Tempest's answer was inaudible. But—he never did.
CHAPTER XVII
INVADERS IN TANNA
"What a beautiful girl! Is she one of the heathens, I wonder?" said Lady Victoria Jenkins, leaning on the rail of her yacht.
The Alcyone floated on a sea of living silver. The coral reefs forty feet before her keel showed like a pavement of pale turquoise in the searching splendour of the tropic moon. Close at hand loomed the dark woods and cliffs of Tanna, and above them, blotting out half the crystal broidery of the stars, rose the cone of the great volcano, crowned by a canopy of fire. So, in the days of Bougainville and of Cook, stood this southward sentinel of the wild New Hebrides, a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. So it stands yet, its deathless fires unquenched, its awful voice breaking the forest silences hour by hour—as the dead and gone discoverers of these distant lands saw and heard it long ago, and as those who follow us will find it in the days to come, when we and our thoughts and hopes, and adventures and loves are but a whisper in the homeless winds and a handful of dust blowing about on long-forgotten graves.
There are few volcanoes in the southern hemisphere more famous, and none less frequently visited, than the fiery cone of Tanna. The island lies thousands of miles away from everywhere, and the inhabitants are known to be almost all heathen, cannibal, and hostile to whites, although the expression of their hostility has been kept considerably in check of late years. But Lady Victoria Jenkins, daughter of the late Earl of Wessex, and wife of Mr. Abel Jenkins ("Jenkins's Perfect Pills"), is well known as a romanticist and a lover of all things unusual and strange. Mr. Abel Jenkins's income is only exceeded by that of two other commoners in England, and Mr. Abel Jenkins's ugliness and ill-temper are not exceeded by the ugliness and ill-temper of any one known to polite society. If the reader will piece these detached facts together, and consider them, he will readily understand why Lady Victoria was enjoying a tour round the world in her celebrated steam-yacht, the Alcyone, why she had come to look at Tanna, and why, including a good deal of miscellaneous company, the travelling party somehow was not miscellaneous enough to include Lady Victoria's husband.
The yacht had come in that afternoon after a somewhat stormy voyage from Sydney ("They call it the Pacific Ocean," said Lady Victoria plaintively, "instead of which, I have not really enjoyed a meal since we cleared the Heads"), and had instantly, by the mere fact of her dropping anchor in Sulphur Bay, denuded the whole seaboard of its population. This was because the conscience of Tanna is never quite clear, and the Tannese, struck by the conviction of sin, thought the Alcyone was a man-of-war. Only two kinds of ships were known to the islands, outside trading schooners: British and French warships, and the lazy little monthly steamers from Sydney, which strolled round the group once a month, picking up copra, and conveying missionaries and traders about. The Alcyone was not a schooner; she was certainly not the well-known "B.P." steamer; therefore she must be some new variety of man-of-war. As it happened, there was a little matter of a murdered trader on the conscience of Tanna just at that time—he had been very annoying, but a British man-of-war is prejudiced about these affairs. So the Tannese of the coast, like the modest violet of the poem, concealed their drooping heads in the shady vales of the interior, and coyly hid from view. Like the modest violet, too—only with a difference—you might, if you wished, have located them by their—— But no; this is a polite history, and the Tannese are a very impolite people. Let us change carriages.
Vaiti and her father, who had come up from Queensland with an empty ship and a full money-bag, and were just starting a fresh recruiting trip, regarded the appearance of the yacht with hearty disgust. What were the good old islands coming to if this sort of thing was to be permitted? Not a bushman would come near the beach as long as the Alcyone stayed, and the sprinkling of mission natives who were not afraid of the yacht were worse than useless, for they neither recruited nor encouraged their heathen friends to do so. Besides, the airs and graces of the Alcyone were sickening. Late dinner with low dresses and jewels; piano tinkling all the evening; clothes that looked as if they had been run hot on to the wearers, as icing is run on to a cake; sparkling glass and brasswork all over the ship, and dainty brass signal cannons, pretty as toys, and a little funnel all cream-colour and blue, and great sails white as trade-wind clouds, and a hull that sat the water like a beautiful sea-bird settled down to rest—all these unnecessary and disgusting affectations made a smart schooner like the Sybil look no better than a mud-scow in a marsh, for all that she was the beauty of the South Seas and the most famous ocean adventuress from 'Frisco to Hobart Town. Besides, Saxon would not stir out of his cabin while the yacht was there, having developed the lumbago that always attacked him whenever English society folk loomed on the horizon—Vaiti knew that lumbago!—and he might really have been of use about Sulphur Bay, where, for a wonder, no one had any old scores against him.
It was all most abominable, thought the "Kapitani," and she cast an unfriendly glance on the luxurious Alcyone, as her boat shot past the yacht in the moonlight, returning from a fruitless hunt along the coast for any stray bushman who might have heard the recruiting signal—a stick or two of dynamite set afloat on a board and exploded—and come down to the coast.
Lady Victoria's comment on the "beautiful girl" did not soften her in the least, coupled as it was with the unspeakable assumption that she was "a heathen." Probably she was, in one sense, having long ago given up all but the merest rags of religion, but it was not the accusation of moral deficiencies that galled her: it was the idea that she, Vaiti, daughter of a great Polynesian princess and a white sea-captain, should have been "evened" to the black, monkey-like, naked hags of Tanna. The resentful spirit of the half-caste burned hot within her as she steered the boat through the moonlit water. She could see Lady Victoria and her friends, a brilliant flower-show of coloured dresses and sparkling gems, leaning over the rail, and watching her as impersonally as if she were a porpoise or a shark. She could catch their comments, loudly and carelessly spoken.