“I do not know,” he feebly answered. “She was exposed and adopted, picked up, a new-born babe, the very day the great goddess who now speaks to me was born.”
“Who found her? Who picked her up?”
Eaeakai tried to answer, but the death rattle was in his throat, a convulsive shudder ran through his frame, and, with his face still in the dust, he died.
Hiwa swam to the mouth of the river, where she found Aelani waiting. In a few words she told him what had happened, but not what the dying man had said. She had never before seen him so deeply moved. Although time pressed and a kingdom was at stake, they returned and buried the fisherman according to his degree, as had been promised.
As they swam home in the small hours of the morning, Hiwa pondered on many things, not least on the mystery of the fisherman’s wife and daughter. She remembered that Lolo, the court jester, once asked her if she had seen her twin sister, and, when she repeated the saying, that her mother laughed and said it was only the quip of a fool; but, never hearing of it again, she did not believe it, although she knew the custom of her people, and also that Lolo died that night of a broken head.
More kittens are drowned than grow up, yet there is no dearth of cats. Infanticide was regarded in much the same way by the ancient Hawaiians. No woman was thought worse of on account of killing her babies, and a large percentage of new-born children were exposed to perish, or to be picked up and adopted, as chance might direct. Hiwa and Lilii, therefore, might be twin sisters, and it might have been thought that twin princesses, too divine to marry mortal men, would cause state embarrassments. The more Hiwa thought it over the more probable it seemed.
“Aa,” she mused, “is old and not fond of women. He would not do this thing for the girl’s youth and beauty. Ambition is his ruling passion, and now that Ii is dead it blazes up in a fierce flame. If he knows, as I believe, that they are my mother’s child and grandchild, he means to kill one to cut off all possibility of rival heirs to the throne, and to marry the other. That is why he seized them the moment my brother was dead. If the girl is Aelani’s cousin on my mother’s side, the boy shall have her for his wife in spite of Aa, for her blood is divine.”
So Hiwa, pondering on these things, and planning for the future, swam silently homeward. Aelani swam in silence by her side. A new inspiration had come to him. The master passion of love had taken a mighty hold on him. Heretofore he had been a patient and painstaking pupil—not because he greatly cared to be a moi, but because he loved his mother. Now the pathway to the throne was his only pathway to Manoa.