"Then I think perhaps you keep your mouth more better shut," said Vaiti, walking off with a contemptuous swing in the very fall of her laced muslin skirts. And Pita of Atiu, as if in defiance of the captain, the mate, and every one else but his cousin Vaiti, pulled a mouth-organ out of his shirt and began to play it triumphantly and frantically, making a noise exactly like the buzzing of a mad bluebottle on a warm window-pane. Further, he plucked a frangipani flower out of the wreath—a good deal the worse for wear—that hung round his neck, and stuck the blossom behind his ear. Now, every one who has ever been in the Islands knows that these two actions are significant of courtship. Pita was courting Vaiti, as everybody knew—Pita, a mere deck hand, who had been taken on at wild Atiu, in the Cook Islands, because he was a relation of Saxon's dead native wife. Very handsome was Pita, very young and tall and broad-shouldered, wily and fierce like all the Atiuans, but smooth and pleasant of countenance. Were not the men of Atiu nicknamed "meek-faced Atiuans," even in the days, only a generation gone, when they were the cruellest and most warlike of cannibals and pirates?
Needless to say, Captain Saxon, who had always had "views" for Vaiti, ever since she left the Tahitian convent school that had given her such fragments of civilisation as she possessed, did not favour the compromising attentions of Pita. As for Vaiti, her father's prohibitions neither piqued her into noticing the handsome Atiuan more, nor alarmed her into favouring him less, than she found agreeable. At present there was rather more than less about the matter, because Saxon was in one of his fits of gloomy depression, and Vaiti foresaw the usual result. It was not at all likely that her father would be able to help her in her forthcoming raid. Harris she did not choose to rely on at a pinch; Gray was old; the crew were far and away too superstitious to aid in such a sacrilege as she proposed. There remained Pita, who, if he was a wild Atiuan, was at least "misinari" after a fashion, had been educated, more or less, in Raratonga, and was most certainly in love with herself.... Yes, Pita would do.
That night, when the second dog-watch had commenced, and a lew large crystal stars were just beginning to glimmer through the pink of the ocean sunset, Vaiti descended to the cabin, looked into Gray and Harris's berths to make sure that they were both on deck, and then sat down on the cushioned locker opposite her father.
"What is it?" asked Saxon, raising his heavy blue eyes. He had been sitting with his head propped in the corner of the cabin, silent as a fish, since the clearing away of tea an hour before. You might have thought him asleep, or, if you knew him intimately, drunk. He was neither; but dead and drowned things were rising up from the black sea caverns of his heart to-night, and their bones showed white and ghastly upon the desert shores of his life. So he sat silent, with his face turned to the darkening porthole and to the night that was striding down upon the sea.
Through the port he saw the shining harbour of Papeëte as it looked a week or two ago—a tall grey British war-ship lying at anchor, the Sybil's dinghy, small and crank and unclean, creeping up to the man-of-war's accommodation-ladder, himself, a weather-scarred, red-faced figure, in a worn duck suit and bulging shoes, sitting in the boat, and waiting patiently until the Governor's steam-launch should have passed in front of him and discharged its freight of visitors.
He saw the captain of the great Queen's ship standing at the top of the ladder, slight and trig and trim, all white and gold from top to toe, all smiling self-possession and cool command.
He saw ladies, immaculately coiffed and daintily shod; tall, clean, grey-moustached men following them; a cordial welcome on the deck; a flutter of light drapery and a glimpse of lounging masculine figures afterwards, framed by the great open gun-ports of the captain's cabin in the stern. They were laughing and talking, and he could hear the clink of cups and glasses. After—a long time after—he could see his own shabby little boat creeping up to the ladder; the captain, cold and business-like, and more than a little brusque, speaking to him on the deck about a certain anchorage in the Cook Islands group, concerning which he was known to have information; himself, burningly conscious of his shoes and his finger-nails, answering shortly and with some embarrassment, and feeling, of a sudden, very shabby, very broken, very old.... Was it twenty-five years, or two thousand, since the Admiral of the Fleet, and the Prince of Saxe-Brandenburg, with half the mess of his own regiment, had dined on board his biggest yacht at Cowes a week before—it—happened? ... Now a mere commander left him standing on the deck, and spoke to him like a native or a dog. Well, what did it all matter to a dead man? Was not his name of those days carved on the family monument in letters half an inch deep, and was not he, Edward Saxon, whom nobody knew, out here in the living death of the farthermost islands, a thousand miles from anywhere? ...
"Father," said Vaiti.
"What is it?" answered Saxon's voice dully, as befitted a dead man.
"The wind is rising at last," said the girl in Maori, "We shall be off the island by morning. Will you, or will you not, go with me into this cave of death, where I have told you that I shall find what is worth finding?"