Wine-Dark Seas and Tropic Skies: Reminiscences and a Romance of the South Seas

by A. Safroni-Middleton

I even told her that I would try and get her a passage back to the colonies, so that she could once more get back to France.

She shook her head. She must never, never go back to the West; but must ever wander, lost, exiled, with her face turned to the South, hopeless, forgotten by all.

Waylao threw her arms about the girl, imploring her not to leave her. When they had wept a little while together, the convict girl gave us to understand that she wished to be left alone with her God for a while. We were strangely impressed by the earnestness of her manner. Her eyes had an indescribable look of beauty in them. The smile on her mouth almost brought the tears to my eyes. I no longer sought to look for meanings of anything. I sat there like one in a dream, as though I were doing my part on some unknown stage where some mysterious drama was being enacted.

“Mon dieu! I will come back to you again, sister,” she whispered in broken English as Waylao kissed her. She went down the little track that led to the shore. We saw her turn and wave her hand as she turned round by the buttressed banyans and then disappeared.

Waylao and I waited together. As the wind came in from the sea and wailed in the giant bread-fruits overhead, we felt strangely unhappy. At last I listened to Waylao, whose instincts were stronger than mine in fathoming the ways of her sex. I had already given up any idea of my returning to Tai-o-hae. I determined to stay with Waylao till her new-found comrade returned. We must have walked up and down that track and along the shore for hours searching, and even calling, in hopes that the fugitive would hear us and return. It was only when Waylao was almost dropping with exhaustion that I returned to the hut in the forest. Again we sat and still waited for the return of the girl who had strangely gripped us by the very heart-strings. I made a soft bed of moss and dead weeds for the homeless girl beside me. She lay down, and ere I had spread the blanket over her figure she had fallen into a deep sleep of exhaustion. Then I crept away down to the shore to smoke and with the hope of discovering our lost companion.

Ah, God! Dawn came stealing in, like hushed grey wings sending the stars home before their wide, silent sweep. Ere the first burnished flame of the sun touched the horizon the blue lagoons of the shores sprang into view. Scarcely a ripple stirred the deep waters of the Pacific as they heaved, dark and immense, like some mighty, troubled tomb, ere it gave up its dead.

Then her body came in on the tide, lifting and falling with the swell. Even the tropic birds seemed to give a low cry of sorrow as they swept away over the hushed waters. Just as the poets might say—her beautiful hair floated like a glinting mass of softest seaweed. It might have been a sleeping mermaid floating shoreward. Not in all the world of romance and reality could one imagine a sight to outrival the pathos, the ineffable sorrow of that castaway returning to the shores of earth—on the incoming tide. I can still see the South Sea chestnut-trees and the leaning bread-fruits as they stretched their tasselled, twining arms over that blue lagoon. The mirroring water shone like purest glass above the multi-coloured corals of the still depths. On she came. The blue strip of ribbon was still at her throat, like some weeping symbol, a tiny flag that had once fluttered on the visionary turrets of the enchanted castle of a girl’s dreams. There it hung, limp as the hands that had tied it there, after all the faeries had flown back to the stars. As she reclined on the surface of those deep, clear waters, her shadow was perfectly outlined, and her sleeping face sideways on her hanging arm distinctly visible beneath her. Even the strip of ribbon was imaged, and fluttered once again as the little starfish sailed right through it.

The light of man’s cruelty, the hopelessness of all the creeds, shone in her dead eyes.

So died the convict girl. Sympathy had made her brave. She had regained belief in the goodness of things, recaptured, out of misery, the lost faith of her childhood; fearlessly risked her all—gone before One who would not judge as men judge, or condemn the clay of His own fashioning.

They buried her by Calaboose Hill, in the hidden cemetery of the forest depth, where lay old Marquesan chiefs and the home-sick white men. And I, irreligious wretch that I am, went to that hallowed spot, leaned over the dead escapee and placed a little cross on the grave.