CHAPTER XIIBREAKING THE MANAVaiti 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 theSybil. 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 theSybilall 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 theSybilwas 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. TheSybilwould 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 isthat? 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 theSybilfled 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 XIIITHE GAME PLAYED OUTEvery 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 theSybilto 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 theIkurangi.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 theIkurangi—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 theSybiland 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 theIkurangi, 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 theIkurangi, 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 XIVHOW THE WITCH-DOCTOR GOT HIS MONEY BACKWhen 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.
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 theSybil. 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 theSybilall 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 theSybilwas 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. TheSybilwould 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 isthat? 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 theSybilfled 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 theSybilto 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 theIkurangi.
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 theIkurangi—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 theSybiland 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 theIkurangi, 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 theIkurangi, 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.