For seventeen days we made good progress to the north-west, though we met with such very heavy weather when between Minto Breakers Beef, and the island of Oraluk, that I had to run back to the latter place for shelter, and all but missed it. Although so small, it is very fertile, and the natives were very hospitable, Niâbon and Lucia being given a room in the chief's house, and I and my two men were given a house to ourselves, where we were very comfortable during our stay of four days, though unable to get about on account of the pouring rain, which hardly ceased for an hour. The chief's house was quite near to that in which we were quartered, so I spent a good deal of my time there, for although I cannot say that I was really in love with my future wife, her gentle endearments, and the happiness that shone in her dark eyes when I was with her gave me a certain restfulness, and I was well content.
We had long since decided as to our future. After our marriage she was to stay with her sister, or with my friends, the Otano's, on Guam, whilst I made my way to my friend at Amboyna, and got him to provide me with such an amount of trade goods that when I returned to Guam I should be in a position to at once begin trading operations either in the Marianas, with Guam for my headquarters, or else choose some suitable place in the Caroline Archipelago. The boat, I had no doubt, I could sell at San Luis d'Apra, or San Ignacio, and this I intended to do if a fair price was offered me. Then I would take passage in one of the Spanish trading schooners to Manila, and from there I could easily get to Amboyna; and all going well, it was more than likely that my friend would lend or sell me on easy terms, one of his own small trading vessels, for he had half a dozen or more employed throughout the Moluccas, and on the coast of the Phillipine Islands.
On the second day after our arrival on Oraluk, the rain cleared off for an hour, and I went over to the chief's house, and found Lucia conversing in Spanish with some native women who could speak it brokenly, for years before there had been a Jesuit mission on the island, but it had been abandoned, and the two priests, after a stay of five years, had gone back to Manila. Niâbon was not in the house—she had gone into the forest with some of the young girls, Lucia said, as she bade me come in and sit down.
“She is a strange girl, Lucia. She seems to love to be in the forest, or walking on the cliffs or mountain tops. I wish I knew the true story of her life.”
Lucia shook her head. “She will not tell it, Jim, and I am sure she does not like to be questioned even by me. But yet she has told me a little, and there can be no harm in my telling you—I am sure she would not mind.”
“No, why should she mind?”
“She told me that her very first memories of her childhood go back to when she was a child of six at Manhiki. She lived alone with her mother in a little hut quite apart from the other people. Even then she says she knew that her mother was a 'witch-woman' and was greatly feared by the natives, who yet came to her for charms and medicines. Who her mother was she does not know—but she is quite certain that she was a full-blooded Polynesian, though not a native of Manhiki. Her father she had never seen, nor had her mother ever made even the faintest allusion to him, and Niâbon herself had never dared question her on the subject. She told me, however, that she imagined he was a white man.”
“I am almost sure he was,” I said; “she certainly is not a full-blooded native.”
“I am sure of it too. But she does not like to be thought anything but a pure native. Why, I cannot tell, and have never asked her her reasons.”
“Is her mother still living?”