Part 16

Litia, entering at this point, wasted no words, but simply buried her hands in Mahina’s curly black masses of hair, and dragged her, shrieking, across the floor. Neumann interfered, and parted them; but Mahina flew at Litia immediately after, ripped open her dress with one clutch, and disclosed the royal gift chastely embracing Litia’s lovely form. With a howl of anger, the rival seized the chemise in both hands; there was a scuffle, a scream, a rending noise, and Litia stood up in the middle of the room, a gold-bronze statue, shedding tears of rage, while Mahina, running out on to the verandah, tore the offending garment into strips and rags, and cast them upon the road. Litia, rushing out after her, stood upon the steps clad with wrath as with a garment (and with extremely little else), explaining her wrongs to an interested and sympathetic native crowd, until the Methodist missionary happened to come by, and told her that unless she went in and dressed herself at once, she might safely count upon eventually finding herself in a place where dress would be very much at a discount ... or words to that effect. So Litia went in, and Mahina went away, escorted by a strong cousinly “tail”; and afterwards Neumann, enveloped in oracular clouds of smoke, remarked sleepily that the princesses were the greatest nuisance on the island, and that he believed the King would run away from the whole set if he could, for he was “by-nearly mad-driven on account of their so-tiresome ways, and feared-himself to choose, because the one that he not married had would cause to make war by her people against the one he married should.”

During the whole of the fight, Vaiti remained perfectly unmoved on a cane lounge in the corner of the room, uninterruptedly puffing rings of blue smoke at the ceiling. Not a detail had escaped her, all the same, nor did she miss a word of Neumann’s remarks. And they made her think.

In the afternoon, the dull thud of galloping hoofs along the grass street made Mrs. Neumann run to the door. She called loudly to Vaiti to come.

“It is the King,” she said.

A small victoria, drawn by two spirited blacks, was tearing up the street. Seated alone in it was an extraordinary and notable figure—Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III., King of Liali. He was six feet four inches in height, and over eighteen stone in weight. He wore a scarlet cloth uniform coat, blazing with gold, and his heavy, handsome brown face, with its weak, small mouth, and black eyes almost too large and soft for a man, was shaded by a white sun helmet with a wide gold band.

He drove furiously, looking neither to right nor to left, and, passing the house like a gorgeous whirlwind, was instantly lost in the casuarina forest beyond.

“That is the King, then?” said Vaiti. The Lialian language came almost as easily to her as her own, being only one of the dialects of the great Maori tongue that covers a good two-thirds of the island world.

“Yes,” said Neumann’s wife, “that is the King. And very little any of us have seen of him lately. He is afraid of the trouble he has got himself into; he shuts himself up all the time, and sees no one but his guards, and just sends a present now and then, first to one girl then to the other. And when he drives to take the air, he flies along like that, so that no one can stop and speak to him. He is terribly shy of strangers; I think it was because the _Sipila_ was here that he did not come out at all last week.”

“Is it such a very good thing for the princess he will marry?” asked Vaiti, playing with a yellow alamanda flower.

“Very, very good indeed,” replied the Lialian impressively. “She will have a gold crown to wear on her head, and sit on a red velvet and gold throne beside the King, and have the most beautiful satin dresses from Sydney, and all her chemises will have lace and ribbons on them. And as soon as the King buys another schooner for himself and Liali, she will travel in it with him whenever she likes, for sometimes he will go to Samoa, to stay with King Malietoa, or he will sail a whole week to Mbau in Fiji, and then Princess Thakombau and the Prince of Kandavu make feasts and dances for him, and the Kovana [governor] gives a real ’papalangi’ dinner for him, with champagne and a band. And as for what she will have to eat at home, it is past telling, for in the palace there is no count whatever made of tinned salmon and biscuit, and she may have a sackful of sugar at every meal, and a whole roast pig every day. She may eat till she falls asleep, and then wake up to eat. Ah, it is a good thing for the princess who marries the King, whichever she may be!”

“I think you will be thirsty if you talk so much,” said Vaiti rather rudely. “I am thirsty myself with only listening to you. Go and make some kava for me.”

Mrs. Neumann, who had been rather proud to have Vaiti staying with her—since her rank as a princess of Atiu counted for a good deal among the island races—began to dislike her visitor soon after this, and to wish her well away. Vaiti was not an angel in the house at the best of times, and she did not trouble to make herself pleasant just then. Indeed, one would almost have thought she was trying to pick a quarrel. And, as that sort of effort rarely goes unrewarded, it is not astonishing to learn that the quarrel came before long—a bitter, loud-tongued dispute that left Mrs. Neumann sobbing in a fat, frightened heap on the floor, and Vaiti, silent but stormy, packing up her camphorwood box to depart.

Neumann, being afraid of Saxon’s possible anger, tried to keep her, but she laughed in his face, and went on packing. There was an empty native house—little more than a palm-leaf hut, once tenanted by a Chinese trader—standing by the road about halfway through the great casuarina forest; a lonely, ramshackle place, used and wanted by nobody. There and there only Vaiti would go, taking mats and cooking pots with her, to stay until her father came back. When some of the islanders betrayed meddlesome curiosity as to her motives, and the missionaries declared they scented scandal, Vaiti silenced and terrified the one, and convinced the others that she was hopelessly beyond the pale, by giving out that she was something of a witch, and meant to go into the forest to gather and prepare certain powerful charms. These, she said, would injure only her enemies, but were altogether powerless to hurt anyone who spoke well of her. In consequence, the evil tongues of Liali received a sudden check.

Furthermore, Vaiti, neglecting the half-castes and the whites, began with considerable art to make herself popular among the natives. She dressed herself Liali fashion, and arranged her hair after the island modes. She joined in all their interminable boating journeys and picnics, and was never tired of sitting cross-legged on the ground, waving her arms and head in time with a hundred others, and chanting Lialian songs that lasted an afternoon apiece. After dark, she was often to be seen out on the reef, with a torch and a fishing spear making an exhibition of piscatorial skill that astonished even the Lialians themselves. When there was an unmissionary dance in some big chief-house, Vaiti was always there, decked with wreaths and flower necklaces, and polished with cocoanut oil, turning the heads of all the young men by the grace of her dancing, and winning the astonished approval of the women by the cool reserve with which she received every advance of a sentimental nature. Both Mahina and Litia took jealous fancies to her—thus acquiring yet one more cause of mutual dissension—and separately poured all their woes into her ear. She was wonderfully sympathetic, and urged each one on to assert her rights and stand no nonsense; insomuch that before very long the island was fairly ringing with what Litia’s people meant to do to Mahina’s, and what Mahina’s would certainly do to Litia’s, in the event of the King selecting one or the other.

Somebody about this time—it was never ascertained who—spread a report that Captain Saxon of the _Sybil_ had a number of trade rifles on board his ship, and several cases of cartridges. The talk began to take a more dangerous turn. The schooner would not be back till the wedding was over, it was said, but let the winning party look out for themselves when she did come! The Lialians, under missionary rule, had been peaceful and law-abiding people for almost a whole generation; but they had not yet forgotten that they were once the masters of the Pacific, and that of all the warlike island races, none had been such fighters as they.... The older men began to snuff battle in the air, walked about with their chests flung out, and told bloodthirsty ancient stories to the younger Lialians. The women sang war songs at the evening gatherings in the chief-houses, and Mahina and Litia began to go about followed by bands of eager partisans. Liali was certainly warming up.

*CHAPTER XX*

*QUEEN AFTER ALL*

News of all these things came duly to the King through his faithful spies, and his Majesty Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. went nearly frantic. He actually began to lose weight—a consummation that all the skill of his European court doctor had hitherto failed to bring about—and day by day he drove more wildly behind his famous blacks, covering mile after mile of lonely forest roads at a pace that brought the horses home all in a lather and the yellow satin cushions grimed with dust. The wedding approached within ten days: the triumphal arches were being erected; the Queen Consort’s throne came back from the carpenter, freshly gilded and upholstered; and the band were hard at work practising the strange conglomeration of shrieks and wails that make up the Lialian National Anthem. The bride’s dress, provided, according to usage, by the House of Lords, arrived at the palace in a palm-leaf basket. It was a very gorgeous affair—a long, loose robe of orange satin, embroidered in scarlet by a few of the cleverest mission-school girls—and it was of a usefully indefinite size, since the difference between the massive Mahina and the waspish little Litia was almost as great as the difference (of another kind) between their respective parties. The silver-printed invitations for the white people and the chiefs—“To be present at the wedding of His Majesty King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. with Princess——,” came up by a whale-ship from Auckland, and so did the wedding cake, largely plaster of Paris. And still the wretched King, lashed by the scourge of his own light-hearted follies, sent pacificating presents to both girls, and put off the dire decision.

It was about this time that any wayfarer passing through the casuarina forest “might have observed” a light in Vaiti’s cottage late one night. There was no one to observe, however, for the wood was supposed to be devil-haunted, and no native ever passed through it save in broad daylight. When it grew toward sunset the only Lialian who would brave its dangers so far as to rush across it in the red evening light was the King himself, who had been educated in Sydney, and did not believe in devils—much. The forest road was the shortest way home from his usual circular drive, and he frequently passed by the cottage just before sunset, driving like Jehu the son of Nimshi, and looking neither to right nor to left. He had never noticed Vaiti as he passed, for she was always within the house, looking out between the cracks of the palm-leaves, where she could see without being seen.

This evening, long after the King had passed by and the dark had come down, Vaiti sat on the floor of the hut, looking very thoughtful, as she turned out the contents of her big camphorwood box by the light of a ship’s hurricane lantern. She was all alone, as usual, and smoking, also as usual. There was no sound in the solitary little house but the sighing of the wind in the casuarina trees and the steady puff of the girl’s cigar. Papers, letters, packets of lace, odd bits of jewellery, silk dresses, pistols, knives, collections of rope and twine, laced underclothing, cartridges, feathers, shells, cigars, pearl-inlaid boxes, revareva plumes, and a miscellaneous collection of odds and ends garnered from all the four corners of the South Seas, strewed the floor, and the box was still half full. By-and-by she came upon what she wanted—a roll of stuff done up in waxed paper. She unfastened it, and let the contents fall out across the mats under the rays of the lantern. It was a web of pure gold tissue, bright as a summer sunrise and fine as a fairy’s wing—an exquisite piece of stuff, which she had acquired from a Chinese trader in Honolulu by means none too scrupulous, and hoarded away for years.

Vaiti looked at it thoughtfully, and then opened a little tortoise-shell and silver box, and spilled its contents—a shower of photographs—into her lap. They were an exceedingly various collection—naval, military, British, French, native and half-caste—but most were men, and many were young and handsome. Perhaps the best-looking of the collection was that of a young English naval officer, signed across the corner “R. Tempest,” with a Sydney address, and “Must it be good-bye?” written in tiny letters under the signature. Vaiti took the picture in her hand, and looked at it so long and earnestly that her cigar went out while she gazed. She lit another, put down the photograph, and sat smoking and thinking for quite a long time.... The world was still all before her ... and the whaling ship had said that another vessel was almost sure to touch, on her way to Sydney next week.

Once in Vaiti’s many-coloured history a looking-glass had proved her undoing. It was a looking-glass that proved her salvation now, at the parting of the ways. For, as she sat thinking, a brilliant picture caught her eye—her own proud, lovely head, crowned regally with a wreath of flowers, reflected in the mirror inside the lid of the box. She smiled, stretched out her hand—letting the photograph fall unnoticed to the floor from her lap—and placed a fold of the golden tissue across her head.... Yes, it looked quite like a crown—a Queen Consort’s crown ... the glass gave back a truly royal picture.

Vaiti’s cheeks flushed as she looked. She could hardly turn away. But the golden fold slipped off her hair, and the queenly picture was gone.

She shut the box, and with set lips took a match, lit it, and set fire to the photograph. It burned very slowly, and the flame seemed to lick sympathetically round her own heart as it crawled about the handsome, debonair, but sensual face, lit up, and then put out, the laughing eyes, crackled through the curly hair and the white naval cap, and at last reduced the whole bright picture to a little pile of feathery black ash—dead, dead, dead!

Vaiti dropped the charred fragments from her hands, and then put her head down upon the mats and lay very still....

When morning broke through the narrow door of the hut, the rays of the rising sun fell upon the figure of a girl with a cold, expressionless face, sitting upon the threshold, hard at work with needle and thread. Upon her lap lay a pile of golden gauze.

That afternoon the King drove late in the forest. The sun was near setting, and the rays were slanting long and low among the red trunks of the gloomy casuarina trees, when the spirited blacks came galloping up to the cottage. Every day they had passed it by, a still, brown nest in the shadows, where nothing moved, but this evening, as they reached the spot, something caused them to check and shy, and the King, splendid driver as he was, had some difficulty in pulling them in. When he had succeeded, he glanced at the object that had caused their fright, and saw a vision startling enough to astonish even himself.

A stranger girl of exceeding beauty stood in the midst of the forest clearing. She was dressed in a robe of magnificent golden tissue, from which the level rays of the westering sun sparkled back in a halo of almost supernatural glory. On her head was a wreath of blood-red hibiscus flowers, and her exquisite right arm, bare except for a twisted chain of gold, held up an island kava cup of carved cocoanut shell. When she saw that the King observed her, she sank on her knees, bent her neck, and raised the cup higher in both hands above her head.

It was an invitation, and one that no Lialian could possibly have refused, for the drink brewed from the kava root, and the ceremonies connected with the brewing, tasting, and giving round, are almost a religion in those islands, and many a man, in the old wild days, has died for the insult of putting aside the proffered cup. Therefore the King descended at once, tied his horses to a tree, and advanced to take the cup from the hands of this unknown woman who understood royal etiquette so well. It was his Majesty’s right to have his kava, and indeed all his food and drink, proffered in this especial attitude; but half-castes and whites were sometimes careless enough to forget the honour.

He drank the great bowlful at a draught, as a king should, and, sending the cup with a twirl to the ground, according to etiquette, cast a side glance at the beautiful cup-bearer. He hated strangers and distrusted foreigners, still....

“Will you not come in and rest, O Great Chief?” asked Vaiti in Lialian.

“Who are you?” said the King, still looking half away—but only half.

“Princess of Atiu, and daughter of the great English sea-captain Saxon,” replied Vaiti, drawing herself up to her full height, and looking him straight in the eyes. The King met the look full this time, and thought that Litia’s eyes, Lialian though she was, were not so bright by half. And if Mahina was fatter—as she certainly was—she never had such hair, or such a coral-red mouth. And what a magnificent dress the magnificent creature wore!

He knew at once who Vaiti was, when she mentioned her rank in Atiu, for the chocolate-coloured island kings and queens understand each other’s complicated genealogies quite as clearly as do their white compeers on the other side of the world—and though Atiu was a broken, half-depopulated place, annexed to the British Crown, its chiefs were of ancient lineage and high repute. Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. hesitated a moment—stretched out his hand—withdrew it—then stretched it out again, and graciously offered it to Vaiti, as to an equal in blood.

Vaiti, glowing with gratification, yet had the happy intuition of dropping on one knee and kissing the royal hand, European fashion. The King understood it, and swelled with pleasure, remembering how Mahina had had the impudence to chuck him under the chin when he bestowed a gracious salute upon her inferior lips, and how Litia had objected altogether to get off her horse when he was passing by, as Lialian royal customs enjoined upon all riders ... What a nuisance they had both grown to be, crying and battering at the palace gates, fighting over his gifts, getting up trouble among their relatives—trouble that he now began to fear might become so serious as to bring down the interference of the British Crown. And every Pacific monarch knew what was the inevitable next move, when that game had once begun! Good-bye to his kingship, if once the British Lion laid a claw on Lialia.

“Will you not come in and rest, Great Chief?” said the humble voice of the stranger again. And the King, still shy and distrustful, and looking at Vaiti only out of the corners of his eyes, did condescend to come in.

And the next day he rested again, and the day after that. It was astonishing how easily driving seemed to tire his Majesty at this period. And all the time the wedding preparations went forward, while Mahina and Litia, with their respective factions, grew more and more jealous of each other, and more and more enraged.

But there came a day at last, four days from the wedding, when the King declared that he would make his final choice on the evening before the marriage day, and would send a herald on that night to proclaim it through the capital.

Ruru, the royal herald, who had never before had a chance to exercise his office or wear his uniform, was extremely pleased. He got out his finery at once—a Beefeater cap and tabard of crimson silk, worn with a large silk sash, and bare legs—and began a dress rehearsal that lasted, with intervals for food and sleep, until the evening of the proclamation. At sunset he went up to the palace, received the paper that contained the message, and strutting like a turkey, came out on to the open green in front, where at least a thousand Lialians—half of them Litia’s friends, and half of them Mahina’s—were collected. Mahina and Litia themselves, each defiantly dressed in all the bridal finery she could muster, stood in the forefront of the crowd, exchanging looks of death and hatred. It had come to this with the two women now, that either would have cheerfully died a death of slow torture, if by so doing only she could have prevented the other from winning. That she might miss the glories of the throne was not the prominent thought in Litia’s mind—only that Mahina might secure them and triumph over her; and the self-same fancy agitated the ample breast of her rival, as the two stood in the cool twilight, within sound of the breakers on the reef, waiting with choking anxiety for Ruru’s words.

“People of Liali!” read the herald impressively, striking an attitude, with one bare leg advanced: “His Majesty King Napoleon Timothy Te Paea III. of Liali, being sovereign by right divine, and the Lord’s Anointed, also High Chief of all the Liali Islands as descendant of the Sacred Lizard, has decided to marry, according to the custom of his forefathers, and give the land of Liali an heir to our mighty crown. The wedding will take place in the mission church to-morrow, at noon and there will be a collection afterwards for expenses! If anyone comes drunk to church, or puts nothing in the plate, he will be turned out. His Majesty hereby announces that, in order to save war and dissension among his loyal subjects, and to teach some princesses to pay him proper respect, he has decided to give the honour of his hand to Princess Vaiti, daughter of Princess Rangi of Atiu, deceased, and Captain Saxon, of the schooner _Sybil_. God save the King, and you are all to go home without making a row.”