Ridan The Devil And Other Stories by George Lewis Becke (read novel full TXT) 📖

/> 'What is it, Tom?' she asked, leaning against the wall and drawing the comb slowly through her long, black locks.

'Why, the barque will be here in another week or so, so this letter says, and there's a _tamaitai papalagi_ (white lady) on board, and she will very likely stay here with us while her husband, who is the new supercargo, goes away in the ship to the Solomon Islands. He will come for her again in about six weeks.'

* * * * *


Melanie's dark eyes glistened with pleasure. White women were rare visitors at lonely Fana 'alu. Every year, it was true, when the American missionary barque touched at the island, one, or sometimes two, white ladies would come ashore; but they were missionaries' wives, and never passed inside the door of the trader's house to speak to his wife. That, in the eyes of the converted natives, would have been scandalous. Melanie might, if she so wished it, have called upon _them_ at the native teacher's house, and paid homage afar off by sitting down on the mats in the furthest corner of the house, while fat, greasy Lepeka,{*} the wife of the equally fat and greasy teacher Paulo, Christianly whispered in the ears of the holy white ladies that that was the white man's 'woman'--who wasn't married to her 'husband.' And even a white missionary's wife must not offend the spouse of the native teacher. So had any of these ladies wished to talk to Melanie, they would have had to make Lepeka their medium; for in some parts of the South Seas the usual position of vicar and curate is reversed, and the white visiting missionary and his wife deliver themselves into the hands of the brown curate and his wife for the time being. Perhaps it is this that makes most white missionaries so thin--the strain of having to submit to a Kanaka teacher's ideas of conventionality must be pretty hard to bear. And so poor Melanie, who would have liked to have sat near the fair-faced, sweet-voiced white ladies, or, perhaps, fondled their hands, as did the young unmarried girls who always surrounded them, bore her lot with content. For once, when she had brought her simple _alofa_ (gift of love) to the missionaries, and laid it timidly down on the mats in the centre of the room, one of the white ladies had smiled at her and said to her husband,--

'Oh, what a pretty girl, and how nicely she is dressed. Ask her to come here and sit by me.'

* Rebecca.

But Melanie was quick to see Lepeka's dark frown, and discreetly retired to her usual corner, at the back of the room, and when she went home to Masters, she did not chatter and laugh as usual when telling him of all she had seen and heard at the teacher's house.

For, in her simple heart, there began to grow an unrest. She would feel better, she thought, when the mission ship had sailed away again, and she would forget the kind smile of the missionary's wife, and forget, too, the sneering curl of Lepeka's fat lips. Three years before, when Tom Masters had picked her up in a dancing saloon in Apia and had asked her to come away with him to Fana 'alu as his wife, she had thought of a marriage in the church, with its attendant mild excitements, and gluttonies of baked pig and fowls, and _palusami_ and other delicacies, and the receiving and giving of many presents. But when Masters--who possessed a fragmentary conscience--told her why he could not marry her, she accepted the position calmly, and said it did not matter.

Perhaps, among the women of Fana 'alu, she stood highest in public estimation, notwithstanding her bar sinister, for she was open-handed and generous, and both the chiefs wife and Lepeka, the teacher's grand lady, were of common blood--whilst she, despite her antecedents in Apia, was of the best in Manono--the birthplace of the noble families of Samoa.

* * * * *


So, as she stood there in the doorway, first combing and then plaiting her hair _a la Suisse_, she asked in her native tongue,--

'Is she young, Tom? Will she have hair of goldthread like that of the wife thou hadst in Sini{*} long ago--she who married another man?'

* Sydney.

Masters laughed. How could he tell! She might be young and fair; she might be an _olomatua_ (an old woman), dried up and skinny. But that was none of their business. All that he and Melanie had to do was to entertain her well and make much of her.

'True,' said the placid-minded Melanie; 'and even if she be as ugly as an _aitu_ (devil), yet will that fat-faced pig Lepeka die with envy to see a white lady a guest in my house. Would that I could send to Manono for my three brothers, so that they might come here and get drunk, and beat Paulo! I hate Paulo, even as I hate Lepeka, for they both speak evil of _me_, yet are for ever cringing to _thee_, taking eagerly thy gifts of money to the church and the school and the mission fund, and yet whispering of me as the dancing-house whore.'

'Never mind that, old woman,' said Masters, softly, placing his hand upon the girl's head. 'Next year we shall go away from Fana 'alu. We shall go to Ponape, in the far, far north--away from these islands; no bitter tongues shall pain thy heart there.' Then, picking up his hat, he sauntered down to the beach again and stood watching his whale-boat being hauled up into the boat-shed by her native crew.

'_Like the wife he once had in Sydney, long ago._'

He lit his pipe, and began to pace to and fro on the sandy path under the cool shade of the coco-palms and bread-fruit trees, thinking of an incident of his past life, which, although six long years had passed, neither his subsequent wanderings in many lands, nor his three latter years' monotonously happy and lazy existence with Melanie at Fana 'alu, had yet quite banished from his memory. And the chance question put to him half an hour before had brought back to him a vision of the slender, blue-eyed and golden-haired woman who was the partner of his first matrimonial venture.

They had in the beginning led a turtle-dovey kind of life in those old days on the shores of Port Jackson. Not long after their marriage the shipping firm in which he was employed failed, and he had to seek for another billet; and, being an energetic, self-reliant man, with no false pride, he shipped as steward on board the _Noord Brabant_, a hogged-backed, heartbroken and worn-out American lumber ship running between Puget Sound and the Australian colonies. His wife had cried a little at first; but he told her that no one but their two selves would know, and it was better for him to be earning five pounds a month than idling about in Sydney.

On board the crazy old barque he found an acquaintance, who soon became a friend. This was the second mate--another Sydney man--who had shipped on the _Noord Brabant_ because berths on good ships were scarce and mates and skippers were plentiful. So the two men, while the ship was being patched up for her long voyage across the Pacific, spent their evenings together at Masters's house.

Harry Laurance--that was the second mate's name--was a fine, handsome man, with clear, honest eyes and a merry, infectious laugh, and those evenings at his friend's house were a source of unalloyed happiness to him, for from his boyhood he had known no home except a ship or a squalid boarding-house.

One night, as the three sat together in Masters's little four-roomed cottage, and Nellie Masters had ceased playing upon the rattling fifteen-guinea box of discord called a piano, the three made plans for the future. When they--Masters and Laurance--returned from Puget Sound, they were not to part. Laurance, who had had long experience in the Island trade, had saved a little money--not much (as he told Masters one day when he placed ten sovereigns in the latter's hand, and asked him to accept it as a loan for his wife's sake), but nearly enough to buy a little thirty-ton vessel he knew of which was for sale, and which would be just the craft to run on trading voyages from New Zealand among the islands of the Gambier Group--if they could load her with trade goods. And he knew a man in Puget Sound who, he thought, would lend him a few hundreds, and take a third share in the venture. Then, when he and Masters returned from the impending voyage to Sydney, they, with Mrs Masters, would go over to Auckland, buy the schooner and the trade goods, and then sail for Manga Reva in the Gambier Group, where Masters and his wife were to buy a bit of land and put up a trading station, whilst Laurance ran the little vessel to and fro among the various islands of the group, and brought back pearl shell and copra for sale to the big German firm in Tahiti. And Masters's pretty wife smiled joyously. She did not like to be parted from Tom for nearly seven months; but seven months was not a lifetime--and then they would be so happy, away from the grinding poverty of their existence in Sydney.

* * * * *


Dreams! Six weeks afterwards, as the old _Noord Brabant_ lay groaning over on her beam ends, thrashing her canvas to ribbons in a fierce night squall off Beveridge Reef, Tom Masters, hurrying on deck to help the hands shorten sail, was knocked overboard by the parting of the spanker-boom guy, and disappeared without a cry, into the seething boil to leeward.

For two hours--after the squall had ceased, and Masters was missed--the boat searched for him under the bright rays of a silvery moon and a clear, cloudless sky. But every now and then rain fell heavily, and though the boat rowed round and round the ship within a radius of two or three miles no answering cry came to the repeated hails of the crew. So then the _Noord Brabant_ stood away again on her course, and Harry Laurance lay awake all his watch below, thinking sadly of his friend and of the dreadful shock which awaited the young wife in Sydney.

But Tom Masters did not drown. When he came to the surface of the water he found himself floating among the _debris_ of the quarter-boat, which, when the spanker-boom guy parted and the heavy spar swung over to leeward, had swept the after-davit out of its socket and let the boat hang, stern down, by the for'ard fall, until the labouring old barque, raising her stern high out of the water, smashed down upon it as it dragged under her counter and tore out the for'ard ringbolt.

Half-stunned by the force of the blow which he had received on the back