Chapter IV: Part 4

The doorway was darkened at that moment by Vaiti herself, balancing lightly up the cocoanut log to the threshold. She wore a white tunic over a scarlet “pareo,” her wavy curls, sparkling with the water of the stream, fell loose upon her shoulders; her lips were as red as the freshly-plucked pomegranate blossom behind her ear. Something like life stirred in the boot-button eyes of the White Man of Nalolo as he looked at her.

“Afi!” he called to a Fijian woman who was sleeping on the mats at the “kaisi” end of the house, “go and hurry the girls with the supper, and make tea for the marama (lady). Quick!”

Then he turned to Saxon.

“Stay here as long as you like, both of you,” he said. “Let her sit there sometimes, where I can see her and fancy.... I’ll show you something.”

He rose slowly and stiffly, and limped across to a Chinese camphorwood box that stood in the corner. In a minute he returned with a faded photograph in a gaudy frame.

“My daughter,” he said. “The only child I ever had. She was Afi’s. She died a long time ago. Afi’s a chief woman: she was as handsome as Andi Thakombau when she was young, and the girl took after her. Your girl’s mother was chief too, I guess. Do you see any likeness?”

Vaiti and her father craned over the photograph. The pretty half-caste girl, was certainly like the stately, slender creature who gazed at her pictured face, though the fire and spirit of Vaiti’s expression were wanting.

“I’m growing old,” went on the White Man. “I’ve no children. Stay a bit. I’ll be glad to have you.”

“Thank you; delighted, I’m sure,” drawled Saxon, with a pathetic resurrection of his long-forgotten “grand manner,” And so it was settled.

Vaiti, listening and thinking as usual, with her chin in her slender fingers, approved of what she heard, and smiled very pleasantly at her host. It seemed to her that he could be very useful just now.

The four weeks that followed after glided away agreeably enough in the silent hills. Nothing happened; no one came or went—the Fijians, men and women, went out to the yam and taro fields in the morning, and returned in the afternoon; and after dark there would be long, monotonous chanting, and interminable sitting dances, on the mats inside the high-roofed houses. Saxon stupefied himself with kava most of the time, in the absence of stronger drink, and almost got himself clubbed once or twice on account of his too impulsive admiration for the beauties of the village. His host, however, was no censor of morals, and troubled very little about him. On Sundays the Fijians dressed themselves in their brightest cottons, stuck up their hair in huge halos, and went five times to church, under the auspices of the native Wesleyan teacher; while Saxon and his host smoked, slept, drank kava, and played cards. The village provided plenty of yam and taro, kumara, cocoanut, and fish; and there was tea and sugar in the Chinese box, and now and then the White Man killed a pig or a fowl. It was very pleasant on the whole.

In a month’s time, however, Saxon girded up his loins to leave this mountain Capua and descend to Suva once more. The _Sybil_ would be ready, and his charter to convey ornamental Fiji woods to San Francisco would not wait.

They said good-bye to their host, and walked a mile or two across the river-flats below the town before either spoke. Then Vaiti put her hand into her sash, and drew out something small and shining.

“See, father, what the White Man gave me, because I was like his daughter,” she said.

Saxon took the object, and turned it over in his fingers. It was a small seal, shaped like an eagle standing on a rock. The eagle was gold, the rock amethyst.

“A pretty thing, but not worth more than two or three pounds,” he said.

Then he turned it over and looked at the device. There was a curious crest on the face of the seal—a wolf with a crescent moon in his jaws; underneath, a motto in a strange foreign character.

Saxon’s red complexion paled as he examined the crest. In other days and scenes, among ice-bound rivers and grim mediæval fortress-castles, he had seen that crest light up the crimson panes of old armorial windows—had read the motto underneath—“What I have, I hold”—of nights when he and the wildest young nobles of the Russian court were dining together under the splendid roof of one of Moscow’s greatest banqueting halls. For a moment he felt the keen cold air of the ice-bound streets blow sharp on his cheek; heard the jingle of the sleigh-bells, drawing up before the marble steps where the yellow lamplight streamed out across the snow. The fancy faded, swift as a passing lantern picture that flashes out for a moment and then sweeps away into darkness. He saw the burning sky and the crackling palms again, felt the furnace-heated wind, and knew that it was all over long ago, and that he was ruined, exiled, and old. Yet there remained a thread of indefinite recollection, a suggestion of something half-remembered, that was not all unconnected with the present day. What was the story belonging to that crest—the story that the whole world knew?

“Where did the fellow get the thing?” he asked his daughter.

Vaiti told him.

The White Man of Nalolo, it seemed, was one of the numerous South Sea wanderers who believe in the existence of various undiscovered islands, hidden here and there in the vast, untravelled wastes of sea that lie off the track of ships. Thirty years before, there had been wondering rumours of an island of this kind, touched at once by a ship that no one could name, found to be uninhabited, and never revisited; indeed, no one was sure where it was within a few hundred miles. Years went by, and the White Man, who had always taken a special interest in the story, found himself shipwrecked—the sole survivor of a boatful of castaways—on the very island itself. But fortune was unkind, for the morning after his arrival, when he was trying to sail round the island, a sudden storm blew him out to sea again, and he had drifted for many days, and all but perished, in spite of the fish and nuts he had obtained from the island, before a mission schooner happened to see him and pick him up. He had examined most of the island while ashore, and had seen no inhabitants or traces of cultivation. Nevertheless he had always been convinced that there was something mysterious about the place, for two reasons. One was the presence of common house-flies, which he had never seen far away from the haunts of human beings. The other was the discovery of an amethyst seal, lying under a stone on the shore. It was dirty and discoloured, but he did not think so small and heavy an object could have been washed up on the shore from a wreck.

Where mystery is in the air, most men’s minds turn naturally to thoughts of hidden treasure, and the White Man of Nalolo had ever since cherished a hope that there was treasure on the island. For several years he had fully intended to go and look—some day—but as he could only guess at the latitude and longitude, and as he had little money to spare, he never succeeded either in hunting the place up himself or in persuading any one else to do so. Now he was old and half-crippled, and did not care any more about anything; so he wanted Vaiti, who reminded him so much of his dead daughter, to have the seal. It was a pretty thing, and perhaps it would make her think sometimes of the poor old White Man of Nalolo.

Saxon listened attentively to the story, and heaved a sigh of disappointment at the end.

“There’s nothing in it, my girl,” he said. “No proof of treasure there, eh?”

“No; no treasure,” said Vaiti, looking at the ground as she walked.

“What then?” asked Saxon curiously. He saw she had something in reserve.

Vaiti suddenly flamed out in eloquent Maori.

“What then, my father? Am I one who sees through men’s heads, that I can tell what was in the mind of you as you looked at the jewel, and turned yellow and green like a parrot, only to see it? What then? I do not know. I walk in the dark, and the light is in your hand, not in mine. As for you, you have made your brain dull with the brandy and the kava, so that you cannot see at all. What then? Tell me yourself, for I do not know. I know only that there is something to be told.”

“Don’t be rough on your poor old father,” said Saxon pathetically. “I’d have knocked the stuffing out of any man who said half as much, but I spoil you, by Gad, I do. I don’t know—I can’t think, somehow or other. But there was a story about the Vasilieffs—the johnnies who had that crest—people I used to stay with when I went to——”

He broke off, smashed a spider-lily bloom with his stick, and began afresh.

“Junia Vasilieff—what was it she did? Big princes they were, and much too close to the throne to be safe company.... Junia Vasili—I have it! Yes—the end of the story was in the Sydney papers, time you were a little kid. I remember. They were to have married her to the Czarewitch, just to make things safe. Her claim to the throne was big enough to have started a revolution any day, if it had been asserted.... Poor little Junia!—only sixteen when I knew—when the marriage was talked of—and such golden hair as she had! She hated the whole thing; courts and ceremony weren’t in her line. But she was a gentle little creature, and I never thought she’d have had the spirit to do as she did.”

He turned the seal over in his fingers, as if reading the past from its glittering surface.

“There was a young lieutenant of Hussars, a Pole—you don’t know what that is, but the Russians don’t like them, I can tell you—a noble, but a very small one; not fit to black Junia’s boots, according to their notions. Well, he bolted with her. It was in the Sydney papers, time I was in the Solomons; the paper came up to Guadalcanar.... She must have been twenty then; just the year the marriage to the Czarewitch was to have come off.... They bolted—cleared out—never seen again. All Russia on the boil about it; no one knew but what they’d hatch up plots against the throne, she having a better claim than any one else, if it hadn’t been for the law against empresses. The secret police were after them for years, but they were never traced, though most people knew Russia’d give a pretty penny to know where they were——”

“O man with the head of a fruit-bat, do you not see?” interrupted Vaiti at this juncture. “They hid on that island—they may be there still. It is worth a hundred treasures!”

“The Pole was a great traveller, and had a sort of a little yacht,” said Saxon thoughtfully. “It might be true, of course—if there is an island, and if the Nalolo Johnnie had any idea of where it was, and if nobody found them out and split years ago. Plenty of ’ifs.’”

“I think him all-right good enough,” averred Vaiti, returning to English and prose. “By’n-by we finish F’lisco, then we go see, me and you.”

*CHAPTER IX*

*THE LOST ISLAND*

Some two or three months later, the schooner might have been seen, like a white-winged butterfly lost at sea, beating up and down before a solitary, low, green island lying far east of the lonely Paumotus. Vaiti, sitting on the top of the deck-house, was examining the land through a glass. The native crew were all on deck; also Harris and Gray, the mate and bo’sun. Captain Saxon was not to be seen.

“The old man always do get squiffy at the wrong time, don’t he?” commented Harris, rather gleefully.

Gray spat over the rail for reply.

“You’re ratty because you don’t know nothing, ain’t you?” he said.

“Do you?” asked the mate curiously. Harris had not much notion of the dignity of his office, and dearly loved a gossip at all times.

“More nor you, havin’ eyes and ears that’s of use to me occasionally,” replied the bo’sun dryly.

Harris considered.

“I’ll give you my grey shirt to tell,” he said persuasively. “There’s sure to be something up.”

“’Ow much does we ever get out of it when there is?” asked Gray sourly. “I could do with that shirt very well, though. There ain’t much to tell, except that the old man he thought there was an island hereabouts not marked on the chart that nobody knew about; and Vaiti she allowed that was all —— rot, because, says she, this part’s been surveyed, and though the Admiralty surveys isn’t the for-ever-’n-ever-Amen dead certainties the little brassbound officers thinks them, still they don’t leave whole islands out on the loose without a collar and a name round their necks, so to say. So, says she, let me work out the length of time they ran before the hurricane, says she, and the d’rection of the wind, which the old boy remembered right enough, says she; and then look it up on the chart, and I’ll be blowed, says she, if you don’t find something for a guide like. So by-and-by she looks, and says she, ‘’Ere’s something; ’ere’s a reef marked P.D., and it is P.D.,’ says she, ’for you and I knows there’s nothin’ there,’ she says. ’But we’ll look a bit more to the north’ard,’ she says, ’where it’s right off the’ track of ships, and maybe we’ll find somethin’ and maybe we won’t,’ she says. ’But I think,’ she says, ’that somewheres not too far off from that P.D. reef we’ll maybe get a sight of what we’re lookin’ for,’ she says, ’because sometimes reefs is put down for bigger things by mistake,’ she says, ’especially if you ’aven’t been to see.’ Then she comes on deck, and I makes myself scarce, for it ain’t healthy on this ship to listen at no cabin skylights, not if she knows you’re there.”

“Well, whatever the game is, I don’t suppose it’ll line our little insides any fatter, bo’sun. We don’t count on this ship anything like as we ought to when there’s shares goin’. I wonder that I stick to her, I do! Old man as drunk as a lord half the time—me doin’ his work as well as my own—a blessed she-cat running the blooming show——”

“Ready about!” sang Vaiti from the deck-house, and the mate and bo’sun sprang across the deck. There was something about the orders of the “she-cat” that enforced a smartness on the _Sybil_ rare on an island schooner, even when heavy-fisted Saxon was not about.

Half an hour later, Vaiti had rowed herself ashore, curtly declining Harris’s polite offers of assistance, and had landed on the beach. As she did not know who she might be going to see, she had provided for all emergencies. Her revolver was in her pocket, and she wore a flowing sacque of lace-trimmed white silk that made her feel she was fit to meet any Russian princess, if such were indeed on the island. It was a gratifying thought that the said princess, if she had been a celebrated beauty, must now be well into the forties, and consequently beneath all contempt as a rival belle.

Her father’s absence did not trouble her. He had a nasty trick of starting a drinking bout just when he was most needed—in fact, it was the one point in Saxon’s character on which you could absolutely rely. Vaiti, therefore, had grown used to doing without him, and rather liked to have a perfectly free hand.

She had fully grasped the bearings of the case. There was possibly a very great chief’s daughter from Europe, with a rather insignificant chief who had stolen her away, living there in hiding. The people of her country would pay a great deal to know where she was and bring her back. Or, if there seemed any lack of safety about this proceeding (Vaiti had long ago learned that her father was not fond of putting himself within the reach of principalities and powers of any kind), the couple themselves must be made to pay for silence. It was all very simple.

The fact that the island was supposed to be uninhabited did not trouble her. She meant to investigate that matter after her own fashion.

She walked all round it first of all. It took her about an hour. There was a nice, white, sandy beach, with straggling bush behind it. There were a good many cocoanuts—all young ones—also a large number of broken trunks, apparently snapped off by a hurricane.

This set Vaiti thinking. It seemed to her that the damage was rather too universal and even to be natural. Yet why should any sane human cut short all his full-grown cocoanuts?

She crossed the island twice at the ends, noting everything with a keen and wary eye. Fairly good soil; nothing growing on it, however, but low scrub and a few berries. In the centre of the island the scrub thickened into dense bush, impenetrable without an axe. No sign of life anywhere.

Vaiti stamped her foot. Was it possible she had been mistaken? Was this indeed just what it seemed, a commonplace, infertile, useless, little mid-ocean islet, let alone because it was worth nothing, and incorrectly described as a reef because no one had ever troubled to examine it? Things began to look like it.

And yet ... she thought—she did not quite know what, but she was very sure that she did not want to leave the island just yet. She would at least climb a tall tree and take a general survey before she gave it up.

Nothing simpler—but there was no such tree.

All the palms were young, or broken off short; all the pandanus trees were in the same condition. There was no rock, no commanding height. She could not get a view.

Vaiti’s cheek flushed crimson under its olive brown. The spark was struck at last!

Somebody had cut short those trees—to prevent anyone from climbing up and overlooking the island. The encircling reef would not allow any ship to approach close enough for a look-out at the mast-head to see over the island, except in a very general way. There was something to conceal. What, and where?

Only one answer was possible. The mass of apparently virgin bush in the centre of the island—several acres in extent—was the only spot where a cat could have concealed itself. The scent was growing hot.

With sparkling eyes Vaiti began to circle the wood, watching narrowly for the smallest trace of a pathway. The branches were interlocked and knitted together as only tropical bush can be. Many were set with huge thorns; all were laced and twined with bush ropes and lianas of every kind.

Nothing larger than a rat could have won its way through such a rampart. Vaiti walked swiftly on and on, striking the bushes now and then with a stick, to make sure that there were no loose masses of stuff masking a concealed entrance, and keeping a sharp eye for traces of footsteps.... It was with a heart-sinking shock that she found herself once more beside the low white coral rock that had marked the commencement of her journey, and realised that she had been all round, and that there was most certainly no opening.

The sun was slipping down the heavens now. She had been exploring half the day, but she was not beaten yet. The unexpected difficulties she had met with only sharpened her determination to enter the thicket at all costs. Harris, suffering acutely, as usual, from suppressed curiosity, was nearly driven mad by the sight of the “she-cat” suddenly reappearing on the ship, picking up an axe, and departing as silently as she had come, with a countenance that did not invite questions. She had taken off her smart silk dress, and was in her chemise and petticoat, arms and feet bare, and waist girdled with a sash into which she had stuck her revolver. She dropped the axe into her boat, rowed silently away, and disappeared on the other side of the island.

The sun was still some distance above the sea when she let the axe slip from her torn, scratched, and aching hands, and stood at last, tired but triumphant, in the heart of the mysterious island’s mystery. She had won her way, with the woodcraft that was in her island blood, through the dense belt of bush, hacking and slashing here, stooping and writhing there, until the light began to show through the tangled stems in front, and a few swift strokes cleared the way into the open. Yes! there was a space in the centre, after all—a clearing over an acre in extent. There was grass here, and a few overgrown bananas, and a tangle of yam and pumpkin vines. Passion fruit ran in a tangle of wild luxuriance over the inner wall of the thicket; pine-apples rotted on the ground and fig-trees spread their wide leaves unchecked and unpruned.... In the middle of all was a house—a one-storied little bungalow, iron-roofed, with a tank to catch the rain. There was a long, low store behind it, and something that looked like a pig-sty, and something that might have been a fowl-run. But....

But everything was rotten, ruined, overgrown, hardly to be distinguished in the thick tangle of vegetation that had overflowed the little retreat like a great green wave let loose upon a low-lying shore. Vaiti knew what she was going to see before she had reached the door of the bungalow—a rotten floor, with green vines shooting up between the crevices, and bush rats scuffling and squeaking under the boards—a rusted iron roof, where pink convolvulus bloom peeped in under the rafters, and lizards sunned themselves in the airy blue furniture unglued and decayed fast sinking into one common mass of ruin—door aslant, and thresholds sunken. Everywhere silence, emptiness, decay. There needed no explanation of the vanished pathway.

The Maori blood owns strange instincts. Again Vaiti knew what she was going to see before it came—knew, and walked straight over to a certain corner of the enclosure, as if she had been there before.... It was under a scarlet-flowered hibiscus tree that she found it—a long, low grave, fenced round with a wall of coral slabs, so that the overflowing bush had surged less thickly here, and one could see that there was something lying on the mound, only half hidden by creeping vines—something long and white and slender.

Vaiti dragged away the creepers.... Yes, it was a skeleton, bare and fleshless, with bony fingers and black, empty eyes. There was a splintered gap in one temple, and close to one of the hands lay a mass of rusted steel that had once been a revolver.

On a flat white stone, standing at the head of the grave, a long inscription had been carved with infinite care in three different languages. Two of them Vaiti did not understand, but the third was English. She pulled the growing ferns off the stone, and, wiping its surface, read:

“Here is buried Junia, of the race of Vasilieff.
Died 20th June, 1889.

“Here is buried Anton, son of Junia Vasilieff
and her husband, Alexis, Baron Varsovi,
Born 20th June, died 21st June,
1889.

“Here rests Alexis, Baron Varsovi. Into the
unknown thou didst follow me: into the
Great Unknown I follow thee.
Reunited 21st June, 1889.”

Vaiti, descendant of cannibal chiefs and lawless soldiers, more than half a pirate herself, and hard of nature as a beautiful flinty coral flower, was yet at bottom a woman after all. What passed in the breast of this dark, wild daughter of the southern seas, as she stood above the strange, sad record of loves and lives unknown, cannot be told. But in a little while, with some dim recollection of the long-ago, gentle, pious days of her convent school, she knelt down beside tie lonely grave, and, crossing herself, said something as near to a prayer as she could remember. Then, still kneeling, she cut and tied two sticks into the form of a cross, and set them upright in the earth of the mound. The sun was slanting low and red across the grave as she turned away.

* * * * *

“What’d she give you?” asked Harris eagerly, as the bo’sun stepped across the gang-plank on to the quay. The lights of San Francisco were blazing all about, the cars roared past, there was a piano-organ jangling joyously at the corner.

“Fifty dollars for the two of us,” said Gray, his acid face sweetened with unwonted smiles.

“Crikey! Honest men is riz in the market at last! What in h—— can she have got herself?”

“Might as well arst me what she got it for. Don’t know, and don’t care, so long as we’ve got the makings of a spree like this out of it. I see her comin’ out of the Rooshian Consulate this mornin’ lookin’ like as if some one ’ad been standin’ treat to her.”

“You know she don’t touch anything.”

“I’m speaking figuryative; she looked that sort of way. And coming’ back to the ship, she says to the old man, she says: ’Why, dad, better dead than alive!’ she says. And he laughs.”

“Don’t sound ’olesome,” observed Harris thoughtfully.

“Now, don’t you get to thinkin’, for you ain’t built that way, and you’ll do yourself a mischief,” said the boatswain warningly. “And let’s be thankful to ’eaven for all its mercies, say I, that we’ve got such a nice, warm, dry, convenient night for to go and get drunk in.”

*CHAPTER X*

*WHAT CAME OF THE PARIS DRESS*

The effects of Saxon’s illness in Fiji were a long time in wearing off. It was many weeks after Vaiti had come back to the _Sybil_, flushed with importance and with the lionising she had received on the cable-ship—many weeks after the voyage to the unknown island and the visit to San Francisco—that he took ill again; not very seriously, but badly enough to prevent his going to sea. Of course, the time was an awkward one. They were off Niué, and there was copra waiting to be taken to Raratonga for the steamer—copra which would certainly be secured by some other schooner if Saxon did not take it at the promised date. Neither Harris nor Gray knew enough to be trusted with the ship, and he did not much care about letting Vaiti sail her—not because he doubted his fiery daughter’s ability or desire, but because, rash as he was himself at times, he knew her to be still worse. He had seen her run the _Sybil_ in the trough of the very last swell alongside a barrier reef for miles, sailing all the time so close to the wind that the shifting of a single point would have meant destruction. He had heard her raving about the deck in half a gale as they swept up to the iron-bound coast of Niué, abusing Harris in the strongest of beach talk because he had not another main topsail in the locker to replace the two that had just carried away one after the other and battered themselves to ribbons—the principal ground of her complaint being apparently the fact that she considered herself labouring under a social disadvantage of the most mortifying kind because the schooner was obliged to come up to Niué for the very first time without all sails set. He had seen her perform tricks of steering, getting in and out of Avarua in Raratonga (a perfect death-trap of a port at times, as all old islanders know), that “fairly gave him the jim-jams,” to use his own phraseology.... No, on the whole he thought he would rather miss that fright than lie idle in the trader’s house at Avatele, and think daily and nightly of the cranky though light-heeled _Sybil_ out upon the high seas in Vaiti’s sole command.

This being so, it was natural and inevitable that Vaiti should set her heart upon going and carry out her desire. She did not make any trouble about the matter; neither was she at all unkind to the invalided owner of the ship. On the contrary, she paid the trader’s wife more than that kindly woman wanted, to take good care of her father while she should be away, bought him everything decent to eat that the island contained (which was saying very little), indulgently presented him with a demijohn of whisky, and then informed him, in the coolest manner in the world, that the copra was all loaded, the stores and water on board, and the schooner ready to sail next day, under her command.

Saxon swore at large first of all, then stormed at Vaiti, and finally began a pathetic lament over his own helpless position and the heartlessness of his only child. Vaiti, sitting cross-legged on the end of his bed, smoked a big cigar through it all and looked out of the window. When he stopped at last, fairly run out, she laughed and handed him a weed out of her own case and a match.

“You take’m that, no speak nonsense. You know me, what?” she demanded; and Saxon, who was not in reality nearly as ill as he thought himself, laughed, and allowed himself to be won over.

Having gained her point, Vaiti went off again to the schooner through the wonderful pink dusk that wraps a South Sea island at sunset, and left the captain to hold commune with his demijohn and sleep.

As she walked down to the shore, she heard a sound of laughing and the rustle of many dresses among the palms close at hand. Now in Niué it is an important matter that brings people out of evenings, because, although the island has been Christianised long ago, like all the rest of the Eastern Pacific, it still suffers from a perfect plague of heathen ghosts that no amount of Sunday church-goings and week-day pious exercises seem to affect in the least. So the natives are afraid to go out of their houses after sunset, lest uncanny things should rise out of the forest to spring upon the wayfarer’s back unseen and choke him. This Vaiti knew, so she suspected something of interest in the little crowd, and turned aside to look. If she had not, there had been no story to tell about Niué and the happenings there.

She saw a curious scene, so nearly hidden by the growing dark that no one but an island resident could have taken in its full significance. A group of islanders, men and women stood round the door of a big white concrete house with a pandanus roof—the finest native house in the village. They seemed to be waiting for something—something both amusing and exciting, to judge by the explosions of giggles that continually burst through the dusk.

Presently the door of the house swung open with considerable violence, and a large mat was thrown out by an invisible hand. Then the door was slammed, and the giggles redoubled. Within the house now sounded something very like a struggle. There were loud sobs and cries of a shrill, theatrical kind, scuffling, banging, and a dragging sound.

“Tck, tck, tck,” went the tongues of the outsiders delightedly. The interesting moment was at hand.

It came without warning. The door burst open with still more violence than before, and out upon the mat was shot by some invisible agency a very solid young woman in a white loose gown, weeping somewhat mechanically, but with much effect. She fairly rolled over with the force of the shock that had ejected her, and before she could pick herself up the door was closed once more with a slam that shook the whole house. Then the waiting group rushed upon her with cries of joy, and bore her away in their midst, singing as they went.

“A wedding,” said Vaiti to herself. “It must be Mata’s; that is their house. And it will be a big wedding, too. I did not know that it was to be so soon.”

She fell into a fit of musing as she wandered shorewards among the leaning palms.... The palms of Niué sweep downwards to the gleaming sea like a band of lovely maidens hurrying with sweet impatience to meet their lovers on the coral shore. Of a moonlight night, when all things are possible, and nothing seems too wonderful in an air that itself is wonder, it needs but little for those white, slender stems, and tossing, plumy crowns, poised high above the shadowy beach they curve to meet, to change themselves into South Sea dryads of a new and lovely race, and rush down, at long last, upon the calling sea, where Tangaroa, the king of ocean, has his dwelling. Under the palms of Niué, when the blazing white moon has risen so high in the heavens that a perfect star of jetty shadow is rayed about the base of every tree—when the wandering sea winds are held close by the breathless spell of midnight and nothing wakes on all the lonely shore but the long, long song of the droning coral reef—under the wonderful palms of Niué, loveliest and strangest of all the islands in that dreamy world of “perilous seas and fairylands forlorn”—nothing is too strange to be true, no fancy too wild to hold, when the moon is up and the palms are alone with the sea....

Was Vaiti thinking of visionary palm-maidens and sea-foam kings as she went down the winding path to the bay, through a wondrous afterglow of russet-rose laced through with opal moonrays? Perhaps—or of kindred fancies. I who knew her cannot say, for no one ever knew her altogether. It is more likely, however, that less poetic thoughts were in her mind just then. The scene she had witnessed in the palm-grove was the usual ceremony that takes place in Niué the night before a wedding, when the friends of the bridegroom come to the house of the bride’s parents, and the latter go through the symbolical form of casting her out and closing the door, so that the bridegroom’s people may take her over and guard her until the wedding morning. Vaiti liked a wedding above all things (next to a funeral), and the hint of great doings on the morrow, offered by the ceremony she had witnessed, decided her to stay another day. Why not? The copra was loaded, and no rivals were in sight. Besides, she had a motive for staying—the strongest possible motive. She wanted to wear her Paris dress.

Yes, it had been acquired at last. That day in San Francisco, when she had come out of the Russian Consulate with more money in her pocket than any one of her adventures had ever brought before, she had been able to restrain herself no longer. And thereafter, in Madame Retaillaud’s elegant and exclusive Parisian emporium, replete with the choicest imported wares (I quote the lady’s own description of her goods), there took place a scene that is remembered to the present day by those of Madame Retaillaud’s young ladies who survived the earthquake year.

Vaiti, dressed in one of her waistless muslin gowns, with a broad-leafed island hat on her head, a long-bladed sheath-knife stuck quite visibly in the breast of her dress, and her wavy hair falling loose over her shoulders, stalked into the shop among the smartly-gowned San Francisco ladies who were turning over Madame’s stock, and demanded to see—

“One dress belong Palisi, pretty dam quick.”

They are used to all sorts of strange nationalities along the water-front in San Francisco, but not, as a rule, in the milliners’ and modistes’ well-bred establishments. Vaiti concentrated the whole attention of the place upon herself at a single stroke. She did not care about that in the least, but Madame’s hesitation stung her, and she pulled out a thick wad of notes.

“Look ’em alive, my hearties!” she ordered impatiently in her quarter-deck voice. “Lay aft here with that goods. I want um Palisi model, all sort.”

The customers were nearly in hysterics by this time, and the assistants were all a-giggle. Madame herself, however, grasped the situation in a twinkling, and frowned down the girls. Whoever and whatever this pirate queen might be, she certainly had money, and Madame would have welcomed Lucrezia Borgia or the Witch of Endor, under like circumstances, as pleasantly as an Anglo-American duchess.

“Perhaps Madame will come into a private room. Madame would like, no doubt, to look at our most exclusive goods, and we do not bring them into the outer shop,” she said in her most honeyed voice. And the door of the lift closed upon the pair.

What Vaiti underwent in that fitting-room in the course of getting into Madame’s latest model promenade gown, built for a typical French figure, will never be told. Early in the proceedings a message came down to the showroom for the strongest pair of Paris corsets in stock, and a little later Madame herself, very red and overheated, ran down to select a fresh silk lace.

“Ah, but she has courage, that one!” she declared, as the lift received her again. “Never, no, never!—jamais de la vie! ...”

The lift went up.

It was almost an hour before a wonderful vision sailed slowly through the show-room and out into the street—slowly, not alone for pride, but also because it could scarcely move or draw its breath. The vision, as described in the receipted bill that went with it, was made up of the following elements:

“One promenade costume (model, Doucet & Cie.) composed of chiffon velours, couleur poussière de roses, inlet with motifs of point d’Alençon, hand-embroidered with lilies of the valley in French paste. Mounted on chiffon bleu-de-ciel, with full volants edged lace and chiffon ruching. Made over foundation of glacé silk, couleur citron d’or.

“One set silk underclothing to match.

“One Corset Ecraseur, patent laces.

“One pair bronze promenade shoes, Louis XV. heels, extra height. Stockings to match.

“One parasol composed peau-de-soie rose fanée and chiffon bleu-de-ciel.”

To which may be added—one young woman, suffering horrible agony and quite intoxicated with happiness.

* * * * *

It was this marvellous possession that Vaiti yearned to show off at the wedding. She had not had a chance to wear it since the day when she had walked through the streets of San Francisco, with an admiring and amused crowd at her rear, and found it quite impossible to get on board the schooner, when she reached the water front, until she took off her voluminous skirt and handed it up over the side—afterwards climbing the rope-ladder in a storm of applause and a pink silk petticoat. Now the occasion for getting full value out of the wonderful thing had come at last, and she could not—no, she really could not—miss it.

Rather late next morning, when the bride and bridegroom—the former in a gorgeous gown of yellow curtain muslin, the latter in a thick tweed suit from Auckland that caused him to stream at every pore—were sitting on opposite sides of the little white church, enthroned on chairs all by themselves, and listening decorously to a long preliminary address from the native pastor—Vaiti swept in, and at once brought the ceremony to a momentary pause. The pastor stopped in his address and gaped, the women exclaimed audibly, the bridegroom fixed his eyes on the apparition and sighed in a manner that the bride evidently resented as a personal slight, for she grew still darker in the face than nature had made her, and stared penknives and scissors at Vaiti. Wild titters of delight swept indecorously through the church. The entry was indeed a success—the native pastor found it necessary to address his flock directly, and to tell them that they would undoubtedly all go to hell if they did not behave better in church, before order was restored.

It is not necessary to relate at length how Mata and Ivi were made one, how they walked out of the church nonchalantly by different doors, and were subsequently so deeply interested in the killing of the pigs for the marriage feast, and the preparing of the various cooking-pots, that they did not meet again all afternoon. It was a commonplace wedding enough, and this history is not interested in it, other than as it concerned the affairs of Vaiti. These, indeed, were fairly notable.

For with Vaiti pride very literally brought about a fall that day.

She had had a terrible time getting into her dress, and the whole ship’s company had shared in the trouble. First, the native A.B.’s had to fetch her a big looking-glass from the nearest trader’s, and secure it to the bulkhead of her cabin. Then the cook had to deliver up all the hot water in the galley—at seven bells, with dinner just coming on!—and the boatswain must needs broach the cargo for some special scented soap. Matters were only beginning, however. When the dress was disinterred from its many wrappings and finally put on it became immediately apparent that the bodice could not possibly be made to meet. Perhaps the coming of the bread-fruit season had caused the young lady’s waist to expand—perhaps the practised art of Madame Retaillaud had exceeded anything that a mere amateur could compass in the way of lacing. At any rate, it was not till Vaiti had passed her corset laces out through the port and ordered two of the strongest sailors to tail on to them—not till Harris, agonising with laughter, had directed this novel evolution from the poop for at least five delirious minutes, during which Vaiti several times thought she was dying, but remained none the less determined to die rather than give in, that the deed was accomplished at last, and the “Kapitani” of _Sybil_ was enabled to look at herself in the glass and know heavenly certainty that she was the best dressed woman in the Pacific at that instant, whoever saw or did not see.

The natural result of all this was that in the very hour of her triumph she fainted dead away in the church, for the first time in her life, and had to be carried out.

The ceremony was just over by now, and the bride, still burning with jealousy of the woman who had dared to eclipse her on her wedding day, was among the first of those who crowded round like bees going after honey, to stare at the beautiful creature lying senseless on the sunburnt grass. The bridegroom had sped away hot-foot in the direction of the village, whence certain enticing yells indicated that the pig-slaughter was now going on; but Mata was not a bit appeased by his indifference to the visitor. That dress—and oh, how wonderful it was!—still rankled in her soul.

Mata was a teacher’s daughter, and she knew something of white people’s lore. A brilliant thought darted into her mind as she pressed and struggled in the crowd about the deathly form on the grass....

“Ai, ai! she is surely dead!” wailed the people. “Ai! the-great chieftainess will rise no more!”

“Daughters of a turtle!” said Mata contemptuously. “I will show you if she is dead. It is nothing at all but that she is vain, and wanted to make herself a middle like the ’papalangi’ women, who all look like stinging hornets. Give me a knife, someone.”

A knife was given, and Mata, with horrid joy, half lifted Vaiti and slipped the keen point into the back of the dress.

Rip went the silk with a hideous splitting noise, and the delicate underwear swelled out through the opening like a bush lily bursting its sheath. Mata felt for the stay-lace, and cut that too. The tension on the bodice increased frightfully—the seams gaped and strained....

“She will die, I think, if I do not cut it off,” said Mata hastily, feeling Vaiti reviving under her hand, and anxious to finish her work. Two more cuts of the knife did it. The Paris dress was, speaking sartorially, no more; the owner, lying on the ground, was opening her eyes to the outrage that had been done; and Mata, shrieking with malign laughter, was fleeing wildly through the palms in the direction of the pig-killing, peace in her heart again.

Peace was very far indeed from Vaiti’s heart when she revived and found out what had been done. The crowd drew away from her in fear when they saw her flashing eyes and set, furious mouth, though she said never a word. Confronted by that Medusa-head, they were almost too terrified to find words; but one or two stammered out a hasty explanation that freed the present company from blame by inculpating Mata.

Vaiti did not doubt it—she had seen the bride’s face during the ceremony. Still silent, but flashing looks of sheet-lightning all about her, she drew together her garments as best she could, and walked off in the direction of the ship. As she did so, a little ugly man with red hair slipped out from behind the trees, and looked narrowly at her retreating figure.

“It is the white man from the bush!” cried the girls. “White man of ours, why did you not come down for the wedding?”

“Because I didn’t, my little dears,” replied the newcomer in English, still looking after Vaiti. He stood well in the shade, and did not make himself unnecessarily conspicuous.

“That’s a fine girl, that Mata,” he added by and by. “A smart girl. I should like to know Mata.”

Vaiti put off her going for yet another day. She had business to attend to.

It was very simple business, and it was characterised by the directness that attended all the proceedings of Saxon’s daughter. She merely went up to the bride’s new home, that was so handsomely stocked with trade goods and imported furniture, while the wedding party were making merry in the village after dark, and set fire to it with a torch in about a dozen places. It was very dry weather, and there was a strong wind.

There was scarce a stick of the cottage left when she marched into the village with a blazing torch in her hand, and calmly told the assembled revellers what she had done. Then she left them, seething in a tumult of excitement that almost drowned the hysteric screams of Mata, and went to bed and to sleep with a quiet mind, ready for an early start next morning.

The men came on board late and very drunk, but they did come. They were afraid of Vaiti, and so was Harris, who would very well have liked to extend his revels in the village for another twelve hours, but did not dare to do so. He thought, as he stumbled into his bunk, that the sounds proceeding from the forecastle were a good deal odder than usual—he could almost have sworn that there was one person, if not several, crying in there. But he had good reason for mistrusting the evidence of his senses just then, so he flung himself down and went to sleep.

*CHAPTER XI*

*A DEAD MAN’S REVENGE*

When one is well on the right side of five-and-twenty, with a good ship underfoot, a fair breeze setting steadily from the right quarter, and a pleasant goal ahead, it is hard to be unhappy. Vaiti’s sense of bereavement at the loss of her cherished dress faded considerably before the _Sybil_ had fairly cleared the land, and was gone altogether by the next day. She had done what she felt to be the right thing by Mata; the score was even. Vaiti did not like loose ends of any kind, and she had not left any behind her. She smiled as she thought of it, and paused in her official-looking walk across and across the poop, to revile a native A.B. for leaving the end of a halyard trailing on deck.

“You d—— lazy nigger,” she said. “What sort ship you thinking you stop? You thinking one mud scow” (_Mud cow_ was her pronunciation), “one pig-boat, one canoe belong dam man-eating Solomon boy? I teaching you some other thing pretty quick. Suppose you no flemish-coil that halyard, keep him coil all-a-time, I let ’em daylight inside that black hide belong you, knock ’em two ugly eye into one.”

She plucked a belaying-pin out of the rail and sent it flying at the sailor’s ear. Vaiti was a straight thrower, but the crew seldom failed to dodge; they had every opportunity of becoming proficient. On this occasion, however, the sailor made not the least attempt to escape, and the pin struck him fair and square at the angle of the jaw, and knocked him over. He was hurt, but not stunned, and sat up immediately on the deck, gazing at the tall white figure on the poop with lack-lustre eyes that scarcely seemed to comprehend what they saw.

“Bring ’em that pin,” commanded Vaiti, still in what stood for English with her. She never addressed the crew in the tongue that was native to both.

The man crept slowly aft, and handed it to her. She motioned to him to replace it neatly in the rail, and then pointed to the trailing halyard. It did not escape her, as the sailor made his way down to the main deck, that there were tears in his large black eyes, and that his pareo was tied with a carelessness unusual among Polynesians, and significant of trouble and depression when seen. But she put the one down to the swelled and reddening bruise that marked all one side of his face and the other to the orgies of the previous night. If the men chose to make brutes of themselves on bush-beer, they need not expect that she was going to slacken their work for them on that account. No, not if she broke the head of every man in the ship. She was not Saxon’s daughter for nothing, as they very well knew.

It was small wonder that Vaiti was not popular with crews.

She went on pacing the deck, in the joyous crystal-clear sunlight of the sea. The trade wind ran through the sky like a warm, blue river, the rigging sang, the sails drew steadily. It was a good day, a happy day, a pleasant day to be alive. The girl felt pleased with the world. She took the wheel from the sailor who held it, for the sheer pleasure of feeling the flying vessel answer to the touch of her own light hand. All the force and fury of those roaring sails overhead seemed to concentrate itself here in her fingers, as the power of a great dynamo passes through a single wire. It was almost as if she drove the ship herself. The _Sybil_ went as steady as an albatross; once or twice the spokes fairly shook in her hands.

“The wheel is laughing to-day,” she said in Maori, using the island sailor’s expression.

Dinner-time came round soon, and she descended to eat with Harris alone. Saxon himself did not particularly care whether he dined with his bo’sun or not, if it happened to be convenient to leave Harris on deck; but Vaiti would have run the ship as strictly as a man-of-war at all times, if she could have had her way. Indeed, she would have liked to dine in solitary state, like the captain of a cruiser, had she not had too much good sense to fly in the face of merchant service custom by excluding the mate.