"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'!"
