Waylao leaves the Matafas in Apia—She drifts a Castaway at Sea—Her Sufferings—The Canoe beaches on an Uninhabited Isle—The Natural Guest of her Sorrow arrives—Death—Strange Visits to the Isle—The Strangers tell Waylao of their Sufferings—Sympathy—Aiola the Hawaiian and O Le Haiwa-oe, her Lover—Mrs Matafa’s Shawl as a Distress Signal—Waylao’s Ruse—Castaways in Sorrow

WHEN Waylao decided to leave the Matafas in Samoa she had been in Apia exactly one month.

The kind old Matafas had wished her good-night, as gently as though she were their own daughter, and then retired to their sleeping compartment. Although the half-caste girl had become quite attached to those old Samoans since first they received her with open arms, the longing for her native isle and the memory of those whom she had loved when a child overcame all the trouble she felt at leaving her benefactors. She resolved to steal one of the beach canoes on the shore by the Matafas’ homestead and put out to sea on her own account, trusting to luck. It was a mad idea, full of peril, and yet as she told her tale bit by bit quietly, and relentlessly, it seemed as though all that she had set out to accomplish had come to her in the fullest measure.

Once out on those wide waters, adrift in that tiny craft, she knew she would be at the mercy of the elements. The chances of being sighted by a passing ship and taken to her native land were very remote, as one may imagine.

But what cared Waylao? She troubled not whither the winds blew her, only longed to drift away on those illimitable waters.

Without hesitation she jumped into the first canoe that she sighted, lifted the paddle and pushed the tiny craft into deep water. The tide was ebbing southward as she drifted away to sea. The dim, forest-clad shore by Mulinuu faded from her sight like a dream of yesterday. She seemed to be leaving reality for the realms of the great unreal as she glided on the bosom of that mighty tide.

Away! Away! Anywhere away, she cared not whither.

The winds of heaven came down; they seemed to come to caress, to respond to the vague wishes of the stricken girl. Their caressing, shifting fingers touched her hair and fevered brow. Ineffable peace breathed languor into her brain, and she slept. No mortal pen can tell the dreams of that castaway girl as the sentinel night stared with a million million eyes on to those waters of the Pacific.

A faint flush brightened the east—daybreak was coming. The stars took hasty flight down the encircling sky-lines as Waylao awoke.

Dawn, like a mighty river’s multitudinous flood of infinite colour, swept into that vast, hollow vault as the first pang of the new day’s birth commenced. Crimson, splashed with lines of saffron and green, climbed, glimmered, flickered and flamed as they touched and fired the lines of mist on the eastern horizon, while far to the south-west the last flock of stars took frightened flight.

The birth of that mighty splendour broadened till the gold-flashing eye of day looked over the blue horizon. Nothing but the vast azure circle of infinite water was in sight, only the frail castaway, a stricken girl adrift, fleeing from wrath, the hatred of outraged virtue.

The very heavens seemed to assume a serious mood. The eye of day stared with magnificent heat from its unlidded socket of all the sky. Old Mrs Matafa’s hands had toiled divinely for the coming events of Time unborn, for out of the measures of her weaving fingers happened that which her soul had no hint of in her wildest dreams, as she knitted and knitted, for lo! the perishing castaway ceased appealing to the dumb sky and drew the laced folds of that old shawl over her sun-scorched head. But for the protection of that old shawl the girl would certainly have perished under the blaze of that brassy sky.

Thirst leapt into her frame with demon craving. The sun dropped like a ball of blood into the ocean and glimmered fiercely in its fading light. Like a goblet of boiling blood lifted on the sky-line, it appeared, then suddenly disappeared.

Notwithstanding her sufferings, the girl still felt the cherished desire of humanity to cling to life—though suffering the pangs of death. In that tiny drifting craft on a world of torpid water, afloat beneath illimitable space, she knelt in prayer to the great dumb sky. The crowded stars at first seemed to mock her. Then, like far-off bright thoughts of longing, they came to her, like flocks of her own unattainable desires, and peeped up at her imaged in the vast, silent waters.

A puff of wind ruffled that mirror and swept the deep waters into reefs of illusive radiance. Then came a wind like an infinite breath of pity, and the dying, parched relic of humanity sucked in that cold sigh of night—as one would drink water. Still she floated on. Slowly a silver glimmer of ineffable wildness flushed the south-west horizon; its broadening tide of radiance outrivalled the earnest splendour of the stars. Higher and higher it climbed, till the full, haggard moon peered like sorrow on that lost child, and stared, with sad surprise, on the edge of the ocean. It lit that hollow vault of night with a ghostly gleam, a gleam that revealed no movement but the tossing arms of the delirious castaway.

Who can paint that scene? Who can describe one iota of the indescribable misery and anguish ere the senses were numbed and the head drooped, faint from its prayer to a heaven that listened not, in all the vastness of that terrible silence?

Another day swept in like a mighty silence of breathing fire. It came almost without warning across those silent, tropic seas. It was as though from the tomb-like vault some mighty starry slab of night had been suddenly uplifted, revealing a vast sepulchre and deep, deep below one little corpse huddled in its shroud, a corpse that still drifted across the silent, blazing seas—as Death, the grey-nosed shark, followed silently.

But Waylao was not dead. It was not the hot furnace winds of heaven that fluttered old Mrs Matafa’s shawl—(I have that shawl)—it was the convulsed movement of death’s despair in one who still lived.

In the delirium of that unquenchable blaze of sunlight Benbow’s misguided daughter lifted her head. It was an eternity of seconds ere she could muster strength enough to hang her face over the rim of her drifting world, then she drank, drank, drank!

Only the infinite powers know why she did not die as that liquid brine stiffened her parched frame with frantic fits of madness.

On, on she drifted. Yet another day swept the skies, yet again Time lifted that tremendous lid from the vault of reality. Just as Fate loves to shatter the dreams, the aspirations, the hopes of men, it seemed to delay the everlasting touch of sleep, the sleep that hovers like an angel with beating wings, waiting to close all eyes.

For lo! that same night the heavens poured down their sparkling drops. The showers of cool liquid drenched her face as she screamed in the ecstasy of its cruel blessing.

With the refreshing fluid on her parched lips, and the cool breezes of heaven, her senses awakened; but only dimly was her mental vision restored. Phantoms danced across that world of water. Shadows of the wrack of clouds, racing beneath the moon, fled away into the darkness of the far-off, silent horizons, and it may have been those shadowy contortions of the sky that peopled the ocean solitude with visions for the girl whose eyes were glazed with insanity. The face of her Islamic betrayer hung enframed beneath the stars. She lifted her hands and beat the air, and cursed that visionary face of evil.

Then her mother came to her, and who knows what visions of those whom she had loved, those who had watched over the innocence of her childhood? Once more her senses were numbed and she fell huddled to the bottom of the canoe.

On the third or fourth day Waylao lifted her death-stricken face and wondered if she still lived. She stared around. Had she died, and was she still travelling onward across some purgatorial ocean of death? As she stared, she saw a tiny blot; it glimmered on the western horizon. At first she thought it was a ship; then in her delirium she thought it was the shores of Nuka Hiva in sight.

At such a possibility the love of life that is so strong in youth awoke again, and her being thrilled with tremendous hope. She might yet live to gaze into the eyes of those she loved.

As the setting sun broadened in the west, the dark spot glittered and took definite shape. One by one tiny hills arose, then plumed palms stuck out in bright relief, distinctly visible against the background of the yet more distant sunset.

The strong, hot north wind still blew and laughed along the rippling sea, yes, as though it knew that its unseen hands were fast drifting the poor derelict to deliverance from the homeless ocean.

At the sight of the little isle with its palms and all the materialised beauty of Nature’s handiwork blossoming forth flowers and ferns, the stricken girl fell on her knees and thanked God, God who in His own inscrutable way had answered her prayers.

Ere sunset faded down into ocean depth behind the solitude of that small, uninhabited isle, Waylao could hear the murmuring of the deep waters on the reefs, and saw the singing waves running up the shore, tossing their hands with delight.

In the reaction from deepest despair to the renewed hope she struggled to a sitting posture and laughed in the madness of delirium. Then she slept.

The stars were crowding the heavens when the canoe suddenly beached itself. The impact of the frail craft on the coral reefs tore the bottom, and so the cooling waters crept in and swathed the fevered limbs of the unconscious girl.

Waylao’s life was not yet closed, though Providence would have been more merciful to have taken her soul away beyond the deepest sleep.

As the cool waters swished about her body, her eyelids quivered; she moved, then sat up and looked around.

Who knows what terrible thoughts haunted her delirious brain as she tried to fathom the loneliness, the deep silence of the small world whereon she had drifted? The pangs of thirst stupefied her faculties. The moaning of the winds in the belt of palms just up the shore inspired her heart with terror, and seemed to mock her misery.

Too weak to stand, she crawled up the little patch of soft sand to the lagoon that glimmered in the hollows by the shore. She almost screamed with delight as the life-giving crystal fluid crept between her cracked lips, moistening her parched throat. It was fresh water. Dimly realising that she was safe from the desolation of the trackless ocean, she crept into the shadow of the bamboo thickets and, quite exhausted, fell asleep.

There she lay, alone beneath the infinite skies. The great world, with its cities and histories, did not exist so far as she was concerned.

Awakening with the gilding of the eastern horizon, she gazed around and at once realised her awful position. Terror seized her. She lifted her face and screamed, then listened. No answer came; only the weird screech of the frightened parrots that had rested, on their migrating flight, in the trees over her head. They rose in glittering flocks and hovered a long time just over the isle ere they once more settled down.

With the rising of the kind sun her terror decreased. But the horror of the loneliness on that silent world still remained. All that she had suffered (only a part of which my pen can attempt to tell) had destroyed her natural pluck. She was as weak as a child.

So great was her grief, and so vividly was the scene burnt in her brain as she stared about her, that she told us how the tiny waves came up the shore to her feet singing a song of tender fellowship.

Then how she ran about the isle calling aloud, in the hope that some human being might exist in that loneliest spot in creation.

But when only the echoes of her own voice answered her despairing cries, the awful desolation overwhelmed her, and she rushed back with terrified eyes to the singing shore waves, and huddled near their presence, just as a child might run from danger back to the security of its little comrades.

The day passed with renewed tropical vigour. The sun seemed to hiss as its molten mass of splendour dropped splash into the sea.

The sea-birds muttered. The migrating cockatoos sat on the topmost branches of the four solitary bread-fruit trees. They looked like big yellow and crimson blossoms that had whistling, chuckling beaks as they all started off on their flight across the trackless seas. Waylao saw them fade like a group of distant caravans on the silent desert blue of the sky-line—leaving her alone in the vast Pacific.

Night came with its terror of darkness and the immutable stars. The girl’s mind, like that of a child, flew back to the nearest bonds of her existence.

“Mother! Mother! Father!” she wailed, staring first at the stars across the sea, then behind her, with fright.

Strange pangs commenced to convulse her being. The critical moment of her sorrow had arrived. The pangs of our first mother, Eve. But she was alone—not even the devil to comfort her.

In the first instincts of approaching motherhood she looked behind her; the terror of the gloom had vanished. She turned and crept into the harbouring thicket of bamboos and tall ferns beneath the plumed palms.

In that silent, loneliest spot on earth she huddled, couched and trembling. She forgot her desolation. The torturing memory of the past vanished. A feeling of fierce joy thrilled her. She began to feel the helpless, tender companionship of the unborn.

Wild delirium, intense longing, half anguish, half joy came to her memory as she remembered the man who had brought the pangs of hell upon her.

A gleam of cruel reality crept into her brain: she remembered the truth.

Struggling to her feet, she screamed: “Abduh! Abduh! I curse you! I curse you and your Mohammed! I curse him!”

She clutched the figure of the Virgin that was at her breast and cried: “O Mary! Mother! O Christ, I have forsaken you!”

In the anguish of her soul’s remorse she crossed herself and fell on her knees. She called the name of Father O’Leary, he who had taught her from childhood.

“Father, Father, I had doubted you, and all the beauty of my childhood’s dreams.”

As Waylao reached this point in her terrible narrative the old priest looked into the half-blind eyes of the girl, and touched her brow with his lips. I saw his hot tears fall on to her face, and half fancied that we stood before the dead who had inherited heaven, so beautiful was the look in the stricken eyes of the girl as the old priest blessed her. Outside the homestead mission-room the stars were shining, and the seas were beating over the barrier reefs. Still the lips of her who was as one dead spoke on.

The white sea moon crept over the silent sea. Its reflected light bathed with silver the palms of that solitary isle. Only a breath of wind came up the shore and stirred the dark-fingered leaves as at last Waylao slept.

The sleeping girl’s bosom moved to the sad music of mortality’s soothing kindness: two small hands were pressing vigorously and a tiny mouth was toiling away for all it was worth at those soft, warm wells of nourishing sorrow.

Dawn struck the east. The day broadened. Waylao lifted her baby up in her arms. It blinked at the light of its first mortal day—and wailed.

Did she, in the ecstasy of a mother’s first inquisitiveness, peer closely at the small face of that little stranger, the stranger who had come as the natural guest of her sorrow—and sin?

She looked fiercely at it as it wailed as though it pleaded forgiveness for that which was not its fault.

A mad desire to live came to her. She rushed down to the shore. Nothing but the blue encircling sky-lines met her hopeless gaze. Her only chance of being rescued was by some schooner being blown out of its course by the terrific typhoons that sometimes swept those hot, unruffled seas. She found a large cave by the shore, not far from the small promontory. Near its gloomy entrance stood a belt of screw-pines and a clump of coco-palms. By the time sunset had once more blazed the western seas she had piled up a barrier of hard coral and rock at the cavern’s low doorway. For in there the wind rushed from the sea, gave a hollow moan and ran out again.

At the far end of this cavern the wretched girl made a soft couch of fern-moss and ti-leaves. It was on this bed that she crept with her child to sleep.

All night long the waves ran up the shores, tossed their wild arms and wailed by the entrance, in wonder that the silence of the old cavern, whereat they had knocked and knocked for ages, should be broken by the wail of a human child.

In imagination Father O’Leary and I saw that cave, and distinctly heard that pitiful wail. We saw the stricken girl mother creep like a wraith beneath the stars of that solitary island world of the trackless Pacific. We saw the tawny mass of ripe coco-nuts hanging as though from the kind hands of Providence. They fell at her feet, so that she might give the child nourishing milk, for grief and illness had stayed its natural food.

Day by day the child sickened. One night the flocks of parrots and strange birds—that none had ever named—suddenly rose in a screeching drove above the palms of that lonely isle. Up, up they rose, fluttering beneath the white South Sea moon. They had been disturbed from their roosts by the agonised scream of the demented human being who had so mysteriously arrived on their little world. It was Waylao’s screech that had disturbed them. Humanity had come with its manifold woes and terrors to their world, and so the very birds of the air groped and fluttered blindly with fright up in the moonlit sky.

Waylao’s child lay on the moss at the end of the cavern, its face resting on one small hand. It had turned waxen white. A wonderful expression seemed to sleep on its face. Only the still, open eyes told the girl of the indefinable something that had happened. She rushed to the shore and dipped its warm body in the sea. The limpness of the limbs and the head struck terror into her heart. She had never seen death like that before. The wandering sea-gulls hovered, came near the shore swiftly and silently, as though with curiosity, then they swerved upward, up over the island’s palms, leaving her sitting alone with the dead infant clutched to her breast.

The moon which flooded the ocean with brilliant light as it gazed on that tragic drama, that scene of the lonely seas, had also shone upon the dark-walled shadow cities of the far, far north-west, the remote wilds of advanced civilisation. It shone on the huddled masses of humanity on the streets of London, New York and Paris—lines and lines of serried dark walls and dirty, ghostly windows. Its beams had streamed into the dim hollows of how many thousands of dungeons wherein slept the huddled forms of breathing humanity, and upon the enchanted castles of happiness, on happy faces of men, women and laughing maidens. And still it shone down on that silent isle set in a silent sea, where one frail girl looked down on a dead child’s face.

But on that night Providence sent other strange beings out of those seas of mystery.

As Waylao sat motionless, paralysed with loneliness and pain, staring vacantly seaward, her heart leapt as she saw what looked like a phantom ship on the dim horizon. She almost screamed with joy as the rigging of that distant craft took definite form. The midnight breeze was hurrying in with the incoming tide, the tide that hurried the small breakers up the white beach.

Like one demented she ran about in her excitement, as nearer and nearer crept the tiny craft.

Though it was still afar off, she held the dead child above her head and screamed. Only the echoes of her own voice responded from the rocky silence of her island world.

What was that strange-looking craft floating into that silent bay? As it came into full view, it looked like some spectral hulk. Waylao stared. She felt afraid. Was it some phantom derelict that was silently approaching that unknown isle? The deck was nearly level with the sea, and all awash with the waves. An old spanker swayed to and fro. The tattered canvas sail still hung just over the broken deck-house, and the jib flapped in the moonlight. But no one was at the helm.

As that strange derelict swerved with the tide, it heaved and came round the edge of the promontory into full view. A gleam of moonlight streamed through the palms, as it hugged the shore and fell slantwise across the deck.

Waylao crept out on to the promontory, then stopped, petrified with fright.

A terrible spectacle met her gaze, and the thought flew into her demented mind that this was some ghostly craft with a crew of devils aboard, who had come to take her dead child, and her, too, away to purgatory.

No wonder she shrieked with horror.

Even in the security of that little mission-room the old priest and I trembled and gasped at what we heard. No wonder Waylao’s scream broke the terrible silence of that awful scene, and at the sound the crew of huddled, ghostly shadows on the hulk’s deck moved.

Slowly one rose to its feet; then two more figures followed. The heads seemed to waver as though the eyes sought the four points of the compass with helpless indecision.

What were they? Devils or human beings? I will tell you. Those figures lifted their heads and turned their faces to the shore. They heard by instinct the direction of Waylao’s terrified call. They stared at her with shining, bulged eyes; they tried to open their gaping, fleshless mouths in ghastly efforts for speech. They were rotting, hideous skeletons.

By the remnant of that hulk’s deck-house stood a tall native chief. He and a beautiful native girl who clung to him alone looked human. They both stared with fright, first at Waylao, and then across the silent isle.

Waylao watched, paralysed with fear. Then from the deck arose two more skeleton figures—revealing their hideous, noseless faces.

They lifted their heads as though with terrible effort. Their mouths gave forth hollow moans as they slowly sank down again, out of sight, among the wreckage of the deck.

One diseased, eaten face stared through the grating which had been fixed up as an extemporised bulwark on the port side.

Waylao gave a terrified cry and turned to flee inland.

As she did so a hollow voice called out in a strange tongue:

“Aloha! Aloha! Wai! Wai! [water].”

The cry so resembled some distressed call of humanity that Waylao’s fright was slightly subdued. She turned and swiftly glanced over her shoulder, her heart beating with strange fear—a wild hope came that the awful visitants might, after all, be friendly spirits in evil disguise. She stared with terrified wonder. Three stricken forms stood on the deck. In the dim light she saw them waving their skeleton hands; but they were calling with beseeching voices, voices that thrilled Waylao’s heart with joy, horror and hope.

She lifted the lifeless infant above her head again. In her delirium she still thought that the direct cause of their visit was—her sorrow.

In response to her cry, a terrible form arose from the deck and stared at her as she held the dead child. That figure from out of the mystery of the silent seas lifted its hands and cried out:

“E ko mako Makua i-loko O ka Lani” (“Our Father which art in Heaven”).

Waylao heard that word Lani. She knew that it meant heaven. Her first great fright vanished. “They are the dead from heaven,” she thought.

Suddenly the hulk crashed against the reefs by the shore, swerved round and stopped still.

The stricken forms rose from the deck, lifted their skeleton faces and for a moment stood terribly visible as they swayed helplessly by the broken mast.

The moonlight brightened the tattered sails. It streamed down through the branches of the surf palms that grew on the edge of the promontory.

Once again those gaping mouths moaned forth: “Wai! Wai!”

As the hulk swerved and listed towards the rocks, the handsome chief leapt ashore, and the woman who had clung to him immediately followed.

For a moment that handsome stranger stood and gazed at Waylao like one in a dream, as she looked up into his fevered, bright eyes.

Staring hurriedly around, he suddenly rushed forward and prostrated himself at the edge of the lagoon. Placing his mouth into the crystal liquid, he breathed like an animal, and drank, drank, drank! His companion, the native girl, likewise prostrated herself and drank beside him.

As Waylao watched, her fright subsided. They were human. For who but mortals could be so maddened by thirst? Her heart was touched with sorrow.

The chief rose to his feet, filled a large calabash with water and returned to the derelict.

Waylao watched, with her heart in her mouth. The sorrow of others overshadowed her own, as she saw the huddled, loathsome forms on that hulk’s deck struggling for the water, their poor heads wobbling as they sought with their blind eyes to locate the calabash.

The Hawaiian maid on the shore, standing by Waylao, forced a smile to her lips, as she, too, watched. It was an unselfish attempt to reassure her companion, to let her know whatever sight met her eyes was a sight of deepest sorrow and nothing that could harm her.

When the chief returned to his comrade’s side, they both whispered together and glanced at Waylao. Then the strange girl took the dead child from the exile’s arms and laid it gently in the fern grass by the lagoon. They spoke to Waylao in soft, musical speech. Seeing she did not understand their language, they said:

“Wahine, you lone? No ones else belonga here?”

The Hawaiian girl clutched the chief’s arm with fright as they both awaited Waylao’s reply. But when she answered, “I am quite alone, no one else is on this island but me,” those silent listeners seemed endowed with renewed life.

They gazed at each other with delight streaming from their eyes. The chief lifted his hand to heaven and shouted some deep thanksgiving to Lani. The intense misery of the woman’s eyes vanished. She turned to Waylao, took her hand and pressed it impulsively. Suddenly she withdrew it and gave a start of terror. For the chief had looked on the Hawaiian girl and reminded her of the curse that lay upon them. But Waylao, who had never thought to hear the music of human voices again, forgot her own grief.

But who were they? What were those terrible figures huddled on the deck of the hulk? Instinct told her that some terrible sorrow had drifted across the sea, some sorrow that was tragically human. That stricken crew had not come to hurt the girl. They would not wilfully harm a hair of her head. They had drifted out of the hells of misery. They were the stricken of the earth. They had escaped from the tomb where the buried still have memories of lovers, husbands, wives and children—yes, the tomb of God’s utterest pestilential misery, where the dead still curse, still dream that they hear the laughter of other days moaning in the wind-swept pines, on the shores of beetling, wave-washed crags.

They came from where the dead lay in their shrouds and could hear, with envy, these toiling spades as their comrades were buried by night—comrades, twice dead, released, at last, from their loathsome, rotting corpse, life’s hideous, bloated face, gaping, fleshless mouth and bulged, half-blind eyes.

O tragical truth! The handsome chief, the beautiful, clinging woman and the stricken crew of the hulk were escapes—fugitives from the dreadful lazaretto on Molokai, the leper isle.

The Hawaiian chief and his lover—for such they were, though stricken with the scourge—had no sign as yet visible on their faces.

The sympathetic look that Waylao gave them, the pleasure she revealed at their presence, touched their hearts. It was long, long ago since human beings had welcomed their presence.

The Hawaiian girl plucked some palm leaves and gently covered Waylao’s dead child.

Then the Hawaiian chief and his tender comrade went back to the hulk and proceeded to bring their leper comrades ashore. In a few moments they both appeared by the hulk’s broken bulwarks and threw some planks that made a gangway down to the wet sands, and began to carry their stricken comrades, one by one, on a deck grating, down to the shore.

There were five all told. One was a flaxen-headed little boy of about six years of age. As they laid the little form beneath the palms, the child lifted its head and moaned.

Waylao, touched with intense pity, disobeyed the order of the chief, went towards the figures of the stricken and attempted to soothe them.

She had no thought of the chances she took of catching the terrible malady, but she gave a cry of horror at the sight that met her eyes.

It seemed impossible that such advanced dissolution should still live; the fleshless, skull-like heads wobbled and lifted, the bulged, glass-like eyes stared at her like hideous misery. The stricken beings discerned the look of sympathy on Waylao’s face. The fleshless mouths smiled. The girl half drew back, for the look in those eyes, the movement of those lips resembled some grin of hate, rather than the intense gratitude that they yearned to express.

As Waylao watched, she heard splashes in the sea, and, looking in the direction of the hulk, saw the Hawaiian chief in the act of throwing the last body into the ocean depths. These were the bodies of the crew who had died ere they reached the isles, and three corpses of those who had drank too quickly of the water on deck, and so had died at once in agony. It appeared that when the hulk sailed away from the leper isle there were fourteen on board. After a week of drifting across the ocean the number was reduced to nine. Another few days without water and scorched by the blazing tropical sun had finished off three more, till only five arrived ashore alive.

The chief had finished his terrible task on the hulk, and as Waylao watched the dark spots bobbing about on the moonlit waters, she saw them drifting round by the promontory’s edge, then, with the tide, go seaward.

The Hawaiian girl clung tightly to her companion’s tall, handsome figure and moaned. The reaction had set in.

“Aiola, Aiola!” he murmured in the tenderest way as he looked down into her uplifted eyes. He was robed in the picturesque Hawaiian costume—a broad-fringed lava-lava to his tawny knees, round his waist a tappa robe swathed in a row of knots of ornamental design.

Aiola, for that was the girl’s name, looked with the deepest affection up into his eyes, then kissed his tattooed, brown, shapely shoulders.

Waylao no longer attempted to shrink from the afflicted. She helped gather soft mosses and leaves. The stricken lepers opened their terrible eyes and regarded her with deep tenderness as she helped to make their couches.

“No touch! No touch! Unclean! Unclean! Mai Pake! Mai Pake!”^[6] they moaned as she pushed their limp, helpless limbs into more comfortable positions.

“Ora, loa, ia Jesu,” breathed one as she closed her eyelids and died—on the shore.

Ere the night passed they had all died; only the Hawaiian chief and his mistress lived.

As the dawn brightened the east they were still sitting huddled beneath the screw-pines. As the sun streamed across the seas, Waylao, the chief and the Hawaiian girl crept beneath the shade of the palms and slept.

So did sorrow in its most terrible form come across the seas to bring balm and true comradeship to the friendless Waylao.

That same day the chief brought old sails and gratings ashore. Ere sunset had faded he had fixed up the cavern’s hollow into two compartments, one for himself and the other for Waylao and Aiola.

The beautiful Hawaiian girl sat by her lover’s side and sang songs to him, looking up into his face all the while she sang—yes, in a way that was like one sees in glorious pictures of tender romance, only it was beautifully, terribly real.

The chief told Waylao how he had loved the maid since she was a little child; how before she had reached womanhood the leprosy spot had appeared on her body. Then came the terrible edict that condemned all lepers to life exile on the Isle of Molokai. He told Waylao how he had hidden the Hawaiian girl in a cave by the shores of his native isle. But notwithstanding all his precautions they had discovered that he had a lover hidden somewhere, a lover who had the dreaded leper spot, and was striving to elude the clutch of the leper-hunters.

One night a terrified scream broke the silence of the shore caves, and Aiola was taken away across the seas to the dread lazaretto. Then, to the chief’s delight, he discovered the dread Mai Pake—the leper spot—on his own body. He, too, was sent to the leper lazaretto, and so met Aiola again.

They had clung to each other with the arms of love, but, still, the loathsome sights, ever haunting their eyes, had made them yearn to escape, anywhere, anywhere across the seas, from that living tomb.

Pointing to the hulk that lay high on the sands, for the tide had left it dry, he said:

“That hulk was the means of our deliverance; it was washed ashore on the Isle of Molokai through a hurricane. One night, under the cover of great darkness, we did creep down to the shore. When we got on to the hulk and stowed away in the dark hold, awaiting to push it into deep water as the tide rose, we discovered that another lot of lepers had also stowed away, ready for the outgoing tide. At first we were sorry, then we became exceedingly glad, for it was only by their help that we were enabled to push the hulk with bamboo rods into deep water.

“So did we drift away to sea. A great storm was blowing from the north-west. The matagia [gale] blew for five days. We all hid in the hold, for we were frightened that some ship might sight the drifting hulk and search and find us. But the great white God heard our prayers, and so we were not discovered!”^[7]

As the Father and I listened to the girl’s story, we marvelled with astonishment, so evident was the intense interest the exiled girl had taken in those stricken people, completely forgetting her own troubles. The Father’s eyes were blind with tears, and so were mine.

Waylao came to love those Hawaiian exiled lepers. She also would kneel beside the castaways and pray and sing with them.

Though they were both cursed with the plague, no spot had, as yet, commenced to show its hideous presence on either of their faces.

The Hawaiian girl had contracted the malady years before her companion, so the signs of the scourge were considerably advanced on her body; but still her shoulders and breast were smooth and beautiful, and still the Hawaiian chief, O Le Haiwa-oe, sang to the beauty of Aiola’s eyes. But one day he noticed that those eyes he loved had begun to look dull and shiny-looking. His heart beat as though it would burst, so deep was his sorrow over what he knew was inevitable.

The leper girl’s swift instinct saw that look on her lover’s face. She blushed deeply and trembled with fright at the thought of the hideous rot, which at last had commenced to show itself on her features.

O Le Haiwa-oe looked at her and said: “Beloved, thou art as lovely as of yore, ’twas the beauty of your eyes that made me gaze into them.”

But Aiola was not to be deceived.

As the days went on, Waylao resolved to stay in exile with those sad fugitives.

So, without telling them, she went out to the dead screw-pine that stood on the edge of the promontory, piled up the rocks one by one, then, standing on them, took down the large bit of canvas sail, fastened there as a signal of distress. She had only allowed it to be placed there through the pleadings of the poor Hawaiians. They knew that the inevitable hour was drawing near when life would be more than a living death, for would they not see their own dissolution? They cared not for the risk of a schooner sighting that signal. It would take Waylao away to safety, but it would not take them. No; the Hawaiians had resolved to go on a longer journey should their hiding-place be discovered. When O Le Haiwa-oe saw Waylao take the signal down, his eyes filled with tears, and in a moment he had run out to the edge of the promontory and placed the canvas sail fluttering to the breeze.

At last a ship was sighted on the horizon. It was beating its lonely way to the north-west. Waylao looked at it with longing eyes. Her heart went out to the white sails that could so easily bear her homeward. She dreamed that she heard the voices of the sailors on deck, and saw the tenderness in their eyes as they carried her on board; then she turned and looked at the stalwart Hawaiian leper chief, and the clinging maid. They, too, were staring seaward, but their eyes were fevered-looking, they were both silent with fear.

“Go and hide in the cave,” said Waylao. “If they should see the signal and come, I will say there are no more here!”

For a moment both the stricken leper lovers looked at her with deep gratitude. A look was in their eyes like the look in the eyes of hunted animals, as they crept into the cave and hid.

When they had both crept away into the dark, they wondered why Waylao had not wished them good-bye, for would she not be taken away on the ship for ever? Aiola, at the thought, sobbed in her lover’s arms.

The schooner was now distinctly visible. Waylao saw the light of the sunset gleaming on the flying sails. Though a tremendous longing thrilled her heart, she crept out on the promontory. She thought of her mother and father and the kind priest. But though her heart cried within her, still she did not hesitate. Standing beneath the dead tree, she piled the stones up as swiftly as possible, took down the distress signal and waited till the schooner had passed before she replaced it.

Then she rushed back to the cave, and called softly:

“Aiola! O Le Zeno! Come, come! The ship has passed, and you are safe!”

The lepers came forth with a look of half-wild delight on their faces, though still trembling, for life is sweet, however sad.

In a moment the Hawaiian chief glanced at the distress signal, “Aiola!” he said, and the leper maid also looked. For a while the two stricken Hawaiians gazed into each other’s eyes, their hearts too full to speak—Waylao had in her hurry put the signal flag back upside down.

In a moment they had seen through the self-sacrifice of their little comrade. Without saying a word, they looked into each other’s eyes, the three of them, and then burst into tears—and far away, on the dim horizon, the schooner’s sails faded like the wings of a grey sea-bird.