She was all white this evening. The rich color had deserted her cheeks, and in her pallor was tenderness and longing. I was drawn to her as never before. Her delicate hand crept into mine, and we remained hushed a few minutes. Curiously, the words of Lemoal did not recur. She was so perfect, so beautiful, the nightfall so embracing, other thoughts were banished. We were in a wild expanse, in a bed of ferns, and landward a prodigal glory of palm and plant, vine and orchid. Nature had spent its richest colors and scents, its rarest shapes and oddest forms, for bird and insect, star and sun, to look upon and rejoice in, and with no count of man. In her grandest or most subtle manifestations, nature had no thought to suit herself to man, and only as he adapted himself to her thousand smiles and frowns, could he remain alive upon an inconsequential planet which was nothing with the blazing star now going down in the west. A shudder, and man died by myriads; a breath, and he perished. But ever nature swelled the seeds of her unthinking creations and ornamented her body with fresh fruitage.
Sunset and death, the heat of the day and of life, and then the lapsing years in the descent toward the cold grave, often stumbling and trembling, and without the cadence and the color of the passing day; and both ending in murk and fear. These tropical islands were for youth, when every sense was a well of enjoyment. Age must only regret not having known them sooner.
The slim hand of Barbe Narbonne, folded in mine, excited no pleasanter thoughts than these as we sat at Otupoto. I felt that I must have drawn them from her, for I was happy, and the tide of life running strong in my veins.
She broke the quiet.
“What do you think of Monsieur Lutz?” she said suddenly.
“What do I think of Monsieur Lutz?” I parried. “I like him. Why do you ask me that?”
“Because, Monsieur, he has asked me to marry him; and I am thinking.”
She took away her hand and smoothed her brow as if she swept away cobwebs.
The crisis had come in which her future was at pitch and toss. The years of childhood make most of us what we are. The white surrounded by Polynesians in the early years of life, learning their language first, and having them as playmates, willy-nilly becomes more than half Polynesian. Their tastes, dreads, superstitions, pleasures, and ideals become his. Barbe Narbonne had the savage blood of her mother to accentuate her environment. The exigency that now confronted her had kindled in her divided soul for the first time the conflict between the white and the brown. From infancy she had been in the convent, and now she had had a few months of unrestraint in the society of her two mothers, and recently of release even from the rigors of the confessional and the nuns’ admonitions. She had been slipping back fast into the ways of the Marquesans; the palm-groves had claimed her, and the jungle was closing in upon her. The courtship of the European, Lutz, was a challenge to her white strain, but it was confusing, for it added a third element. Her mothers’ semi-savagery, and the convent strictness of rule were in strife now with this offer of relief from both by the most important white in the Marquesas except the governor.
“Do you love him?” I asked her, and looked into her eyes.