“Jesu! God, Pelé! Père Chaco, forgive me!” Her voice echoed to the distant valley, coming faintly back as though vast night in sympathy repeated her despairing cries. Again she cried, “Save the soul of my last girlhood and bury my womanhood for ever deep in these everlasting seas!” That was Sestrina’s last appeal to the hollow seabound-night, whereof she was the lone mortality, lonely as God before creation.
Standing there, trembling in fright, she stared seaward, afraid to glance behind her. Her hands were outstretched, her face slightly raised so that her eyes could stare on the horizon’s stars. She resembled some emblematical figure of mortal despair, with lips apart, breathing a prayer to the winds of the universe. The religious emotion, the spiritual fervour of her soul had brought to her mind the magic flash which so often had inspired Hawahee and herself with the wonderful compelling power that had enabled them to send their thoughts roaming the universe. Again and again she felt the visionary beauty of that higher life which feeds the soul of sorrow and brings the light divine which enables humanity to become conscious of God and elevates the human mind. Again and again she appealed to the heavens, asking that her thoughts might fly back to the memory of her girlhood—that he might know she had been faithful in her soul to him through the years of sorrow. She inclined her head and listened. No answer came. Only the restless moaning of the ocean and the melancholy sighing of the bending shore palms whispered to her ears. And as she stood there with wide open eyes, her hair outblown, she might easily have been some terrible, but lovely representation, some symbol of all mortal sorrow, all broken hopes, all shattered dreams and blighted simple faith; some perfect chiselled goddess face telling of woman’s perfect trust and love immortal, staring with cold, bright eyes across the infinite seas! Her head fell forward; her arms dropped to her sides.
Without a cry she jumped on the raft. She cast it adrift—away, away, anywhere from that despairing loneliness! Every tree, every reef and familiar spot filled her heart with a sickening terror as she gazed shoreward for the last time. Slowly the raft drifted, and slowly the shadows of the shoreline receded. Suddenly she struggled to drift shoreward again. She beat the water with her hands for she had no paddles—she had heard a faint, sepulchral voice, coming from the deep shadows up the shore, from the direction of her silent dwelling. “O Atua, O Pelé!” it had cried—it was the aged cockatoo, Rohana, calling for his evening meal. But still the raft drifted out on the relentless tide of unchangeful circumstance. For a moment she lay prostrate in grief over her deserted bird. The next minute she had jumped to her feet, wringing her hands in despair. She placed her fingers to her ears, as slowly and mournfully came those sounds, stealing over the silence of the ocean—the temple gods had moaned aloud! The terror-stricken woman heard those solemn shell-mouths calling her; she heard some appeal in their deep, moaning voices, asking her not to desert them, leave them alone in the great solitude of the valley of the island’s lonely hills, set in endless oceans. As the raft drifted out to the silent, starlit seas, the meaning voices became fainter and fainter.
The castaway soon prayed for death. But death does not come easily to those who dwell in its shadow. She had neither food nor water on the raft. She had cast herself adrift, caring not where the mighty tides might take her.
Day came. The hot sunlight swept the silent tropic seas. Nothing but illimitable skylines surrounded the raft as it floated adrift on the burning waters—a tiny world of floating grief and misery unutterable, its whole humanity a fragile form, speechless with thirst, its whole breath of life and creed, tossing hands appealing to the great dumb, blind, earless tropic sky!
Night came. The vast tomb whereon the living dead moaned and tossed, no longer had the brassy glare of the day over it, but was covered with a mighty slab, bright with a million stars. Then the first great shadow of death crept over her brain. It came like a lovely dream, devoid of pain and anguish, a dream full of infinite hope. She even smiled as she dreamed on and thought she heard some one climbing up the grape-vine below her casement in Port-au-Prince. And as she murmured the old names, memories brought ineffable peace to her soul as the raft drifted away for ever, fading into the vastnesses of the unknown seas.
Sunset still lingered on the skyline across the English hills, as a man gazed from the latticed window of his study that faced the Channel cliffs. He was watching the idly flapping crows fade away into the crimson-streaked western glow. Why did the sight of the distant firs and dark pines and the undulating grey hills so strangely influence him?
Some one softly opened the door and said, “Would you like to see her?”
“Yes,” he responded as he turned his head and gazed on the speaker, who thereupon closed the door and departed. Then a pale-faced woman softly entered the room. She carried a swaddled child in her arms. It was Royal Clensy’s first-born.