Maybe the Patzenhofer had mellowed my sympathies, for I agreed with him that he was a dutiful son and a worthy merchant, and that life had not been quite fair to him. There was a moment when I feared he was about to divulge his secret, but a noise outside made him start, and after he had listened with frowning brow a minute he said good night. He did not wish to be alone, it was evident, for he said he would sleep on a straw couch in my room. I heard him tossing as I fell asleep.
From the hill of Calvary the next afternoon I saw the Morning Star as she glided past the opposite cliffs of Tahauku. At least the main barrier to Lutz’s plans had gone from the Marquesas. As Mademoiselle Narbonne no longer came to Atuona, I had not seen her for many Sundays, and, although I still saw Lutz on his peregrinations, and from my Golden Bed hearkened to the iron of his horse’s heels, I had no direct nor even fairly certain knowledge that he had won her hand. Gradually a desire to see her, to make sure of her intentions, grew in me, and I had fixed the following Sunday as a date for my journey to Taaoa, when a stupefying incident disarranged my scheme.
Le Brunnec, the trader, my companion of the wild cattle hunting, was ever on the outlook for information or entertainment for me. Speaking a little English, and by nature friendly, he now and again sent to my cabin a stranger, with a sealed note explaining the bearer’s particular interest to me. One day, there appeared an American citizen, Lemoal, a twisted, haggard native of Paimpol, who had been an adventurer and vagabond all about the world. After a shell of rum, he had boasted a while, and then when I had given him another drop with a gesture of farewell, he had said with a leer and a curse, that he had seen me with Mademoiselle Narbonne, and that “I would better beware.”
“She is a leper, that rich girl,” he had said; “everybody here knows it but you. Let the accursed German of Tahauku get it, not you!”
He ambled down the trail like an old kobold, a spirit of evil and filth, wagging his long beard, and sucking at his pipe. I threw away the shell from which he had drunk. But in my horror at what he had said, I could not forget that Mademoiselle Narbonne had asked me a strange question, at first meeting—whether it was true that the Government was segregating the lepers in Tahiti, and immuring them in a leprosarium. I had answered in the affirmative, and thought curiosity dictated the query. Now, with Lemoal gone, his statement and her question rose together. Le Brunnec’s note said that Lemoal was not to be believed always. He might have told Le Brunnec about Barbe. It could not be true! Yet, the missionary’s daughter a half a mile away from me was a leper, and Tahiatini, Many Daughters, was suspect. The Chinese imported by the American, Hart, had brought the terrible disease from Canton, and many had died from it in the Marquesas. Those who had it were free to live as they pleased, for there was no care of them by the authorities. But in Tahiti, for the first time, they had taken them from their families, and were keeping them in a separate estate. It was easy, with the abominable assertion of Lemoal agitating me, to exaggerate or misinterpret the meaning of Mademoiselle Narbonne’s interrogation.
Did the visit of Maná to the taua have anything to do with Lemoal’s wretched slander or gossip?
I should be a fool, I reckoned, to believe Lemoal. Even the vicar apostolic had intimated that the Protestant pastor was a rake, and I knew him to be a virtuous man. Gauguin had written in his journal that the bishop was a “goat,” and I believed him a vow-observing celibate. Much, then, I was to credit this lifetime villain, Lemoal! Men who stayed too long in the South Seas became natural, simple children of the sweet soil, or decayed and rejected, rotten fruit of civilization when unsuited to assimilation.
A week after Lemoal had poisoned my mind with his intimation, I met Mademoiselle Narbonne at Otupotu, the divide between the valleys of Atuona and Taaoa, where Kahuiti, the magnificent cannibal of Taaoa, had trapped the Mouth of God’s grandfather and eaten him. It was a precipice facing the valleys of the island of Hiva-Oa, as it curved eastward. The brilliant stretch of sea contrasted with dark glens in the torn, convulsed panorama—gloomy gullies, suggestive of the old pagan days when the Marquesans were free and strong. Above the shadowy caverns, the mountains caught the light of the dying sun and shone green or black under the cloudless sky. To sit there as the day declined and to view the tragic marvel of the advent of night was to me a rapturous experience made sorrowful by the final sinking of the sun. No long twilight, no romantic gloaming followed the plunge of terror. I have always peopled it with afrits and leprechawns, mischievous if not malicious.
It was an hour before dusk when I arrived, and soon I heard, far down the glade of Taaoa, the slow approach of a horse. As the rider came in view, I waved my hand, and the daughter of the Cayennais called to me, with a trifle of surprise in her soft voice. She dismounted and sat beside me. She had changed. In what exactly I could not define. She was less self-centered, silent, melancholy. The savage had fled from her face, and animation with it.
“I am half French, but all Marquesan,” she had said to me once.