THREE days had passed since Hawahee’s terrible appeal to the gods. Sestrina stood in the shelter of her kitchen singing happily. The raft was finished. She and Hawahee were about to embark, to seek the future on the unknown seas around their island home. “Oh, how happy I feel! We are going out to the seas; the gods will be—!”
She dropped her platter full of cooked fish—a terrible cry had reached her ears! Whose cry was it? She stood trembling from head to feet. Hawahee had gone a few moments before for his morning swim in the sea, just behind the coral reefs where he would be hidden by the shore’s palms. Why had he given so despairing a cry? Sestrina rushed from the palavana. Her feet skimmed the sands without noise as she ran out to the edge of the promontory. She stood perfectly still, as though death had stricken her stiff with terror while in an attitude of upright despair. Her face expressed terror in loneliness. Her outblown hair, and lips apart, seemed to voice the wail of all unknown sorrows, her hands, clasped tightly together, the symbol of all human appeal; her wide open staring eyes all dire disaster beneath the sun! For, as she reached the promontory’s edge, she had seen two hands toss up visible for a second above the calm glassy surface of the sea, then swiftly disappear!
No thought came to her as to the cause of this calamity. Whether Hawahee had been seized by a shark, or cramp, or had deliberately tied a lump of coral stone to his feet ere he took his last dive off the promontory’s edge, was something that never puzzled Sestrina. He had gone! that was enough to know! Even the huge sea-birds seemed to hover near and gaze with startled eyes as she stood there—immovable, staring in the awful fascination of hopelessness at that spot!
All day long she rushed to and fro to the promontory’s edge calling “Hawahee! Hawahee!” and weeping.
“’Tis coming, the night, the stars, the moon, I cannot stay!” she cried as she spoke with pagan grief to the ocean, over which the first pale stars were creeping.
She ran down to the raft. It was floating within the entrance of the creek by the reefs. One push and it would go seaward.
Darkness swept over the seas. Sestrina stared in fright up the shore. She was alone! Her half-demented mind peopled the shadows with unknown terrors. Indescribable loneliness smote her heart like a blow. She gazed up at the stars in anguished appeal. But the stars only seemed to gaze in some immutable sorrow and hopeless silence that thundered nightmare-sounds into her soul. Her grief-stricken mind magnified the solitude—if that could be. She groped about the bamboo thickets and puli ferns as she ran up the shore. Such was her loneliness, that she eagerly sought the companionship of the lepers’ graves on the plateau. She ran back to the shore and screamed for Hawahee again. The echoes of her despairing voice awakened the roosting cockatoos and strange birds; up, up they flew, shrieking discordantly in the darkness as they dashed against each other in their blindness. The demented woman looked like a wraith calling the dead as she wrung her hands and ran along the shore, calling “Hawahee! Lupo! Rohana! Steno! come to me!” her mind so distraught that she reverted to the companionship of the dead lepers.
The lagoons along the shore and the calm ocean before her shone with the ethereal gleams of a thousand thousand stars. The trade winds that commenced to blow every night, began to softly sigh. She had made up her mind to go seaward on the raft.
Suddenly she thought of her own shape standing under the palms by the shell temple. She turned round and stared inland, a startled gleam in her eyes—she would seek its companionship! The impulse to gaze on that shape which had been moulded from the dreams of the dead Hawahee, made her stand breathless in some terrible ecstasy of despair. Her sad, fallible mortal intellect, groping in its boundless dark, had clutched a straw on the ocean of hopeless misery. In some vague, mad fancy of the brain she had thought to crush, to outwit destiny’s cruel spite, to still possess the companionship of Hawahee’s mortal conception of herself in cold stone. The next second the impulse had vanished. She realised that the shattered mirror of the past can never again reflect the tender glance of loving eyes. She knew that Hawahee’s conception of the sensuous beauty of her faultless form had vanished with the tossing of his hands from his ocean grave.
The thought of her stone-shape standing under the island’s trees, suddenly filled her soul with boundless misery. She detested it! In her terror-stricken imagination she could see the full, perfect lips, the lovely lines of the bosom and the passion-charmed curves and pose of the whole form, clearer than had she run into the valley and stood before it. She remembered Hawahee’s embrace of that unresponsive shape, and how he had breathed thrilling words when he had clasped her form and found it warm and impassioned as his own. Standing there, she tore her tappa blouse apart, and, gazing down on her bosom, longed for a knife to stab; then thumped and bruised the flesh in some agony!