his correspondent, Mr. Martin Grant, had died of pneumonia. The
authorities left the responsibility of informing others, who might be
interested, to his capable hands.
He went to see Julian Sinclair about it; but he could not discover
whether that sincerely regretful young diplomat with the dazzling smile
and the delightful manners knew anything more. It may have been a
coincidence that, shortly afterwards, Mr. Harvey was recalled to the
shores of Lake Michigan, and replaced by another manager.
IX
MAROONED
I
Rachel Hepburn believed that her first lover had been drawn to her--when
she was twenty-two years old--by the way in which she played the violin.
She played it remarkably well; and she was also exceedingly pretty, in a
frank open-air fashion. Until she was seventeen, she had lived on the
mountainous coast of Cumberland, where she rode astride, and swam half a
mile every morning before breakfast. Her family nicknamed her "the
Shetland Pony"; and that was her picture to the life, as she used to
come in from her swim, with her face glowing and her dark eyes like
mountain pools, and the thick mane of hair blowing about her broad
forehead. Her sturdy build helped the picture at the time; but she had
shot up in height since then, and the phrase was no longer applicable.
At twenty-four, she became beautiful, and her music began to show
traces of genius. Unfortunately, she had the additional attraction of
ten thousand pounds a year in her own right; and, when the marriage
settlement was discussed, she proposed to share the money with her three
younger sisters.
The young man behaved very badly. She told him--very quietly--that this
was the result of her own folly; for, in her family, hitherto, marriages
had always been "arranged." He replied--for he was an intellectual young
man, who understood women, and read the most advanced novelists--that
she was one of those who were ruining England with their feudal ideas.
Then they parted, the young man cursing under his breath, and Rachel
lilting the ballad to which she had hitherto attributed her good
fortune.
"_Maxwelton's braes are bonnie, where early fa's the dew,
And it's there that Annie Laurie gi'ed me her promise true,
Gi'ed me her promise true, which ne'er forgot shall be,
And for bonnie Annie Laurie, I'd lay me doon and dee._"
He had quoted it so often in his letters that she was justified,
perhaps, in thinking that it had influenced her fate. "You know,
darling, that those words were supposed to tell the love of a soldier,
who died in Flanders, fighting for England, more than a hundred years
ago, and when you sing them, I feel that I, too ..." So it was the
obvious thing to toss at him as she went through the door, holding her
head up almost as gallantly as a soldier. But he didn't seem to mind,
and the parting was final.
Rachel, apparently, minded very much indeed; but she kept it to herself
and her violin, till on a certain day, she decided that she must escape
from all her old surroundings and forget.
Her guardian was the only person she consulted, and he made no criticism
of her scheme of travel so far as she divulged it. She had been brought
up to complete freedom, while her parents were alive, and in the six
years since their death, she had proved that she was capable of taking
care of herself. He was wise or unwise enough not to let her know that
he understood her trouble. But he tried to express a certain sympathy in
his gruff parting words, "London is a grimy cavern."
"Yes, and the people are grimy, too," she replied, waving her hand to
him, as she went out into the fog. She looked brighter than she had
looked for months past. His last impression of her was that she looked
as roses would look if they could wear furs and carry stars in their
eyes.
She had been studying the sailings of the ocean-steamers for some time,
but it was not her intention to follow the traveled routes more than was
necessary. Her brain was busy with a new music, the music of the names
in a hundred tales that she had read. The Golden Gate and Rio Grande
called to her like chords in a Beethoven symphony. Yokohama and
Singapore stirred her like Rossini. But it was the folk-song of travel
that she wanted, something wilder and sweeter even than Tahiti, some
fortunate Eden island in the South Seas.
Egypt and Ceylon were only incidents on her way. They only set the fever
burning a little more restlessly in her veins; and her first moment of
content was when the yacht of thirty tons, which she chartered in San
Diego, carried her out to the long heave of the Pacific, and turned
southward on the endless trail to the Happy Islands.
This was a part of her scheme about which she had not consulted any one
at home, or she might have received some good advice about the choice of
her ship. It was a sturdy little craft, with small but excellent cabins
for herself and her maid. The captain and his wife were apparently
created for her special benefit, being very capable people, with the
quality of effacing themselves. The crew, of half a dozen Kanakas in
white shirts and red pareos, was picturesque and remote enough from all
the associations of cities to satisfy her desire for isolation.
The maid was the only mistake, she thought, and she did not discover
this until they had been a fortnight at sea. Her own maid had fallen ill
at an early stage of her travels, and had been sent home from Cairo.
Rachel had engaged this new one in San Diego, chiefly because she
thought it necessary to take somebody with her. When Marie Mendoza had
come to do Rachel's hair at San Diego, she had a somewhat pathetic story
to tell about a husband who had deserted her and forced her to work for
her living. Rachel thought there might be two sides to the story when
she discovered that the captain was playing the part of Samson to this
Delilah. It was a vivid moonlight picture that she saw in the bows one
night, when she had come up on deck unexpectedly for a breath of air.
Captain Ryan was an ardent wooer, and he did not see her. Marie Mendoza
looked rather like a rainbow in the arms of a black-bearded gorilla, and
Rachel retired discreetly, hoping that it was merely a temporary
aberration.
She would have been more disturbed, probably, if she had heard a little
of the conversation of this precious pair.
"I tell you, it's a cinch, Mickey. I never seen pearls like 'em. They're
worth fifty thousand dollars in Tiffany's, if they're worth a cent. She
keeps 'em locked up in her steamer-trunk, but I seen her take 'em out
several times."
"Well, I've been hunting pearls up and down the South Seas for twenty
years, and never had a chance of making good like this."
But Rachel did not hear the conversation, or she might have been able to
change the course of events considerably. She might even have taken an
opportunity of explaining to Marie that the real pearls were in the bank
at home, and that the necklace in her trunk was a clever imitation,
useful when she wished to adorn herself without too much
responsibility, and worth about thirty-five pounds in London, or perhaps
a little more than one hundred and fifty dollars in New York.
But Rachel knew nothing of all this; and so, on a certain morning, when
the _Seamew_ dropped anchor off the coral island of her dreams, she went
ashore without any misgivings. It was an island paradise, not recognized
by any map that she had seen, though Captain Ryan seemed to know all
about it. Rachel had particularly wanted to hear the real music of the
islanders, and Captain Ryan had assured her that she would find it at
its best among the inhabitants of this island, who had been unspoiled by
travelers, and yet were among the most gentle of the natives of the
South Seas. Marie Mendoza pleaded a headache, and remained on board; but
the Captain and his wife accompanied Rachel up the white beach, leaving
the boat in charge of the Kanakas. A throng of brown-skinned,
flower-wreathed islanders watched them timidly from under the first
fringe of palm trees; but the Captain knew how to ingratiate himself;
and, after certain gifts had been proffered to the bolder natives, the
rest came forward with their own gifts of flowers and long stems of
yellow fruit. Two young goddesses seized Rachel by the hands, and
examined her clothes, while the rest danced round her like the figures
from the Hymn to Pan in "Endymion."
Before the morning was over, Rachel had made firm friends of these two
maidens, who rejoiced in the names of Tinovao and Amaru; and, when she
signified to them that she wanted to swim in the lagoon, they danced off
with her in an ecstasy of mirth at the European bathing dress which she
carried over her arm, to their own favorite bathing beach, which was
hidden from the landing-place by a palm-tufted promontory.
It was more than an hour later when she returned, radiant, with her
radiant companions. She was a superb swimmer, and she had lost all her
troubles for the time in that rainbow-colored revel. She thought of
telling the Captain that they would stay here for some days. She wanted
to drink in the beauty of the island, and make it her own; to swim in
the lagoon, and bask in the healing sun; to walk through the palms at
dusk, and listen to the songs of the islanders. But where was the
Captain? Surely, this was the landing-place. There were the foot-prints
and the mark of the boat on the beach. Then she saw--with a quick
contraction of the heart--not only that the boat was missing, but that
there was no sign of the yacht. She stared at the vacant circle of the
sea, and could find no trace of it. There was no speck on that blazing
sapphire.
II
Her last doubt as to whether she had been deliberately marooned was
removed by Tinovao, who pointed to a heap of her belongings that had
been dumped on the beach, all in accordance with the best
sea-traditions, though it was due in this case to a sentimental spasm on
the part of Marie Mendoza, who remembered the kindness of Rachel at San
Diego.
The heap was a small one. But Rachel was glad to see that it included
her violin-case.
She knew that her stay was like to be a long one. They had been looking
for islands out of the way of ships; and she knew that it might even be
some years before another sail appeared on that stainless horizon. The
thieves would disappear, and they were not likely to talk. Her own
movements had been so erratic that she doubted whether her friends could
trace her. But she took it all very pluckily; so that the round-eyed
Amaru and Tinovao were unable to guess the full meaning of her plight.
They came to the conclusion, and Rachel thought it best to encourage
them in it, that she was voluntarily planning to live amongst them for a
little while, and that the yacht would of course return for her. They
had heard of white people doing these strange things, and they were
delighted at the prospect.
In a very short time, they had lodged Rachel in a hut of palm leaves,
with all the fruits of the island at her door. They carried up the small
heap of her possessions, and she gave them each a little mirror from her
dressing bag, which lifted them into the seventh heaven. Thenceforward,
they were her devoted slaves. Rachel discovered, moreover, while they
were turning over her possessions and examining her clothes, that her
ignorance of their language was but a slight barrier to understanding.
They communicated, it seemed, by a kind of wireless telegraphy, through
that universal atmosphere of their sex. They helped her to do her hair;
and, as it fell over her shoulders, they held it up to one another,
admiring its weight and beauty. When it was dark, there came a sound of
singing from the beach; and they crowned her with fresh frangipanni
blossoms, and led her out like a bride, to hear the songs of the
islanders.
It was a night of music. In the moonlight, on the moon-white sands, a
few of the younger islanders, garlanded like the sunburnt lovers of
Theocritus, danced from time to time; but, for the most part, they were
in a restful mood, attuned to the calm breathing of the sea. Their
plaintive songs and choruses rose and fell as quietly as the night-wind
among the palms; and Rachel thought she had never heard or seen anything
more exquisite. The beauty of the night was deepened a thousand-fold by
her new loneliness. The music plucked at her heart-strings. Beautiful
shapes passed her, that made her think of Keats:
"_Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain._"
She murmured the lines to herself; and while her lips yet moved, a
young islander stood before her who might have posed as the model for
Endymion. He was hardly darker than herself, and, to her surprise, he
spoke to her in quaint broken English.
"Make us the music of your own country," was what she understood him to
say, and Tinovao confirmed it by darting off to the hut and returning
with the violin. Rachel took it, and without any conscious choice of a
melody, began to play and sing the air which had been pulsing just below
the level of her consciousness ever since she had left England:
"_Like dew on the gowan lying is the fa' of her fairy feet,
And like winds in simmer sighing, her voice is low and sweet,
Her voice is low and sweet, and she's a' the world to me,
And for bonnie Annie Laurie, I'd lay me doon and dee._"
The islanders listened, as if spellbound; but she could not tell whether
the music went home to any of them, except the boy who lay at her feet
with his eyes fixed on her face. When the last notes died away, the
crowd broke into applause, with cries of "Malo! Malo!" But the boy lay
still, looking at her, as a dog looks at his mistress. Then the
moonlight glistened in his eyes, and she thought that she saw tears.
She bent forward a little to make sure. He rose with a smile, and lifted
her hand to his face, so that she might feel that his eyes were wet.
"Tears," he said, "and I only listen. But you--you make the music, and
no tears are in your eyes." He looked into her face.
"No," she said, "there are no tears in my eyes." Then she continued
hurriedly, as if speaking to herself (and perhaps only a musician would
have felt that the catch in her voice went a little deeper than tears):
"That's one of the things you lose when you go in for music. It used to
be so with me, too."
"I like your music," the boy went on. "My father--English sailor. My
mother--learn speak English--from him. She teach me. My father only stay
here little time. I never see English people before this."
Rachel looked at him with a quick realization of what his words meant.
The boy was at least eighteen years old.
"You remember no ship coming to this island?" she said.
"No. I never see my father. He only stay here little time. My mother
think for long time he will come again. That is how she die, only a
little time ago. Too much waiting. Make some more music. You have made
my ears hungry."
But Rachel was facing the truth now, and she played and sang no more
that night.
III
For a week or two, Rachel spent much time alone, thinking hard, thinking
things out as she had never done before. She did not quite understand
her isolation till the first shock of the full discovery had passed.
Then, one morning, sitting alone, and gazing out over the spotless blue,
she found herself accepting the plain fact, that this might indeed be
for ever. She found herself weighing all the chances, all that she had
lost, and all that yet remained to her. It dawned upon her, for the
first time, that youth does not lightly surrender the fulness of its
life, at the first disillusionment. She knew now that she would have
recovered from that first disastrous love-affair. She knew now that she
had always known it, and that her search had been only for some healing
dittany, some herb of grace that would heal her wound more quickly. She
faced it all--the loss of her birthright as a woman, the loss of the
unknown lover. She saw herself growing old in this loneliness.
She weighed everything that was left to her, the freedom from all the
complications of life, the beauty of her prison, the years of youth and
strength that might yet rejoice in the sun and the sea, and even find
some companionship among these children of nature that rejoiced in them
also. She compared them with the diseased monstrosities, the hideous
bodies and brutal faces that swarmed in the gray cities of Europe. She
saw nothing to alter her former opinion here. She was condemned at any
rate to live among a folk that had walked out of an ode by Keats. But
always, at the end, she pictured herself growing old, with her own life
unfulfilled.
Then, one day, a change came over her. She had lost all count of time in
that island of lasting summer; but she must have been marooned for many
months when it happened.
One afternoon, when she had been swimming with Tinovao and Amaru, the
two girls had run up into the woods to get some fruit, leaving Rachel to
bask on the beach alone. The sunlight of the last few months had tinted
her skin with a smooth rosy brown that would have made it difficult to
distinguish her from a native, except for the contours of her face and
the deep violet of her eyes, as she lay on that milk-white sand. Before
she followed her friends, she thought she would take one more ride
through the surf. She made her way out, through the gap in the reef,
till she had reached the right distance. Then she rested, treading
water, while she waited for the big comber that was to carry her back
again.
It was her civilized intelligence, perhaps, that betrayed her now, for
she turned her back to the sea for a moment, while she drank in the
beauty of the feathery green palms and delicate tresses of the ironwood
that waved along the shore. She was roused from her dreams by the
familiar muffled roar of the approaching breaker, and she turned her
head a few seconds too late to take the rush of it as it ought to have
been taken. It was a giant and, for almost the first time in her life,
she knew the sensation of fear in the sea, as the green crest crumbled
into white high over her. In that instant, too, she caught a glimpse of
a figure on the reef watching her. It was the figure of Rua, the boy
who spoke English; and, as the breaker crashed down with all its tons of
water over her head, she carried with her the impression that he was
about to dive to her rescue. She was whirled helplessly, heels over
head, downward and downward, then swept forward with the rushing
whirlpools in the blackness below, like a reed in a subterranean river.
She knew that if she could hold her breath long enough, she would rise
to the surface; but she had reckoned without the perils of the gap in
the reef. Twice she was whirled and caught against a jagged piece of
coral, which would probably have killed her if it had struck her head.
She took the warning, and held her arms in the best way she could to
ward off any head-blow. A lacerated body would not matter so much as the
momentary stunning that might prevent her from keeping afloat when she
rose. At last, when it seemed that she could hold her breath no longer,
she shot with a wild gasp to the surface again.
She found that she was only half-way through the gap, not in mid-stream
where she would have been comparatively safe, but in an eddy of boiling
water, close to the reef and among sharp fangs of coral that made it
impossible to swim. All that she could do, at the moment, was to hold on
to the coral and prevent herself from being lacerated against it. The
sharp edges of the little shells, with which it was covered here, cut
her hands, as the water swirled her to and fro; but she held on, and
looked round for help.
Then she saw that she was not fated to receive help, but to give it;
and, like lightning in a tropic night, the moment changed her world. She
had no time to think it out now; for she saw the face of Rua, swirling
up towards her through the green water, and it looked like the face of a
drowned man. His head and arms emerged, and sank again, twice, before
she caught him by the hand and drew him, with the strength of a woman
fighting for life, to her side.
She was not sure whether he was alive or dead; but she saw that, in his
hasty plunge to help her, a dive that no native would have taken at that
place in ordinary circumstances, he had struck one of the coral jags.
Blood was flowing from his head and, as she held him floating there
helplessly for a minute, the clear water went away over the white coral
tinted with little clouds of crimson. She waited for the next big wave,
thinking that it would save or destroy them both. Happily, it had not
broken when it reached them; and, as they rose on the smooth back of it,
she held her companion by the hand, and struck out fiercely for a higher
shelf of the reef. It had been out of her reach before; but the wave
carried them both up to its level, and left them stranded there.
From this point, the reef rose by easy stages; and, with the aid of two
more waves, she was able to lug Rua to a point where there was no risk
of their being washed away, though the clear water still swirled up
about them, and went away clouded with red. She lay there for a moment
exhausted; but, as her strength came back to her, the strange sensation
that flashed through her when she had first come to the surface returned
with greater force. Much has been said and sung about the dawn of wonder
on the primitive mind. This was an even stranger dawn, the dawn of
wonder on a daughter of the twentieth century. It seemed to her that she
was looking at the world for the first time, while she lay there panting
and gazing out to sea, with those red stains on the white coral, and
her hands gripping the slender brown hands of the half-drowned islander.
It seemed that she had returned to her childhood, and that she was
looking at a primal world that she had forgotten. She saw now that Rua
was breathing, and she knew instinctively that he would recover. The
wave of joy that went through her had something primitive and fierce in
it, like the joy of the wild creatures. She felt like an islander
herself, and when the sea-birds hovered overhead, she called to them, in
the island tongue, and felt as if she had somehow drawn nearer to them.
She looked at the sea with new eyes, as if it were a fierce old
play-mate of her own, an old tiger that had forgotten to sheath its
claws when it buffeted its cubs. There was a glory in the savor of life,
like the taste of freedom to a caged bird. Only it was Europe now, and
the world of houses, that seemed the cage. The sea had never been so
blue. The brine on her lips was like the sacramental wine of her new
kinship with the world....
Then, looking at Rua's face, as the life came back to it, a wave of
compassion went through her. Every contour of that face told her that
this boy also was a victim of her own kindred. He, too, was marooned,
and more hopelessly than herself, for there must be a soul within him
that could never even know what it had lost or what it hungered for,
unless, ... unless, perhaps, she could help him out of the treasures of
her own memory, and give him glimpses of that imperial palace whence he
came.
It was growing dark when they slipped into the water of the lagoon and
swam slowly towards the beach. There, she helped him to limp as far as
his hut, neither of them speaking. He dropped on his knees, as she
turned to go, and laid his face at her feet. She stayed for a moment,
looking at him, and half stooped to raise him; but she checked the
impulse, and left him abruptly.
At the edge of the wood, she turned to look again, and he was there
still, in the same attitude. There was a dumb pathos in it that reminded
her curiously of certain pictures of her lost world, the peasants in the
Angelus of Millet, though this was a picture unmarred by the curse of
Adam, the picture of a dumb brown youthful god, perfect in physical
beauty, praying in Paradise garden to the star that trembled above the
palms.
Many women (and most men) in their unguarded moments, impute their own
good and evil to others; read their own thoughts in the eyes around
them; pity their own tears, or the tears of Vergil, in the eyes of
"Geist." But Rua was praying to the best he knew.
IV