Presently the scanty congregation came slowly forth. Some, as they passed the white man and Lita, tried to smile a greeting to them, though every brown face was wet with tears. Last of all came Ioane, the Samoan teacher, short, square-built, with deep sunken earnest eyes bent to the ground, his right arm supporting his wife, whose slender frame was shaken with the violence of her grief for those three of her heart whom 'He had taken.' Wallis, followed by Lita, stepped down from his verandah, and held out his hand. The teacher pressed it in silence, and, unable now to speak, walked slowly on. Lita, her dark, oval face still hot with anger, drew back and made no sign, though Eliné, the teacher's wife, murmured as she passed,—'Nay, be not angry, Lita; for death is near to us all.'
As they returned to the house, Ransom, the old trader from Avatulalo, the next village to that in which Wallis lived, met them at the gate. He was a man of sixty or thereabout—grey, dirty, dishevelled and half drunk.
'I want you and Lita to come back with me,' he said slowly, holding to the palings of the fence, and moving his head from side to side; 'you must come... 'you must come, or'—with sudden frenzy—'by God, I'll put a firestick into your house; I will, by blazes, I will! Curse you, Tom Wallis, and your damned, Sydney-white-duck-suit-respectability, and your damned proud quarter-caste Portugee woman, who you ain't married to, as I was to mine—bad as she was. Put up your hands you—'
Wallis gripped him firmly but kindly by the wrists, and forced him into a seat.
'What's the matter with you, Ransom? Only drunk and fightable as usual? or are you being chased by pink snakes with tiger's heads again, eh? There, sit quiet, old man. Where is Addie?'
For a few moments the old man made no answer; then he rose, and placing his trembling hands on Wallis's chest said brokenly,—
'God help me, Tom! She's a-dyin'... an' I'm near drunk. She was took bad this mornin', an' has been callin' for the teacher an' Lita— an' I'd as lief go to hell as to ask a damned Kanaka mission'ry to come an' talk Gospel an' Heaven to a child o' mine—not in my own house, anyway. It ain't right or proper. But she kep' on a-pesterin' me, an' at last I said I would come an' arst him... an' while I was waitin' outside the church I hears the damned feller a-prayin' and sayin' “All flesh is grass, and the grass withereth”'—his voice quivered and broke again—'an' onct I heard my old mother say them very words when she was a-dyin', more'n forty year ago, in the old country. An' Addie's dyin' fast, Tom; dyin', an' I can't say a prayer with her; I don't know none. I'm only a drunken old shellback, an' I ought to be struck dead for my bloody sins. She's all I has in the world to love; an' now, an' now—' He turned away and, covering his face with his coarse, sunburnt hands, sobbed like a child.
Half an hour later Wallis and Lita were in the room with the dying girl. Ransom, shambling behind them, crept in and knelt at the foot of the bed. Two native women, who were squatted on the matted floor went out softly, and Wallis bent over the girl and looked into her pallid, twitching face, over which the dread grey shadow was creeping fast. She put out her hand to the trader and Lita, and a faint smile moved her lips.