curiously sombre in the orange light. “I speak those men in Maori. I
tell them some thing—thing not belong ’papalangi.’ You no understan’.
Wait.”
Then, with a look on her face that the white men had never seen there
before, and were never to see again, she stepped swiftly down the
ladder, crossed the main-deck, and stood in the midst of the prostrate
crew.
As though struck themselves by a spell, Harris and Gray remained
motionless on the poop, only swaying with the unconscious movement of
the sailor to the roll of his ship, while they watched with fascinated
eyes the scene upon the lower deck. The crew at first lay still as
logs, while Vaiti stood and looked at them—only looked. Presently they
began to open their eyes and roll over, and the weeping, which had
apparently ceased, began again.
Then Vaiti, suddenly flinging her arms high above her head, with her
light muslin dress fluttering in the wind and all her magnificent hair
falling to her knees, burst into such a flood of speech as made the two
hard-bitten Englishmen on the poop open eyes of stolid amaze. There is
no language in the world so full of eloquent possibilities as the Maori
tongue—even in the somewhat debased and altered type that is current
among the islands. And, hidden away somewhere in the strange nature of
this strange thing in woman’s shape, there was more than a touch of the
true witch wildness and fire.
“Lord!” said Harris, in a tone of awe. “She’s the devil himself!”
She looked it, as she stood there in that livid light, her arms
stretched high to heaven, her voice—was there ever a voice so full of
passion, prophecy, command?—ringing out, now high, now low, now in tones
vibrating with some subtle suggestion of horror that caused even the
uncomprehending whites upon the poop to feel a cold shudder about the
region of the spine. Upon the crew the effect was marvellous, yet, from
Gray’s and Harris’s point of view, unsatisfactory as well. The limp
figures sat up, it was true, wept afresh, and even rose to their feet
before long; but it was only to rush wildly up and down the heaving
deck, driven, it seemed, by the sting of an agony greater than any they
had suffered yet. Above the loose sails thundered and the wind wailed
wickedly.
Gray, at a motion from the mate, went to the idle wheel and grasped the
spokes. The _Sybil_ would want watching soon.
“Strike me pink if this isn’t the craziest ship’s company outside a
lunertic asylum from Yokohama to the ’Orn,” muttered the bo’sun to
himself. “Now, what the ’ell is _that_? Ho, Jemmy Gray, why don’t you
look for a berth as a bally stoker in a bally Red Sea liner, or a
supercargo on a Chinese pirate junk, and ’ave a quiet life at your age?
Here, Mr. ’Arris, you going to let ’er shoot ’erself before your heyes?”
Vaiti had plucked out her revolver again, but instead of threatening the
crew with it, she was holding it close to her own curly head, all the
time pouring forth a river of eloquent Maori, strongly charged with
adjurations and threats. It needed no translation to understand so
much, not to see the abject if inexplicable terror of the crew, who
cowered and howled in an extremity of distress every time she raised the
pistol to her head.
“Vaiti, Vaiti! What’re you doing, Cap?” yelled Harris. “You’ll shoot
yourself! Are you crazy? What are you givin’ ’em, for Cord’s sake?”
Vaiti turned round, and cried angrily at him:
“Hold ’m tongue! You no leave me myself, very quick I shooting you. I
tell those men I great chief, no one can take ’um curse away, but can
come ’long all those men myself, suppose they die—go Raratonga when ’um
night come, an’ all those man soul he running quick, quick, all a-cold,
’long those mountains top Raratonga where ’um dead man he go to
jumping-off place. A—a—h! I put one bullet in head belong me, very
quick, suppose those men they got dam cheek go an’ die. I coming, very
dead, very angry, I go ’long that soul, all a-time; no let ’um rest, no
let ’um see woman fliend, die long time ago—I take big club belong
chief, make ’um run, cry, all-a-time—no sleep, no eat, no lie down!
A—a—h! no go heaven, no go hell, all-a-time, for ever’n ever, Amen. I
pay him out for going die!”
She stormed through the brief speech like a hot-season squall, and
instantly returned to the natives. Harris, struck dumb by the entirely
unprecedented nature of the situation, could find no vent for his
feelings save in plucking off his cap and casting it under his feet. She
was threatening the crew that she would kill herself if they died;
follow them to the land of shades (the entrance to which was popularly
supposed to be over the edge of a certain desolate, far-up mountain
precipice in Raratonga), and make it so hot for them in the “otherwhere”
that they would certainly wish they hadn’t dared to die.... What on
earth was a man to do in a ship commanded by a thing—he could not call
it a woman—that talked like that—with night coming on, too, and
something very like a bad blow unpleasantly near?
Vaiti did not leave him long in doubt as to what he was to do. The
crew, driven previously to the verge of frenzy by her gruesome threats,
became entirely frantic during the eloquent peroration that followed her
address to Harris. They ran up and down the deck; they shrieked, they
prayed, they besought. Vaiti, with the eye of a hunter watching a
quarry almost driven to bay, kept a keen look-out through all her fiery
eloquence, and just at the moment when the men seamed driven to the
highest point of human endurance, turned to the mate with a triumphant
cry.
“Now, Alliti! he all right by’n-by: I no shoot myself, I think. You and
bo’sun you get rope’s end very quick, give ’um order shorten sail, make
’um go. I think he go; he too much plenty frighten die ’long me.”
“Too much plenty frighten” the men were indeed. The threat that Vaiti
had made—for the carrying out of which they doubted neither her ability
nor her will, any more than she did herself—was so much more potent than
the curse of the witch-doctor that the terror of the one paled before
the terror of the other. For the moment, they felt that they might not
be able to live, but they certainly must not die; and it was right in
the middle of this illogical state of mind that the mate and bo’sun came
in with their rope’s ends and settled the matter once for all. An hour
ago, red-hot irons only would have moved them to hurry up with their
dying. Now a couple of ropes’ ends, laid about among the six with a
will, drove them howling up the masts and out along the yards, where,
with Gray and Harris still after them, and Vaiti threatening from below,
they succeeded in getting the sails stowed and the vessel snug in very
little over the ordinary time. The blow that followed kept all hands
busy the night through, but it came from the right quarter, and the
_Sybil_ fled before it at such a speed that morning found her only half
a day’s run from Raratonga, with the wind quieting down to a pleasant
breeze, the schooner uninjured, and the crew as cheerful and busy as
they had ever been in their lives.
Vaiti caught the steamer, sold her copra, and saw it on the wharf ready
to load. Then she went back to the schooner, and waited till the last
of the men returned.
“Suppose you like go die now, plenty time for you,” she said. “Plenty
good sailor-man stop Raratonga. You go ’long die; I no want.”
The men looked at her sheepishly, and Shalli, the spokesman, scratched
his head and surveyed a heap of tributary pigs, fowls, and fruit that
lay on the deck of the schooner before he answered. The crew had many
relations about Raratonga, and the relations had done them very well
this trip.
“Many thanks, great chieftainess,” he said at last, in his own tongue.
“We are much obliged to you, but we have changed our minds, and now we
do not ever mean to die at all.”
*CHAPTER XIII*
*THE GAME PLAYED OUT*
Every one in the trader’s had gone to bed, and Vaiti, barefoot and
dressed in dark cotton, had just got out of her room by the window, and
was gliding noiselessly down the back verandah.
The moon was down, and the thick darkness under the trees of the village
covered her safely as she slipped along at the backs of the little
white, palm-thatched houses. It was not at all likely that any native
would be about in the middle of the night, but one could never reckon on
white men, of whom there were several in the little town—and Vaiti,
being engaged as usual on “urgent private affairs,” did not want any
inquiries.
She got away from the village without remark, and then struck into one
of the narrow grass roads penetrating the bush. Everything was asleep.
The little green parrots were hidden deep under heavy leaves, each with
its noisy head tucked under its wing. The lizards that had been darting
and flickering all day long about the path now slept, chill as little
stones, among the roots of the trees. There was a cold, dewy smell in
the air, and the palm-tree plumes were motionless as drawings in Indian
ink against the violet gloom of the sky. Very far away the immemorial
music of the reef beat softly in the dark.
Vaiti girded her dress high, and walked swiftly. She had a long way to
go, and she wanted to be back in her neat, white, mosquito-curtained
bed, sleeping the sleep of the innocent, before the trader’s wife should
come in with her morning cup of tea. Vaiti was a past mistress in the
art of avoiding useless comment.
Three miles, five miles, seven miles.... It was right at the other side
of the island, past mile after mile of tangled bush, acre after acre of
sparsely planted, rocky, open ground, grove after grove of tall, plumy
cocoanut, heavy with fruit. Oranges grew by the track here and there;
broad green banners of banana leaf blotted out whole sections of the
stars, and slim, quaint mummy-apple trees stood up among the prickly
coral rocks. Vaiti had no time to stop, but she snatched a little
refreshment on her way from time to time, as the wayfarer may always do
in the kindly South Sea climate.
She struck at last into a narrow track leading off the main pathway—so
small that in the dusk of the starry night it must have been invisible
save for a mass of pointed rocks that stood up just beside the overgrown
entrance and made a landmark. Afterwards came a mile or two of tangled
walking among clumps of pink and scarlet and yellow hibiscus, all
reduced to a common blackness by the levelling night, and through thorny
lemon-trees, and over rocky knolls where there was scarce footing for a
goat.... A lonely God-forsaken region this; not a village, nor even the
gleam of a solitary white-washed hut. What had the “Kapitani” of the
_Sybil_ to do with such a place?
Vaiti knew very well indeed what she had to do. She had gathered in the
town that the mysterious white man who “lived native” in the bush had
his dwelling about this lonely neighbourhood. It was very well known to
her, and she meant to find the man’s dwelling-place, and see him with
her own eyes before....
Well, that was still to come.
It took her rather longer than she had expected, but she did at last
succeed in finding the tumble-down little palm-leaf shanty, built
against the side of a rock, that she had heard described. It was a
miserable place, so far as her cat-like eyes could judge it in the
purple gloom, not more than three or four yards long, and looking like
nothing so much as a heap of dead leaves and rubbish piled against the
rock. She trod noiselessly round its three sides, and listened here and
there. The door, as she ascertained by feeling, was a heavy mat hung up
from the eaves, and it was tightly fastened across the opening. There
was a faint sound of slow, heavy breathing from within. The man was
evidently asleep.
Vaiti climbed up on the rock above the hut, and pulled away a piece of
the loose grey coral of which it was composed. Then, sheltering herself
behind a clump of hibiscus growing in a cleft, she raised her voice in a
fearful squealing cry, exactly reproducing the yell of a wild pig
wandering in the bush at night. At the same time she cast a lump of
coral with all her strength down the side of the big rock, whence it
landed with a crash in the middle of a mass of brushwood, burying itself
completely.
The double noise, as she had anticipated, brought out the owner of the
hut, very cross and sleepy, clad only in a pareo, and angrily anxious
for the safety of his patch of yams. He carried a torch in his hand,
made of blazing candlenuts strung on a stick (“Must have run out every
bit of credit at the stores,” thought Vaiti parenthetically), and he
was, beyond all shadow of doubt, against all common probability, the
red-haired master of the _Ikurangi_.
If looks could ever blast, those black eyes behind the hibiscus boughs
would have slain him where he stood. Vaiti quivered with rage as she
watched him shambling sleepily about, looking, with his long, matted red
hair, bloated, evil face, and half naked body, infinitely lower than any
coloured native on the island.... He had not prospered since he escaped
the wreck of the _Ikurangi_—how or where she did not care to know. He
looked as if he had been living on the natives and half drinking himself
to death, as was indeed the case.
But Vaiti was not in the least mollified by his unprosperous case. In
her opinion, he ought to have been dead long ago. There could be no
peace of mind for her while he was still drifting about the Pacific,
ever on the alert to do her an evil turn. She was not equal to actual
murder, and, in any case, Niué was a British-owned island, with a
resident Commissioner and a regular nest of missionaries, where you had
to be very careful of what you did. But if any accident—a safe,
convenient accident—should befall him by-and-by, why, it would certainly
be an advantage to the _Sybil_ and her owners. Well, that might come
about, and without introducing Saxon into it either. In such a delicate
matter Saxon’s interference would very likely have acted much as a
charge of dynamite might act in the destruction of a wasps’
nest—something more than the wasps would probably come to grief.
She waited until the ugly creature had rolled back into his cottage and
shut the make-shift door. Then she slipped down from the rock once
more, and began the second part of her errand. Neither then, nor at any
other time, did she trouble to find out the manner of Donahue’s escape.
If she had, she would have heard that he had been picked up by a native
canoe, floating about on a piece of wreck the day after the disaster
that destroyed the _Ikurangi_, and that, he had spent a good many months
on a neighbouring island before a stray schooner had consented to accept
his watch for passage money and convey him as far as Niué—the only place
near their course where a penniless beachcomber would have been allowed
to land. As things were, he was more or less smuggled off, and thought
best to take refuge in the bush at once. The moneyless adventurer is
not encouraged in islands belonging to the British Crown.
It is easy, therefore, to understand why Donahue, living under an
assumed name in the far interior of the island, had not been recognised,
and was not likely to be, by any one save the person whom his presence
most concerned. His malice against Vaiti had by no means evaporated
with the events that took place on Vaka. He did not, as it happened,
suspect her of having actually caused the loss of the _Ikurangi_, but he
was of a darkly superstitious nature, and laid down his ill-luck, first,
last, and all through, to the fact of her influence. She had been a
“Jonah” of the worst kind to him, and he would have been very glad
indeed to serve her any ill turn of any kind that might be possible.
But only the small piece of spite compassed through Mata had, so far,
lain within his power.
Vaiti had still a mile or two to go, and it was waxing very late, or
rather, early. She almost ran along the winding rocky path, following
it as easily as if broad day or full moon had surrounded her instead of
star-lit dark. Now the sound of the sea, unheard for the last hour,
broke out again, and a cold salt breath from the beach cut through the
heavy perfume of the forest track. In another minute she was out of the
wood and fairly running down a sloping, sandy track that led to a little
white house standing alone on the shore.... She laughed as she ran—it
was such a soft, clear night, and the sea called so pleasantly down in
the dark, and she did so dearly love an adventure—especially when all
the world imagined her to be sleeping quietly in her mosquito-netted
bed.
There was no secrecy about this matter apparently. The house had a good
wooden door, and she rapped loudly on it with a stone, calling at the
same time, “Sona! Sona! Wake up!”
There was a brief interval, in which the rollers tore at the beach and
the palms swung and crashed overhead, uninterrupted by other sound.
Sona was evidently asleep. She struck loudly on the door again. This
time some one answered in a drowsy voice, and a slow, shuffling foot
came to the door. The hinges creaked, and in another minute a small,
bent, feeble figure appeared on the threshold.
“Tck! tck!” it clucked. “Is there magic in the air, and have I grown
fifty years younger, that the lovely maidens come to my door in the
starlight once more? Is it my beauty that has struck you to the heart,
chieftainess Vaiti; or do you want a charm to catch the love of some one
less deserving than myself?”
A fit of coughing interrupted him; he crept out to the open air, and
clung to the door-post, shaking all over with the violence of the
paroxysm. There was more light here, down by the foaming rollers; one
could see, if one had been walking half the night in the dark bush, that
the man was very small and hairy, very decrepit, and very, very old.
Indeed, the personal appearance of Sona, solitary recluse of the
Avarangi beach, good Nonconformist Christian on Sundays, and heathen
witch-doctor out of business hours, was a very important item of his
stock-in-trade. He looked his part to perfection, and knew it. His
very name was a piece of business, even though, rightly pronounced and
written, it was that of the godly man of Nineveh. When Shark-Tooth of
Avarangi had consented, largely for reasons of policy, to join the
mission fold a good many years before—the last straggling heathens on
the island having been then “brought in” by the exertions of a
determined and energetic missionary—he had selected the name of Jonah
for his baptismal title solely because, so far as he could ascertain,
the original bearer of the name was proverbial for bringing bad luck to
his enemies—and that was the sort of reputation that Shark-Tooth
especially coveted.
Vaiti had not met him before, but she knew him well by reputation, and
was very sure that he knew all he cared to know—probably a good
deal—about her. It was, she thought, a case for going straight to the
point, so she went very straight indeed.
“Let me in, Sona,” she said in his own tongue. “I want to talk with
you, and I want to buy you; for you and I are wise people, and I know
that there is nothing that may not be bought.”
“Crah—crah—crah!” cackled Sona, in a feeble old man’s laugh, tacking a
joke to the end of it that might well have raised a blush on Vaiti’s
cheek if she had been capable of such a weakness. He led the way into
the house, still cackling, lit an ill-smelling kerosene lamp, and sank
down upon the mats, a mere heap of crumpled cotton clothes, old bones,
and ancient wickedness.
Vaiti pulled out her cigar-case, tossed the old creature a cigar, which
he clutched at eagerly, and lit one for herself. Then she squatted down
on the mats, her back against the wall, and puffed for a minute or two
in silence. Old Sona watched her eagerly with his glassy little eyes.
He saw that she was not angry at the part he had played in the late
unpleasant occurrence upon the schooner, or at least that she did not
mean to resent it. He had heard all about the strange happenings of the
voyage, and was a good deal awed at the power of the woman who had
actually broken the spell of his curse—in which, be it observed, he
believed most fully himself, with excellent reasons for doing so. And
he was really very anxious to know what she wanted now, and especially
what he was going to make by it.
Vaiti pulled at her cigar vigorously for a minute to make it draw well,
and then, with a leisurely puff, remarked in Sona’s own tongue:
“Mata gave you a gold ring to curse my sailors that they should die—all
the village knows of it, so you need not deny it, old man with the face
of a scavenger-crab. Was it not foolish of you to set yourself against
Vaiti, the great sea-princess—very foolish to run into danger, and for
so little?”
“Yes, yes, so little,” repeated Sona, in a kind of wail.
“Now I come to buy you for myself,” went on Vaiti, puffing between words
(she smoked like most women, very hard and fast). “I buy like a great
chief’s daughter, and you shall feed and drink well for a long time if
you are faithful to me. If not, I shall split you open with my knife as
one splits open a fish on the beach, and leave you out on the strand, so
that the crabs may come and eat you before you are dead. That is what I
shall do to you.”
“I belong to the high chieftainess, soul and liver,” quavered Sona
nervously. Vaiti, hardly looking at him, pulled something out of her
dress and flung it down carelessly on the mat between the two. Sona’s
eyes glittered, for he heard the chink of gold.
“Take it, old pig of the woods,” said Vaiti contemptuously, and he
clutched eagerly at the little parcel of rag. It contained a roll of
gold coins. Sona, panting with mingled delight and fear lest his
visitor should change her mind, scuttled away to some hiding-hole in an
inner room, and concealed the packet with breathless haste. Then he
returned to the lamp-lit room, where Vaiti sat smoking and waiting.
“I am yours, high chieftainess; I am yours,” he repeated, rubbing his
hands together and cackling.
“What is this thing they tell about a devil that stays upon the road to
Mua, and comes out at night-time?” asked Vaiti carelessly, looking over
Sona’s head at the wall.
Sona shut up his eyes very tight, and shook his shaggy little head from
side to side.
“If you ask the good misinari doctor, he will tell you,” he answered.
“As for me, I have nothing to do with devils. I am a very old man, and
I want to go to heaven.
“You will go to-night, old scorpion-head, if you do not tell me
everything I want to know,” remarked Vaiti. Her tone was pleasant, but
there was a flavour of something else below the pleasantness that caused
Sona, literally and figuratively, to sit up.
“I tell, I tell, high chieftainess,” he stammered eagerly. “The thing
is known to all the people on the island—even the white people. It
happened only last year, and it is as true as the Good Book. It was the
foolish man from Mua way, whom they called a witch-doctor—and every one
knows that such a thing does not exist, high chieftainess; but they said
he was that thing, and he said so himself, because he was proud and mad.
Now, we all know that there are many devils on Niué, and that the
misinaris never were able to drive them all away. And there is a very
bad devil on that road to Mua, right where the six palm-trees stand up
by themselves among the graves. It is powerless in the day, but at
night there is no Niué man who would dare to go there. Sometimes the
white traders will ride past the place coming home in the dark, but it
is a true thing that their horses will often shy and bolt when they come
near to the home of the devil, and no man can say why; indeed, the
devils, for the most part, do not have power over the ’papalangi.’
“So this witch-doctor, as he called himself, said that he did not fear
the devil, and he would go and stay the night among the graves, thinking
that because of that all the people in the island would believe in him,
and give him many pigs and yams for fear of his ’mana.’ So he went to
the devil-place, and all night he stayed, but in the morning he did not
come back at all. And by-and-by all the people of his village went
together to look for him. And they found him lying on the road, all
dead, and his face was black and his body twisted up. So the people
brought him to the misinari doctor, and he said that he could not make
him alive again. And the traders said, ’What is the kind of this death?
We do not know it, though we are white men and know everything.’ But
the misinari doctor did not know. And they buried him, and that is all,
high chieftainess.”