“You knew Hemeury Francois when he was young?”
She put her hand over her eyes, and spat.
“He was my first lover. I had a child by him. He was handsome once.” Her eyes, full of malevolence, turned to the dark grove. “He dies very slowly.”
The memory of her face was with me when at midnight I went alone to my valley. On my pillows I heard again the cracked voice of the hermit, and saw the blue-white skin upon his shaking bones. He could not believe in Po, the Marquesan god of Darkness, or in the Veinehae, the Ghost-Woman who watches the dying; nor did I believe in them or in Satan, but about me in my Golden Bed until midnight was long past the spirits that hate the light moaned and creaked the hut.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
Last days in Atuona; My Darling Hope's letter from her son.
Exploding Eggs was building my fire of cocoanut-husks as usual in the morning to cook my coffee and eggs, when a whistle split the sultry air. Far from the bay it came, shrill and demanding; my call to civilization.
Long expected, the first liner was in the Isles of the Cannibals. France had begun to make good her promise to expand her trade in Oceania, and the isolation of the dying Marquesans and empty valleys was ended. The steamship Saint François, from Bordeaux by way of Tahiti, had come to visit this group and pick up cargo for Papeite and French ports.
Strange was the sight of her in Taha-Uka Bay where never her like had been, but stranger still, two aboard her, the only two not French, were known to me. Here thousands of miles from where I had seen them, unconnected in any way with each other, were a pair of human beings I had known, one in China, and the other in the United States, both American citizens, and sent by fate to replace me as objects of interest to the natives.
They came up from the beach together, one a small black man, the other tall and golden brown, led by Malicious Gossip to see the American who lived in these far-away islands. The black lingered to talk at a distance, but the golden-brown one advanced.