By Reef and Palm Part 15

IV

The captain of the POCAHONTAS dashed the now fast-falling tears from his eyes, and with his rough old heart swelling with pity for the poor wanderer, took from Taku the sheet of paper on which the heart-broken girl's last words were traced.

Ere he could read it a low murmur of voices outside told him his crew had returned. They carried a rude wooden sh.e.l.l, and then with bared heads the captain and boatsteerer entered the house where she lay.

Again the old man raised the piece of navy blue cloth from off the sweet, sad face, and a heavy tear dropped down upon her forehead. Then, aided by the gentle, sympathetic women, his task was soon finished, and two of his crew entered and carried their burden to its grave. Service there was none--only the prayers and tears of the brown women of Rapa-nui.

Ere he said farewell the captain of the whale-ship placed money in the hands of Varua and Taku. They drew back, hurt and mortified. Seeing his mistake, the seaman desired Varua to give the money to the girl Temeteri.

"Nay, sir," said Varua, "she would but give me bitter words. Even when she who is now silent was not yet cold, Temeteri came to the door of the house where she lay and spat twice on the ground, and taking up gravel in her hand cast it at her, and cursed her in the name of our old heathen G.o.ds. And as for money, we here in Rapa-nui need it not.

May Christ protect thee on the sea. Farewell!"

The captain of the POCAHONTAS rose and came to the cabin table, and motioning to his guests to fill their gla.s.ses, said--

"'Tis a real sad story, gentlemen, and if I should ever run across Doctor Francis, I should talk some to him. But see here. Here is my log; my mate, who is a fancy writist, wrote it at my dictation. I can't show you the letter that the pore creature herself wrote; that I ain't going to show to any one."

The two captains rose and stood beside him, and read the entry in the log of the POCAHONTAS.

"November 28, 187-.

This day I landed at Easter Island, to try and obtain as a 'green' hand a young Chilian seaman who, the captain of the Chilian corvette O'HIGGINS informed me, had run away there. On landing I was shown the body of a young girl, whom the natives stated to be the deserter. She had died that morning. Buried her as decently as circ.u.mstances would permit. From a letter she wrote on the morning of her death I learned her name to be Senora Teresa T----. Her husband, Dr Francis T----, was an Englishman in the service of the Chilian Republic. He was sent out on a scientific mission to the island, and his wife followed him in the O'HIGGINS disguised as a blue-jacket. I should take her to have been about nineteen years of age.

"SPENCE ELDRIDGE, MASTER.

"MANUAL LEGASPE, 2ND OFFICER.

"Brig POCAHONTAS, of Martha's Vineyard, U.S.A."

"Well, that's curious now," said the skipper of the Na.s.sAU; "why, I knew that man. He left the island in the KING DARIUS, of New Bedford, and landed at Ponape in the Caroline Group, whar those underground ruins are at Metalanien Harbour. Guess he wanted to potter around there a bit. But he got inter some sorter trouble among the natives there, an' he got shot."

"Aye," said the captain of the DAGGET, "I remember the affair. I was mate of the JOSEPHINE, and we were lying at Jakoits Harbour when he was killed, and now I remember the name too. Waal, he wasn't much account, anyhow."

Ten years ago a wandering white man stood, with Taku the Sailor, at the base of the wall of the great PAPAKU, and the native pointed out the last resting-place of the wanderer. There, under the shadow of the Silent Faces of Stone, the brave and loving heart that dared so much is at peace for ever.

BRANTLEY OF VAHITAHI

One day a trading vessel lay becalmed off Tatakoto, in the Paumotu Archipelago, and the captain and supercargo, taking a couple of native sailors with them, went ash.o.r.e at dawn to catch some turtle. The turtle were plentiful and easily caught, and after half a dozen had been put in the boat, the two white men strolled along the white hard beach. The captain--old, grizzled, and grim--seemed to know the place well, and led the way.

The island is very narrow, and as they left the beach and gained the shade of the forest of coconuts that grew to the margin of high-water mark, they could see, between the tall, stately palms, the placid waters of the lagoon, and a mile or so across, the inner beach of the weather side of the island.

For a quarter of a mile or so the two men walked on till the widest part of the island was reached. Here, under the shadow of some giant PUKA trees, the old skipper stopped and sat down on a roughly hewn slab of coral, the remains of one of those MARAE or heathen temples that are to be found almost anywhere in the islands of Eastern Polynesia.

"I knew this place well, once," he said, as he pulled out his pipe. "I used to come here when I was sailing one of Brander's vessels out of Tahiti. As we have done now we did then--came here for turtle. No natives have lived here for the past forty years. Did you ever hear of Brantley?"

"Yes," answered the supercargo, "but he died long ago, did he not?"

"Aye, he died here, and his wife and sister too. They all lie here in this old MARAE."

And then he told the story of Brantley.

I

It was six years since Brantley, with his companions in misery, had drifted ash.o.r.e at lonely Vahitahi in the Paumotu Group, and the kindly-hearted people had gazed with pitying horror upon the dreadful beings that, muttering and gibbering to each other, lay in the bottom of the boat, and pointed with long talon-like fingers to their burnt and b.l.o.o.d.y thirst-tortured lips.

And now as he sits in the doorway of his thatched house, and gazes dreamily out upon the long curve of creamy beach and wind-swayed line of palms that fringe the leeward side of his island home, Brantley pa.s.ses a brown hand slowly up and down his sun-bronzed cheek, and thinks of the past.

He was so full of life--of the very joy of living--that time six years ago when he sailed from Auckland on that fateful voyage in the DORIS.

It was his first voyage as captain, and the ship was his own, and even now he remembers with a curious time-dulled pang the last words of his only sister--the Doris after whom he had called his new ship--as she had kissed him farewell--"I am so glad, Fred, to hear them call you 'Captain Brantley.'"

And the voyage--the wild feverish desire to make a record pa.s.sage to 'Frisco and back; the earnest words of poor old white-headed Lutton, the mate, "not to carry on so at night going through the Paumotu Group"; that awful midnight crash when the DORIS ran hopelessly into the wild boil of roaring surf on Tuanake Reef; the white, despairing faces of five of his men, who, with curses in their eyes upon his folly, were swept out of sight into the awful blackness of the night.

And then the days in the boat with the six survivors! Ah! the memory of that will chill his blood to his dying day. Men have had to do that which he and the two who came through alive with him had done.

How long they endured that black agony of suffering he knew not. By common consent none of them ever spoke of it again.

Three months after they had drifted ash.o.r.e, a pa.s.sing sperm whaler, cruising through the group, took away the two seamen, and then Brantley, after bidding them a silent farewell, had, with bitter despair gnawing at his heart, turned his face away from the ship, and walked back into the palm-shaded village.

"I will never go back again," he had said to himself. And perhaps he was right; for when the DORIS went to pieces on Tuanake his hope and fortunes went with her, and, save for that other Doris, there was no one in the world who cared for him. He was not the man to face the world again with: "Why, he lost his first ship!" whispered among his acquaintances.

And this is how Brantley--young, handsome, and as smart a seaman (save for that one fatal mistake) as ever trod a deck--became Paranili the PAPALAGI, and was living out his life among the people of solitary Vahitahi.

Ere a year had pa.s.sed a trading captain bound to the Gambier Islands had given him a small stock of trade goods, and the thought of Doris had been his salvation. Only for her he would have sunk to the life of a mere idle, gin-drinking, and dissolute beach-comber. As it was, his steady, straightforward life among the people of the island was a big factor to his business success. And so every year he sent money to Doris by some pa.s.sing whaler or Tahitian trading schooner, but twice only had he got letters from her; and each time she had said: "Let me come to you, Fred. We are alone in the world, and may never meet again else. Sometimes I awake in the night with a sudden fear. Let me come; my heart is breaking with the loneliness of my life here, so far away from you."

But two years ago he had done that which would keep Doris from ever coming to him, he thought. He had married a young native girl--that is, taken her to wife in the Paumotuan fashion--and surely Doris, with her old-fashioned notions of right and wrong, would grieve bitterly if she knew it.