“It is,” murmured Sestrina in her embarrassment, not knowing what she was saying at the moment. Then she smiled, and Hawahee smiled also as the girl glanced down on her pretty sandalled feet.
“The gods will not be angry, Sestrina, if we only speak as lovers. Pelé knoweth my heart well, and no anger would come to her heart if we imagine only our love for one another. For I say unto thee, that the love of the imagination is greater than the reality,” so spake Hawahee as in the religious fervour of his soul he tried to seek comfort for his own sad thoughts.
Sestrina, thinking that Hawahee, who spoke so nobly, might see the passionate light that gleamed in her eyes, walked to the shade of the small banyan tree, and said: “Hark, the great strange birds are singing in the breadfruits, yonder.” And as Hawahee and Sestrina gazed over the small slope by the kitchen outhouse, they saw the big crimson winged birds, that had arrived at the isle a week before, and who ever since had settled on the trees by their home at sunset, croaking, chanting weird, sometimes dismal notes.
“Yes, the birds have come,” murmured Hawahee. Then he gazed softly into Sestrina’s face, and seeing the dark rings beneath her tired eyes, he whispered, “Sestra, sweet sister, you are tired and must go to rest.” Then with well simulated calmness he strode slowly across the patch, away from the loveliness that made his heart stray from the gods in the valley. Sestrina, who had always been so neat in her domestic affairs, forgot to wash the wooden platters and coco-nut-shell goblets ere she retired into her primitive chamber. It was a neatly furnished chamber that Hawahee had built and arranged for her. Long ago they had pulled the first frail shelter down. The couch was made of well dried wood and fastened with strong sennet. The bed mattress was made of tappa-cloth and stuffed with the softest seaweed. On the wall were one or two pictures which had been saved from the wreck. Just over her bed hung the faded photographs of her mother and the Catholic priest, Père Chaco, which she had taken from the palace in her hurried flight from Port-au-Prince ten years before.
For a long time Sestrina could not sleep. Womanhood had given birth to strange thoughts in her worried mind. “Had not Hawahee been a noble friend through the long years of sorrow?” And as she reflected, she felt anger for the gods enter her heart that they should have a deeper place in Hawahee’s heart than she appeared to have. Then, again, she remembered, and sighed over her deepest dreams. “Why not give her love to Hawahee and make him happy? What had the gods done for him or for her? What mattered anything in that terrible isolation of an isle set in apparently endless seas?” And as the castaway girl dreamed on, the winds swept up the shore and all the palms resounded as though with one voice. Again she can hear the moaning of the shells in the valley. Once more the terror of superstition seizes her heart. “O Pelé! Atua! Kauhilo! forgive me for such thoughts,” she cried.
And as the music of the winds soothed her soul, slumber touched her eyes, and she stole off into those isles of troubled dreams that are washed by the lulling, soundless seas of sleep.
CHAPTER III
Come to me in my dreams, and then I’ll hear
The music of your voice steal like a stream
Thro’ some old forest where like thirsty deer