He looked a tortured man in his heavy and smothering vestments when I met him before the mission walls next morning. His face and hands were covered with pustules as if from smallpox.
“The nonos (sand-flies) are so furious the last month,” he said with a patient smile. “I have not slept but an hour at a time. I was afraid I would go mad.”
News of his coming brought all the valley Catholics to eight o'clock mass. The banana-shaded road and the roots of the old banian were crowded with worshippers in all their finery, and when they poured into the mission the few rude benches were well filled. I found a chair in the rear, next to that of Baufré, the shaggy drunkard, and as the chanting began, I observed an empty prie-dieu, specially prepared and placed for some person of importance.
“Mademoiselle N——” said Baufré, noticing the direction of my glance. “She is the richest woman in all the Marquesas.”
At the Gospel she came in, walking slowly down the aisle and taking her place as though unaware of the hundred covert glances that followed her. Wealth is comparative, and Mademoiselle N——, with perhaps a few hundred thousand dollars in cash and cocoanut-grove, stood to the island people as Rockefeller to us. Money and lands were not all her possessions, for though she had never traveled from her birthplace, she was very different in carriage and costume from the girls about her.
She wore a black lace gown, clinging, and becoming her slender figure and delicately charming face. Her features were exquisite, her eyes lustrous black pools of passion, her mouth a scarlet line of pride and disdain. A large leghorn hat of fine black straw, with chiffon, was on her graceful head, and her tiny feet were in silk stockings and patent leather. She held a gold and ivory prayer-book in gloved hands, and a jeweled watch hung upon her breast.
She might have passed for a Creole or for one of those beautiful Filipino mestizas, daughters of Spanish fathers and Filipino mothers. I suppose coquetry in woman was born with the fig-leaf. This dainty, fetching heiress, born of a French father and a savage mother, had all the airs and graces of a ballroom belle. Where had she gained these fashions and desires of the women of cities, of Europe?
I had but to look over the church to feel her loneliness. Teata, Many Daughters, Weaver of Mats, and Flower, savagely handsome, gaudily dressed, were the only companions of her own age. Flower, of the red-gold hair, was striking in a scarlet gown of sateen, a wreath of pink peppers, and a necklace of brass. She had been ornamented by the oarsmen of the Jeanne d'Arc, fortunately without Père Victorien's knowledge. Teata, in her tight gown with its insertions of fishnet revealing her smooth, tawny skin, a red scarf about her waist, straw hat trimmed with a bright blue Chinese shawl perched on her high-piled hair, was still a picture of primitive and savage grace. They were handsome, these girls, but they were wild flowers. Mlle. N—— had the poise and delicacy of the hothouse blossom.
Her father had spent thirty years on Hiva-oa, laboring to wring a fortune from the toil of the natives, and dying, he had left it all to this daughter, who, with her laces and jewels, her elegant, slim form and haughty manner, was in this wild abode of barefooted, half-naked people like a pearl in a gutter. She was free now to do what she liked with herself and her fortune. What would she do?
It was the question on every tongue and in every eye when, after mass, she passed down the lane respectfully widened for her in the throng on the steps and with a black-garbed sister at her side, walked to the nuns' house.