The Ebbing Of The Tide

The stranger had at first wished to have a house built for himself, but Lupton’s quiet place and the shy and reserved natures of his children made him change his intention and ask Lupton for a part of his house. It was given freely—where are there more generous-hearted men than these world-forgotten, isolated traders?—and here the Silent Man, as the people of Mururea called him, lived out the few months of his life. That last deceptive stage of his insidious disease had given him a fictitious strength. On many occasions, accompanied by the trader’s children, he would walk to the north point of the low-lying island, where the cloudy spume of the surge was thickest and where the hollow and resonant crust of the black reef was perforated with countless air-holes, through which the water hissed and roared, and shot high in air, to fall again in misty spray.

And here, with dreamy eyes, he would sit under the shade of a clump of young cocoanuts, and watch the boil and tumble of the surf, whilst the children played with and chased each other about the clinking sand. Sometimes he would call them to him—Farani the boy, and Teremai and Lorani, the sweet-voiced and tender-eyed girls—and ask them to sing to him; and in their soft semi-Tahitian dialect they would sing the old songs that echoed in the ears of the desperate men of the Bounty that fatal dawn when, with bare-headed, defiant Bligh drifting astern in his boat, they headed back for Tahiti and death. *****

Four months had passed when one day the strange white man, with Lupton’s children, returned to the village. As they passed in through the doorway with some merry chant upon their lips, they saw a native seated on the matted floor. He was a young man, with straight, handsome features, such as one may see any day in Eastern Polynesia, but the children, with terrified faces, shrank aside as they passed him and went to their father.

The pale face of the Silent Man turned inquiringly to Lupton, who smiled.

“‘Tis Màmeri’s teaching, you know. She is a Catholic from Magareva, and prays and tells her beads enough to work a whaleship’s crew into heaven. But this man is a ‘Soul Catcher,’ and if any one of us here got sick, Màmeri would let the faith she was reared in go to the wall and send for the ‘Soul Catcher.’ He’s a kind of an all-round prophet, wizard, and general wisdom merchant. Took over the soul-catching business from his father—runs in the family, you know.”

“Ah!” said the Silent Man in his low, languid tones, looking at the native, who, the moment he had entered, had bent his eyes to the ground, “and in which of his manifold capacities has he come to see you, Lupton?”

Lupton hesitated a moment, then laughed.

“Well, sir, he says he wants to speak to you. Wants to pahihi (talk rot), I suppose. It’s his trade, you know. I’d sling him out only that he isn’t a bad sort of a fellow—and a bit mad—and Màmeri says he’ll quit as soon as he has had his say.”

“Let him talk,” said the calm, quiet voice; “I like these people, and like to hear them talk—better than I would most white men.”

Then, with his dark, dilated eyes moving from the pale face of the white man to that of Lupton, the native wizard and Seer of Unseen Things spoke. Then again his eyes sought the ground.

“What does he say?” queried Lupton’s guest.

“D–rot,” replied the trader, angrily.

“Tell me exactly, if you please. I feel interested.”

“Well, he says that he was asleep in his house when his ‘spirit voice’ awoke him and said”—here Lupton paused and looked at his guest, and then, seeing the faint smile of amused interest on his melancholy features, resumed, in his rough, jocular way—“and said—the ‘spirit voice,’ you know—that your soul was struggling to get loose, and is going away from you to-night. And the long and short of it is that this young fellow here wants to know if you’ll let him save it—keep you from dying, you know. Says he’ll do the job for nothing, because you’re a good man, and a friend to all the people of Mururea.”

“Mr. Brown” put his thin hand across his mouth, and his eyes smiled at Lupton. Then some sudden, violent emotion stirred him, and he spoke with such quick and bitter energy that Lupton half rose from his seat in vague alarm.

“Tell him,” he said—“that is, if the language expresses it—that my soul has been in hell these ten years, and its place filled with ruined hopes and black despair,” and then he sank back on his couch of mats, and turned his face to the wall.

The Seer of Unseen Things, at a sign from the now angry Lupton, rose to his feet. As he passed the trader he whispered—

“Be not angry with me, Farani; art not thou and all thy house dear to me, the Snarer of Souls and Keeper Away of Evil Things? And I can truly make a snare to save the soul of the Silent Man, if he so wishes it.” The low, impassioned tones of the wizard’s voice showed him to be under strong emotion, and Lupton, with smoothened brow, placed his hand on the native’s chest in token of amity.

“Farani,” said the wizard, “see’st thou these?” and he pointed to where, in the open doorway, two large white butterflies hovered and fluttered. They were a species but rarely seen in Mururea, and the natives had many curious superstitions regarding them.

“Aye,” said the trader, “what of them?”

“Lo, they are the spirits that await the soul of him who sitteth in thy house. One is the soul of a woman, the other of a man; and their bodies are long ago dust in a far-off land. See, Farani, they hover and wait, wait, wait. To-morrow they will be gone, but then another may be with them.”

Stopping at the doorway the tall native turned, and again his strange, full black eyes fixed upon the figure of Lupton’s guest. Then slowly he untied from a circlet of polished pieces of pearl-shell strung together round his sinewy neck a little round leaf-wrapped bundle. And with quiet assured step he came and stood before the strange white man and extended his hand.

“Take it, O man, with the swift hand and the strong heart, for it is thine.”

And then he passed slowly out.

Lupton could only see that as the outside wrappings of fala leaves fell off they revealed a black substance, when Mr. Brown quickly placed it in the bosom of his shirt.

“And sure enough,” continued Lupton, knocking the ashes from his pipe out upon the crumbling stones of the old marae, and speaking in, for him, strangely softened tones, “the poor chap did die that night, leastways at kalaga moa (cockcrow), and then he refilled his pipe in silence, gazing the while away out to the North-West Point.”

“What a curious story!” began the supercargo, after an interval of some minutes, when he saw that Lupton, usually one of the merriest-hearted wanderers that rove to and fro in Polynesia, seemed strangely silent and affected, and had turned his face from him.

He waited in silence till the trader chose to speak again. Away to the westward, made purple by the sunset haze of the tropics, lay the ever-hovering spume-cloud of the reef of North-West Point—the loved haunt of Lupton’s guest—and the muffled boom of the ceaseless surf deepened now and then as some mighty roller tumbled and crashed upon the flat ledges of blackened reef.

At last the trader turned again to the supercargo, almost restored to his usual equanimity. “I’m a pretty rough case, Mr.–, and not much given to any kind of sentiment or squirming, but I would give half I’m worth to have him back again. He sort of got a pull on my feelin’s the first time he ever spoke to me, and as the days went on, I took to him that much that if he’d a wanted to marry my little Teremai I’d have given her to him cheerful. Not that we ever done much talkin’, but he’d sit night after night and make me talk, and when I’d spun a good hour’s yarn he’d only say, ‘Thank you, Lupton, good-night,’ and give a smile all round to us, from old Màmeri to the youngest tama, and go to bed. And yet he did a thing that’ll go hard agin’ him, I fear.”

“Ah,” said Trenton, “and so he told you at the last—I mean his reason for coming to die at Mururea.”

“No, he didn’t. He only told me something; Peese told me the rest. And he laughed when he told me,” and the dark-faced trader struck his hand on his knee. “Peese would laugh if he saw his mother crucified.”

“Was Peese back here again, then?” inquired Trenton.

“Yes, two months ago. He hove-to outside, and came ashore in a canoe. Said he wanted to hear how his dear friend Brown was. He only stayed an hour, and then cleared out again.9’

“Did he die suddenly?” the supercargo asked, his mind still bent on Lupton’s strange visitor.

“No. Just before daylight he called me to him—with my boy. He took the boy’s hand and said he’d have been glad to have lived after all. He had been happy in a way with me and the children here in Mururea. Then he asked to see Teremai and Lorani. They both cried when they saw he was a goin’—all native-blooded people do that if they cares anything at all about a white man, and sees him dyin’.”

“Have you any message, or anything to say in writin’, sir?” I says to him.

He didn’t answer at once, only took the girls’ hands in his, and kisses each of ‘em on the face, then he says, “No, Lupton, neither. But send the children away now. I want you to stay with me to the last—which will be soon.”

Then he put his hand under his pillow, and took out a tiny little parcel, and held it in his closed hand. *****

“Mr. Lupton, I ask you before God to speak honestly. Have you, or have you not, ever heard of me, and why I came here to die, away from the eyes of men?”

“No, sir,” I said. “Before God I know no more of you now than the day I first saw you.”

“Can you, then, tell me if the native soul-doctor who came here last night is a friend of Captain Peese? Did he see Peese when I landed here? Has he talked with him?”

“No. When you came here with Peese, the soul-seer was away at another island. And as for talking with him, how could he? Peese can’t speak two words of Paumotu.”

He closed his eyes a minute. Then he reached out his hand to me and said, “Look at that; what is it?”

It was the little black thing that the Man Who Sees Beyond gave him, and was a curious affair altogether. “You know what an aitu taliga is?” asked Lupton.

“Yes; a ‘devil’s ear’—that’s what the natives call fungus.”

“Well,” continued Lupton, “this was a piece of dried fungus, and yet it wasn’t a piece of fungus. It was the exact shape of a human heart—just as I’ve seen a model of it made of wax. That hadn’t been its natural shape, but the sides had been brought together and stitched with human hair—by the soul-doctor, of course. I looked at it curiously enough, and gave it back to him. His fingers closed round it again.”

“What is it?” he says again.

“It’s a model of a human heart,” says I, “made of fungus.”

“My God!” he says, “how could he know?” Then he didn’t say any more, and in another half-hour or so he dies, quiet and gentlemanly like. I looked for the heart with Màmeri in the morning—it was gone.

“Well, we buried him. And now look here, Mr. –, as sure as I believe there’s a God over us, I believe that that native soul-catcher has dealings with the Devil. I had just stowed the poor chap in his coffin and was going to nail it down when the kanaka wizard came in, walks up to me, and says he wants to see the dead man’s hand. Just to humour him I lifted off the sheet. The soul-catcher lifted the dead man’s hands carefully, and then I’m d–d if he didn’t lay that dried heart on his chest and press the hands down over it.”

“What’s that for?” says I.

“‘Tis the heart of the woman he slew in her sleep. Let it lie with him, so that there may be peace between them at last,” and then he glides away without another word.

“I let it stay, not thinking much of it at the time. Well, as I was tellin’ you, Peese came again. Seeing that I had all my people armed, I treated him well and we had a chat, and then I told him all about ‘Mr. Brown’s’ death and the soul-saver and the dried heart. And then Peese laughs and gives me this newspaper cutting. I brought it with me to show you.”

Trenton took the piece of paper and read.

“‘Lester Mornington made his escape from the State prison at San Quentin (Cal.) last week, and is stated to be now on his way either to Honolulu or Tahiti. It has been ascertained that a vast sum of money has been disbursed in a very systematic manner during the last few weeks to effect his release. Although nearly eight years have elapsed since he committed his terrible crime, the atrocious nature of it will long be remembered. Young, wealthy, respected, and talented, he had been married but half a year when the whole of the Pacific Slope was startled with the intelligence that he had murdered his beautiful young wife, who had, he found, been disloyal to him.

“‘Entering the bedroom he shot his sleeping wife through the temples, and then with a keen-edged knife had cut out her still-beating heart. This, enclosed in a small box, he took to the house of the man who had wronged him, and desired him to open it and look at the contents. He did so, and Mornington, barely giving him time to realise the tragedy, and that his perfidy was known, shot him twice, the wounds proving fatal next day. The murderer made good his escape to Mexico, only returning to California a month ago, when he was recognised (although disguised) and captured, and at the time of his escape was within two days of the time of his trial before Judge Crittenden.’”

“There’s always a woman in these things,” said Lupton, as the supercargo gave him back the slip. “Come on.” And he got down from his seat on the wall. “There’s Màmeri calling us to kaikai—stewed pigeons. She’s a bully old cook; worth her weight in Chile dollars.”