IV.
That night, as Kineia lay awake, she heard them talking in the room below and once or twice she heard her husband’s voice raised sharply, as if in anger.
Then he came to bed, but not to sleep, and in the morning he was a different man from the man she had always known, heavy-eyed, depressed, and listless.
Packard, on the contrary, seemed more fresh of color and more bright of eye than when he had landed.
He got off immediately after breakfast to see about unloading and taking in cargo, and Lygon sat in the veranda smoking.
Kineia’s heart was heavy. It seemed to her that some blight had come to the island with this stranger, but she said nothing, and for the three succeeding days she said nothing, watching her lord as she might have watched him wilting under the hand of some fatal disease.
Then on the fourth day, when they were alone in the veranda, Kineia, who was at work on some embroidery, suddenly put it aside, got up, and knelt down beside her husband.
“What has that man done to you that you should be like this?” asked Kineia.
Lygon was silent for a moment. Then he spoke.
“Kineia, I am ruined. All this around us is as a dream that must go. Kineia, I killed a man once, in anger. I escaped, but that man Packard was present, and now I have to give him everything or he will tell.”
“Everything?” said Kineia.
“I offered him half I possess—as well offer the gray shark half your body when he can get the whole—no not everything. He will leave me a thousand dollars to begin the world again with.”
Kineia was silent.
“He is going back to San Francisco on the schooner to tell—unless——”
“Unless?”
“Unless we go with him. In San Francisco I am to sell him everything, schooner and all, for the thousand dollars he will give me.”
“And your money?”
“That, too, will be his.”
“Truly,” said Kineia, “his stomach is great.”
“I am bound and helpless,” said Lygon.
The weakness in his character, which prosperity had hidden, was beginning to appear, and Kineia seemed to see it as she brooded on him now long and fatefully.
He who had been everything was now nothing. The other man was all-powerful.
The other man was now the possessor of all.
“Tell me how you killed that man,” said she.
Lygon told, going over the old, sordid story and emphasizing the fact that it was really an accident.
“You did not mean to kill?” said Kineia.
“Never. It was an accident,”
“Where, then, is the harm?”
“His friends would swear that it was not, and I ran away, and even killing by accident is what they call manslaughter over there. I would be put in prison—for years, maybe.”
“I will think about it,” said Kineia. Her manner had grown distant and chill, as though her mind were repelled by the weakness of Lygon.
Next morning, Packard, the dominant man, thought he noticed a change in the manner of Kineia. Lygon’s wife up to this had held aloof from him; her manner seemed more friendly and inviting this morning. Then he felt sure. He knew himself to be the better man, and Kineia had recognized the fact.
He almost forgot Lygon and all his plans about him in this new interest that had suddenly come into his life.
He had never seen any one so beautiful as Kineia, and his evil mind was not a whit less evil because of the esthetic strain in it. He could admire beauty, this man, the beauty of a sunrise or the beauty of a woman—anything but the beauty of goodness.
He went off to his work that morning carrying the picture of Kineia with him, and it held him while he superintended the business of loading the copra on board.
Brown, the mate, who was helping in the work, wondered what had come to Packard making him so silent and abstracted, he who had been so full of life and energy the day before.
If you had told him that Packard was thinking of Kineia, he would have laughed with a certain amount of joy at the cold douche surely being prepared for him by that beauty.
But Brown knew nothing of the tangle of affairs or what native blood can do under certain temptations.
Packard returning next evening found Lygon incapable of coming to dinner. During the last few days Lygon had been taking gin to soothe his mind; to-night he was tipsy, and as he and Kineia dined opposite one another his snoring came distinctly from the room above.
“My husband is ill,” said Kineia, with a little movement of disgust. They talked in low tones during the meal and when dinner was over, Packard, lighting a cigar in the veranda, saw Kineia in the lamplit room going to a box that stood on a little table by the lamp stand. She took something from it and placed whatever it was in her pocket. Then she came out in the veranda. There was in her face something reckless, crafty, and subtle, as though the evil spirit of the gin that had poisoned Lygon were poisoning her, too.
“What was that you put in your pocket?” asked Packard, for want of something better to say.
“A present for you,” said Kineia tenderly and with a little laugh.
He took her hand and she let him hold it. Lygon, whose snoring had ceased for a moment, could be heard turning on his creaking bed, then the snores recommenced.
A little shudder of disgust ran through Kineia.
“Come,” she whispered, “let us get away from that.”
She led the way from the veranda amid the trees. A full moon was shining and the woods were full of light, a light green as the light of a sea cave.
He had released her hand, and now he turned to take it again, but she evaded him.
“I have come here to speak with you alone, not to hold your hand,” said Kineia. “Follow me, for what I have to say must be said far away from men and in the place where my mother’s people once worshiped their gods. You, who say that you love me, must obey me in this.”
“Lead on,” said Packard.
He followed as she went before him like a wraith through the green gloom. Now a shaft of moonlight struck her and now in a denser shadow she was almost invisible. Then came a break in the trees and Packard saw before him an amphitheater where, in the moonlight, great blocks of stone lay tumbled and where the steplike tiers of seats were burst apart by tree roots.
Here Kineia stopped and turned, where the ferns grew high amid the bowlders. This was the spot toward which she had been luring Packard for the last two days.
“Once,” said she to Packard in a low voice, “you saw my husband kill a man.”
Packard started. Then he laughed.
“So he has told you?” said he.
“Is it true?”
“As sure as he’s lying there drunk in the house, now, it is true.”
Kineia pondered for a moment.
“What brought you here across the sea to this island to tell me that?” said she mournfully.
“Luck,” said Packard.
“No,” said Kineia with a sudden laugh. “Death!” And she plunged the knife in his throat, the knife that had saved her father, in the hand of Nalia.
He did not die immediately and she waited to make sure, absolutely sure, and as she waited she wept for the man she loved lying there in the house in the grasp of gin. Then when all was over she came back, running like a mother to her child.
Lygon was sleeping peacefully now, with his face buried on his arm. She kissed his hair, left the room, and leaving the house sought the house of Taro.
“Taro,” said Kineia, “the strange captain sat up at our house drinking gin. He wished to go on board his ship. I went to the beach with him and he said he would swim. He was drunk. I tried to stop him, but it was no use. He had not gone more than a few canoe lengths from the shore when a shark took him. He cried once and went down.”
“Waugh,” said Taro, rubbing his eyes. “When the belly of a shark has taken a man there is no use in searching for him late at night. He was a stranger, anyway.”
It was a temperance story that explained a lot of things, among others the prohibition of alcohol on that island by order of Kineia. Lygon, returned to freedom and sobriety and happiness, never knew. Kineia, happy again like a joyous child, never told, and the ferns where the old gods of Utara once held their revels are safe to keep their secret forever.
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the July 20, 1919 issue ofThe Popular Magazine.
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the July 20, 1919 issue ofThe Popular Magazine.