Gabrielle of the Lagoon: A Romance of the South Seas

by W. H. Myddleton

Before Gabrielle had realised that the woman was going, Maroshe had slipped out of the door. But she came again, and under circumstances that Gabrielle never cared to recall.

The next night the Rajah returned again to the solitary building by the mountains of Tomba-Tomba. He sent his chieftain sentinels away to their huts. He stooped his turbaned head as he entered the low doorway, and approached the girl with the old fascinating look in his fiery eyes. With the almighty deceit of his race he told her he had relented, and would take her back to Bougainville. He made her heart leap with hidden delight as he talked. His voice seemed tender as a woman’s as he poured forth his semi-Mohammedanistic vers libre. Again he knelt before her, as a bigot heathen might kneel before an idol, and stared into her blue, frightened eyes.

Gabrielle, as though in a trance, felt his caressing hands; they seemed shadow hands as his burning words crept into her ears. She heard the winds sigh outside in the mountain palms. She and he were alone.

“Gabri-ar-le! thou art more than life itself; the moon, the stars, thou art; and like unto the stars shall our children be!” he murmured in Biblical tones as he returned to the lingo of the old mission-room. Only the chantings of the cicalas in the ivory-nut palms disturbed the silence. Gabrielle felt the strength of those strong hands, the warm breath of those terrible lips. A mist came before her eyes; she heard the wild tribal drums beating across the centuries! The Papuan’s voice sounded far off; a shadowy figure had whipped across the rush-matted floor as the lamps burnt dimly with a magic light. And still the drums were beating as though in impatient haste across the centuries. And still her soul struggled as she fearfully watched for that which her eyes had surely seen; then, once again, the tappa curtains that separated her chamber from the door that led straight to the jungle outside seemed to divide softly. She could not scream as that terrible thing peeped between the divided curtains, its burning eyes staring upon her. Its beautiful woman’s head was faintly visible. The eyes gleamed with rapture as the enchantress from the past stared appealingly, beckoned to the white girl, nodded her dusky head and besought Gabrielle to do her bidding! Gabrielle stared wildly round. Only she and the terrible enchantress faced one another whichever way her eyes turned. She still peeped beneath the uplifted curtains—now she had begun to crawl on her belly like unto a serpent. Tears were in the shadow woman’s eyes! And still Gabrielle heard the drums beating across the mountains, coming across the silent hills of sleep. And still the struggle went on. The phantom woman crawled slowly beneath the tappa curtain as the white girl watched. She noticed the beauty of the smooth, oily, terra-cotta-hued limbs, the curved, sensuous thighs. At last the visitant lifted her beautiful shadowy head, and began slowly to rise to her feet as the tappa curtain fell softly. She had entered Gabrielle’s chamber! A shadow fell across the girl’s pallid, terror-stricken face, darkening her eyes. She groped in terrible blindness, just for a moment, then pushed it from her. She recognised the terrible presence and recalled in a flash how she had mastered it when it had come to her in the dead of night in her bedroom, at her old home in Bougainville. She fell on her knees and prayed. She wrestled with the evil presence in an indescribable agony of spirit. And then, quite suddenly, the enchantress who had crept out of the jungle of the past gave a wail—and vanished.

Gabrielle stared round her. The perspiration was dropping from her brow; she was trembling from head to foot. She was alone! The Rajah, too, had seen that look in her eyes and had disappeared. In a moment she had recovered her senses. She rushed into the little off-room where she slept, and in two seconds was hastily piling up the mahogany boxes and huge native clubs against the door, so that none could enter without her knowledge. Then she lay on her rush-matted bed and thanked God.

For now she realised instinctively, with a force amounting to certainty, that never again would she be haunted by this shadow woman—her dark ancestress from the past. Gabrielle knew that that struggle in the tambu house had meant for her a complete spiritual victory. The evil spirit had been exorcised.

Perhaps also it meant something more. Perhaps it symbolised a physical triumph over Rajah Macka and his heathen desires. Strange as it may seem, she no longer felt the same fear of him which had possessed her on board the ship. She was trying to persuade herself that, after all, he was only a grotesque heathen, eaten up with his own conceit. And these thoughts, or something like them, were stirring in her mind when she finally fell asleep.

Gabrielle had been a close prisoner in the private tambu house for just eight days before the Rajah came to her again. The girl had almost recovered from the shock of that terrible visitant from the past and the Rajah’s advances. Indeed, she had bribed one of the sentinel chiefs by giving him a tortoise-shell comb from her hair, and so had received valuable information. She had discovered that there were several white settlers residing in the villages by Astrolabe Bay, some twenty-five miles round the coast. And so she had resolved to take flight at the first opportunity, and risk death in the wild coastal forest in a last attempt to secure the help of civilised men.

Sunset had sunk over the mountains as she sat hollow-eyed and miserable in her prison chamber. Gabrielle could hear the terrible tiki priests chanting and beating drums to their great god Urio Moquru, whose mortal power was represented in monstrous carven wood somewhere near the sacred banyans at the foot of the mountains.

Suddenly the Rajah entered her chamber. A fierce, unearthly look gleamed in his eyes. He did not approach her in his usual oblique fashion; he caught her by the arm and began to whisper fierce words in her ears: