"It is the white man from the bush!" cried the girls. "White man of ours, why did you not come down for the wedding?"
"Because I didn't, my little dears," replied the newcomer in English, still looking after Vaiti. He stood well in the shade, and did not make himself unnecessarily conspicuous.
"That's a fine girl, that Mata," he added by and by. "A smart girl. I should like to know Mata."
Vaiti put off her going for yet another day. She had business to attend to.
It was very simple business, and it was characterised by the directness that attended all the proceedings of Saxon's daughter. She merely went up to the bride's new home, that was so handsomely stocked with trade goods and imported furniture, while the wedding party were making merry in the village after dark, and set fire to it with a torch in about a dozen places. It was very dry weather, and there was a strong wind.
There was scarce a stick of the cottage left when she marched into the village with a blazing torch in her hand, and calmly told the assembled revellers what she had done. Then she left them, seething in a tumult of excitement that almost drowned the hysteric screams of Mata, and went to bed and to sleep with a quiet mind, ready for an early start next morning.
The men came on board late and very drunk, but they did come. They were afraid of Vaiti, and so was Harris, who would very well have liked to extend his revels in the village for another twelve hours, but did not dare to do so. He thought, as he stumbled into his bunk, that the sounds proceeding from the forecastle were a good deal odder than usual—he could almost have sworn that there was one person, if not several, crying in there. But he had good reason for mistrusting the evidence of his senses just then, so he flung himself down and went to sleep.
CHAPTER XI
A DEAD MAN'S REVENGE
When one is well on the right side of five-and-twenty, with a good ship underfoot, a fair breeze setting steadily from the right quarter, and a pleasant goal ahead, it is hard to be unhappy. Vaiti's sense of bereavement at the loss of her cherished dress faded considerably before the Sybil had fairly cleared the land, and was gone altogether by the next day. She had done what she felt to be the right thing by Mata; the score was even. Vaiti did not like loose ends of any kind, and she had not left any behind her. She smiled as she thought of it, and paused in her official-looking walk across and across the poop, to revile a native A.B. for leaving the end of a halyard trailing on deck.