CHAPTER XIII—SOUTH
The stars faded, the east grew crimson and the sun arose to show Levua gone; a sky without cloud, a sea without trace of sail or gull.
Le Moan, crouching in the bow with the risen sun hot on her left shoulder, saw the long levels of the marching swell as they came and passed, the Kermadec bowing to them; saw the distant southern sea line and beyond it the road to Karolin.
With her eyes shut and as the needle of the compass finds the north magnetic pole, she could have pointed to where Karolin lay; and as she gazed across the fields of the breeze-blown swell no trace of cloud troubled her mind, all was bright ahead. Sru had made it clear to her that no hurt would come to Taori, and with Peterson, had gone any last lingering doubt that may have been in her mind. She trusted Sru and she trusted Rantan, who had spoken kindly to her, Carlin, and the kanaka crew; of Peterson, the man who had terrified her first and the only trustable man on that ship, she had always had her doubts, begotten by that first impression, by his beard, his gruff voice and what Sru had said about Peterson and how he would “swallow all”—that is to say the pearls of Karolin; those mysterious pearls that the white men treasured and of which the charm hidden behind her ear had spoken to Sru.
She had always worn it as a protection and she had not the least doubt that it had spoken to Sru, just as a person might speak, and told him of those other pearls which she had often seen and played with when oysters were cast to rot on the beach for the sake of their shells. She had not the least doubt that to the talisman behind her ear was due this happy return and the elimination of Peterson. Was she wrong?
As she crouched, the back draught from the head sails fanning her hair, the ship and her crew, the sea and its waves, all vanished, dissolved matter from which grew as by some process of recrystallization the beach of Karolin. The long south beach where the sand was whispering in the wind, the hot south beach where the sun-stricken palms lifted their fronds to the brassy sky of noon and the tender skies of dawn and evening, the beach above which the stars stood at night all turning with the turning dome of sky.
She saw a canoe paddling ashore and the canoe man now on the beach, his eyes crinkled against the sun—eyes coloured like the sea when the grey of the squall mixes with its blue. The sun was on his red-gold hair and he trod the sands lightly, not as the kanaka walks and moves; one might have fancied little wings upon his feet.
His naked body against the blazing lagoon showed like a flame of gold against a flame of blue. It was Taori. Taori as she had seen him first, on that day when he had come to bid Aioma to the canoe building.
It was as if Fate on that day had suddenly stripped away a veil showing her the one thing to be desired, the only thing that would ever matter to her in this life or the next.
As she leaned, the breeze in her hair and her mind like a bird fleeting far ahead into the distance, flying fish like silver shaftless arrow-heads passed and flittered into the blue water, and now a turtle floating asleep and disturbed by the warble of the bow wash and the creak of the onrushing schooner, sank quietly fathoms deep leaving only a few bubbles on the swell.