Out of another’s sorrow balm came to Waylao: she wept not for herself, but for the ragged figure, the blistered feet of the derelict beside us.
O heart of mine! Is it true that the forest trees brightened with ethereal light—that an angel stood weeping in those woods—that a stricken phantom girl seemed to step from the confessional box of that almighty cathedral of giant trees and the domed starlit night, her soul renewed with glory, her shattered dreams restored by our sympathy?
Was it a fallen angel, a phantom of the imagination, that came down to us in the forest by Tai-o-hae, sang that French hymn to beauty, and, with the stars shining in her flying mass of hair,
Danced as the winds came creeping in And I played on the violin!
Yes, danced, as the mad shadow played and played the songs of romance and the waves beat out their warning monotones on the beach below.
Early the next day I hurried back to my two sad fugitives in their hut by the sea. Ere I had left them the night before I had made them promise not to stray away from that spot.
It would have been better if I had broken my promise and gone straight to old Lydia and told her of Waylao’s whereabouts. But as usual in this funny world, I managed to do the wrong thing at exactly the right moment.
So strange and sad had been the happenings of the previous night that I half fancied I had dreamed of Waylao and that hut in the forest and the convict girl. That morning I went to Mrs Ranjo and got her to lend me two blankets. “I’ve got an awful chill on the lungs,” I wailed plaintively, in order to satisfy the bar-woman’s curiosity, and departed for the forest with a parcel of dainty things.
When I arrived at that little hut by the mountains, there they still were, huddled together, sisters of grief in each other’s arms. It is hard to know, even now, which was the greatest sinner—Mohammed in the South Seas, or “Christianity’s” strange justice in the civilised world.
I still recall the earnest eyes of that grateful convict girl as I crept into that little shelter.
Ah, God! it’s hard to have been a missionary at the altar of romance and beauty, to have reaped so little reward for so much sorrow. The milk of human kindness is indeed diluted and hard to digest. That same night Waylao and I listened to the wretched escapee’s story. She told us why she had been transported for life, but it is too sad a tale to tell here. She was a Parisian girl of superior family, and had suffered for twelve months in the galleys and in the hideous chain gangs of Noumea ere she escaped. She had stowed away in the hold of a small schooner that called with stores at Noumea. Friendly sailors had connived to let her slip ashore unperceived at Nuka Hiva a few days before Waylao and I met her.