But he had merely risen to take his leave.
"Well, I won't be lingering, Pastor," he said. "Not this time. You stop by my shack to-morrow, and we'll talk further. Maybe I might have some facts that would interest you. What I really came for to-night was to bring a bit of news."
"News?" blinked the pastor.
"You should go below and look to your chapel," chuckled Gregson. "I minded what you said about new lamps being wanted, d'y' see? And so I made bold to hang two fine brass lights in the porch there myself—as a gift-offering."
"For us! For the church—?"
"Aye. It's a small thing. But I've noticed myself lately how those lamps were needed." He paused. "That's a plaguey dark place for lurking and loitering—that chapel porch."
He was gone; the Reverend Spener had returned from escorting him to the step and was still formulating praise and gratitude; but Miss Matilda had not stirred.
"Matilda—! I'm speaking to you. I say—we've been less than just to Captain Gregson, don't you think? Really, a most hearty, true gentleman. Did I tell you he's settled the difficulty with Jeremiah'sLoo offhand? Oh, quite. One word from him, and they're asking for a church wedding now. And there are other things I might tell you as well—"
She turned to look full at her father.
"There is one thing I wish you might tell me. What did you bring that man here for?"
The pastor went a pinker shade.
"I didn't bring him. He came of his own motion. He desired most earnestly to come."
"You gave him permission?"
"I did; after he had explained—after he showed me—Matilda.... The short of it is, we've wronged Captain Gregson. You have heard that he used to live with a native girl on Napuka?"
"Everybody has heard it."
"Well," said the pastor, solemnly, "he was married to that girl. I've seen the certificate—quite regular—signed by the Moravian missionary. There were no children, and also—and also my dear, he is now free. He received word by yesterday's schooner of the death of—er—Mrs. Gregson. You see?"
"Ah—!" breathed Miss Matilda, who did indeed begin to see.
He laid a hand on her arm and gave way at last to a paternal quaver. "Matilda, my child—for you are still a child in many things—I have taken anxious thought for you of late. Very anxious thought. You must trust me, my dear. Trust me to do the best for your welfare—and happiness too—as always. Good night!"...
He left her a dry kiss and a fervent blessing and they parted; the pastor to write a particularly hopeful mission report, and this child of his—who was, by the way, twenty-nine years old—to keep a last tryst with a lawless and forbidden love. She knew it must be the last. For the previous one, two nights before, had been held in the porch of the chapel—in that same dark porch so benevolently, so deceitfully endowed by Captain Hull Gregson....
A Rex Ingram—Metro Picture.A Rex Ingram—Metro Picture.Where the Pavement Ends.A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.
Her own room opened directly on the veranda. She paused only long enough to snatch up a shawl, as she passed through to the far side of the house. Here she could be safe from hostile ears where the mountain torrent ran thundering; safe from prying eyes in the velvet shadows of the passion-vine.
She parted the leaves and harkened. A soft, thin trilling came up to her from the edge of the guava jungle in the ravine, a mere silver thread of melody against the stream's broad clamor. And then as she leaned farther out, so that her face showed for a moment like a pale blossom in the trellis, Motauri came. He came drifting through the moonlight with a wreath of green about his head, a flower chain over his broad, bare shoulders, clad only in a kilted whitepareu—the very spirit of youth and strength and joyous, untrammeled freedom, stepped down from the days when Faunus himself walked abroad.
"Hokoolele!" he called gently, and smiled up toward her, the most splendid figure of a man her eyes had ever beheld. "Star" was his name for her, though indeed she was a very wan and shrinking one, and so to lend her courage he sang the crooning native love-song that runs somewhat like this:
"Bosom, here is love for you,O bosom, cool as night!How you refresh me as with dew,Your coolness gives delight!"Rain is cold upon the hillAnd water in the pool;But, oh, my heart is yearning stillFor you, O bosom cool!"
"There is a night thistle blooming up the ravine,"he said, "that looks just like the candle-tree you lighted in the church last month. Do you remember, Hokoolele? When I peeped through the window and you were afraid the folk would see me? Ho-ho! Afraid the 'Klistian' folk would see their bad brother outside? But this is much prettier.... Come and see if you can light the thistle."
She kept close to the shadow.
"Are you going to be afraid again?" he asked. "There is no one on the whole mountain to-night. They are all down by the chapel staring at the new lamps and parading themselves along the path. Two great big fireflies by the path! You should see how they shine through the trees."...
He seated himself on the veranda steps and laughed up over the shoulder at her—laughter like a boy's or like a pagan god's.
It was that had tinged and made so live and subtle the fascination he exercised upon her; his unspoiled innocence, his utter, wild simplicity that struck back to the ultimate sources. She could never have felt so toward any of the mission converts, with their woolen shirts and their shoes of ceremony, their hymns and glib, half-comprehended texts; with the fumbling thumb-marks of civilization on their souls. Motauri had never submitted to the first term of the formula. Motauri followed the old first cult of sea and sun, of whispering tree and budding flower. He was the man from the beginning of things, from before Eden; and she who carried in her starved heart the hunger of the first woman—she loved him.
She sank to her knees on the veranda edge above him there and leaned forward with clasped hands to see the soft glow in his deep-lashed eyes, the glint of his even teeth; to catch the sweet breath of jasmine that always clung about him.
"Motauri—" she said, in the liquid tongue thatwas as easy to her as her own, "I am afraid. Oh, I am—I am afraid!"
"What should you fear? I have promised nothing shall hurt you. The jungle is my friend."
"It is not that. I fear my father, Motauri—and—and that man—Gregson."
She could see his smile fade in the moonlight. "The trader?" he said. "Very many fear him. But he is only a cheat and an oppressor of poor people with things to sell and to buy. What has the trader to do with you?"
"He knows—I am sure he knows about us," she breathed. "He knows. Even now he may be watching—!"
Hurriedly she told him of the day's strange development, of her father's sudden friendship with the powerful white man and Gregson's crafty, malicious hints.
"I do not know what he means to do, but for you and for me this is the end, Motauri," she said, wistfully. "I dare not see you any more—I would not dare. It is not permitted, and I am frightened to think what might happen to you. You must go away quickly." Her timid fingers rested on his close, wavy locks, all crisped and scented with the juice of the wild orange. "It is finished, Motauri," she sighed. "This is the end."
But Motauri's mouth had set, his boyish brows had coiled and firmed, and his glance was bright. He drew closer to her with a lithe movement.
"This is the end?" he echoed. "Then I know how. White star of the night—listen to me now, for I have seen how it must end. Yes—I have known this would come....
"Here in Wailoa you behold me one apart, because I do not seek to do as the white men, or kneel intheir temple, or make empty outcry to their gods. Here is not my rightful home. But around the coast two hours' journey, is the little bay of Huapu where dwell some of my people who have never given up their own customs, and there I am truly a high chief, for my fathers used to rule over all the bays. Sweet are the young cocoanuts of Huapu, and the mangoes and the wild plantains of the hillside—sweet and mellow. There in the woods the moss grows deep and soft for a couch, and for shelter are the broad leaves—for hearth the great prostrate tree trunk that holds fire always in its heart. Like mine—white star—like mine!
"Once I would not have ventured, Hokoolele. Once I looked at you from afar, dreaming only of you as one who had dropped from the sky—so different from my kind. But you are my life and the light of my life, and I have touched you and found you real—strange and beautiful, but real—
"Bosom, here is love for you,PublishedPublishedO bosom, cool as night!"
He caught her hands in both of his.
"Come with me now, for always. I will take you away to the groves of Huapu. There we will laugh and dance and sing all the day through, and I will bring you water in a fern-leaf and weave you flower chains and climb to pluck you the rarest fruits, and build a nest to keep you safe. There you shall never be sad any more, or wearied, or lonely—or afraid. Because I will be with you always, always—Hokoolele! Come with me to-night!"...
Then the maiden soul of Miss Matilda was torn like a slender, upright palm in the tropic hurricane, for a lover's arm was about her waist and a lover's importunate breath against her cheek, and thesethings were happening to her for the first time in her life.
"No—no, Motauri!" She struggled inexpertly, fluttering at his touch, bathed in one swift flush. "My father—!" she gasped.
"What does it matter? Your father shall marry us any way he pleases—afterward. But we will live in Huapu forever!"
And with a sudden dizzied weakening she saw that this was true and that she had treasured the knowledge for this very moment. Her father would marry them. He would marry them as he married Jeremiah's Loo and the shell-buyer—"and only too thankful." Curious that the conventional fact should have pleaded with the night's spiced fragrance, with the bland weight of the island zephyr on her eyelids, with the vibrant contact of young flesh and the answering madness in her veins. Curious, too, that her dread and loathing of the man Gregson should have urged her the same way. But so they did, reason fusing with desire like spray with wind, and all conspiring to loose her from the firm hold of habit and training.
"We can go now—this minute," Motauri was whispering. "There are boats to be had below on the beach. We can reach Huapu before morning. None shall see us go."
"You forget the path—the people—" She could hardly frame the words with her lips.
"And Gregson's lights on the chapel—!"
But Motauri laughed low for love and pride.
"I do not use a path. Am I a village-dweller to need steps to my feet? The mountain is path enough for me. That way!... Straight down to the shore."
"By the ravine?" she cried stricken. "Impossible! It has never been done. No one can climb down there. It is death!"
"It is life!" With the word he swept her up like a wisp of a thing in his strong arms. "And also I am not 'no one,' but your captor, Hokoolele. I have caught my star from the sky. See—thus is it done!"...
Such was the elopement of Miss Matilda, when she left her father's house and her father's faith in very much the same manner as her remote maternal ancestor went about the same sort of affair somewhere back in the Stone Age. And in truth Miss Matilda was living the Stone Age for the half hour it took Motauri to get them both down the untracked mountain side. How they managed she never afterward knew. Not that she slept, or fainted, or indulged in any twentieth century tantrum. But it was all too tense to hold.
Of that descent she retained chiefly a memory of the stream and its voices, now low and urgent, now babbling and chuckling in her ear. At times they groped through its luminous mists, again waded from stone to stone in the current or lowered themselves by its brink among the tangled roots. It hurried them, hid them, showed them the way, set the high pulse for their hearts and the pace for their purpose like an exultant accomplice. Nor did Miss Matilda shrink from its ardor.
Once embarked, she had no further fear. Unguessed forces awoke in her. With the hands that had never handled anything rougher than crewelwork she chose her grip along the tough ladder of looped lianas. As confidently as a creature of the wild she sprang across a gulf, or threw herself to the cliff, or slipped to the man's waiting clasp on the next lower ledge. Massed shadows, shifting patches of moonlight, the glimpsed abyss and silvered sea far down—these held no terrors. Sharp danger and quick recovery, sliding moss and rasping rock, the clutch of thorn and creeper—all the rude intricacies of wet earth and teeming jungle seemed things accepted and accessory. She was tinglingly alive, gloriously alert. This was her wonderful night, the great adventure that somehow fulfilled a profound expectancy of her being.
Only at the chute she could not hope to aid. Motauri meant to find a certain slanted fault beyond the last break that offered like a shelf. If they could reach that, they might clamber under the very spout of the hissing outfall, drenched but comparatively safe, for the rest was no more than a scrubby staircase that bore away leftward to the gentler slopes of the valley and the beach below. He told her his plan, then swung her up again and took the whole task to himself, easing inch by inch down the narrow channel. The water boiled and raved about his knees; she could see the streak of its solid flood ahead, where it straightened for a last rush, where the least misstep must dash them down the glistening runaway into space.
But she would not look ahead. She looked at the dim, adorable face so near her own, at the carven lip, the quivering, arched nostril, the fine, proud carriage and dauntless glance of her godling. The flash of their eyes met sidelong. With a deep-drawn sigh of content she surrendered herself to him, drew her arms about his neck until she was pillowed on his smooth shoulder....
"Strange there should be no boats at this end," said Motauri.
They paused by the outskirts of the village and peered toward its clustered, ruddy firelights flickering out upon the shore. There was no one abroadon that empty, nebulous expanse, but they could hear stir and laughter among the huts and the shrill wailing of a child.
"It is still too early," he murmured, and led her back to the cover of a thicket.
Miss Matilda was aware of a slackening from the keen excitement and zested peril of their escape. She had a vague feeling that the boat should have been ready to waft them miraculously over star-lit seas.
"How are you going to get one?" she asked.
"Any of these people would lend me a dugout, but I thought merely to take the first at hand."
"I see none."
"No—they are gone. Perhaps the men are fishing on the reef to-night.... But that would be strange too," he added, perplexed.
Somehow the delay, the uncertainty, began to weigh upon her like an affront. She missed their wild communion, the high, buoying sense of romance and emprise and impossibilities trampled under foot. She missed the single complicity of the stream and its turbulent heartening. Here were voices too, but these were harsh and displeasing, common human voices. An odor of cookery and unclean hearths stole greasily down the air. The fretful child began screaming again and went suddenly silent at a brusque clap. Somebody fell to quarreling in a muttered monotone.
"What are you going to do?" she demanded.
"It will be better if I go search."
"You will not leave me—!"
"Only for a time. I must find someone who has a boat and borrow it. If there are no others, the trader will lend me his."
"Gregson—?"
"He cannot know what I want of it."
"Motauri—" she cried, appalled, "keep away from that man!"
"I have used his boat before," he soothed. "It will be all right. And we must—we must have a boat. Remember where we are."...
She had caught his wrist unwittingly, but now she released it. They stood so for a moment. She was remembering.
"Very well," she said, subdued.
"You will be safe here," he assured her. "Stay close in the brush. Nobody passes this last house. And when I come I will sing a little, very quietly, to let you know. Good-bye, Hokoolele—!"
"Good-bye," she said, with a catch at her throat and a strange foreboding.
Abruptly he had vanished....
How long Miss Matilda crouched in her thicket by the beach of Wailoa she could not have told. It seemed an eternity. The night clouded down, even the stars were veiled. An on-shore breeze whined forlornly across the sands. Her fever had passed. She was damp, bedraggled, bruised and aching, soiled with mud. The wind sought her out, cut through her limp garments.... She waited, shivering.
She was very much alone. She felt helpless beyond anything she had ever experienced, as if the props of life were fallen away. And so they were, for those she had known she had thrust behind and Motauri's magic no longer sustained her. Worse than all was the pressure gathering in her mind, a tide of doubt that she had to deny, like the rising fill in a lock. She dared not let herself think. Still no Motauri.
Benumbed, exhausted, sunk in hebetude, she waited until she could wait no more, until intolerable suspense drove her blindly. She crept through thebush and so came suddenly to the edge of a clearing by a native hut—to see what it was written she should see at that particular moment....
Before the door burned a blink of fire that revealed the dwelling and its tattered alcove of sewn leaves, as if the scene had been set with footlights. It was a very simple little domestic scene. On a fibre mat sprawled a woman. She might have been young, but she was old in the native way, flabby, coarse-grained, with sagging wrinkles, with lusterless hair streaming about her face. A ragged, sleeveless wrapper rendered her precarious service, bulging with flesh. At her side squatted a youngster, an imp of seven it might be, who noisily chewed a stick of sugarcane and spat wide the pith. The woman kept one hand free to admonish him—by his beady eye he required it—and to tend a simmering pot. With the other, tranquilly, she nursed a naked babe.
There was no reticence about that firelight, no possible illusion—and certainly no romance. In grim fidelity it threw up each bald detail, the cheerful dirt and squalor, the easy poverty, the clutter—the plain, animal, every-day facts of a savage home. It touched the bronze skins with splashes of copper, shone in the woman's vacant, bovine stare and gleamed along the generous swell of her breast. And just there it made a wholly candid display of the central figure in this pantomime—the brown babe. Not so brown as he would be some day, indeed quite softly tinted, but unmistakably Polynesian. A most elemental mite of humanity. A most eloquent interpreter of primordial delights. A fat little rascal, with a bobbing fuzzy poll and squirming limbs. And hungry—so very frankly, so very boisterously hungry—!
Miss Matilda went away from that place.
She had a confused idea of flight, but her feet were rebellious, and before she had taken twenty steps she was lost. Without direction, groping in the darkness, even then by some intuition she kept to the trees and the undergrowth for hiding. That was her only effective impulse—to hide. She could not go on. Under heaven there was no going back. People were awake all about her in the huts. More people would be strolling and skylarking along the chapel path, supposing she could have found it. She had the sole, miserable craving that the earth might open to receive her.
And thus it was chance alone that guided her course through the fringe of the village, through garden and sand strip, and that brought her finally, all unseen, to the wall of a large house, to a post, to a slatted gallery aglow inside with lamps, and to her second discovery....
"Curse your black soul!" a voice was saying, with heavy, slow brutality, "when I tell you to drink—you drink! D'y' hear?"
"No can do, Mahrster," came the faltering response, in the brokenbêche de merthat is the token of the white man's domination in the islands. "That fella rum taboo 'long me altogether."
"What do I care for your taboo?Drink!"
Fell an interval of silence.
"Drink again—drink hearty!"
Captain Hull Gregson sat leaning forward by the side of his living-room table, shoving down the length of it a glass that brimmed and sparkled redly. On his knee, in a fist like a ham, he balanced a black bottle. His jutted jaw took a line with the outthrust arm, with the lowering brow, as if the whole implacable force and will of the man were so projected.
And at the end, facing him, stood Motauri—a different, a sadly different Motauri. A Motauri not inthe least the joyous woodland faun in his attitude now. His proud crest was lowered, stripped of its wreath; his magnificent muscles drooped. He stood humbly, with chest collapsed, on shuffling feet, as became an inferior. He drew the back of his hand across his lips and eyed the white man furtively....
"That's better," grunted Gregson, and leaned back to set the bottle on the table amid a litter of odds and ends, books, papers, a revolver, a tarred tiller-rope with a roseknot. "Perhaps that'll loosen your tongue. First time I ever seen your breed hold off the stuff. But then, you're one of these independent lads, ain't you? Old chief stock, you call yourself. Plenty wild Kanaka, you.... Plenty bold, bad fella you—hey?"
"No, Mahrster," said Motauri, deprecating.
Gregson regarded him with a hard smile.
"And now you're going to tell me why you tried to sneak a boat at this hour o' night."
"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.
"You've said that a dozen times, and it's no better. It don't pass. Go fish? Go soak your black head! What are you up to, hey? Come now—tell."
Motauri made no answer, and the other controlled himself. Behind his dark mask the big trader was under the empire of some powerful emotion. His hands clenched and opened again, trembling a little. His face shone like wet leather. But it was in a tone oddly detached, musing, that he went on.
"You're smart. I don't say a Kanaka can't be smart when he wants to hide anything. He can. I ain't figgered you yet. And that's a mighty healthy thing for you, my boy, d'y' see? Because, if I could once make sure it was you I saw slipping away by the chapel hedge two nights ago, I'd—" A purplish haze suffused his cheek. "I'd dig the heart out of your carcass with my two hands," he ended, veryquietly, and hit the table so that it jumped. "Was it?" he roared.
"No-o, Mahrster," said Motauri.
"You lie—blast you—it was!"
"No, Mahrster."
"Was it you that's been hanging around that white fella girl b'long missionary—that's dared lift your dog's eyes to her?"
He crouched like a beast, ferine—all the obscure and diabolic passion of him ready to spring.
"No, Mahrster."
Gregson glared at him steadily.
"What did you want of that boat?"
"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.
The trader sat back again, plying his billowy silk handkerchief.
"The trouble with me—" he said, reflectively, "I can't believe my own eyes; that's the trouble with me. And how could I believe 'em?" he inquired, with almost a plaintive note. "Such things don't happen. They can't. Why—what kind of a man are you? Black, I believe—leastways brown. And she—she—
"A Kanaka. If not you, then another. A Kanaka! To know her, be near her—touch her—play all manner of pretty, cuddlin' tricks around her—to—to kiss her, maybe! To crush her up in his arms—!" The words came away from him hot and slow, from under half-shut eyes. "And I've sat here behind them slats and watched her go by and wished I might crawl where her little feet could walk on me....
"How should one of your sort have the cursed impudence to think of such things? What have you got to do with heaven? Couldyousee anything in that blind-like look sideways—and hair so smooth over the ear? Do you know what level eyebrows anda fullish underlip mean—hey? Do you? A lip like a drop of blood—
"What did you want that boat for?" he cried, in a terrible voice.
"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.
"I tell you one thing, you don't leave here till I'm sure. There's something rotten going on. I smell it. I'm on the track, and I'll never give up—never give up. Right now I've got the mission path watched by my own men. Nobody gets up or down without my knowing it—to-night or ever. D'y' mind that, before I screw the thumbs off you to make you talk?"
It was then that he heard the slight, sobbing breath in his gallery, the rattle of his slatted door that brought him to his feet and bounding across the room. Reaching into the darkness he dragged out the eaves-dropper—whose poor knees had simply given like paper, whose desperate effort to save herself had thrown her against the jamb and betrayed her—Miss Matilda....
"You—!" said Gregson. "You—!"
He dropped her by the threshold and started away from her with spread fingers and fallen jaw. For a time only the sound of his labored breathing filled the silence and the three stayed so, the woman collapsed against a chair, Motauri swaying and winking stupidly and Gregson, struck dumb, incredulous, empurpled at first and then slowly paling. Without a word he spun on his heel, returned to the table and poured himself a drink and tossed it off.
"Respectability!" he said, in the tone of conversation, caught his collar and ripped it loose. "By Heaven!" he cried, and wrung his great hands. "What am I going to do now? What am I going to do?"
His wandering glance lighted on the rope's end on the table-top, and he coiled it in his hand. He began to walk to and fro before them. His face was ghastly, his bloodshot blue eyes were set like jewels. Now he stopped before Motauri and looked him up and down curiously. Laughter took him like a hiccup: laughter not good to hear: but he left off as quickly. He came back and stood over the cowering figure on the floor.
"And you're the thing that was too good for me!"
He let his gaze possess her deliberately, noting each stain and smirch, her disordered dress and loosened hair, and pitiful, staring face.
"Well, you're not too good now," he said, wetting his lips. "No—you're none too good! You'll marry me to-morrow—and you'll crawl on your knees to have me. And that father of yours—that sniveling old hypocrite—he'll crawl to make the lines, if I choose....
"When I think how I've dreamed of you! How I've lived through days and nights of perdition, wanting you—you sweet, cold, white saint you—and a devil after all!
"To think how I've schemed and trembled and trembled and waited, afraid to say a word or make a move lest I'd queer any chance. Me—a common trader with a native wife that wouldn't die. And you up there on the hill so prim and fine. A missionary's daughter. Too respectable to touch! And what are you now—that's been out in the night—?"
He whirled around and the maddened, jealous rage and hate rose up in his soul like scum on a dark pool.
"With a nigger!" he screamed.
All his strength was behind the tiller-rope. It slashed Motauri over the face so that the red welt seemed to spurt. As he lifted his arm to repeat, with a strangled cry Motauri leapt upon him and the restwas fury. They fought baresark, interlocked and silent, spinning from side to side of the room. Gregson had the weight and the thews and the cunning. He kept the other's clutch away from his throat and maneuvred toward the table. As they reeled against it, he put forth a mighty effort, tore off Motauri and hurled him away for an instant—long enough to grab the revolver.
"Nigger—I said!"
But in the very gasp he choked. The weapon raised for a chopping, pointblank shot, dropped over his shoulder. He rocked, pressing at his heart, frowned heavily once, and fell crashing forward....
"Hokoolele! Hokoolele—! Up and make haste!"
Miss Matilda lifted her face from her hands.
"Let us hurry while there is time," urged Motauri, thickly. "No one has seen or heard us yet. His boat-shed is open. We are safe!"
"Go away from me!" said Miss Matilda.
"What do you say?" he stammered. "Come. Nobody will stop us. Nobody will know anything, about us—"
She fended him off with a gesture of instinctive loathing....
"Please go—"
"But you cannot stay here! It would be a very evil thing for you if you were found in this house. It must never be known you were here at all."
"Don't touch me!" That seemed the only important thing.
"Hokoolele—what of the golden chain of love between us? Come with me now!"
"I was mad. I was blind. It is judgment!"
He regarded her sorrowfully, but sternly too.
"You mean you do not want me any more?"
"No—!" she moaned, in the stupor of horror and despair. And then the brown man, the native, whose blood had been roused by every agency that can stir wild blood to frenzy—by love and shame, by drink, by battle and triumph—then Motauri, the high chief, struck unerringly to the heart of the matter and made his swift decision by his own primitive lights. Recovering her shawl he wrapped it about her tightly, caught her up once more willy-nilly in his arms and bore her away from that sinister place by force....
She was lying on a bench in the veranda of her father's house and her father himself was calling her name, when she came to herself.
"Matilda, I'm speaking to you! Where are you?"
He came through the window of her room.
"Gracious me!—have you been sleeping out there?"
She could only stare at him and down at the twisted shawl about her, for it seemed it must be so, she had only been sleeping—with what dreams!
But his next words showed her the truth.
"Matilda, my dear," he quavered, "you must prepare yourself. Be brave. Something dreadful has happened. One of Captain Gregson's boys has just come up from the village with terrible news. The Captain is dead! He had some kind of a stroke, it seems—very sudden—all alone at the time. I shall have to hurry right down. And at this hour too, when the woods are so damp! What a loss, what a loss, Matilda, when I had so hoped—!"
He left her, and it came to her then that she too had hoped and that she too had lost. The mountain stream was singing in her ears, and it seemed threaded with mockery. The moonlight came filtering through the vine, and it was old and cold. Her wonderful night was over. She was safe. Her lifewould begin again where she had dropped it, in formulated routine, and nobody would ever know—unless Motauri—
Some curious twinge, half fearful, half regretful, drove her to peer through the leaves and to listen for his crooning song.
"Bosom, here is love for you,O bosom, cool as night!"
But it did not come. She was to listen for it many times, and it was never to come. Having reached such heights and depths that night, having achieved the impossible and the doubly impossible, going down the stream and climbing it again, Motauri had gone down once more and at last by way of the chute and the outfall. For Motauri was a gentleman of sorts. But perhaps, because he was also a pagan, he had been at some pains before that final descent to enmesh his wrists firmly and helplessly in a knotted tendril from the passion-vine.
The possessions of Christopher Alexander Pellett were these: his name, which he was always careful to retain intact; a suit of ducks, no longer intact, in which he lived and slept; a continuous thirst for liquor, and a set of red whiskers. Also he had a friend. Now, no man can gain friendship, even among the gentle islands of Polynesia, except by virtue of some quality attaching to him. Strength, humor, villainy: he must show some trait by which the friend can catch and hold. How, then, explain the loving devotion lavished upon Christopher Alexander Pellett by Karaki, the company boat boy? This was the mystery at Fufuti.
There was no harm in Pellett. He never quarreled. He never raised his fist. Apparently he had never learned that a white man's foot, though it wabble ever so much, is given him wherewith to kick natives out of the road. He never even cursed any one except himself and the Chinese half-caste who sold him brandy: which was certainly allowable because the brandy was very bad.
On the other hand, there was no perceptible good in him. He had long lost the will to toil, and latterly even the skill to beg. He did not smile, nor dance, nor exhibit any of the amiable eccentricities that sometimes recommend the drunken to a certain toleration. In any other part of the world he must have passed without a struggle. But some chance had drifted him to the beaches where life is as easy as a song and his particular fate had given him a friend. And so hepersisted. That was all. He persisted, a sodden lump of flesh preserved in alcohol....
Karaki, his friend, was a heathen from Bougainville, where some people are smoked and others eaten. Being a black, a Melanesian, he was as much an alien in brown Fufuti as any white. He was a serious, efficient little man with deeply sunken eyes, a great mop of kinky hair, and a complete absence of expression. His tastes were simple. He wore a red cotton kerchief belted around his waist and a brass curtain ring suspended from his nose.
Some powerful chief in his home island had sold Karaki into the service of the trading company for three years, annexing his salary of tobacco and beads in advance. When the time should be accomplished, Karaki would be shipped back to Bougainville, a matter of some eight hundred miles, where he would land no richer than before except in experience. This was the custom. Karaki may have had plans of his own.
It is seldom that one of the black races of the Pacific shows any of the virtues for which subject populations are admired. Fidelity and humility can be exacted from other colors between tan and chocolate. But the black remains the inscrutable savage. His secret heart is his own. Hence the astonishment of Fufuti, which knew the ways of black recruits, when Karaki took the worthless beachcomber to his bosom.
"Hy, you, Johnny," called Moy Jack, the Chinese half-caste. "Better you come catch this fella mahster b'long you. He fella plenty too much drunk, galow."
Karaki left the shade of the copra shed where he had been waiting an hour or more and came forward to receive the sagging bulk that was thrust out of doors. He took it scientifically by wrist and armpit and swung toward the beach. Moy Jack stood on his threshold watching with cynic interest.
"Hy, you," he said; "what name you make so much bobeley 'long that fella mahster? S'pose you bling me all them fella pearl; me pay you one dam fella good trade—my word!"
It annoyed Moy Jack that he had to provide the white man with a daily drunk in exchange for the little seed pearls with which Pellett was always flush. He knew where those pearls came from. Karaki did forbidden diving in the lagoon to get them. Moy Jack made a good thing of the traffic, but he could have made a much better thing by trading directly with Karaki for a few sticks of tobacco.
"What name you give that fella mahster all them fella pearl?" demanded Moy Jack offensively. "He plenty too much no good, galow. Close up he die altogether."
Karaki did not reply. He looked at Moy Jack once, and the half-caste trailed off into mutterings. For an instant there showed a strange light in Karaki's dull eyes, like the flat, green flicker of a turning shark glimpsed ten fathoms down....
Karaki bore his charge down the beach to the little thatched shelter of pandanus leaves that was all his home. Tenderly he eased Pellett to a mat, pillowed his head, bathed him with cool water, brushed the filth from his hair and whiskers. Pellett's whiskers were true whiskers, the kind that sprout like the barbels of a catfish, and they were a glorious coppery, sun-gilt red. Karaki combed them out with a sandalwood comb. Later he sat by with a fan and kept the flies from the bloated face of the drunkard.
It was a little past midday when something brought him scurrying into the open. For weeks he had been studying every weather sign. He knew that the change was due when the southeast trade begins to harden through this flawed belt of calms and cross winds. And now, as he watched, the sharp shadows began toblur along the sands and a film crept over the face of the sun.
All Fufuti was asleep. The house boys snored in the back veranda. Under his netting the agent dreamed happily of big copra shipments and bonuses. Moy Jack dozed among his bottles. Nobody would have been mad enough to stir abroad in the noon hour of repose: nobody but Karaki, the untamed black, who cared nothing for custom nor yet for dreams. The light pad of his steps was lost in the surf drone on the barrier reefs. He flitted to and fro like a wrath. And while Fufuti slept he applied himself to a job for which he had never been hired....
Karaki had long ago ascertained two vital facts: where the key to the trade room was kept and where the rifles and ammunition were hidden. He opened the trade room and selected three bolts of turkey red cloth, a few knives, two cases of tobacco, and a fine small ax. There was much else he might have taken as well. But Karaki was a man of simple tastes, and efficient.
With the ax he next forced the rifle chest and removed therefrom one Winchester and a big box of cartridges. With the ax again he broke into the boat sheds. Finally with the ax he smashed the bottoms out of the whaleboat and the two cutters so they would be of no use to any one for many days to come. It was really a very handy little ax, a true tomahawk, ground to a shaving edge. Karaki took a workman's pleasure in its keen, deep strokes. It was almost his chief prize.
On the beach lay a big proa, a stout outrigger canoe; of the kind Karaki's own people used at Bougainville, so high of prow and stern as to be nearly crescent-shaped. The northwest monsoon of last season had washed it ashore at Fufuti, and Karaki had repairedit, by the agent's own order. This proa he now launched in the lagoon, and aboard of it he stored his loot.
Of supplies he had to make a hasty selection. He took a bag of rice and another of sweet potatoes. He took as many coconuts as he could carry in a net in three trips. He took a cask of water and a box of biscuit.
And here happened an odd thing.
In his search for the biscuit he came upon the agent's private store of liquor, a dozen bottles of rare Irish whisky. He glanced at them and passed them by. He knew what the stuff was, and he was a savage, a black man. But he passed it by. When Moy Jack heard of that later he remembered what he had seen in Karaki's eyes and ventured the surprising prediction that Karaki would never be taken alive.
When all was ready Karaki went back to his thatch and aroused Christopher Alexander Pellett.
"Hy, mahster, you come 'long me."
Mr. Pellett sat up and looked at him. That is to say, he looked. Whether he saw anything or not belongs among the obscurer questions of psychopathy.
"Too late," said Mr. Pellett profoundly. "This shop is closed. Copy boy! Give all those damned loafers good night. I'm—I'm goin'—bed!"
Whereupon he fell flat on his back.
"Wake up, mahster," insisted Karaki, shaking him. "You too much strong fella sleep. Hy-ah, mahster! Rum! You like'm rum? You catch'm rum any amount—my word! Plenty rum, mahster!"
But even this magic call, which never failed to rouse Pellett from his couch in the mornings, fell now on deaf ears. Pellett had had his skinful, and the fitness of things decreed that he should soak the clock around.
Karaki knelt beside him, pried him up until he couldget a shoulder under his middle, and lifted him like a loose bag of meal. Pellett weighed one hundred and fifty pounds; Karaki not much more than a hundred. Yet in some deft coolie fashion of his own the little black man packed his burden, with the feet dragging behind, clear down to the beach. Moreover, he managed to get it aboard the proa. Pellett was half drowned and the proa half swamped. But Karaki managed.
No man saw their departure. Fufuti still dreamed on. Long before the agent awoke to wrath and ruin their queer crescent craft had slipped from the lagoon and faded away on the wings of the trade.
That first day Karaki had all he could do to keep the proa running straight before the wind. Big smoky seas came piling up out of the southeast and would have piled aboard if he had given them the least chance. He was only a heathen who did not know a compass from a degree of latitude. But his forefathers used to people these waters on cockleshell voyages that make the venture of Columbus look like a ride in a ferry-boat. Karaki bailed with a tin pan and sailed with a mat and steered with a paddle: but he proceeded.
Along about sunrise Mr. Pellett stirred in the bilge and raised a peagreen face. He took one bewildered glance overside at the seething waste and collapsed with a groan. After a decent interval he tried again, but this was an illusion that would not pass, and he twisted around to Karaki sitting crouched and all aglisten with spray in the stern.
"Rum!" he demanded.
Karaki shook his head, and a haunted look crept into Pellett's eyes.
"Take—take away all that stuff," he begged pathetically, pointing at the ocean....
Thereafter for two days he was very, very sick, and he learned how a small boat in any kind of a sea can move forty-seven different ways within one and the same minute. This is no trifling bit of knowledge, as those who have acquired it can tell. It was nearly fatal to Pellett.
On the third day he awoke with a mouth and a stomach of fumed leather and a great weakness, but otherwise in command of his few faculties. The gale had fallen and Karaki was quietly preparing fresh coconuts. Pellett quaffed two before he thought to miss the brandy with which his breakfast draft was always laced. But when he remembered the milk choked in his throat.
"Me like'm rum."
"No got'm rum."
Pellett looked forward and aft, to windward and to lee. There was a great deal of horizon in sight, but nothing else. For the first time he was aware of a strangeness in events.
"What name you come so far?" he asked.
"We catch'm one big fella wind," explained Karaki.
Pellett was in no condition to question his statement nor to observe from the careful stocking of the proa that they had not been blown to sea on a casual fishing trip. Pellett had other things to think of. Some of the things were pink and others purple and others were striped like the rainbow in most surprising designs, and all were highly novel and interesting. They came thronging out of the vasty deep to entertain Christopher Alexander Pellett. Which they did.
You cannot cut off alcohol from a man who has been continuously pickled for two years without results more or less picturesque. These were days when the proa went shouting across the empty southern seas to madrigal and choric song. Tied hand and foot and lashed under a thwart, Pellett raved in the numbersof his innocent youth. It would have been singular hearing had there been any to hear, but there was only Karaki, who did not care for the lesser Cavalier poets and on whom whole pages of "Atalanta in Calydon" were quite wasted. Now and then he threw a dipper-ful of sea water over the white man, or spread a mat to keep the sun from him, or fed him coconut milk by force. Karaki was a poor audience, but an excellent nurse. Also, he combed Pellett's whiskers twice every day.
They ran into calms. But the trade picked them up again more gently, so that Karaki ventured to make westing, and they fled under skies as bright as polished brass.
My heart is within meAs an ash in the fire;Whosoever hath seen meWithout lute, without lyre,Shall sing of me grievous things,even things that were illto desire—
Thus chanted Christopher Alexander Pellett, whose face began to show a little more like flesh and a little less like rotten kelp....
Whenever a fair chance offered Karaki landed on the lee of some one of the tiny islets with which the Santa Cruz region is peppered and would make shift to cook rice and potatoes in the tin dipper. This was risky, for one day the islet proved to be inhabited. Two white men in a cutter came out to stop them. Karaki could not hide his resemblance to a runaway nigger, and he did not try to. But when the cutter approached within fifty yards he suddenly announced himself as a runaway nigger with a gun. He left the cutter sinking and one of the men dead.
"There's a bullet hole alongside me here," said Pellett from under the thwart. "You'd better plug it."
Karaki plugged it and released his passenger, who sat up and began stretching himself with a certain naive curiosity of his own body.
"So you're real," observed Pellett, staring hard at Karaki. "By George, youare, and that's comfort."
He was right. Karaki was very real.
"What side you take'm this fella canoe?"
"Balbi," said Karaki, using the native word for Bougainville.
Pellett whistled. An eight-hundred-mile evasion in an open boat was a considerable undertaking. It enlisted his respect. Moreover, he had just had emphatic proof of the efficiency of this little black man.
"Balbi all some home b'long you?"
"Yes."
"All right, commodore," said Pellett. "Lead on. I don't know why you shipped me for supercargo, but I'll see you through."
Strangely—or perhaps not so strangely—the whole Fufuti interval of his history had been fading from his brain while the poison was ebbing from his tissues. The Christopher Alexander Pellett that emerged was one from earlier years: pretty much of a wreck, it was true, and a feckless, indolent, paltry creature at best, but ordinarily human and rather more than ordinarily intelligent.
He was very feeble at first, but Karaki's diet of coconuts and sweet potatoes did wonders for him, and the time came when he could rejoice in the good salt taste of the spray on his lips and forget for hours together the crazy craving for stimulant. They made a strange crew, this pair—simple savage and convalescent drunkard—but there was never any question as to which was in command. That was well seen in the third week when their food began to fail and Pellett noticed that Karaki ate nothing for a whole day.
"See here, this won't do," he cried. "You've given me the last coconut and kept none for yourself."
"Me no like'm eat," said Karaki shortly.
Christopher Alexander Pellett pondered many matters in long, idle hours while the rush of foam under the proa and the creak and fling of her outriggers were the only sounds between sea and sky. Sometimes his brow was knotted with pain. It is not always pleasant to be wrenched back into level contact with one's memories. Thoughts are no sweeter company for having long been drowned. He had met the horrors of delirium. He had now to face the livelier devils of his past. He had fled them before.
But here was no escape of any kind. So he turned and grappled with them and laid them one by one.
When they had been at sea twenty-nine days they had nothing left of their provisions but a little water. Karaki doled it out by moistening a shred of coconut husk and giving Pellett the shred to suck. In spite of Pellett's petulant protest, he would take none himself. Again the heathen nursed the derelict, this time through the last stages of thirst, scraping the staves of the cask and feeding him the ultimate drop of moisture on the point of a knife.
On the thirty-sixth day from Fufuti they sighted Choiseul, a great green wall that built up slowly across the west.
Once fairly under its headlands, Karaki might have indulged a certain triumph. He had taken as his target the whole length of the Solomons, some six hundred miles. But to have fetched the broadside of them anywhere in such a craft as the proa through storm and current, without instrument or chart, was distinctly a feat of navigation. Karaki, however, did no celebrating. Instead, he stared long and anxiously over his shoulder into the east.
The wind had been fitful since morning. By noon it was dead calm on a restless, oily sea. A barometer would have told evil tales, but Karaki must have guessed them anyway, for he staggered forward and unstepped the little mast. Then he bound all his cargo securely under the thwarts and put all his remaining strength into the paddle, heading for a small outpost island where a line of white showed beach. They had been very lucky thus far, but they were still two miles off-shore when the first rush of the hurricane caught them.
Karaki himself was reduced to a rattle of bones in a dried skin, and Pellett could scarce lift a hand. But Karaki fought for Pellett among the waves that leaped up like sheets of fire on the reef. Why or how they got through neither could have said. Perhaps because it was written that after drink, illness, madness, and starvation the white man should be saved by the black man again and a last time from ravening waters. When they came ashore on the islet they were both nearly flayed, but they were alive, and Karaki still gripped Pellett's shirt....
For a week they stayed while Pellett fattened on unlimited coconut and Karaki tinkered the proa. It had landed in a water-logged tangle, but Karaki's treasures were safe. He got his bearings from a passing native fisherman, and then he knew thatallhis treasures were safe. His home island lay across Bougainville Strait, the stretch of water just beyond....
"Balbi over there?" asked Pellett.
"Yes," said Karaki.
"And a mighty good thing too," cried Pellett heartily. "This is the limit of British authority, old boy. Big fella mahster b'long Beretani stop'm here, no can go that side."
Karaki was quite aware of it. If he feared one thing in the world, he feared the Fiji High Court and itsResident Commissioner for the Southern Solomons, who did sure justice upon all who transgressed in its jurisdiction. Once beyond the Strait he might still be liable for the stolen goods and the broken contract. But never—this was the point—never could he be punished for anything he might choose to do over there in Bougainville.
So Karaki was content.
And so was Christopher Alexander Pellett. His body had been wrung and swept and scoured, and he had downed his devils. Sweet air and sunshine were on his lips and in his heart. His bones were sweet in him. As his vigor returned he swam the lagoon or helped Karaki at the proa. He would spend hours hugging the warm sand or rejoicing in the delicate tracery of some tiny sea shell, singing softly to himself while the ground swell hushed along the beach, savoring life as he never had done.
"Oh, this is good—good!" he said.
Karaki puzzled him. Not that he vexed himself, for a smiling wonder at everything, almost childlike, filled him these days. But he thought of this taciturn savage, how he had capped thankless service with rarest sacrifice.
And now that he could consider soberly, the why of it eluded him. Why? Affection? Friendship? It must be so, and he warmed toward the silent little man with the sunken eyes and the expressionless face from which he could never raise a wink.
"Hy, you, Karaki, what name you no laugh all same me? What? You too much fright 'long that fella stuff you steal? Forget it, you old black scamp. If they ever trouble you, I'll square them somehow. By George, I'll say I stole it myself!"
Karaki only grunted and sat down to clean his Winchester with a bit of rag and some drops of oil he had crushed from a dried coconut.
"No, that don't reach him either," murmured Pellett, baffled. "I'd like to know what's going on under that topknot of yours, old chap. You're like Kipling's cat, that walks by himself. God knows I'm not ungrateful. I wish I could show you—"
He sprang up.
"Karaki! Me one big fella friend 'long you: savee? You one big fella friend 'long me: savee? We two dam big fella friend, my word!... What?"
"Yes," said Karaki. No other response. He looked at Pellett and he looked away toward Bougainville. "Yes," he said, "my word," and went on cleaning his gun—the black islander, inscrutable, incomprehensible, an enigma always, and to the end.
The end came two days later at Bougainville.
Under a gorgeous dawn they came into a bay that opened before their prow as with jeweled arms of welcome. The land lay lapped in bright garments like a sleeper half awakened, all flushed and smiling, sensuous intimate, thrilling with life, breathing warm scents—
These were some of the foolish phrases Pellett babbled to himself as he leaped ashore and ran up on a rocky point to see and to feel and to draw all the charm of the place to himself.
Meanwhile Karaki, that simple and efficient little man, was proceeding methodically about his own affairs. He landed his bolts of cloth, his tobacco, his knives, and the other loot. He landed his box of cartridges and his rifle and his fine tomahawk. The goods were somewhat damaged by sea water, but the weapons had been carefully cleaned and polished....
Pellett was declaiming poetry aloud to the alluring solitude when he was aware of a gentle footfall and turned, surprised to find Karaki standing just behind him with the rifle at his hip and the ax in his hand.
"Well," said Pellett cheerfully, "what d'you want, old chappie?"
"Me like," said Karaki, while there gleamed in his eyes the strange light that Moy Jack had glimpsed there, like the flicker of a turning shark; "me like'm too much one fella head b'long you!"
"What? Head! Whose—my head?"
"Yes," said Karaki simply.
That was the way of it. That was all the mystery. The savage had fallen enamored of the head of the beachcomber, and Christopher Alexander Pellett had been betrayed by his fatal red whiskers. In Karaki's country a white man's head, well smoked, is a thing to be desired above wealth, above lands and chiefships, fame, and the love of women. In all Karaki's country was no head like the head of Pellett. Therefore Karaki had served to win it with the patience and single faith of a Jacob. For this he had schemed and waited, committed theft and murder, expended sweat and cunning, starved and denied himself, nursed, watched, tended, fed, and saved his man that he might bring the head alive and on the hoof—so to speak—to the spot where he could remove it at leisure and enjoy the fruits of his labor in safety.
Pellett saw all this at a flash, understood it so far as any white could understand: the whole elemental and stupendous simplicity of it. And standing there in his new strength and sanity under the fair promise of the morning, he gave a laugh that pealed across the waters and started the sea birds from their cliffs, the deep-throated laugh of a man who fathoms and accepts the last great jest....
For finally, by corrected list, the possessions of Christopher Alexander Pellett were these: his name, still intact; the ruins of some rusty ducks; his precious red whiskers—and a soul which had been neatlyrecovered, renewed, refurbished, reanimated, and restored to him by his good friend Karaki.
"Thou shouldst die as he dies,For whom none sheddeth tears;Filling thine eyesAnd fulfilling thine earsWith the brilliance ... the bloomand the beauty...."
Thus chanted Christopher Alexander Pellett over the waters of the bay, and then whirled, throwing wide his arms:
"Shoot, damn you! It's cheap at the price!"