The name of the girl was Ema. She was the half-caste daughter of the old trader. She had come to bathe, but meant to wait awhile and see if some of the native girls from the nearest village, who might be passing along to her father's store, to buy goods or sell native produce, would join her. So, lighting her cigarette with a piece of burning coconut husk that she brought with, her, she spread the towel she carried upon the rock and waited, looking sometimes at the opposite side of the channel to where the path from the village led, and sometimes out to sea.
Somewhat short in stature, the old trader's daughter looked younger than she was, for she was about twenty—and twenty is an age in those tropic climes which puts a girl a long way out of girlhood.
No one would ever say that little Ema Swain was beautiful. She certainly was not. Her freckled face and large mouth “put her out of court,” as Captain Peters would sometimes say to his mate. (Captain Peters frequently came to Drummond's, and he and Etna's father would get drunk on such occasions with uniform regularity.) But wait till you spoke to her, and then let her eyes meet yours, and you would forget all about the big mouth and the freckles; and when she smiled it was with such an innocent sweetness that made a man somehow turn away with a feeling in his heart that no coarse passion had ever ruffled her gentle bosom.
And her eyes. Ah! so different from those of most Polynesian half-blooded girls. Theirs, indeed, in most cases, are beautiful eyes; but there is ever in them a bold and daring challenge to a man they like that gives the pall of monotony to the brightness of a glance.
Nearly every white man who had ever seen Ema and heard the magical tones of her voice, or her sweet innocent laugh, was fascinated when she turned upon him those soft orbs that, beneath the long dark lashes, looked like diamonds floating in fluid crystal.
I said “nearly every white man,” for sometimes men came to Jack Swain's house whose talk and manner, and unmistakable looks at her, made the girl's slight figure quiver and tremble with fear, and she would hide herself away in another room lest her father and brother might guess the terror that filled her tender bosom. For white-headed Jack was a passionate old fellow, and would have quickly invited any one who tried to harm the girl “to come outside”; Jim, her black-haired, morose and silent brother, would have driven a knife between the offender's ribs.
But the girl's merry, loving disposition would never let her tell her brother nor her father how she dreaded these visits of some of the rough traders from the other islands of the group to the house. Besides that, neither of them noticed Ema; for Jim always got as drunk as his father on such occasions of island harmony and foregathering of kindred spirits.
So for the past ten years the girl had grown up amongst these savage surroundings—a fierce, turbulent, native race, delighting in deeds of bloodshed, and only tolerating the presence of her father among them because of his fair dealing and indomitable courage. In those far back, olden days, when the low sandy islands of the Equatorial Pacific were almost unknown (save to the few wandering white men who had cast their lives among their wild and ferocious inhabitants, and the crews of the American whaling fleet), no one but such a man as he would have dared to dwell alone among the intractable and warlike people of Drummond's Island.
But old Swain had lived for nearly forty years among the islands of the South Seas, roaming from one end of the Pacific to the other, and his bold nature was not one to be daunted. There was money to be made in those times in the oil trade; yet sometimes, when he lay upon his couch smoking his pipe, some vague idea would flit through his mind of going back to the world again and ending his days in civilisation.