I looked shoreward. The moon was hidden behind a wrack of cloud massed to the southward. Though the mist seemed to hang in perfect stillness in the heavens, it made me stare in breathless admiration as the palm-plumed mountain range and inland peaks slowly rose, grandly, silently to the skies. Like some slow-travelling castaway’s raft, the cloud wrack crept beneath the moon. It seemed only by a miracle that those jagged peaks did not burst through that crystalline dome of starry heaven.
That old hulk was not the only romantic spot in the heathen-land. By a mossy track, not far from the rugged feet of the mountains, stood that which now appears across the years to have been a phantom-like hamlet. It was a native village of tiny huts. One little, grey, wooden building stood with its verandahed front facing a gap in the granite hills.
Once or twice I went into that little homestead and played the violin, for the settler, John L——, was fond of fiddling.
I slept there one night, or tried to, but the weirdness of that little homestead gave me no sleep, for from that enchanted homestead’s window one could see the distant ocean, looking like a witch’s vast cauldron, full of boiling, bubbling, fire-flecked, silvered foam. It was a silent, windless night that I spent there, yet between the intervals of the nightingale’s “tin lan lone, loe lan ting,” up in the bread-fruit trees, came weird sounds that thrilled me with fear. It was a faint, far-off kind of rasping. It sounded as though two burglars were busily filing at the gates of some enchanted castle of dreams wherein I slept! “Sea-saw—sea-saw” it went, with a frightening sound, then silence at regular intervals. Yes, as though those two burglars, who would rob that castle of romance, paused in their nefarious work, wondering if they were heard. I was wide awake, but still the sounds continued! As a zephyr of wind came and wailed a plaintive accompaniment in the she-oaks, those mysterious raspings sounded as though a phantom violon-cellist had come to perform at the castle gate. First came the low bass’s mellow note, and then it seemed that the performer’s bow was swung over to the “A” string sounding some weird, falsetto harmonic! I leapt from bed, determined to rout the troubadour of such an unseemly hour. I discovered that, like most romantic ideas, the cause of it all was human—and even so had a low origin, for it was Pauline’s father, drunk, snoring on the verandah, while his weird comrade even in sleep followed his deep bass snore in a falsetto, obsequious-like echo.
That was the only occasion that I slept in the white girl Pauline’s home.
CHAPTER XII
Imaginary Millionaires—Pearls and Diamonds—The Fate of the Sacrilegious—Waylao’s Song—The Great Forest Festival—Grimes and I fall—So does the Idol—A Free Fight—Waylao’s Discovery
GRIMES and I returned once more to the grog shanty, penniless. We had been away on a short cruise with a South Sea crank. This particular crank—the South Seas abound with them—was after pearls. He swore that he knew for a positive fact that pearls lay in heaps at the bottom of the shore lagoons, and we believed him.
Our fortunes were made. We almost went balmy with delight as we nudged each other in the ribs and speculated with our riches in the wildest way, and, it may be guessed, we were feeling pretty down in the mouth at the failure of our hopes.