“Let us take Tarita between us and swim to the shore, ere the sharks
come to us.”
“Nay, we are safer here, Ruvani, And how could we tell my mother that
the canoe is lost? Let us wait a little and then the wind will die
away.”
Canoes are valuable property on Pingelap, where suitable wood for
building them is scarce, and this was in Ninia's mind.
They still kept hold of their paddles, and although afraid of the
sharks, waited patiently for the storm to cease, little thinking that
at that moment the ebbing tide and wind together had swept them into
the passage, and that they were quickly drifting away from their island
home.
All that night Ninia the widow and her four slaves sought along the
beach of Tugulu for the three girls, who they felt sure had landed
there. And when the day broke at last, and they saw that the gale had
not ceased and that the canoe had vanished, they ran all the way over to
the village, and Ninia threw herself at Sralik's feet.
“Thy granddaughter and my children have perished, O chief.”
The chief came to the door of his house and looked out upon the wild
turmoil of waters.
“It is the will of the gods,” he said, “else had not my whaleboat been
crushed in the night,” and he pointed to the ruins of the boat-shed upon
which a huge cocoanut tree had fallen and smashed the boat.
Then he went back into his house and covered his face, for Ruvani was
dear to his savage old heart.
And Ninia went back to her lonely house and wept and mourned for her
lost ones as only mothers weep and mourn, be they of white skins or
brown.
*****
Away out into the ocean the canoe was swept along, and Ruvani and Ninia
still clung to her, one at the head and one at the stern. Once there
came a brief lull, and then they succeeded in partly freeing her from
water, and Tarita using her two hands like a scoop meanwhile, the canoe
at last became light enough for them to get in.
They were only just in time, for even then the wind freshened, and Ninia
and Ruvani let the canoe run before it, for they were too exhausted to
keep her head to the wind.
When daylight broke Ninia, with fear in her heart, stood up in the canoe
and looked all round her.
There was no land in sight! Poor children! Even then they could not have
been more than twenty miles away from the island, for Pingelap is very
low and not visible even from a ship's deck at more than twelve or
fifteen miles.
But she was a brave girl, although only fourteen, and when Tarita and
Ruvani wept she encouraged them.
“Sralik will come to seek us in the boat,” she said, although she could
have wept with them.
The wind still carried them along to the westward, and Ninia knew that
every hour was taking them further and further away from Pingelap, but,
although it was not now blowing hard, she knew that it was useless for
them to attempt to paddle against it. So, keeping dead before the wind
and sea, they drifted slowly along.
At noon the wind died away, and then, tired and worn out, she and Ruvani
lay down in the bottom of the canoe and slept, while little Tarita sat
up on the cane framework of the outrigger and watched the horizon for
Sralik's boat.
Hour after hour passed, and the two girls still slept. Tarita, too, had
lain her weary head down and slumbered with them.
Slowly the sun sank beneath a sea of glassy smoothness, unrippled even
by the faintest air, and then Ninia awoke, and, sitting up, tossed her
cloud of dark hair away from her face, and looked around her upon the
darkening ocean. Her lips were dry and parched, and she felt a terrible
thirst.
“Tarita,” she called, “art sleeping, dear one?”
A sob answered her.
“Nay, for my head is burning, and I want a drink.”
*****
The whole story of those days of unutterable agony cannot be told here.
There, under a torrid sun, without a drop of water or a morsel of food,
the poor creatures drifted about till death mercifully came to two of
them.
It was on the evening of the second day that Ninia, taking her little
sister in her own fast weakening arms, pressed her to her bosom, and,
looking into her eyes, felt her thirst-racken body quiver and then grow
still in the strange peacefulness of death. Then a long wailing cry
broke upon the silence of the night.
How long she had sat thus with the child's head upon her bosom and her
dead sightless eyes turned upward to the glory of the star-lit heavens
she knew not; after that one moaning cry of sorrow that escaped from her
anguished heart she had sat there like a figure of stone, dull, dazed,
and unconscious almost of the agonies of thirst. And then Ruvani, with
wild, dreadful eyes and bleeding, sun-baked lips, crept towards her,
and, laying her face on Ninia's hand, muttered--
“Farewell, O friend of my heart; I die.”
And then, as she lay there with closed eyes and loosened hair falling
like a shroud over the form of her dead playmate, she muttered and
talked, and then laughed a strange weird laugh that chilled the blood in
Ninia's veins. So that night passed, and then, as the fiery sun uprose
again upon the wide sweep or lonely sea and the solitary drifting canoe
with its load of misery, Ruvani, who still muttered and laughed to
herself, suddenly rose up, and with the strength of madness, placing
her arms around the stiffened form of little Tarita, she sprang over the
side and sank with her.
Ninia, stretching her arms out piteously, bowed her head, and lay down
to die.
*****
She was aroused from her stupor by the cries of a vast flock of sea
birds, and, opening her eyes, she saw that the canoe was surrounded by
thousands upon thousands of bonita that leaped and sported and splashed
about almost within arm's length of her. They were pursuing a shoal of
small fish called _atuli_, and these every now and then darted under the
canoe for protection. Sometimes, as the hungry bonita pressed them hard,
they would leap out of the water, hundreds together, and then the sea
birds would swoop down and seize them ere they fell back into the sea.
Ninia, trembling with excitement and the hope of life, watched
eagerly. Presently she heard a curious, rippling noise, and then a
rapidly-repeated tapping on the outrigger side of the canoe.
Oh! the joy of it; the water was black with a mass of _atuli_ crowded
together on the surface, and frightened and exhausted.
She thrust her hands in among them and threw handsful after handsful
into the canoe, and then her dreadful thirst and hunger made her cease,
and, taking fish after fish, she bit into them with her sharp teeth, and
assuaged both hunger and thirst.
As she tore ravenously at the _atuli_ the sky became overcast, and while
the bonitas splashed and jumped around her, and the birds cried shrilly
overhead, the blessed rain began to fall, at first in heavy drops, and
then in a steady downpour.
Taking off her thick grass girdle, she rolled it up into a tight coil
and placed it across the bottom of the canoe, about two feet from the
bows, so as to form a dam; and then, lying face downwards, she drank
and drank till satisfied. Then she counted the _atuli_. There were over
forty.
All that day the rain squalls continued, and then the wind settled and
blew steadily from the east, and Ninia kept the canoe right before it.
That night she slept but little. A wild hope had sprung up in her heart
that she might reach the island of Ponape, which she knew was not many
days' sail from Pingelap. Indeed, she had once heard her father and
Sralik talking about going there in the whaleboat to sell turtle-shell
to the white traders there.
But she did not know that the current and trade wind were setting the
canoe quickly away from Ponape towards a group of low-lying atolls
called Ngatik.
*****
The rain had ceased, and in the warm, starlight night she drifted on to
the west, and as she drifted she dreamed of her father, and saw Ninia
the widow, her mother, sitting in the desolate house on Takai, before
the dying embers of the fire, and heard her voice crying:
“_O thou white Christ God, to whom my husband called as he died, tell me
are my children perished? I pray thee because of the white blood that is
in them to protect them and let me behold my beloved again_.”
The girl awoke. Her mother's voice seemed to still murmur in her ears,
and a calm feeling of rest entered her soul. She took her paddle, and
then stopped and thought.
This new God--the Christ-God of her father--perhaps He would help her
to reach the land. She, too, would call upon Him, even as her mother had
done.
“See, O Christ-God. I am but one left of three. I pray Thee guide my
canoe to land, so that I may yet see Ninia my mother once more.”
As the dawn approached she dozed again, and then she heard a sound that
made her heart leap--it was the low, monotonous beat of the surf.
When the sun rose she saw before her a long line of low-lying islands,
clothed in cocoanuts, and shining like jewels upon the deep ocean blue.
She ate some more of the fish, and, paddling as strongly as her strength
would permit, she passed between the passage, entered the smooth waters
of the lagoon, and ran the canoe up on to a white beach.
“The Christ-God has heard me,” she said as she threw her wearied form
under the shade of the cocoa-nut palms and fell into a heavy, dreamless
slumber.
And here next morning the people of Ngatik found her. They took the poor
wanderer back with them to their houses that were clustered under the
palm-groves a mile or two away, and there for two years she dwelt with
them, hoping and waiting to return to Pingelap.
One day a ship came--a whaler cruising back to Strong's Island and the
Marshall Group. The captain was told her story by the people of Ngatik,
and offered to touch at Pingelap and land her.
Ninia the widow was still living on Takai, and her once beautiful face
had grown old and haggard-looking. Since the night of the storm four
ships had called at Pingelap, but she had never once gone over to the
village, for grief was eating her heart away; and so, when one evening
she heard that a ship was in sight, she took no heed.
Her house was very sad and lonely now, and as night came on she lay down
in her end of the house and slept, while the other four people sat round
the fire and talked and smoked.
In the middle of the night the four slaves got up and went away to the
village, for they wanted to be there when the boat from the ship came
ashore.
At daylight the ship was close in, and the people in the village saw a
boat lowered. Then a cry of astonishment burst from them when they
saw the boat pull straight in over the reef and land at Takai, about a
hundred yards from the house of Ninia, the white man's widow.
Only one person got out, and then the boat pushed off again and pulled
back to the ship.
*****
Ninia the widow had risen, and was rolling up the mat she had slept
upon, when a figure darkened the doorway. She turned wonderingly to
see who it was that had come over so early from the village, when the
stranger, who was a tall, graceful young girl, sprang forward, and,
folding her arms around her, said, sobbing with joy--
“My mother... The Christ-God hath brought me back to thee again.”
BALDWIN'S LOISÈ--Miss Lambert.
Her mother was a full-blooded native--a woman of Anaa, in the Chain
Islands--her father a dissolute and broken white wanderer. At the age
of ten she was adopted by a wealthy South Sea trading captain, living
on the East Coast of New Zealand. He, with his childless wife, educated,
cared for, and finally loved her, as they once loved a child of their
own, dead twenty years before.
At sixteen Loisé was a woman; and in the time that had passed since the
morning she had seen her reckless, beach-combing father carried ashore
at Nukutavake with a skinful of whisky and his pockets full of the
dollars for which he had sold her, the tongue and memories of her
mother's race had become, seemingly, utterly forgotten.
*****
But only seemingly; for sometimes in the cold winter months, when savage
southerly gales swept over the cloud-blackened ocean from the white
fields of Antarctic ice and smote the New Zealand coast with chilling
blast, the girl would crouch beside the fire in Mrs. Lambert's
drawing-room, and covering herself with warm rugs, stare into the
glowing coals until she fell asleep.
She had not forgotten.
One day a visitor came to see her adopted father. He was captain of a
small trading schooner running to the Paumotus--her mother's land--and
although old Lambert had long since given up his trading business and
voyagings, he liked to meet people from the Islands, and, indeed, kept
open house to them; so both he and Mrs. Lambert made him welcome.
The captain of the schooner was a man of a type common enough in the
South Seas, rough, good-humoured, and coarsely handsome.
After dinner the two men sat over their whisky and talked and smoked.
Mrs. Lambert, always an invalid, had gone to her room, but Loisé, book
in hand, lay on a sofa and seemed to read. But she did not read, she
listened. She had caught a word or two uttered by the dark-faced,
black-bearded skipper--words that filled her with vague memories of long
ago. And soon she heard names--names of men, white and brown, whom she
had known in that distant, almost forgotten and savage childhood.
*****
When the seaman rose to leave and extended his tanned, sinewy hand to
the beautiful “Miss Lambert,” and gazed with undisguised admiration into
her face, he little thought that she longed to say, “Stay and let me
hear more.” But she was conventional enough to know better than that,
and that her adopted parents would be genuinely shocked to see her
anything more than distantly friendly with such a man as a common
trading captain--even though that man had once been one of Lambert's
most trusted men. Still, as she raised her eyes to his, she murmured
softly, “We will be glad to see you again, Captain Lemaire.” And the
dark-faced seaman gave her a subtle, answering glance.
*****
All that night she lay awake--awake to the child memories of the life
that until now had slumbered within her. From her opened bedroom window
she could see the dulled blaze of the city's lights, and hear ever and
anon the hoarse and warning roar of a steamer's whistle. She raised
herself and looked out upon the waters of the harbour. A huge,
black mass was moving slowly seaward, showing only her masthead and
side-lights--some ocean tramp bound northward. Again the boom of the
whistle sounded, and then, by the quickened thumping of the propeller,
the girl, knew that the tramp had rounded the point and was heading for
the open sea.
*****
She lay back again on the pillow and tried to sleep. Why couldn't she
sleep, she wondered. She closed her eyes. The branches of the pine that
grew close to her window rustled and shook to a passing breath of wind,
and her eyes opened again. How strangely, though, it sounded to-night,
and how her heart was thumping! Again the white lids drooped and half
closed again, and the pine branches waved and soughed gently to the
breeze.
And then the dead grey of the wall of the room changed to a bright,
shimmering white--the white of an island beach as it changes, under the
red flush of the morn, from the shadows of the night to a broad belt of
gleaming silver--and the sough of the pine-tree by the window deepened
into the humming music of the trade-wind when it passes through the
sleeping palms, and a million branches awake trembling to its first
breaths and shake off in pearly showers the dews of the night. Again she
raced along the clinking sand with her childish, half-naked companions,
and heard the ceaseless throb of the beating surf upon the windward
reef, and saw the flash of gold and scarlet of a flock of parrakeets
that with shrill, whistling note, vanished through the groves of
cocoa-nuts as they sped mountain wards. Then her latent native soul
awoke and made her desperate.
*****
Ere two days had passed she was missing, and six weeks later a little
white-painted schooner hove-to off one of the Paumotu Group, lowered a
boat, and landed her amongst the wondering natives.
The dark-faced, black-bearded man who steered the boat held her hand a
moment ere he said good-bye.
“It is not too late, Loisé.”
She raised her face and laughed scornfully.
“To go back? To go back to hear the old man who was a father and the
good woman who was a mother to me, tell me that they hated and despised
me!” And then quick, scalding tears.
The man's face flushed. “No, not that, but,” with an oath, “look here,
if you'll come with me I'll head the schooner for Tahiti, and as soon as
she swings to her anchor we will be ashore and married.”
She shook her head. “Let me go, Captain Lemaire. Whatever comes to me,
'tis I alone who must answer for it. And so--good-bye.”
*****
She stood and watched the boat hoisted to the davits, and saw the
schooner slowly gather way, and then glide past and disappear round
the palm-crowned point. Then she turned with streaming eyes and choking
voice to the brown-skinned people that stood around her, and spoke to
them in her mother's tongue.
So ended the sixteen years' life of the beautiful Miss Lambert and began
that of Loisé, the half-blood.