“Hark!” said Sestrina; and as she and Hawahee listened they distinctly heard the sea winds moan as they swept through the rows of shore palms.
“Aue! Lo mao sapola!” said Hawahee, as he beckoned to Rohana and Lupo.
The next moment the lepers had rushed to the raft. Then the crash came. The Belle Isle had struck broadside on the reefs in rather deep water. In a second the great seas came ramping over the side like huge monsters with slashing mains, crashed on deck and then leapt right over to the port side. The lepers had just managed to cling on to the raft when it was washed away over the side, going with ease over the rail, which was level with the seas. Sestrina, who had expected the schooner to run softly on the beach and so allow them all to paddle safely ashore, or at least go in the schooner’s broken boat, gave a scream in her fright as the seas crashed on board. The terrific tumult, the swaying and moaning and snapping of the spars, and the chaotic ramping of the foaming waters around her, made Sestrina think that a typhoon had struck the Belle Isle without the slightest warning. The next minute Hawahee had clutched the frightened girl in his arms. A tremendous swell wave struck the Belle Isle—they were both washed away.
“Have no fear, Wahine,” said Hawahee, as he recovered his breath, and held the girl’s head above the water, placing one arm under her body. “Let go, quick, Wahine!” he gasped, as Sestrina in her terror gripped his swimming arm. Again they were engulfed, a sea passing right over their heads. Sestrina thought her last moment had come. She gave a despairing cry as she came to the surface, and then prepared to go under again. It seemed to her that Hawahee had let go his hold as a great wave engulfed them, and she fell down, down, into the blackness of the ocean. Her consciousness began to fade. She felt herself being slowly dragged along. She imagined that she was at the bottom of the Pacific and that some dark, terrible, silent form was dragging her along, and at the same time placing soft arms round her throat in an attempt to strangle her. Sestrina’s delight can be imagined when she opened her eyes and discovered Hawahee frantically pulling her up the wave-ridden beach. She was saved! Sestrina, who had swallowed a deal of sea-water, immediately lost consciousness. Hawahee lifted her in his arms and carried her up the beach. In a few moments he had gathered a heap of the dry, soft, drift seaweed scattered about the higher shore, and had placed her on a soft couch under the palms. For a long time he rubbed her hands and did all he could to revive the insensible girl.
“O Kuahilo! O Pelé!” he cried as he appealed to his old gods, and then stared again on the girl’s pallid face that looked pathetically beautiful lying there upturned, just visible in the moonlight which streamed through the palms.
In his despair he unloosed her bodice. “Ora li Jesu!” he cried, as be appealed to the new God of the mission-rooms, and softly rubbed away at the girl’s bosom, just above the heart. Just as he was thinking that Sestrina had succumbed to her long submersion in the water, she opened her eyes. In his delight, Hawahee rose from his knees, and lifting his hands towards the sky, mumbled some strange chant-like prayer to his heathen deities. For, as is often the case with the Hawaiians who have been converted to Christianity, Hawahee in his sorrow and great joy had instinctively fallen back to the older faith, had appealed to the gods of his childhood. With infinite care and tenderness Hawahee pulled the folds of the girl’s bodice together again and arranged her clothing. Sestrina’s wakeful brain noticed these things, and she looked into Hawahee’s face and smiled.
“All is well; you are safe, Wahine,” he muttered. Then he left her and hurried down to the beach to see how it fared with his comrades. No sooner was he out of sight than Sestrina sat up and stared around her. Her brain was the swift-seeing, imaginative kind. As she looked towards the distant moonlit seas and heard the palms sighing over her head, a cruel flash of intense realisation came to her.
“’Tis an isle where no one lives. I am cast away, lost for ever. I will never see him or those I love again. Royal! come to me! Claircine, dear old Claircine, where are you?” In the bitterness of her thoughts her mind reverted to Père Chaco. “O Père Chaco, what have I done that this should happen to me? ‘As we sow, so shall we reap,’ you said to me. O Père Chaco, have mercy on me! What have I sown?” And as the miserable girl wailed and reflected, she stared over her shoulder in fright at the seas as they rushed up the beach. Then a great weariness came to her brain. In the misery and confusion of her senses she began to think that she was haunting the realms of some nightmare from which she must soon awaken. But the terrors of reality soon presented themselves to her. For she looked along the shore and saw a tall figure dragging helpless bodies out of reach of the waves. It was Hawahee doing his best to save his comrades from the ocean. Out of the nine lepers only five were saved—Rohana, Lupo, Steno, and two blind men. Hawahee had found them huddled on the shore, quite exhausted. He had swiftly dragged them higher up the beach and placed them in a comfortable spot in the thick grass and fern by the shore’s sheltering palms. The bodies which Sestrina had seen Hawahee dragging from the sea were dead. In a few moments the Hawaiian had placed them in a silent spot by the high reefs ready for burial. Then he came back to Sestrina’s side.
“Wahine, you have sorrow on your face, and there is nothing to grieve over now if you have true faith in your White God, the same as I have in my country’s gods.” So spoke Hawahee, but for all his kind words and great mental effort to cheer Sestrina, he was weak and ill and, giving way to his sorrow, prostrated himself on the shore and wept.
“I will be brave since you have been so good and brave yourself,” whispered Sestrina, as she gazed on the bowed head of the strange semi-savage man beside her. Hawahee at once recovered his composure. He hung his head like a big child for a moment as though he felt shame that Sestrina should have seen his tears.