THREE days had passed since Hawahee’s terrible appeal to the gods. Sestrina stood in the shelter of her kitchen singing happily. The raft was finished. She and Hawahee were about to embark, to seek the future on the unknown seas around their island home. “Oh, how happy I feel! We are going out to the seas; the gods will be—!”

She dropped her platter full of cooked fish—a terrible cry had reached her ears! Whose cry was it? She stood trembling from head to feet. Hawahee had gone a few moments before for his morning swim in the sea, just behind the coral reefs where he would be hidden by the shore’s palms. Why had he given so despairing a cry? Sestrina rushed from the palavana. Her feet skimmed the sands without noise as she ran out to the edge of the promontory. She stood perfectly still, as though death had stricken her stiff with terror while in an attitude of upright despair. Her face expressed terror in loneliness. Her outblown hair, and lips apart, seemed to voice the wail of all unknown sorrows, her hands, clasped tightly together, the symbol of all human appeal; her wide open staring eyes all dire disaster beneath the sun! For, as she reached the promontory’s edge, she had seen two hands toss up visible for a second above the calm glassy surface of the sea, then swiftly disappear!

No thought came to her as to the cause of this calamity. Whether Hawahee had been seized by a shark, or cramp, or had deliberately tied a lump of coral stone to his feet ere he took his last dive off the promontory’s edge, was something that never puzzled Sestrina. He had gone! that was enough to know! Even the huge sea-birds seemed to hover near and gaze with startled eyes as she stood there—immovable, staring in the awful fascination of hopelessness at that spot!

All day long she rushed to and fro to the promontory’s edge calling “Hawahee! Hawahee!” and weeping.

“’Tis coming, the night, the stars, the moon, I cannot stay!” she cried as she spoke with pagan grief to the ocean, over which the first pale stars were creeping.

She ran down to the raft. It was floating within the entrance of the creek by the reefs. One push and it would go seaward.

Darkness swept over the seas. Sestrina stared in fright up the shore. She was alone! Her half-demented mind peopled the shadows with unknown terrors. Indescribable loneliness smote her heart like a blow. She gazed up at the stars in anguished appeal. But the stars only seemed to gaze in some immutable sorrow and hopeless silence that thundered nightmare-sounds into her soul. Her grief-stricken mind magnified the solitude—if that could be. She groped about the bamboo thickets and puli ferns as she ran up the shore. Such was her loneliness, that she eagerly sought the companionship of the lepers’ graves on the plateau. She ran back to the shore and screamed for Hawahee again. The echoes of her despairing voice awakened the roosting cockatoos and strange birds; up, up they flew, shrieking discordantly in the darkness as they dashed against each other in their blindness. The demented woman looked like a wraith calling the dead as she wrung her hands and ran along the shore, calling “Hawahee! Lupo! Rohana! Steno! come to me!” her mind so distraught that she reverted to the companionship of the dead lepers.

The lagoons along the shore and the calm ocean before her shone with the ethereal gleams of a thousand thousand stars. The trade winds that commenced to blow every night, began to softly sigh. She had made up her mind to go seaward on the raft.

Suddenly she thought of her own shape standing under the palms by the shell temple. She turned round and stared inland, a startled gleam in her eyes—she would seek its companionship! The impulse to gaze on that shape which had been moulded from the dreams of the dead Hawahee, made her stand breathless in some terrible ecstasy of despair. Her sad, fallible mortal intellect, groping in its boundless dark, had clutched a straw on the ocean of hopeless misery. In some vague, mad fancy of the brain she had thought to crush, to outwit destiny’s cruel spite, to still possess the companionship of Hawahee’s mortal conception of herself in cold stone. The next second the impulse had vanished. She realised that the shattered mirror of the past can never again reflect the tender glance of loving eyes. She knew that Hawahee’s conception of the sensuous beauty of her faultless form had vanished with the tossing of his hands from his ocean grave.

The thought of her stone-shape standing under the island’s trees, suddenly filled her soul with boundless misery. She detested it! In her terror-stricken imagination she could see the full, perfect lips, the lovely lines of the bosom and the passion-charmed curves and pose of the whole form, clearer than had she run into the valley and stood before it. She remembered Hawahee’s embrace of that unresponsive shape, and how he had breathed thrilling words when he had clasped her form and found it warm and impassioned as his own. Standing there, she tore her tappa blouse apart, and, gazing down on her bosom, longed for a knife to stab; then thumped and bruised the flesh in some agony!

“Jesu! God, PelÉ! PÈre Chaco, forgive me!” Her voice echoed to the distant valley, coming faintly back as though vast night in sympathy repeated her despairing cries. Again she cried, “Save the soul of my last girlhood and bury my womanhood for ever deep in these everlasting seas!” That was Sestrina’s last appeal to the hollow seabound-night, whereof she was the lone mortality, lonely as God before creation.

Standing there, trembling in fright, she stared seaward, afraid to glance behind her. Her hands were outstretched, her face slightly raised so that her eyes could stare on the horizon’s stars. She resembled some emblematical figure of mortal despair, with lips apart, breathing a prayer to the winds of the universe. The religious emotion, the spiritual fervour of her soul had brought to her mind the magic flash which so often had inspired Hawahee and herself with the wonderful compelling power that had enabled them to send their thoughts roaming the universe. Again and again she felt the visionary beauty of that higher life which feeds the soul of sorrow and brings the light divine which enables humanity to become conscious of God and elevates the human mind. Again and again she appealed to the heavens, asking that her thoughts might fly back to the memory of her girlhood—that he might know she had been faithful in her soul to him through the years of sorrow. She inclined her head and listened. No answer came. Only the restless moaning of the ocean and the melancholy sighing of the bending shore palms whispered to her ears. And as she stood there with wide open eyes, her hair outblown, she might easily have been some terrible, but lovely representation, some symbol of all mortal sorrow, all broken hopes, all shattered dreams and blighted simple faith; some perfect chiselled goddess face telling of woman’s perfect trust and love immortal, staring with cold, bright eyes across the infinite seas! Her head fell forward; her arms dropped to her sides.

Without a cry she jumped on the raft. She cast it adrift—away, away, anywhere from that despairing loneliness! Every tree, every reef and familiar spot filled her heart with a sickening terror as she gazed shoreward for the last time. Slowly the raft drifted, and slowly the shadows of the shoreline receded. Suddenly she struggled to drift shoreward again. She beat the water with her hands for she had no paddles—she had heard a faint, sepulchral voice, coming from the deep shadows up the shore, from the direction of her silent dwelling. “O Atua, O PelÉ!” it had cried—it was the aged cockatoo, Rohana, calling for his evening meal. But still the raft drifted out on the relentless tide of unchangeful circumstance. For a moment she lay prostrate in grief over her deserted bird. The next minute she had jumped to her feet, wringing her hands in despair. She placed her fingers to her ears, as slowly and mournfully came those sounds, stealing over the silence of the ocean—the temple gods had moaned aloud! The terror-stricken woman heard those solemn shell-mouths calling her; she heard some appeal in their deep, moaning voices, asking her not to desert them, leave them alone in the great solitude of the valley of the island’s lonely hills, set in endless oceans. As the raft drifted out to the silent, starlit seas, the meaning voices became fainter and fainter.

The castaway soon prayed for death. But death does not come easily to those who dwell in its shadow. She had neither food nor water on the raft. She had cast herself adrift, caring not where the mighty tides might take her.

Day came. The hot sunlight swept the silent tropic seas. Nothing but illimitable skylines surrounded the raft as it floated adrift on the burning waters—a tiny world of floating grief and misery unutterable, its whole humanity a fragile form, speechless with thirst, its whole breath of life and creed, tossing hands appealing to the great dumb, blind, earless tropic sky!

Night came. The vast tomb whereon the living dead moaned and tossed, no longer had the brassy glare of the day over it, but was covered with a mighty slab, bright with a million stars. Then the first great shadow of death crept over her brain. It came like a lovely dream, devoid of pain and anguish, a dream full of infinite hope. She even smiled as she dreamed on and thought she heard some one climbing up the grape-vine below her casement in Port-au-Prince. And as she murmured the old names, memories brought ineffable peace to her soul as the raft drifted away for ever, fading into the vastnesses of the unknown seas.

Sunset still lingered on the skyline across the English hills, as a man gazed from the latticed window of his study that faced the Channel cliffs. He was watching the idly flapping crows fade away into the crimson-streaked western glow. Why did the sight of the distant firs and dark pines and the undulating grey hills so strangely influence him?

Some one softly opened the door and said, “Would you like to see her?”

“Yes,” he responded as he turned his head and gazed on the speaker, who thereupon closed the door and departed. Then a pale-faced woman softly entered the room. She carried a swaddled child in her arms. It was Royal Clensy’s first-born.

“Why call her Sestrina? It is a strange name; what made you think of it,” said the woman as she gazed in wonder up at the earnest face of the man.

“Oh, nothing, it’s the name of some one I knew abroad, years ago.”

The man’s voice had become strangely soft and tender. Why did his senses swim as a great sorrow crept over his heart? He tried to calm himself; then gazed in surprise at the child’s eyes. They had suddenly opened wide, had looked straight into his own.

“She has dark eyes,” he stammered as the woman stared. His voice shook. Was it imagination? Why did the child’s gaze and his own meet as though in the surprised light of swift recognition?

The woman crept from the room, softly closing the door behind her.

Royal Clensy stared like one in a dream through the window-pane, apparently gazing out towards the distant seas. “Well, of all the world of women the child reminds me of her—Sestrina!” he muttered. And as he gazed, the pale hands of half-forgotten romance seemed to scrape up and down the window-pane. He threw the lattice wide open. Was it the winds that caressed his brow as the rich scent of the wistaria drifted to his nostrils, coming like the scented odours from orange groves?

“Sestrina, you—after all these years!” he murmured.

Then he sadly smiled as he stared again at the image of the two stars that seemed to stare up from the bowl where the goldfish swam, as, like outblown hair, the leaves of the wistaria touched his face. His mind wandered, went far away. It was not the Channel cliffs by the English seas that he saw; he was gazing on the vast solitude of tropic seas, and knew that the voice that called his name was no foolish sound, no freak of the imagination. He felt the hot tropic wind touch his face. He saw the castaway’s raft as it drifted on—on towards the skylines of infinity. The great blinding sun shone over a phantom day. He saw the silent, huddled form, and the fluttering rags as the hot wind blew, revealing the bleached, whitened skeleton—the relic that had called to him; the call which had roamed, how far across the universe before he heard? He knew the truth. Even the waves seemed to put forth their hands and pluck in sorrow, as they gently tossed against the craft which bore that sad burden of all his soul’s conceptions of the beautiful on the drought-swept depths of the past. It was as though the ocean felt the sorrow of it all, had sent her children, the waves, that they might push the fragile freight of that lone argosy into the deep calm of her bosom for rest.

The vision slowly passed. The castaway’s raft became as shadowy as those whitened bones of old trust, love and simple faith, as it faded away into the great dusk of the starlit tropic seas—with all that had once been the beautiful Sestrina.