Part 9

Rather late next morning, when the bride and bridegroom—the former in a gorgeous gown of yellow curtain muslin, the latter in a thick tweed suit from Auckland that caused him to stream at every pore—were sitting on opposite sides of the little white church, enthroned on chairs all by themselves, and listening decorously to a long preliminary address from the native pastor—Vaiti swept in, and at once brought the ceremony to a momentary pause. The pastor stopped in his address and gaped, the women exclaimed audibly, the bridegroom fixed his eyes on the apparition and sighed in a manner that the bride evidently resented as a personal slight, for she grew still darker in the face than nature had made her, and stared penknives and scissors at Vaiti. Wild titters of delight swept indecorously through the church. The entry was indeed a success—the native pastor found it necessary to address his flock directly, and to tell them that they would undoubtedly all go to hell if they did not behave better in church, before order was restored.

It is not necessary to relate at length how Mata and Ivi were made one, how they walked out of the church nonchalantly by different doors, and were subsequently so deeply interested in the killing of the pigs for the marriage feast, and the preparing of the various cooking-pots, that they did not meet again all afternoon. It was a commonplace wedding enough, and this history is not interested in it, other than as it concerned the affairs of Vaiti. These, indeed, were fairly notable.

For with Vaiti pride very literally brought about a fall that day.

She had had a terrible time getting into her dress, and the whole ship’s company had shared in the trouble. First, the native A.B.’s had to fetch her a big looking-glass from the nearest trader’s, and secure it to the bulkhead of her cabin. Then the cook had to deliver up all the hot water in the galley—at seven bells, with dinner just coming on!—and the boatswain must needs broach the cargo for some special scented soap. Matters were only beginning, however. When the dress was disinterred from its many wrappings and finally put on it became immediately apparent that the bodice could not possibly be made to meet. Perhaps the coming of the bread-fruit season had caused the young lady’s waist to expand—perhaps the practised art of Madame Retaillaud had exceeded anything that a mere amateur could compass in the way of lacing. At any rate, it was not till Vaiti had passed her corset laces out through the port and ordered two of the strongest sailors to tail on to them—not till Harris, agonising with laughter, had directed this novel evolution from the poop for at least five delirious minutes, during which Vaiti several times thought she was dying, but remained none the less determined to die rather than give in, that the deed was accomplished at last, and the “Kapitani” of _Sybil_ was enabled to look at herself in the glass and know heavenly certainty that she was the best dressed woman in the Pacific at that instant, whoever saw or did not see.

The natural result of all this was that in the very hour of her triumph she fainted dead away in the church, for the first time in her life, and had to be carried out.

The ceremony was just over by now, and the bride, still burning with jealousy of the woman who had dared to eclipse her on her wedding day, was among the first of those who crowded round like bees going after honey, to stare at the beautiful creature lying senseless on the sunburnt grass. The bridegroom had sped away hot-foot in the direction of the village, whence certain enticing yells indicated that the pig-slaughter was now going on; but Mata was not a bit appeased by his indifference to the visitor. That dress—and oh, how wonderful it was!—still rankled in her soul.

Mata was a teacher’s daughter, and she knew something of white people’s lore. A brilliant thought darted into her mind as she pressed and struggled in the crowd about the deathly form on the grass....

“Ai, ai! she is surely dead!” wailed the people. “Ai! the-great chieftainess will rise no more!”

“Daughters of a turtle!” said Mata contemptuously. “I will show you if she is dead. It is nothing at all but that she is vain, and wanted to make herself a middle like the ’papalangi’ women, who all look like stinging hornets. Give me a knife, someone.”

A knife was given, and Mata, with horrid joy, half lifted Vaiti and slipped the keen point into the back of the dress.

Rip went the silk with a hideous splitting noise, and the delicate underwear swelled out through the opening like a bush lily bursting its sheath. Mata felt for the stay-lace, and cut that too. The tension on the bodice increased frightfully—the seams gaped and strained....

“She will die, I think, if I do not cut it off,” said Mata hastily, feeling Vaiti reviving under her hand, and anxious to finish her work. Two more cuts of the knife did it. The Paris dress was, speaking sartorially, no more; the owner, lying on the ground, was opening her eyes to the outrage that had been done; and Mata, shrieking with malign laughter, was fleeing wildly through the palms in the direction of the pig-killing, peace in her heart again.

Peace was very far indeed from Vaiti’s heart when she revived and found out what had been done. The crowd drew away from her in fear when they saw her flashing eyes and set, furious mouth, though she said never a word. Confronted by that Medusa-head, they were almost too terrified to find words; but one or two stammered out a hasty explanation that freed the present company from blame by inculpating Mata.

Vaiti did not doubt it—she had seen the bride’s face during the ceremony. Still silent, but flashing looks of sheet-lightning all about her, she drew together her garments as best she could, and walked off in the direction of the ship. As she did so, a little ugly man with red hair slipped out from behind the trees, and looked narrowly at her retreating figure.

“It is the white man from the bush!” cried the girls. “White man of ours, why did you not come down for the wedding?”

“Because I didn’t, my little dears,” replied the newcomer in English, still looking after Vaiti. He stood well in the shade, and did not make himself unnecessarily conspicuous.

“That’s a fine girl, that Mata,” he added by and by. “A smart girl. I should like to know Mata.”

Vaiti put off her going for yet another day. She had business to attend to.

It was very simple business, and it was characterised by the directness that attended all the proceedings of Saxon’s daughter. She merely went up to the bride’s new home, that was so handsomely stocked with trade goods and imported furniture, while the wedding party were making merry in the village after dark, and set fire to it with a torch in about a dozen places. It was very dry weather, and there was a strong wind.

There was scarce a stick of the cottage left when she marched into the village with a blazing torch in her hand, and calmly told the assembled revellers what she had done. Then she left them, seething in a tumult of excitement that almost drowned the hysteric screams of Mata, and went to bed and to sleep with a quiet mind, ready for an early start next morning.

The men came on board late and very drunk, but they did come. They were afraid of Vaiti, and so was Harris, who would very well have liked to extend his revels in the village for another twelve hours, but did not dare to do so. He thought, as he stumbled into his bunk, that the sounds proceeding from the forecastle were a good deal odder than usual—he could almost have sworn that there was one person, if not several, crying in there. But he had good reason for mistrusting the evidence of his senses just then, so he flung himself down and went to sleep.

*CHAPTER XI*

*A DEAD MAN’S REVENGE*

When one is well on the right side of five-and-twenty, with a good ship underfoot, a fair breeze setting steadily from the right quarter, and a pleasant goal ahead, it is hard to be unhappy. Vaiti’s sense of bereavement at the loss of her cherished dress faded considerably before the _Sybil_ had fairly cleared the land, and was gone altogether by the next day. She had done what she felt to be the right thing by Mata; the score was even. Vaiti did not like loose ends of any kind, and she had not left any behind her. She smiled as she thought of it, and paused in her official-looking walk across and across the poop, to revile a native A.B. for leaving the end of a halyard trailing on deck.

“You d—— lazy nigger,” she said. “What sort ship you thinking you stop? You thinking one mud scow” (_Mud cow_ was her pronunciation), “one pig-boat, one canoe belong dam man-eating Solomon boy? I teaching you some other thing pretty quick. Suppose you no flemish-coil that halyard, keep him coil all-a-time, I let ’em daylight inside that black hide belong you, knock ’em two ugly eye into one.”

She plucked a belaying-pin out of the rail and sent it flying at the sailor’s ear. Vaiti was a straight thrower, but the crew seldom failed to dodge; they had every opportunity of becoming proficient. On this occasion, however, the sailor made not the least attempt to escape, and the pin struck him fair and square at the angle of the jaw, and knocked him over. He was hurt, but not stunned, and sat up immediately on the deck, gazing at the tall white figure on the poop with lack-lustre eyes that scarcely seemed to comprehend what they saw.

“Bring ’em that pin,” commanded Vaiti, still in what stood for English with her. She never addressed the crew in the tongue that was native to both.

The man crept slowly aft, and handed it to her. She motioned to him to replace it neatly in the rail, and then pointed to the trailing halyard. It did not escape her, as the sailor made his way down to the main deck, that there were tears in his large black eyes, and that his pareo was tied with a carelessness unusual among Polynesians, and significant of trouble and depression when seen. But she put the one down to the swelled and reddening bruise that marked all one side of his face and the other to the orgies of the previous night. If the men chose to make brutes of themselves on bush-beer, they need not expect that she was going to slacken their work for them on that account. No, not if she broke the head of every man in the ship. She was not Saxon’s daughter for nothing, as they very well knew.

It was small wonder that Vaiti was not popular with crews.

She went on pacing the deck, in the joyous crystal-clear sunlight of the sea. The trade wind ran through the sky like a warm, blue river, the rigging sang, the sails drew steadily. It was a good day, a happy day, a pleasant day to be alive. The girl felt pleased with the world. She took the wheel from the sailor who held it, for the sheer pleasure of feeling the flying vessel answer to the touch of her own light hand. All the force and fury of those roaring sails overhead seemed to concentrate itself here in her fingers, as the power of a great dynamo passes through a single wire. It was almost as if she drove the ship herself. The _Sybil_ went as steady as an albatross; once or twice the spokes fairly shook in her hands.

“The wheel is laughing to-day,” she said in Maori, using the island sailor’s expression.

Dinner-time came round soon, and she descended to eat with Harris alone. Saxon himself did not particularly care whether he dined with his bo’sun or not, if it happened to be convenient to leave Harris on deck; but Vaiti would have run the ship as strictly as a man-of-war at all times, if she could have had her way. Indeed, she would have liked to dine in solitary state, like the captain of a cruiser, had she not had too much good sense to fly in the face of merchant service custom by excluding the mate.

As things were, she graciously condescended to order Harris down to the cabin with her, and they discussed together the inevitable curried tin of Pacific cookery. It was wonderfully light and bright in the little cabin, which was large for the size of the ship, and had plenty of berth and locker space, besides its neatly fitted trade shelves. The bulkheads were painted white picked out with blue (they were satinwood and bird’s-eye maple underneath the paint, a thing which had astonished and perplexed more than one ship’s carpenter in the past quarter of a century), and there was a pretty bird’s-nest fern in a basket hanging from the skylight, and the seats were covered with the neatest thing in blue and white trade prints that Auckland could produce. Vaiti’s taste was evident everywhere, and Vaiti herself, hair freshly combed and held back with a bright ribbon, laces and frills dainty and immaculate as ever, looked, as she demurely poured out tea (you will seldom find the teapot absent from the table of a colonial ship), quite the last sort of person by whom a native A.B. might expect to be knocked into the scuppers. Yet, truth to tell, the unlicked Harris, wolfing his food at the opposite side of the table, was very much better liked by the crew, even though he was heavy-handed enough at times; and he certainly understood more about the five A.B.’s and one ordinary seaman who inhabited the forecastle than did Vaiti, who was half one of themselves, and therefore thought them beneath consideration as a rule.

Of this fact he proceeded to give an illustration when the curry and the tea and the fried bananas were almost done, and nobody’s dinner could be spoilt by unpleasant news.

“Think you’re in for a good time, don’t you, Cap?” he said.

Vaiti, the economical of words, merely nodded. But her face spoke for her.

Harris was never quite sure whether he liked Vaiti in an uncomfortable, indefinite way, or heartily hated her. To-day the balance perhaps inclined in the latter direction. He watched her face with some interest as he said:

“That’s where you spoils yourself, Cap. You ain’t. And if you want my advice, which you never do, I’d tell you that the sooner you ’bouts ship and back to Niué the better.”

Vaiti bit slowly through the piece of bread she was eating and deliberately chewed it, eyeing the mate all the time, before she condescended to answer.

“Mph!” was all she said at last. She had never studied diplomacy, but she knew how much more you learn in general by letting the other person lead the conversation than by talking yourself. And it occurred to her that Harris wanted to make himself important by hinting and patronising over some ship business which might, or might not, be in his department. Well, let him. She would not give him a lead.

Harris, on his part, got angry at once, and blurted out what he had meant to keep a good deal longer.

“Oh, very well,” he said. “You can do just as you likes, of course, but where you’ll find yourself when it comes to a question of mutiny, that’s another two-and-six. Musling curtains on the ports, and white table-cloths, and ropes all flemish-coiled on deck is going to help you a lot then, ain’t they? And if ever I’ve seen signs of trouble in a crew, I seen them to-day, and you knows it—ma’am.”

The last word came with a jerk, screwed out, as it were, by an ominous flash of Vaiti’s eye.

Vaiti herself was thinking very quickly indeed, but you would not have imagined it if you had seen her slowly scooping out the inside of a mummy-apple, and as slowly eating it. She was obliged to acknowledge to herself, now Harris had spoken, that there had been something unusual about the demeanour of more than one of the men since their departure yesterday. But mutiny? Nonsense! Indigestion from too much pork, more likely. She did not believe for an instant that any crew once handled by her father and herself would have an ounce of mutiny left in the lot, if you ran them through a stamp-mill and assayed the result three times over.

So she merely remarked, between spoonfuls:

“You talk plenty nonsense. You keep those men work, they no squeak. Suppose you finish eat, you go tell Gray he come down ki-ki.”

“All right!” said Harris meaningly, trying to make an effective and tragic exit. He was really not at all easy in his mind, and Vaiti’s attitude did nothing to relieve his apprehension of what might be about to follow. The men had never dragged on the rein as they had done these two days past, and he felt it in his bones that there was more than met the eye in the matter.

Vaiti, for her part, was so much incensed by the tone of his remonstrance that she would not even listen to the conviction which began to force itself upon her own mind, next day, that there was really something astray. Luck in general seemed to have deserted them. With a fair wind the schooner should have made the run to Raratonga in three days, but on the afternoon of the second day a dead calm had fallen, and they lay helpless in the trough of the sea by four o’clock, three hundred miles from anywhere.

“All-a-time I saying no good trust those trade winds, when that (adjective) Cook Islands be near,” sighed Vaiti, scanning the horizon vainly right and left. Like a true sailor, she was generally cross in a calm.

“I wish we was out of this, ma’am, I do,” remarked Gray, who was busy spinning sinnet at her feet on the deck. For some odd reason, the sour old bo’sun generally found her more approachable than the others.

“Why?” asked Vaiti, almost amiably.

“Because, ma’am, of that, for one thing. And hothers.”

He pointed forward, and Vaiti saw what she had not noticed before, the ship’s carpenter, a powerful young Mangaian, lying flat on the foc’sle head and obviously weeping.

“They’ve been at that game, one and another, off and on, ma’am, all to-day,” he said. “And you know yourself ’ow we’ve been put to it to get the work out of them. Darned if I knows what monkey tricks they’s up to, but I allow we’re liable to understand all about it before very long, for that sea-lawyer of a fellow, Shalli, he’s bin speechifyin’ down in the foc’sle ’alf of this watch, like a bloomin’ ’Yde Park sosherlist, he has.”

Vaiti glanced at her watch.

“Make him eight bell,” she ordered, scanning the foc’sle hatch.

“Ay, ay, ma’am,” said Gray readily, passing on the order.

The watch below were prompt enough about turning out, but Shalli the forlorn could not, it seemed, find energy enough to get up and turn in. Instead, he beat his curly head upon the planks and began to sob. Vaiti took no notice of him whatever, but just strolled nonchalantly for a minute into her cabin, and reappeared with a slight projection in the bosom of her muslin dress that had not been there before. Harris and Gray looked at each other significantly, and the former cast a swift glance about the vacant horizon. No, not a shred of sail, not a trail of smoke. Only the glancing flying-fish, and the oily, glittering swell, and the hard, pale, empty sky.

The men, who had all been standing in a bunch by the hatch, now signalled to Shalli, who put off the rest of his weeping to a more convenient season, and got upon his feet. Then the six began advancing slowly and uncertainly to the break of the poop. They were a good-looking crew in their way, all Eastern Pacific men, with bright eyes and well-featured brown faces, and their dress—the brilliant red or yellow “pareo” of the islands, gaily figured with enormous white flowers, and the bright cotton shirt or coloured jersey—lent a distinctly operatic air to the little scene. Vaiti and her officers, however (like Molière’s _bourgeois_ who had talked prose all his life without knowing it), had lived in the midst of picturesque and extraordinary things most of their lives, and therefore took no interest, as a rule, in anything save the sternest practicalities.

And it was stern enough in all conscience, this fact with which they were confronted. The men were mutinous, beyond doubt.

Vaiti’s mind rapidly ran over all possible causes for the trouble, even while Shalli was stepping forward and opening his mouth to speak. It could not be rough treatment, because, as a matter of fact, the men were no worse handled on the _Sybil_ than on most other island schooners, and an occasional knock-down blow is not the sort of thing that a Pacific native will seriously resent. It could not be any objection to go to Raratonga—the crew were mostly Cook Islanders themselves, and glad of a chance of seeing their homes. Nor could it be dislike to her command, for a chief rank counts tremendously among Polynesians; and islanders who were ruled at home by a queen of her family would be most unlikely to strike against the authority of one of the Makea race, unless for some very grave cause. It was, of course, possible that they had planned to seize the schooner and run off with it.... She put her hand up to her bosom, and played with the laces that lay over that hard substance under the dress....

But Shalli was speaking now, in answer to her sharp query as to what they wanted there.

He had a good deal to say, and he said it with flashing eyes and much eloquence, using his slender, pointed, brown fingers a good deal to emphasise his remarks, and turning dramatically from his mates to Vaiti, and back to his mates again. Harris listened anxiously, catching only a stray word here and there, for his knowledge of Maori was confined to the few phrases used in running the ship. Shalli was certainly saying that somebody was going to die—that somebody had got to die, and immediately—to judge by the emphasis with which he spoke.... The mate was, as Vaiti had once told him, rather chicken-hearted underneath his great bulk and strength. He felt himself turning chilly, for all the burning sky. What the devil did that fiend of a Vaiti mean by standing there listening as calmly as if they were paying her compliments on her eyes? Perhaps there was no particular trouble after all; but her demeanour was no guarantee, for she would have looked like that if they had all been on the verge of drowning, or burning, or hanging together, any day of the week.

Gray, on the other hand, did not trouble to try and make out anything, but cut a large quid and chewed it at leisure, idly looking on. He did not know if the men meant mutiny or not, and he did not particularly care. They were three whites against six niggers, and there were firearms on their side. And he had seen mutinies in his time beside which any little amusement that could be got up by half a dozen amiable Cook Islanders would seem a mere Sunday-school tea-party. Let them mutiny if they liked. It would not mean the interruption of the work for half a watch.

And Shalli went on talking as if he never would stop, and the _Sybil_ rolled ceaselessly on the idle swell, and the useless sails slapped rhythmically upon the mast. And Vaiti, standing on the poop above the group of men on the main-deck, listened with an unmoved countenance until quite the end of Shalli’s long speech.

When he had finished he turned his face away, and instantly began to weep. And the five other men, exactly as if a tap had been turned on, also began to weep at the same moment, howling loudly and lifting their hands to heaven.

“If this isn’t a bloomin’ mutiny, it’s a bloomin’ lunatic asylum,” declared Harris quite inaudibly in the midst of the hideous noise from the main-deck. It is not a common thing, even in that world where all things are possible, the wide, strange Pacific Ocean, to see a whole ship’s company shedding tears in concert on a calm and peaceful afternoon, with nothing more alarming in sight than a handsome young woman in an expensively pretty frock.

“Ow-ow-ow!” went Shalli, getting quite beyond his own control.

“Ey-ah, eyah!” screamed a plump lad from Aitutaki, fluttering his hands like frantic pigeons.