I have seen old chiefs and women, girls too, come out of that confessional box as though they had just been given everlasting life. The tears all vanished as they leapt off into the forest, or stood on their heads with delight just behind the mission-room coco-palms. There’s no doubt about it, but that box was the supreme court of true justice and glad truth. In there terrible dramas were unrolled to the Father’s ears. He was the solitary judge; nor was he hard in the sentences that he meted out to the culprits, for alas! he expiated for all their crimes with prayers from his own soul.
But to revert to my experiences. I was digging away at post-holes and feeling down in the mouth (for I do not tell all my reflections and troubles of those times), when Waylao stepped out of the shade of the pomegranates. In a moment I perceived that something was wrong with her. Her eyes stared wildly. She did not respond to my cheery salutations in her usual way.
As the Father stepped out of his mission-room she nearly fell into his arms. I saw her embrace the old fellow as a daughter would a father. “What’s the matter, my child?” he said, as he noticed her hysterical manner. I threw my spade aside. The knowledge that the girl was in trouble upset me. I could get no further than wondering at the meaning of it all as I heard her weeping violently in that silent, sacred wooden enclosure—the confessional box.
I heard the girl’s sighs as she ceased weeping, and the Father’s solemn voice as he gave advice and absolution. I suppose Waylao was a true daughter of Eve, and only told the Father half the truth. I know she did not tell all, otherwise things would have taken a very different course. Though the Father knew it not, Waylao had become the wife of a sensualist.
So much I discovered long after. I did not know then how some of the native girls and white girls got married in the South Seas. I had heard a good deal of chaff, as I thought, about the ways of the Chinese and the Indians, but I little dreamed how true it all was. As it turned out, Waylao had married an Indian—which means that she had gone through a midnight ceremony which was as follows. A deluded girl would come under the influence of some emigrant hawker from Calcutta, or the Malay Peninsula, usually a man with a smile that would have brought a fortune to a Lyceum tragedian, for it was the breathing essence of limelight sadness and sensual longing. One can imagine how such a man would trade on a girl’s infatuation. It was the custom to lure them into the forest and repeat the following wedding service, which is the Mohammedan marriage prayer:—“There is no deity but Mohammed, and Mohammed is the one prophet of Allah. I who now kneel before thee, O man, renounce the heathen creed called Christianity, I, such an one’s daughter, by the grace of my heart and the testimony of my virtue, give myself up to thee body and soul for life and life everlasting.”