During these few remaining days, before the expected eclipse, Kea sat with me often on the verandah doing nothing, for her work on her trousseau was now all finished; but she seemed more pre-occupied and self-centred than usual, as if dreading and hating her expected marriage. I felt sure she disliked the husband they had chosen for her. Often when I spoke to her she brought her eyes back suddenly, as if from a great distance, and sighed before she answered me, like one whose mind has been fully engaged upon some very different and unpleasant subject. She asked me much too, at times, about her father's brother and friends in England, about the life in our quiet home country, about people and places she had heard her father talk about in her early childhood. She knew them all well by name; her father, she said, had loved to speak of them to her. Evidently he had been one of those wild younger sons of a good family, who had left home early and gone to sea, and taking to a roving Pacific life had fallen in love with some young Hawaiian girl, Kalaua's sister and Kea's mother, for whose sake at last he had made his home for life upon a lofty peak of these remote islands. His family, displeased at his marriage, no doubt, had all but cast him off; and even if they invited Kea to come home to them in England after his early death, they would have had no great affection, one may easily believe, for their little unknown half-caste kinswoman. Yet I felt sure if only they could once have really seen Kea they must have loved her dearly, for there was something so sweetly pathetic and winsome in her child-like manner that no one who saw her could help, in spite of himself, sympathizing with her and liking her.
"Are there any volcanoes in England?" Kea asked me once, after a long pause, with sudden energy.
"Unhappily, no," I answered, with a quiet sigh of professional regret. "That's my one solitary cause of complaint against my native country. It's disgustingly free from volcanic disturbances. Britain is much too solid indeed for my private taste. It affords no scope for an enterprising seismologist. There were some good craters once, to be sure, in geological times, at Mull and Cader Idris, but they're all extinct long since. We haven't a volcano, good, bad, or indifferent, anywhere nearer us than Hecla or Vesuvius."
"Then I should love England," Kea replied very quietly. "Oh, Mr. Hesselgrave, if that's so, what on earth made you ever leave England to come to such a country as Hawaii?"
She spoke so earnestly, that I hardly liked to tell her in cold blood, I came just for the sake of those very volcanoes which seemed to impress her own private fancy so very unfavourably. There's no accounting for tastes. I've known people who loved yachting and didn't mind a bear hunt, yet wouldn't go near an eruption for a thousand pounds, and could hardly even be induced by the most glowing descriptions to look over the edge of a sheer precipice into the smoking crater of an active volcano. Some folk's prejudices are really astonishing! As if volcanoes weren't at bottom the merest safety-valves to the internal fires of our earth's centre!
The few remaining days before the date of the eclipse passed by, I am happy to say, uneventfully. I was grateful for that. Excitements indeed had come so thick and fast during these late weeks that a little quiet was a welcome novelty. And the presence of our English friends from the gunboat gave us further a sense of confidence and security to which we had far too long been strangers. We knew now, at least, that a British war-vessel lay moored in the harbour below to watch over our safety.
On one of the intervening evenings, as I sat in the verandah smoking a cigarette alone in the pleasant cool of tropical twilight, I heard two natives, hangers-on of Kalaua's, talking together in the garden, where they were busy picking fruit and flowers for the use of the house on the grand occasion. At first I paid little heed to their conversation: but presently I thought I overheard among their talk the mysterious name of that strange Maloka. I pricked up my ears at the sound. How very curious! Then they too were busy with the great event. I listened eagerly for the rest of their colloquy.
"What are the flowers for?" the younger man asked, as he laid some roses and a great bunch of plumbago into a palm-leaf basket.
"Garlands and wreaths for Maloka's wedding," the elder answered in a hushed and lowered voice.
"It will be a very grand affair, no doubt," the younger went on quietly. "They've made great preparations. I saw the dress that Kea is to wear, and the bridesmaids' veils. Very fine, all of them. Quite a festival! Shall you go and see it?"