Part 13

"Tears," he said, "and I only listen. But you--you make the music, and no tears are in your eyes." He looked into her face.

"No," she said, "there are no tears in my eyes." Then she continued hurriedly, as if speaking to herself (and perhaps only a musician would have felt that the catch in her voice went a little deeper than tears): "That's one of the things you lose when you go in for music. It used to be so with me, too."

"I like your music," the boy went on. "My father--English sailor. My mother--learn speak English--from him. She teach me. My father only stay here little time. I never see English people before this."

Rachel looked at him with a quick realization of what his words meant. The boy was at least eighteen years old.

"You remember no ship coming to this island?" she said.

"No. I never see my father. He only stay here little time. My mother think for long time he will come again. That is how she die, only a little time ago. Too much waiting. Make some more music. You have made my ears hungry."

But Rachel was facing the truth now, and she played and sang no more that night.

III

For a week or two, Rachel spent much time alone, thinking hard, thinking things out as she had never done before. She did not quite understand her isolation till the first shock of the full discovery had passed. Then, one morning, sitting alone, and gazing out over the spotless blue, she found herself accepting the plain fact, that this might indeed be for ever. She found herself weighing all the chances, all that she had lost, and all that yet remained to her. It dawned upon her, for the first time, that youth does not lightly surrender the fulness of its life, at the first disillusionment. She knew now that she would have recovered from that first disastrous love-affair. She knew now that she had always known it, and that her search had been only for some healing dittany, some herb of grace that would heal her wound more quickly. She faced it all--the loss of her birthright as a woman, the loss of the unknown lover. She saw herself growing old in this loneliness.

She weighed everything that was left to her, the freedom from all the complications of life, the beauty of her prison, the years of youth and strength that might yet rejoice in the sun and the sea, and even find some companionship among these children of nature that rejoiced in them also. She compared them with the diseased monstrosities, the hideous bodies and brutal faces that swarmed in the gray cities of Europe. She saw nothing to alter her former opinion here. She was condemned at any rate to live among a folk that had walked out of an ode by Keats. But always, at the end, she pictured herself growing old, with her own life unfulfilled.

Then, one day, a change came over her. She had lost all count of time in that island of lasting summer; but she must have been marooned for many months when it happened.

One afternoon, when she had been swimming with Tinovao and Amaru, the two girls had run up into the woods to get some fruit, leaving Rachel to bask on the beach alone. The sunlight of the last few months had tinted her skin with a smooth rosy brown that would have made it difficult to distinguish her from a native, except for the contours of her face and the deep violet of her eyes, as she lay on that milk-white sand. Before she followed her friends, she thought she would take one more ride through the surf. She made her way out, through the gap in the reef, till she had reached the right distance. Then she rested, treading water, while she waited for the big comber that was to carry her back again.

It was her civilized intelligence, perhaps, that betrayed her now, for she turned her back to the sea for a moment, while she drank in the beauty of the feathery green palms and delicate tresses of the ironwood that waved along the shore. She was roused from her dreams by the familiar muffled roar of the approaching breaker, and she turned her head a few seconds too late to take the rush of it as it ought to have been taken. It was a giant and, for almost the first time in her life, she knew the sensation of fear in the sea, as the green crest crumbled into white high over her. In that instant, too, she caught a glimpse of a figure on the reef watching her. It was the figure of Rua, the boy who spoke English; and, as the breaker crashed down with all its tons of water over her head, she carried with her the impression that he was about to dive to her rescue. She was whirled helplessly, heels over head, downward and downward, then swept forward with the rushing whirlpools in the blackness below, like a reed in a subterranean river. She knew that if she could hold her breath long enough, she would rise to the surface; but she had reckoned without the perils of the gap in the reef. Twice she was whirled and caught against a jagged piece of coral, which would probably have killed her if it had struck her head. She took the warning, and held her arms in the best way she could to ward off any head-blow. A lacerated body would not matter so much as the momentary stunning that might prevent her from keeping afloat when she rose. At last, when it seemed that she could hold her breath no longer, she shot with a wild gasp to the surface again.

She found that she was only half-way through the gap, not in mid-stream where she would have been comparatively safe, but in an eddy of boiling water, close to the reef and among sharp fangs of coral that made it impossible to swim. All that she could do, at the moment, was to hold on to the coral and prevent herself from being lacerated against it. The sharp edges of the little shells, with which it was covered here, cut her hands, as the water swirled her to and fro; but she held on, and looked round for help.

Then she saw that she was not fated to receive help, but to give it; and, like lightning in a tropic night, the moment changed her world. She had no time to think it out now; for she saw the face of Rua, swirling up towards her through the green water, and it looked like the face of a drowned man. His head and arms emerged, and sank again, twice, before she caught him by the hand and drew him, with the strength of a woman fighting for life, to her side.

She was not sure whether he was alive or dead; but she saw that, in his hasty plunge to help her, a dive that no native would have taken at that place in ordinary circumstances, he had struck one of the coral jags. Blood was flowing from his head and, as she held him floating there helplessly for a minute, the clear water went away over the white coral tinted with little clouds of crimson. She waited for the next big wave, thinking that it would save or destroy them both. Happily, it had not broken when it reached them; and, as they rose on the smooth back of it, she held her companion by the hand, and struck out fiercely for a higher shelf of the reef. It had been out of her reach before; but the wave carried them both up to its level, and left them stranded there.

From this point, the reef rose by easy stages; and, with the aid of two more waves, she was able to lug Rua to a point where there was no risk of their being washed away, though the clear water still swirled up about them, and went away clouded with red. She lay there for a moment exhausted; but, as her strength came back to her, the strange sensation that flashed through her when she had first come to the surface returned with greater force. Much has been said and sung about the dawn of wonder on the primitive mind. This was an even stranger dawn, the dawn of wonder on a daughter of the twentieth century. It seemed to her that she was looking at the world for the first time, while she lay there panting and gazing out to sea, with those red stains on the white coral, and her hands gripping the slender brown hands of the half-drowned islander. It seemed that she had returned to her childhood, and that she was looking at a primal world that she had forgotten. She saw now that Rua was breathing, and she knew instinctively that he would recover. The wave of joy that went through her had something primitive and fierce in it, like the joy of the wild creatures. She felt like an islander herself, and when the sea-birds hovered overhead, she called to them, in the island tongue, and felt as if she had somehow drawn nearer to them. She looked at the sea with new eyes, as if it were a fierce old play-mate of her own, an old tiger that had forgotten to sheath its claws when it buffeted its cubs. There was a glory in the savor of life, like the taste of freedom to a caged bird. Only it was Europe now, and the world of houses, that seemed the cage. The sea had never been so blue. The brine on her lips was like the sacramental wine of her new kinship with the world....

Then, looking at Rua's face, as the life came back to it, a wave of compassion went through her. Every contour of that face told her that this boy also was a victim of her own kindred. He, too, was marooned, and more hopelessly than herself, for there must be a soul within him that could never even know what it had lost or what it hungered for, unless, ... unless, perhaps, she could help him out of the treasures of her own memory, and give him glimpses of that imperial palace whence he came.

It was growing dark when they slipped into the water of the lagoon and swam slowly towards the beach. There, she helped him to limp as far as his hut, neither of them speaking. He dropped on his knees, as she turned to go, and laid his face at her feet. She stayed for a moment, looking at him, and half stooped to raise him; but she checked the impulse, and left him abruptly.

At the edge of the wood, she turned to look again, and he was there still, in the same attitude. There was a dumb pathos in it that reminded her curiously of certain pictures of her lost world, the peasants in the Angelus of Millet, though this was a picture unmarred by the curse of Adam, the picture of a dumb brown youthful god, perfect in physical beauty, praying in Paradise garden to the star that trembled above the palms.

Many women (and most men) in their unguarded moments, impute their own good and evil to others; read their own thoughts in the eyes around them; pity their own tears, or the tears of Vergil, in the eyes of "Geist." But Rua was praying to the best he knew.

IV

The prayer was a long one. It lasted, in various forms, for more than a year. At dawn, she would wake, and find offerings of fruit and flowers left at her door by her faithful worshiper; and often she would talk with him on the beach, telling him of her own country, about which he daily thirsted to hear more; for the more he learned, the more he seemed to share her own exile. Music, too, they shared, that universal language whose very spirituality is its chief peril; for it is emotion unattached to facts, and it may mean different things to different people; so that you may accompany the sacking of cities by the thunders of Wagner, or dream that you see angels in an empty shrine. Sometimes, in the evening, Rua would steal like a shadow from the shadows around her hut, where he had been waiting to see her pass, and would beg her to play the music of her own country. Then she would sing, and he would stand in the doorway listening, with every pulse of his body beating time, and one brown foot tapping in the dust.

One night, she had been wandering with Tinovao and Amaru by the lagoon, in which the reflected stars burned so brightly that one might easily believe the island hung in mid-heaven. She looked at them for a long time; then, with her arms round the two girls, who understood her words only vaguely, she murmured to herself: "What does it matter? What does anything matter when one looks up there? And life is going ... life and youth."

She said good-night to her friends, and laughingly plucked the red hibiscus flower from behind the shell-like ear of Tinovao as they parted. When she neared her door, a shadow stole out of the woods, and stood before her on the threshold. His eyes were shining like dark stars, the eyes of a fawn. "Music," he pleaded, "the music of your country."

Then he saw the red flower that she wore behind her ear, exactly as Tinovao had worn it. He stared at her, as Endymion must have stared at Diana among the poppies of Latmos, half frightened, half amazed. He dropped to his knees, as on that night when she had saved him. He pressed his face against her bare feet. They were cold and salt from the sea. But she stooped now, and raised him.

"In my country, in our country," she said, "love crowns a man. Happy is the love that does not bring the woman to the dust."

* * * * *

There followed a time when she was happy, or thought herself happy. It must have lasted for nearly seven years, the lifetime of that dancing ray of sunlight, the small son, whom she buried with her own hands under a palm-tree. Then Rua deserted her, almost as a child forsakes its mother. He was so much younger than herself, and he took a younger wife from among the islanders. When she first discovered his intention, Rachel laughed mockingly at herself, and said--also to herself, for she knew that she had somehow lost the power to make Rua understand her,--"Have you, too, become an advanced thinker, Rua?"

But Rua understood that it was some kind of mockery; and, as her mockery was keeping him away from his new fancy, and he was an undisciplined child, he leapt at her in fury, seized her by the throat, and beat her face against the ground. When she rose to her feet, with the blood running from her mouth, he saw that he had broken out two of her teeth. This effectively wrecked her beauty, and convinced him, as clearly as if he had indeed been an advanced thinker, that love must be free to develop its own life, and that, in the interests of his own soul, he must get away as quickly as possible. Thereafter, he avoided her carefully, and she led a life of complete solitude, spending all her days by the little grave under the palm-tree.

She lost all count of time. She only knew that the colors were fading from things, and that while she used to be able to watch the waves breaking into distinct spray on the reef, she could only see now a blur of white, from her place by the grave. She was growing old, she supposed, and it was very much like going to sleep, after all. The slow pulse of the sea, the voice of the eternal, was lulling her to rest.

* * * * *

When the schooner _Pearl_, with its party of irresponsible European globe-trotters, dropped anchor off the island, it was the first ship that had been seen there since the arrival of the _Seamew_, the first that had ever been seen there by many of the young islanders.

The visitors came ashore, shouting and singing, the men in white duck suits, with red and blue pareos fastened round their waists; the women in long flowing lava-lavas of yellow and rose and green, which they had bought in Tahiti, for they were going to do the thing properly. The lady in yellow had already loosened her hair and crowned herself with frangipanni blossoms. The islanders flocked around them, examining everything they wore, and decorating them with garlands of flowers, just as they had done with Rachel's party. The new arrivals feasted on the white beach of the lagoon, in what they believed to be island fashion; and when the stars came out, and the banjos were tired, they called on the islanders for the songs and dances of the South Seas. The lady in yellow tittered apprehensively, and remarked to her neighbor in green, that she had heard dreadful things about some of those dances. But she was disappointed on this occasion. The plaintive airs rose and fell around them, like the very voice of the wind in the palm trees; and the dancers moved as gracefully as the waves broke on the shore.

When the islanders had ended their entertainment, amidst resounding applause, one of the young native women called out a name that seemed to amuse her companions. They instantly echoed it, and one of them snatched a banjo from the hands of a white man. Then they all flew, like chattering birds, towards a hut, which had kept its door closed throughout the day.

They clamored round it, gleefully nudging each other, as if in expectation of a huge joke. At last, the door opened, and a gray, bent old woman appeared. She was of larger build than most of the islanders, and there was something in her aspect that silenced the chatterers, even though they still nudged each other slyly. The native with the banjo offered it to her almost timidly, and said something, to which the old woman shook her head.

"They say she is a witch," said the Captain of the _Pearl_, who had been listening to the conversation of the group nearest to him. "They want her to give us some of her music. She used to sing songs, apparently, before her man drove her out of his house, in the old days, but she has not sung them since. They think she might oblige our party, for some strange reason. Evidently, they've got some little joke they want to play on us. You know these Kanakas have a pretty keen sense of humor."

The visitors gathered round curiously. An island witch was certainly something to record in their diaries. The old woman looked at them for a moment, with eyes like burning coals through her shaggy elf-locks. They seemed to remind her of something unpleasant. A savage sneer bared her broken teeth. Then she took the banjo in her shaking hands. They were queerly distorted by age or some disease and they looked like the claws of a land-crab. She sat down on her own threshold, and touched the strings absently with her misshapen fingers. The faint sound of it seemed to rouse her, seemed to kindle some sleeping fire within her, and she struck it twice, vigorously.

The banjo is not a subtle instrument, but the sound of those two chords drew the crowd to attention, as a master holds his audience breathless when he tests his violin before playing.

"Holy smoke!" muttered the owner of the banjo, "where did the old witch learn to do that?"

Then the miracle began. The decrepit fingers drew half a dozen chords that went like fire through the unexpectant veins of the Europeans, went through them as a national march shivers through the soul of a people when its armies return from war. The haggard burning eyes, between the tattered elf-locks, moistened and softened like the eyes of a Madonna, and the withered mouth, with its broken teeth, began to sing, very softly and quaveringly, at first, but, gathering strength, note by note, the words that told of the love of a soldier who fought in Flanders more than a hundred years ago:

"_Maxwelton's braes are bonnie, where early fa's the dew, And it's there that Annie Laurie gi'ed me her promise true._"

"But it's a white woman," said the lady in the yellow lava-lava, who had expected only the islanders to shock her, "a white woman gone native! How disgustin'!"

"Ssh!" said somebody else, "she's going to give us more."

The old witch hardly seemed conscious of their presence now. The slumbering sea of music within her was breaking up the ice which had sealed and silenced it for so long. She nodded at them, with shining eyes, and muttered thickly, an almost childlike boast:

"Oh, but I could do better than that once. My fingers are stiff. Wait!"

She went into her hut, and returned with the violin. Tremblingly, she opened a little packet of violin strings.

"It's my last," she said. "I've kept it very carefully; but it won't be as good as it used to be."

The throng watched her breathlessly, as she made ready, and the trade-wind hushed itself to sleep among the palms.

"When I was in Europe last," she said, "it seemed to me there was darkness coming. People had forgotten the meaning of music like this. They wanted discord and blood and wickedness. I didn't understand it. But you could see it coming everywhere. Horrible pictures. Women like snakes. Books like lumps of poison. Hatred everywhere. Even the musicians hated each other; and if they thought any one had genius, O ever so little of that--do you know--I think they wanted to kill. Of course, I chose wrong. I ought to have stayed and fought them. It's too late now. But you know the meaning of this? It's the cry over the lost city, before the windows were darkened and the daughters of music brought low."

"Crazy as a loon!" whispered the lady in the yellow lava-lava.

The old woman stood upright in the shadow of a tall palm-tree, a shadow that spread round her on the milk-white beach like a purple star. Then her violin began to speak, began to cry, through the great simple melody of the _Largo_ of Handel, like the soul of an outcast angel.

At the climax of its infinite compassion, two strings snapped in quick succession, and she sank to the ground with a sob, hugging the violin to her breast, as if it were a child.

"That was the last," she said.

They saw her head fall over on her shoulder, as she lay back against the stem of the palm, an old, old woman asleep in the deep heart of its purple star of shadow; and they knew, instinctively, even before the Captain of the _Pearl_ advanced to make quite sure, that it was indeed the last.

X

THE GARDEN ON THE CLIFF

"I don't know about three acres and a cow, but every man ought to have his garden. That's the way I look at it," said the old fisherman, picking up another yard of the brown net that lay across his knees. "There's gardens that you see, and gardens that you don't see. There's gardens all shut in with hedges, prickly hedges that 'ull tear your hand if you try to make a spy-hole in them; and some that you wouldn't know was there at all--invisible gardens, like the ones that Cap'n Ellis used to talk about.

"I never followed him rightly; for I supposed he meant the garden of the heart, the same as the sentimental song; but he hadn't any use for that song, so he told me. My wife sent it to him for a Christmas present, thinking it would please him; and he used it for pipe-lights. The words was very pretty, I thought, and very appropriate to his feelings:

_'Ef I should plant a little seed of love, In the garden of your heart._

That's how it went. But he didn't like it.

"Then there's other gardens that every one can see, both market-gardens and flower-gardens. Cap'n Ellis told me he knew a man once that wore a cauliflower in his buttonhole, whenever he went to chapel, and thought it was a rose. Leastways, he thought that every one else thought it was a rose. Kind of an orstrich he must have been. But that wasn't the way with Cap'n Ellis. Every one could see _his_ garden, though he had a nice big hedge round three sides of it, and it wasn't more than three-quarters of an acre. Right on the edge of the white chalk coast it was; and his little six-room cottage looked like a piece of the white chalk itself.

"But he was a queer old chap, and he always would have it that nobody could really see his garden. I used to take him a few mackerel occasionally--he liked 'em for his supper--and he'd walk in his garden with me for half an hour at a time. Then, just as I'd be going he'd give a little smile and say, 'Well, you haven't seen my garden yet! You must come again.'

"'Haven't seen your garden,' I'd say. 'I've been looking at it this half hour an' more!'

"'Once upon a time, there was a man that couldn't see a joke,' he'd say. Then he'd go off chuckling, and swinging his mackerel against the hollyhocks.

"Funny little old chap he was, with a pinched white face, and a long nose, and big gray eyes, and fluffy white hair for all the world like swans' down. But he'd been a good seaman in his day.