"Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I."
No need now for the despairing finality of:--
"I have trod the upward and the downward slopes, I have endured and done in the days of yore, I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope, And I have lived, and loved, and closed the door."
Death has set his seal of peace on the unequal conflict of mind and matter; the All-Mother has gathered him to herself.
In years to come, when his grave is perchance forgotten, a rugged ruin, home of the lizard and the bat, Tusitala--the story teller--"the man with a heart of gold" (as I so often heard him designated in the Islands) will live, when it may be his tales have ceased to interest, in the tender remembrance of those whose lives he beautified, and whose hearts he warmed into gratitude.
So we left him, "still loftier than the world suspects, living and dying," and once more, following the footsteps of our guide, we took up that ferny moss-grown track. It was scarcely less easy to scramble down the steep descent than it had been to toil upwards. But "time and the hour run through the roughest day," and we eventually arrived at the bottom, torn and scratched and not a little weary, but well content, only somewhat regretful that the visit to the grave was over and not still to come, comforting each other with the recollection that the house yet remained to be explored.
Vailima is not much changed since the days when Robert Louis Stevenson lived there. Where the walls had been, in the late native war, riddled with shot, they had been renewed, but so exactly on the old lines that the change was scarcely perceptible. Although the house has been added to, and in my estimation considerably improved thereby, yet the old part remains intact.
Herr Conrade, the manager for Herr Kunz, the present owner, was kind enough to show us everything, but naturally Stevenson's suite of rooms were the only ones that possessed any special interest. First his bedroom, then his library, and lastly his Temple of Peace, the innermost shrine where he wrote, and which, opening as it did on to the upper verandah, commanded a magnificent view of sea and mountain. From the verandah could be seen the gleam of the sunlight on the breaking surf around the far distant bay. On the left, fronting seaward, were the heights where he was laid to rest.