once, hardly waiting for the schooner to cast anchor before they were
alongside with their boats. Saxon and Vaiti were swept ashore
immediately, and begged to make their home in half-a-dozen different
houses. With a fine sense of the fitting, Saxon selected Bob Peter’s
public-house, misnamed hotel, and immediately held a _levée_ in the bar,
wearing his smartest Auckland suit (not paid for, and not likely to be)
and looking, with his heavy, old-fashioned cavalry moustache,
blonde-grey hair, and well set-up though rather bloated figure, quite
like a somewhat seedy Milor on his travels. (And, as a matter of
fact.... But that was Saxon’s long-buried secret, and must not be
told.)
Vaiti, splendidly attired in a flowing island robe of yellow silk, with
a gold chain twisted through her misty black hair, sat in the midst of a
court of her own, and drank expensive pink lemonade to her soul’s
content. She was revelling in the sights, the sounds, the smells of the
dear eastern islands once more. She had a necklace of perfumed red
berries round her neck, and white “tieré” flowers behind each ear, and
the well-remembered scent almost intoxicated her. Outside she could
hear the boom of a dancing-chant, broken by interludes of clapping; and
from the very next house, a big native reed-built structure, came now
and then in the quieter moments the sonorous voice of a Lialian man
calling out the names at a kava-drinking.
The double soul that is the curse of the half-caste surged within the
girl.... This, this, this, and all it meant—how she loved it! And yet,
the wild, fierce life of the western islands; the chance, the risk, the
strong wine of danger, adventure, power! The two natures of the soldier
of fortune and the sensuous island princess who had given her birth,
fought together in her heart.... If one could eat one’s cake and have
it! If one could sleep all day, crowned with flowers, under the singing
casuarina trees, and yet be the daring sea-queen, the “Kapitani” of the
_Sybil_, if only....
Vaiti shook herself impatiently in her hammock chair, and asked for
ginger beer with sugar in it. She hated thinking, and felt as if she
were going mad when the half-white brain in her pretty dusky head took a
strange fit of sober industry. Swift, instinctive plotting and planning
were one thing, deliberate reflection quite another.... Ugh! she must
be sick.... And for once the temperate Vaiti said yes to the inevitable
offer of “a stick in it,” as her ginger beer was handed to her by an
eager admirer.
The “sickness” passed away, and she began to listen and watch in her old
fashion, smiling all the time to the compliments and sweet sayings that
were being poured into her ears. A trader was telling her father all
about the latest dynastic crisis in the monarchy, and Saxon was not even
pretending to listen. The affairs of “niggers” never interested him,
unless there was a question of immediate profit ahead.
“You see,” said the trader, “King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., which
is his full title, wants for to get married. He’s thirty, and there’s
no heir. And there being just the two Lialian princesses that wasn’t
his sisters—Mahina and Litia—what does he do but go and propose to both
of them, and, of course, gets snapped up like winkin’ by the two. It’s
no small potatoes being Queen of Liali, mind you. Te Paea gets lots of
money out of the fruit, and copra taxes, and then the Crown lands is
half the island, there’s presents besides. And he’s a real king if he
is coffee-coloured—why, the kings of Liali goes back hundreds of years
before Captain Cook, and he was in Henry Eighth’s time, wasn’t he? And
if you was to see the pink satin chairs in the throne-room, and the
phonographs, and musical-boxes, and albums, and lookin’-glasses, and the
lovely wax flowers in cases, and real hand-painted oil pictures—ah! it’s
a good job, is Te Paea’s, and either Mahina or Litia’s going to be a
very lucky girl. What he’d like, you see, is to marry both of them,
same as his old grandfather—only he married nine, he did. But the
King’s a Methody, good as they make them—when he don’t forget, or want a
spree—and of course the missionaries won’t hear of his havin’ two
queens. And, says he, Mahina’s real fat; there’s nothing mean about
Mahina; she fills the eye, says he, and that’s what a Lialian likes, for
they don’t hold with any sort of stinginess, says he. But Litia, he
says, has eyes like the buttons on his Auckland boots, they’re so round
and black and bright, says he, and she walks for all the world like a
lovely young mutton-bird, says he. And what’s a king to do, with both
the girls’ relations fighting and squabbling over him like land-crabs
fighting over a bit of fish, and he himself liking them both, and the
girls clean mad for him—because, you see, Te Paea he’s a handsome
fellow, and when he’s got his military uniform on, and all his orders
and medals what he drew out himself on paper, and got made in Sydney,
he’s a fancy man, he is. The wedding’s to be in three weeks, and the
invites is being printed down in Auckland all in silver, with a blank to
write the bride’s name in—and the House of Lords has bought the bride’s
dress for her, which is what the Kings says it’s their right to do,
according to custom,—and no one knows which he’s going to marry, and no
more does he. And it’s my belief that there’ll be war over it, before
all’s said and done, for Mahina’s people say they’ll burn down every
village belonging to Litia’s tribe, and Litia’s folks say they’ll kill
Mahina’s people’s cattle and cut up their gardens. That’s the way
things are, and you may take my word it’s a pretty kettle of fish.”
“What are you giving for copra at present?” asked Saxon, yawning
unrestrainedly. And the conversation turned at once to the inevitable
trading “shop.”
A few days afterwards the _Sybil_ spread her wings and started for
Waiwai, the outermost of the Liali islands. She was to make the whole
round of the group afterwards, and might not be back for some weeks, so
that it seemed likely that Saxon would miss the festivities of the
King’s wedding. This Vaiti declared was no reason why she should miss
them, and she insisted on being left behind. Saxon was not too well
pleased, for if he had a remnant of conscience left, it was connected
with the care of his daughter, and he did not quite care about leaving
her alone in a group to which they were both strangers. But Vaiti
promised to behave like a saint, and furthermore said that she would
stay with one of the married traders, and not in the native villages.
She also added that she meant to stay anyhow, and that it was no use
making a fuss.
So the _Sybil_ sailed away out of Liali harbour, and became a little
pearl-coloured pinhead on the blue horizon, and then melted quite away.
And Vaiti went to the tin-roofed shanty belonging to Neumann, the fat
German trader, who had married a Lialian wife, and was received with the
unquestioning hospitality of the islands.
Nobody, among either whites or natives, could talk of anything but the
King’s matrimonial affairs. Mahina and Litia both appeared in Neumann’s
parlour more than once, sat on the floor, drank black tea with a handful
of sugar in it, and related their several woes at length. They did not
come together, except once, when Litia, walking in unexpectedly, found
Mahina there, crying into her teacup, and telling Neumann’s wife that
the King had given Litia a beautiful chemise, all trimmed with lace,
only the day before, and that in consequence she considered him a
monster and a perjured villain, although she knew perfectly well that he
meant nothing whatever by it. What was a chemise? He had sent her two
pounds of stick tobacco the Sunday before last. She would show Litia yet
that the King was her King, and nobody else’s.
Litia, entering at this point, wasted no words, but simply buried her
hands in Mahina’s curly black masses of hair, and dragged her,
shrieking, across the floor. Neumann interfered, and parted them; but
Mahina flew at Litia immediately after, ripped open her dress with one
clutch, and disclosed the royal gift chastely embracing Litia’s lovely
form. With a howl of anger, the rival seized the chemise in both hands;
there was a scuffle, a scream, a rending noise, and Litia stood up in
the middle of the room, a gold-bronze statue, shedding tears of rage,
while Mahina, running out on to the verandah, tore the offending garment
into strips and rags, and cast them upon the road. Litia, rushing out
after her, stood upon the steps clad with wrath as with a garment (and
with extremely little else), explaining her wrongs to an interested and
sympathetic native crowd, until the Methodist missionary happened to
come by, and told her that unless she went in and dressed herself at
once, she might safely count upon eventually finding herself in a place
where dress would be very much at a discount ... or words to that
effect. So Litia went in, and Mahina went away, escorted by a strong
cousinly “tail”; and afterwards Neumann, enveloped in oracular clouds of
smoke, remarked sleepily that the princesses were the greatest nuisance
on the island, and that he believed the King would run away from the
whole set if he could, for he was “by-nearly mad-driven on account of
their so-tiresome ways, and feared-himself to choose, because the one
that he not married had would cause to make war by her people against
the one he married should.”
During the whole of the fight, Vaiti remained perfectly unmoved on a
cane lounge in the corner of the room, uninterruptedly puffing rings of
blue smoke at the ceiling. Not a detail had escaped her, all the same,
nor did she miss a word of Neumann’s remarks. And they made her think.
In the afternoon, the dull thud of galloping hoofs along the grass
street made Mrs. Neumann run to the door. She called loudly to Vaiti to
come.
“It is the King,” she said.
A small victoria, drawn by two spirited blacks, was tearing up the
street. Seated alone in it was an extraordinary and notable
figure—Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., King of Liali. He was six feet
four inches in height, and over eighteen stone in weight. He wore a
scarlet cloth uniform coat, blazing with gold, and his heavy, handsome
brown face, with its weak, small mouth, and black eyes almost too large
and soft for a man, was shaded by a white sun helmet with a wide gold
band.
He drove furiously, looking neither to right nor to left, and, passing
the house like a gorgeous whirlwind, was instantly lost in the casuarina
forest beyond.
“That is the King, then?” said Vaiti. The Lialian language came almost
as easily to her as her own, being only one of the dialects of the great
Maori tongue that covers a good two-thirds of the island world.
“Yes,” said Neumann’s wife, “that is the King. And very little any of us
have seen of him lately. He is afraid of the trouble he has got himself
into; he shuts himself up all the time, and sees no one but his guards,
and just sends a present now and then, first to one girl then to the
other. And when he drives to take the air, he flies along like that, so
that no one can stop and speak to him. He is terribly shy of strangers;
I think it was because the _Sipila_ was here that he did not come out at
all last week.”
“Is it such a very good thing for the princess he will marry?” asked
Vaiti, playing with a yellow alamanda flower.
“Very, very good indeed,” replied the Lialian impressively. “She will
have a gold crown to wear on her head, and sit on a red velvet and gold
throne beside the King, and have the most beautiful satin dresses from
Sydney, and all her chemises will have lace and ribbons on them. And as
soon as the King buys another schooner for himself and Liali, she will
travel in it with him whenever she likes, for sometimes he will go to
Samoa, to stay with King Malietoa, or he will sail a whole week to Mbau
in Fiji, and then Princess Thakombau and the Prince of Kandavu make
feasts and dances for him, and the Kovana [governor] gives a real
’papalangi’ dinner for him, with champagne and a band. And as for what
she will have to eat at home, it is past telling, for in the palace
there is no count whatever made of tinned salmon and biscuit, and she
may have a sackful of sugar at every meal, and a whole roast pig every
day. She may eat till she falls asleep, and then wake up to eat. Ah, it
is a good thing for the princess who marries the King, whichever she may
be!”
“I think you will be thirsty if you talk so much,” said Vaiti rather
rudely. “I am thirsty myself with only listening to you. Go and make
some kava for me.”
Mrs. Neumann, who had been rather proud to have Vaiti staying with
her—since her rank as a princess of Atiu counted for a good deal among
the island races—began to dislike her visitor soon after this, and to
wish her well away. Vaiti was not an angel in the house at the best of
times, and she did not trouble to make herself pleasant just then.
Indeed, one would almost have thought she was trying to pick a quarrel.
And, as that sort of effort rarely goes unrewarded, it is not
astonishing to learn that the quarrel came before long—a bitter,
loud-tongued dispute that left Mrs. Neumann sobbing in a fat, frightened
heap on the floor, and Vaiti, silent but stormy, packing up her
camphorwood box to depart.
Neumann, being afraid of Saxon’s possible anger, tried to keep her, but
she laughed in his face, and went on packing. There was an empty native
house—little more than a palm-leaf hut, once tenanted by a Chinese
trader—standing by the road about halfway through the great casuarina
forest; a lonely, ramshackle place, used and wanted by nobody. There
and there only Vaiti would go, taking mats and cooking pots with her, to
stay until her father came back. When some of the islanders betrayed
meddlesome curiosity as to her motives, and the missionaries declared
they scented scandal, Vaiti silenced and terrified the one, and
convinced the others that she was hopelessly beyond the pale, by giving
out that she was something of a witch, and meant to go into the forest
to gather and prepare certain powerful charms. These, she said, would
injure only her enemies, but were altogether powerless to hurt anyone
who spoke well of her. In consequence, the evil tongues of Liali
received a sudden check.
Furthermore, Vaiti, neglecting the half-castes and the whites, began
with considerable art to make herself popular among the natives. She
dressed herself Liali fashion, and arranged her hair after the island
modes. She joined in all their interminable boating journeys and
picnics, and was never tired of sitting cross-legged on the ground,
waving her arms and head in time with a hundred others, and chanting
Lialian songs that lasted an afternoon apiece. After dark, she was
often to be seen out on the reef, with a torch and a fishing spear
making an exhibition of piscatorial skill that astonished even the
Lialians themselves. When there was an unmissionary dance in some big
chief-house, Vaiti was always there, decked with wreaths and flower
necklaces, and polished with cocoanut oil, turning the heads of all the
young men by the grace of her dancing, and winning the astonished
approval of the women by the cool reserve with which she received every
advance of a sentimental nature. Both Mahina and Litia took jealous
fancies to her—thus acquiring yet one more cause of mutual
dissension—and separately poured all their woes into her ear. She was
wonderfully sympathetic, and urged each one on to assert her rights and
stand no nonsense; insomuch that before very long the island was fairly
ringing with what Litia’s people meant to do to Mahina’s, and what
Mahina’s would certainly do to Litia’s, in the event of the King
selecting one or the other.
Somebody about this time—it was never ascertained who—spread a report
that Captain Saxon of the _Sybil_ had a number of trade rifles on board
his ship, and several cases of cartridges. The talk began to take a
more dangerous turn. The schooner would not be back till the wedding
was over, it was said, but let the winning party look out for themselves
when she did come! The Lialians, under missionary rule, had been
peaceful and law-abiding people for almost a whole generation; but they
had not yet forgotten that they were once the masters of the Pacific,
and that of all the warlike island races, none had been such fighters as
they.... The older men began to snuff battle in the air, walked about
with their chests flung out, and told bloodthirsty ancient stories to
the younger Lialians. The women sang war songs at the evening
gatherings in the chief-houses, and Mahina and Litia began to go about
followed by bands of eager partisans. Liali was certainly warming up.
*CHAPTER XX*
*QUEEN AFTER ALL*
News of all these things came duly to the King through his faithful
spies, and his Majesty Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. went nearly
frantic. He actually began to lose weight—a consummation that all the
skill of his European court doctor had hitherto failed to bring
about—and day by day he drove more wildly behind his famous blacks,
covering mile after mile of lonely forest roads at a pace that brought
the horses home all in a lather and the yellow satin cushions grimed
with dust. The wedding approached within ten days: the triumphal arches
were being erected; the Queen Consort’s throne came back from the
carpenter, freshly gilded and upholstered; and the band were hard at
work practising the strange conglomeration of shrieks and wails that
make up the Lialian National Anthem. The bride’s dress, provided,
according to usage, by the House of Lords, arrived at the palace in a
palm-leaf basket. It was a very gorgeous affair—a long, loose robe of
orange satin, embroidered in scarlet by a few of the cleverest
mission-school girls—and it was of a usefully indefinite size, since the
difference between the massive Mahina and the waspish little Litia was
almost as great as the difference (of another kind) between their
respective parties. The silver-printed invitations for the white people
and the chiefs—“To be present at the wedding of His Majesty King
Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. with Princess——,” came up by a whale-ship
from Auckland, and so did the wedding cake, largely plaster of Paris.
And still the wretched King, lashed by the scourge of his own
light-hearted follies, sent pacificating presents to both girls, and put
off the dire decision.
It was about this time that any wayfarer passing through the casuarina
forest “might have observed” a light in Vaiti’s cottage late one night.
There was no one to observe, however, for the wood was supposed to be
devil-haunted, and no native ever passed through it save in broad
daylight. When it grew toward sunset the only Lialian who would brave
its dangers so far as to rush across it in the red evening light was the
King himself, who had been educated in Sydney, and did not believe in
devils—much. The forest road was the shortest way home from his usual
circular drive, and he frequently passed by the cottage just before
sunset, driving like Jehu the son of Nimshi, and looking neither to
right nor to left. He had never noticed Vaiti as he passed, for she was
always within the house, looking out between the cracks of the
palm-leaves, where she could see without being seen.
This evening, long after the King had passed by and the dark had come
down, Vaiti sat on the floor of the hut, looking very thoughtful, as she
turned out the contents of her big camphorwood box by the light of a
ship’s hurricane lantern. She was all alone, as usual, and smoking,
also as usual. There was no sound in the solitary little house but the
sighing of the wind in the casuarina trees and the steady puff of the
girl’s cigar. Papers, letters, packets of lace, odd bits of jewellery,
silk dresses, pistols, knives, collections of rope and twine, laced
underclothing, cartridges, feathers, shells, cigars, pearl-inlaid boxes,
revareva plumes, and a miscellaneous collection of odds and ends
garnered from all the four corners of the South Seas, strewed the floor,
and the box was still half full. By-and-by she came upon what she
wanted—a roll of stuff done up in waxed paper. She unfastened it, and
let the contents fall out across the mats under the rays of the lantern.
It was a web of pure gold tissue, bright as a summer sunrise and fine as
a fairy’s wing—an exquisite piece of stuff, which she had acquired from
a Chinese trader in Honolulu by means none too scrupulous, and hoarded
away for years.
Vaiti looked at it thoughtfully, and then opened a little tortoise-shell
and silver box, and spilled its contents—a shower of photographs—into
her lap. They were an exceedingly various collection—naval, military,
British, French, native and half-caste—but most were men, and many were
young and handsome. Perhaps the best-looking of the collection was that
of a young English naval officer, signed across the corner “R. Tempest,”
with a Sydney address, and “Must it be good-bye?” written in tiny
letters under the signature. Vaiti took the picture in her hand, and
looked at it so long and earnestly that her cigar went out while she
gazed. She lit another, put down the photograph, and sat smoking and
thinking for quite a long time.... The world was still all before her
... and the whaling ship had said that another vessel was almost sure to
touch, on her way to Sydney next week.
Once in Vaiti’s many-coloured history a looking-glass had proved her
undoing. It was a looking-glass that proved her salvation now, at the
parting of the ways. For, as she sat thinking, a brilliant picture
caught her eye—her own proud, lovely head, crowned regally with a wreath
of flowers, reflected in the mirror inside the lid of the box. She
smiled, stretched out her hand—letting the photograph fall unnoticed to
the floor from her lap—and placed a fold of the golden tissue across her
head.... Yes, it looked quite like a crown—a Queen Consort’s crown ...
the glass gave back a truly royal picture.
Vaiti’s cheeks flushed as she looked. She could hardly turn away. But
the golden fold slipped off her hair, and the queenly picture was gone.
She shut the box, and with set lips took a match, lit it, and set fire
to the photograph. It burned very slowly, and the flame seemed to lick
sympathetically round her own heart as it crawled about the handsome,
debonair, but sensual face, lit up, and then put out, the laughing eyes,
crackled through the curly hair and the white naval cap, and at last
reduced the whole bright picture to a little pile of feathery black
ash—dead, dead, dead!
Vaiti dropped the charred fragments from her hands, and then put her
head down upon the mats and lay very still....
When morning broke through the narrow door of the hut, the rays of the
rising sun fell upon the figure of a girl with a cold, expressionless
face, sitting upon the threshold, hard at work with needle and thread.
Upon her lap lay a pile of golden gauze.
That afternoon the King drove late in the forest. The sun was near
setting, and the rays were slanting long and low among the red trunks of
the gloomy casuarina trees, when the spirited blacks came galloping up
to the cottage. Every day they had passed it by, a still, brown nest in
the shadows, where nothing moved, but this evening, as they reached the
spot, something caused them to check and shy, and the King, splendid
driver as he was, had some difficulty in pulling them in. When he had
succeeded, he glanced at the object that had caused their fright, and
saw a vision startling enough to astonish even himself.
A stranger girl of exceeding beauty stood in the midst of the forest
clearing. She was dressed in a robe of magnificent golden tissue, from
which the level rays of the westering sun sparkled back in a halo of
almost supernatural glory. On her head was a wreath of blood-red
hibiscus flowers, and her exquisite right arm, bare except for a twisted
chain of gold, held up an island kava cup of carved cocoanut shell.
When she saw that the King observed her, she sank on her knees, bent her
neck, and raised the cup higher in both hands above her head.