The Great Taboo Part 24

It is an awful thing for any race or nation when its taboos fail all at once, and die out entirely. To the men of Boupari, the Tu-Kila-Kila of the moment represented both the Moral Order and the regular sequence of the physical universe. Anarchy and chaos might rule when he was gone. The sun might be quenched, and the people run riot. No wonder they shrank from the fearful consequence that might next ensue. King and priest, G.o.d and religion, all at one fell blow were to be taken away from them!

Felix turned round on the sh.o.r.e and spoke to them again. "My people," he said, in a kindly tone--for, after all, he pitied them--"you need have no fear. When I am gone, the sun will still shine and the trees will still bear fruit every year as formerly. I will send the messengers I promised from my own land to teach you. Until they come, I leave you this as a great Taboo. Tu-Kila-Kila enjoins it. Shed no human blood; eat no human flesh. Those who do will be punished when another fire-canoe comes from the far land to bring my messengers."

The King of Fire bent low at the words. "Oh, Tu-Kila-Kila," he said, "it shall be done as you say. Till your messengers come, every man shall live at peace with all his neighbors."

They stepped into the gig. Mali and Toko followed before M. Peyron as naturally as they had always followed their masters on the island before.

"Who are these?" the captain asked, smiling.

"Our Shadows," Felix answered. "Let them come. I will pay their pa.s.sage when I reach San Francisco. They have been very faithful to us, and they are afraid to remain, lest the islanders should kill them for letting us go or for not accompanying us."

"Very well," the captain answered. "Forward all, there, boys! Now, ahead for the ship. And thank G.o.d, we're well out of it!"

But the islanders still stood on the sh.o.r.e and wept, stretching their hands in vain after the departing boat, and crying aloud in piteous tones, "Oh, my father, return! Oh, my mother, come back! Oh, very great G.o.ds, do not fly and desert us!"

Seven weeks later Mr. and Mrs. Felix Thurstan, who had been married in the cathedral at Honolulu the very morning the Australasian arrived there, sat in an eminently respectable drawing-room in a London square, where Mrs. Ellis, Muriel's aunt by marriage, was acting as their hostess.

"But how dreadful it is to think, dear," Mrs. Ellis remarked for the twentieth time since their arrival, with a deep-drawn sigh, "how dreadful to think that you and Felix should have been all those months alone on the island together without being married!"

Muriel looked up with a quiet smile toward Felix. "I think, Aunt Mary,"

she said, dreamily, "if you'd been there yourself, and suffered all those fears, and pa.s.sed through all those horrors that we did together, you'd have troubled your head very little indeed about such conventionalities, as whether or not you happened to be married.... Besides," she added, after a pause, with a fine perception of the inexorable stringency of Mrs. Grundy's law, "we weren't quite without chaperons, either, don't you know; for our Shadows, of course, were always with us."

Whereat Felix smiled an equally quiet smile. "And terrible as it all was," he put in, "I shall never regret it, because it made Muriel know how profoundly I loved her, and it made me know how brave and trustful and pure a woman could be under such awful conditions."

But Mrs. Ellis sat still in her chair and smiled uncomfortably. It affected her spirits. Taboos, after all, are much the same in England as in Boupari.