'Here, Melanie, old woman, where are you?' he called, as he flung himself lazily into a cane lounge on the verandah.
Melanie, who, native-like, was combing her hair in the sitting-room, rose from the mat upon which she was sitting and came to the door.
'What is it, Tom?' she asked, leaning against the wall and drawing the comb slowly through her long, black locks.
'Why, the barque will be here in another week or so, so this letter says, and there's a tamaitai papalagi (white lady) on board, and she will very likely stay here with us while her husband, who is the new supercargo, goes away in the ship to the Solomon Islands. He will come for her again in about six weeks.'
Melanie's dark eyes glistened with pleasure. White women were rare visitors at lonely Fana 'alu. Every year, it was true, when the American missionary barque touched at the island, one, or sometimes two, white ladies would come ashore; but they were missionaries' wives, and never passed inside the door of the trader's house to speak to his wife. That, in the eyes of the converted natives, would have been scandalous. Melanie might, if she so wished it, have called upon them at the native teacher's house, and paid homage afar off by sitting down on the mats in the furthest corner of the house, while fat, greasy Lepeka,{*} the wife of the equally fat and greasy teacher Paulo, Christianly whispered in the ears of the holy white ladies that that was the white man's 'woman'—who wasn't married to her 'husband.' And even a white missionary's wife must not offend the spouse of the native teacher. So had any of these ladies wished to talk to Melanie, they would have had to make Lepeka their medium; for in some parts of the South Seas the usual position of vicar and curate is reversed, and the white visiting missionary and his wife deliver themselves into the hands of the brown curate and his wife for the time being. Perhaps it is this that makes most white missionaries so thin—the strain of having to submit to a Kanaka teacher's ideas of conventionality must be pretty hard to bear. And so poor Melanie, who would have liked to have sat near the fair-faced, sweet-voiced white ladies, or, perhaps, fondled their hands, as did the young unmarried girls who always surrounded them, bore her lot with content. For once, when she had brought her simple alofa (gift of love) to the missionaries, and laid it timidly down on the mats in the centre of the room, one of the white ladies had smiled at her and said to her husband,—
'Oh, what a pretty girl, and how nicely she is dressed. Ask her to come here and sit by me.'
* Rebecca.
But Melanie was quick to see Lepeka's dark frown, and discreetly retired to her usual corner, at the back of the room, and when she went home to Masters, she did not chatter and laugh as usual when telling him of all she had seen and heard at the teacher's house.
For, in her simple heart, there began to grow an unrest. She would feel better, she thought, when the mission ship had sailed away again, and she would forget the kind smile of the missionary's wife, and forget, too, the sneering curl of Lepeka's fat lips. Three years before, when Tom Masters had picked her up in a dancing saloon in Apia and had asked her to come away with him to Fana 'alu as his wife, she had thought of a marriage in the church, with its attendant mild excitements, and gluttonies of baked pig and fowls, and palusami and other delicacies, and the receiving and giving of many presents. But when Masters—who possessed a fragmentary conscience—told her why he could not marry her, she accepted the position calmly, and said it did not matter.