My immediate recollections are centred on the occasion when, with the help of Grimes, I was building a little outhouse for Father O’Leary. It was near his mission-room, which, by the way, adjoined his homestead. During the erection of this wooden building I became very pally with the priest. Up to that period I had looked upon priests as unapproachable mortals who lingered between the border-line of mortality and the Promised Land. To my pleasant surprise, I found the Father a human being of intellectual calibre. He knew the hearts of men and women to an almost infallible degree. Nor was this to be wondered at, for his old confessional box had held what strange types of mortals, what strange tales of hope and remorse had he heard there!
The experiences of his profession seemed to have gifted him with second sight and imbued his heart with extreme sympathy for erring mankind. Yes, he toiled on in that temple of thought, a temple of spiritual faith he had slowly built up, as it were, wall by wall, and turret by turret, round the sorrow of his mortal dreams. Just think of it—the multitudes of disenchanted native children who had crept out of the forest depths to fall and confess at his feet! What hearts full of remorse, what benighted lovers, what hapless wives, youths, girls with their cherished dreams, quaking, had come to him after passion had burnt their converted souls!
I myself had seen them arrive: dethroned kings and guilty queens, aged, tattooed chiefs on tottering feet, shaking with fear of the wrath of the great white God, after some wild reversion to the heathen orgies in the old amphitheatres by the mountains. I had seen the Father put forth his hands to hold up the stricken forms as they appeared before him—tawny old chiefs swaying like dead men with the terror they felt—ere they entered that confessional box.
For lo! a native once converted to Christianity takes to it seriously, believes implicitly all that he professes to believe but cannot adhere to.
I have seen old chiefs and women, girls too, come out of that confessional box as though they had just been given everlasting life. The tears all vanished as they leapt off into the forest, or stood on their heads with delight just behind the mission-room coco-palms. There’s no doubt about it, but that box was the supreme court of true justice and glad truth. In there terrible dramas were unrolled to the Father’s ears. He was the solitary judge; nor was he hard in the sentences that he meted out to the culprits, for alas! he expiated for all their crimes with prayers from his own soul.
But to revert to my experiences. I was digging away at post-holes and feeling down in the mouth (for I do not tell all my reflections and troubles of those times), when Waylao stepped out of the shade of the pomegranates. In a moment I perceived that something was wrong with her. Her eyes stared wildly. She did not respond to my cheery salutations in her usual way.
As the Father stepped out of his mission-room she nearly fell into his arms. I saw her embrace the old fellow as a daughter would a father. “What’s the matter, my child?” he said, as he noticed her hysterical manner. I threw my spade aside. The knowledge that the girl was in trouble upset me. I could get no further than wondering at the meaning of it all as I heard her weeping violently in that silent, sacred wooden enclosure—the confessional box.
I heard the girl’s sighs as she ceased weeping, and the Father’s solemn voice as he gave advice and absolution. I suppose Waylao was a true daughter of Eve, and only told the Father half the truth. I know she did not tell all, otherwise things would have taken a very different course. Though the Father knew it not, Waylao had become the wife of a sensualist.
So much I discovered long after. I did not know then how some of the native girls and white girls got married in the South Seas. I had heard a good deal of chaff, as I thought, about the ways of the Chinese and the Indians, but I little dreamed how true it all was. As it turned out, Waylao had married an Indian—which means that she had gone through a midnight ceremony which was as follows. A deluded girl would come under the influence of some emigrant hawker from Calcutta, or the Malay Peninsula, usually a man with a smile that would have brought a fortune to a Lyceum tragedian, for it was the breathing essence of limelight sadness and sensual longing. One can imagine how such a man would trade on a girl’s infatuation. It was the custom to lure them into the forest and repeat the following wedding service, which is the Mohammedan marriage prayer:—“There is no deity but Mohammed, and Mohammed is the one prophet of Allah. I who now kneel before thee, O man, renounce the heathen creed called Christianity, I, such an one’s daughter, by the grace of my heart and the testimony of my virtue, give myself up to thee body and soul for life and life everlasting.”
After getting the maid to repeat the foregoing drivel, the Mohammedan would murmur mystical Eastern phrases. The deluded girl then thought the great romantic hero of her life had blessed her with faithful love. Her lips met those of the sensualist. The light of fear died away from the child-girl’s eyes as she clung to her prize. Well might Adam and Eve have sighed in their graves!