starry night it must have been invisible save for a mass

-of pointed rocks that stood up just beside the overgrown

-entrance and made a landmark.  Afterwards came a mile

-or two of tangled walking among clumps of pink and

-scarlet and yellow hibiscus, all reduced to a common

-blackness by the levelling night, and through thorny

-lemon-trees, and over rocky knolls where there was

-scarce footing for a goat....  A lonely God-forsaken

-region this; not a village, nor even the gleam of a

-solitary white-washed hut.  What had the "Kapitani"

-of the *Sybil* to do with such a place?

-

-Vaiti knew very well indeed what she had to do.  She

-had gathered in the town that the mysterious white

-man who "lived native" in the bush had his dwelling

-about this lonely neighbourhood.  It was very well

-known to her, and she meant to find the man's

-dwelling-place, and see him with her own eyes before...

-

-Well, that was still to come.

-

-It took her rather longer than she had expected, but

-she did at last succeed in finding the tumble-down little

-palm-leaf shanty, built against the side of a rock, that

-she had heard described.  It was a miserable place,

-so far as her cat-like eyes could judge it in the purple

-gloom, not more than three or four yards long, and

-looking like nothing so much as a heap of dead leaves

-and rubbish piled against the rock.  She trod noiselessly

-round its three sides, and listened here and there.

-The door, as she ascertained by feeling, was a heavy mat

-hung up from the eaves, and it was tightly fastened across

-the opening.  There was a faint sound of slow, heavy

-breathing from within.  The man was evidently asleep.

-

-Vaiti climbed up on the rock above the hut, and pulled

-away a piece of the loose grey coral of which it was

-composed.  Then, sheltering herself behind a clump

-of hibiscus growing in a cleft, she raised her voice in

-a fearful squealing cry, exactly reproducing the yell

-of a wild pig wandering in the bush at night.  At the

-same time she cast a lump of coral with all her strength

-down the side of the big rock, whence it landed with a

-crash in the middle of a mass of brushwood, burying

-itself completely.

-

-The double noise, as she had anticipated, brought

-out the owner of the hut, very cross and sleepy, clad

-only in a pareo, and angrily anxious for the safety of

-his patch of yams.  He carried a torch in his hand,

-made of blazing candlenuts strung on a stick ("Must

-have run out every bit of credit at the stores," thought

-Vaiti parenthetically), and he was, beyond all shadow

-of doubt, against all common probability, the

-red-haired master of the *Ikurangi*.

-

-If looks could ever blast, those black eyes behind

-the hibiscus boughs would have slain him where he

-stood.  Vaiti quivered with rage as she watched him

-shambling sleepily about, looking, with his long, matted

-red hair, bloated, evil face, and half naked body, infinitely

-lower than any coloured native on the island....  He

-had not prospered since he escaped the wreck of the

-*Ikurangi*—how or where she did not care to know.

-He looked as if he had been living on the natives

-and half drinking himself to death, as was indeed the case.

-

-But Vaiti was not in the least mollified by his

-unprosperous case.  In her opinion, he ought to have been

-dead long ago.  There could be no peace of mind for

-her while he was still drifting about the Pacific, ever

-on the alert to do her an evil turn.  She was not equal

-to actual murder, and, in any case, Niué was a

-British-owned island, with a resident Commissioner and a

-regular nest of missionaries, where you had to be very

-careful of what you did.  But if any accident—a safe,

-convenient accident—should befall him by-and-by,

-why, it would certainly be an advantage to the *Sybil*

-and her owners.  Well, that might come about, and

-without introducing Saxon into it either.  In such a

-delicate matter Saxon's interference would very likely

-have acted much as a charge of dynamite might act

-in the destruction of a wasps' nest—something more

-than the wasps would probably come to grief.

-

-She waited until the ugly creature had rolled back

-into his cottage and shut the make-shift door.  Then she

-slipped down from the rock once more, and began

-the second part of her errand.  Neither then, nor at

-any other time, did she trouble to find out the manner

-of Donahue's escape.  If she had, she would have heard

-that he had been picked up by a native canoe, floating

-about on a piece of wreck the day after the disaster

-that destroyed the *Ikurangi*, and that, he had spent a

-good many months on a neighbouring island before a

-stray schooner had consented to accept his watch for

-passage money and convey him as far as Niué—the

-only place near their course where a penniless

-beachcomber would have been allowed to land.  As things

-were, he was more or less smuggled off, and thought

-best to take refuge in the bush at once.  The moneyless

-adventurer is not encouraged in islands belonging to

-the British Crown.

-

-It is easy, therefore, to understand why Donahue,

-living under an assumed name in the far interior of

-the island, had not been recognised, and was not likely

-to be, by any one save the person whom his presence

-most concerned.  His malice against Vaiti had by no

-means evaporated with the events that took place on

-Vaka.  He did not, as it happened, suspect her of having

-actually caused the loss of the *Ikurangi*, but he was of a

-darkly superstitious nature, and laid down his ill-luck,

-first, last, and all through, to the fact of her influence.

-She had been a "Jonah" of the worst kind to him, and

-he would have been very glad indeed to serve her any ill

-turn of any kind that might be possible.  But only the

-small piece of spite compassed through Mata had, so far,

-lain within his power.

-

-Vaiti had still a mile or two to go, and it was waxing

-very late, or rather, early.  She almost ran along the

-winding rocky path, following it as easily as if broad

-day or full moon had surrounded her instead of star-lit

-dark.  Now the sound of the sea, unheard for the last

-hour, broke out again, and a cold salt breath from the

-beach cut through the heavy perfume of the forest track.

-In another minute she was out of the wood and fairly

-running down a sloping, sandy track that led to a little

-white house standing alone on the shore....  She

-laughed as she ran—it was such a soft, clear night, and

-the sea called so pleasantly down in the dark, and she

-did so dearly love an adventure—especially when all

-the world imagined her to be sleeping quietly in her

-mosquito-netted bed.

-

-There was no secrecy about this matter apparently.

-The house had a good wooden door, and she rapped

-loudly on it with a stone, calling at the same time,

-"Sona!  Sona!  Wake up!"

-

-There was a brief interval, in which the rollers tore

-at the beach and the palms swung and crashed overhead,

-uninterrupted by other sound.  Sona was evidently

-asleep.  She struck loudly on the door again.  This

-time some one answered in a drowsy voice, and a slow,

-shuffling foot came to the door.  The hinges creaked,

-and in another minute a small, bent, feeble figure appeared

-on the threshold.

-

-"Tck! tck!" it clucked.  "Is there magic in

-the air, and have I grown fifty years younger, that the

-lovely maidens come to my door in the starlight once

-more?  Is it my beauty that has struck you to the

-heart, chieftainess Vaiti; or do you want a charm

-to catch the love of some one less deserving than

-myself?"

-

-A fit of coughing interrupted him; he crept out to

-the open air, and clung to the door-post, shaking all over

-with the violence of the paroxysm.  There was more

-light here, down by the foaming rollers; one could see,

-if one had been walking half the night in the dark bush,

-that the man was very small and hairy, very decrepit,

-and very, very old.  Indeed, the personal appearance of

-Sona, solitary recluse of the Avarangi beach, good

-Nonconformist Christian on Sundays, and heathen

-witch-doctor out of business hours, was a very important

-item of his stock-in-trade.  He looked his part to

-perfection, and knew it.  His very name was a piece of

-business, even though, rightly pronounced and written.

-it was that of the godly man of Nineveh.  When Shark-Tooth

-of Avarangi had consented, largely for reasons of

-policy, to join the mission fold a good many years

-before—the last straggling heathens on the island having

-been then "brought in" by the exertions of a determined

-and energetic missionary—he had selected the

-name of Jonah for his baptismal title solely because, so

-far as he could ascertain, the original bearer of the name

-was proverbial for bringing bad luck to his enemies—and

-that was the sort of reputation that Shark-Tooth

-especially coveted.

-

-Vaiti had not met him before, but she knew him well

-by reputation, and was very sure that he knew all he

-cared to know—probably a good deal—about her.

-It was, she thought, a case for going straight to the point,

-so she went very straight indeed.

-

-"Let me in, Sona," she said in his own tongue.  "I

-want to talk with you, and I want to buy you; for you

-and I are wise people, and I know that there is nothing

-that may not be bought."

-

-"Crah—crah—crah!" cackled Sona, in a feeble

-old man's laugh, tacking a joke to the end of it that

-might well have raised a blush on Vaiti's cheek if she

-had been capable of such a weakness.  He led the way

-into the house, still cackling, lit an ill-smelling kerosene

-lamp, and sank down upon the mats, a mere heap of

-crumpled cotton clothes, old bones, and ancient wickedness.

-

-Vaiti pulled out her cigar-case, tossed the old creature

-a cigar, which he clutched at eagerly, and lit one for

-herself.  Then she squatted down on the mats, her back

-against the wall, and puffed for a minute or two in

-silence.  Old Sona watched her eagerly with his glassy

-little eyes.  He saw that she was not angry at the part

-he had played in the late unpleasant occurrence upon the

-schooner, or at least that she did not mean to resent it.

-He had heard all about the strange happenings of the

-voyage, and was a good deal awed at the power of the

-woman who had actually broken the spell of his curse—in

-which, be it observed, he believed most fully himself,

-with excellent reasons for doing so.  And he was really

-very anxious to know what she wanted now, and

-especially what he was going to make by it.

-

-Vaiti pulled at her cigar vigorously for a minute to

-make it draw well, and then, with a leisurely puff,

-remarked in Sona's own tongue:

-

-"Mata gave you a gold ring to curse my sailors

-that they should die—all the village knows of it, so

-you need not deny it, old man with the face of a scavenger-crab.

-Was it not foolish of you to set yourself against

-Vaiti, the great sea-princess—very foolish to run into

-danger, and for so little?"

-

-"Yes, yes, so little," repeated Sona, in a kind of

-wail.

-

-"Now I come to buy you for myself," went on Vaiti,

-puffing between words (she smoked like most women,

-very hard and fast).  "I buy like a great chief's daughter,

-and you shall feed and drink well for a long time if you

-are faithful to me.  If not, I shall split you open with

-my knife as one splits open a fish on the beach, and

-leave you out on the strand, so that the crabs may come

-and eat you before you are dead.  That is what I shall

-do to you."

-

-"I belong to the high chieftainess, soul and liver,"

-quavered Sona nervously.  Vaiti, hardly looking at

-him, pulled something out of her dress and flung it

-down carelessly on the mat between the two.  Sona's

-eyes glittered, for he heard the chink of gold.

-

-"Take it, old pig of the woods," said Vaiti

-contemptuously, and he clutched eagerly at the little

-parcel of rag.  It contained a roll of gold coins.  Sona,

-panting with mingled delight and fear lest his visitor

-should change her mind, scuttled away to some hiding-hole

-in an inner room, and concealed the packet with

-breathless haste.  Then he returned to the lamp-lit

-room, where Vaiti sat smoking and waiting.

-

-"I am yours, high chieftainess; I am yours," he

-repeated, rubbing his hands together and cackling.

-

-"What is this thing they tell about a devil that

-stays upon the road to Mua, and comes out at night-time?"

-asked Vaiti carelessly, looking over Sona's

-head at the wall.

-

-Sona shut up his eyes very tight, and shook his shaggy

-little head from side to side.

-

-"If you ask the good misinari doctor, he will tell

-you," he answered.  "As for me, I have nothing to do with

-devils.  I am a very old man, and I want to go to heaven.

-

-"You will go to-night, old scorpion-head, if you do

-not tell me everything I want to know," remarked

-Vaiti.  Her tone was pleasant, but there was a flavour

-of something else below the pleasantness that caused

-Sona, literally and figuratively, to sit up.

-

-"I tell, I tell, high chieftainess," he stammered

-eagerly.  "The thing is known to all the people on the

-island—even the white people.  It happened only last

-year, and it is as true as the Good Book.  It was the

-foolish man from Mua way, whom they called a

-witch-doctor—and every one knows that such a thing does not

-exist, high chieftainess; but they said he was that thing,

-and he said so himself, because he was proud and mad.

-Now, we all know that there are many devils on Niué,

-and that the misinaris never were able to drive them

-all away.  And there is a very bad devil on that road

-to Mua, right where the six palm-trees stand up by

-themselves among the graves.  It is powerless in the

-day, but at night there is no Niué man who would dare

-to go there.  Sometimes the white traders will ride

-past the place coming home in the dark, but it is a true

-thing that their horses will often shy and bolt when

-they come near to the home of the devil, and no man

-can say why; indeed, the devils, for the most part, do

-not have power over the 'papalangi.'

-

-"So this witch-doctor, as he called himself, said that

-he did not fear the devil, and he would go and stay the

-night among the graves, thinking that because of that

-all the people in the island would believe in him, and

-give him many pigs and yams for fear of his 'mana.'  So

-he went to the devil-place, and all night he stayed,

-but in the morning he did not come back at all.  And

-by-and-by all the people of his village went together

-to look for him.  And they found him lying on the

-road, all dead, and his face was black and his body

-twisted up.  So the people brought him to the misinari

-doctor, and he said that he could not make him alive

-again.  And the traders said, 'What is the kind of this

-death?  We do not know it, though we are white men

-and know everything.'  But the misinari doctor did

-not know.  And they buried him, and that is all, high

-chieftainess."

-

-Vaiti smoked thoughtfully.  She had heard something

-of the tale before, and Sona's story did not vary from

-the version that was generally current about the island.

-She thought, on the whole, that she believed in it.

-There was no doubt that many of the white people gave

-it credit, though a few of them declared the man must

-have died in a drunken fit.  A paper in Australia had

-published an account of the mysterious incident, and

-the spiritualistic set in Sydney were so deeply interested

-in it that a letter of inquiry from a psychical research

-society had been sent up to the island, inquiring into

-the matter.  But it happened that the trader to whom

-the letter was addressed had committed suicide a good

-many months earlier, and excellent onions and pumpkins

-(much appreciated by his successor) were growing green

-upon his grave by the time the letter reached the island.

-So the inquiry was never answered.

-

-Yes, on the whole, Vaiti thought she believed the

-story.  That a similar result would follow in the case of

-a "papalangi" (white man) who followed the deceased

-magician's example she did not, however, believe.

-She thought it very likely, however, that mischief of

-one kind or another would result....  And if the worst

-should chance to come about....

-

-Vaiti took another cigar.

-

-"What does your misinari say?" she asked.  "He

-is not the right sort of misinari, it is true, but still,

-he should know more about devils than the traders."

-

-"Our good misinari was not here when it happened,"

-replied Sona in a pious tone.  "It was the doctor

-misinari.  Our own good misinari says that devils

-cannot do harm to any but bad men."

-

-Vaiti reflected, her eyes on the floor.  She really

-had some respect, in an odd, upside-down kind of way,

-for missionary opinion.  It is bred in the bone with the

-younger generation of Eastern Pacific islanders.

-

-Donahue was certainly a very bad man.  She did not

-think she had ever met any one much worse.  Perhaps

-the badness, balanced against the whiteness, might

-swing down the scale.  At any rate....

-

-"Hear me, Sona!" she said, in a voice of command.

-"I have bought you to-night, and you belong to me.

-There will be more to pay by-and-by if you do as I tell

-you.  But I would warn you to be careful, for you will

-not find it pleasant lying on the shore down there, with

-your inside hanging out like a gutted fish, and the crabs

-coming running to eat you before you are dead, as you

-will if you make any mistakes.  Listen, then, very

-carefully."

-

-"I listen, I listen!" cried Sona.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`HOW THE WITCH-DOCTOR GOT HIS MONEY BACK`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XIV

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   HOW THE WITCH-DOCTOR GOT HIS MONEY BACK

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-When the trader's wife came in next morning with

-Vaiti's cup of tea, she was touched to see how deeply

-her pretty lodger was sleeping.

-

-"Poor young dear," said the good woman, "lying

-there so sweet and innocent, sleeping like a baby!

-It's only the good heart that rests like that.  I don't

-believe a word of the silly lies they tell about her.  Here,

-dear, wake up," she called gently.  "Your good papa

-is ever so much better this morning, and looking for

-you to come in.  And it is Sunday morning, and a nice

-cool day."

-

-"Thank you, Mrs. Smith," said Vaiti politely, broad

-awake at once.  "May I asking you one little hot

-water?  I like get up and go to turch."

-

-Church, attended for reasons religious or otherwise,

-was not one of the amusements patronised by the

-nameless white man of the bush.  Indeed, his amusements,

-such as they were, were so far confined to the

-native villages of the interior that very few of the other

-whites had seen him.  He was not good for trade,

-having no money and possessing no credit—that was all

-they knew, or for the most part wanted to know, about

-him.

-

-There was all the more astonishment, therefore, in

-the shanty owned by the Mua trader, away up in the

-bush, when the unknown man walked into the store

-that Sunday night, and demanded some tobacco, at the

-same time showing a sovereign he held in his hand.  He

-was dressed in a pitiful mass of rags, none too clean,

-but he looked well pleased with himself, and was more

-than half drunk.  Fortune had apparently found him

-out at last.

-

-The Mua trader was an honest man, but he did not

-see why he should not have a share in anything good

-that happened to be available about that lonely and

-unprofitable district.  So he welcomed the stranger in

-with much cordiality, and asked him to stop for supper.

-

-The newcomer had no objection in the world to come

-in and share the trader's good tinned meats and new

-yeast bread, and he made himself very much at home

-without pressing.  The trader, who had a private

-store of consolation in his own back kitchen, plied the

-spirits freely.  He was curious, and he believed in the

-old saw of "Wine in, truth out."  A couple of friends

-who had ridden over from Alofi, the capital, and were

-equally curious about the derelict's sudden access to

-fortune, did their disinterested best to help, and the

-bottle went merrily round.  The Niué traders are a

-sober, decent set of people enough, but Donahue had

-mixed with them so little that he did not know this,

-and consequently was not put on his guard by the unusual

-conviviality.  Indeed, he was by no means the same

-active, crafty villain who had set that successful snare

-of the diamond necklace in Apia many months ago.  A

-white man cannot "live native" without going downhill

-very fast, and Donahue was nearly at the bottom.

-

-So he drank, and laughed, and told evil tales, and grew

-quarrelsome, and pathetic, and finally affectionate and

-confidential, in well-defined stages, while all the time

-the other men kept sober, or nearly so.  The Mua

-trader in particular hardly touched his glass.  But

-Donahue, once so wary, never saw, and chattered on.

-

-Before midnight the trader had sold him some gay

-calico for the native' girls, and a little tinned meat and

-flour, and half-a-dozen various trifles that brought

-the score up to about a pound.  Here the guest came

-to a pause and fingered his coin.

-

-"Oh, well, if that's all you have, you won't get any

-more goods to-night.  Thanks," said the trader, putting

-out his hand.

-

-The visitor, however, declined to hand over the money.

-He would pay to-morrow, he said.  He was not going

-to leave himself without money again—not if he knew

-it—and he would have lots to-morrow: and if the trader

-wouldn't send up the goods without the cash to-night,

-why, he might keep his condemned rubbish, and his

-customer would go elsewhere.

-

-Rather than lose the order, the other gave in, and

-sent a boy away with the stuff.  It would always be

-easy to bully him out of it afterwards, he thought, and

-there was no arguing with a drunken man's whim.

-

-Then he set himself, in company with all the rest, to

-find out where the money had come from.

-

-Donahue, who by now was far gone, responded

-readily.  It was the silly old chap who lived down on

-Avarangi beach, he said; an old fool who was an uncle

-of a girl who was a friend of his.  The old chap had a

-notion that there were some Spanish doubloons hidden

-somewhere on the island, but in a place he was afraid

-to touch, so he had forked out a good British sovereign,

-and offered it to Donahue to go in his place, and share

-the money with him.  Donahue was to keep the earnest

-money for his trouble, if nothing came of it, and if

-anything did turn up he was to take half.  So he was

-going, that very night—the sooner the better.  Natives

-were—well, natives; but as for him, he was afraid of

-nothing.

-

-"Thasser-sort-er-man I am," he finished thickly,

-looking round for applause.

-

-He did not get it.  The traders one and all burst

-out laughing.  The story of the doubloons, they told

-him, was a very old one in the island, and only the

-newest of new chums thought of believing it.  It was

-quite true that the natives, who were perfect magpies

-for hoarding, did possess among them a certain number

-of doubloons, which came from God-knows-where—for

-the coinage used in the island was British—and true

-also that the trader would get a doubloon from one of

-them every now and then in the course of business,

-always with some mystery attached to it, and some

-reluctance to part with the coin.  But the Resident

-Commissioner, who knew the island pretty well, and the

-missionary too, had long been certain that the store was

-merely the remains of some ship-wrecking raid of past

-days, about which the Niuéans were now ashamed to

-speak.  They were great misers, and it would like enough

-be another generation before all the hoarded coins

-had come to light and passed through the traders'

-hands.  But hidden treasure in Niué!  Pf!  If old

-Sona had been giving away money, he must be either

-going mad with age or (more likely) up to something.

-He was the cutest old fox on Niué, and that was saying

-something.  Why, when he had come into that very store

-to buy a darning-needle a few hours ago (what a man

-who lived in a waist-cloth and nothing else wanted

-with a darning-needle he hadn't explained), it had

-been all the trader could do to prevent his picking up

-half-a-dozen odds and ends.  That was what he was

-like if one ever took an eye off him; and he wouldn't

-even pay for the needle, either, till the trader had

-threatened to hammer him unless he forked out.  Take

-his word for it, if Sona had been giving away money,

-he meant to have it back—somehow.  And the treasure

-was poppy-cock.

-

-Donahue had now passed into the quarrelsome stage,

-and he rose with tipsy dignity from his seat.

-

-"I considdle you no gennlemen," he said scornfully.

-"For half a Chile dorrer I'd" ... He mentioned

-what he would do, in gross and in detail, to the assembled

-company for the small sum mentioned.

-

-"Kick the dirty brute out," said the Alofi trader

-disgustedly.  "It's easy to see what sort of company

-that carrion has kept."

-

-Donahue was gone, however—gone with surprising

-agility, and lurching rapidly up the forest pathway

-towards his house.  His legs were always the last thing

-to fail him.

-

-He knew very well that he had had too much, and

-when he reached his hut he proceeded to sober himself

-by dipping his head repeatedly in a bucket of water.

-Then he brewed himself a powerful jorum of black tea,

-drank it, and set off considerably sobered.

-

-It was a long way to the clump of palms, and he

-stumbled badly now and then as he went over the

-graves that lay thick about the edges of the path.

-Burial along the high-road is very popular in Niué,

-where they like to keep an eye on their dead and see

-that they are lying quiet in their graves—a thing that

-no one considers at all a matter of course.  Some of

-the graves that Donahue passed had felt hats laid upon

-them; others had plates, bowls, bottles of hair-oil,

-fans—all to amuse the ghost and keep it quiet; and one

-or two looked ghostly enough to scare a nervous person

-as it was, with the wraith-like mosquito curtains

-thoughtfully suspended over the tomb by mourning and anxious

-relatives.  Every grave was completed by a solid mass

-of concrete, weighing anything from several hundredweight

-to a ton.  It was not the fault of any Niuéan

-if his dead relatives "walked."

-

-Donahue as he went chuckled to himself at the

-thought of his keenness in over-reaching the old

-witch-doctor.  He had used him for his own purposes through

-the girl Mata before, and though that had not worked

-out too well, it was the witch-doctor who bore the

-discredit, not he.  He would use him again now, and in

-another way.  It was in the daytime that Sona had

-arranged to meet him at the palm-tree clump.  At night,

-he said, it would be certain death; and even in daylight

-no one would linger there who could help it.  He at

-least would never dare to disturb the big tomb in which

-the money was hidden and call down the anger of the

-devils on himself, unless he had a white man with him

-who feared nothing.  So next morning, very early, the

-white man who was so brave would meet him, and they

-would open the big, cracked tomb together—the tomb

-that no Niuéan had ever dared to lay a finger on before,

-though there were one or two besides himself who

-suspected that it was just there the mysterious foreign

-coins had come from years ago, and that there were a

-good many left.

-

-Thus the witch-doctor.  And Donahue had assented

-eagerly, and gone off with his earnest money.  And,

-on arriving at his hut, he had looked out an old axe

-that he possessed, and cleaned up his lamp, and begged

-a drop of oil from the nearest native house.  For he

-meant to go that very night, and take everything there

-was for himself.  Who was to prove it?

-

-Which was just the course of action that Sona had

-calculated very confidently on his taking.

-

-It poured furiously in an hour or two, for it was in

-the hot season, and the great rains were out.  Donahue

-could not light his lamp when he came to the clump

-of palms, which he knew well enough to recognise almost

-in the pitch dark.  It thundered soon after, and the

-sky was split from pole to pole by corpse-blue flashes of

-lightning.  In one of these, Donahue, feeling about

-the cracks of the tomb, thought he saw something

-moving against the gloom of the bush near at hand.

-It made his throat turn dry, for all the wet, and he felt

-his hair prickle curiously.  But he went on groping.

-Another flash ripped up the sky; it was a smaller one,

-but for one horrible moment he thought he had been

-struck, for something stinging streaked across his face

-and gave him an ugly thrill.  But it passed immediately,

-and he began groping again—groping with both hands,

-in a frantic hurry, trying to make out the best place to

-apply the axe—tearing and grasping and scuffling like

-some deadly graveyard mole, breathless, with beads of

-warm sweat coursing down his face through the streams

-of chilly rain....  He was fighting—fighting he knew

-not what and knew not why—but he was fighting,

-for all that, fighting hard, with the stone falling away

-from his nerveless hands, and the breath in his body

-sinking down under some nightmare oppression, and

-the sound of the thunder now almost continuous, blending

-itself with another and far louder sound that was

-battering madly in his ears.  He was fighting

-with——  Christ!—it was Death!

-

-The thunder passed, as tropic storms do pass, suddenly

-and completely.  The dawn shot up in the east, wet

-and red, and cast long, black, ghostly shadows, set

-shaking by an icy wind, low down upon the

-palm-trunks and the grave.  But Donahue did not want

-the light.  The axe lay untouched beside him; and

-he lay over the tomb, dead.  And his face was black

-and his body was all contorted.

-

-It was barely daylight yet when something small

-and slow crept out of the bush, and began hunting

-carefully near the corpse.  It could not find what it

-wanted, seemingly, and this distressed it, for it whimpered

-pitifully in a thin old voice, and looked long before

-it desisted.  Then it put its claws into the dead man's

-pockets, and hunted through them, before it finally

-disappeared down the road.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-The Mua trader was at his door when a howling

-procession of natives came into the village, carrying the

-white man's corpse to his home.  The Alofi trader,

-who had found the body, stepped aside to speak.  After

-the tale of the finding had been told, the Mua trader

-asked slowly:

-

-"Did you think of searching his pockets?  A dead

-man's a dead man—and I'd not be sorry to have the

-money he owed me, for the natives will have taken the

-goods by this time."

-

-"They were empty when I found him.  Queer, for

-I was the first to see him," said the other.  "I found

-this thing on the road close by, though.  Do you

-recognise it?"

-

-It was the trader's darning-needle, stuck neatly into

-the end of a tiny, arrow-like reed, and stained at the

-point with some dark sticky stuff.

-

-The Mua trader took it in his hand, smelt it and looked

-at it closely.  Then he walked to his kitchen, and,

-watched by the Alofi trader, threw the thing into the

-fire.

-

-"That's what I think of it," he said.  "My boy, I

-traded in the worst of the Solomons for three years.

-I'm the only man on the island that knows that thing,

-bar one—and he was a plantation hand in the Solomons,

-in the black-birding days.  There's no wanderers like

-the Nuié men."

-

-"Do you think——" began the other.

-

-"I think," said the Mua trader, "that old Sona has

-got his money back."

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-The schooner *Sybil* had no reason for staying longer

-in Niué, for the business of the ship was done, and the

-captain was quite well again.  A picture of perfect

-beauty the *Sybil* made, as she stood out of Alofi roads

-in the golden afternoon, every sail set and every inch

-of cloth straining to the merry breeze.  Niué was sorry

-to part with Vaiti, for she had interested the island

-considerably, and her beauty had, as usual, won her more

-admiration than her temper deserved.  Every one, on

-parting, expressed a courteous wish to see the *Sybil* and

-her owners again.

-

-For all that, and all that, the schooner came back

-no more.  Vaiti had won the game at last, but she never

-willingly mentioned Niué again.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE CALAMITY OF CORAL BAY`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XV

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE CALAMITY OF CORAL BAY

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-The wide, still waters of Coral Bay were turning glassy

-pink under the sunset afterglow.  The *Sybil's* boat,

-rowing rapidly towards the schooner, left as it went

-a long, ugly flaw upon the stainless crystal of the

-sea.  It was very still, and the night was coming

-down.

-

-Even in that uncertain twilight the colour of the boat

-as it cut through the pale-hued water stood out strange

-and sinister.  Most boats are white in tropic seas: the

-*Sybil's* had always been snowy as her own graceful hull.

-Now they were vivid scarlet, and the ship herself had a

-wide band of scarlet round her counter and flew a scarlet

-flag at her masthead.

-

-Any islander could have told you at a glance what

-these things meant.  The schooner was "recruiting"—conveying

-natives from the wild cannibal islands of

-the New Hebrides to the Queensland sugar plantations.

-Ten pounds a head was paid for the men on their arrival,

-and it was politely supposed that these ignorant heathen

-had one and all been duly engaged under a contract

-to serve three years, at a wage of five pounds a year.

-How much they understood of contracts, times, and

-wages—where and what they thought Australia might

-be—and what were the means employed to get them on

-board the ship, nobody asked.  Saxon was not the man

-to answer, if any one had.

-

-Why he had temporarily deserted the pleasant, peaceful

-islands of the Eastern Pacific, and gone "black-birding"

-in the wild and wicked and fever-smitten groups of the

-West, was Saxon's own affair.  Doubtless he had his

-reasons; possibly they were satisfactory.  But there is

-reason to believe that about Apia and Papeëte at this

-time he was characterised as a (double-adjectived)

-liar, and an (impolite expression) villain, who was running

-away because it was (adverbially) unsafe for him to

-stay and risk his (past participled) neck among (adjective)

-men.  This is not the history of Captain Saxon; at

-least, not all of it—from such a recital as that may the

-eleven thousand virgins of Saint Mudie, and the Blessed

-Young Person of Sixteen, deliver us!  It must therefore

-be enough to say that, for sufficient reasons,

-he decided to shift his headquarters to the New

-Hebrides, and immediately did so, leaving behind him

-certain unsettled scores with which this tale has nothing

-to do.

-

-He was not new to the islands or the natives, having

-been one of the most notorious of the sandal-wood traders

-in years gone by.  The sandal-wood was gone, and

-of the money he had made by it not even the memory

-remained.  But there was still something in the labour

-trade, and Saxon liked the lawless atmosphere of the

-place.

-

-Vaiti remembered the islands well, though she had

-only been there as a child, and she was glad to have the

-excitement of the change.  When the recruiting boat

-left the schooner (guarded by a companion, full of armed

-men) and drew up on the beach to negotiate with the

-islanders, she always sat in the stern, with a very smart

-little Winchester rifle across her knees, and took

-command, if her father was not there.  Very often he was

-not; for the New Hebrideans have long memories,

-and there was many a spot where Saxon had run up

-so many bad, black scores in the sandal-wood days that

-he could not hope for success—or safety, if he had

-minded that—in going ashore.  Harris usually took

-command of the covering boat, a post of comparative

-security that suited him very well, while the dauntless

-Vaiti managed all the real business, and seldom came

-back with an empty bag.

-

-They had good luck, on the whole, and not many

-narrow escapes.  Coasting round the notorious island

-of Mallicolo, or Malekula, they succeeded in obtaining

-about forty natives in a week or two.  Saxon was well

-pleased, and began to count up his profits.  Also he

-began to drink again.

-

-Then it was that trouble came, as trouble generally

-does, out of a fair-seeming sky.

-

-Half-a-dozen natives had been given up to the missionaries

-on the far side of Malekula, to hand over to the

-British gunboat *Alligator*, which at that time was

-cruising about the islands, intent on punishing the

-Malekulans for a more than usually atrocious murder of

-whites.  The tribes to whom the culprits belonged had

-taken fright, and were anxious to save themselves at

-any cost.  The missionaries, when asked by them,

-consented to take charge of the prisoners, but refused to

-keep them any longer than could possibly be helped,

-since they did not consider themselves judges or gaolers.

-At this point the *Sybil* turned up, and the missionaries,

-hearing she was bound for Parrot Harbour, where the

-*Alligator* was certain to call, put the men on board,

-and engaged Saxon to hand them over to the Parrot

-Harbour mission, receiving from the missionaries there

-the price of their passage, which the man-of-war would

-doubtless refund.

-

-Saxon, understanding that he had not to meet the

-*Alligator*, undertook the job at a rather excessive rate,

-and brought the prisoners over as agreed.  But, finding

-that the Parrot Harbour mission refused to pay the

-passage money until the man-of-war arrived, he went

-into a towering rage and abused everybody.  Wait for

-the *Alligator*?  Not he!  He had something else to

-do, and he wouldn't have any condemned gunboat

-that ever sailed the sanguinary waters of the Pacific

-poking her nose into any of his business.  He had been

-promised the money as soon as he arrived, and the money

-or its equivalent he meant to have or know the reason

-why.  Off he went, with much more whisky in his brain

-than was compatible with sober judgment—off out to

-sea again, taking with him the whole six prisoners,

-and openly declaring his intention either to hold them

-for ransom or run them down to the Queensland

-plantations, as seemed most convenient.

-

-Next day the *Alligator* appeared, and her commander

-was informed of the occurrence.  Saxon, master of a

-miserable labour schooner, had run off with prisoners

-of war belonging to a British gunboat, defied the Imperial

-Government, and offered open disrespect to the Crown!

-The commander, an iron-faced, flinty-eyed disciplinarian

-of the toughest school, and a first-class pepper-pot into

-the bargain, nearly choked with rage and indignation.

-Out went the *Alligator* again, full steam ahead, making

-the captain's dainty suite of cabins tremble like an

-ill-set jelly in the stern as the ship forged along at thirteen

-knots an hour, blackening the crystal sky with trails

-of smoke, and looking implacably about for the offending

-*Sybil*.  That delinquent of the high seas was farther

-off than might have been supposed.  The wind, though

-light, was in her favour, and she had managed to get

-round the far end of the island, and down the other side

-to Coral Bay, eighty miles off, before the *Alligator* came

-up with her, late in the afternoon.  Once caught, her

-shrift was short.  The prisoners were at once transferred;

-Saxon was arrested and taken, still half drunk,

-on board the man-of-war, and his ship was confiscated,

-"just to learn him," as Gray (who had viewed his

-captain's proceedings with sour and silent disapproval

-throughout) was heard to remark, not without a little

-I-told-you-so satisfaction.

-

-And so it came about that Vaiti, returning with

-the boat from an unsuccessful recruiting expedition,

-and not in the best of humours to begin with,

-was met on her arrival with extremely unpleasant

-news.

-

-"We're took, cap'n; we're took, ma'am!" shouted

-Gray over the bulwarks, as the boat nosed along the

-side of the schooner.  He added a rapid account of

-the calamity, in which he was careful to suppress his

-personal feelings of triumph.

-

-The smart young lieutenant who had been left in

-charge of the ship came and looked down at the boat.

-He wanted to know what sort of person it might be

-who was addressed with this extraordinary hail.  He

-had been under the impression that the "captain"

-of the *Sybil* had been left two hours ago—sullen,

-swearing, and not at all sober—in the cells of

-H.M.S. *Alligator*.

-

-What he saw was a red-painted boat, manned by four

-stalwart native seamen, and steered by an extremely

-handsome, olive-faced young woman, who looked up

-at him with eyes that seemed to dart black lightning

-under their beautifully drawn brows as she listened to the

-boatswain's story.  She wore a dainty, lacy white

-muslin frock, and carried a Winchester rifle in her

-lap.

-

-Second Lieutenant Tempest, who had been cursing

-his luck up to that moment, suddenly became reconciled

-to the uninteresting job in which he was engaged.  It is

-just conceivable that his commander might have selected

-another officer to perform the duty if he had been aware

-of its possible alleviations; for Mr. Tempest was

-notoriously given to scrapes with a *soupçon* of petticoat

-in them, and had already imperilled his career more

-than once after this fashion.  But Commander the

-Hon. Francis St. John Raleigh had not seen "Captain"

-Vaiti; so he sent Mr. Tempest to take possession of the

-*Sybil*, and slept the sleep of the well-conscienced and

-well-dined, that evening, in his velvet armchair....  It

-might have seemed somewhat less perfectly stuffed to

-him, had his dreams been concerned with what was

-happening a few hundred yards away.

-

-Mr. Tempest, smiling like the godmother beast of

-his own ship, offered his hand to the sullen beauty as she

-swung herself up the *Sybil's* side.  Vaiti tossed it

-indignantly away, favoured him with another black-lightning

-glance that reduced his susceptible sailor

-heart to pulp, and stalked aft like an offended Cleopatra.

-Tempest, persistently following, poured out explanations,

-apologies, smiles, consolations, promises.  Vaiti

-began to think that civility might possibly avail her

-something, and began to melt by carefully calculated

-degrees.  Before very long she was sitting on the main

-hatch, with Tempest beside her, holding her hand

-unreproved and continuing his consolations.  The

-commander was very angry, no doubt, but he was a

-good sort at bottom, and perhaps he would not really

-seize the ship.  She would be sent to Fiji, no doubt,

-and Saxon might possibly be imprisoned, but it would

-all come out all right, trust him!  And he would

-take very good care of the *Sybil* and her charming

-"captain."

-

-Vaiti, still smiling sweetly, dug her nails into wood

-of the hatch at her side.  Underneath all this verbiage

-she foresaw the reality of serious trouble.  Why had

-her father been such a fool?  What could be done to

-save the ship?  There seemed no way of helping Saxon

-himself.  If the commander proved implacable, to

-prison he must go.  Well, that would not break any

-bones; but the loss of the *Sybil*—if such a disaster was

-indeed possible—must be averted at any cost.  She did

-not believe Mr. Tempest's smiling assertion.  The

-commander had threatened to confiscate the ship, and

-most probably he would.  At any rate, the risk was

-too great to face.  The schooner must not be taken to Fiji.

-

-The wily brain was hard at work, as she sat on the

-hatch, listening, with a gentle smile and soft, downcast,

-maidenly eyes, to Tempest's love-making, and answering

-now and then in her pretty Polynesian "pigeon-English"—so

-much simpler and less grotesque than the *bêche-de-mer*

-talk of the Melanesian Islands....  If he could be

-got out of the way, and the marines suddenly

-overpowered, the schooner might slip off round the corner

-of the headland in the dark, and get nearly a hundred

-miles away before daylight, with the steady wind that

-was blowing outside the glassy, landlocked harbour of

-Coral Bay.  There was just enough air stirring at this

-farthest point to allow her to get out, and once off, she

-could show her heels in a way that would astonish

-even a British gunboat.  Of course, the latter would

-easily overhaul her in an open chase, but Vaiti did not

-propose any such folly.  There was many a perilous

-inlet and passage among those dangerous, ill-surveyed

-islands where the *Sybil* could safely go, but where the

-*Alligator* could not venture.  Let them only gain a day,

-and who was to say whither they had flown into the

-wide wastes of the Pacific?  Once beyond pursuit,

-paint and other disguises would so alter the ship that

-no one could identify her; her name could be changed,

-and the *Mary Ann* or the *Nautilus* would innocently

-sail the seas formerly polluted by the presence

-of the naughty *Sybil*....  It was certainly worth

-trying.

-

-As for Tempest, she had a plan concocted to get rid

-of him almost as soon as the matter entered her mind.

-She left him, by and by, solacing himself with fresh

-turtle steak and excellent champagne in the cabin for

-the loss of his own dinner, while she went into the bows

-with Harris and Gray, and rapidly explained her plans.

-The marines had been accommodated with eatables

-and drinkables after their own hearts, on the cover of the

-main hatch, and were too much engaged to notice

-anything in the thick darkness that was now lying

-heavily on Coral Bay.

-

-Vaiti's plan was simple and effective.  Tempest was

-to be enticed into leaving his duty and going ashore—she

-would see to that.  Four of the New Hebridean

-crew, stripped of their ship clothes, and attired in their

-aboriginal paint and plumes, were to be concealed on

-the beach.  They would capture him, and carry him

-off to a bush village near the coast, where the people

-were not ill disposed to the whites, and leave him there,

-scared no doubt, but safe until the morning, when he

-would be let go.  Vaiti would come back to the ship as

-soon as the capture was effected, and the four native

-sailors would hurry down from the village as quickly

-as possible.  Meantime, it would be easy for Harris

-to drug the marines' drink and make them helpless.

-They would be set adrift in one of the boats, as soon as

-the schooner was clear of the land, so that they should

-tell no tales.  With good luck, everything should be

-over, and the *Sybil* far out to sea, in less than a couple

-of hours.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-Of the disgrace of Lieutenant Tempest—of his temptation,

-his struggle, and his fall—there is no need to tell

-at length.  The decline of a British officer from duty

-and honour—his desertion of a post which every

-professional instinct should have compelled him to keep

-is not a happy subject, as (fortunately) it is not a common

-one.  Vaiti, in brief, invited the officer to leave the ship

-unguarded, and slip ashore with her, to sup at a

-neighbouring trader's shanty, where she said there would be

-drink and dancing, and every kind of fun.  There was

-no such place, but Tempest did not know that; and if

-he had known, he might not have cared.  Half-crazed

-with love and champagne, he thought only of the beautiful

-half-caste girl, and was ready to follow her to the

-mouth of hell, if she had asked him.  The dinghy was

-got out softly and cautiously, and, with muffled oars,

-they slipped away unheard.  So far out of his mind

-was the lieutenant that he did not even note the

-disappearance of his men, who were all lying, very ably and

-completely Shanghai'ed, in the hold.

-

-In less than half an hour Vaiti came back, swimming

-the stretch of black water that lay between the *Sybil*

-and the shore, to leave the boat ready for the men.

-Dripping, sparkling, and laughing, she stood up in the

-dim light of the deck lantern and told the mate and

-boatswain how the capture had been managed.  Tempest,

-with a sack over his head and his hands and feet bound

-to a pole, was at that moment being carried up in the

-dark to the bush village.  The inhabitants of the place

-were to have ten pounds' worth of trade goods promised

-them to keep him there all night and let him escape

-in the morning, when they themselves would go off

-and hide in the impenetrable forests until the man-of-war

-had sailed away again.  In half an hour or so the

-four natives would be back on board, and they would

-all sail away round the headland, and leave no evidence

-of any kind to connect the *Sybil* with this last

-unpardonable outrage; for Tempest could not but suppose that

-the natives who so neatly bagged him as he was philandering

-along the dark beach with the innocent Vaiti were

-ordinary hill tribesmen.  And, in any case, his sacred

-person would be taken good care of.

-

-"Then he ain't to be damaged, the little darlin'?"

-inquired Harris.  The question was not an idle one.

-Every one on board the schooner knew that Vaiti was

-capable of ugly things at her worst.

-

-The girl laughed—a low, gurgling laugh.

-

-"No.  No kill him, no hurt him.  I not like," she

-said, tossing back her wet, wavy hair, with a coquettish

-gesture that told Harris the woman in Vaiti was fully

-awake that night, despite the rough and ready adventure

-on which she was engaged.  Harris was no fool, if he

-was something unsteady in character, and more or less

-he admired Vaiti himself, which tended to sharpen his

-sight.

-

-"Good job the dandy leftenant *is* out of the way,"

-he growled as Vaiti disappeared into the cabin to

-change.  "'Twouldn't take much for 'er to get fancyin'

-his silly face, after all, and then the fat would be in the

-fire."

-

-"Well, if you hask me, I don't like none of the 'ole

-thing from beginnin' to hend," declared the bo'sun,

-jamming a wad of tobacco viciously into his pipe.  "Not

-the keepin' of the bloomin' niggers, not again runnin'

-to Coral Bay, nor again this business.  Wy?  Because

-I don't, and because it make me smell dirty weather.

-Give us a light."

-

-Overhead the stars in the velvet sky began to twinkle

-here and there as the breeze rose and the clouds melted

-away.  An odour of hot, wet jungle drifted out across

-the bay from the invisible land, and a locust with a

-rattle exactly like a policeman's whistle burred loudly

-among the trees.  It might have been half an hour, and it

-might have been more, before something else became

-audible—something that sounded like a frightened

-wailing on the shore.

-

-"A—wé!  A—a—wé!"

-

-Vaiti came out of her cabin and stood on deck,

-listening intently.

-

-The sound went on.

-

-"A—wé!  A—wé!  A—wa—wé!"

-

-Harris, watching Vaiti's face in the light of the

-lantern, saw it change and harden, but she said nothing.

-There was another sound now—a dinghy shoving off

-from the beach and the rattle of carelessly handled oars.

-

-"What's the —— fools makin' such a —— row

-for?" asked Gray.  "They'll 'ave the *Halligator* on

-to us."

-

-Still Vaiti said nothing, but stood like a statue on

-the deck, listening and looking into the darkness.

-

-The boat rammed the *Sybil* in another minute with a

-shock that made her quiver, and then drifted aimlessly

-along her sides.  Three brown naked figures lifted up

-their arms from below, and cried despairingly:

-

-"Kapitani!  Kapitani!  A—wé!  A—wé!"

-

-"Get those fellows on board, too much quick, and

-bring him cabin," ordered Vaiti.  Harris and Gray

-hauled them in with small ceremony, and dumped them

-down the companion into the cabin, where they stood

-in the light of the lamp, painted, feather-bedecked

-creatures, fierce enough in appearance, but in reality

-abjectly frightened and a-shiver.

-

-"What thing you been do?" demanded Vaiti sharply.

-"Where you make other sailor-man?  What you do

-Tempesi?"

-

-One of the men was beginning his wail again.  She

-seized him by the shoulder, pulled a pistol from among

-her draperies, and shook it in his face.  The man,

-with a yell of terror, twisted himself out of her hold.

-Harris, who was rather frightened at her demeanour,

-got him away, forced a dram of spirits into his mouth,

-and tried to extract the terrified creature's story from

-him by degrees.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE FATE OF THE LIEUTENANT`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XVI

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE FATE OF THE LIEUTENANT

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-It was not a gratifying tale.  Half a mile from the beach,

-the captors had been overtaken by a party of wild

-hillmen from Ranaar, one of the worst of the inland

-cannibal towns, and had been set upon fiercely in the

-dark.  Aki, one of their own party, had been clubbed,

-and his body carried off.  The other natives had escaped.

-As for the lieutenant, the Ranaar men had seized on

-him with cries of joy, exclaiming that now indeed they

-had a chance of "making themselves strong" before all

-Malekula.  Then they had carried him away, slung

-on a pole between two men, and the *Sybil's* people,

-half dead with fright, had run down to the beach again;

-and here they were, begging the Kapitani to have mercy

-on them, for indeed it was not their fault, and no one

-could have known that the Ranaar men would venture

-so near the coast.

-

-Vaiti, Harris, and Gray all looked grave at this

-recital.  They knew only too well what was implied

-by the phrase "making strong," and what virtues

-the hill tribes of Malekula ascribed to the eating of

-white man's flesh.  The rude play of the capture had

-turned into most serious earnest, and Tempest's life

-was worth just so many hours as it might take the

-cannibals to reach their mountain stronghold and go

-through the preliminary ceremonies of the feast.  No more.

-

-There was silence for a minute or two, while the

-schooner rolled gently on the swell of the incoming

-tide, and the smoky kerosene light flickered to and fro

-upon the strange, wild scene: Vaiti's beautiful, angry

-head standing out above the weather-beaten faces of

-the two English sailors, the three naked New Hebrideans,

-squalid and monkey-faced, cowering before her; the

-remnants of Tempest's dinner, some one's greasy pack

-of cards, and a couple of Saxon's empty whisky bottles

-decorating the table.  The natives were badly frightened

-still.  They did not understand that the Kapitani's

-plans had been entangled beyond all hope of setting

-right by this disaster, or that the *Alligator* must have

-been alarmed by their noisy return; but Vaiti's

-countenance was enough to warn any one who had ever seen

-the unpleasant things that happened at times on board

-the *Sybil* that hurricane weather was ahead.  But

-before she had time to speak again, a loud hail from

-outside made every one look towards the deck.  In

-another moment the first lieutenant of the *Alligator*

-had framed his smart white and gold personality in the

-dark oblong of the companion, and demanded, loudly,

-and authoritatively, to know where Mr. Tempest was,

-where the marines were, and what the deuce was the

-meaning of all this.

-

-Vaiti, motioning aside the mate and bo'sun, swept

-to the front and spoke straight out.

-

-"All your sailor, he too much drunk, sleep 'long hold.

-Tempesi, he been go shore.  Men belong Ranaar, they

-catch him, take him away.  Pretty dam quick they eat him."

-

-"Great Scott!" said the officer.  Facts were falling

-very thick and fast, and there were evidently more

-facts behind them which for the present he felt

-obliged—most reluctantly—to neglect.  People think quickly

-in the navy, and Lieutenant Darcy realised instantly

-that this strange, wild, handsome creature was speaking

-the truth, and that it must be acted on without delay.

-

-He stepped out on deck, and gave certain orders to

-his men.  A sharp little midshipman and half the boat's

-crew followed him on board, and planted themselves

-about the ship.  The rest remained in the boat.

-

-"This officer will stay here and take charge, and you

-will come with me to the *Alligator*," said the lieutenant,

-addressing Vaiti.

-

-"Yes, I speak captain.  Very good you let me see

-him quick," said the girl imperiously; and the

-lieutenant, guessing that there was more still to be told,

-hurried the boat away.

-

-He delivered his report to the commander, and

-concluded by saying that the girl was in waiting, and had,

-in his opinion, something more to say about the matter.

-

-"Bring her in," said the commander shortly.  The

-gravity of the affair had darkened his face a trifle, but

-he made no comment.  It was not a time for talk.

-

-Vaiti entered with the light step and carriage of the

-woman who wears neither shoes nor stays, and stood

-silently before the commander, fixing his hard grey

-eyes with her inscrutable dark stare.

-

-"You can sit down," said the officer.  "I want to

-ask you some questions."

-

-Vaiti drew herself up a little higher.

-

-"No time for sit," she said curtly.  "Suppose you

-no want Tempesi ki-ki [eaten] pretty quick, you listen me."

-

-"Young woman!" began Commander the Hon. Francis

-St. John Raleigh sternly.

-

-"I tell you, no time talk!" interrupted Vaiti.  "I

-savvy all right you very big sea-chief; I savvy my

-father been made bad work, made bad work myself.

-Let him go all-a-same that; by-'n-by we talk those

-thing.  Now you listen me."

-

-"All right; sit down," said the officer in a more

-conciliatory tone.  Vaiti sat, and leaning across the

-table with her chin in one slender hand, and her eyes

-blazing out from under the mass of damp waves on her

-forehead, she said her say.

-

-"You no savvy Malekula man; I savvy plenty.

-Suppose you do what I telling you, Tempesi he come

-back, I think.  Suppose not, Tempesi he eat.  Ranaar,

-he ten, eleven mile up 'long bush, plenty bad way.

-You take some sailor; he go too much sof', too much

-quiet, all-a-same cat.  Time we coming along Ranaar,

-one half-mile, sailor he all stop.  I go myself Ranaar.

-Maybe I get Tempesi; we coming back to sailor, go

-home all right."

-

-"Oh, nonsense! how are you going to get him, if

-the men can't?" demanded the commander.  He

-saw that he had a remarkable personality to deal with

-in this strange half-caste beauty, but he did not

-comprehend her very clearly, and he thought she was

-"gassing" a little.

-

-Vaiti frowned.

-

-"I tell you, you no savvy Malekula," she said scornfully.

-"Sailor belong you, all the man hear him when

-he walk 'long bush.  Ranaar man he hear; he run away."

-

-"Well, so long as we rescue Mr. Tempest——"

-

-"No you talk, I say; you listen, you Kapitani with

-um wooden face!" spat Vaiti.

-

-The lieutenant turned his head away, and choked a

-little in his pocket-handkerchief.  The commander

-stared, then burst out laughing.

-

-"Go on, you she-cat," he said.

-

-"Ranaar man he run away; very good.  He leave

-Tempesi; very good.  No want Tempesi tell some tale,

-so he leave him dead.  Break him head, all same pig,

-very quick, then run away.  Now what you think?"

-

-"I think you are a very plucky young lady, and that

-you have something more to say about it," replied the

-commander politely.

-

-"Very good.  Suppose I going 'long bush; savvy

-plenty the way.  I been 'long Ranaar recruit; savvy

-all-a-road.  No walking all same white man, walking

-all same one snake, all same one mice.  No white man

-he walk that way.  I come up Ranaar, all-a-dark,

-I stop 'long one small place; see the man he dance, he

-sing, he make ki-ki.  Bushman, he plenty frighten

-something he no savvy.  Savvy gun, dynamite, but

-no savvy big blue-light signal thing you got 'long ship.

-I take one, two blue-light thing; I throw.  Bushman

-he think one big devil stop, no think man-of-war come;

-run away too much dam quick, not stop kill Tempesi.

-By'n-by he coming back, but I cut rope before he come.

-I bring Tempesi 'long me, 'long sailor-man; we go back

-quick.  Tempesi all right.  Savvy?"

-

-"Yes, I do savvy; seems a neat plan, on the whole.

-But what's going to happen to you if they catch you?"

-

-"Eat," said Vaiti succinctly.  "Now you listen me.

-I no do all this thing for nothing, see?"

-

-"H'm; yes, I do see.  How much do you want?"

-

-"Two thing," said Vaiti, eyeing him narrowly.

-"One.  My father say he plenty sorry, no do any more

-bad thing.  You let him go, let schooner go."

-

-"Well—yes, I'll promise that," answered the

-commander rather stiffly.  The girl was taking her life in

-her hand to serve the interests of the British Crown,

-and it was not a time to stick at trifles, or, indeed,

-larger things.

-

-"Two," went on Vaiti.  "Tempesi he seen leave

-ship, go 'long shore with me.  You tell him all right,

-you no punish."

-

-"Oh, by Jove! that's too much," snapped out the

-commander.  "No, Miss—Miss What's-your-name, I

-can't promise any such thing.  I can't have you or

-any one else interfering with the discipline of my ship.

-Mr. Tempest's conduct is a very serious matter, and

-he must take the consequences, by Gad he must, if he

-comes back alive to take them."

-

-Vaiti had had a good deal to do with men-of-war,

-and their officers, during the course of the schooner's

-many wanderings.  She did not need to be told that

-Tempest's career might be ended, and his life disgraced,

-if naval justice took its course.  A few hours ago she

-would not have cared.  But Mr. Tempest, like all men

-notorious for getting into scrapes with a petticoat at

-the bottom of them, had a "way with him," and it

-happened to be a way that appealed to this daughter

-of the Islands more than she would have cared to allow.

-Besides, it was not her custom to give in to a defeat.

-

-"All right," she said calmly.  "I savvy all thing

-about Englis' officer.  Tempesi he no like court-mars'al,

-make break, make longshoreman, all the people laugh.

-Tempesi, he like die, I think.  All right.  I let him.

-Good night."

-

-The commander held out his hand.

-

-"Good night," he said politely.  "Mr. Darcy, you will

-see about getting a native guide who can show the way to

-Ranaar, at once.  We will do our best to surprise them."

-

-A low, sarcastic laugh came from Vaiti.

-

-"You wooden-faced Kapitani, you think you savvy

-Malekula!" she said.  "Where you get guide?"

-

-Mr. Darcy did know a little about the New Hebrides,

-and he saw that they were beaten.

-

-"She's right, sir," he said.  "Take my word for it,

-no native would dare to guide you.  There's no mission

-here; they're a very bad lot, and all at war."

-

-It was a bitter moment for the commander, but he

-surrendered like a gentleman.

-

-"You've got the best of me, Miss—Miss Saxon,"

-he said.  "Very well.  You have my promise.

-Mr. Tempest shall be pardoned, if we get him back alive.

-You know nothing about this matter, you will remember,

-Mr. Darcy.  Miss Saxon, you're a very brave young

-lady, and I wish I had met you in circumstances of

-which I could more honestly approve."

-

-"No one need tell me," he said afterwards, "that

-that old vagabond we had in the cells wasn't a gentleman

-once.  It comes out in the girl; blood will tell, even in

-a half-caste.  But Providence ought rightly to have

-a down on the man who is responsible for any one of

-them, for there seems no right place for them, either in

-heaven or earth."

-

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-

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-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-Neither the bluejackets of the *Alligator*, nor the

-officer appointed to command the column, ever forgot

-that night's march through the mountain bush of

-Malekula.  The air was like hot water, and not a breath

-of wind was stirring.  The track was but a few inches

-wide, and as slippery as butter, so that the men slid

-and fell continually when struggling up the endless

-sides of the innumerable gullies.  Mosquitoes settled in

-bloodthirsty hordes upon their faces and hands, roots

-tripped them up, saw-edged reeds slapped them in the

-eyes, and thorny tangles of bush-lawyers fished for and

-successfully hooked them.  At any moment a huge

-soft-nosed bullet, cruel as a shell, might come singing

-out of the darkness; or a poisoned arrow, freighted with

-sure and agonising death, might whirr across their

-path.  When the officer in command, irritated by the

-stumbling and falling of the men, ordered them to

-remove their boots and march barefoot, Vaiti told him

-that nothing of the kind must be done, for poisoned

-spear-heads were in all probability set here and there

-in unsuspected places, ready to pierce the unwary foot.

-She herself seemed invulnerable and untiring; she led

-the column at a pace that caused more than one to fall

-out, and never hesitated nor faltered through all the

-three hours of the worst and most intricate march that

-the *Alligator* men had ever known.

-

-At last she told the officer to call a halt, and on no

-account to make the slightest noise or advance his men

-until he should see a blue light burning about half a mile

-ahead.  Then she vanished into the darkness, lithe and

-noiseless as a lizard, and silence, dead and oppressive,

-settled down upon the bush.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

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-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-Lieutenant Tempest was a man and a British sailor,

-and he was not afraid of death.  But he thought there

-might be pleasanter ways of dying than that which

-actually stared him in the face.

-

-Memory plays strange tricks when the dark is closing

-down about her doors.  Lying there on the damp

-earth, bound hand and foot to a pole, with the hideous

-howls of the cannibal dancers in his ears and the glare

-of the cooking-pits in his eyes.  Tempest could think of

-nothing but a fragment of verse out of a half-forgotten

-poem read somewhere long ago:

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-..

-

-   |  "It isn't the fact that you're dead that counts.

-   |  But only—how did you die?"

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-How was he dying?  Not as an English officer might

-gladly die in the cause of his country and in loyal

-obedience to orders.  Not even as a man, with a sword

-in his hand, facing the foe.  He was dying an unfaithful

-servant, false to his trust, and suffering because of

-that falseness, as a slaughtered brute struck down with

-a club like a bullock, and afterwards....

-

-The red remains of the luckless Aki, jointed and piled

-in a ghastly heap, told the rest.

-

-Tempest did not look at that ugly pile any more than

-he could help.  He wanted all the nerve he could muster

-for he was haunted by a deadly fear that he might cry

-out for mercy when it came to the last, and he did not

-want to add cowardice to the tale of his many

-shortcomings.  If he could have died here as a prisoner of

-war—as a captured scout, a fighting enemy, taken in a

-skirmish—the death, hideous as it was, would have

-been honourable, and his pride of country would have

-upheld him.  But it seemed as if his courage had

-nothing to stand on now, and he was almost—almost, but,

-thank God! not quite—afraid.

-

-The Malekulans had been dancing for full two hours,

-ever since they had brought him to the valley and flung

-him down upon the ground.  In the middle of the open

-village square were three huge idols, carved out of

-entire tree-trunks set upright.  They had black, empty

-sockets for eyes; their mouths were curved upwards into

-a ghastly wrinkled grin, and their tongues hung

-mockingly out.  On the head of each was perched a huge

-black wooden bird, with beak bent down and gloomy

-wings outspread—the very spirit of Nightmare herself.

-Round and round these devilish things, in the red glow

-of the fires, danced the cannibals ceaselessly and

-untiringly, fleeing with heads down and outspread hands,

-wheeling and turning, circling with measured steps; and

-all the time the huge hollow idols, beaten with heavy

-clubs "to make the spirits speak," thundered death

-and doom.  It was plainly a religious ceremony which

-must be fully enacted down to the last detail; but

-Tempest thought, as clearly as he could think in such a

-place and at such a time, that it could not last much

-longer.

-

-"A fellow ought to say his prayers," he thought;

-but the thunder of the drums and the wild, shrieking

-song of the dancers bewildered him, and his swollen

-wrists and ankles hurt him so much as almost to confuse

-his mind....  What could he say?  Only one prayer

-remained clear in the turmoil of his brain—just the

-old, old prayer that he had prayed at his mother's

-knee.  Well, it would serve—and up above he hoped

-they'd understand how sorry he was ... for lots of

-things....

-

-"Our Father Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy

-name.  Thy kingdom come...."

-

-It was coming, indeed!  The dance had stopped.

-

-"Thy will be done...."

-

-What came next?  He could not remember—and

-the savages were advancing across the square.

-

-"Forgive us our trespasses ... and lead us not into

-temptation, but deliver us from evil...."

-

-It was *now*!  The women were hiding themselves in

-the houses, and two of the men, armed with clubs, were

-stepping forward.

-

-He was only conscious of one feeling—joy that he

-had the courage to look the cannibals in the face as

-they advanced, and meet his fate "game."  He hardly

-knew that he was still praying—

-

-"... For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and

-the glory...."

-

-Death!

-

-It came with a blaze of light—a sound as of a wild,

-deep shout and the rushing of many waters—then——

-

-Was this the end?  Was it indeed death?  He had

-felt nothing—but a man does not feel the blow that

-kills—and his eyes were so dazzled with a strange, blue

-glory that he could not see....  The rushing sound

-continued; it was like the thunder of hundreds of

-flying feet....  The light burst forth again, and yet

-again, and then died away, and there was a great

-silence.  Tempest saw the hideous faces of the idols

-standing out in the empty square, and began to

-understand.  He was not dead—but something had

-happened.  What was it?  He tried to break loose and sit

-up so as to see all round.

-

-"Stop um little bit," said a voice, and some one drew

-a sharp knife across the lashings that bound his limbs,

-and lifted him into a sitting position.

-

-The blinding light had almost died away now, and he

-could see the whole square.  There was no one in it.

-The cannibals were gone, and the beautiful half-caste

-girl who had brought about his downfall—innocently,

-as Tempest of course supposed—was squatting beside

-him and putting a flask to his lips.

-

-"Drink a little bit whisky," she said.  "Good

-whisky; he make strong.  No good stop here, you

-Belitani sailor-man; more better we go away too much

-quick."

-

-The spirit cleared Tempest's head and put some life

-into his limbs.  Vaiti poked him unceremoniously in

-the ribs as soon as she saw that he was reviving.

-

-"Show um leg there, lively!" she ordered, dragging

-him by the arms.  Rather to his surprise, Tempest found

-that he could walk, once on his feet.  He wasted no

-time in getting away, after Vaiti's brief explanation

-of the blue-light stratagem, and the probable return of

-his enemies before very long.  At something as near a

-run as his cramped limbs would allow, he followed

-her down the pathway that led away from the village—narrow,

-wet, and dark as a wolf's gullet—and into the

-comparative security of the bush, towards the advancing

-relief column from the *Alligator*.

-

-It would have been no more than fitting if Vaiti,

-like a true heroine of romance, had vanished silently

-into the forest when they encountered the man-of-war's

-men, leaving Tempest to "turn to thank his preserver,"

-and "find that she had disappeared."  But Vaiti,

-as it happened, was born under the Southern Cross,

-where the poetry of the footlights does not flourish.

-So she gave the men her company on the way down

-as a matter of course, asked the officer in command for a

-cigar, smoked it and accepted half a dozen more out

-of his case, and made herself wonderfully pleasant—for

-Vaiti.  She had further driven Tempest to distraction

-by starting a flirtation with a handsome petty

-officer, eaten up two emergency rations, "borrowed"

-some one's gold tie-pin, and very soundly boxed the

-ears of a leading seaman who tried to kiss her in the

-dark, before the long roll of the surf on the barrier reef,

-and the welcome glimmer of the *Alligator's* riding lights,

-told the tired-out party that they were safe back again.

-Then, like the mysterious heroine, at last she disappeared,

-and slipped off to the *Sybil* in a native canoe, for the

-reason that she did not want to be seen on board the

-man-of-war in a very untidy and dirty dress, without

-any flowers in her hair, or fresh scent on her laces.

-Tempest had found time to "thank his preserver" on

-the way down, haltingly enough; but the preserver,

-instead of accepting his thanks after the fashion he

-would have preferred, had laughed wildly and somewhat

-wickedly, and gone on walking right in the middle of

-the column, without a glance to spare for him....

-Still—he thought he knew women—and....  Time

-would show.

-

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-

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-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-The rest of the wardroom did not envy Mr. Tempest

-his interview with the commander.  It took place

-immediately after his return to the ship, and he came

-out from it with a countenance of entire inexpressiveness

-and extreme whiteness.  One sentence—the last—was

-unavoidably heard by the lieutenant who followed

-immediately after Tempest, to deliver his report.

-

-"Finally, Mr. Tempest—this Miss—a—Saxon—has

-risked her life to save your life and reputation.  I think

-there is only one way in which you can repay her—by

-never seeing her again."

-

-Tempest's answer was inaudible.  But—he never did.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`INVADERS IN TANNA`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XVII

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   INVADERS IN TANNA

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-"What a beautiful girl!  Is she one of the heathens,

-I wonder?" said Lady Victoria Jenkins, leaning on the

-rail of her yacht.

-

-The *Alcyone* floated on a sea of living silver.  The

-coral reefs forty feet before her keel showed like a

-pavement of pale turquoise in the searching splendour

-of the tropic moon.  Close at hand loomed the dark

-woods and cliffs of Tanna, and above them, blotting out

-half the crystal broidery of the stars, rose the cone of

-the great volcano, crowned by a canopy of fire.  So, in

-the days of Bougainville and of Cook, stood this

-southward sentinel of the wild New Hebrides, a pillar of

-cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.  So it stands

-yet, its deathless fires unquenched, its awful voice

-breaking the forest silences hour by hour—as the dead

-and gone discoverers of these distant lands saw and

-heard it long ago, and as those who follow us will find

-it in the days to come, when we and our thoughts and

-hopes, and adventures and loves are but a whisper in the

-homeless winds and a handful of dust blowing about

-on long-forgotten graves.

-

-There are few volcanoes in the southern hemisphere

-more famous, and none less frequently visited, than

-the fiery cone of Tanna.  The island lies thousands of

-miles away from everywhere, and the inhabitants are

-known to be almost all heathen, cannibal, and hostile

-to whites, although the expression of their hostility

-has been kept considerably in check of late years.  But

-Lady Victoria Jenkins, daughter of the late Earl of

-Wessex, and wife of Mr. Abel Jenkins ("Jenkins's

-Perfect Pills"), is well known as a romanticist and a

-lover of all things unusual and strange.  Mr. Abel

-Jenkins's income is only exceeded by that of two other

-commoners in England, and Mr. Abel Jenkins's ugliness

-and ill-temper are not exceeded by the ugliness and

-ill-temper of any one known to polite society.  If the

-reader will piece these detached facts together, and

-consider them, he will readily understand why Lady

-Victoria was enjoying a tour round the world in her

-celebrated steam-yacht, the *Alcyone*, why she had

-come to look at Tanna, and why, including a good deal

-of miscellaneous company, the travelling party somehow

-was not miscellaneous enough to include Lady Victoria's

-husband.

-

-The yacht had come in that afternoon after a

-somewhat stormy voyage from Sydney ("They call it the

-Pacific Ocean," said Lady Victoria plaintively, "instead

-of which, I have not really enjoyed a meal since we

-cleared the Heads"), and had instantly, by the mere

-fact of her dropping anchor in Sulphur Bay, denuded

-the whole seaboard of its population.  This was because

-the conscience of Tanna is never quite clear, and the

-Tannese, struck by the conviction of sin, thought the

-*Alcyone* was a man-of-war.  Only two kinds of ships

-were known to the islands, outside trading schooners:

-British and French warships, and the lazy little monthly

-steamers from Sydney, which strolled round the group

-once a month, picking up copra, and conveying missionaries

-and traders about.  The *Alcyone* was not a schooner;

-she was certainly not the well-known "B.P." steamer;

-therefore she must be some new variety of man-of-war.

-As it happened, there was a little matter of a murdered

-trader on the conscience of Tanna just at that time—he

-had been very annoying, but a British man-of-war

-is prejudiced about these affairs.  So the Tannese of

-the coast, like the modest violet of the poem, concealed

-their drooping heads in the shady vales of the interior,

-and coyly hid from view.  Like the modest violet,

-too—only with a difference—you might, if you wished,

-have located them by their——  But no; this is a

-polite history, and the Tannese are a very impolite

-people.  Let us change carriages.

-

-Vaiti and her father, who had come up from Queensland

-with an empty ship and a full money-bag, and

-were just starting a fresh recruiting trip, regarded the

-appearance of the yacht with hearty disgust.  What

-were the good old islands coming to if this sort of thing

-was to be permitted?  Not a bushman would come

-near the beach as long as the *Alcyone* stayed, and the

-sprinkling of mission natives who were not afraid of

-the yacht were worse than useless, for they neither

-recruited nor encouraged their heathen friends to do so.

-Besides, the airs and graces of the *Alcyone* were sickening.

-Late dinner with low dresses and jewels; piano tinkling

-all the evening; clothes that looked as if they had been

-run hot on to the wearers, as icing is run on to a cake;

-sparkling glass and brasswork all over the ship, and

-dainty brass signal cannons, pretty as toys, and a little

-funnel all cream-colour and blue, and great sails white

-as trade-wind clouds, and a hull that sat the water like

-a beautiful sea-bird settled down to rest—all these

-unnecessary and disgusting affectations made a smart

-schooner like the *Sybil* look no better than a mud-scow

-in a marsh, for all that she was the beauty of the South

-Seas and the most famous ocean adventuress from

-'Frisco to Hobart Town.  Besides, Saxon would not

-stir out of his cabin while the yacht was there, having

-developed the lumbago that always attacked him

-whenever English society folk loomed on the horizon—Vaiti

-knew that lumbago!—and he might really have

-been of use about Sulphur Bay, where, for a wonder, no

-one had any old scores against him.

-

-It was all most abominable, thought the "Kapitani,"

-and she cast an unfriendly glance on the luxurious

-*Alcyone*, as her boat shot past the yacht in the moonlight,

-returning from a fruitless hunt along the coast for any

-stray bushman who might have heard the recruiting

-signal—a stick or two of dynamite set afloat on a board

-and exploded—and come down to the coast.

-

-Lady Victoria's comment on the "beautiful girl"

-did not soften her in the least, coupled as it was with

-the unspeakable assumption that she was "a heathen."  Probably

-she was, in one sense, having long ago given

-up all but the merest rags of religion, but it was not the

-accusation of moral deficiencies that galled her: it

-was the idea that she, Vaiti, daughter of a great

-Polynesian princess and a white sea-captain, should have

-been "evened" to the black, monkey-like, naked hags

-of Tanna.  The resentful spirit of the half-caste burned

-hot within her as she steered the boat through the moonlit

-water.  She could see Lady Victoria and her friends, a

-brilliant flower-show of coloured dresses and sparkling

-gems, leaning over the rail, and watching her as

-impersonally as if she were a porpoise or a shark.  She

-could catch their comments, loudly and carelessly

-spoken.

-

-"I suppose she is one of them.  But she looks quite

-nice.  See her pretty dress.  She is quite decently

-clothed, isn't she?"

-

-"I wonder is she a cannibal?  She does not look

-dangerous.  I would like to ask her on board, and give

-her some tea and cake, and things of that kind, and talk

-to her.  Just to try and reform her from their own

-horrible food, you know," said Lady Victoria angelically.

-

-"That would be so dear of you," chimed in her special

-sycophant and foil, a plain and elderly young woman

-who knew when her bread was buttered on both sides,

-and why.

-

-But here the rowers—urged by a signal from Vaiti

-who thought she had heard about as much as she could

-stand without exploding—gave way vigorously, and

-pulled the boat out of earshot.

-

-That was not a happy evening for any one on board

-the *Sybil*.  Vaiti would not give out any grog for supper

-though it was a settled custom on the ship; would not

-have singing in the cabin, gloomed like a hurricane sky

-over the mate and boatswain's sociable game of cards

-until Gray, out of pure nervousness, dropped a greasy

-ace upon his knee, and was thereupon accused by Harris

-of cheating, and coarsely threatened by him with an

-operation usually confined to sufferers from appendicitis.

-At this Vaiti rose and walked out of the cabin with the

-air of a convent-bred princess who had never so much as

-heard a jibbing donkey "confounded"; and went to sit

-on deck near the wheel, where she stayed so long, smoking

-so many thin black cigars, that every one but the night

-watchman turned in and left her, and only the dead,

-dark hour of two o'clock, when the spongy heat of the

-island night stiffens for a while into fever-bringing chill,

-shook her out of her sulks and into her cabin.

-

-When Vaiti sulked it was usually observed that things

-happened before very long.  But on this occasion the

-exception seemed to rule.  The disgusting yacht stayed

-all the next day, and the *Sybil* lay quietly at anchor on

-the other side of the bay.  Some of the yacht people

-went ashore in the afternoon, and roamed timorously

-about the beach, wondering at the hot springs and tasting

-everything in the way of fruit they happened to see.

-(It was nearly all inedible, but none of it, by a fortunate

-chance, happened to be poisonous.)  Lady Victoria was

-disappointed with her day on the whole.  The natives

-from the mission, who had officiously attended them all

-day long, were unromantically clothed, clean, and

-English-speaking.  The wild savages did not appear;

-and there were one or two other mishaps of an entirely

-unromantic kind.

-

-"How did you enjoy it, darling?" asked the plain

-young woman of Lady Victoria, when the daring

-pioneers returned.

-

-Mr. Jenkins's partner shook out her soiled tussore

-silk disgustedly.

-

-"It was untidy and ugly and nasty," she declared;

-"and when I sat down under a great pineapple tree all

-covered with fruit, and said that I was realising one of

-my dreams, Jack de Coverley laughed at me, and said it

-was only a pandamn-us, or something else profane, and

-that pineapples grew on the ground.  And when we

-started to walk among the palms, and I was saying that

-I had always dreamed of wandering softly by a coral

-strand and seeing the cocoanuts drop into my hands,

-something as big as a horse's head suddenly thundered

-down like a bombshell from a hundred feet high, and

-buried itself in the sand at my feet with such a fearful

-shock that I jumped a yard away and screamed like

-anything!  So then the missionary came out, and said

-he wondered I wasn't killed; and if you'll believe me,

-it was nothing but a horrible nut!  And the coral

-strand was pretty enough, all over little bits of branching

-coral stuff; but why doesn't anyone ever tell you that

-coral strands burn all the skin off your nose and blacken

-you into a nigger?  We're going up the volcano

-tomorrow—the missionary says it's quite safe—and I'm

-sure I hope it's true, but one never knows.  Darling,

-if I die, see that the new Lafayette photo is sent to the

-papers—not on any account the other; and I like

-Latin crosses on graves, I think; Carrara marble, very

-thick, and just one short text, something nice, like

-'They were lovely and pleasant in their lives'—you

-know."

-

-... "'And in death they were not divided,'"

-finished the plain young woman with mechanical piety....

-"Darling! dearest! what have I said?  What is

-the matter?"

-

-"Now you *have* done it!" roared Mr. de Coverley,

-who was rather a well-bred, but sometimes rather a

-vulgar young man.  "Not divided!  Oh, great Scott!

-Oh, my eye!  Oh, I'll die of laughing!  Hold me up!

-Never mind, Vic; I'll see you aren't divided, or cooked

-either—trust to me!"

-

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-

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-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-Vaiti was still in a speechless state of sulks when she

-started off the next morning into the interior, to recruit

-on her own account.  It was not a very safe thing to

-do, but the bushmen would not come down to the coast,

-and the *Sybil* could not hang out indefinitely, since the

-doubtful character of her methods had given the French

-and English Commissioners of the islands a nasty habit

-of asking questions about her.  Saxon, who had

-relinquished his lumbago to go off into the hills at a safe

-distance from the yacht, wanted to make his daughter

-accompany him; but Vaiti simply laughed at him, and

-departed with a guide seduced from the mission towards

-a village lying a mile or two above the volcano.  She

-preferred the glory of working on her own account, and

-besides, it doubled the chances of recruits.

-

-She knew the Tannese nature well, so she dressed

-herself for her part in a robe of scarlet sateen, with

-liberal necklaces of different coloured trade beads, and

-stuck a couple of tomahawks in her sash, besides an

-ornamented sheath-knife.  Across her splendid young

-bosom she slung an incongruous-looking bandolier of

-cartridges, designed apparently for the slaughter of

-elephants; and a smart magazine rifle, carried over her

-shoulder, completed the outfit.  All these valuables,

-though designed to assist her plans by suggesting the

-enormous store of desirable goods possessed by the

-recruiters, were almost as likely to assist her to a sudden

-and unprovided end, by reason of the natives' covetousness.

-She took her chance of this, however; Vaiti was

-used to taking chances.  It is easier than most people

-suppose to take the risk of being killed every day of your

-life.  In the strange places of the earth, where such

-things are a common happening, men do not look upon

-the inevitable end after the pursy, secretive,

-never-mention-it fashion of Peckham and Brixton.  Death is

-just death in the earth's wild places—yours to-day,

-mine to-morrow—a thing to walk with shoulder to

-shoulder, to meet face to face at noonday; in any case,

-to make no bones of it until it makes bones of you; and

-after that circumstances will keep you from complaining

-if you feel like it.

-

-It was a long, hot walk up to the village.  A "walk"

-is mostly a scramble about the uncleared New Hebrides,

-where roads are mere foot-wide cracks and canyons in

-the dense forest growth, and level ground apparently

-does not exist.  Besides, a bandolier of cartridges and

-an assortment of small arms are rather heavy jewellery

-for such a climate.  Vaiti, however, possessed the

-enviable gift of never looking, or apparently feeling, hot

-or tired; and she swung along at an unvarying pace that

-caused the unlawfully enticed mission native, who had

-waxed fat and lazy, to regret his enticement and wish

-himself back in the mission school writing copies, instead

-of slaving up and down precipitous gullies in the rear of

-a woman-devil who did not know what it was to want a

-rest.

-

-At long last, however, the reedwork fence of the village

-came in sight, and they entered the open square, shaded

-by an immense banyan tree and surrounded by low,

-ugly huts, all roof and no wall, like all the mountain

-villages of Tanna.  There were sentries perched up in

-the trees outside the gate, and others squatted on the

-ground at every entrance, their rifles ready in the crook

-of the elbow.  Within, the dusty tan-coloured square,

-quivering under the pitiless fire of the white-hot sky, was

-all alive with moving figures—ugly women in brief

-grass skirts humped out into swaying bustles; young

-boys with murderous little faces, and full-sized rifles;

-wild-looking men, with thick hair twined into myriads

-of tiny strings ending in a great bush on the shoulders,

-stripes of scarlet paint on their faces, and no clothing save

-their native impudence and a cartridge belt—all seething

-about in a very bee-hive of excitement and alarm.  As

-for the rifle-barrels, they were bobbing about like

-piano-jumpers all over the square, and every weapon was cocked

-and loaded.

-

-Vaiti saw at a glance that they were expecting an

-attack, and picking out a native who could speak English,

-asked what the trouble was.  The man replied that they

-feared the little man-of-war down below, but that they

-were entirely innocent.  Questioned further, they said

-naïvely that they had never eaten a white man, and that

-none of them were low cannibals in any case.  Vaiti,

-who had not heard of this little affair before, saw her

-chance.

-

-"No good you speak alonga that fellow way," she

-said, using the *bêche-de-mer* talk that some of the Tannese

-understood; for Vaiti, like many half-castes, could

-handle almost any dialect or corruption of a dialect,

-though she could not speak decent English or French.

-"I savvy plenty, you eatum one fellow white man.

-By'n by, big fellow man-of-war come, shoot you all-a-same

-one pig, all-a-same one blind box [flying fox],

-burn altogether house belong you.  Very good you

-come alonga Saxon ship, go Queensland; then you all right."

-

-"No eatum," persisted the man (who was the professional

-talking-man or orator of the village), with a

-coy smile.

-

-Vaiti's nose was keen, and she had already guessed

-something by its aid.  She marched straight across the

-square into a little yam-house, and pointed to a small

-parcel done up in green banana-leaf and tied with

-cocoanut sinnet.  Five toes and an instep protruded

-from one end.  The game had been well hung, as the

-Tannaman likes it to be, and there was no mistaking the

-fact of its presence in any sense.

-

-The talking-man giggled like a school-girl caught

-consuming surreptitious chocolates.

-

-"Eatum jus' little-fellow bit," he allowed, with a

-bad-child chuckle.  The other men took up the laugh,

-and the village resounded with a roar like the bellowing

-of a herd of bulls.

-

-Vaiti, seeing her advantage, stepped out into the

-square and began to talk, marching to and fro in Tannese

-fashion as she spoke.  The sun cast dancing spangles

-on her many-coloured beads as she moved, and threw

-back darts of fire from her heavy bandolier.  One arm

-emphasised her remarks with sweeping gesture; in the

-other the tall rifle pounded the earth with its stock,

-marking the points of her discourse.  The fat, stolid

-mission native watched her with staring eyes and open

-mouth, and the chiefs gloomed at her under sullen

-savage brows, evidently impressed, but restive.

-

-The sum of her discourse was that they and their

-women would do well to come down with her to the

-schooner, recruit at once, and fly to a land of safety

-where men-of-war never came, where Tanna people

-reclined all day under the shade of banyan and banana,

-picked a little cane for their employers occasionally,

-lived upon tinned meat and sugared tea, and eventually

-returned loaded with riches in the shape of rifles,

-cartridges, cotton, and knives.  There was a good deal

-more of the same highly-coloured stuff.  This was old

-business to the people of the *Sybil*.

-

-The talking-man, also strutting backwards and

-forwards, Tanna fashion, in a kind of continual country

-dance with the glittering vision from the ship, answered

-now and then.  It was very well to talk about recruiting,

-and perhaps some of them might go if they got lots of

-tinned salmon and "bisketti" to eat before they went on

-board, and promise of rifles to be paid the tribe when

-the bargain was complete.  But they did not believe

-that the new ship was not a little man-of war, and until

-she was gone they would not go down to the coast—no,

-not even to bathe, although they had all decided to

-have a bath soon, for the weather was hot and their

-skins were like the bark of trees, and it was now about

-ten moons since they had had their last bath.

-

-At this Vaiti's eyes lit up, for she suddenly saw a plan,

-a plan which might give her a score of recruits, drive

-the objectionable yacht out of Sulphur Bay, and pay off

-every rankling insult inflicted by the *Alcyone* and her

-people.  But the savages were watching her, so she

-veiled her eyes with her long lashes, and replied

-carelessly:

-

-"All that very good.  To-morrow, small-fellow

-man-of-war he go 'way; then you coming longa schooner.

-To-day, what name [why?] you no go wash big water

-'long place one-fellow-fire stop?  Very good place that.

-Suppose you going, I come up from schooner, bring

-plenty-plenty tucker.  Plenty-plenty bulimacow [beef],

-bisketti, tucker belong white man, cost ten rifle.  All the

-Tannaman he eat; by'n-by he stop lie down, he break, so

-much he eat."

-

-This tempting picture had its effect, backed up by a

-few presents of beads and cartridges.  The Tannamen

-agreed that the plain below the burning mountain,

-where a wide, stagnant lake spread out its dull expanse,

-would do for a bathing place, short of the impossible

-shore, and they chuckled with joyous anticipation of

-the feast.  They also agreed, rather doubtfully, to

-embark as soon as the "man-of-war" was gone; and it

-seemed evident that a fair number would at least come

-down and negotiate on board the schooner after which—well,

-the *Sybil's* smart heels would do the rest.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`A CANNIBAL PARTY`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XVIII

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   A CANNIBAL PARTY

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-Vaiti went off to get ready the feast, telling the natives

-that they might follow her before long, as everything

-would be ready soon; and they might trust her, the

-great Kapitani, that it would be a feast such as no

-Tannaman, not even of those who had served in

-Queensland, had ever witnessed in his wildest dreams.

-

-The mission native being a rather weak-kneed convert,

-and anxious to enjoy a good heathen gossip with his old

-companions, wanted very much to stay on in the village.

-But that was just what Vaiti did not want, so she drove

-him out in front of her like a fat and nervous sheep,

-hastening his movements all the way down with

-occasional reminders from the butt of her rifle.  He had

-given her certain information about a picnic at the foot

-of the volcano, arranged by the people of the yacht for

-that afternoon, and she did not want him to share his

-news with the men of the village and cause them, perhaps,

-to put two and two together where he himself had failed

-to do so.  She despatched him therefore to his own

-town on the coast, and saw that he went, before herself

-turning off in the direction of the track that led to the

-volcano.

-

-Near to the lake there lies a curious little valley with

-a soft, clean flooring of black volcanic sand and sheltering

-walls of green pandanus.  Here, shaded from the burning

-heat, yet close to the volcano plain, was the only possible

-place for the picnickers to enjoy their meal.  Beyond

-lay only a lurid plateau of red and yellow lava beds,

-curdled and coiled as they had flowed down from the

-crater lip long ago; a desert of black ash and sand,

-and a dark, wicked, smoking, rumbling cone in the

-centre of all.  Not a native would have climbed the

-cone for all the goods in the *Sybil's* hold; it was the

-mouth of hell, they said, and full of devils of every kind.

-But they were not afraid of the valley below, within

-safe limits, and even if they had been, the feast and the

-bathe after it were attractive enough to conquer a little

-nervousness.

-

-As Vaiti had anticipated, there were several picnic

-baskets stowed under a tree in the valley, and a big

-wine hamper as well.  Four mission natives, who had

-acted as guides and carried up the provisions, were

-lying on their stomachs in the shade, smoking and

-talking.

-

-It was essential to get them out of the way, and time

-was short.  Vaiti did not waste any unnecessary words.

-She simply pointed her rifle at the men and told them to

-clear.  They cleared, howling, and she was left alone.

-

-With quick, neat hands she unpacked the hampers,

-spread the cloth, and laid out the food.  It was a goodly

-display—hams and tongues and fowls, cold meats, pies,

-cakes, tarts, fruits, and tinned dainties of every kind.

-There was plenty of champagne, also a supply of whisky

-and soda.  She set all the bottles in a row, and looked

-with satisfaction upon the glittering array.  Then she

-went up to the edge of the plain and looked at the

-crater.  No one was yet in sight.  The exploring

-party at that moment were on the other side of the cone,

-standing on the black lip of an appalling gulf eight

-hundred feet deep and half a mile across; looking down,

-awe-struck and amazed, upon colossal fire fountains that

-uplifted their gory spray three hundred feet in the air,

-and listening to the heart-shaking thunders of the

-volcano's awful voice, as from time to time that terrifying

-note of illimitable force and fury made the whole plain

-tremble and echoed far out to sea....  It was indeed

-no wonder that the ignorant Tannamen feared to ascend

-the cone.

-

-Vaiti sat down at the edge of the plain, and watched

-till she saw a number of many-coloured dots creeping

-down the black pyramid in its centre.  Then she suddenly

-lay down upon the ashy ground, and writhed with silent

-laughter.  People were in the habit of saying that Vaiti

-had no more sense of humour than the jibboom of her

-father's ship.  They might have modified that

-judgment, could they have seen her now.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-Lady Victoria Jenkins had enjoyed her morning

-very much indeed.  She had dressed for the ascent in

-a mountaineering costume that combined equal

-suggestions of "Carmen" and the Alpine Club, and gave

-great opportunities to her ankles.  She had been helped

-up the cone by four devoted admirers, all at once, and

-had come down it at a wild running slide, ably braked by

-two strong hands of two or three others who wanted to

-have their turn.  The other women had trodden on their

-skirts, and torn them, burned and cut their foolish boots,

-and also got unbecomingly hot and out of breath,

-because there was not nearly one man apiece to help them

-up, after Lady Victoria had annexed all the best.  It

-must be allowed that the men were the weak point

-of the *Alcyone's* travelling party.  Mr. de Coverley and

-his set were "dear boys" and charming companions, no

-doubt, but they were not quite as manly as some of

-the ladies.  Lady Vic and her companions did not

-attract the best sort of men, as a rule.

-

-They were all very hungry when they reached the

-plain, and thirsty with a thirst unknown outside the

-tropics.  All the way across the baking black sand and

-the tinkling lava beds, "one fair vision ever fled" before

-the eyes of the party—vision of gold-necked champagne

-bottles lying coolly embedded in icebaskets; of

-topaz-coloured jellies, trembling on silver dishes; of flaky,

-savoury pies, and delicate cold meats, and crisp green

-salads concocted as only the hand of the *Alcyone's* *chef*

-could concoct them.

-

-It seemed as if that plain would never end, but it did

-end at last, and a green fringe of pandanus announced

-the beginning of the bush.  The elderly young lady and

-most of the others were making excellent time ahead,

-and they reached the verge of the plain some little while

-before Lady Victoria and Mr. de Coverley came to it.

-The latter pair, as it happened, were really not thinking

-very much about their lunch, because a still more

-interesting matter absorbed their attention.

-

-"Not understood!" Mr. de Coverley was saying

-bitterly.  "And so we die and go down to the

-grave—not understood!  The pathos of it!"

-

-"We are never understood," sighed Lady Victoria,

-patting the side waves of her "transformation" to

-see that it was on straight.  "We women, especially.

-And those who should understand us best of all are so

-often——"

-

-"Exactly—so they are.  But, Lady Victoria—Victoria!—there

-are some who are different; there are

-men, rare souls, who——"

-

-"What in Heaven's name is the matter?" interrupted

-the misunderstood one, stopping dead in her

-tracks (literally, for the sand was deep) and staring at

-the edge of the bush.

-

-From the valley below the plain had just risen a long,

-loud shriek, followed by another and another, and then

-by a burst of laughter that sounded scarcely human.

-The other members of the party had disappeared, but it

-was clear that something had happened.

-

-"Good God, the savages!" exclaimed Lady Victoria;

-and she began to run.  Let it be stated, for the credit

-of her race and name, that she ran towards the sound.

-As for Mr. de Coverley....

-

-But this story is not about Mr. de Coverley.  If it

-were, it would be interesting to tell why the Sydney

-steamer that called at Sulphur Bay two days later found

-an unexpected passenger waiting at the trader's, and why

-Lady Victoria and Mr. Abel Jenkins, of Jenkins's Perfect

-Pills, became eventually reconciled and lived the life

-of a model couple.  As things are, it must be enough to

-state that Mr. Jack de Coverley turned and ran away at

-the sound of the shouts—ran right across the plain into

-the bush at the other side—ran as far as he could get, and

-did not come back at all—and thereby ran once and for

-ever out of the life of the lady whom he "understood."

-

-Lady Victoria, speeding in the opposite direction,

-reached the edge of the little valley in a very few minutes,

-and, looking over, beheld what was certainly the strangest

-sight she had encountered in all her varied life.

-

-Round about the elaborately-laid luncheon were

-squatting a dozen or so of naked brown savages, painted,

-feathered, and slashed with ornamental scars.  A few

-women, clad only in a six-inch fringe of grass, stood

-behind them, eyeing the eatables eagerly, but not daring

-to touch them while their masters fed.  The talking-man,

-a big, hulking savage with a huge bush of hair, and a

-match-box stuck in each ear-lobe, had buried his face

-in the savoury interior of a boned turkey, and was

-gnawing out the stuffing.  The principal chief, one

-hand in a dish of Spanish cream and the other in a

-chicken curry, was casting double supplies into his

-mouth with the regularity of a patent feed-machine.

-A fat young fighting man, with nose and forehead

-painted scarlet, and white ashes in his hair, had tucked

-a ham under one arm, and was sitting on a peach pie,

-with intent to secure as many good things as possible,

-while he hastily worried large mouthfuls off the

-forequarter of lamb he was holding in both hands.  Another

-man was drinking mint sauce out of the silver sauceboat

-with horrible grimaces; his neighbour, having

-captured a handful of maraschino jelly, fast melting

-in the sun, was industriously rubbing it on his hair;

-and a grizzly old fellow, with a monkey-like face, was

-half-choking himself over a soufflé, which he was trying

-to swallow case and all.  The necks of the champagne

-bottles were all knocked off, and from engraved

-wine-cases, empty entrée-dishes, and dredged-out tins the

-savages were drinking Lady Victoria's excellent wines

-with every appearance of satisfaction.  Between mouthfuls

-they stopped to look at the party from the yacht,

-and to roar with laughter at their evident fright.  Too

-terrified even to run away, the voyagers, in their dainty

-frocks and smart white suits, stood huddling together

-for protection, the women crying, the men looking rather

-white and foolish, for every Tannaman had a loaded rifle

-slung to his side, and there was not so much as a saloon

-pistol among the whites.  A few yards off Vaiti stood,

-regarding the whole scene with an expressionless

-countenance that covered a good deal of quiet enjoyment.

-She knew, if the visitors did not, that the cannibal

-bushmen were really not at all a bad lot of fellows when

-you knew them, and that the yacht party, against whom

-they had no grudge, were perfectly safe.  In fact, the

-Tannamen merely thought these oddly-behaved whites

-were a new party of missionaries, and were quite ready

-to be civil to them, since they thought all the mission

-people harmless, if eccentric.

-

-But the true inwardness of the situation not being

-apparent, the *Alcyone's* guests were very frightened indeed.

-

-"P-perhaps if we go away very quietly, they won't

-f-follow us," said a wealthy young stockbroker, who had

-retained a little presence of mind, though his teeth were

-chattering in his head.

-

-"Oh, let us!  Victoria, save me!  Oh, what shall

-we do?" wailed the elderly young lady, rushing up the

-bank and flinging her arms round the mistress of the

-violated feast.  Lady Victoria, though white as her own

-Belfast linen collar, kept her head fairly well.  She saw

-that Vaiti was not one of the invaders, and called to

-her.  "Do you speak English?  What are we to do?

-Will they kill us?" she asked.

-

-Vaiti walked over to her with the bearing of a stage

-duchess, and favoured her with a fashionable high

-handshake that was the one thing wanting to complete the

-insanity of the whole impossible scene.  A new idea

-had suddenly struck her—a fresh spark of mischief was

-lit.  With an immovable countenance she replied:

-

-"No kill you, I think.  Suppose you want go 'way all

-right by'n-by, very good I think you sit down, eatum

-dinner alonga those fellow—then they think you all

-right, let you go home, no kill."

-

-"Oh, Victoria, anything to please them!" sobbed

-the elderly young lady.

-

-"Yes—a—I think we'd better do anything we can to

-get into their good graces, since we're not armed,"

-submitted the stockbroker.

-

-Vaiti exchanged a few words with the Tannese.  She

-explained that these white people had come a long way,

-and were very hungry.  The Melanesian has not many

-virtues, but hospitality is certainly one of them; and a

-man who may be planning to dine off you himself

-tomorrow will certainly not refuse you half of his own

-leaf of yams to-day.  The Tannese were delighted at the

-chance of sharing their good fortune with the white

-chiefs, even in spite of the latter's extremely silly

-manners, and they beckoned to them at once to come and

-sit down.

-

-Thereafter took place a scene incapable of description

-by mortal pen.  The chief took his head out of the turkey,

-chewed off a leg, and grinningly handed it to Lady

-Victoria.  The young warrior got off the pie,

-disembowelled it with one scoop of the hand that had not

-known water "for ten moons," and laid its interior in

-the elderly young lady's lap.  Another knowingly

-poured out a champagne glass of Worcester sauce and

-handed it to the stockbroker, while the much-bitten

-lump of mutton that was at that moment circling

-from mouth to mouth, native-fashion, was hospitably

-passed on to all the whites.  Driven by fear, they tried

-to swallow something; choked in the effort, made

-futile remarks to each other, laughed nervous laughs,

-and all the time watched with eyes of utmost apprehension

-the dusky hosts who were thus entertaining them

-with their own audaciously ravished goods.  And above

-the crazy party the burning Tanna sun beat down, and

-the great volcano-cone far across the plain smoked and

-thundered.

-

-It had been Vaiti's design to dismiss them in peace

-by and by, assured that their compliance had saved their

-lives, and anxious to make steam out of Sulphur Bay as

-soon as was reasonably possible.  Fate, however,

-reserved a more dramatic ending to the entertainment,

-And it was "all along of" that talking-man.

-

-The cannibal native is invariably shy of displaying

-his tastes before whites, since people who do not share

-the "point of view" are so frequently prejudiced.

-Therefore the talking-man did not open a certain small

-green parcel tied up with sinnet string, which he had

-brought down with him from the mountain village.

-A feast in the hand is worth two in the pandanus-bush,

-thought the talking-man, so he brought his *bonne bouche*

-with him for dessert and said nothing about it.  And

-thereby came the end.

-

-For Lady Victoria, unable to swallow the clawed and

-chewed morsels pressed upon her by dirt-encrusted

-hands, began to hunt despairingly about for something

-that she could really eat, so that she should not offend

-the dangerous monsters who surrounded her.

-

-"Isn't there anything clean to be had?" she asked

-the stockbroker anxiously.  "I can't eat—and yet we

-must!  What are we to do?"

-

-The stockbroker, who had once been to Honolulu,

-and thought he knew something about native foods,

-spied the packet of green banana-leaf, and reached out

-for it.

-

-"This'll be some of their own boiled yam," he said.

-"Natives always do it up like this.  You can eat it all

-right if you scrape it with a knife.  Allow me."

-

-Before the talking-man could stretch out his filthy

-claw to stop him, the Englishman had cut the sinnet

-string, the parcel had burst open, and right into the

-middle of a half-demolished chicken pie fell a large

-white foot, cut off at the ankle, nicely browned across

-the instep and all crackled on the toes.

-

-There was a wild shriek from the women, a splutter

-of horrified exclamations from the men, a boiling up of

-white petticoats like to the breaking of a wave on a

-pebbly shore, and then nothing but a diminishing string

-of rapidly trotting figures, each woman hand in hand with

-a man who was dragging her along far away, farther and

-farther, down the long, black, sandy path into the bush.

-Then ... they were gone.

-

-Vaiti stood on the bank to look after them, and

-laughed quietly.

-

-"Now I think we keep Sulphur Bay all our own self,"

-she said.

-

-As for the Tannamen, they rolled on the ground with

-laughter, and then picked the dainty morsel out of the

-chicken pie and ate it up.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`THE RIVAL PRINCESSES`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XIX

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   THE RIVAL PRINCESSES

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-It was full mid-day when the schooner *Sybil* dropped

-anchor off Liali Island.  The hot season was at its

-height.  The long, white coral strand blazed in the sun,

-the moated lagoon was raw emerald, the waveless outer

-sea blue fire.  Beyond the beach stretched a green,

-grassy lawn, dotted with quaintly-shaped Norfolk pines,

-tall palms, and feather-tressed ironwood trees; and

-against its enamelled background rose a palace like a

-picture in a fairy-tale—white, long-windowed,

-lofty-towered, and crowned with a crimson flag set below a

-gilded vane.

-

-Vaiti, standing on the break of the poop, with the

-inevitable cigar between her fingers, looked critically

-at the island, and liked it well.  A mere little matter

-of kidnapping somebody's indentured labourers—the

-sort of thing that any gentleman with an extensive

-island practice might easily find himself obliged to

-do—had brought about her father's expulsion from the New

-Hebrides labour trade, and obliged him to seek new fields

-for the activities of the notorious and naughty *Sybil*.

-Saxon himself was virtuously indignant, Vaiti not

-particularly sorry.  She was getting tired of the gloomy

-feverish New Hebrides and their ugly savages.  The

-Eastern Pacific was her heart's home after all,

-semi-Polynesian as she was; and even the wild excitement

-of the cruel western isles could not hold her away very

-long.  So when Saxon was wavering between the advantages

-of strictly illegal gun-running in the Solomons

-and honest trading about the Liali group (which had just

-wrecked its native schooner, and was open to employ a

-successor), Vaiti's influence went for once on the side of

-peace and virtue, and the course was set for Liali.  The

-group was new to both father and daughter, but was

-none the less attractive on that account, since all over

-the wide island world the *Sybil* and her owners were best

-loved and most warmly welcomed where they were least

-known.

-

-The Liali group, as many people in the Southern

-hemisphere agree, offers the nearest possible approach

-to comic opera known off the actual stage.  Liali itself,

-the chief island, is as pretty as a toy-box, and quite

-extraordinarily theatrical in appearance.  Its handsome,

-merry, brown people wear the most picturesque costume

-in the Pacific—a knee-length kilt of fine cashmere,

-girded by a deep sash of pure silk, and worn with a silken

-or cashmere shirt or a graceful sleeveless tunic, according

-to sex—all in the most vivid of sea- and flower-colour.

-Liali is civilised after a fashion.  It goes barefoot and

-barelegged, sits on mats, lives in reed-woven houses

-devoid of furniture, worships a sacred lizard on the sly,

-and sometimes breaks out openly into club-fights and

-devil-dances.  But it has a king, and a palace and a

-Parliament, a brass band, and quite a number of very

-active Nonconformist churches, run by white missionaries,

-who find that "labouring" among the well-off

-and amiable Lialians is a task in which the meritorious

-martyrdom of missionary life can be combined with

-quite a number of pleasant alleviations.

-

-Nothing in Liali is entirely what it seems.  The palace,

-when one comes close to it, is perceived to be built

-of painted wood, like a "practicable" scene in a theatre.

-The Parliament never passes any laws, because the

-Lords, who are chiefs, always on principle throw out

-every bill introduced by the vulgar Commons, just to

-"teach" them.  The Prime Minister is oftener in prison

-for *lése majestè* than out of it, and several Chancellors

-of the Exchequer have been transported to the Colonies

-for theft.  But there is a real throne in the palace, all

-crimson velvet and gilt wood, and a wonderful gold

-crown (the verdigris is cleaned off it with a wad of

-cocoanut husks by the Chief Equerry every Saturday

-afternoon), and when the King goes out in state he wears

-a purple velvet train, held up by two pages in tights

-and plumes, and a marvellous ermined robe, all exactly

-like the Savoy Theatre in the consulship of Gilbert and

-Sullivan.  On occasions not of state he sits cross-legged

-upon the palace parquet, clad in a shirt and a

-kilt, and plays *écarté* with his native guards.

-

-There are a few colonial traders in Liali, and a dozen

-or so of the English "legion that never was listed"—just

-such as one finds in all the odd corners of the

-Pacific—talkative, plausible, thin and nervous, given to avoid

-home topics and discourse with awful fluency upon

-small local politics; hospitable, restless and lazy, and

-usually married more or less to some dark beauty of the

-islands, who has grown as fat as a feather bed and spends

-a fortune on store muslins.

-

-These, as a matter of course, took possession of the

-*Sybil's* people at once, hardly waiting for the schooner to

-cast anchor before they were alongside with their boats.

-Saxon and Vaiti were swept ashore immediately, and

-begged to make their home in half-a-dozen different

-houses.  With a fine sense of the fitting, Saxon selected

-Bob Peter's public-house, misnamed hotel, and

-immediately held a *levée* in the bar, wearing his smartest

-Auckland suit (not paid for, and not likely to be) and

-looking, with his heavy, old-fashioned cavalry moustache,

-blonde-grey hair, and well set-up though rather bloated

-figure, quite like a somewhat seedy Milor on his travels.

-(And, as a matter of fact....  But that was Saxon's

-long-buried secret, and must not be told.)

-

-Vaiti, splendidly attired in a flowing island robe of

-yellow silk, with a gold chain twisted through her misty

-black hair, sat in the midst of a court of her own, and

-drank expensive pink lemonade to her soul's content.

-She was revelling in the sights, the sounds, the smells of

-the dear eastern islands once more.  She had a necklace

-of perfumed red berries round her neck, and white

-"tieré" flowers behind each ear, and the well-remembered

-scent almost intoxicated her.  Outside she

-could hear the boom of a dancing-chant, broken by

-interludes of clapping; and from the very next house, a big

-native reed-built structure, came now and then in the

-quieter moments the sonorous voice of a Lialian man

-calling out the names at a kava-drinking.

-

-The double soul that is the curse of the half-caste

-surged within the girl....  This, this, this, and all

-it meant—how she loved it!  And yet, the wild, fierce

-life of the western islands; the chance, the risk, the

-strong wine of danger, adventure, power!  The two

-natures of the soldier of fortune and the sensuous island

-princess who had given her birth, fought together in

-her heart....  If one could eat one's cake and have it!

-If one could sleep all day, crowned with flowers, under

-the singing casuarina trees, and yet be the daring

-sea-queen, the "Kapitani" of the *Sybil*, if only...

-

-Vaiti shook herself impatiently in her hammock

-chair, and asked for ginger beer with sugar in it.  She

-hated thinking, and felt as if she were going mad when

-the half-white brain in her pretty dusky head took a

-strange fit of sober industry.  Swift, instinctive plotting

-and planning were one thing, deliberate reflection quite

-another....  Ugh! she must be sick....  And for

-once the temperate Vaiti said yes to the inevitable offer

-of "a stick in it," as her ginger beer was handed to her

-by an eager admirer.

-

-The "sickness" passed away, and she began to listen

-and watch in her old fashion, smiling all the time to the

-compliments and sweet sayings that were being poured

-into her ears.  A trader was telling her father all about

-the latest dynastic crisis in the monarchy, and Saxon

-was not even pretending to listen.  The affairs of

-"niggers" never interested him, unless there was a

-question of immediate profit ahead.

-

-"You see," said the trader, "King Napoleon Timothy

-Te Paea III., which is his full title, wants for to get

-married.  He's thirty, and there's no heir.  And there

-being just the two Lialian princesses that wasn't his

-sisters—Mahina and Litia—what does he do but go and

-propose to both of them, and, of course, gets snapped up

-like winkin' by the two.  It's no small potatoes being

-Queen of Liali, mind you.  Te Paea gets lots of money

-out of the fruit, and copra taxes, and then the Crown

-lands is half the island, there's presents besides.  And

-he's a real king if he is coffee-coloured—why, the kings

-of Liali goes back hundreds of years before Captain Cook,

-and he was in Henry Eighth's time, wasn't he?  And if

-you was to see the pink satin chairs in the throne-room,

-and the phonographs, and musical-boxes, and albums,

-and lookin'-glasses, and the lovely wax flowers in cases,

-and real hand-painted oil pictures—ah! it's a good

-job, is Te Paea's, and either Mahina or Litia's going to

-be a very lucky girl.  What he'd like, you see, is to marry

-both of them, same as his old grandfather—only he

-married nine, he did.  But the King's a Methody, good

-as they make them—when he don't forget, or want a

-spree—and of course the missionaries won't hear of his

-havin' two queens.  And, says he, Mahina's real fat;

-there's nothing mean about Mahina; she fills the eye,

-says he, and that's what a Lialian likes, for they don't

-hold with any sort of stinginess, says he.  But Litia, he

-says, has eyes like the buttons on his Auckland boots,

-they're so round and black and bright, says he, and

-she walks for all the world like a lovely young mutton-bird,

-says he.  And what's a king to do, with both the

-girls' relations fighting and squabbling over him like

-land-crabs fighting over a bit of fish, and he himself

-liking them both, and the girls clean mad for

-him—because, you see, Te Paea he's a handsome fellow, and

-when he's got his military uniform on, and all his orders

-and medals what he drew out himself on paper, and got

-made in Sydney, he's a fancy man, he is.  The wedding's

-to be in three weeks, and the invites is being printed

-down in Auckland all in silver, with a blank to write the

-bride's name in—and the House of Lords has bought

-the bride's dress for her, which is what the Kings says

-it's their right to do, according to custom,—and no

-one knows which he's going to marry, and no more

-does he.  And it's my belief that there'll be war over it,

-before all's said and done, for Mahina's people say they'll

-burn down every village belonging to Litia's tribe, and

-Litia's folks say they'll kill Mahina's people's cattle and

-cut up their gardens.  That's the way things are, and you

-may take my word it's a pretty kettle of fish."

-

-"What are you giving for copra at present?" asked

-Saxon, yawning unrestrainedly.  And the conversation

-turned at once to the inevitable trading "shop."

-

-A few days afterwards the *Sybil* spread her wings and

-started for Waiwai, the outermost of the Liali islands.

-She was to make the whole round of the group afterwards,

-and might not be back for some weeks, so that it seemed

-likely that Saxon would miss the festivities of the King's

-wedding.  This Vaiti declared was no reason why she

-should miss them, and she insisted on being left behind.

-Saxon was not too well pleased, for if he had a remnant

-of conscience left, it was connected with the care of his

-daughter, and he did not quite care about leaving her

-alone in a group to which they were both strangers.  But

-Vaiti promised to behave like a saint, and furthermore

-said that she would stay with one of the married traders,

-and not in the native villages.  She also added that she

-meant to stay anyhow, and that it was no use making

-a fuss.

-

-So the *Sybil* sailed away out of Liali harbour, and

-became a little pearl-coloured pinhead on the blue

-horizon, and then melted quite away.  And Vaiti went

-to the tin-roofed shanty belonging to Neumann, the fat

-German trader, who had married a Lialian wife, and was

-received with the unquestioning hospitality of the

-islands.

-

-Nobody, among either whites or natives, could talk

-of anything but the King's matrimonial affairs.

-Mahina and Litia both appeared in Neumann's parlour

-more than once, sat on the floor, drank black tea with a

-handful of sugar in it, and related their several woes at

-length.  They did not come together, except once, when

-Litia, walking in unexpectedly, found Mahina there,

-crying into her teacup, and telling Neumann's wife that

-the King had given Litia a beautiful chemise, all trimmed

-with lace, only the day before, and that in consequence

-she considered him a monster and a perjured villain,

-although she knew perfectly well that he meant nothing

-whatever by it.  What was a chemise?  He had sent

-her two pounds of stick tobacco the Sunday before last.

-She would show Litia yet that the King was her King,

-and nobody else's.

-

-Litia, entering at this point, wasted no words, but

-simply buried her hands in Mahina's curly black masses

-of hair, and dragged her, shrieking, across the floor.

-Neumann interfered, and parted them; but Mahina

-flew at Litia immediately after, ripped open her dress

-with one clutch, and disclosed the royal gift chastely

-embracing Litia's lovely form.  With a howl of anger,

-the rival seized the chemise in both hands; there was a

-scuffle, a scream, a rending noise, and Litia stood up in

-the middle of the room, a gold-bronze statue, shedding

-tears of rage, while Mahina, running out on to the

-verandah, tore the offending garment into strips and

-rags, and cast them upon the road.  Litia, rushing out

-after her, stood upon the steps clad with wrath as with

-a garment (and with extremely little else), explaining

-her wrongs to an interested and sympathetic native

-crowd, until the Methodist missionary happened to come

-by, and told her that unless she went in and dressed

-herself at once, she might safely count upon eventually

-finding herself in a place where dress would be very

-much at a discount ... or words to that effect.  So

-Litia went in, and Mahina went away, escorted by a

-strong cousinly "tail"; and afterwards Neumann,

-enveloped in oracular clouds of smoke, remarked sleepily

-that the princesses were the greatest nuisance on the

-island, and that he believed the King would run away

-from the whole set if he could, for he was "by-nearly

-mad-driven on account of their so-tiresome ways, and

-feared-himself to choose, because the one that he not

-married had would cause to make war by her people

-against the one he married should."

-

-During the whole of the fight, Vaiti remained

-perfectly unmoved on a cane lounge in the corner of the

-room, uninterruptedly puffing rings of blue smoke at

-the ceiling.  Not a detail had escaped her, all the same,

-nor did she miss a word of Neumann's remarks.  And

-they made her think.

-

-In the afternoon, the dull thud of galloping hoofs

-along the grass street made Mrs. Neumann run to the

-door.  She called loudly to Vaiti to come.

-

-"It is the King," she said.

-

-A small victoria, drawn by two spirited blacks, was

-tearing up the street.  Seated alone in it was an

-extraordinary and notable figure—Napoleon Timothy Te

-Paea III., King of Liali.  He was six feet four inches in

-height, and over eighteen stone in weight.  He wore

-a scarlet cloth uniform coat, blazing with gold, and his

-heavy, handsome brown face, with its weak, small mouth,

-and black eyes almost too large and soft for a man, was

-shaded by a white sun helmet with a wide gold band.

-

-He drove furiously, looking neither to right nor to left,

-and, passing the house like a gorgeous whirlwind, was

-instantly lost in the casuarina forest beyond.

-

-"That is the King, then?" said Vaiti.  The Lialian

-language came almost as easily to her as her own, being

-only one of the dialects of the great Maori tongue that

-covers a good two-thirds of the island world.

-

-"Yes," said Neumann's wife, "that is the King.

-And very little any of us have seen of him lately.  He

-is afraid of the trouble he has got himself into; he shuts

-himself up all the time, and sees no one but his guards,

-and just sends a present now and then, first to one girl

-then to the other.  And when he drives to take the air,

-he flies along like that, so that no one can stop and speak

-to him.  He is terribly shy of strangers; I think it was

-because the *Sipila* was here that he did not come out at

-all last week."

-

-"Is it such a very good thing for the princess he will

-marry?" asked Vaiti, playing with a yellow alamanda

-flower.

-

-"Very, very good indeed," replied the Lialian

-impressively.  "She will have a gold crown to wear on

-her head, and sit on a red velvet and gold throne beside

-the King, and have the most beautiful satin dresses from

-Sydney, and all her chemises will have lace and ribbons

-on them.  And as soon as the King buys another

-schooner for himself and Liali, she will travel in it with

-him whenever she likes, for sometimes he will go to

-Samoa, to stay with King Malietoa, or he will sail a whole

-week to Mbau in Fiji, and then Princess Thakombau and

-the Prince of Kandavu make feasts and dances for

-him, and the Kovana [governor] gives a real 'papalangi'

-dinner for him, with champagne and a band.  And as

-for what she will have to eat at home, it is past telling,

-for in the palace there is no count whatever made of

-tinned salmon and biscuit, and she may have a sackful

-of sugar at every meal, and a whole roast pig every day.

-She may eat till she falls asleep, and then wake up to

-eat.  Ah, it is a good thing for the princess who marries

-the King, whichever she may be!"

-

-"I think you will be thirsty if you talk so much,"

-said Vaiti rather rudely.  "I am thirsty myself with

-only listening to you.  Go and make some kava for me."

-

-Mrs. Neumann, who had been rather proud to have

-Vaiti staying with her—since her rank as a princess of

-Atiu counted for a good deal among the island races—began

-to dislike her visitor soon after this, and to wish

-her well away.  Vaiti was not an angel in the house at

-the best of times, and she did not trouble to make

-herself pleasant just then.  Indeed, one would almost have

-thought she was trying to pick a quarrel.  And, as

-that sort of effort rarely goes unrewarded, it is not

-astonishing to learn that the quarrel came before long—a

-bitter, loud-tongued dispute that left Mrs. Neumann

-sobbing in a fat, frightened heap on the floor, and

-Vaiti, silent but stormy, packing up her camphorwood

-box to depart.

-

-Neumann, being afraid of Saxon's possible anger,

-tried to keep her, but she laughed in his face, and went

-on packing.  There was an empty native house—little

-more than a palm-leaf hut, once tenanted by a Chinese

-trader—standing by the road about halfway through

-the great casuarina forest; a lonely, ramshackle place,

-used and wanted by nobody.  There and there only

-Vaiti would go, taking mats and cooking pots with

-her, to stay until her father came back.  When some

-of the islanders betrayed meddlesome curiosity as to

-her motives, and the missionaries declared they scented

-scandal, Vaiti silenced and terrified the one, and

-convinced the others that she was hopelessly beyond the

-pale, by giving out that she was something of a witch,

-and meant to go into the forest to gather and prepare

-certain powerful charms.  These, she said, would injure

-only her enemies, but were altogether powerless to hurt

-anyone who spoke well of her.  In consequence, the

-evil tongues of Liali received a sudden check.

-

-Furthermore, Vaiti, neglecting the half-castes and

-the whites, began with considerable art to make herself

-popular among the natives.  She dressed herself Liali

-fashion, and arranged her hair after the island modes.

-She joined in all their interminable boating journeys and

-picnics, and was never tired of sitting cross-legged on

-the ground, waving her arms and head in time with

-a hundred others, and chanting Lialian songs that lasted

-an afternoon apiece.  After dark, she was often to be

-seen out on the reef, with a torch and a fishing spear

-making an exhibition of piscatorial skill that astonished

-even the Lialians themselves.  When there was an

-unmissionary dance in some big chief-house, Vaiti was

-always there, decked with wreaths and flower necklaces,

-and polished with cocoanut oil, turning the heads of

-all the young men by the grace of her dancing, and

-winning the astonished approval of the women by the

-cool reserve with which she received every advance of

-a sentimental nature.  Both Mahina and Litia took

-jealous fancies to her—thus acquiring yet one more

-cause of mutual dissension—and separately poured all

-their woes into her ear.  She was wonderfully sympathetic,

-and urged each one on to assert her rights and stand

-no nonsense; insomuch that before very long the island

-was fairly ringing with what Litia's people meant

-to do to Mahina's, and what Mahina's would certainly

-do to Litia's, in the event of the King selecting one or

-the other.

-

-Somebody about this time—it was never ascertained

-who—spread a report that Captain Saxon of the *Sybil*

-had a number of trade rifles on board his ship, and several

-cases of cartridges.  The talk began to take a more

-dangerous turn.  The schooner would not be back till

-the wedding was over, it was said, but let the winning

-party look out for themselves when she did come!  The

-Lialians, under missionary rule, had been peaceful and

-law-abiding people for almost a whole generation; but

-they had not yet forgotten that they were once the

-masters of the Pacific, and that of all the warlike island

-races, none had been such fighters as they....  The

-older men began to snuff battle in the air, walked about

-with their chests flung out, and told bloodthirsty ancient

-stories to the younger Lialians.  The women sang war

-songs at the evening gatherings in the chief-houses, and

-Mahina and Litia began to go about followed by bands

-of eager partisans.  Liali was certainly warming up.

-

-

-

-

-

-.. vspace:: 4

-

-.. _`QUEEN AFTER ALL`:

-

-.. class:: center large bold

-

-   CHAPTER XX

-

-

-.. class:: center medium bold

-

-   QUEEN AFTER ALL

-

-.. vspace:: 2

-

-News of all these things came duly to the King through

-his faithful spies, and his Majesty Napoleon Timothy Te

-Paea III. went nearly frantic.  He actually began to lose

-weight—a consummation that all the skill of his European

-court doctor had hitherto failed to bring about—and

-day by day he drove more wildly behind his famous

-blacks, covering mile after mile of lonely forest roads

-at a pace that brought the horses home all in a lather

-and the yellow satin cushions grimed with dust.  The

-wedding approached within ten days: the triumphal

-arches were being erected; the Queen Consort's throne

-came back from the carpenter, freshly gilded and

-upholstered; and the band were hard at work practising

-the strange conglomeration of shrieks and wails that

-make up the Lialian National Anthem.  The bride's

-dress, provided, according to usage, by the House of

-Lords, arrived at the palace in a palm-leaf basket.

-It was a very gorgeous affair—a long, loose robe of orange

-satin, embroidered in scarlet by a few of the cleverest

-mission-school girls—and it was of a usefully indefinite

-size, since the difference between the massive Mahina

-and the waspish little Litia was almost as great as the

-difference (of another kind) between their respective

-parties.  The silver-printed invitations for the white

-people and the chiefs—"To be present at the wedding

-of His Majesty King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. with

-Princess——," came up by a whale-ship from

-Auckland, and so did the wedding cake, largely plaster of

-Paris.  And still the wretched King, lashed by the

-scourge of his own light-hearted follies, sent pacificating

-presents to both girls, and put off the dire decision.

-

-It was about this time that any wayfarer passing

-through the casuarina forest "might have observed"

-a light in Vaiti's cottage late one night.  There was no

-one to observe, however, for the wood was supposed to

-be devil-haunted, and no native ever passed through

-it save in broad daylight.  When it grew toward sunset

-the only Lialian who would brave its dangers so far as to

-rush across it in the red evening light was the King

-himself, who had been educated in Sydney, and did

-not believe in devils—much.  The forest road was the

-shortest way home from his usual circular drive, and he

-frequently passed by the cottage just before sunset,

-driving like Jehu the son of Nimshi, and looking neither

-to right nor to left.  He had never noticed Vaiti as he

-passed, for she was always within the house, looking out

-between the cracks of the palm-leaves, where she could

-see without being seen.

-

-This evening, long after the King had passed by and

-the dark had come down, Vaiti sat on the floor of the

-hut, looking very thoughtful, as she turned out the

-contents of her big camphorwood box by the light of a

-ship's hurricane lantern.  She was all alone, as usual,

-and smoking, also as usual.  There was no sound in

-the solitary little house but the sighing of the wind in

-the casuarina trees and the steady puff of the girl's cigar.

-Papers, letters, packets of lace, odd bits of jewellery,

-silk dresses, pistols, knives, collections of rope and twine,

-laced underclothing, cartridges, feathers, shells, cigars,

-pearl-inlaid boxes, revareva plumes, and a miscellaneous

-collection of odds and ends garnered from all the four

-corners of the South Seas, strewed the floor, and the box

-was still half full.  By-and-by she came upon what she

-wanted—a roll of stuff done up in waxed paper.  She

-unfastened it, and let the contents fall out across the mats

-under the rays of the lantern.  It was a web of pure

-gold tissue, bright as a summer sunrise and fine as a

-fairy's wing—an exquisite piece of stuff, which she had

-acquired from a Chinese trader in Honolulu by means

-none too scrupulous, and hoarded away for years.

-

-Vaiti looked at it thoughtfully, and then opened a

-little tortoise-shell and silver box, and spilled its

-contents—a shower of photographs—into her lap.  They were

-an exceedingly various collection—naval, military,

-British, French, native and half-caste—but most were

-men, and many were young and handsome.  Perhaps

-the best-looking of the collection was that of a young

-English naval officer, signed across the corner

-"R. Tempest," with a Sydney address, and "Must it be

-good-bye?" written in tiny letters under the signature.

-Vaiti took the picture in her hand, and looked at it

-so long and earnestly that her cigar went out while she

-gazed.  She lit another, put down the photograph, and

-sat smoking and thinking for quite a long time....  The

-world was still all before her ... and the whaling ship

-had said that another vessel was almost sure to touch, on

-her way to Sydney next week.

-

-Once in Vaiti's many-coloured history a

-looking-glass had proved her undoing.  It was a looking-glass

-that proved her salvation now, at the parting of the

-ways.  For, as she sat thinking, a brilliant picture

-caught her eye—her own proud, lovely head, crowned

-regally with a wreath of flowers, reflected in the mirror

-inside the lid of the box.  She smiled, stretched out

-her hand—letting the photograph fall unnoticed to the

-floor from her lap—and placed a fold of the golden tissue

-across her head....  Yes, it looked quite like a

-crown—a Queen Consort's crown ... the glass gave back a

-truly royal picture.

-

-Vaiti's cheeks flushed as she looked.  She could

-hardly turn away.  But the golden fold slipped off her

-hair, and the queenly picture was gone.

-

-She shut the box, and with set lips took a match, lit

-it, and set fire to the photograph.  It burned very slowly,

-and the flame seemed to lick sympathetically round her

-own heart as it crawled about the handsome, debonair,

-but sensual face, lit up, and then put out, the laughing

-eyes, crackled through the curly hair and the white

-naval cap, and at last reduced the whole bright picture

-to a little pile of feathery black ash—dead, dead, dead!

-

-Vaiti dropped the charred fragments from her hands,

-and then put her head down upon the mats and lay very

-still....

-

-When morning broke through the narrow door of

-the hut, the rays of the rising sun fell upon the figure

-of a girl with a cold, expressionless face, sitting upon the

-threshold, hard at work with needle and thread.  Upon

-her lap lay a pile of golden gauze.

-

-That afternoon the King drove late in the forest.

-The sun was near setting, and the rays were slanting long

-and low among the red trunks of the gloomy casuarina

-trees, when the spirited blacks came galloping up to the

-cottage.  Every day they had passed it by, a still,

-brown nest in the shadows, where nothing moved,

-but this evening, as they reached the spot, something

-caused them to check and shy, and the King, splendid

-driver as he was, had some difficulty in pulling them in.

-When he had succeeded, he glanced at the object that

-had caused their fright, and saw a vision startling

-enough to astonish even himself.

-

-A stranger girl of exceeding beauty stood in the

-midst of the forest clearing.  She was dressed in a robe

-of magnificent golden tissue, from which the level rays

-of the westering sun sparkled back in a halo of almost

-supernatural glory.  On her head was a wreath of blood-red

-hibiscus flowers, and her exquisite right arm, bare

-except for a twisted chain of gold, held up an island

-kava cup of carved cocoanut shell.  When she saw that

-the King observed her, she sank on her knees, bent her

-neck, and raised the cup higher in both hands above her

-head.

-

-It was an invitation, and one that no Lialian could

-possibly have refused, for the drink brewed from the

-kava root, and the ceremonies connected with the

-brewing, tasting, and giving round, are almost a religion

-in those islands, and many a man, in the old wild days,

-has died for the insult of putting aside the proffered

-cup.  Therefore the King descended at once, tied his

-horses to a tree, and advanced to take the cup from the

-hands of this unknown woman who understood royal

-etiquette so well.  It was his Majesty's right to have

-his kava, and indeed all his food and drink, proffered

-in this especial attitude; but half-castes and whites

-were sometimes careless enough to forget the honour.

-

-He drank the great bowlful at a draught, as a king

-should, and, sending the cup with a twirl to the ground,

-according to etiquette, cast a side glance at the beautiful

-cup-bearer.  He hated strangers and distrusted foreigners,

-still...

-

-"Will you not come in and rest, O Great Chief?"

-asked Vaiti in Lialian.

-

-"Who are you?" said the King, still looking half

-away—but only half.

-

-"Princess of Atiu, and daughter of the great English

-sea-captain Saxon," replied Vaiti, drawing herself up

-to her full height, and looking him straight in the eyes.

-The King met the look full this time, and thought that

-Litia's eyes, Lialian though she was, were not so bright

-by half.  And if Mahina was fatter—as she certainly

-was—she never had such hair, or such a coral-red mouth.

-And what a magnificent dress the magnificent creature

-wore!

-

-He knew at once who Vaiti was, when she mentioned

-her rank in Atiu, for the chocolate-coloured island

-kings and queens understand each other's complicated

-genealogies quite as clearly as do their white compeers

-on the other side of the world—and though Atiu was a

-broken, half-depopulated place, annexed to the British

-Crown, its chiefs were of ancient lineage and high repute.

-Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. hesitated a moment—stretched

-out his hand—withdrew it—then stretched

-it out again, and graciously offered it to Vaiti, as to

-an equal in blood.

-

-Vaiti, glowing with gratification, yet had the happy

-intuition of dropping on one knee and kissing the royal

-hand, European fashion.  The King understood it, and

-swelled with pleasure, remembering how Mahina had had

-the impudence to chuck him under the chin when he

-bestowed a gracious salute upon her inferior lips, and

-how Litia had objected altogether to get off her horse

-when he was passing by, as Lialian royal customs

-enjoined upon all riders ... What a nuisance they

-had both grown to be, crying and battering at the

-palace gates, fighting over his gifts, getting up trouble

-among their relatives—trouble that he now began to

-fear might become so serious as to bring down the

-interference of the British Crown.  And every Pacific monarch

-knew what was the inevitable next move, when that game

-had once begun!  Good-bye to his kingship, if once the

-British Lion laid a claw on Lialia.

-

-"Will you not come in and rest, Great Chief?" said

-the humble voice of the stranger again.  And the King,

-still shy and distrustful, and looking at Vaiti only out of

-the corners of his eyes, did condescend to come in.

-

-And the next day he rested again, and the day after

-that.  It was astonishing how easily driving seemed to

-tire his Majesty at this period.  And all the time the

-wedding preparations went forward, while Mahina and

-Litia, with their respective factions, grew more and more

-jealous of each other, and more and more enraged.

-

-But there came a day at last, four days from the

-wedding, when the King declared that he would make

-his final choice on the evening before the marriage day,

-and would send a herald on that night to proclaim it

-through the capital.

-

-Ruru, the royal herald, who had never before had a

-chance to exercise his office or wear his uniform, was

-extremely pleased.  He got out his finery at once—a

-Beefeater cap and tabard of crimson silk, worn with a

-large silk sash, and bare legs—and began a dress

-rehearsal that lasted, with intervals for food and sleep,

-until the evening of the proclamation.  At sunset he

-went up to the palace, received the paper that

-contained the message, and strutting like a turkey, came out

-on to the open green in front, where at least a thousand

-Lialians—half of them Litia's friends, and half of them

-Mahina's—were collected.  Mahina and Litia themselves,

-each defiantly dressed in all the bridal finery

-she could muster, stood in the forefront of the crowd,

-exchanging looks of death and hatred.  It had come to

-this with the two women now, that either would have

-cheerfully died a death of slow torture, if by so doing

-only she could have prevented the other from winning.

-That she might miss the glories of the throne was not

-the prominent thought in Litia's mind—only that

-Mahina might secure them and triumph over her; and

-the self-same fancy agitated the ample breast of her

-rival, as the two stood in the cool twilight, within

-sound of the breakers on the reef, waiting with choking

-anxiety for Ruru's words.

-

-"People of Liali!" read the herald impressively,

-striking an attitude, with one bare leg advanced: "His

-Majesty King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. of

-Liali, being sovereign by right divine, and the Lord's

-Anointed, also High Chief of all the Liali Islands as

-descendant of the Sacred Lizard, has decided to marry,

-according to the custom of his forefathers, and give the

-land of Liali an heir to our mighty crown.  The wedding

-will take place in the mission church to-morrow, at noon

-and there will be a collection afterwards for expenses!

-If anyone comes drunk to church, or puts nothing in

-the plate, he will be turned out.  His Majesty hereby

-announces that, in order to save war and dissension

-among his loyal subjects, and to teach some princesses

-to pay him proper respect, he has decided to give the

-honour of his hand to Princess Vaiti, daughter of Princess

-Rangi of Atiu, deceased, and Captain Saxon, of the

-schooner *Sybil*.  God save the King, and you are all to

-go home without making a row."

-

-It was a fine proclamation, but assuredly the order

-in the last clause asked too much of Lialian humanity.

-No one attempted to obey it.  The news was received

-first in a dead silence of amazement, and then by a storm

-of shrieks, howls, questions, a wild trampling and rushing

-to and fro, and, last of all, by a Homeric roar of

-laughter.  The Lialian possesses a rough but reliable

-sense of humour, practical joking being his especial

-delight; and it suddenly dawned upon the populace

-of Liali that the King had played the most stupendous

-practical joke upon them ever known in the history of

-the islands.  Therefore these light-hearted children of

-the sun, instead of raiding the palace in two separate

-factions, lay down and rolled upon the grass, or held

-helplessly on to one another, roaring with laughter.

-The utter disconcerting of Mahina and Litia, now that

-all party feeling was removed from the matter, further

-appealed to them as a jest of the finest sort, and

-witticisms that would have made a trooper blush were hurled

-upon the disconsolate maidens from all sides.  Some

-few there were who frowned at the triumph of a foreigner

-and a stranger; but Vaiti's arts had succeeded in making

-her popular, and the malcontents were borne down by

-the roar of public amusement and assent.  Vaiti herself,

-safely hidden in the Methodist mission house, listened

-to the laughter far off, and felt well pleased.  She had

-not been very sure how matters might go, and had

-therefore, at a bold stroke, won the favour of the Church

-by approaching the missionary, and assuring him of the

-extreme purity of her Methodism (she was, if anything,

-a pure heathen) and, in confidence, of the honour awaiting

-her.  The reverend gentleman, who had long sat on

-thorns by reason of the power of the Seventh Day

-Adventist, Christian Science, and Original Shaker

-missions in the islands, received her with delight, and

-handed her over to the care of his wife, who shortly

-afterwards informed him that the new light of the Church

-was, in her opinion, a "perfect minx"—but that she

-supposed it was as well, under the circumstances, to

-make to herself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness,

-as the Bible enjoined, and remain on intimate

-visiting terms with the palace.  So Vaiti spent the

-fateful evening under the secure protection of the

-Church itself, and claimed the same creditable patronage

-for the day of the wedding.

-

-What of Mahina and Litia?  The disappointed

-princesses, when the proclamation was read out, turned

-and stared at each other like tigresses robbed of a meal.

-Neither was going to be Queen of Liali—neither was

-going to scratch her rival's eyes out, and root up her hair,

-for the crime of securing the coveted honour.  The very

-bottom of the world had dropped out—what was to

-follow?

-

-For a moment they continued to stare, each scanning

-the other's face under a new light—the light of common

-feeling.  Litia remembered that she and Mahina had

-been brought up almost as sisters in the palace of the

-late Queen.  Mahina recalled the time when she had

-almost died of measles, and Litia had nursed her through.

-They were both deceived, both deserted, and the friends

-of one could never crow offensively over the other now.

-The thought was mingled bitter-sweet, and the two

-burst out crying, and dropped into each other's arms,

-simultaneously vowing threats of vengeance against the

-treacherous interloper, which—unbacked by their

-war-like following of friends—they knew very well they

-would never be able to execute.  And the crowd dispersed

-as the sun went down.

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

-

-   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

-

-.. vspace:: 1

-

-

-

-The *Sybil* made better time than was expected, after

-all.  Her white sails lifted against the blue, from behind

-the nearest island, just as the royal wedding party

-commenced its gorgeous procession to the church.  Before

-the ceremony was ended, the schooner had made the

-harbour and Saxon was ashore.  He came upon an

-utterly deserted town, and saw not a human being

-until he was halfway up to the church, outside of which

-he perceived an immense crowd, unable to enter.  Under

-a tree by the wayside sat one of the English traders

-who had failed to get a place.  He greeted Saxon

-uproariously, and asked him if this wasn't a proper go.

-

-"What?" asked Saxon.  "Which is he marrying?"

-

-"Oh, crikey! he doesn't know!" roared the trader—and

-fell back against the tree, suffocating with laughter,

-and utterly declining to explain.

-

-Saxon, cursing him for a silly fool, tramped on towards

-the church.  The procession was coming out now, and

-he wanted to see the show, for though he might call the

-coffee-coloured Lialians niggers, he quite understood the

-position of King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., and

-the importance to all the islands of his choice.

-

-He got upon a bank to see the better, fixed his

-long-sighted sailor eyes upon the chapel door, and saw a

-glittering vision emerge into the sunlight, amidst the

-cries and cheers of the people.  That was the King, in

-a gorgeous uniform, with his crown on his head and a

-long velvet mantle sweeping behind him ... and at

-his left hand stepped a tall, stately, slender figure, also

-crowned, and dazzlingly dressed all in glittering gold....

-Not Mahina, certainly; not Litia either—Who was

-it, then?  It could never be—but it was—Vaiti!

-

-Saxon staggered off the bank, sat down, jumped up

-again, and clapped his hands.

-

-"By ——, if it isn't like her, through and through!"

-he cried.  "By ——, I'm proud of her!  Queen of

-Liali!  Queen of Liali!  But——"

-

-He stopped, and shook his head with a knowing

-laugh.  He was not very sober.

-

-"But—God help the King!" he said.

-

-.. vspace:: 3

-

-.. class:: center

-

-   THE END

-

-.. vspace:: 3

-

-.. class:: center small

-

-   PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND ECCLES.

-

-.. vspace:: 6

-

-.. pgfooter::

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-                          VAITI OF THE ISLANDS
-
-
-
-
-This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at
-http://www.gutenberg.org/license. If you are not located in the United
-States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are
-located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: Vaiti of the Islands
-Author: Beatrice Grimshaw
-Release Date: December 10, 2015 [EBook #50663]
-Language: English
-Character set encoding: US-ASCII
-
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VAITI OF THE ISLANDS ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Al Haines.
-
-
-
-
-
-                         *VAITI OF THE ISLANDS*
-
-
-                         *BY BEATRICE GRIMSHAW*
-
-
-
-                                 LONDON
-                         GEORGE NEWNES, LIMITED
-                    SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND, W.C.
-
-
-
-
-                               *CONTENTS*
-
-CHAPTER
-
-Prologue
-
-      I. The Pearl Lagoon
-     II. A Race for a Fortune
-    III. The Flower behind the Ear
-     IV. The Black Viri
-      V. A Diamond Web
-     VI. Marooned
-    VII. The Turning of the Tables
-   VIII. The White Man of Nalolo
-     IX. The Lost Island
-      X. What came of the Paris Dress
-     XI. A Dead Man's Revenge
-    XII. Breaking the Mana
-   XIII. The Game Played Out
-    XIV. How the Witch-Doctor got his Money back
-     XV. The Calamity of Coral Bay
-    XVI. The Fate of the Lieutenant
-   XVII. Invaders in Tanna
-  XVIII. A Cannibal Party
-    XIX. The Rival Princesses
-     XX. Queen after all
-
-
-
-
-                         *VAITI OF THE ISLANDS*
-
-
-                               *PROLOGUE*
-
-
-It was in the seventies, long ago.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Summer--yet a slow grey dawn, lingering long in the sky.  August--yet a
-chilly morning, crisping the landlocked waters of the bay with cold
-knife-edges of foam.  Out at sea, the wild white horses plunging madly
-under the whip of the sunrise wind; the bar beginning to thunder.
-Inshore, beneath the green slope of the castle hill, small angry ripples
-beating and fretting the untrampled sand.  Dead rose-leaves from the
-gardens floating among the seaweed; a torn bird's-nest, flung down by
-the wind, lying on the edge of the steep cliff pathway....  It was still
-the time of summer, yet, too surely, autumn had come.
-
-The sodden leaves lay thick in the bottom of the boat when the man
-seized it by the gunwale and ran it down the beach into the snatching
-waves....  Oh, an autumn day indeed, here in wild Caithness, though
-summer was still at its fairest in kinder lands.  And in the heart of
-the man who was rowing fast through the angry dawn light, to the tall
-schooner yacht that swung and tore at her moorings out in the bay, there
-was autumn too, with winter close at hand.
-
-All so long ago! who remembers?
-
-Not the newspapers which, in a day or two after, shrieked the scandal
-broadcast, east and west.  Not the guests of the castle
-house-party--they are dead, or old, which is half of death, since then.
-Not the Prince whose dignity had been insulted by the outbreak of a
-vulgar card scandal in his very presence--he struck the titled owner of
-the house off the list of his intimates forthwith, and then forgot about
-it and him.  Not the colonel of the famous regiment, who found out
-defalcations in the funds belonging to the mess, a few days after, and
-knew why his most promising young officer had done the unforgiveable
-thing--for the Ashanti spears ended life and memory for him out on the
-African plains, before even Piccadilly had made an end of talking. Not
-the Royal Yacht Squadron--the reported loss of the famous _Paquita_ at
-sea, with her disgraced owner on board, is a tale that even the oldest
-_habitue_ of Cowes could not tell you to-day....  No one remembers. When
-the beautiful white schooner spread her wings below the castle wall, and
-beat her way like a frightened butterfly out to the stormy sea, she
-sailed away in silence, and she and hers were known no more.
-
-Yet, but for that stormy day in the Highlands, and the boat that fled to
-sea, these tales of far-off lands had never been told.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER I*
-
-                           *THE PEARL LAGOON*
-
-
-"Where's the old man?"
-
-"Old man drunk," replied Vaiti indifferently.  She had learned to play
-"The Maiden's Prayer," maltreat three European languages, and cultivate
-a waist in her Tahitian convent school.  But that was five years ago
-now, and Vaiti's "papalangi" verbs had dropped from her quite as soon,
-and as naturally, as her "Belitani" stays.
-
-"Why can't he wake up and give us an observation?" commented the mate
-indignantly.  "It would be hard if a man mightn't enjoy himself in port;
-but we're four days out now, and he's as bad as ever, lyin' all the time
-on the settee like a----"
-
-"You better mind too much what you say my father!"  Vaiti had set one
-shapely olive hand on the deck, and sprung to her feet like a
-flying-fish making a leap.  She was taller than the sturdy, red-haired
-mate, as she stood up on the poop, her bare feet well apart, her white
-muslin loose gown swelling out as she leaned to the roll of the steamer,
-and her black-brown eyes, deep-set under fine brows as straight as a
-ruler, staring down the blue eyes of the man.
-
-"Very sorry, I'm sure; no offence meant," said the mate humbly.  "But we
-want an observation, and he ain't no good.  Why, you know as well as me
-that he'll be like this, off and on, all the voyage now; we've both of
-us seen it before."
-
-Vaiti stamped her bare feet on the deck.
-
-"I know--I know!  I try all the way from Apia wake him up--no good!  I
-tell you, Alliti"--the mate's name, Harris, usually took this form in
-the pigeon-English of Polynesia--"this very bad time for him to get
-'quiffy.  Too much bad time.  Never mind.  Get the sextan'.  I take sun
-myself."
-
-The mate ran down the companion and into the cabin, where the captain's
-six feet two of drunken ineptitude sprawled over most of the space
-available for passing.  He stopped for a moment to look at the heavy,
-unconscious face--a handsome face, with the remains of refinement about
-it; for Captain Saxon had been a gentleman once, and his name (which was
-certainly not Saxon then) had appeared among the lists of "members
-deceased" in the annual reports of all the best London clubs of the
-'seventies....  Why Saxon died, and why he came to life again in the
-South Pacific some years later, is a tale that need not be told, even if
-it is guessed.  Many such substantial ghosts roam the South Seas
-unexorcised--many a man whose name adorns a memorial tablet, guarded by
-weeping marble angels, on the walls of some ivied English Church, is
-busy conferring a peculiar fitness upon the occupation of those guardian
-seraphs, down among "The Islands," where he and the devil may do as they
-please.
-
-"'Og!" observed the mate, as he passed through to the captain's cabin,
-and fetched out the sextant. "'Alf-caste or quarter-caste, Vaiti's too
-good a daughter for him, by the length of the mainmast and the mizzen
-together.  She's got all his brains--Lord, how she learned navigation
-from him, like a cat lapping up milk, when she set her mind to it!--and
-none of his villainy. At least----"  The mate paused on the companion,
-and filled his pipe.
-
-"At least----" he repeated, and broke off the remark unfinished.
-
-"Sun coming out nice now," he said, handing the sextant to the girl.
-Vaiti made her observation with the ease of an old sea-captain, and went
-below to work it out.  It was true, as Harris said, that she had plenty
-of brains, though they did not lie along the lines of "The Maiden's
-Prayer" and Dr. Smith's English Grammar.  And, whatever the legal status
-of poor derelict Saxon, or the mate, might be, no one who had ever
-climbed the side of the schooner _Sybil_ could doubt the obvious fact
-that the real commanding officer of that vessel was Vaiti herself.
-
-"What d'ye make it?" asked the mate, looking over her shoulder.  Vaiti,
-always sparing of her words, pointed to the figures.  Harris whistled.
-
-"Ain't we off our course, just!" he said, drawing his finger down the
-chart.
-
-"No," said Vaiti.
-
-"Why, hang it all, Cap"--the girl was accorded the title, half in fun,
-half through habit, a good deal oftener than her father--"we ain't
-making for the Delgada reefs, are we?  I don't pretend to be any
-navigator, but I do know the course for Papeete."
-
-"What you think not matter," said Vaiti, rolling up the chart.  "Make
-him eight bell.  You go take wheel; I ki-ki [dinner], then I take him."
-
-"What's the course?" demanded the mate eagerly.
-
-"Nor'-west by west," answered Vaiti, going into her cabin, and slamming
-the door against Harris's open-mouthed questions.
-
-An Aitutaki boy with a chain of red berries in his hair, and a scarlet
-and yellow "pareo" (kilt) for all clothing, brought up the dinner.
-Vaiti ate her meal alone, and then came on deck to take over the wheel,
-keeping a determined silence that Harris hardly cared to break....  And
-yet--Nor'-west by west, with the wind fair for distant Papeete, and the
-deadly Delgadas lying about a quarter point off their present course,
-not ten miles away!
-
-"She's a hard case, bo'sun," he remarked to that official as they sat
-down together.  "She has me fair scared with the course she's steering;
-and yet, you may sling me over the side in a shotted hammock for the
-sharks'es ki-ki, if she don't know a lot more than the old man himself.
-Ain't she a daisy, too!  Look at her there 'olding the wheel, as upright
-as a cocoanut palm, and as pretty and plump as a--as a----"
-
-"Porker," concluded the bo'sun, pouring an imperial pint of tea into his
-mug.
-
-"You ain't got no poetry in you," said the mate disgustedly.
-
-"Nor nothing else," growled the bo'sun.  "Ain't you going to help that
-curry, and give a man something to put in his own inside after stowing
-the whale-boat full of beef and biscuits?"
-
-"The whale-boat?  (That's plenty, bo'sun; I've got to live as well as
-you)."
-
-"Ay, biscuits, beef, and water; compass and sextant. She give the order
-a while ago."
-
-"What's in the wind now?"
-
-"I don't ask questions, so I'm never told no lies."
-
-"I do, though," said the mate, in a spasm of authority, deserting his
-dinner to spring up the companion and join Vaiti at the wheel.  The
-bo'sun's mahogany face broke up into a score of curving wrinkles, and
-his shoulders shook a little, as he watched the scene on deck.  Quite
-mechanically he transferred the rest of the curry to his plate, and
-while clearing the dish with the precision of a machine, kept an eye on
-the couple at the wheel.  He saw Harris ask an eager question, and
-repeat it more eagerly.  He saw Vaiti jerk a brief answer, and the mate
-speak again.  Then he saw the girl swing round on her heel, lift one
-slender hand, and bring it down across Harris's cheek with an emphasis
-that left a crimson mark upon the polished brown.  He saw the mate take
-a step forward, and look at the handsome helmswoman as though he were
-very much minded to pay back the correction after the manner of man in
-general where a pretty vixen is concerned.  The two figures stared at
-each other, eye to eye, for a full minute. Vaiti's brown eyes, keen as
-twin swords, never wavered; her lip was insolent and unrelenting.  The
-mate's half-angry, half mischievous expression dissolved into an
-embarrassed grin; then he turned tail and hurried down the hatch.
-
-"She's a tigress in 'uman form," he declared.  "If the old man--or any
-other--was to lay 'is little finger on me--but there! who cares what a
-scratchin' cat does?  I'd as soon marry a shark--I would!"
-
-"You've as much chance," granted the bo'sun.
-
-"Talk of sharks!" said the mate, gazing ruefully at the table and the
-empty dish.
-
-Some two hours later, a milky gleam on the port bow attracted the mate's
-attention as he stood on the poop. A Kanaka sailor had just taken the
-wheel, and Vaiti was below.
-
-"Breakers on the port bow!" sang out Harris.
-
-Vaiti was up in a minute.
-
-"I t'row water on my father's head," she said coolly--"but no good; he
-too much sick, he see snake by and by, I think.  You and Oki carry him
-into him cabin, and come back pretty quick.  I see this t'rough myself."
-
-"See _what_?" demanded the mate, on the last verge of frenzy.
-
-"Not know myself yet," answered Vaiti, giving one of her rare laughs.
-She seemed in a very good humour for once.
-
-When the mate came out a little later, and the sailor went back to the
-neglected wheel, Vaiti was standing by the whale-boat, wearing an air of
-perfect self-possession and a complete suit of her father's white ducks.
-The sight was no novelty to Harris, but it came upon him now, as
-usually, with a new shock of admiration.
-
-"Isn't she an outrighter!" he observed to the unsympathetic bo'sun.
-
-"She certainly is, if outrighter's French for an undacent young woman,"
-replied that officer sourly. Harris did not hear him, for the
-significance of the morning's mystery had just burst on his mind.  He
-had not spent ten years in the Pacific for nothing and the sight of Tai,
-a diver from Penrhyn, standing beside Vaiti, with a water-glass in his
-hand, spelt "pearl-shell" to the eyes of the mate as clearly as if the
-magic word had been printed in letters three feet long.  Vaiti flashed
-her white teeth at him.
-
-"Tai, me, three boys, we go into lagoon," she said. "Suppose somethings
-happen, you find course for Apia written out, cabin table; you take ship
-back, put captain in hospital."
-
-"By ----, but you're a corker, Vaiti!" cried Harris admiringly.
-"Where'd you hear anything about the Delgadas?  No ship goes near them
-that can help it; they're a regular ocean cemetery."
-
-"You 'member officer from gun-boat, Apia?"
-
-"Ay!" said Harris.  He did remember the lad, and the rather inexplicable
-friendliness shown him by Saxon and Vaiti during the stay in port of the
-_Alligator_.
-
-"He show me photo Delgadas.  _Alligator_ he been go all round him, mark
-him right for chart, because he all wrong.  Officer give my father
-bearings; say plenty talk and show photo.  He dam fool officer, I think;
-he not know that kind place mean pearl-shell, and we not tell anything."
-
-Harris mounted the rigging, and surveyed the reef from the main
-cross-trees.  It was the best part of a mile away; a creaming circle of
-foam on the sea's blue surface, enclosing a pallid spot of green.
-Vaiti, who had followed him, flung one arm round the mast, and, leaning
-outwards towards the horizon, surveyed the reef intently.  Within that
-ring of foam--the grave of many a gallant ship that had sailed the fair
-Pacific as bravely as their own little schooner--might lie many
-thousands of pounds.  The repurchase of the _Sybil_, once Saxon's sole
-property, now partly owned by a trading syndicate; the regaining of her
-captain's lost position in decent society--perhaps the realisation of
-half a hundred luxurious dreams, dreamed on coral beaches under the
-romance-breeding splendours of the tropic moon--all this, and more, hung
-on the chances of the next few hours.
-
-There was silence for the space of a minute or two, as the man and woman
-swung between earth and heaven, staring across the sun-dazzled plain of
-sea. Then, in one instant, the dream broke, and the rainbow fragments of
-that bubble of glory scattered themselves east and west.  For across the
-bar of the level horizon slipped a small, pointed, pearl-coloured sail,
-growing as they watched it, flying past, and heading all too surely for
-the Delgadas reef.
-
-Vaiti flung herself round a backstay, and slid down to the deck, with a
-word on her lips that would have justified the bo'sun's recent judgment,
-could he have caught it.  Harris followed, swearing fully and freely. It
-was evident to both that the newcomer had special business with the reef
-as well as themselves; and they wasted no time, acting in concord, and
-without dispute, after a fashion that was new on board the _Sybil_.
-Within half an hour they had reduced the distance between the ship and
-the reef to a quarter of a mile; nearer than that even Vaiti did not
-care to go, for the weather looked unsettled, though the wind was off
-the reef. The whale-boat, with a picked crew, was lowered, and sent
-flying towards the break in the reef, while the mate, burning to be in
-her, but conscious that his duty must keep him on the ship, paced
-excitedly up and down the deck, glass in hand, watching the advance of
-the stranger ship from time to time.  She was a good two hours' sail
-away as yet; and surely first possession was worth something, even out
-here in the lawless South Seas!
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER II*
-
-                         *A RACE FOR A FORTUNE*
-
-
-Before an hour was over, the wind had freshened considerably, and the
-mate began to feel anxious for the safety of the boat, in case he should
-be obliged to run for it from the neighbourhood of the treacherous reef.
-That Vaiti would return an instant sooner because of the threatening
-weather he did not expect, knowing the dare-devil recklessness of her
-character too well. It was certain, however, that he might lose the
-ship, and incidentally himself, by waiting too long; and it was equally
-certain that Saxon, once recovered, would put a bullet through his
-mate's head if Vaiti came to harm.  And all the time that threatening
-sail was growing larger and larger.
-
-It was an unspeakable relief, though no less of a surprise, when he saw
-that the boat was actually heading towards the ship again, the sail up
-and every oar hard at work.  He did not remember having seen Tai go
-down, in any of his hurried inspections through the glass, and the time
-was certainly short.  What did it all mean?
-
-The meaning became sufficiently clear as soon as the boat approached the
-ship, but not through the medium of eye or ear.  A strong stench of
-rotting fish struck the mate's nostrils almost before the boat was
-within hail, and instantly enlightened him.  No one who has ever smelt
-the terrible smell of the pearl-oyster removed from its ocean bed, and
-left to putrefy in a tropical sun, can mistake the odour.  Harris
-understood at once that the strange ship had been there before, and that
-Vaiti was bringing back a sample of the last catch, left out to rot
-during the vessel's temporary absence.
-
-The _Sybil_ was leaping dangerously when the boat came alongside, but
-Vaiti snatched at the lowered rope, and swung herself up over the
-bulwarks before any of the native crew.  Tai, following her, brought a
-sack of hideously smelling carrion, and dumped it down on the deck.  The
-mate's eyes glistened.
-
-"I find great lot lying on reef," said Vaiti, with an apparent calmness
-that might have deceived any one who knew her less accurately than the
-mate.  "I think been there two week.  C'lismas Island, he one week away,
-good weather.  Papalangi C'lismas Island belong plenty diving gear.  You
-see?"
-
-"Rather!" said Harris gloomily.  "Game up, eh?"
-
-"I think you no man at all," spat Vaiti suddenly, swinging into the
-cabin.  Harris, not especially put out, gave a hand to hauling in the
-boat, remarking to the bo'sun, who was picking over the heap of decaying
-pearl-shell, "Don't know as one could say the same about her, lump of
-solid devilment that she is!  But this looks like the end of all our
-'opes, as they say in the plays; don't it?"
-
-In a minute or two Vaiti appeared again, wearing a dignified muslin gown
-with three frills on its tail, and holding a chart in her hands.  She
-eyed the horizon narrowly, and ordered the ship to be put about, a
-manoeuvre which headed the _Sybil_ straight for the oncoming sail.  It
-was now evident that the stranger ship was a schooner of some eighty or
-ninety tons, rather larger than the _Sybil_, and nearly as fast.  No one
-on board had the smallest doubt of her mission, even had that rotting
-heap of shell not been there to offer evidence.  Pearl-shell lagoons,
-with their shell worth L100 to L200 per ton, and their pearls (if any
-are found, which is not always certain) worth a fortune for half a
-handful, are the gold mines of the South Sea world; the very birds of
-the sea seem at times to carry the news of such a discovery, and spread
-it far and wide.
-
-The _Sybil_ gathered way, and sped fast towards the stranger ship.  The
-sea was blackening and rising, but there was not very much wind as yet.
-Vaiti sat cross-legged on the deck, studying her chart in the waning
-light of the gusty afternoon.  It was some minutes before she laid it
-down and stood up to speak, steadying herself with one hand against the
-deck-house, for the schooner was now rolling heavily.
-
-"Alliti," she said, "suppose you got heart one small fowl inside you, I
-get captain's Winchester, my levolver, you and bosun's levolver, and we
-send that people Davy Jones, or go ourself, pretty quick.  But you not
-got heart, though you big man, and old man he all time sick.  Now, you
-listen too much what I tell you.  You run alongside ship, you go on
-board.  You say captain sick, no one take sun, we get off course, nearly
-wreck on Delgadas. Then you ask captain give bearings reef, and you look
-at him chart too much careful, see if this line mark--here."
-
-She put the point of her small forefinger on the chart she held, and
-showed two or three newly-ruled lines in red ink, enclosing a large
-space east and south of Samoa. These were the boundaries of the area
-lately annexed by New Zealand, and she was exceedingly anxious to know
-if the stranger knew as much about the significance of that matter as
-she did.
-
-"Then," she went on, "you ask him if he been Wellington, say we wanting
-news----"
-
-"What the (adjective noun) for?" demanded the mate.
-
-"Because I say, pauki!" (pig) flashed Vaiti.  "No!--you got head of pig,
-heart of fowl.  You bo'sun, you know I get you through this all right,
-suppose you trusting me--you come here."
-
-Harris, shaking his great shoulders in an easy laugh, swung down on to
-the main deck, and began ordering about the crew.  He had an enormous
-admiration for Vaiti, even when she boxed his ears, but he thought her
-special peculiarities of character rather a trying obstacle in the way
-of his enjoying the easy life beloved of South Sea mates.
-
-The acidulous bo'sun rose from his seat on deck, holding out an unclean
-palm, in the midst of which glittered two fine pearls.
-
-"I've been through that little lot, and got these, which do look like
-biz, ma'am," he observed.  "As to people havin' fowls' hearts, or pigs'
-heads, I'm not prepared to pass judgment.  But I don't own to neither
-myself, and if you say it's a fight, a fight it is.  Or if you've got a
-better plan in that uncommon level 'ead of yours, I'm ready to stand
-by."
-
-"You something like a man," pronounced the commanding officer in the
-muslin skirt.  "You listen. I tell him all again."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-An hour later the bo'sun, very wet and draggled, climbed over the
-bulwarks of the _Sybil_, and the schooner _Margaret Macintyre_, of
-Sydney, slipped behind into the falling dusk.
-
-"Said he was thirteen weeks out from Sydney, ma'am," reported the
-ambassador.  "Four weeks out from Apia, gettin' copra round here and
-there, and there wasn't no Wellington news anywhere, as he remembered.
-Nice new chart, with no lines of that kind ruled on it anywhere.  As to
-where he got the divin' gear that was in the cabin, or what kind of
-copra he reckoned to pick up on the Delgadas, he didn't say, not bein'
-asked."
-
-Vaiti stood still to consider, a beautifully poised black silhouette
-against the yellow oblong of the lamp-lit cabin door.
-
-"I think it all right; he not been near Wellington," she pronounced at
-last.  "Alliti!  How her head?"
-
-"Sou'-west by south," answered the mate from the wheel.
-
-"Keep her so."
-
-"Ay, ay, sir!" laughed the mate.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Every one in the South Pacific knew that the _Sybil_ was a marvel of
-speed, and that she had not been originally built for trading, though
-nobody could tell exactly how Saxon had acquired such a clipper.  It was
-a popular theory that she was a millionaire's yacht from San Francisco,
-which he had stolen and subsequently disguised.  He was known, however,
-to have possessed her for more than twenty years, and was now as
-completely identified with her as her own mainmast; so that any doubts
-as to the honesty of the way by which he might originally have obtained
-her were now of a purely academic nature.
-
-Famous as she was for speed, the record of her passage from the Delgadas
-to Wellington fairly astonished the Islands, when it came to be told.
-They had a fair wind almost all the way, with two or three lively nights
-when the little vessel, hard driven under the utmost pressure of the
-canvas, piled up the knots like a liner.  Saxon continued delirious, but
-was fortunately quiet.  Harris, and Gray the boatswain, though
-unenlightened as to the cause of the _Sybil's_ sudden southward flight,
-fully understood that the possession of the pearl lagoon hung in the
-balance, and worked like half-a-dozen to supplement the efforts of the
-scanty Kanaka crew.
-
-Vaiti interfered little with the working of the ship, but she kept a
-look-out that hardly left her time for sleep or food; although the
-_Sybil_, like most Pacific ships, was allowed, under ordinary
-circumstances, to chance it, day and night.  Hour after hour she sat
-cross-legged on deck, watching the unbroken rim of the black horizon, or
-paced up and down the poop, silent and grave, in her lace and muslin
-fripperies, as a naval officer on the bridge. What she was looking for
-no one knew, but during that wild ten days of foam and smother, cracking
-sails and straining sheets, her silent watchfulness infected the men
-themselves, and eyes were constantly turned to scan the empty, seething
-plain over which they flew.
-
-It was drawing on towards dusk of the tenth day, and the sky was
-beginning to light fires of angry copper-purple, high in the
-storm-driven west, when Vaiti, of a sudden, stopped dead in her endless
-walk, and looked with lips apart and eyes narrowed deep beneath her
-brows over the weather rail.  All this time they had not sighted a
-single sail or a solitary funnel.  They had been well off the track of
-New Zealand bound ships, and the Pacific waters are wide.  But now they
-were drawing near to Wellington, and there was nothing to be astonished
-at in the sight of another sail creeping up over the horizon, except,
-indeed, the fact that it was momentarily growing larger and gaining on
-the _Sybil_. There was scarce another schooner afloat from New Guinea to
-the Paumotus that could have done as much.
-
-The mate came up behind Vaiti, and handed her a glass.  She looked
-through it, lowered it, raised it, and looked again with a steady gaze,
-and suddenly flung it out of her hand across the deck.
-
-Harris caught it deftly and asked, with the constitutional calm that
-alone saved his reason when Vaiti took over command, "What's to pay
-now?"
-
-"She got auxiliary," said Vaiti, with a note of agony in her voice.
-
-"What if she has?  Isn't any vessel free to carry an auxiliary that can
-stand the stink of the oil and the cussedness of the injin?"
-
-"I go see captain," said Vaiti, flashing down the companion.
-
-Saxon was better to-day, and almost in full possession of his senses.
-Vaiti went to the medicine chest; took out a hypodermic syringe, filled
-it with careful accuracy from a tiny dark blue bottle, and lifted her
-father's arm as he lay limp and weak, but mending fast, in his bunk.
-
-"Good girl, take care of your old father," he murmured in island Maori
-as she slipped the needle-point painlessly under the skin, and the
-powerful drug began to race through every vein of the inert body.  The
-effect was rapid and decisive.  Saxon sat up against his pillows in five
-minutes, clear-headed though weak, and asked if the _Sybil_ had not
-sighted the Delgadas yet.
-
-"Listen, father," said Vaiti, speaking fluently in the low, soft tongue
-that the two had used together all her life--the Maori language Saxon
-had first learned from the pretty brown girl, dead this many years, whom
-he had stolen from her South Sea island to sail the blue Pacific at his
-side in the days of long ago.  "Listen. There is little time, and we are
-in great need.  We came to the reef, and the shell was there truly, but
-a strange ship had been before us.  Even as we lay there she returned
-from Christmas Island with diving gear.  I sent Gray on board to look at
-her chart and find out if she had been to Wellington; and it seemed that
-she had not the new line of annexation marked on the chart, where New
-Zealand this year added to herself all that lay within a certain space
-of the sea; also she had not been south of Auckland.  So then, knowing
-that we, if we asked the Government, might have the atoll granted us for
-twenty years and take possession above the people of the other ship, I
-made sail for Wellington; and we are now but one day away when this ship
-appears again, chasing us.  Where the suspicion has waked in their
-hearts, or when, is nothing; but that they have thought and discovered
-our desire, that is certain."
-
-"Give the _Sybil_ all sail, daughter, and she will leave the other.
-What is this talk?" asked Saxon, raising himself on his elbow to look
-out of the glooming circle of the port.
-
-"But the ship has 'auxiliary,' my father, and she will have passed out
-of sight before the morning."
-
-"Oh, she has, has she?" grunted the captain, dropping back into his
-native tongue.  "What are you going to do about it?"
-
-He had noted a glimmer in Vaiti's eye that told him that she was not yet
-at the end of her resources.  The Maori guile and the English daring
-were united to some purpose in this strange creature that he had given
-to the world.
-
-"I will tell," she said, standing up to her full height. "But you must
-give the order, my father, for Alliti drags on the rein these days.  Let
-the bale of trawl-net, and the Manila rope, be taken from the cargo, and
-let us cross the bows of this ship, and drop them across her path.  The
-keel will run clean, but the screw will foul, and they will creep like a
-bird with a broken wing till daylight.  Then, if the sea has grown less,
-they will send down a diver and clear the screws; but we shall be almost
-into Wellington, and the lagoon is ours."
-
-"You are worthy to be the daughter of a brave man," answered Saxon in
-Maori, sinking back wearily on his pillow.  "Go, then; and if we lose
-the ship, we lose her; there is great wealth to gain, and a man must die
-at one time, if not another.  I am tired.  I will sleep."
-
-Vaiti left him, and hurried back on deck.  The purple dusk was already
-beginning to gather, and the green starboard light of the _Margaret
-Macintyre_ gleamed like a glow-worm a mile or so behind.  She was
-drawing very near; there was no time to lose.
-
-"Alliti!" called Vaiti.  "My father he better; he send word to take
-trawl-net and Malila out of hold, make come across that ship him path,
-foul him sclew. Suppose you not afraid, you bring us close, drop net and
-Malila."
-
-Harris's hide was thick, but Vaiti knew how to pierce it when she chose;
-and the man had courage enough, in streaks.  Vaiti had hit the mark when
-she called him chicken-hearted in fighting, but there was no manoeuvre
-of the ship too risky for him to undertake and carry through with
-perfect coolness.
-
-"All right, my lady," he nodded.  "Don't forget me and Gray when it
-comes to sharing out the swag, that's all."
-
-The net and the rope were brought up, and the latter knotted here and
-there to make a hideous tangle of it. Then the _Sybil's_ lights were put
-out, even the cabin lamp being extinguished.  The stars pricked
-themselves out in sudden sharpness on the great blue chart of heaven
-above, and the waste of dark rolling water all around grew large and
-lonely.
-
-You are not to suppose that Saxon's daughter did not see and feel these
-things--did not hear the voiceless talk of the great seas on starry
-evenings, or feel her mortal body almost rapt away in the ecstasy of a
-black midnight and a shrieking storm; just as you, perhaps, who think
-that no one ever shared such experiences with yourself, may feel.  It is
-not only the blameless tourist, with his daily diary, and his books of
-travel teaching him how and when to "enthuse," who enjoys the splendid
-pageant of the seas.  Vaiti, as the most indulgent chronicler must
-confess, had more than a spice of her father's villainy in her
-composition, not to speak of whatever devilry her Maori forebears might
-have bequeathed to her.  She was unscrupulous, ruthless, and crafty as a
-general rule; she was engaged in a deed of the very shadiest description
-to-night--yet, as she stood with her hands on the wheel, and her eyes on
-the green starboard light of the oncoming ship, steering the _Sybil_ to
-something extremely like certain destruction, she knew that the Southern
-Cross was rising, clear and beautiful, above its gem-like pointers, just
-ahead; and that a little sliver of young moon, crystal-silver against
-the dark, was slipping up the sky to her left.  The thought just grazed
-her mind that this might be the last time the moon would ever rise over
-the Pacific for her.  She smiled a little in the dusk, and steered
-steadily ahead. There were no "streaks" in the composition of Vaiti's
-spirit.
-
-A short tack to the starboard became necessary. Harris put the ship
-about at a lift of Vaiti's hand.  It grew very dark; a cloud was over
-the moon, and the stars were dimmed by driving vapour.  The wind was
-increasing; the schooner lay over with its weight, and the foam gurgled
-along her clean-ran sides.  Still the _Margaret Macintyre_ came on,
-stately and unsuspicious, all sail set, and the beat of the little screw
-distinctly audible through the night.
-
-Vaiti signalled again to put the ship about, and as soon as the great
-booms had creaked across the deck. gave over the wheel to Harris.
-
-"Run him just as he head now," she said softly, "and bring him too much
-close; so (double adjective) close to ship he scrape the (qualified)
-paint off him.  I go do rest."
-
-Harris, humming "Good-bye, Dolly Gray," took the wheel over.  If he had
-any doubts as to Vaiti's purpose, the vigour of her language would have
-dispersed them.  Vaiti never swore unless she was exceedingly in
-earnest.
-
-The trawl-net and the tangle of Manila were hanging over the stern, held
-up by a single rope.  Vaiti glided to the rail, holding a sharp knife in
-her hand--("I always _did_ think she kept one somewhere among her
-frilligigs," commented Harris silently, as he caught the flash of the
-steel)--and waited, still as a statue.
-
-Presently out of the darkness shot a hail, accompanied by a perfect
-constellation of oaths.  Its apparent object was to ascertain the
-_Sybil's_ reason for steering such a course.  The _Sybil_ answered not a
-word, but steered the course some more.
-
-The hail, at the second time of repeating, became a yell, with a strong
-note of terror in it.  On came the _Sybil_, a dim, unlit tower of
-blackness, taking as much notice of the shouts as the _Flying Dutchman_.
-Those on board the _Margaret Macintyre_ gave themselves up for lost.
-There was even a rush made for one of the boats. But the threatening
-shape swept past her bows, so near that the furious captain could have
-tossed a biscuit on board--so near that the _Sybil's_ Kanaka crew,
-thinking the "papalangi" officers meant to ram the stranger, uttered
-war-cries wherein pure delight was mingled with overjoyed surprise.
-
-It was all over in a minute, and the _Sybil_ was well away on the
-_Margaret Macintyre's_ port side before the latter vessel discovered,
-through the medium of a horrible jar from the engine-room and a powerful
-odour of oil, that the screw was badly fouled, leaving them, like St.
-Paul with nothing to do but make the best of circumstances, and "wish
-that it were day."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-December weather is hot in Wellington, and it was now close to
-Christmas.  Perhaps that was why the senior member of the trading firm
-that had taken over part ownership of the _Sybil_ for an unpaid debt
-thought his eyes were deceived by the glare of the sun when he saw a
-white schooner of singularly graceful lines lying alongside one of the
-wharves on a date when her engagements plainly demanded her presence in
-Tahiti.
-
-When, however, he met Saxon and his daughter, a few minutes afterwards,
-on Lambton Quay, he understood that his eyes were in excellent order.
-So, it soon appeared, was his tongue.  He was a gentleman of Scottish
-extraction, and it hurt him badly to see possible profits thrown away.
-
-Saxon let him have his say, and merely laughed for answer.
-
-"Come into the Occidental, and Vaiti and I'll tell you something worth
-all the trade that you'd take out of Papeete in ten years," he said.
-"I'm going to own the ship again before New Year's Day, and paint this
-good old town scarlet as well.  You'll see."
-
-And the man of money-bags, anxious to see, went into the hotel.
-
-Vaiti, in a fit of perversity, declined to come in.  She knew only too
-well that, in Saxon's impecunious condition, there was no hope of
-getting their discovery effectively worked save at a price that would
-leave very little change over for the present possessors of the
-lagoon--even if the captain had been quite sober, which he was not.
-They had got the grant, and had furthermore had the satisfaction of
-noting that, day after day, Wellington Harbour remained empty of the
-hardly-used _Margaret Macintyre_.  It was evident that her people,
-whoever they were, had tamely accepted defeat. There was no standing
-against a grant from the Government of New Zealand--no matter how
-acquired. But all this did not alter the fact that there was not going
-to be a great deal for the _Sybil_, and her captain, and her captain's
-daughter--especially the latter.  It was there that the sting lay.
-Vaiti had had dreams--oh, but dreams! oh, such dreams! before solid
-common-sense had brought her down to earth, and made her realise that
-Saxon's unlucky state, and the eminently Scottish firm who held the
-destinies of the _Sybil_ in their hands, were quite certain to stand in
-the way of realisation.  To make a fortune, you must first have one,
-generally speaking.  And it was the canny Glasgow men who had it.
-
-So, because she did not want to hear with her own ears what she knew
-very well must take place, she refused to come into the hotel, and
-wandered off alone down the quays, in the warm December sun, which yet
-was cool compared to the burning heats of the island world.  She was
-dressed in a long, waistless muslin gown, as usual, but her shady Niue
-hat and white deck shoes--not to speak of a pair of kid gloves that
-caused her horrible discomfort and a parasol that embarrassed her
-extremely--spoke of a respect for certain of the conventions that might
-have astonished people who knew, or thought they knew, Vaiti of the
-Islands.  Of course, the loungers on the quays looked admiringly after
-her--she would have liked to see them dare to omit that tribute to her
-fiery charms--and some of them freely spoke to her, calling her Mary and
-Polly, offering her hearts and drinks and new bonnets, and asking her
-for kisses or jobs on the schooner, just as it occurred to them, after
-the simple fashion of the sea.  Some of them knew her, and some of them
-did not.  It was the latter who asked for jobs.  The men who did know
-the _Sybil_ and her "Kapitani" asked for kisses, which they did not
-expect to get.  That was safer.
-
-Vaiti, quite accustomed to this sort of demonstration, and enjoying it
-in a languid way as she strolled along under the annoying parasol,
-covered half a mile or so of the quay at her own leisurely pace, and
-then sat down on a coil of rope in a quiet place, to stare across the
-water and think.
-
-She wanted something, and she did not see her way to get it.
-
-To disentangle the dreams and hopes, wild fancies, and wilder
-aspirations of the half-caste mind when that mind, puzzling and elusive
-enough to the pure white in any case, is further complicated with a
-touch of genius, would be a task worthy of a whole academy of science.
-This much alone can the necessarily all-knowing biographer of Vaiti
-say--that she wanted to be someone, and wanted it so badly that nothing
-else in life seemed worth having, or even existent, She was a princess
-of Atiu on her mother's side, and on her father's (though Saxon's past
-was as much a mystery as the origin of the yacht-like _Sybil_ herself)
-Vaiti felt that she had every right to claim high standing.
-
-Doubly dowered, therefore, with the instinct of rule, the actual command
-of the schooner had fallen into her capable hands quite naturally.  Left
-to herself, she would probably have made the _Sybil_ pay in a way
-unknown before to the easy-going island world.  But the useless,
-dissipated Saxon had to be counted on.  She liked him in her own way,
-such as it was, but she despised him also.  And it was an undoubted fact
-that he hampered everything.  This bargain with M'Coy and Co., for
-instance--it was useless for her to attempt to put a finger on it.
-Saxon had got drunk the night before, as soon as the matter of the grant
-had been finally decided, at the end of some anxious days of waiting;
-and in the morning the numerous "hairs" that he had taken to restore him
-had left him in a condition of hopeless obstinacy and self-sufficiency.
-In such a state he was as certain to be over-reached as a stranded
-jelly-fish is certain to be licked up by the sun.  And this was bitter
-to Vaiti.
-
-For, sitting there motionless under the parasol (which was serving a
-useful purpose at last, in shading her handsome face from observation
-and comment by the passers-by), Vaiti had arrived at something rather
-like a conclusion, and a conclusion, too, that was likely to shape most
-of her thoughts and acts henceforward.
-
-Money was the thing.
-
-She did not care for money in itself, and none of the things it could
-bring really interested her, except pretty clothes.
-
-But money was importance, money was power; money was the freedom to do
-exactly what you wanted, and make other people do it too.  She did not
-think it out in words, like a European.  Pictures passed before her
-mind, more vivid by far than the glittering water and flashing sea-gull
-wings in front of her bodily eyes.  She saw captains of great ships,
-giving orders like kings, and obeyed by the promptest and smartest of
-slaves. She saw owners of big stores entertaining half the island on
-their verandahs, paid court to by wandering beach-combers, going out to
-ships in beautiful boats manned by their own uniformed crews, who bent
-their backs double at a word.  She saw "Tusitala," of Samoa, the great
-English story-teller, living in his splendid house outside Apia,
-surrounded by a humble clan of native followers wearing wonderful
-lava-lavas of a foreign stuff they called "tatani" (tartan)--Tusitala,
-who was as great a chief as Mataafa himself, and had spoken to her,
-Vaiti, as one worthy of all honour.... Her pictures were almost all of
-the islands, for the islands were in her blood; but something, too, she
-saw of Auckland--the merchant M'Coy, old and so ugly, and of the
-commonest birth, yet reverenced like the greatest of chiefs, because he
-had money....
-
-The afternoon rays grew blinding hot on the water as the sun sank down.
-The sea-gulls dipped and screamed.  Steamers glided away from the
-wharves with long hooting cries that somehow seemed to embody all the
-melancholy of the homeless sea.  Steam cranes chattered ceaselessly
-above the yawning holds of discharging ships.  Behind, the tramcars
-hummed in the street, and people hurried up and down.
-
-And at last the western sky began to burn with sultry red, and Vaiti
-went home.
-
-Something had taken root in her mind that afternoon that struck down and
-shot up, in the days to come, and led her into ways and places wilder
-even than the adventure of the pearl lagoon.  As children string berries
-on a straw, so upon the stem that grew from that seed were strung the
-strange events that followed, one by one.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER III*
-
-                      *THE FLOWER BEHIND THE EAR*
-
-
-As Vaiti, Cassandra-wise, had prophesied about the pearl lagoon, so
-indeed it fell out.
-
-It takes money to exploit even the smallest discovery of this kind, and
-the canny M'Coy made the most of the fact.  Delgadas Reef was too risky
-a neighbourhood to be worked by any vessel unprovided with an auxiliary
-engine, so a cranky little schooner of some forty tons, owning a tiny
-oil engine that sometimes worked and sometimes did not--more commonly
-the latter--was chartered; also a couple of boats for diving work, and
-two sets of diving dresses; and a cheap crew was picked up somewhere,
-and some poor provisions laid in.  Everything was done on the most
-economical scale possible--yet the Scotchman grumbled and lamented, and
-declared he would never see his money back.  The shares had been fixed
-at a wickedly low figure for Saxon and there were, furthermore, clauses
-in the agreement concerning expenses which made that unlucky derelict
-swear fiercely when he read them after he was sober.  It was too late to
-complain then, however, for he had signed everything he was asked, under
-the influence of the good whisky to which M'Coy--liberal for once--had
-freely treated him.  Nor did he get any sympathy from Vaiti.  She merely
-laughed when he complained, and told him frankly that he would have done
-better to stay in his cabin and drink there, if he liked, leaving her to
-finish what she had begun.
-
-So the pearling ship sailed off, and Saxon, who could not afford to stay
-in port, went another voyage.  And some months later, when he came back,
-it was to find that Delgadas Reef was cleaned out.  It had held not much
-after all, said the Glasgow man, and shell was down, and the pearls had
-been few and off colour.  But there was enough to pay Saxon's debt and
-leave him owner and master of the _Sybil_ once more.  And there might be
-a few pounds in addition--not much; but there, he was an honest man, and
-he would rather ruin himself than let Saxon and the charming Miss Vaiti
-feel they were badly treated.  And if Saxon would kindly sign this paper
-releasing him from all further claims, he would be happy to give over
-all claim in the ship.  Otherwise--money was tight, and that little
-matter between them had been owing so long that----
-
-Saxon interrupted with a statement to the effect that he knew blank well
-he had been blank well had, and for the sum of two sanguinary sixpences
-he would be prepared to knock Mr. M'Coy's doubly condemned head off his
-unpleasantly qualified shoulders--only, luckily for Mr. M'Coy, he was
-sick of him and the like of him, and merely wanted to get out of his way
-as soon as he possibly could.  With which concise summing up of facts he
-signed the paper, picked up the cheque, and went out to spend it after
-his own fashion.  Vaiti secured half of it at the bank where he cashed
-it, and went off with the money done up in her hair, to keep house by
-herself on the schooner until her father should turn up again.  She knew
-him too well to expect that that would come about immediately.
-
-Meanwhile, there were banks in which she could deposit her own share,
-and thus feel herself a step nearer to her goal--that dim, undefined
-goal that was to be reached somehow, some time, through the possession
-of the precious bits of paper and coin without which all pleasant things
-were impossible.  She did not decide at once where the money should go,
-but hid it in her cabin, and day by day walked the pavements of
-Wellington, delighting her eyes with the shop-window beauties which she
-had so seldom seen.  Thus came her undoing.  Vaiti had never heard the
-saying, "We are none of us infallible, even the youngest," or she might
-have been less certain of herself before it came about, and less bitter
-afterwards.
-
-For was it not natural that when Saxon unexpectedly reappeared at the
-Constantinople Hotel with a good deal of his money still left, and sent
-for Vaiti to join him and "live like a lady while she could," the
-improvident island blood should all unbidden well up and smother
-everything else?  Why go on?  There are shops in Wellington--there are
-as many ways of getting fifteen shillings' worth out of a sovereign, and
-repeating the process a great deal oftener than one means, as in any
-other of the world's big ports....  The end was that, after ten
-delirious days of glorious spending. Captain Saxon and his daughter set
-sail for Tahiti with a general cargo, a complete set of empty pockets
-between them, and, on the part of Vaiti, a glad remembrance more than
-half stifled by angry regret for the cost.  Yet, and yet, what a lovely
-thing money was, and what a pity that one could not both spend and keep
-it!  If you did the one, you were happy, but no one thought anything of
-you.  If you did the other, everyone paid court to you, but you didn't
-get the fun.  Yes, that was true of money--and of other things.  Girls
-who had been brought up at convent schools understood a lot that the
-ignorant beach girls didn't....  And, _bon Dieu!_ as they used to say in
-Papeete, when the Sisters couldn't hear--what a headache it gave her to
-think, and what a fool she was to do it!
-
-"Ruru!" she called in Maori to a native sleeping peacefully on the deck.
-"Wake up, pig-face, son of a fruit-bat, and make me kava immediately.  I
-am weary."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-It was many weeks after, and the hot season had come round once more.
-
-The schooner was slamming helplessly about on a huge glassy swell.
-Everything on board that could rattle, rattled; everything in the cabins
-that could break loose and take charge, did so, sending up a melancholy
-chorus of crashes with every wallow of the ship. The great mizzen sail
-slatted about above the poop, offering and then instantly withdrawing a
-promise of cooling shade, in a manner that was little short of
-maddening, seeing that the hour was three o'clock, and the latitude not
-four degrees south.  Friday Island looking like a small blue flower on
-the rim of a crystal dish, hovered tantalisingly on the extreme verge of
-the horizon, as unattainable as Sydney Heads or heaven.  For the _Sybil_
-was becalmed, a week's from anywhere in particular, and there seemed no
-chance of a breeze.
-
-"Lord," said the mate, dropping the marlinspike with which he was
-splicing a rope, and mopping his forehead with his rolled-up sleeve, "I
-wonder 'ow many thousand miles we are from an iced beer!"
-
-"Turtle!" said Vaiti, taking a slim brown cigar out of her mouth, and
-looking down from her seat on the top of the deck-house.  "Only nine
-hundred and eighty-seven.  You not remember Charley's in Apia?"
-
-"I'd forgotten Samoa," said Harris, in a more cheerful tone, picking up
-the marlinspike, and going to work again, as if revived by Vaiti's
-arithmetic.
-
-"A miss is as good as a mile, for all me, specially when it's nine
-hundred mile," remarked the gloomy boatswain. "Couldn't you manage to
-talk about something rather less 'arrowing to a man's insides?"
-
-"I'd like to know why she's going skull-huntin' to Friday Island, then,"
-said the mate, casting a cautious glance at Vaiti, who was scarcely out
-of ear-shot, up on the deck-house.
-
-"Trade I can understand," he went on, "and shell-huntin'--we haven't
-done too bad all round over that last little job, and the old man's a
-sight more sober since he's owned the ship again.  But skulls--and old
-skulls at that--filthy natives' bones that's been lyin' in the caves
-since Heaven knows when!  Besides, they ain't our skulls, however you
-may look at it----"
-
-"Nor I hope they won't be," said the boatswain darkly.  "In no way, I
-mean.  The Friday Islanders aren't people to ask out to an afternoon
-tea-party without you've got your knuckle-duster on underneath your
-voylet kid gloves.  And you know what natives are about their old bones
-and graves."
-
-"I do.  What I don't know is how she thinks she's going to make anything
-out of a proper nasty job like that."
-
-"Oh, she's on the make, is she!"
-
-"Did you ever know her anything else, bless her?" asked the mate.  "She
-wants sixty pounds, havin' spent all the old man give her out of the
-shell business in Wellington, takin' boxes at the theaytres and halls,
-and buyin' women's gear, and staying at the Constantinople, where she
-wore two new 'ats a day for a week; and other games of a similar kind.
-Pity you was sick, and not there to see the fun.  I tell you, she made
-the town look silly."
-
-"What's the sixty pound for?" asked the boatswain, chewing fondly on his
-quid.
-
-Harris giggled explosively, and whispered:
-
-"She wants a Dozey dress!"
-
-"What in ----'s that?  It don't sound respectable," virtuously observed
-the boatswain, who had never heard of the famous French dressmaker.
-
-"You bet it is, then.  Dozey's a regular bang-up swell in Paris, who
-makes the most expensive gownds in the world, and every one in them
-parts treats him just the same as a baronight or a duke.  You can't get
-so much as a jumper from him for less than sixty pound, and Vaiti she
-says every woman in Papeete or Aucklan' or Sydney who saw one of his
-dresses would spot it right away, and go and throw herself over the
-Heads. She read about his things in a piece in one of them female papers
-in the hotel, and she saw an actress wearin' of one, and she's been
-layin' out to get one ever since, somethin' awful.  Seems when a woman
-in London, or Paris, or Yarmouth gets a Dozey dress, and takes to
-standin' off and on before the others, who's only got new velveteens
-with musling frills or such-like it just makes them other women drag
-their anchors and run head-on to the shore.  So Vaiti, she----"
-
-"Hold on," interrupted the boatswain.  "Why, if she 'ad one of those
-gownds, she couldn't bend it on to her yards, not if it cost a million.
-Man alive, she ain't laid down on the same lines as them Frenchwomen,
-anyway."
-
-"You let her alone for that," chuckled Harris.  "But what beats me is
-_who_ she's going to do with them skulls, and _how_.  We won't know in a
-hurry, either, because she and Pita's fixed it up between them to do the
-job alone.  Thank 'eaven for small mercies, says I.  'Er on the
-war-path's rather more than I care for; and this isn't going to be any
-picnic, if I know anything of natives."
-
-"Pita!" whistled the boatswain.  "The old man will 'ave 'is gore before
-the voyage is out, if Vaiti goes on like this.  It's Ritter, that fat
-German trader in Papeete, that he's wanting to marry her to; and as for
-natives, it's 'ands off for them, if she is 'alf of one 'erself."
-
-"Well, she and Pita was planning it all out in the fore-top last night.
-I heard them, when she thought I was sleeping on the top of the galley.
-And the old man came out and roared at her like a Marquesas bull to come
-down; so down she came, laughing at him, like the devil she is.  There's
-no one else on this ship would laugh, without it was on the wrong side
-of his mouth, when the old man gets ratty.  Coming!  All right!"
-
-The mate jumped to his feet, and answered Vaiti's sharp hail in person,
-a deprecating smile spreading like spilt treacle all over his face as he
-came up to her, cap in hand.  Vaiti took her cigar out of her mouth, and
-looked at him for a minute without speaking.  The _Sybil_ rolled on the
-towering swell like a captured beast trying to beat its brains out
-against a wall, but Saxon's Maori daughter stood as steady as the
-slender main-mast upon the reeling deck.  Harris smiled more than ever,
-and turned the marlinspike about in his hands, looking a little foolish.
-
-"You wanting Captain Saxon come and lay you out in the scupper pretty
-soon?" inquired Vaiti presently.
-
-"Not particular," answered the mate, the smile sliding slowly off his
-face.
-
-"Then I think perhaps you keep your mouth more better shut," said Vaiti,
-walking off with a contemptuous swing in the very fall of her laced
-muslin skirts.  And Pita of Atiu, as if in defiance of the captain, the
-mate, and every one else but his cousin Vaiti, pulled a mouth-organ out
-of his shirt and began to play it triumphantly and frantically, making a
-noise exactly like the buzzing of a mad bluebottle on a warm
-window-pane.  Further, he plucked a frangipani flower out of the
-wreath--a good deal the worse for wear--that hung round his neck, and
-stuck the blossom behind his ear.  Now, every one who has ever been in
-the Islands knows that these two actions are significant of courtship.
-Pita was courting Vaiti, as everybody knew--Pita, a mere deck hand, who
-had been taken on at wild Atiu, in the Cook Islands, because he was a
-relation of Saxon's dead native wife. Very handsome was Pita, very young
-and tall and broad-shouldered, wily and fierce like all the Atiuans, but
-smooth and pleasant of countenance.  Were not the men of Atiu nicknamed
-"meek-faced Atiuans," even in the days, only a generation gone, when
-they were the cruellest and most warlike of cannibals and pirates?
-
-Needless to say, Captain Saxon, who had always had "views" for Vaiti,
-ever since she left the Tahitian convent school that had given her such
-fragments of civilisation as she possessed, did not favour the
-compromising attentions of Pita.  As for Vaiti, her father's
-prohibitions neither piqued her into noticing the handsome Atiuan more,
-nor alarmed her into favouring him less, than she found agreeable.  At
-present there was rather more than less about the matter, because Saxon
-was in one of his fits of gloomy depression, and Vaiti foresaw the usual
-result.  It was not at all likely that her father would be able to help
-her in her forthcoming raid.  Harris she did not choose to rely on at a
-pinch; Gray was old; the crew were far and away too superstitious to aid
-in such a sacrilege as she proposed.  There remained Pita, who, if he
-was a wild Atiuan, was at least "misinari" after a fashion, had been
-educated, more or less, in Raratonga, and was most certainly in love
-with herself....  Yes, Pita would do.
-
-That night, when the second dog-watch had commenced, and a lew large
-crystal stars were just beginning to glimmer through the pink of the
-ocean sunset, Vaiti descended to the cabin, looked into Gray and
-Harris's berths to make sure that they were both on deck, and then sat
-down on the cushioned locker opposite her father.
-
-"What is it?" asked Saxon, raising his heavy blue eyes.  He had been
-sitting with his head propped in the corner of the cabin, silent as a
-fish, since the clearing away of tea an hour before.  You might have
-thought him asleep, or, if you knew him intimately, drunk.  He was
-neither; but dead and drowned things were rising up from the black sea
-caverns of his heart to-night, and their bones showed white and ghastly
-upon the desert shores of his life.  So he sat silent, with his face
-turned to the darkening porthole and to the night that was striding down
-upon the sea.
-
-Through the port he saw the shining harbour of Papeete as it looked a
-week or two ago--a tall grey British war-ship lying at anchor, the
-_Sybil's_ dinghy, small and crank and unclean, creeping up to the
-man-of-war's accommodation-ladder, himself, a weather-scarred, red-faced
-figure, in a worn duck suit and bulging shoes, sitting in the boat, and
-waiting patiently until the Governor's steam-launch should have passed
-in front of him and discharged its freight of visitors.
-
-He saw the captain of the great Queen's ship standing at the top of the
-ladder, slight and trig and trim, all white and gold from top to toe,
-all smiling self-possession and cool command.
-
-He saw ladies, immaculately coiffed and daintily shod; tall, clean,
-grey-moustached men following them; a cordial welcome on the deck; a
-flutter of light drapery and a glimpse of lounging masculine figures
-afterwards, framed by the great open gun-ports of the captain's cabin in
-the stern.  They were laughing and talking, and he could hear the clink
-of cups and glasses.  After--a long time after--he could see his own
-shabby little boat creeping up to the ladder; the captain, cold and
-business-like, and more than a little brusque, speaking to him on the
-deck about a certain anchorage in the Cook Islands group, concerning
-which he was known to have information; himself, burningly conscious of
-his shoes and his finger-nails, answering shortly and with some
-embarrassment, and feeling, of a sudden, very shabby, very broken, very
-old....  Was it twenty-five years, or two thousand, since the Admiral of
-the Fleet, and the Prince of Saxe-Brandenburg, with half the mess of his
-own regiment, had dined on board his biggest yacht at Cowes a week
-before--it--happened? ... Now a mere commander left him standing on the
-deck, and spoke to him like a native or a dog.  Well, what did it all
-matter to a dead man?  Was not his name of those days carved on the
-family monument in letters half an inch deep, and was not he, Edward
-Saxon, whom nobody knew, out here in the living death of the farthermost
-islands, a thousand miles from anywhere? ...
-
-"Father," said Vaiti.
-
-"What is it?" answered Saxon's voice dully, as befitted a dead man.
-
-"The wind is rising at last," said the girl in Maori, "We shall be off
-the island by morning.  Will you, or will you not, go with me into this
-cave of death, where I have told you that I shall find what is worth
-finding?"
-
-"I have no heart.  I will not."
-
-"Then I and Pita will go," said Vaiti, fixing the Englishman's blue eyes
-with her own black, stabbing and savagely unfathomable, yet set in
-Saxon's very own narrow high-bred face.
-
-The captain's dark mood was on him, and he turned his face to the wall,
-with a Maori oath consigning Vaiti and Pita to a cannibal end.
-
-"I go; stay you there," said Vaiti, using the quaintly courteous native
-form of farewell, barbed with a little sneer unknown to the original.
-Then she went to her cabin.  And Saxon turned in his seat, and reached
-for the brandy bottle at last.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Handsome Pita had a great awe for Vaiti, for she was a princess of Atiu
-by her mother's side.  But she was beautiful, and he admired her--also
-he hoped that her imperious soul harboured one soft spot for him. It
-seemed good, on the whole, when they were pulling the dinghy over the
-reef next morning, to ask Vaiti openly where the value of the booty came
-in--with a secret hope in the background of securing as much as possible
-for a certain very deserving, more or less Christian youth of Atiu.
-
-Vaiti, her white dress girded up high over her scarlet pareo, waded
-through the last yard or two of the emerald lagoon before she answered.
-The boat being safe on shore, she stood up and looked sharply about her.
-They had chosen a quiet spot at the back of the island for landing, all
-the natives being down at the harbour loading copra.  The weird pandanus
-trees, standing on their high wooden stilts at the verge of the shore,
-the rustling coco-palms swinging their great fronds far over the water,
-the golden and pink-flowered vines trailing yard on yard of green
-garlandry over the paper-white sand, could carry no tales, and they were
-the only witnesses.
-
-Vaiti looked at Pita up and down, from head to foot, and Pita gave the
-flower behind his ear a knowing cock, and set one hand saucily on his
-hip.  He knew that he was the handsomest man in the Cook archipelago,
-and he felt that the way his pareo was tied that day was a pure
-inspiration.  So he shut up his mouth very tight, and made play with his
-burning black eyes as only a South Sea Islander can, waiting confidently
-the while for the information that the whole ship's company of the
-_Sybil_ could not have extracted from Vaiti in a week.
-
-The girl stepped forward, and with a commanding finger tapped Pita's
-biggest dimple, as if he had been a baby.
-
-"Suppose I tell you, then you know too much, you plenty frighten, go
-back to ship," she laughed.
-
-"Speak Maori, high chieftainess!" implored Pita.
-
-"No fee-ah!" answered Saxon's daughter succinctly. Pita understood at
-once that Vaiti was unwilling to use a language that gave free rein to
-her tongue and his, and the knowledge elated him.
-
-"Perhaps I tell you," went on Vaiti, watching him narrowly.  "I think
-you got heart in belly belong you, more better than Alliti.  I tell you,
-you want plenty heart by-and-by."
-
-"High chieftainess, Vaiti, speak Maori!" was Pita's answer, linked to an
-attempted embrace that only fell short of its main object because Vaiti
-quite calmly pulled a seaman's knife out of her dress and laid it edge
-upwards across her lips.  Pita, who had learned the real European kiss
-during his visits to civilisation, and wanted very much to show it off,
-felt disappointed, although there was a smile behind the blade that
-almost out-dazzled the steel.
-
-"Maori!" he persisted, putting his arm round her waist, with a cool
-disregard of her well-known readiness with the knife that won Vaiti's
-admiration a step further than before.  She laughed, wavered, and then,
-still playing with the keen, bright blade, she lowered it a little, and
-spoke in the soft language of the Islands at last.
-
-It was a fairly long tale that she had to tell.  When last the _Sybil_
-had been in the Society Islands, some weeks before, there had been a
-German man of science in the group, collecting native skulls for museums
-at home.  The grizzly old gentleman and his pursuits had not troubled
-Vaiti's mind particularly until her chief admirer, Ritter, a Papeete
-trader, happened to drop a remark one day about the amount of money some
-of these old skulls were worth.  Vaiti's sharp intelligence linked on
-the casual saying at once to certain other wandering rumours she
-remembered, and she decided to find out something more.  She did not ask
-Ritter, for he was no talker, even to a handsome girl whom he admired;
-and the German was his compatriot, in any case.  But when the schooner
-reached Raiatea, where Professor Spricht was staying, Vaiti drifted off
-among the native huts, and squatted for an hour or two on the mats of
-the second chief's wife's mother's cousin's house, smoking a great deal,
-talking very little, and listening quietly.  By degrees the house filled
-up with interested natives all eager for gossip and chatter; and to
-Vaiti, pulling steadily at her cigar, and maintaining the grave,
-unsmiling demeanour proper to a princess of Atiu and a great Belitani
-chieftain's daughter, the drawing out of the secret she wanted was as
-easy as spinning sinnet out of cocoanut husk.
-
-Nothing is private in the Eastern Pacific, and it was not long before
-all the professor's personal affairs were tossing about like seaweed on
-the flood of general gossip--mostly unfit for publication--that surged
-about the apparently uninterested ears of the silent, splendid sea-queen
-throned on the pile of pandanus mats.... The Siamani (German) had got
-skulls in Niue, in Uea, in Mangaia, and was now collecting them about
-the Society group....  He was an ugly, grey-snouted pig to look at, and
-rooted in the earth like any pig; still, Taous and Mahina, daughters of
-Falani, seemed to think that--(details lost in a heated argument about
-the personal characteristics of the ladies)....  Anyhow, Vekia from the
-hills said he was going to buy her two silk dresses from San Francisco
-when he came back from Falaite Island; so he was not as mean as he
-looked.  Yes, he was going to Falaite Island in a great hurry; he would
-not even take time to finish his pig-rooting in Raiatea, on account of
-something he had heard from an old man who had once lived up in
-Falaite.... What fools the papalangi (whites) were.  Did not every one
-in the Islands know about the old, old people that used to live on
-Falaite, hundreds of moons before the days of Tuti (Cook), and how they
-all died, and nobody lived there for very, very long, until some people
-wandered up from Niue in Tuti's time; and how the skulls of the old, old
-people were still there, buried in a cave that was a hundred miles long,
-and guarded by as many devils as would fill twenty war canoes?  Of
-course, these things were known, and always had been--but when would any
-man of Tahiti or Raiatea have thought of such folly as travelling more
-than a thousand miles to fight the devils and take away the skulls?
-What if they were worth money enough to buy a big schooner, as the old
-grey pig had told Vekia when he promised her those dresses?  Would a
-whole schooner, loaded down with dollars, be any good to a man after the
-devils had killed him?  Vekia would never get her trade finery, for all
-her airs; and Jacky Te Vaka, whose schooner was to be hired to take the
-Siamani up to Falaite, would never come back from such a sacrilegious
-journey....  Why could he not wait, and go by Kapitani Satoni's schooner
-when she made her yearly trip by and by?  Every one knew that the
-_Sipila_ was under a charm, and no harm could come to any one on board
-her.  But he would not wait, and just as soon as Jacky's boat came back
-from Bora-Bora, next week, they were to go....  Ahi! and Jacky was such
-a handsome man--it was a great pity!
-
-Such was the substance of the information gathered by Vaiti.  It
-resulted in her ordering the course of the ship to be changed, and
-heading direct for Friday Island, instead of going down to Auckland.
-Friday Island--out of the way, infertile, uninteresting, and little
-known--had been one of Saxon's private preserves for some years.  He
-touched there once a year, purchased all the copra that the little place
-produced at his own price, and paid for it in cheap tinned meat, boxes
-of damaged biscuit, and tins of imitation salmon instead of cash.  He
-seldom went ashore, and certainly did not waste his time cave-hunting,
-if he did chance to set foot on the beach.  Vaiti, with her odd faculty
-for acquiring miscellaneous information, had known since the first time
-the _Sybil_ called that there were great caves on the island, and that a
-devil of unusual quality and size guarded them.  So much might have been
-said of a hundred similar islands, however, and she had not troubled
-herself about either caves or devils until the German professor's secret
-set her on the alert for something that looked like a dangerous,
-exciting, and profitable adventure.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER IV*
-
-                            *THE BLACK VIRI*
-
-
-Moreover, as Harris had said, she had been devoured with desire of a
-real Paris dress ever since her stay in the Wellington hotel.  There had
-been a famous actress there at the same time, and all her garments had
-been freely paragraphed in the ladies' column of the local press.  When
-she swam languidly through the hall of the Constantinople, shining
-mystic and wonderful out of a cloud of rainbow silks and chiffons that
-had cost a formidable row of figures in the Rue de la Paix, all the
-women caught their breath, looked once, and then gazed determinedly out
-of the windows, pretending that they had noticed nothing.  When she came
-in to a late supper, floating in spangled mists and sparkling with
-constellations of diamonds, every head was turned her way, and half the
-heads--the short-cropped ones--stayed turned, in more senses than one.
-It was a revelation and a martyrdom to Vaiti.  What were her muslin
-frocks and her ten new hats at a whole pound apiece compared to this?
-And the vision of money saved up faded away for the time being before
-the vision of one such frock--only one--belonging to her.  Life could
-surely offer nothing more.
-
-Of this, naturally, she said nothing to Pita, merely relating the matter
-of the skulls in as few words as possible.  Pita, for his part, made no
-comment, but took a couple of revolvers out of the boat and thrust one
-into his belt, handing the other to the girl.  Then he girded up his
-pareo--a significant action among islanders--and felt the handle of his
-knife to see that it was loose in the sheath.  There was a large sack in
-the boat containing candles and food, and leaving ample space for other
-filling later on.  Vaiti tossed it to Pita, and the two began their
-walk, barefoot, swift and silent, casting a quick glance every now and
-then among the weirdly stilted stems of the lonely pandanus groves as
-they went.
-
-"They are all down with the _Sybil_--it is safer now than it would be at
-night," said Pita.  "Vaiti, if we get these things, and sell them for
-much money in Sitani, you and I will leave the _Sybil_ when she next
-goes to Atiu; and you shall be queen of Atiu and I shall be king, and we
-shall eat roast pork and 'uakari' every day."
-
-"My father would burn the villages and kill the chiefs, and hang your
-head on the bowsprit of the ship," replied Vaiti conversationally.
-"Besides, I like Sitani, and I will buy myself a wonder dress from
-Palisi town there."
-
-"Then we will leave at Sitani, and be great chiefs there, if these old
-bones indeed sell for so much money. And we will buy a little schooner
-for ourselves, and you shall be the real captain, and there will be four
-gold bands on your sleeve and one on the peak of your cap; and you shall
-get a _sitificati_ from the chiefs of the great harbour, and take the
-schooner out of Sitani Heads yourself.  And every one shall be afraid of
-me and you, and they will say----"
-
-Vaiti had been listening as she swung along, now casting a glance of
-approval at the handsome lad while he spoke cunningly of the schooner
-she should command, now shooting out her lip a little, and slashing
-impatiently with her knife at the young cocoanut fronds.  Suddenly,
-looking very straight ahead, she interrupted.
-
-"Pita, you talk too fast.  There are things you do not know.  Tell me,
-is your heart strong within you?"
-
-"It is strong," answered the island Maori.
-
-"Then listen.  There is a devil in the cave."
-
-"I do not believe in devils.  I am misinari, and go to church five times
-on Sundays; also I have a black coat and two boots very nearly the same
-as each other to wear on collection days."
-
-"There is a devil all the same; you do not know everything that is in
-the world, little Pita," replied Vaiti.  "There is something bad there.
-I do not believe in native devils, for I am 'papa-langi'; but I know
-there is--a thing of some kind--there.  A bad thing.  A black viri, they
-say, but I do not understand that."
-
-"A black viri is nothing.  You and I do not mind such things.
-See--there will perhaps be one in this rotten wood."  Pita struck and
-kicked at a mass of decaying cocoanut wood, and hunted out one of the
-great black centipedes that are common in the equatorial islands.
-
-There is nothing on the bosom of Mother Earth more loathly than the
-centipede, and Pita's quarry--nearly a foot long, as thick as a sausage,
-scarlet feelers on its hideous head, and scarlet legs fringing its long
-lithe body--was as hideous a specimen as ever jerked itself
-lightning-wise across a forest path.  Pita, however, with swift
-dexterity, seized the horrible beast by the neck and tail, holding it so
-that it could neither bite nor sting, and lifted it up to his companion.
-Vaiti's eyes dilated ever so little.  She drew her knife and slashed the
-creature in two; then, stooping down, she struck at the flying halves as
-they ran away in opposite directions, and cut them up into mincemeat.
-Leaving the red fragments still wriggling in the track amidst an
-unsavoury, snaky smell, she stepped swiftly on.
-
-"It is no matter," she said.  "We two shall see what we shall see.  Keep
-your heart warm within you."
-
-"And if we come back safe?" cried the impetuous Pita, catching the
-girl's warm round arms in his two sinewy hands, and letting his black
-eyes gaze into hers.
-
-Vaiti stood very still for a moment, looking out to sea. The spell of
-her stillness fell on Pita, and he remained as if frozen.  Far away the
-surf hummed on the reef, and a sea-bird cried.  Above the two beautiful,
-motionless young figures the palms rustled endlessly in the long trade
-wind.
-
-"... If we come back" ... said Vaiti at last, her eyes still fixed on
-the far-off line of the outer sea--"if we come back--we will go away
-together, you and I."
-
-She looked so like a witch in a trance (such things are not unknown even
-now, in strange Atiu) that Pita's hands dropped from her arms, and he
-felt half frightened in the moment of his triumph.  But Vaiti recalled
-him to himself by starting her steady swing again, and saying with a
-laugh, as they footed it through the dry, sun-struck woods side by side:
-
-"I think some day my father will make a parrot cage to hang a green Atiu
-parrot in, and it will be made of your ribs and breast-bone, little
-Pita--all the same as my grandfather did in the islands to the man who
-stole his wife."
-
-At that moment the woods opened out and the cave came into view--a
-velvet-dark blot in the dazzling glare of greenery that tangled itself
-about the shoreward cliffs.
-
-Pita's hand sprang to his revolver, and he uttered an exclamation of
-angry surprise.  Beside the cave stood a tall, brown, naked figure
-painted like a witch-doctor and armed with a spear.
-
-"Do not shoot," said Vaiti quickly.  "It will do no good.  Let me look
-to him myself."
-
-She walked right up to the native, stood within a yard of him, and
-stared at him, in a silence that somehow managed to express unflattering
-things.  The man, stamping the butt of his spear on the ground, turned
-away from her and addressed Pita.
-
-"I have nothing to do with this woman of yours," he said.  "It is with
-men I would speak."
-
-"Speak, then, pig-face," said Pita insolently, hoping to provoke a
-fight, since the man seemed to be alone.
-
-"Enter if you wish," replied the other.  "We have sent no fighting-men
-to hinder you; the way is clear. Yet if you think the hot sun on the
-pleasant land is good to see, and the beating of the warm heart in the
-living breast is sweet to feel, go not into our sacred caves, to lay
-evil hands upon the holy bones of Falaiti.  Enough."
-
-The man's words were strangely void of heat or anger, and he held his
-spear loosely, Vaiti did not suspect an ambush, for she knew that no
-native would enter the cave.  Yet in that moment her quick mind leaped
-to the knowledge of some unknown danger threatening herself and Pita
-from out the cold-breathing world of darkness that lay within that
-rugged arch, and for one prophetic instant she could smell the very
-smell of death.
-
-But Vaiti's courage was of the kind that rises, wave by wave, the higher
-for all obstacle, and her spirit swelled within her to flood-tide in
-that moment.  She turned upon the witch-doctor and laughed in his face.
-Then she stretched out her hand, and Pita's leaped into it, warm and
-strong, and together they stepped over the threshold of the cave.
-
-The man outside cursed them, slowly and with relish.
-
-"Shall we not kill him?" asked Pita.
-
-"There is no use," said Vaiti.  "It is plain to me that all the tribe
-know, and they trust to the dangers of the place, whatever these may be.
-This island is at the very end of the world, it is true, and strange
-things may happen here."
-
-"Yes, there is nothing that one might not believe in this place," said
-Pita, looking back.  Already the gloom of Hades itself was winding about
-them, and the air struck gravelike and cold.  In the distance the mouth
-of the cave cast a brief glow of emerald light upon the dewy ferns and
-mosses close to the threshold, so that they shone like the jewelled
-foliage of some magic forest in a fairy play.  Then came the dripping
-roof, the enormous stalactite buttresses of the cave, dimly edged with
-light; the oozing floor, and the lifeless dark.
-
-Vaiti spoke not at all, as they walked side by side down dark tunnel
-after dark tunnel, across empty, thunderous-echoing black halls and
-archways--their little candles flitting like fireflies through a dim
-world of unconquerable gloom.  Pita, however, was strangely gay.  He
-yelled aloud to set the echoes booming in the black domes above, when
-they crossed some invisible great goblin market-place, full of hollow
-sounds and half-glimpsed monstrosities.  He sang when the way along the
-endless corridors grew tedious, and the glistening stalactite candelabra
-succeeded one another, thick as forest branches, for mile after mile
-unchanged.  When the path was barred by inky lakes of unknown depth and
-ghastly chill, and the two explorers had to tie their lights on their
-heads and swim for it, he pretended to cry at the cold, and played
-tricks on Vaiti by slipping behind her and catching her feet in his
-teeth.  So they went on, one in wild spirits, the other silent and
-grave. And the hours of the sunny day slipped by dark and changeless, as
-they passed farther and farther away life and light into the cold black
-depths of the cave.
-
-When it was about noon, as near as they could guess, Vaiti took the
-biscuits and tinned meat out of the sack, and they ate, squatting on the
-wet floor of the tunnel. They knew that the journey was a long one, and
-that the way could not well be missed, yet they were beginning to feel a
-little uneasy now.  Did this cave go on for ever?
-
-Somehow, the food did not cheer them and when they rose and went on
-again they did not talk.  And now a worse difficulty than any they had
-yet encountered suddenly barred the way.  The winding tunnel along which
-they were walking turned sharp round a corner, and then ended to all
-appearance in nothing.  They stood at the edge of an empty gulf, black
-as a starless sky and of depth unknowable.  Thin trickles of light. from
-the candles wavered faintly about its edges, and showed that the
-colossal crack had a farther side, but it was impossible to see what lay
-beyond, and the depth below cast back the candle rays as an armoured
-hull throws off a rifle bullet.
-
-Pita detached a lump of rock and threw it over the edge.  Vaiti watched
-him with sombre eyes.  "There is no bottom there," she said.  "It goes
-through the earth, and out on the other side; that is what I think."
-
-"Children's talk," said Pita, listening intently. There was an echoing
-rattle as the stone bounded from side to side on its way down.  The
-rattle grew fainter and fainter, diminished to a sound like the ticking
-of a watch, faded to an almost imperceptible vibration, and then seemed
-to die out.  Seemed--for although there was nothing left for the ear to
-catch, the sharpened sensory nerves of the body still responded to a
-faint tingle, somewhere, somehow, long after the actual sound had faded
-away.
-
-"I told you," said Vaiti.  "There is no bottom."  Pita did not answer;
-he was measuring the narrowest part of the gulf with his eye, and
-estimating the value of the three short steps of a run that were
-possible before taking off.
-
-"It is not two fathoms wide here," he said, throwing the provision sack
-across to judge his distance better in the uncertain light.  Yet,
-despite the three steps of a run, there was not an inch to spare when he
-landed on the other side, with an effort that strained every muscle of
-his powerful young body.
-
-"Can you jump it?" he called to Vaiti--without any particular anxiety,
-for the Maori has no nerves, and he knew what the girl could do aloft on
-the schooner.
-
-To his astonishment, Vaiti made no answer, but stood leaning up against
-the wall of the tunnel, both hands pressed against her chest.  In a
-moment more she was violently sick.
-
-"The smell!" she said presently, turning a ghastly face towards the
-light of Pita's candle.
-
-"I smell nothing," said Pita, puzzled.  "The wind blows your way.  There
-is perhaps some dead thing down there."
-
-Vaiti shook her head, and Pita saw that her eyes seemed to fill half her
-face as she looked down into the gulf.  Suddenly she sprang, her white
-drapery flying behind her, and landed half a yard behind Pita, with a
-leap that drew a cry of wonder from the Atiuan. "Come, come," she said,
-taking his hand and fairly dragging him on.
-
-They had little farther to go.  The tunnel wound on for perhaps another
-hundred yards, and then stopped. They found themselves in a low-roofed
-circular chamber, such as is often met with at the end of long
-underground passages--a small, insignificant place, roofed with drooping
-green stalactites and floored with shapeless, slimy hummocks of
-stalagmite.  Numbers of deep shelves were quarried out in the rocky
-sides, and in these lay, row on row, the bare, mouldering skulls of
-Falaite's long-ago chiefs--many of them cracked and split, and not a few
-fallen into shapeless fragments, though there were a score or two in
-excellent condition. They were curious skulls indeed, had their
-discoverers been able to understand them.  In the projecting jaws, huge
-canines, strangely high cranium, and oddly developed ridges near the
-opening of the ear were the materials of a problem contradictory and
-complicated enough to occupy the wits of a whole college of science. But
-Vaiti and Pita saw none of these things.  They only noted with
-disappointment, that most of the skulls had gone to decay--picked out
-the best of the unbroken specimens, packed the great sack full of them,
-and turned homewards.
-
-"Vaiti," said Pita, as they walked down the rocky tunnel, and felt the
-slope of the gulf beginning under their feet.  "Vaiti, what did you----"
-
-Her face, turned back upon him, slew the still-born question on his
-lips.
-
-It was scarce a minute before the chasm gaped in their path yet again.
-The leap was worse on this side, for the clustered cones of stalagmite
-did not allow a fair take-off.  Pita looked calculatingly at the farther
-side, very dimly visible in the faint candle-light, and picked up a
-fallen stalactite to throw across.
-
-"Do not throw!" said Vaiti, in a breathless whisper.
-
-"Why not?  I can jump better if I hear where it hits," replied Pita,
-casting the stone before Vaiti had time to snatch at his hand.  It fell
-short, and rolled down into the chasm with a loud, crashing noise.
-
-"Fool! fool!  Jump quickly!" exclaimed Vaiti, in the same strained,
-horrible whisper....  Just for a second before he sprang, Pita looked
-down into the black pit beneath, and it seemed to him that the darkness
-shirred and shivered below the farther edge of the crevasse--that for
-the fragment of a second something long, red, whiplike, vibrated high up
-in the light of the candles, and then was gone....  There was a
-sickening odour in the air--a living smell, not a dead one; there was a
-sliding, rustling sound....
-
-"Jump!" shrieked Vaiti.
-
-They leaped through the air as one, but it was only Vaiti who landed on
-the farther side.  Behind her, as she touched the rock, rose a shriek
-that blasted the leaden air into red-hot drops of horror--that went on
-and on and on, tearing upwards to the vaulted roof like a rocket fired
-from the mouth of hell; breaking at last into a gasping bellow, and
-snapping off into grisly silence on the very crest of a long, choking
-roar, in which there was nothing left of human.
-
-... Pita had jumped short.  Falling on the far side, with his legs half
-over the abyss, he had grasped for an instant at Vaiti's outstretched
-hands, and in the very act had been snatched away--snatched by a long,
-ghastly head, armed with poisoned jaws and quivering red antennas, that
-shot with the speed of a bullet out from the depths of the chasm, and
-back again with its prey....  The head was a foot long at least, the
-horrible winnowing feelers more than a yard, the black and red body,
-that just flashed into view for a second, was as thick as a man's thigh.
-It was a nightmare, an impossibility, and yet ... it was, beyond doubt,
-the Black Viri.
-
-For a little while it seemed to Vaiti that she went mad, and then that
-the world went out and she died. A long time after, she found  herself
-sitting on  the floor of the tunnel, her head badly bruised and cut
-where she had dashed it against the rock, her candle guttering down
-towards extinction, her revolver empty and smelling of powder--she did
-not remember in the least how it had become so--and the whole black,
-horrible place still and silent as the bottom of the sea. Pita was gone.
-The bag of skulls had disappeared--fallen, no doubt, into the abyss.
-There was not a movement or a sound, save the whisper of the
-water--drops trickling ceaselessly from the roof into the dark pools
-upon the ground.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-That evening, when the early starlight was beginning to shine down upon
-the creepers veiling the mouth of the tunnel, Saxon, sober at last, and
-rushing like a madman to the cave to find his daughter, met Vaiti
-herself coming down the rocks at the entrance, haggard, trembling, and
-almost old.  He asked for Pita, and was answered only by a shuddering
-gesture of the hands. Questioning no more, he carried the girl down to
-the beach and brought her on board the schooner.  There, when they had
-sailed, he left her undisturbed in her cabin for many days, while they
-ran steadily southward to pleasant Auckland and the temperate latitudes,
-farther and farther away from lonely, sun-smitten Falaite.  The story of
-the day in the cave was known to him, as to every one on the island, for
-the witch-doctor of Falaite had told it far and wide, reserving only the
-one interesting fact--how he became possessed of the information.  And
-as no one else alive on Falaite knew that there were two ways of
-reaching the skull-chamber, and more than one place where a man could
-hide unseen, the witch-doctor's reputation as a prophet and a
-clairvoyant was greatly increased; so that he suffered continually from
-a happily-acquired indigestion, and his dogs grew fat on bones of pig
-and fowl.  And no one came ever any more into the sacred caves of
-Falaite Island.
-
-Saxon declared plumply that he did not believe the tale, opining rather
-that the "blanked old wizard Johnnie had shoved Pita into the hole
-himself, and good riddance of bad rubbish, too."
-
-None the less, he was uneasy at Vaiti's rather prolonged depression, and
-though he dared not break in upon her solitude further than to hand her
-in her meals and ask her how she felt, now and then, he listened almost
-constantly at her state-room door, and gave up whisky for at least ten
-days.
-
-About the eleventh day, Te Ai, a young Samoan A.B., sat upon the main
-hatch in the pleasant coolness of the second dog-watch, and sang the
-farewell song of sweet Samoa, "Good-bye, my F'lennie"--the song that
-plucks so surely at the heartstrings of all who have ever loved and
-sailed away among the far-off fairy islands of the wide South Seas.
-
-    "Good-bye, my F'lennie (friend)--o le a o tea,
-    Efau lau le va'a, o le alii pule i ..."
-
-he sang, beating time with his knees on the hatch.... Then suddenly he
-stopped, and the little group of mates and captain on the poop did not
-see why.
-
-Later on, Harris, his face stiff with suppressed laughter, knocked at
-the captain's door.
-
-"Can you oblige me with a piece of sticking-plaster, sir?" he said.
-
-"Who for?" asked Saxon, reaching for the yellow roll that lies handy in
-every shipmaster's cabin about the peaceful Pacific.
-
-"Te Ai, sir.  He's been knocked down, and his head got cut against the
-pump."
-
-"Who did it?" bristled Saxon, ready to uphold his own peculiar
-privileges, at once.
-
-"She did, sir," said Harris, nearly choking.  "Te Ai, he was singin'
-'Good-bye, my F'lennie,' on the main 'atch and out she come from the
-deck cabin like a--like a nurricane, begging your pardon, sir--and she
-ups with a belayin' pin from the rail, an----"
-
-"All right, all right; there's your plaster," interrupted Saxon.
-"Harris!  Here."
-
-"Yes, sir!"
-
-"Give this to Te Ai."
-
-"Lor' bless you, sir, 'e don't mind; 'e's a----"
-
-"You do what you're told.  Stop.  Where's my daughter?"
-
-"Walkin' on the poop, sir, uncommon lively, and looking like dirty
-weather ahead."
-
-"That's all right," sighed the captain, with an air of infinite relief.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER V*
-
-                            *A DIAMOND WEB*
-
-
-It was six o'clock in Apia, and the round sun was hanging low above the
-rim of the level sea, like a burning coal ready to drop down upon a
-breadth of hyacinth silk.  The stores were closed along the straggling
-beach street, where the sand was white under foot, and parrakeets
-tweedled cheerily in the scarlet-flowered flamboyant trees.  Native
-dandies, greatly oiled and dyed, and wearing a bright hibiscus blossom
-over each ear, swung past with the inimitable Samoan roll, their golden
-brown limbs gay with the red-and-white English bath-towel that is
-popular as full dress for steamer days in the little island capital.
-Girls with high-coiffed yellow heads and pink or green tunics wandered
-lazily home to the cool, dark-domed native houses open all round to the
-sunset sky.  They went in groups, and sang as they walked--windy, fitful
-gusts of strange island melody, breaking out and dying away like the
-evening breeze among the heavy-headed palms.  Smells of yam and
-breadfruit, brown from the baking pits, of fish cooked in green, savoury
-leaves, and taro spinach stewed with cocoanut cream, crept out upon the
-cooling air.  The long, hot day was done, and Apia rested and ate.
-
-In "Charley's"--the least reputable of Apia's tavern-hotels--the
-egregious _table d'hote_ was in full progress out in the green-shuttered
-verandah.  Charley himself, an oily, flashy New Caledonian half-caste,
-dressed in striped pyjamas, was eating curried tin--nature unknown--with
-a knife and two fingers, at the head of the table.  A corpse-faced
-Chinese was shuffling round with the inevitable Pacific fowl, cut up in
-a watery soup.  The table-cloth was of linoleum, the swinging lamp
-guttered and smoked, the cutlery was dislocated and black.  But there
-was English beer on the bar counter, and plenty of broken ice; and the
-whisky that mounted high in each man's smeary tumbler was good of its
-kind.  Charley knew his customers, and sought first the essential.
-
-Captain Saxon, his schooner safe at anchor outside, and his copra
-advantageously sold to an Auckland agent, sat eating at the table,
-heavy-faced, a little intoxicated, and almost absolutely blank in mind.
-This was his nearest approach to happiness, and one that he enjoyed
-often enough, for, since thought meant pain to him, he had managed to
-acquire a wonderful agility in avoiding it, and to live for the most
-part almost as purely by instinct and impulse as a dog.
-
-It was perhaps for this reason that he did not notice anything unusual
-in the demeanour of that singularly unknown quantity, Vaiti, his
-daughter.  And yet Vaiti--sombre and sparkling in a dress of vaporous
-red, with a handful of star stephanotis from the verandah thrust into
-the marvellous waves of her hair--was evidently not quite herself.  She
-sat a little apart from the noisy company that sprawled about the table,
-looked at no one, ate her food absent-mindedly and pulled little strips
-off the decaying oilcloth of the table-cover with a steady industry that
-made Charley wriggle in his seat, although he did not dare to
-remonstrate.
-
-Some one else was watching her, if Saxon was not. A short, stocky man,
-with burning grey eyes, a fiery red beard, and a sharp furrow between
-the eyebrows, that somehow suggested belaying-pins and rope's ends, was
-looking at her every now and then as he noisily sucked in his soup.  The
-inspection did not appear to please him altogether.  He finished his
-dinner quickly, took the current glass of whisky in his hand, and rolled
-off to the dark end of the verandah, followed by a grey-haired,
-greasy-faced mate who had been sitting beside him.
-
-"Still on for it, cap?" asked the latter, leaning over the railing with
-an air of careless ease that contrasted oddly with his watchful eye.
-
-"Yes, blank asterisk your condemned foolishness, sure I am on for it!"
-replied the captain, betraying his nationality by a slight touch of
-brogue.
-
-There is no nation that swings so high and so low between opposite
-extremes of character as the impetuous race that is handcuffed, by an
-odd freak of geography, to steady, serious England.  Great saints and
-great rogues are commoner in Ireland than ordinary people, and each
-displays the fullest flavour of his kind. Donahue, master of the island
-schooner _Ikurangi_, was, or had been, Irish; and it was assuredly not
-the company of the saints that claimed his membership.
-
-The two spoke together for a little while in level tones that sounded
-loud and careless enough, yet somehow did not carry.  One learns these
-things by practice.
-
-"She smells a rat, I'm thinking," said the old mate, looking critically
-the while at Charley, as if he were valuing the half-caste's clothes for
-pawn.
-
-"Let her.  You and I are apt to be a match for her, for all that,"
-answered the captain.  He looked at Charley also.  You would have sworn
-the two were discussing him, and rather unfavourably.  Charley himself
-shifted in his seat, and showed his magnificent teeth uncomfortably.
-
-"Think she'll come on board?"
-
-Vaiti was watching them, her chin on her hand. Her expression was not to
-be read.
-
-"I'll get her on board all right," answered the captain, keeping his
-eyes away from the girl with an effort.  "You play up, that's all."
-
-"'Jer think you're a match for that weasel in a woman's skin--you or any
-of us?"
-
-"I do, then.  Forty's a match for twenty any day in the year, if the
-heads of them comes anything near equal.  Cunnin' as Old Nick she is,
-but I've been cunnin' twenty years longer than her."
-
-"You pitched her a good yarn, I'll lay."
-
-"I did that--about the derelick we boarded nor'-east of the Paumotus,
-and the Spanish ladies' clothes and cases of goods that was lying about,
-and how we took what there was, includin' of a di'mond necklashe that
-was sittin' all its lone on the table in the old man's cabin (Be minding
-me, now, or you'll be making mistakes), and the way a gale riz on us
-before we was through, and hurried us back to the _Ikurangi_, so that we
-lost the derelick, and didn't see no more of her; and how we heard in
-Noumea afterwards that there was like to be joolery on boord her, so
-that we're all on to go and find her again."
-
-"Straight fact up to finding the di'monds, and gory lyin' after that, I
-see.  But how d'ye make out the people that deserted the ship was such
-fat-headed idiots as to leave the joolery?"
-
-"Why, they was fat-headed idiots right enough; they did leave a good lot
-of saleable stuff, as you and I knows; and it's only addin' on a bit to
-say that the ship had been on fire and made them clear for their lives,
-so that they didn't think of the valuables.  There's the necklashe I
-have for proof.  And, mind me now, what we heard was that the people of
-the ship knows now that she didn't go down, and will be out after her
-themselves when they can raise the cash, so that hurry's the word."
-
-"How much of that's true?"
-
-"Not a ---- bit.  The people was drowned, I allow. But it hangs well,
-and don't you go and forget none of it.  I pitched the yarn that way
-because of that bit of pashtry joolery I got hould of in mistake for
-goods down Melbourne way....  I misremember if I tould you."
-
-"You did, more nor once, and you was jolly well served right by her,"
-candidly replied the mate. "The yarn's all right, I suppose, and the
-paste necklace is good business; but where does this Vaiti come in?"
-
-"Quit lookin' at her, ye ---- fool, and give me a light for me poipe.
-Talk easy, can't you....  Why, she knows more navigation than most men
-that's got a master's ticket, and she's as vain of it as a paycock. And
-that's how I'll have her.  Always get a woman t'rough her consate, me
-boy, especially if her eyes are too sharp in common.  That'll pull the
-wool over them when nothing else will."
-
-"When I was in Callao----" began the mate, with an evil chuckle.
-
-"Leave Callao be now; you can tell me about her another time.  Well, you
-understand about Saxon's girl, I hope?  She's to navigate us on the
-trip, because nayther you nor I knows enough for a cruisin' job like
-this, and the old chap himself is pretty general drunk--that's the way I
-put it--and shares with what we find, and the ould divil himself to come
-along, just for propriety, and in case of a fight with the owners.  Oh,
-a nate yarn, and she shwallowed it down like a cat atin' butter.  She's
-comin' on boord to-night, to see the necklashe and look over the chart
-I've marked. She'll not bring ould Saxon, for she's feared of nayther
-man nor divil, and I'll bet she thinks to get the bearin's of the place
-off of me and chate me out of it after all."
-
-"And how the h---- do you think she's going to believe that you give the
-show away before the ship sails?  Her teeth wasn't cut yesterday, by all
-we know."
-
-"Faith, and we do know!" muttered the captain, with a horrible
-undercurrent of oaths.  "And she'll know, by ---- she will!  I'd slit
-the throat of her, if it wasn't for the other bit of divarsion we've
-planned."
-
-"Say you've planned," interrupted the mate darkly. "I call it bad work,
-whether she was man, woman, or child; but you're my master."
-
-"And you're a plashter saint, ain't you?" sneered the captain.  "Let's
-have no more of your chat; we know each other a ---- sight too well.  As
-for the chart, she'll think we don't mean to give it away till she and
-her father is under sail with us, but she'll come on the chance of
-sneaking it out somehow.  And when we've got her aboard, why--lave it to
-me!  Ould Saxon's hell-cat daughter won't take no more pearl-shell beds
-from us or any one else."
-
-"You ain't afraid of her knowing who we are?"
-
-"How would she, then?  The _Ikurangi_ isn't the _Margaret
-Macintyre_--bad luck to her who brought me down to such a tub, after
-ownin' the finest auxiliary in Auckland!--and she never seen you or me
-till to-day. No, it's all right.  That's enough jaw; you go aboard, and
-attend to you know what, and then send off the boat for her and me."
-
-Vaiti, curly classic head on slender hand, still watched from her
-corner.
-
-Did she suspect?  There was nothing for suspicion to lay hold of.
-Donahue was one of the acutest villains under the Southern Cross, and he
-did not make clumsy mistakes.  The story of the derelict, of the
-valuables abandoned on board, of the necessity for finding the ship soon
-and secretly, might have sounded far-fetched to city-dwelling folk, but
-out in the wild South Seas stranger things may happen any day.  The plan
-was neat and plausible from every point of view, and Vaiti had taken the
-bait readily enough that afternoon. Yet Donahue felt--as the two walked
-silently down the dim, perfumed beach street, all ablow with vagrant sea
-winds and wandering wafts of song--that he would have given a good deal
-for just one peep into his handsome companion's mind.
-
-Vaiti walked beside him, looking straight ahead. Had Donahue's wish been
-granted, he would have thought somewhat less of his own acuteness.  She
-did suspect.  A man, in her case, would have been convinced by the
-reasonable aspect of the whole affair. Vaiti, being a woman, with
-sea-anemone tentacles of instinct floating and tingling all about the
-steady centres of reason in her mind, was convinced, and vet not
-convinced.  She thought it was all right, yet she knew it was not--after
-a woman's way.
-
-In any case, however, it was an adventure, and there was a mystery to
-fathom.  So she put on a more substantial dress than the gauzy draperies
-she had been wearing, hung the neatest possible little pearl-handled
-Smith and Wesson round her neck, under the swelling folds of her frock,
-by means of an innocent-looking thin gold neck-chain that would snap
-with a tug; put her long-bladed knife in her pocket, with the sheath
-sewn to the dress, so that a pull would bring out the blade, and joined
-Donahue an hour after dinner, on the verandah steps, confident of her
-ability to see the thing through, whatever it might be.
-
-She looked sharply about her, as she stepped over the low bulwarks of
-the _Ikurangi_ and dropped down on to the encumbered, untidy deck.  No
-one about. Nothing to be seen but a dirty little main deck, with rusty
-pumps and a yawning hatch, and a poop that even in the pallid light just
-beginning to tremble up from the rising moon showed neglect of the
-sacred ceremony of daily deck-washing.
-
-Now, any decent ship's captain will attend to his deck-washing, even if
-he doesn't shave or wash himself from port to port.  Vaiti did not like
-that unscrupulous, dirty poop.  But she was already up on it, and
-Donahue was bowing her down the cabin companion, with a jarring smile
-and a good deal of over-fluent blarney.  The cabin was small and smelly;
-it had an oblong table in the middle, surrounded by cushioned lockers,
-and an open door at the end facing the companion.  This door evidently
-opened into Donahue's own cabin, for a rough wash-stand and a
-looking-glass, the latter hung high on the bulkhead, were plainly
-visible.  There was a lamp nailed above the glass, and the two together
-shone brightly out into the rather ill-lit main cabin.
-
-"What'll you take?" asked Donahue, with his unpleasant smile.  "I've got
-some sweet sherry wine, just the thing for ladies--or wouldn't ye put
-your lips to a taste of peach brandy?"
-
-Vaiti shook her head.
-
-"No good drink, suppose talk business," she said. She would not have
-swallowed a glass of water on the _Ikurangi_ for a dozen Virot hats.
-
-Donahue had not expected to catch her so easily; still, he cast a
-thought of regret to his nicely-doctored liquors.  She evidently meant
-what she said--and the other way Was harder.
-
-"Well, thin, darlin', we'll have a look at the cha-art," he observed,
-producing a roll of paper.  "It's yourself that can help us t'rough this
-business--you and the ould man--better than any one from Calloa to
-Sydney if only yez are raisonable about terms."
-
-He spread the chart out on the table, and weighted it down with a couple
-of tumblers.
-
-Vaiti, her mind charged full with watchful suspicion, felt that sudden
-small, sick thrill that is the forerunner of the thought--"I wish I
-hadn't!"  Afterwards, when she came to think matters over, she knew that
-it was because Donahue had made the mistake of bringing out the chart
-before the terms had been discussed, which was an improbable sort of
-thing to do.  In such moments, however, one does not think, one only
-feels.  Still, the warning was unmistakable, and Vaiti made as if to
-rise, intending to plead sudden illness and get out on deck.  But
-Donahue, sharp as a snake, saw the movement, and brought out his trump
-card at once.
-
-"Sure, I'm a ---- fool, I am, to forget the necklashe! You haven't seen
-that yet," he said, whipping a stream of white fire out of his pocket
-and letting it fall across the dark wood of the table.  It was a
-magnificent piece of paste-work, and had taken in Donahue himself, some
-few weeks ago, after a fashion that made him sore enough to remember.
-Vaiti gasped when she saw it, and laid both her pretty olive hands upon
-it at once. Her suspicions were not exactly killed, but they had for the
-moment no room to live with the passionate feeling aroused by the gems.
-Donahue, with his unspeakable experience of the sex, had calculated
-rightly when he classified her among the women who would almost do
-murder for a diamond....  Such jewels! and she had never had one in her
-hand before, though her eyes had often filled and her heart ached with
-hopeless desire before the maddening glories of the jewellers' windows
-in Auckland and Sydney.
-
-She hugged the necklace to her breast like a baby, she shook it, she
-danced it in the light....  And then, was it in woman's nature to
-refrain from snapping the clasp about her neck, and feeling the dear
-touch of those cold drops and pendants on her bosom?
-
-"Ah, now, but you're the beauty wit' them little jokers round your neck!
-And the lovely neck you have, darlin'!" blarneyed Donahue.  He had
-better have been silent, for Vaiti, used to admiration of every kind and
-degree as to daily bread, felt the falseness of the tone.  If all other
-men admired her beauty, this one did not, though he said so.  His grey,
-goat-like eyes looked something more like hate across the narrow table,
-under the ill-smelling oily lamp, and Vaiti saw they did.
-
-Donahue, taught by twenty years of active villainy, was quick to feel
-the necessity for the next move. He went into his own cabin and turned
-up the lamp.  The looking-glass shone out brightly under its rays.
-
-"Come and look at yourself, me beauty," he said; "and let me ould
-shavin'-glass see the handsomest girl in the islands wearin' what she
-ought to wear every day of her life, if she'd her rights."
-
-For the moment, Vaiti was not herself.  She was drunk with the jewels;
-she was crazed with the desire to see herself in them.  If heaven and
-hell had stood between her and the looking-glass, she was bound to go to
-it, and Donahue knew it, as surely as he knew that the moon would set
-that night.
-
-Vaiti--still sensing the danger that she would not heed, through all the
-intoxication of the jewels--thought, in a cinematographic flash, that
-one was safe before a glass, at all events....  No one could come up
-behind you....  Besides, there was the little revolver, hanging on the
-chain that would snap with a tug....
-
-And then, for the space of a full minute, she saw nothing, knew nothing,
-lived for nothing but the sight of her own dark, beautiful face in the
-glass, lit up into surpassing loveliness by the scintillating fires
-about her neck.  There was no movement in the mirror behind her.
-Donahue sat motionless at the table, and the cabin was very still.
-
-... The first ecstasy subsided, and she turned her head a little to see
-the diamonds twinkle....
-
-Donahue's elbow knocked a glass off the table with a sharp crash.
-Almost at the same instant two powerful hands closed on each of Vaiti's
-ankles, and snatched her feet from under her.  She plucked out the
-revolver as she fell, but her hands were caught, whisked behind her, and
-securely tied, with a prompt swiftness that told of frequent experience.
-In another minute her ankles were lashed together, none too gently; she
-was carried into a small state-room, thrown down upon the bunk, and left
-alone in the dark, with the slam of the door and snap of the lock
-resounding in her ears.
-
-Most women would have screamed.  Vaiti remembered that they were out in
-the middle of a wide harbour, and decided not to risk the infliction of
-a gag for such a slight chance of rescue....  Certain ugly scenes on the
-_Sybil_ rose up before her eyes.  No; decidedly it was her only policy
-to keep quiet.
-
-Outside there was the thud of bare feet running about the deck, the
-creak of the booms rising on the masts, the slatting of loose
-sails--loud orders, long yells from the native crew, as they pulled and
-hauled.  The _Ikurangi_ was making sail.
-
-Then sudden silence, slow heeling over of the cabin, lip-lap of hurrying
-water along the hull.  They were off. Where?  God--or the devil--only
-knew!
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER VI*
-
-                               *MAROONED*
-
-
-There was plenty of time for reflection in the long days that followed.
-The greasy-faced old mate came in and cut the lashings off Vaiti's
-ankles and wrists, a few hours after sailing, and she was left free to
-move about the cabin, which offered a promenade of exactly seven feet by
-three.  Meals were handed in to her three times daily--the usual black
-tea, tinned meat, and weevily biscuit of second-class island
-schooners--and she was not in any way molested, though the door was
-always kept locked.  Donahue put in his head once or twice to look at
-her, as she sat cross-legged on her bunk, staring out through the port
-at the tumbling seas. He generally had something to say--a jarring,
-mocking compliment, or a remark about the time they were likely to make
-Sydney Heads--knowing all the time that Vaiti could estimate the general
-direction of their course by the sun, and that there was no southing in
-it. If she had ever feared any one, she feared this man--almost.
-
-It was not difficult to understand how the capture had been brought
-about.  A man under the bunk, another under the sofa opposite--her own
-eyes watching only the upper part of the cabin as reflected in the
-glass--nothing could be simpler or better planned.  The affair was none
-the less ugly on that account.  Perhaps it was only Vaiti's burning
-anger at her utter rout and defeat in her own business of plotting and
-intrigue that saved her from something very like despair, as the
-schooner ploughed steadily on, day after day, carrying her into the
-great unknown, farther and farther away from all who could defend her.
-Yet, despairing or not, Saxon's daughter never lost her courage.  They
-had taken her weapons from her as they carried her into the cabin, but
-they could not take away her undaunted spirit.  She waited her time.
-
-As to the meaning of the business, she trusted, again, to time's
-enlightenment.  Saxon had many enemies; so had she.  It would all come
-out by-and-by. Meantime, it was clear that no one meant to murder her.
-What else might be meant she could not tell, and she did not care to
-speculate overmuch.  Under such circumstances one does best to save
-one's nerve against the time it may be wanted.
-
-It was on the twenty-third day out from Apia, bearing, as far as she
-could discover, in a north-westerly direction, that she first noted the
-approach of land.  Nothing could be seen from her side of the ship, but
-she heard the long, excited cries of the island crew, and the thundering
-of their feet, as they began putting the ship about with unwonted
-vigour, to a chorus of native songs.  She strained her eyes eagerly when
-the ship came about on the other tack, but the line of the horizon was
-unbroken; and it was not for another hour that she saw, from her low
-elevation, what the look-out in the crow's nest had sighted long
-before--a line of small black bristles pricking the edge of the horizon
-several miles away.
-
-Vaiti knew the sight at once for the palms of a low atoll
-island--evidently some barren, sun-smitten spot close up to the
-line--and a ready solution of the whole puzzling affair at once sprang
-into her mind.
-
-Marooning!
-
-Most people know the meaning of this term; nearly every one has heard of
-sailors captured by pirates in old days, and left on lonely islands, or
-even deserted by their own comrades on some isolated spot, with just
-enough food and water to save the marooners' consciences from the guilt
-of actual murder.  Vaiti knew both the word and the thing very
-well-indeed, and she was almost certain that the _Ikurangi_ had gone off
-the course on the way to some South American port with the view of
-hiding her where she would not easily be found again.  There are many
-islands in the wastes of the vast Pacific where a ship may not pass once
-in half a century, and these--unlike the typical "desert" island of
-stories--are almost always barren, hungry, shadeless spots, where Crusoe
-himself would have been hard put to it to make a decent living.  The
-fertile, mountainous, well-watered isle is never without a native
-population, permanent or occasional, and is very seldom indeed, in these
-days, without a trader as well, and a regularly calling schooner.  As
-for the breadfruit, oranges, pineapples, the pigs and goats, the
-sugarcane and maize of uninhabited islands as known to fiction, they
-have no counterpart in real life.  All the valuable food plants and all
-useful animals are the product of importation and cultivation, ancient
-or modern.  It follows, that where there are no people and no ships,
-there is nothing worth having.
-
-Vaiti knew this very well, and decided that if she was going to be
-marooned, she might as well make such provision as circumstances
-allowed.  She had hunted over every inch of the cabin--which seemed to
-belong to the mate--during the long days of the voyage, and she knew
-exactly what it contained.  From the stores put away under the bunk she
-selected a large new sheet, which she concealed under her dress; a small
-stock of needles and thread, a box or two of matches, some hooks and
-line, and a stick of dynamite, evidently meant for some forgotten
-fishing purpose.  There was nothing in the shape of a knife, much to her
-regret; and there was a good deal of clothing that she would have liked
-to carry away; but it would not do to take more than she could easily
-conceal.  So she made an end of her preparations, and sat down to wait
-once more.
-
-There was no moon that night until very late, and darkness came down so
-close on the stroke of four bells that Vaiti felt sure they were very
-near the equator.  No one came near her, and tea seemed to be unusually
-late.  The anchor-chain roared home soon after dark, the ship lay very
-still, and there was a good deal of running about on deck.  Vaiti was
-confirmed in her anticipations of an uninhabited island by the fact that
-no boat was to be heard coming off from shore.  Not a sound of any kind,
-indeed, came from the island, and there were no lights on the beach.
-Some one handed her in her tea by-and-by, and a little later her door
-was flung open again by the mate.
-
-"Come on out," he said.
-
-Vaiti followed the mate out of the cabin at once, rather to his
-surprise.  She had made up her mind that anything was better than the
-_Ikurangi_, and she was looking out sharply for a chance--any chance--of
-turning the tables.
-
-It did not look at first as if she were to have one. The dinghy had been
-swung out when she got on deck, and a couple of men were standing ready
-to lower away. They were islanders, and she knew that they would
-befriend her if they could--indeed, their glances showed as much--yet
-what could they do?
-
-Donahue was nowhere visible.  He had planned this business with some
-forethought, and he wanted to have a chance of casting blame on his
-subordinate if any inquisitive Government official should incline to
-look the matter up later on.  So he stayed down in his own cabin,
-pretending to be asleep, and the mate, rather against his will, had to
-carry out orders alone.
-
-Just as the boat was ready to lower away, one of the men let her go with
-a run, and she struck the water stern first, with a terrible splash.
-The mate, screaming curses, ran over to the falls and began to abuse the
-crew. The dinghy was injured, and they had to haul her up and swing out
-the whaleboat instead.
-
-This took some little time, and Vaiti was forgotten for the moment--a
-chance that made her heart beat with eagerness to profit by it.
-
-Two ideas held possession of her--that she must plan to secure a boat,
-and that she must manage to do the _Ikurangi_ some sort of mischief.
-Was it to be borne that Donahue should go unpaid?  The blood of a
-hundred fierce Island chiefs made answer.
-
-Concerning the boat, she thought she saw a chance. They were bound to
-stay a day for wood and water, and that should furnish an opportunity.
-But the other matter?
-
-If she could only get hold of the ship's papers and destroy them!  That
-would be satisfactory.  She knew, none better, that a ship's papers are
-her character, her "marriage-lines" of respectability.  Without them a
-vessel is an illegitimate, furtive creature, every man's hand against
-her, every official eye turned coldly upon her.  Vaiti would have liked
-very well to get hold of the _Ikurangi's_.
-
-But, careless as Donahue was, the papers were not to be found in the
-little deck cabin which he used as a chart-room.  Vaiti, disappointed,
-took one of the charts and began studying the position of the ship, with
-a view to finding out the name of the island off which they were lying.
-The chart was almost a blank, nothing being marked upon its wide expanse
-but a number of reefs and two or three atolls--Bilboa Island, Vaka,
-Ngamaru--dotted hundreds of miles apart in a naked waste of white.
-Bilboa, an abandoned guano island, of which she had heard something,
-seemed to Vaiti the most likely of the three spots.  Ngamaru, she knew,
-had a native population, and about Vaka she could for the moment
-remember nothing, although she knew she had heard something once upon a
-time. All this part of the Pacific was far removed from the _Sybil's_
-haunts, and indeed from the haunts of any other ship of which Vaiti had
-ever heard.
-
-It did not seem to be a healthy place for schooners; the reefs round
-both Vaka and Bilboa were many, and most were marked "Position
-doubtful."  Donahue was evidently not familiar with either place, for
-the chart was freshly pencilled over with notes and corrections.
-Vaiti's heart leaped up as she looked at the careless work....  She saw
-a way.
-
-They were still clearing the lumber out of the whaleboat on deck.  No
-one was watching.
-
-Vaiti took a pencil and rubber, and began to do some artistic
-alterations on the chart, helped by her knowledge of seamanship.  In ten
-minutes she had converted the innocent piece of parchment into a perfect
-death-trap, rolled it up and replaced it, put back the rubber and
-pencil, and slipped out again on deck, where she sat down on a coil of
-rope and waited.
-
-In another couple of minutes the boat was in the water, and the mate
-called rudely to Vaiti.  She came without a word, covering her face with
-her dress, and sobbing bitterly.  She stumbled as she walked; you would
-have sworn she was weak, broken in spirit, and utterly helpless.
-
-If the mate felt any compassion, he did not dare to show it.  They
-shoved off, two natives at the oars. Vaiti, sobbing effectively behind
-her hands, kept a sharp look-out with the corner of one eye as they slid
-across the dark water, but she could see nothing save a faintly
-glimmering line of grey shore, and hear nothing but the humming of the
-surf on the reef.
-
-As soon as they reached the shallow water near the shore, the mate took
-Vaiti by her arm and roared, "Out you go!"
-
-Sobbing afresh, in the most natural and convincing manner in the world,
-she obeyed....  It was dark, and the native who rowed bow oar never knew
-that she whipped his knife dexterously out of his belt as she passed
-him.
-
-"Why are you marooning me?" she wailed, as she waded through the warm,
-shallow water towards the shore.
-
-The mate leaned out of the boat, now fading fast away into the starry
-gloom, and shouted as he disappeared:
-
-"To pay for Delgadas Reef and the _Margaret Macintyre_!"
-
-Vaiti, who had reached the shore, almost sat down with the shock.  So
-that was it! that was it! The pearl-shell lagoon out of which she,
-almost unaided, had "jockeyed" the schooner _Margaret Macintyre_, some
-months before, was bringing in a crop other than pearls--of which last,
-indeed, the canny Scot who had financed the working of the place had had
-very much the larger share.
-
-Well, things must be taken as they were found.  The soft tropic night
-stirred gently round her.  The stars were large and golden; they shone
-in the still lagoon like little moons.  Palm trees waved somewhere up in
-the dusk above, striking their huge rattling vanes together with the
-swing of the night-breeze.  It was land, safe, solid land, and the sand
-was warm and soft, and Vaiti was tired.  She walked a little way up the
-beach, stretched herself under a pandanus tree, and went to sleep....
-
-Some hours later she woke, with the dim, mysterious volcano-glow of the
-tropic dawn in her eyes, and a curious feeling of disquiet about her
-heart.  Still half asleep, she saw the long grey shore sloping down to
-the silent lagoon, the ink-coloured pandanus trees standing up against
-the dull orange sky, the leaning stems and stumps of coco-palms, dark
-and formless in the shadow.  She shut her eyes and tried to sleep again.
-
-No use.  That nameless disquiet--now almost fear--still stirred at her
-heart.  She opened her eyes once more, and looked about.  A little more
-light--the touch of a glowing finger away in the east--a clearer
-defining of the cocoanut stumps, snapped off near their roots in the
-last great hurricane....  One of the stumps was oddly shaped--almost
-like a human figure.  She could have fancied it was a rude image of a
-sitting man, only that the profile, against the lightening east, was
-featureless, and there was nothing to represent the hands.
-
-"I will not be frightened by a rotten cocoanut tree," thought Vaiti.  "I
-will sleep again till it is light.  Am I not a sea-captain's daughter,
-and the descendant of great Island chiefs, and shall I fear the fancies
-of my own mind?"
-
-Determinedly she closed her eyes again, and lay very still.  The dawn
-wind began to stir; the ripples crisped upon the beach; the locusts in
-the trees broke out into a loud chirr-ing chorus.  And as the day broke
-silver-clear upon the shore, Vaiti, still lying on the sand, felt that
-some one, in the gathering light, was watching her as she lay.
-
-Wary as a fox, she opened her dark, keen eyes without stirring her body
-... and looked straight into a face that was bending almost over her ...
-a face hooded by a black cloth that hid the head and brow, and only left
-to view ... O God!  O God! what was it?
-
-The thing was featureless.  Nose, eyes, and mouth were gone.  In the
-midst of a cavern of unspeakable ruin the ghastly throat gaped vacant.
-Two handless, rotting stumps of arms waved blindly
-about--feeling--feeling....
-
-Could it hear?  Some instinct told the girl that it could.  Softly as a
-snake she writhed out of the reach of those terrible groping arms.
-
-It did hear.  It sprang blindly forward--it snatched.
-
-With one leap Vaiti was on her feet.  Never looking back, she fled down
-the open beach, the sand spurting behind her as she ran.  She heard a
-dull padding in her rear at first; it soon grew faint, but she ran on
-blindly, long after it had died away--ran, while the sun climbed over
-the horizon and cast down handfuls of burning gold on her uncovered
-head--ran, while the beach grew parchment-white and dazzled back the
-heat into her face like an open furnace--ran till at last her
-over-driven body gave way, and the sand spun round and the sky turned
-red before her eyes.  Then only she staggered into the shade and dropped
-down upon a green mattress of convolvulus creeper to rest.
-
-And now, when she had leisure to think and strength to cast off the
-haunting horror of that inhuman face, she knew what Donahue had done.
-
-This was not Bilboa, the uninhabited guano island that she had feared.
-This was infinitely worse--it was Vaka, the leper isle!
-
-She remembered that she had once heard a dim rumour of Vaka and its
-ghastly leper people--the remnant of a plague-smitten tribe long ago
-forcibly exiled there from one of the fierce western groups.  No ships
-ever called at this graveyard of the living; it was supposed that the
-cocoanuts and fish of the island provided sufficient food for the
-people, and no one cared to run the chance of their stowing away and
-escaping, especially as they were known to be both daring and
-treacherous on occasion.  Donahue had indeed laid his plans well for the
-most hideous revenge that the heart of man or devil could conceive.  A
-few weeks or months in this charnel-house of horrors, where the very air
-must reek of contagion, and what would it avail her if, after all, some
-stray, storm-driven vessel should rescue the castaway? Better, then,
-that she should stay and die among the other nameless nightmare horrors
-that walked these stricken shores.
-
-No!  Vaiti, sitting cross-legged on the netted vines and staring grimly
-out to sea, then and there took resolve that such a fate should not be
-hers....  Sharks were uncertain, if you really wanted them; but the
-stick of dynamite she had taken from the mate's cabin was safe and sure.
-If she failed in using it for the special purpose she had planned, she
-would put it in her mouth and light the fuse....  There would be no more
-trouble after that.  And as for the flies--one did not feel them, of
-course, when one was dead.
-
-All the same, she did not mean to die if she could avoid it, and, as the
-first step towards helping herself, she knocked some nuts off a young
-palm, and took her breakfast off the refreshing water and juicy meat.
-Then she cut a length of bush rope, looped it round the tallest palm in
-sight, and set her feet inside the loop, so that she could work herself
-up to the top of the tree, monkey-on-stick fashion, leaning against the
-rope.  When she got into the crown of the palm she knelt among the
-leaves, holding on tightly, and looked right and left over the island.
-
-It was a pure atoll, an irregular circle of feather palms lying on the
-sea like a great green garland set afloat. The inner lagoon was several
-square miles in extent, but the land was not more than a few hundred
-yards wide at any point, and there was no soil to speak of.  The palms,
-the scanty, pale green scrub, the mop-headed pandanus trees, the
-trailing creepers, all sprang out of pure white coral gravel and sand.
-The scene was lovely as only a coral atoll can be--the jewel-green water
-of the inner lagoon, shaded with vivid reflections of lilac and pale
-turquoise, the stately circled palms, the wide, white beach enclasping
-all the island like a frame of purest pearl, the burning blue of the
-surrounding sea, all combined to form a picture bright as fairyland and
-sparkling as an enamelled gem set upon a velvet shield.
-
-But Vaiti, while she saw and admired the loveliness of the scene, also
-recognised its barrenness as only an islander could.  No fruit, no
-roots, little fresh water--nothing, in fact, but cocoanut and pandanus
-kernels, eked out by a little fish....  The lepers must often go hungry.
-
-The hot day turned suddenly chill as Vaiti recalled those blind,
-snatching, handless arms.  They came of a cannibal race, these Vaka
-folk.  What if she had not waked?  What if, wearied as she well might
-be, she slept too long and too soundly in the night that was to come?
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER VII*
-
-                      *THE TURNING OF THE TABLES*
-
-
-She looked narrowly about the island, hoping to discover the place where
-the lepers lived.  A cluster of small, miserable huts, on the far side
-of the lagoon, attracted her attention.  It seemed not more than half a
-mile from the spot where she had spent the night.  The best fishing
-grounds she judged, by the look of the shore, to be near the village.
-She was therefore, no doubt, several miles from their usual haunts.
-
-So far, so good.  Where was the schooner?  It lay to her left about a
-mile out at sea, close to a small, uninhabited, sandy islet.  Vaiti
-supposed that the men were cutting wood and looking for water.  She saw
-one or two black dots on the shore, recognisable by their blue dungaree
-clothing, and strained her eyes eagerly to see if the dinghy had been
-pulled up on the sand, for in this lay her only chance.  If they brought
-the boat up on the beach, to repair her where wood could be had without
-going to the atoll itself (Vaiti would have wagered that the _Ikurangi_
-did not carry a splinter outside of the galley fuel), then the schooner
-would probably stop overnight.  In that case she could carry out her
-plans. Otherwise ... there was always the dynamite.
-
-The dinghy was ashore, drawn well up on the beach.
-
-She drew a breath of relief, and slid down the tree again.  Now she
-could wait till night with an easy mind.
-
-All day she hid in the tangle of young palm and low-growing scrub that
-clustered about the foot of the loftier trees.  Once she saw a couple of
-the lepers pass by in the distance, evidently looking for something.
-These had eyes, and she crept closer into the shelter of the scrub till
-they were gone.  Then she came cautiously out, and plucked long sheets
-of the fine pale-brown natural matting that protects the young shoot of
-the cocoanut, to cover up her white dress, for the scrub was dangerously
-thin, in that staring overhead sun.  She did not venture down to the sea
-to fish, but fed upon cocoanuts during the day.
-
-Night came at last--night and coolness, with big stars shining in the
-lagoon, and a gentle breeze stirring among the palms.  About midnight,
-as near as she could guess, Vaiti came out of her shelter and prepared
-for action.
-
-She took off her clothes, and fastened about her waist a petticoat of
-the dark-coloured cocoanut matting which she had stitched together
-during the day.  So habited, with her olive skin and black hair, she
-knew that she was invisible in the darkness of the night.  She fastened
-the dynamite, and a box of matches, into the coil of hair on the top of
-her head, stuck her knife into the waist of her petticoat, and walked
-down the beach into the warm, dark sea.
-
-She knew very well that the outer side of an atoll commonly swarms with
-sharks, but the risk did not trouble her.  There was something a good
-deal worse to face on the island than any number of sharks.  Heading for
-the distant light of the schooner, she swam through the starry water
-with the low, dog-like island paddle that can cover such marvellous
-distances--keeping her head well out, and quietly taking her time.
-
-It was a long swim, but it ended at last, and the schooner rose up
-before her in the water, black and silent, and shifting ever so little
-upon the swell of the incoming tide.  The stars made little trickles of
-light upon her wet, dark hull.  Two boats lay alongside--the dinghy,
-freshly mended and watertight, and the whaleboat, loaded with wood and
-cocoanuts.  After the slovenly fashion of the _Ikurangi_, they had left
-the boats until the morning to hoist inboard, seeing that it was dead
-calm in the lee of the islet.
-
-This was more than Vaiti had hoped for, and it made her task easy.  She
-cut the dinghy's painter, got into the boat, and muffled the oars with a
-strip or two torn from her petticoat.  Then she put the dynamite into
-the whaleboat, cut and attached a good long fuse, set a match to it, and
-saw that the tiny red spark was steadily eating its way along, before
-she pulled off from the ship. She towed the whaleboat after her a little
-way, and then let it go thirty or forty yards from the ship.  It was not
-her desire to wreck the schooner at Vaka Island, and possibly let loose
-her enemies upon the atoll; rather she wished the ship well out of the
-way before any disaster should overtake her.  The charts would most
-probably ensure that matter.  The destruction of the boat was only
-intended to secure her own possession of the dinghy.
-
-She had scarcely reached the shore before a loud explosion boomed out
-across the water, and immediately after lights began to stir on board
-the schooner.  Vaiti worked with coolness and speed, knowing that it was
-not likely, though possible, that any one would swim ashore.  From her
-eyrie in the coco-palm she had noted a deep, narrow creek running up
-from the lagoon--a mere crack in the coral, but wide enough to admit a
-small boat, taken in with care.  There was just enough light from the
-stars to enable her to find the place, and run the boat up on the sand
-at the end, into the heart of a tangle of leaves and creepers that
-entirely concealed it.  For safety's sake, she cut a few more armfuls of
-trailing vines from the shore, and buried the boat two or three feet
-deep, so that neither from the sea nor the land could it possibly be
-seen.
-
-As she worked, she could hear shouts and cries, made faint by distance,
-coming across the water from the schooner.  She could imagine the scene
-that would take place on board when they found themselves boatless. Some
-of the native crew--not Donahue or the mate; they would never face the
-sharks--would probably swim ashore to-morrow to investigate.  Well, let
-them!
-
-Having finished the concealing of the dinghy, she got into it herself,
-put on her clothes again, drew the tangled creepers well over her, and
-went calmly to sleep, secure that no one could find her unless she chose
-to be found.
-
-All the same, she was very cautious about getting up the next morning,
-and looked carefully between the leaves before she ventured out of her
-hiding-place.  She covered up her light dress with the cocoanut canvas,
-and then climbed a palm to look about.
-
-People were moving hurriedly about the decks of the schooner; something
-seemed to be going on.  As she watched, she saw two natives, clad only
-in loin-cloths, stand up on the bulwarks, ready to dive.  In another
-moment they had flashed down into the sea, small as ants to sight at
-that distance, but perfectly clear to Vaiti's sea-trained eyes.  Then
-the dark specks began to make their way across the water.  The sun was
-newly risen, the sea was still a mirror of molten gold, and the tiny
-black heads stood out sharply on its surface.  Vaiti set her teeth as
-she watched them creeping on.  They were island men, of her mother's own
-race, and they had done her no harm.  And ... the longer a vessel lies
-at anchor in equatorial latitudes, the more certain it is that sharks
-will gather round her--even if there has been no explosion in the water
-alongside to kill the fish and collect the tigers of the sea from far
-and near.
-
-Vaiti looked away, and began desperately to count the nuts clustered
-among the palm-fronds at her feet....  How many were there?
-Ten--fifteen--twenty----
-
-A long, despairing shriek tore across the water.  She put her fingers in
-her ears and buried her face in the leaves.  Yet, all the same, she
-heard a second cry, short and sudden, and quickly ended.  There was
-nothing more.  She lifted her face again, her teeth set tight into her
-lower lip.  The two black heads were gone.
-
-"No one will come ashore to-day," she said, with a shiver.  Something
-seemed to stab her, as she thought of that doctored chart in the
-schooner's deck cabin. The reefs on the course to South America were
-hundreds of miles from shore--the ship had no boats--and the native crew
-must suffer with the villainous captain and mate, if the disaster that
-she had plotted so carefully should come about....  There would be
-sharks there, too, when the ship broke up....
-
-The crystal-gold of the sea turned dim before Vaiti's eyes.  It was only
-a mist of tears that lay between, but to the girl's excited imagination
-it seemed like the spreading and darkening stain of blood.
-
-Careless of whether she was seen or not, she slid down the tree and
-rushed into the scrub, where she sat down upon the sand and cried like a
-mere nervous schoolgirl. The sun was past the zenith when she lifted her
-head again; the schooner had put out to sea, and lay, a far-off snowy
-speck, upon the blue horizon.
-
-Vaiti stood up, flung back her hair, and cast the trouble from her.  She
-could not afford to grieve over the inevitable now; there was too much
-to do.  The boat had to be prepared and provisioned, and that was not
-the work of a moment.
-
-She husked and opened a number of large cocoanuts, and removed the
-insides.  She then cut a quantity of young palm-leaves, and plaited them
-into baskets, which she filled with the cocoanut meat.  Afterwards she
-cut down dozens of young green nuts for drinking, husked them to save
-space, and slung them together in bunches with strips of their own
-fibre.  This done, she hid the provisions in the boat, and set about her
-own supper, as it was almost dark.
-
-Nourishing food she felt she must have, if she was to get through with
-her enterprise, but she dared not attract attention to herself by going
-out torch-fishing on the reef.  However, there were certain holes in the
-ground about the roots of the palms that to her experienced eye promised
-something better than fish.
-
-She dug a fire-hole in the gravel at the end of the gully where she had
-hidden the boat, lined it with stones, and made a fire, looking well to
-it that no gleam should be visible from above.  When the stones were
-beginning to heat, she took a piece of palms-leaf in her hand, hid
-herself in the bush, and waited, still as a rock.
-
-By-and-by there was a faint scuffling among the roots of the trees, and
-a shadowy thing began climbing up the trunk of a palm.  Vaiti waited
-till it had disappeared in the crown of the tree, and then climbed after
-it to a point about ten feet from the top, where she tied her strip of
-leaf round the trunk and came down again.
-
-Thump! thump!  Two cocoanuts fell to the earth. The crab (for it was a
-cocoanut crab of the biggest and fiercest kind) was getting his supper.
-Now he would come down the tree, rip open the nuts with his formidable
-claws, and enjoy the contents.
-
-Slowly he began to back down the palm, his sensitive tail ready to tell
-him when he had touched earth and might safely let go.  And now it was
-that Vaiti's trap (a well-known native trick) proved his undoing.  The
-belt of dry leaflets round the tree tickled his tail, he promptly let
-go, and fell with a crash seventy feet through air on to the pile of
-coral lumps that Vaiti had heaped up at the foot of the tree.
-
-The girl picked him up, badly injured and unable to use his claws (which
-were big enough to crack her ankle), and put an end to him with a clever
-stroke of her knife. He proved to be two feet long in the body alone,
-and of a fine blue and red colour, as seen in the dim light of the fire.
-She put him on the heated stones, wrapped in leaves, buried him until
-cooked, and then enjoyed a hot supper that an epicure might have envied.
-
-Strengthened by the good food, she worked on late into the night,
-catching more crabs, whose meat she hoped she could dry in the sun,
-making a rough sail out of the bed-sheet she had carried away from the
-schooner, twisting sinnet plait out of cocoanut husk for ropes, cutting
-and trimming a small pandanus for the mast. She had all her plans laid,
-and knew what she meant to do.  Her present position was about five
-hundred miles from the Marquesas, and the south-east trades would be in
-her favour.  With lines for fishing, a beaker full of fresh water on
-board (she had found that in the dinghy when she took it away),
-cocoanuts to help out with, and plenty of crab to dry, she hoped that
-she might manage to reach the islands before her strength or her food
-gave out.  Greater voyages had been done many a time in mere canoes, and
-the dinghy was a large boat of its kind, strong, well built, and new.
-If she failed--well, any death, any horror that the wide seas could hold
-was better than Vaka Island.
-
-All being ready, she lay down and slept till dawn--a somewhat restless
-sleep, for it was full of wandering dreams, and all the dreams took one
-shape: Donahue's schooner, snared by the lying chart, rushing helpless
-to her end, with the green-eyed tigers of the sea hovering ever about
-the reefs, and waiting ... waiting....
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-"I don't think the patient can see any one," said the nurse doubtfully.
-
-The big, yellow-haired sailor took off his hat and stepped up on to the
-verandah.  It was a very beautiful verandah.  You could see most of Suva
-Bay from it, and half the tumbled purple peaks of Fiji's wonderful
-mountains lying across the harbour.
-
-"If you could stretch a point, ma'am," said the sailor, "it might be as
-well for him.  I've got good news."
-
-"About his daughter?" asked the nurse.  She, like every one else in
-Suva, was deeply interested in this especial patient's story.  He had
-come to Suva in his own schooner, the _Sybil_, several weeks before,
-furious with rage and despair at the loss of his daughter, and eager to
-demand assistance from the High Commissioner of the Western Pacific,
-although it seemed by no means clear in what manner Her Majesty's
-representative could aid him.  Before the matter had even been
-discussed, however, he had fallen seriously ill of sunstroke and
-excitement combined, and had been sent to hospital, with rather a bad
-chance of recovery.  He was just turning the corner now, and the
-nurse--who could not but admire his rather weather-beaten good looks and
-romantic history--regarded him as her most interesting patient.
-
-"Yes, it's about his daughter," answered the sailor. "I'm the mate of
-the _Sybil_, ma'am; Harris is my name. Perhaps you'd kindly read this."
-
-He held out a long slip of printed paper, containing a _resume_ of the
-cables for the day--Suva's substitute for a daily paper.
-
-The nurse took it, and read:
-
-"The missing daughter of Edward Saxon, owner and master of the trading
-schooner _Sybil_, has at last reappeared.  Her fate has excited much
-interest and conjecture all over the Pacific.  She arrived in Sydney
-yesterday on board the cable-ship _Clotho_, by which she was picked up
-on the 2nd instant, in an open boat, alone, and two hundred miles from
-any land.  She had experienced bad weather, and was much exhausted for
-want of food, but declared herself capable, if it had been necessary, of
-reaching the nearest island group unaided.  She had been carried away,
-as was surmised, by the captain of the island schooner _Ikurangi_, who
-marooned her on a remote leper island, Vaka, and then sailed for South
-America.  Revenge for the loss of a pearl-shell bed of disputed
-ownership is said to have been the motive of this unparalleled outrage."
-
-"He shall have it at once," said the nurse cordially. "It'll do him more
-good than our medicines."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-The story was a popular one in the hospital for months after, and it had
-not been quite forgotten when, towards the close of the hot season, a
-Sydney paper furnished the last chapter of the tale.  Saxon's late nurse
-read it aloud to the others at afternoon tea, and they all agreed (not
-knowing how Vaiti's fingers had cogged the dice of chance) that it was a
-wonderful Providence and a real judgment.  The item read:
-
-
-                     "THE LAST OF AN OCEAN ROMANCE.
-
-"News comes via Tahiti from Nukahiva, Marquesas Islands, of the arrival
-of a shipwrecked crew on a raft, six weeks ago.  They were the survivors
-of a disaster that destroyed the notorious schooner _Ikurangi_ whose
-master, it will be remembered, kidnapped and marooned the daughter of a
-British captain some months ago.  The schooner, after leaving the
-island, sailed for Callao, but was wrecked on an uncharted reef three
-days east of Vaka, and went to pieces.  The crew escaped on a raft, and
-underwent great suffering in their efforts to reach land.  The captain
-and mate were drowned."
-
-
-"And serve them right, too!" said the audience.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER VIII*
-
-                       *THE WHITE MAN OF NALOLO*
-
-
-"By Jove! it's a white man," said Saxon, checking like a pointer on the
-threshold of the low dark doorway.
-
-"Certainly.  Very pleased to meet you," observed the figure on the mats.
-It was sitting cross-legged, clad only in a waist-cloth, and the house
-was a Fijian chief-house in a mountain village three days' journey from
-the nearest white settlement--but the thing squatted on the mats was
-undoubtedly white, and--English?  Well, no; Saxon thought no.  The
-phrase was American in flavour.  He stepped across the threshold, and
-came a little way in, relieved in mind.  When you have been dead and
-buried among the islands for a quarter of a century it is much
-pleasanter not to run the risk of meeting other ghosts (with university
-accents, tea-coloured families, and a preference for modest retirement
-on steamer days) who may possibly have been alive together with you
-before...
-
-Before....  The word means much in that vast Pacific world, sepulchre of
-so many lost hopes and forgotten lives.  We do not, in the Islands,
-cultivate curiosity as a virtue, since it would be likely to bring
-rather more than virtue's own reward after it.  We do not ask cross
-questions, because the crooked answers might involve questions of
-another sort.  And when overfed, sanguineous passengers from smart
-liners happen along and tell us, as a new and excellent joke, that the
-proper formula for receiving an introduction in the Islands is: "Glad to
-meet you, Mr. So-and-so; what were you called _before_?" we smile an
-acid smile, and pretend we are amused....
-
-Saxon was very tired, having walked thirty miles that day, and very
-hungry, being out of luck, and more or less on the tramp.  But I think,
-tired as he was, he would have found another village to rest in if the
-derelict white on the mats had spoken with the shibboleth of his own
-class and country.
-
-As things were, the look of the house pleased him, and he came in and
-folded himself up on the mats.  The other man noted that he selected a
-"tabu kaisi" mat (a kind strictly forbidden to all but chiefs or
-whites), and that he looked hopefully towards the kava bowl.
-
-"Not the first time you've stopped under a pandanus roof, I guess?" he
-remarked.
-
-"No," said Saxon.  "Whose house is this?"
-
-"Mine," said the stranger.  "Make yourself at home."
-
-It was a handsome chief-house of the best Fijian type, forty feet from
-mats to ridge-pole, the walls covered with beautifully inlaid and
-interwoven reeds, the roof bound together with exquisite sinnet work in
-artistic patterns, of red, black, and yellow, and towering up into a
-dark, cool cavern of pleasant gloom.  The floor was overlaid with fine
-parquetry of split bamboo at the "kasii" or common-folk end, and piled
-deep with fine mats in the "chief" part.  A Fijian bed, ten feet wide
-and three feet high, ran like a dais right across the end of the house.
-It was covered by mats prettily fringed with coloured parrot feathers.
-There were three great doors, east, west, and south, each framing in its
-dark-set opening a different picture of surpassing loveliness.  Nalolo
-town (its name is on the map of Fiji, but it reads otherwise) stands
-very high on the sheer crest of a pointed green hill that is just like
-the enchanted hill in the pictures of a fairy tale.  There is a little
-round green lawn on the top, and all about it stand the high, pointed
-beehive houses of the town, each perched on its own tiny mound like a
-toy on a stand.  Sloped cocoanut logs run up to the doors of the houses,
-and quaintly coloured crotons cluster about them.  In the deep, soft
-grass golden eggs from the guava trees lie tumbled about among fallen
-stars of orange and lemon blossom, and everywhere the red hibiscus
-shakes its splendid bells in the soft hill-winds.  About the foot of the
-peak a wide blue river wanders, singing all day long; and from every
-door of every house, high perched above the cloudy valleys and hyacinth
-hill ranges, one can see pictures, and pictures, and pictures almost too
-lovely to be true.  There are not two places in the world like Nalolo.
-
-The White Man of Nalolo, however, was only interested in the fact that
-the river provided excellent crayfish; and that taro grew very well
-indeed on the slopes below the town.  He had once been young, but he was
-not young now, and did not matter any longer.  Therefore he had become
-particular about his dinner and indifferent to scenery.  I will not tell
-you the story of the White Man of Nalolo, or why he, of all men,
-rebelled so fiercely against the common lot of "not mattering any more,"
-that he came away to the wilds of the Pacific and the highlands of Fiji,
-and never went back again, because, like many true stories, it cannot be
-believed, and therefore had better not be told.  Besides, this is the
-story of Saxon and his daughter.
-
-Saxon was down on his luck.  He had a charter for the _Sybil_, but she
-was not able to undertake it at present, for, trying to pilot her into
-Suva harbour himself, he had contrived to run her on a reef, and damaged
-her so seriously that she was at present careened on the beach in front
-of the local boat-builder's, undergoing repairs. The builder, knowing
-something of Saxon's reputation, had insisted on cash in advance, and
-the captain, in consequence, found himself so nearly out of funds that
-he was unable to stay in Suva pending the repairs to his ship.  He had
-therefore started with Vaiti for the interior of the great island of
-Viti Levu, intending to live on the real hospitality of the natives for
-a few weeks, and tramp from village to village.
-
-He explained something of this as he sat on the mats enjoying the
-grateful coolness of the house.  The other man nodded gravely, watching
-the door.  He offered a curious contrast to the Englishman's coarse red
-fairness, being lean, sundried, and grizzled, with expressionless,
-boot-buttoned eyes, and a straggling "goatee" beard that dated his exile
-from America back to long-ago days.
-
-"Where's your daughter?" he asked.
-
-"Coming.  She stopped to tidy up at the river."
-
-The doorway was darkened at that moment by Vaiti herself, balancing
-lightly up the cocoanut log to the threshold.  She wore a white tunic
-over a scarlet "pareo," her wavy curls, sparkling with the water of the
-stream, fell loose upon her shoulders; her lips were as red as the
-freshly-plucked pomegranate blossom behind her ear.  Something like life
-stirred in the boot-button eyes of the White Man of Nalolo as he looked
-at her.
-
-"Afi!" he called to a Fijian woman who was sleeping on the mats at the
-"kaisi" end of the house, "go and hurry the girls with the supper, and
-make tea for the marama (lady).  Quick!"
-
-Then he turned to Saxon.
-
-"Stay here as long as you like, both of you," he said. "Let her sit
-there sometimes, where I can see her and fancy....  I'll show you
-something."
-
-He rose slowly and stiffly, and limped across to a Chinese camphorwood
-box that stood in the corner. In a minute he returned with a faded
-photograph in a gaudy frame.
-
-"My daughter," he said.  "The only child I ever had.  She was Afi's.
-She died a long time ago.  Afi's a chief woman: she was as handsome as
-Andi Thakombau when she was young, and the girl took after her.  Your
-girl's mother was chief too, I guess.  Do you see any likeness?"
-
-Vaiti and her father craned over the photograph. The pretty half-caste
-girl, was certainly like the stately, slender creature who gazed at her
-pictured face, though the fire and spirit of Vaiti's expression were
-wanting.
-
-"I'm growing old," went on the White Man.  "I've no children.  Stay a
-bit.  I'll be glad to have you."
-
-"Thank you; delighted, I'm sure," drawled Saxon, with a pathetic
-resurrection of his long-forgotten "grand manner," And so it was
-settled.
-
-Vaiti, listening and thinking as usual, with her chin in her slender
-fingers, approved of what she heard, and smiled very pleasantly at her
-host.  It seemed to her that he could be very useful just now.
-
-The four weeks that followed after glided away agreeably enough in the
-silent hills.  Nothing happened; no one came or went--the Fijians, men
-and women, went out to the yam and taro fields in the morning, and
-returned in the afternoon; and after dark there would be long,
-monotonous chanting, and interminable sitting dances, on the mats inside
-the high-roofed houses.  Saxon stupefied himself with kava most of the
-time, in the absence of stronger drink, and almost got himself clubbed
-once or twice on account of his too impulsive admiration for the
-beauties of the village.  His host, however, was no censor of morals,
-and troubled very little about him. On Sundays the Fijians dressed
-themselves in their brightest cottons, stuck up their hair in huge
-halos, and went five times to church, under the auspices of the native
-Wesleyan teacher; while Saxon and his host smoked, slept, drank kava,
-and played cards.  The village provided plenty of yam and taro, kumara,
-cocoanut, and fish; and there was tea and sugar in the Chinese box, and
-now and then the White Man killed a pig or a fowl.  It was very pleasant
-on the whole.
-
-In a month's time, however, Saxon girded up his loins to leave this
-mountain Capua and descend to Suva once more.  The _Sybil_ would be
-ready, and his charter to convey ornamental Fiji woods to San Francisco
-would not wait.
-
-They said good-bye to their host, and walked a mile or two across the
-river-flats below the town before either spoke.  Then Vaiti put her hand
-into her sash, and drew out something small and shining.
-
-"See, father, what the White Man gave me, because I was like his
-daughter," she said.
-
-Saxon took the object, and turned it over in his fingers. It was a small
-seal, shaped like an eagle standing on a rock.  The eagle was gold, the
-rock amethyst.
-
-"A pretty thing, but not worth more than two or three pounds," he said.
-
-Then he turned it over and looked at the device. There was a curious
-crest on the face of the seal--a wolf with a crescent moon in his jaws;
-underneath, a motto in a strange foreign character.
-
-Saxon's red complexion paled as he examined the crest. In other days and
-scenes, among ice-bound rivers and grim mediaeval fortress-castles, he
-had seen that crest light up the crimson panes of old armorial
-windows--had read the motto underneath--"What I have, I hold"--of nights
-when he and the wildest young nobles of the Russian court were dining
-together under the splendid roof of one of Moscow's greatest banqueting
-halls.  For a moment he felt the keen cold air of the ice-bound streets
-blow sharp on his cheek; heard the jingle of the sleigh-bells, drawing
-up before the marble steps where the yellow lamplight streamed out
-across the snow. The fancy faded, swift as a passing lantern picture
-that flashes out for a moment and then sweeps away into darkness.  He
-saw the burning sky and the crackling palms again, felt the
-furnace-heated wind, and knew that it was all over long ago, and that he
-was ruined, exiled, and old.  Yet there remained a thread of indefinite
-recollection, a suggestion of something half-remembered, that was not
-all unconnected with the present day. What was the story belonging to
-that crest--the story that the whole world knew?
-
-"Where did the fellow get the thing?" he asked his daughter.
-
-Vaiti told him.
-
-The White Man of Nalolo, it seemed, was one of the numerous South Sea
-wanderers who believe in the existence of various undiscovered islands,
-hidden here and there in the vast, untravelled wastes of sea that lie
-off the track of ships.  Thirty years before, there had been wondering
-rumours of an island of this kind, touched at once by a ship that no one
-could name, found to be uninhabited, and never revisited; indeed, no one
-was sure where it was within a few hundred miles.  Years went by, and
-the White Man, who had always taken a special interest in the story,
-found himself shipwrecked--the sole survivor of a boatful of
-castaways--on the very island itself.  But fortune was unkind, for the
-morning after his arrival, when he was trying to sail round the island,
-a sudden storm blew him out to sea again, and he had drifted for many
-days, and all but perished, in spite of the fish and nuts he had
-obtained from the island, before a mission schooner happened to see him
-and pick him up.  He had examined most of the island while ashore, and
-had seen no inhabitants or traces of cultivation.  Nevertheless he had
-always been convinced that there was something mysterious about the
-place, for two reasons.  One was the presence of common house-flies,
-which he had never seen far away from the haunts of human beings.  The
-other was the discovery of an amethyst seal, lying under a stone on the
-shore.  It was dirty and discoloured, but he did not think so small and
-heavy an object could have been washed up on the shore from a wreck.
-
-Where mystery is in the air, most men's minds turn naturally to thoughts
-of hidden treasure, and the White Man of Nalolo had ever since cherished
-a hope that there was treasure on the island.  For several years he had
-fully intended to go and look--some day--but as he could only guess at
-the latitude and longitude, and as he had little money to spare, he
-never succeeded either in hunting the place up himself or in persuading
-any one else to do so.  Now he was old and half-crippled, and did not
-care any more about anything; so he wanted Vaiti, who reminded him so
-much of his dead daughter, to have the seal.  It was a pretty thing, and
-perhaps it would make her think sometimes of the poor old White Man of
-Nalolo.
-
-Saxon listened attentively to the story, and heaved a sigh of
-disappointment at the end.
-
-"There's nothing in it, my girl," he said.  "No proof of treasure there,
-eh?"
-
-"No; no treasure," said Vaiti, looking at the ground as she walked.
-
-"What then?" asked Saxon curiously.  He saw she had something in
-reserve.
-
-Vaiti suddenly flamed out in eloquent Maori.
-
-"What then, my father?  Am I one who sees through men's heads, that I
-can tell what was in the mind of you as you looked at the jewel, and
-turned yellow and green like a parrot, only to see it?  What then?  I do
-not know.  I walk in the dark, and the light is in your hand, not in
-mine.  As for you, you have made your brain dull with the brandy and the
-kava, so that you cannot see at all.  What then?  Tell me yourself, for
-I do not know. I know only that there is something to be told."
-
-"Don't be rough on your poor old father," said Saxon pathetically.  "I'd
-have knocked the stuffing out of any man who said half as much, but I
-spoil you, by Gad, I do.  I don't know--I can't think, somehow or other.
-But there was a story about the Vasilieffs--the johnnies who had that
-crest--people I used to stay with when I went to----"
-
-He broke off, smashed a spider-lily bloom with his stick, and began
-afresh.
-
-"Junia Vasilieff--what was it she did?  Big princes they were, and much
-too close to the throne to be safe company....  Junia Vasili--I have it!
-Yes--the end of the story was in the Sydney papers, time you were a
-little kid.  I remember.  They were to have married her to the
-Czarewitch, just to make things safe.  Her claim to the throne was big
-enough to have started a revolution any day, if it had been asserted....
-Poor little Junia!--only sixteen when I knew--when the marriage was
-talked of--and such golden hair as she had!  She hated the whole thing;
-courts and ceremony weren't in her line.  But she was a gentle little
-creature, and I never thought she'd have had the spirit to do as she
-did."
-
-He turned the seal over in his fingers, as if reading the past from its
-glittering surface.
-
-"There was a young lieutenant of Hussars, a Pole--you don't know what
-that is, but the Russians don't like them, I can tell you--a noble, but
-a very small one; not fit to black Junia's boots, according to their
-notions. Well, he bolted with her.  It was in the Sydney papers, time I
-was in the Solomons; the paper came up to Guadalcanar....  She must have
-been twenty then; just the year the marriage to the Czarewitch was to
-have come off....  They bolted--cleared out--never seen again.  All
-Russia on the boil about it; no one knew but what they'd hatch up plots
-against the throne, she having a better claim than any one else, if it
-hadn't been for the law against empresses.  The secret police were after
-them for years, but they were never traced, though most people knew
-Russia'd give a pretty penny to know where they were----"
-
-"O man with the head of a fruit-bat, do you not see?" interrupted Vaiti
-at this juncture.  "They hid on that island--they may be there still.
-It is worth a hundred treasures!"
-
-"The Pole was a great traveller, and had a sort of a little yacht," said
-Saxon thoughtfully.  "It might be true, of course--if there is an
-island, and if the Nalolo Johnnie had any idea of where it was, and if
-nobody found them out and split years ago.  Plenty of 'ifs.'"
-
-"I think him all-right good enough," averred Vaiti, returning to English
-and prose.  "By'n-by we finish F'lisco, then we go see, me and you."
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER IX*
-
-                           *THE LOST ISLAND*
-
-
-Some two or three months later, the schooner might have been seen, like
-a white-winged butterfly lost at sea, beating up and down before a
-solitary, low, green island lying far east of the lonely Paumotus.
-Vaiti, sitting on the top of the deck-house, was examining the land
-through a glass.  The native crew were all on deck; also Harris and
-Gray, the mate and bo'sun. Captain Saxon was not to be seen.
-
-"The old man always do get squiffy at the wrong time, don't he?"
-commented Harris, rather gleefully.
-
-Gray spat over the rail for reply.
-
-"You're ratty because you don't know nothing, ain't you?" he said.
-
-"Do you?" asked the mate curiously.  Harris had not much notion of the
-dignity of his office, and dearly loved a gossip at all times.
-
-"More nor you, havin' eyes and ears that's of use to me occasionally,"
-replied the bo'sun dryly.
-
-Harris considered.
-
-"I'll give you my grey shirt to tell," he said persuasively.  "There's
-sure to be something up."
-
-"'Ow much does we ever get out of it when there is?" asked Gray sourly.
-"I could do with that shirt very well, though.  There ain't much to
-tell, except that the old man he thought there was an island hereabouts
-not marked on the chart that nobody knew about; and Vaiti she allowed
-that was all ---- rot, because, says she, this part's been surveyed, and
-though the Admiralty surveys isn't the for-ever-'n-ever-Amen dead
-certainties the little brassbound officers thinks them, still they don't
-leave whole islands out on the loose without a collar and a name round
-their necks, so to say.  So, says she, let me work out the length of
-time they ran before the hurricane, says she, and the d'rection of the
-wind, which the old boy remembered right enough, says she; and then look
-it up on the chart, and I'll be blowed, says she, if you don't find
-something for a guide like.  So by-and-by she looks, and says she,
-''Ere's something; 'ere's a reef marked P.D., and it is P.D.,' says she,
-'for you and I knows there's nothin' there,' she says.  'But we'll look
-a bit more to the north'ard,' she says, 'where it's right off the' track
-of ships, and maybe we'll find somethin' and maybe we won't,' she says.
-'But I think,' she says, 'that somewheres not too far off from that P.D.
-reef we'll maybe get a sight of what we're lookin' for,' she says,
-'because sometimes reefs is put down for bigger things by mistake,' she
-says, 'especially if you 'aven't been to see.'  Then she comes on deck,
-and I makes myself scarce, for it ain't healthy on this ship to listen
-at no cabin skylights, not if she knows you're there."
-
-"Well, whatever the game is, I don't suppose it'll line our little
-insides any fatter, bo'sun.  We don't count on this ship anything like
-as we ought to when there's shares goin'.  I wonder that I stick to her,
-I do! Old man as drunk as a lord half the time--me doin' his work as
-well as my own--a blessed she-cat running the blooming show----"
-
-"Ready about!" sang Vaiti from the deck-house, and the mate and bo'sun
-sprang across the deck.  There was something about the orders of the
-"she-cat" that enforced a smartness on the _Sybil_ rare on an island
-schooner, even when heavy-fisted Saxon was not about.
-
-Half an hour later, Vaiti had rowed herself ashore, curtly declining
-Harris's polite offers of assistance, and had landed on the beach.  As
-she did not know who she might be going to see, she had provided for all
-emergencies. Her revolver was in her pocket, and she wore a flowing
-sacque of lace-trimmed white silk that made her feel she was fit to meet
-any Russian princess, if such were indeed on the island.  It was a
-gratifying thought that the said princess, if she had been a celebrated
-beauty, must now be well into the forties, and consequently beneath all
-contempt as a rival belle.
-
-Her father's absence did not trouble her.  He had a nasty trick of
-starting a drinking bout just when he was most needed--in fact, it was
-the one point in Saxon's character on which you could absolutely rely.
-Vaiti, therefore, had grown used to doing without him, and rather liked
-to have a perfectly free hand.
-
-She had fully grasped the bearings of the case.  There was possibly a
-very great chief's daughter from Europe, with a rather insignificant
-chief who had stolen her away, living there in hiding.  The people of
-her country would pay a great deal to know where she was and bring her
-back.  Or, if there seemed any lack of safety about this proceeding
-(Vaiti had long ago learned that her father was not fond of putting
-himself within the reach of principalities and powers of any kind), the
-couple themselves must be made to pay for silence. It was all very
-simple.
-
-The fact that the island was supposed to be uninhabited did not trouble
-her.  She meant to investigate that matter after her own fashion.
-
-She walked all round it first of all.  It took her about an hour.  There
-was a nice, white, sandy beach, with straggling bush behind it.  There
-were a good many cocoanuts--all young ones--also a large number of
-broken trunks, apparently snapped off by a hurricane.
-
-This set Vaiti thinking.  It seemed to her that the damage was rather
-too universal and even to be natural. Yet why should any sane human cut
-short all his full-grown cocoanuts?
-
-She crossed the island twice at the ends, noting everything with a keen
-and wary eye.  Fairly good soil; nothing growing on it, however, but low
-scrub and a few berries.  In the centre of the island the scrub
-thickened into dense bush, impenetrable without an axe.  No sign of life
-anywhere.
-
-Vaiti stamped her foot.  Was it possible she had been mistaken?  Was
-this indeed just what it seemed, a commonplace, infertile, useless,
-little mid-ocean islet, let alone because it was worth nothing, and
-incorrectly described as a reef because no one had ever troubled to
-examine it?  Things began to look like it.
-
-And yet ... she thought--she did not quite know what, but she was very
-sure that she did not want to leave the island just yet.  She would at
-least climb a tall tree and take a general survey before she gave it up.
-
-Nothing simpler--but there was no such tree.
-
-All the palms were young, or broken off short; all the pandanus trees
-were in the same condition.  There was no rock, no commanding height.
-She could not get a view.
-
-Vaiti's cheek flushed crimson under its olive brown. The spark was
-struck at last!
-
-Somebody had cut short those trees--to prevent anyone from climbing up
-and overlooking the island. The encircling reef would not allow any ship
-to approach close enough for a look-out at the mast-head to see over the
-island, except in a very general way.  There was something to conceal.
-What, and where?
-
-Only one answer was possible.  The mass of apparently virgin bush in the
-centre of the island--several acres in extent--was the only spot where a
-cat could have concealed itself.  The scent was growing hot.
-
-With sparkling eyes Vaiti began to circle the wood, watching narrowly
-for the smallest trace of a pathway. The branches were interlocked and
-knitted together as only tropical bush can be.  Many were set with huge
-thorns; all were laced and twined with bush ropes and lianas of every
-kind.
-
-Nothing larger than a rat could have won its way through such a rampart.
-Vaiti walked swiftly on and on, striking the bushes now and then with a
-stick, to make sure that there were no loose masses of stuff masking a
-concealed entrance, and keeping a sharp eye for traces of footsteps....
-It was with a heart-sinking shock that she found herself once more
-beside the low white coral rock that had marked the commencement of her
-journey, and realised that she had been all round, and that there was
-most certainly no opening.
-
-The sun was slipping down the heavens now.  She had been exploring half
-the day, but she was not beaten yet.  The unexpected difficulties she
-had met with only sharpened her determination to enter the thicket at
-all costs.  Harris, suffering acutely, as usual, from suppressed
-curiosity, was nearly driven mad by the sight of the "she-cat" suddenly
-reappearing on the ship, picking up an axe, and departing as silently as
-she had come, with a countenance that did not invite questions. She had
-taken off her smart silk dress, and was in her chemise and petticoat,
-arms and feet bare, and waist girdled with a sash into which she had
-stuck her revolver. She dropped the axe into her boat, rowed silently
-away, and disappeared on the other side of the island.
-
-The sun was still some distance above the sea when she let the axe slip
-from her torn, scratched, and aching hands, and stood at last, tired but
-triumphant, in the heart of the mysterious island's mystery.  She had
-won her way, with the woodcraft that was in her island blood, through
-the dense belt of bush, hacking and slashing here, stooping and writhing
-there, until the light began to show through the tangled stems in front,
-and a few swift strokes cleared the way into the open. Yes! there was a
-space in the centre, after all--a clearing over an acre in extent.
-There was grass here, and a few overgrown bananas, and a tangle of yam
-and pumpkin vines.  Passion fruit ran in a tangle of wild luxuriance
-over the inner wall of the thicket; pine-apples rotted on the ground and
-fig-trees spread their wide leaves unchecked and unpruned....  In the
-middle of all was a house--a one-storied little bungalow, iron-roofed,
-with a tank to catch the rain.  There was a long, low store behind it,
-and something that looked like a pig-sty, and something that might have
-been a fowl-run.  But....
-
-But everything was rotten, ruined, overgrown, hardly to be distinguished
-in the thick tangle of vegetation that had overflowed the little retreat
-like a great green wave let loose upon a low-lying shore.  Vaiti knew
-what she was going to see before she had reached the door of the
-bungalow--a rotten floor, with green vines shooting up between the
-crevices, and bush rats scuffling and squeaking under the boards--a
-rusted iron roof, where pink convolvulus bloom peeped in under the
-rafters, and lizards sunned themselves in the airy blue furniture
-unglued and decayed fast sinking into one common mass of ruin--door
-aslant, and thresholds sunken.  Everywhere silence, emptiness, decay.
-There needed no explanation of the vanished pathway.
-
-The Maori blood owns strange instincts.  Again Vaiti knew what she was
-going to see before it came--knew, and walked straight over to a certain
-corner of the enclosure, as if she had been there before....  It was
-under a scarlet-flowered hibiscus tree that she found it--a long, low
-grave, fenced round with a wall of coral slabs, so that the overflowing
-bush had surged less thickly here, and one could see that there was
-something lying on the mound, only half hidden by creeping
-vines--something long and white and slender.
-
-Vaiti dragged away the creepers....  Yes, it was a skeleton, bare and
-fleshless, with bony fingers and black, empty eyes.  There was a
-splintered gap in one temple, and close to one of the hands lay a mass
-of rusted steel that had once been a revolver.
-
-On a flat white stone, standing at the head of the grave, a long
-inscription had been carved with infinite care in three different
-languages.  Two of them Vaiti did not understand, but the third was
-English.  She pulled the growing ferns off the stone, and, wiping its
-surface, read:
-
-
-            "Here is buried Junia, of the race of Vasilieff.
-                         Died 20th June, 1889.
-
-             "Here is buried Anton, son of Junia Vasilieff
-                and her husband, Alexis, Baron Varsovi,
-                    Born 20th June, died 21st June,
-                                 1889.
-
-              "Here rests Alexis, Baron Varsovi.  Into the
-                 unknown thou didst follow me: into the
-                      Great Unknown I follow thee.
-                       Reunited 21st June, 1889."
-
-
-Vaiti, descendant of cannibal chiefs and lawless soldiers, more than
-half a pirate herself, and hard of nature as a beautiful flinty coral
-flower, was yet at bottom a woman after all.  What passed in the breast
-of this dark, wild daughter of the southern seas, as she stood above the
-strange, sad record of loves and lives unknown, cannot be told.  But in
-a little while, with some dim recollection of the long-ago, gentle,
-pious days of her convent school, she knelt down beside tie lonely
-grave, and, crossing herself, said something as near to a prayer as she
-could remember.  Then, still kneeling, she cut and tied two sticks into
-the form of a cross, and set them upright in the earth of the mound.
-The sun was slanting low and red across the grave as she turned away.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-"What'd she give you?" asked Harris eagerly, as the bo'sun stepped
-across the gang-plank on to the quay.  The lights of San Francisco were
-blazing all about, the cars roared past, there was a piano-organ
-jangling joyously at the corner.
-
-"Fifty dollars for the two of us," said Gray, his acid face sweetened
-with unwonted smiles.
-
-"Crikey!  Honest men is riz in the market at last! What in h---- can she
-have got herself?"
-
-"Might as well arst me what she got it for.  Don't know, and don't care,
-so long as we've got the makings of a spree like this out of it.  I see
-her comin' out of the Rooshian Consulate this mornin' lookin' like as if
-some one 'ad been standin' treat to her."
-
-"You know she don't touch anything."
-
-"I'm speaking figuryative; she looked that sort of way.  And coming'
-back to the ship, she says to the old man, she says: 'Why, dad, better
-dead than alive!' she says.  And he laughs."
-
-"Don't sound 'olesome," observed Harris thoughtfully.
-
-"Now, don't you get to thinkin', for you ain't built that way, and
-you'll do yourself a mischief," said the boatswain warningly.  "And
-let's be thankful to 'eaven for all its mercies, say I, that we've got
-such a nice, warm, dry, convenient night for to go and get drunk in."
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER X*
-
-                     *WHAT CAME OF THE PARIS DRESS*
-
-
-The effects of Saxon's illness in Fiji were a long time in wearing off.
-It was many weeks after Vaiti had come back to the _Sybil_, flushed with
-importance and with the lionising she had received on the
-cable-ship--many weeks after the voyage to the unknown island and the
-visit to San Francisco--that he took ill again; not very seriously, but
-badly enough to prevent his going to sea. Of course, the time was an
-awkward one.  They were off Niue, and there was copra waiting to be
-taken to Raratonga for the steamer--copra which would certainly be
-secured by some other schooner if Saxon did not take it at the promised
-date.  Neither Harris nor Gray knew enough to be trusted with the ship,
-and he did not much care about letting Vaiti sail her--not because he
-doubted his fiery daughter's ability or desire, but because, rash as he
-was himself at times, he knew her to be still worse.  He had seen her
-run the _Sybil_ in the trough of the very last swell alongside a barrier
-reef for miles, sailing all the time so close to the wind that the
-shifting of a single point would have meant destruction. He had heard
-her raving about the deck in half a gale as they swept up to the
-iron-bound coast of Niue, abusing Harris in the strongest of beach talk
-because he had not another main topsail in the locker to replace the two
-that had just carried away one after the other and battered themselves
-to ribbons--the principal ground of her complaint being apparently the
-fact that she considered herself labouring under a social disadvantage
-of the most mortifying kind because the schooner was obliged to come up
-to Niue for the very first time without all sails set.  He had seen her
-perform tricks of steering, getting in and out of Avarua in Raratonga (a
-perfect death-trap of a port at times, as all old islanders know), that
-"fairly gave him the jim-jams," to use his own phraseology....  No, on
-the whole he thought he would rather miss that fright than lie idle in
-the trader's house at Avatele, and think daily and nightly of the cranky
-though light-heeled _Sybil_ out upon the high seas in Vaiti's sole
-command.
-
-This being so, it was natural and inevitable that Vaiti should set her
-heart upon going and carry out her desire.  She did not make any trouble
-about the matter; neither was she at all unkind to the invalided owner
-of the ship.  On the contrary, she paid the trader's wife more than that
-kindly woman wanted, to take good care of her father while she should be
-away, bought him everything decent to eat that the island contained
-(which was saying very little), indulgently presented him with a
-demijohn of whisky, and then informed him, in the coolest manner in the
-world, that the copra was all loaded, the stores and water on board, and
-the schooner ready to sail next day, under her command.
-
-Saxon swore at large first of all, then stormed at Vaiti, and finally
-began a pathetic lament over his own helpless position and the
-heartlessness of his only child. Vaiti, sitting cross-legged on the end
-of his bed, smoked a big cigar through it all and looked out of the
-window. When he stopped at last, fairly run out, she laughed and handed
-him a weed out of her own case and a match.
-
-"You take'm that, no speak nonsense.  You know me, what?" she demanded;
-and Saxon, who was not in reality nearly as ill as he thought himself,
-laughed, and allowed himself to be won over.
-
-Having gained her point, Vaiti went off again to the schooner through
-the wonderful pink dusk that wraps a South Sea island at sunset, and
-left the captain to hold commune with his demijohn and sleep.
-
-As she walked down to the shore, she heard a sound of laughing and the
-rustle of many dresses among the palms close at hand.  Now in Niue it is
-an important matter that brings people out of evenings, because,
-although the island has been Christianised long ago, like all the rest
-of the Eastern Pacific, it still suffers from a perfect plague of
-heathen ghosts that no amount of Sunday church-goings and week-day pious
-exercises seem to affect in the least.  So the natives are afraid to go
-out of their houses after sunset, lest uncanny things should rise out of
-the forest to spring upon the wayfarer's back unseen and choke him.
-This Vaiti knew, so she suspected something of interest in the little
-crowd, and turned aside to look.  If she had not, there had been no
-story to tell about Niue and the happenings there.
-
-She saw a curious scene, so nearly hidden by the growing dark that no
-one but an island resident could have taken in its full significance.  A
-group of islanders, men and women stood round the door of a big white
-concrete house with a pandanus roof--the finest native house in the
-village.  They seemed to be waiting for something--something both
-amusing and exciting, to judge by the explosions of giggles that
-continually burst through the dusk.
-
-Presently the door of the house swung open with considerable violence,
-and a large mat was thrown out by an invisible hand.  Then the door was
-slammed, and the giggles redoubled.  Within the house now sounded
-something very like a struggle.  There were loud sobs and cries of a
-shrill, theatrical kind, scuffling. banging, and a dragging sound.
-
-"Tck, tck, tck," went the tongues of the outsiders delightedly.  The
-interesting moment was at hand.
-
-It came without warning.  The door burst open with still more violence
-than before, and out upon the mat was shot by some invisible agency a
-very solid young woman in a white loose gown, weeping somewhat
-mechanically, but with much effect.  She fairly rolled over with the
-force of the shock that had ejected her, and before she could pick
-herself up the door was closed once more with a slam that shook the
-whole house. Then the waiting group rushed upon her with cries of joy,
-and bore her away in their midst, singing as they went.
-
-"A wedding," said Vaiti to herself.  "It must be Mata's; that is their
-house.  And it will be a big wedding, too.  I did not know that it was
-to be so soon."
-
-She fell into a fit of musing as she wandered shorewards among the
-leaning palms....  The palms of Niue sweep downwards to the gleaming sea
-like a band of lovely maidens hurrying with sweet impatience to meet
-their lovers on the coral shore.  Of a moonlight night, when all things
-are possible, and nothing seems too wonderful in an air that itself is
-wonder, it needs but little for those white, slender stems, and tossing,
-plumy crowns, poised high above the shadowy beach they curve to meet, to
-change themselves into South Sea dryads of a new and lovely race, and
-rush down, at long last, upon the calling sea, where Tangaroa, the king
-of ocean, has his dwelling.  Under the palms of Niue, when the blazing
-white moon has risen so high in the heavens that a perfect star of jetty
-shadow is rayed about the base of every tree--when the wandering sea
-winds are held close by the breathless spell of midnight and nothing
-wakes on all the lonely shore but the long, long song of the droning
-coral reef--under the wonderful palms of Niue, loveliest and strangest
-of all the islands in that dreamy world of "perilous seas and fairylands
-forlorn"--nothing is too strange to be true, no fancy too wild to hold,
-when the moon is up and the palms are alone with the sea....
-
-Was Vaiti thinking of visionary palm-maidens and sea-foam kings as she
-went down the winding path to the bay, through a wondrous afterglow of
-russet-rose laced through with opal moonrays?  Perhaps--or of kindred
-fancies.  I who knew her cannot say, for no one ever knew her
-altogether.  It is more likely, however, that less poetic thoughts were
-in her mind just then.  The scene she had witnessed in the palm-grove
-was the usual ceremony that takes place in Niue the night before a
-wedding, when the friends of the bridegroom come to the house of the
-bride's parents, and the latter go through the symbolical form of
-casting her out and closing the door, so that the bridegroom's people
-may take her over and guard her until the wedding morning.  Vaiti liked
-a wedding above all things (next to a funeral), and the hint of great
-doings on the morrow, offered by the ceremony she had witnessed, decided
-her to stay another day.  Why not?  The copra was loaded, and no rivals
-were in sight.  Besides, she had a motive for staying--the strongest
-possible motive. She wanted to wear her Paris dress.
-
-Yes, it had been acquired at last.  That day in San Francisco, when she
-had come out of the Russian Consulate with more money in her pocket than
-any one of her adventures had ever brought before, she had been able to
-restrain herself no longer.  And thereafter, in Madame Retaillaud's
-elegant and exclusive Parisian emporium, replete with the choicest
-imported wares (I quote the lady's own description of her goods), there
-took place a scene that is remembered to the present day by those of
-Madame Retaillaud's young ladies who survived the earthquake year.
-
-Vaiti, dressed in one of her waistless muslin gowns, with a broad-leafed
-island hat on her head, a long-bladed sheath-knife stuck quite visibly
-in the breast of her dress, and her wavy hair falling loose over her
-shoulders, stalked into the shop among the smartly-gowned San Francisco
-ladies who were turning over Madame's stock, and demanded to see--
-
-"One dress belong Palisi, pretty dam quick."
-
-They are used to all sorts of strange nationalities along the
-water-front in San Francisco, but not, as a rule, in the milliners' and
-modistes' well-bred establishments. Vaiti concentrated the whole
-attention of the place upon herself at a single stroke.  She did not
-care about that in the least, but Madame's hesitation stung her, and she
-pulled out a thick wad of notes.
-
-"Look 'em alive, my hearties!" she ordered impatiently in her
-quarter-deck voice.  "Lay aft here with that goods.  I want um Palisi
-model, all sort."
-
-The customers were nearly in hysterics by this time, and the assistants
-were all a-giggle.  Madame herself, however, grasped the situation in a
-twinkling, and frowned down the girls.  Whoever and whatever this pirate
-queen might be, she certainly had money, and Madame would have welcomed
-Lucrezia Borgia or the Witch of Endor, under like circumstances, as
-pleasantly as an Anglo-American duchess.
-
-"Perhaps Madame will come into a private room. Madame would like, no
-doubt, to look at our most exclusive goods, and we do not bring them
-into the outer shop," she said in her most honeyed voice.  And the door
-of the lift closed upon the pair.
-
-What Vaiti underwent in that fitting-room in the course of getting into
-Madame's latest model promenade gown, built for a typical French figure,
-will never be told.  Early in the proceedings a message came down to the
-showroom for the strongest pair of Paris corsets in stock, and a little
-later Madame herself, very red and overheated, ran down to select a
-fresh silk lace.
-
-"Ah, but she has courage, that one!" she declared, as the lift received
-her again.  "Never, no, never!--jamais de la vie! ..."
-
-The lift went up.
-
-It was almost an hour before a wonderful vision sailed slowly through
-the show-room and out into the street--slowly, not alone for pride, but
-also because it could scarcely move or draw its breath.  The vision, as
-described in the receipted bill that went with it, was made up of the
-following elements:
-
-"One promenade costume (model, Doucet & Cie.) composed of chiffon
-velours, couleur poussiere de roses, inlet with motifs of point
-d'Alencon, hand-embroidered with lilies of the valley in French paste.
-Mounted on chiffon bleu-de-ciel, with full volants edged lace and
-chiffon ruching.  Made over foundation of glace silk, couleur citron
-d'or.
-
-"One set silk underclothing to match.
-
-"One Corset Ecraseur, patent laces.
-
-"One pair bronze promenade shoes, Louis XV. heels, extra height.
-Stockings to match.
-
-"One parasol composed peau-de-soie rose fanee and chiffon bleu-de-ciel."
-
-To which may be added--one young woman, suffering horrible agony and
-quite intoxicated with happiness.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-It was this marvellous possession that Vaiti yearned to show off at the
-wedding.  She had not had a chance to wear it since the day when she had
-walked through the streets of San Francisco, with an admiring and amused
-crowd at her rear, and found it quite impossible to get on board the
-schooner, when she reached the water front, until she took off her
-voluminous skirt and handed it up over the side--afterwards climbing the
-rope-ladder in a storm of applause and a pink silk petticoat. Now the
-occasion for getting full value out of the wonderful thing had come at
-last, and she could not--no, she really could not--miss it.
-
-Rather late next morning, when the bride and bridegroom--the former in a
-gorgeous gown of yellow curtain muslin, the latter in a thick tweed suit
-from Auckland that caused him to stream at every pore--were sitting on
-opposite sides of the little white church, enthroned on chairs all by
-themselves, and listening decorously to a long preliminary address from
-the native pastor--Vaiti swept in, and at once brought the ceremony to a
-momentary pause.  The pastor stopped in his address and gaped, the women
-exclaimed audibly, the bridegroom fixed his eyes on the apparition and
-sighed in a manner that the bride evidently resented as a personal
-slight, for she grew still darker in the face than nature had made her,
-and stared penknives and scissors at Vaiti.  Wild titters of delight
-swept indecorously through the church. The entry was indeed a
-success--the native pastor found it necessary to address his flock
-directly, and to tell them that they would undoubtedly all go to hell if
-they did not behave better in church, before order was restored.
-
-It is not necessary to relate at length how Mata and Ivi were made one,
-how they walked out of the church nonchalantly by different doors, and
-were subsequently so deeply interested in the killing of the pigs for
-the marriage feast, and the preparing of the various cooking-pots, that
-they did not meet again all afternoon.  It was a commonplace wedding
-enough, and this history is not interested in it, other than as it
-concerned the affairs of Vaiti.  These, indeed, were fairly notable.
-
-For with Vaiti pride very literally brought about a fall that day.
-
-She had had a terrible time getting into her dress, and the whole ship's
-company had shared in the trouble. First, the native A.B.'s had to fetch
-her a big looking-glass from the nearest trader's, and secure it to the
-bulkhead of her cabin.  Then the cook had to deliver up all the hot
-water in the galley--at seven bells, with dinner just coming on!--and
-the boatswain must needs broach the cargo for some special scented soap.
-Matters were only beginning, however.  When the dress was disinterred
-from its many wrappings and finally put on it became immediately
-apparent that the bodice could not possibly be made to meet.  Perhaps
-the coming of the bread-fruit season had caused the young lady's waist
-to expand--perhaps the practised art of Madame Retaillaud had exceeded
-anything that a mere amateur could compass in the way of lacing.  At any
-rate, it was not till Vaiti had passed her corset laces out through the
-port and ordered two of the strongest sailors to tail on to them--not
-till Harris, agonising with laughter, had directed this novel evolution
-from the poop for at least five delirious minutes, during which Vaiti
-several times thought she was dying, but remained none the less
-determined to die rather than give in, that the deed was accomplished at
-last, and the "Kapitani" of _Sybil_ was enabled to look at herself in
-the glass and know heavenly certainty that she was the best dressed
-woman in the Pacific at that instant, whoever saw or did not see.
-
-The natural result of all this was that in the very hour of her triumph
-she fainted dead away in the church, for the first time in her life, and
-had to be carried out.
-
-The ceremony was just over by now, and the bride, still burning with
-jealousy of the woman who had dared to eclipse her on her wedding day,
-was among the first of those who crowded round like bees going after
-honey, to stare at the beautiful creature lying senseless on the
-sunburnt grass.  The bridegroom had sped away hot-foot in the direction
-of the village, whence certain enticing yells indicated that the
-pig-slaughter was now going on; but Mata was not a bit appeased by his
-indifference to the visitor.  That dress--and oh, how wonderful it
-was!--still rankled in her soul.
-
-Mata was a teacher's daughter, and she knew something of white people's
-lore.  A brilliant thought darted into her mind as she pressed and
-struggled in the crowd about the deathly form on the grass....
-
-"Ai, ai! she is surely dead!" wailed the people. "Ai! the-great
-chieftainess will rise no more!"
-
-"Daughters of a turtle!" said Mata contemptuously. "I will show you if
-she is dead.  It is nothing at all but that she is vain, and wanted to
-make herself a middle like the 'papalangi' women, who all look like
-stinging hornets.  Give me a knife, someone."
-
-A knife was given, and Mata, with horrid joy, half lifted Vaiti and
-slipped the keen point into the back of the dress.
-
-Rip went the silk with a hideous splitting noise, and the delicate
-underwear swelled out through the opening like a bush lily bursting its
-sheath.  Mata felt for the stay-lace, and cut that too.  The tension on
-the bodice increased frightfully--the seams gaped and strained....
-
-"She will die, I think, if I do not cut it off," said Mata hastily,
-feeling Vaiti reviving under her hand, and anxious to finish her work.
-Two more cuts of the knife did it.  The Paris dress was, speaking
-sartorially, no more; the owner, lying on the ground, was opening her
-eyes to the outrage that had been done; and Mata, shrieking with malign
-laughter, was fleeing wildly through the palms in the direction of the
-pig-killing, peace in her heart again.
-
-Peace was very far indeed from Vaiti's heart when she revived and found
-out what had been done.  The crowd drew away from her in fear when they
-saw her flashing eyes and set, furious mouth, though she said never a
-word.  Confronted by that Medusa-head, they were almost too terrified to
-find words; but one or two stammered out a hasty explanation that freed
-the present company from blame by inculpating Mata.
-
-Vaiti did not doubt it--she had seen the bride's face during the
-ceremony.  Still silent, but flashing looks of sheet-lightning all about
-her, she drew together her garments as best she could, and walked off in
-the direction of the ship.  As she did so, a little ugly man with red
-hair slipped out from behind the trees, and looked narrowly at her
-retreating figure.
-
-"It is the white man from the bush!" cried the girls.  "White man of
-ours, why did you not come down for the wedding?"
-
-"Because I didn't, my little dears," replied the newcomer in English,
-still looking after Vaiti.  He stood well in the shade, and did not make
-himself unnecessarily conspicuous.
-
-"That's a fine girl, that Mata," he added by and by. "A smart girl.  I
-should like to know Mata."
-
-Vaiti put off her going for yet another day.  She had business to attend
-to.
-
-It was very simple business, and it was characterised by the directness
-that attended all the proceedings of Saxon's daughter.  She merely went
-up to the bride's new home, that was so handsomely stocked with trade
-goods and imported furniture, while the wedding party were making merry
-in the village after dark, and set fire to it with a torch in about a
-dozen places.  It was very dry weather, and there was a strong wind.
-
-There was scarce a stick of the cottage left when she marched into the
-village with a blazing torch in her hand, and calmly told the assembled
-revellers what she had done.  Then she left them, seething in a tumult
-of excitement that almost drowned the hysteric screams of Mata, and went
-to bed and to sleep with a quiet mind, ready for an early start next
-morning.
-
-The men came on board late and very drunk, but they did come.  They were
-afraid of Vaiti, and so was Harris, who would very well have liked to
-extend his revels in the village for another twelve hours, but did not
-dare to do so.  He thought, as he stumbled into his bunk, that the
-sounds proceeding from the forecastle were a good deal odder than
-usual--he could almost have sworn that there was one person, if not
-several, crying in there.  But he had good reason for mistrusting the
-evidence of his senses just then, so he flung himself down and went to
-sleep.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER XI*
-
-                         *A DEAD MAN'S REVENGE*
-
-
-When one is well on the right side of five-and-twenty, with a good ship
-underfoot, a fair breeze setting steadily from the right quarter, and a
-pleasant goal ahead, it is hard to be unhappy.  Vaiti's sense of
-bereavement at the loss of her cherished dress faded considerably before
-the _Sybil_ had fairly cleared the land, and was gone altogether by the
-next day.  She had done what she felt to be the right thing by Mata; the
-score was even. Vaiti did not like loose ends of any kind, and she had
-not left any behind her.  She smiled as she thought of it, and paused in
-her official-looking walk across and across the poop, to revile a native
-A.B. for leaving the end of a halyard trailing on deck.
-
-"You d---- lazy nigger," she said.  "What sort ship you thinking you
-stop?  You thinking one mud scow" (_Mud cow_ was her pronunciation),
-"one pig-boat, one canoe belong dam man-eating Solomon boy?  I teaching
-you some other thing pretty quick.  Suppose you no flemish-coil that
-halyard, keep him coil all-a-time, I let 'em daylight inside that black
-hide belong you, knock 'em two ugly eye into one."
-
-She plucked a belaying-pin out of the rail and sent it flying at the
-sailor's ear.  Vaiti was a straight thrower, but the crew seldom failed
-to dodge; they had every opportunity of becoming proficient.  On this
-occasion, however, the sailor made not the least attempt to escape, and
-the pin struck him fair and square at the angle of the jaw, and knocked
-him over.  He was hurt, but not stunned, and sat up immediately on the
-deck, gazing at the tall white figure on the poop with lack-lustre eyes
-that scarcely seemed to comprehend what they saw.
-
-"Bring 'em that pin," commanded Vaiti, still in what stood for English
-with her.  She never addressed the crew in the tongue that was native to
-both.
-
-The man crept slowly aft, and handed it to her.  She motioned to him to
-replace it neatly in the rail, and then pointed to the trailing halyard.
-It did not escape her, as the sailor made his way down to the main deck,
-that there were tears in his large black eyes, and that his pareo was
-tied with a carelessness unusual among Polynesians, and significant of
-trouble and depression when seen.  But she put the one down to the
-swelled and reddening bruise that marked all one side of his face and
-the other to the orgies of the previous night.  If the men chose to make
-brutes of themselves on bush-beer, they need not expect that she was
-going to slacken their work for them on that account.  No, not if she
-broke the head of every man in the ship.  She was not Saxon's daughter
-for nothing, as they very well knew.
-
-It was small wonder that Vaiti was not popular with crews.
-
-She went on pacing the deck, in the joyous crystal-clear sunlight of the
-sea.  The trade wind ran through the sky like a warm, blue river, the
-rigging sang, the sails drew steadily.  It was a good day, a happy day,
-a pleasant day to be alive.  The girl felt pleased with the world.  She
-took the wheel from the sailor who held it, for the sheer pleasure of
-feeling the flying vessel answer to the touch of her own light hand.
-All the force and fury of those roaring sails overhead seemed to
-concentrate itself here in her fingers, as the power of a great dynamo
-passes through a single wire.  It was almost as if she drove the ship
-herself.  The _Sybil_ went as steady as an albatross; once or twice the
-spokes fairly shook in her hands.
-
-"The wheel is laughing to-day," she said in Maori, using the island
-sailor's expression.
-
-Dinner-time came round soon, and she descended to eat with Harris alone.
-Saxon himself did not particularly care whether he dined with his bo'sun
-or not, if it happened to be convenient to leave Harris on deck; but
-Vaiti would have run the ship as strictly as a man-of-war at all times,
-if she could have had her way.  Indeed, she would have liked to dine in
-solitary state, like the captain of a cruiser, had she not had too much
-good sense to fly in the face of merchant service custom by excluding
-the mate.
-
-As things were, she graciously condescended to order Harris down to the
-cabin with her, and they discussed together the inevitable curried tin
-of Pacific cookery. It was wonderfully light and bright in the little
-cabin, which was large for the size of the ship, and had plenty of berth
-and locker space, besides its neatly fitted trade shelves.  The
-bulkheads were painted white picked out with blue (they were satinwood
-and bird's-eye maple underneath the paint, a thing which had astonished
-and perplexed more than one ship's carpenter in the past quarter of a
-century), and there was a pretty bird's-nest fern in a basket hanging
-from the skylight, and the seats were covered with the neatest thing in
-blue and white trade prints that Auckland could produce.  Vaiti's taste
-was evident everywhere, and Vaiti herself, hair freshly combed and held
-back with a bright ribbon, laces and frills dainty and immaculate as
-ever, looked, as she demurely poured out tea (you will seldom find the
-teapot absent from the table of a colonial ship), quite the last sort of
-person by whom a native A.B. might expect to be knocked into the
-scuppers.  Yet, truth to tell, the unlicked Harris, wolfing his food at
-the opposite side of the table, was very much better liked by the crew,
-even though he was heavy-handed enough at times; and he certainly
-understood more about the five A.B.'s and one ordinary seaman who
-inhabited the forecastle than did Vaiti, who was half one of themselves,
-and therefore thought them beneath consideration as a rule.
-
-Of this fact he proceeded to give an illustration when the curry and the
-tea and the fried bananas were almost done, and nobody's dinner could be
-spoilt by unpleasant news.
-
-"Think you're in for a good time, don't you, Cap?" he said.
-
-Vaiti, the economical of words, merely nodded.  But her face spoke for
-her.
-
-Harris was never quite sure whether he liked Vaiti in an uncomfortable,
-indefinite way, or heartily hated her.  To-day the balance perhaps
-inclined in the latter direction.  He watched her face with some
-interest as he said:
-
-"That's where you spoils yourself, Cap.  You ain't. And if you want my
-advice, which you never do, I'd tell you that the sooner you 'bouts ship
-and back to Niue the better."
-
-Vaiti bit slowly through the piece of bread she was eating and
-deliberately chewed it, eyeing the mate all the time, before she
-condescended to answer.
-
-"Mph!" was all she said at last.  She had never studied diplomacy, but
-she knew how much more you learn in general by letting the other person
-lead the conversation than by talking yourself.  And it occurred to her
-that Harris wanted to make himself important by hinting and patronising
-over some ship business which might, or might not, be in his department.
-Well, let him.  She would not give him a lead.
-
-Harris, on his part, got angry at once, and blurted out what he had
-meant to keep a good deal longer.
-
-"Oh, very well," he said.  "You can do just as you likes, of course, but
-where you'll find yourself when it comes to a question of mutiny, that's
-another two-and-six.  Musling curtains on the ports, and white
-table-cloths, and ropes all flemish-coiled on deck is going to help you
-a lot then, ain't they?  And if ever I've seen signs of trouble in a
-crew, I seen them to-day, and you knows it--ma'am."
-
-The last word came with a jerk, screwed out, as it were, by an ominous
-flash of Vaiti's eye.
-
-Vaiti herself was thinking very quickly indeed, but you would not have
-imagined it if you had seen her slowly scooping out the inside of a
-mummy-apple, and as slowly eating it.  She was obliged to acknowledge to
-herself, now Harris had spoken, that there had been something unusual
-about the demeanour of more than one of the men since their departure
-yesterday.  But mutiny?  Nonsense!  Indigestion from too much pork, more
-likely.  She did not believe for an instant that any crew once handled
-by her father and herself would have an ounce of mutiny left in the lot,
-if you ran them through a stamp-mill and assayed the result three times
-over.
-
-So she merely remarked, between spoonfuls:
-
-"You talk plenty nonsense.  You keep those men work, they no squeak.
-Suppose you finish eat, you go tell Gray he come down ki-ki."
-
-"All right!" said Harris meaningly, trying to make an effective and
-tragic exit.  He was really not at all easy in his mind, and Vaiti's
-attitude did nothing to relieve his apprehension of what might be about
-to follow.  The men had never dragged on the rein as they had done these
-two days past, and he felt it in his bones that there was more than met
-the eye in the matter.
-
-Vaiti, for her part, was so much incensed by the tone of his
-remonstrance that she would not even listen to the conviction which
-began to force itself upon her own mind, next day, that there was really
-something astray. Luck in general seemed to have deserted them.  With a
-fair wind the schooner should have made the run to Raratonga in three
-days, but on the afternoon of the second day a dead calm had fallen, and
-they lay helpless in the trough of the sea by four o'clock, three
-hundred miles from anywhere.
-
-"All-a-time I saying no good trust those trade winds, when that
-(adjective) Cook Islands be near," sighed Vaiti, scanning the horizon
-vainly right and left.  Like a true sailor, she was generally cross in a
-calm.
-
-"I wish we was out of this, ma'am, I do," remarked Gray, who was busy
-spinning sinnet at her feet on the deck.  For some odd reason, the sour
-old bo'sun generally found her more approachable than the others.
-
-"Why?" asked Vaiti, almost amiably.
-
-"Because, ma'am, of that, for one thing.  And hothers."
-
-He pointed forward, and Vaiti saw what she had not noticed before, the
-ship's carpenter, a powerful young Mangaian, lying flat on the foc'sle
-head and obviously weeping.
-
-"They've been at that game, one and another, off and on, ma'am, all
-to-day," he said.  "And you know yourself 'ow we've been put to it to
-get the work out of them.  Darned if I knows what monkey tricks they's
-up to, but I allow we're liable to understand all about it before very
-long, for that sea-lawyer of a fellow, Shalli, he's bin speechifyin'
-down in the foc'sle 'alf of this watch, like a bloomin' 'Yde Park
-sosherlist, he has."
-
-Vaiti glanced at her watch.
-
-"Make him eight bell," she ordered, scanning the foc'sle hatch.
-
-"Ay, ay, ma'am," said Gray readily, passing on the order.
-
-The watch below were prompt enough about turning out, but Shalli the
-forlorn could not, it seemed, find energy enough to get up and turn in.
-Instead, he beat his curly head upon the planks and began to sob.  Vaiti
-took no notice of him whatever, but just strolled nonchalantly for a
-minute into her cabin, and reappeared with a slight projection in the
-bosom of her muslin dress that had not been there before.  Harris and
-Gray looked at each other significantly, and the former cast a swift
-glance about the vacant horizon.  No, not a shred of sail, not a trail
-of smoke.  Only the glancing flying-fish, and the oily, glittering
-swell, and the hard, pale, empty sky.
-
-The men, who had all been standing in a bunch by the hatch, now
-signalled to Shalli, who put off the rest of his weeping to a more
-convenient season, and got upon his feet.  Then the six began advancing
-slowly and uncertainly to the break of the poop.  They were a
-good-looking crew in their way, all Eastern Pacific men, with bright
-eyes and well-featured brown faces, and their dress--the brilliant red
-or yellow "pareo" of the islands, gaily figured with enormous white
-flowers, and the bright cotton shirt or coloured jersey--lent a
-distinctly operatic air to the little scene.  Vaiti and her officers,
-however (like Moliere's _bourgeois_ who had talked prose all his life
-without knowing it), had lived in the midst of picturesque and
-extraordinary things most of their lives, and therefore took no
-interest, as a rule, in anything save the sternest practicalities.
-
-And it was stern enough in all conscience, this fact with which they
-were confronted.  The men were mutinous, beyond doubt.
-
-Vaiti's mind rapidly ran over all possible causes for the trouble, even
-while Shalli was stepping forward and opening his mouth to speak.  It
-could not be rough treatment, because, as a matter of fact, the men were
-no worse handled on the _Sybil_ than on most other island schooners, and
-an occasional knock-down blow is not the sort of thing that a Pacific
-native will seriously resent.  It could not be any objection to go to
-Raratonga--the crew were mostly Cook Islanders themselves, and glad of a
-chance of seeing their homes. Nor could it be dislike to her command,
-for a chief rank counts tremendously among Polynesians; and islanders
-who were ruled at home by a queen of her family would be most unlikely
-to strike against the authority of one of the Makea race, unless for
-some very grave cause.  It was, of course, possible that they had
-planned to seize the schooner and run off with it.... She put her hand
-up to her bosom, and played with the laces that lay over that hard
-substance under the dress....
-
-But Shalli was speaking now, in answer to her sharp query as to what
-they wanted there.
-
-He had a good deal to say, and he said it with flashing eyes and much
-eloquence, using his slender, pointed, brown fingers a good deal to
-emphasise his remarks, and turning dramatically from his mates to Vaiti,
-and back to his mates again.  Harris listened anxiously, catching only a
-stray word here and there, for his knowledge of Maori was confined to
-the few phrases used in running the ship.  Shalli was certainly saying
-that somebody was going to die--that somebody had got to die, and
-immediately--to judge by the emphasis with which he spoke....  The mate
-was, as Vaiti had once told him, rather chicken-hearted underneath his
-great bulk and strength.  He felt himself turning chilly, for all the
-burning sky.  What the devil did that fiend of a Vaiti mean by standing
-there listening as calmly as if they were paying her compliments on her
-eyes?  Perhaps there was no particular trouble after all; but her
-demeanour was no guarantee, for she would have looked like that if they
-had all been on the verge of drowning, or burning, or hanging together,
-any day of the week.
-
-Gray, on the other hand, did not trouble to try and make out anything,
-but cut a large quid and chewed it at leisure, idly looking on.  He did
-not know if the men meant mutiny or not, and he did not particularly
-care.  They were three whites against six niggers, and there were
-firearms on their side.  And he had seen mutinies in his time beside
-which any little amusement that could be got up by half a dozen amiable
-Cook Islanders would seem a mere Sunday-school tea-party. Let them
-mutiny if they liked.  It would not mean the interruption of the work
-for half a watch.
-
-And Shalli went on talking as if he never would stop, and the _Sybil_
-rolled ceaselessly on the idle swell, and the useless sails slapped
-rhythmically upon the mast. And Vaiti, standing on the poop above the
-group of men on the main-deck, listened with an unmoved countenance
-until quite the end of Shalli's long speech.
-
-When he had finished he turned his face away, and instantly began to
-weep.  And the five other men, exactly as if a tap had been turned on,
-also began to weep at the same moment, howling loudly and lifting their
-hands to heaven.
-
-"If this isn't a bloomin' mutiny, it's a bloomin' lunatic asylum,"
-declared Harris quite inaudibly in the midst of the hideous noise from
-the main-deck. It is not a common thing, even in that world where all
-things are possible, the wide, strange Pacific Ocean, to see a whole
-ship's company shedding tears in concert on a calm and peaceful
-afternoon, with nothing more alarming in sight than a handsome young
-woman in an expensively pretty frock.
-
-"Ow-ow-ow!" went Shalli, getting quite beyond his own control.
-
-"Ey-ah, eyah!" screamed a plump lad from Aitutaki, fluttering his hands
-like frantic pigeons.
-
-"For God's sake, Vaiti, tell us what's up," called Harris, sending his
-bull-like tones through the confusion.
-
-And then Vaiti spoke, shrieking at the top of her voice in order to be
-heard.  Her face, its hard calm broken up at last, was black with rage,
-and she had pulled out her revolver, and was holding it in her hand,
-though, strange to say, none of the men took the least notice of it.
-
-"That ----, ---- witch-man belong Niue, he curse them, they say they
-die!" she screamed.  "By'n-by I cut him liver out!"
-
-"What witch-man?" bellowed Harris.  "Don't understand.  That white
-bloke--him with the red hair and the scar on his nose--who dresses
-native, and lives native up in the bush?  Saw him lookin' at you like as
-if he'd like to knife you, from behind Mata's house."
-
-"No, pig-head! no white man got 'mana' for make die that way," shrieked
-Vaiti, shaking her revolver without effect at the men.  "Niue witch-man.
-What man you mean?  I not see----"
-
-But she did see at that moment, and to Harris's utter dismay she dropped
-the revolver on the deck and flung her skirt over her head.
-
-"My Gord! she's mad now," cried Harris.  The crew paid not the least
-attention, but continued to weep with lungs of brass.  The mate's head
-went round. He felt as if he was going out of his senses, too.  Gray,
-who seemed to be the only normal person left on board, went up to Vaiti
-and plucked her dress off her face.
-
-"Now, ma'am, keep 'er 'ead to wind," he remonstrated. "What's got 'old
-of the Capting?  Blest if we ever saw you afraid before."
-
-Vaiti turned on him like a tigress.
-
-"You think me frighten, you parrot-face, bal'-head, humpback pig-monkey!
-Think some more those thing, and I shoot some hole in you lie-making
-tongue, learn you talk to me.  I tell you----"
-
-The hubbub on deck was calming down a little now, and subsiding into
-lost and homeless wails.  It was possible to make oneself heard.
-
-"I tell you, that thing Alliti see 'long Niue, he one dead man.  Captain
-schooner _Ikurangi_--same I making tart [chart] all wrong, so he go
-drown, he and him mate. You think it good thing one dead man he go walk
-along Niue, looking me?"
-
-"A cat may look at a king," said Harris, who had realised that no
-fighting was afoot, and therefore was very brave just now.  "Besides,
-that red-head man wasn't no ghost--he borrowed a pouchful of tobacco off
-of me, and never paid it back."
-
-"What sort that man?" demanded Vaiti.  "He small, all same Gray, he ugly
-all same you, got red hair, cut 'long him nose, tooth all break?"
-
-"That's him," agreed Harris.
-
-Vaiti took a turn across the deck, and fell silent, angrily chewing a
-lock of her hair.  The horrid vision of Donahue risen from his ocean
-grave, and wandering about the islands as a malignant ghost, bent on
-avenging his death, had struck her as such a fancy could only strike an
-islander, and almost paralysed her active mind. Now she realised that it
-was merely a case of mistaken newspaper report, and that Donahue had
-somehow escaped from the wreck of his schooner, and was once more
-roaming the islands in the flesh--at the very lowest ebb of fortune, it
-was evident, but probably none the less dangerous for that.  She was
-quite certain that he was in some way at the bottom of this business of
-cursing the crew, although no doubt the witch-doctor and Mata had been
-intermediary.  And it was no trifle. Sheer mutiny she would have much
-preferred.
-
-"Wot's it all about?" asked Gray, who had not been so long in the
-islands as the mate.  "Wot's the odds if a lot of bally niggers thinks
-they've been cursed? Seems to me anythin' the witch-doctor could do
-wouldn't be likely to harm a crew that's been salted by our old man in
-the cursin' way.  There ain't no witch-what-d'ye-call-'em about the
-islands that can lay over 'im for language."
-
-"Oh, shut up!  You don't know anything about it," said Harris with
-irritation.
-
-"Suppose you tells me," suggested Gray, tucking another quid into his
-cheek, and looking dispassionately at the crew, who were now lying on
-deck rolling about with the motion of the vessel, and looking half dead
-already.  "Doesn't seem as if we was goin' to have much bother with that
-lot....  And you gettin' as white at the gills as a flounder, thinkin'
-they was goin' to take charge.  Go 'ome and learn a ladies'
-dancin'-class, Mr. 'Arris; you ain't fit to 'andle men."
-
-"I'll handle you if----" Harris was beginning roughly, when Vaiti, whose
-temper had been badly ruffled by the events of the last half-hour,
-stepped across the deck and delivered two stinging blows, one on
-Harris's right ear and one on Gray's left.
-
-"You take'm that," she said.  "Alliti, you speak bo'sun about Maori
-'mana.'  Glay, you lemember Alliti mate, no give cheek."
-
-"Want to know if I've got any left for myself, before I start givin' it
-away," observed the bo'sun ruefully, rubbing his face.  "But better be
-slapped nor neglected by a pretty girl, hany day, says I."
-
-Vaiti did not smile, but leaned over the rail, and began staring at the
-crew.  She was in no mood for flattery.
-
-"Well, if you want to know, it's like this," said Harris.  "These native
-blokes, they thinks some of their chiefs has got what they call 'mana.'"
-
-"Wot's that mean?"
-
-"Pretty near any thin', take it by and large, but one meanin's all we
-want, and that's the notion they have that these chiefs can sort of
-blast 'em with a curse, so's they'll go away and die.  Like as if I was
-a chief, and you was a common man, same as you are, anyhow, and I was to
-say, 'Gray, you go off out of this and die next Thursday at four bells
-in the afternoon watch.'  And you says to me, says you, 'Ay, ay, sir,'
-says you."
-
-"Blowed if I would," ejaculated the bo'sun.
-
-"Yes, you would, you chump, because you'd be a bloomin' native, and they
-always does.  So off you'd go, and when Thursday come you'd lie down and
-die at four bells, wherever you happened to be."
-
-"Wot of?"
-
-"Nothin'--you'd run down like a watch--sort of 'stop short never to go
-again' business, like the grandfather's clock--and when you was dead
-you'd stay dead.  That's all."
-
-"And I never 'eard worse rot in all me days," said the bo'sun
-disgustedly.  "Think I'm going to believe all that?"
-
-"Who cares what you believes or what you don't?" demanded Harris,
-"You'll ---- well see all about it soon enough.  Vaiti she says they
-says Mata went to the witch-doctor, who they're as much afraid of as any
-chief in Niue, for all they're by way of bein' Christian, and he cursed
-them up and down and inside and out, worst style, and says they're all
-to die by sunset, to-night. And if I knows anything of natives they'll
-do it.  I'll lay you, we got to work the ship up to Raratonga
-ourselves--if we ever get there.  Of all the low-down, mean skinks that
-ever walked, them natives are the worst.  They haven't a blessed scrap
-of consideration in them for anyone but themselves.  Here we are with
-every man-jack of these fellows got an advance on his wages, and they
-says they're going to die!  Die!  I've no patience with them.  I do hate
-selfishness and meanness."
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XII*
-
-                          *BREAKING THE MANA*
-
-
-Vaiti all this time had been steadily watching the men as they lay about
-on the main-deck in various attitudes of limp resignation.  One or
-two--notably the emotional Shalli--were already beginning to look ill.
-Matters looked badly enough for the _Sybil_.  It was in the hurricane
-season, and signs were not wanting that the calm would break up with
-energy when it did break.  If the crew persisted in their dying, other
-people who had not been in any way subjected to the witch-doctor's
-operations might find it incumbent on them to die too.  She did not for
-a moment doubt the Niuean's power to slay.  Had she not more than once
-seen the queen, who was her own cousin, politely dismiss some offender
-with the significant remark, "I wish I may never see you again after
-to-morrow" (for the queen was always courteous, and would never have
-used the crude terms of a Niuean witch-doctor); and had not every one on
-the island known that with the next evening's sunset the wretch would
-lay him down and die as surely as the dark would fall?  These men were
-doomed, and the ship would miss the steamer and the cargo would not be
-sold, and possibly the schooner would be lost in the blow that was
-creeping up, and none of them would ever go home any more.
-
-Thus the native side of Vaiti spoke.  But now the white side woke up and
-demanded its innings too. Was it endurable that the red-headed rat of a
-Donahue (for she was as certain that he had been at the bottom of the
-matter as only a woman with no direct evidence to go on can be) should
-win the last move in the deadly game they had been playing this year and
-more. Was she to get into difficulties, and perhaps lose the ship, the
-very first time that she had taken off the _Sybil_ all alone?  The fact
-that such a disaster would include the losing of herself did not
-trouble, as it did not console, her.  She would leave her reputation
-behind her, and people, when they spoke of Vaiti of the Islands, would
-say----
-
-No, they wouldn't, and they shouldn't.  The white blood was up now.  It
-was impossible to prevent the "mana" from working.  Well, let it be.
-She would do the impossible.  She had done the impossible before, in
-many ways; it was the only sort of thing really very well worth doing,
-in the opinion of Vaiti of the Islands.
-
-Whatever was to be done must be done quickly. The storm was not far
-away, and the _Sybil_ was rolling in the trough of the increasing swell
-with every rag of sail set.
-
-"What you goin' to do?" asked Harris hopelessly, as he saw her move.
-"Give them medicine?  It ain't any good."
-
-"Yes, give 'em medicine--you and Gray, you giving it plenty by'n-by,"
-said Vaiti calmly, beckoning the two men over to her.  The crew
-continued to lie on the deck, giving no sign of life but an occasional
-groan.  The wind was beginning to cry a little among the rigging, just
-whimpering, like a chidden child.  A glassy tinkling of foam sounded
-about the keel.  The sun was almost down.
-
-"You listen me," said the girl, her handsome, hawk-like features looking
-curiously sombre in the orange light.  "I speak those men in Maori.  I
-tell them some thing--thing not belong 'papalangi.'  You no understan'.
-Wait."
-
-Then, with a look on her face that the white men had never seen there
-before, and were never to see again, she stepped swiftly down the
-ladder, crossed the main-deck, and stood in the midst of the prostrate
-crew.
-
-As though struck themselves by a spell, Harris and Gray remained
-motionless on the poop, only swaying with the unconscious movement of
-the sailor to the roll of his ship, while they watched with fascinated
-eyes the scene upon the lower deck.  The crew at first lay still as
-logs, while Vaiti stood and looked at them--only looked.  Presently they
-began to open their eyes and roll over, and the weeping, which had
-apparently ceased, began again.
-
-Then Vaiti, suddenly flinging her arms high above her head, with her
-light muslin dress fluttering in the wind and all her magnificent hair
-falling to her knees, burst into such a flood of speech as made the two
-hard-bitten Englishmen on the poop open eyes of stolid amaze.  There is
-no language in the world so full of eloquent possibilities as the Maori
-tongue--even in the somewhat debased and altered type that is current
-among the islands.  And, hidden away somewhere in the strange nature of
-this strange thing in woman's shape, there was more than a touch of the
-true witch wildness and fire.
-
-"Lord!" said Harris, in a tone of awe.  "She's the devil himself!"
-
-She looked it, as she stood there in that livid light, her arms
-stretched high to heaven, her voice--was there ever a voice so full of
-passion, prophecy, command?--ringing out, now high, now low, now in
-tones vibrating with some subtle suggestion of horror that caused even
-the uncomprehending whites upon the poop to feel a cold shudder about
-the region of the spine.  Upon the crew the effect was marvellous, yet,
-from Gray's and Harris's point of view, unsatisfactory as well.  The
-limp figures sat up, it was true, wept afresh, and even rose to their
-feet before long; but it was only to rush wildly up and down the heaving
-deck, driven, it seemed, by the sting of an agony greater than any they
-had suffered yet.  Above the loose sails thundered and the wind wailed
-wickedly.
-
-Gray, at a motion from the mate, went to the idle wheel and grasped the
-spokes.  The _Sybil_ would want watching soon.
-
-"Strike me pink if this isn't the craziest ship's company outside a
-lunertic asylum from Yokohama to the 'Orn," muttered the bo'sun to
-himself.  "Now, what the 'ell is _that_?  Ho, Jemmy Gray, why don't you
-look for a berth as a bally stoker in a bally Red Sea liner, or a
-supercargo on a Chinese pirate junk, and 'ave a quiet life at your age?
-Here, Mr. 'Arris, you going to let 'er shoot 'erself before your heyes?"
-
-Vaiti had plucked out her revolver again, but instead of threatening the
-crew with it, she was holding it close to her own curly head, all the
-time pouring forth a river of eloquent Maori, strongly charged with
-adjurations and threats.  It needed no translation to understand so
-much, not to see the abject if inexplicable terror of the crew, who
-cowered and howled in an extremity of distress every time she raised the
-pistol to her head.
-
-"Vaiti, Vaiti!  What're you doing, Cap?" yelled Harris.  "You'll shoot
-yourself!  Are you crazy? What are you givin' 'em, for Cord's sake?"
-
-Vaiti turned round, and cried angrily at him:
-
-"Hold 'm tongue!  You no leave me myself, very quick I shooting you.  I
-tell those men I great chief, no one can take 'um curse away, but can
-come 'long all those men myself, suppose they die--go Raratonga when 'um
-night come, an' all those man soul he running quick, quick, all a-cold,
-'long those mountains top Raratonga where 'um dead man he go to
-jumping-off place.  A--a--h!  I put one bullet in head belong me, very
-quick, suppose those men they got dam cheek go an' die.  I coming, very
-dead, very angry, I go 'long that soul, all a-time; no let 'um rest, no
-let 'um see woman fliend, die long time ago--I take big club belong
-chief, make 'um run, cry, all-a-time--no sleep, no eat, no lie down!
-A--a--h! no go heaven, no go hell, all-a-time, for ever'n ever, Amen.  I
-pay him out for going die!"
-
-She stormed through the brief speech like a hot-season squall, and
-instantly returned to the natives. Harris, struck dumb by the entirely
-unprecedented nature of the situation, could find no vent for his
-feelings save in plucking off his cap and casting it under his feet. She
-was threatening the crew that she would kill herself if they died;
-follow them to the land of shades (the entrance to which was popularly
-supposed to be over the edge of a certain desolate, far-up mountain
-precipice in Raratonga), and make it so hot for them in the "otherwhere"
-that they would certainly wish they hadn't dared to die....  What on
-earth was a man to do in a ship commanded by a thing--he could not call
-it a woman--that talked like that--with night coming on, too, and
-something very like a bad blow unpleasantly near?
-
-Vaiti did not leave him long in doubt as to what he was to do.  The
-crew, driven previously to the verge of frenzy by her gruesome threats,
-became entirely frantic during the eloquent peroration that followed her
-address to Harris.  They ran up and down the deck; they shrieked, they
-prayed, they besought.  Vaiti, with the eye of a hunter watching a
-quarry almost driven to bay, kept a keen look-out through all her fiery
-eloquence, and just at the moment when the men seamed driven to the
-highest point of human endurance, turned to the mate with a triumphant
-cry.
-
-"Now, Alliti! he all right by'n-by: I no shoot myself, I think.  You and
-bo'sun you get rope's end very quick, give 'um order shorten sail, make
-'um go.  I think he go; he too much plenty frighten die 'long me."
-
-"Too much plenty frighten" the men were indeed. The threat that Vaiti
-had made--for the carrying out of which they doubted neither her ability
-nor her will, any more than she did herself--was so much more potent
-than the curse of the witch-doctor that the terror of the one paled
-before the terror of the other.  For the moment, they felt that they
-might not be able to live, but they certainly must not die; and it was
-right in the middle of this illogical state of mind that the mate and
-bo'sun came in with their rope's ends and settled the matter once for
-all.  An hour ago, red-hot irons only would have moved them to hurry up
-with their dying.  Now a couple of ropes' ends, laid about among the six
-with a will, drove them howling up the masts and out along the yards,
-where, with Gray and Harris still after them, and Vaiti threatening from
-below, they succeeded in getting the sails stowed and the vessel snug in
-very little over the ordinary time.  The blow that followed kept all
-hands busy the night through, but it came from the right quarter, and
-the _Sybil_ fled before it at such a speed that morning found her only
-half a day's run from Raratonga, with the wind quieting down to a
-pleasant breeze, the schooner uninjured, and the crew as cheerful and
-busy as they had ever been in their lives.
-
-Vaiti caught the steamer, sold her copra, and saw it on the wharf ready
-to load.  Then she went back to the schooner, and waited till the last
-of the men returned.
-
-"Suppose you like go die now, plenty time for you," she said.  "Plenty
-good sailor-man stop Raratonga. You go 'long die; I no want."
-
-The men looked at her sheepishly, and Shalli, the spokesman, scratched
-his head and surveyed a heap of tributary pigs, fowls, and fruit that
-lay on the deck of the schooner before he answered.  The crew had many
-relations about Raratonga, and the relations had done them very well
-this trip.
-
-"Many thanks, great chieftainess," he said at last, in his own tongue.
-"We are much obliged to you, but we have changed our minds, and now we
-do not ever mean to die at all."
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XIII*
-
-                         *THE GAME PLAYED OUT*
-
-
-Every one in the trader's had gone to bed, and Vaiti, barefoot and
-dressed in dark cotton, had just got out of her room by the window, and
-was gliding noiselessly down the back verandah.
-
-The moon was down, and the thick darkness under the trees of the village
-covered her safely as she slipped along at the backs of the little
-white, palm-thatched houses.  It was not at all likely that any native
-would be about in the middle of the night, but one could never reckon on
-white men, of whom there were several in the little town--and Vaiti,
-being engaged as usual on "urgent private affairs," did not want any
-inquiries.
-
-She got away from the village without remark, and then struck into one
-of the narrow grass roads penetrating the bush.  Everything was asleep.
-The little green parrots were hidden deep under heavy leaves, each with
-its noisy head tucked under its wing.  The lizards that had been darting
-and flickering all day long about the path now slept, chill as little
-stones, among the roots of the trees.  There was a cold, dewy smell in
-the air, and the palm-tree plumes were motionless as drawings in Indian
-ink against the violet gloom of the sky.  Very far away the immemorial
-music of the reef beat softly in the dark.
-
-Vaiti girded her dress high, and walked swiftly.  She had a long way to
-go, and she wanted to be back in her neat, white, mosquito-curtained
-bed, sleeping the sleep of the innocent, before the trader's wife should
-come in with her morning cup of tea.  Vaiti was a past mistress in the
-art of avoiding useless comment.
-
-Three miles, five miles, seven miles....  It was right at the other side
-of the island, past mile after mile of tangled bush, acre after acre of
-sparsely planted, rocky, open ground, grove after grove of tall, plumy
-cocoanut, heavy with fruit.  Oranges grew by the track here and there;
-broad green banners of banana leaf blotted out whole sections of the
-stars, and slim, quaint mummy-apple trees stood up among the prickly
-coral rocks.  Vaiti had no time to stop, but she snatched a little
-refreshment on her way from time to time, as the wayfarer may always do
-in the kindly South Sea climate.
-
-She struck at last into a narrow track leading off the main pathway--so
-small that in the dusk of the starry night it must have been invisible
-save for a mass of pointed rocks that stood up just beside the overgrown
-entrance and made a landmark.  Afterwards came a mile or two of tangled
-walking among clumps of pink and scarlet and yellow hibiscus, all
-reduced to a common blackness by the levelling night, and through thorny
-lemon-trees, and over rocky knolls where there was scarce footing for a
-goat....  A lonely God-forsaken region this; not a village, nor even the
-gleam of a solitary white-washed hut.  What had the "Kapitani" of the
-_Sybil_ to do with such a place?
-
-Vaiti knew very well indeed what she had to do.  She had gathered in the
-town that the mysterious white man who "lived native" in the bush had
-his dwelling about this lonely neighbourhood.  It was very well known to
-her, and she meant to find the man's dwelling-place, and see him with
-her own eyes before...
-
-Well, that was still to come.
-
-It took her rather longer than she had expected, but she did at last
-succeed in finding the tumble-down little palm-leaf shanty, built
-against the side of a rock, that she had heard described.  It was a
-miserable place, so far as her cat-like eyes could judge it in the
-purple gloom, not more than three or four yards long, and looking like
-nothing so much as a heap of dead leaves and rubbish piled against the
-rock.  She trod noiselessly round its three sides, and listened here and
-there. The door, as she ascertained by feeling, was a heavy mat hung up
-from the eaves, and it was tightly fastened across the opening.  There
-was a faint sound of slow, heavy breathing from within.  The man was
-evidently asleep.
-
-Vaiti climbed up on the rock above the hut, and pulled away a piece of
-the loose grey coral of which it was composed.  Then, sheltering herself
-behind a clump of hibiscus growing in a cleft, she raised her voice in a
-fearful squealing cry, exactly reproducing the yell of a wild pig
-wandering in the bush at night.  At the same time she cast a lump of
-coral with all her strength down the side of the big rock, whence it
-landed with a crash in the middle of a mass of brushwood, burying itself
-completely.
-
-The double noise, as she had anticipated, brought out the owner of the
-hut, very cross and sleepy, clad only in a pareo, and angrily anxious
-for the safety of his patch of yams.  He carried a torch in his hand,
-made of blazing candlenuts strung on a stick ("Must have run out every
-bit of credit at the stores," thought Vaiti parenthetically), and he
-was, beyond all shadow of doubt, against all common probability, the
-red-haired master of the _Ikurangi_.
-
-If looks could ever blast, those black eyes behind the hibiscus boughs
-would have slain him where he stood.  Vaiti quivered with rage as she
-watched him shambling sleepily about, looking, with his long, matted red
-hair, bloated, evil face, and half naked body, infinitely lower than any
-coloured native on the island....  He had not prospered since he escaped
-the wreck of the _Ikurangi_--how or where she did not care to know. He
-looked as if he had been living on the natives and half drinking himself
-to death, as was indeed the case.
-
-But Vaiti was not in the least mollified by his unprosperous case.  In
-her opinion, he ought to have been dead long ago.  There could be no
-peace of mind for her while he was still drifting about the Pacific,
-ever on the alert to do her an evil turn.  She was not equal to actual
-murder, and, in any case, Niue was a British-owned island, with a
-resident Commissioner and a regular nest of missionaries, where you had
-to be very careful of what you did.  But if any accident--a safe,
-convenient accident--should befall him by-and-by, why, it would
-certainly be an advantage to the _Sybil_ and her owners.  Well, that
-might come about, and without introducing Saxon into it either.  In such
-a delicate matter Saxon's interference would very likely have acted much
-as a charge of dynamite might act in the destruction of a wasps'
-nest--something more than the wasps would probably come to grief.
-
-She waited until the ugly creature had rolled back into his cottage and
-shut the make-shift door.  Then she slipped down from the rock once
-more, and began the second part of her errand.  Neither then, nor at any
-other time, did she trouble to find out the manner of Donahue's escape.
-If she had, she would have heard that he had been picked up by a native
-canoe, floating about on a piece of wreck the day after the disaster
-that destroyed the _Ikurangi_, and that, he had spent a good many months
-on a neighbouring island before a stray schooner had consented to accept
-his watch for passage money and convey him as far as Niue--the only
-place near their course where a penniless beachcomber would have been
-allowed to land.  As things were, he was more or less smuggled off, and
-thought best to take refuge in the bush at once.  The moneyless
-adventurer is not encouraged in islands belonging to the British Crown.
-
-It is easy, therefore, to understand why Donahue, living under an
-assumed name in the far interior of the island, had not been recognised,
-and was not likely to be, by any one save the person whom his presence
-most concerned.  His malice against Vaiti had by no means evaporated
-with the events that took place on Vaka.  He did not, as it happened,
-suspect her of having actually caused the loss of the _Ikurangi_, but he
-was of a darkly superstitious nature, and laid down his ill-luck, first,
-last, and all through, to the fact of her influence. She had been a
-"Jonah" of the worst kind to him, and he would have been very glad
-indeed to serve her any ill turn of any kind that might be possible.
-But only the small piece of spite compassed through Mata had, so far,
-lain within his power.
-
-Vaiti had still a mile or two to go, and it was waxing very late, or
-rather, early.  She almost ran along the winding rocky path, following
-it as easily as if broad day or full moon had surrounded her instead of
-star-lit dark.  Now the sound of the sea, unheard for the last hour,
-broke out again, and a cold salt breath from the beach cut through the
-heavy perfume of the forest track. In another minute she was out of the
-wood and fairly running down a sloping, sandy track that led to a little
-white house standing alone on the shore....  She laughed as she ran--it
-was such a soft, clear night, and the sea called so pleasantly down in
-the dark, and she did so dearly love an adventure--especially when all
-the world imagined her to be sleeping quietly in her mosquito-netted
-bed.
-
-There was no secrecy about this matter apparently. The house had a good
-wooden door, and she rapped loudly on it with a stone, calling at the
-same time, "Sona!  Sona!  Wake up!"
-
-There was a brief interval, in which the rollers tore at the beach and
-the palms swung and crashed overhead, uninterrupted by other sound.
-Sona was evidently asleep.  She struck loudly on the door again.  This
-time some one answered in a drowsy voice, and a slow, shuffling foot
-came to the door.  The hinges creaked, and in another minute a small,
-bent, feeble figure appeared on the threshold.
-
-"Tck! tck!" it clucked.  "Is there magic in the air, and have I grown
-fifty years younger, that the lovely maidens come to my door in the
-starlight once more?  Is it my beauty that has struck you to the heart,
-chieftainess Vaiti; or do you want a charm to catch the love of some one
-less deserving than myself?"
-
-A fit of coughing interrupted him; he crept out to the open air, and
-clung to the door-post, shaking all over with the violence of the
-paroxysm.  There was more light here, down by the foaming rollers; one
-could see, if one had been walking half the night in the dark bush, that
-the man was very small and hairy, very decrepit, and very, very old.
-Indeed, the personal appearance of Sona, solitary recluse of the
-Avarangi beach, good Nonconformist Christian on Sundays, and heathen
-witch-doctor out of business hours, was a very important item of his
-stock-in-trade.  He looked his part to perfection, and knew it.  His
-very name was a piece of business, even though, rightly pronounced and
-written. it was that of the godly man of Nineveh.  When Shark-Tooth of
-Avarangi had consented, largely for reasons of policy, to join the
-mission fold a good many years before--the last straggling heathens on
-the island having been then "brought in" by the exertions of a
-determined and energetic missionary--he had selected the name of Jonah
-for his baptismal title solely because, so far as he could ascertain,
-the original bearer of the name was proverbial for bringing bad luck to
-his enemies--and that was the sort of reputation that Shark-Tooth
-especially coveted.
-
-Vaiti had not met him before, but she knew him well by reputation, and
-was very sure that he knew all he cared to know--probably a good
-deal--about her. It was, she thought, a case for going straight to the
-point, so she went very straight indeed.
-
-"Let me in, Sona," she said in his own tongue.  "I want to talk with
-you, and I want to buy you; for you and I are wise people, and I know
-that there is nothing that may not be bought."
-
-"Crah--crah--crah!" cackled Sona, in a feeble old man's laugh, tacking a
-joke to the end of it that might well have raised a blush on Vaiti's
-cheek if she had been capable of such a weakness.  He led the way into
-the house, still cackling, lit an ill-smelling kerosene lamp, and sank
-down upon the mats, a mere heap of crumpled cotton clothes, old bones,
-and ancient wickedness.
-
-Vaiti pulled out her cigar-case, tossed the old creature a cigar, which
-he clutched at eagerly, and lit one for herself.  Then she squatted down
-on the mats, her back against the wall, and puffed for a minute or two
-in silence.  Old Sona watched her eagerly with his glassy little eyes.
-He saw that she was not angry at the part he had played in the late
-unpleasant occurrence upon the schooner, or at least that she did not
-mean to resent it. He had heard all about the strange happenings of the
-voyage, and was a good deal awed at the power of the woman who had
-actually broken the spell of his curse--in which, be it observed, he
-believed most fully himself, with excellent reasons for doing so.  And
-he was really very anxious to know what she wanted now, and especially
-what he was going to make by it.
-
-Vaiti pulled at her cigar vigorously for a minute to make it draw well,
-and then, with a leisurely puff, remarked in Sona's own tongue:
-
-"Mata gave you a gold ring to curse my sailors that they should die--all
-the village knows of it, so you need not deny it, old man with the face
-of a scavenger-crab. Was it not foolish of you to set yourself against
-Vaiti, the great sea-princess--very foolish to run into danger, and for
-so little?"
-
-"Yes, yes, so little," repeated Sona, in a kind of wail.
-
-"Now I come to buy you for myself," went on Vaiti, puffing between words
-(she smoked like most women, very hard and fast).  "I buy like a great
-chief's daughter, and you shall feed and drink well for a long time if
-you are faithful to me.  If not, I shall split you open with my knife as
-one splits open a fish on the beach, and leave you out on the strand, so
-that the crabs may come and eat you before you are dead.  That is what I
-shall do to you."
-
-"I belong to the high chieftainess, soul and liver," quavered Sona
-nervously.  Vaiti, hardly looking at him, pulled something out of her
-dress and flung it down carelessly on the mat between the two.  Sona's
-eyes glittered, for he heard the chink of gold.
-
-"Take it, old pig of the woods," said Vaiti contemptuously, and he
-clutched eagerly at the little parcel of rag.  It contained a roll of
-gold coins.  Sona, panting with mingled delight and fear lest his
-visitor should change her mind, scuttled away to some hiding-hole in an
-inner room, and concealed the packet with breathless haste.  Then he
-returned to the lamp-lit room, where Vaiti sat smoking and waiting.
-
-"I am yours, high chieftainess; I am yours," he repeated, rubbing his
-hands together and cackling.
-
-"What is this thing they tell about a devil that stays upon the road to
-Mua, and comes out at night-time?" asked Vaiti carelessly, looking over
-Sona's head at the wall.
-
-Sona shut up his eyes very tight, and shook his shaggy little head from
-side to side.
-
-"If you ask the good misinari doctor, he will tell you," he answered.
-"As for me, I have nothing to do with devils.  I am a very old man, and
-I want to go to heaven.
-
-"You will go to-night, old scorpion-head, if you do not tell me
-everything I want to know," remarked Vaiti.  Her tone was pleasant, but
-there was a flavour of something else below the pleasantness that caused
-Sona, literally and figuratively, to sit up.
-
-"I tell, I tell, high chieftainess," he stammered eagerly.  "The thing
-is known to all the people on the island--even the white people.  It
-happened only last year, and it is as true as the Good Book.  It was the
-foolish man from Mua way, whom they called a witch-doctor--and every one
-knows that such a thing does not exist, high chieftainess; but they said
-he was that thing, and he said so himself, because he was proud and mad.
-Now, we all know that there are many devils on Niue, and that the
-misinaris never were able to drive them all away.  And there is a very
-bad devil on that road to Mua, right where the six palm-trees stand up
-by themselves among the graves.  It is powerless in the day, but at
-night there is no Niue man who would dare to go there.  Sometimes the
-white traders will ride past the place coming home in the dark, but it
-is a true thing that their horses will often shy and bolt when they come
-near to the home of the devil, and no man can say why; indeed, the
-devils, for the most part, do not have power over the 'papalangi.'
-
-"So this witch-doctor, as he called himself, said that he did not fear
-the devil, and he would go and stay the night among the graves, thinking
-that because of that all the people in the island would believe in him,
-and give him many pigs and yams for fear of his 'mana.'  So he went to
-the devil-place, and all night he stayed, but in the morning he did not
-come back at all.  And by-and-by all the people of his village went
-together to look for him.  And they found him lying on the road, all
-dead, and his face was black and his body twisted up.  So the people
-brought him to the misinari doctor, and he said that he could not make
-him alive again.  And the traders said, 'What is the kind of this death?
-We do not know it, though we are white men and know everything.'  But
-the misinari doctor did not know.  And they buried him, and that is all,
-high chieftainess."
-
-Vaiti smoked thoughtfully.  She had heard something of the tale before,
-and Sona's story did not vary from the version that was generally
-current about the island. She thought, on the whole, that she believed
-in it. There was no doubt that many of the white people gave it credit,
-though a few of them declared the man must have died in a drunken fit.
-A paper in Australia had published an account of the mysterious
-incident, and the spiritualistic set in Sydney were so deeply interested
-in it that a letter of inquiry from a psychical research society had
-been sent up to the island, inquiring into the matter.  But it happened
-that the trader to whom the letter was addressed had committed suicide a
-good many months earlier, and excellent onions and pumpkins (much
-appreciated by his successor) were growing green upon his grave by the
-time the letter reached the island. So the inquiry was never answered.
-
-Yes, on the whole, Vaiti thought she believed the story.  That a similar
-result would follow in the case of a "papalangi" (white man) who
-followed the deceased magician's example she did not, however, believe.
-She thought it very likely, however, that mischief of one kind or
-another would result....  And if the worst should chance to come
-about....
-
-Vaiti took another cigar.
-
-"What does your misinari say?" she asked.  "He is not the right sort of
-misinari, it is true, but still, he should know more about devils than
-the traders."
-
-"Our good misinari was not here when it happened," replied Sona in a
-pious tone.  "It was the doctor misinari.  Our own good misinari says
-that devils cannot do harm to any but bad men."
-
-Vaiti reflected, her eyes on the floor.  She really had some respect, in
-an odd, upside-down kind of way, for missionary opinion.  It is bred in
-the bone with the younger generation of Eastern Pacific islanders.
-
-Donahue was certainly a very bad man.  She did not think she had ever
-met any one much worse.  Perhaps the badness, balanced against the
-whiteness, might swing down the scale.  At any rate....
-
-"Hear me, Sona!" she said, in a voice of command. "I have bought you
-to-night, and you belong to me. There will be more to pay by-and-by if
-you do as I tell you.  But I would warn you to be careful, for you will
-not find it pleasant lying on the shore down there, with your inside
-hanging out like a gutted fish, and the crabs coming running to eat you
-before you are dead, as you will if you make any mistakes.  Listen,
-then, very carefully."
-
-"I listen, I listen!" cried Sona.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XIV*
-
-               *HOW THE WITCH-DOCTOR GOT HIS MONEY BACK*
-
-
-When the trader's wife came in next morning with Vaiti's cup of tea, she
-was touched to see how deeply her pretty lodger was sleeping.
-
-"Poor young dear," said the good woman, "lying there so sweet and
-innocent, sleeping like a baby! It's only the good heart that rests like
-that.  I don't believe a word of the silly lies they tell about her.
-Here, dear, wake up," she called gently.  "Your good papa is ever so
-much better this morning, and looking for you to come in.  And it is
-Sunday morning, and a nice cool day."
-
-"Thank you, Mrs. Smith," said Vaiti politely, broad awake at once.  "May
-I asking you one little hot water?  I like get up and go to turch."
-
-Church, attended for reasons religious or otherwise, was not one of the
-amusements patronised by the nameless white man of the bush.  Indeed,
-his amusements, such as they were, were so far confined to the native
-villages of the interior that very few of the other whites had seen him.
-He was not good for trade, having no money and possessing no
-credit--that was all they knew, or for the most part wanted to know,
-about him.
-
-There was all the more astonishment, therefore, in the shanty owned by
-the Mua trader, away up in the bush, when the unknown man walked into
-the store that Sunday night, and demanded some tobacco, at the same time
-showing a sovereign he held in his hand.  He was dressed in a pitiful
-mass of rags, none too clean, but he looked well pleased with himself,
-and was more than half drunk.  Fortune had apparently found him out at
-last.
-
-The Mua trader was an honest man, but he did not see why he should not
-have a share in anything good that happened to be available about that
-lonely and unprofitable district.  So he welcomed the stranger in with
-much cordiality, and asked him to stop for supper.
-
-The newcomer had no objection in the world to come in and share the
-trader's good tinned meats and new yeast bread, and he made himself very
-much at home without pressing.  The trader, who had a private store of
-consolation in his own back kitchen, plied the spirits freely.  He was
-curious, and he believed in the old saw of "Wine in, truth out."  A
-couple of friends who had ridden over from Alofi, the capital, and were
-equally curious about the derelict's sudden access to fortune, did their
-disinterested best to help, and the bottle went merrily round.  The Niue
-traders are a sober, decent set of people enough, but Donahue had mixed
-with them so little that he did not know this, and consequently was not
-put on his guard by the unusual conviviality.  Indeed, he was by no
-means the same active, crafty villain who had set that successful snare
-of the diamond necklace in Apia many months ago.  A white man cannot
-"live native" without going downhill very fast, and Donahue was nearly
-at the bottom.
-
-So he drank, and laughed, and told evil tales, and grew quarrelsome, and
-pathetic, and finally affectionate and confidential, in well-defined
-stages, while all the time the other men kept sober, or nearly so.  The
-Mua trader in particular hardly touched his glass.  But Donahue, once so
-wary, never saw, and chattered on.
-
-Before midnight the trader had sold him some gay calico for the native'
-girls, and a little tinned meat and flour, and half-a-dozen various
-trifles that brought the score up to about a pound.  Here the guest came
-to a pause and fingered his coin.
-
-"Oh, well, if that's all you have, you won't get any more goods
-to-night.  Thanks," said the trader, putting out his hand.
-
-The visitor, however, declined to hand over the money. He would pay
-to-morrow, he said.  He was not going to leave himself without money
-again--not if he knew it--and he would have lots to-morrow: and if the
-trader wouldn't send up the goods without the cash to-night, why, he
-might keep his condemned rubbish, and his customer would go elsewhere.
-
-Rather than lose the order, the other gave in, and sent a boy away with
-the stuff.  It would always be easy to bully him out of it afterwards,
-he thought, and there was no arguing with a drunken man's whim.
-
-Then he set himself, in company with all the rest, to find out where the
-money had come from.
-
-Donahue, who by now was far gone, responded readily.  It was the silly
-old chap who lived down on Avarangi beach, he said; an old fool who was
-an uncle of a girl who was a friend of his.  The old chap had a notion
-that there were some Spanish doubloons hidden somewhere on the island,
-but in a place he was afraid to touch, so he had forked out a good
-British sovereign, and offered it to Donahue to go in his place, and
-share the money with him.  Donahue was to keep the earnest money for his
-trouble, if nothing came of it, and if anything did turn up he was to
-take half.  So he was going, that very night--the sooner the better.
-Natives were--well, natives; but as for him, he was afraid of nothing.
-
-"Thasser-sort-er-man I am," he finished thickly, looking round for
-applause.
-
-He did not get it.  The traders one and all burst out laughing.  The
-story of the doubloons, they told him, was a very old one in the island,
-and only the newest of new chums thought of believing it.  It was quite
-true that the natives, who were perfect magpies for hoarding, did
-possess among them a certain number of doubloons, which came from
-God-knows-where--for the coinage used in the island was British--and
-true also that the trader would get a doubloon from one of them every
-now and then in the course of business, always with some mystery
-attached to it, and some reluctance to part with the coin.  But the
-Resident Commissioner, who knew the island pretty well, and the
-missionary too, had long been certain that the store was merely the
-remains of some ship-wrecking raid of past days, about which the Niueans
-were now ashamed to speak.  They were great misers, and it would like
-enough be another generation before all the hoarded coins had come to
-light and passed through the traders' hands.  But hidden treasure in
-Niue!  Pf!  If old Sona had been giving away money, he must be either
-going mad with age or (more likely) up to something. He was the cutest
-old fox on Niue, and that was saying something.  Why, when he had come
-into that very store to buy a darning-needle a few hours ago (what a man
-who lived in a waist-cloth and nothing else wanted with a darning-needle
-he hadn't explained), it had been all the trader could do to prevent his
-picking up half-a-dozen odds and ends.  That was what he was like if one
-ever took an eye off him; and he wouldn't even pay for the needle,
-either, till the trader had threatened to hammer him unless he forked
-out.  Take his word for it, if Sona had been giving away money, he meant
-to have it back--somehow.  And the treasure was poppy-cock.
-
-Donahue had now passed into the quarrelsome stage, and he rose with
-tipsy dignity from his seat.
-
-"I considdle you no gennlemen," he said scornfully. "For half a Chile
-dorrer I'd" ... He mentioned what he would do, in gross and in detail,
-to the assembled company for the small sum mentioned.
-
-"Kick the dirty brute out," said the Alofi trader disgustedly.  "It's
-easy to see what sort of company that carrion has kept."
-
-Donahue was gone, however--gone with surprising agility, and lurching
-rapidly up the forest pathway towards his house.  His legs were always
-the last thing to fail him.
-
-He knew very well that he had had too much, and when he reached his hut
-he proceeded to sober himself by dipping his head repeatedly in a bucket
-of water. Then he brewed himself a powerful jorum of black tea, drank
-it, and set off considerably sobered.
-
-It was a long way to the clump of palms, and he stumbled badly now and
-then as he went over the graves that lay thick about the edges of the
-path. Burial along the high-road is very popular in Niue, where they
-like to keep an eye on their dead and see that they are lying quiet in
-their graves--a thing that no one considers at all a matter of course.
-Some of the graves that Donahue passed had felt hats laid upon them;
-others had plates, bowls, bottles of hair-oil, fans--all to amuse the
-ghost and keep it quiet; and one or two looked ghostly enough to scare a
-nervous person as it was, with the wraith-like mosquito curtains
-thoughtfully suspended over the tomb by mourning and anxious relatives.
-Every grave was completed by a solid mass of concrete, weighing anything
-from several hundredweight to a ton.  It was not the fault of any Niuean
-if his dead relatives "walked."
-
-Donahue as he went chuckled to himself at the thought of his keenness in
-over-reaching the old witch-doctor.  He had used him for his own
-purposes through the girl Mata before, and though that had not worked
-out too well, it was the witch-doctor who bore the discredit, not he.
-He would use him again now, and in another way.  It was in the daytime
-that Sona had arranged to meet him at the palm-tree clump.  At night, he
-said, it would be certain death; and even in daylight no one would
-linger there who could help it.  He at least would never dare to disturb
-the big tomb in which the money was hidden and call down the anger of
-the devils on himself, unless he had a white man with him who feared
-nothing.  So next morning, very early, the white man who was so brave
-would meet him, and they would open the big, cracked tomb together--the
-tomb that no Niuean had ever dared to lay a finger on before, though
-there were one or two besides himself who suspected that it was just
-there the mysterious foreign coins had come from years ago, and that
-there were a good many left.
-
-Thus the witch-doctor.  And Donahue had assented eagerly, and gone off
-with his earnest money.  And, on arriving at his hut, he had looked out
-an old axe that he possessed, and cleaned up his lamp, and begged a drop
-of oil from the nearest native house.  For he meant to go that very
-night, and take everything there was for himself.  Who was to prove it?
-
-Which was just the course of action that Sona had calculated very
-confidently on his taking.
-
-It poured furiously in an hour or two, for it was in the hot season, and
-the great rains were out.  Donahue could not light his lamp when he came
-to the clump of palms, which he knew well enough to recognise almost in
-the pitch dark.  It thundered soon after, and the sky was split from
-pole to pole by corpse-blue flashes of lightning.  In one of these,
-Donahue, feeling about the cracks of the tomb, thought he saw something
-moving against the gloom of the bush near at hand. It made his throat
-turn dry, for all the wet, and he felt his hair prickle curiously.  But
-he went on groping. Another flash ripped up the sky; it was a smaller
-one, but for one horrible moment he thought he had been struck, for
-something stinging streaked across his face and gave him an ugly thrill.
-But it passed immediately, and he began groping again--groping with both
-hands, in a frantic hurry, trying to make out the best place to apply
-the axe--tearing and grasping and scuffling like some deadly graveyard
-mole, breathless, with beads of warm sweat coursing down his face
-through the streams of chilly rain....  He was fighting--fighting he
-knew not what and knew not why--but he was fighting, for all that,
-fighting hard, with the stone falling away from his nerveless hands, and
-the breath in his body sinking down under some nightmare oppression, and
-the sound of the thunder now almost continuous, blending itself with
-another and far louder sound that was battering madly in his ears.  He
-was fighting with----  Christ!--it was Death!
-
-The thunder passed, as tropic storms do pass, suddenly and completely.
-The dawn shot up in the east, wet and red, and cast long, black, ghostly
-shadows, set shaking by an icy wind, low down upon the palm-trunks and
-the grave.  But Donahue did not want the light.  The axe lay untouched
-beside him; and he lay over the tomb, dead.  And his face was black and
-his body was all contorted.
-
-It was barely daylight yet when something small and slow crept out of
-the bush, and began hunting carefully near the corpse.  It could not
-find what it wanted, seemingly, and this distressed it, for it whimpered
-pitifully in a thin old voice, and looked long before it desisted.  Then
-it put its claws into the dead man's pockets, and hunted through them,
-before it finally disappeared down the road.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-The Mua trader was at his door when a howling procession of natives came
-into the village, carrying the white man's corpse to his home.  The
-Alofi trader, who had found the body, stepped aside to speak.  After the
-tale of the finding had been told, the Mua trader asked slowly:
-
-"Did you think of searching his pockets?  A dead man's a dead man--and
-I'd not be sorry to have the money he owed me, for the natives will have
-taken the goods by this time."
-
-"They were empty when I found him.  Queer, for I was the first to see
-him," said the other.  "I found this thing on the road close by, though.
-Do you recognise it?"
-
-It was the trader's darning-needle, stuck neatly into the end of a tiny,
-arrow-like reed, and stained at the point with some dark sticky stuff.
-
-The Mua trader took it in his hand, smelt it and looked at it closely.
-Then he walked to his kitchen, and, watched by the Alofi trader, threw
-the thing into the fire.
-
-"That's what I think of it," he said.  "My boy, I traded in the worst of
-the Solomons for three years. I'm the only man on the island that knows
-that thing, bar one--and he was a plantation hand in the Solomons, in
-the black-birding days.  There's no wanderers like the Nuie men."
-
-"Do you think----" began the other.
-
-"I think," said the Mua trader, "that old Sona has got his money back."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-The schooner _Sybil_ had no reason for staying longer in Niue, for the
-business of the ship was done, and the captain was quite well again.  A
-picture of perfect beauty the _Sybil_ made, as she stood out of Alofi
-roads in the golden afternoon, every sail set and every inch of cloth
-straining to the merry breeze.  Niue was sorry to part with Vaiti, for
-she had interested the island considerably, and her beauty had, as
-usual, won her more admiration than her temper deserved.  Every one, on
-parting, expressed a courteous wish to see the _Sybil_ and her owners
-again.
-
-For all that, and all that, the schooner came back no more.  Vaiti had
-won the game at last, but she never willingly mentioned Niue again.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER XV*
-
-                      *THE CALAMITY OF CORAL BAY*
-
-
-The wide, still waters of Coral Bay were turning glassy pink under the
-sunset afterglow.  The _Sybil's_ boat, rowing rapidly towards the
-schooner, left as it went a long, ugly flaw upon the stainless crystal
-of the sea.  It was very still, and the night was coming down.
-
-Even in that uncertain twilight the colour of the boat as it cut through
-the pale-hued water stood out strange and sinister.  Most boats are
-white in tropic seas: the _Sybil's_ had always been snowy as her own
-graceful hull. Now they were vivid scarlet, and the ship herself had a
-wide band of scarlet round her counter and flew a scarlet flag at her
-masthead.
-
-Any islander could have told you at a glance what these things meant.
-The schooner was "recruiting"--conveying natives from the wild cannibal
-islands of the New Hebrides to the Queensland sugar plantations. Ten
-pounds a head was paid for the men on their arrival, and it was politely
-supposed that these ignorant heathen had one and all been duly engaged
-under a contract to serve three years, at a wage of five pounds a year.
-How much they understood of contracts, times, and wages--where and what
-they thought Australia might be--and what were the means employed to get
-them on board the ship, nobody asked.  Saxon was not the man to answer,
-if any one had.
-
-Why he had temporarily deserted the pleasant, peaceful islands of the
-Eastern Pacific, and gone "black-birding" in the wild and wicked and
-fever-smitten groups of the West, was Saxon's own affair.  Doubtless he
-had his reasons; possibly they were satisfactory.  But there is reason
-to believe that about Apia and Papeete at this time he was characterised
-as a (double-adjectived) liar, and an (impolite expression) villain, who
-was running away because it was (adverbially) unsafe for him to stay and
-risk his (past participled) neck among (adjective) men.  This is not the
-history of Captain Saxon; at least, not all of it--from such a recital
-as that may the eleven thousand virgins of Saint Mudie, and the Blessed
-Young Person of Sixteen, deliver us!  It must therefore be enough to say
-that, for sufficient reasons, he decided to shift his headquarters to
-the New Hebrides, and immediately did so, leaving behind him certain
-unsettled scores with which this tale has nothing to do.
-
-He was not new to the islands or the natives, having been one of the
-most notorious of the sandal-wood traders in years gone by.  The
-sandal-wood was gone, and of the money he had made by it not even the
-memory remained.  But there was still something in the labour trade, and
-Saxon liked the lawless atmosphere of the place.
-
-Vaiti remembered the islands well, though she had only been there as a
-child, and she was glad to have the excitement of the change.  When the
-recruiting boat left the schooner (guarded by a companion, full of armed
-men) and drew up on the beach to negotiate with the islanders, she
-always sat in the stern, with a very smart little Winchester rifle
-across her knees, and took command, if her father was not there.  Very
-often he was not; for the New Hebrideans have long memories, and there
-was many a spot where Saxon had run up so many bad, black scores in the
-sandal-wood days that he could not hope for success--or safety, if he
-had minded that--in going ashore.  Harris usually took command of the
-covering boat, a post of comparative security that suited him very well,
-while the dauntless Vaiti managed all the real business, and seldom came
-back with an empty bag.
-
-They had good luck, on the whole, and not many narrow escapes.  Coasting
-round the notorious island of Mallicolo, or Malekula, they succeeded in
-obtaining about forty natives in a week or two.  Saxon was well pleased,
-and began to count up his profits.  Also he began to drink again.
-
-Then it was that trouble came, as trouble generally does, out of a
-fair-seeming sky.
-
-Half-a-dozen natives had been given up to the missionaries on the far
-side of Malekula, to hand over to the British gunboat _Alligator_, which
-at that time was cruising about the islands, intent on punishing the
-Malekulans for a more than usually atrocious murder of whites.  The
-tribes to whom the culprits belonged had taken fright, and were anxious
-to save themselves at any cost.  The missionaries, when asked by them,
-consented to take charge of the prisoners, but refused to keep them any
-longer than could possibly be helped, since they did not consider
-themselves judges or gaolers. At this point the _Sybil_ turned up, and
-the missionaries, hearing she was bound for Parrot Harbour, where the
-_Alligator_ was certain to call, put the men on board, and engaged Saxon
-to hand them over to the Parrot Harbour mission, receiving from the
-missionaries there the price of their passage, which the man-of-war
-would doubtless refund.
-
-Saxon, understanding that he had not to meet the _Alligator_, undertook
-the job at a rather excessive rate, and brought the prisoners over as
-agreed.  But, finding that the Parrot Harbour mission refused to pay the
-passage money until the man-of-war arrived, he went into a towering rage
-and abused everybody.  Wait for the _Alligator_?  Not he!  He had
-something else to do, and he wouldn't have any condemned gunboat that
-ever sailed the sanguinary waters of the Pacific poking her nose into
-any of his business.  He had been promised the money as soon as he
-arrived, and the money or its equivalent he meant to have or know the
-reason why.  Off he went, with much more whisky in his brain than was
-compatible with sober judgment--off out to sea again, taking with him
-the whole six prisoners, and openly declaring his intention either to
-hold them for ransom or run them down to the Queensland plantations, as
-seemed most convenient.
-
-Next day the _Alligator_ appeared, and her commander was informed of the
-occurrence.  Saxon, master of a miserable labour schooner, had run off
-with prisoners of war belonging to a British gunboat, defied the
-Imperial Government, and offered open disrespect to the Crown! The
-commander, an iron-faced, flinty-eyed disciplinarian of the toughest
-school, and a first-class pepper-pot into the bargain, nearly choked
-with rage and indignation. Out went the _Alligator_ again, full steam
-ahead, making the captain's dainty suite of cabins tremble like an
-ill-set jelly in the stern as the ship forged along at thirteen knots an
-hour, blackening the crystal sky with trails of smoke, and looking
-implacably about for the offending _Sybil_.  That delinquent of the high
-seas was farther off than might have been supposed.  The wind, though
-light, was in her favour, and she had managed to get round the far end
-of the island, and down the other side to Coral Bay, eighty miles off,
-before the _Alligator_ came up with her, late in the afternoon.  Once
-caught, her shrift was short.  The prisoners were at once transferred;
-Saxon was arrested and taken, still half drunk, on board the man-of-war,
-and his ship was confiscated, "just to learn him," as Gray (who had
-viewed his captain's proceedings with sour and silent disapproval
-throughout) was heard to remark, not without a little I-told-you-so
-satisfaction.
-
-And so it came about that Vaiti, returning with the boat from an
-unsuccessful recruiting expedition, and not in the best of humours to
-begin with, was met on her arrival with extremely unpleasant news.
-
-"We're took, cap'n; we're took, ma'am!" shouted Gray over the bulwarks,
-as the boat nosed along the side of the schooner.  He added a rapid
-account of the calamity, in which he was careful to suppress his
-personal feelings of triumph.
-
-The smart young lieutenant who had been left in charge of the ship came
-and looked down at the boat. He wanted to know what sort of person it
-might be who was addressed with this extraordinary hail.  He had been
-under the impression that the "captain" of the _Sybil_ had been left two
-hours ago--sullen, swearing, and not at all sober--in the cells of
-H.M.S. _Alligator_.
-
-What he saw was a red-painted boat, manned by four stalwart native
-seamen, and steered by an extremely handsome, olive-faced young woman,
-who looked up at him with eyes that seemed to dart black lightning under
-their beautifully drawn brows as she listened to the boatswain's story.
-She wore a dainty, lacy white muslin frock, and carried a Winchester
-rifle in her lap.
-
-Second Lieutenant Tempest, who had been cursing his luck up to that
-moment, suddenly became reconciled to the uninteresting job in which he
-was engaged.  It is just conceivable that his commander might have
-selected another officer to perform the duty if he had been aware of its
-possible alleviations; for Mr. Tempest was notoriously given to scrapes
-with a _soupcon_ of petticoat in them, and had already imperilled his
-career more than once after this fashion.  But Commander the Hon.
-Francis St. John Raleigh had not seen "Captain" Vaiti; so he sent Mr.
-Tempest to take possession of the _Sybil_, and slept the sleep of the
-well-conscienced and well-dined, that evening, in his velvet
-armchair....  It might have seemed somewhat less perfectly stuffed to
-him, had his dreams been concerned with what was happening a few hundred
-yards away.
-
-Mr. Tempest, smiling like the godmother beast of his own ship, offered
-his hand to the sullen beauty as she swung herself up the _Sybil's_
-side.  Vaiti tossed it indignantly away, favoured him with another
-black-lightning glance that reduced his susceptible sailor heart to
-pulp, and stalked aft like an offended Cleopatra. Tempest, persistently
-following, poured out explanations, apologies, smiles, consolations,
-promises.  Vaiti began to think that civility might possibly avail her
-something, and began to melt by carefully calculated degrees.  Before
-very long she was sitting on the main hatch, with Tempest beside her,
-holding her hand unreproved and continuing his consolations.  The
-commander was very angry, no doubt, but he was a good sort at bottom,
-and perhaps he would not really seize the ship.  She would be sent to
-Fiji, no doubt, and Saxon might possibly be imprisoned, but it would all
-come out all right, trust him!  And he would take very good care of the
-_Sybil_ and her charming "captain."
-
-Vaiti, still smiling sweetly, dug her nails into wood of the hatch at
-her side.  Underneath all this verbiage she foresaw the reality of
-serious trouble.  Why had her father been such a fool?  What could be
-done to save the ship?  There seemed no way of helping Saxon himself.
-If the commander proved implacable, to prison he must go.  Well, that
-would not break any bones; but the loss of the _Sybil_--if such a
-disaster was indeed possible--must be averted at any cost.  She did not
-believe Mr. Tempest's smiling assertion.  The commander had threatened
-to confiscate the ship, and most probably he would.  At any rate, the
-risk was too great to face.  The schooner must not be taken to Fiji.
-
-The wily brain was hard at work, as she sat on the hatch, listening,
-with a gentle smile and soft, downcast, maidenly eyes, to Tempest's
-love-making, and answering now and then in her pretty Polynesian
-"pigeon-English"--so much simpler and less grotesque than the
-_beche-de-mer_ talk of the Melanesian Islands....  If he could be got
-out of the way, and the marines suddenly overpowered, the schooner might
-slip off round the corner of the headland in the dark, and get nearly a
-hundred miles away before daylight, with the steady wind that was
-blowing outside the glassy, landlocked harbour of Coral Bay.  There was
-just enough air stirring at this farthest point to allow her to get out,
-and once off, she could show her heels in a way that would astonish even
-a British gunboat.  Of course, the latter would easily overhaul her in
-an open chase, but Vaiti did not propose any such folly.  There was many
-a perilous inlet and passage among those dangerous, ill-surveyed islands
-where the _Sybil_ could safely go, but where the _Alligator_ could not
-venture.  Let them only gain a day, and who was to say whither they had
-flown into the wide wastes of the Pacific?  Once beyond pursuit, paint
-and other disguises would so alter the ship that no one could identify
-her; her name could be changed, and the _Mary Ann_ or the _Nautilus_
-would innocently sail the seas formerly polluted by the presence of the
-naughty _Sybil_....  It was certainly worth trying.
-
-As for Tempest, she had a plan concocted to get rid of him almost as
-soon as the matter entered her mind. She left him, by and by, solacing
-himself with fresh turtle steak and excellent champagne in the cabin for
-the loss of his own dinner, while she went into the bows with Harris and
-Gray, and rapidly explained her plans. The marines had been accommodated
-with eatables and drinkables after their own hearts, on the cover of the
-main hatch, and were too much engaged to notice anything in the thick
-darkness that was now lying heavily on Coral Bay.
-
-Vaiti's plan was simple and effective.  Tempest was to be enticed into
-leaving his duty and going ashore--she would see to that.  Four of the
-New Hebridean crew, stripped of their ship clothes, and attired in their
-aboriginal paint and plumes, were to be concealed on the beach.  They
-would capture him, and carry him off to a bush village near the coast,
-where the people were not ill disposed to the whites, and leave him
-there, scared no doubt, but safe until the morning, when he would be let
-go.  Vaiti would come back to the ship as soon as the capture was
-effected, and the four native sailors would hurry down from the village
-as quickly as possible.  Meantime, it would be easy for Harris to drug
-the marines' drink and make them helpless. They would be set adrift in
-one of the boats, as soon as the schooner was clear of the land, so that
-they should tell no tales.  With good luck, everything should be over,
-and the _Sybil_ far out to sea, in less than a couple of hours.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Of the disgrace of Lieutenant Tempest--of his temptation, his struggle,
-and his fall--there is no need to tell at length.  The decline of a
-British officer from duty and honour--his desertion of a post which
-every professional instinct should have compelled him to keep is not a
-happy subject, as (fortunately) it is not a common one.  Vaiti, in
-brief, invited the officer to leave the ship unguarded, and slip ashore
-with her, to sup at a neighbouring trader's shanty, where she said there
-would be drink and dancing, and every kind of fun.  There was no such
-place, but Tempest did not know that; and if he had known, he might not
-have cared.  Half-crazed with love and champagne, he thought only of the
-beautiful half-caste girl, and was ready to follow her to the mouth of
-hell, if she had asked him.  The dinghy was got out softly and
-cautiously, and, with muffled oars, they slipped away unheard.  So far
-out of his mind was the lieutenant that he did not even note the
-disappearance of his men, who were all lying, very ably and completely
-Shanghai'ed, in the hold.
-
-In less than half an hour Vaiti came back, swimming the stretch of black
-water that lay between the _Sybil_ and the shore, to leave the boat
-ready for the men. Dripping, sparkling, and laughing, she stood up in
-the dim light of the deck lantern and told the mate and boatswain how
-the capture had been managed.  Tempest, with a sack over his head and
-his hands and feet bound to a pole, was at that moment being carried up
-in the dark to the bush village.  The inhabitants of the place were to
-have ten pounds' worth of trade goods promised them to keep him there
-all night and let him escape in the morning, when they themselves would
-go off and hide in the impenetrable forests until the man-of-war had
-sailed away again.  In half an hour or so the four natives would be back
-on board, and they would all sail away round the headland, and leave no
-evidence of any kind to connect the _Sybil_ with this last unpardonable
-outrage; for Tempest could not but suppose that the natives who so
-neatly bagged him as he was philandering along the dark beach with the
-innocent Vaiti were ordinary hill tribesmen.  And, in any case, his
-sacred person would be taken good care of.
-
-"Then he ain't to be damaged, the little darlin'?" inquired Harris.  The
-question was not an idle one. Every one on board the schooner knew that
-Vaiti was capable of ugly things at her worst.
-
-The girl laughed--a low, gurgling laugh.
-
-"No.  No kill him, no hurt him.  I not like," she said, tossing back her
-wet, wavy hair, with a coquettish gesture that told Harris the woman in
-Vaiti was fully awake that night, despite the rough and ready adventure
-on which she was engaged.  Harris was no fool, if he was something
-unsteady in character, and more or less he admired Vaiti himself, which
-tended to sharpen his sight.
-
-"Good job the dandy leftenant _is_ out of the way," he growled as Vaiti
-disappeared into the cabin to change.  "'Twouldn't take much for 'er to
-get fancyin' his silly face, after all, and then the fat would be in the
-fire."
-
-"Well, if you hask me, I don't like none of the 'ole thing from
-beginnin' to hend," declared the bo'sun, jamming a wad of tobacco
-viciously into his pipe.  "Not the keepin' of the bloomin' niggers, not
-again runnin' to Coral Bay, nor again this business.  Wy?  Because I
-don't, and because it make me smell dirty weather. Give us a light."
-
-Overhead the stars in the velvet sky began to twinkle here and there as
-the breeze rose and the clouds melted away.  An odour of hot, wet jungle
-drifted out across the bay from the invisible land, and a locust with a
-rattle exactly like a policeman's whistle burred loudly among the trees.
-It might have been half an hour, and it might have been more, before
-something else became audible--something that sounded like a frightened
-wailing on the shore.
-
-"A--we!  A--a--we!"
-
-Vaiti came out of her cabin and stood on deck, listening intently.
-
-The sound went on.
-
-"A--we!  A--we!  A--wa--we!"
-
-Harris, watching Vaiti's face in the light of the lantern, saw it change
-and harden, but she said nothing. There was another sound now--a dinghy
-shoving off from the beach and the rattle of carelessly handled oars.
-
-"What's the ---- fools makin' such a ---- row for?" asked Gray.
-"They'll 'ave the _Halligator_ on to us."
-
-Still Vaiti said nothing, but stood like a statue on the deck, listening
-and looking into the darkness.
-
-The boat rammed the _Sybil_ in another minute with a shock that made her
-quiver, and then drifted aimlessly along her sides.  Three brown naked
-figures lifted up their arms from below, and cried despairingly:
-
-"Kapitani!  Kapitani!  A--we!  A--we!"
-
-"Get those fellows on board, too much quick, and bring him cabin,"
-ordered Vaiti.  Harris and Gray hauled them in with small ceremony, and
-dumped them down the companion into the cabin, where they stood in the
-light of the lamp, painted, feather-bedecked creatures, fierce enough in
-appearance, but in reality abjectly frightened and a-shiver.
-
-"What thing you been do?" demanded Vaiti sharply. "Where you make other
-sailor-man?  What you do Tempesi?"
-
-One of the men was beginning his wail again.  She seized him by the
-shoulder, pulled a pistol from among her draperies, and shook it in his
-face.  The man, with a yell of terror, twisted himself out of her hold.
-Harris, who was rather frightened at her demeanour, got him away, forced
-a dram of spirits into his mouth, and tried to extract the terrified
-creature's story from him by degrees.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XVI*
-
-                      *THE FATE OF THE LIEUTENANT*
-
-
-It was not a gratifying tale.  Half a mile from the beach, the captors
-had been overtaken by a party of wild hillmen from Ranaar, one of the
-worst of the inland cannibal towns, and had been set upon fiercely in
-the dark.  Aki, one of their own party, had been clubbed, and his body
-carried off.  The other natives had escaped. As for the lieutenant, the
-Ranaar men had seized on him with cries of joy, exclaiming that now
-indeed they had a chance of "making themselves strong" before all
-Malekula.  Then they had carried him away, slung on a pole between two
-men, and the _Sybil's_ people, half dead with fright, had run down to
-the beach again; and here they were, begging the Kapitani to have mercy
-on them, for indeed it was not their fault, and no one could have known
-that the Ranaar men would venture so near the coast.
-
-Vaiti, Harris, and Gray all looked grave at this recital.  They knew
-only too well what was implied by the phrase "making strong," and what
-virtues the hill tribes of Malekula ascribed to the eating of white
-man's flesh.  The rude play of the capture had turned into most serious
-earnest, and Tempest's life was worth just so many hours as it might
-take the cannibals to reach their mountain stronghold and go through the
-preliminary ceremonies of the feast.  No more.
-
-There was silence for a minute or two, while the schooner rolled gently
-on the swell of the incoming tide, and the smoky kerosene light
-flickered to and fro upon the strange, wild scene: Vaiti's beautiful,
-angry head standing out above the weather-beaten faces of the two
-English sailors, the three naked New Hebrideans, squalid and
-monkey-faced, cowering before her; the remnants of Tempest's dinner,
-some one's greasy pack of cards, and a couple of Saxon's empty whisky
-bottles decorating the table.  The natives were badly frightened still.
-They did not understand that the Kapitani's plans had been entangled
-beyond all hope of setting right by this disaster, or that the
-_Alligator_ must have been alarmed by their noisy return; but Vaiti's
-countenance was enough to warn any one who had ever seen the unpleasant
-things that happened at times on board the _Sybil_ that hurricane
-weather was ahead.  But before she had time to speak again, a loud hail
-from outside made every one look towards the deck.  In another moment
-the first lieutenant of the _Alligator_ had framed his smart white and
-gold personality in the dark oblong of the companion, and demanded,
-loudly, and authoritatively, to know where Mr. Tempest was, where the
-marines were, and what the deuce was the meaning of all this.
-
-Vaiti, motioning aside the mate and bo'sun, swept to the front and spoke
-straight out.
-
-"All your sailor, he too much drunk, sleep 'long hold. Tempesi, he been
-go shore.  Men belong Ranaar, they catch him, take him away.  Pretty dam
-quick they eat him."
-
-"Great Scott!" said the officer.  Facts were falling very thick and
-fast, and there were evidently more facts behind them which for the
-present he felt obliged--most reluctantly--to neglect.  People think
-quickly in the navy, and Lieutenant Darcy realised instantly that this
-strange, wild, handsome creature was speaking the truth, and that it
-must be acted on without delay.
-
-He stepped out on deck, and gave certain orders to his men.  A sharp
-little midshipman and half the boat's crew followed him on board, and
-planted themselves about the ship.  The rest remained in the boat.
-
-"This officer will stay here and take charge, and you will come with me
-to the _Alligator_," said the lieutenant, addressing Vaiti.
-
-"Yes, I speak captain.  Very good you let me see him quick," said the
-girl imperiously; and the lieutenant, guessing that there was more still
-to be told, hurried the boat away.
-
-He delivered his report to the commander, and concluded by saying that
-the girl was in waiting, and had, in his opinion, something more to say
-about the matter.
-
-"Bring her in," said the commander shortly.  The gravity of the affair
-had darkened his face a trifle, but he made no comment.  It was not a
-time for talk.
-
-Vaiti entered with the light step and carriage of the woman who wears
-neither shoes nor stays, and stood silently before the commander, fixing
-his hard grey eyes with her inscrutable dark stare.
-
-"You can sit down," said the officer.  "I want to ask you some
-questions."
-
-Vaiti drew herself up a little higher.
-
-"No time for sit," she said curtly.  "Suppose you no want Tempesi ki-ki
-[eaten] pretty quick, you listen me."
-
-"Young woman!" began Commander the Hon. Francis St. John Raleigh
-sternly.
-
-"I tell you, no time talk!" interrupted Vaiti.  "I savvy all right you
-very big sea-chief; I savvy my father been made bad work, made bad work
-myself. Let him go all-a-same that; by-'n-by we talk those thing.  Now
-you listen me."
-
-"All right; sit down," said the officer in a more conciliatory tone.
-Vaiti sat, and leaning across the table with her chin in one slender
-hand, and her eyes blazing out from under the mass of damp waves on her
-forehead, she said her say.
-
-"You no savvy Malekula man; I savvy plenty. Suppose you do what I
-telling you, Tempesi he come back, I think.  Suppose not, Tempesi he
-eat.  Ranaar, he ten, eleven mile up 'long bush, plenty bad way. You
-take some sailor; he go too much sof', too much quiet, all-a-same cat.
-Time we coming along Ranaar, one half-mile, sailor he all stop.  I go
-myself Ranaar. Maybe I get Tempesi; we coming back to sailor, go home
-all right."
-
-"Oh, nonsense! how are you going to get him, if the men can't?" demanded
-the commander.  He saw that he had a remarkable personality to deal with
-in this strange half-caste beauty, but he did not comprehend her very
-clearly, and he thought she was "gassing" a little.
-
-Vaiti frowned.
-
-"I tell you, you no savvy Malekula," she said scornfully. "Sailor belong
-you, all the man hear him when he walk 'long bush.  Ranaar man he hear;
-he run away."
-
-"Well, so long as we rescue Mr. Tempest----"
-
-"No you talk, I say; you listen, you Kapitani with um wooden face!" spat
-Vaiti.
-
-The lieutenant turned his head away, and choked a little in his
-pocket-handkerchief.  The commander stared, then burst out laughing.
-
-"Go on, you she-cat," he said.
-
-"Ranaar man he run away; very good.  He leave Tempesi; very good.  No
-want Tempesi tell some tale, so he leave him dead.  Break him head, all
-same pig, very quick, then run away.  Now what you think?"
-
-"I think you are a very plucky young lady, and that you have something
-more to say about it," replied the commander politely.
-
-"Very good.  Suppose I going 'long bush; savvy plenty the way.  I been
-'long Ranaar recruit; savvy all-a-road.  No walking all same white man,
-walking all same one snake, all same one mice.  No white man he walk
-that way.  I come up Ranaar, all-a-dark, I stop 'long one small place;
-see the man he dance, he sing, he make ki-ki.  Bushman, he plenty
-frighten something he no savvy.  Savvy gun, dynamite, but no savvy big
-blue-light signal thing you got 'long ship. I take one, two blue-light
-thing; I throw.  Bushman he think one big devil stop, no think
-man-of-war come; run away too much dam quick, not stop kill Tempesi.
-By'n-by he coming back, but I cut rope before he come. I bring Tempesi
-'long me, 'long sailor-man; we go back quick.  Tempesi all right.
-Savvy?"
-
-"Yes, I do savvy; seems a neat plan, on the whole. But what's going to
-happen to you if they catch you?"
-
-"Eat," said Vaiti succinctly.  "Now you listen me. I no do all this
-thing for nothing, see?"
-
-"H'm; yes, I do see.  How much do you want?"
-
-"Two thing," said Vaiti, eyeing him narrowly. "One.  My father say he
-plenty sorry, no do any more bad thing.  You let him go, let schooner
-go."
-
-"Well--yes, I'll promise that," answered the commander rather stiffly.
-The girl was taking her life in her hand to serve the interests of the
-British Crown, and it was not a time to stick at trifles, or, indeed,
-larger things.
-
-"Two," went on Vaiti.  "Tempesi he seen leave ship, go 'long shore with
-me.  You tell him all right, you no punish."
-
-"Oh, by Jove! that's too much," snapped out the commander.  "No,
-Miss--Miss What's-your-name, I can't promise any such thing.  I can't
-have you or any one else interfering with the discipline of my ship. Mr.
-Tempest's conduct is a very serious matter, and he must take the
-consequences, by Gad he must, if he comes back alive to take them."
-
-Vaiti had had a good deal to do with men-of-war, and their officers,
-during the course of the schooner's many wanderings.  She did not need
-to be told that Tempest's career might be ended, and his life disgraced,
-if naval justice took its course.  A few hours ago she would not have
-cared.  But Mr. Tempest, like all men notorious for getting into scrapes
-with a petticoat at the bottom of them, had a "way with him," and it
-happened to be a way that appealed to this daughter of the Islands more
-than she would have cared to allow. Besides, it was not her custom to
-give in to a defeat.
-
-"All right," she said calmly.  "I savvy all thing about Englis' officer.
-Tempesi he no like court-mars'al, make break, make longshoreman, all the
-people laugh. Tempesi, he like die, I think.  All right.  I let him.
-Good night."
-
-The commander held out his hand.
-
-"Good night," he said politely.  "Mr. Darcy, you will see about getting
-a native guide who can show the way to Ranaar, at once.  We will do our
-best to surprise them."
-
-A low, sarcastic laugh came from Vaiti.
-
-"You wooden-faced Kapitani, you think you savvy Malekula!" she said.
-"Where you get guide?"
-
-Mr. Darcy did know a little about the New Hebrides, and he saw that they
-were beaten.
-
-"She's right, sir," he said.  "Take my word for it, no native would dare
-to guide you.  There's no mission here; they're a very bad lot, and all
-at war."
-
-It was a bitter moment for the commander, but he surrendered like a
-gentleman.
-
-"You've got the best of me, Miss--Miss Saxon," he said.  "Very well.
-You have my promise. Mr. Tempest shall be pardoned, if we get him back
-alive. You know nothing about this matter, you will remember, Mr. Darcy.
-Miss Saxon, you're a very brave young lady, and I wish I had met you in
-circumstances of which I could more honestly approve."
-
-"No one need tell me," he said afterwards, "that that old vagabond we
-had in the cells wasn't a gentleman once.  It comes out in the girl;
-blood will tell, even in a half-caste.  But Providence ought rightly to
-have a down on the man who is responsible for any one of them, for there
-seems no right place for them, either in heaven or earth."
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Neither the bluejackets of the _Alligator_, nor the officer appointed to
-command the column, ever forgot that night's march through the mountain
-bush of Malekula.  The air was like hot water, and not a breath of wind
-was stirring.  The track was but a few inches wide, and as slippery as
-butter, so that the men slid and fell continually when struggling up the
-endless sides of the innumerable gullies.  Mosquitoes settled in
-bloodthirsty hordes upon their faces and hands, roots tripped them up,
-saw-edged reeds slapped them in the eyes, and thorny tangles of
-bush-lawyers fished for and successfully hooked them.  At any moment a
-huge soft-nosed bullet, cruel as a shell, might come singing out of the
-darkness; or a poisoned arrow, freighted with sure and agonising death,
-might whirr across their path.  When the officer in command, irritated
-by the stumbling and falling of the men, ordered them to remove their
-boots and march barefoot, Vaiti told him that nothing of the kind must
-be done, for poisoned spear-heads were in all probability set here and
-there in unsuspected places, ready to pierce the unwary foot. She
-herself seemed invulnerable and untiring; she led the column at a pace
-that caused more than one to fall out, and never hesitated nor faltered
-through all the three hours of the worst and most intricate march that
-the _Alligator_ men had ever known.
-
-At last she told the officer to call a halt, and on no account to make
-the slightest noise or advance his men until he should see a blue light
-burning about half a mile ahead.  Then she vanished into the darkness,
-lithe and noiseless as a lizard, and silence, dead and oppressive,
-settled down upon the bush.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Lieutenant Tempest was a man and a British sailor, and he was not afraid
-of death.  But he thought there might be pleasanter ways of dying than
-that which actually stared him in the face.
-
-Memory plays strange tricks when the dark is closing down about her
-doors.  Lying there on the damp earth, bound hand and foot to a pole,
-with the hideous howls of the cannibal dancers in his ears and the glare
-of the cooking-pits in his eyes.  Tempest could think of nothing but a
-fragment of verse out of a half-forgotten poem read somewhere long ago:
-
-    "It isn't the fact that you're dead that counts.
-    But only--how did you die?"
-
-
-How was he dying?  Not as an English officer might gladly die in the
-cause of his country and in loyal obedience to orders.  Not even as a
-man, with a sword in his hand, facing the foe.  He was dying an
-unfaithful servant, false to his trust, and suffering because of that
-falseness, as a slaughtered brute struck down with a club like a
-bullock, and afterwards....
-
-The red remains of the luckless Aki, jointed and piled in a ghastly
-heap, told the rest.
-
-Tempest did not look at that ugly pile any more than he could help.  He
-wanted all the nerve he could muster for he was haunted by a deadly fear
-that he might cry out for mercy when it came to the last, and he did not
-want to add cowardice to the tale of his many shortcomings.  If he could
-have died here as a prisoner of war--as a captured scout, a fighting
-enemy, taken in a skirmish--the death, hideous as it was, would have
-been honourable, and his pride of country would have upheld him.  But it
-seemed as if his courage had nothing to stand on now, and he was
-almost--almost, but, thank God! not quite--afraid.
-
-The Malekulans had been dancing for full two hours, ever since they had
-brought him to the valley and flung him down upon the ground.  In the
-middle of the open village square were three huge idols, carved out of
-entire tree-trunks set upright.  They had black, empty sockets for eyes;
-their mouths were curved upwards into a ghastly wrinkled grin, and their
-tongues hung mockingly out.  On the head of each was perched a huge
-black wooden bird, with beak bent down and gloomy wings outspread--the
-very spirit of Nightmare herself. Round and round these devilish things,
-in the red glow of the fires, danced the cannibals ceaselessly and
-untiringly, fleeing with heads down and outspread hands, wheeling and
-turning, circling with measured steps; and all the time the huge hollow
-idols, beaten with heavy clubs "to make the spirits speak," thundered
-death and doom.  It was plainly a religious ceremony which must be fully
-enacted down to the last detail; but Tempest thought, as clearly as he
-could think in such a place and at such a time, that it could not last
-much longer.
-
-"A fellow ought to say his prayers," he thought; but the thunder of the
-drums and the wild, shrieking song of the dancers bewildered him, and
-his swollen wrists and ankles hurt him so much as almost to confuse his
-mind....  What could he say?  Only one prayer remained clear in the
-turmoil of his brain--just the old, old prayer that he had prayed at his
-mother's knee.  Well, it would serve--and up above he hoped they'd
-understand how sorry he was ... for lots of things....
-
-"Our Father Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name.  Thy kingdom
-come...."
-
-It was coming, indeed!  The dance had stopped.
-
-"Thy will be done...."
-
-What came next?  He could not remember--and the savages were advancing
-across the square.
-
-"Forgive us our trespasses ... and lead us not into temptation, but
-deliver us from evil...."
-
-It was _now_!  The women were hiding themselves in the houses, and two
-of the men, armed with clubs, were stepping forward.
-
-He was only conscious of one feeling--joy that he had the courage to
-look the cannibals in the face as they advanced, and meet his fate
-"game."  He hardly knew that he was still praying--
-
-"... For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory...."
-
-Death!
-
-It came with a blaze of light--a sound as of a wild, deep shout and the
-rushing of many waters--then----
-
-Was this the end?  Was it indeed death?  He had felt nothing--but a man
-does not feel the blow that kills--and his eyes were so dazzled with a
-strange, blue glory that he could not see....  The rushing sound
-continued; it was like the thunder of hundreds of flying feet....  The
-light burst forth again, and yet again, and then died away, and there
-was a great silence.  Tempest saw the hideous faces of the idols
-standing out in the empty square, and began to understand.  He was not
-dead--but something had happened.  What was it?  He tried to break loose
-and sit up so as to see all round.
-
-"Stop um little bit," said a voice, and some one drew a sharp knife
-across the lashings that bound his limbs, and lifted him into a sitting
-position.
-
-The blinding light had almost died away now, and he could see the whole
-square.  There was no one in it. The cannibals were gone, and the
-beautiful half-caste girl who had brought about his
-downfall--innocently, as Tempest of course supposed--was squatting
-beside him and putting a flask to his lips.
-
-"Drink a little bit whisky," she said.  "Good whisky; he make strong.
-No good stop here, you Belitani sailor-man; more better we go away too
-much quick."
-
-The spirit cleared Tempest's head and put some life into his limbs.
-Vaiti poked him unceremoniously in the ribs as soon as she saw that he
-was reviving.
-
-"Show um leg there, lively!" she ordered, dragging him by the arms.
-Rather to his surprise, Tempest found that he could walk, once on his
-feet.  He wasted no time in getting away, after Vaiti's brief
-explanation of the blue-light stratagem, and the probable return of his
-enemies before very long.  At something as near a run as his cramped
-limbs would allow, he followed her down the pathway that led away from
-the village--narrow, wet, and dark as a wolf's gullet--and into the
-comparative security of the bush, towards the advancing relief column
-from the _Alligator_.
-
-It would have been no more than fitting if Vaiti, like a true heroine of
-romance, had vanished silently into the forest when they encountered the
-man-of-war's men, leaving Tempest to "turn to thank his preserver," and
-"find that she had disappeared."  But Vaiti, as it happened, was born
-under the Southern Cross, where the poetry of the footlights does not
-flourish. So she gave the men her company on the way down as a matter of
-course, asked the officer in command for a cigar, smoked it and accepted
-half a dozen more out of his case, and made herself wonderfully
-pleasant--for Vaiti.  She had further driven Tempest to distraction by
-starting a flirtation with a handsome petty officer, eaten up two
-emergency rations, "borrowed" some one's gold tie-pin, and very soundly
-boxed the ears of a leading seaman who tried to kiss her in the dark,
-before the long roll of the surf on the barrier reef, and the welcome
-glimmer of the _Alligator's_ riding lights, told the tired-out party
-that they were safe back again. Then, like the mysterious heroine, at
-last she disappeared, and slipped off to the _Sybil_ in a native canoe,
-for the reason that she did not want to be seen on board the man-of-war
-in a very untidy and dirty dress, without any flowers in her hair, or
-fresh scent on her laces. Tempest had found time to "thank his
-preserver" on the way down, haltingly enough; but the preserver, instead
-of accepting his thanks after the fashion he would have preferred, had
-laughed wildly and somewhat wickedly, and gone on walking right in the
-middle of the column, without a glance to spare for him.... Still--he
-thought he knew women--and....  Time would show.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-The rest of the wardroom did not envy Mr. Tempest his interview with the
-commander.  It took place immediately after his return to the ship, and
-he came out from it with a countenance of entire inexpressiveness and
-extreme whiteness.  One sentence--the last--was unavoidably heard by the
-lieutenant who followed immediately after Tempest, to deliver his
-report.
-
-"Finally, Mr. Tempest--this Miss--a--Saxon--has risked her life to save
-your life and reputation.  I think there is only one way in which you
-can repay her--by never seeing her again."
-
-Tempest's answer was inaudible.  But--he never did.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XVII*
-
-                          *INVADERS IN TANNA*
-
-
-"What a beautiful girl!  Is she one of the heathens, I wonder?" said
-Lady Victoria Jenkins, leaning on the rail of her yacht.
-
-The _Alcyone_ floated on a sea of living silver.  The coral reefs forty
-feet before her keel showed like a pavement of pale turquoise in the
-searching splendour of the tropic moon.  Close at hand loomed the dark
-woods and cliffs of Tanna, and above them, blotting out half the crystal
-broidery of the stars, rose the cone of the great volcano, crowned by a
-canopy of fire.  So, in the days of Bougainville and of Cook, stood this
-southward sentinel of the wild New Hebrides, a pillar of cloud by day
-and a pillar of fire by night.  So it stands yet, its deathless fires
-unquenched, its awful voice breaking the forest silences hour by
-hour--as the dead and gone discoverers of these distant lands saw and
-heard it long ago, and as those who follow us will find it in the days
-to come, when we and our thoughts and hopes, and adventures and loves
-are but a whisper in the homeless winds and a handful of dust blowing
-about on long-forgotten graves.
-
-There are few volcanoes in the southern hemisphere more famous, and none
-less frequently visited, than the fiery cone of Tanna.  The island lies
-thousands of miles away from everywhere, and the inhabitants are known
-to be almost all heathen, cannibal, and hostile to whites, although the
-expression of their hostility has been kept considerably in check of
-late years.  But Lady Victoria Jenkins, daughter of the late Earl of
-Wessex, and wife of Mr. Abel Jenkins ("Jenkins's Perfect Pills"), is
-well known as a romanticist and a lover of all things unusual and
-strange.  Mr. Abel Jenkins's income is only exceeded by that of two
-other commoners in England, and Mr. Abel Jenkins's ugliness and
-ill-temper are not exceeded by the ugliness and ill-temper of any one
-known to polite society.  If the reader will piece these detached facts
-together, and consider them, he will readily understand why Lady
-Victoria was enjoying a tour round the world in her celebrated
-steam-yacht, the _Alcyone_, why she had come to look at Tanna, and why,
-including a good deal of miscellaneous company, the travelling party
-somehow was not miscellaneous enough to include Lady Victoria's husband.
-
-The yacht had come in that afternoon after a somewhat stormy voyage from
-Sydney ("They call it the Pacific Ocean," said Lady Victoria
-plaintively, "instead of which, I have not really enjoyed a meal since
-we cleared the Heads"), and had instantly, by the mere fact of her
-dropping anchor in Sulphur Bay, denuded the whole seaboard of its
-population.  This was because the conscience of Tanna is never quite
-clear, and the Tannese, struck by the conviction of sin, thought the
-_Alcyone_ was a man-of-war.  Only two kinds of ships were known to the
-islands, outside trading schooners: British and French warships, and the
-lazy little monthly steamers from Sydney, which strolled round the group
-once a month, picking up copra, and conveying missionaries and traders
-about.  The _Alcyone_ was not a schooner; she was certainly not the
-well-known "B.P." steamer; therefore she must be some new variety of
-man-of-war. As it happened, there was a little matter of a murdered
-trader on the conscience of Tanna just at that time--he had been very
-annoying, but a British man-of-war is prejudiced about these affairs.
-So the Tannese of the coast, like the modest violet of the poem,
-concealed their drooping heads in the shady vales of the interior, and
-coyly hid from view.  Like the modest violet, too--only with a
-difference--you might, if you wished, have located them by their----
-But no; this is a polite history, and the Tannese are a very impolite
-people.  Let us change carriages.
-
-Vaiti and her father, who had come up from Queensland with an empty ship
-and a full money-bag, and were just starting a fresh recruiting trip,
-regarded the appearance of the yacht with hearty disgust.  What were the
-good old islands coming to if this sort of thing was to be permitted?
-Not a bushman would come near the beach as long as the _Alcyone_ stayed,
-and the sprinkling of mission natives who were not afraid of the yacht
-were worse than useless, for they neither recruited nor encouraged their
-heathen friends to do so. Besides, the airs and graces of the _Alcyone_
-were sickening. Late dinner with low dresses and jewels; piano tinkling
-all the evening; clothes that looked as if they had been run hot on to
-the wearers, as icing is run on to a cake; sparkling glass and brasswork
-all over the ship, and dainty brass signal cannons, pretty as toys, and
-a little funnel all cream-colour and blue, and great sails white as
-trade-wind clouds, and a hull that sat the water like a beautiful
-sea-bird settled down to rest--all these unnecessary and disgusting
-affectations made a smart schooner like the _Sybil_ look no better than
-a mud-scow in a marsh, for all that she was the beauty of the South Seas
-and the most famous ocean adventuress from 'Frisco to Hobart Town.
-Besides, Saxon would not stir out of his cabin while the yacht was
-there, having developed the lumbago that always attacked him whenever
-English society folk loomed on the horizon--Vaiti knew that
-lumbago!--and he might really have been of use about Sulphur Bay, where,
-for a wonder, no one had any old scores against him.
-
-It was all most abominable, thought the "Kapitani," and she cast an
-unfriendly glance on the luxurious _Alcyone_, as her boat shot past the
-yacht in the moonlight, returning from a fruitless hunt along the coast
-for any stray bushman who might have heard the recruiting signal--a
-stick or two of dynamite set afloat on a board and exploded--and come
-down to the coast.
-
-Lady Victoria's comment on the "beautiful girl" did not soften her in
-the least, coupled as it was with the unspeakable assumption that she
-was "a heathen."  Probably she was, in one sense, having long ago given
-up all but the merest rags of religion, but it was not the accusation of
-moral deficiencies that galled her: it was the idea that she, Vaiti,
-daughter of a great Polynesian princess and a white sea-captain, should
-have been "evened" to the black, monkey-like, naked hags of Tanna.  The
-resentful spirit of the half-caste burned hot within her as she steered
-the boat through the moonlit water.  She could see Lady Victoria and her
-friends, a brilliant flower-show of coloured dresses and sparkling gems,
-leaning over the rail, and watching her as impersonally as if she were a
-porpoise or a shark.  She could catch their comments, loudly and
-carelessly spoken.
-
-"I suppose she is one of them.  But she looks quite nice.  See her
-pretty dress.  She is quite decently clothed, isn't she?"
-
-"I wonder is she a cannibal?  She does not look dangerous.  I would like
-to ask her on board, and give her some tea and cake, and things of that
-kind, and talk to her.  Just to try and reform her from their own
-horrible food, you know," said Lady Victoria angelically.
-
-"That would be so dear of you," chimed in her special sycophant and
-foil, a plain and elderly young woman who knew when her bread was
-buttered on both sides, and why.
-
-But here the rowers--urged by a signal from Vaiti who thought she had
-heard about as much as she could stand without exploding--gave way
-vigorously, and pulled the boat out of earshot.
-
-That was not a happy evening for any one on board the _Sybil_.  Vaiti
-would not give out any grog for supper though it was a settled custom on
-the ship; would not have singing in the cabin, gloomed like a hurricane
-sky over the mate and boatswain's sociable game of cards until Gray, out
-of pure nervousness, dropped a greasy ace upon his knee, and was
-thereupon accused by Harris of cheating, and coarsely threatened by him
-with an operation usually confined to sufferers from appendicitis. At
-this Vaiti rose and walked out of the cabin with the air of a
-convent-bred princess who had never so much as heard a jibbing donkey
-"confounded"; and went to sit on deck near the wheel, where she stayed
-so long, smoking so many thin black cigars, that every one but the night
-watchman turned in and left her, and only the dead, dark hour of two
-o'clock, when the spongy heat of the island night stiffens for a while
-into fever-bringing chill, shook her out of her sulks and into her
-cabin.
-
-When Vaiti sulked it was usually observed that things happened before
-very long.  But on this occasion the exception seemed to rule.  The
-disgusting yacht stayed all the next day, and the _Sybil_ lay quietly at
-anchor on the other side of the bay.  Some of the yacht people went
-ashore in the afternoon, and roamed timorously about the beach,
-wondering at the hot springs and tasting everything in the way of fruit
-they happened to see. (It was nearly all inedible, but none of it, by a
-fortunate chance, happened to be poisonous.)  Lady Victoria was
-disappointed with her day on the whole.  The natives from the mission,
-who had officiously attended them all day long, were unromantically
-clothed, clean, and English-speaking.  The wild savages did not appear;
-and there were one or two other mishaps of an entirely unromantic kind.
-
-"How did you enjoy it, darling?" asked the plain young woman of Lady
-Victoria, when the daring pioneers returned.
-
-Mr. Jenkins's partner shook out her soiled tussore silk disgustedly.
-
-"It was untidy and ugly and nasty," she declared; "and when I sat down
-under a great pineapple tree all covered with fruit, and said that I was
-realising one of my dreams, Jack de Coverley laughed at me, and said it
-was only a pandamn-us, or something else profane, and that pineapples
-grew on the ground.  And when we started to walk among the palms, and I
-was saying that I had always dreamed of wandering softly by a coral
-strand and seeing the cocoanuts drop into my hands, something as big as
-a horse's head suddenly thundered down like a bombshell from a hundred
-feet high, and buried itself in the sand at my feet with such a fearful
-shock that I jumped a yard away and screamed like anything!  So then the
-missionary came out, and said he wondered I wasn't killed; and if you'll
-believe me, it was nothing but a horrible nut!  And the coral strand was
-pretty enough, all over little bits of branching coral stuff; but why
-doesn't anyone ever tell you that coral strands burn all the skin off
-your nose and blacken you into a nigger?  We're going up the volcano
-tomorrow--the missionary says it's quite safe--and I'm sure I hope it's
-true, but one never knows.  Darling, if I die, see that the new
-Lafayette photo is sent to the papers--not on any account the other; and
-I like Latin crosses on graves, I think; Carrara marble, very thick, and
-just one short text, something nice, like 'They were lovely and pleasant
-in their lives'--you know."
-
-... "'And in death they were not divided,'" finished the plain young
-woman with mechanical piety.... "Darling! dearest! what have I said?
-What is the matter?"
-
-"Now you _have_ done it!" roared Mr. de Coverley, who was rather a
-well-bred, but sometimes rather a vulgar young man.  "Not divided!  Oh,
-great Scott! Oh, my eye!  Oh, I'll die of laughing!  Hold me up! Never
-mind, Vic; I'll see you aren't divided, or cooked either--trust to me!"
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Vaiti was still in a speechless state of sulks when she started off the
-next morning into the interior, to recruit on her own account.  It was
-not a very safe thing to do, but the bushmen would not come down to the
-coast, and the _Sybil_ could not hang out indefinitely, since the
-doubtful character of her methods had given the French and English
-Commissioners of the islands a nasty habit of asking questions about
-her.  Saxon, who had relinquished his lumbago to go off into the hills
-at a safe distance from the yacht, wanted to make his daughter accompany
-him; but Vaiti simply laughed at him, and departed with a guide seduced
-from the mission towards a village lying a mile or two above the
-volcano.  She preferred the glory of working on her own account, and
-besides, it doubled the chances of recruits.
-
-She knew the Tannese nature well, so she dressed herself for her part in
-a robe of scarlet sateen, with liberal necklaces of different coloured
-trade beads, and stuck a couple of tomahawks in her sash, besides an
-ornamented sheath-knife.  Across her splendid young bosom she slung an
-incongruous-looking bandolier of cartridges, designed apparently for the
-slaughter of elephants; and a smart magazine rifle, carried over her
-shoulder, completed the outfit.  All these valuables, though designed to
-assist her plans by suggesting the enormous store of desirable goods
-possessed by the recruiters, were almost as likely to assist her to a
-sudden and unprovided end, by reason of the natives' covetousness. She
-took her chance of this, however; Vaiti was used to taking chances.  It
-is easier than most people suppose to take the risk of being killed
-every day of your life.  In the strange places of the earth, where such
-things are a common happening, men do not look upon the inevitable end
-after the pursy, secretive, never-mention-it fashion of Peckham and
-Brixton.  Death is just death in the earth's wild places--yours to-day,
-mine to-morrow--a thing to walk with shoulder to shoulder, to meet face
-to face at noonday; in any case, to make no bones of it until it makes
-bones of you; and after that circumstances will keep you from
-complaining if you feel like it.
-
-It was a long, hot walk up to the village.  A "walk" is mostly a
-scramble about the uncleared New Hebrides, where roads are mere
-foot-wide cracks and canyons in the dense forest growth, and level
-ground apparently does not exist.  Besides, a bandolier of cartridges
-and an assortment of small arms are rather heavy jewellery for such a
-climate.  Vaiti, however, possessed the enviable gift of never looking,
-or apparently feeling, hot or tired; and she swung along at an unvarying
-pace that caused the unlawfully enticed mission native, who had waxed
-fat and lazy, to regret his enticement and wish himself back in the
-mission school writing copies, instead of slaving up and down
-precipitous gullies in the rear of a woman-devil who did not know what
-it was to want a rest.
-
-At long last, however, the reedwork fence of the village came in sight,
-and they entered the open square, shaded by an immense banyan tree and
-surrounded by low, ugly huts, all roof and no wall, like all the
-mountain villages of Tanna.  There were sentries perched up in the trees
-outside the gate, and others squatted on the ground at every entrance,
-their rifles ready in the crook of the elbow.  Within, the dusty
-tan-coloured square, quivering under the pitiless fire of the white-hot
-sky, was all alive with moving figures--ugly women in brief grass skirts
-humped out into swaying bustles; young boys with murderous little faces,
-and full-sized rifles; wild-looking men, with thick hair twined into
-myriads of tiny strings ending in a great bush on the shoulders, stripes
-of scarlet paint on their faces, and no clothing save their native
-impudence and a cartridge belt--all seething about in a very bee-hive of
-excitement and alarm.  As for the rifle-barrels, they were bobbing about
-like piano-jumpers all over the square, and every weapon was cocked and
-loaded.
-
-Vaiti saw at a glance that they were expecting an attack, and picking
-out a native who could speak English, asked what the trouble was.  The
-man replied that they feared the little man-of-war down below, but that
-they were entirely innocent.  Questioned further, they said naively that
-they had never eaten a white man, and that none of them were low
-cannibals in any case.  Vaiti, who had not heard of this little affair
-before, saw her chance.
-
-"No good you speak alonga that fellow way," she said, using the
-_beche-de-mer_ talk that some of the Tannese understood; for Vaiti, like
-many half-castes, could handle almost any dialect or corruption of a
-dialect, though she could not speak decent English or French. "I savvy
-plenty, you eatum one fellow white man. By'n by, big fellow man-of-war
-come, shoot you all-a-same one pig, all-a-same one blind box [flying
-fox], burn altogether house belong you.  Very good you come alonga Saxon
-ship, go Queensland; then you all right."
-
-"No eatum," persisted the man (who was the professional talking-man or
-orator of the village), with a coy smile.
-
-Vaiti's nose was keen, and she had already guessed something by its aid.
-She marched straight across the square into a little yam-house, and
-pointed to a small parcel done up in green banana-leaf and tied with
-cocoanut sinnet.  Five toes and an instep protruded from one end.  The
-game had been well hung, as the Tannaman likes it to be, and there was
-no mistaking the fact of its presence in any sense.
-
-The talking-man giggled like a school-girl caught consuming
-surreptitious chocolates.
-
-"Eatum jus' little-fellow bit," he allowed, with a bad-child chuckle.
-The other men took up the laugh, and the village resounded with a roar
-like the bellowing of a herd of bulls.
-
-Vaiti, seeing her advantage, stepped out into the square and began to
-talk, marching to and fro in Tannese fashion as she spoke.  The sun cast
-dancing spangles on her many-coloured beads as she moved, and threw back
-darts of fire from her heavy bandolier.  One arm emphasised her remarks
-with sweeping gesture; in the other the tall rifle pounded the earth
-with its stock, marking the points of her discourse.  The fat, stolid
-mission native watched her with staring eyes and open mouth, and the
-chiefs gloomed at her under sullen savage brows, evidently impressed,
-but restive.
-
-The sum of her discourse was that they and their women would do well to
-come down with her to the schooner, recruit at once, and fly to a land
-of safety where men-of-war never came, where Tanna people reclined all
-day under the shade of banyan and banana, picked a little cane for their
-employers occasionally, lived upon tinned meat and sugared tea, and
-eventually returned loaded with riches in the shape of rifles,
-cartridges, cotton, and knives.  There was a good deal more of the same
-highly-coloured stuff.  This was old business to the people of the
-_Sybil_.
-
-The talking-man, also strutting backwards and forwards, Tanna fashion,
-in a kind of continual country dance with the glittering vision from the
-ship, answered now and then.  It was very well to talk about recruiting,
-and perhaps some of them might go if they got lots of tinned salmon and
-"bisketti" to eat before they went on board, and promise of rifles to be
-paid the tribe when the bargain was complete.  But they did not believe
-that the new ship was not a little man-of war, and until she was gone
-they would not go down to the coast--no, not even to bathe, although
-they had all decided to have a bath soon, for the weather was hot and
-their skins were like the bark of trees, and it was now about ten moons
-since they had had their last bath.
-
-At this Vaiti's eyes lit up, for she suddenly saw a plan, a plan which
-might give her a score of recruits, drive the objectionable yacht out of
-Sulphur Bay, and pay off every rankling insult inflicted by the
-_Alcyone_ and her people.  But the savages were watching her, so she
-veiled her eyes with her long lashes, and replied carelessly:
-
-"All that very good.  To-morrow, small-fellow man-of-war he go 'way;
-then you coming longa schooner. To-day, what name [why?] you no go wash
-big water 'long place one-fellow-fire stop?  Very good place that.
-Suppose you going, I come up from schooner, bring plenty-plenty tucker.
-Plenty-plenty bulimacow [beef], bisketti, tucker belong white man, cost
-ten rifle.  All the Tannaman he eat; by'n-by he stop lie down, he break,
-so much he eat."
-
-This tempting picture had its effect, backed up by a few presents of
-beads and cartridges.  The Tannamen agreed that the plain below the
-burning mountain, where a wide, stagnant lake spread out its dull
-expanse, would do for a bathing place, short of the impossible shore,
-and they chuckled with joyous anticipation of the feast.  They also
-agreed, rather doubtfully, to embark as soon as the "man-of-war" was
-gone; and it seemed evident that a fair number would at least come down
-and negotiate on board the schooner after which--well, the _Sybil's_
-smart heels would do the rest.
-
-
-
-
-                            *CHAPTER XVIII*
-
-                           *A CANNIBAL PARTY*
-
-
-Vaiti went off to get ready the feast, telling the natives that they
-might follow her before long, as everything would be ready soon; and
-they might trust her, the great Kapitani, that it would be a feast such
-as no Tannaman, not even of those who had served in Queensland, had ever
-witnessed in his wildest dreams.
-
-The mission native being a rather weak-kneed convert, and anxious to
-enjoy a good heathen gossip with his old companions, wanted very much to
-stay on in the village. But that was just what Vaiti did not want, so
-she drove him out in front of her like a fat and nervous sheep,
-hastening his movements all the way down with occasional reminders from
-the butt of her rifle.  He had given her certain information about a
-picnic at the foot of the volcano, arranged by the people of the yacht
-for that afternoon, and she did not want him to share his news with the
-men of the village and cause them, perhaps, to put two and two together
-where he himself had failed to do so.  She despatched him therefore to
-his own town on the coast, and saw that he went, before herself turning
-off in the direction of the track that led to the volcano.
-
-Near to the lake there lies a curious little valley with a soft, clean
-flooring of black volcanic sand and sheltering walls of green pandanus.
-Here, shaded from the burning heat, yet close to the volcano plain, was
-the only possible place for the picnickers to enjoy their meal.  Beyond
-lay only a lurid plateau of red and yellow lava beds, curdled and coiled
-as they had flowed down from the crater lip long ago; a desert of black
-ash and sand, and a dark, wicked, smoking, rumbling cone in the centre
-of all.  Not a native would have climbed the cone for all the goods in
-the _Sybil's_ hold; it was the mouth of hell, they said, and full of
-devils of every kind. But they were not afraid of the valley below,
-within safe limits, and even if they had been, the feast and the bathe
-after it were attractive enough to conquer a little nervousness.
-
-As Vaiti had anticipated, there were several picnic baskets stowed under
-a tree in the valley, and a big wine hamper as well.  Four mission
-natives, who had acted as guides and carried up the provisions, were
-lying on their stomachs in the shade, smoking and talking.
-
-It was essential to get them out of the way, and time was short.  Vaiti
-did not waste any unnecessary words. She simply pointed her rifle at the
-men and told them to clear.  They cleared, howling, and she was left
-alone.
-
-With quick, neat hands she unpacked the hampers, spread the cloth, and
-laid out the food.  It was a goodly display--hams and tongues and fowls,
-cold meats, pies, cakes, tarts, fruits, and tinned dainties of every
-kind. There was plenty of champagne, also a supply of whisky and soda.
-She set all the bottles in a row, and looked with satisfaction upon the
-glittering array.  Then she went up to the edge of the plain and looked
-at the crater.  No one was yet in sight.  The exploring party at that
-moment were on the other side of the cone, standing on the black lip of
-an appalling gulf eight hundred feet deep and half a mile across;
-looking down, awe-struck and amazed, upon colossal fire fountains that
-uplifted their gory spray three hundred feet in the air, and listening
-to the heart-shaking thunders of the volcano's awful voice, as from time
-to time that terrifying note of illimitable force and fury made the
-whole plain tremble and echoed far out to sea....  It was indeed no
-wonder that the ignorant Tannamen feared to ascend the cone.
-
-Vaiti sat down at the edge of the plain, and watched till she saw a
-number of many-coloured dots creeping down the black pyramid in its
-centre.  Then she suddenly lay down upon the ashy ground, and writhed
-with silent laughter.  People were in the habit of saying that Vaiti had
-no more sense of humour than the jibboom of her father's ship.  They
-might have modified that judgment, could they have seen her now.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-Lady Victoria Jenkins had enjoyed her morning very much indeed.  She had
-dressed for the ascent in a mountaineering costume that combined equal
-suggestions of "Carmen" and the Alpine Club, and gave great
-opportunities to her ankles.  She had been helped up the cone by four
-devoted admirers, all at once, and had come down it at a wild running
-slide, ably braked by two strong hands of two or three others who wanted
-to have their turn.  The other women had trodden on their skirts, and
-torn them, burned and cut their foolish boots, and also got unbecomingly
-hot and out of breath, because there was not nearly one man apiece to
-help them up, after Lady Victoria had annexed all the best.  It must be
-allowed that the men were the weak point of the _Alcyone's_ travelling
-party.  Mr. de Coverley and his set were "dear boys" and charming
-companions, no doubt, but they were not quite as manly as some of the
-ladies.  Lady Vic and her companions did not attract the best sort of
-men, as a rule.
-
-They were all very hungry when they reached the plain, and thirsty with
-a thirst unknown outside the tropics.  All the way across the baking
-black sand and the tinkling lava beds, "one fair vision ever fled"
-before the eyes of the party--vision of gold-necked champagne bottles
-lying coolly embedded in icebaskets; of topaz-coloured jellies,
-trembling on silver dishes; of flaky, savoury pies, and delicate cold
-meats, and crisp green salads concocted as only the hand of the
-_Alcyone's_ _chef_ could concoct them.
-
-It seemed as if that plain would never end, but it did end at last, and
-a green fringe of pandanus announced the beginning of the bush.  The
-elderly young lady and most of the others were making excellent time
-ahead, and they reached the verge of the plain some little while before
-Lady Victoria and Mr. de Coverley came to it. The latter pair, as it
-happened, were really not thinking very much about their lunch, because
-a still more interesting matter absorbed their attention.
-
-"Not understood!" Mr. de Coverley was saying bitterly.  "And so we die
-and go down to the grave--not understood!  The pathos of it!"
-
-"We are never understood," sighed Lady Victoria, patting the side waves
-of her "transformation" to see that it was on straight.  "We women,
-especially. And those who should understand us best of all are so
-often----"
-
-"Exactly--so they are.  But, Lady Victoria--Victoria!--there are some
-who are different; there are men, rare souls, who----"
-
-"What in Heaven's name is the matter?" interrupted the misunderstood
-one, stopping dead in her tracks (literally, for the sand was deep) and
-staring at the edge of the bush.
-
-From the valley below the plain had just risen a long, loud shriek,
-followed by another and another, and then by a burst of laughter that
-sounded scarcely human. The other members of the party had disappeared,
-but it was clear that something had happened.
-
-"Good God, the savages!" exclaimed Lady Victoria; and she began to run.
-Let it be stated, for the credit of her race and name, that she ran
-towards the sound. As for Mr. de Coverley....
-
-But this story is not about Mr. de Coverley.  If it were, it would be
-interesting to tell why the Sydney steamer that called at Sulphur Bay
-two days later found an unexpected passenger waiting at the trader's,
-and why Lady Victoria and Mr. Abel Jenkins, of Jenkins's Perfect Pills,
-became eventually reconciled and lived the life of a model couple.  As
-things are, it must be enough to state that Mr. Jack de Coverley turned
-and ran away at the sound of the shouts--ran right across the plain into
-the bush at the other side--ran as far as he could get, and did not come
-back at all--and thereby ran once and for ever out of the life of the
-lady whom he "understood."
-
-Lady Victoria, speeding in the opposite direction, reached the edge of
-the little valley in a very few minutes, and, looking over, beheld what
-was certainly the strangest sight she had encountered in all her varied
-life.
-
-Round about the elaborately-laid luncheon were squatting a dozen or so
-of naked brown savages, painted, feathered, and slashed with ornamental
-scars.  A few women, clad only in a six-inch fringe of grass, stood
-behind them, eyeing the eatables eagerly, but not daring to touch them
-while their masters fed.  The talking-man, a big, hulking savage with a
-huge bush of hair, and a match-box stuck in each ear-lobe, had buried
-his face in the savoury interior of a boned turkey, and was gnawing out
-the stuffing.  The principal chief, one hand in a dish of Spanish cream
-and the other in a chicken curry, was casting double supplies into his
-mouth with the regularity of a patent feed-machine. A fat young fighting
-man, with nose and forehead painted scarlet, and white ashes in his
-hair, had tucked a ham under one arm, and was sitting on a peach pie,
-with intent to secure as many good things as possible, while he hastily
-worried large mouthfuls off the forequarter of lamb he was holding in
-both hands.  Another man was drinking mint sauce out of the silver
-sauceboat with horrible grimaces; his neighbour, having captured a
-handful of maraschino jelly, fast melting in the sun, was industriously
-rubbing it on his hair; and a grizzly old fellow, with a monkey-like
-face, was half-choking himself over a souffle, which he was trying to
-swallow case and all.  The necks of the champagne bottles were all
-knocked off, and from engraved wine-cases, empty entree-dishes, and
-dredged-out tins the savages were drinking Lady Victoria's excellent
-wines with every appearance of satisfaction.  Between mouthfuls they
-stopped to look at the party from the yacht, and to roar with laughter
-at their evident fright.  Too terrified even to run away, the voyagers,
-in their dainty frocks and smart white suits, stood huddling together
-for protection, the women crying, the men looking rather white and
-foolish, for every Tannaman had a loaded rifle slung to his side, and
-there was not so much as a saloon pistol among the whites.  A few yards
-off Vaiti stood, regarding the whole scene with an expressionless
-countenance that covered a good deal of quiet enjoyment. She knew, if
-the visitors did not, that the cannibal bushmen were really not at all a
-bad lot of fellows when you knew them, and that the yacht party, against
-whom they had no grudge, were perfectly safe.  In fact, the Tannamen
-merely thought these oddly-behaved whites were a new party of
-missionaries, and were quite ready to be civil to them, since they
-thought all the mission people harmless, if eccentric.
-
-But the true inwardness of the situation not being apparent, the
-_Alcyone's_ guests were very frightened indeed.
-
-"P-perhaps if we go away very quietly, they won't f-follow us," said a
-wealthy young stockbroker, who had retained a little presence of mind,
-though his teeth were chattering in his head.
-
-"Oh, let us!  Victoria, save me!  Oh, what shall we do?" wailed the
-elderly young lady, rushing up the bank and flinging her arms round the
-mistress of the violated feast.  Lady Victoria, though white as her own
-Belfast linen collar, kept her head fairly well.  She saw that Vaiti was
-not one of the invaders, and called to her.  "Do you speak English?
-What are we to do? Will they kill us?" she asked.
-
-Vaiti walked over to her with the bearing of a stage duchess, and
-favoured her with a fashionable high handshake that was the one thing
-wanting to complete the insanity of the whole impossible scene.  A new
-idea had suddenly struck her--a fresh spark of mischief was lit.  With
-an immovable countenance she replied:
-
-"No kill you, I think.  Suppose you want go 'way all right by'n-by, very
-good I think you sit down, eatum dinner alonga those fellow--then they
-think you all right, let you go home, no kill."
-
-"Oh, Victoria, anything to please them!" sobbed the elderly young lady.
-
-"Yes--a--I think we'd better do anything we can to get into their good
-graces, since we're not armed," submitted the stockbroker.
-
-Vaiti exchanged a few words with the Tannese.  She explained that these
-white people had come a long way, and were very hungry.  The Melanesian
-has not many virtues, but hospitality is certainly one of them; and a
-man who may be planning to dine off you himself tomorrow will certainly
-not refuse you half of his own leaf of yams to-day.  The Tannese were
-delighted at the chance of sharing their good fortune with the white
-chiefs, even in spite of the latter's extremely silly manners, and they
-beckoned to them at once to come and sit down.
-
-Thereafter took place a scene incapable of description by mortal pen.
-The chief took his head out of the turkey, chewed off a leg, and
-grinningly handed it to Lady Victoria.  The young warrior got off the
-pie, disembowelled it with one scoop of the hand that had not known
-water "for ten moons," and laid its interior in the elderly young lady's
-lap.  Another knowingly poured out a champagne glass of Worcester sauce
-and handed it to the stockbroker, while the much-bitten lump of mutton
-that was at that moment circling from mouth to mouth, native-fashion,
-was hospitably passed on to all the whites.  Driven by fear, they tried
-to swallow something; choked in the effort, made futile remarks to each
-other, laughed nervous laughs, and all the time watched with eyes of
-utmost apprehension the dusky hosts who were thus entertaining them with
-their own audaciously ravished goods.  And above the crazy party the
-burning Tanna sun beat down, and the great volcano-cone far across the
-plain smoked and thundered.
-
-It had been Vaiti's design to dismiss them in peace by and by, assured
-that their compliance had saved their lives, and anxious to make steam
-out of Sulphur Bay as soon as was reasonably possible.  Fate, however,
-reserved a more dramatic ending to the entertainment, And it was "all
-along of" that talking-man.
-
-The cannibal native is invariably shy of displaying his tastes before
-whites, since people who do not share the "point of view" are so
-frequently prejudiced. Therefore the talking-man did not open a certain
-small green parcel tied up with sinnet string, which he had brought down
-with him from the mountain village. A feast in the hand is worth two in
-the pandanus-bush, thought the talking-man, so he brought his _bonne
-bouche_ with him for dessert and said nothing about it.  And thereby
-came the end.
-
-For Lady Victoria, unable to swallow the clawed and chewed morsels
-pressed upon her by dirt-encrusted hands, began to hunt despairingly
-about for something that she could really eat, so that she should not
-offend the dangerous monsters who surrounded her.
-
-"Isn't there anything clean to be had?" she asked the stockbroker
-anxiously.  "I can't eat--and yet we must!  What are we to do?"
-
-The stockbroker, who had once been to Honolulu, and thought he knew
-something about native foods, spied the packet of green banana-leaf, and
-reached out for it.
-
-"This'll be some of their own boiled yam," he said. "Natives always do
-it up like this.  You can eat it all right if you scrape it with a
-knife.  Allow me."
-
-Before the talking-man could stretch out his filthy claw to stop him,
-the Englishman had cut the sinnet string, the parcel had burst open, and
-right into the middle of a half-demolished chicken pie fell a large
-white foot, cut off at the ankle, nicely browned across the instep and
-all crackled on the toes.
-
-There was a wild shriek from the women, a splutter of horrified
-exclamations from the men, a boiling up of white petticoats like to the
-breaking of a wave on a pebbly shore, and then nothing but a diminishing
-string of rapidly trotting figures, each woman hand in hand with a man
-who was dragging her along far away, farther and farther, down the long,
-black, sandy path into the bush. Then ... they were gone.
-
-Vaiti stood on the bank to look after them, and laughed quietly.
-
-"Now I think we keep Sulphur Bay all our own self," she said.
-
-As for the Tannamen, they rolled on the ground with laughter, and then
-picked the dainty morsel out of the chicken pie and ate it up.
-
-
-
-
-                             *CHAPTER XIX*
-
-                         *THE RIVAL PRINCESSES*
-
-
-It was full mid-day when the schooner _Sybil_ dropped anchor off Liali
-Island.  The hot season was at its height.  The long, white coral strand
-blazed in the sun, the moated lagoon was raw emerald, the waveless outer
-sea blue fire.  Beyond the beach stretched a green, grassy lawn, dotted
-with quaintly-shaped Norfolk pines, tall palms, and feather-tressed
-ironwood trees; and against its enamelled background rose a palace like
-a picture in a fairy-tale--white, long-windowed, lofty-towered, and
-crowned with a crimson flag set below a gilded vane.
-
-Vaiti, standing on the break of the poop, with the inevitable cigar
-between her fingers, looked critically at the island, and liked it well.
-A mere little matter of kidnapping somebody's indentured labourers--the
-sort of thing that any gentleman with an extensive island practice might
-easily find himself obliged to do--had brought about her father's
-expulsion from the New Hebrides labour trade, and obliged him to seek
-new fields for the activities of the notorious and naughty _Sybil_.
-Saxon himself was virtuously indignant, Vaiti not particularly sorry.
-She was getting tired of the gloomy feverish New Hebrides and their ugly
-savages.  The Eastern Pacific was her heart's home after all,
-semi-Polynesian as she was; and even the wild excitement of the cruel
-western isles could not hold her away very long.  So when Saxon was
-wavering between the advantages of strictly illegal gun-running in the
-Solomons and honest trading about the Liali group (which had just
-wrecked its native schooner, and was open to employ a successor),
-Vaiti's influence went for once on the side of peace and virtue, and the
-course was set for Liali.  The group was new to both father and
-daughter, but was none the less attractive on that account, since all
-over the wide island world the _Sybil_ and her owners were best loved
-and most warmly welcomed where they were least known.
-
-The Liali group, as many people in the Southern hemisphere agree, offers
-the nearest possible approach to comic opera known off the actual stage.
-Liali itself, the chief island, is as pretty as a toy-box, and quite
-extraordinarily theatrical in appearance.  Its handsome, merry, brown
-people wear the most picturesque costume in the Pacific--a knee-length
-kilt of fine cashmere, girded by a deep sash of pure silk, and worn with
-a silken or cashmere shirt or a graceful sleeveless tunic, according to
-sex--all in the most vivid of sea- and flower-colour. Liali is civilised
-after a fashion.  It goes barefoot and barelegged, sits on mats, lives
-in reed-woven houses devoid of furniture, worships a sacred lizard on
-the sly, and sometimes breaks out openly into club-fights and
-devil-dances.  But it has a king, and a palace and a Parliament, a brass
-band, and quite a number of very active Nonconformist churches, run by
-white missionaries, who find that "labouring" among the well-off and
-amiable Lialians is a task in which the meritorious martyrdom of
-missionary life can be combined with quite a number of pleasant
-alleviations.
-
-Nothing in Liali is entirely what it seems.  The palace, when one comes
-close to it, is perceived to be built of painted wood, like a
-"practicable" scene in a theatre. The Parliament never passes any laws,
-because the Lords, who are chiefs, always on principle throw out every
-bill introduced by the vulgar Commons, just to "teach" them.  The Prime
-Minister is oftener in prison for _lese majeste_ than out of it, and
-several Chancellors of the Exchequer have been transported to the
-Colonies for theft.  But there is a real throne in the palace, all
-crimson velvet and gilt wood, and a wonderful gold crown (the verdigris
-is cleaned off it with a wad of cocoanut husks by the Chief Equerry
-every Saturday afternoon), and when the King goes out in state he wears
-a purple velvet train, held up by two pages in tights and plumes, and a
-marvellous ermined robe, all exactly like the Savoy Theatre in the
-consulship of Gilbert and Sullivan.  On occasions not of state he sits
-cross-legged upon the palace parquet, clad in a shirt and a kilt, and
-plays _ecarte_ with his native guards.
-
-There are a few colonial traders in Liali, and a dozen or so of the
-English "legion that never was listed"--just such as one finds in all
-the odd corners of the Pacific--talkative, plausible, thin and nervous,
-given to avoid home topics and discourse with awful fluency upon small
-local politics; hospitable, restless and lazy, and usually married more
-or less to some dark beauty of the islands, who has grown as fat as a
-feather bed and spends a fortune on store muslins.
-
-These, as a matter of course, took possession of the _Sybil's_ people at
-once, hardly waiting for the schooner to cast anchor before they were
-alongside with their boats. Saxon and Vaiti were swept ashore
-immediately, and begged to make their home in half-a-dozen different
-houses.  With a fine sense of the fitting, Saxon selected Bob Peter's
-public-house, misnamed hotel, and immediately held a _levee_ in the bar,
-wearing his smartest Auckland suit (not paid for, and not likely to be)
-and looking, with his heavy, old-fashioned cavalry moustache,
-blonde-grey hair, and well set-up though rather bloated figure, quite
-like a somewhat seedy Milor on his travels. (And, as a matter of
-fact....  But that was Saxon's long-buried secret, and must not be
-told.)
-
-Vaiti, splendidly attired in a flowing island robe of yellow silk, with
-a gold chain twisted through her misty black hair, sat in the midst of a
-court of her own, and drank expensive pink lemonade to her soul's
-content. She was revelling in the sights, the sounds, the smells of the
-dear eastern islands once more.  She had a necklace of perfumed red
-berries round her neck, and white "tiere" flowers behind each ear, and
-the well-remembered scent almost intoxicated her.  Outside she could
-hear the boom of a dancing-chant, broken by interludes of clapping; and
-from the very next house, a big native reed-built structure, came now
-and then in the quieter moments the sonorous voice of a Lialian man
-calling out the names at a kava-drinking.
-
-The double soul that is the curse of the half-caste surged within the
-girl....  This, this, this, and all it meant--how she loved it!  And
-yet, the wild, fierce life of the western islands; the chance, the risk,
-the strong wine of danger, adventure, power!  The two natures of the
-soldier of fortune and the sensuous island princess who had given her
-birth, fought together in her heart....  If one could eat one's cake and
-have it! If one could sleep all day, crowned with flowers, under the
-singing casuarina trees, and yet be the daring sea-queen, the "Kapitani"
-of the _Sybil_, if only...
-
-Vaiti shook herself impatiently in her hammock chair, and asked for
-ginger beer with sugar in it.  She hated thinking, and felt as if she
-were going mad when the half-white brain in her pretty dusky head took a
-strange fit of sober industry.  Swift, instinctive plotting and planning
-were one thing, deliberate reflection quite another....  Ugh! she must
-be sick....  And for once the temperate Vaiti said yes to the inevitable
-offer of "a stick in it," as her ginger beer was handed to her by an
-eager admirer.
-
-The "sickness" passed away, and she began to listen and watch in her old
-fashion, smiling all the time to the compliments and sweet sayings that
-were being poured into her ears.  A trader was telling her father all
-about the latest dynastic crisis in the monarchy, and Saxon was not even
-pretending to listen.  The affairs of "niggers" never interested him,
-unless there was a question of immediate profit ahead.
-
-"You see," said the trader, "King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., which
-is his full title, wants for to get married.  He's thirty, and there's
-no heir.  And there being just the two Lialian princesses that wasn't
-his sisters--Mahina and Litia--what does he do but go and propose to
-both of them, and, of course, gets snapped up like winkin' by the two.
-It's no small potatoes being Queen of Liali, mind you.  Te Paea gets
-lots of money out of the fruit, and copra taxes, and then the Crown
-lands is half the island, there's presents besides.  And he's a real
-king if he is coffee-coloured--why, the kings of Liali goes back
-hundreds of years before Captain Cook, and he was in Henry Eighth's
-time, wasn't he?  And if you was to see the pink satin chairs in the
-throne-room, and the phonographs, and musical-boxes, and albums, and
-lookin'-glasses, and the lovely wax flowers in cases, and real
-hand-painted oil pictures--ah! it's a good job, is Te Paea's, and either
-Mahina or Litia's going to be a very lucky girl.  What he'd like, you
-see, is to marry both of them, same as his old grandfather--only he
-married nine, he did.  But the King's a Methody, good as they make
-them--when he don't forget, or want a spree--and of course the
-missionaries won't hear of his havin' two queens.  And, says he,
-Mahina's real fat; there's nothing mean about Mahina; she fills the eye,
-says he, and that's what a Lialian likes, for they don't hold with any
-sort of stinginess, says he.  But Litia, he says, has eyes like the
-buttons on his Auckland boots, they're so round and black and bright,
-says he, and she walks for all the world like a lovely young
-mutton-bird, says he.  And what's a king to do, with both the girls'
-relations fighting and squabbling over him like land-crabs fighting over
-a bit of fish, and he himself liking them both, and the girls clean mad
-for him--because, you see, Te Paea he's a handsome fellow, and when he's
-got his military uniform on, and all his orders and medals what he drew
-out himself on paper, and got made in Sydney, he's a fancy man, he is.
-The wedding's to be in three weeks, and the invites is being printed
-down in Auckland all in silver, with a blank to write the bride's name
-in--and the House of Lords has bought the bride's dress for her, which
-is what the Kings says it's their right to do, according to custom,--and
-no one knows which he's going to marry, and no more does he.  And it's
-my belief that there'll be war over it, before all's said and done, for
-Mahina's people say they'll burn down every village belonging to Litia's
-tribe, and Litia's folks say they'll kill Mahina's people's cattle and
-cut up their gardens.  That's the way things are, and you may take my
-word it's a pretty kettle of fish."
-
-"What are you giving for copra at present?" asked Saxon, yawning
-unrestrainedly.  And the conversation turned at once to the inevitable
-trading "shop."
-
-A few days afterwards the _Sybil_ spread her wings and started for
-Waiwai, the outermost of the Liali islands. She was to make the whole
-round of the group afterwards, and might not be back for some weeks, so
-that it seemed likely that Saxon would miss the festivities of the
-King's wedding.  This Vaiti declared was no reason why she should miss
-them, and she insisted on being left behind. Saxon was not too well
-pleased, for if he had a remnant of conscience left, it was connected
-with the care of his daughter, and he did not quite care about leaving
-her alone in a group to which they were both strangers.  But Vaiti
-promised to behave like a saint, and furthermore said that she would
-stay with one of the married traders, and not in the native villages.
-She also added that she meant to stay anyhow, and that it was no use
-making a fuss.
-
-So the _Sybil_ sailed away out of Liali harbour, and became a little
-pearl-coloured pinhead on the blue horizon, and then melted quite away.
-And Vaiti went to the tin-roofed shanty belonging to Neumann, the fat
-German trader, who had married a Lialian wife, and was received with the
-unquestioning hospitality of the islands.
-
-Nobody, among either whites or natives, could talk of anything but the
-King's matrimonial affairs. Mahina and Litia both appeared in Neumann's
-parlour more than once, sat on the floor, drank black tea with a handful
-of sugar in it, and related their several woes at length.  They did not
-come together, except once, when Litia, walking in unexpectedly, found
-Mahina there, crying into her teacup, and telling Neumann's wife that
-the King had given Litia a beautiful chemise, all trimmed with lace,
-only the day before, and that in consequence she considered him a
-monster and a perjured villain, although she knew perfectly well that he
-meant nothing whatever by it.  What was a chemise?  He had sent her two
-pounds of stick tobacco the Sunday before last. She would show Litia yet
-that the King was her King, and nobody else's.
-
-Litia, entering at this point, wasted no words, but simply buried her
-hands in Mahina's curly black masses of hair, and dragged her,
-shrieking, across the floor. Neumann interfered, and parted them; but
-Mahina flew at Litia immediately after, ripped open her dress with one
-clutch, and disclosed the royal gift chastely embracing Litia's lovely
-form.  With a howl of anger, the rival seized the chemise in both hands;
-there was a scuffle, a scream, a rending noise, and Litia stood up in
-the middle of the room, a gold-bronze statue, shedding tears of rage,
-while Mahina, running out on to the verandah, tore the offending garment
-into strips and rags, and cast them upon the road.  Litia, rushing out
-after her, stood upon the steps clad with wrath as with a garment (and
-with extremely little else), explaining her wrongs to an interested and
-sympathetic native crowd, until the Methodist missionary happened to
-come by, and told her that unless she went in and dressed herself at
-once, she might safely count upon eventually finding herself in a place
-where dress would be very much at a discount ... or words to that
-effect.  So Litia went in, and Mahina went away, escorted by a strong
-cousinly "tail"; and afterwards Neumann, enveloped in oracular clouds of
-smoke, remarked sleepily that the princesses were the greatest nuisance
-on the island, and that he believed the King would run away from the
-whole set if he could, for he was "by-nearly mad-driven on account of
-their so-tiresome ways, and feared-himself to choose, because the one
-that he not married had would cause to make war by her people against
-the one he married should."
-
-During the whole of the fight, Vaiti remained perfectly unmoved on a
-cane lounge in the corner of the room, uninterruptedly puffing rings of
-blue smoke at the ceiling.  Not a detail had escaped her, all the same,
-nor did she miss a word of Neumann's remarks.  And they made her think.
-
-In the afternoon, the dull thud of galloping hoofs along the grass
-street made Mrs. Neumann run to the door.  She called loudly to Vaiti to
-come.
-
-"It is the King," she said.
-
-A small victoria, drawn by two spirited blacks, was tearing up the
-street.  Seated alone in it was an extraordinary and notable
-figure--Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., King of Liali.  He was six feet
-four inches in height, and over eighteen stone in weight.  He wore a
-scarlet cloth uniform coat, blazing with gold, and his heavy, handsome
-brown face, with its weak, small mouth, and black eyes almost too large
-and soft for a man, was shaded by a white sun helmet with a wide gold
-band.
-
-He drove furiously, looking neither to right nor to left, and, passing
-the house like a gorgeous whirlwind, was instantly lost in the casuarina
-forest beyond.
-
-"That is the King, then?" said Vaiti.  The Lialian language came almost
-as easily to her as her own, being only one of the dialects of the great
-Maori tongue that covers a good two-thirds of the island world.
-
-"Yes," said Neumann's wife, "that is the King. And very little any of us
-have seen of him lately.  He is afraid of the trouble he has got himself
-into; he shuts himself up all the time, and sees no one but his guards,
-and just sends a present now and then, first to one girl then to the
-other.  And when he drives to take the air, he flies along like that, so
-that no one can stop and speak to him.  He is terribly shy of strangers;
-I think it was because the _Sipila_ was here that he did not come out at
-all last week."
-
-"Is it such a very good thing for the princess he will marry?" asked
-Vaiti, playing with a yellow alamanda flower.
-
-"Very, very good indeed," replied the Lialian impressively.  "She will
-have a gold crown to wear on her head, and sit on a red velvet and gold
-throne beside the King, and have the most beautiful satin dresses from
-Sydney, and all her chemises will have lace and ribbons on them.  And as
-soon as the King buys another schooner for himself and Liali, she will
-travel in it with him whenever she likes, for sometimes he will go to
-Samoa, to stay with King Malietoa, or he will sail a whole week to Mbau
-in Fiji, and then Princess Thakombau and the Prince of Kandavu make
-feasts and dances for him, and the Kovana [governor] gives a real
-'papalangi' dinner for him, with champagne and a band.  And as for what
-she will have to eat at home, it is past telling, for in the palace
-there is no count whatever made of tinned salmon and biscuit, and she
-may have a sackful of sugar at every meal, and a whole roast pig every
-day. She may eat till she falls asleep, and then wake up to eat.  Ah, it
-is a good thing for the princess who marries the King, whichever she may
-be!"
-
-"I think you will be thirsty if you talk so much," said Vaiti rather
-rudely.  "I am thirsty myself with only listening to you.  Go and make
-some kava for me."
-
-Mrs. Neumann, who had been rather proud to have Vaiti staying with
-her--since her rank as a princess of Atiu counted for a good deal among
-the island races--began to dislike her visitor soon after this, and to
-wish her well away.  Vaiti was not an angel in the house at the best of
-times, and she did not trouble to make herself pleasant just then.
-Indeed, one would almost have thought she was trying to pick a quarrel.
-And, as that sort of effort rarely goes unrewarded, it is not
-astonishing to learn that the quarrel came before long--a bitter,
-loud-tongued dispute that left Mrs. Neumann sobbing in a fat, frightened
-heap on the floor, and Vaiti, silent but stormy, packing up her
-camphorwood box to depart.
-
-Neumann, being afraid of Saxon's possible anger, tried to keep her, but
-she laughed in his face, and went on packing.  There was an empty native
-house--little more than a palm-leaf hut, once tenanted by a Chinese
-trader--standing by the road about halfway through the great casuarina
-forest; a lonely, ramshackle place, used and wanted by nobody.  There
-and there only Vaiti would go, taking mats and cooking pots with her, to
-stay until her father came back.  When some of the islanders betrayed
-meddlesome curiosity as to her motives, and the missionaries declared
-they scented scandal, Vaiti silenced and terrified the one, and
-convinced the others that she was hopelessly beyond the pale, by giving
-out that she was something of a witch, and meant to go into the forest
-to gather and prepare certain powerful charms.  These, she said, would
-injure only her enemies, but were altogether powerless to hurt anyone
-who spoke well of her.  In consequence, the evil tongues of Liali
-received a sudden check.
-
-Furthermore, Vaiti, neglecting the half-castes and the whites, began
-with considerable art to make herself popular among the natives.  She
-dressed herself Liali fashion, and arranged her hair after the island
-modes. She joined in all their interminable boating journeys and
-picnics, and was never tired of sitting cross-legged on the ground,
-waving her arms and head in time with a hundred others, and chanting
-Lialian songs that lasted an afternoon apiece.  After dark, she was
-often to be seen out on the reef, with a torch and a fishing spear
-making an exhibition of piscatorial skill that astonished even the
-Lialians themselves.  When there was an unmissionary dance in some big
-chief-house, Vaiti was always there, decked with wreaths and flower
-necklaces, and polished with cocoanut oil, turning the heads of all the
-young men by the grace of her dancing, and winning the astonished
-approval of the women by the cool reserve with which she received every
-advance of a sentimental nature.  Both Mahina and Litia took jealous
-fancies to her--thus acquiring yet one more cause of mutual
-dissension--and separately poured all their woes into her ear.  She was
-wonderfully sympathetic, and urged each one on to assert her rights and
-stand no nonsense; insomuch that before very long the island was fairly
-ringing with what Litia's people meant to do to Mahina's, and what
-Mahina's would certainly do to Litia's, in the event of the King
-selecting one or the other.
-
-Somebody about this time--it was never ascertained who--spread a report
-that Captain Saxon of the _Sybil_ had a number of trade rifles on board
-his ship, and several cases of cartridges.  The talk began to take a
-more dangerous turn.  The schooner would not be back till the wedding
-was over, it was said, but let the winning party look out for themselves
-when she did come!  The Lialians, under missionary rule, had been
-peaceful and law-abiding people for almost a whole generation; but they
-had not yet forgotten that they were once the masters of the Pacific,
-and that of all the warlike island races, none had been such fighters as
-they....  The older men began to snuff battle in the air, walked about
-with their chests flung out, and told bloodthirsty ancient stories to
-the younger Lialians.  The women sang war songs at the evening
-gatherings in the chief-houses, and Mahina and Litia began to go about
-followed by bands of eager partisans.  Liali was certainly warming up.
-
-
-
-
-                              *CHAPTER XX*
-
-                           *QUEEN AFTER ALL*
-
-
-News of all these things came duly to the King through his faithful
-spies, and his Majesty Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. went nearly
-frantic.  He actually began to lose weight--a consummation that all the
-skill of his European court doctor had hitherto failed to bring
-about--and day by day he drove more wildly behind his famous blacks,
-covering mile after mile of lonely forest roads at a pace that brought
-the horses home all in a lather and the yellow satin cushions grimed
-with dust.  The wedding approached within ten days: the triumphal arches
-were being erected; the Queen Consort's throne came back from the
-carpenter, freshly gilded and upholstered; and the band were hard at
-work practising the strange conglomeration of shrieks and wails that
-make up the Lialian National Anthem.  The bride's dress, provided,
-according to usage, by the House of Lords, arrived at the palace in a
-palm-leaf basket. It was a very gorgeous affair--a long, loose robe of
-orange satin, embroidered in scarlet by a few of the cleverest
-mission-school girls--and it was of a usefully indefinite size, since
-the difference between the massive Mahina and the waspish little Litia
-was almost as great as the difference (of another kind) between their
-respective parties.  The silver-printed invitations for the white people
-and the chiefs--"To be present at the wedding of His Majesty King
-Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. with Princess----," came up by a
-whale-ship from Auckland, and so did the wedding cake, largely plaster
-of Paris.  And still the wretched King, lashed by the scourge of his own
-light-hearted follies, sent pacificating presents to both girls, and put
-off the dire decision.
-
-It was about this time that any wayfarer passing through the casuarina
-forest "might have observed" a light in Vaiti's cottage late one night.
-There was no one to observe, however, for the wood was supposed to be
-devil-haunted, and no native ever passed through it save in broad
-daylight.  When it grew toward sunset the only Lialian who would brave
-its dangers so far as to rush across it in the red evening light was the
-King himself, who had been educated in Sydney, and did not believe in
-devils--much.  The forest road was the shortest way home from his usual
-circular drive, and he frequently passed by the cottage just before
-sunset, driving like Jehu the son of Nimshi, and looking neither to
-right nor to left.  He had never noticed Vaiti as he passed, for she was
-always within the house, looking out between the cracks of the
-palm-leaves, where she could see without being seen.
-
-This evening, long after the King had passed by and the dark had come
-down, Vaiti sat on the floor of the hut, looking very thoughtful, as she
-turned out the contents of her big camphorwood box by the light of a
-ship's hurricane lantern.  She was all alone, as usual, and smoking,
-also as usual.  There was no sound in the solitary little house but the
-sighing of the wind in the casuarina trees and the steady puff of the
-girl's cigar. Papers, letters, packets of lace, odd bits of jewellery,
-silk dresses, pistols, knives, collections of rope and twine, laced
-underclothing, cartridges, feathers, shells, cigars, pearl-inlaid boxes,
-revareva plumes, and a miscellaneous collection of odds and ends
-garnered from all the four corners of the South Seas, strewed the floor,
-and the box was still half full.  By-and-by she came upon what she
-wanted--a roll of stuff done up in waxed paper.  She unfastened it, and
-let the contents fall out across the mats under the rays of the lantern.
-It was a web of pure gold tissue, bright as a summer sunrise and fine as
-a fairy's wing--an exquisite piece of stuff, which she had acquired from
-a Chinese trader in Honolulu by means none too scrupulous, and hoarded
-away for years.
-
-Vaiti looked at it thoughtfully, and then opened a little tortoise-shell
-and silver box, and spilled its contents--a shower of photographs--into
-her lap.  They were an exceedingly various collection--naval, military,
-British, French, native and half-caste--but most were men, and many were
-young and handsome.  Perhaps the best-looking of the collection was that
-of a young English naval officer, signed across the corner "R. Tempest,"
-with a Sydney address, and "Must it be good-bye?" written in tiny
-letters under the signature. Vaiti took the picture in her hand, and
-looked at it so long and earnestly that her cigar went out while she
-gazed.  She lit another, put down the photograph, and sat smoking and
-thinking for quite a long time....  The world was still all before her
-... and the whaling ship had said that another vessel was almost sure to
-touch, on her way to Sydney next week.
-
-Once in Vaiti's many-coloured history a looking-glass had proved her
-undoing.  It was a looking-glass that proved her salvation now, at the
-parting of the ways.  For, as she sat thinking, a brilliant picture
-caught her eye--her own proud, lovely head, crowned regally with a
-wreath of flowers, reflected in the mirror inside the lid of the box.
-She smiled, stretched out her hand--letting the photograph fall
-unnoticed to the floor from her lap--and placed a fold of the golden
-tissue across her head....  Yes, it looked quite like a crown--a Queen
-Consort's crown ... the glass gave back a truly royal picture.
-
-Vaiti's cheeks flushed as she looked.  She could hardly turn away.  But
-the golden fold slipped off her hair, and the queenly picture was gone.
-
-She shut the box, and with set lips took a match, lit it, and set fire
-to the photograph.  It burned very slowly, and the flame seemed to lick
-sympathetically round her own heart as it crawled about the handsome,
-debonair, but sensual face, lit up, and then put out, the laughing eyes,
-crackled through the curly hair and the white naval cap, and at last
-reduced the whole bright picture to a little pile of feathery black
-ash--dead, dead, dead!
-
-Vaiti dropped the charred fragments from her hands, and then put her
-head down upon the mats and lay very still....
-
-When morning broke through the narrow door of the hut, the rays of the
-rising sun fell upon the figure of a girl with a cold, expressionless
-face, sitting upon the threshold, hard at work with needle and thread.
-Upon her lap lay a pile of golden gauze.
-
-That afternoon the King drove late in the forest. The sun was near
-setting, and the rays were slanting long and low among the red trunks of
-the gloomy casuarina trees, when the spirited blacks came galloping up
-to the cottage.  Every day they had passed it by, a still, brown nest in
-the shadows, where nothing moved, but this evening, as they reached the
-spot, something caused them to check and shy, and the King, splendid
-driver as he was, had some difficulty in pulling them in. When he had
-succeeded, he glanced at the object that had caused their fright, and
-saw a vision startling enough to astonish even himself.
-
-A stranger girl of exceeding beauty stood in the midst of the forest
-clearing.  She was dressed in a robe of magnificent golden tissue, from
-which the level rays of the westering sun sparkled back in a halo of
-almost supernatural glory.  On her head was a wreath of blood-red
-hibiscus flowers, and her exquisite right arm, bare except for a twisted
-chain of gold, held up an island kava cup of carved cocoanut shell.
-When she saw that the King observed her, she sank on her knees, bent her
-neck, and raised the cup higher in both hands above her head.
-
-It was an invitation, and one that no Lialian could possibly have
-refused, for the drink brewed from the kava root, and the ceremonies
-connected with the brewing, tasting, and giving round, are almost a
-religion in those islands, and many a man, in the old wild days, has
-died for the insult of putting aside the proffered cup.  Therefore the
-King descended at once, tied his horses to a tree, and advanced to take
-the cup from the hands of this unknown woman who understood royal
-etiquette so well.  It was his Majesty's right to have his kava, and
-indeed all his food and drink, proffered in this especial attitude; but
-half-castes and whites were sometimes careless enough to forget the
-honour.
-
-He drank the great bowlful at a draught, as a king should, and, sending
-the cup with a twirl to the ground, according to etiquette, cast a side
-glance at the beautiful cup-bearer.  He hated strangers and distrusted
-foreigners, still...
-
-"Will you not come in and rest, O Great Chief?" asked Vaiti in Lialian.
-
-"Who are you?" said the King, still looking half away--but only half.
-
-"Princess of Atiu, and daughter of the great English sea-captain Saxon,"
-replied Vaiti, drawing herself up to her full height, and looking him
-straight in the eyes. The King met the look full this time, and thought
-that Litia's eyes, Lialian though she was, were not so bright by half.
-And if Mahina was fatter--as she certainly was--she never had such hair,
-or such a coral-red mouth. And what a magnificent dress the magnificent
-creature wore!
-
-He knew at once who Vaiti was, when she mentioned her rank in Atiu, for
-the chocolate-coloured island kings and queens understand each other's
-complicated genealogies quite as clearly as do their white compeers on
-the other side of the world--and though Atiu was a broken,
-half-depopulated place, annexed to the British Crown, its chiefs were of
-ancient lineage and high repute. Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. hesitated
-a moment--stretched out his hand--withdrew it--then stretched it out
-again, and graciously offered it to Vaiti, as to an equal in blood.
-
-Vaiti, glowing with gratification, yet had the happy intuition of
-dropping on one knee and kissing the royal hand, European fashion.  The
-King understood it, and swelled with pleasure, remembering how Mahina
-had had the impudence to chuck him under the chin when he bestowed a
-gracious salute upon her inferior lips, and how Litia had objected
-altogether to get off her horse when he was passing by, as Lialian royal
-customs enjoined upon all riders ... What a nuisance they had both grown
-to be, crying and battering at the palace gates, fighting over his
-gifts, getting up trouble among their relatives--trouble that he now
-began to fear might become so serious as to bring down the interference
-of the British Crown.  And every Pacific monarch knew what was the
-inevitable next move, when that game had once begun!  Good-bye to his
-kingship, if once the British Lion laid a claw on Lialia.
-
-"Will you not come in and rest, Great Chief?" said the humble voice of
-the stranger again.  And the King, still shy and distrustful, and
-looking at Vaiti only out of the corners of his eyes, did condescend to
-come in.
-
-And the next day he rested again, and the day after that.  It was
-astonishing how easily driving seemed to tire his Majesty at this
-period.  And all the time the wedding preparations went forward, while
-Mahina and Litia, with their respective factions, grew more and more
-jealous of each other, and more and more enraged.
-
-But there came a day at last, four days from the wedding, when the King
-declared that he would make his final choice on the evening before the
-marriage day, and would send a herald on that night to proclaim it
-through the capital.
-
-Ruru, the royal herald, who had never before had a chance to exercise
-his office or wear his uniform, was extremely pleased.  He got out his
-finery at once--a Beefeater cap and tabard of crimson silk, worn with a
-large silk sash, and bare legs--and began a dress rehearsal that lasted,
-with intervals for food and sleep, until the evening of the
-proclamation.  At sunset he went up to the palace, received the paper
-that contained the message, and strutting like a turkey, came out on to
-the open green in front, where at least a thousand Lialians--half of
-them Litia's friends, and half of them Mahina's--were collected.  Mahina
-and Litia themselves, each defiantly dressed in all the bridal finery
-she could muster, stood in the forefront of the crowd, exchanging looks
-of death and hatred.  It had come to this with the two women now, that
-either would have cheerfully died a death of slow torture, if by so
-doing only she could have prevented the other from winning. That she
-might miss the glories of the throne was not the prominent thought in
-Litia's mind--only that Mahina might secure them and triumph over her;
-and the self-same fancy agitated the ample breast of her rival, as the
-two stood in the cool twilight, within sound of the breakers on the
-reef, waiting with choking anxiety for Ruru's words.
-
-"People of Liali!" read the herald impressively, striking an attitude,
-with one bare leg advanced: "His Majesty King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea
-III. of Liali, being sovereign by right divine, and the Lord's Anointed,
-also High Chief of all the Liali Islands as descendant of the Sacred
-Lizard, has decided to marry, according to the custom of his
-forefathers, and give the land of Liali an heir to our mighty crown.
-The wedding will take place in the mission church to-morrow, at noon and
-there will be a collection afterwards for expenses! If anyone comes
-drunk to church, or puts nothing in the plate, he will be turned out.
-His Majesty hereby announces that, in order to save war and dissension
-among his loyal subjects, and to teach some princesses to pay him proper
-respect, he has decided to give the honour of his hand to Princess
-Vaiti, daughter of Princess Rangi of Atiu, deceased, and Captain Saxon,
-of the schooner _Sybil_.  God save the King, and you are all to go home
-without making a row."
-
-It was a fine proclamation, but assuredly the order in the last clause
-asked too much of Lialian humanity. No one attempted to obey it.  The
-news was received first in a dead silence of amazement, and then by a
-storm of shrieks, howls, questions, a wild trampling and rushing to and
-fro, and, last of all, by a Homeric roar of laughter.  The Lialian
-possesses a rough but reliable sense of humour, practical joking being
-his especial delight; and it suddenly dawned upon the populace of Liali
-that the King had played the most stupendous practical joke upon them
-ever known in the history of the islands.  Therefore these light-hearted
-children of the sun, instead of raiding the palace in two separate
-factions, lay down and rolled upon the grass, or held helplessly on to
-one another, roaring with laughter. The utter disconcerting of Mahina
-and Litia, now that all party feeling was removed from the matter,
-further appealed to them as a jest of the finest sort, and witticisms
-that would have made a trooper blush were hurled upon the disconsolate
-maidens from all sides.  Some few there were who frowned at the triumph
-of a foreigner and a stranger; but Vaiti's arts had succeeded in making
-her popular, and the malcontents were borne down by the roar of public
-amusement and assent.  Vaiti herself, safely hidden in the Methodist
-mission house, listened to the laughter far off, and felt well pleased.
-She had not been very sure how matters might go, and had therefore, at a
-bold stroke, won the favour of the Church by approaching the missionary,
-and assuring him of the extreme purity of her Methodism (she was, if
-anything, a pure heathen) and, in confidence, of the honour awaiting
-her.  The reverend gentleman, who had long sat on thorns by reason of
-the power of the Seventh Day Adventist, Christian Science, and Original
-Shaker missions in the islands, received her with delight, and handed
-her over to the care of his wife, who shortly afterwards informed him
-that the new light of the Church was, in her opinion, a "perfect
-minx"--but that she supposed it was as well, under the circumstances, to
-make to herself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, as the Bible
-enjoined, and remain on intimate visiting terms with the palace.  So
-Vaiti spent the fateful evening under the secure protection of the
-Church itself, and claimed the same creditable patronage for the day of
-the wedding.
-
-What of Mahina and Litia?  The disappointed princesses, when the
-proclamation was read out, turned and stared at each other like
-tigresses robbed of a meal. Neither was going to be Queen of
-Liali--neither was going to scratch her rival's eyes out, and root up
-her hair, for the crime of securing the coveted honour.  The very bottom
-of the world had dropped out--what was to follow?
-
-For a moment they continued to stare, each scanning the other's face
-under a new light--the light of common feeling.  Litia remembered that
-she and Mahina had been brought up almost as sisters in the palace of
-the late Queen.  Mahina recalled the time when she had almost died of
-measles, and Litia had nursed her through. They were both deceived, both
-deserted, and the friends of one could never crow offensively over the
-other now. The thought was mingled bitter-sweet, and the two burst out
-crying, and dropped into each other's arms, simultaneously vowing
-threats of vengeance against the treacherous interloper, which--unbacked
-by their war-like following of friends--they knew very well they would
-never be able to execute.  And the crowd dispersed as the sun went down.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-The _Sybil_ made better time than was expected, after all.  Her white
-sails lifted against the blue, from behind the nearest island, just as
-the royal wedding party commenced its gorgeous procession to the church.
-Before the ceremony was ended, the schooner had made the harbour and
-Saxon was ashore.  He came upon an utterly deserted town, and saw not a
-human being until he was halfway up to the church, outside of which he
-perceived an immense crowd, unable to enter.  Under a tree by the
-wayside sat one of the English traders who had failed to get a place.
-He greeted Saxon uproariously, and asked him if this wasn't a proper go.
-
-"What?" asked Saxon.  "Which is he marrying?"
-
-"Oh, crikey! he doesn't know!" roared the trader--and fell back against
-the tree, suffocating with laughter, and utterly declining to explain.
-
-Saxon, cursing him for a silly fool, tramped on towards the church.  The
-procession was coming out now, and he wanted to see the show, for though
-he might call the coffee-coloured Lialians niggers, he quite understood
-the position of King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., and the importance
-to all the islands of his choice.
-
-He got upon a bank to see the better, fixed his long-sighted sailor eyes
-upon the chapel door, and saw a glittering vision emerge into the
-sunlight, amidst the cries and cheers of the people.  That was the King,
-in a gorgeous uniform, with his crown on his head and a long velvet
-mantle sweeping behind him ... and at his left hand stepped a tall,
-stately, slender figure, also crowned, and dazzlingly dressed all in
-glittering gold.... Not Mahina, certainly; not Litia either--Who was it,
-then?  It could never be--but it was--Vaiti!
-
-Saxon staggered off the bank, sat down, jumped up again, and clapped his
-hands.
-
-"By ----, if it isn't like her, through and through!" he cried.  "By
-----, I'm proud of her!  Queen of Liali!  Queen of Liali!  But----"
-
-He stopped, and shook his head with a knowing laugh.  He was not very
-sober.
-
-"But--God help the King!" he said.
-
-
-
-                                THE END
-
-
-
-    PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND ECCLES.
-
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