“On cold nights at sea,” Hillary responded, as he stroked his chin and felt amused at the girl’s remarks.
And still the girl sang on as he watched her. She looked like a faery child as she sat there swinging on the banyan bough, the music of her voice ringing some elfin tune into his ears. There was a look that reminded him of Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Indeed, the apprentice half fancied that she was some visionary girl sitting there singing to him from a banyan bough in the Solomon Isles. And as the sea-winds drifted in and made a kind of moaning music in the ivory-nut palms their murmurings seemed to sing:
“I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
“I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
“I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried: ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!’”
A strange bird that neither knew the name of began to whistle its evening song and broke the spell. “I wish that damned bird hadn’t come and spoilt everything,” was Hillary’s most emphatic mental comment. Gabrielle had stopped singing. “Do you love the songs of birds, Miss Everard?” he said as he looked at her and gave an inane smile.
“I do this evening,” she replied, then quickly added: “It’s the tribal drums, that horrible booming and banging in the mountains, that I hate to hear!”
“Fancy that!” said Hillary, somewhat surprised, as he listened to the distant echoes—it was the tribal drums up in the native village beating the stars in.
“I was just thinking how romantic that distant drumming sounded; the people in the far-off cities of the world would give something to hear that primitive overture to the night, I can tell you,” said he.
“Fancy that! Why——” said Gabrielle, as she over-balanced and fell from the bough in considerable confusion at his feet. Hillary made a grab as though she had yet another sheer depth to fall.
“Oh, allow me!” he exclaimed, as he picked her novel up. The girl whipped her robe down swiftly and hid the brown, ornamental-stockinged calves that a few months before had been exposed by short skirts to the gaze of all those who might wish to stare. Gabrielle blushed as she rearranged her crimson sash. She was dressed in a kind of Oriental style, in a sarong, opened at the sleeves to about one inch above the elbows. The crimson sash was tied bow-wise at the left hip; a large hibiscus blossom was stuck coquettishly in the folds of her hair, making her small white ear peep out like a pearly shell. Her retroussé nose had a tiny scratch on it where a bee had stung her the day before.
“Why, you’ve scratched your arm!” exclaimed Hillary, taking advantage of the delicate situation by gently pulling back the sleeve of her sarong and boldly wiping a tiny speck of blood away from the soft whiteness that had been pricked by a cactus thorn. Gabrielle put on a look of extreme modesty, notwithstanding that she had danced on a heathen pae pae a few nights before.