Chapter II: Part 2

“Trade I can understand,” he went on, “and shell-huntin’—we haven’t done too bad all round over that last little job, and the old man’s a sight more sober since he’s owned the ship again. But skulls—and old skulls at that—filthy natives’ bones that’s been lyin’ in the caves since Heaven knows when! Besides, they ain’t our skulls, however you may look at it——”

“Nor I hope they won’t be,” said the boatswain darkly. “In no way, I mean. The Friday Islanders aren’t people to ask out to an afternoon tea-party without you’ve got your knuckle-duster on underneath your voylet kid gloves. And you know what natives are about their old bones and graves.”

“I do. What I don’t know is how she thinks she’s going to make anything out of a proper nasty job like that.”

“Oh, she’s on the make, is she!”

“Did you ever know her anything else, bless her?” asked the mate. “She wants sixty pounds, havin’ spent all the old man give her out of the shell business in Wellington, takin’ boxes at the theaytres and halls, and buyin’ women’s gear, and staying at the Constantinople, where she wore two new ’ats a day for a week; and other games of a similar kind. Pity you was sick, and not there to see the fun. I tell you, she made the town look silly.”

“What’s the sixty pound for?” asked the boatswain, chewing fondly on his quid.

Harris giggled explosively, and whispered:

“She wants a Dozey dress!”

“What in ——’s that? It don’t sound respectable,” virtuously observed the boatswain, who had never heard of the famous French dressmaker.

“You bet it is, then. Dozey’s a regular bang-up swell in Paris, who makes the most expensive gownds in the world, and every one in them parts treats him just the same as a baronight or a duke. You can’t get so much as a jumper from him for less than sixty pound, and Vaiti she says every woman in Papeëte or Aucklan’ or Sydney who saw one of his dresses would spot it right away, and go and throw herself over the Heads. She read about his things in a piece in one of them female papers in the hotel, and she saw an actress wearin’ of one, and she’s been layin’ out to get one ever since, somethin’ awful. Seems when a woman in London, or Paris, or Yarmouth gets a Dozey dress, and takes to standin’ off and on before the others, who’s only got new velveteens with musling frills or such-like it just makes them other women drag their anchors and run head-on to the shore. So Vaiti, she——”

“Hold on,” interrupted the boatswain. “Why, if she ’ad one of those gownds, she couldn’t bend it on to her yards, not if it cost a million. Man alive, she ain’t laid down on the same lines as them Frenchwomen, anyway.”

“You let her alone for that,” chuckled Harris. “But what beats me is _who_ she’s going to do with them skulls, and _how_. We won’t know in a hurry, either, because she and Pita’s fixed it up between them to do the job alone. Thank ’eaven for small mercies, says I. ’Er on the war-path’s rather more than I care for; and this isn’t going to be any picnic, if I know anything of natives.”

“Pita!” whistled the boatswain. “The old man will ’ave ’is gore before the voyage is out, if Vaiti goes on like this. It’s Ritter, that fat German trader in Papeëte, that he’s wanting to marry her to; and as for natives, it’s ’ands off for them, if she is ’alf of one ’erself.”

“Well, she and Pita was planning it all out in the fore-top last night. I heard them, when she thought I was sleeping on the top of the galley. And the old man came out and roared at her like a Marquesas bull to come down; so down she came, laughing at him, like the devil she is. There’s no one else on this ship would laugh, without it was on the wrong side of his mouth, when the old man gets ratty. Coming! All right!”

The mate jumped to his feet, and answered Vaiti’s sharp hail in person, a deprecating smile spreading like spilt treacle all over his face as he came up to her, cap in hand. Vaiti took her cigar out of her mouth, and looked at him for a minute without speaking. The _Sybil_ rolled on the towering swell like a captured beast trying to beat its brains out against a wall, but Saxon’s Maori daughter stood as steady as the slender main-mast upon the reeling deck. Harris smiled more than ever, and turned the marlinspike about in his hands, looking a little foolish.

“You wanting Captain Saxon come and lay you out in the scupper pretty soon?” inquired Vaiti presently.

“Not particular,” answered the mate, the smile sliding slowly off his face.

“Then I think perhaps you keep your mouth more better shut,” said Vaiti, walking off with a contemptuous swing in the very fall of her laced muslin skirts. And Pita of Atiu, as if in defiance of the captain, the mate, and every one else but his cousin Vaiti, pulled a mouth-organ out of his shirt and began to play it triumphantly and frantically, making a noise exactly like the buzzing of a mad bluebottle on a warm window-pane. Further, he plucked a frangipani flower out of the wreath—a good deal the worse for wear—that hung round his neck, and stuck the blossom behind his ear. Now, every one who has ever been in the Islands knows that these two actions are significant of courtship. Pita was courting Vaiti, as everybody knew—Pita, a mere deck hand, who had been taken on at wild Atiu, in the Cook Islands, because he was a relation of Saxon’s dead native wife. Very handsome was Pita, very young and tall and broad-shouldered, wily and fierce like all the Atiuans, but smooth and pleasant of countenance. Were not the men of Atiu nicknamed “meek-faced Atiuans,” even in the days, only a generation gone, when they were the cruellest and most warlike of cannibals and pirates?

Needless to say, Captain Saxon, who had always had “views” for Vaiti, ever since she left the Tahitian convent school that had given her such fragments of civilisation as she possessed, did not favour the compromising attentions of Pita. As for Vaiti, her father’s prohibitions neither piqued her into noticing the handsome Atiuan more, nor alarmed her into favouring him less, than she found agreeable. At present there was rather more than less about the matter, because Saxon was in one of his fits of gloomy depression, and Vaiti foresaw the usual result. It was not at all likely that her father would be able to help her in her forthcoming raid. Harris she did not choose to rely on at a pinch; Gray was old; the crew were far and away too superstitious to aid in such a sacrilege as she proposed. There remained Pita, who, if he was a wild Atiuan, was at least “misinari” after a fashion, had been educated, more or less, in Raratonga, and was most certainly in love with herself.... Yes, Pita would do.

That night, when the second dog-watch had commenced, and a lew large crystal stars were just beginning to glimmer through the pink of the ocean sunset, Vaiti descended to the cabin, looked into Gray and Harris’s berths to make sure that they were both on deck, and then sat down on the cushioned locker opposite her father.

“What is it?” asked Saxon, raising his heavy blue eyes. He had been sitting with his head propped in the corner of the cabin, silent as a fish, since the clearing away of tea an hour before. You might have thought him asleep, or, if you knew him intimately, drunk. He was neither; but dead and drowned things were rising up from the black sea caverns of his heart to-night, and their bones showed white and ghastly upon the desert shores of his life. So he sat silent, with his face turned to the darkening porthole and to the night that was striding down upon the sea.

Through the port he saw the shining harbour of Papeëte as it looked a week or two ago—a tall grey British war-ship lying at anchor, the _Sybil’s_ dinghy, small and crank and unclean, creeping up to the man-of-war’s accommodation-ladder, himself, a weather-scarred, red-faced figure, in a worn duck suit and bulging shoes, sitting in the boat, and waiting patiently until the Governor’s steam-launch should have passed in front of him and discharged its freight of visitors.

He saw the captain of the great Queen’s ship standing at the top of the ladder, slight and trig and trim, all white and gold from top to toe, all smiling self-possession and cool command.

He saw ladies, immaculately coiffed and daintily shod; tall, clean, grey-moustached men following them; a cordial welcome on the deck; a flutter of light drapery and a glimpse of lounging masculine figures afterwards, framed by the great open gun-ports of the captain’s cabin in the stern. They were laughing and talking, and he could hear the clink of cups and glasses. After—a long time after—he could see his own shabby little boat creeping up to the ladder; the captain, cold and business-like, and more than a little brusque, speaking to him on the deck about a certain anchorage in the Cook Islands group, concerning which he was known to have information; himself, burningly conscious of his shoes and his finger-nails, answering shortly and with some embarrassment, and feeling, of a sudden, very shabby, very broken, very old.... Was it twenty-five years, or two thousand, since the Admiral of the Fleet, and the Prince of Saxe-Brandenburg, with half the mess of his own regiment, had dined on board his biggest yacht at Cowes a week before—it—happened?... Now a mere commander left him standing on the deck, and spoke to him like a native or a dog. Well, what did it all matter to a dead man? Was not his name of those days carved on the family monument in letters half an inch deep, and was not he, Edward Saxon, whom nobody knew, out here in the living death of the farthermost islands, a thousand miles from anywhere?...

“Father,” said Vaiti.

“What is it?” answered Saxon’s voice dully, as befitted a dead man.

“The wind is rising at last,” said the girl in Maori, “We shall be off the island by morning. Will you, or will you not, go with me into this cave of death, where I have told you that I shall find what is worth finding?”

“I have no heart. I will not.”

“Then I and Pita will go,” said Vaiti, fixing the Englishman’s blue eyes with her own black, stabbing and savagely unfathomable, yet set in Saxon’s very own narrow high-bred face.

The captain’s dark mood was on him, and he turned his face to the wall, with a Maori oath consigning Vaiti and Pita to a cannibal end.

“I go; stay you there,” said Vaiti, using the quaintly courteous native form of farewell, barbed with a little sneer unknown to the original. Then she went to her cabin. And Saxon turned in his seat, and reached for the brandy bottle at last.

* * * * *

Handsome Pita had a great awe for Vaiti, for she was a princess of Atiu by her mother’s side. But she was beautiful, and he admired her—also he hoped that her imperious soul harboured one soft spot for him. It seemed good, on the whole, when they were pulling the dinghy over the reef next morning, to ask Vaiti openly where the value of the booty came in—with a secret hope in the background of securing as much as possible for a certain very deserving, more or less Christian youth of Atiu.

Vaiti, her white dress girded up high over her scarlet pareo, waded through the last yard or two of the emerald lagoon before she answered. The boat being safe on shore, she stood up and looked sharply about her. They had chosen a quiet spot at the back of the island for landing, all the natives being down at the harbour loading copra. The weird pandanus trees, standing on their high wooden stilts at the verge of the shore, the rustling coco-palms swinging their great fronds far over the water, the golden and pink-flowered vines trailing yard on yard of green garlandry over the paper-white sand, could carry no tales, and they were the only witnesses.

Vaiti looked at Pita up and down, from head to foot, and Pita gave the flower behind his ear a knowing cock, and set one hand saucily on his hip. He knew that he was the handsomest man in the Cook archipelago, and he felt that the way his pareo was tied that day was a pure inspiration. So he shut up his mouth very tight, and made play with his burning black eyes as only a South Sea Islander can, waiting confidently the while for the information that the whole ship’s company of the _Sybil_ could not have extracted from Vaiti in a week.

The girl stepped forward, and with a commanding finger tapped Pita’s biggest dimple, as if he had been a baby.

“Suppose I tell you, then you know too much, you plenty frighten, go back to ship,” she laughed.

“Speak Maori, high chieftainess!” implored Pita.

“No fee-ah!” answered Saxon’s daughter succinctly. Pita understood at once that Vaiti was unwilling to use a language that gave free rein to her tongue and his, and the knowledge elated him.

“Perhaps I tell you,” went on Vaiti, watching him narrowly. “I think you got heart in belly belong you, more better than Alliti. I tell you, you want plenty heart by-and-by.”

“High chieftainess, Vaiti, speak Maori!” was Pita’s answer, linked to an attempted embrace that only fell short of its main object because Vaiti quite calmly pulled a seaman’s knife out of her dress and laid it edge upwards across her lips. Pita, who had learned the real European kiss during his visits to civilisation, and wanted very much to show it off, felt disappointed, although there was a smile behind the blade that almost out-dazzled the steel.

“Maori!” he persisted, putting his arm round her waist, with a cool disregard of her well-known readiness with the knife that won Vaiti’s admiration a step further than before. She laughed, wavered, and then, still playing with the keen, bright blade, she lowered it a little, and spoke in the soft language of the Islands at last.

It was a fairly long tale that she had to tell. When last the _Sybil_ had been in the Society Islands, some weeks before, there had been a German man of science in the group, collecting native skulls for museums at home. The grizzly old gentleman and his pursuits had not troubled Vaiti’s mind particularly until her chief admirer, Ritter, a Papeëte trader, happened to drop a remark one day about the amount of money some of these old skulls were worth. Vaiti’s sharp intelligence linked on the casual saying at once to certain other wandering rumours she remembered, and she decided to find out something more. She did not ask Ritter, for he was no talker, even to a handsome girl whom he admired; and the German was his compatriot, in any case. But when the schooner reached Raiatea, where Professor Spricht was staying, Vaiti drifted off among the native huts, and squatted for an hour or two on the mats of the second chief’s wife’s mother’s cousin’s house, smoking a great deal, talking very little, and listening quietly. By degrees the house filled up with interested natives all eager for gossip and chatter; and to Vaiti, pulling steadily at her cigar, and maintaining the grave, unsmiling demeanour proper to a princess of Atiu and a great Belitani chieftain’s daughter, the drawing out of the secret she wanted was as easy as spinning sinnet out of cocoanut husk.

Nothing is private in the Eastern Pacific, and it was not long before all the professor’s personal affairs were tossing about like seaweed on the flood of general gossip—mostly unfit for publication—that surged about the apparently uninterested ears of the silent, splendid sea-queen throned on the pile of pandanus mats.... The Siamani (German) had got skulls in Niué, in Uea, in Mangaia, and was now collecting them about the Society group.... He was an ugly, grey-snouted pig to look at, and rooted in the earth like any pig; still, Taous and Mahina, daughters of Falani, seemed to think that—(details lost in a heated argument about the personal characteristics of the ladies).... Anyhow, Vekia from the hills said he was going to buy her two silk dresses from San Francisco when he came back from Falaite Island; so he was not as mean as he looked. Yes, he was going to Falaite Island in a great hurry; he would not even take time to finish his pig-rooting in Raiatea, on account of something he had heard from an old man who had once lived up in Falaite.... What fools the papalangi (whites) were. Did not every one in the Islands know about the old, old people that used to live on Falaite, hundreds of moons before the days of Tuti (Cook), and how they all died, and nobody lived there for very, very long, until some people wandered up from Niué in Tuti’s time; and how the skulls of the old, old people were still there, buried in a cave that was a hundred miles long, and guarded by as many devils as would fill twenty war canoes? Of course, these things were known, and always had been—but when would any man of Tahiti or Raiatea have thought of such folly as travelling more than a thousand miles to fight the devils and take away the skulls? What if they were worth money enough to buy a big schooner, as the old grey pig had told Vekia when he promised her those dresses? Would a whole schooner, loaded down with dollars, be any good to a man after the devils had killed him? Vekia would never get her trade finery, for all her airs; and Jacky Te Vaka, whose schooner was to be hired to take the Siamani up to Falaite, would never come back from such a sacrilegious journey.... Why could he not wait, and go by Kapitani Satoni’s schooner when she made her yearly trip by and by? Every one knew that the _Sipila_ was under a charm, and no harm could come to any one on board her. But he would not wait, and just as soon as Jacky’s boat came back from Bora-Bora, next week, they were to go.... Ahi! and Jacky was such a handsome man—it was a great pity!

Such was the substance of the information gathered by Vaiti. It resulted in her ordering the course of the ship to be changed, and heading direct for Friday Island, instead of going down to Auckland. Friday Island—out of the way, infertile, uninteresting, and little known—had been one of Saxon’s private preserves for some years. He touched there once a year, purchased all the copra that the little place produced at his own price, and paid for it in cheap tinned meat, boxes of damaged biscuit, and tins of imitation salmon instead of cash. He seldom went ashore, and certainly did not waste his time cave-hunting, if he did chance to set foot on the beach. Vaiti, with her odd faculty for acquiring miscellaneous information, had known since the first time the _Sybil_ called that there were great caves on the island, and that a devil of unusual quality and size guarded them. So much might have been said of a hundred similar islands, however, and she had not troubled herself about either caves or devils until the German professor’s secret set her on the alert for something that looked like a dangerous, exciting, and profitable adventure.

*CHAPTER IV*

*THE BLACK VIRI*

Moreover, as Harris had said, she had been devoured with desire of a real Paris dress ever since her stay in the Wellington hotel. There had been a famous actress there at the same time, and all her garments had been freely paragraphed in the ladies’ column of the local press. When she swam languidly through the hall of the Constantinople, shining mystic and wonderful out of a cloud of rainbow silks and chiffons that had cost a formidable row of figures in the Rue de la Paix, all the women caught their breath, looked once, and then gazed determinedly out of the windows, pretending that they had noticed nothing. When she came in to a late supper, floating in spangled mists and sparkling with constellations of diamonds, every head was turned her way, and half the heads—the short-cropped ones—stayed turned, in more senses than one. It was a revelation and a martyrdom to Vaiti. What were her muslin frocks and her ten new hats at a whole pound apiece compared to this? And the vision of money saved up faded away for the time being before the vision of one such frock—only one—belonging to her. Life could surely offer nothing more.

Of this, naturally, she said nothing to Pita, merely relating the matter of the skulls in as few words as possible. Pita, for his part, made no comment, but took a couple of revolvers out of the boat and thrust one into his belt, handing the other to the girl. Then he girded up his pareo—a significant action among islanders—and felt the handle of his knife to see that it was loose in the sheath. There was a large sack in the boat containing candles and food, and leaving ample space for other filling later on. Vaiti tossed it to Pita, and the two began their walk, barefoot, swift and silent, casting a quick glance every now and then among the weirdly stilted stems of the lonely pandanus groves as they went.

“They are all down with the _Sybil_—it is safer now than it would be at night,” said Pita. “Vaiti, if we get these things, and sell them for much money in Sitani, you and I will leave the _Sybil_ when she next goes to Atiu; and you shall be queen of Atiu and I shall be king, and we shall eat roast pork and ’uakari’ every day.”

“My father would burn the villages and kill the chiefs, and hang your head on the bowsprit of the ship,” replied Vaiti conversationally. “Besides, I like Sitani, and I will buy myself a wonder dress from Palisi town there.”

“Then we will leave at Sitani, and be great chiefs there, if these old bones indeed sell for so much money. And we will buy a little schooner for ourselves, and you shall be the real captain, and there will be four gold bands on your sleeve and one on the peak of your cap; and you shall get a _sitificati_ from the chiefs of the great harbour, and take the schooner out of Sitani Heads yourself. And every one shall be afraid of me and you, and they will say——”

Vaiti had been listening as she swung along, now casting a glance of approval at the handsome lad while he spoke cunningly of the schooner she should command, now shooting out her lip a little, and slashing impatiently with her knife at the young cocoanut fronds. Suddenly, looking very straight ahead, she interrupted.

“Pita, you talk too fast. There are things you do not know. Tell me, is your heart strong within you?”

“It is strong,” answered the island Maori.

“Then listen. There is a devil in the cave.”

“I do not believe in devils. I am misinari, and go to church five times on Sundays; also I have a black coat and two boots very nearly the same as each other to wear on collection days.”

“There is a devil all the same; you do not know everything that is in the world, little Pita,” replied Vaiti. “There is something bad there. I do not believe in native devils, for I am ’papa-langi’; but I know there is—a thing of some kind—there. A bad thing. A black viri, they say, but I do not understand that.”

“A black viri is nothing. You and I do not mind such things. See—there will perhaps be one in this rotten wood.” Pita struck and kicked at a mass of decaying cocoanut wood, and hunted out one of the great black centipedes that are common in the equatorial islands.

There is nothing on the bosom of Mother Earth more loathly than the centipede, and Pita’s quarry—nearly a foot long, as thick as a sausage, scarlet feelers on its hideous head, and scarlet legs fringing its long lithe body—was as hideous a specimen as ever jerked itself lightning-wise across a forest path. Pita, however, with swift dexterity, seized the horrible beast by the neck and tail, holding it so that it could neither bite nor sting, and lifted it up to his companion. Vaiti’s eyes dilated ever so little. She drew her knife and slashed the creature in two; then, stooping down, she struck at the flying halves as they ran away in opposite directions, and cut them up into mincemeat. Leaving the red fragments still wriggling in the track amidst an unsavoury, snaky smell, she stepped swiftly on.

“It is no matter,” she said. “We two shall see what we shall see. Keep your heart warm within you.”

“And if we come back safe?” cried the impetuous Pita, catching the girl’s warm round arms in his two sinewy hands, and letting his black eyes gaze into hers.

Vaiti stood very still for a moment, looking out to sea. The spell of her stillness fell on Pita, and he remained as if frozen. Far away the surf hummed on the reef, and a sea-bird cried. Above the two beautiful, motionless young figures the palms rustled endlessly in the long trade wind.

“... If we come back” ... said Vaiti at last, her eyes still fixed on the far-off line of the outer sea—“if we come back—we will go away together, you and I.”

She looked so like a witch in a trance (such things are not unknown even now, in strange Atiu) that Pita’s hands dropped from her arms, and he felt half frightened in the moment of his triumph. But Vaiti recalled him to himself by starting her steady swing again, and saying with a laugh, as they footed it through the dry, sun-struck woods side by side:

“I think some day my father will make a parrot cage to hang a green Atiu parrot in, and it will be made of your ribs and breast-bone, little Pita—all the same as my grandfather did in the islands to the man who stole his wife.”

At that moment the woods opened out and the cave came into view—a velvet-dark blot in the dazzling glare of greenery that tangled itself about the shoreward cliffs.

Pita’s hand sprang to his revolver, and he uttered an exclamation of angry surprise. Beside the cave stood a tall, brown, naked figure painted like a witch-doctor and armed with a spear.

“Do not shoot,” said Vaiti quickly. “It will do no good. Let me look to him myself.”

She walked right up to the native, stood within a yard of him, and stared at him, in a silence that somehow managed to express unflattering things. The man, stamping the butt of his spear on the ground, turned away from her and addressed Pita.

“I have nothing to do with this woman of yours,” he said. “It is with men I would speak.”

“Speak, then, pig-face,” said Pita insolently, hoping to provoke a fight, since the man seemed to be alone.

“Enter if you wish,” replied the other. “We have sent no fighting-men to hinder you; the way is clear. Yet if you think the hot sun on the pleasant land is good to see, and the beating of the warm heart in the living breast is sweet to feel, go not into our sacred caves, to lay evil hands upon the holy bones of Falaiti. Enough.”

The man’s words were strangely void of heat or anger, and he held his spear loosely, Vaiti did not suspect an ambush, for she knew that no native would enter the cave. Yet in that moment her quick mind leaped to the knowledge of some unknown danger threatening herself and Pita from out the cold-breathing world of darkness that lay within that rugged arch, and for one prophetic instant she could smell the very smell of death.

But Vaiti’s courage was of the kind that rises, wave by wave, the higher for all obstacle, and her spirit swelled within her to flood-tide in that moment. She turned upon the witch-doctor and laughed in his face. Then she stretched out her hand, and Pita’s leaped into it, warm and strong, and together they stepped over the threshold of the cave.

The man outside cursed them, slowly and with relish.

“Shall we not kill him?” asked Pita.

“There is no use,” said Vaiti. “It is plain to me that all the tribe know, and they trust to the dangers of the place, whatever these may be. This island is at the very end of the world, it is true, and strange things may happen here.”

“Yes, there is nothing that one might not believe in this place,” said Pita, looking back. Already the gloom of Hades itself was winding about them, and the air struck gravelike and cold. In the distance the mouth of the cave cast a brief glow of emerald light upon the dewy ferns and mosses close to the threshold, so that they shone like the jewelled foliage of some magic forest in a fairy play. Then came the dripping roof, the enormous stalactite buttresses of the cave, dimly edged with light; the oozing floor, and the lifeless dark.

Vaiti spoke not at all, as they walked side by side down dark tunnel after dark tunnel, across empty, thunderous-echoing black halls and archways—their little candles flitting like fireflies through a dim world of unconquerable gloom. Pita, however, was strangely gay. He yelled aloud to set the echoes booming in the black domes above, when they crossed some invisible great goblin market-place, full of hollow sounds and half-glimpsed monstrosities. He sang when the way along the endless corridors grew tedious, and the glistening stalactite candelabra succeeded one another, thick as forest branches, for mile after mile unchanged. When the path was barred by inky lakes of unknown depth and ghastly chill, and the two explorers had to tie their lights on their heads and swim for it, he pretended to cry at the cold, and played tricks on Vaiti by slipping behind her and catching her feet in his teeth. So they went on, one in wild spirits, the other silent and grave. And the hours of the sunny day slipped by dark and changeless, as they passed farther and farther away life and light into the cold black depths of the cave.

When it was about noon, as near as they could guess, Vaiti took the biscuits and tinned meat out of the sack, and they ate, squatting on the wet floor of the tunnel. They knew that the journey was a long one, and that the way could not well be missed, yet they were beginning to feel a little uneasy now. Did this cave go on for ever?

Somehow, the food did not cheer them and when they rose and went on again they did not talk. And now a worse difficulty than any they had yet encountered suddenly barred the way. The winding tunnel along which they were walking turned sharp round a corner, and then ended to all appearance in nothing. They stood at the edge of an empty gulf, black as a starless sky and of depth unknowable. Thin trickles of light, from the candles wavered faintly about its edges, and showed that the colossal crack had a farther side, but it was impossible to see what lay beyond, and the depth below cast back the candle rays as an armoured hull throws off a rifle bullet.

Pita detached a lump of rock and threw it over the edge. Vaiti watched him with sombre eyes. “There is no bottom there,” she said. “It goes through the earth, and out on the other side; that is what I think.”

“Children’s talk,” said Pita, listening intently. There was an echoing rattle as the stone bounded from side to side on its way down. The rattle grew fainter and fainter, diminished to a sound like the ticking of a watch, faded to an almost imperceptible vibration, and then seemed to die out. Seemed—for although there was nothing left for the ear to catch, the sharpened sensory nerves of the body still responded to a faint tingle, somewhere, somehow, long after the actual sound had faded away.

“I told you,” said Vaiti. “There is no bottom.” Pita did not answer; he was measuring the narrowest part of the gulf with his eye, and estimating the value of the three short steps of a run that were possible before taking off.

“It is not two fathoms wide here,” he said, throwing the provision sack across to judge his distance better in the uncertain light. Yet, despite the three steps of a run, there was not an inch to spare when he landed on the other side, with an effort that strained every muscle of his powerful young body.

“Can you jump it?” he called to Vaiti—without any particular anxiety, for the Maori has no nerves, and he knew what the girl could do aloft on the schooner.

To his astonishment, Vaiti made no answer, but stood leaning up against the wall of the tunnel, both hands pressed against her chest. In a moment more she was violently sick.

“The smell!” she said presently, turning a ghastly face towards the light of Pita’s candle.

“I smell nothing,” said Pita, puzzled. “The wind blows your way. There is perhaps some dead thing down there.”

Vaiti shook her head, and Pita saw that her eyes seemed to fill half her face as she looked down into the gulf. Suddenly she sprang, her white drapery flying behind her, and landed half a yard behind Pita, with a leap that drew a cry of wonder from the Atiuan. “Come, come,” she said, taking his hand and fairly dragging him on.

They had little farther to go. The tunnel wound on for perhaps another hundred yards, and then stopped. They found themselves in a low-roofed circular chamber, such as is often met with at the end of long underground passages—a small, insignificant place, roofed with drooping green stalactites and floored with shapeless, slimy hummocks of stalagmite. Numbers of deep shelves were quarried out in the rocky sides, and in these lay, row on row, the bare, mouldering skulls of Falaite’s long-ago chiefs—many of them cracked and split, and not a few fallen into shapeless fragments, though there were a score or two in excellent condition. They were curious skulls indeed, had their discoverers been able to understand them. In the projecting jaws, huge canines, strangely high cranium, and oddly developed ridges near the opening of the ear were the materials of a problem contradictory and complicated enough to occupy the wits of a whole college of science. But Vaiti and Pita saw none of these things. They only noted with disappointment, that most of the skulls had gone to decay—picked out the best of the unbroken specimens, packed the great sack full of them, and turned homewards.

“Vaiti,” said Pita, as they walked down the rocky tunnel, and felt the slope of the gulf beginning under their feet. “Vaiti, what did you——”

Her face, turned back upon him, slew the still-born question on his lips.

It was scarce a minute before the chasm gaped in their path yet again. The leap was worse on this side, for the clustered cones of stalagmite did not allow a fair take-off. Pita looked calculatingly at the farther side, very dimly visible in the faint candle-light, and picked up a fallen stalactite to throw across.

“Do not throw!” said Vaiti, in a breathless whisper.

“Why not? I can jump better if I hear where it hits,” replied Pita, casting the stone before Vaiti had time to snatch at his hand. It fell short, and rolled down into the chasm with a loud, crashing noise.

“Fool! fool! Jump quickly!” exclaimed Vaiti, in the same strained, horrible whisper.... Just for a second before he sprang, Pita looked down into the black pit beneath, and it seemed to him that the darkness shirred and shivered below the farther edge of the crevasse—that for the fragment of a second something long, red, whiplike, vibrated high up in the light of the candles, and then was gone.... There was a sickening odour in the air—a living smell, not a dead one; there was a sliding, rustling sound....

“Jump!” shrieked Vaiti.

They leaped through the air as one, but it was only Vaiti who landed on the farther side. Behind her, as she touched the rock, rose a shriek that blasted the leaden air into red-hot drops of horror—that went on and on and on, tearing upwards to the vaulted roof like a rocket fired from the mouth of hell; breaking at last into a gasping bellow, and snapping off into grisly silence on the very crest of a long, choking roar, in which there was nothing left of human.

... Pita had jumped short. Falling on the far side, with his legs half over the abyss, he had grasped for an instant at Vaiti’s outstretched hands, and in the very act had been snatched away—snatched by a long, ghastly head, armed with poisoned jaws and quivering red antennas, that shot with the speed of a bullet out from the depths of the chasm, and back again with its prey.... The head was a foot long at least, the horrible winnowing feelers more than a yard, the black and red body, that just flashed into view for a second, was as thick as a man’s thigh. It was a nightmare, an impossibility, and yet ... it was, beyond doubt, the Black Viri.

For a little while it seemed to Vaiti that she went mad, and then that the world went out and she died. A long time after, she found herself sitting on the floor of the tunnel, her head badly bruised and cut where she had dashed it against the rock, her candle guttering down towards extinction, her revolver empty and smelling of powder—she did not remember in the least how it had become so—and the whole black, horrible place still and silent as the bottom of the sea. Pita was gone. The bag of skulls had disappeared—fallen, no doubt, into the abyss. There was not a movement or a sound, save the whisper of the water—drops trickling ceaselessly from the roof into the dark pools upon the ground.

* * * * *

That evening, when the early starlight was beginning to shine down upon the creepers veiling the mouth of the tunnel, Saxon, sober at last, and rushing like a madman to the cave to find his daughter, met Vaiti herself coming down the rocks at the entrance, haggard, trembling, and almost old. He asked for Pita, and was answered only by a shuddering gesture of the hands. Questioning no more, he carried the girl down to the beach and brought her on board the schooner. There, when they had sailed, he left her undisturbed in her cabin for many days, while they ran steadily southward to pleasant Auckland and the temperate latitudes, farther and farther away from lonely, sun-smitten Falaite. The story of the day in the cave was known to him, as to every one on the island, for the witch-doctor of Falaite had told it far and wide, reserving only the one interesting fact—how he became possessed of the information. And as no one else alive on Falaite knew that there were two ways of reaching the skull-chamber, and more than one place where a man could hide unseen, the witch-doctor’s reputation as a prophet and a clairvoyant was greatly increased; so that he suffered continually from a happily-acquired indigestion, and his dogs grew fat on bones of pig and fowl. And no one came ever any more into the sacred caves of Falaite Island.

Saxon declared plumply that he did not believe the tale, opining rather that the “blanked old wizard Johnnie had shoved Pita into the hole himself, and good riddance of bad rubbish, too.”

None the less, he was uneasy at Vaiti’s rather prolonged depression, and though he dared not break in upon her solitude further than to hand her in her meals and ask her how she felt, now and then, he listened almost constantly at her state-room door, and gave up whisky for at least ten days.

About the eleventh day, Te Ai, a young Samoan A.B., sat upon the main hatch in the pleasant coolness of the second dog-watch, and sang the farewell song of sweet Samoa, “Good-bye, my F’lennie”—the song that plucks so surely at the heartstrings of all who have ever loved and sailed away among the far-off fairy islands of the wide South Seas.

“Good-bye, my F’lennie (friend)—o le a o tea,
Efau lau le va’a, o le alii pule i....”

he sang, beating time with his knees on the hatch.... Then suddenly he stopped, and the little group of mates and captain on the poop did not see why.

Later on, Harris, his face stiff with suppressed laughter, knocked at the captain’s door.

“Can you oblige me with a piece of sticking-plaster, sir?” he said.

“Who for?” asked Saxon, reaching for the yellow roll that lies handy in every shipmaster’s cabin about the peaceful Pacific.

“Te Ai, sir. He’s been knocked down, and his head got cut against the pump.”

“Who did it?” bristled Saxon, ready to uphold his own peculiar privileges, at once.

“She did, sir,” said Harris, nearly choking. “Te Ai, he was singin’ ’Good-bye, my F’lennie,’ on the main ’atch and out she come from the deck cabin like a—like a nurricane, begging your pardon, sir—and she ups with a belayin’ pin from the rail, an——”

“All right, all right; there’s your plaster,” interrupted Saxon. “Harris! Here.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Give this to Te Ai.”

“Lor’ bless you, sir, ’e don’t mind; ’e’s a——”

“You do what you’re told. Stop. Where’s my daughter?”

“Walkin’ on the poop, sir, uncommon lively, and looking like dirty weather ahead.”

“That’s all right,” sighed the captain, with an air of infinite relief.

*CHAPTER V*

*A DIAMOND WEB*

It was six o’clock in Apia, and the round sun was hanging low above the rim of the level sea, like a burning coal ready to drop down upon a breadth of hyacinth silk. The stores were closed along the straggling beach street, where the sand was white under foot, and parrakeets tweedled cheerily in the scarlet-flowered flamboyant trees. Native dandies, greatly oiled and dyed, and wearing a bright hibiscus blossom over each ear, swung past with the inimitable Samoan roll, their golden brown limbs gay with the red-and-white English bath-towel that is popular as full dress for steamer days in the little island capital. Girls with high-coiffed yellow heads and pink or green tunics wandered lazily home to the cool, dark-domed native houses open all round to the sunset sky. They went in groups, and sang as they walked—windy, fitful gusts of strange island melody, breaking out and dying away like the evening breeze among the heavy-headed palms. Smells of yam and breadfruit, brown from the baking pits, of fish cooked in green, savoury leaves, and taro spinach stewed with cocoanut cream, crept out upon the cooling air. The long, hot day was done, and Apia rested and ate.

In “Charley’s”—the least reputable of Apia’s tavern-hotels—the egregious _table d’hôte_ was in full progress out in the green-shuttered verandah. Charley himself, an oily, flashy New Caledonian half-caste, dressed in striped pyjamas, was eating curried tin—nature unknown—with a knife and two fingers, at the head of the table. A corpse-faced Chinese was shuffling round with the inevitable Pacific fowl, cut up in a watery soup. The table-cloth was of linoleum, the swinging lamp guttered and smoked, the cutlery was dislocated and black. But there was English beer on the bar counter, and plenty of broken ice; and the whisky that mounted high in each man’s smeary tumbler was good of its kind. Charley knew his customers, and sought first the essential.

Captain Saxon, his schooner safe at anchor outside, and his copra advantageously sold to an Auckland agent, sat eating at the table, heavy-faced, a little intoxicated, and almost absolutely blank in mind. This was his nearest approach to happiness, and one that he enjoyed often enough, for, since thought meant pain to him, he had managed to acquire a wonderful agility in avoiding it, and to live for the most part almost as purely by instinct and impulse as a dog.

It was perhaps for this reason that he did not notice anything unusual in the demeanour of that singularly unknown quantity, Vaiti, his daughter. And yet Vaiti—sombre and sparkling in a dress of vaporous red, with a handful of star stephanotis from the verandah thrust into the marvellous waves of her hair—was evidently not quite herself. She sat a little apart from the noisy company that sprawled about the table, looked at no one, ate her food absent-mindedly and pulled little strips off the decaying oilcloth of the table-cover with a steady industry that made Charley wriggle in his seat, although he did not dare to remonstrate.

Some one else was watching her, if Saxon was not. A short, stocky man, with burning grey eyes, a fiery red beard, and a sharp furrow between the eyebrows, that somehow suggested belaying-pins and rope’s ends, was looking at her every now and then as he noisily sucked in his soup. The inspection did not appear to please him altogether. He finished his dinner quickly, took the current glass of whisky in his hand, and rolled off to the dark end of the verandah, followed by a grey-haired, greasy-faced mate who had been sitting beside him.

“Still on for it, cap?” asked the latter, leaning over the railing with an air of careless ease that contrasted oddly with his watchful eye.

“Yes, blank asterisk your condemned foolishness, sure I am on for it!” replied the captain, betraying his nationality by a slight touch of brogue.

There is no nation that swings so high and so low between opposite extremes of character as the impetuous race that is handcuffed, by an odd freak of geography, to steady, serious England. Great saints and great rogues are commoner in Ireland than ordinary people, and each displays the fullest flavour of his kind. Donahue, master of the island schooner _Ikurangi_, was, or had been, Irish; and it was assuredly not the company of the saints that claimed his membership.

The two spoke together for a little while in level tones that sounded loud and careless enough, yet somehow did not carry. One learns these things by practice.

“She smells a rat, I’m thinking,” said the old mate, looking critically the while at Charley, as if he were valuing the half-caste’s clothes for pawn.

“Let her. You and I are apt to be a match for her, for all that,” answered the captain. He looked at Charley also. You would have sworn the two were discussing him, and rather unfavourably. Charley himself shifted in his seat, and showed his magnificent teeth uncomfortably.

“Think she’ll come on board?”

Vaiti was watching them, her chin on her hand. Her expression was not to be read.

“I’ll get her on board all right,” answered the captain, keeping his eyes away from the girl with an effort. “You play up, that’s all.”

“’Jer think you’re a match for that weasel in a woman’s skin—you or any of us?”

“I do, then. Forty’s a match for twenty any day in the year, if the heads of them comes anything near equal. Cunnin’ as Old Nick she is, but I’ve been cunnin’ twenty years longer than her.”

“You pitched her a good yarn, I’ll lay.”

“I did that—about the derelick we boarded nor’-east of the Paumotus, and the Spanish ladies’ clothes and cases of goods that was lying about, and how we took what there was, includin’ of a di’mond necklashe that was sittin’ all its lone on the table in the old man’s cabin (Be minding me, now, or you’ll be making mistakes), and the way a gale riz on us before we was through, and hurried us back to the _Ikurangi_, so that we lost the derelick, and didn’t see no more of her; and how we heard in Noumea afterwards that there was like to be joolery on boord her, so that we’re all on to go and find her again.”

“Straight fact up to finding the di’monds, and gory lyin’ after that, I see. But how d’ye make out the people that deserted the ship was such fat-headed idiots as to leave the joolery?”

“Why, they was fat-headed idiots right enough; they did leave a good lot of saleable stuff, as you and I knows; and it’s only addin’ on a bit to say that the ship had been on fire and made them clear for their lives, so that they didn’t think of the valuables. There’s the necklashe I have for proof. And, mind me now, what we heard was that the people of the ship knows now that she didn’t go down, and will be out after her themselves when they can raise the cash, so that hurry’s the word.”

“How much of that’s true?”

“Not a —— bit. The people was drowned, I allow. But it hangs well, and don’t you go and forget none of it. I pitched the yarn that way because of that bit of pashtry joolery I got hould of in mistake for goods down Melbourne way.... I misremember if I tould you.”

“You did, more nor once, and you was jolly well served right by her,” candidly replied the mate. “The yarn’s all right, I suppose, and the paste necklace is good business; but where does this Vaiti come in?”

“Quit lookin’ at her, ye —— fool, and give me a light for me poipe. Talk easy, can’t you.... Why, she knows more navigation than most men that’s got a master’s ticket, and she’s as vain of it as a paycock. And that’s how I’ll have her. Always get a woman t’rough her consate, me boy, especially if her eyes are too sharp in common. That’ll pull the wool over them when nothing else will.”

“When I was in Callao——” began the mate, with an evil chuckle.

“Leave Callao be now; you can tell me about her another time. Well, you understand about Saxon’s girl, I hope? She’s to navigate us on the trip, because nayther you nor I knows enough for a cruisin’ job like this, and the old chap himself is pretty general drunk—that’s the way I put it—and shares with what we find, and the ould divil himself to come along, just for propriety, and in case of a fight with the owners. Oh, a nate yarn, and she shwallowed it down like a cat atin’ butter. She’s comin’ on boord to-night, to see the necklashe and look over the chart I’ve marked. She’ll not bring ould Saxon, for she’s feared of nayther man nor divil, and I’ll bet she thinks to get the bearin’s of the place off of me and chate me out of it after all.”

“And how the h—— do you think she’s going to believe that you give the show away before the ship sails? Her teeth wasn’t cut yesterday, by all we know.”

“Faith, and we do know!” muttered the captain, with a horrible undercurrent of oaths. “And she’ll know, by —— she will! I’d slit the throat of her, if it wasn’t for the other bit of divarsion we’ve planned.”

“Say you’ve planned,” interrupted the mate darkly. “I call it bad work, whether she was man, woman, or child; but you’re my master.”

“And you’re a plashter saint, ain’t you?” sneered the captain. “Let’s have no more of your chat; we know each other a —— sight too well. As for the chart, she’ll think we don’t mean to give it away till she and her father is under sail with us, but she’ll come on the chance of sneaking it out somehow. And when we’ve got her aboard, why—lave it to me! Ould Saxon’s hell-cat daughter won’t take no more pearl-shell beds from us or any one else.”

“You ain’t afraid of her knowing who we are?”

“How would she, then? The _Ikurangi_ isn’t the _Margaret Macintyre_—bad luck to her who brought me down to such a tub, after ownin’ the finest auxiliary in Auckland!—and she never seen you or me till to-day. No, it’s all right. That’s enough jaw; you go aboard, and attend to you know what, and then send off the boat for her and me.”

Vaiti, curly classic head on slender hand, still watched from her corner.