Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas Part 8

She took his hands and looked up into his face with such poignant longing and tenderness, that Jack's comrades, already uncomfortable enough, were quite overborne by the scene. Tough old Hatch snuffled audibly, and Brady could hardly speak.

"Come, come, lad," he cried huskily, "you mustn't keep us longer!"

Jack unclasped the girl's hands and suffered himself to be led away by his comrades. Stumbling and falling against one another in the dark, they made shift to find the uncertain path, Winterslea, in the lead, coo-eeing like a bushfellow for them to follow. Little by little they gained the sleeping village, and pressed on to the beach beyond, where their boat was already afloat on the incoming tide. They took their places without a word and pulled out in the direction of the ship. In the pa.s.s, rising and falling in the heavy swell, they burned a blue light, which the _Dauntless_ answered with another, and ran up a masthead lantern to guide them. A few minutes later they clambered up the ladder, the boat was hoisted in, and the boatswain's whistle was rousing the watch on deck:

"Mainsail haul!"

By morning the island had sunk behind them, and standing on the dizzy main-royal yard with one arm round the mast, Jack could make out nothing but a little cloud on the horizon.

At sixty, John Garrard was a post captain, a Knight Commander of the Bath, and within a year of receiving flag rank and the command of a fleet. His career had been more than distinguished, and he had won his way to the front as much by his fine personal qualities as by his invariable good judgment and high professional attainments. He had earned the character of a man who could be trusted in situations involving tact, temper, and diplomatic skill; and no captain in the navy was more confidently ordered to those scenes of international tension, which, in spite of statesmen, so often arise in some distant place to menace the peace of the world.

He had never married, and when rallied on the subject was wont to say with a laugh that the sea was his only mistress. No one had ever ventured to question him much further, though his friends were often piqued, especially the women, as to an implied romance in the captain's earlier life. It was known he supported two old-maid sisters, the Misses Hadow, the impoverished daughters of his first commander; but in view of his considerable private fortune this drain on his resources seemed scarcely the reason of his renunciation. Nor did it seem to his admirers that any woman could have had the heart to refuse him, for even at sixty he was a noticeably handsome man, and was endowed, besides, with more than the advantage of good looks, a charm of manner, a distinction, a captivating gallantry that made him everywhere a favorite.

He was in command of the _Inflexible_ battleship, one of the Australian squadron, when she developed some defects in her hydraulic turning gear and was ordered home to England by Admiral Lord George Howard for overhaul. The captain's heart beat a little faster as he realized his course would take him south of the Societies. He spread out the chart on his cabin table and sighed as he laid his finger on Borabora. He shut his eyes, and saw the basaltic cliffs, the white and foaming reefs, the green, still forests of that unforgotten island. He was a boy once more, with flowers in his hair, wandering beneath the palms with Tehea. How often had he thought of her during all these years; the years that had left him gray and old; the years that had carried him unscathed through so many dangers in every quarter of the world! For him she was still in her adorable girlhood, untouched by time, a radiant princess in her radiant isle, waiting by the sh.o.r.e for his return. It shocked him to remember she was not far short of sixty--a fat old woman, perhaps, married to some strapping chief, and, more than likely, with grown children of her own! How incredible it seemed!

But a word, and he might land and see her. But a word, and the questions of forty years might yet be answered--answered, yes, to shatter, as like as not, with pitiless realities the tender figment of a dream. No, he said, he dared not expose himself to a possible disillusion, to play into the hands of sardonic nature, ever mocking at man. No; but he would carry his ship close insh.o.r.e and watch from the bridge the unfolding bays and tiny settlements of that lost paradise, and then, dipping his flag to his vanished youth, he would sink over the horizon, his memory thrilled and his sentiment unimpaired, to set his face for England.

Dawn was breaking as he slowed down to leeward of the island and watched the shadows melt away. It was Sunday, a day of heavenly calm, fresh yet windless, with a sea so smooth that the barrier reefs for once were silent, and one could hear, far across the hushed and shining water, the coo of pigeons in the forest. Under bare steerage way, with the leadsman droning in the fore chains, the ship hugged the sh.o.r.e and steamed at a snail's pace round the island. On the lofty bridge, high above the wondering faces of his command, the white-haired captain, impa.s.sive, supreme, and solitary, gave no sign of those inner emotions that were devouring him. Along the sh.o.r.e the sight of the battleship brought out here and there a startled figure or a group; a couple of laughing girls, astride on ponies, raced the _Inflexible_ for a mile, and then, their road ending in a precipice, threw kisses with their saucy hands; little children ran out into the lagoon, shouting with joy; old men, in Sunday _parius_ and with black Bibles under their arms, turned their solemn eyes to seaward and forgot for a moment the road to church. A white man, in striped pajamas, was surprised at morning coffee on the veranda of his little house. He darted inside, and reappeared with a magazine rifle which he emptied in the air, and followed up his courtesies by raising and lowering a Union Jack the size of a handkerchief. The battleship dipped her stately white ensign in acknowledgment, as a swan might salute a fly, and swept on with majesty.

With every mile the bays and wooded promontories grew increasingly familiar as Sir John was borne toward Lihua, the scene of his boyish folly. He looked ash.o.r.e in wonder, surprised at the vividness and exactness of his recollection. He might have landed anywhere and found his way through those tangled, scented paths with no other guide but memory. There was Papaloloa with its roaring falls; there, the ti'a a Peau where he had shot his first goat; yonder, the misty heights of Tiarapu, where Tehea and he had camped a night in the clouds in an air of English cold. It was like a home-coming to see all these familiar scenes spreading out before him. He looked at his hands, his thin, veined, wrinkled hands, and it came over him with a sort of wonder that he was an old man.

"That was forty years ago," he said to himself. "Forty years ago!"

And yet, by G.o.d! it all seemed like yesterday.

As Lihua opened out and he perceived, with an inexpressible pang, the thatched houses set deep in the shade of palms and breadfruit trees, he felt himself in the throes of a strange and painful indecision. He paced up and down the bridge; he lit a cigar and threw it away again; he twice approached Captain Stillwell as though to give an order, and then, still in doubt, turned shamefacedly on his heel.

"By the deep nine!" came the hoa.r.s.e murmur of the leadsman.

It lay with him to stop the ship or not; a word, and she would come shivering to a standstill; a word, and the boatswain would pipe away his gig and the crew would be running to their places. His heart ached with the desire to land, but something, he knew not what, withheld the order on his lips. Let him remain silent, and the opportunity would pa.s.s away forever; it was pa.s.sing now with every turn of the propeller. Had he not told her he would return? Had he not whispered it that night when they were torn apart? Did he not owe it to her to keep the promise of forty years, a promise given in the flush of youth and hope, and sealed with scalding tears?

His resolution was taken. He ordered Captain Stillwell to stop the ship and lower a boat.

"I am going to treat myself to a run ash.o.r.e," he said by way of explanation.

The vessel slowly stopped. The covers were whipped off the gig. She was hoisted out and lowered, the crew dropping down the ladder into their places at the peep-peep-peep of the whistle.

"I leave the ship," said Sir John, not to convey a fact patently obvious, but in obedience to a naval formula.

He was landed at a little cove where in bygone days he had often whiled away an hour waiting in charge of Hadow's boat. It gave him a singular sensation to feel the keel grate against the shingle, and to find himself once more setting foot in Lihua. He drew a deep breath as he looked about and noticed how unchanged it all was. There were some new houses in new places, and gra.s.s on the sites of others that were endeared to him in recollection; but it was Lihua, after all, the Lihua of his boyhood, the Lihua of his dreams. For a while he strolled about at random, walking with the phantoms of the past, hearing their laughter, seeing their faces, recalling a thousand things he had forgotten.

It came over him with a start that the village was empty. Then he remembered it was Sunday, and they were all in church. Thank G.o.d, there was none to watch him; no prying, curious eyes to disturb his thoughts.

But they would soon be out again, and it behooved him to make the best use of his solitude while he might. He struck inland, his heart beating with a curious expectancy; at every sound he held his breath, and he would turn quickly and look back with a haunting sense that Tehea was near him; that perhaps she was gazing at him through the trees. He approached his old home through overgrown plantations. It awed him to part the branches and to feel himself drawing nearer at every step to the only house he had ever called his own. As he heard the splashing waterfall he stopped, not daring for the moment to go on. When at last he did so, and mounted the little hill, he found no house at all; nothing but ferns and weeds, man-high. He moved about here and there, up to the armpits in verdure, in a sort of consternation at discovering it gone.

His foot struck against a boulder.

He had forgotten there were any rocks on the hill. He moved along, and his foot struck again. He pressed the weeds back and looked down. He saw a tomb of crumbling cement, green with age and buried out of sight under the tangle.

It had never occurred to him before that Tehea might be dead.

He held back the undergrowth again and peered into the depths. Yes, it was the grave of a chief, or of a woman of rank, one of those artless mounds of cement and rock that the natives, with poetic fancy, used to call _falelauasi_, houses of sandalwood; _oliolisanga_, or the place where birds sing; or, in vulgar speech, simply _tuungamau_, or tombs.

These words, unspoken, unthought of for forty years, lost, overlaid, and forgotten in some recess of his brain, now returned to him with tormenting recollection. He laid both hands on the thick stem of a shrub and tore it out of the ground. He seized another and dragged it out with the same ferocity. It was intolerable that she should suffocate under all this warm, wet jungle; he would give her air and sunshine, she that had loved them both; he would uncover the poor stones that marked her last resting place; he would lay bare the earth that wrapped her dead beauty.

He worked with desperation until his hands were bleeding, until his eyes were stung and blinded with the streaming sweat. Dizzy with the heat, parched with thirst, and sick with the steam that rose from the damp ground, he was forced again and again to desist and rest. He cut his waistcoat into slips and bound them round his b.l.o.o.d.y hands; he broke the blades of his penknife on recalcitrant roots that defied the strength of his arms; he labored with fury to complete the task he had set before him. Here he stood, within four walls of vegetation, the sky above him, the cracked and rotted tomb below, satisfied at last by the accomplishment of his duty. The gold on his sleeves was dirty and disordered; one of his shoulder-straps dangled loose from his sodden coat; his trousers were splashed with earth. But for the moment the post captain was forgotten in the man, as he mused on the tragedy of human life, on the mysteries of love and death and destiny, on his own irrevocable youth now so far behind him, when he had forfeited his honor for the dead woman at his feet. He called her aloud by name. He bent down and kissed her mossy bed. He whispered, with a strange conviction that she could hear him, that he had kept his promise to return.

Then, rising to his feet, he turned toward the sea and retraced his steps. The people were still in church, and the village was deserted as before. He walked swiftly lest they might come flocking out before he could reach his boat, to torture him with recognition, with the questions they would ask, with their story of Tehea's death. Then he laughed at his own fears, remembering his white hair and the intervening generation. Time had pa.s.sed over Borabora, too. The world, he remembered, was older by forty years--older and sadder and emptier.

He swung himself up the ladder, mounted the bridge, and put the vessel on her course. The telegraph rang, the engineers repeated back the signal, and the great battleship, vibrating with her mighty engines, resumed once more her ponderous way.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: "Existence doubtful; position doubtful," familiar contractions still on any Pacific chart.]

O'S HEAD

Silver Tongue loved Rosalie, and Rosalie loved Silver Tongue, and ever since they had first met at the Taufusi Club dance their friends had seen the inevitable finish of their acquaintance. They were invited everywhere together, and the affair had progressed from the first or furtive stage to the secondary or solemn Sunday drive about the Eleele Sa. The third, that of carpenters adding a story to the bakery and dressmakers hard at work in Miss Potter's little establishment, was looming up close in view.

Never was a match in Apia that gave a rosier promise of success. Silver Tongue, so called by the Samoans on account of his beautiful voice (but who in ordinary life answered to the homelier appellation of Oppenstedt), had been making a very good thing out of the Southern Cross Bakery, and was regarded throughout Apia as a man of responsibility and substance. He was a tall, spare German of about forty, who, like the most of us, had followed the sea before fate had brought him to the islands, there in years gone by to marry a Samoan maid and settle down.

The little Samoan had died, leaving behind her nothing but a memory in Silver Tongue's heart, a tangled grave in the foreign cemetery, and a host of relations who lived in tumble-down quarters in the rear of the bakery. In one way and another these hungry mouths must have been a considerable drain on Silver Tongue's resources; and though they feebly responded to his bounty--one by driving a natty cart and delivering hot morning rolls, and another by pilfering firewood for the furnace--the account (if one had been made) was far from even. But to any objection to this Quixotic generosity Silver Tongue had a reply ever ready on his lips. "I lofe dem like my fader," he would say in his deep, fluty voice, and the conversation was seldom carried further. When it was--by some one ill advised enough to do so--Silver Tongue would flare up, and recall with flashing eyes and a face crimson with indignation the ten-year debt of grat.i.tude he owed his dead wife's _ainga_.

Indeed, if Silver Tongue had a fault it was a certain moroseness and fierceness of temper, a readiness and even an apparent pleasure in taking offense, that made him somewhat of a solitary in our midst and threw him more than ever on the companionship of his own Kanakas; so that at night, when one had occasion to seek him out, he was usually to be found on the mats of his native house, smoking his pipe or playing _sweepy_ with his bulky father-in-law, Papalangi Mativa. I doubt if he had another intimate in Apia besides myself, and though I must confess we often disagreed, and once or twice approached the verge of estrangement, I was too much his friend and too mindful of the old days on the _Ransom_ to let such trifles come between us.

I was, besides, Rosalie's friend as well, for old Clyde, her father, had died in my arms at Nonootch, and with his last breath had consigned her to my care. This obligation, rendered sacred by an a.s.sociation that extended back to the days of Steinberg and Bully Hayes, when in the _Moroa_ and the _Eugenie_ we had slept under the same mats and had played our part together in the stirring times of Stewart and the great Atuona Plantation--this obligation, I say, I met easily enough so long as Rosalie was a child and safe in the convent at Savalalo. But when she grew to womanhood and went to live with her relations in their shanty near the Firm, I began to experience some anxiety in regard to her. Her relations, to begin with, were not at all the kind of natives I liked.

They had been too long the hangers-on of the Firm, and had seen too much of a low cla.s.s of whites to be the proper guardians of a very pretty half-caste of eighteen. They had an ugly name, besides--but I won't be censorious--and it may have been all beach talk. But they were certainly a whining, begging lot, the girls bold and the men impudent and saucy, and I never saw Rosalie in their midst but it made me heartsick for her future.

I did the little I could, and let it be pretty well understood about the beach that the man who played fast and loose with her would have to reckon with old Captain Brans...o...b... And then I got the missionary ladies to take her up, and as I never stinted a bit of money for her dresses and what not (as though Clyde's daughter wasn't worthy of the best in the land), she made good headway in what little gayeties took place in the town. Of course, I went about to keep an eye on her--that is, when they asked me to their parties, which wasn't always; and I remember once making very short work of one fellow, a labor captain from the Westward, who seemed bent on mischief till I took him out in the starlight and showed him the business end of my gun. To tell the truth, I never had a peaceful moment till he up anchor and cleared, for he was a good deal the kind of man I was at thirty, and he hung on in spite of me, keeping half the family in his pay while I kept the other, and he even landed the last night with m.u.f.fled oars, when, instead of finding Rosalie on the beach to fly with him, he ran into _me_, laying for him under an umbrella!

There were many who said I was in love with the girl myself, which, as like as not, was true; for she was one of those tall, queenly women, with a wonderful grace to anything she did, and magnificent dark eyes, and a way of smiling,--brilliant, arch, and tender--that made even an old stager of sixty remember he still wore a heart under his jumper.

Yes, I had a pretty soft spot for Rosalie, though I had sense enough to know that G.o.d had never meant her for an old sea horse like myself. And lacking me--whom the weight of three-score years had put out of the ring (not but what I'm a pretty game old devil yet)--I could see n.o.body in sight I preferred half so much as Silver Tongue.

So there was the situation till the war of Ninety-three came along to jumble us all up and knock everything to spillikins. Oppenstedt in love with Rosalie; Rosalie in love with Oppenstedt; Bahn and old Taylor working on the second story of the Southern Cross Bakery; Miss Potter doing double tides at the trousseau, and I, the friend of both, with a six-hundred-dollar piano on the way from Bremen for their wedding present. A fair wind, port in sight, and (say you) everything drawing nicely alow and aloft. So it was till that wretched fight at Vaitele, when the Vaimaunga came pouring in at dusk, bearing wounded, chorusing their songs, and tossing in the air above them the heads of their dead enemies. It made me feel bad to see it all, for to me these people were children, and it seemed horrible they should kill one another; and it made me sicker still to watch the wounded carried into the Mission and stretched out in rows on the blood-stained boards. Though not a drinking man, I braced up at Peter's bar and then went on to pa.s.s the time of day with Oppenstedt.

I found him, as usual, on the mats of the native house, glumly smoking a pipe and talking politics with Papalangi Mativa. His lean, dark, handsome face was overcast, his eyes uneasy, and had I not known him for a brave man I should have thought that he was frightened. He was certainly very curt and short in greeting me, and I had a dim perception that my visit was unwelcome.

"This is a black business, Silver Tongue," I said; though, to be exact, I called him Leoalio, which means the same thing in native.

"Plack!" he exclaimed. "It's horrible! It's disgusting! They have been cutting off beople's heads!"

"Fourteen by one count," I said; "twenty-two by another."

"Gabtain," said he with a look of extraordinary gravity, "dere's worse nor that!"

"Worse?" I said.