* * * * *The rest of the wardroom did not envy Mr. Tempest his interview with the commander. It took place immediately after his return to the ship, and he came out from it with a countenance of entire inexpressiveness and extreme whiteness. One sentence—the last—was unavoidably heard by the lieutenant who followed immediately after Tempest, to deliver his report."Finally, Mr. Tempest—this Miss—a—Saxon—has risked her life to save your life and reputation. I think there is only one way in which you can repay her—by never seeing her again."Tempest's answer was inaudible. But—he never did.CHAPTER XVIIINVADERS IN TANNA"What a beautiful girl! Is she one of the heathens, I wonder?" said Lady Victoria Jenkins, leaning on the rail of her yacht.TheAlcyonefloated on a sea of living silver. The coral reefs forty feet before her keel showed like a pavement of pale turquoise in the searching splendour of the tropic moon. Close at hand loomed the dark woods and cliffs of Tanna, and above them, blotting out half the crystal broidery of the stars, rose the cone of the great volcano, crowned by a canopy of fire. So, in the days of Bougainville and of Cook, stood this southward sentinel of the wild New Hebrides, a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. So it stands yet, its deathless fires unquenched, its awful voice breaking the forest silences hour by hour—as the dead and gone discoverers of these distant lands saw and heard it long ago, and as those who follow us will find it in the days to come, when we and our thoughts and hopes, and adventures and loves are but a whisper in the homeless winds and a handful of dust blowing about on long-forgotten graves.There are few volcanoes in the southern hemisphere more famous, and none less frequently visited, than the fiery cone of Tanna. The island lies thousands of miles away from everywhere, and the inhabitants are known to be almost all heathen, cannibal, and hostile to whites, although the expression of their hostility has been kept considerably in check of late years. But Lady Victoria Jenkins, daughter of the late Earl of Wessex, and wife of Mr. Abel Jenkins ("Jenkins's Perfect Pills"), is well known as a romanticist and a lover of all things unusual and strange. Mr. Abel Jenkins's income is only exceeded by that of two other commoners in England, and Mr. Abel Jenkins's ugliness and ill-temper are not exceeded by the ugliness and ill-temper of any one known to polite society. If the reader will piece these detached facts together, and consider them, he will readily understand why Lady Victoria was enjoying a tour round the world in her celebrated steam-yacht, theAlcyone, why she had come to look at Tanna, and why, including a good deal of miscellaneous company, the travelling party somehow was not miscellaneous enough to include Lady Victoria's husband.The yacht had come in that afternoon after a somewhat stormy voyage from Sydney ("They call it the Pacific Ocean," said Lady Victoria plaintively, "instead of which, I have not really enjoyed a meal since we cleared the Heads"), and had instantly, by the mere fact of her dropping anchor in Sulphur Bay, denuded the whole seaboard of its population. This was because the conscience of Tanna is never quite clear, and the Tannese, struck by the conviction of sin, thought theAlcyonewas a man-of-war. Only two kinds of ships were known to the islands, outside trading schooners: British and French warships, and the lazy little monthly steamers from Sydney, which strolled round the group once a month, picking up copra, and conveying missionaries and traders about. TheAlcyonewas not a schooner; she was certainly not the well-known "B.P." steamer; therefore she must be some new variety of man-of-war. As it happened, there was a little matter of a murdered trader on the conscience of Tanna just at that time—he had been very annoying, but a British man-of-war is prejudiced about these affairs. So the Tannese of the coast, like the modest violet of the poem, concealed their drooping heads in the shady vales of the interior, and coyly hid from view. Like the modest violet, too—only with a difference—you might, if you wished, have located them by their—— But no; this is a polite history, and the Tannese are a very impolite people. Let us change carriages.Vaiti and her father, who had come up from Queensland with an empty ship and a full money-bag, and were just starting a fresh recruiting trip, regarded the appearance of the yacht with hearty disgust. What were the good old islands coming to if this sort of thing was to be permitted? Not a bushman would come near the beach as long as theAlcyonestayed, and the sprinkling of mission natives who were not afraid of the yacht were worse than useless, for they neither recruited nor encouraged their heathen friends to do so. Besides, the airs and graces of theAlcyonewere sickening. Late dinner with low dresses and jewels; piano tinkling all the evening; clothes that looked as if they had been run hot on to the wearers, as icing is run on to a cake; sparkling glass and brasswork all over the ship, and dainty brass signal cannons, pretty as toys, and a little funnel all cream-colour and blue, and great sails white as trade-wind clouds, and a hull that sat the water like a beautiful sea-bird settled down to rest—all these unnecessary and disgusting affectations made a smart schooner like theSybillook no better than a mud-scow in a marsh, for all that she was the beauty of the South Seas and the most famous ocean adventuress from 'Frisco to Hobart Town. Besides, Saxon would not stir out of his cabin while the yacht was there, having developed the lumbago that always attacked him whenever English society folk loomed on the horizon—Vaiti knew that lumbago!—and he might really have been of use about Sulphur Bay, where, for a wonder, no one had any old scores against him.It was all most abominable, thought the "Kapitani," and she cast an unfriendly glance on the luxuriousAlcyone, as her boat shot past the yacht in the moonlight, returning from a fruitless hunt along the coast for any stray bushman who might have heard the recruiting signal—a stick or two of dynamite set afloat on a board and exploded—and come down to the coast.Lady Victoria's comment on the "beautiful girl" did not soften her in the least, coupled as it was with the unspeakable assumption that she was "a heathen." Probably she was, in one sense, having long ago given up all but the merest rags of religion, but it was not the accusation of moral deficiencies that galled her: it was the idea that she, Vaiti, daughter of a great Polynesian princess and a white sea-captain, should have been "evened" to the black, monkey-like, naked hags of Tanna. The resentful spirit of the half-caste burned hot within her as she steered the boat through the moonlit water. She could see Lady Victoria and her friends, a brilliant flower-show of coloured dresses and sparkling gems, leaning over the rail, and watching her as impersonally as if she were a porpoise or a shark. She could catch their comments, loudly and carelessly spoken."I suppose she is one of them. But she looks quite nice. See her pretty dress. She is quite decently clothed, isn't she?""I wonder is she a cannibal? She does not look dangerous. I would like to ask her on board, and give her some tea and cake, and things of that kind, and talk to her. Just to try and reform her from their own horrible food, you know," said Lady Victoria angelically."That would be so dear of you," chimed in her special sycophant and foil, a plain and elderly young woman who knew when her bread was buttered on both sides, and why.But here the rowers—urged by a signal from Vaiti who thought she had heard about as much as she could stand without exploding—gave way vigorously, and pulled the boat out of earshot.That was not a happy evening for any one on board theSybil. Vaiti would not give out any grog for supper though it was a settled custom on the ship; would not have singing in the cabin, gloomed like a hurricane sky over the mate and boatswain's sociable game of cards until Gray, out of pure nervousness, dropped a greasy ace upon his knee, and was thereupon accused by Harris of cheating, and coarsely threatened by him with an operation usually confined to sufferers from appendicitis. At this Vaiti rose and walked out of the cabin with the air of a convent-bred princess who had never so much as heard a jibbing donkey "confounded"; and went to sit on deck near the wheel, where she stayed so long, smoking so many thin black cigars, that every one but the night watchman turned in and left her, and only the dead, dark hour of two o'clock, when the spongy heat of the island night stiffens for a while into fever-bringing chill, shook her out of her sulks and into her cabin.When Vaiti sulked it was usually observed that things happened before very long. But on this occasion the exception seemed to rule. The disgusting yacht stayed all the next day, and theSybillay quietly at anchor on the other side of the bay. Some of the yacht people went ashore in the afternoon, and roamed timorously about the beach, wondering at the hot springs and tasting everything in the way of fruit they happened to see. (It was nearly all inedible, but none of it, by a fortunate chance, happened to be poisonous.) Lady Victoria was disappointed with her day on the whole. The natives from the mission, who had officiously attended them all day long, were unromantically clothed, clean, and English-speaking. The wild savages did not appear; and there were one or two other mishaps of an entirely unromantic kind."How did you enjoy it, darling?" asked the plain young woman of Lady Victoria, when the daring pioneers returned.Mr. Jenkins's partner shook out her soiled tussore silk disgustedly."It was untidy and ugly and nasty," she declared; "and when I sat down under a great pineapple tree all covered with fruit, and said that I was realising one of my dreams, Jack de Coverley laughed at me, and said it was only a pandamn-us, or something else profane, and that pineapples grew on the ground. And when we started to walk among the palms, and I was saying that I had always dreamed of wandering softly by a coral strand and seeing the cocoanuts drop into my hands, something as big as a horse's head suddenly thundered down like a bombshell from a hundred feet high, and buried itself in the sand at my feet with such a fearful shock that I jumped a yard away and screamed like anything! So then the missionary came out, and said he wondered I wasn't killed; and if you'll believe me, it was nothing but a horrible nut! And the coral strand was pretty enough, all over little bits of branching coral stuff; but why doesn't anyone ever tell you that coral strands burn all the skin off your nose and blacken you into a nigger? We're going up the volcano tomorrow—the missionary says it's quite safe—and I'm sure I hope it's true, but one never knows. Darling, if I die, see that the new Lafayette photo is sent to the papers—not on any account the other; and I like Latin crosses on graves, I think; Carrara marble, very thick, and just one short text, something nice, like 'They were lovely and pleasant in their lives'—you know."... "'And in death they were not divided,'" finished the plain young woman with mechanical piety.... "Darling! dearest! what have I said? What is the matter?""Now youhavedone it!" roared Mr. de Coverley, who was rather a well-bred, but sometimes rather a vulgar young man. "Not divided! Oh, great Scott! Oh, my eye! Oh, I'll die of laughing! Hold me up! Never mind, Vic; I'll see you aren't divided, or cooked either—trust to me!"* * * * *Vaiti was still in a speechless state of sulks when she started off the next morning into the interior, to recruit on her own account. It was not a very safe thing to do, but the bushmen would not come down to the coast, and theSybilcould not hang out indefinitely, since the doubtful character of her methods had given the French and English Commissioners of the islands a nasty habit of asking questions about her. Saxon, who had relinquished his lumbago to go off into the hills at a safe distance from the yacht, wanted to make his daughter accompany him; but Vaiti simply laughed at him, and departed with a guide seduced from the mission towards a village lying a mile or two above the volcano. She preferred the glory of working on her own account, and besides, it doubled the chances of recruits.She knew the Tannese nature well, so she dressed herself for her part in a robe of scarlet sateen, with liberal necklaces of different coloured trade beads, and stuck a couple of tomahawks in her sash, besides an ornamented sheath-knife. Across her splendid young bosom she slung an incongruous-looking bandolier of cartridges, designed apparently for the slaughter of elephants; and a smart magazine rifle, carried over her shoulder, completed the outfit. All these valuables, though designed to assist her plans by suggesting the enormous store of desirable goods possessed by the recruiters, were almost as likely to assist her to a sudden and unprovided end, by reason of the natives' covetousness. She took her chance of this, however; Vaiti was used to taking chances. It is easier than most people suppose to take the risk of being killed every day of your life. In the strange places of the earth, where such things are a common happening, men do not look upon the inevitable end after the pursy, secretive, never-mention-it fashion of Peckham and Brixton. Death is just death in the earth's wild places—yours to-day, mine to-morrow—a thing to walk with shoulder to shoulder, to meet face to face at noonday; in any case, to make no bones of it until it makes bones of you; and after that circumstances will keep you from complaining if you feel like it.It was a long, hot walk up to the village. A "walk" is mostly a scramble about the uncleared New Hebrides, where roads are mere foot-wide cracks and canyons in the dense forest growth, and level ground apparently does not exist. Besides, a bandolier of cartridges and an assortment of small arms are rather heavy jewellery for such a climate. Vaiti, however, possessed the enviable gift of never looking, or apparently feeling, hot or tired; and she swung along at an unvarying pace that caused the unlawfully enticed mission native, who had waxed fat and lazy, to regret his enticement and wish himself back in the mission school writing copies, instead of slaving up and down precipitous gullies in the rear of a woman-devil who did not know what it was to want a rest.At long last, however, the reedwork fence of the village came in sight, and they entered the open square, shaded by an immense banyan tree and surrounded by low, ugly huts, all roof and no wall, like all the mountain villages of Tanna. There were sentries perched up in the trees outside the gate, and others squatted on the ground at every entrance, their rifles ready in the crook of the elbow. Within, the dusty tan-coloured square, quivering under the pitiless fire of the white-hot sky, was all alive with moving figures—ugly women in brief grass skirts humped out into swaying bustles; young boys with murderous little faces, and full-sized rifles; wild-looking men, with thick hair twined into myriads of tiny strings ending in a great bush on the shoulders, stripes of scarlet paint on their faces, and no clothing save their native impudence and a cartridge belt—all seething about in a very bee-hive of excitement and alarm. As for the rifle-barrels, they were bobbing about like piano-jumpers all over the square, and every weapon was cocked and loaded.Vaiti saw at a glance that they were expecting an attack, and picking out a native who could speak English, asked what the trouble was. The man replied that they feared the little man-of-war down below, but that they were entirely innocent. Questioned further, they said naïvely that they had never eaten a white man, and that none of them were low cannibals in any case. Vaiti, who had not heard of this little affair before, saw her chance."No good you speak alonga that fellow way," she said, using thebêche-de-mertalk that some of the Tannese understood; for Vaiti, like many half-castes, could handle almost any dialect or corruption of a dialect, though she could not speak decent English or French. "I savvy plenty, you eatum one fellow white man. By'n by, big fellow man-of-war come, shoot you all-a-same one pig, all-a-same one blind box [flying fox], burn altogether house belong you. Very good you come alonga Saxon ship, go Queensland; then you all right.""No eatum," persisted the man (who was the professional talking-man or orator of the village), with a coy smile.Vaiti's nose was keen, and she had already guessed something by its aid. She marched straight across the square into a little yam-house, and pointed to a small parcel done up in green banana-leaf and tied with cocoanut sinnet. Five toes and an instep protruded from one end. The game had been well hung, as the Tannaman likes it to be, and there was no mistaking the fact of its presence in any sense.The talking-man giggled like a school-girl caught consuming surreptitious chocolates."Eatum jus' little-fellow bit," he allowed, with a bad-child chuckle. The other men took up the laugh, and the village resounded with a roar like the bellowing of a herd of bulls.Vaiti, seeing her advantage, stepped out into the square and began to talk, marching to and fro in Tannese fashion as she spoke. The sun cast dancing spangles on her many-coloured beads as she moved, and threw back darts of fire from her heavy bandolier. One arm emphasised her remarks with sweeping gesture; in the other the tall rifle pounded the earth with its stock, marking the points of her discourse. The fat, stolid mission native watched her with staring eyes and open mouth, and the chiefs gloomed at her under sullen savage brows, evidently impressed, but restive.The sum of her discourse was that they and their women would do well to come down with her to the schooner, recruit at once, and fly to a land of safety where men-of-war never came, where Tanna people reclined all day under the shade of banyan and banana, picked a little cane for their employers occasionally, lived upon tinned meat and sugared tea, and eventually returned loaded with riches in the shape of rifles, cartridges, cotton, and knives. There was a good deal more of the same highly-coloured stuff. This was old business to the people of theSybil.The talking-man, also strutting backwards and forwards, Tanna fashion, in a kind of continual country dance with the glittering vision from the ship, answered now and then. It was very well to talk about recruiting, and perhaps some of them might go if they got lots of tinned salmon and "bisketti" to eat before they went on board, and promise of rifles to be paid the tribe when the bargain was complete. But they did not believe that the new ship was not a little man-of war, and until she was gone they would not go down to the coast—no, not even to bathe, although they had all decided to have a bath soon, for the weather was hot and their skins were like the bark of trees, and it was now about ten moons since they had had their last bath.At this Vaiti's eyes lit up, for she suddenly saw a plan, a plan which might give her a score of recruits, drive the objectionable yacht out of Sulphur Bay, and pay off every rankling insult inflicted by theAlcyoneand her people. But the savages were watching her, so she veiled her eyes with her long lashes, and replied carelessly:"All that very good. To-morrow, small-fellow man-of-war he go 'way; then you coming longa schooner. To-day, what name [why?] you no go wash big water 'long place one-fellow-fire stop? Very good place that. Suppose you going, I come up from schooner, bring plenty-plenty tucker. Plenty-plenty bulimacow [beef], bisketti, tucker belong white man, cost ten rifle. All the Tannaman he eat; by'n-by he stop lie down, he break, so much he eat."This tempting picture had its effect, backed up by a few presents of beads and cartridges. The Tannamen agreed that the plain below the burning mountain, where a wide, stagnant lake spread out its dull expanse, would do for a bathing place, short of the impossible shore, and they chuckled with joyous anticipation of the feast. They also agreed, rather doubtfully, to embark as soon as the "man-of-war" was gone; and it seemed evident that a fair number would at least come down and negotiate on board the schooner after which—well, theSybil'ssmart heels would do the rest.CHAPTER XVIIIA CANNIBAL PARTYVaiti went off to get ready the feast, telling the natives that they might follow her before long, as everything would be ready soon; and they might trust her, the great Kapitani, that it would be a feast such as no Tannaman, not even of those who had served in Queensland, had ever witnessed in his wildest dreams.The mission native being a rather weak-kneed convert, and anxious to enjoy a good heathen gossip with his old companions, wanted very much to stay on in the village. But that was just what Vaiti did not want, so she drove him out in front of her like a fat and nervous sheep, hastening his movements all the way down with occasional reminders from the butt of her rifle. He had given her certain information about a picnic at the foot of the volcano, arranged by the people of the yacht for that afternoon, and she did not want him to share his news with the men of the village and cause them, perhaps, to put two and two together where he himself had failed to do so. She despatched him therefore to his own town on the coast, and saw that he went, before herself turning off in the direction of the track that led to the volcano.Near to the lake there lies a curious little valley with a soft, clean flooring of black volcanic sand and sheltering walls of green pandanus. Here, shaded from the burning heat, yet close to the volcano plain, was the only possible place for the picnickers to enjoy their meal. Beyond lay only a lurid plateau of red and yellow lava beds, curdled and coiled as they had flowed down from the crater lip long ago; a desert of black ash and sand, and a dark, wicked, smoking, rumbling cone in the centre of all. Not a native would have climbed the cone for all the goods in theSybil'shold; it was the mouth of hell, they said, and full of devils of every kind. But they were not afraid of the valley below, within safe limits, and even if they had been, the feast and the bathe after it were attractive enough to conquer a little nervousness.As Vaiti had anticipated, there were several picnic baskets stowed under a tree in the valley, and a big wine hamper as well. Four mission natives, who had acted as guides and carried up the provisions, were lying on their stomachs in the shade, smoking and talking.It was essential to get them out of the way, and time was short. Vaiti did not waste any unnecessary words. She simply pointed her rifle at the men and told them to clear. They cleared, howling, and she was left alone.With quick, neat hands she unpacked the hampers, spread the cloth, and laid out the food. It was a goodly display—hams and tongues and fowls, cold meats, pies, cakes, tarts, fruits, and tinned dainties of every kind. There was plenty of champagne, also a supply of whisky and soda. She set all the bottles in a row, and looked with satisfaction upon the glittering array. Then she went up to the edge of the plain and looked at the crater. No one was yet in sight. The exploring party at that moment were on the other side of the cone, standing on the black lip of an appalling gulf eight hundred feet deep and half a mile across; looking down, awe-struck and amazed, upon colossal fire fountains that uplifted their gory spray three hundred feet in the air, and listening to the heart-shaking thunders of the volcano's awful voice, as from time to time that terrifying note of illimitable force and fury made the whole plain tremble and echoed far out to sea.... It was indeed no wonder that the ignorant Tannamen feared to ascend the cone.Vaiti sat down at the edge of the plain, and watched till she saw a number of many-coloured dots creeping down the black pyramid in its centre. Then she suddenly lay down upon the ashy ground, and writhed with silent laughter. People were in the habit of saying that Vaiti had no more sense of humour than the jibboom of her father's ship. They might have modified that judgment, could they have seen her now.* * * * *Lady Victoria Jenkins had enjoyed her morning very much indeed. She had dressed for the ascent in a mountaineering costume that combined equal suggestions of "Carmen" and the Alpine Club, and gave great opportunities to her ankles. She had been helped up the cone by four devoted admirers, all at once, and had come down it at a wild running slide, ably braked by two strong hands of two or three others who wanted to have their turn. The other women had trodden on their skirts, and torn them, burned and cut their foolish boots, and also got unbecomingly hot and out of breath, because there was not nearly one man apiece to help them up, after Lady Victoria had annexed all the best. It must be allowed that the men were the weak point of theAlcyone'stravelling party. Mr. de Coverley and his set were "dear boys" and charming companions, no doubt, but they were not quite as manly as some of the ladies. Lady Vic and her companions did not attract the best sort of men, as a rule.They were all very hungry when they reached the plain, and thirsty with a thirst unknown outside the tropics. All the way across the baking black sand and the tinkling lava beds, "one fair vision ever fled" before the eyes of the party—vision of gold-necked champagne bottles lying coolly embedded in icebaskets; of topaz-coloured jellies, trembling on silver dishes; of flaky, savoury pies, and delicate cold meats, and crisp green salads concocted as only the hand of theAlcyone'schefcould concoct them.It seemed as if that plain would never end, but it did end at last, and a green fringe of pandanus announced the beginning of the bush. The elderly young lady and most of the others were making excellent time ahead, and they reached the verge of the plain some little while before Lady Victoria and Mr. de Coverley came to it. The latter pair, as it happened, were really not thinking very much about their lunch, because a still more interesting matter absorbed their attention."Not understood!" Mr. de Coverley was saying bitterly. "And so we die and go down to the grave—not understood! The pathos of it!""We are never understood," sighed Lady Victoria, patting the side waves of her "transformation" to see that it was on straight. "We women, especially. And those who should understand us best of all are so often——""Exactly—so they are. But, Lady Victoria—Victoria!—there are some who are different; there are men, rare souls, who——""What in Heaven's name is the matter?" interrupted the misunderstood one, stopping dead in her tracks (literally, for the sand was deep) and staring at the edge of the bush.From the valley below the plain had just risen a long, loud shriek, followed by another and another, and then by a burst of laughter that sounded scarcely human. The other members of the party had disappeared, but it was clear that something had happened."Good God, the savages!" exclaimed Lady Victoria; and she began to run. Let it be stated, for the credit of her race and name, that she ran towards the sound. As for Mr. de Coverley....But this story is not about Mr. de Coverley. If it were, it would be interesting to tell why the Sydney steamer that called at Sulphur Bay two days later found an unexpected passenger waiting at the trader's, and why Lady Victoria and Mr. Abel Jenkins, of Jenkins's Perfect Pills, became eventually reconciled and lived the life of a model couple. As things are, it must be enough to state that Mr. Jack de Coverley turned and ran away at the sound of the shouts—ran right across the plain into the bush at the other side—ran as far as he could get, and did not come back at all—and thereby ran once and for ever out of the life of the lady whom he "understood."Lady Victoria, speeding in the opposite direction, reached the edge of the little valley in a very few minutes, and, looking over, beheld what was certainly the strangest sight she had encountered in all her varied life.Round about the elaborately-laid luncheon were squatting a dozen or so of naked brown savages, painted, feathered, and slashed with ornamental scars. A few women, clad only in a six-inch fringe of grass, stood behind them, eyeing the eatables eagerly, but not daring to touch them while their masters fed. The talking-man, a big, hulking savage with a huge bush of hair, and a match-box stuck in each ear-lobe, had buried his face in the savoury interior of a boned turkey, and was gnawing out the stuffing. The principal chief, one hand in a dish of Spanish cream and the other in a chicken curry, was casting double supplies into his mouth with the regularity of a patent feed-machine. A fat young fighting man, with nose and forehead painted scarlet, and white ashes in his hair, had tucked a ham under one arm, and was sitting on a peach pie, with intent to secure as many good things as possible, while he hastily worried large mouthfuls off the forequarter of lamb he was holding in both hands. Another man was drinking mint sauce out of the silver sauceboat with horrible grimaces; his neighbour, having captured a handful of maraschino jelly, fast melting in the sun, was industriously rubbing it on his hair; and a grizzly old fellow, with a monkey-like face, was half-choking himself over a soufflé, which he was trying to swallow case and all. The necks of the champagne bottles were all knocked off, and from engraved wine-cases, empty entrée-dishes, and dredged-out tins the savages were drinking Lady Victoria's excellent wines with every appearance of satisfaction. Between mouthfuls they stopped to look at the party from the yacht, and to roar with laughter at their evident fright. Too terrified even to run away, the voyagers, in their dainty frocks and smart white suits, stood huddling together for protection, the women crying, the men looking rather white and foolish, for every Tannaman had a loaded rifle slung to his side, and there was not so much as a saloon pistol among the whites. A few yards off Vaiti stood, regarding the whole scene with an expressionless countenance that covered a good deal of quiet enjoyment. She knew, if the visitors did not, that the cannibal bushmen were really not at all a bad lot of fellows when you knew them, and that the yacht party, against whom they had no grudge, were perfectly safe. In fact, the Tannamen merely thought these oddly-behaved whites were a new party of missionaries, and were quite ready to be civil to them, since they thought all the mission people harmless, if eccentric.But the true inwardness of the situation not being apparent, theAlcyone'sguests were very frightened indeed."P-perhaps if we go away very quietly, they won't f-follow us," said a wealthy young stockbroker, who had retained a little presence of mind, though his teeth were chattering in his head."Oh, let us! Victoria, save me! Oh, what shall we do?" wailed the elderly young lady, rushing up the bank and flinging her arms round the mistress of the violated feast. Lady Victoria, though white as her own Belfast linen collar, kept her head fairly well. She saw that Vaiti was not one of the invaders, and called to her. "Do you speak English? What are we to do? Will they kill us?" she asked.Vaiti walked over to her with the bearing of a stage duchess, and favoured her with a fashionable high handshake that was the one thing wanting to complete the insanity of the whole impossible scene. A new idea had suddenly struck her—a fresh spark of mischief was lit. With an immovable countenance she replied:"No kill you, I think. Suppose you want go 'way all right by'n-by, very good I think you sit down, eatum dinner alonga those fellow—then they think you all right, let you go home, no kill.""Oh, Victoria, anything to please them!" sobbed the elderly young lady."Yes—a—I think we'd better do anything we can to get into their good graces, since we're not armed," submitted the stockbroker.Vaiti exchanged a few words with the Tannese. She explained that these white people had come a long way, and were very hungry. The Melanesian has not many virtues, but hospitality is certainly one of them; and a man who may be planning to dine off you himself tomorrow will certainly not refuse you half of his own leaf of yams to-day. The Tannese were delighted at the chance of sharing their good fortune with the white chiefs, even in spite of the latter's extremely silly manners, and they beckoned to them at once to come and sit down.Thereafter took place a scene incapable of description by mortal pen. The chief took his head out of the turkey, chewed off a leg, and grinningly handed it to Lady Victoria. The young warrior got off the pie, disembowelled it with one scoop of the hand that had not known water "for ten moons," and laid its interior in the elderly young lady's lap. Another knowingly poured out a champagne glass of Worcester sauce and handed it to the stockbroker, while the much-bitten lump of mutton that was at that moment circling from mouth to mouth, native-fashion, was hospitably passed on to all the whites. Driven by fear, they tried to swallow something; choked in the effort, made futile remarks to each other, laughed nervous laughs, and all the time watched with eyes of utmost apprehension the dusky hosts who were thus entertaining them with their own audaciously ravished goods. And above the crazy party the burning Tanna sun beat down, and the great volcano-cone far across the plain smoked and thundered.It had been Vaiti's design to dismiss them in peace by and by, assured that their compliance had saved their lives, and anxious to make steam out of Sulphur Bay as soon as was reasonably possible. Fate, however, reserved a more dramatic ending to the entertainment, And it was "all along of" that talking-man.The cannibal native is invariably shy of displaying his tastes before whites, since people who do not share the "point of view" are so frequently prejudiced. Therefore the talking-man did not open a certain small green parcel tied up with sinnet string, which he had brought down with him from the mountain village. A feast in the hand is worth two in the pandanus-bush, thought the talking-man, so he brought hisbonne bouchewith him for dessert and said nothing about it. And thereby came the end.For Lady Victoria, unable to swallow the clawed and chewed morsels pressed upon her by dirt-encrusted hands, began to hunt despairingly about for something that she could really eat, so that she should not offend the dangerous monsters who surrounded her."Isn't there anything clean to be had?" she asked the stockbroker anxiously. "I can't eat—and yet we must! What are we to do?"The stockbroker, who had once been to Honolulu, and thought he knew something about native foods, spied the packet of green banana-leaf, and reached out for it."This'll be some of their own boiled yam," he said. "Natives always do it up like this. You can eat it all right if you scrape it with a knife. Allow me."Before the talking-man could stretch out his filthy claw to stop him, the Englishman had cut the sinnet string, the parcel had burst open, and right into the middle of a half-demolished chicken pie fell a large white foot, cut off at the ankle, nicely browned across the instep and all crackled on the toes.There was a wild shriek from the women, a splutter of horrified exclamations from the men, a boiling up of white petticoats like to the breaking of a wave on a pebbly shore, and then nothing but a diminishing string of rapidly trotting figures, each woman hand in hand with a man who was dragging her along far away, farther and farther, down the long, black, sandy path into the bush. Then ... they were gone.Vaiti stood on the bank to look after them, and laughed quietly."Now I think we keep Sulphur Bay all our own self," she said.As for the Tannamen, they rolled on the ground with laughter, and then picked the dainty morsel out of the chicken pie and ate it up.CHAPTER XIXTHE RIVAL PRINCESSESIt was full mid-day when the schoonerSybildropped anchor off Liali Island. The hot season was at its height. The long, white coral strand blazed in the sun, the moated lagoon was raw emerald, the waveless outer sea blue fire. Beyond the beach stretched a green, grassy lawn, dotted with quaintly-shaped Norfolk pines, tall palms, and feather-tressed ironwood trees; and against its enamelled background rose a palace like a picture in a fairy-tale—white, long-windowed, lofty-towered, and crowned with a crimson flag set below a gilded vane.Vaiti, standing on the break of the poop, with the inevitable cigar between her fingers, looked critically at the island, and liked it well. A mere little matter of kidnapping somebody's indentured labourers—the sort of thing that any gentleman with an extensive island practice might easily find himself obliged to do—had brought about her father's expulsion from the New Hebrides labour trade, and obliged him to seek new fields for the activities of the notorious and naughtySybil. Saxon himself was virtuously indignant, Vaiti not particularly sorry. She was getting tired of the gloomy feverish New Hebrides and their ugly savages. The Eastern Pacific was her heart's home after all, semi-Polynesian as she was; and even the wild excitement of the cruel western isles could not hold her away very long. So when Saxon was wavering between the advantages of strictly illegal gun-running in the Solomons and honest trading about the Liali group (which had just wrecked its native schooner, and was open to employ a successor), Vaiti's influence went for once on the side of peace and virtue, and the course was set for Liali. The group was new to both father and daughter, but was none the less attractive on that account, since all over the wide island world theSybiland her owners were best loved and most warmly welcomed where they were least known.The Liali group, as many people in the Southern hemisphere agree, offers the nearest possible approach to comic opera known off the actual stage. Liali itself, the chief island, is as pretty as a toy-box, and quite extraordinarily theatrical in appearance. Its handsome, merry, brown people wear the most picturesque costume in the Pacific—a knee-length kilt of fine cashmere, girded by a deep sash of pure silk, and worn with a silken or cashmere shirt or a graceful sleeveless tunic, according to sex—all in the most vivid of sea- and flower-colour. Liali is civilised after a fashion. It goes barefoot and barelegged, sits on mats, lives in reed-woven houses devoid of furniture, worships a sacred lizard on the sly, and sometimes breaks out openly into club-fights and devil-dances. But it has a king, and a palace and a Parliament, a brass band, and quite a number of very active Nonconformist churches, run by white missionaries, who find that "labouring" among the well-off and amiable Lialians is a task in which the meritorious martyrdom of missionary life can be combined with quite a number of pleasant alleviations.Nothing in Liali is entirely what it seems. The palace, when one comes close to it, is perceived to be built of painted wood, like a "practicable" scene in a theatre. The Parliament never passes any laws, because the Lords, who are chiefs, always on principle throw out every bill introduced by the vulgar Commons, just to "teach" them. The Prime Minister is oftener in prison forlése majestèthan out of it, and several Chancellors of the Exchequer have been transported to the Colonies for theft. But there is a real throne in the palace, all crimson velvet and gilt wood, and a wonderful gold crown (the verdigris is cleaned off it with a wad of cocoanut husks by the Chief Equerry every Saturday afternoon), and when the King goes out in state he wears a purple velvet train, held up by two pages in tights and plumes, and a marvellous ermined robe, all exactly like the Savoy Theatre in the consulship of Gilbert and Sullivan. On occasions not of state he sits cross-legged upon the palace parquet, clad in a shirt and a kilt, and playsécartéwith his native guards.There are a few colonial traders in Liali, and a dozen or so of the English "legion that never was listed"—just such as one finds in all the odd corners of the Pacific—talkative, plausible, thin and nervous, given to avoid home topics and discourse with awful fluency upon small local politics; hospitable, restless and lazy, and usually married more or less to some dark beauty of the islands, who has grown as fat as a feather bed and spends a fortune on store muslins.These, as a matter of course, took possession of theSybil'speople at once, hardly waiting for the schooner to cast anchor before they were alongside with their boats. Saxon and Vaiti were swept ashore immediately, and begged to make their home in half-a-dozen different houses. With a fine sense of the fitting, Saxon selected Bob Peter's public-house, misnamed hotel, and immediately held alevéein the bar, wearing his smartest Auckland suit (not paid for, and not likely to be) and looking, with his heavy, old-fashioned cavalry moustache, blonde-grey hair, and well set-up though rather bloated figure, quite like a somewhat seedy Milor on his travels. (And, as a matter of fact.... But that was Saxon's long-buried secret, and must not be told.)Vaiti, splendidly attired in a flowing island robe of yellow silk, with a gold chain twisted through her misty black hair, sat in the midst of a court of her own, and drank expensive pink lemonade to her soul's content. She was revelling in the sights, the sounds, the smells of the dear eastern islands once more. She had a necklace of perfumed red berries round her neck, and white "tieré" flowers behind each ear, and the well-remembered scent almost intoxicated her. Outside she could hear the boom of a dancing-chant, broken by interludes of clapping; and from the very next house, a big native reed-built structure, came now and then in the quieter moments the sonorous voice of a Lialian man calling out the names at a kava-drinking.The double soul that is the curse of the half-caste surged within the girl.... This, this, this, and all it meant—how she loved it! And yet, the wild, fierce life of the western islands; the chance, the risk, the strong wine of danger, adventure, power! The two natures of the soldier of fortune and the sensuous island princess who had given her birth, fought together in her heart.... If one could eat one's cake and have it! If one could sleep all day, crowned with flowers, under the singing casuarina trees, and yet be the daring sea-queen, the "Kapitani" of theSybil, if only...Vaiti shook herself impatiently in her hammock chair, and asked for ginger beer with sugar in it. She hated thinking, and felt as if she were going mad when the half-white brain in her pretty dusky head took a strange fit of sober industry. Swift, instinctive plotting and planning were one thing, deliberate reflection quite another.... Ugh! she must be sick.... And for once the temperate Vaiti said yes to the inevitable offer of "a stick in it," as her ginger beer was handed to her by an eager admirer.The "sickness" passed away, and she began to listen and watch in her old fashion, smiling all the time to the compliments and sweet sayings that were being poured into her ears. A trader was telling her father all about the latest dynastic crisis in the monarchy, and Saxon was not even pretending to listen. The affairs of "niggers" never interested him, unless there was a question of immediate profit ahead."You see," said the trader, "King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., which is his full title, wants for to get married. He's thirty, and there's no heir. And there being just the two Lialian princesses that wasn't his sisters—Mahina and Litia—what does he do but go and propose to both of them, and, of course, gets snapped up like winkin' by the two. It's no small potatoes being Queen of Liali, mind you. Te Paea gets lots of money out of the fruit, and copra taxes, and then the Crown lands is half the island, there's presents besides. And he's a real king if he is coffee-coloured—why, the kings of Liali goes back hundreds of years before Captain Cook, and he was in Henry Eighth's time, wasn't he? And if you was to see the pink satin chairs in the throne-room, and the phonographs, and musical-boxes, and albums, and lookin'-glasses, and the lovely wax flowers in cases, and real hand-painted oil pictures—ah! it's a good job, is Te Paea's, and either Mahina or Litia's going to be a very lucky girl. What he'd like, you see, is to marry both of them, same as his old grandfather—only he married nine, he did. But the King's a Methody, good as they make them—when he don't forget, or want a spree—and of course the missionaries won't hear of his havin' two queens. And, says he, Mahina's real fat; there's nothing mean about Mahina; she fills the eye, says he, and that's what a Lialian likes, for they don't hold with any sort of stinginess, says he. But Litia, he says, has eyes like the buttons on his Auckland boots, they're so round and black and bright, says he, and she walks for all the world like a lovely young mutton-bird, says he. And what's a king to do, with both the girls' relations fighting and squabbling over him like land-crabs fighting over a bit of fish, and he himself liking them both, and the girls clean mad for him—because, you see, Te Paea he's a handsome fellow, and when he's got his military uniform on, and all his orders and medals what he drew out himself on paper, and got made in Sydney, he's a fancy man, he is. The wedding's to be in three weeks, and the invites is being printed down in Auckland all in silver, with a blank to write the bride's name in—and the House of Lords has bought the bride's dress for her, which is what the Kings says it's their right to do, according to custom,—and no one knows which he's going to marry, and no more does he. And it's my belief that there'll be war over it, before all's said and done, for Mahina's people say they'll burn down every village belonging to Litia's tribe, and Litia's folks say they'll kill Mahina's people's cattle and cut up their gardens. That's the way things are, and you may take my word it's a pretty kettle of fish.""What are you giving for copra at present?" asked Saxon, yawning unrestrainedly. And the conversation turned at once to the inevitable trading "shop."A few days afterwards theSybilspread her wings and started for Waiwai, the outermost of the Liali islands. She was to make the whole round of the group afterwards, and might not be back for some weeks, so that it seemed likely that Saxon would miss the festivities of the King's wedding. This Vaiti declared was no reason why she should miss them, and she insisted on being left behind. Saxon was not too well pleased, for if he had a remnant of conscience left, it was connected with the care of his daughter, and he did not quite care about leaving her alone in a group to which they were both strangers. But Vaiti promised to behave like a saint, and furthermore said that she would stay with one of the married traders, and not in the native villages. She also added that she meant to stay anyhow, and that it was no use making a fuss.So theSybilsailed away out of Liali harbour, and became a little pearl-coloured pinhead on the blue horizon, and then melted quite away. And Vaiti went to the tin-roofed shanty belonging to Neumann, the fat German trader, who had married a Lialian wife, and was received with the unquestioning hospitality of the islands.Nobody, among either whites or natives, could talk of anything but the King's matrimonial affairs. Mahina and Litia both appeared in Neumann's parlour more than once, sat on the floor, drank black tea with a handful of sugar in it, and related their several woes at length. They did not come together, except once, when Litia, walking in unexpectedly, found Mahina there, crying into her teacup, and telling Neumann's wife that the King had given Litia a beautiful chemise, all trimmed with lace, only the day before, and that in consequence she considered him a monster and a perjured villain, although she knew perfectly well that he meant nothing whatever by it. What was a chemise? He had sent her two pounds of stick tobacco the Sunday before last. She would show Litia yet that the King was her King, and nobody else's.Litia, entering at this point, wasted no words, but simply buried her hands in Mahina's curly black masses of hair, and dragged her, shrieking, across the floor. Neumann interfered, and parted them; but Mahina flew at Litia immediately after, ripped open her dress with one clutch, and disclosed the royal gift chastely embracing Litia's lovely form. With a howl of anger, the rival seized the chemise in both hands; there was a scuffle, a scream, a rending noise, and Litia stood up in the middle of the room, a gold-bronze statue, shedding tears of rage, while Mahina, running out on to the verandah, tore the offending garment into strips and rags, and cast them upon the road. Litia, rushing out after her, stood upon the steps clad with wrath as with a garment (and with extremely little else), explaining her wrongs to an interested and sympathetic native crowd, until the Methodist missionary happened to come by, and told her that unless she went in and dressed herself at once, she might safely count upon eventually finding herself in a place where dress would be very much at a discount ... or words to that effect. So Litia went in, and Mahina went away, escorted by a strong cousinly "tail"; and afterwards Neumann, enveloped in oracular clouds of smoke, remarked sleepily that the princesses were the greatest nuisance on the island, and that he believed the King would run away from the whole set if he could, for he was "by-nearly mad-driven on account of their so-tiresome ways, and feared-himself to choose, because the one that he not married had would cause to make war by her people against the one he married should."During the whole of the fight, Vaiti remained perfectly unmoved on a cane lounge in the corner of the room, uninterruptedly puffing rings of blue smoke at the ceiling. Not a detail had escaped her, all the same, nor did she miss a word of Neumann's remarks. And they made her think.In the afternoon, the dull thud of galloping hoofs along the grass street made Mrs. Neumann run to the door. She called loudly to Vaiti to come."It is the King," she said.A small victoria, drawn by two spirited blacks, was tearing up the street. Seated alone in it was an extraordinary and notable figure—Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., King of Liali. He was six feet four inches in height, and over eighteen stone in weight. He wore a scarlet cloth uniform coat, blazing with gold, and his heavy, handsome brown face, with its weak, small mouth, and black eyes almost too large and soft for a man, was shaded by a white sun helmet with a wide gold band.He drove furiously, looking neither to right nor to left, and, passing the house like a gorgeous whirlwind, was instantly lost in the casuarina forest beyond."That is the King, then?" said Vaiti. The Lialian language came almost as easily to her as her own, being only one of the dialects of the great Maori tongue that covers a good two-thirds of the island world."Yes," said Neumann's wife, "that is the King. And very little any of us have seen of him lately. He is afraid of the trouble he has got himself into; he shuts himself up all the time, and sees no one but his guards, and just sends a present now and then, first to one girl then to the other. And when he drives to take the air, he flies along like that, so that no one can stop and speak to him. He is terribly shy of strangers; I think it was because theSipilawas here that he did not come out at all last week.""Is it such a very good thing for the princess he will marry?" asked Vaiti, playing with a yellow alamanda flower."Very, very good indeed," replied the Lialian impressively. "She will have a gold crown to wear on her head, and sit on a red velvet and gold throne beside the King, and have the most beautiful satin dresses from Sydney, and all her chemises will have lace and ribbons on them. And as soon as the King buys another schooner for himself and Liali, she will travel in it with him whenever she likes, for sometimes he will go to Samoa, to stay with King Malietoa, or he will sail a whole week to Mbau in Fiji, and then Princess Thakombau and the Prince of Kandavu make feasts and dances for him, and the Kovana [governor] gives a real 'papalangi' dinner for him, with champagne and a band. And as for what she will have to eat at home, it is past telling, for in the palace there is no count whatever made of tinned salmon and biscuit, and she may have a sackful of sugar at every meal, and a whole roast pig every day. She may eat till she falls asleep, and then wake up to eat. Ah, it is a good thing for the princess who marries the King, whichever she may be!""I think you will be thirsty if you talk so much," said Vaiti rather rudely. "I am thirsty myself with only listening to you. Go and make some kava for me."Mrs. Neumann, who had been rather proud to have Vaiti staying with her—since her rank as a princess of Atiu counted for a good deal among the island races—began to dislike her visitor soon after this, and to wish her well away. Vaiti was not an angel in the house at the best of times, and she did not trouble to make herself pleasant just then. Indeed, one would almost have thought she was trying to pick a quarrel. And, as that sort of effort rarely goes unrewarded, it is not astonishing to learn that the quarrel came before long—a bitter, loud-tongued dispute that left Mrs. Neumann sobbing in a fat, frightened heap on the floor, and Vaiti, silent but stormy, packing up her camphorwood box to depart.Neumann, being afraid of Saxon's possible anger, tried to keep her, but she laughed in his face, and went on packing. There was an empty native house—little more than a palm-leaf hut, once tenanted by a Chinese trader—standing by the road about halfway through the great casuarina forest; a lonely, ramshackle place, used and wanted by nobody. There and there only Vaiti would go, taking mats and cooking pots with her, to stay until her father came back. When some of the islanders betrayed meddlesome curiosity as to her motives, and the missionaries declared they scented scandal, Vaiti silenced and terrified the one, and convinced the others that she was hopelessly beyond the pale, by giving out that she was something of a witch, and meant to go into the forest to gather and prepare certain powerful charms. These, she said, would injure only her enemies, but were altogether powerless to hurt anyone who spoke well of her. In consequence, the evil tongues of Liali received a sudden check.Furthermore, Vaiti, neglecting the half-castes and the whites, began with considerable art to make herself popular among the natives. She dressed herself Liali fashion, and arranged her hair after the island modes. She joined in all their interminable boating journeys and picnics, and was never tired of sitting cross-legged on the ground, waving her arms and head in time with a hundred others, and chanting Lialian songs that lasted an afternoon apiece. After dark, she was often to be seen out on the reef, with a torch and a fishing spear making an exhibition of piscatorial skill that astonished even the Lialians themselves. When there was an unmissionary dance in some big chief-house, Vaiti was always there, decked with wreaths and flower necklaces, and polished with cocoanut oil, turning the heads of all the young men by the grace of her dancing, and winning the astonished approval of the women by the cool reserve with which she received every advance of a sentimental nature. Both Mahina and Litia took jealous fancies to her—thus acquiring yet one more cause of mutual dissension—and separately poured all their woes into her ear. She was wonderfully sympathetic, and urged each one on to assert her rights and stand no nonsense; insomuch that before very long the island was fairly ringing with what Litia's people meant to do to Mahina's, and what Mahina's would certainly do to Litia's, in the event of the King selecting one or the other.Somebody about this time—it was never ascertained who—spread a report that Captain Saxon of theSybilhad a number of trade rifles on board his ship, and several cases of cartridges. The talk began to take a more dangerous turn. The schooner would not be back till the wedding was over, it was said, but let the winning party look out for themselves when she did come! The Lialians, under missionary rule, had been peaceful and law-abiding people for almost a whole generation; but they had not yet forgotten that they were once the masters of the Pacific, and that of all the warlike island races, none had been such fighters as they.... The older men began to snuff battle in the air, walked about with their chests flung out, and told bloodthirsty ancient stories to the younger Lialians. The women sang war songs at the evening gatherings in the chief-houses, and Mahina and Litia began to go about followed by bands of eager partisans. Liali was certainly warming up.
* * * * *
The rest of the wardroom did not envy Mr. Tempest his interview with the commander. It took place immediately after his return to the ship, and he came out from it with a countenance of entire inexpressiveness and extreme whiteness. One sentence—the last—was unavoidably heard by the lieutenant who followed immediately after Tempest, to deliver his report.
"Finally, Mr. Tempest—this Miss—a—Saxon—has risked her life to save your life and reputation. I think there is only one way in which you can repay her—by never seeing her again."
Tempest's answer was inaudible. But—he never did.
CHAPTER XVII
INVADERS IN TANNA
"What a beautiful girl! Is she one of the heathens, I wonder?" said Lady Victoria Jenkins, leaning on the rail of her yacht.
TheAlcyonefloated on a sea of living silver. The coral reefs forty feet before her keel showed like a pavement of pale turquoise in the searching splendour of the tropic moon. Close at hand loomed the dark woods and cliffs of Tanna, and above them, blotting out half the crystal broidery of the stars, rose the cone of the great volcano, crowned by a canopy of fire. So, in the days of Bougainville and of Cook, stood this southward sentinel of the wild New Hebrides, a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. So it stands yet, its deathless fires unquenched, its awful voice breaking the forest silences hour by hour—as the dead and gone discoverers of these distant lands saw and heard it long ago, and as those who follow us will find it in the days to come, when we and our thoughts and hopes, and adventures and loves are but a whisper in the homeless winds and a handful of dust blowing about on long-forgotten graves.
There are few volcanoes in the southern hemisphere more famous, and none less frequently visited, than the fiery cone of Tanna. The island lies thousands of miles away from everywhere, and the inhabitants are known to be almost all heathen, cannibal, and hostile to whites, although the expression of their hostility has been kept considerably in check of late years. But Lady Victoria Jenkins, daughter of the late Earl of Wessex, and wife of Mr. Abel Jenkins ("Jenkins's Perfect Pills"), is well known as a romanticist and a lover of all things unusual and strange. Mr. Abel Jenkins's income is only exceeded by that of two other commoners in England, and Mr. Abel Jenkins's ugliness and ill-temper are not exceeded by the ugliness and ill-temper of any one known to polite society. If the reader will piece these detached facts together, and consider them, he will readily understand why Lady Victoria was enjoying a tour round the world in her celebrated steam-yacht, theAlcyone, why she had come to look at Tanna, and why, including a good deal of miscellaneous company, the travelling party somehow was not miscellaneous enough to include Lady Victoria's husband.
The yacht had come in that afternoon after a somewhat stormy voyage from Sydney ("They call it the Pacific Ocean," said Lady Victoria plaintively, "instead of which, I have not really enjoyed a meal since we cleared the Heads"), and had instantly, by the mere fact of her dropping anchor in Sulphur Bay, denuded the whole seaboard of its population. This was because the conscience of Tanna is never quite clear, and the Tannese, struck by the conviction of sin, thought theAlcyonewas a man-of-war. Only two kinds of ships were known to the islands, outside trading schooners: British and French warships, and the lazy little monthly steamers from Sydney, which strolled round the group once a month, picking up copra, and conveying missionaries and traders about. TheAlcyonewas not a schooner; she was certainly not the well-known "B.P." steamer; therefore she must be some new variety of man-of-war. As it happened, there was a little matter of a murdered trader on the conscience of Tanna just at that time—he had been very annoying, but a British man-of-war is prejudiced about these affairs. So the Tannese of the coast, like the modest violet of the poem, concealed their drooping heads in the shady vales of the interior, and coyly hid from view. Like the modest violet, too—only with a difference—you might, if you wished, have located them by their—— But no; this is a polite history, and the Tannese are a very impolite people. Let us change carriages.
Vaiti and her father, who had come up from Queensland with an empty ship and a full money-bag, and were just starting a fresh recruiting trip, regarded the appearance of the yacht with hearty disgust. What were the good old islands coming to if this sort of thing was to be permitted? Not a bushman would come near the beach as long as theAlcyonestayed, and the sprinkling of mission natives who were not afraid of the yacht were worse than useless, for they neither recruited nor encouraged their heathen friends to do so. Besides, the airs and graces of theAlcyonewere sickening. Late dinner with low dresses and jewels; piano tinkling all the evening; clothes that looked as if they had been run hot on to the wearers, as icing is run on to a cake; sparkling glass and brasswork all over the ship, and dainty brass signal cannons, pretty as toys, and a little funnel all cream-colour and blue, and great sails white as trade-wind clouds, and a hull that sat the water like a beautiful sea-bird settled down to rest—all these unnecessary and disgusting affectations made a smart schooner like theSybillook no better than a mud-scow in a marsh, for all that she was the beauty of the South Seas and the most famous ocean adventuress from 'Frisco to Hobart Town. Besides, Saxon would not stir out of his cabin while the yacht was there, having developed the lumbago that always attacked him whenever English society folk loomed on the horizon—Vaiti knew that lumbago!—and he might really have been of use about Sulphur Bay, where, for a wonder, no one had any old scores against him.
It was all most abominable, thought the "Kapitani," and she cast an unfriendly glance on the luxuriousAlcyone, as her boat shot past the yacht in the moonlight, returning from a fruitless hunt along the coast for any stray bushman who might have heard the recruiting signal—a stick or two of dynamite set afloat on a board and exploded—and come down to the coast.
Lady Victoria's comment on the "beautiful girl" did not soften her in the least, coupled as it was with the unspeakable assumption that she was "a heathen." Probably she was, in one sense, having long ago given up all but the merest rags of religion, but it was not the accusation of moral deficiencies that galled her: it was the idea that she, Vaiti, daughter of a great Polynesian princess and a white sea-captain, should have been "evened" to the black, monkey-like, naked hags of Tanna. The resentful spirit of the half-caste burned hot within her as she steered the boat through the moonlit water. She could see Lady Victoria and her friends, a brilliant flower-show of coloured dresses and sparkling gems, leaning over the rail, and watching her as impersonally as if she were a porpoise or a shark. She could catch their comments, loudly and carelessly spoken.
"I suppose she is one of them. But she looks quite nice. See her pretty dress. She is quite decently clothed, isn't she?"
"I wonder is she a cannibal? She does not look dangerous. I would like to ask her on board, and give her some tea and cake, and things of that kind, and talk to her. Just to try and reform her from their own horrible food, you know," said Lady Victoria angelically.
"That would be so dear of you," chimed in her special sycophant and foil, a plain and elderly young woman who knew when her bread was buttered on both sides, and why.
But here the rowers—urged by a signal from Vaiti who thought she had heard about as much as she could stand without exploding—gave way vigorously, and pulled the boat out of earshot.
That was not a happy evening for any one on board theSybil. Vaiti would not give out any grog for supper though it was a settled custom on the ship; would not have singing in the cabin, gloomed like a hurricane sky over the mate and boatswain's sociable game of cards until Gray, out of pure nervousness, dropped a greasy ace upon his knee, and was thereupon accused by Harris of cheating, and coarsely threatened by him with an operation usually confined to sufferers from appendicitis. At this Vaiti rose and walked out of the cabin with the air of a convent-bred princess who had never so much as heard a jibbing donkey "confounded"; and went to sit on deck near the wheel, where she stayed so long, smoking so many thin black cigars, that every one but the night watchman turned in and left her, and only the dead, dark hour of two o'clock, when the spongy heat of the island night stiffens for a while into fever-bringing chill, shook her out of her sulks and into her cabin.
When Vaiti sulked it was usually observed that things happened before very long. But on this occasion the exception seemed to rule. The disgusting yacht stayed all the next day, and theSybillay quietly at anchor on the other side of the bay. Some of the yacht people went ashore in the afternoon, and roamed timorously about the beach, wondering at the hot springs and tasting everything in the way of fruit they happened to see. (It was nearly all inedible, but none of it, by a fortunate chance, happened to be poisonous.) Lady Victoria was disappointed with her day on the whole. The natives from the mission, who had officiously attended them all day long, were unromantically clothed, clean, and English-speaking. The wild savages did not appear; and there were one or two other mishaps of an entirely unromantic kind.
"How did you enjoy it, darling?" asked the plain young woman of Lady Victoria, when the daring pioneers returned.
Mr. Jenkins's partner shook out her soiled tussore silk disgustedly.
"It was untidy and ugly and nasty," she declared; "and when I sat down under a great pineapple tree all covered with fruit, and said that I was realising one of my dreams, Jack de Coverley laughed at me, and said it was only a pandamn-us, or something else profane, and that pineapples grew on the ground. And when we started to walk among the palms, and I was saying that I had always dreamed of wandering softly by a coral strand and seeing the cocoanuts drop into my hands, something as big as a horse's head suddenly thundered down like a bombshell from a hundred feet high, and buried itself in the sand at my feet with such a fearful shock that I jumped a yard away and screamed like anything! So then the missionary came out, and said he wondered I wasn't killed; and if you'll believe me, it was nothing but a horrible nut! And the coral strand was pretty enough, all over little bits of branching coral stuff; but why doesn't anyone ever tell you that coral strands burn all the skin off your nose and blacken you into a nigger? We're going up the volcano tomorrow—the missionary says it's quite safe—and I'm sure I hope it's true, but one never knows. Darling, if I die, see that the new Lafayette photo is sent to the papers—not on any account the other; and I like Latin crosses on graves, I think; Carrara marble, very thick, and just one short text, something nice, like 'They were lovely and pleasant in their lives'—you know."
... "'And in death they were not divided,'" finished the plain young woman with mechanical piety.... "Darling! dearest! what have I said? What is the matter?"
"Now youhavedone it!" roared Mr. de Coverley, who was rather a well-bred, but sometimes rather a vulgar young man. "Not divided! Oh, great Scott! Oh, my eye! Oh, I'll die of laughing! Hold me up! Never mind, Vic; I'll see you aren't divided, or cooked either—trust to me!"
* * * * *
Vaiti was still in a speechless state of sulks when she started off the next morning into the interior, to recruit on her own account. It was not a very safe thing to do, but the bushmen would not come down to the coast, and theSybilcould not hang out indefinitely, since the doubtful character of her methods had given the French and English Commissioners of the islands a nasty habit of asking questions about her. Saxon, who had relinquished his lumbago to go off into the hills at a safe distance from the yacht, wanted to make his daughter accompany him; but Vaiti simply laughed at him, and departed with a guide seduced from the mission towards a village lying a mile or two above the volcano. She preferred the glory of working on her own account, and besides, it doubled the chances of recruits.
She knew the Tannese nature well, so she dressed herself for her part in a robe of scarlet sateen, with liberal necklaces of different coloured trade beads, and stuck a couple of tomahawks in her sash, besides an ornamented sheath-knife. Across her splendid young bosom she slung an incongruous-looking bandolier of cartridges, designed apparently for the slaughter of elephants; and a smart magazine rifle, carried over her shoulder, completed the outfit. All these valuables, though designed to assist her plans by suggesting the enormous store of desirable goods possessed by the recruiters, were almost as likely to assist her to a sudden and unprovided end, by reason of the natives' covetousness. She took her chance of this, however; Vaiti was used to taking chances. It is easier than most people suppose to take the risk of being killed every day of your life. In the strange places of the earth, where such things are a common happening, men do not look upon the inevitable end after the pursy, secretive, never-mention-it fashion of Peckham and Brixton. Death is just death in the earth's wild places—yours to-day, mine to-morrow—a thing to walk with shoulder to shoulder, to meet face to face at noonday; in any case, to make no bones of it until it makes bones of you; and after that circumstances will keep you from complaining if you feel like it.
It was a long, hot walk up to the village. A "walk" is mostly a scramble about the uncleared New Hebrides, where roads are mere foot-wide cracks and canyons in the dense forest growth, and level ground apparently does not exist. Besides, a bandolier of cartridges and an assortment of small arms are rather heavy jewellery for such a climate. Vaiti, however, possessed the enviable gift of never looking, or apparently feeling, hot or tired; and she swung along at an unvarying pace that caused the unlawfully enticed mission native, who had waxed fat and lazy, to regret his enticement and wish himself back in the mission school writing copies, instead of slaving up and down precipitous gullies in the rear of a woman-devil who did not know what it was to want a rest.
At long last, however, the reedwork fence of the village came in sight, and they entered the open square, shaded by an immense banyan tree and surrounded by low, ugly huts, all roof and no wall, like all the mountain villages of Tanna. There were sentries perched up in the trees outside the gate, and others squatted on the ground at every entrance, their rifles ready in the crook of the elbow. Within, the dusty tan-coloured square, quivering under the pitiless fire of the white-hot sky, was all alive with moving figures—ugly women in brief grass skirts humped out into swaying bustles; young boys with murderous little faces, and full-sized rifles; wild-looking men, with thick hair twined into myriads of tiny strings ending in a great bush on the shoulders, stripes of scarlet paint on their faces, and no clothing save their native impudence and a cartridge belt—all seething about in a very bee-hive of excitement and alarm. As for the rifle-barrels, they were bobbing about like piano-jumpers all over the square, and every weapon was cocked and loaded.
Vaiti saw at a glance that they were expecting an attack, and picking out a native who could speak English, asked what the trouble was. The man replied that they feared the little man-of-war down below, but that they were entirely innocent. Questioned further, they said naïvely that they had never eaten a white man, and that none of them were low cannibals in any case. Vaiti, who had not heard of this little affair before, saw her chance.
"No good you speak alonga that fellow way," she said, using thebêche-de-mertalk that some of the Tannese understood; for Vaiti, like many half-castes, could handle almost any dialect or corruption of a dialect, though she could not speak decent English or French. "I savvy plenty, you eatum one fellow white man. By'n by, big fellow man-of-war come, shoot you all-a-same one pig, all-a-same one blind box [flying fox], burn altogether house belong you. Very good you come alonga Saxon ship, go Queensland; then you all right."
"No eatum," persisted the man (who was the professional talking-man or orator of the village), with a coy smile.
Vaiti's nose was keen, and she had already guessed something by its aid. She marched straight across the square into a little yam-house, and pointed to a small parcel done up in green banana-leaf and tied with cocoanut sinnet. Five toes and an instep protruded from one end. The game had been well hung, as the Tannaman likes it to be, and there was no mistaking the fact of its presence in any sense.
The talking-man giggled like a school-girl caught consuming surreptitious chocolates.
"Eatum jus' little-fellow bit," he allowed, with a bad-child chuckle. The other men took up the laugh, and the village resounded with a roar like the bellowing of a herd of bulls.
Vaiti, seeing her advantage, stepped out into the square and began to talk, marching to and fro in Tannese fashion as she spoke. The sun cast dancing spangles on her many-coloured beads as she moved, and threw back darts of fire from her heavy bandolier. One arm emphasised her remarks with sweeping gesture; in the other the tall rifle pounded the earth with its stock, marking the points of her discourse. The fat, stolid mission native watched her with staring eyes and open mouth, and the chiefs gloomed at her under sullen savage brows, evidently impressed, but restive.
The sum of her discourse was that they and their women would do well to come down with her to the schooner, recruit at once, and fly to a land of safety where men-of-war never came, where Tanna people reclined all day under the shade of banyan and banana, picked a little cane for their employers occasionally, lived upon tinned meat and sugared tea, and eventually returned loaded with riches in the shape of rifles, cartridges, cotton, and knives. There was a good deal more of the same highly-coloured stuff. This was old business to the people of theSybil.
The talking-man, also strutting backwards and forwards, Tanna fashion, in a kind of continual country dance with the glittering vision from the ship, answered now and then. It was very well to talk about recruiting, and perhaps some of them might go if they got lots of tinned salmon and "bisketti" to eat before they went on board, and promise of rifles to be paid the tribe when the bargain was complete. But they did not believe that the new ship was not a little man-of war, and until she was gone they would not go down to the coast—no, not even to bathe, although they had all decided to have a bath soon, for the weather was hot and their skins were like the bark of trees, and it was now about ten moons since they had had their last bath.
At this Vaiti's eyes lit up, for she suddenly saw a plan, a plan which might give her a score of recruits, drive the objectionable yacht out of Sulphur Bay, and pay off every rankling insult inflicted by theAlcyoneand her people. But the savages were watching her, so she veiled her eyes with her long lashes, and replied carelessly:
"All that very good. To-morrow, small-fellow man-of-war he go 'way; then you coming longa schooner. To-day, what name [why?] you no go wash big water 'long place one-fellow-fire stop? Very good place that. Suppose you going, I come up from schooner, bring plenty-plenty tucker. Plenty-plenty bulimacow [beef], bisketti, tucker belong white man, cost ten rifle. All the Tannaman he eat; by'n-by he stop lie down, he break, so much he eat."
This tempting picture had its effect, backed up by a few presents of beads and cartridges. The Tannamen agreed that the plain below the burning mountain, where a wide, stagnant lake spread out its dull expanse, would do for a bathing place, short of the impossible shore, and they chuckled with joyous anticipation of the feast. They also agreed, rather doubtfully, to embark as soon as the "man-of-war" was gone; and it seemed evident that a fair number would at least come down and negotiate on board the schooner after which—well, theSybil'ssmart heels would do the rest.
CHAPTER XVIII
A CANNIBAL PARTY
Vaiti went off to get ready the feast, telling the natives that they might follow her before long, as everything would be ready soon; and they might trust her, the great Kapitani, that it would be a feast such as no Tannaman, not even of those who had served in Queensland, had ever witnessed in his wildest dreams.
The mission native being a rather weak-kneed convert, and anxious to enjoy a good heathen gossip with his old companions, wanted very much to stay on in the village. But that was just what Vaiti did not want, so she drove him out in front of her like a fat and nervous sheep, hastening his movements all the way down with occasional reminders from the butt of her rifle. He had given her certain information about a picnic at the foot of the volcano, arranged by the people of the yacht for that afternoon, and she did not want him to share his news with the men of the village and cause them, perhaps, to put two and two together where he himself had failed to do so. She despatched him therefore to his own town on the coast, and saw that he went, before herself turning off in the direction of the track that led to the volcano.
Near to the lake there lies a curious little valley with a soft, clean flooring of black volcanic sand and sheltering walls of green pandanus. Here, shaded from the burning heat, yet close to the volcano plain, was the only possible place for the picnickers to enjoy their meal. Beyond lay only a lurid plateau of red and yellow lava beds, curdled and coiled as they had flowed down from the crater lip long ago; a desert of black ash and sand, and a dark, wicked, smoking, rumbling cone in the centre of all. Not a native would have climbed the cone for all the goods in theSybil'shold; it was the mouth of hell, they said, and full of devils of every kind. But they were not afraid of the valley below, within safe limits, and even if they had been, the feast and the bathe after it were attractive enough to conquer a little nervousness.
As Vaiti had anticipated, there were several picnic baskets stowed under a tree in the valley, and a big wine hamper as well. Four mission natives, who had acted as guides and carried up the provisions, were lying on their stomachs in the shade, smoking and talking.
It was essential to get them out of the way, and time was short. Vaiti did not waste any unnecessary words. She simply pointed her rifle at the men and told them to clear. They cleared, howling, and she was left alone.
With quick, neat hands she unpacked the hampers, spread the cloth, and laid out the food. It was a goodly display—hams and tongues and fowls, cold meats, pies, cakes, tarts, fruits, and tinned dainties of every kind. There was plenty of champagne, also a supply of whisky and soda. She set all the bottles in a row, and looked with satisfaction upon the glittering array. Then she went up to the edge of the plain and looked at the crater. No one was yet in sight. The exploring party at that moment were on the other side of the cone, standing on the black lip of an appalling gulf eight hundred feet deep and half a mile across; looking down, awe-struck and amazed, upon colossal fire fountains that uplifted their gory spray three hundred feet in the air, and listening to the heart-shaking thunders of the volcano's awful voice, as from time to time that terrifying note of illimitable force and fury made the whole plain tremble and echoed far out to sea.... It was indeed no wonder that the ignorant Tannamen feared to ascend the cone.
Vaiti sat down at the edge of the plain, and watched till she saw a number of many-coloured dots creeping down the black pyramid in its centre. Then she suddenly lay down upon the ashy ground, and writhed with silent laughter. People were in the habit of saying that Vaiti had no more sense of humour than the jibboom of her father's ship. They might have modified that judgment, could they have seen her now.
* * * * *
Lady Victoria Jenkins had enjoyed her morning very much indeed. She had dressed for the ascent in a mountaineering costume that combined equal suggestions of "Carmen" and the Alpine Club, and gave great opportunities to her ankles. She had been helped up the cone by four devoted admirers, all at once, and had come down it at a wild running slide, ably braked by two strong hands of two or three others who wanted to have their turn. The other women had trodden on their skirts, and torn them, burned and cut their foolish boots, and also got unbecomingly hot and out of breath, because there was not nearly one man apiece to help them up, after Lady Victoria had annexed all the best. It must be allowed that the men were the weak point of theAlcyone'stravelling party. Mr. de Coverley and his set were "dear boys" and charming companions, no doubt, but they were not quite as manly as some of the ladies. Lady Vic and her companions did not attract the best sort of men, as a rule.
They were all very hungry when they reached the plain, and thirsty with a thirst unknown outside the tropics. All the way across the baking black sand and the tinkling lava beds, "one fair vision ever fled" before the eyes of the party—vision of gold-necked champagne bottles lying coolly embedded in icebaskets; of topaz-coloured jellies, trembling on silver dishes; of flaky, savoury pies, and delicate cold meats, and crisp green salads concocted as only the hand of theAlcyone'schefcould concoct them.
It seemed as if that plain would never end, but it did end at last, and a green fringe of pandanus announced the beginning of the bush. The elderly young lady and most of the others were making excellent time ahead, and they reached the verge of the plain some little while before Lady Victoria and Mr. de Coverley came to it. The latter pair, as it happened, were really not thinking very much about their lunch, because a still more interesting matter absorbed their attention.
"Not understood!" Mr. de Coverley was saying bitterly. "And so we die and go down to the grave—not understood! The pathos of it!"
"We are never understood," sighed Lady Victoria, patting the side waves of her "transformation" to see that it was on straight. "We women, especially. And those who should understand us best of all are so often——"
"Exactly—so they are. But, Lady Victoria—Victoria!—there are some who are different; there are men, rare souls, who——"
"What in Heaven's name is the matter?" interrupted the misunderstood one, stopping dead in her tracks (literally, for the sand was deep) and staring at the edge of the bush.
From the valley below the plain had just risen a long, loud shriek, followed by another and another, and then by a burst of laughter that sounded scarcely human. The other members of the party had disappeared, but it was clear that something had happened.
"Good God, the savages!" exclaimed Lady Victoria; and she began to run. Let it be stated, for the credit of her race and name, that she ran towards the sound. As for Mr. de Coverley....
But this story is not about Mr. de Coverley. If it were, it would be interesting to tell why the Sydney steamer that called at Sulphur Bay two days later found an unexpected passenger waiting at the trader's, and why Lady Victoria and Mr. Abel Jenkins, of Jenkins's Perfect Pills, became eventually reconciled and lived the life of a model couple. As things are, it must be enough to state that Mr. Jack de Coverley turned and ran away at the sound of the shouts—ran right across the plain into the bush at the other side—ran as far as he could get, and did not come back at all—and thereby ran once and for ever out of the life of the lady whom he "understood."
Lady Victoria, speeding in the opposite direction, reached the edge of the little valley in a very few minutes, and, looking over, beheld what was certainly the strangest sight she had encountered in all her varied life.
Round about the elaborately-laid luncheon were squatting a dozen or so of naked brown savages, painted, feathered, and slashed with ornamental scars. A few women, clad only in a six-inch fringe of grass, stood behind them, eyeing the eatables eagerly, but not daring to touch them while their masters fed. The talking-man, a big, hulking savage with a huge bush of hair, and a match-box stuck in each ear-lobe, had buried his face in the savoury interior of a boned turkey, and was gnawing out the stuffing. The principal chief, one hand in a dish of Spanish cream and the other in a chicken curry, was casting double supplies into his mouth with the regularity of a patent feed-machine. A fat young fighting man, with nose and forehead painted scarlet, and white ashes in his hair, had tucked a ham under one arm, and was sitting on a peach pie, with intent to secure as many good things as possible, while he hastily worried large mouthfuls off the forequarter of lamb he was holding in both hands. Another man was drinking mint sauce out of the silver sauceboat with horrible grimaces; his neighbour, having captured a handful of maraschino jelly, fast melting in the sun, was industriously rubbing it on his hair; and a grizzly old fellow, with a monkey-like face, was half-choking himself over a soufflé, which he was trying to swallow case and all. The necks of the champagne bottles were all knocked off, and from engraved wine-cases, empty entrée-dishes, and dredged-out tins the savages were drinking Lady Victoria's excellent wines with every appearance of satisfaction. Between mouthfuls they stopped to look at the party from the yacht, and to roar with laughter at their evident fright. Too terrified even to run away, the voyagers, in their dainty frocks and smart white suits, stood huddling together for protection, the women crying, the men looking rather white and foolish, for every Tannaman had a loaded rifle slung to his side, and there was not so much as a saloon pistol among the whites. A few yards off Vaiti stood, regarding the whole scene with an expressionless countenance that covered a good deal of quiet enjoyment. She knew, if the visitors did not, that the cannibal bushmen were really not at all a bad lot of fellows when you knew them, and that the yacht party, against whom they had no grudge, were perfectly safe. In fact, the Tannamen merely thought these oddly-behaved whites were a new party of missionaries, and were quite ready to be civil to them, since they thought all the mission people harmless, if eccentric.
But the true inwardness of the situation not being apparent, theAlcyone'sguests were very frightened indeed.
"P-perhaps if we go away very quietly, they won't f-follow us," said a wealthy young stockbroker, who had retained a little presence of mind, though his teeth were chattering in his head.
"Oh, let us! Victoria, save me! Oh, what shall we do?" wailed the elderly young lady, rushing up the bank and flinging her arms round the mistress of the violated feast. Lady Victoria, though white as her own Belfast linen collar, kept her head fairly well. She saw that Vaiti was not one of the invaders, and called to her. "Do you speak English? What are we to do? Will they kill us?" she asked.
Vaiti walked over to her with the bearing of a stage duchess, and favoured her with a fashionable high handshake that was the one thing wanting to complete the insanity of the whole impossible scene. A new idea had suddenly struck her—a fresh spark of mischief was lit. With an immovable countenance she replied:
"No kill you, I think. Suppose you want go 'way all right by'n-by, very good I think you sit down, eatum dinner alonga those fellow—then they think you all right, let you go home, no kill."
"Oh, Victoria, anything to please them!" sobbed the elderly young lady.
"Yes—a—I think we'd better do anything we can to get into their good graces, since we're not armed," submitted the stockbroker.
Vaiti exchanged a few words with the Tannese. She explained that these white people had come a long way, and were very hungry. The Melanesian has not many virtues, but hospitality is certainly one of them; and a man who may be planning to dine off you himself tomorrow will certainly not refuse you half of his own leaf of yams to-day. The Tannese were delighted at the chance of sharing their good fortune with the white chiefs, even in spite of the latter's extremely silly manners, and they beckoned to them at once to come and sit down.
Thereafter took place a scene incapable of description by mortal pen. The chief took his head out of the turkey, chewed off a leg, and grinningly handed it to Lady Victoria. The young warrior got off the pie, disembowelled it with one scoop of the hand that had not known water "for ten moons," and laid its interior in the elderly young lady's lap. Another knowingly poured out a champagne glass of Worcester sauce and handed it to the stockbroker, while the much-bitten lump of mutton that was at that moment circling from mouth to mouth, native-fashion, was hospitably passed on to all the whites. Driven by fear, they tried to swallow something; choked in the effort, made futile remarks to each other, laughed nervous laughs, and all the time watched with eyes of utmost apprehension the dusky hosts who were thus entertaining them with their own audaciously ravished goods. And above the crazy party the burning Tanna sun beat down, and the great volcano-cone far across the plain smoked and thundered.
It had been Vaiti's design to dismiss them in peace by and by, assured that their compliance had saved their lives, and anxious to make steam out of Sulphur Bay as soon as was reasonably possible. Fate, however, reserved a more dramatic ending to the entertainment, And it was "all along of" that talking-man.
The cannibal native is invariably shy of displaying his tastes before whites, since people who do not share the "point of view" are so frequently prejudiced. Therefore the talking-man did not open a certain small green parcel tied up with sinnet string, which he had brought down with him from the mountain village. A feast in the hand is worth two in the pandanus-bush, thought the talking-man, so he brought hisbonne bouchewith him for dessert and said nothing about it. And thereby came the end.
For Lady Victoria, unable to swallow the clawed and chewed morsels pressed upon her by dirt-encrusted hands, began to hunt despairingly about for something that she could really eat, so that she should not offend the dangerous monsters who surrounded her.
"Isn't there anything clean to be had?" she asked the stockbroker anxiously. "I can't eat—and yet we must! What are we to do?"
The stockbroker, who had once been to Honolulu, and thought he knew something about native foods, spied the packet of green banana-leaf, and reached out for it.
"This'll be some of their own boiled yam," he said. "Natives always do it up like this. You can eat it all right if you scrape it with a knife. Allow me."
Before the talking-man could stretch out his filthy claw to stop him, the Englishman had cut the sinnet string, the parcel had burst open, and right into the middle of a half-demolished chicken pie fell a large white foot, cut off at the ankle, nicely browned across the instep and all crackled on the toes.
There was a wild shriek from the women, a splutter of horrified exclamations from the men, a boiling up of white petticoats like to the breaking of a wave on a pebbly shore, and then nothing but a diminishing string of rapidly trotting figures, each woman hand in hand with a man who was dragging her along far away, farther and farther, down the long, black, sandy path into the bush. Then ... they were gone.
Vaiti stood on the bank to look after them, and laughed quietly.
"Now I think we keep Sulphur Bay all our own self," she said.
As for the Tannamen, they rolled on the ground with laughter, and then picked the dainty morsel out of the chicken pie and ate it up.
CHAPTER XIX
THE RIVAL PRINCESSES
It was full mid-day when the schoonerSybildropped anchor off Liali Island. The hot season was at its height. The long, white coral strand blazed in the sun, the moated lagoon was raw emerald, the waveless outer sea blue fire. Beyond the beach stretched a green, grassy lawn, dotted with quaintly-shaped Norfolk pines, tall palms, and feather-tressed ironwood trees; and against its enamelled background rose a palace like a picture in a fairy-tale—white, long-windowed, lofty-towered, and crowned with a crimson flag set below a gilded vane.
Vaiti, standing on the break of the poop, with the inevitable cigar between her fingers, looked critically at the island, and liked it well. A mere little matter of kidnapping somebody's indentured labourers—the sort of thing that any gentleman with an extensive island practice might easily find himself obliged to do—had brought about her father's expulsion from the New Hebrides labour trade, and obliged him to seek new fields for the activities of the notorious and naughtySybil. Saxon himself was virtuously indignant, Vaiti not particularly sorry. She was getting tired of the gloomy feverish New Hebrides and their ugly savages. The Eastern Pacific was her heart's home after all, semi-Polynesian as she was; and even the wild excitement of the cruel western isles could not hold her away very long. So when Saxon was wavering between the advantages of strictly illegal gun-running in the Solomons and honest trading about the Liali group (which had just wrecked its native schooner, and was open to employ a successor), Vaiti's influence went for once on the side of peace and virtue, and the course was set for Liali. The group was new to both father and daughter, but was none the less attractive on that account, since all over the wide island world theSybiland her owners were best loved and most warmly welcomed where they were least known.
The Liali group, as many people in the Southern hemisphere agree, offers the nearest possible approach to comic opera known off the actual stage. Liali itself, the chief island, is as pretty as a toy-box, and quite extraordinarily theatrical in appearance. Its handsome, merry, brown people wear the most picturesque costume in the Pacific—a knee-length kilt of fine cashmere, girded by a deep sash of pure silk, and worn with a silken or cashmere shirt or a graceful sleeveless tunic, according to sex—all in the most vivid of sea- and flower-colour. Liali is civilised after a fashion. It goes barefoot and barelegged, sits on mats, lives in reed-woven houses devoid of furniture, worships a sacred lizard on the sly, and sometimes breaks out openly into club-fights and devil-dances. But it has a king, and a palace and a Parliament, a brass band, and quite a number of very active Nonconformist churches, run by white missionaries, who find that "labouring" among the well-off and amiable Lialians is a task in which the meritorious martyrdom of missionary life can be combined with quite a number of pleasant alleviations.
Nothing in Liali is entirely what it seems. The palace, when one comes close to it, is perceived to be built of painted wood, like a "practicable" scene in a theatre. The Parliament never passes any laws, because the Lords, who are chiefs, always on principle throw out every bill introduced by the vulgar Commons, just to "teach" them. The Prime Minister is oftener in prison forlése majestèthan out of it, and several Chancellors of the Exchequer have been transported to the Colonies for theft. But there is a real throne in the palace, all crimson velvet and gilt wood, and a wonderful gold crown (the verdigris is cleaned off it with a wad of cocoanut husks by the Chief Equerry every Saturday afternoon), and when the King goes out in state he wears a purple velvet train, held up by two pages in tights and plumes, and a marvellous ermined robe, all exactly like the Savoy Theatre in the consulship of Gilbert and Sullivan. On occasions not of state he sits cross-legged upon the palace parquet, clad in a shirt and a kilt, and playsécartéwith his native guards.
There are a few colonial traders in Liali, and a dozen or so of the English "legion that never was listed"—just such as one finds in all the odd corners of the Pacific—talkative, plausible, thin and nervous, given to avoid home topics and discourse with awful fluency upon small local politics; hospitable, restless and lazy, and usually married more or less to some dark beauty of the islands, who has grown as fat as a feather bed and spends a fortune on store muslins.
These, as a matter of course, took possession of theSybil'speople at once, hardly waiting for the schooner to cast anchor before they were alongside with their boats. Saxon and Vaiti were swept ashore immediately, and begged to make their home in half-a-dozen different houses. With a fine sense of the fitting, Saxon selected Bob Peter's public-house, misnamed hotel, and immediately held alevéein the bar, wearing his smartest Auckland suit (not paid for, and not likely to be) and looking, with his heavy, old-fashioned cavalry moustache, blonde-grey hair, and well set-up though rather bloated figure, quite like a somewhat seedy Milor on his travels. (And, as a matter of fact.... But that was Saxon's long-buried secret, and must not be told.)
Vaiti, splendidly attired in a flowing island robe of yellow silk, with a gold chain twisted through her misty black hair, sat in the midst of a court of her own, and drank expensive pink lemonade to her soul's content. She was revelling in the sights, the sounds, the smells of the dear eastern islands once more. She had a necklace of perfumed red berries round her neck, and white "tieré" flowers behind each ear, and the well-remembered scent almost intoxicated her. Outside she could hear the boom of a dancing-chant, broken by interludes of clapping; and from the very next house, a big native reed-built structure, came now and then in the quieter moments the sonorous voice of a Lialian man calling out the names at a kava-drinking.
The double soul that is the curse of the half-caste surged within the girl.... This, this, this, and all it meant—how she loved it! And yet, the wild, fierce life of the western islands; the chance, the risk, the strong wine of danger, adventure, power! The two natures of the soldier of fortune and the sensuous island princess who had given her birth, fought together in her heart.... If one could eat one's cake and have it! If one could sleep all day, crowned with flowers, under the singing casuarina trees, and yet be the daring sea-queen, the "Kapitani" of theSybil, if only...
Vaiti shook herself impatiently in her hammock chair, and asked for ginger beer with sugar in it. She hated thinking, and felt as if she were going mad when the half-white brain in her pretty dusky head took a strange fit of sober industry. Swift, instinctive plotting and planning were one thing, deliberate reflection quite another.... Ugh! she must be sick.... And for once the temperate Vaiti said yes to the inevitable offer of "a stick in it," as her ginger beer was handed to her by an eager admirer.
The "sickness" passed away, and she began to listen and watch in her old fashion, smiling all the time to the compliments and sweet sayings that were being poured into her ears. A trader was telling her father all about the latest dynastic crisis in the monarchy, and Saxon was not even pretending to listen. The affairs of "niggers" never interested him, unless there was a question of immediate profit ahead.
"You see," said the trader, "King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., which is his full title, wants for to get married. He's thirty, and there's no heir. And there being just the two Lialian princesses that wasn't his sisters—Mahina and Litia—what does he do but go and propose to both of them, and, of course, gets snapped up like winkin' by the two. It's no small potatoes being Queen of Liali, mind you. Te Paea gets lots of money out of the fruit, and copra taxes, and then the Crown lands is half the island, there's presents besides. And he's a real king if he is coffee-coloured—why, the kings of Liali goes back hundreds of years before Captain Cook, and he was in Henry Eighth's time, wasn't he? And if you was to see the pink satin chairs in the throne-room, and the phonographs, and musical-boxes, and albums, and lookin'-glasses, and the lovely wax flowers in cases, and real hand-painted oil pictures—ah! it's a good job, is Te Paea's, and either Mahina or Litia's going to be a very lucky girl. What he'd like, you see, is to marry both of them, same as his old grandfather—only he married nine, he did. But the King's a Methody, good as they make them—when he don't forget, or want a spree—and of course the missionaries won't hear of his havin' two queens. And, says he, Mahina's real fat; there's nothing mean about Mahina; she fills the eye, says he, and that's what a Lialian likes, for they don't hold with any sort of stinginess, says he. But Litia, he says, has eyes like the buttons on his Auckland boots, they're so round and black and bright, says he, and she walks for all the world like a lovely young mutton-bird, says he. And what's a king to do, with both the girls' relations fighting and squabbling over him like land-crabs fighting over a bit of fish, and he himself liking them both, and the girls clean mad for him—because, you see, Te Paea he's a handsome fellow, and when he's got his military uniform on, and all his orders and medals what he drew out himself on paper, and got made in Sydney, he's a fancy man, he is. The wedding's to be in three weeks, and the invites is being printed down in Auckland all in silver, with a blank to write the bride's name in—and the House of Lords has bought the bride's dress for her, which is what the Kings says it's their right to do, according to custom,—and no one knows which he's going to marry, and no more does he. And it's my belief that there'll be war over it, before all's said and done, for Mahina's people say they'll burn down every village belonging to Litia's tribe, and Litia's folks say they'll kill Mahina's people's cattle and cut up their gardens. That's the way things are, and you may take my word it's a pretty kettle of fish."
"What are you giving for copra at present?" asked Saxon, yawning unrestrainedly. And the conversation turned at once to the inevitable trading "shop."
A few days afterwards theSybilspread her wings and started for Waiwai, the outermost of the Liali islands. She was to make the whole round of the group afterwards, and might not be back for some weeks, so that it seemed likely that Saxon would miss the festivities of the King's wedding. This Vaiti declared was no reason why she should miss them, and she insisted on being left behind. Saxon was not too well pleased, for if he had a remnant of conscience left, it was connected with the care of his daughter, and he did not quite care about leaving her alone in a group to which they were both strangers. But Vaiti promised to behave like a saint, and furthermore said that she would stay with one of the married traders, and not in the native villages. She also added that she meant to stay anyhow, and that it was no use making a fuss.
So theSybilsailed away out of Liali harbour, and became a little pearl-coloured pinhead on the blue horizon, and then melted quite away. And Vaiti went to the tin-roofed shanty belonging to Neumann, the fat German trader, who had married a Lialian wife, and was received with the unquestioning hospitality of the islands.
Nobody, among either whites or natives, could talk of anything but the King's matrimonial affairs. Mahina and Litia both appeared in Neumann's parlour more than once, sat on the floor, drank black tea with a handful of sugar in it, and related their several woes at length. They did not come together, except once, when Litia, walking in unexpectedly, found Mahina there, crying into her teacup, and telling Neumann's wife that the King had given Litia a beautiful chemise, all trimmed with lace, only the day before, and that in consequence she considered him a monster and a perjured villain, although she knew perfectly well that he meant nothing whatever by it. What was a chemise? He had sent her two pounds of stick tobacco the Sunday before last. She would show Litia yet that the King was her King, and nobody else's.
Litia, entering at this point, wasted no words, but simply buried her hands in Mahina's curly black masses of hair, and dragged her, shrieking, across the floor. Neumann interfered, and parted them; but Mahina flew at Litia immediately after, ripped open her dress with one clutch, and disclosed the royal gift chastely embracing Litia's lovely form. With a howl of anger, the rival seized the chemise in both hands; there was a scuffle, a scream, a rending noise, and Litia stood up in the middle of the room, a gold-bronze statue, shedding tears of rage, while Mahina, running out on to the verandah, tore the offending garment into strips and rags, and cast them upon the road. Litia, rushing out after her, stood upon the steps clad with wrath as with a garment (and with extremely little else), explaining her wrongs to an interested and sympathetic native crowd, until the Methodist missionary happened to come by, and told her that unless she went in and dressed herself at once, she might safely count upon eventually finding herself in a place where dress would be very much at a discount ... or words to that effect. So Litia went in, and Mahina went away, escorted by a strong cousinly "tail"; and afterwards Neumann, enveloped in oracular clouds of smoke, remarked sleepily that the princesses were the greatest nuisance on the island, and that he believed the King would run away from the whole set if he could, for he was "by-nearly mad-driven on account of their so-tiresome ways, and feared-himself to choose, because the one that he not married had would cause to make war by her people against the one he married should."
During the whole of the fight, Vaiti remained perfectly unmoved on a cane lounge in the corner of the room, uninterruptedly puffing rings of blue smoke at the ceiling. Not a detail had escaped her, all the same, nor did she miss a word of Neumann's remarks. And they made her think.
In the afternoon, the dull thud of galloping hoofs along the grass street made Mrs. Neumann run to the door. She called loudly to Vaiti to come.
"It is the King," she said.
A small victoria, drawn by two spirited blacks, was tearing up the street. Seated alone in it was an extraordinary and notable figure—Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., King of Liali. He was six feet four inches in height, and over eighteen stone in weight. He wore a scarlet cloth uniform coat, blazing with gold, and his heavy, handsome brown face, with its weak, small mouth, and black eyes almost too large and soft for a man, was shaded by a white sun helmet with a wide gold band.
He drove furiously, looking neither to right nor to left, and, passing the house like a gorgeous whirlwind, was instantly lost in the casuarina forest beyond.
"That is the King, then?" said Vaiti. The Lialian language came almost as easily to her as her own, being only one of the dialects of the great Maori tongue that covers a good two-thirds of the island world.
"Yes," said Neumann's wife, "that is the King. And very little any of us have seen of him lately. He is afraid of the trouble he has got himself into; he shuts himself up all the time, and sees no one but his guards, and just sends a present now and then, first to one girl then to the other. And when he drives to take the air, he flies along like that, so that no one can stop and speak to him. He is terribly shy of strangers; I think it was because theSipilawas here that he did not come out at all last week."
"Is it such a very good thing for the princess he will marry?" asked Vaiti, playing with a yellow alamanda flower.
"Very, very good indeed," replied the Lialian impressively. "She will have a gold crown to wear on her head, and sit on a red velvet and gold throne beside the King, and have the most beautiful satin dresses from Sydney, and all her chemises will have lace and ribbons on them. And as soon as the King buys another schooner for himself and Liali, she will travel in it with him whenever she likes, for sometimes he will go to Samoa, to stay with King Malietoa, or he will sail a whole week to Mbau in Fiji, and then Princess Thakombau and the Prince of Kandavu make feasts and dances for him, and the Kovana [governor] gives a real 'papalangi' dinner for him, with champagne and a band. And as for what she will have to eat at home, it is past telling, for in the palace there is no count whatever made of tinned salmon and biscuit, and she may have a sackful of sugar at every meal, and a whole roast pig every day. She may eat till she falls asleep, and then wake up to eat. Ah, it is a good thing for the princess who marries the King, whichever she may be!"
"I think you will be thirsty if you talk so much," said Vaiti rather rudely. "I am thirsty myself with only listening to you. Go and make some kava for me."
Mrs. Neumann, who had been rather proud to have Vaiti staying with her—since her rank as a princess of Atiu counted for a good deal among the island races—began to dislike her visitor soon after this, and to wish her well away. Vaiti was not an angel in the house at the best of times, and she did not trouble to make herself pleasant just then. Indeed, one would almost have thought she was trying to pick a quarrel. And, as that sort of effort rarely goes unrewarded, it is not astonishing to learn that the quarrel came before long—a bitter, loud-tongued dispute that left Mrs. Neumann sobbing in a fat, frightened heap on the floor, and Vaiti, silent but stormy, packing up her camphorwood box to depart.
Neumann, being afraid of Saxon's possible anger, tried to keep her, but she laughed in his face, and went on packing. There was an empty native house—little more than a palm-leaf hut, once tenanted by a Chinese trader—standing by the road about halfway through the great casuarina forest; a lonely, ramshackle place, used and wanted by nobody. There and there only Vaiti would go, taking mats and cooking pots with her, to stay until her father came back. When some of the islanders betrayed meddlesome curiosity as to her motives, and the missionaries declared they scented scandal, Vaiti silenced and terrified the one, and convinced the others that she was hopelessly beyond the pale, by giving out that she was something of a witch, and meant to go into the forest to gather and prepare certain powerful charms. These, she said, would injure only her enemies, but were altogether powerless to hurt anyone who spoke well of her. In consequence, the evil tongues of Liali received a sudden check.
Furthermore, Vaiti, neglecting the half-castes and the whites, began with considerable art to make herself popular among the natives. She dressed herself Liali fashion, and arranged her hair after the island modes. She joined in all their interminable boating journeys and picnics, and was never tired of sitting cross-legged on the ground, waving her arms and head in time with a hundred others, and chanting Lialian songs that lasted an afternoon apiece. After dark, she was often to be seen out on the reef, with a torch and a fishing spear making an exhibition of piscatorial skill that astonished even the Lialians themselves. When there was an unmissionary dance in some big chief-house, Vaiti was always there, decked with wreaths and flower necklaces, and polished with cocoanut oil, turning the heads of all the young men by the grace of her dancing, and winning the astonished approval of the women by the cool reserve with which she received every advance of a sentimental nature. Both Mahina and Litia took jealous fancies to her—thus acquiring yet one more cause of mutual dissension—and separately poured all their woes into her ear. She was wonderfully sympathetic, and urged each one on to assert her rights and stand no nonsense; insomuch that before very long the island was fairly ringing with what Litia's people meant to do to Mahina's, and what Mahina's would certainly do to Litia's, in the event of the King selecting one or the other.
Somebody about this time—it was never ascertained who—spread a report that Captain Saxon of theSybilhad a number of trade rifles on board his ship, and several cases of cartridges. The talk began to take a more dangerous turn. The schooner would not be back till the wedding was over, it was said, but let the winning party look out for themselves when she did come! The Lialians, under missionary rule, had been peaceful and law-abiding people for almost a whole generation; but they had not yet forgotten that they were once the masters of the Pacific, and that of all the warlike island races, none had been such fighters as they.... The older men began to snuff battle in the air, walked about with their chests flung out, and told bloodthirsty ancient stories to the younger Lialians. The women sang war songs at the evening gatherings in the chief-houses, and Mahina and Litia began to go about followed by bands of eager partisans. Liali was certainly warming up.