Chapter XIII

THE GAME PLAYED OUT

Every one in the trader’s had gone to bed, and Vaiti, barefoot and dressed in dark cotton, had just got out of her room by the window, and was gliding noiselessly down the back verandah.

The moon was down, and the thick darkness under the trees of the village covered her safely as she slipped along at the backs of the little white, palm-thatched houses. It was not at all likely that any native would be about in the middle of the night, but one could never reckon on white men, of whom there were several in the little town—and Vaiti, being engaged as usual on “urgent private affairs,” did not want any inquiries.

She got away from the village without remark, and then struck into one of the narrow grass roads penetrating the bush. Everything was asleep. The little green parrots were hidden deep under heavy leaves, each with its noisy head tucked under its wing. The lizards that had been darting and flickering all day long about the path now slept, chill as little stones, among the roots of the trees. There was a cold, dewy smell in the air, and the palm-tree plumes were motionless as drawings in Indian ink against the violet gloom of the sky. Very far away the immemorial music of the reef beat softly in the dark.

Vaiti girded her dress high, and walked swiftly. She had a long way to go, and she wanted to be back in her neat, white, mosquito-curtained bed, sleeping the sleep of the innocent, before the trader’s wife should come in with her morning cup of tea. Vaiti was a past mistress in the art of avoiding useless comment.

Three miles, five miles, seven miles.... It was right at the other side of the island, past mile after mile of tangled bush, acre after acre of sparsely planted, rocky, open ground, grove after grove of tall, plumy cocoanut, heavy with fruit. Oranges grew by the track here and there; broad green banners of banana leaf blotted out whole sections of the stars, and slim, quaint mummy-apple trees stood up among the prickly coral rocks. Vaiti had no time to stop, but she snatched a little refreshment on her way from time to time, as the wayfarer may always do in the kindly South Sea climate.

She struck at last into a narrow track leading off the main pathway—so small that in the dusk of the starry night it must have been invisible save for a mass of pointed rocks that stood up just beside the overgrown entrance and made a landmark. Afterwards came a mile or two of tangled walking among clumps of pink and scarlet and yellow hibiscus, all reduced to a common blackness by the levelling night, and through thorny lemon-trees, and over rocky knolls where there was scarce footing for a goat.... A lonely God-forsaken region this; not a village, nor even the gleam of a solitary white-washed hut. What had the “Kapitani” of the Sybil to do with such a place?

Vaiti knew very well indeed what she had to do. She had gathered in the town that the mysterious white man who “lived native” in the bush had his dwelling about this lonely neighbourhood. It was very well known to her, and she meant to find the man’s dwelling-place, and see him with her own eyes before....

Well, that was still to come.

It took her rather longer than she had expected, but she did at last succeed in finding the tumble-down little palm-leaf shanty, built against the side of a rock, that she had heard described. It was a miserable place, so far as her cat-like eyes could judge it in the purple gloom, not more than three or four yards long, and looking like nothing so much as a heap of dead leaves and rubbish piled against the rock. She trod noiselessly round its three sides, and listened here and there. The door, as she ascertained by feeling, was a heavy mat hung up from the eaves, and it was tightly fastened across the opening. There was a faint sound of slow, heavy breathing from within. The man was evidently asleep.

Vaiti climbed up on the rock above the hut, and pulled away a piece of the loose grey coral of which it was composed. Then, sheltering herself behind a clump of hibiscus growing in a cleft, she raised her voice in a fearful squealing cry, exactly reproducing the yell of a wild pig wandering in the bush at night. At the same time she cast a lump of coral with all her strength down the side of the big rock, whence it landed with a crash in the middle of a mass of brushwood, burying itself completely.

The double noise, as she had anticipated, brought out the owner of the hut, very cross and sleepy, clad only in a pareo, and angrily anxious for the safety of his patch of yams. He carried a torch in his hand, made of blazing candlenuts strung on a stick (“Must have run out every bit of credit at the stores,” thought Vaiti parenthetically), and he was, beyond all shadow of doubt, against all common probability, the red-haired master of the Ikurangi.

If looks could ever blast, those black eyes behind the hibiscus boughs would have slain him where he stood. Vaiti quivered with rage as she watched him shambling sleepily about, looking, with his long, matted red hair, bloated, evil face, and half naked body, infinitely lower than any coloured native on the island.... He had not prospered since he escaped the wreck of the Ikurangi—how or where she did not care to know. He looked as if he had been living on the natives and half drinking himself to death, as was indeed the case.

But Vaiti was not in the least mollified by his unprosperous case. In her opinion, he ought to have been dead long ago. There could be no peace of mind for her while he was still drifting about the Pacific, ever on the alert to do her an evil turn. She was not equal to actual murder, and, in any case, Niué was a British-owned island, with a resident Commissioner and a regular nest of missionaries, where you had to be very careful of what you did. But if any accident—a safe, convenient accident—should befall him by-and-by, why, it would certainly be an advantage to the Sybil and her owners. Well, that might come about, and without introducing Saxon into it either. In such a delicate matter Saxon’s interference would very likely have acted much as a charge of dynamite might act in the destruction of a wasps’ nest—something more than the wasps would probably come to grief.

She waited until the ugly creature had rolled back into his cottage and shut the make-shift door. Then she slipped down from the rock once more, and began the second part of her errand. Neither then, nor at any other time, did she trouble to find out the manner of Donahue’s escape. If she had, she would have heard that he had been picked up by a native canoe, floating about on a piece of wreck the day after the disaster that destroyed the Ikurangi, and that, he had spent a good many months on a neighbouring island before a stray schooner had consented to accept his watch for passage money and convey him as far as Niué—the only place near their course where a penniless beachcomber would have been allowed to land. As things were, he was more or less smuggled off, and thought best to take refuge in the bush at once. The moneyless adventurer is not encouraged in islands belonging to the British Crown.

It is easy, therefore, to understand why Donahue, living under an assumed name in the far interior of the island, had not been recognised, and was not likely to be, by any one save the person whom his presence most concerned. His malice against Vaiti had by no means evaporated with the events that took place on Vaka. He did not, as it happened, suspect her of having actually caused the loss of the Ikurangi, but he was of a darkly superstitious nature, and laid down his ill-luck, first, last, and all through, to the fact of her influence. She had been a “Jonah” of the worst kind to him, and he would have been very glad indeed to serve her any ill turn of any kind that might be possible. But only the small piece of spite compassed through Mata had, so far, lain within his power.

Vaiti had still a mile or two to go, and it was waxing very late, or rather, early. She almost ran along the winding rocky path, following it as easily as if broad day or full moon had surrounded her instead of star-lit dark. Now the sound of the sea, unheard for the last hour, broke out again, and a cold salt breath from the beach cut through the heavy perfume of the forest track. In another minute she was out of the wood and fairly running down a sloping, sandy track that led to a little white house standing alone on the shore.... She laughed as she ran—it was such a soft, clear night, and the sea called so pleasantly down in the dark, and she did so dearly love an adventure—especially when all the world imagined her to be sleeping quietly in her mosquito-netted bed.

There was no secrecy about this matter apparently. The house had a good wooden door, and she rapped loudly on it with a stone, calling at the same time, “Sona! Sona! Wake up!”

There was a brief interval, in which the rollers tore at the beach and the palms swung and crashed overhead, uninterrupted by other sound. Sona was evidently asleep. She struck loudly on the door again. This time some one answered in a drowsy voice, and a slow, shuffling foot came to the door. The hinges creaked, and in another minute a small, bent, feeble figure appeared on the threshold.

“Tck! tck!” it clucked. “Is there magic in the air, and have I grown fifty years younger, that the lovely maidens come to my door in the starlight once more? Is it my beauty that has struck you to the heart, chieftainess Vaiti; or do you want a charm to catch the love of some one less deserving than myself?”

A fit of coughing interrupted him; he crept out to the open air, and clung to the door-post, shaking all over with the violence of the paroxysm. There was more light here, down by the foaming rollers; one could see, if one had been walking half the night in the dark bush, that the man was very small and hairy, very decrepit, and very, very old. Indeed, the personal appearance of Sona, solitary recluse of the Avarangi beach, good Nonconformist Christian on Sundays, and heathen witch-doctor out of business hours, was a very important item of his stock-in-trade. He looked his part to perfection, and knew it. His very name was a piece of business, even though, rightly pronounced and written, it was that of the godly man of Nineveh. When Shark-Tooth of Avarangi had consented, largely for reasons of policy, to join the mission fold a good many years before—the last straggling heathens on the island having been then “brought in” by the exertions of a determined and energetic missionary—he had selected the name of Jonah for his baptismal title solely because, so far as he could ascertain, the original bearer of the name was proverbial for bringing bad luck to his enemies—and that was the sort of reputation that Shark-Tooth especially coveted.

Vaiti had not met him before, but she knew him well by reputation, and was very sure that he knew all he cared to know—probably a good deal—about her. It was, she thought, a case for going straight to the point, so she went very straight indeed.

“Let me in, Sona,” she said in his own tongue. “I want to talk with you, and I want to buy you; for you and I are wise people, and I know that there is nothing that may not be bought.”

“Crah—crah—crah!” cackled Sona, in a feeble old man’s laugh, tacking a joke to the end of it that might well have raised a blush on Vaiti’s cheek if she had been capable of such a weakness. He led the way into the house, still cackling, lit an ill-smelling kerosene lamp, and sank down upon the mats, a mere heap of crumpled cotton clothes, old bones, and ancient wickedness.

Vaiti pulled out her cigar-case, tossed the old creature a cigar, which he clutched at eagerly, and lit one for herself. Then she squatted down on the mats, her back against the wall, and puffed for a minute or two in silence. Old Sona watched her eagerly with his glassy little eyes. He saw that she was not angry at the part he had played in the late unpleasant occurrence upon the schooner, or at least that she did not mean to resent it. He had heard all about the strange happenings of the voyage, and was a good deal awed at the power of the woman who had actually broken the spell of his curse—in which, be it observed, he believed most fully himself, with excellent reasons for doing so. And he was really very anxious to know what she wanted now, and especially what he was going to make by it.

Vaiti pulled at her cigar vigorously for a minute to make it draw well, and then, with a leisurely puff, remarked in Sona’s own tongue:

“Mata gave you a gold ring to curse my sailors that they should die—all the village knows of it, so you need not deny it, old man with the face of a scavenger-crab. Was it not foolish of you to set yourself against Vaiti, the great sea-princess—very foolish to run into danger, and for so little?”

“Yes, yes, so little,” repeated Sona, in a kind of wail.

“Now I come to buy you for myself,” went on Vaiti, puffing between words (she smoked like most women, very hard and fast). “I buy like a great chief’s daughter, and you shall feed and drink well for a long time if you are faithful to me. If not, I shall split you open with my knife as one splits open a fish on the beach, and leave you out on the strand, so that the crabs may come and eat you before you are dead. That is what I shall do to you.”

“I belong to the high chieftainess, soul and liver,” quavered Sona nervously. Vaiti, hardly looking at him, pulled something out of her dress and flung it down carelessly on the mat between the two. Sona’s eyes glittered, for he heard the chink of gold.

“Take it, old pig of the woods,” said Vaiti contemptuously, and he clutched eagerly at the little parcel of rag. It contained a roll of gold coins. Sona, panting with mingled delight and fear lest his visitor should change her mind, scuttled away to some hiding-hole in an inner room, and concealed the packet with breathless haste. Then he returned to the lamp-lit room, where Vaiti sat smoking and waiting.

“I am yours, high chieftainess; I am yours,” he repeated, rubbing his hands together and cackling.

“What is this thing they tell about a devil that stays upon the road to Mua, and comes out at night-time?” asked Vaiti carelessly, looking over Sona’s head at the wall.

Sona shut up his eyes very tight, and shook his shaggy little head from side to side.

“If you ask the good misinari doctor, he will tell you,” he answered. “As for me, I have nothing to do with devils. I am a very old man, and I want to go to heaven.

“You will go to-night, old scorpion-head, if you do not tell me everything I want to know,” remarked Vaiti. Her tone was pleasant, but there was a flavour of something else below the pleasantness that caused Sona, literally and figuratively, to sit up.

“I tell, I tell, high chieftainess,” he stammered eagerly. “The thing is known to all the people on the island—even the white people. It happened only last year, and it is as true as the Good Book. It was the foolish man from Mua way, whom they called a witch-doctor—and every one knows that such a thing does not exist, high chieftainess; but they said he was that thing, and he said so himself, because he was proud and mad. Now, we all know that there are many devils on Niué, and that the misinaris never were able to drive them all away. And there is a very bad devil on that road to Mua, right where the six palm-trees stand up by themselves among the graves. It is powerless in the day, but at night there is no Niué man who would dare to go there. Sometimes the white traders will ride past the place coming home in the dark, but it is a true thing that their horses will often shy and bolt when they come near to the home of the devil, and no man can say why; indeed, the devils, for the most part, do not have power over the ’papalangi.’

“So this witch-doctor, as he called himself, said that he did not fear the devil, and he would go and stay the night among the graves, thinking that because of that all the people in the island would believe in him, and give him many pigs and yams for fear of his ’mana.’ So he went to the devil-place, and all night he stayed, but in the morning he did not come back at all. And by-and-by all the people of his village went together to look for him. And they found him lying on the road, all dead, and his face was black and his body twisted up. So the people brought him to the misinari doctor, and he said that he could not make him alive again. And the traders said, ’What is the kind of this death? We do not know it, though we are white men and know everything.’ But the misinari doctor did not know. And they buried him, and that is all, high chieftainess.”

Vaiti smoked thoughtfully. She had heard something of the tale before, and Sona’s story did not vary from the version that was generally current about the island. She thought, on the whole, that she believed in it. There was no doubt that many of the white people gave it credit, though a few of them declared the man must have died in a drunken fit. A paper in Australia had published an account of the mysterious incident, and the spiritualistic set in Sydney were so deeply interested in it that a letter of inquiry from a psychical research society had been sent up to the island, inquiring into the matter. But it happened that the trader to whom the letter was addressed had committed suicide a good many months earlier, and excellent onions and pumpkins (much appreciated by his successor) were growing green upon his grave by the time the letter reached the island. So the inquiry was never answered.

Yes, on the whole, Vaiti thought she believed the story. That a similar result would follow in the case of a “papalangi” (white man) who followed the deceased magician’s example she did not, however, believe. She thought it very likely, however, that mischief of one kind or another would result.... And if the worst should chance to come about....

Vaiti took another cigar.

“What does your misinari say?” she asked. “He is not the right sort of misinari, it is true, but still, he should know more about devils than the traders.”

“Our good misinari was not here when it happened,” replied Sona in a pious tone. “It was the doctor misinari. Our own good misinari says that devils cannot do harm to any but bad men.”

Vaiti reflected, her eyes on the floor. She really had some respect, in an odd, upside-down kind of way, for missionary opinion. It is bred in the bone with the younger generation of Eastern Pacific islanders.

Donahue was certainly a very bad man. She did not think she had ever met any one much worse. Perhaps the badness, balanced against the whiteness, might swing down the scale. At any rate....

“Hear me, Sona!” she said, in a voice of command. “I have bought you to-night, and you belong to me. There will be more to pay by-and-by if you do as I tell you. But I would warn you to be careful, for you will not find it pleasant lying on the shore down there, with your inside hanging out like a gutted fish, and the crabs coming running to eat you before you are dead, as you will if you make any mistakes. Listen, then, very carefully.”

“I listen, I listen!” cried Sona.