GABRIELLE OF THE LAGOON

A ROMANCE OF THE SOUTH SEAS

BY

A. SAFRONI-MIDDLETON

AUTHOR OF
“SAILOR AND BEACHCOMBER”

PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
1919

COPYRIGHT 1919, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS

PHILADELPHIA, U. S. A

PROLOGUE

Though it was night and there was no moon, a dim, weird light lay over the isle and pierced to the depths of the forests. It was in the Solomons, where the dark, picturesque surroundings of palm and reef, the noise of the distant surfs, made a suitable setting for anything unexpected. Even the silver sea-birds had weird, startled-looking eyes down Felisi beach way. And when the wild brown men crept away from the grave-side of one whom they had just buried in the forest, the winds sighed a fitting music across the primeval heights. But there was nothing strange in that; men must die wherever one goes, and it was a common enough occurrence in that heathen land where the ocean boomed on the one side and inland to the south-west stood the mountains, looking like mighty monuments erected in memory of the first dark ages. Across the skies of Bougainville the stars had been marshalled in the millions. It seemed a veritable heathen faeryland as the night echoed a hollow “Tarabab!” But even that heathenish word was only the tribal chief’s yell as he stood under the palms conducting the semi-religious tambu ceremony. The tawny maidens and high chiefs, with their feather head-dresses, all in full festival costume, were squatting in front of the secret tambu stage, some mumbling prayer, others beating their hands together as an accompaniment. And still the dusky tambu dancer moved her perfect limbs rhythmically to the rustling of her sarong-like attire, swaying first to the right then to the left as she chanted to the wailings of the bamboo fifes and bone flutes. The orchestral-like moan of the huge bread-fruits, as odorous drifts of hot wind swept in from the tropic seas, seemed to murmur in complete sympathy with the pretty dancer. One might easily have concluded that Oom Pa, the aged high priest, was the “star turn” of the evening as he stood there enjoying his thoughts and performing magnificently on the monster tribal drum.

There was something fascinating and super-primitive about the whole scene. The very scents from decaying forest frangipani and hibiscus blossoms seemed to drift out of the damp gloom of the dark ages. The presence of civilisation in any form seemed the remotest of possibilities. Even the fore-and-aft schooner, with yellowish, hanging canvas sails, lying at anchor just beyond the shore lagoons, looked like some strange-rigged craft that sailed mysterious seas.

But as the assembled tribe once again wildly clamoured for the next dancer to come forward and exhibit her charms, a murmur of surprise rose from the back rows of stalwart, tattooed chiefs—a white girl suddenly ran out of the forest and jumped on to the tambu stage!

One aged chiefess who was busy mumbling her prayers looked up and gave a frightened scream. Even the aged philosophical head-hunter Ra-mai, who had one hundred and eighty skulls hanging to his credit in his palavana hard by, gave a mellow grunt, so great was his surprise. A white girl, lips red as coral, hair like the sunset’s gold, standing by his old pae pae! It was something that he had never dreamed of. The tawny maidens squatting beneath the coco-nut-oil-lamp-lit shades on the right of the buttressed banyans, lifted their hands in astonishment. For a moment the white girl stood perfectly still. All eyes were upon her. She stared vacantly as though she were in a trance. Then she moved forward a few steps, her feet lightly touching the forest floor as if she were a visionary figure veiled in moonlight. Only the sudden renewal of the wild clamouring and guttural cries of “O la Maramam tambu, papalaga!” (“A white girl will dance before us!”) seemed to rouse her to her senses, reminding her of the reason she had responded to the swelling chorus of tribal drums.

The barbarian musicians had begun to bang and blow on their flutes in an inspired way as they urged her to dance. Her sudden hesitation was very evident to every onlooker. And as she stood there by the monster tambu idol, its big glass eyes agog and wooden lips stretched in hideous laughter, she had a strange, unearthly beauty. The winds sighed in the palms; she wavered like a blown spirit-girl that had been suddenly swept out of the night of stars into the midst of those Pharaoh-like chiefs. Some of those warriors watched with chin on hand, others stared upon her with burning eyes.

Those old chiefs and their women-kind had seen many strange sights and experienced many shocks since German, British, Malayan, Hindoo, Chinese and Dutch settlers had set foot on their shores; but still they were quite unprepared for the sight they witnessed that night. The handsome Malayo-Polynesian half-castes nudged their comrades in the ribs and murmured the native equivalent to “What-o!” To their delight, the white girl had mounted the pae pae and had begun to dance and sing. The whole tribe watched and listened, spellbound. The haunting sweetness of the melody seemed to bring all ears under its influence. It was something in the way of song that those wild people had never heard before.

Only the pretty faded blue robe falling down to her brown-stockinged ankles and the long tortoise-shell comb stuck in the rich folds of her golden-bronze hair told of her mortal origin. And there was no mistaking the reality of that indisputable bang on the heathen bandmaster’s drum. That dusky virtuoso was certainly inspired by human passion.

Ra-mai, who was a kind of religious genius, dropped his festival calabash and rubbed his eyes, for the girl was swaying as though she were fastened on to the winds, her eyes wide open, staring upon him. The old priestly warrior swore, long after, that she was a spirit-maid whom he had loved a thousand years ago, and who had returned that night, as white as a deep-sea pearl, to show men how great a priest and warrior he really was. But he was a poetical old fellow and had a high opinion of himself where female beauty and frailty were concerned. But if there was an element of surprise over her sudden appearance before them, the astonishment of these natives was intensified by her dramatic exit from their midst. Just as the guttural cries of the chiefs and the weird monotones of the chanting tambu maidens had caught the tempo of her dance, she gave a scream, stood perfectly still and stared on those wild men with a terrified look in her eyes. Then, before anyone could realise her intentions, she had leapt from the pae pae, had run away into the forest and vanished like a wraith!

The whole tribal assemblage looked into each other’s eyes in astonishment. Such an exhibition of red betel-nut-stained teeth had never been seen in a midnight forest festival before, for they all stared open-mouthed.

“Tabaran

“Not so. Didst see the light of vanity in her wondrous eyes as the young chiefs praised her beauty?” said another.

“’Tis a white girl suddenly up-grown and full of fever for love,” said an old chief with wise wrinkles on his brow. And then yet another said: “Had it been a full-moon sacred festival, ’twould have been well to slay her for such boldness, the cursed papalagi!”

Then the festival broke up. And that night the handsome chiefs, and even the aged priests, tossed restlessly on their bed-mats as they lay in their village huts dreaming of a goddess-like creature who had flitted through their tambu ceremony like a dream.

CHAPTER I—ROMANCE’S FIRST THRILL

On the day following the tribal festival when the white girl had so astonished the heathen priests in the village called Ackra-Ackra a runaway ship’s apprentice emerged from his half-caste landlady’s wooden lodging-house. He was off for a stroll, for the tenth time or so, over the slopes that divided the banyan forests from the small township of Rokeville. He was stagnating and so had little else to do except to make the colour of the picturesque scenery harmonise with his meditations. He was a tall, handsome fellow, about twenty years of age. His brass-bound suit looked decidedly faded by the hot tropical sun, and the flannel collar of his only shirt had begun to look slightly grimy. All the same, he had that look of refinement which is inherited from good ancestors. A romantically inclined maid would have thought him extremely attractive. A bronze-hued lock seemed to ooze from beneath the rim of his cheese-cutter cap, for when funds were low in distant lands, and scissors scarce on ships at sea, his hair grew quite curly. One of his eyes was a deep blue and the other a golden-brown. This eccentric combination of colour may have had something to do with the romantic adventures that fell to his lot through his leaving ship in Bougainville. It was quite three weeks since he had made a bolt from his full-rigged sailing-ship in the harbour, consequently his cash in hand had seriously diminished. He had already become terribly sane whilst pondering over the natural consequences of being cashless.

Hillary L——, for that was his name, hated plantation work and all muscular endeavours that did not contain some element of romance. But still, he had long since realised, through his many adversities at the end of long voyages, that wherever one goes one must toil for a living, however romantic the scenery may appear.

“Blasted wicked world this! Wish white men could dress like the natives and chew nourishing nuts for a living!” he murmured, as he thoughtfully saluted the German official who was leaning against a dead screw-pine, on the top of which blew the Double Eagle flag.

Hillary was no fool; he could always be polite at the right time and place. He’d been stranded, with fourpence-halfpenny or so in his possession, in about ten islands during the last twelve months, and he knew that if things got to the worst he could apply to the German consul for a free passage to British New Guinea or to Samoa. Hence his politeness. He was British to the backbone, and as the Teutonic official murmured that it was a nice day Hillary nodded and then lifted a cloud of the finest coral-dust with his offside boot. He could hear the German spluttering and coughing in a fearful rage, wondering why the hot wind had suddenly lifted so much dust. Hillary’s contempt for anything in the German line was quite unaffected. The natives whispered: “Germhony mans nicer feller when he looker one way, but all-e-samee, he belonga debil mans.”

The young apprentice was one of a type that commercially was not worth a tinker’s dam. If he were a party to any scheme connected with finance, one could safely predict that that scheme was predestined to complete failure. But in the imaginative world Hillary could be pronounced a decided success.

It was the same wherever he went. The old sea-boots on the shelf of the seaport’s slop-shop danced a jig on some ship far at sea; the oilskins swelled to visionary limbs as sailormen opened their bearded mouths and climbed aloft, singing the chanteys that he could distinctly hear as he placed his ear to the shop’s dirty window!

The silk, blue-fringed chemise hanging on a nail by the oil lamp clung, as he gazed, to the limbs of some laughing girl; fingers travelling down the yellow keys of the second-hand piano mysteriously strummed out some melody that told of the briefness of life, youth and beauty. This poetical weakness was a veritable Old Man of the Sea on his back. But still, he was no fool, and, like most of his type, he could be strong where most men are weak.

As he turned round and looked on the desolate scene, and stared at the sunset out at sea, his face expressed an emotion that words cannot describe. The parrots rose in a glittering cloud as he stood their meditating, gazing on the small burial ground that he had suddenly stumbled across. It was where a few white men had been buried on the lonely beach-side, miles from the township. The crosses of coral stone were sunken very deep, the names nearly oblitered. “What a godforsaken, tragic place,” he muttered as he read:

TO THE MEMORY OF

BILL LARGO, BOATSWAIN

DIED JUNE 3RD 1860

SPEARED BY HEAD-HUNTERS IN TRYING TO SAVE SHIP’S

COOK—THIS STONE IS RAISED BY THE CREW

OF THE S.S. “SALAMANDER” BOUND

FOR CALLAO

Everything seemed tragic in those parts. For as he wandered along the beach a voice startled him as a weird face suddenly poked out of the mangroves:

“Noice even’ng, matey?”

“Yes,” responded the apprentice as he looked into the face of a sun-tanned remnant of a white man who stood by a fern-sheltered, thatched den. It was only old Adams, an ex-sailor, leading his Mormon-like existence. He was a kind of Solomon Island aristocrat of independent means. He was apparently attired in a wide-brimmed hat and beard only, for the climate is muggy in the Solomons. He did wear thin cotton pants, but they were so drenched with perspiration that they clung to his legs like a skin. He borrowed a shilling from the apprentice, shot a stream of tobacco juice seaward, then entered his hut, but before slamming the door behind him he looked back and said: “I’d git back to me ship if I was you; the Kai-Kai chiefs are on the b——taboo lay round ’ere, and they’d give their ears for that curly mop of yourn!” The door slammed. Once more Hillary was alone. As he walked away he could distinctly hear old Adams swearing at his four wives, who was apparently rushing round the hut looking for his clean shirt. They were dusky women, probably the daughters of tribal kings, and had given their birthrights to Adams so that they could be the wives of a noble papalagi. Such was the queer, mixed population of that solitary locality where the apprentice mooched along. And Rokeville, the shore township, was not much more dignified; but what it lacked socially was amply made up for by its Arabian-Nights-like atmosphere. Its one street, a silvery track made of coral dust, went winding down to the shore. And when the full moon peered over the ocean rim, touching with dim light the feathery palms that sheltered the tin roofs of the scattered coral-built houses, it looked like some staged faery town of a South Sea isle. Often by night some strange-rigged ship would hug the coast-line for hours while its crew of blackbirders crept ashore and kidnapped native men and women from the villages. Before dawn that stealthy craft had sailed away, crammed up to the hatches with cheap labour for the plantations and heathen seraglios of nowhere. By day things looked as real as possible. There was nothing faery-like about Parsons’ wooden grog shanty, that stood, sheltered by three tall palms, at the head of the township. Through its ever-open doorway by day and night passed the German, Scandinavian, Norwegian and Yankee shell-backs, who drank strong rum at the bar, banged their fists and narrated their Homeric deeds. That shanty was the commercial centre and stock exchange of Bougainville. It was haunted by about a dozen nondescript, aged Chinese, Dutch and Japanese seamen who wore pigtails, pointed beards or scraggy whiskers: on the brightest tropic day they succeeded in adding a touch of romance to the shore landscape, for when rum was scarce they leant their ragged backs against the palm stems and looked like old figure-heads from Chinese junks and Spanish galleons stuck up on end, till they spoilt the picture by pulling their tangled beards as they spat seaward. They also drank rum and existed, apparently, by watching the white seahorses charge the purple-ridged line of coral reefs that made the natural pier of that seaside resort. Consequently the young apprentice preferred the wild scenery of the mahogany forests and the blue lagoons where the brown maids dived, to the mixed society of that delectable township. To him there was something fascinating, almost poetic, about the mahogany-hued Papuans and Polynesians. But his ideals quite saved him from falling in love with a brown maid. And it must be confessed that the Solomon Isles was not an Olympian locality, where dwelt cold, passionless Hellenic beauties, and many a dusky Nausicaa and luring Circe had tempted bold sailormen to destruction by their songs and demonstrative exhibitions of their charms. But some of the maids were innocent enough, for as Hillary wandered by Felisi beach he caught sight of a tiny Polynesian baby girl. She was busy pulling wild flowers that grew amongst the thick tavu-grass. Her tiny body shone with a hue like a new Australian sovereign as sunset bathed her little figure with its hot light. Her alert, savage ears heard the apprentice’s footsteps in the scrub. Just for a moment her thick curls tossed and sparkled among the tall fern-grass as she sped away into the forest as though she quite expected a white man to shoot her at sight!

“I wonder what I’ll sight next; why, it’s like some fairy spot,” Hillary murmured as he watched the child disappear. Then he climbed over the reefs till he came right opposite the shore islets, where the natives swore their gods danced under the stars.

At this spot there happened to be a wide lagoon, and on the still waters, just where the mighty banyans leaned over and made a delightful shade, floated a canoe. “The very thing!” Hillary exclaimed. In a moment he was paddling about on the lagoon in the small primitive craft. Strange birds shrieked over his head, their crimson and blue wings flashing along as they resented his intrusion into their lovely solitude. Some had eyes like sparkling jewels and long, hanging coral-red legs and feet.

“What a bit of luck! I could paddle about here for ever!” was his comment as he swished the paddle, turned the prow of his canoe and went off full speed down the narrow creek-like passage that led to the wider stretch of water inland. “It’s like being alone on an uninhabited island,” he thought. Suddenly a hush came over the waters. Only the solitary “Kai koo-seeeek!” of a parakeet disturbed the silence. So still was the water of the lagoon that he seemed to float about on a mighty mirror. The huge buttressed banyans reflected in the deep, clear water by the banks hung upside down, twisted shapes in an abyss of blue. He could even discern the flock of shrieking, sky-winging lories as their images went wheeling silently over the wooded heights, so clearly was the forest fringe reflected in the depths.

“Good Lord!” he gasped, as he stared on that shadow-world; and no wonder, for on the rim of the hanging cloud, high over the leaning trees of the reflected sky, sped an ornamental canoe! Its paddle was swiftly curling, like a fast-flying bird’s wing. He nearly upset his small craft, so great was his astonishment, for, looking towards the bend where the banyans hid the expanse of inland water from view, he saw that the reflected figure in the canoe was real.

It wasn’t the canoe but the paddler that made him exclaim. “It can’t be an apparition with those hibiscus blossoms stuck in her hair,” he thought as he rubbed his eyes and stared again. The blue robe, open low at the neck, was the apprentice’s only excuse for his ridiculous idea in thinking that a beautiful princess of some unknown white race had suddenly appeared on the lagoon. She softly dipped her paddle and, shattering the blue sky and twisted boughs with one blow, came speeding towards him!

“Am I awake?” he muttered. She had waved her paddle, welcoming his presence as though she had known him for years. At first he hesitated, thinking that one word, one sign of recognition from him would make her vanish back into her native skies. But at length he too lifted his paddle and waved most enthusiastically!

As Hillary came closer he saw that there was sorrow in the girl’s blue eyes, as needs there must be, since Beauty is Sorrow’s legitimate child. A far-off gleam shone in them and glinted in her hair, which tumbled down to the warm white curves of her neck and round to her throat.

It was the pretty retroussé nose that looked so human.

Hillary took a deep breath and gazed again.

“Fancy meeting you here!” he said as in his embarrassment he pulled his dirty kerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face to hide his confusion; then, remembering, he hastily replaced the rag-like kerchief in his pocket.

“Fancy meeting you!” said the girl as she gave a silvery peal of laughter.

The young apprentice’s heart began to thump. He stared into the girl’s eyes as though she had mesmerised him. A wild desire thrilled his soul as she leaned forward, still paddling softly as she returned his gaze.

“Do you live here?—out here in the South Seas?” he murmured as he almost dropped his cheese-cutter midshipman’s cap into the water.

“Of course I do! Do you think I live up in the sky?”

“Shouldn’t be surprised if you did,” he responded, gaining his nerve. Then he told the girl that he thought she might have been a princess migrating or on tour in one of the intermediate steamers.

The girl stared at hearing this sally. The look that came into her eyes made the apprentice understand the cause of the girl’s apparently bold familiarity. She was quite unworldly. She seemed to read his thoughts, for she ceased paddling and, looking almost seriously into his face, said: “I’m Gabrielle Everard. I’ve lived in these islands with Dad since I was a child. Dad took me away to Ysabel and Gualdacanar about a year ago.”

“Did he really?” said Hillary as he metaphorically nudged himself to find her so pleasant and confidential.

“Mother dead?” he murmured as the sea-wind drifted across the waters, sighed in the shore banyans and blew the girl’s tresses about her throat.

“Mother’s dead, of course! Always has been so far as I can remember,” she responded, looking into the young man’s face intently, wondering why on earth his voice should sound so tender and concerned when he asked about her long-dead parent.

They paddled side by side. The strange girl’s eyes had done a grievous thing to Hillary’s soul. The feathery palms and old trees, catching the sea-winds, seemed to whisper cherished things of romance and long-forgotten lover to his ears. It took him that way because he was an amateur musician.

“What a beautiful voice you’ve got!” said he, as she dipped her paddle in perfect tempo to some wild melody that she sang in a minor key.

“Have I? Why, Dad says I’ve got a voice like a cockatoo!” she responded merrily.

“The wicked, unmusical old bounder!” said the apprentice; then he swiftly apologised.

“Oh, you needn’t be so sorry that you’ve said that. I don’t care a cuss!”

Once more Hillary metaphorically rubbed his hands. “Jove! What an original, fascinating creature the girl is, to be sure,” was his secret comment. Had the young apprentice known that the girl before him had danced on a heathen pae pae (stage) and sang before those cannibalistic tribal warriors the night before, he would most probably have been more fascinated by her presence than ever!

“Gabrielle! Gabrielle! What a name! Beautiful!” he murmured to himself as the girl dipped the paddle and sang on. By now they had arrived near the sandy shore of the inland lagoon.

“Must you go?” he said.

“Well, yes; but I can easily see you again, can’t I?” Hillary L—— made no articulate response. “And this is the Solomon Isles, remote from civilisation, far away in the cannibalistic South Seas!” he murmured deep within his happy soul.

But mad as Hillary was, he half realised that the girl before him was more of a child than a woman. She laughed, even giggled a little, like a happy child. Only five years had passed since she had played with the native kiddies, who many times had persuaded her to dance and sing their heathen songs as they pretended to be heathen chiefs and chiefesses performing on a toy pae pae. She had revelled in those dances. But no one would have dreamed by looking at her that she was not a pure-blooded white girl. Her father had married a beautiful three-quarter caste girl in Honolulu, so Gabrielle had a strain of dark blood in her veins!

The young apprentice couldn’t fathom the look in her eyes as he stared. Passion was just awakening in her soul, stealing like a tropical sunrise over the hills of childhood. To him she appeared like some spirit-creation that might at any moment take wings and fly away; so when she turned the prow of her canoe dead on to the soft sand and jumped ashore, he made a frantic dash and jumped, landing just behind her. He was determined to know when and where she would meet him again. But he had no need to fear; she did not fly away. She simply tied her canoe to a bamboo stem and, turning round, looked him full in the face with those glorious eyes that were to be for him two stars of the first magnitude. Then she placed her fingers in the folds of her hair and taking out one of the hibiscus blossoms, handed it to him, much to his surprise. He realised that it was more the act of a child than a woman of the world.

“I’ve read in books that girls give men flowers that have been fastened in their hair,” she said. This remark and act of the girl’s, and the look in her eyes, had a strange effect on Hillary’s susceptible mind. He almost felt the tears well into his eyes. It was all so unexpected, and told him in some great poetry of silence what the girl’s heart was made of, the utter loneliness of her existence and the way her childish dreams were flowing out to the great realities of life. He placed the flower in his buttonhole, then gazed on the girl as only an infatuated youth can gaze, and said: “Will you meet me here again, by this lagoon? Any day and time will do for me.”

“I’m sure to be this way again,” she said, and before the young apprentice could stop her she had flitted away under the coco-palms.

Before she got out of sight she turned and waved her hand. In his excitement he responded by waving his cap. Then she disappeared under the thick belt of dark mangroves by the swamp track that led inland in the direction of her father’s bungalow.

“What a girl!” That was the only audible comment he made as the girl went out of sight. And where did she go? She ran away over the slopes that lay just behind the township of Rokeville, back to her home and her trader father.

Old Everard, her parent, was a kind of freak too. He was a tall, clean-shaved, thin-faced man, with blue-grey eyes and a beaked nose; his mouth had a melancholy droop about it; the face in repose looked strong at times, but when he grinned and revealed his tobacco-blackened teeth it looked characterless, almost weak. At times he was extremely garrulous, at other times either reticent or insulting to anyone who might be unfortunate enough to come near him. Gabrielle seemed to be the only person in Bougainville who understood him. He didn’t take much interest in his daughter, though she might have done so in him. All he did was religiously to exercise his parental control by sending the girl on his selfish errands, mostly for rum and whisky. At other times he demanded that she should attend to his comforts when delirium tremens shook his spine. He was an ex-sailor. Trailing from the mainyard of his ship whilst anchored off the Solomon Group, he had lost a leg, and during his convalescence in Honolulu had married, finally settling down in Bougainville.

His homestead was a three-roomed bungalow, and he kept things going by the money he had saved during his seafaring life; he was also interested in copra plantations at Bougainville and at Ysabel. His temperament was choleric. He was known in the vicinity by the nickname “Shiver-me-timbers.” This cognomen was derived from the fact that he always stamped his wooden leg, making it shiver in his impatience, when he wanted a drink, consequently his wooden leg was never at rest. He looked like some wooden-legged Nemesis as he sat there that evening; and if any glamour still lingered in Gabrielle’s brain from her chance meeting with the young apprentice, it was swiftly dispelled by the stumping of that wooden member as she rushed indoors.

Even a wooden leg would seem to have its part to play in the universe: there was something imperative about its tapping voice. That fate-like tapping had smashed up many of Gabrielle’s young dreams; possibly that wooden leg was a soulless agent of the devil.

“Here’s the whisky, Dad,” said she, as the cockatoo looked down from its perch and shrieked: “Gabby-ell! Gabby-ell! Kai-kai-too!”

In a moment that weird symbol in wood, that represented all that was unromantic to her ardent soul, ceased its ominous “tip-e-te-tap-tap” as the old sailor looked up and spied his daughter.

“Thankee, thankee, kid!” he growled as he put forth his hand. Such was the domestic atmosphere that the girl had rushed back to.

After the young apprentice had waved his farewell to Gabrielle he strolled away under the palms. “Well, she’s a beautiful creature. Who’d have thought of meeting her in this wild place? She’s ethereal, too beautiful to make love to,” he sighed.

Possibly the contrast between Gabrielle Everard and the Solomon Island mop-headed girls etherealised her natural beauty in his eyes. This was a fatal outlook for Hillary, considering the girl’s impulsive nature and his chances in the love affair that he had unknowingly embarked upon. And possibly this outlook of his was the result of outward glamour having greatly influenced his indwelling life. He had succeeded in making himself the more unfitted to cope with his immediate surroundings by poring over such writers as Tolstoy, Walt Whitman, Rousseau and Ruskin. But still, these writers, with their mad denunciations and rhapsodies, had helped to awaken in Hillary’s soul that adoration for the beautiful, that love for living art that nourishes a delight in God’s work. The young apprentice did not digest the whole contents of those volumes; he was too young to grasp their full meaning, but his mind had grasped enough to make him a kind of derelict missionary of the beautiful. When the moods came to him he would bury his nose in the pages of Byron, Shelley, Keats, etc. And the influence gathered from those poets possibly filled his head with vague imaginings over beauty and innocence, feeding the fires of wild aspiration that cannot be realised in this world, and were never realised and acted up to by the poets who wrote the poems.

As he walked on thoughts of the strange girl on the lagoon would haunt his brain. He had quite made up his mind to secure a berth on the sailing-ship that was leaving for New South Wales in a few days, but Gabrielle Everard’s eyes seemed to have magically changed the future for him.

It was almost with relief that he gave his arm to the drunken shellback who suddenly appeared from nowhere, struck him on the back and spat a stream of tobacco juice across Hillary’s poetic vision, taking him completely away from himself. Then the shellback faded away, went off shouting some wild sea chantey as he rolled over the slopes, bound for the sailor’s Morning and Evening Star—the distant light of Parsons’s grog shanty. It was getting dark. That night Hillary seemed inspired. He sat outside the wooden building where he lodged and played his violin to the shellback, traders and natives who came over the slopes to listen. Mango Pango, the pretty Polynesian servant, grinned from ear to ear, showing her pearly teeth, as she danced beneath the palms that grew right up to the verandah of his landlady’s homestead. Even the congregated sailormen ceased their unmelodious oaths as they pulled their beards and listened to his playing.

Hillary wasn’t a master on the violin; his career had been too erratic for him to get the necessary practice to accomplish great things in instrumental playing. But still he could perform the Poet and Peasant overture and most of the stock pieces, besides playing heathen melodies that sent the natives into ecstasies of delight. His sailor critics swore that his extemporised sea-jigs were the most classical of compositions that they had ever heard. For when he played the South Sea maids threw their limbs about in rhythmical swerves, till the soles of their pretty bare feet sometimes seemed turned toward the South Sea moon! Mango Pango, Marga Maroo and Topsy Turvy were dancing to their heart’s content as the hills re-echoed the shellbacks’ laughter and the wild chorus of O, For Rio Grande when the concert was disturbed. For notwithstanding the wild surroundings, the hilarity and awful oaths, piety roamed those savage isles.

As the strains of the Poet and Peasant overture trembled from Hillary’s violin a tall, handsome savage, attired in European clothes, stepped out from beneath the palms and complimented the young Englishman on his artistic performance. He was an educated savage, and naturally conducted himself in public just as a late missionary from the North-West Mission School at Honolulu should do. He was certainly an attractive-looking being, possibly through his mother being a Papuan and his father a handsome Malayan. Even the shellbacks pulled their whiskers and beards, and put on their best behaviour as he stood there and spoke as becomes a Rajah and late missionary who has “saved” thousands of souls; for he studied the philosophy of the Psalms so that they might fit in with his views. And it might be mentioned at once that he did not allow idealistic views to disturb the nice equilibrium of his earthly requirements. When he was excited his speech lapsed into the native pidgin-English. But he spoke perfectly as he addressed Hillary, saying: “You play exceedingly well, young man, and your rendering of Spohr’s concerto strikes me as superb. For perfect intonation and verve your performance outrivals the rendering by Monsieur De T——, whom I heard play it at the Tivoli, Honolulu.” So spake the civilised heathen.

“’Ark at ’im! an ole kanaka missionary!” whispered Bunky Lory, the ordinary seaman.

“’Andsome cove with his whiskers on,” said another, a Cockney.

There is no doubt that Rajah Koo Macka was a handsome type of man so far as the world’s idea of what’s handsome goes. He wore a fine moustache curled artistically at the ends; had fine teeth, ivory-white; and full, sensual, curved lips that were not a libel on his character. But his greatest asset was his magnetic, telescope-like eyes that could sight a sinfully inclined girl or woman miles off! Indeed he was a splendid example of a christianised heathen doing his best to be religious notwithstanding his inherently antagonistic principles. He had plenty of cash; he owned two or three schooners, and received a Government bounty for hunting down the white miscreants, those skippers who indulged in all the horrors of the black-birding slave traffic. He wore three medals on his ample breast, and besides the aforementioned bounty received a pension from some missionary society in London which had heard of his self-sacrifice whilst converting his heathen brothers from cannibalistic orgy and lust. And more, it was discovered, after many days, that he was a good and dutiful son to his old father Bapa, who still dwelt in the Rajah’s native village in far-away Tumba-Tumba, on the wild, God-forsaken coast of New Guinea. Such is a rough summary of the Rajah Koo Macka, whose ways were mysterious, more so than the wily Chinee! And though dead men may turn in their graves over the doings of men on earth, the apprentice only pulled the end of his virgin moustache, no prophetic breath of all that was destined to happen disturbing his equanimity.

CHAPTER II—THE CALL OF THE BLOOD

The day after the young apprentice had played his violin to the shellbacks and listened to the Papuan Rajah’s eulogies over his playing, old Everard was sitting in his bungalow swearing like the much-maligned trooper. He was holding out his gouty foot whilst his daughter poured cool water upon it.

“What the devil are yer doing!” he yelled, as the girl, who had done exactly as she had been told to do, stood half-paralysed with fear over her parent’s outburst. Then the ex-sailor picked the ointment pot up and rubbed the swollen foot himself. As Gabrielle looked on and mentally thanked her Maker that her father had only one foot, he finished up by grabbing a chair and pitching it across the room, careless as to what it might hit. A fierce look came into the girl’s eyes, her face was hotly flushed. For a moment the old man opened his mouth in surprise, really thinking she meant to hurl the chair back at him. She looked for a moment like a beautiful young savage. Then she turned and rushed from the bungalow.

“Come back, you blasted little heathen!” roared old Everard as he stood up on his wooden leg; then he gave a fearful howl as his gouty foot gave him another twinge. His face was purple with passion. “I’ll break her b—— neck when she comes back, I will. She’s like her mother, that’s what she is.”

The ex-sailor’s wild sayings meant nothing. He had been genuinely fond of his wife. Like most men who have choleric tempers, his hot words had no relation to his true feelings. Gabrielle’s mother had been dead for many years. Although she had dark blood in her veins, she had been a very beautiful woman. Indeed an eerie kind of beauty seems to be the natural heritage of women who are remotely descended from a mixture of the dark and white races. And this striking beauty is most noticeable in those half-castes who are descended from the Malayan types, a superstitious people, of wild, poetic, passionate temperament. There was some mystery concerning Gabrielle’s mother: she had flown from Haiti to Honolulu in some great fear. Everard had met her because it was on his ship that she had stowed away; but she had never divulged the cause of her flight from the land where she had been born. All that Gabrielle knew was that her mother’s photograph hung on her bedroom wall, a sad, beautiful face that gave no hint of her dark ancestry. Gabrielle had been the tiny guest who had unconsciously caused her natural host to depart from this life—for her mother had died during confinement. Gabrielle Everard felt that loss as she walked beneath the palms; but, still, she felt glad that her father’s violence had inspired her with sufficient courage to beat a hasty retreat, careless of the parental wrath when she at length returned home again. “Perhaps he’ll be so full of rum when I get back that he’ll have forgotten,” was her sanguine reflection. Then she pulled her pretty, washed-out blue robe tight with the sash, and murmured: “The old devil! Good job if he pegged out!”

As the girl’s temper subsided the savage look on her face faded away. Like a gleam of sunrise across the lagoons at dawn, the laughing expression of her blue eyes slowly returned. The firm resolve of the lips also disappeared. Her mouth was again a rosebud of the warm, impassioned South, a mouth that easily claimed twinship with the beauty of the luring eyes, which looked warm with desire as the lips themselves. She wore her loose blouse very low at the neck, so low that the sun had delicately touched the curve of her breast. But she was only an undeveloped woman as yet. Her ideas of the great world were vague and shadowy. She knew little of what lay beyond her own surroundings, of men’s ways, the terror of cities, human frailty, and the force and passion of human tragedies. All the ribaldry, the hints thrust upon her by the rough sailors since she had entered her teens, had been quite lost on her undeveloped mind. Her whole idea of life and its mysteries had come to her out of a few old books. They were books that had been left at her father’s homestead by a ship’s captain when Gabrielle was a child. This captain’s ship had gone ashore in a typhoon off Bougainville, and its wreck could still be seen lying on the barrier reefs about a mile from the shore.

Who could foresee the wondrous potentialities that lay within the pages of those books which the old skipper had carelessly thrown aside?—what dreams they would some day awaken in a girl’s heart, giving her strength to combat the desires that came with volcanic-like force on the threshold of womanhood? For, true enough, the heroes and heroines of those old books mysteriously leapt from the thumb-torn, yellow pages and seemed to struggle in their effort to help her regain her better self.

One book was Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; another, Christina Rossetti’s poems; The Arabian Nights and Hans Andersen’s fairy tales. That old captain (he must have been old by the dates in the books) had brought many valuable cargoes across the world, but he dreamed not that his most wonderful cargo was the magic in the books that he was destined one day to leave behind him in the Solomon Isles!

To a great extent old Everard’s daughter was the embodiment of the principles and idealisms that were in those faded volumes: in her imagination Bunyan stood there beneath the palms, seeing God in those tropic skies; Hans Andersen drank in the mystery of sunset on the mountains, and Christina Rossetti laid a visionary hand on the tiny, shaggy heads of the native children who had rushed from the forest’s depths and had started gambolling at Gabrielle’s feet. She hastened on. “Awaie!” she cried to the dusky little creatures, who looked up at her in a bewildered way, as though they had seen a ghost. “Ma Soo!” they wailed, as they sped away, frightened, into the shadows of the forest. A wild desire entered Gabrielle’s heart; she half bounded forward, as though to rush after those tiny forest ragamuffins. She felt like casting aside her civilised attire, so that she too might race off, untrammelled, into those happy leafy glooms. The cry of the yellow-crested cockatoo, the deep moaning of the bronze pigeons and iris doves in the bread-fruits seemed to feed her soul with unfathomable music. As she passed by a lagoon she saw her reflection in the still depths. The dark-toning water made her appear almost swarthy; her bronze-gold hair looked quite black. It was only a momentary glance, but that glimpse was enough to strike a wild feeling of terror into her heart, reminding her that she was connected by blood to the dark races.

At that thought her heart trembled: to her it was as though God had suddenly thumped it in some inscrutable spite. In a moment she had recovered. The strange dread of she knew not what vanished. Once more she gave a peal of silvery laughter, and even went so far as to wave her hand to the crowd of dark, handsome native men who were hurrying by on their way back from the plantations.

As she meandered along she began to think over all that had happened on the festival night when she had suddenly felt that strange impulse and astonished the natives by jumping on to the festival pae pae and dancing before them all. She rubbed her eyes. “I can’t think that I really did such a thing; I feel sure it must have been a dream.” Then she remembered that her gown was torn and one of her slippers lost when she had arrived home in her father’s bungalow. “It must have been true. Fancy me doing such a thing! I wonder what he would have thought.” So she reflected over all she had done. Then she began to reassure herself by recalling how she had often, when only ten years of age, danced on the pae pae with the pretty tambu maidens. And, as she remembered it all, she gave an instinctive high kick and burst into a fit of laughter; then she said to herself: “I’m a woman now and really must not do such things!” She started running down the forest track, and as she passed by the native village the handsome emigrant Polynesian youths waved their hands and cried: “Talofa Madimselle!” One handsome young Polynesian, gifted with superb effrontery, ran forward and stuck a frangipani blossom in her hair. This by-play made the tawny maids who were squatting on their mats by the village huts jump to their feet and give a hop, skip and a jump through sheer jealousy.

Once more Gabrielle had passed on and entered the depths of the forest. Passing along by the banyan groves on the outskirts of the villages she suddenly came across a cleared space surrounded by giant mahogany-trees—a kind of natural amphitheatre. Between the tree trunks stood several huge wooden idols with glass boss eyes and hideous carved mouths. They seemed to grin with extreme delight at the adoration they were receiving from the twelve skinny hags and three chiefs who knelt and chanted at their wooden feet. Gabrielle stood still, fascinated by the weirdness of that pagan scene. Again and again the hags and chiefs jumped to their feet and prostrated themselves before the carved deities. “Tan woomba! Te woomba, tarabaran, woomba woomba!” they seemed to moan and mumble as the stalwart chieftains jumped to their feet, wagged their feathered head-dresses, thrust forth their arms and chanted into the idols’ wooden ears. The largest centre idol seemed actually to grin with delight as it listened to the mumbling of the chiefs. Gabrielle stared, awestruck, as she listened, and the hags, leaping to their feet, danced wildly and shook their shell-ornamented ramis (loin chemises), making a weird, jingling music as the shells tinkled. Then they lifted their skinny arms and bony chins to the forest height and mumbled weird chants of death. Gabrielle had seen many similar sights in Bougainville, but never before had she quite realised the full meaning of that strange chanting, or of the sorrow that impels heathens to fashion an effigy with a fate-like grin on its curved wooden lips so that it could stand before them as some material symbol of the Unknown Power! As Gabrielle watched, two of the chiefs turned their heads, recognised her, and gave their sombre salutation: “Maino tepiake!” And still the hags chanted on.

Then Gabriello heard a faint mumbling coming from the belt of mangroves that grew by the lagoons near by. She was astonished to see six tambu maids appear, attired in full festival costume, which consisted of a kind of sarong fashioned from the thinnest tappa cloth. The girls had large red and black feathers stuck in their head-mops and Gabrielle knew by this that someone had died in the village and was being borne to the grave. They were walking slowly, carrying their mournful burden between them. It was an old-time tribal funeral. As the coffin-bearers arrived in front of the idols they laid their burden down. Gabrielle instinctively crossed herself when she saw the wan face of the dead mahogany-hued Broka girl. It was a sad, curiously beautiful face, for death had toned down the old wildness of the living features. The reddish, coral-dyed hair had fallen forward on to the pallid brown brow and gave a pathetic touch to that silent figure. On the forehead was the plastered scarlet mud cross, a sign that the girl had died in maidenhood. She was stretched out on a long, narrow death-mat that had handles, something after the style of an ambulance stretcher, but fashioned in such a way that when the primitive hearse of dusky arms moved forward the corpse regained a sitting posture. The effect was gruesome in the extreme, for the head of the corpse, being limp, fell forward or wobbled as the mourners passed along the narrow mossy track. Through entering into the spirit of the proceedings Gabrielle at once gained the sympathy of those pagan mourners. For she too crept behind the procession as it moved along among the pillars of the vast primitive cathedral. The thick foliage of the giant bread-fruits, the buttressed banyans and towering vines, that ran here and there like symphonies of green, scented the forest depth. And when the wind sighed it seemed to be some moan from infinity, as though that moving procession and the forest itself stood on the deep inward slopes of some vast sea. Only the remote wide window, through which the stars shone by night and the sunsets marked the close of each tropic day, was visible between the colonnades of tree trunks, as there it shone—the far-away western horizon. Suddenly the procession stopped. The six tambu maidens had begun to chant an eerie but beautiful pagan psalm as they approached the grave-side; then they laid their burden gently down. The weeping hags and chiefs stood looking up into the branches of the tall coco-palm. It was there that the girl’s body was to rest till her bones whitened to the hot tropic winds. Along one of the lower branches they had fashioned a grave-mattress of twigs and leaves, jungle grass and tough seaweed, the whole being fastened on to the branch by strong sennet. It was a weirdly fascinating sight as they stood there voiceless and began hurriedly to perform the last sacred rites over the dead girl. The tallest of the mourners, an aged chief, who had a naturally melancholy aspect, besides both his ears being missing, took a bone flute from his lava-lava and began to blow a weird Te Deum. Gabrielle could hardly believe her eyes as the tambu maidens started to whirl their bodies in perfect silence to the sound of the wild man’s piping. Only the jingle of the rami shells, tinkling in exact tempo to the wailing fife (made out of the thigh-bone of some dead high priest), told her that those girls were whirling rapidly in the forest shadows. The hags and chiefs had already fallen prone on their stomachs, so that they could perform the lost mysterious rite. This rite necessitated them rising repeatedly to their knees so that they might take in a deep breath and blow their stomachs out, balloon-like, to enormous proportions. The contrast was weird in the extreme when their bodies receded and subsided into a mass of wrinkles. This strange rite took about five minutes to perform. It was a rite that was supposed to blow the sins of the dead away ere the spirit entered shadow-land.

As soon as this ritual was completed two of the chiefs climbed the grave-palm and then, hanging in a marvellous way by their feet, they leaned earthwards and gripped the dead girl’s coffin-mat by the sennet handles. One old woman (the mother probably) rushed hastily forward, and lifting the corpse’s hand kissed it. Then the living limbs of the weird grave-elevators went taut as, still with their heads hanging downwards, they clutched the coffin-mat and slowly pulled the dead figure foot by foot off terra firma towards the sky! In a few moments the dead girl lay lashed to the bough of her strange grave, high up in the forest coco-palm. Suddenly the mourners had all vanished! Even Gabrielle felt some of the fright that haunted the souls of those wild people. They had hurried away because it was known that directly the forest wind blew across the new-made grave the soul of the dead departed for shadow-land and must not be tainted by the breath of the living. After seeing that sight Gabrielle hurried away also. She trembled as she stepped at last out of the forest shadows into the glory of the sunlight. She seemed to realise at that moment that the sun was the visible god of the universe, the rolling orb that woos the world, creating the green happiness of the woods and bills. She saw the migrating birds going south as she lifted her eyes. Perhaps she felt the winged poetry of the birds on their flight to the southward, hurrying away like symbols of our own brief days. Her eyes were very concentrated as she sighed and then jumped carelessly on to a springy banyan bough and began to sing one of her peculiar songs. Suddenly she ceased to sing, and a startled look leapt into her eyes as she turned her head. She had even let her swinging legs fall stiff so that the old blue robe might fall and hide her pretty ankles. Then she gave a merry peal of laughter that frightened the life out of a decrepit cockatoo. “Cah-eah! Whoo-cah!” it shrieked as it left its high perch and flapped away. Hillary looked up and threw a coco-nut at it and missed by a hundred yards. It was he who had disturbed the girl. As the apprentice stood before her she blushed softly, as though her bright eyes and face mysteriously reflected the sunset fire that shone on the sea horizon to the westward.

Hillary metaphorically rubbed his hands over his luck. He had strolled over the hills for no other reason than to get clear of his growling landlady, who had begun to give hints over delayed rent. Nor was the old half-caste woman to be blamed, for many white youths from “Peretania” arrived in the Solomon Isles crammed with hopes and promises and little cash! Besides, the evening was the only time fit for a quiet stroll without being charged by myriads of sand-flies and other winged, tropical things. Though Gabrielle had hinted to him that she generally took her walks by the lagoons, he had gathered that she was usually busy at the twilight hours getting her father’s tea, polishing his wooden leg, etc. Consequently, Hillary’s face was aglow with pleasure as he approached the girl. In his confusion he lifted his cap and bowed as men bow to maids in civilised communities. Gabrielle, who was unused to such gallant manners, was delighted. She even gave a little nod in response. It was a most fascinating bit of “court etiquette” on her part, for she had learnt it from her French novels. Hillary, who had especially noticed and loved the girl’s wild, rough, fascinating ways, was charmed at Gabrielle’s tiny bit of “put-on.” It would have been impossible to reproduce the expression of his face as he flung himself down in the fern-grass close to Gabrielle.

The girl who was again swinging to and fro on the banyan bough, looked sideways like a parrot on the apprentice’s face, wondering why he looked so confused. Hillary always felt shy when she looked at him with those childish, big eyes.

“I’m going to clear out of this God-forsaken place soon,” he said, as he found his voice. Then he continued: “It’s marvellous how a girl like you can exist in this infernal hole, full of tattooed savages.”

She only stared at him as he rambled on, and wondered why he attracted her so. Then she laughed like a child, and looking him straight in the face said: “You are very different to the other men I’ve seen round these parts.” Hillary felt himself redden as she stared into his eyes; she looked critically for a moment and said: “Different coloured eyes too!” Then she added artlessly: “Do you drink rum?”

“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.

“Your eyes are different colours, one brown and one a beautiful blue!” she suddenly exclaimed for the second time as she burst into a merry peal of laughter.

The young apprentice reddened slightly. “I can’t help that I did not make my own eyes, did I?” he said.

For a moment the girl stared earnestly at his face, then said: “Well, you needn’t mind, really. I reckon they look fine!”

“Don’t you get full up of wandering about this heathen locality?” said Hillary, changing the conversation. “Nothing but palm-trees, parrots, and brown men and tattooed women roaming about gabbling tabak and worshipping idols.”

Gabrielle laughed. “Don’t you care for the natives? I think they’re amusing; especially at the festival dances,” she added after a pause.

“Well, I don’t object to the festivals; they’re original and decidedly attractive. I was charmed by seeing a Polynesian maid dance like a goddess over a Buka village two nights ago.”

“Fancy you liking to see native girls dance!” said Gabrielle, giving a roguish glance.

“Well, I do; there’s something so fascinating and poetic in the way they do it all,” Hillary responded.

Gabrielle readjusted the flowers in her hair, then said: “Would you like to see me dance?”

“Dear me, I certainly should!” exclaimed the young apprentice, his eyes betraying the astonishment he felt over her question.

“Shall I dance?” Gabrielle repeated.

“What! Now!” he exclaimed. He lit his cigarette twice over, wondering if she were laughing at him or really meant that she would dance there on the spot.

Before he could say another word Gabrielle had risen to her feet and was dancing before him. He blew his nose, coughed, put on an inane smile and then fairly gasped in his astonishment and admiration. Her tripping feet softly brushed the blue forest flowers and tall, ferny grass that swished against her loose robe. Hillary’s embarrassment had changed to a tremendous interest in the originality of the dancer before him. He clapped his hands in a kind of obsequious way for an encore as she swayed in a most fascinating manner, her hair tumbling over her shoulders, her eyes shining, one hand holding up the fold of her sarong-like robe, just revealing her brown stocking above the left ankle. “Well, I’m blessed!” he breathed. She had begun to hum a weird melody; her right hand was outstretched, uplifted as though she held a goblet of wine and would drink a toast to some pagan deity.

He looked at the sunset; he half fancied that it had always been staring from the ocean rim, and would never set! And as he looked at the dancing figure she really did seem to hold a goblet in her outstretched hand—full to the brim—with the gold of sunset that touched the landscape and was glinting over her tumbling hair and eyes.

“The Solomon Isles! The Solomon Isles!” was all that he could breathe to himself as she stared at him, a strange fixed look in her eyes. A cockatoo fluttered down to the lowest bough of the bread-fruit tree, looked sideways on her swaying figure, slowly flapped its blue-tipped wings in surprise and chuckled discordantly.

“Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!” chimed in Hillary, as he clapped his hands, stared idiotically and felt like hiding behind the thick trunk of the bread-fruit.

“Well now! You dance perfectly!” he gasped. Gabrielle had ceased tripping. She looked embarrassed and had begun to coil up her tumbling tresses.

“Worth chewing salt-horse and hard-tack on a dozen voyages to have seen what I’ve seen!” was the apprentice’s inward reflection.

“Do the girls in England dance like that?” she said in an eager, frightened way.

“Oh no, not as well as you’ve danced. Blest if they do!” said he. That last remark of hers made him realise that girl before him was half-wild and had danced before him as a child might ere it became self-conscious. “Fancy meeting a beautiful white girl, half-wild! It’s thrilling! I wonder what will be the end of it,” mused Hillary, as he stared on that strange maid whom he had chanced upon so suddenly.

Suddenly she said: “I’m no good at all; you may think I am, but I’m not.”

“Aren’t you?” murmured Hillary, somewhat taken aback.

“You’re a clever girl. Not many girls can quote the poets and rattle off verses as you can. I suppose your father’s an educated kind of man and has a good library?” he added after a pause.

Gabrielle’s hearty peal of laughter at the idea of her father possessing a library made the frightened parrots flutter in a wheel-like procession over the belt of shoreward mangroves. Then she said: “Well, my father has got a lot of books, but they really belonged to a ship’s captain—a nice old man who lived with us years ago, when I was a child.” Then she added: “His ship was blown ashore here in a typhoon and when he went away he left all his books behind him in Dad’s bungalow. I’ve learned almost all I know from those books.” Saying this, she pointed with her finger towards the shore, and said: “From the top of that hill you can see the old captain’s ship to-day: it’s a big wreck with three masts. Father told me that the old captain often got sentimental and went up on the hills to stare through a telescope at his old ship lying on the reefs.”

“How romantic! So I’ve to thank the old captain that you can quote the works of the poets to me,” said Hillary. Then he added: “But still, you’re a clever girl, there’s no doubt about it.”

“I’m secretly wicked, down in the very depths of me.”

“No! Surely not!” gasped the apprentice as he stared at the girl.

Then he smiled and said quickly: “What you’ve just said is proof enough that you’re not wicked. You’re imaginative, and so you imagine that you have limitations that no one else has. If anyone’s wicked it’s me, I know,” he added, laughing quietly.

“I’ve got the limitations right enough, that’s why I feel so strange and miserable at times.”

“Don’t feel miserable, please don’t,” said Hillary softly as he blessed the silence of the primitive spot and the opportunity that had arisen for his direct sympathy.

“You must remember that we all have our besetting sins, and that the majority of us think our besetting sin is our prime virtue,” he said. “I’ve been all over the world but never met a girl like you before,” he added in a sentimental way.

“I can take that as the reverse of a compliment,” said Gabrielle, laughing musically.

“Believe me, Gabrielle, I would not say things to you that I might say in a bantering way to other girls I’ve met. I dreamed of you when I was a child, so to speak. It seems strange that I should at last have met you out here in the Solomon Isles, that we should be sitting here by a blue lagoon in which our shadows seem to swim together.”

“Look into those dark waters,” he added after a pause.

Gabrielle looked, and as she looked Hillary became bold and placed his hand softly on her shoulder, amongst her golden tresses that tumbled about her neck. And Gabrielle, who could see every act as she stared on their images in the water, smiled.

“It’s a pity you’re so wicked,” said Hillary jokingly. Then he added suddenly: “Ah! I could fall madly in love with a girl, like you if only I thought I were worthy of you.—What’s the matter?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Gabrielle. Hillary noticed that she had become pale and trembling.

“Why, you’ve caught a chill!” he said in monstrous concern, though it was 100° in the shade and the heat-blisters were ripe to burst on his neck.

“Dad thinks everything that he does is quite perfect,” Gabrielle said, just to change the conversation, for the look she saw in the young apprentice’s eyes strangely smote her heart.

“Of course he does,” said Hillary absently.

The girl, looking eagerly into his face, said: “You know quite well that you play your violin beautifully, I suppose?”

“I’m the rottenest player in the world.”

The girl at this gave a merry ripple of laughter and said: “Now I do believe in your theory, for I’ve heard you play beautifully in the grog bar by Rokeville. You played this”—here she closed her lips and hummed a melody from Il Trovatore.

“Good gracious! you don’t mean to tell me that you hover about the Rokeville grog shanty after dark?” exclaimed Hillary.

Gabrielle seemed surprised at his serious look, then she burst into another silvery peal of laughter that echoed to the mountains.

Hillary looked into her eyes, and seeing that eerie light of witchery which so fascinated him, felt that he had met his fate.

“If I can’t get her to love me I’m as good as dead,” was his mental comment. Even the music of her laughter thrilled him. Then she rose from the ferns, and sitting on the banyan bough again started to swing to and fro, singing some weird strain that she had evidently learnt from the tambu dancers in the tribal villages.

“It seems like some wonderful dream, she a beautiful girl with flowers in her hair, sitting there singing to me,” thought the apprentice.

Then she looked down at him, gave a mischievous peal of laughter, and said: “Oh, I say, you are a flatterer! I almost forgot who I really was while you were saying those poetic things about me!”

“Don’t laugh at me, I’m serious enough,” Hillary responded, as he looked earnestly at the swaying figure. Heaven knows how far Hillary might have progressed in his love affair had not the usual noisy interruption occurred at the usual crucial moment. Just as he felt the true hero of a South Sea romance—sitting there in a perfect picture of ferns and forest flowers, sunset fading on a sea horizon, dark-fingered palms bending tenderly over his beloved by a lagoon—with a rude rush out of the forest it came! It was not a ferocious boar, or revengeful elephant; it was a bulky, heavily breathing figure that seemed the embodiment of prosaic reality. It was attired in large, loose pantaloons, belted at the waist, a vandyke beard and mighty, viking-like moustachios drooping down to the Herculean shoulder curves.

“What the blazes!” gasped Hillary, as he looked over his shoulder and saw that massive personality step out from underneath the forest palms. The strange being wore an antediluvian topee and an extraordinary, old-fashioned, long-tailed coat. The atmosphere of another age hung about him. A colt revolver stuck in his leather belt seemed to have some strong link of kinship with the grim determination of its owner’s mouth.

“What-o, chum! How’s the gal?” Saying this, the new-comer put forth his huge, thorny palm and emphasised his monstrous presence by bringing it down smash!—nearly fracturing Hillary’s spine.

“What-o, friend from the great unknown!” came like an obsequious echo from the young apprentice’s lips as, recovering his breath, he saw the humour of the situation. Hillary well knew that it was wise to return such Solomon Island civility as affably as possible. At that first onslaught Gabrielle had jumped behind Hillary’s back when he had sprung to his feet. No one knows how long that new-comer had stood hidden behind the palm stems before he came forth. Anyhow, he rubbed his big hands together in a mighty good temper, chuckling to himself to think his presence should be so little desired. He bowed to the girl with massive, Homeric gallantry. Then, as they both stared with open-mouthed wonder, he put his hand up and, twisting his enormous moustache-end on the starboard side, courteously inquired the route for the equivalent of the South Sea halls of Olympus. It was then, and with the most consummate impertinence imaginable, that he gave them both the full view of his Herculean back and put forth his mighty feet to go once more on his way, bound for the wooden halls of Bacchus—the nearest grog shanty.

Such a being as that intruder on Gabrielle’s and Hillary’s privacy might well seem to exist in the imagination only, but he was real enough. That remarkable individual was only one of many of his kind who, having left their ship on some drunken spree, roamed the islands, seeking the nearest grog shanty, after some drunken carousal in the inland tribal villages.

As that massive figure passed away he left his breath, so to speak, behind him. It seemed to pervade all things, sending a pungent flavour of adventure over forest, hill and lagoon. Indeed, the faery-like creation into which Hillary’s imagination had so beautifully transmuted Gabrielle—vanished. “Well, I’m jiggered!” he muttered. As for Gabrielle, she looked as though she was half sorry to see that handsome personality go. His big, grey eyes had gazed at her with an unmistakable, yet not rude, look of admiration. Indeed, before he strode away he gazed at Hillary as though with a mighty concern, as though he would not hesitate to redress wrongs done to fair maids who had been lured into a South Sea forest by such as he.

“Do you know him?” gasped the apprentice as the man went off; but the astonished look in the girl’s eyes at once convinced him that the late visitor was a stranger to Gabrielle as well as to himself. It all happened so suddenly that he wondered if he had dreamed of that remarkable presence. But the frightened cockatoos still giving their ghostly “Cah! Cah!” over the palms were real enough. And as they both listened they could still hear the fading crash of the travelling feet that accompanied some rollicking song, as the big sea-boots of that extraordinary being beat down the scrubby forest growth as they travelled due south-west.

Gabrielle little dreamed as she stood there listening how one day she would hear that intruder’s big voice again, and with what welcome music it would ring in her ears.

Gabrielle laughed quietly to herself as the intruder passed away and seemingly left a mighty silence behind him. She had seen many men of his type in her short day, not only in Rokeville, but out on the ships that anchored in the harbour. She had also seen stranded sailors at Gualdacanar, at Ysabel and at Malaita, where her father had taken her on a trip a year or so before. Such men stood out of the ruck, quite distinct from the ordinary run of beachcombers, who were usually stranded scallawags, seeking out the tenderfoots who would stand them drinks in the nearest grog bar. Hillary saw that new-comer as some mighty novelty in the way of man; to the young apprentice the late intruder was something between a Ulysses and a Don Quixote. And Hillary’s conception of the man’s character was not far wrong. Anyway, he did not express his private opinion, for he looked up at Gabrielle and said: “Good Lord, what an awful being. Glad to see the back of him!”

It may have been that the late stranger’s presence had turned Hillary’s thoughts to his sailor life, for that massive being positively smelt of the high seas, of tornadoes and sea-board life on buffeting voyages to distant lands. Looking up at Gabrielle, he suddenly said: “I’m going aboard the schooner that is due to leave for Apia next week. I’m on the look-out for a berth. I suppose I sha’n’t see you any more if I get a job?”

Everard’s daughter gazed at the apprentice for a moment as though she did not quite know her own mind concerning his query. Then she sighed and said: “Must you go away to sea again?”

Hillary looked steadily into the girl’s face. He could not express his thoughts, tell her that he would wish to stay with her always. What would she do were he to spring towards her, clutch her tenderly, fold her in his arms, rain impassioned kisses on her lips, look into her eyes and behave in general like an escaped lunatic? She might think he was mad!—race from him, screaming with fright, seeking her father’s assistance, or even hasten for the native police. Such were the thoughts that flashed through Hillary’s mind. And so, although he longed to do all these things, he only stood half-ashamed over the passionate thoughts that flamed in his brain as he gazed into the half-laughing eyes of the girl.

They sat and talked of many things. Hillary forgot the outside world. He half fancied he had been sitting there for thousands of years with that strange girl by his side. He spoke to her of scenes that were remote from Bougainville: of England, of London and the wide bridges over the Thames, and of the deep, dark waters that bore the tall ships away from the white Channel cliffs, taking wanderers to other lands. And as the girl listened she saw old London as some city of enchantment and romance, where cold-eyed men and women tramped down labyrinthine streets by dark walls. In her imagination she even fancied she heard the mighty clock chime the hour over that far-off city of wonder and romance.

“Fancy! And you’ve lived there! Actually seen the great palaces, the spires and towers that I’ve read of and dreamed about!” said Gabrielle. Then she added: “And you’ve seen the queen and the beautiful princesses?”

“Yes, Gabrielle, I have.”

Then she said artlessly: “Weren’t they sorry when you left England for the Solomon Isles?”

For a moment Hillary was grimly silent, then he said: “Well, they were, rather!”

Gabrielle’s innocence and his own mendacity had broken the spell that home-sickness and distance had cast over him, the spell that had enabled him to picture to Gabrielle’s mind the atmosphere of old London in such true perspective. Indeed, as he talked, Bougainville, with all its novelty and heathenish atmosphere, became some dull, drab reality and London a great modern Babylon of his own hungry-souled century. His voice as well as Gabrielle’s became hushed. He was so carried away by his own vivid imagination that he fancied he had dwelt in some ancient city of smoky romance, and had seen a Semiramis on her throne, and Pharaoh-like peoples of a past age. It was only the eerie beauty of Gabrielle’s eyes that awakened him to the reality that blurs man’s inward vision. The girl had handed him a small flower which she had taken from her hair.

“Could anything be more innocent and beautiful,” he thought as he placed that first symbol of the girl’s awakening affection for him in the buttonhole of his brass-bound jacket.

Night had fallen over the island. “I must go,” said Gabrielle. “It’s terribly late.”

“So it is!” Hillary moaned regretfully. Gabrielle hastily jumped into her canoe, fear in her heart over the coming wrath of her father. Hillary had intended to place his arms about her and embrace her before she went, but his chance had gone!

As he stood beneath the tamuni-trees and watched, she looked more like an elf-girl than ever, as her canoe shot out into the shadows of the moon-lit lagoon and was paddled swiftly away.

CHAPTER III—SOUTH SEA OPERA BOUFFE

Hillary hardly knew where he was going as he walked back round the coast, thinking of Gabrielle Everard and all that had upset his mind. When he at last arrived at his lodgings, the old wooden shack near Rokeville, he was tired out. Even pretty Mango Pango, the half-caste Polynesian servant-maid, wondered why on earth he looked so solemn as she gave her usual salutation: “Tolafa! Monsieur Hilly-aire!”

“Nasty face no belonger you!” said the cheeky girl as the young apprentice forced a smile to his lips, chucked her under her pretty, dimpled brown chin, and then went off into his room. It wouldn’t have been called a room in a civilised city, unless a small trestle bed, a tub and fourteen calabashes and wooden walls ornamented with grotesque-looking Kai-kai clubs and native spears deserved that name. He could even see the stars twinkling through the roof chinks on windy nights, when the palms swayed inland to the breath of the typhoon and no longer let their dark-fingered leaves hide the cracks half across the wooden ceiling. But still, that mattered nothing to him; the companionship of his own reflections, away from the oaths of grog-shanty men, beachcombers on the shores, and surly skippers, and jabbering natives, made up amply for all the apparent discomfort of his apartments.

Pretty Mango Pango, the housemaid, was singing some weird native melody; it seemed to soothe his nerves as the strains, from somewhere in the outbuildings, came to his ears while he sat there reflecting. He thought of England, and wondered what his people thought over his long silence. He knew that they must by then know the truth, for his ship must have arrived back in the old country long, long ago without him. He thought of the wild life he was leading as compared with life in London. “It’s like being in another world.” Standing there by the window listening to the tribal drums beating in the mountains, he thought he saw the dark firs and palms for miles over the inland hills. And as he stared he felt the eeriness of the scene, and he remembered the ghostly figures that sailors swore they saw on those moon-lit nights, even when rum was scarce. As he thought of Gabrielle his brain became etherealised with dreams. He took out his dilapidated volume of Shelley’s poems and read The Ode to the West Wind, and finally became so sentimental that he sat down and wrote this letter home:

Dear Mater,—Forgive me for not writing before this. I ran away from my ship. Though the skipper smiled like an angel when you saw him, he turned out a fiend incarnate. I’m out here in the Solomon Isles. I often think of you.... You’d never believe the wonderful things I’ve seen, the experiences I’ve gone through, since I left you all. I couldn’t stand Australia.

First of all I must tell you that the natives here are inveterate cannibals, but still they’re not likely to eat me. I’ve got tough. The wonderful part of it all is this: I’ve met a most beautiful, eerie kind of girl here in the Solomon Isles. She comes up to all that I ever dreamed of in the way of beauty and innocence in human shape. I know, dear, that you will smile, that thousands of men have thought they had come across the one perfect woman; but it seems to me something to be thankful to God for that I should really find her! And living out here in these God-forsaken isles, too! Her father’s not much of a catch in the way of prospects. But he’s a retired captain and, I believe, is well respected by the population. I’m sure you would like Gabrielle if you saw her, and you will see her if I can manage it all.... It seems gross to have to mention business prospects after mentioning her.

Well, I’m making fine progress with my music. I’ve mastered Paganini’s twenty-four Caprices. I’ve also composed some wonderful pieces. I know they’re good....

I’m reading Shelley, Byron and Swinburne and Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata. The people here seem strangely to lack poetic vision. They are wonderful men, though, brave and truthful in their forcible expression at the concerts outside the Beach Hotel. It’s a kind of Brighton Hotel, but the prima donnas are dusky. I was knighted by a tribal king the other night.

Kiss dear sister Bertha for me. Tell her to read Balzac’s Wild Ass’s Skin. It’s a beautiful book. She must skip the chapters where the woman’s silken knee comes in, etc., etc. Your affectionate, loving son,

Hillary.

Having penned the foregoing epistle, Hillary placed it in his sea-chest. Like many of his temperament, he wrote more letters under the impulse of the moment than he ever posted.

“It’s early yet,” he said to himself as he stared out of the window and saw the moonlight stealing across the rows of mountain palms to the south-west. He could hear the faint rattling of the derrick, where some schooner was being unloaded by night. That noise seemed to rouse him from his dreams. He lit his pipe and crept out of the door. A puff of cool ocean breeze came like a draught of scented wine to his nostrils; for it had passed over the pine-apple plantations and drifted down the orange and lemon groves. The pungent odours seemed to intoxicate him. But still he was feeling moody, so he started off over the slopes. He was off to the grog shanty. He knew that originality abounded in that drinking saloon and in the neighborhood of its wooden walls.

The grog shanty of Bougainville harbour was known by sailormen as far as the four corners of the world as the finest pick-me-up and dispeller of fits of the blues in existence. Indeed, that shanty was a kind of medicine chest, the magical chemist’s shop of the Pacific. It was the opéra bouffe of South Sea life: it made the cynic smile, the poet philosophical, the madman feel that he must surely be deadly sane, and the ne’er-do-wells drunk with happiness. Indeed, the consequential, heavily moustached German consul, Arn Von de Sixth, had crept down the Rokeville highroad one night and seen such sights that German culture received a shock! He at once issued an edict that no native girls were to visit the precincts of the grog shanties after sunset.

But notwithstanding his strict orders the dances still went on. Indeed, as Hillary arrived in sight of the dead screw-pine that flew the Double Eagle flag the scene that met his gaze fairly astonished him. It was as though he was witnessing some phantom-like cinematograph show. A small cloud that traversed the clear tropic sky suddenly blurred the moon, sending lines of shadows over the shining spaces outside the grog shanty. This made the scenic effect look as though a covey of dusky female ghosts had rushed from the jungle and were whirling their semi-robed limbs in wild delight beneath the coco-palms. If the apprentice had any idea that the scene was supernatural it must have been swiftly dispelled by the sound of the wild chorus of a chantey coming from the hoarse-throated sailormen assembled outside Parsons’s bar. Then the moon seemed to burst into a silvery flood of silent laughter that went tumbling over the dark palm groves, drenched the distant shore forests with pale light, and touched the dim horizon of the sea; it even lit up the bearded mouths of the shellbacks and revealed the brilliant eyes of the dusky ballet girls who had stolen down from the mountain villages. They had their chaperon with them in the shape of old High Chief Bango Seru. Those brown girls were his prize gamal-house, or tambu dancers. A mighty calabash was by his side. It was in that handy receptacle that he carefully placed the accumulating bribes that he demanded as payment for all that his dusky protégé did—and ought not to do! Parsons, the bar-keeper, poked his elongated, bald cranium out of the shanty’s doorway and shook his towel violently. (It was the signal that no German official was in sight.)

Once more pretty Singa Mavoo and Loa Mog-wog lifted their ramis (chemises), revealed their nut-brown knees and swerved with inimitable grace. The Yankee nudged the German half-caste in the ribs till they both so roared with laughter that they fell down. It was a kind of miniature representation of the wine of the European music hall and opéra bouffe poured into one goblet so that the onlooker might swallow the draught at a gulp! Oom Pa, the aged high priest, was there. That fervent ecclesiastic had been unable to resist the temptation thrown out to him by the half-caste German sailors and grog-bar keepers. There he stood, as plain as plain could be, his eyes alive with avarice, as he too winked, begged for a drink and solemnly pointed out the attractions of his two pretty, semi-nude granddaughters, who danced ecstatically, so that he might add his mite to the collection-box for the heathen temple fund down at Ackra-Ackra.

The most unimaginative of those onlookers breathed a sigh of admiration when two Malayo-Polynesian youths stepped out of the shadows and put forth their arms, looking at first like dusky statues, not only because of their perfect terra-cotta limbs and artistic pose, but because of their graceful erectness as their arms and legs moved with marvellous symmetrical precision. Even the night seemed astonished as a breath of wind came in from the seas and ran across the island trees. For now it seemed like a shadow-world peopled with puppets. The youths put forth their arms and dived up, up between the palms, coming down on their bare feet like dusky marionettes dropping softly from the moon-lit sky! Then the tambu maids began to chant and dance. Only the weird jingling of their armlets and leglets showed that they were really there in the shadows, as the shellbacks in their wide-brimmed hats looked on in silence.

“Tavoo! Malloot!” suddenly said a voice. The effect of those two words was magical. Every maid, dancer and onlooker had vanished! Only the palms sighed as though in sorrow of it all as a German official’s white helmet hat came into sight far along the beach.

“Did I dream it all?” murmured Hillary. He rubbed his eyes; then he went across the sands to the spot where the dancers had done such wondrous feats. He stamped with his foot to see if there was some subterranean outlet through which the dancers could so mysteriously disappear. But all was solid enough. The moon still shone with its silent, religious light. Parsons flapped his towel three times from the grog-bar doorway. One could have sworn that the rough men in his bar-room had never left their drinks as they stood there solemnly pulling their beards, discussing old grievances in hushed voices. Not a breath of wind stirred the phantom-like palm groves outside; only the chants of the cicalas were faintly audible as they clacked down in the tall bamboo grass of the swamps and shore lagoons. Those old sailors and shellbacks looked the picture of honesty till they gazed meaningly into each other’s eyes and drank on, sighed and sent the flames of the roof oil lamps flickering over their wide-brimmed hats. But even they gave a startled jump as something out in the silent night went “Bang!” It might have been the signal that any kind of horror was being perpetrated. But it was only a mighty thump on a tribal drum, somewhere up in a mountain village, telling the frightened inhabitants that all was well, that the last of the tambu maids had arrived safely, had entered the stockade gates and that their pagan world might rest in peace for the remainder of the night.

Even Hillary responded to the far-off voice of the tribal drum, for he turned away and strolled back to his humble lodging-house. As he went over the slopes he saw Oom Pa staggering homeward with his mighty calabashes, minus his granddaughters, who had come down from the mountain villages. All was silent as he crept beneath the palms, passed under the verandah and entered his room. Even Mango Pango was snoring on her sleeping-mat in the kitchen, so late was it. And yet, as he looked out of his open window and yawned, he could distinctly hear the sounds of muffled drums beating across the slopes.

“Damned if there is not another heathen festival on somewhere,” he muttered. It was true enough: the full-moon festivals were in progress, and down at Ackra-Ackra they were chanting and banging, and their sacred maids were dancing to the discordant music. Had Hillary known who was dancing at that moment on a tambu stage only two miles away he wouldn’t have slept much that night. But he was oblivious to all that happened, so he fell asleep and dreamed of dusky whirling ghosts and fate-like drums that swept dancing maidens away into a shadowy pageant of swift-footed figures that bolted into the mountains and were seen no more.

CHAPTER IV—THE SOUL’S RIVAL

As soon as Gabrielle Everard had paddled across the lagoon and passed from Hillary’s enraptured sight she pulled her little craft up on the sandy beach, hid it amongst the tall rushes and started off home. She stood for a moment hidden beneath the mangoes till three jabbering, hurrying native chiefs had passed by.

As she watched them recede from sight down into the gloom of the sylvan glades, she gave a sigh. “I hate to see those big tatooed chiefs; it’s through them that I feel so wild at times, I’m sure. I simply curse that ancestor of mine who married a dark woman. Why, I’d sooner die than marry a dark man!” Then she added: “Pooh! Why should I worry? I’m white enough, since I feel such a dislike for them—but, still, I do like dancing and singing at times, I admit.”

Then she thought of the young apprentice; his bronzed, frank face and earnest eyes rose before her memory. “He does look handsome; those odd-coloured eyes of his do fascinate me; but it’s a pity he’s not a passionate kind, who would make love like those handsome chiefs do when they sing to their brides on the pae paes and tambu stages. But there, they’re wild and can’t control their passions as we do!” she added. She looked down into the lagoon at her image and blushed deeply at her own thoughts. “I’m getting quite a pretty girl—almost a beautiful woman,” was her next reflection, as she noticed her large shadowy eyes and her full throat in the still water.

“Hallo, Ramai!” she exclaimed, as a graceful native girl suddenly stepped out of the bamboo thickets, stared with large dark eyes at her, then made as if to pass on. “Don’t go, Ramai,” said Gabrielle. The girl stared sphinx-like for a second, then moved on. “I go, Madesi, to pray, tabaran! Must go or die!” answered the strange maid as she turned round, then pointed her dark finger in the direction of the god-house that was situated somewhere in the taboo mountains.

“Your old god-houses! Do you really believe in them?” said Gabrielle, looking earnestly into the strange maid’s serious eyes. For a moment Ramai stared, put her brown knee forward, made a magic pass with her hands above her head, and said: “The gods have spoken more than once to Ramai when the stars did shine in the lagoons and the caves by Temeroesi, and told the future. And am I not sacred in the eyes of the gods? For I am head singer at the tambu festivals, so are my love affairs good, and chiefs have died for that look from my eyes that would tell all that a woman may say.”

“If I danced on the pae paes would I be loved too?” said Gabrielle almost eagerly.

“Pale-faced Marama, you no dance; the gods like not your kind!” Ramai answered almost scornfully. Then she glided away into the shadows on the other side of the track and disappeared.

Gabrielle burst into a merry peal of laughter. Once more she looked at her image in the lagoon and began to chant and sway and clap her hands rhythmically, just as she had seen the natives do. The deep boom of the bronze pigeon recalled her to herself as she stood throwing her shapely limbs softly to and fro. The songs of the birds seemed to remind her that she was no longer a child, and that such antics were a bit out of place now that she wore long dresses. She stopped dead, and put her hands into the folds of her hair that had fallen in a glinting mass to her shoulders as she shuffled her sandalled feet in the long jungle grass.

“I’m really getting awful,” was her next reflection. The sun was lying broad on the western sea-line; it looked like an enormous, dissipated, blood-splashed face that would hurry to hide itself below the rim of the ocean, away from the violent wooing of the hot, impassioned, tropic day.

Gabrielle stared across the seas from the hill-top and half fancied that that great hot face grinned from ear to ear over all it had seen. A peculiar feeling of fright seized her heart. In a moment she had turned and hurried away. She felt quite relieved as she sighted her father’s bungalow beneath the shade of the bread-fruits. “It’s late. Won’t Dad swear! I don’t care; men must swear, I suppose,” she muttered as she plucked up courage and entered the small door of the solitary homestead.

The shadows of evening had fallen; the last cockatoo had chimed its discordant vesper from the banyans near by. The room was nearly dark as she opened the door; only a faint stream of light crept through the wide-open casement that was thickly covered with twining tropic vine and sickly yellowish blossoms. To her astonishment, she was received by her father with a broad smile of welcome. “Come in, deary, don’t stand there! What yer frightened of—you beauty?” said old Everard, as his lean, clean-shaven face looked up at the girl in a warning way and he placed a forcible accent on the last two words.

“Who’s here that he should be so affable?” thought Gabrielle.

Turning round, she was startled to see a tall figure standing by the window. In a moment she hurried to the mantel piece and, striking a match, lit the small oil lamp, scolding her father all the time for his discourtesy in allowing a stranger to stand in the darkness. As she turned and gazed at the visitor she almost gave a cry, so impressed was she by the appearance of the man before her. It was the handsome Rajah Koo Macka, the half-caste Malayo-Papuan missionary. He was attired in semi-European clothes, but with this difference—round his waist was twined a large red sash and on his head the tribal insignia of the Malay Archipelago Rajahship, which consisted of coils of richly coloured material swathed round and round to resemble a turban. He looked like a handsome Corsair who had suddenly stepped out of an Eastern seraglio. For a moment the girl stared in astonishment; the Rajah corresponded with her conception of what the grand old heroes of romance were like.

The Rajah took in the whole situation and the impression he had made at this first glance at the father and daughter. He swelled his chest and assumed his most majestic attitude, and then behaved as though he knew he had befriended the girl by being at her homestead at that opportune moment.

“My darter!” said old Everard, inclining his lean face and introducing the girl with a grin.

“Your daughter!” gasped the Rajah as he stared with all the boldness and brazen admiration that Hillary’s eyes had lacked into Gabrielle’s face. He was taking no risks, had no idealistic views about innocence and beauty to thwart his heart’s desires—in a sense he had already captured her!

Gabrielle, recovering from that thrilling glance, blushed deeply. She stared at the dark moustache; it was waxed, and curled artistically at the tips. “What eyes!—luminous, warm-looking, alive with romantic dreams!” she thought.

The Rajah looked again at the girl. That second swift glance made her heart tremble with fright, but somehow she liked to see a man stare so.

“My darter ’andsome girl,” gurgled old Everard, stumping his wooden leg twenty times in swift succession, as Gabrielle brought out the rum bottle. The business confab that had been going on between Everard and his guest ceased abruptly. The old ex-sailor took the Rajah’s proffered cigar, stuck it in his mouth and gripped the ex-missionary’s hand, with secret delight bubbling in his heart. That grip said to Everard: “Everard, old pal, I never knew you had such a bonny daughter. Never mind the business I came here about, I’ll supply you with cash for rum!” The old sailor rubbed his hands. He knew that the man before him was wealthy, owned a schooner, and was boss of two plantations in Honolulu, where he had first met him. He put forth his horny fist and gave the Rajah the first familiar nudge of equality.

Everard was altogether worldly, but utterly unworldly in the great human sense of that phrase. He lacked the swift instincts that should have made him discern the truth and see how the wind might blow. His drunken eyes could not read the deeper meaning in the Rajah’s eyes as that worthy glanced at his daughter. He could see nothing of the passion and lust that is so often in the hearts of the men of mixed blood in the dark races.

Even Gabrielle’s half-fledged instincts of womanhood made her realise that the man before her did not exactly represent her preconceived ideas of what the old heroes of romance would look like could they stand before her in the flesh; the look in the Rajah’s eyes as he gazed on her was rather too obvious.

That night as the three of them sat at the table and Everard roared with laughter over Rajah Macka’s jokes, and giggled in delight at discovering that the Papuan potentate was such a fine fellow after all, Gabrielle’s heart fluttered like a caught bird. Rajah Koo Macka had leaned across the table once and stared into her eyes in such a way that even old Everard had ceased his narrative concerning his own astuteness and, like the idiot he was, stared at the Rajah, the rum goblet still between his lips and the table. But the Rajah, noticing that swift look in the old ex-sailor’s face, immediately recovered his mental equilibrium, and with astute cunning swiftly turned to his host and said: “I really couldn’t help staring so. Why, bless me, Everard, this Miss Gabrielle is the dead spit of the Madonna, the glorious painting that adorned the sacred walls of my missionary home when I studied Christianity’s holy precepts.”

“Damn it! Is she?” wailed old Everard, as the artful heathen gent shaded his eyes archwise with one dusky hand and, staring unabashed with a long, reflective glance at Gabrielle, murmured in holiest tones: “Virginity! Virginity! O blessed word!”

Gabrielle certainly did look beautiful: the dying flowers in her bronze-golden hair and her negligé attire (a much-renovated, washed-out blue robe and scarlet sash) added to the mystery of that sordid bungalow, as the dim candles and oil lamp burnt humbly before the unfathomable eyes of sapphire-blue. The deep golden gleam in their pupils seemed to expand as the night grew old. What a night of magic it was for her! The strange man from the seas thrilled her.

The old bungalow, lit up by two tallow candles and one oil lamp, the smell of rum, all vanished, and the dilapidated furniture and walls shone with a beautiful light, a light that came from that romantic presence! By an inscrutable paradox Macka was abnormally sensual and selfish, and yet truly religious! He spoke in low, sombre tones about Christ, of innocence, of the hopes of the living and of men when they are dead. Old Everard looked almost sane as he leaned his Dantesque face across the table and murmured “Amen.” And as the girl listened the Rajah loomed before her imagination as some glorious representative of the chivalric ages who had stolen into their bungalow out of the hush of the great starry night. The very walls of the room faded away as she watched his eyes flash. It was the sudden tiny pinch on her leg as he stooped to pick up his fallen cigar that she couldn’t quite place. It most certainly had no Biblical import in the books she had read. But still, “Why worry?” she thought, as she once more came under the spell of that look. And still old Everard looked round with insane eyes and thanked God for a Rajah’s friendship; and still Gabrielle struggled against the fascination of that man of mystery. Though nature has fixed indisputable danger signals in the eyes of voluptuaries, liars, rogues and old roués so that they give themselves away in a thousand acts, women’s blind eyes will not see!

All the old idolatry, the belief in his heathen gods, returned to Rajah Koo Macka that night. His mind was fired with superstition, much as Gabrielle’s was by romance, as he stared upon her. Had not the gods of his boyhood far away in New Guinea spoken of such a one with midnight-blue eyes and the hue of the stars in her hair? And was she not before him drinking to his eyes as she held the goblet at his wish? Had not their lips met in secret before the white man’s blinded eyes?

He even made a further advance in that predestined courtship, as planned by the gods, when he left the bungalow that night. In a way that is the special gift of voluptuaries, he managed to squeeze by her in the doorway, passing his arm about her with heathen artistry till she felt a strange thrill. Old Everard also received monstrous pressures of friendship as he put forth his hand and opened his insane-looking mouth at being so flattered. Then the old ex-sailor fell down in the doorway, dead drunk.

As soon as the Rajah got outside the bungalow he stood under the palms and looked back at that little homestead, a terrible fire gleaming in his eyes. The old superstition, deep in his heart’s blood, asserted itself with that full strength that is always triumphant when invested with the power of two creeds. “She’s mine!” he muttered in the old Malayan language. He looked like an agent of the devil as he waved his arms and made magical passes. Then he gave a low whistle. Two stalwart Kanakas, with mop-heads and glassy eyes like dead fish, stepped out of the shadows and saluted the Rajah. “Talofa Alii, Sah!” said one, as he softly swung his strangling rope to and fro and muttered, “Oner, twoer, threer, fourer,” at the same time ticking off each number with his dusky finger. They were kidnappers, members of his crew. In a moment they were all hurrying down towards the shore. As they stood by the coral reefs, the waves singing up to their feet, the Rajah rubbed his hands with delight, for there were five dark girls lying prone, half strangled, in his waiting boat.

They had just been caught while swimming in the enchanted lagoons at Felisi, where native maidens, at the tribal witchman’s bidding, went in the dead of night to wash their bodies in the charm-waters that made girls so beautiful. Even as the Rajah and his kidnappers stood on the shore they heard the sound of a sharp, terrified scream come faintly on the hot winds across the hills. They knew that another victim had been caught in the thug-nets. It was easy enough too; for it was a happy hunting ground for the “recruiters” down Felisi beach way. In the dead of night native girls often ran along the soft, moon-lit sands like coveys of dishevelled mermaids, placing sea-shells to their ears that they might hear the songs of dead sailors and the far-off voices of their unborn children humming and moaning in the great spirit-land that is under the sea.

Gabrielle’s heart thumped like a drum as she softly closed the door of the bungalow. She thought she must have dreamed it all. A handsome, god-like Rajah had gazed upon her as though she were a goddess—impossible! So thought the girl as she stumbled over a sordid reality—her father’s recumbent form on the bungalow door-mat. He still lay where he had fallen. He was a big man, and so it was with much difficulty that she at length managed to pick him up and lay him down on the old settee. Then she sat down in the big arm-chair. She heard her father gurgling out some old-time sea-chantey, so faint that it sounded a long way off. The two tallow candles were burning low in their coco-nut-shell candlesticks. But still she sat there. The idea of going to bed seemed ridiculous after the wonderful thing that had happened. She was still trembling to her very soul over the Rajah’s flatteries.

She thought of that secret pressure, the hot kiss, the deep meaning look in the flashing eyes. “He even spoke of God. Men seem to think more of God than women,” she muttered absently. “I’m dark, a heathen at heart; I’d like to marry a handsome, dark man like that,” she continued, as she began to beat her hands to and fro. Suddenly she felt a pang at her heart, for she had begun quite unconsciously to hum a melody that she had heard the young apprentice play to her on his violin. Her limbs started to tremble; the old look came back to her eyes; the swarthy, half-fierce look had vanished. She tried to change her thoughts by humming on in that weird way. “I’m heathenish, I’m sure I am,” she almost sobbed. Then a fierce feeling took possession of her as she realised her own unstable thoughts over the two men she had just met. For a moment she sat perfectly still, thinking—then she burst into tears.

Everard still snored on. Gabrielle ceased her tears, clapped her hands and laughed softly to herself. She had drunk a little rum and stuff that she knew not the name of that night. How could she help doing so. Had not the Rajah placed his lips at the goblet’s edge and looked sideways in deep meaning at her as he drank a toast to her father? But it wasn’t the rum that filled the bungalow parlour with mystery and changed the universe for her. She forgot the armchair in which she sat: it seemed that she sat on a lonely shore by night and stared at a blood-red sun that peered at her over the ocean horizon. Perhaps the Rajah had done this mysterious thing to her through his tender pressure. He knew! He knew! But still, he had no hint in his mind of the witchery of that girl’s soul.

She rose from the arm-chair, her shadow dodged about the walls of the bungalow, then she peeped through the open casement. Night lay with its tropical mystery drenched with stars as she stared upward and then again across that silent land. She withdrew her head and placed a pillow under her sleeping father’s head, then crept from the room, passing up the three steps that separated her from her own chamber. Her room was faintly lit up by the tint of moonrise on the distant mountains. “How silly of me to feel frightened like this,” she murmured, as she swiftly lit the oil lamp. Her limbs still trembled. A feeling of intense sorrow had come over her. The apprentice’s eyes rose before her memory again; she thought of the tryst by the lagoon, and it all seemed like some memory of a romantic opera she had seen and heard long years ago. Then she gave a startled cry: a shadow had run across the room. “How foolish of me to be frightened of my own shadow!” she said almost loudly to herself, as though she would seek courage by hearing her own voice. “I’ve heard that mother had nights of madness, when she thought a dark woman, blind, deaf and dumb, crouched under her bed and begged forgiveness for something she’d done.” So she thought as she rushed to the window to get away from her thought.

But Gabrielle could not escape from that presence. She looked out on the wide landscape of feathery palms and pyramid-shaped hills to the south-east in a strange fear. Then she stared seaward in the direction of the dark-armed promontory, where she knew the native girls stood on their great god-nights, coiled their tresses up and dived into the moon-lit seas, so that they might swim and beat their hands at the cavern doors where Quat and his vassal-gods moaned.

“I’m going mad too,” she murmured, as she pulled her head in through the open window and began to undress. One by one she pulled off her sandals and ribbons. Then she heard a queer kind of sawing noise. “What’s that?” she wondered. But it was only the regular intervals between Everard’s snores in the silent parlour below. “It’s Dad!” she murmured; and the sound of that deep bass snore soothed her soul as though it were the music of the singing spheres. She took off her blouse, undid the lace corsage, loosened the sash swathing till her semi-oriental attire fell rustling to her knees. “Am I so beautiful?” she murmured, as she looked half in fright and guilt at herself in the oval bamboo mirror. Her eyes sparkled like stars in the gloom as she peeped through her bronze-gold tresses. And still she swerved and swayed, so that the cataract of golden hair fell to her throat and again below the sun-tanned flush of her bosom. She thought of the Rajah, the warm look of his dark eyes. A strange thrill went through her. As though a dark figure ran across the moon-lit space just outside her window once again, a shadow whipped across the room. She hastily wrapped a robe about her, rushed across the room and stared through the vine-clad bamboo casement. The sight of the masts in the bay and the dim light of the far-off grog shanty by Felisi, where she knew sunburnt men from the seas spent the nights in wild carousal, dispelled her fears. She looked round her; then in some unaccountable fascination she stared in the mirror again. “I’m growing into a woman, getting quite beautiful!”

“I’m growing into a woman, getting quite beautiful!” came some exact echo of her words. She was startled; she swiftly glanced round the room; she could almost swear that she was not alone.

“What’s that?” she muttered, as she heard the muffled sounds of beaten drums, so faint that it seemed that the barbarian rumbling came across the centuries.

“What’s that!” re-echoed her own query. The echoes startled her more than the reality would have done. Thoughts of Ra-mai, the tambu dancer, of her gods and the terrors of the phantoms that haunted those whom the tabaran high priests had tabooed flashed through her brain. Her bedroom was faintly lit up by the light of the oil lamp that fell over the dilapidated furniture and on to her old settee bed. A swarm of fire-flies whirled and sparkled beneath the palms outside and then were blown through the open casement, right into the room! She swiftly placed her hands over her eyes, as one might at the sight of vivid lightning—a ghostly flash leapt across the room and seared her very soul! The hot night winds swept through the palms outside; she heard them moan as something leapt out of the night and clutched her heart with its shadowy fingers! In her terror she swiftly looked up at her mother’s photograph, as though she would rush to the dead for companionship. No help there. The faded eyes of that sad face only stared in immutable silence down from the frame on the wall, as though in some twinship of misery. Gabrielle dared not turn her head. She knew that something stood there watching her. Another gust of wind seemed to come from the stars and burst the half-closed casement open.

“Dad!” she cried in her terror, as she felt a hot breath against her face.

“Dad!” echoed the walls of her room in mockery.

“Who are you?” she managed to wail out.

“Who are you?” came the relentless echo.

She had just caught sight of her face in the mirror. Even the fear of that presence in the room was somewhat subdued, so unbounded was her astonishment at seeing the reflection that stared back at her from the bright glass—it was not her own face that she saw, but the face of a wildly beautiful, dark-blooded woman!

She stared again, paralysed with horror. The fiery eyes mocked her fright and astonishment. Then the expression changed: the face seemed to appeal and smile half sadly at the girl.

It was not a monstrous Nothing that gazed upon her. She turned to flee from the terrible presence. But in a second it had leapt out of the mirror—had sprung at her! So it seemed to the terrified girl; but the figure was standing behind her, staring into the mirror over her shoulders like some relentless, cruel Nemesis from her helpless past, a hideous thing that had searched for centuries—and found her at last!

Old Everard slept on. He heard nothing of the terrible conflict in the room three steps up, where his daughter struggled in the awful grip of that temptress who had found her—a woman from some long-forgotten forest grave in the Malay Archipelago.

It was not madness; nor did the struggle exist only in her imagination. The sheets were torn, the counterpane rent in twain, as that merciless phantom tried to overpower the girl.

Only those who have been true worshippers in the great Papuan tambu temples who have seen and heard the magic of the heritage rites, can guess what really happened in the girl’s room. Only those who have experienced a like experience secretly know how she felt as she attempted to overthrow that deadly visitant. For a few seconds their two figures swayed in the dark. The oil lamp had been knocked over! Then the small door of the bungalow suddenly opened: Gabrielle had escaped. She ran out into the moon-lit night! Just for a second she stood under the windless palms, staring first one way and then another, as though she longed to leap over her own shoulders—escape from herself. Up the slopes she ran, and down into the distant hollows by Fallamboco. She passed the derelict hut where the high priest dreamed before he died and was buried just in front of his front door. The broken, crumbling wooden idol still stood on his grave, its bulged glass eyes staring in immutable insolence as Gabrielle rushed by. She stopped by the lagoons at Felisi, where the huddled waters lay, the sacred waters that washed the beautiful bodies of the dead brides ere they were buried safe in the highest mahogany-tree of Bougainville.

She was not surprised when she stooped and gazed on her reflection in the waters and saw a second image beside her own in those silent depths. Standing there in her hastily donned night attire, her hair outblown, her chemise torn to rags at one shoulder, her blue robe clinging to her delicate figure, she looked around in despair. Only the mountains looked on silently as their giant stone heads seemed to stare like Fate across the desolate landscape and out to the moon-lit seas. She looked at the sky and groped in some blindness, lifting her hands in mute appeal. Some past heathen life possessed her. A crawling, half-human-shaped cloud blurred the moon’s face, failing suddenly, like a dark hand. It was not a cloud to Gabrielle’s changed eyes as the shadow fell over the weird landscape; it was a big thumb busily tattooing the sky, as one by one the dim constellations rebrightened on their darkened background.

She stood alert and peered over her shoulder, her face and eyes bright with startled delight—she heard the tribal drums beating.

Those sounds were real enough. Even the young apprentice in his room over the hills jumped as he heard the booming, then put his head out of his window and bobbed it back, startled like a frightened child.

Gabrielle recognised those sounds. The long, low-drawn chant was familiar to her ears. Softly they came, weird undertones drifting across the silence. Like a monstrous rat that had wings, something whirred across the sky and gave a wretched groan as it swept out of sight.

“Ta Savoo! Ta Savoo!” (“Come on! Come on!”) said a voice beside her. A shadowy hand was laid upon her shoulder. The horror of that presence had already vanished. She startled the hills by bursting into a silvery peal of laughter; then away she ran, on, on, into the depths of the forest.

On the brightest tropic night the forest depths were dark with lurking mystery; the multitudinous twistings of the giant trees and their gnarled limbs, all thickly lichened with serpent-like vines, made a wonderful depth of brooding silence and unfathomable light, and in the moonlight looked like some mighty forest of twisted coral miles down under the sea.

White men would sooner walk miles than pass through those depths by night. “No, thank ye! No tabooed b—— heathen forest for me!” they said, as they gave a knowing glance. And none could persuade them. Old Sour Von Craut simply shrugged his shoulders, spread out his fat hands and intimated by raised eyebrows that it was the most natural thing on earth to have found the dead beachcomber, with ears and eyes missing, in the forests behind Felisi beach.

Even Gabrielle stopped running, gave a startled moan and looked up in the dim light. Something screamed and gave a mocking laugh; it was a red-striped vulture. The girl saw the whitened bones of its eyrie as it stood up and flapped its wings. For it had made its nest amongst a dead man’s bones, a grave up there in the palms of the tabooed forest. Just for a moment she crouched in fear, but not because of that sight over her head. An aged dark man with a large nose was passing along, not ten yards off, chanting to himself. It was Oom Pa, hurrying back from the festival outside Parsons’s grog shanty. He had a bamboo rod across his shoulders, Chinese fashion, wherefrom his calabashes swung as he disappeared in the depth beyond. In a few seconds Gabrielle was off again. She had been that way before, so knew the near cuts to the villages and tambu temples. As she ran out of the bamboo thickets she caught a first glimpse of the hanging lamps. A breath of wind had swept through the forest, blowing the thick, dark leaves aside that made the natural taboo curtain to the festival spot. She saw the whirling figures of the tambu maiden dancers. She heard the weird music of the flutes and twanging stringed gourds. The chants only increased the wild feeling of savagery that was delighting her soul. She did not hesitate, but deliberately pushed aside the bamboo stems and stood in the presence of that secret midnight throng of sacred worshippers and the great tambu priests. For a moment the dark heathen men and affrighted women stared from their squatting mats in astonishment, the expression on their faces strangely resembling the carved surprise of the big wooden, one-toothed idol that stood six feet high, staring with glass eyes from behind the taboo stage. Even the dancing tambu maidens swerved slightly in their sacred movements, their steps put out of gear as Gabrielle, with hands uplifted, and eyes staring strangely, appeared before that pae pae.

The head priest coughed in astonishment; then he rose and wailed out: “Taboo! She is white, and such are tabooed by the gods!”

As he brought his club down with a crash, anger come into the dark eyes of the sacred chiefesses, who had leapt to their feet, all disturbed while they had been paying obeisance to the wooden Idol Quat (chief god of the skies). It was a specially private occasion, only the greatly trusted allowed to attend. One stalwart chief stepped forward as though he intended slaying the girl on the spot. Old Oom Pa, who had barely wiped the perspiration from his brow and flung down his calabashes of bribes, gazed with as much surprise as anyone on Gabrielle. Then, seeing that harm might come to the girl, he hastily stepped forward and said: “Hold, O chiefs; this papalagi has that in her eyes which tells she is under the influence of our gods. And, therefore, is she not one of us?” He swiftly turned and said something in the guttural language of his tribe. Whatever he said was for Gabrielle’s benefit, for it greatly calmed the fears of the huddled dark men and their women-kind. In a moment the fierce resentment towards Gabrielle changed to wild grunts of welcome. One aged priest who was grovelling on his stomach before the dwarf taboo idols that were receiving the sacred slanting moonbeams through the palms prostrated himself at Gabrielle’s feet. The white girl looked round her like one who stared in a dream, then she gave a merry peal of laughter. The handsome, tattooed braves who stood leaning on the palm stems gave a hushed cry of admiration as they saw the girl standing, bathed in moonbeams, her hair wildly dishevelled, her eyes like stars, her arms as white as coral as she made mystical movements in a dance they did not know. The old priest, who was at her feet lifted his face and chanted some prayer to her eyes.

This act of the priest made the chiefs and chiefesses think that the girl was there by special decree of their kai-kai (sacred moon gods). In a moment the whole tribe had followed the priest’s act, hod surrounded the girl and were moaning and grovelling at her feet.

“Tala Marama Taraban!” (“’Tis a spirit-girl!”) they whispered in an awestruck voice as they lifted their chins and stared at the girl’s vacant eyes. The peculiar stare of those wonderful blue eyes intensified their superstitious belief.

Two of the chiefs rose, nodded their heads, wailed, and said: “She has been here before, O brothers!”

The tambu maidens had now stopped dancing. The barbarian flutes had ceased their wailings, not a drum note disturbed the hush as the wild, swarthy men gazed on Gabrielle and the aged priest chanted into her ears.

The girl seemed to be dimly conscious of the reverent homage those wild men and women paid her as they fell on their faces before her. She looked down with a dream-like stare on their muscular brown bodies, on their richly shelled ramis, their red-feathered headgear.

“Savoo! Savoo!” (“Go on! Go on! Dance for us!”) they almost whispered, as they turned their shaggy heads and peered into the depths of the forest, half in terror and pleasurable anticipation of what the girl might do.

For a moment Gabrielle swayed, clapped her hands softly as a prelude, then chanted. Then she swiftly glided towards the tambu elevation. In a moment the tambu maidens had jumped down, soft-footed, on to the mossy floor before the sacred erection. Gabrielle had leapt on to the stage! The skulls and skeleton bones and other gruesome ritual objects that dangled on boughs just above her head swayed to the hot night breeze, all tinkling weirdly as she stood for a moment in dreamy hesitation. Then she gave a silvery peal of laughter. She had begun to move hither and thither as though in a dream, swaying to and fro with marvellous delicacy and grace. Never before had those chiefs seen so weird, so wonderful a sight or heard a voice chant their wild melodies with such strange effect. They all stared. Even the tambu maidens stood as though riveted to the forest floor in envious wonder. A drum began softly to beat out the tribal notes, “Too Woomb! Too Woomb!” in perfect tempo to the girl’s shifting faery-like footsteps. Suddenly the aged high priest, Pooma Malo, fell prostrate before his tambu idol and began to chant, so great was his fear. The whole assemblage were trembling like wind-blown shadows. They had all noticed the silent, shadowy woman who stood beside the white girl on the pae pae mimicking her every movement, as it, too, bobbed rhythmically to and fro, moving its feet noiselessly behind her across that pae pae before them all.

Two of the tambu maidens and one dusky youth jumped to their feet and bolted off into the forest in fright. The giant wooden idol just behind the shadow-figure gave a wide carven grin from ear to ear as a shaft of moonlight fell across its hideous face. A handsome, plucky young chief stepped forward. He was adorned with the insignias and decorations of the fetish rites. He leapt straight on to the pae pae. Under the influence of the white girl’s dance he too swayed his arms and chanted, as only men of his race can dance and chant.

Gabrielle looked up at him, a strange light in her eyes. He reminded her of the Rajah. She lifted her arms in response to the handsome young chief’s gesticulations as he careened by her in the mystical cross-passes of the ritual dance. She lifted her mouth to his. The tribal chiefs saw the strange look of the girl’s eyes and at once smothered the cry of “Awai! O lao Mia!” the old tribal exclamation that would express their innermost feelings. The elder priests stood open-mouthed, leaning against their idols in fear and trembling, as though they would ask their protection.

The impassioned warrior chief grew bolder, and held Gabrielle’s delicate figure in a swerving embrace. His dark mouth came close to her ear, murmuring words of magic that she could not understand. Even the idol seemed to stare its surprise as he lifted one white arm and touched the soft flesh with his lips. And still the tambu flute-players blew on, for they too had come under the spell of that strange sight, where the two races clung together and chanted mysteriously to each other. Then the chief untwined his swarthy arms from that embrace and, falling forward on one knee, placed his lips to her feet. He was eager to press his extraordinary advantage. To kiss a maid’s feet is the first act the happy warrior performs when a maid favours his presence on a tambu stage. But he found that her feet were covered. In a moment he had pushed her robe aside and had begun to remove one of her small, blue-bowed sandals.

Just for a moment the white girl’s face seemed to betray the light of vanity over this act of the young chief. Then he lifted her foot once again, to his lips, and immediately Gabrielle’s expression changed. She stared around her in astonishment, looked with a dream-like stare back into the eyes of the giant warrior who was caressing her and at the swarthy men and women who stood under the coco-nut-oil lamps watching in front of the pae pae stage. They knew that the cry she gave was one of terror, for Gabrielle had awakened; her soul had been asleep.

The young chief who had danced with her suddenly cowered away from her side; then he jumped in the opposite direction as she leapt from the pae pae.

“Taboo!” whispered the astonished chiefesses as the wind sighed mournfully across the forest height and flickered the bluish flames of the hanging lamps.

“She would tempt our menkind!” yelled a deep-bosomed chiefess as she leapt forward, her head-dress feathers swaying violently.

One or two of the older chiefs put forth their dusky hands as though they would clutch her in their anger. In a moment Oom Pa lifted his dark fist and bade none touch her. Placing his tawny hand on his tattooed chest, just where his sun-tanned skin encased his thumping heart, he muttered solemn-sounding undertones that told the assembled tambu watchers to leave the girl to him.

Gabrielle looked round on those fierce-eyed men and women in terror. She saw that look in the eyes of old Oom Pa which told her that he, at least, had her welfare deep in his heart. The lines of tambu maidens divided, and moved back half in fright as Gabrielle made a dash and passed by them.

“Stay, O papalagi maid,” said Oom Pa, as he too moved back into the recesses of the forest and, staying her flight, said: “O white maid, you come to tambu dance before, I knower you. I know, too, that you no belonger to our race.” Then he rubbed his wrinkled face, looked at her sternly and proceeded: “Remember that great trouble may come to one who comer to our full-moon rites unasked. Savvy?”

Gabrielle nodded. She could not speak as she stood there trembling from head to feet. Then the old priest looked quietly in her eyes and said: “Tell me, O white maid, who was she with skin dark as the night, eyes like unto stars and cloudy, flowing hair as she dance on pae pae stage with you, mimicking you like a spirit-shadow?”

“With me!” exclaimed the girl in a startled, hushed voice, as she looked round into the forest depth in a great fear.

“Wither you!” reiterated Oom Pa. Then he said: “You knower not that such a spirit-shadow dancer with you and laugher when you place your lips ’gainst those of our taboo warrior? La Umano?”

So spake old Oom Pa, as the light of the moon and superstition lit up his wrinkled face. Before he could say more Gabrielle had fled in fear from his presence.

She had no recollection of the way of her flight back to her father’s bungalow. Her feet went swiftly, like pattering rain, over the forest floor as she ran from her fear and shame. And only God knows the thoughts of her sad heart as she entered her father’s homestead in the dead of night and crept into her little civilised bed to sleep.

Was it imagination? Well, whoever you may be, go to Bougainville, look into the wonderful eyes of those half-caste women who happen to have the blood of the white, Papuan and Polynesian races mixed in their veins, fall in love with such a one, hold her in your arms by night and watch for the shadow!—listen for the rustle of the old life that revelled in the magic of the tambu and maidia temples, the altars of heathen passion and enchantment.

CHAPTER V—MUSIC OF ROMANCE

On the morning following Gabrielle’s terrible experience old Everard sat bathing his head in a calabash of sea-water. It considerably revived his numbed sense. Then he blew his nose fiercely and, stumping his wooden leg with tremendous irritability, sat down to breakfast. Suddenly, as he was munching, he looked up, wondering what on earth was the matter with his daughter. Her dress was torn, her face looked pale and haggard, her eyes full of drowsy fright and some haunting fear. She looked years older than when she had retired the night before. The expression on her face was one of infinite sorrow. The lips kept trembling. The old man, completely lacking in imagination, could see nothing of the pathos, the absolute wretchedness of the girl’s expression. He summed up the whole business according to his own feelings.

“Did you drink rum last night?—get drunk? What’s the matter?” said he, as he concluded by munching fast at his bread and toasted cheese.

“You were drunk,” said the girl, squeezing the words out with an effort as her voice cracked.

“Wha’ you think of Rajah Koo Macka, gal, eh?”

“Not much,” she responded. Her mouth visibly twitched as she turned her eyes from the stupid, inquiring parental gaze.

“Nice fellow ’im; believes in God, Christ and in virginity. Rajahs ain’t knocking about everywhere, Gabby old gal, either,” he continued, as he gave a wink. Then he added: “It’s wonderful how people who was once ’eathens seems to be the most relygous folk; they seems to ’ave a real faith in goodness ’o things, that’s what it is.”

Gabrielle still kept silent, hardly hearing at all as the old idiot rambled on in this wise: “’E’s got ther brass too! Going to ’ire me to go on a pearl-hunting scheme in the Admiralty Group. ’E knows I know where the pearls are found. He he!”

Suddenly the man ceased his wild talk and looked at the girl quizzically for a second, then said: “Gabrielle, you’re a woman now, don’t yer feel like one?”

At this, to the old man’s astonishment, the girl burst into tears.

“What on earth ’ave I said,” he mumbled, as his eyes lost the bleared, rum-dim look, and he tapped his wooden leg. Something that slept deep down in his heart stirred in its long slumber: “Don’t cry, girlie. Aren’t you well?”

Even he saw the faint appeal of those violet-blue eyes.