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!