She clutched the figure of the Virgin that was at her breast and cried: “O Mary! Mother! O Christ, I have forsaken you!”
In the anguish of her soul’s remorse she crossed herself and fell on her knees. She called the name of Father O’Leary, he who had taught her from childhood.
“Father, Father, I had doubted you, and all the beauty of my childhood’s dreams.”
As Waylao reached this point in her terrible narrative the old priest looked into the half-blind eyes of the girl, and touched her brow with his lips. I saw his hot tears fall on to her face, and half fancied that we stood before the dead who had inherited heaven, so beautiful was the look in the stricken eyes of the girl as the old priest blessed her. Outside the homestead mission-room the stars were shining, and the seas were beating over the barrier reefs. Still the lips of her who was as one dead spoke on.
The white sea moon crept over the silent sea. Its reflected light bathed with silver the palms of that solitary isle. Only a breath of wind came up the shore and stirred the dark-fingered leaves as at last Waylao slept.
The sleeping girl’s bosom moved to the sad music of mortality’s soothing kindness: two small hands were pressing vigorously and a tiny mouth was toiling away for all it was worth at those soft, warm wells of nourishing sorrow.
Dawn struck the east. The day broadened. Waylao lifted her baby up in her arms. It blinked at the light of its first mortal day—and wailed.
Did she, in the ecstasy of a mother’s first inquisitiveness, peer closely at the small face of that little stranger, the stranger who had come as the natural guest of her sorrow—and sin?
She looked fiercely at it as it wailed as though it pleaded forgiveness for that which was not its fault.
A mad desire to live came to her. She rushed down to the shore. Nothing but the blue encircling sky-lines met her hopeless gaze. Her only chance of being rescued was by some schooner being blown out of its course by the terrific typhoons that sometimes swept those hot, unruffled seas. She found a large cave by the shore, not far from the small promontory. Near its gloomy entrance stood a belt of screw-pines and a clump of coco-palms. By the time sunset had once more blazed the western seas she had piled up a barrier of hard coral and rock at the cavern’s low doorway. For in there the wind rushed from the sea, gave a hollow moan and ran out again.