“Your wahine?” said one pretty little maid as she put her finger to her coral-hued lips and grinned.
“No,” I said, as I shook my head, and then at finding that Waylao was not my wife, they gazed with deeper interest.
“You after Marama? She belonger you? Runs away from you? You love, she no love you?”
To please those pretty Fijian beauties, I placed my hand on my heart and sighed. I shall never forget the great murmur that went up from that flock of dusky mouths, or the gaze of those dark eyes that gleamed at the thought of some romance in the arrival of the travelling maid, her disappearance—and then my coming on the scene. Directly those old chiefs found that I was after the girl that they had befriended a few days before they became intensely excited. Up they jumped like mighty puppets on a string that had just been violently pulled by some hidden humorist. For a while I could not think—so loud, so plaintive were the comments of those dusky warriors.
“Me give nice Marama food!” “Me give ’ers nice coco-nut milk,” said another. So did they clamour about me, praising Waylao’s beauty. Twenty terra-cotta-coloured old hags lifted their hands to heaven and praised the glory of Waylao’s eyes. The head chief of the village prostrated himself at my feet. I knew too well that all this praise and servility to my person was because they wanted to get paid for anything that they may have done or pretended to have done for Waylao’s sake. It relieved my feelings a good deal to find that she had had their sympathy. I felt that they had, anyhow, done their best.
They were very savage-looking beings, dressed in the sulu only, tattooed and scarred by old tribal battles; but their savagery—like civilisation—was only skin deep. When they told me that several of the village youths had given up their employment on the sugar plantations so that they could paddle Waylao up the river in a canoe, I took the old chiefs and chiefesses aside and, though I had only got a pound or so, I gave them the cash that I had intended to pay the pious, Christianised Pinks.
I see by my diary that I arrived at N—— the following evening. N—— was as wild a village as one could find in this world. Besides the native population, it was inhabited by the emigrant settlers who worked on the sugar and coffee plantations. These settlers were mostly Indians from the Malay Archipelago—Singapore, Malacca, Mandalay and Martaban. Indeed the first knowledge I received that I was in the vicinity of the village was when three pretty Malabar maids jumped out of a clump of bamboos and greeted me in a strange tongue. I inquired of them the nearest way to the village that I was seeking.
One, a very pretty girl, dressed in a costume of many colours, could speak a little English. As soon as I had explained to her, she led the way, jumping along the track in front of me like a forest nymph. It was this Malabar girl who led me into the presence of the tribal chief. I think he was called the Buli. Anyway, he was a decent old fellow, could speak my language remarkably well and at once invited me into his homestead. I think this man (who was a half-caste) was a kind of missionary, and hailed from the mission station Maton Suva, down near the town of Rewa.
As soon as I described Benbow’s daughter to him, he became interested. Then I gathered from him that Waylao had arrived there in a destitute condition a week or so before. It appeared that she had made inquiries for the relatives that old Lydia had blown about so much, only to find that they had never existed, or were dead and forgotten long ago.
Waylao’s disappointment and grief had filled the Buli and the native girls with compassion. They had done their best to cheer her up, had even invited her to stop in the village. Notwithstanding this hospitality, she had suddenly disappeared from their midst two days after her arrival. On going to the hut that they had prepared specially for the castaway girl, they found that she had flown. None knew the way of her going, for she had slipped away in the dead of night. I still recall my disappointment over the result of my long tramp to N——. I must admit that I could not blame the girl for leaving that semi-pagan citadel of the forest.