Abruptly he had vanished....
How long Miss Matilda crouched in her thicket by the beach of Wailoa she could not have told. It seemed an eternity. The night clouded down, even the stars were veiled. An on-shore breeze whined forlornly across the sands. Her fever had passed. She was damp, bedraggled, bruised and aching, soiled with mud. The wind sought her out, cut through her limp garments.... She waited, shivering.
She was very much alone. She felt helpless beyond anything she had ever experienced, as if the props of life were fallen away. And so they were, for those she had known she had thrust behind and Motauri's magic no longer sustained her. Worse than all was the pressure gathering in her mind, a tide of doubt that she had to deny, like the rising fill in a lock. She dared not let herself think. Still no Motauri.
Benumbed, exhausted, sunk in hebetude, she waited until she could wait no more, until intolerable suspense drove her blindly. She crept through the bush and so came suddenly to the edge of a clearing by a native hut—to see what it was written she should see at that particular moment....
Before the door burned a blink of fire that revealed the dwelling and its tattered alcove of sewn leaves, as if the scene had been set with footlights. It was a very simple little domestic scene. On a fibre mat sprawled a woman. She might have been young, but she was old in the native way, flabby, coarse-grained, with sagging wrinkles, with lusterless hair streaming about her face. A ragged, sleeveless wrapper rendered her precarious service, bulging with flesh. At her side squatted a youngster, an imp of seven it might be, who noisily chewed a stick of sugarcane and spat wide the pith. The woman kept one hand free to admonish him—by his beady eye he required it—and to tend a simmering pot. With the other, tranquilly, she nursed a naked babe.
There was no reticence about that firelight, no possible illusion—and certainly no romance. In grim fidelity it threw up each bald detail, the cheerful dirt and squalor, the easy poverty, the clutter—the plain, animal, every-day facts of a savage home. It touched the bronze skins with splashes of copper, shone in the woman's vacant, bovine stare and gleamed along the generous swell of her breast. And just there it made a wholly candid display of the central figure in this pantomime—the brown babe. Not so brown as he would be some day, indeed quite softly tinted, but unmistakably Polynesian. A most elemental mite of humanity. A most eloquent interpreter of primordial delights. A fat little rascal, with a bobbing fuzzy poll and squirming limbs. And hungry—so very frankly, so very boisterously hungry—!
Miss Matilda went away from that place.
She had a confused idea of flight, but her feet were rebellious, and before she had taken twenty steps she was lost. Without direction, groping in the darkness, even then by some intuition she kept to the trees and the undergrowth for hiding. That was her only effective impulse—to hide. She could not go on. Under heaven there was no going back. People were awake all about her in the huts. More people would be strolling and skylarking along the chapel path, supposing she could have found it. She had the sole, miserable craving that the earth might open to receive her.
And thus it was chance alone that guided her course through the fringe of the village, through garden and sand strip, and that brought her finally, all unseen, to the wall of a large house, to a post, to a slatted gallery aglow inside with lamps, and to her second discovery....