The kind old Matafas had wished her good-night, as gently as though she were their own daughter, and then retired to their sleeping compartment. Although the half-caste girl had become quite attached to those old Samoans since first they received her with open arms, the longing for her native isle and the memory of those whom she had loved when a child overcame all the trouble she felt at leaving her benefactors. She resolved to steal one of the beach canoes on the shore by the Matafas’ homestead and put out to sea on her own account, trusting to luck. It was a mad idea, full of peril, and yet as she told her tale bit by bit quietly, and relentlessly, it seemed as though all that she had set out to accomplish had come to her in the fullest measure.
Once out on those wide waters, adrift in that tiny craft, she knew she would be at the mercy of the elements. The chances of being sighted by a passing ship and taken to her native land were very remote, as one may imagine.
But what cared Waylao? She troubled not whither the winds blew her, only longed to drift away on those illimitable waters.
Without hesitation she jumped into the first canoe that she sighted, lifted the paddle and pushed the tiny craft into deep water. The tide was ebbing southward as she drifted away to sea. The dim, forest-clad shore by Mulinuu faded from her sight like a dream of yesterday. She seemed to be leaving reality for the realms of the great unreal as she glided on the bosom of that mighty tide.
Away! Away! Anywhere away, she cared not whither.
The winds of heaven came down; they seemed to come to caress, to respond to the vague wishes of the stricken girl. Their caressing, shifting fingers touched her hair and fevered brow. Ineffable peace breathed languor into her brain, and she slept. No mortal pen can tell the dreams of that castaway girl as the sentinel night stared with a million million eyes on to those waters of the Pacific.
A faint flush brightened the east—daybreak was coming. The stars took hasty flight down the encircling sky-lines as Waylao awoke.
Dawn, like a mighty river’s multitudinous flood of infinite colour, swept into that vast, hollow vault as the first pang of the new day’s birth commenced. Crimson, splashed with lines of saffron and green, climbed, glimmered, flickered and flamed as they touched and fired the lines of mist on the eastern horizon, while far to the south-west the last flock of stars took frightened flight.
The birth of that mighty splendour broadened till the gold-flashing eye of day looked over the blue horizon. Nothing but the vast azure circle of infinite water was in sight, only the frail castaway, a stricken girl adrift, fleeing from wrath, the hatred of outraged virtue.
The very heavens seemed to assume a serious mood. The eye of day stared with magnificent heat from its unlidded socket of all the sky. Old Mrs Matafa’s hands had toiled divinely for the coming events of Time unborn, for out of the measures of her weaving fingers happened that which her soul had no hint of in her wildest dreams, as she knitted and knitted, for lo! the perishing castaway ceased appealing to the dumb sky and drew the laced folds of that old shawl over her sun-scorched head. But for the protection of that old shawl the girl would certainly have perished under the blaze of that brassy sky.