Part 19 (2/2)

If you will kindly send by return mail a few dollars, he will clothe, feed, and water himself, and return immediately to those arms which, if his memory does not belie him, have more than once sheltered his unworthy frame. I have, dear sir, the fortune to be the article above described.

The six months which would elapse before I could Hope for an answer would probably have found me past all recognition, so I ceased crying to the compa.s.sionate bowels of Tom, d.i.c.k, and Harry, waiting with haggard patience the departure of the vessel that was to bear me home with a palpable C. O. D. tacked on to me. Those last hours were brightened by the delicate attentions of a few good souls who learned, too late, the shocking state of my case. Thanks to them, I slept well thereafter in a real bed, and was sure of dinners that wouldn't rattle in me like a withered kernel in an old nutsh.e.l.l.

I had but to walk to the beach, wave my lily hand, heavily tanned about that time, when lo! a boat was immediately despatched from the plump little corvette ”Chevert,” where the tricolour waved triumphantly from sunrise to sunset, all the year round.

Such capital French dinners as I had there, such offers of bed and board and boundless sympathy as were made me by those dear fellows who wore the gold lace and had a piratical-looking cabin all to themselves, were enough to wring a heart that had been nearly wrung out in its battle with life in Tahiti.

No longer I walked the streets as one smitten with the plague, or revolved in envious circles about the market-place, where I could have got my fill for a half-dollar, but had neither the one nor the other. No longer I went at daybreak to swell the procession at the water-spout, or sat on the sh.o.r.e the picture of despair, waiting sunrise, finding it my sole happiness to watch a canoe-load of children drifting out upon the bay, singing like a railful of larks; nor walked solitarily through the night up and down the narrow streets wherein the _gendarmes_ had learned to pa.s.s me unnoticed, with my hat under my arm and my heart in my throat. Those delicious moons always seduced me from my natural sleep, and I sauntered through the cocoa-groves whose boughs glistened like row after row of crystals, whose shadows were as mosaics wrought in blocks of silver.

I used to nod at the low, whitewashed ”calabooses” fairly steaming in the sun, wherein Herman Melville got some chapters of ”Omoo.”

Over and over again I tracked the ground of that delicious story, saying to the bread-fruit trees that had sheltered him, ”Shelter me also, and whoever shall follow after, so long as your branches quiver in the wind!”

O reader of ”Omoo,” think of ”Motoo-Otoo,” actually looking warlike in these sad days, with a row of new cannons around its edge, and pyramids of b.a.l.l.s as big as cocoanuts covering its shady centre.

Walking alone in those splendid nights I used to hear a dry, ominous coughing in the huts of the natives. I felt as though I were treading upon the brinks of half-dug graves, and I longed to bring a respite to the doomed race.

One windy afternoon we cut our stern hawser in a fair wind and sailed out of the harbour; I felt a sense of relief, and moralized for five minutes without stopping. Then I turned away from all listeners, and saw those glorious green peaks growing dim in the distance; the clouds embraced them in their profound secrecy; like a lovely mirage Tahiti floated upon the bosom of the sea. Between sea and sky was swallowed up vale, garden, and waterfall; point after point crowded with palms; peak above peak in that eternal crown of beauty; and with them the nation of warriors and lovers falling like the leaf, but, unlike it, with no followers in the new season.

THE END

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London & Edinburgh

AN AFTERGLOW.

There is a bell in a tower in the middle of our Square. At six every morning that bell does its best to tip over in delirious joy, but a dozen strokes with the big tongue of it is about all that is ever accomplished.

I like to be wakened by that bell; I like to hear it at meridian when my day's work is nearly done. It is swinging at this very minute, and the iron hammer is b.u.mping its head on either side, wrought with melodious fury.

The voice of it is so like the voice of a certain bell I used to hear in a dreamy seaside village off in the tropics, that I have only to close my eyes and I am over the seas again where I belong.

As it rings now, I fancy I am in a great stone house with broad verandahs, that stands in the centre of a grove of palms; across a dusty lane lies the churchyard, and in the midst of the congregation of the departed I catch a glimpse of the homely whitewashed walls of the old missionary church.

As the bell rings out at high noon, the pigeons flutter from the eaves of this old church, and sail about, half afraid, yet seeming to be a part of the service that is renewed from day to day.

In spirit I pace again those winding paths; I meet dark faces, that brighten as I greet them; I hear the reef-music blown in from the summer sea; through leafy trellises I look into the watery distance, across which white sails are wafted like feathers in an azure sky.

A dry and floating dust, like powdered gold, glorifies the air. The vertical sun has driven the shadows to the wall, and the dry pods of the tamarind rattle and crackle in the intense heat, or perhaps a cocoanut drops suddenly to the gra.s.s with a dull _thud_.

A vixenish hornet swaggers in at the window, dangling its legs, the very ghost of an emaciated ballet-girl, and pirouettes about my head while I sit statue-like, but presently flirts out of the window and is gone.

Do you think nothing transpires in this corner of the world? The Coolie who brings me my morning cocoanut, the milk of which I drink from the sh.e.l.l, is just now picking up leaves as big as a panama hat out in the croquet-ground. Is that a common sight?

Were I in Honolulu--the metropolis, you know--from my window I could see as of yore a singularly-shaped hill called Punch-bowl, that looms above the ma.s.s of foliage engulfing the pretty village. This Punch-bowl has been empty for ages, so have all the craters in that particular island.

It has baked hard in the sun and is as red as clay, though a tinge of green in all its c.h.i.n.ks suggests those antique bronzes of uncertain origin. Above it roll the snow-white trade-wind clouds, those commercial travellers that rush over us as though they had special business elsewhere. Beyond all is the eternally blue sky of the tropics, which generally seems so awfully high and hollow, that it makes a fellow lonesome to look at it.

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