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 grass 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 titanic 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-god, 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 compass.
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."
Muriel clung to his arm with a passionate clinging.
"Oh, Felix," she cried, "no! Don't leave me here alone. My darling, I
love you. You're all the world there is left to me now, Felix. Don't go
out to those wretches and leave me here alone. They'll murder you!
they'll murder you! Don't go out, I implore you. If they mean to kill us,
let them kill us both together, in one another's arms. Oh, Felix, I am
yours, and you are mine, my darling!"
It was the first time either of them had acknowledged the fact; but
there, before the face of that awful convulsion of nature, all the little
deceptions and veils of life seemed rent asunder forever as by a flash of
lightning. They stood face to face with each other's souls, and forgot
all else in the agony of the moment. Felix clasped the trembling girl in
his arms like a lover. The two Shadows looked on and shook with silent
terror. If the King of the Rain thus embraced the Queen of the Clouds
before their very eyes, amid so awful a storm, what unspeakable effects
might not follow at once from it! But they had too much respect for those
supernatural creatures to attempt to interfere with their action at such
a moment. They accepted their masters almost as passively as they
accepted the wind and the thunder, which they believed to arise from
them.
Felix laid his poor Muriel tenderly down on the mud floor again. "I
_must_ go out, my child," he said. "For the very love of _you_, I must
play the man, and find out what these savages mean by their drumming."
He crept to the door of the hut (for no man could walk upright before
that awful storm), and peered out into the darkness once more, awaiting
one of the frequent flashes of lightning. He had not long to wait. In a
moment the sky was all ablaze again from end to end, and continued so
for many seconds consecutively. By the light of the continuous zigzags
of fire, Felix could see for himself that hundreds and hundreds of
natives--men, women, and children, naked, or nearly so, with their hair
loose and wet about their cheeks--lay flat on their faces, many courses
deep, just outside the taboo line. The wind swept over them with
extraordinary force, and the tropical rain descended in great floods upon
their bare backs and shoulders. But the savages, as if entranced, seemed
to take no heed of all these earthly things. They lay grovelling in the
mud before some unseen power; and beating their tom-toms in unison, with
barbaric concord, they cried aloud once more as Felix appeared, in a
weird litany that overtopped the tumultuous noise of the tempest, "Oh,
Storm-God, hear us! Oh, great spirit, deliver us! King of the Rain and
Queen of the Clouds, befriend us! Be angry no more! Hide your wrath from
your people! Take away your hurricane, and we will bring you many gifts.
Eat no longer of the storm-apple--the seed of the wind--and we will feed
you with yam and turtle, and much choice bread-fruit. Great king, we are
yours; you shall choose which you will of our children for your meat and
drink; you shall sup on our blood. But take your storm away; do not
utterly drown and submerge our island!"
As they spoke they crawled nearer and nearer, with gliding serpentine
motion, till their heads almost touched the white line of coral. But not
a man of them all went one inch beyond it. They stopped there and gazed
at him. Felix signed to them with his hand, and pointed vaguely to the
sky, as much as to say _he_ was not responsible. At the gesture the whole
assembly burst into one loud shout of gratitude. "He has heard us, he has
heard us!" they exclaimed, with a perfect wail of joy. "He will not
utterly destroy us. He will take away his storm. He will bring the sun
and the moon back to us."
Felix returned into the hut, somewhat reassured so far as the attitude of
the savages went. "Don't be afraid of them, Muriel," he cried, taking her
passionately once more in a tender embrace. "They daren't cross the
taboo. They won't come near; they're too frightened themselves to dream
of hurting us."