“You are an old-timer here now,” he began, “and I’ve got to go away on the schooner to the Paumotus to-morrow. Drop in at Tahia’s shack once in a while and cheer her up. She lives back of the Catholic mission, and she’s pretty sick.”
Tahia was desperately ill, I thought. She was thin, the color of the yellow wax candles of the high altar, and her straight nose, with expanded nostrils, and hard, almost savage mouth, features carved as with the stone chisel of her ancient tribe, conjured up the profile of Nenehofra, an Egyptian princess whose mummy I had seen. She was stern, silent, resigned to her fate, as are these races who know the inexorable will of the gods.
“Is she your girl?” I asked Ormsby.
He colored slightly.
“I suppose so, and the baby will be mine if it’s ever born. At any rate, I’m going to stick to her while she’s in this fix. I’ll tell you on the square, I’m not gone on her; but she had a lover, an Australian I knew, and he was good to her, but he got the consumption and couldn’t work. Maybe he came here with it. They hadn’t a shilling, and Tahia built a hut in the hills up there near where the nature men live, and put him in it, and she fed and cared for him. She went to the mountains for feis she came down here to the reef to fish, and she found eggs and breadfruit in other people’s gardens. She kept him alive, the Lord knows how, until he could secure money from Sydney to go home and die. Now, she’s got the con from him, I suppose, and it would be a shabby trick to leave her when she’s dying and will be a mother in two months, according to Doctor Cassiou!”
He made a wry face and lit his pipe. The girl could not understand a word and sat immovable.
“She’s Marquesan,” he went on. “Her mother has written through a trader in Atuona, on Hiva-Oa, to send her to her own valley, but she’s quit. She sits and broods all day. I ’d like to go back to my own home in Warwickshire. I know I’m changing for the bad here. I live like a dam’ beach-comber. I only get a screw of three hundred francs a month, and that all goes for us two, with medicines and doctors. She’d go to Atuona if I’d go; but I can’t make a living there, and I’m rotten enough now without living off her people in the cannibal group. She’s skin and bones and coughs all night.”
Ormsby puffed his pipe as Tahia put her hand in his. Her action was that of a small dog who puts his paw on his master’s sleeve, hesitating, hopeful, but uncertain. She regarded me with slightly veiled hostility. I was a white who might be taking him away to foreign things.
“She’s heard us talking about Atuona and Hiva-Oa, and she thinks maybe I ’ve concluded to go. I can’t do it, O’Brien. If I go there, I’ll go native forever. I’ve got a streak of some dam’ savage in me. Listen! I’ve got to go on the Etoile to Kaukura tojmorrow. Now, the natives are always kind to any one, but sickness they are not interested in. You go and see her, won’t you? She’s about all in, and it won’t hurt you.”
Ormsby went to the Dangerous Isles on the Etoile, and did not return for three weeks. He did not find Tahia in her shack on the hill. She was in the cemetery,—in the plot reserved for the natives of other islands,—and her babe unborn. She had died alone. I think she made up her mind to relieve the Englishman of her care, and willed to die at once. Dr. Cassiou, with whom I visited her, said: