As Gabrielle stopped and stared at the dusky horde of raised faces and tossing limbs beneath rows of hanging lamps, she seemed to awaken from her trance-like state. She raised her hands and gave a cry. The whole audience, who thought that cry was an exclamation expressing some ecstasy of the moment, renewed their volleys of applause. Only the Rajah knew the truth, the meaning of that cry. He hurried forward, gripped the girl’s hand, breathed hotly in her face and murmured, “Come, Bini, mine! Wife!” Then the Rajah gave a start. Above the guttural cries of the tambu marriage assembly one voice had begun to ring out shrill and clear. It was the voice of Maroshe, the Rajah’s long-cast-off tribal wife. She had been a beautiful Koiari maid when the Rajah, who was ten years her senior, had first wooed her. But her feminine attractions had been cruelly brief. The girls of the Papuan races leap into full-blown womanhood at fourteen, and at twenty-five, sometimes earlier, have apparently reached old age, their brows and cheeks being seared with wrinkles. But Maroshe still had a remnant of the old fire gleaming in her fine eyes. But it was a fire that boded no good for the amorous Macka as she stood amidst the motley audience and yelled: “Tao se cowana tumbi!” (May the gods send thee twins!)
Macka heard that voice. It was the one voice on earth that could echo into the depths of his soul and awaken a tinge of remorse in him. Indeed, as he gripped Gabrielle’s wrist he looked against his will across the tiers of uplifted dusky faces till his eyes met the magnetic glance of the scorned Maroshe. Again she held her hand mockingly aloft, and once more yelled: “Tao se cowana tumbi!” The tambu maidens ceased dancing, and stood with fingers to lips beneath the rows of hanging lamps. They knew Maroshe, and also knew that something in her voice revealed the fact that, after all, she still retained her old love for the Rajah. The huge wooden idol, its big eyes agog, was the only face that did not express the horror that seemed to transfix every heathen countenance.
Suddenly Maroshe waved her skinny hand thrice. Then at the sight of her late husband standing there with a new bride, and a white girl to boot, she lowered her wrinkled but still half-beautiful face and disappeared. Macka gave a sigh of relief to see her go.
Suddenly the audience seemed to be awakened from their horrified stupor. “Bang! To woomb!” It was the sound of a monstrous heathen drum banged twice only, somewhere in a mountain village.
Once more the Rajah gripped Gabrielle by the wrist. “Come, my pretty putih bunga!”
According to the ceremonial rites of the creeds of Tumba-Tumba, Gabrielle Everard was now Macka’s wife. That orgy of lust, toddy and heathen seraglio chanting and dances was a genuine old-time New Guinea marriage ceremony.
Gabrielle hardly realised all that it meant for her. She placed her hand to her brow and stared as though she gazed on some strange sight afar off. The village priests and darah tiki-tiki enchanters and enchantresses beat their skinny breasts to show their appreciation of the bride’s beauty. Such an honour had never been theirs before; for had they not been the means of binding a beautiful white maid in marriage bonds to one of their own race.
Directly the Rajah got Gabrielle outside the tambu house he pressed hot kisses on her face. She struggled in that embrace. Her cries brought hordes of dusky, imp-like girls and mop-headed youths on to the scene. He desisted in his matrimonial advances. In a moment he had decided to take her to his old bapa.
As Gabrielle once more prepared to enter the Rajah’s homestead, old bapa, and his hideous, baboon-like wife, rushed forth from the palms just behind, and threw wedding gifts of a suggestive nature upon the trembling girl. After they had been in the presence of old bapa for some little time, the Rajah altered his mind, and throwing his body on the sacred mats of his father’s home expressed a wish to leave the parental roof and take his bride up to his own private establishment in the mountains (two miles off), a place where he had taken so many victims who had fallen under the lure of his university education and the glory of the Christian apostles.
As the Rajah once more went forth, taking his pretty putih bini up the little village track that led under the feathery palms and ivory-nut trees, he gazed upon Gabrielle’s form as only Macka the ex-missionary could gaze. At last they arrived outside a large wooden building (made of thick, rough-hewn mahogany logs) situated on the lower slopes of the Tomba-Tomba Mountains.