The White Man's Foot Part 5

CHAPTER VIII.

All that night Kea sat up with me; and somewhat to my surprise she occupied herself for most of the time in working at a great white veil of very fine material.

"That looks like a bridal veil, Kea," I said at last, regarding it curiously in an interval of sleeplessness.

Kea laughed, not merrily as heretofore, but a very sad laugh. "It _is_ a bridal veil," she answered, blus.h.i.+ng and stammering. "I--I'm working at it at present for--for one of my family."

I saw she was embarra.s.sed, so I asked her no further questions about it.

Perhaps, I thought, she's going to be married. Even in Polynesia, young girls are naturally reticent upon that subject. And Kea was hardly a Polynesian at all: on her father's side she was an English lady. So I turned on my back and dismissed the matter for the moment from my consideration.

For eight long weary weeks I lay there on my bed, or on the adjoining sofa, with my leg slowly and tediously healing, and my head much bothered by such long inaction. What made me more impatient still of my enforced idleness was the fact that, according to Frank's continuous report, Mauna Loa was now rumbling, and grumbling, and mumbling away in a more persistently threatening style than ever. I was afraid there was going to be a really grand eruption on the large scale--and that I wouldn't be well enough to be there to observe it. It would be ignominious indeed for the accredited representative of the British a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science to be carried down the mountain on a hospital stretcher at the very moment when perhaps the finest volcanic display of the present century was just about to inaugurate its arrival by a magnificent outburst of lava and ashes. I should feel like a soldier who turned his back upon the field of battle: like a sailor who went below to the ladies' cabin at the first approach of a West Indian hurricane.

The idea distressed me and gnawed my heart out. If you are a man of science you will understand and sympathize with me. If you are not, you will perhaps consider me a donkey.

Kalaua meanwhile remained as courteous and attentive as ever. But he often came in from the mountain much perturbed in soul, as I could see by his manner, and as I gathered, also, from his remarks to Kea. I understood Hawaiian pretty well by this time. I'm naturally quick at languages, I believe, and I've travelled about the world so much, in search of the playful and pensive volcano, that a new idiom comes to me readily: and besides, I had nothing to do while I lay idle on my bed but to take lessons in the native dialect from Kea. Now a pretty girl, it is well known, is the best possible teacher of languages. You understand at once from her mouth what you would only vaguely guess at on a man and a brother's. You read from her eyes what her lips are saying.

"Pele's uneasy again, my niece," the old man would murmur often as he entered. "I never knew the crater more disturbed. Pele is angry. She will flood Hawaii. She will drown the people. We must try to quiet her."

Kea looked down always when he spoke like that with a guilty look upon her poor young face. I understood that look. I knew she considered she had cheated the G.o.ddess by rescuing me from the flames, and I grieved to think that I should cause her unhappiness.

"Kea," I said to her one day, as she sat still sewing away at a pure white dress in the room by my side, "do you know anything of your English relations--your father's people?"

Kea burst suddenly into a flood of tears. "I wish I did!" she cried earnestly. "I wish I could go to them. I wish I could get away from Hawaii for ever. I'm tired of this terrible, terrible island. It wears my heart out." And she flung away the dress from her in an agony of horror, and fled from the room, still crying bitterly.

"I see what it is," I said to myself pityingly. "They want to marry that helpless young girl to somebody or other she doesn't like. Probably a fat old native with a good thing in cocoa-nuts and sugar-plantations.

Poor child! I can easily understand her feelings. She, an English girl almost, in blood and sentiment, to be tied to some wretched old Hawaiian ex-cannibal--some creature incapable of appreciating or sympathizing with her! I don't wonder she shrinks from the horrid prospect. She's a great deal too good and too sweet for any of them."

I may mention however, to prevent misconception, that I was not myself the least little bit in the world in love with Kea. I merely regarded her from a brotherly point of view, with friends.h.i.+p and grat.i.tude. The fact is, a certain young lady in a remote English country rectory, who received a letter from me by every Honolulu mail regularly, might have had just ground of complaint against me had I harboured any trace of such a feeling in my heart towards the gentle little Hawaiian maiden. It was the thought of that particular English lady that caused me so much agony as I lay on the floor of Mauna Loa that awful morning. Nothing else could have made me cling to the last chance of life with so fierce a clinging. For my own part, as a man of science, I have rather a contempt for any fellow who will not willingly risk his own neck, under ordinary circ.u.mstances, for any great or n.o.ble cause on which he may be occupied: and among such great and n.o.ble causes I venture to hold the pursuit of truth and natural knowledge by no means inferior to the pursuit of liberty or of material welfare. But when there's a lady in the case--why, then, of course, the case is altered. A man must then, to some extent, consult his own personal safety. His life is not entirely his own to lose: he has mortgaged it as it were on behalf of another.

This however is a pure digression, for which I must apologize, on the ground that it is needful to prevent misapprehension of the relation in which I stood to Kea. Forgive me for thus for a moment dragging in my own private and domestic feelings.

In a few minutes Kea returned again. She had an envelope with a name and address on it in her hand. She gave it to me simply. Her eyes were still red with crying. "That's where my father's people live," she said quietly. "I wish I was with them. My father wanted me to return to them when he died. But I was afraid to go, because--because, though they asked me after his death, they never wrote to me while he was alive--they never wrote to _him_ either--They were angry with him for marrying my mother."

She said it with infinite tenderness and regret. I glanced at the address Kea had given me, and saw to my surprise the name of her father's brother, he was a clergyman in Kent, well known, as it happened, to my own family in England.

"I wish you could go to them, Kea," I cried earnestly. "Whatever they think and feel now, they couldn't help liking you and loving you when they saw you. I wish you could get away from this dreadful Hawaii!"

"I wish I could," Kea answered in a hopeless voice. "But--" she paused for a moment. "I must stop here now; I must stop here--till my marriage!"

She pointed to the white dress that lay huddled upon the floor; and, with the tears welling up into her eyes once more, rushed madly and desperately out of the room like one distracted.

I couldn't help contrasting the life of that peaceful Kentish rectory with the awful surroundings of the priest of Pele, and wis.h.i.+ng I could rescue that gentle girl from so terrible a place, as she herself had rescued me from the floor of Mauna Loa.

And I wondered to myself to whom on earth they could ever mean against her will to marry her.

Meanwhile, in spite of my broken leg, the volcano itself attracted no little share of my distinguished attention. I couldn't go out to call on it in person, to be sure; but I had in Frank an acute and well-trained a.s.sistant, who could be trusted to keep a steady eye upon its daily proceedings, and who knew exactly what traits in its character I wished him to report to me. In order that I might the more fully be kept informed from time to time of the state of the crater, and the momentary changes taking place in its temper and the lava level, I taught Frank in his leisure moments how to work a heliograph. For that purpose I fastened a slanting piece of looking-gla.s.s to my own bed-head, and stationed my brother with a second mirror on the summit of the mountain, in a good position for observing the lake of fire and the smoke-stacks in its centre. On this simple form of telegraphic arrangement Frank flashed me news by the Morse code; so many long and short flashes in certain fixed and regular orders standing each for a certain letter: and I flashed him back by the same method my directions and remarks on his own despatches. In this way we constantly kept up quite a brisk conversation by means of the mirrors. "Lava now rising in the main basin;" Frank would flash over to me. "Any fissures?" I would ask. In a minute the answer came promptly back, "Yes, two, in the black basalt."

"Steam issuing from them?" "None at present, but clouds of dense smoke forming slowly in the second cavern." "All right: then note its volume and direction." And so forth for an hour at a time together. It relieved the monotony of my existence on my sick bed thus to carry on by proxy my accustomed avocations: and I was glad to feel I wasn't quite useless, even with my broken leg to weigh me down, but was honestly earning my bread (or at least my taro-paste) from the subscribers to the British a.s.sociation Seismological Committee Fund.

One evening, towards the end of my convalescence, Frank came in in very high spirits (for Mauna Loa had been smoking like a German student that day) and found Kea busy as usual at her endless task of making her own very extensive trousseau. She was at work now on a long white satin train, which certainly seemed to me far more expensive and handsome in texture and quality than I should ever have expected a Hawaiian half caste girl to wear for her wedding.

"What a swell you are, Kea!" Frank cried, half chaffingly. "I wonder what sort of a match you expect to make, that you're getting yourself up so smart for the occasion?"

Kea glanced back at him with a painfully sad and serious face. "I'm going to marry a very important personage indeed," she said solemnly.

"A chief, perhaps?" Frank suggested laughing, and peeling a banana.

The tears stood in poor Kea's eyes, though Frank did not notice them.

"Higher than a chief," she answered slowly, with a deep-drawn sigh.

"A prince of the blood-royal of Hawaii, then," Frank went on, boy-like, without observing how serious and painful the conversation seemed to the poor little half-caste.

"Higher than a prince," Kea replied once more almost reverently.

"What! Not the King!" Frank exclaimed in astonishment.

"The King is married already," Kea replied with dignity, the tears trickling one by one down her cheeks, unseen by Frank, who, busy with his banana, couldn't observe her downcast face as well as I could from my place on the pillow.

"Higher than a chief! Higher than a prince! Higher than the King!" Frank cried incredulously. "Hang it all, Kea; why, then, you must be going to marry the captain of an American whaler!"

I laughed in spite of myself. Hawaiian royalty, to say the truth, when you see it on the spot (as we had done at Honolulu) is such a very cheap sort of imitation kings.h.i.+p! But Kea, instead of laughing, burst suddenly into tears, and flung down her work on the floor in an agony of despondency. "Frank," I cried, "how on earth can you tease her so? Don't you see poor Kea's dreadfully distressed? It's downright cruelty to chaff on such a subject."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'IF YOU KNEW ALL,' SHE ANSWERED,--'HOW YOU WOULD PITY ME!'"]

Kea turned her big brown eyes full upon me, all tearful as they were.

"If you knew all," she answered, "you would say so indeed. You would pity me, both of you--oh, how you would pity me!"

And without another word, she rose like a queen and glided from the room, muttering to herself some inaudible sentence in Hawaiian as she retreated.

When she had left us alone, Frank turned to me, abashed, with unusual earnestness and wonder in his voice. "Tom," said he impressively, "does it ever strike you there's something very mysterious indeed about this marriage of Kea's?"

"How so?" I asked; though in fact I felt it quite as much as he did, but I wanted to hear Frank's own unadulterated idea about the matter.

"Why, you see," he answered, "they're getting ready for a wedding: but where's the bridegroom? A marriage is never quite complete without a man in the proceedings. Now, we've never seen any young man come courting around; especially not any one so very important as Kea makes her future husband out to be. A bridegroom, I take it, is an indispensable sort of accompaniment to every respectable civilized wedding. You can't very well get on without him. But he's not forthcoming here. It seems to me there's something awfully uncanny about it all."

"I often hear them speak among themselves," I said, "about somebody called Maloka. I wonder who on earth this Maloka is? I expect it's Maloka she's going to marry."

"I'll make inquiries," Frank answered decisively. "We must get to the bottom of it. For my part, Tom I don't half like the look of it."

CHAPTER IX.

That night I hardly closed my eyes in sleep. My leg, which for several days had scarcely pained me, became troublesome once more with a sort of violent twitching neuralgic rheumatism. Never before had I felt anything so curiously spasmodic. I had tossed about during the evening indeed a great deal more than usual, and Kalaua, who noted my discomfort with his keen and observant Hawaiian glance, asked me more than once how I felt, with apparent kindliness. I told him my symptoms in perfect frankness.