understand about Saxon’s girl, I hope? She’s to navigate us on the
trip, because nayther you nor I knows enough for a cruisin’ job like
this, and the old chap himself is pretty general drunk—that’s the way I
put it—and shares with what we find, and the ould divil himself to come
along, just for propriety, and in case of a fight with the owners. Oh,
a nate yarn, and she shwallowed it down like a cat atin’ butter. She’s
comin’ on boord to-night, to see the necklashe and look over the chart
I’ve marked. She’ll not bring ould Saxon, for she’s feared of nayther
man nor divil, and I’ll bet she thinks to get the bearin’s of the place
off of me and chate me out of it after all.”
“And how the h—— do you think she’s going to believe that you give the
show away before the ship sails? Her teeth wasn’t cut yesterday, by all
we know.”
“Faith, and we do know!” muttered the captain, with a horrible
undercurrent of oaths. “And she’ll know, by —— she will! I’d slit the
throat of her, if it wasn’t for the other bit of divarsion we’ve
planned.”
“Say you’ve planned,” interrupted the mate darkly. “I call it bad work,
whether she was man, woman, or child; but you’re my master.”
“And you’re a plashter saint, ain’t you?” sneered the captain. “Let’s
have no more of your chat; we know each other a —— sight too well. As
for the chart, she’ll think we don’t mean to give it away till she and
her father is under sail with us, but she’ll come on the chance of
sneaking it out somehow. And when we’ve got her aboard, why—lave it to
me! Ould Saxon’s hell-cat daughter won’t take no more pearl-shell beds
from us or any one else.”
“You ain’t afraid of her knowing who we are?”
“How would she, then? The _Ikurangi_ isn’t the _Margaret Macintyre_—bad
luck to her who brought me down to such a tub, after ownin’ the finest
auxiliary in Auckland!—and she never seen you or me till to-day. No,
it’s all right. That’s enough jaw; you go aboard, and attend to you
know what, and then send off the boat for her and me.”
Vaiti, curly classic head on slender hand, still watched from her
corner.
Did she suspect? There was nothing for suspicion to lay hold of.
Donahue was one of the acutest villains under the Southern Cross, and he
did not make clumsy mistakes. The story of the derelict, of the
valuables abandoned on board, of the necessity for finding the ship soon
and secretly, might have sounded far-fetched to city-dwelling folk, but
out in the wild South Seas stranger things may happen any day. The plan
was neat and plausible from every point of view, and Vaiti had taken the
bait readily enough that afternoon. Yet Donahue felt—as the two walked
silently down the dim, perfumed beach street, all ablow with vagrant sea
winds and wandering wafts of song—that he would have given a good deal
for just one peep into his handsome companion’s mind.
Vaiti walked beside him, looking straight ahead. Had Donahue’s wish been
granted, he would have thought somewhat less of his own acuteness. She
did suspect. A man, in her case, would have been convinced by the
reasonable aspect of the whole affair. Vaiti, being a woman, with
sea-anemone tentacles of instinct floating and tingling all about the
steady centres of reason in her mind, was convinced, and vet not
convinced. She thought it was all right, yet she knew it was not—after
a woman’s way.
In any case, however, it was an adventure, and there was a mystery to
fathom. So she put on a more substantial dress than the gauzy draperies
she had been wearing, hung the neatest possible little pearl-handled
Smith and Wesson round her neck, under the swelling folds of her frock,
by means of an innocent-looking thin gold neck-chain that would snap
with a tug; put her long-bladed knife in her pocket, with the sheath
sewn to the dress, so that a pull would bring out the blade, and joined
Donahue an hour after dinner, on the verandah steps, confident of her
ability to see the thing through, whatever it might be.
She looked sharply about her, as she stepped over the low bulwarks of
the _Ikurangi_ and dropped down on to the encumbered, untidy deck. No
one about. Nothing to be seen but a dirty little main deck, with rusty
pumps and a yawning hatch, and a poop that even in the pallid light just
beginning to tremble up from the rising moon showed neglect of the
sacred ceremony of daily deck-washing.
Now, any decent ship’s captain will attend to his deck-washing, even if
he doesn’t shave or wash himself from port to port. Vaiti did not like
that unscrupulous, dirty poop. But she was already up on it, and
Donahue was bowing her down the cabin companion, with a jarring smile
and a good deal of over-fluent blarney. The cabin was small and smelly;
it had an oblong table in the middle, surrounded by cushioned lockers,
and an open door at the end facing the companion. This door evidently
opened into Donahue’s own cabin, for a rough wash-stand and a
looking-glass, the latter hung high on the bulkhead, were plainly
visible. There was a lamp nailed above the glass, and the two together
shone brightly out into the rather ill-lit main cabin.
“What’ll you take?” asked Donahue, with his unpleasant smile. “I’ve got
some sweet sherry wine, just the thing for ladies—or wouldn’t ye put
your lips to a taste of peach brandy?”
Vaiti shook her head.
“No good drink, suppose talk business,” she said. She would not have
swallowed a glass of water on the _Ikurangi_ for a dozen Virot hats.
Donahue had not expected to catch her so easily; still, he cast a
thought of regret to his nicely-doctored liquors. She evidently meant
what she said—and the other way Was harder.
“Well, thin, darlin’, we’ll have a look at the cha-art,” he observed,
producing a roll of paper. “It’s yourself that can help us t’rough this
business—you and the ould man—better than any one from Calloa to Sydney
if only yez are raisonable about terms.”
He spread the chart out on the table, and weighted it down with a couple
of tumblers.
Vaiti, her mind charged full with watchful suspicion, felt that sudden
small, sick thrill that is the forerunner of the thought—“I wish I
hadn’t!” Afterwards, when she came to think matters over, she knew that
it was because Donahue had made the mistake of bringing out the chart
before the terms had been discussed, which was an improbable sort of
thing to do. In such moments, however, one does not think, one only
feels. Still, the warning was unmistakable, and Vaiti made as if to
rise, intending to plead sudden illness and get out on deck. But
Donahue, sharp as a snake, saw the movement, and brought out his trump
card at once.
“Sure, I’m a —— fool, I am, to forget the necklashe! You haven’t seen
that yet,” he said, whipping a stream of white fire out of his pocket
and letting it fall across the dark wood of the table. It was a
magnificent piece of paste-work, and had taken in Donahue himself, some
few weeks ago, after a fashion that made him sore enough to remember.
Vaiti gasped when she saw it, and laid both her pretty olive hands upon
it at once. Her suspicions were not exactly killed, but they had for the
moment no room to live with the passionate feeling aroused by the gems.
Donahue, with his unspeakable experience of the sex, had calculated
rightly when he classified her among the women who would almost do
murder for a diamond.... Such jewels! and she had never had one in her
hand before, though her eyes had often filled and her heart ached with
hopeless desire before the maddening glories of the jewellers’ windows
in Auckland and Sydney.
She hugged the necklace to her breast like a baby, she shook it, she
danced it in the light.... And then, was it in woman’s nature to
refrain from snapping the clasp about her neck, and feeling the dear
touch of those cold drops and pendants on her bosom?
“Ah, now, but you’re the beauty wit’ them little jokers round your neck!
And the lovely neck you have, darlin’!” blarneyed Donahue. He had
better have been silent, for Vaiti, used to admiration of every kind and
degree as to daily bread, felt the falseness of the tone. If all other
men admired her beauty, this one did not, though he said so. His grey,
goat-like eyes looked something more like hate across the narrow table,
under the ill-smelling oily lamp, and Vaiti saw they did.
Donahue, taught by twenty years of active villainy, was quick to feel
the necessity for the next move. He went into his own cabin and turned
up the lamp. The looking-glass shone out brightly under its rays.
“Come and look at yourself, me beauty,” he said; “and let me ould
shavin’-glass see the handsomest girl in the islands wearin’ what she
ought to wear every day of her life, if she’d her rights.”
For the moment, Vaiti was not herself. She was drunk with the jewels;
she was crazed with the desire to see herself in them. If heaven and
hell had stood between her and the looking-glass, she was bound to go to
it, and Donahue knew it, as surely as he knew that the moon would set
that night.
Vaiti—still sensing the danger that she would not heed, through all the
intoxication of the jewels—thought, in a cinematographic flash, that one
was safe before a glass, at all events.... No one could come up behind
you.... Besides, there was the little revolver, hanging on the chain
that would snap with a tug....
And then, for the space of a full minute, she saw nothing, knew nothing,
lived for nothing but the sight of her own dark, beautiful face in the
glass, lit up into surpassing loveliness by the scintillating fires
about her neck. There was no movement in the mirror behind her.
Donahue sat motionless at the table, and the cabin was very still.
... The first ecstasy subsided, and she turned her head a little to see
the diamonds twinkle....
Donahue’s elbow knocked a glass off the table with a sharp crash.
Almost at the same instant two powerful hands closed on each of Vaiti’s
ankles, and snatched her feet from under her. She plucked out the
revolver as she fell, but her hands were caught, whisked behind her, and
securely tied, with a prompt swiftness that told of frequent experience.
In another minute her ankles were lashed together, none too gently; she
was carried into a small state-room, thrown down upon the bunk, and left
alone in the dark, with the slam of the door and snap of the lock
resounding in her ears.
Most women would have screamed. Vaiti remembered that they were out in
the middle of a wide harbour, and decided not to risk the infliction of
a gag for such a slight chance of rescue.... Certain ugly scenes on the
_Sybil_ rose up before her eyes. No; decidedly it was her only policy
to keep quiet.
Outside there was the thud of bare feet running about the deck, the
creak of the booms rising on the masts, the slatting of loose sails—loud
orders, long yells from the native crew, as they pulled and hauled. The
_Ikurangi_ was making sail.
Then sudden silence, slow heeling over of the cabin, lip-lap of hurrying
water along the hull. They were off. Where? God—or the devil—only
knew!
*CHAPTER VI*
*MAROONED*
There was plenty of time for reflection in the long days that followed.
The greasy-faced old mate came in and cut the lashings off Vaiti’s
ankles and wrists, a few hours after sailing, and she was left free to
move about the cabin, which offered a promenade of exactly seven feet by
three. Meals were handed in to her three times daily—the usual black
tea, tinned meat, and weevily biscuit of second-class island
schooners—and she was not in any way molested, though the door was
always kept locked. Donahue put in his head once or twice to look at
her, as she sat cross-legged on her bunk, staring out through the port
at the tumbling seas. He generally had something to say—a jarring,
mocking compliment, or a remark about the time they were likely to make
Sydney Heads—knowing all the time that Vaiti could estimate the general
direction of their course by the sun, and that there was no southing in
it. If she had ever feared any one, she feared this man—almost.
It was not difficult to understand how the capture had been brought
about. A man under the bunk, another under the sofa opposite—her own
eyes watching only the upper part of the cabin as reflected in the
glass—nothing could be simpler or better planned. The affair was none
the less ugly on that account. Perhaps it was only Vaiti’s burning
anger at her utter rout and defeat in her own business of plotting and
intrigue that saved her from something very like despair, as the
schooner ploughed steadily on, day after day, carrying her into the
great unknown, farther and farther away from all who could defend her.
Yet, despairing or not, Saxon’s daughter never lost her courage. They
had taken her weapons from her as they carried her into the cabin, but
they could not take away her undaunted spirit. She waited her time.
As to the meaning of the business, she trusted, again, to time’s
enlightenment. Saxon had many enemies; so had she. It would all come
out by-and-by. Meantime, it was clear that no one meant to murder her.
What else might be meant she could not tell, and she did not care to
speculate overmuch. Under such circumstances one does best to save
one’s nerve against the time it may be wanted.
It was on the twenty-third day out from Apia, bearing, as far as she
could discover, in a north-westerly direction, that she first noted the
approach of land. Nothing could be seen from her side of the ship, but
she heard the long, excited cries of the island crew, and the thundering
of their feet, as they began putting the ship about with unwonted
vigour, to a chorus of native songs. She strained her eyes eagerly when
the ship came about on the other tack, but the line of the horizon was
unbroken; and it was not for another hour that she saw, from her low
elevation, what the look-out in the crow’s nest had sighted long
before—a line of small black bristles pricking the edge of the horizon
several miles away.
Vaiti knew the sight at once for the palms of a low atoll
island—evidently some barren, sun-smitten spot close up to the line—and
a ready solution of the whole puzzling affair at once sprang into her
mind.
Marooning!
Most people know the meaning of this term; nearly every one has heard of
sailors captured by pirates in old days, and left on lonely islands, or
even deserted by their own comrades on some isolated spot, with just
enough food and water to save the marooners’ consciences from the guilt
of actual murder. Vaiti knew both the word and the thing very
well-indeed, and she was almost certain that the _Ikurangi_ had gone off
the course on the way to some South American port with the view of
hiding her where she would not easily be found again. There are many
islands in the wastes of the vast Pacific where a ship may not pass once
in half a century, and these—unlike the typical “desert” island of
stories—are almost always barren, hungry, shadeless spots, where Crusoe
himself would have been hard put to it to make a decent living. The
fertile, mountainous, well-watered isle is never without a native
population, permanent or occasional, and is very seldom indeed, in these
days, without a trader as well, and a regularly calling schooner. As
for the breadfruit, oranges, pineapples, the pigs and goats, the
sugarcane and maize of uninhabited islands as known to fiction, they
have no counterpart in real life. All the valuable food plants and all
useful animals are the product of importation and cultivation, ancient
or modern. It follows, that where there are no people and no ships,
there is nothing worth having.
Vaiti knew this very well, and decided that if she was going to be
marooned, she might as well make such provision as circumstances
allowed. She had hunted over every inch of the cabin—which seemed to
belong to the mate—during the long days of the voyage, and she knew
exactly what it contained. From the stores put away under the bunk she
selected a large new sheet, which she concealed under her dress; a small
stock of needles and thread, a box or two of matches, some hooks and
line, and a stick of dynamite, evidently meant for some forgotten
fishing purpose. There was nothing in the shape of a knife, much to her
regret; and there was a good deal of clothing that she would have liked
to carry away; but it would not do to take more than she could easily
conceal. So she made an end of her preparations, and sat down to wait
once more.
There was no moon that night until very late, and darkness came down so
close on the stroke of four bells that Vaiti felt sure they were very
near the equator. No one came near her, and tea seemed to be unusually
late. The anchor-chain roared home soon after dark, the ship lay very
still, and there was a good deal of running about on deck. Vaiti was
confirmed in her anticipations of an uninhabited island by the fact that
no boat was to be heard coming off from shore. Not a sound of any kind,
indeed, came from the island, and there were no lights on the beach.
Some one handed her in her tea by-and-by, and a little later her door
was flung open again by the mate.
“Come on out,” he said.
Vaiti followed the mate out of the cabin at once, rather to his
surprise. She had made up her mind that anything was better than the
_Ikurangi_, and she was looking out sharply for a chance—any chance—of
turning the tables.
It did not look at first as if she were to have one. The dinghy had been
swung out when she got on deck, and a couple of men were standing ready
to lower away. They were islanders, and she knew that they would
befriend her if they could—indeed, their glances showed as much—yet what
could they do?
Donahue was nowhere visible. He had planned this business with some
forethought, and he wanted to have a chance of casting blame on his
subordinate if any inquisitive Government official should incline to
look the matter up later on. So he stayed down in his own cabin,
pretending to be asleep, and the mate, rather against his will, had to
carry out orders alone.
Just as the boat was ready to lower away, one of the men let her go with
a run, and she struck the water stern first, with a terrible splash.
The mate, screaming curses, ran over to the falls and began to abuse the
crew. The dinghy was injured, and they had to haul her up and swing out
the whaleboat instead.
This took some little time, and Vaiti was forgotten for the moment—a
chance that made her heart beat with eagerness to profit by it.
Two ideas held possession of her—that she must plan to secure a boat,
and that she must manage to do the _Ikurangi_ some sort of mischief.
Was it to be borne that Donahue should go unpaid? The blood of a
hundred fierce Island chiefs made answer.
Concerning the boat, she thought she saw a chance. They were bound to
stay a day for wood and water, and that should furnish an opportunity.
But the other matter?
If she could only get hold of the ship’s papers and destroy them! That
would be satisfactory. She knew, none better, that a ship’s papers are
her character, her “marriage-lines” of respectability. Without them a
vessel is an illegitimate, furtive creature, every man’s hand against
her, every official eye turned coldly upon her. Vaiti would have liked
very well to get hold of the _Ikurangi’s_.
But, careless as Donahue was, the papers were not to be found in the
little deck cabin which he used as a chart-room. Vaiti, disappointed,
took one of the charts and began studying the position of the ship, with
a view to finding out the name of the island off which they were lying.
The chart was almost a blank, nothing being marked upon its wide expanse
but a number of reefs and two or three atolls—Bilboa Island, Vaka,
Ngamaru—dotted hundreds of miles apart in a naked waste of white.
Bilboa, an abandoned guano island, of which she had heard something,
seemed to Vaiti the most likely of the three spots. Ngamaru, she knew,
had a native population, and about Vaka she could for the moment
remember nothing, although she knew she had heard something once upon a
time. All this part of the Pacific was far removed from the _Sybil’s_
haunts, and indeed from the haunts of any other ship of which Vaiti had
ever heard.
It did not seem to be a healthy place for schooners; the reefs round
both Vaka and Bilboa were many, and most were marked “Position
doubtful.” Donahue was evidently not familiar with either place, for
the chart was freshly pencilled over with notes and corrections.
Vaiti’s heart leaped up as she looked at the careless work.... She saw
a way.
They were still clearing the lumber out of the whaleboat on deck. No
one was watching.
Vaiti took a pencil and rubber, and began to do some artistic
alterations on the chart, helped by her knowledge of seamanship. In ten
minutes she had converted the innocent piece of parchment into a perfect
death-trap, rolled it up and replaced it, put back the rubber and
pencil, and slipped out again on deck, where she sat down on a coil of
rope and waited.
In another couple of minutes the boat was in the water, and the mate
called rudely to Vaiti. She came without a word, covering her face with
her dress, and sobbing bitterly. She stumbled as she walked; you would
have sworn she was weak, broken in spirit, and utterly helpless.
If the mate felt any compassion, he did not dare to show it. They
shoved off, two natives at the oars. Vaiti, sobbing effectively behind
her hands, kept a sharp look-out with the corner of one eye as they slid
across the dark water, but she could see nothing save a faintly
glimmering line of grey shore, and hear nothing but the humming of the
surf on the reef.
As soon as they reached the shallow water near the shore, the mate took
Vaiti by her arm and roared, “Out you go!”
Sobbing afresh, in the most natural and convincing manner in the world,
she obeyed.... It was dark, and the native who rowed bow oar never knew
that she whipped his knife dexterously out of his belt as she passed
him.
“Why are you marooning me?” she wailed, as she waded through the warm,
shallow water towards the shore.
The mate leaned out of the boat, now fading fast away into the starry
gloom, and shouted as he disappeared:
“To pay for Delgadas Reef and the _Margaret Macintyre_!”
Vaiti, who had reached the shore, almost sat down with the shock. So
that was it! that was it! The pearl-shell lagoon out of which she,
almost unaided, had “jockeyed” the schooner _Margaret Macintyre_, some
months before, was bringing in a crop other than pearls—of which last,
indeed, the canny Scot who had financed the working of the place had had
very much the larger share.
Well, things must be taken as they were found. The soft tropic night
stirred gently round her. The stars were large and golden; they shone
in the still lagoon like little moons. Palm trees waved somewhere up in
the dusk above, striking their huge rattling vanes together with the
swing of the night-breeze. It was land, safe, solid land, and the sand
was warm and soft, and Vaiti was tired. She walked a little way up the
beach, stretched herself under a pandanus tree, and went to sleep....
Some hours later she woke, with the dim, mysterious volcano-glow of the
tropic dawn in her eyes, and a curious feeling of disquiet about her
heart. Still half asleep, she saw the long grey shore sloping down to
the silent lagoon, the ink-coloured pandanus trees standing up against
the dull orange sky, the leaning stems and stumps of coco-palms, dark
and formless in the shadow. She shut her eyes and tried to sleep again.
No use. That nameless disquiet—now almost fear—still stirred at her
heart. She opened her eyes once more, and looked about. A little more
light—the touch of a glowing finger away in the east—a clearer defining
of the cocoanut stumps, snapped off near their roots in the last great
hurricane.... One of the stumps was oddly shaped—almost like a human
figure. She could have fancied it was a rude image of a sitting man,
only that the profile, against the lightening east, was featureless, and
there was nothing to represent the hands.
“I will not be frightened by a rotten cocoanut tree,” thought Vaiti. “I
will sleep again till it is light. Am I not a sea-captain’s daughter,
and the descendant of great Island chiefs, and shall I fear the fancies
of my own mind?”
Determinedly she closed her eyes again, and lay very still. The dawn
wind began to stir; the ripples crisped upon the beach; the locusts in
the trees broke out into a loud chirr-ing chorus. And as the day broke
silver-clear upon the shore, Vaiti, still lying on the sand, felt that
some one, in the gathering light, was watching her as she lay.
Wary as a fox, she opened her dark, keen eyes without stirring her body
... and looked straight into a face that was bending almost over her ...
a face hooded by a black cloth that hid the head and brow, and only left
to view ... O God! O God! what was it?