But we were made welcome in the great drawing-room, reached by three broad descending steps, walled with rare books, and containing works of art and curios from all the world: old furniture from European palaces that would be the despair of a repulsed collector; tables of lustrous Hawaiian woods fashioned to order in Germany half a century ago; rare oriental vases set upon flare-topped pedestals ingeniously made from inverted tree stumps of native brown kou wood, polished like marble; a quaint and stately concert grand piano; old portraits of royalty, white and dusky; and, most fascinating of all, treasures of Hawaiian courts, among them some of the marvelous feather work. In dim corners, kahilis stand as if on guard—barbaric royal insignia, plumed staffs of state, some of them twice the height of a man. The feathers are fastened at right angles to the pole of shining hardwood, forming a barrel-shaped decoration, somewhat like our hearse-plumes of a past generation. But the kahili is only sometimes of funereal hue, more often flaming in scarlet, or some grade of the rich yellows loved of the Islanders. Originally a fly-brush in savage courts, the kahili progressed in dignity through the dynasties to an indispensable adjunct to official occasions, sometimes exceeding thirty feet in height. To me, it and the outrigger canoe are the most significantly impressive of royal barbaric forms.
Mr. Cleghorn suggested that he could arrange a private audience with Queen Liliuokalani at her residence in town, if we desired. Which reminds me that Jack holds a letter of introduction to her from Charles Warren Stoddard, who knew her in the days of her tempestuous reign. He and Jack have called each other Dad and Son for years, though acquainted only by correspondence. But we have little wish to intrude upon the Queen, for it can be scant pleasure to her to meet Americans, no matter how sympathetic they may be with her changed state.
Upon a carven desk lay open a guest book, an old ledger, in which we were asked to leave our hand. The first name written in this thick tome is that of “Oskar, of Sweden and Norway,” and, running over the yellowed pages, among other notable autographs we read that of Agassiz.
Here, there, and everywhere, in photograph, in oil portraiture, on wall and upon easel, we met the lovely, pale face of Kaiulani, in whose memory her father seems to exist in a mood of adoration. Every event dates from her untimely passing. “When Kaiulani died,” he would begin; or “Since Kaiulani went away,” and “Before Kaiulani left me—” was the burden of his thought and conversation concerning the past of which we loved to hear. Pictures show her to have been a woman compounded of the beauty of her dual races, proud, loving, sensitive, spirituelle, with the characteristic curling mouth and luminous brown eyes of the Hawaiian, looking out wistfully upon a world of pleasure and opportunity that could not detain her frail body. Flower of romance she was—romance that nothing in the old books of South Sea adventuring can rival; her sire, a handsome roving boy ashore from an English ship back in the ’50’s; her mother a dusky princess of the blood royal, who loved the handsome fair-skinned youth and constituted him governor of Oahu under the Crown, that she might with honor espouse him.
And now, the boy, grown old—his Caucasian vitality having survived the gentle Polynesian blood of the wife who brought him laurels in her own land,—having watched the changing administrations of that land for nearly threescore years, abides alone with the shadow of her and of the daughter with the poet brow who did honor to them both by coming into being. To this beloved child-woman, previous to her voyage to England’s Court, Robert Louis Stevenson, living where we peeped into the garden but a few nights gone, sent the following:
[Written in April to Kaiulani in the April of her age; and at Waikiki, within easy walk of Kaiulani’s banyan! When she comes to my land and her father’s, and the rain beats upon the window (as I fear it will), let her look at this page; it will be like a weed gathered and pressed at home; and she will remember her own islands, and the shadow of the mighty tree; and she will hear the peacocks screaming in the dusk and the wind blowing in the palms; and she will think of her father sitting there alone.—R. L. S.]
“Forth from her land to mine she goes,
The island maid, the island rose,
Light of heart and bright of face:
The daughter of a double race.