A primal woman

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

II.

Never did a man fall on his feet more surely than Lygon.

Captain Jourdain had lost his wife only the year before and he was in need of a friend. He had married a native woman fourteen years ago and being a straight, simple-minded man with an idea, somehow, that Kanakas have souls just the same as Christians, and that love once found is the only thing worth finding, and the only thing worth guarding, he had stuck to her faithfully as she to him.

Now when a white man marries an island woman he marries a woman with a past, a being with an ancestry as remote from his as Sirius from Rigel. Nalia, the wife of Captain Jourdain, and the mother of Kineia, a tender-eyed, gentle, soft-voiced woman, had exhibited this fact once in a flash. A ruffian named Havermuth, who had been fired off a ship and had become at once the beach comber and terror of the island, had gone for Jourdain with intent to kill. He had got the captain down and was trying to gouge when a tiger cat intervened. It was Nalia, and she was armed with Havermuth’s knife that had been dropped in the struggle, and the feel of the knife dividing his lumbar muscles and abdominal aorta was the last thing Havermuth knew.

Jourdain often thought of that and of how a European woman would have acted in the same situation—screamed, most likely, and run for help that would have been too late in coming. He had loved Nalia before, but after that he worshiped her, and when she died his worship was transferred in part to Kineia. Kineia took after her mother, the same hair, the same eyes, the same soft voice, the same mysterious charm, heightened, in some curious way, by the touch of European in her. She had the direct gaze of her father, and she spoke French without any clipping of the words, and like her father she seemed to take to the newcomer from the first, so that in a few months they were like one family, Lygon helping in the work of superintending the copra getting and sharing Jourdain’s house.

“It is good you have come,” said the old man one evening, as they sat on the veranda watching a canoe putting out for fishing, “but the hard work will not begin till my ship comes in. Then we will all be busy—I do not know how you will like it, but you shall be paid.”

“Oh, I’m not afraid of work,” said Lygon, “and I’m not thinking of payment. It seems to me that I have a big debt to wipe off before I talk of payment.”

“We will see,” said Captain Jourdain.

In the long run payment was not talked of; the captain gave Lygon a fourth share in the business and Lygon earned it. There was plenty to do. The Haliotis was the name of Jourdain’s schooner, and every time she called there was endless work writing letters to the San Francisco agent, taking tally of trade goods, going over accounts as to payments of crew, and so forth, to say nothing of the business of getting the copra on board.

At the end of a year Jourdain had proved Lygon and found him trustworthy, and he raised his position to an equal partnership with an equal share in the business.