The Hawaiian maid on the shore, standing by Waylao, forced a smile to her lips, as she, too, watched. It was an unselfish attempt to reassure her companion, to let her know whatever sight met her eyes was a sight of deepest sorrow and nothing that could harm her.
When the chief returned to his comrade’s side, they both whispered together and glanced at Waylao. Then the strange girl took the dead child from the exile’s arms and laid it gently in the fern grass by the lagoon. They spoke to Waylao in soft, musical speech. Seeing she did not understand their language, they said:
“Wahine, you lone? No ones else belonga here?”
The Hawaiian girl clutched the chief’s arm with fright as they both awaited Waylao’s reply. But when she answered, “I am quite alone, no one else is on this island but me,” those silent listeners seemed endowed with renewed life.
They gazed at each other with delight streaming from their eyes. The chief lifted his hand to heaven and shouted some deep thanksgiving to Lani. The intense misery of the woman’s eyes vanished. She turned to Waylao, took her hand and pressed it impulsively. Suddenly she withdrew it and gave a start of terror. For the chief had looked on the Hawaiian girl and reminded her of the curse that lay upon them. But Waylao, who had never thought to hear the music of human voices again, forgot her own grief.
But who were they? What were those terrible figures huddled on the deck of the hulk? Instinct told her that some terrible sorrow had drifted across the sea, some sorrow that was tragically human. That stricken crew had not come to hurt the girl. They would not wilfully harm a hair of her head. They had drifted out of the hells of misery. They were the stricken of the earth. They had escaped from the tomb where the buried still have memories of lovers, husbands, wives and children—yes, the tomb of God’s utterest pestilential misery, where the dead still curse, still dream that they hear the laughter of other days moaning in the wind-swept pines, on the shores of beetling, wave-washed crags.
They came from where the dead lay in their shrouds and could hear, with envy, these toiling spades as their comrades were buried by night—comrades, twice dead, released, at last, from their loathsome, rotting corpse, life’s hideous, bloated face, gaping, fleshless mouth and bulged, half-blind eyes.
O tragical truth! The handsome chief, the beautiful, clinging woman and the stricken crew of the hulk were escapes—fugitives from the dreadful lazaretto on Molokai, the leper isle.
The Hawaiian chief and his lover—for such they were, though stricken with the scourge—had no sign as yet visible on their faces.
The sympathetic look that Waylao gave them, the pleasure she revealed at their presence, touched their hearts. It was long, long ago since human beings had welcomed their presence.