Riva, 16th August.Dear Maisie:Please read this letter from one who has spoiled much that was beautiful, one who has taken the taste out of three lives, yours, Dan Pritchard’s and my own.Maisie, Dan Pritchard is here with me. He is my husband, and to me he is very kind and loving and faithful. When he came first it was his desire to marry me according to the way of your people, but the missionary here was mad and would not oblige him, so we were married according to the desire of our hearts. In the presence of the sea and the earth and the sky we swore, each to the other, that we would love each other and dwell together in honor. This we have done. But Dan is no longer happy. Life slowly loses its taste for him, I have watched and I know. He is very lonely, nor can all of my love compensate him for the loss of his friends, for the loss of the world that was his. I know he feels as sometimes I felt when I dwelled in his house in San Francisco, and that is terrible.The thought has come to me that if Dan lives here he will some day grow to hate me. And I shall some day be too unlovely to hold him. These things cannot be helped. They are a part of life. My love wearies him even now. He is nervous and unhappy and sometimes he withdraws from my caresses, and last night in his sleep he spoke of you and his sorrow because you had not loved him. Perhaps you do not know this truth, Maisie, but men can never love as women love. It is very foolish to expect this. A woman can love one man until death, but a man can love two women, or even more, but he will love best that woman who gives to him the most comfort and peace of mind, the woman who makes few demands and who refrains from forcing love upon him when he is unhappy.Dan Pritchard does not like my people. We are as oil and water. He does not like the food we have here, nor the heat nor the rain nor the silence nor the loneliness. He would have his own people about him. Alas, I would have mine about me. He fits not into my world, nor can I ever fit into his. Therefore, it is wise that we should part. I would not have him in unhappiness. Rather would I die.Maisie, come for him. Please! Evil will befall him if you do not. If you love him as I think you do, you will come; nor will pride—the false pride of a woman—keep you from your happiness. Dan was always your man, Maisie. Never was he truly mine. I do not know why, but this is true. I would give him back to you, Maisie. Please come.Tamea
Riva, 16th August.
Dear Maisie:
Please read this letter from one who has spoiled much that was beautiful, one who has taken the taste out of three lives, yours, Dan Pritchard’s and my own.
Maisie, Dan Pritchard is here with me. He is my husband, and to me he is very kind and loving and faithful. When he came first it was his desire to marry me according to the way of your people, but the missionary here was mad and would not oblige him, so we were married according to the desire of our hearts. In the presence of the sea and the earth and the sky we swore, each to the other, that we would love each other and dwell together in honor. This we have done. But Dan is no longer happy. Life slowly loses its taste for him, I have watched and I know. He is very lonely, nor can all of my love compensate him for the loss of his friends, for the loss of the world that was his. I know he feels as sometimes I felt when I dwelled in his house in San Francisco, and that is terrible.
The thought has come to me that if Dan lives here he will some day grow to hate me. And I shall some day be too unlovely to hold him. These things cannot be helped. They are a part of life. My love wearies him even now. He is nervous and unhappy and sometimes he withdraws from my caresses, and last night in his sleep he spoke of you and his sorrow because you had not loved him. Perhaps you do not know this truth, Maisie, but men can never love as women love. It is very foolish to expect this. A woman can love one man until death, but a man can love two women, or even more, but he will love best that woman who gives to him the most comfort and peace of mind, the woman who makes few demands and who refrains from forcing love upon him when he is unhappy.
Dan Pritchard does not like my people. We are as oil and water. He does not like the food we have here, nor the heat nor the rain nor the silence nor the loneliness. He would have his own people about him. Alas, I would have mine about me. He fits not into my world, nor can I ever fit into his. Therefore, it is wise that we should part. I would not have him in unhappiness. Rather would I die.
Maisie, come for him. Please! Evil will befall him if you do not. If you love him as I think you do, you will come; nor will pride—the false pride of a woman—keep you from your happiness. Dan was always your man, Maisie. Never was he truly mine. I do not know why, but this is true. I would give him back to you, Maisie. Please come.
Tamea
Mellenger folded the letter and put it back in his pocket. Dan hid his face in his hands and wept.
“Poor child,” Mellenger murmured. “She has never heard that pity is akin to love—that she stirred in you all the profound pity and tenderness of your naturally kind and chivalrous heart. I wouldn’t feel so badly about it if I were you, Dan. You weep now because your love lies dead and you have killed it. You merely made a very human mistake. So did Tamea. But she realizes it and has the courage to confess it. Old son, your romance is at an end.”
“I shall not abandon her, Mel,” Dan cried brokenly. “My unhappiness shall not be paid off against hers. She’s too tremendously fine, too noble.”
“That is true. She is too tremendously fine, too noble, to permit you to dramatize yourself for her sake. There is only one sacrifice necessary here, and Tamea is making it—gladly, without regret and all because she possesses in full measure a love so wonderful, so glorious that no man can ever possibly understand it or appreciate it. There will be no pandering to your ego, my son. You are no longer infatuated with Tamea, she knows it and you might as well acknowledge it. Heroics are quite unnecessary. Tamea, I take it, does not desire them and I shall not permit them.”
“But Maisie. What of her, Mel?”
“Well, when she received this letter she sent for me and gave it to me to read. She knew I was your friend so she sought my counsel. I asked her pointblank if she loved you and she said she did. I asked her why she had permitted you to escape and she told me. I think I can understand her point of view. Then I asked her if she had any conception of your point of view in this triangle and she said she thought she understood enough of it to forgive you. I know you rather well, Dan, and I tried to paint for Maisie a word picture of you as I know you. I told her that you had never been truly in love with Tamea but rather in love with love.
“It is your nature to idealize everything. You yearned for a high romance and Tamea was a romantic figure. She appealed to you physically and romantically. She aroused your pity, she stirred you and set your soul afire, and neither of you knew that it was the sort of conflagration that burns itself out and leaves only a heap of ashes—ashes of sorrow and regret. I tried to make Maisie see that it was largely her fault. She had declined to reach forth and possess you as Tamea, in her primitive innocence, did not hesitate to do.
“I asked her if the memory of this escapade of yours would cloud her future happiness, if she should marry you, and she said she thought she could manage to forget it.” Mellenger paused and gazed out to sea through half closed eyes. “As a matter of fact,” he continued, “there is not the slightest necessity that anybody in our world need know what has happened. You have merely been knocking around the isles of the South Sea, painting and enjoying yourself. Nobody knows except Tamea, Maisie, you, Hackett and myself—and none of us will ever tell.”
“But, Mel, Maisie refused to marry me. If she had, this would never have happened.”
“You are a sublimated idiot. You never told Maisie that you loved her. Women love love, too. You dawdled around, wishful to have your cake and eat it, hating the freedom of your bachelorhood, yet dreading to abandon it, restless, perturbed, unhappy—ah, you’re anut. Understand? Anut!”
By his silence under fire Dan admitted the truth of this charge and instantly the great-hearted Mellenger was sorry he had spoken. He laid his hand gently on his friend’s shoulder.
“Buck up, old son,” he pleaded. “At least you’ve done your best to be a gentleman all through this affair. Maisie understands that.”
“Tamea asked Maisie to come and get me. Did she come? Is she here?”
“She is aboard the Pelorus now. Old Casson and his wife think she is in Tahiti. Nothing wrong with taking a summer trip to Tahiti, is there? What the old folks do not know will not worry them. Well, we came down on the same steamer and in the harbor at Tahiti we found the Pelorus. When I told Hackett that I wanted to charter his vessel for a passage to Riva, he eyed me curiously and said he had been expecting somebody to come along and charter him for that trip. Then it developed that he knew you. He wanted more money than Maisie and I could scrape up, but when I informed him of this he said he’d collect the deficit at Riva. Said he’d draw a draft on your Chinese bank. So he cleaned up a stateroom for Maisie and shipped a real cook. He has an ice plant in his hold and we had a pleasant trip. Hackett is a most agreeable man and for a monetary consideration is prepared to carry us all directly to San Francisco.”
“Sorry, but I can’t go,” Dan repeated doggedly. “Nor will I inflict on myself the pain of seeing Maisie.”
“Better toddle along home and talk it over with Tamea,” his friend suggested patiently. “You may change your mind after that.”
Without a word Dan left him. On the way up the hill he met the master of the Pelorus coming down. “I’ll send up a couple of my boys to carry down your trunk,” he told Dan. “Your Tamea is packing it now.” And he smiled his knowing little smile and continued on toward the mission.
Tamea met Dan as he came up the stairs. “Tamea, dear,” he began, “what does this mean?”
“You have talked to Mellenger. You know what it means. When I took you for my husband,chéri, I said: ‘I will take you and cherish you only so long as I may make you happy.’ That time has passed. You are no longer happy, so I have arranged that you shall leave me. There must be no argument.”
“Tamea,” he almost groaned, “I cannot bear to break your heart.”
She smiled sadly. “My heart will not be broken. It will be hurt but time will cure that. I do not wish you to remain longer. If you do I shall be much more unhappy than if you go away. You will, perhaps, not understand, but these are true words, dear one. We have both made a large mistake and it would be foolish not to admit it and strive to mend that mistake.”
He bowed his head. “And you truly desire this, Tamea?”
“With all my heart,” she answered. She came to him and placed her arms around his neck. “Love of my life,” she said softly, and in her voice the stored-up pathos and longing of her shattered life vibrated, “you will kiss me once and then you will go—quickly.”
“Oh, sweetheart!” he moaned.
“Sh-h,” she pleaded. “I desire this parting, dear love, and because I desire it I have been to some pains and expense to accomplish it. Here you are as a fish cast up on the beach. You gasp and struggle for life and in the end you will die—living. I understand, darling.Chéri, believe me, I understand truly, and there is naught to grieve over.”
She kissed him and clung to him, wet-eyed and trembling, but resolute. “Now, dear love, you will go,” she whispered, “nor will you look back as you descend the hill. And sometimes you will think of your Tamea who loved you better than you will ever be loved again. Adieu, my husband.”
She left him abruptly. He stood for about a minute, his thoughts inchoate, his brain numbed; yet, out of the chaos of his conflicting emotions there rose, almost subconsciously, the tiniest flicker of relief. He hated himself for it. He felt low and mean and treacherous, felt that he had played a sorry part, indeed, yet he had not meant to do this, nor had he even contemplated doing it. The situation existed, that was all, nor could any power of his or Tamea’s alter it in the slightest. As well strive to restrain a falling star!
His heart constricted, his eyes blurred with tears of sorrow and shame, he turned away at last and stumbled down the path to the Muggridge bungalow. Hackett and Mellenger, seeing him coming, walked around to the opposite side of the house, in order that he might be spared the humiliation of knowing they had seen him with his soul laid bare. Straight for the whaleboat, drawn up at the edge of the wash, Dan headed, and the Kanaka sailors, seeing him coming, ran the boat into the surf until it floated; there they held it, waiting; and when Dan Pritchard climbed wearily in, they pulled him out to the Pelorus.
Up on the veranda of the mission house Captain Hackett produced two of his famous Sumatra cigars. “We’ll give him a couple of hours in which to straighten out his record with Miss Morrison,” the maritime philosopher suggested. “Smoke up.”
Mellenger took the cigar, but he did not light it. “I think I shall make a brief call on Tamea,” he declared. “I really think she would enjoy seeing me, and until the Pelorus leaves Riva, I imagine Tamea will have herself rather well under control. How does one reach her habitation?”
Hackett described the way and Mellenger left him. On the steps of Tamea’s home he found Sooey Wan seated; the old Chinaman looked angry and disconsolate, but at sight of Mellenger his yellow fangs showed in a glad smile of welcome. He rose, proffered his hand, which Mellenger grasped heartily, and for several seconds they stood, looking into each other’s faces; then the look of desolation sifted back over Sooey Wan’s face and he shook his head dolefully.
“Missa Mel,” he quavered, “evelybody clazy. Pitty soon Sooey Wan clazy, too.”
“Yes, Sooey, my friend,” Mellenger replied, “everybody is. In fact, I’m half crazy myself. Where is Tamea?”
Sooey Wan jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Lady queen packum tlunk, Missa Mel.”
Mellenger entered the house. In the center of the living room Tamea sat, folding Dan’s well worn linen and packing it away in trunk trays. She looked up at his entrance—and stared unbelievingly a moment before scrambling to her feet and rushing to him with outstretched arms.
“Mellengair! Mellengair, my friend!” she cried, and then she was sobbing out, upon that great, understanding heart, the agony she had seen fit to repress in the presence of Dan. He held her to him, stroking the beautiful head but saying nothing, for he knew that her full heart was emptying itself, that she would be the better for her tears.
Presently she ceased to sob, but still she clung to him; long, heart-breaking sighs finally told Mellenger that she was getting herself under control once more. Gently he lifted her face and with his own handkerchief dried her eyes. “Poor Tamea!” he murmured. “Poor, unhappy, misunderstood waif!”
“Do not pity me, my friend,” she pleaded. “It is the fate of half-breeds to dwell in a world apart; in time we learn to make the best of it.” She smiled wanly. “It was, perhaps, unfortunate for me that my father was Gaston of the Beard. He put upon me the imprint of his own soul. So I see too clearly, I understand too readily, I feel too deeply.” She lifted his great hand and laid her cheek against the back of it. “Once I hurt you, Mellengair. I am sorry. I have wept many tears because I have called you Stoneface.”
“Don’t! Please don’t!” he pleaded hoarsely. “I didn’t mind. Really, I didn’t.”
“You are a kind liar.” She kissed his hand humbly. “And now,” she added, with just a suspicion of a quaver in her voice, “it is your friend, Tamea, who is Stoneface—always to look out to sea for that which came—and went—and will never, never come again.”
Mellenger’s poker face twitched ever so slightly. “I am here to help you. Tell me how.”
“There can be no help, Mel. Dan is very unhappy with me. He loves me, but he is not happy with me, and it has come to the knowledge that never can the poor boy be happy with me. Great unhappiness is stronger than great love. It will kill love—and I have watched and his love is dying. I would have him leave me, loving me. If he remains he will grow mad, like that missionary Muggridge. Something in him that is fine and very like a little boy will wither and die.”
Mellenger nodded and Tamea continued: “To Dan also has been given the gift of seeing too clearly, understanding too readily, feeling too deeply.”
“Dan is my friend,” said Mellenger. “He has many virtues. He is lovable. But he is too much given to introspection. He thinks too much about himself and too little about others. He has not known great happiness and he has been eager to protect the little he has known. He has a restless soul, always poised for flight. In a word, he is utterly selfish and doesn’t know it. He would be highly insulted if he heard me say so, and he knows as much about women as a pig does about the binomial theorem.”
Tamea smiled wistfully. “Yes, he knows little of women. He is not observing, and, as you say, I think it is because he thinks overmuch about what each new day may bring him. I am to be the mother of his child, but he does not know this—and I have, for reasons of my own, not told him.”
“Ah!” Mellenger gasped. “That complicates matters. You are not married, I take it.”
“No, not the way you take it. You will not tell this to Dan, of course.”
“Of course I shall. If he is the father of your child he shall not evade the responsibility of fatherhood, although, to do him full justice, I do not think it would ever occur to him to evade it.”
“In his world, Mellengair, it is not quiteau faitto be the father of a quarter-bred Polynesian child while still a bachelor.”
“It would be regarded as embarrassing.”
“I would not have Dan embarrassed.”
“You can obviate the embarrassment. Come with us to Tahiti and marry Dan legally before the child is born. Nobody in his world, then, need know.”
“I could not be happy in Dan’s world any more than he can be happy in mine. You do not seem to understand, Mellengair. I love him. I do not delude myself, my friend. If I want him I can hold fast to him. I know my power. But I love him too greatly to hold him when the holding will smash his life. It is better that I should smash my own, for look you, Mellengair,” she explained with an odd wistfulness, “I am but Tamea, the half-caste Queen of Riva. I am old—very old—and I—I do not matter. I have known the fulness of life. I am content. I cannot leave this land in which the roots of my soul will ever cling; always when I dwelt with Dan Pritchard in San Francisco I heard the sound of the surf on the reef yonder I heard the sigh of these coco-palms, I heard the songs and the woes of my people. You will, perhaps, not understand, Mellengair, but I know that I am right.”
He bowed his head. He knew she was right, knew that only a great and noble soul could so calmly enunciate such a bitter truth. The old, immutable law of existence could not be shattered. Kind begets kind, yearns for it, is happy with nothing else. Human beings, habituated to their environment, cast in certain molds of evolution, may not progress forward or backward when such progression is not a part of the Infinite Plan. To attempt it is ruinous; to defy that immutable law—particularly in the case of super-intelligences like Dan and Tamea—invites disaster.
“Dan Pritchard will go tonight and I shall not see him again,” Tamea said, following the long silence while Mellenger revolved this sad puzzle in his poor brain. “Farewells do but bear down the heart, and if I do not see him again it will be much easier for him, poor dear. He knows I love him. Why, then, tell him this at parting, why hurt him with my tears, why subject him to the shame of having me see him bent and broken? He will go. He greatly desires to go, and I know why, and it is the law and I am not embittered. Nothing matters in life save that human beings shall know true happiness—and I have known that. When my baby comes I shall know it again. I have in me the blood of my mother, and we were proud of our line. And I have in me the blood of my father and he was brave and laughed when the seas boiled over the knightheads. I too shall laugh.”
“I dare say you do not care to visit Maisie, or have her visit you.”
“You are right. You are always right, dear Stoneface. I give to her the man she loves, the man who, in the bottom of his heart, has always loved her, the man I took from her. From me he has learned something of life; at least I have not hurt him, nor have I dwelt with him in dishonor. He will be comforted by Maisie; life will have a taste for him again; and of his life here with me, none in his world should ever know. You see, I understand your people, Mellengair,” she added, with that same odd, twisted, wistful little smile. “It is that you do not like to be found out.”
Fell a silence. “You will go now, please, and take Dan Pritchard with you. Sooey Wan is ready and the sailors from the Pelorus will come for his trunk.” She gave him her hand.
“May I kiss you, Tamea?” he whispered, and there was that in his deep-set, unlovely eyes, in his poker face, that might have been seen in the face of Christ, writhing on the Cross. She lifted her face to his and he kissed her, very tenderly, on each cheek, after the fashion of her father’s people. Then he left her, and he descended the hill to the beach.
“Well?” said Hackett, as Mellenger came up on the Muggridge veranda and heaved himself wearily into a chair.
“I have just talked with the finest woman God Almighty ever made,” Mellenger replied huskily. “Compared with her the noblest of men is so low he could kiss a flounder without bending his knees.” He thoughtfully bit the end off the cigar Hackett had given him and the latter struck a match and held it to the tip of the cigar. “Brave, like her father,” Mellenger continued. “Faces the issue without cringing. She is magnificent—perfectly tremendous!”
“Well, that’s a comfort, Mr. Mellenger.”
Fell a silence. Then: “Captain Hackett, when you return to the Pelorus, please send my dunnage ashore and have one of your men dump it in this veranda. I have decided to remain in Riva. I do not fancy that long trip home with Dan and Maisie. My presence would make them both uncomfortable, and I am quite finished with my self-appointed task of directing that man’s love affairs. He’s a fine man but a poor lover.”
“Nonsense, Mr. Mellenger,” Hackett urged. “The Pelorus is a hundred and thirty feet long and there is room enough aboard her to make yourself scarce.”
“Well, I have other reasons for staying. Unlike Dan Pritchard, I have no dollars calling me back. All I had was a heart-breaking job on a newspaper and I chucked that forever when I started for Riva. I have never had a vacation and I have a notion I’ll enjoy knocking around in the islands. At any rate, I’m going to remain. Having no conscience to speak of, I will help myself to the supplies you are going to land for this deserted mission. I shall get along quite nicely.”
“There is no accounting for the ways of white men,” Captain Hackett declared. “Here comes the whaleboat, loaded with supplies.” He held out his hand. “Happy days, Mr. Mellenger.”
“Thank you. Good-by. Do not tell Dan I have stayed. He might take it into his fool head to come ashore and argue with me. And the next time you happen to be passing along the coast of Riva, drop in and say howdy. I might be ready to leave at that time.”
CHAPTER XXX
When Dan Pritchard descended into the main cabin of the Pelorus, he found Maisie seated there. She stared at him a moment, not recognizing in the brown, somewhat unkempt figure at the foot of the companion, the man she had known and loved in another world.
“It is I—Dan,” he told her.
Maisie made no effort to rise. She knew she was unequal to the effort. “I—I came—to see if you—cared to come home, Dan,” she said with difficulty. “Tamea wrote—asked me to come and get you. It has been very hard for me to do this, Dan. Perhaps you can understand why.”
He came and took her hand in both of his, but made no movement toward a more affectionate greeting. He was not quite equal to such disloyalty so soon, even though at sight of Maisie his heart thrilled wildly. “I can understand your reluctance to running after any man, Maisie,” he answered her. “Least of all myself.”
“This situation is perfectly amazing. I cannot, even now, understand why I have come here, Dan.”
“Perhaps it would be just as well not to try to understand some things, Maisie,” he pleaded. “Do you think it is possible for us to take up our lives where they were when we saw each other last? You know all about me, of course.”
“Mark Mellenger was at some pains to attempt a long, scientific and, at times, reasonable, defense of masculine weaknesses in general and of yours in particular. Somehow, Dan, I cannot feel that you have been either weak or wicked. It—it—just happened. I cannot conceive that you would ever be less than a gentleman.”
He bowed his head. “I have tried to be that, Maisie, although today I do not feel that I have succeeded. But I cannot do otherwise than leave Tamea. I do not think it would have occurred to me to leave her, no matter how bitter the price of staying, but—she willed it otherwise. We have parted without bitterness; I want you to know that so long as I live she shall remain a holy and tender memory.”
“You love her?” Maisie choked on the query.
“I love her as one loves a beautiful and lovable child; for the nobility of soul she possesses I feel a tremendous reverence.”
“I understand—being a woman. You have entertained for me something of that same affection, I think. Well, it is no fault of yours, is it, if you mistook infatuation for love?”
“Perhaps, at some future date, Maisie, it will not seem so—so terrible—to discuss so intimately my feelings toward you or toward Tamea. I only know that—at last—I am quite certain of myself. I tried my best to play the game with Tamea, but I wasn’t smart enough to conceal my true feelings from her, once those feelings became apparent to myself. She has the mind of a warlock. I—I—tried to love her, but—oh, my God, forgive me—we were as oil and water. We could not mix. I couldn’t stand this place. There is beauty here and peace; life tiptoes by so serenely that the sameness of the days was driving me mad. I had no social intercourse—no points of intellectual contact—and every relative of Tamea’s, no matter how distantly related—was dwelling under the mantle of our—of her—philanthropy. She loves them all and hasn’t the heart to drive them away. It is the custom and she is the last of her blood. She will not alter the custom. I hate the food, I hate the smell of decaying vegetation, I hate the rain, I hate the music, I hate the sunshine—and the loneliness would, eventually, have driven me insane. That’s what it did to Muggridge. I did some sketching the first few months. Since then I have had no heart for it. My mind is back in San Francisco; I can’t shake off the memories of the old life. Tamea spends her days adoring me—and I’m sick of it.I’m sick of it, I tell you. I’m fed up on love. I’m—I’m——”
Maisie managed to stand up. She placed her hands on Dan’s shoulders. “Buck up, old booby,” she murmured, with something of the adorable camaraderie that had charmed him so in happier days. “You are the victim of a terrible tragedy and so is poor Tamea. But she was wise enough to see that something radical had to be done—and she did it. You see, Dan’l, you weren’t truly in love with Tamea and I knew it all the time. You were in love with love, or perhaps your pity led you, like a will-o’-the-wisp. At any rate, it’s all over and nobody shall ever know and—and—I love you, Dan. I never thought I would be brave enough, or unmaidenly enough, to tell you this. But I know you love me, Dan. I knew it long before Tamea flashed across your life like a meteor and swept you off your silly old feet. I was weak, or I would have saved you—and when I found I could manage the strength, you were gone and it was too late. You’ve been such an old stupid. I should have made allowance for you, because I know you so well. . . . Well, I am here—and nothing that has happened matters any more. There, there you go with that sad old Abraham Lincoln look again—and now I’ll have to be friend Maisie again.”
She forced him down into a seat and he laid his arms on the cabin table and buried his face in them, in order that Maisie might not see the agony in his soul. “Nobody can ever understand except one who has had the experience,” he tried to explain. “Tamea is all white—and half native. She gazes upon life native-fashion—she’s a tragic contradiction. I could never quite know what was in her mind when she gazed upon me so sweetly and tragically and she could never quite know what was in mine.”
“Ah, but she did know, poor dear,” Maisie contradicted. “She has proved that she knew.”
“She is old—old, with the wisdom of the aged and the philosophy of patriarchs——”
“And the heart of a woman, Dan.”
“No, the heart of a child.”
Maisie smiled wistfully. Poor old booby Dan’l! He would never, never know that a woman is always a child! Because she had tact and more imagination than Dan Pritchard had ever given her credit for possessing, she left him and went up on deck.
At sunset the Pelorus passed out of the lagoon and as her bow lifted to the long, lazy rollers beyond the outer reef, Dan Pritchard, from her quarter-deck, through a mist gazed back on his Paradise lost. High up on the headland where Tamea’s home nestled in the grove, a white figure, silhouetted against the sunset glow, waved to him. And presently, as the Pelorus drew clear of the coast and the full force of the trades bellied her canvas, to send her ramping toward the horizon, that white figure slowly faded; the last Dan Pritchard saw of Riva was the steadily deepening glow of the hot heart of Hakataua, pulsating against the purple sky. And whatever thoughts occurred to him in that supreme moment were never given utterance, for Maisie came and stood beside him and said:
“Don’t be ashamed of it, Dan, dear. I understand. Truly, I do.”
“It will be terrible if you do not, Maisie, for I have lived to be too thoroughly understood—I who am not worth understanding.”
CHAPTER XXXI
When the last sunlight faded from the earth and the sea and the swift tropic twilight had swallowed the Pelorus, Tamea cast herself upon the earth and beat it with her beautiful hands, sobbing aloud, in the language of her mother’s people, the agony of her broken heart. Upon her the gods had rained the supreme blow and she could no longer stand erect and take it smiling. Upon the pungent, fetid earth she groveled in her despair until, utterly spent, she lay like a beautiful wilted lily, an occasional long, constricted gasp alone giving evidence that she still lived—and suffered.
After a long time a voice spoke in the semi-darkness.
“Tamea! Stoneface is speaking.”
The girl started up. “Mellengair! You have not gone?”
“Did I not tell you once, Tamea, that I loved you? That when you too were a Stoneface, with your flower face in the dust, I would love you more than ever, because your child’s heart would have been broken? And did I not tell you that I would lift you up and hold you to my heart and comfort you? Behold, Tamea, these hands outthrust to you.” And with the words he lifted her from the ground and held her against his great breast. “Poor child!” he kept murmuring, and stroked her hair.
“Oh, why did you stay?” she sobbed. “I do not love you, Mel. You are to me a true friend only.”
“I do not ask for love, Tamea,” he replied gently. “I seek service. I thought I would stay until your baby should be born—it seemed I ought to wait awhile and see that all goes well with you, child.”
“My race is dying. I too shall die, and that soon. Life has lost its taste, and when my baby has been born—my friend, when such as we have lost our taste for life, life departs. We do not live for the coward’s love of life, but for life’s joys.”
“But the baby,” he reminded her.
“I will give him to you, my friend. Would you not care to have my son and love him as your own?”
The poker face twitched, the unlovely eyes blinked a little. Mel bowed his head affirmatively.
“I have an illness—here,” Tamea murmured, and placed her hand on her side. “It is the lung disease that comes to so many of us Polynesians, and when I knew my length of life was measured by but a year or two, I did not hesitate. I had to make haste, since I did not desire Dan to grow like Muggridge in his mind. Muggridge was here too long, too long removed from his kind; in striving to draw my people upward, he drew himself downward. I would not have Dan remember me as a thin and haggard invalid, old before my time, no longer beautiful. Do you understand, Mellengair?”
“I understand.”
“I have money. You know how much my father left me. When I am gone you will take it and my child, both for your own. You are a poor man in your own land, wherefore you must have money to dwell in contentment. And you will never tell Dan Pritchard I have borne him a child, because that would render him unhappy. And you will raise my child as a full white, in white ways, and none shall know that my baby’s mother was a half-breed Polynesian. Understand, I am not ashamed of my blood, but”—through her tears she smiled the odd, wistful little smile—“it is inconvenient. There are some who might regard my blood as base and remind my child of it in years to come. In a three-quarter white none but the very wise, the very observant, can tell the blood of the other quarter.”
He held her close to him and stroked her wonderful black hair. “Poor child,” he kept saying, “poor child.” And finally: “Remember, I do not ask for love, but service.”
“I understand, dear, kind Stoneface. We are two with stone faces now, are we not, my friend?. . . Well, you shall take me to my house, and then you shall go to the house of Muggridge and dwell there until the period of service shall be over. Or,” she added, “until it shall begin!”
She lifted his big hand and kissed it. “My friend,” she whispered, “my good, kind friend!”
“Poor child,” said Mellenger. “Poor, poor child!”
THE END
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
When nested quoting was encountered, nested double quotes were changed to single quotes.
A cover was created for this ebook which is placed in the public domain.
Some pages of advertising by the publisher were removed from the end of the ebook.