He waited. Tamea set the crackers on her butter plate, as she had observed him do; like him, she made no movement to eat them. Dan took up his butter knife and buttered a cracker. Tamea instantly searched out her butter knife—Dan would have been willing to wager considerable she had never seen one before—and buttered her cracker. Bite for bite and sip for sip she followed his lead, her smoky glance seldom straying from him. Observing that she was not using her napkin, Dan flirted his, on pretense of straightening it out, and respread it. Immediately Tamea unfolded her napkin and spread it.
“She’ll do,” Dan soliloquized. “Doesn’t know a thing, but has the God-given grace to know she doesn’t know and is smart enough not to try to four-flush. That girl has brains to spare. She speaks when she is spoken to, but tonight silence is not good for her. She must not think too much about her father.” Aloud he said: “Tamea, what was your life in Riva like?”
“Very simple, Dan Pritchard. While our family ruled Riva we were rulers with little ruling to do. Ten years ago my mother’s father died. After that my mother and I spent many months each year with my father aboard the Moorea. My mother did not speak good French, but my father would speak to me in no other tongue. He taught me to read and write French and English, and when I was twelve years old he brought a woman from Manga Riva to be my governess. She was half Samoan and half English, and she had been educated in England. The island blood called her back. She played the piano and was lazy and would get drunk if she could, but she feared my father, so she taught me faithfully each day when sober. My father paid her well—too well.”
“What became of her, Tamea?”
“She is dead. Influenza in nineteen eighteen. Our people do not survive it, although I was very ill with it. My father said it was his blood that saved me.”
“Doubtless. What did you do all day in Riva?”
“In the morning, early, I swam in the river or to the lagoon. The tiger shark seldom comes inside the reef. Then breakfast and lessons for two hours, then some sleep and more lessons late in the afternoon, followed, perhaps, by another swim. Then dinner and after dinner some music and song and perhaps a dance. Twice a year, sometimes three times a year, we would have a big feast when some schooner would call for water and supplies and offer trade for our copra. But my father controlled that.”
“Were you happy, Tamea?”
“Oh, yes, very!”
“When your mother died, was your father in Riva?”