None answered that gaze of hers. We all knew that her father had just gone staggering home, blind drunk, crying like a demented man.
Even Queen’s Vaekehu’s valet de chambre (a ferocious-looking Marquesan who haunted the shanty, cadging drinks) looked sorry for the girl.
Though it was years ago, I recall the sympathetic comments of those men, the look in their eyes, expressing all they felt.
That picture of astonishment, the breathless stare of admiration on the upturned, bearded faces, resembled some wax-work show, a kind of Madame Tussaud’s fixed up in a South Sea grog shanty. But I know well enough that those unshaved, apparently villainous-looking men gazed on the avatar of their lost boyhood’s dreams. So grim did they look, all mimicked in the huge ship’s mirror as they still held their rum mugs half-way between their lips, staring through the wreaths of smoke, in perfect silence.
“Gott in Himmel!” said the Teuton from Samoa.
“Mon Dieu!” said the awestruck gendarme from Calaboose Hill.
“A hangel form!” gasped Grimes, as the three swarthy Marquesan women, who wore loose ridis and had no morals, grinned spitefully to see such admiration for a white girl.
“Did you ever!” sighed several more, as I laid the fiddle down and felt a warm flood thrill me from head to foot.
Pauline vanished as swiftly as she came. Went off, I suppose, to seek her drunken parent.
I half wondered if I had dreamed that glimpse of a white girl, a glorious creation here in the South Seas, by the awful beach near Tai-o-hae. It seemed impossible.