“Falani, you will forget me,” she persists, “and marry some white woman, as Mr Leason did. And you swore so often you would never leave me. Only a week ago you swore it.”
This being true is too much for his patience.
“You will make me tire of you, Finau, if you talk foolishly, and get angry. I have told you the truth. In six months I shall be back, and then we will be married by the missionary—that is, if you are good, and do not talk foolishly.”
This has the desired effect of making Finau cry; and as even a German copra-trader has a soft spot in his composition, a sudden impulse of tenderness and remorse makes the man take her in his arms and try to soothe away her trouble. For the moment he almost realises that this woman has loved him as he never deserved to be loved,—that she has not even shrunk from death itself for his sake, and that in return she only asks him to let her go on serving him; and for all this he is about to stab her in the back, to lie to her, to desert her. Is it too late?
So they sit in the steamy air, laden with the hot smell of rotting fruit, while the laughter and shouts float up to them from the wharf, and he, half wavering, caresses her, and whispers comforting promises into her ear.
But the shrill whistle of the steamer pierces the air, drowning all other sounds in its own vulgar yell. The spell is broken. Kraft has paid his passage, and the steamer is going. All the rest is folly, born of an over-tender heart.
“Finau, I must go!” he cries; “give me the box, and say good-bye, or I shall be late.”
“Oua leva” (wait), she says, and running to the box under pretence of rearranging its contents, she strips off her scented neckerchief, and buries it among the clothes. “He shall take my shadow with him,” she murmurs; and then turning to him, she asks him to throw his handkerchief into the sea when the steamer sails, “to be your shadow with me.” She is so earnest about this little superstition that, half laughing, he promises.
The whistle blows again, a hurried kiss, and he goes off, box on shoulder, while she, stifling her sobs, walks wearily to the hill above the harbour and sits down, covering her head with her vala.
She sees the mate drive the crowd of natives over the gangway on to the wharf, the hawser cast off, and she sees Falani distinctly leaning over the rail and laughing with the other white men with whom he has just parted. She watches him as the steamer glides down the harbour. Now he will throw his handkerchief, and be bound irrevocably to come back to her. Now, surely, he will throw it. What, not yet? Ah! he is waiting till the vessel nears the point. She stands up in her eagerness. “He must throw it,—he promised!” she cries aloud in her agony. But the vessel is half behind the point now—a moment more and she is out of sight—and he never threw it: so he is gone for ever, and will never return to Finau as long as they both shall live.