Sestrina: A romance of the South Seas

by A. Safroni-Middleton

Than this lone isle’s green palms and coral bars?

That I—lost on a vast untravelled sea—

Might stand astonished staring at the stars!

EIGHT years had passed since the winds had drifted Sestrina and the lepers into the vast solitude of that isle in the Pacific Ocean. Even on that lonely island world, Time’s flight had wrought wondrous changes.

On the elevation, just above the shore reefs by the lagoons, stood five lumps of coral stone which had been fashioned so as to resemble crosses. It was the tiny necropolis where the lepers, Lupo, Rohana, Steno and their two blind comrades lay asleep with all their mortal desires and sins in the dust under the waving palms.

The years had changed Sestrina from a slim maid into the fully developed beauty of womanhood. The hot tropical suns had tanned her body into a deeper olive hue. Clad in the carefully woven raiment of tropical tappa and silky fibres, she looked as wildly beautiful as the rich tropical loveliness of the isle itself. Deferred hope and the agony of years, all that she had suffered during her castaway life on the isle, had written the poetry of sorrow on her brow. Her full dark eyes had become mournful-looking, but shone with a deeper light than they had done in her girlhood. In all the time that had passed since she had first set foot on that desert isle, only one schooner had appeared on the horizon, bringing a great hope to her heart. The cleverly weaved red and green tappa-cloth signal-flag, made by Hawahee’s hands, and which still flew on top of the dead palm that stood out on the promontory’s edge, had streamed to the breezes, calling to the skylines—in vain! The schooner’s sails had faded away, leaving a deeper loneliness in Sestrina’s heart. She had watched it tacking, creeping along the dim blue skyline till the sails faded into the sunset’s glow, taking her dreams and passionate yearnings out to the great world that she but dimly remembered.

Time had completely metamorphosed her memory of the past. Her childhood’s knowledge of the great world of men and women had been slowly transmuted into a tiny isle set in surrounding, infinite seas, a universe of stars, a lonely tropic sun, dim horizons, and Hawahee’s melancholy eyes. Her Bible, and the books of life that she read, were the moods of the winds, the seas and changing seasons. She saw her passions blossom in the fiery crimson of the flamboyant trees, her purest thoughts in the delicate spiritual flowers of gossamer whiteness; her soul’s longing shone in the earnest stars, and her vanity in the mirroring blue lagoons. All the great wonder, terror and mystery of the unknown came to her on the voice of the winds when the ramping storms and typhoons swept those sailless seas. Nature’s multitudinous twinings, leafy arms of green and dark-branched broodings, made the grand æolian harp that played to the wind’s shifting fingers, filling her soul with religious fervour. The stars shining by night through those sombre boughs were, to her, the glittering thoughts of the mighty dark-branched brain of some heathen god. But dawn brought the eternal rose of beauty in the radiant birth of the sunrise as she sat on the shore reefs, piping on her flute while the flowers danced and the birds sang those long, long thoughts that floated in the haunting mists of her mind. Her sorrow, all the anguish and tears of years, had imparadised the skyline of her memory, shining like an everlasting rainbow by virtue of the sunlight of her days of pale resignation.

Sestrina had become a pagan! Yet—though her life had been slowly transmuted into a conscious dreaming of the vast mystery of the universe—she was still full of sweetness and light as she went about her domestic duties. As she stood by the shore palms, she glanced with satisfaction down at the heap of shellfish in her hand-woven basket. Then she walked up the soft silvery sands till she came to her homestead, a thatched hut which stood in the shades of the valley’s high breadfruit trees and palms.

“Sestra!” said a man’s voice as she lifted a calabash and poured water into the big shell-pot wherein she had placed the fish, and which was hanging over the small domestic hearth-fire.

It was Hawahee who spoke. The hand of time had also toiled on his brow, leaving faint lines and all the poetry of grief which ennobles the human countenance. Through living on fresh shellfish, and through constant bathings in the ocean that encircled his home, he had stayed the ravages of the terrible scourge with which he was afflicted. He was still young and handsome.