At the far end of this cavern the wretched girl made a soft couch of fern-moss and ti-leaves. It was on this bed that she crept with her child to sleep.
All night long the waves ran up the shores, tossed their wild arms and wailed by the entrance, in wonder that the silence of the old cavern, whereat they had knocked and knocked for ages, should be broken by the wail of a human child.
In imagination Father O’Leary and I saw that cave, and distinctly heard that pitiful wail. We saw the stricken girl mother creep like a wraith beneath the stars of that solitary island world of the trackless Pacific. We saw the tawny mass of ripe coco-nuts hanging as though from the kind hands of Providence. They fell at her feet, so that she might give the child nourishing milk, for grief and illness had stayed its natural food.
Day by day the child sickened. One night the flocks of parrots and strange birds—that none had ever named—suddenly rose in a screeching drove above the palms of that lonely isle. Up, up they rose, fluttering beneath the white South Sea moon. They had been disturbed from their roosts by the agonised scream of the demented human being who had so mysteriously arrived on their little world. It was Waylao’s screech that had disturbed them. Humanity had come with its manifold woes and terrors to their world, and so the very birds of the air groped and fluttered blindly with fright up in the moonlit sky.
Waylao’s child lay on the moss at the end of the cavern, its face resting on one small hand. It had turned waxen white. A wonderful expression seemed to sleep on its face. Only the still, open eyes told the girl of the indefinable something that had happened. She rushed to the shore and dipped its warm body in the sea. The limpness of the limbs and the head struck terror into her heart. She had never seen death like that before. The wandering sea-gulls hovered, came near the shore swiftly and silently, as though with curiosity, then they swerved upward, up over the island’s palms, leaving her sitting alone with the dead infant clutched to her breast.
The moon which flooded the ocean with brilliant light as it gazed on that tragic drama, that scene of the lonely seas, had also shone upon the dark-walled shadow cities of the far, far north-west, the remote wilds of advanced civilisation. It shone on the huddled masses of humanity on the streets of London, New York and Paris—lines and lines of serried dark walls and dirty, ghostly windows. Its beams had streamed into the dim hollows of how many thousands of dungeons wherein slept the huddled forms of breathing humanity, and upon the enchanted castles of happiness, on happy faces of men, women and laughing maidens. And still it shone down on that silent isle set in a silent sea, where one frail girl looked down on a dead child’s face.
But on that night Providence sent other strange beings out of those seas of mystery.
As Waylao sat motionless, paralysed with loneliness and pain, staring vacantly seaward, her heart leapt as she saw what looked like a phantom ship on the dim horizon. She almost screamed with joy as the rigging of that distant craft took definite form. The midnight breeze was hurrying in with the incoming tide, the tide that hurried the small breakers up the white beach.
Like one demented she ran about in her excitement, as nearer and nearer crept the tiny craft.
Though it was still afar off, she held the dead child above her head and screamed. Only the echoes of her own voice responded from the rocky silence of her island world.