Chapter I · (continued 2)

As Hawahee spoke on and Sestrina listened, the ocean’s monotone, resounding on the reefs below, seemed to moan in sympathy with all he told her.

“Ah, wahine, thou knowest not the sorrow of my people,” he murmured; then he once more lapsed into pidgin English, which he usually did when speaking under the stress of deep emotion. “Sestra, when I was once a helper of the afflicted on Molokai, I did often see some beautiful wahine with flying hair and starry eyes, running along the beach by moonlight, wringing her hands, as she cried and answered the moaning voice of the winds in the palms that sighed to her dying ears, like to the dead laughter and the memories of lost children, lovers and husband; I know not which. Then she would jump into the sea. And the waves, closing over her head, did bring the peace of Atua, Pelé, and the great White God, whichever may be the most merciful.”

Such were the incidents connected with Hawahee’s history, and which he deigned to tell Sestrina that night and the next night as she sat by the kitchen cooking-fire of her solitary home on their lone isle of the vast Pacific. And often, when Hawahee had crossed the hollow and entered his hut for sleep, the imaginative castaway girl would lie in her own chamber and fancy she could hear the dead laughter of children and the calling voices of the dying lepers, shrieking and calling somewhere out in the wind swept palms, that sighed fitfully on the valley’s ridge by her homestead. In these dreams Sestrina fully realised that, to the lepers at least, her lonely desert isle was a haven of refuge, an oasis in the desert of their life’s misery. For not in all the world was sorrow so heart-rending, so hideous and intense as on Molokai. Yes, notwithstanding that missionaries devoted their days as ministering angels to the stricken exiles, and that the heroic martyr-priest Damien, the lepers’ Christ, and Father Albert the good dwelt in their midst. For who can stay the dead from dreaming in their living tombs, or from leaping from the grave to run along the dark, beetling crags of the moonlit beach, listening to the memories of the wind swept palms and calling to the skies for mercy?