The evening fires were lighting up the darkness of the coming night,
when Prout, the only white man on the island, left his house on the edge
of the lagoon, and, with his little daughter running by his side, walked
slowly through the village.
As they passed through the now deserted pathways that intersected the
straggling collection of grey, thatched-roofed houses, and Prout's heavy
step crunched into the broken coral, the natives, gathered together for
their evening meal, looked forth, and the brown women called out a word
or two of greeting to the child, and smiled and beckoned her to
leave her father for an instant and take the fruit or piece of cooked
breadfruit that they held out to her with their brown hands. But only
a solemn shake of the little head, and then she and the taciturn,
bronzed-faced man went by, the child's tiny fingers grasping his tanned
and roughened hand as they walked across the narrow island towards the
sound of the muffled thunder of the surf on the outer ocean beach.
*****
Here, with the little one perched beside him and looking wonderingly
into his grave, impassive face, the white man would sit for long hours
staring moodily out upon the tumbling breakers as they reared and fell
upon the black, grim shelves of the reef.
Sometimes, as he sat with his chin resting on his hand, and the red glow
of his pipe sending now and again a fitful gleam of light across the
rugged lines of his face, the girl would get quietly down from the
moss-grown coral boulder on which she rested by his side, and stepping
down to the short, steep beach, play with childish solemnity with such
pebbles and light shells as lay within the reach of her little hands.
Perhaps, if the tide was heavy and at its flood, and a breaker heavier
than the rest breached shorewards in a white wall of seething foam, and
crashed and rattled together the loose coral slabs that marked the line
of high-water mark, the silent, dreaming man would spring to his feet
with a loud warning call. And the little one, answering his deep tones
with her soft, sweet treble, would spring back to her father's side, and
nestling her tender form against his gaunt frame, lay her cheek against
his, and say, in the soft Tokelau tongue, “'Twas a great wave, my
father!”
“Aye,” he would answer, as he placed an arm round the child and gazed at
her for a moment, “'twas a great wave truly, _taka taina_,{*} and thou
art so small, that if it but touched thy feet thou wouldst be swept
away like as a leaf in a strong wind. So stay thee here beside me, sweet
one,” and again his face would turn seaward, and the silence of the
night, save for the soughing of the wind and the cry of the surf, fall
upon them again.
* “Little one of my heart.”
Thus the first hours of the island night would pass, till a glare of
light flashed upon the blackness of the sea beyond the snow-line of
surf, as the canoes from Matakatea would round the point, each one with
a flaming torch of dried palm-leaves held high by a brown, tattooed
hand, to dazzle the flying fish that, with wings outspread, floated
motionless upon the surface of the water.
*****
Then, because the child had no playmates, and her little life was almost
as joyless and as solitary as his own, he would wait with her till
the long line of canoes passed by, so that she could see the bronzed,
half-naked figures of the paddlers, and the bright gleam and shimmer of
the fish as they were swept up by the deadly net, and hear the warning
cry from the torch-bearers, as in the depths beneath they saw the black
shadow of a prowling shark rushing to seize the net, or perchance the
outrigger of the canoe, in his cruel, murderous jaws.
Slowly the canoes paddled by, and as they passed, the hum of voices
and laughter and the cheery lilt of island melody died away, and the
paddlers looked shoreward to the motionless figure of Prout, who, with
the child by his side, seemed to heed naught but the wide sweep of ocean
that lay before him.
But though the voices and laughter and snatches of song ceased, many of
the kindly-hearted people would, ere they passed, call out a word or two
of greeting to the white man and his child, and the latter would wave
her hand and smile back, while her father, as if awakened from a dream,
called out, in the island tongue, the customary “May your fishing
to-night be lucky.” And then, as the last canoe vanished, and the glare
and the smoke of the torches with it, he, with the little Mercedes by
his side, walked back to his house on the lagoon.
*****
And so, night after night, save in the stormy season of the year, when
the white rain-squalls gathered together on the windward sea-line, and
swept quickly down upon the island and drenched the loose, sandy soil
with pouring showers, the white man had sat with his face turned seaward
to the cloudless horizon of the starlit ocean and his mind dwelling upon
the ever-present memories of the past.
Such, for three years past, ever since he had first landed among the
people of Nukutavau, had been the existence of Prout, the silent,
solitary trader.
*****