IV
The prayer was a long one. It lasted, in various forms, for more than a year. At dawn, she would wake, and find offerings of fruit and flowers left at her door by her faithful worshiper; and often she would talk with him on the beach, telling him of her own country, about which he daily thirsted to hear more; for the more he learned, the more he seemed to share her own exile. Music, too, they shared, that universal language whose very spirituality is its chief peril; for it is emotion unattached to facts, and it may mean different things to different people; so that you may accompany the sacking of cities by the thunders of Wagner, or dream that you see angels in an empty shrine. Sometimes, in the evening, Rua would steal like a shadow from the shadows around her hut, where he had been waiting to see her pass, and would beg her to play the music of her own country. Then she would sing, and he would stand in the doorway listening, with every pulse of his body beating time, and one brown foot tapping in the dust.
One night, she had been wandering with Tinovao and Amaru by the lagoon, in which the reflected stars burned so brightly that one might easily believe the island hung in mid-heaven. She looked at them for a long time; then, with her arms round the two girls, who understood her words only vaguely, she murmured to herself: "What does it matter? What does anything matter when one looks up there? And life is going ... life and youth."
She said good-night to her friends, and laughingly plucked the red hibiscus flower from behind the shell-like ear of Tinovao as they parted. When she neared her door, a shadow stole out of the woods, and stood before her on the threshold. His eyes were shining like dark stars, the eyes of a fawn. "Music," he pleaded, "the music of your country."
Then he saw the red flower that she wore behind her ear, exactly as Tinovao had worn it. He stared at her, as Endymion must have stared at Diana among the poppies of Latmos, half frightened, half amazed. He dropped to his knees, as on that night when she had saved him. He pressed his face against her bare feet. They were cold and salt from the sea. But she stooped now, and raised him.
"In my country, in our country," she said, "love crowns a man. Happy is the love that does not bring the woman to the dust."
There followed a time when she was happy, or thought herself happy. It must have lasted for nearly seven years, the lifetime of that dancing ray of sunlight, the small son, whom she buried with her own hands under a palm-tree. Then Rua deserted her, almost as a child forsakes its mother. He was so much younger than herself, and he took a younger wife from among the islanders. When she first discovered his intention, Rachel laughed mockingly at herself, and said—also to herself, for she knew that she had somehow lost the power to make Rua understand her,—"Have you, too, become an advanced thinker, Rua?"
But Rua understood that it was some kind of mockery; and, as her mockery was keeping him away from his new fancy, and he was an undisciplined child, he leapt at her in fury, seized her by the throat, and beat her face against the ground. When she rose to her feet, with the blood running from her mouth, he saw that he had broken out two of her teeth. This effectively wrecked her beauty, and convinced him, as clearly as if he had indeed been an advanced thinker, that love must be free to develop its own life, and that, in the interests of his own soul, he must get away as quickly as possible. Thereafter, he avoided her carefully, and she led a life of complete solitude, spending all her days by the little grave under the palm-tree.
She lost all count of time. She only knew that the colors were fading from things, and that while she used to be able to watch the waves breaking into distinct spray on the reef, she could only see now a blur of white, from her place by the grave. She was growing old, she supposed, and it was very much like going to sleep, after all. The slow pulse of the sea, the voice of the eternal, was lulling her to rest.