“Not liking to be left out of the ensemble, as the assembled wives, girls, and servants beat their hands in a kind of chant,—I saw that the Britisher had taught them all that song, for they chanted it in a rather effective manner,—I took my flute from my breast pocket and commenced to play. It must have been an incongruous sight to see and to hear as that disgusting relic of our race squatted there, a grin on his blubbery jowls, as Deny, with lifted hand, sang and made eyes at the passable-looking girls of the royal retinue, and I stood, maestro fashion, my helmet hat bashed against the low roof, performing on the flute. It was whilst this quartette was in progress that the improbable occurred. Suddenly the row of tattooed Fijians, who were huddled by the door of some inner compartment, all moved as though to make way for someone. The tappa curtains were drawn aside. I stopped my flute-playing; Deny opened his mouth and gasped aloud. There she stood, her pale blue eyes open with astonishment as she stared wistfully, like a shadowy-figure in a South Sea picture, on Deny and then on me. It was Yoraka’s, that loathsome British criminal’s, daughter!
“To my eyes, which had never before seen a pure-blooded white girl in native costume, expressing all the innocent abandonment of natural life in the pose of her figure and movement of her shapely limbs, she seemed the most impressively beautiful example of charming womanhood that my eyes had ever beheld. She was sun-tanned from head to feet, as though she had been varnished by some artist with a wondrous mixture that resembled a Cremona violin’s hue mixed up with sunlight. The picturesque raiment of threaded fern grass that swathed her thighs, like a loin-cloth, increased the beauty of the picture of that wild white girl who stood there before us. She looked like the pictures I have seen of Queen Boadicea. Her hair was a bright golden-bronze hue, like that deep shade seen in the sunset’s aftermath, her rough, loosened tresses falling down to the exquisitely curved shoulders, while one or two stray locks fell in front, rippling down over her bosom to the tasselled raiment that fell in modest modulation to her knees. I had a suspicion that she had been told we were there in that palavana, that she had peeped through the tappa-curtains and seen us, and had then gone and arranged her secret toilet to please our eyes. I discovered afterwards that the hue of her hair and the length of her tresses were the pride of the whole tribe, the chiefs giving cattle to Yoraka that they might breathe through her tresses, and so treating her as a goddess!
“I think Deny’s heart went out to her at once. However, I know that when the strains of the flute mingled with the notes of the Scottish songs he sang that night, it was very hard to know which sounded the most beseeching!
“That which struck me forcibly as I scanned the girl’s clear eyes and fine brow was, that she should really be the daughter of the chimpanzee-like debauchee squatting there before us. But, recalling to mind the trite old saying, ‘’Tis a wise child that knows its own father,’ I gave the girl the benefit of the doubt; nor did this opinion of mine cast a slur on the mother, for by the character of the man before us, none could blame her for bestowing her secret affections on another than her ‘rightful lord.’ I confess that the girl had her failings. But they seemed only some natural expression of the innate instincts that are prominent in all the actions of her more fortunate, civilized white sisters. For, as I watched, it was quite evident that, notwithstanding Deny’s boisterous manner as he ogled her, twirling his moustache and assuming a massive gallantry that I had not thought him capable of, she favoured his advances; indeed, she actually returned with interest his admiring looks as her eyes roamed up and down his giant figure, that swayed, drunken-wise, before her.
“‘He! he! nicer girl—eh?’ leered Yoraka, as he observed Deny’s infatuated glances.
“Then that heathen scoundrel lurched forward and pinched Sanga’s leg again, putting on such an unholy look as he gazed on her, that I felt like giving him a punch under the ear. I’ve seen Chinamen, Niggers, Kaffirs, Turks, all grades of followers of Mohammed, Borneo cannibals, and what not, gaze on young native girls, but the look in that degenerate Britisher’s eyes beat them all for downright wickedness. He looked like some personification of all the guile, hypocrisy, power, indescribable lust, and bestiality of white man, that have blighted native life in these isles, crammed into one skull, gleaming forth from one pair of terrible eyes, drivelling and chuckling from one mouth, expressed on one iron brow, voiced by one filthy, fang-like tongue.
“Deny’s dead now. I won’t say a word of the further doings of that night. He’d been down with fever too; the weather was terribly muggy into the bargain, and that does put a thirst into a man. And, moreover, notwithstanding the hideousness of all Yoraka’s actions, and the fright that we both confessed we felt afterwards, through being in his power, there was something fascinating in the novelty of it all. I think it took twelve high chiefs to carry Deny across the rara (space) and lay him down in the hut that had been allotted to him, Sanga, and my humble self.
“I rubbed my eyes in the morning, wondering if I had dreamed it all. It was no dream though; there was no mistaking the reality of the wild bird’s song that sang in the mountain banyans just outside our hut door. Besides, there sat little Sanga, rubbing her sleepy eyes, and Deny was as real as real could be, as he sat there with his head in a large calabash of cold water, cooling his fevered skull!
“We had no sooner eaten the food that the natives brought to us than we were outside in the clear morning air. Our great desire was to see that white girl again.
“‘We must get her away from this hell of a hole,’ said Deny, turning his eyes away from me as though he felt a bit ashamed of himself. Then he said: ‘You got a bit rocky last night, didn’t you, pal?’