inscription had been carved with infinite care in three different
languages. Two of them Vaiti did not understand, but the third was
English. She pulled the growing ferns off the stone, and, wiping its
surface, read:
“Here is buried Junia, of the race of Vasilieff.
Died 20th June, 1889.
“Here is buried Anton, son of Junia Vasilieff
and her husband, Alexis, Baron Varsovi,
Born 20th June, died 21st June,
1889.
“Here rests Alexis, Baron Varsovi. Into the
unknown thou didst follow me: into the
Great Unknown I follow thee.
Reunited 21st June, 1889.”
Vaiti, descendant of cannibal chiefs and lawless soldiers, more than
half a pirate herself, and hard of nature as a beautiful flinty coral
flower, was yet at bottom a woman after all. What passed in the breast
of this dark, wild daughter of the southern seas, as she stood above the
strange, sad record of loves and lives unknown, cannot be told. But in
a little while, with some dim recollection of the long-ago, gentle,
pious days of her convent school, she knelt down beside tie lonely
grave, and, crossing herself, said something as near to a prayer as she
could remember. Then, still kneeling, she cut and tied two sticks into
the form of a cross, and set them upright in the earth of the mound.
The sun was slanting low and red across the grave as she turned away.
* * * * *
“What’d she give you?” asked Harris eagerly, as the bo’sun stepped
across the gang-plank on to the quay. The lights of San Francisco were
blazing all about, the cars roared past, there was a piano-organ
jangling joyously at the corner.
“Fifty dollars for the two of us,” said Gray, his acid face sweetened
with unwonted smiles.
“Crikey! Honest men is riz in the market at last! What in h—— can she
have got herself?”
“Might as well arst me what she got it for. Don’t know, and don’t care,
so long as we’ve got the makings of a spree like this out of it. I see
her comin’ out of the Rooshian Consulate this mornin’ lookin’ like as if
some one ’ad been standin’ treat to her.”
“You know she don’t touch anything.”
“I’m speaking figuryative; she looked that sort of way. And coming’
back to the ship, she says to the old man, she says: ’Why, dad, better
dead than alive!’ she says. And he laughs.”
“Don’t sound ’olesome,” observed Harris thoughtfully.
“Now, don’t you get to thinkin’, for you ain’t built that way, and
you’ll do yourself a mischief,” said the boatswain warningly. “And
let’s be thankful to ’eaven for all its mercies, say I, that we’ve got
such a nice, warm, dry, convenient night for to go and get drunk in.”
*CHAPTER X*
*WHAT CAME OF THE PARIS DRESS*
The effects of Saxon’s illness in Fiji were a long time in wearing off.
It was many weeks after Vaiti had come back to the _Sybil_, flushed with
importance and with the lionising she had received on the
cable-ship—many weeks after the voyage to the unknown island and the
visit to San Francisco—that he took ill again; not very seriously, but
badly enough to prevent his going to sea. Of course, the time was an
awkward one. They were off Niué, and there was copra waiting to be
taken to Raratonga for the steamer—copra which would certainly be
secured by some other schooner if Saxon did not take it at the promised
date. Neither Harris nor Gray knew enough to be trusted with the ship,
and he did not much care about letting Vaiti sail her—not because he
doubted his fiery daughter’s ability or desire, but because, rash as he
was himself at times, he knew her to be still worse. He had seen her
run the _Sybil_ in the trough of the very last swell alongside a barrier
reef for miles, sailing all the time so close to the wind that the
shifting of a single point would have meant destruction. He had heard
her raving about the deck in half a gale as they swept up to the
iron-bound coast of Niué, abusing Harris in the strongest of beach talk
because he had not another main topsail in the locker to replace the two
that had just carried away one after the other and battered themselves
to ribbons—the principal ground of her complaint being apparently the
fact that she considered herself labouring under a social disadvantage
of the most mortifying kind because the schooner was obliged to come up
to Niué for the very first time without all sails set. He had seen her
perform tricks of steering, getting in and out of Avarua in Raratonga (a
perfect death-trap of a port at times, as all old islanders know), that
“fairly gave him the jim-jams,” to use his own phraseology.... No, on
the whole he thought he would rather miss that fright than lie idle in
the trader’s house at Avatele, and think daily and nightly of the cranky
though light-heeled _Sybil_ out upon the high seas in Vaiti’s sole
command.
This being so, it was natural and inevitable that Vaiti should set her
heart upon going and carry out her desire. She did not make any trouble
about the matter; neither was she at all unkind to the invalided owner
of the ship. On the contrary, she paid the trader’s wife more than that
kindly woman wanted, to take good care of her father while she should be
away, bought him everything decent to eat that the island contained
(which was saying very little), indulgently presented him with a
demijohn of whisky, and then informed him, in the coolest manner in the
world, that the copra was all loaded, the stores and water on board, and
the schooner ready to sail next day, under her command.
Saxon swore at large first of all, then stormed at Vaiti, and finally
began a pathetic lament over his own helpless position and the
heartlessness of his only child. Vaiti, sitting cross-legged on the end
of his bed, smoked a big cigar through it all and looked out of the
window. When he stopped at last, fairly run out, she laughed and handed
him a weed out of her own case and a match.
“You take’m that, no speak nonsense. You know me, what?” she demanded;
and Saxon, who was not in reality nearly as ill as he thought himself,
laughed, and allowed himself to be won over.
Having gained her point, Vaiti went off again to the schooner through
the wonderful pink dusk that wraps a South Sea island at sunset, and
left the captain to hold commune with his demijohn and sleep.
As she walked down to the shore, she heard a sound of laughing and the
rustle of many dresses among the palms close at hand. Now in Niué it is
an important matter that brings people out of evenings, because,
although the island has been Christianised long ago, like all the rest
of the Eastern Pacific, it still suffers from a perfect plague of
heathen ghosts that no amount of Sunday church-goings and week-day pious
exercises seem to affect in the least. So the natives are afraid to go
out of their houses after sunset, lest uncanny things should rise out of
the forest to spring upon the wayfarer’s back unseen and choke him.
This Vaiti knew, so she suspected something of interest in the little
crowd, and turned aside to look. If she had not, there had been no
story to tell about Niué and the happenings there.
She saw a curious scene, so nearly hidden by the growing dark that no
one but an island resident could have taken in its full significance. A
group of islanders, men and women stood round the door of a big white
concrete house with a pandanus roof—the finest native house in the
village. They seemed to be waiting for something—something both amusing
and exciting, to judge by the explosions of giggles that continually
burst through the dusk.
Presently the door of the house swung open with considerable violence,
and a large mat was thrown out by an invisible hand. Then the door was
slammed, and the giggles redoubled. Within the house now sounded
something very like a struggle. There were loud sobs and cries of a
shrill, theatrical kind, scuffling, banging, and a dragging sound.
“Tck, tck, tck,” went the tongues of the outsiders delightedly. The
interesting moment was at hand.
It came without warning. The door burst open with still more violence
than before, and out upon the mat was shot by some invisible agency a
very solid young woman in a white loose gown, weeping somewhat
mechanically, but with much effect. She fairly rolled over with the
force of the shock that had ejected her, and before she could pick
herself up the door was closed once more with a slam that shook the
whole house. Then the waiting group rushed upon her with cries of joy,
and bore her away in their midst, singing as they went.
“A wedding,” said Vaiti to herself. “It must be Mata’s; that is their
house. And it will be a big wedding, too. I did not know that it was
to be so soon.”
She fell into a fit of musing as she wandered shorewards among the
leaning palms.... The palms of Niué sweep downwards to the gleaming sea
like a band of lovely maidens hurrying with sweet impatience to meet
their lovers on the coral shore. Of a moonlight night, when all things
are possible, and nothing seems too wonderful in an air that itself is
wonder, it needs but little for those white, slender stems, and tossing,
plumy crowns, poised high above the shadowy beach they curve to meet, to
change themselves into South Sea dryads of a new and lovely race, and
rush down, at long last, upon the calling sea, where Tangaroa, the king
of ocean, has his dwelling. Under the palms of Niué, when the blazing
white moon has risen so high in the heavens that a perfect star of jetty
shadow is rayed about the base of every tree—when the wandering sea
winds are held close by the breathless spell of midnight and nothing
wakes on all the lonely shore but the long, long song of the droning
coral reef—under the wonderful palms of Niué, loveliest and strangest of
all the islands in that dreamy world of “perilous seas and fairylands
forlorn”—nothing is too strange to be true, no fancy too wild to hold,
when the moon is up and the palms are alone with the sea....
Was Vaiti thinking of visionary palm-maidens and sea-foam kings as she
went down the winding path to the bay, through a wondrous afterglow of
russet-rose laced through with opal moonrays? Perhaps—or of kindred
fancies. I who knew her cannot say, for no one ever knew her
altogether. It is more likely, however, that less poetic thoughts were
in her mind just then. The scene she had witnessed in the palm-grove
was the usual ceremony that takes place in Niué the night before a
wedding, when the friends of the bridegroom come to the house of the
bride’s parents, and the latter go through the symbolical form of
casting her out and closing the door, so that the bridegroom’s people
may take her over and guard her until the wedding morning. Vaiti liked
a wedding above all things (next to a funeral), and the hint of great
doings on the morrow, offered by the ceremony she had witnessed, decided
her to stay another day. Why not? The copra was loaded, and no rivals
were in sight. Besides, she had a motive for staying—the strongest
possible motive. She wanted to wear her Paris dress.
Yes, it had been acquired at last. That day in San Francisco, when she
had come out of the Russian Consulate with more money in her pocket than
any one of her adventures had ever brought before, she had been able to
restrain herself no longer. And thereafter, in Madame Retaillaud’s
elegant and exclusive Parisian emporium, replete with the choicest
imported wares (I quote the lady’s own description of her goods), there
took place a scene that is remembered to the present day by those of
Madame Retaillaud’s young ladies who survived the earthquake year.
Vaiti, dressed in one of her waistless muslin gowns, with a broad-leafed
island hat on her head, a long-bladed sheath-knife stuck quite visibly
in the breast of her dress, and her wavy hair falling loose over her
shoulders, stalked into the shop among the smartly-gowned San Francisco
ladies who were turning over Madame’s stock, and demanded to see—
“One dress belong Palisi, pretty dam quick.”
They are used to all sorts of strange nationalities along the
water-front in San Francisco, but not, as a rule, in the milliners’ and
modistes’ well-bred establishments. Vaiti concentrated the whole
attention of the place upon herself at a single stroke. She did not
care about that in the least, but Madame’s hesitation stung her, and she
pulled out a thick wad of notes.
“Look ’em alive, my hearties!” she ordered impatiently in her
quarter-deck voice. “Lay aft here with that goods. I want um Palisi
model, all sort.”
The customers were nearly in hysterics by this time, and the assistants
were all a-giggle. Madame herself, however, grasped the situation in a
twinkling, and frowned down the girls. Whoever and whatever this pirate
queen might be, she certainly had money, and Madame would have welcomed
Lucrezia Borgia or the Witch of Endor, under like circumstances, as
pleasantly as an Anglo-American duchess.
“Perhaps Madame will come into a private room. Madame would like, no
doubt, to look at our most exclusive goods, and we do not bring them
into the outer shop,” she said in her most honeyed voice. And the door
of the lift closed upon the pair.
What Vaiti underwent in that fitting-room in the course of getting into
Madame’s latest model promenade gown, built for a typical French figure,
will never be told. Early in the proceedings a message came down to the
showroom for the strongest pair of Paris corsets in stock, and a little
later Madame herself, very red and overheated, ran down to select a
fresh silk lace.
“Ah, but she has courage, that one!” she declared, as the lift received
her again. “Never, no, never!—jamais de la vie! ...”
The lift went up.
It was almost an hour before a wonderful vision sailed slowly through
the show-room and out into the street—slowly, not alone for pride, but
also because it could scarcely move or draw its breath. The vision, as
described in the receipted bill that went with it, was made up of the
following elements:
“One promenade costume (model, Doucet & Cie.) composed of chiffon
velours, couleur poussière de roses, inlet with motifs of point
d’Alençon, hand-embroidered with lilies of the valley in French paste.
Mounted on chiffon bleu-de-ciel, with full volants edged lace and
chiffon ruching. Made over foundation of glacé silk, couleur citron
d’or.
“One set silk underclothing to match.
“One Corset Ecraseur, patent laces.
“One pair bronze promenade shoes, Louis XV. heels, extra height.
Stockings to match.
“One parasol composed peau-de-soie rose fanée and chiffon bleu-de-ciel.”
To which may be added—one young woman, suffering horrible agony and
quite intoxicated with happiness.
* * * * *
It was this marvellous possession that Vaiti yearned to show off at the
wedding. She had not had a chance to wear it since the day when she had
walked through the streets of San Francisco, with an admiring and amused
crowd at her rear, and found it quite impossible to get on board the
schooner, when she reached the water front, until she took off her
voluminous skirt and handed it up over the side—afterwards climbing the
rope-ladder in a storm of applause and a pink silk petticoat. Now the
occasion for getting full value out of the wonderful thing had come at
last, and she could not—no, she really could not—miss it.
Rather late next morning, when the bride and bridegroom—the former in a
gorgeous gown of yellow curtain muslin, the latter in a thick tweed suit
from Auckland that caused him to stream at every pore—were sitting on
opposite sides of the little white church, enthroned on chairs all by
themselves, and listening decorously to a long preliminary address from
the native pastor—Vaiti swept in, and at once brought the ceremony to a
momentary pause. The pastor stopped in his address and gaped, the women
exclaimed audibly, the bridegroom fixed his eyes on the apparition and
sighed in a manner that the bride evidently resented as a personal
slight, for she grew still darker in the face than nature had made her,
and stared penknives and scissors at Vaiti. Wild titters of delight
swept indecorously through the church. The entry was indeed a
success—the native pastor found it necessary to address his flock
directly, and to tell them that they would undoubtedly all go to hell if
they did not behave better in church, before order was restored.
It is not necessary to relate at length how Mata and Ivi were made one,
how they walked out of the church nonchalantly by different doors, and
were subsequently so deeply interested in the killing of the pigs for
the marriage feast, and the preparing of the various cooking-pots, that
they did not meet again all afternoon. It was a commonplace wedding
enough, and this history is not interested in it, other than as it
concerned the affairs of Vaiti. These, indeed, were fairly notable.
For with Vaiti pride very literally brought about a fall that day.
She had had a terrible time getting into her dress, and the whole ship’s
company had shared in the trouble. First, the native A.B.’s had to fetch
her a big looking-glass from the nearest trader’s, and secure it to the
bulkhead of her cabin. Then the cook had to deliver up all the hot
water in the galley—at seven bells, with dinner just coming on!—and the
boatswain must needs broach the cargo for some special scented soap.
Matters were only beginning, however. When the dress was disinterred
from its many wrappings and finally put on it became immediately
apparent that the bodice could not possibly be made to meet. Perhaps
the coming of the bread-fruit season had caused the young lady’s waist
to expand—perhaps the practised art of Madame Retaillaud had exceeded
anything that a mere amateur could compass in the way of lacing. At any
rate, it was not till Vaiti had passed her corset laces out through the
port and ordered two of the strongest sailors to tail on to them—not
till Harris, agonising with laughter, had directed this novel evolution
from the poop for at least five delirious minutes, during which Vaiti
several times thought she was dying, but remained none the less
determined to die rather than give in, that the deed was accomplished at
last, and the “Kapitani” of _Sybil_ was enabled to look at herself in
the glass and know heavenly certainty that she was the best dressed
woman in the Pacific at that instant, whoever saw or did not see.
The natural result of all this was that in the very hour of her triumph
she fainted dead away in the church, for the first time in her life, and
had to be carried out.
The ceremony was just over by now, and the bride, still burning with
jealousy of the woman who had dared to eclipse her on her wedding day,
was among the first of those who crowded round like bees going after
honey, to stare at the beautiful creature lying senseless on the
sunburnt grass. The bridegroom had sped away hot-foot in the direction
of the village, whence certain enticing yells indicated that the
pig-slaughter was now going on; but Mata was not a bit appeased by his
indifference to the visitor. That dress—and oh, how wonderful it
was!—still rankled in her soul.
Mata was a teacher’s daughter, and she knew something of white people’s
lore. A brilliant thought darted into her mind as she pressed and
struggled in the crowd about the deathly form on the grass....
“Ai, ai! she is surely dead!” wailed the people. “Ai! the-great
chieftainess will rise no more!”
“Daughters of a turtle!” said Mata contemptuously. “I will show you if
she is dead. It is nothing at all but that she is vain, and wanted to
make herself a middle like the ’papalangi’ women, who all look like
stinging hornets. Give me a knife, someone.”
A knife was given, and Mata, with horrid joy, half lifted Vaiti and
slipped the keen point into the back of the dress.
Rip went the silk with a hideous splitting noise, and the delicate
underwear swelled out through the opening like a bush lily bursting its
sheath. Mata felt for the stay-lace, and cut that too. The tension on
the bodice increased frightfully—the seams gaped and strained....
“She will die, I think, if I do not cut it off,” said Mata hastily,
feeling Vaiti reviving under her hand, and anxious to finish her work.
Two more cuts of the knife did it. The Paris dress was, speaking
sartorially, no more; the owner, lying on the ground, was opening her
eyes to the outrage that had been done; and Mata, shrieking with malign
laughter, was fleeing wildly through the palms in the direction of the
pig-killing, peace in her heart again.
Peace was very far indeed from Vaiti’s heart when she revived and found
out what had been done. The crowd drew away from her in fear when they
saw her flashing eyes and set, furious mouth, though she said never a
word. Confronted by that Medusa-head, they were almost too terrified to
find words; but one or two stammered out a hasty explanation that freed
the present company from blame by inculpating Mata.
Vaiti did not doubt it—she had seen the bride’s face during the
ceremony. Still silent, but flashing looks of sheet-lightning all about
her, she drew together her garments as best she could, and walked off in
the direction of the ship. As she did so, a little ugly man with red
hair slipped out from behind the trees, and looked narrowly at her
retreating figure.
“It is the white man from the bush!” cried the girls. “White man of
ours, why did you not come down for the wedding?”
“Because I didn’t, my little dears,” replied the newcomer in English,
still looking after Vaiti. He stood well in the shade, and did not make
himself unnecessarily conspicuous.
“That’s a fine girl, that Mata,” he added by and by. “A smart girl. I
should like to know Mata.”
Vaiti put off her going for yet another day. She had business to attend
to.
It was very simple business, and it was characterised by the directness
that attended all the proceedings of Saxon’s daughter. She merely went
up to the bride’s new home, that was so handsomely stocked with trade
goods and imported furniture, while the wedding party were making merry
in the village after dark, and set fire to it with a torch in about a
dozen places. It was very dry weather, and there was a strong wind.
There was scarce a stick of the cottage left when she marched into the
village with a blazing torch in her hand, and calmly told the assembled
revellers what she had done. Then she left them, seething in a tumult
of excitement that almost drowned the hysteric screams of Mata, and went
to bed and to sleep with a quiet mind, ready for an early start next
morning.
The men came on board late and very drunk, but they did come. They were
afraid of Vaiti, and so was Harris, who would very well have liked to
extend his revels in the village for another twelve hours, but did not
dare to do so. He thought, as he stumbled into his bunk, that the
sounds proceeding from the forecastle were a good deal odder than
usual—he could almost have sworn that there was one person, if not
several, crying in there. But he had good reason for mistrusting the
evidence of his senses just then, so he flung himself down and went to
sleep.
*CHAPTER XI*
*A DEAD MAN’S REVENGE*
When one is well on the right side of five-and-twenty, with a good ship
underfoot, a fair breeze setting steadily from the right quarter, and a
pleasant goal ahead, it is hard to be unhappy. Vaiti’s sense of
bereavement at the loss of her cherished dress faded considerably before
the _Sybil_ had fairly cleared the land, and was gone altogether by the
next day. She had done what she felt to be the right thing by Mata; the
score was even. Vaiti did not like loose ends of any kind, and she had
not left any behind her. She smiled as she thought of it, and paused in
her official-looking walk across and across the poop, to revile a native
A.B. for leaving the end of a halyard trailing on deck.
“You d—— lazy nigger,” she said. “What sort ship you thinking you stop?
You thinking one mud scow” (_Mud cow_ was her pronunciation), “one
pig-boat, one canoe belong dam man-eating Solomon boy? I teaching you
some other thing pretty quick. Suppose you no flemish-coil that
halyard, keep him coil all-a-time, I let ’em daylight inside that black
hide belong you, knock ’em two ugly eye into one.”