So intensely sad was her face that I instinctively leaned forward and stared. In a moment the song ceased. The girl had observed me; she half turned, as if to fly. It must have been some expression of my face that made her stay, look again and respond half fearfully to my beckoning.
I think the memory, the pathos of that scene will remain with me till I die.
The escapee’s eyes filled with tears as Waylao threw her arms about that frail, possibly lately lashed form, for Waylao understood more than I did the plight of those wretched derelicts who escaped and drifted as stowaways across the Pacific from Noumea. Either they came to those parts, hunted men—seldom women—or their skeletons were discovered in the hold of some ship wherein they had hidden their trembling frames too well.
So did romance come to me in its saddest, most terrible form. Nothing, not even the sorrow of Calvary, could outdo that tragedy, that picture of man’s inhumanity and mighty injustice to those in his power.
With all the impulsiveness of a boy’s wild desire to help the stricken, to plead for the beauty of romance in woman, I knelt at that altar of misery.
It may sound like a page from a drama that never saw the light of day. I only wish it were a fevered dream of the brain. But it was real enough, though it certainly sounds sufficiently mad to be untrue in this world of inscrutable mockery, where man lifts his eyes piously, and where all his prayers begin or end with “God have mercy upon me!”
God! I’ve done glorious mission work in my time.
We took the poor escapee into the forest depth so that she might be safe from the eyes of the gendarmes, the hunters, the officials of the calaboose near Tai-o-hae, and she stood trembling beside us, beneath those giant bread-fruits. Even those old, insensate trees seemed to bend tenderly over that hunted convict girl.
After she had discovered that we were friends and had listened to our sympathy, a beautiful expression, an almost indescribable splendour lit up her tearful face. She looked like some fallen angel: the earnest stars seemed to shine in her eyes as she stood before us, the dirty strip of blue ribbon fluttering at her beautiful throat as she wept, and told us all—yes, even the crime of passion which had caused her to be exiled from her La Belle France.
As we listened to her story, we three huddled together in that forest, the scents of the damp glooms were stirred by the creeping zephyrs, as though the mighty brooding heart of Nature was in sympathy with all we heard and with unseen fingers touched us, and sighed the breath from her dead forest flowers upon us, as I sat there with those two beautiful castaways, one a child of the South, and one from far-away civilisation.