The Ebbing Of The Tide

Ere two days had passed she was missing, and six weeks later a little white-painted schooner hove-to off one of the Paumotu Group, lowered a boat, and landed her amongst the wondering natives.

The dark-faced, black-bearded man who steered the boat held her hand a moment ere he said good-bye.

“It is not too late, Loisé.”

She raised her face and laughed scornfully.

“To go back? To go back to hear the old man who was a father and the good woman who was a mother to me, tell me that they hated and despised me!” And then quick, scalding tears.

The man’s face flushed. “No, not that, but,” with an oath, “look here, if you’ll come with me I’ll head the schooner for Tahiti, and as soon as she swings to her anchor we will be ashore and married.”

She shook her head. “Let me go, Captain Lemaire. Whatever comes to me, ‘tis I alone who must answer for it. And so—good-bye.”

She stood and watched the boat hoisted to the davits, and saw the schooner slowly gather way, and then glide past and disappear round the palm-crowned point. Then she turned with streaming eyes and choking voice to the brown-skinned people that stood around her, and spoke to them in her mother’s tongue.

So ended the sixteen years’ life of the beautiful Miss Lambert and began that of Loisé, the half-blood.

There was a wild rush of naked, scurrying feet, and a quick panting of brown bosoms along the winding path that led to Baldwin’s house at Rikitea. A trading schooner had just dropped anchor inside the reef, and the runners, young lads and girls—half-naked, lithe-limbed and handsome—like all the people of the “thousand isles,” wanted to welcome Baldwin the Trader at his own house door.

Two of them—a boy and girl—gained the trader’s gate ahead of their excited companions, and, leaning their backs against the white palings, mocked the rest for their tardiness in the race. With one arm around the girl’s lissom waist, the boy, Maturei, short, thickset, muscular, and the bully of the village, beat off with his left hand those who sought to displace them from the gate; and the girl, thin, créole-faced, with soft, red-lipped mouth, laughed softly at their vexation. Her gaily-coloured grass waist girdle had broken, and presently moving the boy’s protecting arm, she tried to tie the band, and as she tied it she rattled out oaths in English and French at the score of brown hands that sought to prevent her.

“Hui! Hui!! Away, ye fools, and let me tie my girdle,” she said in the native tongue. “‘Tis no time now for such folly as this; for, see, the boat is lowered from the ship and in a little time the master will be here.”

The merry chatter ceased in an instant and every face turned towards the schooner, and a hundred pair of curious eyes watched. Then, one by one, they sat down and waited; all but the two at the gate, who remained standing, the boy’s arm still wound round the girl’s waist.

The boat was pulling in swiftly now, and the “click-clack” of the rowlocks reached the listening ears of those on shore.

There were two figures in the stern, and presently one stood up, and taking off his hat, waved it towards the shore.

A roar of welcome from the thronging mass of natives that lined the beach drowned the shrill, piping treble of the children round the gate, and told sturdy old Tom Baldwin that he was recognised, and scarce had the bow of the boat ploughed into the soft sand of the beach when he was seized upon and smothered with caresses, the men with good-natured violence thrusting aside the women and forming a body-guard to conduct him and the young man with him from the boat to the house. And about the strange white man the people thronged with inquiring and admiring glances, for he was big and strong-looking—and that to a native mind is better than all else in the world.

With joyous, laughing clamour, the natives pressed around the white men till the gate was reached, and then fell back.

The girl stepped forward, and taking the trader’s hand, bent her forehead to it in token of submission.

“The key of this thy house, Tâmu,” she murmured in the native tongue, as she placed it in his hand.

“Enter thou first, Loisé,” and he waved it away.

A faint smile of pleasure illumined her face; Baldwin, rough and careless as he was, was yet studious to observe native custom.

The white men followed her, and then in the open doorway Baldwin stopped, turned, and raised his hand, palm outwards, to the throng of natives without.

“I thank thee, friends, for thy welcome. Dear to mine ears is the sound of the tongue of the men of Rikitea. See ye this young man here. He is the son of my friend who is now dead—he whom some of ye have seen, Kapeni Paraisi” (Captain Brice).

A tall, broad-shouldered native, with his hair streaming down over his shoulders, strode up the steps, and taking the young man’s hand in his, placed it to his forehead.

“The son of Paraisi is welcome to Rikitea, and to me, the chief of Rikitea.”

There was a murmur of approval; Baldwin waved his hand again, and then, with Brice, entered the house.

Outside, the boy and girl, seated on the verandah steps, talked and waited for orders.

Said Maturei, “Loisé, think you that now Tâmu hath found thee to be faithful to his house and his name that he will marry thee according to the promise made to the priests at Tenararo when he first brought thee here?”

She took a thick coil of her shining black hair and wound it round and round her hand meditatively, looking out absently over the calm waters of the harbour.

“Who knows, Maturei? And I, I care not. Yet do I think it will be so; for what other girl is there here that knoweth his ways, and the ways of the white men as I know them? And this old man is a glutton; and, so that my skill in baking pigeons and making karri and rice fail me not, then am I mistress here.... Maturei, is not the stranger an evil-looking man?”

“Evil-looking!” said the boy, wonderingly; “nay, how canst thou say that of him?”

“What a jolly old fellow he is, and how these people adore him!” thought Brice, as they sat down to dinner. Two or three of the village girls waited upon them, and in the open doorway sat a vision of loveliness, arrayed in yellow muslin, and directing the movements of the girls by almost imperceptible motions of her palm-leaf fan.

Brice was strangely excited. The novelty of the surroundings, the wondrous, bright beauty of sea, and shore, and palm-grove that lay within his range of vision were already beginning to weave their fetal spell upon his susceptible nature. And then, again and again, his glance would fall upon the sweet, oval face and scarlet lips of the girl that sat in the doorway. Who was she? Not old Baldwin’s wife, surely! for had not the old fellow often told him that he was not married?… And what a lovely spot to live in, this Rikitea! By Jove, he would like to stay a year here instead of a few months only.... Again his eyes rested on the figure in the doorway—and then his veins thrilled—Loisé, lazily lifting her long, sweeping lashes had caught his admiring glance.

Brice was no fool with women—that is, he thought so, never taking into consideration that his numerous love affairs had always ended disastrously—to the woman. And his mother, good simple soul, had thought that the best means of taking her darling son away from unapproved-of female society would be a voyage to the islands with old Tom Baldwin!

Dinner was finished, and the two men were sitting out on the verandah smoking and drinking whisky, when Brice said, carelessly—

“I wonder you never married, Baldwin.”

The old trader puffed at his pipe for a minute or two ere he answered—

“Did you notice that girl at all?” and he inclined his head towards the door of the sitting-room.

The young man nodded.

Then the candid Baldwin told him her history. “I can’t defend my own position. I am no better than most traders—you see it is the custom here, neither is she worse than any of these half-blooded Paumotuans. If I married a native of this particular island I would only bring trouble on my head. I could not show any preference for any particular girl for a wife without raising the bitterest quarrels among some of the leading chiefs here. You see, as a matter of fact, I should have married as soon as I came here, twenty years ago; then the trouble would have been over. But I didn’t. I can see my mistake now, for I am getting old pretty fast;… and now that the missionaries are here, and I do a lot of business with them, I think us white men ought to show them some kind of respect by getting married—properly married—to our wives.”

Brice laughed. “You mean, Baldwin, they should get married according to the rites of the Roman Catholic Church?”

“Aye,” the old trader assented. “Now, there’s Loisé, there—a clever, intelligent, well-educated girl, and as far as money or trade goes, as honest as the day. Can I, an old white-headed fool of sixty, go to Australia and ask any good woman to marry me, and come and live down here? No.”

He smoked in silence awhile, and then resumed.

“Yes; honest and trustworthy she is, I believe; although the white blood in her veins is no recommendation. If ever you should live in the islands, my lad—which isn’t likely—take an old fool’s advice and never marry a half-caste, either in native fashion or in a church with a brass band and a bishop as leading features of the show.”

Loisé came to them. “Will you take coffee, Tâmu?” she asked, standing before them with folded hands.

The trader bent his head, and as the girl with noiseless step glided gracefully away again he watched her.

“I think I will marry her, Brice. Sometimes when the old Marist priest comes here he makes me feel d–d uncomfortable. Of course he is too much of a gentleman—although he is a sky-pilot—to say all he would like to say, but every time he bids me good-bye he says—cunning old chap—‘And think, M. Baldwin, her father, bad as he was, was a white man!”

The young man listened in silence.

“I don’t think I will ever go back to civilisation again, my lad—I am no use there. Here I am somebody—there I am nobody; so I think I’ll give the old Father a bit of a surprise soon.” Then with his merry, chuckling laugh—“and you’ll be my best man. You see, it won’t make any difference to you. Nearly all that I have, when I peg out, will go to you—the son of my old friend and shipmate.”

A curious feeling shot through Brice’s heart as he murmured his thanks. The recital of the girl’s history made him burn with hot anger against her. He had thought her so innocent. And yet the old trader’s words, “I’ve almost made up my mind to marry her,” seemed to dash to the ground some vague hope, he knew not what.

That night he lay on a soft mat on Baldwin’s verandah and tried to sleep. But from between the grey-reds of the serried line of palms that encompassed the house on all but the seaward side, a pale face with star-like eyes and ruby lips looked out and smiled upon him; in the distant and ever varying cadences of the breaking surf he heard the sweet melody of her voice; in the dazzling brilliancy of the starry heavens her haunting face, with eyes alight with love, looked into his.

“D–n!” He rose from his couch, opened the gate, and went out along the white dazzle of the starlit beach. “What the devil is the matter with me? I must be drunk—on two or three nips of whisky.... What a glorious, heavenly night!… And what a grand old fellow Baldwin is!… And I’m an infernal scoundrel to think of her—or a d–d idiot, or a miserable combination of both.”

In a few days two things had happened. Baldwin had married Loisé, and Brice was madly in love with her and she with him. Yet scarcely a word had passed between them—he silent because of genuine shame at the treachery of his thoughts to the old man; she because she but bided her time.

One day he accepted an invitation from the old French priest to pay a visit to the Mission. He went away quietly one morning, and then wrote to Baldwin.

“Ten miles is a good long way off,” he thought. “I’ll be all right in a week or so—then I’ll come back and be a fool no longer.”

The priest liked the young man, and in his simple, hospitable way, made much of him. On the evening of the third day, as they paced to and fro on the path in the Mission garden, they saw Baldwin’s boat sail up to the beach.

“See,” said the priest, with a smile, “M. Baldwin will not let me keep you; and Loisé comes with him. So, so, you must go, but you will come again?” and he pressed the young Englishman’s hand.

The sturdy figure of the old trader came up through the garden; Loisé, native fashion, walking behind him.

Knitting his heavy white eyebrows in mock anger he ordered Brice to the boat, and then extending his hand to the priest—“I must take him back, Father; the Malolo sails to-morrow, and the skipper is coming ashore to-night to dinner, to say good-bye; and, as you know, Father, I’m a silly old man with the whisky bottle, and I’ll get Mr. Brice to keep me steady.”

The tall, thin old priest raised his finger warningly and shook his head at old Baldwin and then smiled.

“Ah, M. Baldwin, I am very much afraid that I will never make you to understand that too much of the whisky is very bad for the head.”

With a parting glass of wine they bade the good Father good-bye, and then hoisting the sail, they stood across for Rikitea. The sun had dipped, and the land-breeze stole softly down from the mountains and sped the boat along. Baldwin was noisy and jocular; Brice silent and ill at ease.

Another hour’s run and Baldwin sailed the boat close under the trading schooner’s stern. Leaning over the rail was the pyjama-clad captain, smoking a cigar.

“Now then, Harding,” bawled the old trader, “don’t forget to be up to time, eight o’clock.”

“Come aboard, and make out your order for your trade, you noisy old Areoi devil,” said Harding. “You’ll ‘make it out ashore,’ eh? No fear, I won’t trust you, you careless, forgetful old dog. So just lay up alongside, and I’ll take you ashore in half an hour.”

“By Jupiter, I mustn’t forget the order,” and Baldwin, finding he could not inveigle the captain ashore just then, ran the boat alongside the schooner and stepped over her rail—“Go on, Brice, my lad. I’ll soon be with you. Give him some whisky or beer, or something, Loisé, as soon as you get to the house. He looks as melancholy as a ghost.”

As the boat’s crew pushed off from the schooner, Brice came aft to steer, and placing his hand on the tiller it touched Loisé’s. She moved aside to make room for him, and he heard his name whispered, and in the darkness he saw her lips part in a happy smile.

Then, still silent, they were pulled ashore.

From his end of the house he heard a soft footfall enter the big room, and then stop. She was standing by the table when, soon after, he came out of his room. At the sound of his footstep she turned the flame of the shaded lamp to its full height, and then raised her face and looked at him. There was a strange, radiant expectancy in her eyes that set his heart to beat wildly. Then he remembered her husband—his friend.

“I suppose Tom won’t be long,” he began, nervously, when she came over to him and placed her hand on his sleeve. The slumbrous eyes were all aglow now, and her bosom rose and fell in short, quick strokes beneath her white muslin gown.

“Why did you go away?” she said, her voice scarce raised above a whisper, yet quivering and tremulous with emotion.

He tried to look away from her, trembling himself, and not knowing what to say.

“Ah,” she said, “speak to me, answer me; why don’t you say something to me? I thought that once your eyes sought mine in the boat”—then as she saw him still standing awkward and silent, all her wild passion burst out—“Brice, Brice, I love you, I love you. And you, you hate me.” He tried to stop her.

Her voice sank again. “Oh, yes, yes; you hate me, else why would you go away without one word to me? Baldwin has told you of—of—of something. It is all true, quite true, and I am wicked, wicked; no woman could have been worse—and you hate me.”

She released her hold upon his arm, and walking over to the window leant against it and wept passionately.

He went over to her and placed his hand upon her shoulder.

“Look here, Loisé, I’m very, very sorry I ever came here in the Malolo”—her shaking figure seemed to shrink at the words—“for I love you too, but, Loisé—your husband was my father’s oldest friend—and mine.”

The oval, tear-swept face was dangerously close to his now, and set his blood racing again in all the quick, hot madness of youth.

“What is that to me?” she whispered; “I love you.”

Brice shut his fists tightly and then—fatal mistake—tried to be angry and tender at the same moment.

“Ah, but Loisé, you, as well as I, know that among English people, for a man to love his friend’s wife–”

Again the low whisper—“What is that to me—and you? You love me, you say. And, we are not among English people. I have my mother’s heart—not a cold English heart.”

“Loisé, Baldwin is my friend. He looks upon me as his son, and he trusts me—and trusts you.... I could never look him in the face again.... If he were any other man I wouldn’t care, or if, if–”

She lifted her face from his shoulder. “Then you only lied to me. You don’t love me!”

That made him reckless. “Love you! By God. I love you so that if you were any other man’s wife but his–” He looked steadily at her and then, with gentle force, tried to take her arm from his neck.

She knew now that he was the stronger of the two, and yet wished to hear more.

“Brice, dear Brice,” she bent his head down to her lips, “if Baldwin died would you marry me?”

The faintly murmured words struck him like a shot; she still holding her arms around him, watched his face.

He kissed her on the lips. “I would marry you and never go back to the world again,” he answered, in the blind passion of the moment.

A hot, passionate kiss on his lips and she was gone, and Brice, with throbbing pulses and shame in his heart, took up his hat and went out upon the beach. He couldn’t meet Baldwin just then. Other men’s wives had never made him feel such a miserable scoundrel as did this reckless half-blood with the scarlet lips and starry eyes.

That night old Baldwin and the captain of the Malolo got thoroughly drunk in the orthodox and time-honoured Island business fashion. Brice, afraid of “making an ass of himself,” was glad to get away, and took the captain on board at midnight in Baldwin’s boat, and at the mate’s invitation remained for breakfast.

At daylight the mate got the Malolo under weigh, the skipper, with aching head, sitting up in his bunk and cursing the old trader’s hospitality.

When the vessel was well outside the reef, Brice bade him good-bye, and getting his boat alongside started for the shore.

“I will—I must—clear out of this,” he was telling himself as the boat swept round the point of the passage on the last sweep of the ocean swell. “I can’t stay under the same roof with him day after day, month after month, and not feel my folly and her weakness. But where the deuce I can get to for five months till the schooner comes back, I don’t know. There’s the Mission, but that is too close; the old fellow would only bring me back again in a week.”

Suddenly a strange, weird cry pealed over the water from the native village, a cry that to him was mysterious, as well as mournful and blood-chilling.

The four natives who pulled the boat had rested on their oars the instant they heard the cry, and with alarm and deep concern depicted on their countenances were looking toward the shore.

“What is it, boys?” said Brice in English.

Before the native to whom he spoke could answer, the long, loud wailing cry again burst forth.

“Some man die,” said the native who pulled stroke-oar to Brice—he was the only one who knew English.

Then Brice, following the looks of his crew, saw that around the white paling fence that enclosed Baldwin’s house was gathered a great concourse of natives, most of whom were sitting on the ground.

“Give way, boys,” he said, with an instinctive feeling of fear that something dreadful had happened. In another five minutes the boat touched the sand and Brice sprang out.

Maturei alone, of all the motionless, silent crowd that gathered around the house, rose and walked down to him.

“Oh, white man, Tâmu is dead!”

He felt the shock terribly, and for a moment or two was motionless and nerveless. Then the prolonged wailing note of grief from a thousand throats again broke out and brought him to his senses, and with hasty step he opened the gate and went in.

With white face and shaking limbs Loisé met him at the door and endeavoured to speak, but only hollow, inarticulate sounds came from her lips, and sitting down on a cane sofa she covered her face with her robe, after the manner of the people of the island when in the presence of death.

Presently the door of Baldwin’s room opened, and the white-haired old priest came out and laid his hand sympathetically on the young man’s arm, and drew him aside.

He told him all in a few words. An hour before daylight Loisé and the boy Maturei had heard the old trader breathing stertorously, and ere they could raise him to a sitting position he had breathed his last.

Heart disease, the good Father said. And he was so careless a man, was M. Baldwin. And then with tears in his eyes the priest told Brice how, from the olden times when Baldwin, pretending to scoff at the efforts of the missionaries, had yet ever been their best and truest friend.

“And now he is dead, M. Brice, and had I been but a little sooner I could have closed his eyes. I was passing in my boat, hastening to take the mission letters to the Malolo when I heard the tagi (the death wail) of the people here, and hastening ashore found he had just passed away.”

Sick at heart as he was, the young man was glad of the priest’s presence, and presently together they went in and looked at the still figure in the bedroom.

When they returned to the front room they found Loisé had gone.

“She was afraid to stay in the house of death,” said Maturei, “and has gone to Vehaga” (a village eight miles away), “and these are her words to the Father and to the friend of Târau—‘Naught have I taken from the house of Tâmu, and naught do I want’—and then she was gone.”

The old priest nodded to Brice—“Native blood, native blood, M. Brice. Do not, I pray you, misjudge her. She only does this because she knows the village feeling against her. She does not belong to this island, and the people here resented, in a quiet way, her marriage with my old friend. She is not cruel and ungrateful as you think. It is but her way of showing these natives that she cares not to benefit by Baldwin’s death. By and by we will send for her.”

After Baldwin had been buried and matters arranged, Brice and the priest, and a colleague from the Mission, read the will, and Brice found himself in possession of some two or three thousand dollars in cash and as much in trade. The house at Rikitea and a thousand dollars were for Loisé.

He told the Fathers to send word over to Vehaga and tell Loisé that he only awaited her to come and take the house over from him. As for himself he would gladly accept their kind invitation to remain at the Mission as their guest till the schooner returned.

The shock of his friend’s death had all but cured him of his passion, and he felt sure now of his own strength.

But day after day, and then week after week passed, and no word came from Vehaga, till one evening as he leant over the railing of the garden, looking out upon the gorgeous setting of the sun into the ocean, Maturei came paddling across the smooth waters of the harbour, and, drawing his canoe up on the beach, the boy approached the white man.

“See,” he said, “Loisé hath sent thee this.”

He unrolled a packet of broad, dried palm leaves, and taking from it a thick necklet of sweet-smelling kurahini buds, placed it in Brice’s hand.

He knew its meaning—it was the gift of a woman to an accepted lover.

The perfume of the flowers brought back her face to him in a moment. There was a brief struggle in his mind; and then home, friends, his future prospects in the great outside world, went to the wall, and the half-blood had won.