She saw a curious scene, so nearly hidden by the growing dark that no one but an island resident could have taken in its full significance. A group of islanders, men and women stood round the door of a big white concrete house with a pandanus roof—the finest native house in the village. They seemed to be waiting for something—something both amusing and exciting, to judge by the explosions of giggles that continually burst through the dusk.
Presently the door of the house swung open with considerable violence, and a large mat was thrown out by an invisible hand. Then the door was slammed, and the giggles redoubled. Within the house now sounded something very like a struggle. There were loud sobs and cries of a shrill, theatrical kind, scuffling. banging, and a dragging sound.
"Tck, tck, tck," went the tongues of the outsiders delightedly. The interesting moment was at hand.
It came without warning. The door burst open with still more violence than before, and out upon the mat was shot by some invisible agency a very solid young woman in a white loose gown, weeping somewhat mechanically, but with much effect. She fairly rolled over with the force of the shock that had ejected her, and before she could pick herself up the door was closed once more with a slam that shook the whole house. Then the waiting group rushed upon her with cries of joy, and bore her away in their midst, singing as they went.
"A wedding," said Vaiti to herself. "It must be Mata's; that is their house. And it will be a big wedding, too. I did not know that it was to be so soon."
She fell into a fit of musing as she wandered shorewards among the leaning palms.... The palms of Niué sweep downwards to the gleaming sea like a band of lovely maidens hurrying with sweet impatience to meet their lovers on the coral shore. Of a moonlight night, when all things are possible, and nothing seems too wonderful in an air that itself is wonder, it needs but little for those white, slender stems, and tossing, plumy crowns, poised high above the shadowy beach they curve to meet, to change themselves into South Sea dryads of a new and lovely race, and rush down, at long last, upon the calling sea, where Tangaroa, the king of ocean, has his dwelling. Under the palms of Niué, when the blazing white moon has risen so high in the heavens that a perfect star of jetty shadow is rayed about the base of every tree—when the wandering sea winds are held close by the breathless spell of midnight and nothing wakes on all the lonely shore but the long, long song of the droning coral reef—under the wonderful palms of Niué, loveliest and strangest of all the islands in that dreamy world of "perilous seas and fairylands forlorn"—nothing is too strange to be true, no fancy too wild to hold, when the moon is up and the palms are alone with the sea....
Was Vaiti thinking of visionary palm-maidens and sea-foam kings as she went down the winding path to the bay, through a wondrous afterglow of russet-rose laced through with opal moonrays? Perhaps—or of kindred fancies. I who knew her cannot say, for no one ever knew her altogether. It is more likely, however, that less poetic thoughts were in her mind just then. The scene she had witnessed in the palm-grove was the usual ceremony that takes place in Niué the night before a wedding, when the friends of the bridegroom come to the house of the bride's parents, and the latter go through the symbolical form of casting her out and closing the door, so that the bridegroom's people may take her over and guard her until the wedding morning. Vaiti liked a wedding above all things (next to a funeral), and the hint of great doings on the morrow, offered by the ceremony she had witnessed, decided her to stay another day. Why not? The copra was loaded, and no rivals were in sight. Besides, she had a motive for staying—the strongest possible motive. She wanted to wear her Paris dress.
Yes, it had been acquired at last. That day in San Francisco, when she had come out of the Russian Consulate with more money in her pocket than any one of her adventures had ever brought before, she had been able to restrain herself no longer. And thereafter, in Madame Retaillaud's elegant and exclusive Parisian emporium, replete with the choicest imported wares (I quote the lady's own description of her goods), there took place a scene that is remembered to the present day by those of Madame Retaillaud's young ladies who survived the earthquake year.
Vaiti, dressed in one of her waistless muslin gowns, with a broad-leafed island hat on her head, a long-bladed sheath-knife stuck quite visibly in the breast of her dress, and her wavy hair falling loose over her shoulders, stalked into the shop among the smartly-gowned San Francisco ladies who were turning over Madame's stock, and demanded to see—
"One dress belong Palisi, pretty dam quick."