mats to ridge-pole, the walls covered with beautifully inlaid and
interwoven reeds, the roof bound together with exquisite sinnet work in
artistic patterns, of red, black, and yellow, and towering up into a
dark, cool cavern of pleasant gloom. The floor was overlaid with fine
parquetry of split bamboo at the “kasii” or common-folk end, and piled
deep with fine mats in the “chief” part. A Fijian bed, ten feet wide
and three feet high, ran like a dais right across the end of the house.
It was covered by mats prettily fringed with coloured parrot feathers.
There were three great doors, east, west, and south, each framing in its
dark-set opening a different picture of surpassing loveliness. Nalolo
town (its name is on the map of Fiji, but it reads otherwise) stands
very high on the sheer crest of a pointed green hill that is just like
the enchanted hill in the pictures of a fairy tale. There is a little
round green lawn on the top, and all about it stand the high, pointed
beehive houses of the town, each perched on its own tiny mound like a
toy on a stand. Sloped cocoanut logs run up to the doors of the houses,
and quaintly coloured crotons cluster about them. In the deep, soft
grass golden eggs from the guava trees lie tumbled about among fallen
stars of orange and lemon blossom, and everywhere the red hibiscus
shakes its splendid bells in the soft hill-winds. About the foot of the
peak a wide blue river wanders, singing all day long; and from every
door of every house, high perched above the cloudy valleys and hyacinth
hill ranges, one can see pictures, and pictures, and pictures almost too
lovely to be true. There are not two places in the world like Nalolo.
The White Man of Nalolo, however, was only interested in the fact that
the river provided excellent crayfish; and that taro grew very well
indeed on the slopes below the town. He had once been young, but he was
not young now, and did not matter any longer. Therefore he had become
particular about his dinner and indifferent to scenery. I will not tell
you the story of the White Man of Nalolo, or why he, of all men,
rebelled so fiercely against the common lot of “not mattering any more,”
that he came away to the wilds of the Pacific and the highlands of Fiji,
and never went back again, because, like many true stories, it cannot be
believed, and therefore had better not be told. Besides, this is the
story of Saxon and his daughter.
Saxon was down on his luck. He had a charter for the _Sybil_, but she
was not able to undertake it at present, for, trying to pilot her into
Suva harbour himself, he had contrived to run her on a reef, and damaged
her so seriously that she was at present careened on the beach in front
of the local boat-builder’s, undergoing repairs. The builder, knowing
something of Saxon’s reputation, had insisted on cash in advance, and
the captain, in consequence, found himself so nearly out of funds that
he was unable to stay in Suva pending the repairs to his ship. He had
therefore started with Vaiti for the interior of the great island of
Viti Levu, intending to live on the real hospitality of the natives for
a few weeks, and tramp from village to village.
He explained something of this as he sat on the mats enjoying the
grateful coolness of the house. The other man nodded gravely, watching
the door. He offered a curious contrast to the Englishman’s coarse red
fairness, being lean, sundried, and grizzled, with expressionless,
boot-buttoned eyes, and a straggling “goatee” beard that dated his exile
from America back to long-ago days.
“Where’s your daughter?” he asked.
“Coming. She stopped to tidy up at the river.”
The doorway was darkened at that moment by Vaiti herself, balancing
lightly up the cocoanut log to the threshold. She wore a white tunic
over a scarlet “pareo,” her wavy curls, sparkling with the water of the
stream, fell loose upon her shoulders; her lips were as red as the
freshly-plucked pomegranate blossom behind her ear. Something like life
stirred in the boot-button eyes of the White Man of Nalolo as he looked
at her.
“Afi!” he called to a Fijian woman who was sleeping on the mats at the
“kaisi” end of the house, “go and hurry the girls with the supper, and
make tea for the marama (lady). Quick!”
Then he turned to Saxon.
“Stay here as long as you like, both of you,” he said. “Let her sit
there sometimes, where I can see her and fancy.... I’ll show you
something.”
He rose slowly and stiffly, and limped across to a Chinese camphorwood
box that stood in the corner. In a minute he returned with a faded
photograph in a gaudy frame.
“My daughter,” he said. “The only child I ever had. She was Afi’s.
She died a long time ago. Afi’s a chief woman: she was as handsome as
Andi Thakombau when she was young, and the girl took after her. Your
girl’s mother was chief too, I guess. Do you see any likeness?”
Vaiti and her father craned over the photograph. The pretty half-caste
girl, was certainly like the stately, slender creature who gazed at her
pictured face, though the fire and spirit of Vaiti’s expression were
wanting.
“I’m growing old,” went on the White Man. “I’ve no children. Stay a
bit. I’ll be glad to have you.”
“Thank you; delighted, I’m sure,” drawled Saxon, with a pathetic
resurrection of his long-forgotten “grand manner,” And so it was
settled.
Vaiti, listening and thinking as usual, with her chin in her slender
fingers, approved of what she heard, and smiled very pleasantly at her
host. It seemed to her that he could be very useful just now.
The four weeks that followed after glided away agreeably enough in the
silent hills. Nothing happened; no one came or went—the Fijians, men
and women, went out to the yam and taro fields in the morning, and
returned in the afternoon; and after dark there would be long,
monotonous chanting, and interminable sitting dances, on the mats inside
the high-roofed houses. Saxon stupefied himself with kava most of the
time, in the absence of stronger drink, and almost got himself clubbed
once or twice on account of his too impulsive admiration for the
beauties of the village. His host, however, was no censor of morals,
and troubled very little about him. On Sundays the Fijians dressed
themselves in their brightest cottons, stuck up their hair in huge
halos, and went five times to church, under the auspices of the native
Wesleyan teacher; while Saxon and his host smoked, slept, drank kava,
and played cards. The village provided plenty of yam and taro, kumara,
cocoanut, and fish; and there was tea and sugar in the Chinese box, and
now and then the White Man killed a pig or a fowl. It was very pleasant
on the whole.
In a month’s time, however, Saxon girded up his loins to leave this
mountain Capua and descend to Suva once more. The _Sybil_ would be
ready, and his charter to convey ornamental Fiji woods to San Francisco
would not wait.
They said good-bye to their host, and walked a mile or two across the
river-flats below the town before either spoke. Then Vaiti put her hand
into her sash, and drew out something small and shining.
“See, father, what the White Man gave me, because I was like his
daughter,” she said.
Saxon took the object, and turned it over in his fingers. It was a small
seal, shaped like an eagle standing on a rock. The eagle was gold, the
rock amethyst.
“A pretty thing, but not worth more than two or three pounds,” he said.
Then he turned it over and looked at the device. There was a curious
crest on the face of the seal—a wolf with a crescent moon in his jaws;
underneath, a motto in a strange foreign character.
Saxon’s red complexion paled as he examined the crest. In other days and
scenes, among ice-bound rivers and grim mediæval fortress-castles, he
had seen that crest light up the crimson panes of old armorial
windows—had read the motto underneath—“What I have, I hold”—of nights
when he and the wildest young nobles of the Russian court were dining
together under the splendid roof of one of Moscow’s greatest banqueting
halls. For a moment he felt the keen cold air of the ice-bound streets
blow sharp on his cheek; heard the jingle of the sleigh-bells, drawing
up before the marble steps where the yellow lamplight streamed out
across the snow. The fancy faded, swift as a passing lantern picture
that flashes out for a moment and then sweeps away into darkness. He
saw the burning sky and the crackling palms again, felt the
furnace-heated wind, and knew that it was all over long ago, and that he
was ruined, exiled, and old. Yet there remained a thread of indefinite
recollection, a suggestion of something half-remembered, that was not
all unconnected with the present day. What was the story belonging to
that crest—the story that the whole world knew?
“Where did the fellow get the thing?” he asked his daughter.
Vaiti told him.
The White Man of Nalolo, it seemed, was one of the numerous South Sea
wanderers who believe in the existence of various undiscovered islands,
hidden here and there in the vast, untravelled wastes of sea that lie
off the track of ships. Thirty years before, there had been wondering
rumours of an island of this kind, touched at once by a ship that no one
could name, found to be uninhabited, and never revisited; indeed, no one
was sure where it was within a few hundred miles. Years went by, and
the White Man, who had always taken a special interest in the story,
found himself shipwrecked—the sole survivor of a boatful of castaways—on
the very island itself. But fortune was unkind, for the morning after
his arrival, when he was trying to sail round the island, a sudden storm
blew him out to sea again, and he had drifted for many days, and all but
perished, in spite of the fish and nuts he had obtained from the island,
before a mission schooner happened to see him and pick him up. He had
examined most of the island while ashore, and had seen no inhabitants or
traces of cultivation. Nevertheless he had always been convinced that
there was something mysterious about the place, for two reasons. One
was the presence of common house-flies, which he had never seen far away
from the haunts of human beings. The other was the discovery of an
amethyst seal, lying under a stone on the shore. It was dirty and
discoloured, but he did not think so small and heavy an object could
have been washed up on the shore from a wreck.
Where mystery is in the air, most men’s minds turn naturally to thoughts
of hidden treasure, and the White Man of Nalolo had ever since cherished
a hope that there was treasure on the island. For several years he had
fully intended to go and look—some day—but as he could only guess at the
latitude and longitude, and as he had little money to spare, he never
succeeded either in hunting the place up himself or in persuading any
one else to do so. Now he was old and half-crippled, and did not care
any more about anything; so he wanted Vaiti, who reminded him so much of
his dead daughter, to have the seal. It was a pretty thing, and perhaps
it would make her think sometimes of the poor old White Man of Nalolo.
Saxon listened attentively to the story, and heaved a sigh of
disappointment at the end.
“There’s nothing in it, my girl,” he said. “No proof of treasure there,
eh?”
“No; no treasure,” said Vaiti, looking at the ground as she walked.
“What then?” asked Saxon curiously. He saw she had something in
reserve.
Vaiti suddenly flamed out in eloquent Maori.
“What then, my father? Am I one who sees through men’s heads, that I
can tell what was in the mind of you as you looked at the jewel, and
turned yellow and green like a parrot, only to see it? What then? I do
not know. I walk in the dark, and the light is in your hand, not in
mine. As for you, you have made your brain dull with the brandy and the
kava, so that you cannot see at all. What then? Tell me yourself, for
I do not know. I know only that there is something to be told.”
“Don’t be rough on your poor old father,” said Saxon pathetically. “I’d
have knocked the stuffing out of any man who said half as much, but I
spoil you, by Gad, I do. I don’t know—I can’t think, somehow or other.
But there was a story about the Vasilieffs—the johnnies who had that
crest—people I used to stay with when I went to——”
He broke off, smashed a spider-lily bloom with his stick, and began
afresh.
“Junia Vasilieff—what was it she did? Big princes they were, and much
too close to the throne to be safe company.... Junia Vasili—I have it!
Yes—the end of the story was in the Sydney papers, time you were a
little kid. I remember. They were to have married her to the
Czarewitch, just to make things safe. Her claim to the throne was big
enough to have started a revolution any day, if it had been asserted....
Poor little Junia!—only sixteen when I knew—when the marriage was talked
of—and such golden hair as she had! She hated the whole thing; courts
and ceremony weren’t in her line. But she was a gentle little creature,
and I never thought she’d have had the spirit to do as she did.”
He turned the seal over in his fingers, as if reading the past from its
glittering surface.
“There was a young lieutenant of Hussars, a Pole—you don’t know what
that is, but the Russians don’t like them, I can tell you—a noble, but a
very small one; not fit to black Junia’s boots, according to their
notions. Well, he bolted with her. It was in the Sydney papers, time I
was in the Solomons; the paper came up to Guadalcanar.... She must have
been twenty then; just the year the marriage to the Czarewitch was to
have come off.... They bolted—cleared out—never seen again. All Russia
on the boil about it; no one knew but what they’d hatch up plots against
the throne, she having a better claim than any one else, if it hadn’t
been for the law against empresses. The secret police were after them
for years, but they were never traced, though most people knew Russia’d
give a pretty penny to know where they were——”
“O man with the head of a fruit-bat, do you not see?” interrupted Vaiti
at this juncture. “They hid on that island—they may be there still. It
is worth a hundred treasures!”
“The Pole was a great traveller, and had a sort of a little yacht,” said
Saxon thoughtfully. “It might be true, of course—if there is an island,
and if the Nalolo Johnnie had any idea of where it was, and if nobody
found them out and split years ago. Plenty of ’ifs.’”
“I think him all-right good enough,” averred Vaiti, returning to English
and prose. “By’n-by we finish F’lisco, then we go see, me and you.”
*CHAPTER IX*
*THE LOST ISLAND*
Some two or three months later, the schooner might have been seen, like
a white-winged butterfly lost at sea, beating up and down before a
solitary, low, green island lying far east of the lonely Paumotus.
Vaiti, sitting on the top of the deck-house, was examining the land
through a glass. The native crew were all on deck; also Harris and
Gray, the mate and bo’sun. Captain Saxon was not to be seen.
“The old man always do get squiffy at the wrong time, don’t he?”
commented Harris, rather gleefully.
Gray spat over the rail for reply.
“You’re ratty because you don’t know nothing, ain’t you?” he said.
“Do you?” asked the mate curiously. Harris had not much notion of the
dignity of his office, and dearly loved a gossip at all times.
“More nor you, havin’ eyes and ears that’s of use to me occasionally,”
replied the bo’sun dryly.
Harris considered.
“I’ll give you my grey shirt to tell,” he said persuasively. “There’s
sure to be something up.”
“’Ow much does we ever get out of it when there is?” asked Gray sourly.
“I could do with that shirt very well, though. There ain’t much to
tell, except that the old man he thought there was an island hereabouts
not marked on the chart that nobody knew about; and Vaiti she allowed
that was all —— rot, because, says she, this part’s been surveyed, and
though the Admiralty surveys isn’t the for-ever-’n-ever-Amen dead
certainties the little brassbound officers thinks them, still they don’t
leave whole islands out on the loose without a collar and a name round
their necks, so to say. So, says she, let me work out the length of
time they ran before the hurricane, says she, and the d’rection of the
wind, which the old boy remembered right enough, says she; and then look
it up on the chart, and I’ll be blowed, says she, if you don’t find
something for a guide like. So by-and-by she looks, and says she,
‘’Ere’s something; ’ere’s a reef marked P.D., and it is P.D.,’ says she,
’for you and I knows there’s nothin’ there,’ she says. ’But we’ll look
a bit more to the north’ard,’ she says, ’where it’s right off the’ track
of ships, and maybe we’ll find somethin’ and maybe we won’t,’ she says.
’But I think,’ she says, ’that somewheres not too far off from that P.D.
reef we’ll maybe get a sight of what we’re lookin’ for,’ she says,
’because sometimes reefs is put down for bigger things by mistake,’ she
says, ’especially if you ’aven’t been to see.’ Then she comes on deck,
and I makes myself scarce, for it ain’t healthy on this ship to listen
at no cabin skylights, not if she knows you’re there.”
“Well, whatever the game is, I don’t suppose it’ll line our little
insides any fatter, bo’sun. We don’t count on this ship anything like
as we ought to when there’s shares goin’. I wonder that I stick to her,
I do! Old man as drunk as a lord half the time—me doin’ his work as well
as my own—a blessed she-cat running the blooming show——”
“Ready about!” sang Vaiti from the deck-house, and the mate and bo’sun
sprang across the deck. There was something about the orders of the
“she-cat” that enforced a smartness on the _Sybil_ rare on an island
schooner, even when heavy-fisted Saxon was not about.
Half an hour later, Vaiti had rowed herself ashore, curtly declining
Harris’s polite offers of assistance, and had landed on the beach. As
she did not know who she might be going to see, she had provided for all
emergencies. Her revolver was in her pocket, and she wore a flowing
sacque of lace-trimmed white silk that made her feel she was fit to meet
any Russian princess, if such were indeed on the island. It was a
gratifying thought that the said princess, if she had been a celebrated
beauty, must now be well into the forties, and consequently beneath all
contempt as a rival belle.
Her father’s absence did not trouble her. He had a nasty trick of
starting a drinking bout just when he was most needed—in fact, it was
the one point in Saxon’s character on which you could absolutely rely.
Vaiti, therefore, had grown used to doing without him, and rather liked
to have a perfectly free hand.
She had fully grasped the bearings of the case. There was possibly a
very great chief’s daughter from Europe, with a rather insignificant
chief who had stolen her away, living there in hiding. The people of
her country would pay a great deal to know where she was and bring her
back. Or, if there seemed any lack of safety about this proceeding
(Vaiti had long ago learned that her father was not fond of putting
himself within the reach of principalities and powers of any kind), the
couple themselves must be made to pay for silence. It was all very
simple.
The fact that the island was supposed to be uninhabited did not trouble
her. She meant to investigate that matter after her own fashion.
She walked all round it first of all. It took her about an hour. There
was a nice, white, sandy beach, with straggling bush behind it. There
were a good many cocoanuts—all young ones—also a large number of broken
trunks, apparently snapped off by a hurricane.
This set Vaiti thinking. It seemed to her that the damage was rather
too universal and even to be natural. Yet why should any sane human cut
short all his full-grown cocoanuts?
She crossed the island twice at the ends, noting everything with a keen
and wary eye. Fairly good soil; nothing growing on it, however, but low
scrub and a few berries. In the centre of the island the scrub
thickened into dense bush, impenetrable without an axe. No sign of life
anywhere.
Vaiti stamped her foot. Was it possible she had been mistaken? Was
this indeed just what it seemed, a commonplace, infertile, useless,
little mid-ocean islet, let alone because it was worth nothing, and
incorrectly described as a reef because no one had ever troubled to
examine it? Things began to look like it.
And yet ... she thought—she did not quite know what, but she was very
sure that she did not want to leave the island just yet. She would at
least climb a tall tree and take a general survey before she gave it up.
Nothing simpler—but there was no such tree.
All the palms were young, or broken off short; all the pandanus trees
were in the same condition. There was no rock, no commanding height.
She could not get a view.
Vaiti’s cheek flushed crimson under its olive brown. The spark was
struck at last!
Somebody had cut short those trees—to prevent anyone from climbing up
and overlooking the island. The encircling reef would not allow any ship
to approach close enough for a look-out at the mast-head to see over the
island, except in a very general way. There was something to conceal.
What, and where?
Only one answer was possible. The mass of apparently virgin bush in the
centre of the island—several acres in extent—was the only spot where a
cat could have concealed itself. The scent was growing hot.
With sparkling eyes Vaiti began to circle the wood, watching narrowly
for the smallest trace of a pathway. The branches were interlocked and
knitted together as only tropical bush can be. Many were set with huge
thorns; all were laced and twined with bush ropes and lianas of every
kind.
Nothing larger than a rat could have won its way through such a rampart.
Vaiti walked swiftly on and on, striking the bushes now and then with a
stick, to make sure that there were no loose masses of stuff masking a
concealed entrance, and keeping a sharp eye for traces of footsteps....
It was with a heart-sinking shock that she found herself once more
beside the low white coral rock that had marked the commencement of her
journey, and realised that she had been all round, and that there was
most certainly no opening.
The sun was slipping down the heavens now. She had been exploring half
the day, but she was not beaten yet. The unexpected difficulties she
had met with only sharpened her determination to enter the thicket at
all costs. Harris, suffering acutely, as usual, from suppressed
curiosity, was nearly driven mad by the sight of the “she-cat” suddenly
reappearing on the ship, picking up an axe, and departing as silently as
she had come, with a countenance that did not invite questions. She had
taken off her smart silk dress, and was in her chemise and petticoat,
arms and feet bare, and waist girdled with a sash into which she had
stuck her revolver. She dropped the axe into her boat, rowed silently
away, and disappeared on the other side of the island.
The sun was still some distance above the sea when she let the axe slip
from her torn, scratched, and aching hands, and stood at last, tired but
triumphant, in the heart of the mysterious island’s mystery. She had
won her way, with the woodcraft that was in her island blood, through
the dense belt of bush, hacking and slashing here, stooping and writhing
there, until the light began to show through the tangled stems in front,
and a few swift strokes cleared the way into the open. Yes! there was a
space in the centre, after all—a clearing over an acre in extent. There
was grass here, and a few overgrown bananas, and a tangle of yam and
pumpkin vines. Passion fruit ran in a tangle of wild luxuriance over
the inner wall of the thicket; pine-apples rotted on the ground and
fig-trees spread their wide leaves unchecked and unpruned.... In the
middle of all was a house—a one-storied little bungalow, iron-roofed,
with a tank to catch the rain. There was a long, low store behind it,
and something that looked like a pig-sty, and something that might have
been a fowl-run. But....
But everything was rotten, ruined, overgrown, hardly to be distinguished
in the thick tangle of vegetation that had overflowed the little retreat
like a great green wave let loose upon a low-lying shore. Vaiti knew
what she was going to see before she had reached the door of the
bungalow—a rotten floor, with green vines shooting up between the
crevices, and bush rats scuffling and squeaking under the boards—a
rusted iron roof, where pink convolvulus bloom peeped in under the
rafters, and lizards sunned themselves in the airy blue furniture
unglued and decayed fast sinking into one common mass of ruin—door
aslant, and thresholds sunken. Everywhere silence, emptiness, decay.
There needed no explanation of the vanished pathway.
The Maori blood owns strange instincts. Again Vaiti knew what she was
going to see before it came—knew, and walked straight over to a certain
corner of the enclosure, as if she had been there before.... It was
under a scarlet-flowered hibiscus tree that she found it—a long, low
grave, fenced round with a wall of coral slabs, so that the overflowing
bush had surged less thickly here, and one could see that there was
something lying on the mound, only half hidden by creeping
vines—something long and white and slender.
Vaiti dragged away the creepers.... Yes, it was a skeleton, bare and
fleshless, with bony fingers and black, empty eyes. There was a
splintered gap in one temple, and close to one of the hands lay a mass
of rusted steel that had once been a revolver.