Vaiti of the Islands

VAITI OF THE ISLANDS

BY BEATRICE GRIMSHAW

LONDON
GEORGE NEWNES, LIMITED
SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND, W.C.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

[Prologue]

1. [The Pearl Lagoon]
2. [A Race for a Fortune]
3. [The Flower behind the Ear]
4. [The Black Viri]
5. [A Diamond Web]
6. [Marooned]
7. [The Turning of the Tables]
8. [The White Man of Nalolo]
9. [The Lost Island]
10. [What came of the Paris Dress]
11. [A Dead Man's Revenge]
12. [Breaking the Mana]
13. [The Game Played Out]
14. [How the Witch-Doctor got his Money back]
15. [The Calamity of Coral Bay]
16. [The Fate of the Lieutenant]
17. [Invaders in Tanna]
18. [A Cannibal Party]
19. [The Rival Princesses]
20. [Queen after all]

VAITI OF THE ISLANDS

PROLOGUE

It was in the seventies, long ago.

* * * * *

Summer—yet a slow grey dawn, lingering long in the sky. August—yet a chilly morning, crisping the landlocked waters of the bay with cold knife-edges of foam. Out at sea, the wild white horses plunging madly under the whip of the sunrise wind; the bar beginning to thunder. Inshore, beneath the green slope of the castle hill, small angry ripples beating and fretting the untrampled sand. Dead rose-leaves from the gardens floating among the seaweed; a torn bird's-nest, flung down by the wind, lying on the edge of the steep cliff pathway.... It was still the time of summer, yet, too surely, autumn had come.

The sodden leaves lay thick in the bottom of the boat when the man seized it by the gunwale and ran it down the beach into the snatching waves.... Oh, an autumn day indeed, here in wild Caithness, though summer was still at its fairest in kinder lands. And in the heart of the man who was rowing fast through the angry dawn light, to the tall schooner yacht that swung and tore at her moorings out in the bay, there was autumn too, with winter close at hand.

All so long ago! who remembers?

Not the newspapers which, in a day or two after, shrieked the scandal broadcast, east and west. Not the guests of the castle house-party—they are dead, or old, which is half of death, since then. Not the Prince whose dignity had been insulted by the outbreak of a vulgar card scandal in his very presence—he struck the titled owner of the house off the list of his intimates forthwith, and then forgot about it and him. Not the colonel of the famous regiment, who found out defalcations in the funds belonging to the mess, a few days after, and knew why his most promising young officer had done the unforgiveable thing—for the Ashanti spears ended life and memory for him out on the African plains, before even Piccadilly had made an end of talking. Not the Royal Yacht Squadron—the reported loss of the famous Paquita at sea, with her disgraced owner on board, is a tale that even the oldest habitue of Cowes could not tell you to-day.... No one remembers. When the beautiful white schooner spread her wings below the castle wall, and beat her way like a frightened butterfly out to the stormy sea, she sailed away in silence, and she and hers were known no more.

Yet, but for that stormy day in the Highlands, and the boat that fled to sea, these tales of far-off lands had never been told.

CHAPTER I

THE PEARL LAGOON

"Where's the old man?"

"Old man drunk," replied Vaiti indifferently. She had learned to play "The Maiden's Prayer," maltreat three European languages, and cultivate a waist in her Tahitian convent school. But that was five years ago now, and Vaiti's "papalangi" verbs had dropped from her quite as soon, and as naturally, as her "Belitani" stays.

"Why can't he wake up and give us an observation?" commented the mate indignantly. "It would be hard if a man mightn't enjoy himself in port; but we're four days out now, and he's as bad as ever, lyin' all the time on the settee like a——"

"You better mind too much what you say my father!" Vaiti had set one shapely olive hand on the deck, and sprung to her feet like a flying-fish making a leap. She was taller than the sturdy, red-haired mate, as she stood up on the poop, her bare feet well apart, her white muslin loose gown swelling out as she leaned to the roll of the steamer, and her black-brown eyes, deep-set under fine brows as straight as a ruler, staring down the blue eyes of the man.

"Very sorry, I'm sure; no offence meant," said the mate humbly. "But we want an observation, and he ain't no good. Why, you know as well as me that he'll be like this, off and on, all the voyage now; we've both of us seen it before."

Vaiti stamped her bare feet on the deck.

"I know—I know! I try all the way from Apia wake him up—no good! I tell you, Alliti"—the mate's name, Harris, usually took this form in the pigeon-English of Polynesia—"this very bad time for him to get 'quiffy. Too much bad time. Never mind. Get the sextan'. I take sun myself."

The mate ran down the companion and into the cabin, where the captain's six feet two of drunken ineptitude sprawled over most of the space available for passing. He stopped for a moment to look at the heavy, unconscious face—a handsome face, with the remains of refinement about it; for Captain Saxon had been a gentleman once, and his name (which was certainly not Saxon then) had appeared among the lists of "members deceased" in the annual reports of all the best London clubs of the 'seventies.... Why Saxon died, and why he came to life again in the South Pacific some years later, is a tale that need not be told, even if it is guessed. Many such substantial ghosts roam the South Seas unexorcised—many a man whose name adorns a memorial tablet, guarded by weeping marble angels, on the walls of some ivied English Church, is busy conferring a peculiar fitness upon the occupation of those guardian seraphs, down among "The Islands," where he and the devil may do as they please.

"'Og!" observed the mate, as he passed through to the captain's cabin, and fetched out the sextant. "'Alf-caste or quarter-caste, Vaiti's too good a daughter for him, by the length of the mainmast and the mizzen together. She's got all his brains—Lord, how she learned navigation from him, like a cat lapping up milk, when she set her mind to it!—and none of his villainy. At least——" The mate paused on the companion, and filled his pipe.

"At least——" he repeated, and broke off the remark unfinished.

"Sun coming out nice now," he said, handing the sextant to the girl. Vaiti made her observation with the ease of an old sea-captain, and went below to work it out. It was true, as Harris said, that she had plenty of brains, though they did not lie along the lines of "The Maiden's Prayer" and Dr. Smith's English Grammar. And, whatever the legal status of poor derelict Saxon, or the mate, might be, no one who had ever climbed the side of the schooner Sybil could doubt the obvious fact that the real commanding officer of that vessel was Vaiti herself.

"What d'ye make it?" asked the mate, looking over her shoulder. Vaiti, always sparing of her words, pointed to the figures. Harris whistled.

"Ain't we off our course, just!" he said, drawing his finger down the chart.

"No," said Vaiti.

"Why, hang it all, Cap"—the girl was accorded the title, half in fun, half through habit, a good deal oftener than her father—"we ain't making for the Delgada reefs, are we? I don't pretend to be any navigator, but I do know the course for Papeëte."

"What you think not matter," said Vaiti, rolling up the chart. "Make him eight bell. You go take wheel; I ki-ki [dinner], then I take him."

"What's the course?" demanded the mate eagerly.

"Nor'-west by west," answered Vaiti, going into her cabin, and slamming the door against Harris's open-mouthed questions.

An Aitutaki boy with a chain of red berries in his hair, and a scarlet and yellow "pareo" (kilt) for all clothing, brought up the dinner. Vaiti ate her meal alone, and then came on deck to take over the wheel, keeping a determined silence that Harris hardly cared to break.... And yet—Nor'-west by west, with the wind fair for distant Papeëte, and the deadly Delgadas lying about a quarter point off their present course, not ten miles away!

"She's a hard case, bo'sun," he remarked to that official as they sat down together. "She has me fair scared with the course she's steering; and yet, you may sling me over the side in a shotted hammock for the sharks'es ki-ki, if she don't know a lot more than the old man himself. Ain't she a daisy, too! Look at her there 'olding the wheel, as upright as a cocoanut palm, and as pretty and plump as a—as a——"

"Porker," concluded the bo'sun, pouring an imperial pint of tea into his mug.

"You ain't got no poetry in you," said the mate disgustedly.

"Nor nothing else," growled the bo'sun. "Ain't you going to help that curry, and give a man something to put in his own inside after stowing the whale-boat full of beef and biscuits?"

"The whale-boat? (That's plenty, bo'sun; I've got to live as well as you)."

"Ay, biscuits, beef, and water; compass and sextant. She give the order a while ago."

"What's in the wind now?"

"I don't ask questions, so I'm never told no lies."

"I do, though," said the mate, in a spasm of authority, deserting his dinner to spring up the companion and join Vaiti at the wheel. The bo'sun's mahogany face broke up into a score of curving wrinkles, and his shoulders shook a little, as he watched the scene on deck. Quite mechanically he transferred the rest of the curry to his plate, and while clearing the dish with the precision of a machine, kept an eye on the couple at the wheel. He saw Harris ask an eager question, and repeat it more eagerly. He saw Vaiti jerk a brief answer, and the mate speak again. Then he saw the girl swing round on her heel, lift one slender hand, and bring it down across Harris's cheek with an emphasis that left a crimson mark upon the polished brown. He saw the mate take a step forward, and look at the handsome helmswoman as though he were very much minded to pay back the correction after the manner of man in general where a pretty vixen is concerned. The two figures stared at each other, eye to eye, for a full minute. Vaiti's brown eyes, keen as twin swords, never wavered; her lip was insolent and unrelenting. The mate's half-angry, half mischievous expression dissolved into an embarrassed grin; then he turned tail and hurried down the hatch.

"She's a tigress in 'uman form," he declared. "If the old man—or any other—was to lay 'is little finger on me—but there! who cares what a scratchin' cat does? I'd as soon marry a shark—I would!"

"You've as much chance," granted the bo'sun.

"Talk of sharks!" said the mate, gazing ruefully at the table and the empty dish.

Some two hours later, a milky gleam on the port bow attracted the mate's attention as he stood on the poop. A Kanaka sailor had just taken the wheel, and Vaiti was below.

"Breakers on the port bow!" sang out Harris.

Vaiti was up in a minute.

"I t'row water on my father's head," she said coolly—"but no good; he too much sick, he see snake by and by, I think. You and Oki carry him into him cabin, and come back pretty quick. I see this t'rough myself."

"See what?" demanded the mate, on the last verge of frenzy.

"Not know myself yet," answered Vaiti, giving one of her rare laughs. She seemed in a very good humour for once.

When the mate came out a little later, and the sailor went back to the neglected wheel, Vaiti was standing by the whale-boat, wearing an air of perfect self-possession and a complete suit of her father's white ducks. The sight was no novelty to Harris, but it came upon him now, as usually, with a new shock of admiration.

"Isn't she an outrighter!" he observed to the unsympathetic bo'sun.

"She certainly is, if outrighter's French for an undacent young woman," replied that officer sourly. Harris did not hear him, for the significance of the morning's mystery had just burst on his mind. He had not spent ten years in the Pacific for nothing and the sight of Tai, a diver from Penrhyn, standing beside Vaiti, with a water-glass in his hand, spelt "pearl-shell" to the eyes of the mate as clearly as if the magic word had been printed in letters three feet long. Vaiti flashed her white teeth at him.

"Tai, me, three boys, we go into lagoon," she said. "Suppose somethings happen, you find course for Apia written out, cabin table; you take ship back, put captain in hospital."

"By ——, but you're a corker, Vaiti!" cried Harris admiringly. "Where'd you hear anything about the Delgadas? No ship goes near them that can help it; they're a regular ocean cemetery."

"You 'member officer from gun-boat, Apia?"

"Ay!" said Harris. He did remember the lad, and the rather inexplicable friendliness shown him by Saxon and Vaiti during the stay in port of the Alligator.

"He show me photo Delgadas. Alligator he been go all round him, mark him right for chart, because he all wrong. Officer give my father bearings; say plenty talk and show photo. He dam fool officer, I think; he not know that kind place mean pearl-shell, and we not tell anything."

Harris mounted the rigging, and surveyed the reef from the main cross-trees. It was the best part of a mile away; a creaming circle of foam on the sea's blue surface, enclosing a pallid spot of green. Vaiti, who had followed him, flung one arm round the mast, and, leaning outwards towards the horizon, surveyed the reef intently. Within that ring of foam—the grave of many a gallant ship that had sailed the fair Pacific as bravely as their own little schooner—might lie many thousands of pounds. The repurchase of the Sybil, once Saxon's sole property, now partly owned by a trading syndicate; the regaining of her captain's lost position in decent society—perhaps the realisation of half a hundred luxurious dreams, dreamed on coral beaches under the romance-breeding splendours of the tropic moon—all this, and more, hung on the chances of the next few hours.

There was silence for the space of a minute or two, as the man and woman swung between earth and heaven, staring across the sun-dazzled plain of sea. Then, in one instant, the dream broke, and the rainbow fragments of that bubble of glory scattered themselves east and west. For across the bar of the level horizon slipped a small, pointed, pearl-coloured sail, growing as they watched it, flying past, and heading all too surely for the Delgadas reef.

Vaiti flung herself round a backstay, and slid down to the deck, with a word on her lips that would have justified the bo'sun's recent judgment, could he have caught it. Harris followed, swearing fully and freely. It was evident to both that the newcomer had special business with the reef as well as themselves; and they wasted no time, acting in concord, and without dispute, after a fashion that was new on board the Sybil. Within half an hour they had reduced the distance between the ship and the reef to a quarter of a mile; nearer than that even Vaiti did not care to go, for the weather looked unsettled, though the wind was off the reef. The whale-boat, with a picked crew, was lowered, and sent flying towards the break in the reef, while the mate, burning to be in her, but conscious that his duty must keep him on the ship, paced excitedly up and down the deck, glass in hand, watching the advance of the stranger ship from time to time. She was a good two hours' sail away as yet; and surely first possession was worth something, even out here in the lawless South Seas!

CHAPTER II

A RACE FOR A FORTUNE

Before an hour was over, the wind had freshened considerably, and the mate began to feel anxious for the safety of the boat, in case he should be obliged to run for it from the neighbourhood of the treacherous reef. That Vaiti would return an instant sooner because of the threatening weather he did not expect, knowing the dare-devil recklessness of her character too well. It was certain, however, that he might lose the ship, and incidentally himself, by waiting too long; and it was equally certain that Saxon, once recovered, would put a bullet through his mate's head if Vaiti came to harm. And all the time that threatening sail was growing larger and larger.

It was an unspeakable relief, though no less of a surprise, when he saw that the boat was actually heading towards the ship again, the sail up and every oar hard at work. He did not remember having seen Tai go down, in any of his hurried inspections through the glass, and the time was certainly short. What did it all mean?

The meaning became sufficiently clear as soon as the boat approached the ship, but not through the medium of eye or ear. A strong stench of rotting fish struck the mate's nostrils almost before the boat was within hail, and instantly enlightened him. No one who has ever smelt the terrible smell of the pearl-oyster removed from its ocean bed, and left to putrefy in a tropical sun, can mistake the odour. Harris understood at once that the strange ship had been there before, and that Vaiti was bringing back a sample of the last catch, left out to rot during the vessel's temporary absence.

The Sybil was leaping dangerously when the boat came alongside, but Vaiti snatched at the lowered rope, and swung herself up over the bulwarks before any of the native crew. Tai, following her, brought a sack of hideously smelling carrion, and dumped it down on the deck. The mate's eyes glistened.

"I find great lot lying on reef," said Vaiti, with an apparent calmness that might have deceived any one who knew her less accurately than the mate. "I think been there two week. C'lismas Island, he one week away, good weather. Papalangi C'lismas Island belong plenty diving gear. You see?"

"Rather!" said Harris gloomily. "Game up, eh?"

"I think you no man at all," spat Vaiti suddenly, swinging into the cabin. Harris, not especially put out, gave a hand to hauling in the boat, remarking to the bo'sun, who was picking over the heap of decaying pearl-shell, "Don't know as one could say the same about her, lump of solid devilment that she is! But this looks like the end of all our 'opes, as they say in the plays; don't it?"

In a minute or two Vaiti appeared again, wearing a dignified muslin gown with three frills on its tail, and holding a chart in her hands. She eyed the horizon narrowly, and ordered the ship to be put about, a manoeuvre which headed the Sybil straight for the oncoming sail. It was now evident that the stranger ship was a schooner of some eighty or ninety tons, rather larger than the Sybil, and nearly as fast. No one on board had the smallest doubt of her mission, even had that rotting heap of shell not been there to offer evidence. Pearl-shell lagoons, with their shell worth £100 to £200 per ton, and their pearls (if any are found, which is not always certain) worth a fortune for half a handful, are the gold mines of the South Sea world; the very birds of the sea seem at times to carry the news of such a discovery, and spread it far and wide.

The Sybil gathered way, and sped fast towards the stranger ship. The sea was blackening and rising, but there was not very much wind as yet. Vaiti sat cross-legged on the deck, studying her chart in the waning light of the gusty afternoon. It was some minutes before she laid it down and stood up to speak, steadying herself with one hand against the deck-house, for the schooner was now rolling heavily.

"Alliti," she said, "suppose you got heart one small fowl inside you, I get captain's Winchester, my levolver, you and bosun's levolver, and we send that people Davy Jones, or go ourself, pretty quick. But you not got heart, though you big man, and old man he all time sick. Now, you listen too much what I tell you. You run alongside ship, you go on board. You say captain sick, no one take sun, we get off course, nearly wreck on Delgadas. Then you ask captain give bearings reef, and you look at him chart too much careful, see if this line mark—here."

She put the point of her small forefinger on the chart she held, and showed two or three newly-ruled lines in red ink, enclosing a large space east and south of Samoa. These were the boundaries of the area lately annexed by New Zealand, and she was exceedingly anxious to know if the stranger knew as much about the significance of that matter as she did.

"Then," she went on, "you ask him if he been Wellington, say we wanting news——"

"What the (adjective noun) for?" demanded the mate.

"Because I say, pauki!" (pig) flashed Vaiti. "No!—you got head of pig, heart of fowl. You bo'sun, you know I get you through this all right, suppose you trusting me—you come here."

Harris, shaking his great shoulders in an easy laugh, swung down on to the main deck, and began ordering about the crew. He had an enormous admiration for Vaiti, even when she boxed his ears, but he thought her special peculiarities of character rather a trying obstacle in the way of his enjoying the easy life beloved of South Sea mates.

The acidulous bo'sun rose from his seat on deck, holding out an unclean palm, in the midst of which glittered two fine pearls.

"I've been through that little lot, and got these, which do look like biz, ma'am," he observed. "As to people havin' fowls' hearts, or pigs' heads, I'm not prepared to pass judgment. But I don't own to neither myself, and if you say it's a fight, a fight it is. Or if you've got a better plan in that uncommon level 'ead of yours, I'm ready to stand by."

"You something like a man," pronounced the commanding officer in the muslin skirt. "You listen. I tell him all again."

* * * * *

An hour later the bo'sun, very wet and draggled, climbed over the bulwarks of the Sybil, and the schooner Margaret Macintyre, of Sydney, slipped behind into the falling dusk.

"Said he was thirteen weeks out from Sydney, ma'am," reported the ambassador. "Four weeks out from Apia, gettin' copra round here and there, and there wasn't no Wellington news anywhere, as he remembered. Nice new chart, with no lines of that kind ruled on it anywhere. As to where he got the divin' gear that was in the cabin, or what kind of copra he reckoned to pick up on the Delgadas, he didn't say, not bein' asked."

Vaiti stood still to consider, a beautifully poised black silhouette against the yellow oblong of the lamp-lit cabin door.

"I think it all right; he not been near Wellington," she pronounced at last. "Alliti! How her head?"

"Sou'-west by south," answered the mate from the wheel.

"Keep her so."

"Ay, ay, sir!" laughed the mate.

* * * * *

Every one in the South Pacific knew that the Sybil was a marvel of speed, and that she had not been originally built for trading, though nobody could tell exactly how Saxon had acquired such a clipper. It was a popular theory that she was a millionaire's yacht from San Francisco, which he had stolen and subsequently disguised. He was known, however, to have possessed her for more than twenty years, and was now as completely identified with her as her own mainmast; so that any doubts as to the honesty of the way by which he might originally have obtained her were now of a purely academic nature.

Famous as she was for speed, the record of her passage from the Delgadas to Wellington fairly astonished the Islands, when it came to be told. They had a fair wind almost all the way, with two or three lively nights when the little vessel, hard driven under the utmost pressure of the canvas, piled up the knots like a liner. Saxon continued delirious, but was fortunately quiet. Harris, and Gray the boatswain, though unenlightened as to the cause of the Sybil's sudden southward flight, fully understood that the possession of the pearl lagoon hung in the balance, and worked like half-a-dozen to supplement the efforts of the scanty Kanaka crew.

Vaiti interfered little with the working of the ship, but she kept a look-out that hardly left her time for sleep or food; although the Sybil, like most Pacific ships, was allowed, under ordinary circumstances, to chance it, day and night. Hour after hour she sat cross-legged on deck, watching the unbroken rim of the black horizon, or paced up and down the poop, silent and grave, in her lace and muslin fripperies, as a naval officer on the bridge. What she was looking for no one knew, but during that wild ten days of foam and smother, cracking sails and straining sheets, her silent watchfulness infected the men themselves, and eyes were constantly turned to scan the empty, seething plain over which they flew.

It was drawing on towards dusk of the tenth day, and the sky was beginning to light fires of angry copper-purple, high in the storm-driven west, when Vaiti, of a sudden, stopped dead in her endless walk, and looked with lips apart and eyes narrowed deep beneath her brows over the weather rail. All this time they had not sighted a single sail or a solitary funnel. They had been well off the track of New Zealand bound ships, and the Pacific waters are wide. But now they were drawing near to Wellington, and there was nothing to be astonished at in the sight of another sail creeping up over the horizon, except, indeed, the fact that it was momentarily growing larger and gaining on the Sybil. There was scarce another schooner afloat from New Guinea to the Paumotus that could have done as much.

The mate came up behind Vaiti, and handed her a glass. She looked through it, lowered it, raised it, and looked again with a steady gaze, and suddenly flung it out of her hand across the deck.

Harris caught it deftly and asked, with the constitutional calm that alone saved his reason when Vaiti took over command, "What's to pay now?"

"She got auxiliary," said Vaiti, with a note of agony in her voice.

"What if she has? Isn't any vessel free to carry an auxiliary that can stand the stink of the oil and the cussedness of the injin?"

"I go see captain," said Vaiti, flashing down the companion.

Saxon was better to-day, and almost in full possession of his senses. Vaiti went to the medicine chest; took out a hypodermic syringe, filled it with careful accuracy from a tiny dark blue bottle, and lifted her father's arm as he lay limp and weak, but mending fast, in his bunk.

"Good girl, take care of your old father," he murmured in island Maori as she slipped the needle-point painlessly under the skin, and the powerful drug began to race through every vein of the inert body. The effect was rapid and decisive. Saxon sat up against his pillows in five minutes, clear-headed though weak, and asked if the Sybil had not sighted the Delgadas yet.

"Listen, father," said Vaiti, speaking fluently in the low, soft tongue that the two had used together all her life—the Maori language Saxon had first learned from the pretty brown girl, dead this many years, whom he had stolen from her South Sea island to sail the blue Pacific at his side in the days of long ago. "Listen. There is little time, and we are in great need. We came to the reef, and the shell was there truly, but a strange ship had been before us. Even as we lay there she returned from Christmas Island with diving gear. I sent Gray on board to look at her chart and find out if she had been to Wellington; and it seemed that she had not the new line of annexation marked on the chart, where New Zealand this year added to herself all that lay within a certain space of the sea; also she had not been south of Auckland. So then, knowing that we, if we asked the Government, might have the atoll granted us for twenty years and take possession above the people of the other ship, I made sail for Wellington; and we are now but one day away when this ship appears again, chasing us. Where the suspicion has waked in their hearts, or when, is nothing; but that they have thought and discovered our desire, that is certain."

"Give the Sybil all sail, daughter, and she will leave the other. What is this talk?" asked Saxon, raising himself on his elbow to look out of the glooming circle of the port.

"But the ship has 'auxiliary,' my father, and she will have passed out of sight before the morning."

"Oh, she has, has she?" grunted the captain, dropping back into his native tongue. "What are you going to do about it?"

He had noted a glimmer in Vaiti's eye that told him that she was not yet at the end of her resources. The Maori guile and the English daring were united to some purpose in this strange creature that he had given to the world.

"I will tell," she said, standing up to her full height. "But you must give the order, my father, for Alliti drags on the rein these days. Let the bale of trawl-net, and the Manila rope, be taken from the cargo, and let us cross the bows of this ship, and drop them across her path. The keel will run clean, but the screw will foul, and they will creep like a bird with a broken wing till daylight. Then, if the sea has grown less, they will send down a diver and clear the screws; but we shall be almost into Wellington, and the lagoon is ours."

"You are worthy to be the daughter of a brave man," answered Saxon in Maori, sinking back wearily on his pillow. "Go, then; and if we lose the ship, we lose her; there is great wealth to gain, and a man must die at one time, if not another. I am tired. I will sleep."

Vaiti left him, and hurried back on deck. The purple dusk was already beginning to gather, and the green starboard light of the Margaret Macintyre gleamed like a glow-worm a mile or so behind. She was drawing very near; there was no time to lose.

"Alliti!" called Vaiti. "My father he better; he send word to take trawl-net and Malila out of hold, make come across that ship him path, foul him sclew. Suppose you not afraid, you bring us close, drop net and Malila."

Harris's hide was thick, but Vaiti knew how to pierce it when she chose; and the man had courage enough, in streaks. Vaiti had hit the mark when she called him chicken-hearted in fighting, but there was no manoeuvre of the ship too risky for him to undertake and carry through with perfect coolness.

"All right, my lady," he nodded. "Don't forget me and Gray when it comes to sharing out the swag, that's all."

The net and the rope were brought up, and the latter knotted here and there to make a hideous tangle of it. Then the Sybil's lights were put out, even the cabin lamp being extinguished. The stars pricked themselves out in sudden sharpness on the great blue chart of heaven above, and the waste of dark rolling water all around grew large and lonely.

You are not to suppose that Saxon's daughter did not see and feel these things—did not hear the voiceless talk of the great seas on starry evenings, or feel her mortal body almost rapt away in the ecstasy of a black midnight and a shrieking storm; just as you, perhaps, who think that no one ever shared such experiences with yourself, may feel. It is not only the blameless tourist, with his daily diary, and his books of travel teaching him how and when to "enthuse," who enjoys the splendid pageant of the seas. Vaiti, as the most indulgent chronicler must confess, had more than a spice of her father's villainy in her composition, not to speak of whatever devilry her Maori forebears might have bequeathed to her. She was unscrupulous, ruthless, and crafty as a general rule; she was engaged in a deed of the very shadiest description to-night—yet, as she stood with her hands on the wheel, and her eyes on the green starboard light of the oncoming ship, steering the Sybil to something extremely like certain destruction, she knew that the Southern Cross was rising, clear and beautiful, above its gem-like pointers, just ahead; and that a little sliver of young moon, crystal-silver against the dark, was slipping up the sky to her left. The thought just grazed her mind that this might be the last time the moon would ever rise over the Pacific for her. She smiled a little in the dusk, and steered steadily ahead. There were no "streaks" in the composition of Vaiti's spirit.

A short tack to the starboard became necessary. Harris put the ship about at a lift of Vaiti's hand. It grew very dark; a cloud was over the moon, and the stars were dimmed by driving vapour. The wind was increasing; the schooner lay over with its weight, and the foam gurgled along her clean-ran sides. Still the Margaret Macintyre came on, stately and unsuspicious, all sail set, and the beat of the little screw distinctly audible through the night.

Vaiti signalled again to put the ship about, and as soon as the great booms had creaked across the deck. gave over the wheel to Harris.

"Run him just as he head now," she said softly, "and bring him too much close; so (double adjective) close to ship he scrape the (qualified) paint off him. I go do rest."

Harris, humming "Good-bye, Dolly Gray," took the wheel over. If he had any doubts as to Vaiti's purpose, the vigour of her language would have dispersed them. Vaiti never swore unless she was exceedingly in earnest.

The trawl-net and the tangle of Manila were hanging over the stern, held up by a single rope. Vaiti glided to the rail, holding a sharp knife in her hand—("I always did think she kept one somewhere among her frilligigs," commented Harris silently, as he caught the flash of the steel)—and waited, still as a statue.

Presently out of the darkness shot a hail, accompanied by a perfect constellation of oaths. Its apparent object was to ascertain the Sybil's reason for steering such a course. The Sybil answered not a word, but steered the course some more.

The hail, at the second time of repeating, became a yell, with a strong note of terror in it. On came the Sybil, a dim, unlit tower of blackness, taking as much notice of the shouts as the Flying Dutchman. Those on board the Margaret Macintyre gave themselves up for lost. There was even a rush made for one of the boats. But the threatening shape swept past her bows, so near that the furious captain could have tossed a biscuit on board—so near that the Sybil's Kanaka crew, thinking the "papalangi" officers meant to ram the stranger, uttered war-cries wherein pure delight was mingled with overjoyed surprise.

It was all over in a minute, and the Sybil was well away on the Margaret Macintyre's port side before the latter vessel discovered, through the medium of a horrible jar from the engine-room and a powerful odour of oil, that the screw was badly fouled, leaving them, like St. Paul with nothing to do but make the best of circumstances, and "wish that it were day."

* * * * *

December weather is hot in Wellington, and it was now close to Christmas. Perhaps that was why the senior member of the trading firm that had taken over part ownership of the Sybil for an unpaid debt thought his eyes were deceived by the glare of the sun when he saw a white schooner of singularly graceful lines lying alongside one of the wharves on a date when her engagements plainly demanded her presence in Tahiti.

When, however, he met Saxon and his daughter, a few minutes afterwards, on Lambton Quay, he understood that his eyes were in excellent order. So, it soon appeared, was his tongue. He was a gentleman of Scottish extraction, and it hurt him badly to see possible profits thrown away.

Saxon let him have his say, and merely laughed for answer.

"Come into the Occidental, and Vaiti and I'll tell you something worth all the trade that you'd take out of Papeëte in ten years," he said. "I'm going to own the ship again before New Year's Day, and paint this good old town scarlet as well. You'll see."

And the man of money-bags, anxious to see, went into the hotel.

Vaiti, in a fit of perversity, declined to come in. She knew only too well that, in Saxon's impecunious condition, there was no hope of getting their discovery effectively worked save at a price that would leave very little change over for the present possessors of the lagoon—even if the captain had been quite sober, which he was not. They had got the grant, and had furthermore had the satisfaction of noting that, day after day, Wellington Harbour remained empty of the hardly-used Margaret Macintyre. It was evident that her people, whoever they were, had tamely accepted defeat. There was no standing against a grant from the Government of New Zealand—no matter how acquired. But all this did not alter the fact that there was not going to be a great deal for the Sybil, and her captain, and her captain's daughter—especially the latter. It was there that the sting lay. Vaiti had had dreams—oh, but dreams! oh, such dreams! before solid common-sense had brought her down to earth, and made her realise that Saxon's unlucky state, and the eminently Scottish firm who held the destinies of the Sybil in their hands, were quite certain to stand in the way of realisation. To make a fortune, you must first have one, generally speaking. And it was the canny Glasgow men who had it.

So, because she did not want to hear with her own ears what she knew very well must take place, she refused to come into the hotel, and wandered off alone down the quays, in the warm December sun, which yet was cool compared to the burning heats of the island world. She was dressed in a long, waistless muslin gown, as usual, but her shady Niué hat and white deck shoes—not to speak of a pair of kid gloves that caused her horrible discomfort and a parasol that embarrassed her extremely—spoke of a respect for certain of the conventions that might have astonished people who knew, or thought they knew, Vaiti of the Islands. Of course, the loungers on the quays looked admiringly after her—she would have liked to see them dare to omit that tribute to her fiery charms—and some of them freely spoke to her, calling her Mary and Polly, offering her hearts and drinks and new bonnets, and asking her for kisses or jobs on the schooner, just as it occurred to them, after the simple fashion of the sea. Some of them knew her, and some of them did not. It was the latter who asked for jobs. The men who did know the Sybil and her "Kapitani" asked for kisses, which they did not expect to get. That was safer.

Vaiti, quite accustomed to this sort of demonstration, and enjoying it in a languid way as she strolled along under the annoying parasol, covered half a mile or so of the quay at her own leisurely pace, and then sat down on a coil of rope in a quiet place, to stare across the water and think.

She wanted something, and she did not see her way to get it.

To disentangle the dreams and hopes, wild fancies, and wilder aspirations of the half-caste mind when that mind, puzzling and elusive enough to the pure white in any case, is further complicated with a touch of genius, would be a task worthy of a whole academy of science. This much alone can the necessarily all-knowing biographer of Vaiti say—that she wanted to be someone, and wanted it so badly that nothing else in life seemed worth having, or even existent, She was a princess of Atiu on her mother's side, and on her father's (though Saxon's past was as much a mystery as the origin of the yacht-like Sybil herself) Vaiti felt that she had every right to claim high standing.

Doubly dowered, therefore, with the instinct of rule, the actual command of the schooner had fallen into her capable hands quite naturally. Left to herself, she would probably have made the Sybil pay in a way unknown before to the easy-going island world. But the useless, dissipated Saxon had to be counted on. She liked him in her own way, such as it was, but she despised him also. And it was an undoubted fact that he hampered everything. This bargain with M'Coy and Co., for instance—it was useless for her to attempt to put a finger on it. Saxon had got drunk the night before, as soon as the matter of the grant had been finally decided, at the end of some anxious days of waiting; and in the morning the numerous "hairs" that he had taken to restore him had left him in a condition of hopeless obstinacy and self-sufficiency. In such a state he was as certain to be over-reached as a stranded jelly-fish is certain to be licked up by the sun. And this was bitter to Vaiti.

For, sitting there motionless under the parasol (which was serving a useful purpose at last, in shading her handsome face from observation and comment by the passers-by), Vaiti had arrived at something rather like a conclusion, and a conclusion, too, that was likely to shape most of her thoughts and acts henceforward.

Money was the thing.

She did not care for money in itself, and none of the things it could bring really interested her, except pretty clothes.

But money was importance, money was power; money was the freedom to do exactly what you wanted, and make other people do it too. She did not think it out in words, like a European. Pictures passed before her mind, more vivid by far than the glittering water and flashing sea-gull wings in front of her bodily eyes. She saw captains of great ships, giving orders like kings, and obeyed by the promptest and smartest of slaves. She saw owners of big stores entertaining half the island on their verandahs, paid court to by wandering beach-combers, going out to ships in beautiful boats manned by their own uniformed crews, who bent their backs double at a word. She saw "Tusitala," of Samoa, the great English story-teller, living in his splendid house outside Apia, surrounded by a humble clan of native followers wearing wonderful lava-lavas of a foreign stuff they called "tatani" (tartan)—Tusitala, who was as great a chief as Mataafa himself, and had spoken to her, Vaiti, as one worthy of all honour.... Her pictures were almost all of the islands, for the islands were in her blood; but something, too, she saw of Auckland—the merchant M'Coy, old and so ugly, and of the commonest birth, yet reverenced like the greatest of chiefs, because he had money....

The afternoon rays grew blinding hot on the water as the sun sank down. The sea-gulls dipped and screamed. Steamers glided away from the wharves with long hooting cries that somehow seemed to embody all the melancholy of the homeless sea. Steam cranes chattered ceaselessly above the yawning holds of discharging ships. Behind, the tramcars hummed in the street, and people hurried up and down.

And at last the western sky began to burn with sultry red, and Vaiti went home.

Something had taken root in her mind that afternoon that struck down and shot up, in the days to come, and led her into ways and places wilder even than the adventure of the pearl lagoon. As children string berries on a straw, so upon the stem that grew from that seed were strung the strange events that followed, one by one.

CHAPTER III

THE FLOWER BEHIND THE EAR

As Vaiti, Cassandra-wise, had prophesied about the pearl lagoon, so indeed it fell out.

It takes money to exploit even the smallest discovery of this kind, and the canny M'Coy made the most of the fact. Delgadas Reef was too risky a neighbourhood to be worked by any vessel unprovided with an auxiliary engine, so a cranky little schooner of some forty tons, owning a tiny oil engine that sometimes worked and sometimes did not—more commonly the latter—was chartered; also a couple of boats for diving work, and two sets of diving dresses; and a cheap crew was picked up somewhere, and some poor provisions laid in. Everything was done on the most economical scale possible—yet the Scotchman grumbled and lamented, and declared he would never see his money back. The shares had been fixed at a wickedly low figure for Saxon and there were, furthermore, clauses in the agreement concerning expenses which made that unlucky derelict swear fiercely when he read them after he was sober. It was too late to complain then, however, for he had signed everything he was asked, under the influence of the good whisky to which M'Coy—liberal for once—had freely treated him. Nor did he get any sympathy from Vaiti. She merely laughed when he complained, and told him frankly that he would have done better to stay in his cabin and drink there, if he liked, leaving her to finish what she had begun.

So the pearling ship sailed off, and Saxon, who could not afford to stay in port, went another voyage. And some months later, when he came back, it was to find that Delgadas Reef was cleaned out. It had held not much after all, said the Glasgow man, and shell was down, and the pearls had been few and off colour. But there was enough to pay Saxon's debt and leave him owner and master of the Sybil once more. And there might be a few pounds in addition—not much; but there, he was an honest man, and he would rather ruin himself than let Saxon and the charming Miss Vaiti feel they were badly treated. And if Saxon would kindly sign this paper releasing him from all further claims, he would be happy to give over all claim in the ship. Otherwise—money was tight, and that little matter between them had been owing so long that——

Saxon interrupted with a statement to the effect that he knew blank well he had been blank well had, and for the sum of two sanguinary sixpences he would be prepared to knock Mr. M'Coy's doubly condemned head off his unpleasantly qualified shoulders—only, luckily for Mr. M'Coy, he was sick of him and the like of him, and merely wanted to get out of his way as soon as he possibly could. With which concise summing up of facts he signed the paper, picked up the cheque, and went out to spend it after his own fashion. Vaiti secured half of it at the bank where he cashed it, and went off with the money done up in her hair, to keep house by herself on the schooner until her father should turn up again. She knew him too well to expect that that would come about immediately.

Meanwhile, there were banks in which she could deposit her own share, and thus feel herself a step nearer to her goal—that dim, undefined goal that was to be reached somehow, some time, through the possession of the precious bits of paper and coin without which all pleasant things were impossible. She did not decide at once where the money should go, but hid it in her cabin, and day by day walked the pavements of Wellington, delighting her eyes with the shop-window beauties which she had so seldom seen. Thus came her undoing. Vaiti had never heard the saying, "We are none of us infallible, even the youngest," or she might have been less certain of herself before it came about, and less bitter afterwards.

For was it not natural that when Saxon unexpectedly reappeared at the Constantinople Hotel with a good deal of his money still left, and sent for Vaiti to join him and "live like a lady while she could," the improvident island blood should all unbidden well up and smother everything else? Why go on? There are shops in Wellington—there are as many ways of getting fifteen shillings' worth out of a sovereign, and repeating the process a great deal oftener than one means, as in any other of the world's big ports.... The end was that, after ten delirious days of glorious spending. Captain Saxon and his daughter set sail for Tahiti with a general cargo, a complete set of empty pockets between them, and, on the part of Vaiti, a glad remembrance more than half stifled by angry regret for the cost. Yet, and yet, what a lovely thing money was, and what a pity that one could not both spend and keep it! If you did the one, you were happy, but no one thought anything of you. If you did the other, everyone paid court to you, but you didn't get the fun. Yes, that was true of money—and of other things. Girls who had been brought up at convent schools understood a lot that the ignorant beach girls didn't.... And, bon Dieu! as they used to say in Papeëte, when the Sisters couldn't hear—what a headache it gave her to think, and what a fool she was to do it!

"Ruru!" she called in Maori to a native sleeping peacefully on the deck. "Wake up, pig-face, son of a fruit-bat, and make me kava immediately. I am weary."

* * * * *

It was many weeks after, and the hot season had come round once more.

The schooner was slamming helplessly about on a huge glassy swell. Everything on board that could rattle, rattled; everything in the cabins that could break loose and take charge, did so, sending up a melancholy chorus of crashes with every wallow of the ship. The great mizzen sail slatted about above the poop, offering and then instantly withdrawing a promise of cooling shade, in a manner that was little short of maddening, seeing that the hour was three o'clock, and the latitude not four degrees south. Friday Island looking like a small blue flower on the rim of a crystal dish, hovered tantalisingly on the extreme verge of the horizon, as unattainable as Sydney Heads or heaven. For the Sybil was becalmed, a week's from anywhere in particular, and there seemed no chance of a breeze.

"Lord," said the mate, dropping the marlinspike with which he was splicing a rope, and mopping his forehead with his rolled-up sleeve, "I wonder 'ow many thousand miles we are from an iced beer!"

"Turtle!" said Vaiti, taking a slim brown cigar out of her mouth, and looking down from her seat on the top of the deck-house. "Only nine hundred and eighty-seven. You not remember Charley's in Apia?"

"I'd forgotten Samoa," said Harris, in a more cheerful tone, picking up the marlinspike, and going to work again, as if revived by Vaiti's arithmetic.

"A miss is as good as a mile, for all me, specially when it's nine hundred mile," remarked the gloomy boatswain. "Couldn't you manage to talk about something rather less 'arrowing to a man's insides?"

"I'd like to know why she's going skull-huntin' to Friday Island, then," said the mate, casting a cautious glance at Vaiti, who was scarcely out of ear-shot, up on the deck-house.

"Trade I can understand," he went on, "and shell-huntin'—we haven't done too bad all round over that last little job, and the old man's a sight more sober since he's owned the ship again. But skulls—and old skulls at that—filthy natives' bones that's been lyin' in the caves since Heaven knows when! Besides, they ain't our skulls, however you may look at it——"

"Nor I hope they won't be," said the boatswain darkly. "In no way, I mean. The Friday Islanders aren't people to ask out to an afternoon tea-party without you've got your knuckle-duster on underneath your voylet kid gloves. And you know what natives are about their old bones and graves."

"I do. What I don't know is how she thinks she's going to make anything out of a proper nasty job like that."

"Oh, she's on the make, is she!"

"Did you ever know her anything else, bless her?" asked the mate. "She wants sixty pounds, havin' spent all the old man give her out of the shell business in Wellington, takin' boxes at the theaytres and halls, and buyin' women's gear, and staying at the Constantinople, where she wore two new 'ats a day for a week; and other games of a similar kind. Pity you was sick, and not there to see the fun. I tell you, she made the town look silly."

"What's the sixty pound for?" asked the boatswain, chewing fondly on his quid.

Harris giggled explosively, and whispered:

"She wants a Dozey dress!"

"What in ——'s that? It don't sound respectable," virtuously observed the boatswain, who had never heard of the famous French dressmaker.

"You bet it is, then. Dozey's a regular bang-up swell in Paris, who makes the most expensive gownds in the world, and every one in them parts treats him just the same as a baronight or a duke. You can't get so much as a jumper from him for less than sixty pound, and Vaiti she says every woman in Papeëte or Aucklan' or Sydney who saw one of his dresses would spot it right away, and go and throw herself over the Heads. She read about his things in a piece in one of them female papers in the hotel, and she saw an actress wearin' of one, and she's been layin' out to get one ever since, somethin' awful. Seems when a woman in London, or Paris, or Yarmouth gets a Dozey dress, and takes to standin' off and on before the others, who's only got new velveteens with musling frills or such-like it just makes them other women drag their anchors and run head-on to the shore. So Vaiti, she——"

"Hold on," interrupted the boatswain. "Why, if she 'ad one of those gownds, she couldn't bend it on to her yards, not if it cost a million. Man alive, she ain't laid down on the same lines as them Frenchwomen, anyway."

"You let her alone for that," chuckled Harris. "But what beats me is who she's going to do with them skulls, and how. We won't know in a hurry, either, because she and Pita's fixed it up between them to do the job alone. Thank 'eaven for small mercies, says I. 'Er on the war-path's rather more than I care for; and this isn't going to be any picnic, if I know anything of natives."

"Pita!" whistled the boatswain. "The old man will 'ave 'is gore before the voyage is out, if Vaiti goes on like this. It's Ritter, that fat German trader in Papeëte, that he's wanting to marry her to; and as for natives, it's 'ands off for them, if she is 'alf of one 'erself."

"Well, she and Pita was planning it all out in the fore-top last night. I heard them, when she thought I was sleeping on the top of the galley. And the old man came out and roared at her like a Marquesas bull to come down; so down she came, laughing at him, like the devil she is. There's no one else on this ship would laugh, without it was on the wrong side of his mouth, when the old man gets ratty. Coming! All right!"

The mate jumped to his feet, and answered Vaiti's sharp hail in person, a deprecating smile spreading like spilt treacle all over his face as he came up to her, cap in hand. Vaiti took her cigar out of her mouth, and looked at him for a minute without speaking. The Sybil rolled on the towering swell like a captured beast trying to beat its brains out against a wall, but Saxon's Maori daughter stood as steady as the slender main-mast upon the reeling deck. Harris smiled more than ever, and turned the marlinspike about in his hands, looking a little foolish.

"You wanting Captain Saxon come and lay you out in the scupper pretty soon?" inquired Vaiti presently.

"Not particular," answered the mate, the smile sliding slowly off his face.

"Then I think perhaps you keep your mouth more better shut," said Vaiti, walking off with a contemptuous swing in the very fall of her laced muslin skirts. And Pita of Atiu, as if in defiance of the captain, the mate, and every one else but his cousin Vaiti, pulled a mouth-organ out of his shirt and began to play it triumphantly and frantically, making a noise exactly like the buzzing of a mad bluebottle on a warm window-pane. Further, he plucked a frangipani flower out of the wreath—a good deal the worse for wear—that hung round his neck, and stuck the blossom behind his ear. Now, every one who has ever been in the Islands knows that these two actions are significant of courtship. Pita was courting Vaiti, as everybody knew—Pita, a mere deck hand, who had been taken on at wild Atiu, in the Cook Islands, because he was a relation of Saxon's dead native wife. Very handsome was Pita, very young and tall and broad-shouldered, wily and fierce like all the Atiuans, but smooth and pleasant of countenance. Were not the men of Atiu nicknamed "meek-faced Atiuans," even in the days, only a generation gone, when they were the cruellest and most warlike of cannibals and pirates?

Needless to say, Captain Saxon, who had always had "views" for Vaiti, ever since she left the Tahitian convent school that had given her such fragments of civilisation as she possessed, did not favour the compromising attentions of Pita. As for Vaiti, her father's prohibitions neither piqued her into noticing the handsome Atiuan more, nor alarmed her into favouring him less, than she found agreeable. At present there was rather more than less about the matter, because Saxon was in one of his fits of gloomy depression, and Vaiti foresaw the usual result. It was not at all likely that her father would be able to help her in her forthcoming raid. Harris she did not choose to rely on at a pinch; Gray was old; the crew were far and away too superstitious to aid in such a sacrilege as she proposed. There remained Pita, who, if he was a wild Atiuan, was at least "misinari" after a fashion, had been educated, more or less, in Raratonga, and was most certainly in love with herself.... Yes, Pita would do.

That night, when the second dog-watch had commenced, and a lew large crystal stars were just beginning to glimmer through the pink of the ocean sunset, Vaiti descended to the cabin, looked into Gray and Harris's berths to make sure that they were both on deck, and then sat down on the cushioned locker opposite her father.

"What is it?" asked Saxon, raising his heavy blue eyes. He had been sitting with his head propped in the corner of the cabin, silent as a fish, since the clearing away of tea an hour before. You might have thought him asleep, or, if you knew him intimately, drunk. He was neither; but dead and drowned things were rising up from the black sea caverns of his heart to-night, and their bones showed white and ghastly upon the desert shores of his life. So he sat silent, with his face turned to the darkening porthole and to the night that was striding down upon the sea.

Through the port he saw the shining harbour of Papeëte as it looked a week or two ago—a tall grey British war-ship lying at anchor, the Sybil's dinghy, small and crank and unclean, creeping up to the man-of-war's accommodation-ladder, himself, a weather-scarred, red-faced figure, in a worn duck suit and bulging shoes, sitting in the boat, and waiting patiently until the Governor's steam-launch should have passed in front of him and discharged its freight of visitors.

He saw the captain of the great Queen's ship standing at the top of the ladder, slight and trig and trim, all white and gold from top to toe, all smiling self-possession and cool command.

He saw ladies, immaculately coiffed and daintily shod; tall, clean, grey-moustached men following them; a cordial welcome on the deck; a flutter of light drapery and a glimpse of lounging masculine figures afterwards, framed by the great open gun-ports of the captain's cabin in the stern. They were laughing and talking, and he could hear the clink of cups and glasses. After—a long time after—he could see his own shabby little boat creeping up to the ladder; the captain, cold and business-like, and more than a little brusque, speaking to him on the deck about a certain anchorage in the Cook Islands group, concerning which he was known to have information; himself, burningly conscious of his shoes and his finger-nails, answering shortly and with some embarrassment, and feeling, of a sudden, very shabby, very broken, very old.... Was it twenty-five years, or two thousand, since the Admiral of the Fleet, and the Prince of Saxe-Brandenburg, with half the mess of his own regiment, had dined on board his biggest yacht at Cowes a week before—it—happened? ... Now a mere commander left him standing on the deck, and spoke to him like a native or a dog. Well, what did it all matter to a dead man? Was not his name of those days carved on the family monument in letters half an inch deep, and was not he, Edward Saxon, whom nobody knew, out here in the living death of the farthermost islands, a thousand miles from anywhere? ...

"Father," said Vaiti.

"What is it?" answered Saxon's voice dully, as befitted a dead man.

"The wind is rising at last," said the girl in Maori, "We shall be off the island by morning. Will you, or will you not, go with me into this cave of death, where I have told you that I shall find what is worth finding?"

"I have no heart. I will not."

"Then I and Pita will go," said Vaiti, fixing the Englishman's blue eyes with her own black, stabbing and savagely unfathomable, yet set in Saxon's very own narrow high-bred face.

The captain's dark mood was on him, and he turned his face to the wall, with a Maori oath consigning Vaiti and Pita to a cannibal end.

"I go; stay you there," said Vaiti, using the quaintly courteous native form of farewell, barbed with a little sneer unknown to the original. Then she went to her cabin. And Saxon turned in his seat, and reached for the brandy bottle at last.

* * * * *

Handsome Pita had a great awe for Vaiti, for she was a princess of Atiu by her mother's side. But she was beautiful, and he admired her—also he hoped that her imperious soul harboured one soft spot for him. It seemed good, on the whole, when they were pulling the dinghy over the reef next morning, to ask Vaiti openly where the value of the booty came in—with a secret hope in the background of securing as much as possible for a certain very deserving, more or less Christian youth of Atiu.

Vaiti, her white dress girded up high over her scarlet pareo, waded through the last yard or two of the emerald lagoon before she answered. The boat being safe on shore, she stood up and looked sharply about her. They had chosen a quiet spot at the back of the island for landing, all the natives being down at the harbour loading copra. The weird pandanus trees, standing on their high wooden stilts at the verge of the shore, the rustling coco-palms swinging their great fronds far over the water, the golden and pink-flowered vines trailing yard on yard of green garlandry over the paper-white sand, could carry no tales, and they were the only witnesses.

Vaiti looked at Pita up and down, from head to foot, and Pita gave the flower behind his ear a knowing cock, and set one hand saucily on his hip. He knew that he was the handsomest man in the Cook archipelago, and he felt that the way his pareo was tied that day was a pure inspiration. So he shut up his mouth very tight, and made play with his burning black eyes as only a South Sea Islander can, waiting confidently the while for the information that the whole ship's company of the Sybil could not have extracted from Vaiti in a week.

The girl stepped forward, and with a commanding finger tapped Pita's biggest dimple, as if he had been a baby.

"Suppose I tell you, then you know too much, you plenty frighten, go back to ship," she laughed.

"Speak Maori, high chieftainess!" implored Pita.

"No fee-ah!" answered Saxon's daughter succinctly. Pita understood at once that Vaiti was unwilling to use a language that gave free rein to her tongue and his, and the knowledge elated him.

"Perhaps I tell you," went on Vaiti, watching him narrowly. "I think you got heart in belly belong you, more better than Alliti. I tell you, you want plenty heart by-and-by."

"High chieftainess, Vaiti, speak Maori!" was Pita's answer, linked to an attempted embrace that only fell short of its main object because Vaiti quite calmly pulled a seaman's knife out of her dress and laid it edge upwards across her lips. Pita, who had learned the real European kiss during his visits to civilisation, and wanted very much to show it off, felt disappointed, although there was a smile behind the blade that almost out-dazzled the steel.

"Maori!" he persisted, putting his arm round her waist, with a cool disregard of her well-known readiness with the knife that won Vaiti's admiration a step further than before. She laughed, wavered, and then, still playing with the keen, bright blade, she lowered it a little, and spoke in the soft language of the Islands at last.

It was a fairly long tale that she had to tell. When last the Sybil had been in the Society Islands, some weeks before, there had been a German man of science in the group, collecting native skulls for museums at home. The grizzly old gentleman and his pursuits had not troubled Vaiti's mind particularly until her chief admirer, Ritter, a Papeëte trader, happened to drop a remark one day about the amount of money some of these old skulls were worth. Vaiti's sharp intelligence linked on the casual saying at once to certain other wandering rumours she remembered, and she decided to find out something more. She did not ask Ritter, for he was no talker, even to a handsome girl whom he admired; and the German was his compatriot, in any case. But when the schooner reached Raiatea, where Professor Spricht was staying, Vaiti drifted off among the native huts, and squatted for an hour or two on the mats of the second chief's wife's mother's cousin's house, smoking a great deal, talking very little, and listening quietly. By degrees the house filled up with interested natives all eager for gossip and chatter; and to Vaiti, pulling steadily at her cigar, and maintaining the grave, unsmiling demeanour proper to a princess of Atiu and a great Belitani chieftain's daughter, the drawing out of the secret she wanted was as easy as spinning sinnet out of cocoanut husk.

Nothing is private in the Eastern Pacific, and it was not long before all the professor's personal affairs were tossing about like seaweed on the flood of general gossip—mostly unfit for publication—that surged about the apparently uninterested ears of the silent, splendid sea-queen throned on the pile of pandanus mats.... The Siamani (German) had got skulls in Niué, in Uea, in Mangaia, and was now collecting them about the Society group.... He was an ugly, grey-snouted pig to look at, and rooted in the earth like any pig; still, Taous and Mahina, daughters of Falani, seemed to think that—(details lost in a heated argument about the personal characteristics of the ladies).... Anyhow, Vekia from the hills said he was going to buy her two silk dresses from San Francisco when he came back from Falaite Island; so he was not as mean as he looked. Yes, he was going to Falaite Island in a great hurry; he would not even take time to finish his pig-rooting in Raiatea, on account of something he had heard from an old man who had once lived up in Falaite.... What fools the papalangi (whites) were. Did not every one in the Islands know about the old, old people that used to live on Falaite, hundreds of moons before the days of Tuti (Cook), and how they all died, and nobody lived there for very, very long, until some people wandered up from Niué in Tuti's time; and how the skulls of the old, old people were still there, buried in a cave that was a hundred miles long, and guarded by as many devils as would fill twenty war canoes? Of course, these things were known, and always had been—but when would any man of Tahiti or Raiatea have thought of such folly as travelling more than a thousand miles to fight the devils and take away the skulls? What if they were worth money enough to buy a big schooner, as the old grey pig had told Vekia when he promised her those dresses? Would a whole schooner, loaded down with dollars, be any good to a man after the devils had killed him? Vekia would never get her trade finery, for all her airs; and Jacky Te Vaka, whose schooner was to be hired to take the Siamani up to Falaite, would never come back from such a sacrilegious journey.... Why could he not wait, and go by Kapitani Satoni's schooner when she made her yearly trip by and by? Every one knew that the Sipila was under a charm, and no harm could come to any one on board her. But he would not wait, and just as soon as Jacky's boat came back from Bora-Bora, next week, they were to go.... Ahi! and Jacky was such a handsome man—it was a great pity!

Such was the substance of the information gathered by Vaiti. It resulted in her ordering the course of the ship to be changed, and heading direct for Friday Island, instead of going down to Auckland. Friday Island—out of the way, infertile, uninteresting, and little known—had been one of Saxon's private preserves for some years. He touched there once a year, purchased all the copra that the little place produced at his own price, and paid for it in cheap tinned meat, boxes of damaged biscuit, and tins of imitation salmon instead of cash. He seldom went ashore, and certainly did not waste his time cave-hunting, if he did chance to set foot on the beach. Vaiti, with her odd faculty for acquiring miscellaneous information, had known since the first time the Sybil called that there were great caves on the island, and that a devil of unusual quality and size guarded them. So much might have been said of a hundred similar islands, however, and she had not troubled herself about either caves or devils until the German professor's secret set her on the alert for something that looked like a dangerous, exciting, and profitable adventure.

CHAPTER IV

THE BLACK VIRI

Moreover, as Harris had said, she had been devoured with desire of a real Paris dress ever since her stay in the Wellington hotel. There had been a famous actress there at the same time, and all her garments had been freely paragraphed in the ladies' column of the local press. When she swam languidly through the hall of the Constantinople, shining mystic and wonderful out of a cloud of rainbow silks and chiffons that had cost a formidable row of figures in the Rue de la Paix, all the women caught their breath, looked once, and then gazed determinedly out of the windows, pretending that they had noticed nothing. When she came in to a late supper, floating in spangled mists and sparkling with constellations of diamonds, every head was turned her way, and half the heads—the short-cropped ones—stayed turned, in more senses than one. It was a revelation and a martyrdom to Vaiti. What were her muslin frocks and her ten new hats at a whole pound apiece compared to this? And the vision of money saved up faded away for the time being before the vision of one such frock—only one—belonging to her. Life could surely offer nothing more.

Of this, naturally, she said nothing to Pita, merely relating the matter of the skulls in as few words as possible. Pita, for his part, made no comment, but took a couple of revolvers out of the boat and thrust one into his belt, handing the other to the girl. Then he girded up his pareo—a significant action among islanders—and felt the handle of his knife to see that it was loose in the sheath. There was a large sack in the boat containing candles and food, and leaving ample space for other filling later on. Vaiti tossed it to Pita, and the two began their walk, barefoot, swift and silent, casting a quick glance every now and then among the weirdly stilted stems of the lonely pandanus groves as they went.

"They are all down with the Sybil—it is safer now than it would be at night," said Pita. "Vaiti, if we get these things, and sell them for much money in Sitani, you and I will leave the Sybil when she next goes to Atiu; and you shall be queen of Atiu and I shall be king, and we shall eat roast pork and 'uakari' every day."

"My father would burn the villages and kill the chiefs, and hang your head on the bowsprit of the ship," replied Vaiti conversationally. "Besides, I like Sitani, and I will buy myself a wonder dress from Palisi town there."

"Then we will leave at Sitani, and be great chiefs there, if these old bones indeed sell for so much money. And we will buy a little schooner for ourselves, and you shall be the real captain, and there will be four gold bands on your sleeve and one on the peak of your cap; and you shall get a sitificati from the chiefs of the great harbour, and take the schooner out of Sitani Heads yourself. And every one shall be afraid of me and you, and they will say——"

Vaiti had been listening as she swung along, now casting a glance of approval at the handsome lad while he spoke cunningly of the schooner she should command, now shooting out her lip a little, and slashing impatiently with her knife at the young cocoanut fronds. Suddenly, looking very straight ahead, she interrupted.

"Pita, you talk too fast. There are things you do not know. Tell me, is your heart strong within you?"

"It is strong," answered the island Maori.

"Then listen. There is a devil in the cave."

"I do not believe in devils. I am misinari, and go to church five times on Sundays; also I have a black coat and two boots very nearly the same as each other to wear on collection days."

"There is a devil all the same; you do not know everything that is in the world, little Pita," replied Vaiti. "There is something bad there. I do not believe in native devils, for I am 'papa-langi'; but I know there is—a thing of some kind—there. A bad thing. A black viri, they say, but I do not understand that."

"A black viri is nothing. You and I do not mind such things. See—there will perhaps be one in this rotten wood." Pita struck and kicked at a mass of decaying cocoanut wood, and hunted out one of the great black centipedes that are common in the equatorial islands.

There is nothing on the bosom of Mother Earth more loathly than the centipede, and Pita's quarry—nearly a foot long, as thick as a sausage, scarlet feelers on its hideous head, and scarlet legs fringing its long lithe body—was as hideous a specimen as ever jerked itself lightning-wise across a forest path. Pita, however, with swift dexterity, seized the horrible beast by the neck and tail, holding it so that it could neither bite nor sting, and lifted it up to his companion. Vaiti's eyes dilated ever so little. She drew her knife and slashed the creature in two; then, stooping down, she struck at the flying halves as they ran away in opposite directions, and cut them up into mincemeat. Leaving the red fragments still wriggling in the track amidst an unsavoury, snaky smell, she stepped swiftly on.

"It is no matter," she said. "We two shall see what we shall see. Keep your heart warm within you."

"And if we come back safe?" cried the impetuous Pita, catching the girl's warm round arms in his two sinewy hands, and letting his black eyes gaze into hers.

Vaiti stood very still for a moment, looking out to sea. The spell of her stillness fell on Pita, and he remained as if frozen. Far away the surf hummed on the reef, and a sea-bird cried. Above the two beautiful, motionless young figures the palms rustled endlessly in the long trade wind.

"... If we come back" ... said Vaiti at last, her eyes still fixed on the far-off line of the outer sea—"if we come back—we will go away together, you and I."

She looked so like a witch in a trance (such things are not unknown even now, in strange Atiu) that Pita's hands dropped from her arms, and he felt half frightened in the moment of his triumph. But Vaiti recalled him to himself by starting her steady swing again, and saying with a laugh, as they footed it through the dry, sun-struck woods side by side:

"I think some day my father will make a parrot cage to hang a green Atiu parrot in, and it will be made of your ribs and breast-bone, little Pita—all the same as my grandfather did in the islands to the man who stole his wife."

At that moment the woods opened out and the cave came into view—a velvet-dark blot in the dazzling glare of greenery that tangled itself about the shoreward cliffs.

Pita's hand sprang to his revolver, and he uttered an exclamation of angry surprise. Beside the cave stood a tall, brown, naked figure painted like a witch-doctor and armed with a spear.

"Do not shoot," said Vaiti quickly. "It will do no good. Let me look to him myself."

She walked right up to the native, stood within a yard of him, and stared at him, in a silence that somehow managed to express unflattering things. The man, stamping the butt of his spear on the ground, turned away from her and addressed Pita.

"I have nothing to do with this woman of yours," he said. "It is with men I would speak."

"Speak, then, pig-face," said Pita insolently, hoping to provoke a fight, since the man seemed to be alone.

"Enter if you wish," replied the other. "We have sent no fighting-men to hinder you; the way is clear. Yet if you think the hot sun on the pleasant land is good to see, and the beating of the warm heart in the living breast is sweet to feel, go not into our sacred caves, to lay evil hands upon the holy bones of Falaiti. Enough."

The man's words were strangely void of heat or anger, and he held his spear loosely, Vaiti did not suspect an ambush, for she knew that no native would enter the cave. Yet in that moment her quick mind leaped to the knowledge of some unknown danger threatening herself and Pita from out the cold-breathing world of darkness that lay within that rugged arch, and for one prophetic instant she could smell the very smell of death.

But Vaiti's courage was of the kind that rises, wave by wave, the higher for all obstacle, and her spirit swelled within her to flood-tide in that moment. She turned upon the witch-doctor and laughed in his face. Then she stretched out her hand, and Pita's leaped into it, warm and strong, and together they stepped over the threshold of the cave.

The man outside cursed them, slowly and with relish.

"Shall we not kill him?" asked Pita.

"There is no use," said Vaiti. "It is plain to me that all the tribe know, and they trust to the dangers of the place, whatever these may be. This island is at the very end of the world, it is true, and strange things may happen here."

"Yes, there is nothing that one might not believe in this place," said Pita, looking back. Already the gloom of Hades itself was winding about them, and the air struck gravelike and cold. In the distance the mouth of the cave cast a brief glow of emerald light upon the dewy ferns and mosses close to the threshold, so that they shone like the jewelled foliage of some magic forest in a fairy play. Then came the dripping roof, the enormous stalactite buttresses of the cave, dimly edged with light; the oozing floor, and the lifeless dark.

Vaiti spoke not at all, as they walked side by side down dark tunnel after dark tunnel, across empty, thunderous-echoing black halls and archways—their little candles flitting like fireflies through a dim world of unconquerable gloom. Pita, however, was strangely gay. He yelled aloud to set the echoes booming in the black domes above, when they crossed some invisible great goblin market-place, full of hollow sounds and half-glimpsed monstrosities. He sang when the way along the endless corridors grew tedious, and the glistening stalactite candelabra succeeded one another, thick as forest branches, for mile after mile unchanged. When the path was barred by inky lakes of unknown depth and ghastly chill, and the two explorers had to tie their lights on their heads and swim for it, he pretended to cry at the cold, and played tricks on Vaiti by slipping behind her and catching her feet in his teeth. So they went on, one in wild spirits, the other silent and grave. And the hours of the sunny day slipped by dark and changeless, as they passed farther and farther away life and light into the cold black depths of the cave.

When it was about noon, as near as they could guess, Vaiti took the biscuits and tinned meat out of the sack, and they ate, squatting on the wet floor of the tunnel. They knew that the journey was a long one, and that the way could not well be missed, yet they were beginning to feel a little uneasy now. Did this cave go on for ever?

Somehow, the food did not cheer them and when they rose and went on again they did not talk. And now a worse difficulty than any they had yet encountered suddenly barred the way. The winding tunnel along which they were walking turned sharp round a corner, and then ended to all appearance in nothing. They stood at the edge of an empty gulf, black as a starless sky and of depth unknowable. Thin trickles of light. from the candles wavered faintly about its edges, and showed that the colossal crack had a farther side, but it was impossible to see what lay beyond, and the depth below cast back the candle rays as an armoured hull throws off a rifle bullet.

Pita detached a lump of rock and threw it over the edge. Vaiti watched him with sombre eyes. "There is no bottom there," she said. "It goes through the earth, and out on the other side; that is what I think."

"Children's talk," said Pita, listening intently. There was an echoing rattle as the stone bounded from side to side on its way down. The rattle grew fainter and fainter, diminished to a sound like the ticking of a watch, faded to an almost imperceptible vibration, and then seemed to die out. Seemed—for although there was nothing left for the ear to catch, the sharpened sensory nerves of the body still responded to a faint tingle, somewhere, somehow, long after the actual sound had faded away.

"I told you," said Vaiti. "There is no bottom." Pita did not answer; he was measuring the narrowest part of the gulf with his eye, and estimating the value of the three short steps of a run that were possible before taking off.

"It is not two fathoms wide here," he said, throwing the provision sack across to judge his distance better in the uncertain light. Yet, despite the three steps of a run, there was not an inch to spare when he landed on the other side, with an effort that strained every muscle of his powerful young body.

"Can you jump it?" he called to Vaiti—without any particular anxiety, for the Maori has no nerves, and he knew what the girl could do aloft on the schooner.

To his astonishment, Vaiti made no answer, but stood leaning up against the wall of the tunnel, both hands pressed against her chest. In a moment more she was violently sick.

"The smell!" she said presently, turning a ghastly face towards the light of Pita's candle.

"I smell nothing," said Pita, puzzled. "The wind blows your way. There is perhaps some dead thing down there."

Vaiti shook her head, and Pita saw that her eyes seemed to fill half her face as she looked down into the gulf. Suddenly she sprang, her white drapery flying behind her, and landed half a yard behind Pita, with a leap that drew a cry of wonder from the Atiuan. "Come, come," she said, taking his hand and fairly dragging him on.

They had little farther to go. The tunnel wound on for perhaps another hundred yards, and then stopped. They found themselves in a low-roofed circular chamber, such as is often met with at the end of long underground passages—a small, insignificant place, roofed with drooping green stalactites and floored with shapeless, slimy hummocks of stalagmite. Numbers of deep shelves were quarried out in the rocky sides, and in these lay, row on row, the bare, mouldering skulls of Falaite's long-ago chiefs—many of them cracked and split, and not a few fallen into shapeless fragments, though there were a score or two in excellent condition. They were curious skulls indeed, had their discoverers been able to understand them. In the projecting jaws, huge canines, strangely high cranium, and oddly developed ridges near the opening of the ear were the materials of a problem contradictory and complicated enough to occupy the wits of a whole college of science. But Vaiti and Pita saw none of these things. They only noted with disappointment, that most of the skulls had gone to decay—picked out the best of the unbroken specimens, packed the great sack full of them, and turned homewards.

"Vaiti," said Pita, as they walked down the rocky tunnel, and felt the slope of the gulf beginning under their feet. "Vaiti, what did you——"

Her face, turned back upon him, slew the still-born question on his lips.

It was scarce a minute before the chasm gaped in their path yet again. The leap was worse on this side, for the clustered cones of stalagmite did not allow a fair take-off. Pita looked calculatingly at the farther side, very dimly visible in the faint candle-light, and picked up a fallen stalactite to throw across.

"Do not throw!" said Vaiti, in a breathless whisper.

"Why not? I can jump better if I hear where it hits," replied Pita, casting the stone before Vaiti had time to snatch at his hand. It fell short, and rolled down into the chasm with a loud, crashing noise.

"Fool! fool! Jump quickly!" exclaimed Vaiti, in the same strained, horrible whisper.... Just for a second before he sprang, Pita looked down into the black pit beneath, and it seemed to him that the darkness shirred and shivered below the farther edge of the crevasse—that for the fragment of a second something long, red, whiplike, vibrated high up in the light of the candles, and then was gone.... There was a sickening odour in the air—a living smell, not a dead one; there was a sliding, rustling sound....

"Jump!" shrieked Vaiti.

They leaped through the air as one, but it was only Vaiti who landed on the farther side. Behind her, as she touched the rock, rose a shriek that blasted the leaden air into red-hot drops of horror—that went on and on and on, tearing upwards to the vaulted roof like a rocket fired from the mouth of hell; breaking at last into a gasping bellow, and snapping off into grisly silence on the very crest of a long, choking roar, in which there was nothing left of human.

... Pita had jumped short. Falling on the far side, with his legs half over the abyss, he had grasped for an instant at Vaiti's outstretched hands, and in the very act had been snatched away—snatched by a long, ghastly head, armed with poisoned jaws and quivering red antennas, that shot with the speed of a bullet out from the depths of the chasm, and back again with its prey.... The head was a foot long at least, the horrible winnowing feelers more than a yard, the black and red body, that just flashed into view for a second, was as thick as a man's thigh. It was a nightmare, an impossibility, and yet ... it was, beyond doubt, the Black Viri.

For a little while it seemed to Vaiti that she went mad, and then that the world went out and she died. A long time after, she found herself sitting on the floor of the tunnel, her head badly bruised and cut where she had dashed it against the rock, her candle guttering down towards extinction, her revolver empty and smelling of powder—she did not remember in the least how it had become so—and the whole black, horrible place still and silent as the bottom of the sea. Pita was gone. The bag of skulls had disappeared—fallen, no doubt, into the abyss. There was not a movement or a sound, save the whisper of the water—drops trickling ceaselessly from the roof into the dark pools upon the ground.

* * * * *

That evening, when the early starlight was beginning to shine down upon the creepers veiling the mouth of the tunnel, Saxon, sober at last, and rushing like a madman to the cave to find his daughter, met Vaiti herself coming down the rocks at the entrance, haggard, trembling, and almost old. He asked for Pita, and was answered only by a shuddering gesture of the hands. Questioning no more, he carried the girl down to the beach and brought her on board the schooner. There, when they had sailed, he left her undisturbed in her cabin for many days, while they ran steadily southward to pleasant Auckland and the temperate latitudes, farther and farther away from lonely, sun-smitten Falaite. The story of the day in the cave was known to him, as to every one on the island, for the witch-doctor of Falaite had told it far and wide, reserving only the one interesting fact—how he became possessed of the information. And as no one else alive on Falaite knew that there were two ways of reaching the skull-chamber, and more than one place where a man could hide unseen, the witch-doctor's reputation as a prophet and a clairvoyant was greatly increased; so that he suffered continually from a happily-acquired indigestion, and his dogs grew fat on bones of pig and fowl. And no one came ever any more into the sacred caves of Falaite Island.

Saxon declared plumply that he did not believe the tale, opining rather that the "blanked old wizard Johnnie had shoved Pita into the hole himself, and good riddance of bad rubbish, too."

None the less, he was uneasy at Vaiti's rather prolonged depression, and though he dared not break in upon her solitude further than to hand her in her meals and ask her how she felt, now and then, he listened almost constantly at her state-room door, and gave up whisky for at least ten days.

About the eleventh day, Te Ai, a young Samoan A.B., sat upon the main hatch in the pleasant coolness of the second dog-watch, and sang the farewell song of sweet Samoa, "Good-bye, my F'lennie"—the song that plucks so surely at the heartstrings of all who have ever loved and sailed away among the far-off fairy islands of the wide South Seas.

"Good-bye, my F'lennie (friend)—o le a o tea,

Efau lau le va'a, o le alii pule i ..."

he sang, beating time with his knees on the hatch.... Then suddenly he stopped, and the little group of mates and captain on the poop did not see why.

Later on, Harris, his face stiff with suppressed laughter, knocked at the captain's door.

"Can you oblige me with a piece of sticking-plaster, sir?" he said.

"Who for?" asked Saxon, reaching for the yellow roll that lies handy in every shipmaster's cabin about the peaceful Pacific.

"Te Ai, sir. He's been knocked down, and his head got cut against the pump."

"Who did it?" bristled Saxon, ready to uphold his own peculiar privileges, at once.

"She did, sir," said Harris, nearly choking. "Te Ai, he was singin' 'Good-bye, my F'lennie,' on the main 'atch and out she come from the deck cabin like a—like a nurricane, begging your pardon, sir—and she ups with a belayin' pin from the rail, an——"

"All right, all right; there's your plaster," interrupted Saxon. "Harris! Here."

"Yes, sir!"

"Give this to Te Ai."

"Lor' bless you, sir, 'e don't mind; 'e's a——"

"You do what you're told. Stop. Where's my daughter?"

"Walkin' on the poop, sir, uncommon lively, and looking like dirty weather ahead."

"That's all right," sighed the captain, with an air of infinite relief.

CHAPTER V

A DIAMOND WEB

It was six o'clock in Apia, and the round sun was hanging low above the rim of the level sea, like a burning coal ready to drop down upon a breadth of hyacinth silk. The stores were closed along the straggling beach street, where the sand was white under foot, and parrakeets tweedled cheerily in the scarlet-flowered flamboyant trees. Native dandies, greatly oiled and dyed, and wearing a bright hibiscus blossom over each ear, swung past with the inimitable Samoan roll, their golden brown limbs gay with the red-and-white English bath-towel that is popular as full dress for steamer days in the little island capital. Girls with high-coiffed yellow heads and pink or green tunics wandered lazily home to the cool, dark-domed native houses open all round to the sunset sky. They went in groups, and sang as they walked—windy, fitful gusts of strange island melody, breaking out and dying away like the evening breeze among the heavy-headed palms. Smells of yam and breadfruit, brown from the baking pits, of fish cooked in green, savoury leaves, and taro spinach stewed with cocoanut cream, crept out upon the cooling air. The long, hot day was done, and Apia rested and ate.

In "Charley's"—the least reputable of Apia's tavern-hotels—the egregious table d'hôte was in full progress out in the green-shuttered verandah. Charley himself, an oily, flashy New Caledonian half-caste, dressed in striped pyjamas, was eating curried tin—nature unknown—with a knife and two fingers, at the head of the table. A corpse-faced Chinese was shuffling round with the inevitable Pacific fowl, cut up in a watery soup. The table-cloth was of linoleum, the swinging lamp guttered and smoked, the cutlery was dislocated and black. But there was English beer on the bar counter, and plenty of broken ice; and the whisky that mounted high in each man's smeary tumbler was good of its kind. Charley knew his customers, and sought first the essential.

Captain Saxon, his schooner safe at anchor outside, and his copra advantageously sold to an Auckland agent, sat eating at the table, heavy-faced, a little intoxicated, and almost absolutely blank in mind. This was his nearest approach to happiness, and one that he enjoyed often enough, for, since thought meant pain to him, he had managed to acquire a wonderful agility in avoiding it, and to live for the most part almost as purely by instinct and impulse as a dog.

It was perhaps for this reason that he did not notice anything unusual in the demeanour of that singularly unknown quantity, Vaiti, his daughter. And yet Vaiti—sombre and sparkling in a dress of vaporous red, with a handful of star stephanotis from the verandah thrust into the marvellous waves of her hair—was evidently not quite herself. She sat a little apart from the noisy company that sprawled about the table, looked at no one, ate her food absent-mindedly and pulled little strips off the decaying oilcloth of the table-cover with a steady industry that made Charley wriggle in his seat, although he did not dare to remonstrate.

Some one else was watching her, if Saxon was not. A short, stocky man, with burning grey eyes, a fiery red beard, and a sharp furrow between the eyebrows, that somehow suggested belaying-pins and rope's ends, was looking at her every now and then as he noisily sucked in his soup. The inspection did not appear to please him altogether. He finished his dinner quickly, took the current glass of whisky in his hand, and rolled off to the dark end of the verandah, followed by a grey-haired, greasy-faced mate who had been sitting beside him.

"Still on for it, cap?" asked the latter, leaning over the railing with an air of careless ease that contrasted oddly with his watchful eye.

"Yes, blank asterisk your condemned foolishness, sure I am on for it!" replied the captain, betraying his nationality by a slight touch of brogue.

There is no nation that swings so high and so low between opposite extremes of character as the impetuous race that is handcuffed, by an odd freak of geography, to steady, serious England. Great saints and great rogues are commoner in Ireland than ordinary people, and each displays the fullest flavour of his kind. Donahue, master of the island schooner Ikurangi, was, or had been, Irish; and it was assuredly not the company of the saints that claimed his membership.

The two spoke together for a little while in level tones that sounded loud and careless enough, yet somehow did not carry. One learns these things by practice.

"She smells a rat, I'm thinking," said the old mate, looking critically the while at Charley, as if he were valuing the half-caste's clothes for pawn.

"Let her. You and I are apt to be a match for her, for all that," answered the captain. He looked at Charley also. You would have sworn the two were discussing him, and rather unfavourably. Charley himself shifted in his seat, and showed his magnificent teeth uncomfortably.

"Think she'll come on board?"

Vaiti was watching them, her chin on her hand. Her expression was not to be read.