"Hello! what's this?""Hello! what's this?"
"Hello! what's this?""Hello! what's this?"
"A present—for Aunt Jannet, I should say," laughed Blair. "Some dusky admirer bringing tribute."
"A thankoffering to the wounded warriors," said Evans.
"An unusually fine coco-nut," said Stuart, tipping it with his usable foot. "Carefully wrapped in leaves, too."
Captain Cathie picked it up, and began to open the bundle. Evans struck a match, and match and bundle fell suddenly with a dull, dead bump to the floor, and were followed by a quite involuntary and seamanlike oath from the captain.
"What is it?" cried the younger ladies in a breath.
"Come away!" said Aunt Jannet hastily, and set the example herself.
"It's a man's head," said Evans gravely, as he tried to light a lamp.
And when the lamp was lit, and the bundle lay open in their midst, they saw that he was right—it was the head of a man.
An exclamation burst from Blair as he bent over the ghastly offering, while the others wondered what it might mean.
Was it a challenge?—a defiance?—a threat?
None of these.
"It is the head of Ra'a," said Blair at last. "I wonder who it was that brought it? If we knew that, we might guess what it means."
There had been no fighting of late between Ha'o's people and Ra'a's. In fact, the quiescence of the latter during the other troubles had been cause for congratulation. And since then everything had been quiet in the villages—over-quiet, the quietness of repletion. Evans had indeed begun to fear ill results from the over-indulgence of savage appetites.
"What do you make of it, captain?" asked Blair at last, as of one more versed than the rest in heathen ways.
"Hanged if I know!" said the old man, with a puzzled frown.
"I take it, it is a sign of submission on the part of Ra'a's men," said Blair quietly. "Ra'a himself would never have come in of his own accord. His men have wanted to, and so they have brought him."
"I shouldn't wonder," said Cathie. "It's just the thing they might do."
And in the morning they sent up early for Ha'o, and showed him the message, and asked his opinion.
"Kenni is right," he said at last. "They submit."
And presently he went boldly up the mountain-side and in due course came back with Ra'a's followers in a straggling tail behind him.
He explained afterwards to Blair that Ra'a's men had wanted for a long time past to come in and enjoy all the benefits they saw the others receiving, but Ra'a had held them back, telling them that the whites were only tricking Ha'o and his people and would presently carry them away. They had seen the arrival of the Blackbird ships, had watched the fight at sea, and also that in the pass, and these had convinced them of the good intentions of the white men. Finally they had taken matters into their own hands and settled things their own way.
And so the divisions in the island were healed by blood, and that which had seemed like to wreck their hopes turned marvellously to their highest good.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE SCOURGE OF GOD
But there was trouble of a quite unexpected kind brewing.
The yellow men in their lives had slain a certain number of the brown. In their deaths they slew still more.
The whites had hoped that, with the introduction of new food supplies, the unnatural but deep-rooted native craving for human flesh would have disappeared. The final rites of the battlefield shocked them exceedingly, and words had so far failed to convince Ha'o and his people of the error of their ways.
"You eat pig," was Ha'o's blunt argument in reply, "and man is cleaner than pig."
There was, however, an argument in preparation for him with which the white men had nothing whatever to do, but which drove home conviction beyond dispute and in the most terrifying fashion.
Ever since the fighting, and the subsequent orgies, the villages had been unusually quiet. Even the wholesale submission of Ra'a's men produced little excitement among them.
"They are like snakes after a full meal," said Cathie. "They've eaten too much, and it'll take 'em all their time to digest it."
Evans, however, had his doubts. He hinted to Blair that he feared an outbreak of sickness, but as yet could form no opinion as to its character. The men had lost all their energy, the women were depressed, the children listless. It was as though the strenuous doings at One-Tree Pass had sucked all the life out of them. And Evans went in and out of the houses with a keen eye for symptoms.
It was about a fortnight after the fight that Blair, going up to the village, met him coming hastily from it, and was startled at the sight of his face.
"What is it, Evans?" he asked.
"It's come—I feared it, but could not be sure—smallpox."
"God help us! ... How has it got here?"
"I can only imagine," said Evans, with a quick, meaning look at him.
"Good God! How very horrible!"
"Yes. They'll have a lesson they'll never forget, and many of them will never have the chance to. What about our wives, Blair? Shall we send them away till it is over?"
Kenneth Blair's lips pinched tight at the thought of it all, and he walked heavily and in silence.
"We are in God's hands," he said at last. "I think it must be left to themselves to decide."
"Then they will stop," said Evans decisively.
"Yes, they will stop," said Blair. "God grant us a safe deliverance!"
"Amen!" said Evans, and they walked in the shadow of the coming death.
The ladies received the news with white faces but stout hearts, and did not hesitate one moment.
Their place was beside the men. They did not wait to count the cost, though in each one of them was the dull, dread knowledge of what that cost might be. Their duty was to these brown kinsfolk of their adoption, and they were British born.
Evans took charge of the defence with all the energy and skill that were in him, and, possessing their souls in God, they all went quietly into the fight, compared with which the battle of One-Tree Pass was veriest child's play.
The village was sheltered by the bush and the crowding palms. Every man was taken off the dismantledTorch, and set to work building a hospital on the beach, a long, open house of poles and palm-leaves, through which the fresh sea breezes could blow at will. Soft springy couches of palm-leaves were ranged inside, and the simple preparations were complete.
Not the smallest of the horrors and perplexities of the situation was the wholesale nature of the seizure. Springing from one identical cause, the results came all together. The hospital was filled before it was finished, and the builders could not keep pace with the demands for accommodation.
Not one of Ra'a's people suffered—clear indication of the ghastly origin of the evil. Blair induced them to return for the time being to their village on the hillside, and such of Ha'o's people as showed no signs of infection he camped temporarily on the opposite hill. Every house from which the sick were carried was promptly burned. The brown folk could not understand such radical measures, but they were scared by the sights they saw, and they did as they were told.
So suddenly had the catastrophe come upon them, and in so wholesale a fashion, that their thoughts had had no time to travel beyond their own immediate concerns. But when the work was steadily under way Blair bethought him suddenly of their new allies on the east coast, and he begged Captain Cathie to run round in the launch and see how matters were going with them.
Cathie returned in due course with a long face and the news that things were just as bad there, and Stuart and his wife promptly offered to go round and carry out the same measures as had been started at the home settlement. They were given half a dozenTorchmen, whom they could ill spare. Evans promised to come round as soon as he possibly could, and the launch chuffed gallantly away to the relief of the still more necessitous on the other side of the island. Stuart could still only limp, and would have been better not to attempt even that, but the healing of his own wound was a small thing compared with that which had to be done. As a matter of fact he limped slightly for the rest of his life in consequence—a most honourable limp.
Then followed for all of them a time of patient endurance and endless self-sacrifice, which, trying as it was, still wrought mightily for and in them.
They went to and fro in that long open shed with quiet set faces, soothing and alleviating as far as these were possible, whispering hope to the hopeless, and insisting inflexibly on the observance of rules in which the only hope lay, rules the meaning of which these brown children could not understand, and which they broke at every opportunity.
Death sat grimly down before them and laid siege to them, and the little band of white-faced women and grim-faced men fought him day by day and life by life, losing heavily but refusing to be beaten.
They met one another with such cheerfulness as they could muster, and even with quiet strained smiles at times, but ever with keen apprehensive glances for what each feared any day to find in the other. A time for the trying of souls, with none of the glamour and activities of actual warfare, but with perils infinitely more appalling in their insidiousness and impalpability.
"Ech, Jean, my dear!" murmured Aunt Jannet Harvey one evening, as she and Jean and Alison Evans met outside for a few full draughts of sweet sea air. "It's terrible, terrible work. You're looking white; child. I wish you were back in London."
"I don't," said Jean cheerfully. "We're doing our appointed work, and I feel as if I'd never done anything worth doing at home. Kenneth says he believes this will be a corner-stone in the building up of the island."
"Ay, ay! Well, it's good to be able to take a hopeful view of things when they're about as bad as they can be. And I don't see that they could be much worse."
"Oh yes, they could," said Jean quickly. "Some of us might have taken it, which would be very much worse. We have to thank Mr. Evans for that, Alison."
"Charlie says he thinks we're through the worst," said Alison quietly.
"I wish I could see it," said Aunt Jannet.
"We have only had three deaths to-day, and most of the others are past the crisis. It's been a terrible clearance. There's that poor little baby crying again. I must go," and they separated to their various duties.
It was Nai's baby boy that cried, and it died in its mother's arms that night. She yielded it sorrowfully to those who took away the dead, and returned wearily to her husband's couch to keep the flies off him with a palm branch. Nai herself had been too much occupied with her baby to go with the others across the island after the fight, and she had not developed the disease. The baby had taken it, however, and Nai had nursed him and his father indefatigably, and now the boy was gone just as his father turned the corner, and the little mother was broken-hearted. They comforted her by telling her that Ha'o would live, and she fanned away wearily to the tune of her sobs that would not be kept in.
Jean, as she flitted noiselessly to and fro, with cold water for this one and medicine for that, and hopeful words for all, and special ones for Nai, thought now and again of the mighty change her marriage had wrought in her life, but never once regretted what she had done and all she had left. And more than once the dreadful thought came upon her—"Supposing Ken were to take the sickness and die and leave me alone!" Ah, then she felt as though her world would fall to pieces, and she prayed, as she had never prayed in her life before, that he might be spared, or that they might go together.
The one thing that wrought itself indelibly into all their memories was the contrast between their hospital work and its setting. Inside the long palm-thatched sheds—the moans and murmurs and restless movements of the sufferers; the ever-fluttering fans which kept off the plague of insects, and alleviated to some extent the pungency of the atmosphere; the irresistible depression induced by the close presence of insidious, crawling death. And outside—the implacable glare of the sunshine; the smooth, slow-heaving, blue mirror of the lagoon; the metronomic roar and long white flashes of the surge on the reef; the palms swinging slowly and solemnly with a sound like the patter of falling rain; and up above, the pale blue sky. Death in its most repulsive form, set in a picture of surpassing beauty, which yet had in it something of pitilessness from the very sharpness of the contrast. These things they never forgot.
They held no regular services at these times, for some were always on duty. But there was much prayer among them, and when the watches changed, the one in charge, Blair, Evans, or Cathie, would give his band of helpers a few brave words to carry with them—grateful thanks for perils past, hopeful prayers for safety in the hours to come. For they never knew but what the evil seeds might even then be working in any one of them, and they went with fear in their hearts though their faith and hope were strong, and their faces were tuned to quietness.
Evans wore himself thin with his ceaseless toils. As medical director the burden of the fight was on his shoulders, and he divided himself between the stricken camps in proportion to their needs. The going to and fro consumed much time, though he himself maintained that it did him good. But he showed the wear and tear so visibly at last that his wife, who had had a medical training at home, insisted on taking over the east coast hospital herself, and she joined Stuart and his wife there.
The epidemic ran its course, the dead were reverently wrapped in their mats, weighted with rocks, and towed out to sea on a small raft, and there committed to the deep. The convalescents began to creep about the beach and show a languid interest in life.
Ha'o was among the first to get into the sunshine. While none were neglected, Blair and Jean and Nai had nursed him as though all their lives depended on his recovery. And indeed, to Blair's thinking, very much more than their simple lives depended on Ha'o. He looked on him as the corner-stone of the work on Kapaa'a, and his death would have been a terrible blow to them all.
As Jean had said, he had great hopes that this sharp trial might also turn to good. He tackled Ha'o the very first day he judged him well enough for discussion.
"This has been a terrible time, Ha'o, my friend. Have you any idea why it came upon you?"
"It was your new God sent it, I suppose," said Ha'o gloomily, with the air of a child giving an expected answer with mental reservations of his own.
"God permits such things. If men will do wrong they must suffer. That is how they learn to do right. If you want to bang your head against this rock, God won't stop you. But the recollection of what you suffer may stop you doing the same again."
"What wrong did we do? You killed the yellow men too."
"But we did not eat them. Not one of us has been ill. Not one of Ra'a's people has been ill. They also kept apart."
Ha'o looked sombrely out over the lagoon. He was thinking of his boy.
"Kenni," he said presently, "I know you do not like us to eat men; but our fathers did so, and their fathers, and never have we had this crawling death before."
"Perhaps it was to teach you and your people. See, Ha'o! We want you to take your right place in the world. It was for that we came. It was for that we beat off the yellow men who would have carried you away. We are ready to give our lives to help you. But we must have the foundations firm or we cannot build. You do not build a house on running sand, nor a platform on cracking poles."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Promise me, here and now, that you will never eat man again, and that you will make it tabu to your people. They will do what you say. They are frightened. God never meant man to be eaten."
"How do you know, Kenni?"
"He forbade man even to kill man, but of the beasts He has provided He said, 'Kill and eat.'"
"You killed the yellow men," he said again.
"To save you from them."
"Then you did wrong too. Why did the crawling death not touch you?"
"It is not right to kill men, yet if a man attacks you, and in defending yourself he gets killed, the blame is his, not yours."
"You never tasted man, Kenni, did you?"
"No, never," said Blair, with an expression of disgust.
"Then you cannot know how good he is. My people think there is nothing equal to man—except woman or child, which are better still. But I will promise you never to eat yellow man again, Kenni."
"That is not enough. Unless you will give up eating man of any kind we must go. We have provided other food. You cannot go hungry. The pigs and the goats are all over the island. The paw-paws grow while you sleep. You have taro and bananas, and breadfruit and coco-nuts. You have the chance to become a nation, strong and powerful. You are sole chief on Kapaa'a now. I would have you chief of the other islands also. But if you prefer to eat man I can do nothing for you. It is the foundation of all the rest that you give up eating man."
"My little son did not eat of the yellow men, Kenni, but your God took him. Why?"
"It was the disease took him. It is the most terrible thing for passing from one to another. Could you stand the thought of your little son being eaten, Ha'o?"
"My son? No! I would have died sooner than let him be eaten."
"Yet you say other men's babies are good to eat."
Ha'o looked at him, and then lay looking out over the lagoon.
"See, Ha'o," said Blair at last, "if the thought of your little son will turn you from flesh-eating, he will have done more for Kapaa'a in the short time he lived than you have done in all your life, and we shall remember Ha'o's little son always as the beginning of the better times."
The brown man lay thinking a long time and one may not know his thoughts. But at last he said quietly—
"Twice you have saved my life and my people, Kenni. I am your man. You must not go away. For the thought of my little son who is dead I will give up eating man. I will become a nation."
"And you will answer for the rest?"
"I will answer for the rest. If any man eats man I will kill him."
Ha'o kept his word, and so, in the death of his little son, the foundations were laid in Kapaa'a, and the black cloud broke once more in blessing.
CHAPTER XXIV
GAIN OF LOSS
With a clean bill of health, and Ha'o as supreme chief anxious to become a nation, and therefore ready to follow the white men's ideas, matters began to progress rapidly.
The first thing to be done, as soon as the men could be spared from hospital work, was to get rid of the Blackbirders.
Captain Cathie, vehemently backed up by Aunt Jannet, would even now have made short work of them.
"Give 'em a fair trial and string 'em up," was his simple idea of the justice that would meet the case. And "Hear, hear!" said Aunt Jannet with energy.
"I really don't think they're likely ever to come back, after the lesson they've had this time," said Blair.
"They wouldn't if I had my way," said Cathie grimly. "Vermin like that is best stamped out when it's under your foot."
"We stamped pretty hard last time. They'll recognise that the game is not worth the candle."
So, in due course, the larger schooner, which was the older and poorer found of the two, was provisioned for the voyage, and the prisoners were brought over from the valley and put on board of her. Blair and Stuart and Cathie awaited them there, and, through Stuart, Blair told them very explicitly what would happen if they ever showed face in those waters again. Then the refittedTorchtowed them out to the offing, and bade them make tracks for home, and followed them with dogged restraint for three days to see that they did it, and the island was once more purged of contamination.
When the captain got back, Blair laughingly asked him if they had got safely away, and Aunt Jannet eyed him with a spark of hope.
"They're gone," said Cathie, with a gloomy nod. "I'd have felt better if they'd gone by the shorter road."
"You ought to have scuttled them, captain," said Aunt Jannet.
Then followed many busy full days. First the village was rebuilt on a plan Blair had thought out during his hospital watches. The bush between the hills was all cleared away and burnt on the spot, leaving only the palms standing, and on this open space, with the shallow river brawling through the middle, the houses were built. Stereotyped lines, both as to design and location, were purposely avoided, and the result was eminently pleasing. Fresh plantations of taro and bananas were started, pawpaw trees and breadfruit were put in wherever space offered, and a close fence across the valley kept the pigs and goats from intruding.
The next great undertaking was the making of a decent road up to One-Tree Pass, for the benefit of the east coast community. And at all these works, brown men and white, Ha'o's people and the late rebels, the atoll men, and the east coasters, high and low without exception, toiled side by side, to the very great promotion of good feeling and mutual understanding. The ladies, meanwhile, fostered among the women and children all such imitative habits as were judged good for them, and after the stress and storm the peaceful times made for growth and enlightenment, and feelings of security and content such as Kapaa'a had never known before.
Of direct religious teaching there was no lack, though it still ran more to practice than to precept. Native habits and customs were interfered with as little as possible, save wherein they palpably ran counter to Nature's own laws and made for deterioration rather than uplifting.
The white men held their services regularly, and made them as simple as possible so that gleams of the light might penetrate dark hearts but by no means dark understandings. The brown men, at their work in the plantations, along the hillsides after the pigs and goats, and skimming along the combers on the other side of the ridge, chanted merry hymns whose meanings they understood not, but which did them no harm, and were very good to hear. The women learned many things in their own homes and in the mission houses, and the tubby, brown children rollicked nakedly in the school-house, learned games in which they delighted, and some of them were even beginning their ABC.
"Charles, my son," said Blair to Evans, as they were all sitting in usual conclave on the verandah one evening, "what do you say to vaccinating the whole community, lock, stock, and barrel? All, I mean, that did not have the plague. There may be some germs of it lurking in hidden corners yet."
"I'm willing, if you can bring them to it. I can take them in batches."
"I'll speak to Ha'o. He can make them do pretty well anything he pleases. I'm more and more thankful that he was spared to us."
"And Nai too," said Jean. "She is a great help. The women do whatever she tells them, and she's as bright as a needle. What do you think she came to ask for to-day, Ken?"
"No idea. Not a pair of shoes, I hope."
"No—some hairpins! She wanted to do her hair like ours."
"The eternal feminine," laughed Blair. "Well?"
"I assured her that it looked far nicer hanging loose with flowers stuck in it. But she was so disappointed that I had to give her the pins. You won't recognise the women in a day or two, I expect."
Blair explained the vaccination idea to Ha'o, and made it as clear as the limitations of language and understanding of so abstruse a matter permitted.
"You would give them a little crawling death to keep them from having it big?" said Ha'o, after much explanation.
"Yes, that is what it comes to."
"All those who did not have it before?"
"Yes."
"I will order it. It is right that Ra'a's people should taste it too."
Exactly what he told them they never learned, but in due course a batch of stalwart brown men came doubtfully into the compound, and watched Evans with apprehensive, white-eyed glances as he deftly pricked and bound up their arms, and sent them away looking doubtfully at their white bandages, in evident expectation of speedy and unique developments.
They were in fine healthy condition and the operation was prosperous. The bandage-wearers regarded them as badges of distinction. They looked upon their inoculation as a ceremonial necessary to full admission to the white alliance, and Blair was at once scandalised and amused by a crowd clamouring round the house next day for similar honours.
"Kenni," they cried, "make us Christians too! Prick our arms and give us our badges."
So their arms were pricked and they got their badges, and were no longer subject to the taunts of the favoured first batch, which had nearly led to friction in the village the night before.
CHAPTER XXV
THE LIFTING VEIL
Jean, and Alison Evans, and Mary Stuart found the tubby youngsters, and especially the little round, brown babies, irresistibly attractive. Such merry, mischievous little imps the former, and each newcomer such a wonder of soft, sleek, dimpled, black-velvet-eyed brownness, that their hearts went out to them, and the mothers laughed at their doting absorption and cackled strenuously and meaningly among themselves. And Aunt Jannet, never having had any children of her own, knew more about the rights and wrongs of their upbringing than any single mother ever knew in this world before, and had to be restrained by main force at times from putting some of her more strenuous theories into practice. But the good-natured brown women came to understand even Aunt Jannet's peculiarities in time, and to accept her efforts, so far as they accorded with their own ideas, with something like appreciation.
For educative purposes the children were, up to a certain age, left entirely to the care of the ladies, and it would have been hard to say whether pupils or teachers enjoyed most the time spent in nominal study in the wide, open schoolroom, or the still merrier jinks on the beach and river bank.
If Jean Blair's quondam friends in London could have seen her at play with her naked brown boys and girls on Kapaa'a front—well, in the first place they would not have known her, and when they did they would have renounced her acquaintance at once.
For the purpose of opening their little minds to better things than their fathers and mothers had known, she brought herself down to their level, became almost one of themselves, romped and played and danced with them, in the water and out of it, and captured all their hearts. And she enjoyed this partial and temporary reversion to nature as she had never enjoyed life before. The children learned many things without knowing that they were being taught, and Jean herself learned not a little also.
Aunt Jannet looked on with surprise, and spasms of doubt at times—it was all so different from her ideas of missionary work. But she had much to occupy her in connection with the other women, and as regards things generally she held an open mind, with a reserve of gentle sarcasm in case these extremely odd ways should turn out worse than she knew her own more precise methods would have done.
The men took the older boys in hand and employed ways quite as unconventional and with equally happy results, and the girls of size were well left to the care of Alison Evans and Mary Stuart, whose special training had fitted them excellently for the work.
In addition to the extraordinary curriculum of their school, the men were working hard at the new foundations of life in Kapaa'a.
It was a beginning of things such as Kenneth Blair's soul delighted in. He was at it night and day, and suffered no whit from all the hard work. For it was better even than recreation, since to all intents and purposes it was creation itself, the bringing of order out of chaos, the evolution of new life.
Ha'o, in the large hope of becoming a nation, worked with them hand to hand, and heart to heart. Savage born and all untutored, he was gifted with a sharp wit and a clear understanding, and he was a born ruler of men. He was tall in stature, and his bearing they had noted even in the hold of theBlackbirder. Of late his presence had seemed to increase in dignity, possibly from his own large belief in the future, possibly because they viewed him in the light of what they hoped to make him. Whatever it was, his own people noticed it also, and even the last returned prodigals never ventured to cross him.
His confidence in the wisdom and good faith of the white men was implicit. When he placed his hand in Blair's, the day they landed, and proclaimed himself his man, and again when they discussed the delicate subject of man-eating after his illness, he meant what he said and stuck to it loyally.
Not that he by any means assented at once to every suggestion they made. He could argue like an Old Bailey lawyer, and until a matter was explained to him so that he understood all the ins and outs, and the ultimate end and aim of it, and saw from his own point of view just how it would affect his people and himself, he would have none of it.
He would listen politely, follow with the most patient intentness, question till it was clear, argue-bargle occasionally, as Captain Cathie put it, and then,—"Kenni, it is good. It shall be,"—and some new brick was ready for the foundations.
They all enjoyed an argument with Ha'o. The turns of his quick mind were so odd and illuminating at times, that, as Evans said, it was actually educational.
Stuart especially delighted in him.
"He's an absolute revelation," he said, "And I'm more and more certain that there's more than ordinary savage blood in him. It's very queer to think of, you know, Blair. It's a clear case of reversion."
"And of evolution."
"I wonder now, if, by any conjunction of circumstances, we in Great Britain could ever go back like that."
"Impossible. The very suggestion is horrible."
"Nothing is impossible," said Evans. "The whole country might be devastated by a pestilence, and the few survivors might lapse into anything."
"Unless the whole earth were devastated in the same way, the survivors would have common sense enough to get back to their kind. But all this won't help Kapaa'a boys, so let's get to business."
They went very wisely to work, with the wisdom of long deliberation on other men's failures and successes. They imposed no restrictions save such as were absolutely necessary for the general well-being, and even these made for freedom. For the freedom of savagery is bondage worse than slavery.
They promulgated through Ha'o simple rules for the protection of life and property, and saw them carried out with the most rigid inflexibility. Any disputes, and there were many, were brought before the chief sitting in judgment on the verandah of his house on certain days, with the white men in attendance to assist his deliberations.
At first theTorchmen acted as police when necessary, and carried out the orders of the court. But before long certain of the tribesmen, becoming distinguished above their fellows for their sobriety of conduct and general demeanour, were nominated to headships of sections, and did all that was necessary.
And Kapaa'a slept of a night, freed for ever from the stealthy terrors of the dark.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE GENTLE MARTYR
All these matters took time, and while their hands and hearts were full of them there came to them certain other little matters which filled both hands and hearts to overflowing.
To Kenneth and Jean Blair was born a son, and a month later to Charles and Alison Evans a daughter, and it is doubtful if anything in the history of Kapaa'a had ever stirred the feminine portion of the community to such a pitch of excitement and enthusiasm as did the arrival of these little white strangers.
"Now," said the brown women, with deeper lights in their lustrous eyes, as they gazed admiringly on the little pink-and-white squirmers, "you belong to us indeed, since you have borne children among us."
And every day they made pilgrimages to the two new shrines, and sat worshipfully, while the unconscious little saints performed their morning ablutions and then lay gazing placidly out of their blue eyes at the sights which no one else could see. Those striking blue eyes—the blue of the sky up above—completed the capture of the dark-eyed ones. There were blue eyes in plenty among the grown-up whites, but never were blue eyes like these, and the dark eyes never tired of gazing at them.
Of the rapturous joy of the two mothers, and the deep thankfulness of the fathers, there is no need to speak. For a time the new maternal cares monopolised the former, and the latter went into their island work with new high lights in their faces and with even greater vigour than before.
Aunt Harvey exulted in those babies as though she had had not a little to do with bringing them about, and Mary Stuart gloated over them with blushing cheeks and kindling eyes that told their own hopeful stories.
Every man of theTorchoffered his services as nursemaid to carry them about the beach, and the numbers of small brothers and sisters they had all been in the habit of devoting their early years to was simply marvellous.
The christening ceremony—Kenneth Kapaa'a Blair and Alison Kaapa'a Evans—was an occasion of high festival throughout the islands, and Blair, with his life-work always large in his mind, turned it to account. Aunt Harvey was not present at that high ceremony, to her very great regret but more greatly to her honour. And this is how it came about.
Intercourse with the other islands had been constantly maintained by the regular visitations of theTorchand the quondamBlackbirdschooner—renamed theJean Arnotand captained by Jim Gregor, first officer of theTorch; but, compared with what had been done on Kapaa'a, the advances had been small.
Blair had, for a long while past, recognised the fact that the greatest object-lesson he could possibly offer the other chiefs was the sight of what was being done on Kapaa'a. But at the first suggestion of taking them over in the ship to see for themselves, their suspicions were in arms. That was an old trick of the white men's. They had all heard how the brown men were decoyed on board the white men's ships under wonderful promises, and never heard of again. They accepted all he gave them, they listened to all he had to say, but sail away in the big ship they would not.
Here was a chance not to be missed. Surely never in this world was there seen a younger pair of missionaries than Master Kenneth Kapaa'a Blair—Kenni-Kenni to the natives—and Miss Alison Kapaa'a Evans—Alivani—when they set out, in their frills and furbelows, to wile the hearts of the brown men and women of the outer islands.
Ha'o and Nai went with them, to add their persuasions and the argument of their presence to the rest, and Aunt Jannet went because she knew something untoward would happen to those babies unless her eye was on them.
Blair knew it would be no easy matter at best, and it was not.
At Kanele, the first island they came to, the largest of the group after Kapaa'a, about thirty miles away, the old chief Maru received them with the heartiest of welcomes, and his old wife and her daughter-in-law and all the other women went into raptures over the blue-eyed babies.
But when the subject of the visit was cautiously broached, the old man stiffened at once with his natural suspicion and declined the invitation on the spot, and nothing they could say would persuade him to it.
They stayed the night, however, and Ha'o had much talk with the old man's son, a bright stalwart fellow over six feet high whose name was Kahili. In the morning Kahili announced his intention of going with the white men. Whereupon loud lamentations from his father and mother and wife and children, who clung to him wherever they could grip, and expressed their intention of anchoring him to his native soil at cost of their lives. He reasoned with them good-humouredly at first, but finally began to get angry at the exhibition, and the more they tried to dissuade him the more determined was he to go.
Then, suddenly, the old chief surprised them all by proposing a bargain. If the white men would leave their grandmother—Aunt Jannet Harvey to wit—as pledge of their honourable intentions, both he and Kahili his son would go in the big ship, and when they returned safe and sound the ship could take the grandmother away.
Blair laughed so much over the old fellow's 'cuteness that he came near to dispelling their suspicions. And the matter being explained to Aunt Jannet, without undue insistence upon the maturity of her new dignity, that good lady, with a somewhat forlorn attempt at nonchalance, accepted the offer on the spot, and said she would stop. And what it cost her no man may venture to say, for she had been looking forward to the christening of Jean's boy as a white stone day in her life.
"It's for the good of the work, Kenneth, so get away with them before I change my mind," said she, bravely enough.
"Oh, Aunt Jannet, I shall miss you so," from Jean, with a suspicion of tears in her voice.
"Not a bit, child. You'll have far too much to think of, and I'll be perfectly all right here."
"But—you——" for Jean knew all her longing in the matter.
"I'll chum up with Mrs. Maru, and we'll be as happy as—h'm"—with a glance at the native houses among the trees—"well, as things in a rug, you know. You shall tell me all about it when I get back. Don't let Ken forget to send for me."
She kissed the babies as though she knew in her own mind that she would never set eyes on them again, waved her adieus gallantly from the white shell beach, and when theTorchhad swept out of sight round the corner she went up into a thicket of lemon hibiscus, and had it out all by herself there. Then she preened her ruffled plumes, and went down and rated Mrs. Maru for the untidiness of her dwelling-place, till the old lady regretted more than ever the exchange she had made. By degrees, however, Aunt Jannet's natural goodness and masterfulness overcame her disappointment. The two became capital friends, and talked away at one another, on a twenty-five per cent. basis of understanding, which left the most extraordinary views of the other's life on each of their minds.
Her self-sacrifice, however, bore excellent fruit. Old Maru and Kahili proved admirable bait for Blair's fishing. Persuaded themselves to a somewhat doubtful step, the step once taken they became most zealous partisans of their new cause. Assured, by the solid fact of Aunt Jannet's temporary residence on Kanele, of their own safety, they laughed to scorn the fears of others as doubtful in the matter as they themselves had originally been.
Their assured confidence amounted well-nigh to boastfulness.
"Look at us," they said, "we have no mistrust in going with the white men. Put away your fears, and come along."
TheTorchmade a most prosperous collection, and returned to Kapaa'a laden with dusky notables.
It would have been difficult to imagine anything less like a Christian martyr than Aunt Jannet Harvey, sitting opposite her hostess on Kanele, conscientiously eating away at the food with which they kept her supplied, wrestling strenuously with the intricacies of the Kanelese dialect, and an object of extreme curiosity to all the other women, and of wonderment to herself. But martyrs are found in the strangest guise, and Aunt Jannet wrought well for Kapaa'a when she consented to stop on Kanele that day.
The strangers viewed with amazement the changes in Kapaa'a. They had raided there aforetime, and fought more than one bloody battle on the white beach of the lagoon. For Kapaa'a, the largest of the islands and the richest, had always been an object of envy to the rest, and more than one warrior chief of the outer isles had cast longing eyes upon it, and had planned and schemed till he could attempt its conquest.
Now they found it richer and stronger than ever in the white men's alliance. They saw its comfortable homes, and large plantations of strange new grains and fruits. They were introduced to the pleasures of the chase. They ate piglet and wild goat, and found them good. They tasted still deeper of the novel atmosphere of law and order, and found these things also very good.
They watched the boys at cricket and football, and the men, brown and white, fencing and boxing as though their lives depended on it, and no harm done. They watched the cutlass drill, and tingled to do likewise. They saw the white men bowl over coco-nuts with their Winchesters at many times the distance they could hurl a spear, and do the same again quicker than they could wink, and for their benefit Long Tom bellowed his loudest, and they heard the roar of him clang to and fro among the hills. They compared the new Kapaa'a boats with their own, and they sat open-mouthed and listened to the last squeals of an ironwood tree from up the valley, as the circular saw cleft it into planks which they could not have imitated with weeks of hardest labour. And—they saw men sleep without weapons by their sides, and without fear. And these things wrought powerfully upon them, and set them thinking.
The christening feast of Kenni-Kenni and Alivani was long remembered in the Dark Islands. Aunt Jannet Harvey always professed regret at having missed it, but Kenneth Blair always assured her, with a great light in his face, that in missing it as she had done she had rendered service to the mission which no words could express.
Aunt Jannet's exile ran into a longer term than she had expected, and there were many anxious faces and apprehensive hearts in the island villages before theTorchcame gliding quietly round the heads, and dropped her passengers at their homes.
They all came laden with presents, which already, before they landed, inclined them favourably towards similar trips in the future. But they brought with them also richer invisible freight of new ideas and new hopes, which kept their tongues wagging for weeks afterwards, and set their brains working.
For the visit had not by any means been confined to sight-seeing and enjoyment. The white men turned it to fullest account in the clear and definite explanation of their views and hopes for the whole group of islands, offering all an equal share in the new order of things on the sole condition of union and cohesion. The higher matters which lay closest to their hearts were touched on, but only lightly as yet. Blair had no faith in outward conversion born of a hankering after material good things. He had a firm belief in the advantages of hastening slowly. Get the savages out of their savagery, open the dark minds to the lower lights, and the higher would come in good time.
He suggested regular meetings of the headmen on Kapaa'a, and the idea was received with acclaim. Kapaa'a was a storehouse of good things. They desired no better than to come there often. And in that he saw the germ of a united nation. Ha'o, as the most advanced among them, would naturally preside. Of Ha'o's loyalty and level-headedness he had no doubt. He was years ahead of the rest already. Blair believed his influence would grow, and in time make itself felt throughout the whole group, and through Ha'o he hoped to win them all to the higher life.
If on these highest matters of all he touched as yet but lightly, in others, concerning their material welfare, he gave them some very straight talk, by way of putting them on their guard against that which might come any day.
He told them that other white men would come offering to trade with them, to buy their land, to do great things for them, and of such he begged them to beware, and to allow him to deal with them.
He told them just what had happened in other places, where grasping white traders had pushed themselves in, bringing in with them drink, disease, and dispossession. He showed them how they, the heads of the communities, were responsible for their people. And he promised them every advantage these other men could offer them without any of the penalties.
"What do these traders come for?" he asked them, and answered himself, "To benefit themselves. And what do we come for? To benefit you. The time may be close at hand when you will have to choose between us. As you choose, so will your future be."
So the notables went back to their island homes with much to think about, and Aunt Jannet came back from Kanele, and Kenneth Blair and his friends had good reason for high hopes of the future.
It was a spring-time of hope for all of them. The work was prospering, and their hearts were full of gladness.
"Quite happy, Jean?" asked Blair, as he came up quietly and sat down beside her, where the sweet water ran into the salt, and the small waves of the lagoon creamed softly up the white sand.