The Great Taboo Part 8

"That's how the King of the Birds sings," the Shadow said, as he finished, throwing back his head, and laughing with all his might at his own imitation. "So funny, isn't it? It's exactly like the song of the pink-crested parrot."

"Why, Toko, it's French," Felix exclaimed, using the Fijian word for a Frenchman, which the Shadow, of course, on his remote island, had never before heard. "How on earth did he come here?"

"I can't tell you," Toko answered, waving his arms seaward. "He came from the sun, like yourselves. But not in a sun-boat. It had no fire. He came in a canoe, all by himself. And Mali says"--here the Shadow lowered his voice to a most mysterious whisper--"he's a man-a-oui-oui."

Felix quivered with excitement. "Man-a-oui-oui" is the universal name over semi-civilized Polynesia for a Frenchman. Felix seized upon it with avidity. "A man-a-oui-oui!" he cried, delighted. "How strange! How wonderful! I must go in at once to his hut and see him!"

He had lifted his foot and was just going to cross the white line of coral-sand, when his Shadow, catching him suddenly and stoutly round the waist, pulled him back from the enclosure with every sign of horror, alarm, and astonishment. "No, you can't go," he cried, grappling with him with all his force, yet using him very tenderly for all that, as becomes a G.o.d. "Taboo! Taboo there!"

"But I am a G.o.d myself," Felix cried, insisting upon his privileges. If you have to submit to the disadvantages of taboo, you may as well claim its advantages as well. "The King of Fire and the King of Water crossed my taboo line. Why shouldn't I cross equally the King of the Birds', then?"

"So you might--as a rule," the Shadow answered with prompt.i.tude. "You are both G.o.ds. Your taboos do not cross. You may visit each other. You may transgress one another's lines without danger of falling dead on the ground as common men would do if they broke taboo-lines. But this is the Month of Birds. The king is in retreat. No man may see him except his own Shadow, the Little c.o.c.katoo, who brings him his food and drink. Do you see that hawk's head, stuck upon the post by the door at the side. That is his Special Taboo. He keeps it for this month. Even G.o.ds must respect that sign, for a reason which it would be very bad medicine to mention.

While the Month of Birds lasts, no man may look upon the king or hear him. If they did, they would die, and the carrion birds would eat them.

Come away. This is dangerous."

Scarcely were the words well out of his mouth when from the recesses of the hut a rollicking French voice was heard, trilling out merrily:

"Quand on con-spi-re, Quand, sans frayeur--"

Without waiting for more, the Shadow seized Felix's arm in an agony of terror. "Come away!" he cried, hurriedly, "come away! What will become of us? This is horrible, horrible! We have broken taboo. We have heard the G.o.d's voice. The sky will fall on us. If his Shadow were to find it out and tell my people, my people would tear us limb from limb. Quick, quick! Hide away! Let us run fast through the forest before any man discover it."

The Shadow's voice rang deep with alarm. Felix felt he dare not trifle with this superst.i.tion. Profound as was his curiosity about the mysterious Frenchman, he was compelled to bottle up his eagerness and anxiety for the moment, and patiently wait till the Month of Birds had run its course, and taken its inconvenient taboo along with it. These limitations were terrible. Yet he counted much upon the information the Frenchman could give him. The man had been some time on the island, it was clear, and doubtless he understood its ways thoroughly; he might cast some light at last upon the Korong mystery.

So he went back through the woods with a heart somewhat lighter.

Not far from their own huts he met Muriel and Mali.

As they walked home together, Felix told his companion in a very few words the strange discovery about the Frenchman, and the impenetrable taboo by which he was at present surrounded. Muriel drew a deep sigh.

"Oh, Felix," she said--for they were naturally by this time very much at home with one another, "did you ever know anything so dreadful as the mystery of these taboos? It seems as if we should never get really to the bottom of them. Mali's always springing some new one upon me. I don't believe we shall ever be able to leave the island--we're so hedged round with taboos. Even if we were to see a ship to-day, I don't believe they'd allow us to signal it."

There was a red sunset; a lurid, tropical, red-and-green sunset. It boded mischief.

They were pa.s.sing by some huts at the moment, and over the stockade of one of them a tree was hanging with small yellow fruits, which Felix knew well in Fiji as wholesome and agreeable. He broke off a small branch as he pa.s.sed; and offered a couple thoughtlessly to Muriel. She took them in her fingers, and tasted them gingerly. "They're not so bad," she said, taking another from the bough. "They're very much like gooseberries."

At the same moment, Felix popped one into his own mouth, and swallowed it without thinking.

Almost before they knew what had happened, with the same extraordinary rapidity as in the case of the wedding, the people in the cottages ran out, with every sign of fear and apprehension, and, seizing the branch from Felix's hands, began upbraiding the two Shadows for their want of attention.

"We couldn't help it," Toko exclaimed, with every appearance of guilt and horror on his face. "They were much too sharp for us. Their hearts are black. How could we two interfere? These G.o.ds are so quick! They had picked and eaten them before we ever saw them."

One of the men raised his hand with a threatening air--but against the Shadow, not against the sacred person of Felix. "He will be ill," he said, angrily, pointing toward the white man; "and she will, too. Their hearts are indeed black. They have sown the seed of the wind. They have both of them eaten of it. They will both be ill. You deserve to die! And what will come now to our trees and plantations?"

The crowd gathered round them, cursing low and horribly. The two terrified Europeans slunk off to their huts, unaware of their exact crime, and closely followed by a scowling but despondent mob of natives.

As they crossed their sacred boundary, Muriel cried, with a sudden outburst of tears, "Oh, Felix, what on earth shall we ever do to get rid of this terrible, unendurable G.o.dship!"

The natives without set up a great shout of horror. "See, see! she cries!" they exclaimed, in indescribable panic. "She has eaten the storm-fruit, and already she cries! Oh, clouds, restrain yourselves! Oh, great queen, mercy! Whatever will become of us and our poor huts and gardens!"

And for hours they crouched around, beating their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and shrieking.

That evening, Muriel sat up late in Felix's hut, with Mali by her side, too frightened to go back into her own alone before those angry people.

And all the time, just beyond the barrier line, they could hear, above the whistle of the wind around the hut, the droning voices of dozens of natives, cowering low on the ground; they seemed to be going through some litany or chant, as if to deprecate the result of this imprudent action.

"What are they doing outside?" Felix asked of his Shadow at last, after a peculiarly long wail of misery.

And the Shadow made answer, in very solemn tones, "They are trying to propitiate your mightiness, and to avert the omen, lest the rain should fall, and the wind should blow, and the storm-cloud should burst over the island to destroy them."

Then Felix remembered suddenly of himself that the season when this storm-fruit, or storm-apple, as they called it, was ripe in Fiji, was also the season when the great Pacific cyclones most often swept over the land in full fury--storms unexampled on any other sea, like that famous one which wrecked so many European men-of-war a few years since in the harbor of Samoa.

And without, the wail came louder and clearer still! "If you sow the bread-fruit seed, you will reap the breadfruit. If you sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind. They have eaten the storm-fruit. Oh, great king, save us!"

CHAPTER X.

REAPING THE WHIRLWIND.

Toward midnight Muriel began to doze lightly from pure fatigue.

"Put a pillow under her head, and let her sleep," Felix said in a whisper. "Poor child, it would be cruel to send her alone to-night into her own quarters."

And Mali slipped a pillow of mulberry paper under her mistress's head, and laid it on her own lap, and bent down to watch her.

But outside, beyond the line, the natives murmured loud their discontent.

"The Queen of the Clouds stays in the King of the Rain's hut to-night,"

they muttered, angrily. "She will not listen to us. Before morning, be sure, the Tempest will be born of their meeting to destroy us."

About two o'clock there came a lull in the wind, which had been rising steadily ever since that lurid sunset. Felix looked out of the hut door.

The moon was full. It was almost as clear as day with the bright tropical moonlight, silvery in the open, pale green in the shadow. The people were still squatting in great rings round the hut, just outside the taboo line, and beating gongs, and sticks and human bones, to keep time to the lilt of their lugubrious litany.

The air felt unusually heavy and oppressive. Felix raised his eyes to the sky, and saw whisps of light cloud drifting in rapid flight over the scudding moon. Below, an ominous fog bank gathered steadily westward.

Then one clap of thunder rent the sky. After it came a deadly silence.

The moon was veiled. All was dark as pitch. The natives themselves fell on their faces and prayed with mute lips. Three minutes later, the cyclone had burst upon them in all its frenzy.

Such a hurricane Felix had never before experienced. Its energy was awful. Round the palm-trees the wind played a frantic and capricious devil's dance. It pirouetted about the atoll in the mad glee of unconsciousness. Here and there it cleared lanes, hundreds of yards in length, among the forest-trees and the cocoanut plantations. The noise of snapping and falling trunks rang thick on the air. At times the cyclone would swoop down from above upon the swaying stem of some tall and stately palm that bent like gra.s.s before the wind, break it off short with a roar at the bottom, and lay it low at once upon the ground, with a crash like thunder. In other places, little playful whirlwinds seemed to descend from the sky in the very midst of the dense brushwood, where they cleared circular patches, strewn thick under foot with trunks and branches in their t.i.tanic sport, and yet left unhurt all about the surrounding forest. Then again a special cyclone of gigantic proportions would advance, as it were, in a single column against one stem of a clump, whirl round it spirally like a lightning flash, and, deserting it for another, leave it still standing, but turned and twisted like a screw by the irresistible force of its invisible fingers. The storm-G.o.d, said Toko, was dancing with the palm-trees. The sight was awful. Such destructive energy Felix had never even imagined before. No wonder the savages all round beheld in it the personal wrath of some mighty spirit.

For in spite of the black clouds they could _see_ it all--both the Europeans and the islanders. The intense darkness of the night was lighted up for them every minute by an almost incessant blaze of sheet and forked lightning. The roar of the thunder mingled with the roar of the tempest, each in turn overtopping and drowning the other. The hut where Felix and Muriel sheltered themselves shook before the storm; the very ground of the island trembled and quivered--like the timbers of a great ship before a mighty sea--at each onset of the breakers upon the surrounding fringe-reef. And side by side with it all, to crown their misery, wild torrents of rain, descending in waterspouts, as it seemed, or dashed in great sheets against the roof of their frail tenement, poured fitfully on with fierce tropical energy.

In the midst of the hut Muriel crouched and prayed with bloodless lips to Heaven. This was too, too terrible. It seemed incredible to her that on top of all they had been called upon to suffer of fear and suspense at the hands of the savages, the very dumb forces of nature themselves should thus be stirred up to open war against them. Her faith in Providence was sorely tried. Dumb forces, indeed! Why, they roared with more terrible voices than any wild beast on earth could possibly compa.s.s.

The thunder and the wind were howling each other down in emulous din, and the very hiss of the lightning could be distinctly heard, like some huge snake, at times above the creaking and snapping of the trees before the gale in the surrounding forest.

Muriel crouched there long, in the mute misery of utter despair. At her feet Mali crouched too, as frightened as herself, but muttering aloud from time to time, in a reproachful voice, "I tell Missy Queenie what going to happen. I warn her not. I tell her she must not eat that very bad storm-apple. But Missy Queenie no listen. Her take her own way, then storm come down upon us."

And Felix's Shadow, in his own tongue, exclaimed more than once in the self-same tone, half terror, half expostulation, "See now what comes from breaking taboo? You eat the storm-fruit. The storm-fruit suits ill with the King of the Rain and the Queen of the Clouds. The heavens have broken loose. The sea has boiled. See what wind and what flood you are bringing upon us."

By and by, above even the fierce roar of the mingled thunder and cyclone, a wild orgy of noise burst upon them all from without the hut. It was a sound as of numberless drums and tom-toms, all beaten in unison with the mad energy of fear; a hideous sound, suggestive of some hateful heathen devil-worship. Muriel clapped her hands to her ears in horror. "Oh, what's that?" she cried to Felix, at this new addition to their endless alarms. "Are the savages out there rising in a body? Have they come to murder us?"

"Perhaps," Felix said, smoothing her hair with his hand, as a mother might soothe her terrified child, "perhaps they're angry with us for having caused this storm, as they think, by our foolish action. I believe they all set it down to our having unluckily eaten that unfortunate fruit. I'll go out to the door myself and speak to them."