Early the next day I hurried back to my two sad fugitives in their hut by the sea. Ere I had left them the night before I had made them promise not to stray away from that spot.
It would have been better if I had broken my promise and gone straight to old Lydia and told her of Waylao’s whereabouts. But as usual in this funny world, I managed to do the wrong thing at exactly the right moment.
So strange and sad had been the happenings of the previous night that I half fancied I had dreamed of Waylao and that hut in the forest and the convict girl. That morning I went to Mrs Ranjo and got her to lend me two blankets. “I’ve got an awful chill on the lungs,” I wailed plaintively, in order to satisfy the bar-woman’s curiosity, and departed for the forest with a parcel of dainty things.
When I arrived at that little hut by the mountains, there they still were, huddled together, sisters of grief in each other’s arms. It is hard to know, even now, which was the greatest sinner—Mohammed in the South Seas, or “Christianity’s” strange justice in the civilised world.
I still recall the earnest eyes of that grateful convict girl as I crept into that little shelter.
Ah, God! it’s hard to have been a missionary at the altar of romance and beauty, to have reaped so little reward for so much sorrow. The milk of human kindness is indeed diluted and hard to digest. That same night Waylao and I listened to the wretched escapee’s story. She told us why she had been transported for life, but it is too sad a tale to tell here. She was a Parisian girl of superior family, and had suffered for twelve months in the galleys and in the hideous chain gangs of Noumea ere she escaped. She had stowed away in the hold of a small schooner that called with stores at Noumea. Friendly sailors had connived to let her slip ashore unperceived at Nuka Hiva a few days before Waylao and I met her.
As we sat under the trees of that forest near Tai-o-hae, she seemed still to be a being from another world. Our sympathy, which she had probably never thought to find again on earth, inspired her with a new, half-etherealised existence. Strange as it may appear to the marble-like human beings of the great, polite world, she sang to us, swaying like to some faery creature as I played to her on my violin. Ah! What a soloist I’ve been! Who has had such fame, such success as I? What an audience was mine—when I played to immortality, to those earnest eyes, to those sad lips singing magical French songs to us. I think God must have composed the melodies we three sang together in those wide halls before the footlight of the stars, over the seas, years ago.
The native drums had already beaten the last stars in as I sat there in deep thought, pondering over it all, wondering what was the best thing to do for that poor derelict’s sake. As Waylao wept on, the lost escapee rose as though restless, as though she wished to leave us. Her restlessness had already worried me, for it was not the first time she had intimated that she must leave us. Indeed Waylao had almost promised me that she would return home for that derelict girl’s sake. For I must confess that I had traded on the miraculous appearance of that fugitive, and had sought to make her the instrument to serve two purposes.
“Waylao,” I said, “if you return to your mother, we can, with each other’s help, hide this poor castaway till such time as we can help her to get to a safer retreat.” At this Waylao had listened earnestly and, for the sake of the French convict girl, promised to go home. I was delighted at the way things were working, till that French girl rose and intimated that she must go away.
“Why go? We will look after you,” we said appealingly.