Gabrielle of the Lagoon. W. H. Myddleton

caste girl in Honolulu, so Gabrielle had a strain of dark blood in her veins!

      The young apprentice couldn’t fathom the look in her eyes as he stared. Passion was just awakening in her soul, stealing like a tropical sunrise over the hills of childhood. To him she appeared like some spirit-creation that might at any moment take wings and fly away; so when she turned the prow of her canoe dead on to the soft sand and jumped ashore, he made a frantic dash and jumped, landing just behind her. He was determined to know when and where she would meet him again. But he had no need to fear; she did not fly away. She simply tied her canoe to a bamboo stem and, turning round, looked him full in the face with those glorious eyes that were to be for him two stars of the first magnitude. Then she placed her fingers in the folds of her hair and taking out one of the hibiscus blossoms, handed it to him, much to his surprise. He realised that it was more the act of a child than a woman of the world.

      “I’ve read in books that girls give men flowers that have been fastened in their hair,” she said. This remark and act of the girl’s, and the look in her eyes, had a strange effect on Hillary’s susceptible mind. He almost felt the tears well into his eyes. It was all so unexpected, and told him in some great poetry of silence what the girl’s heart was made of, the utter loneliness of her existence and the way her childish dreams were flowing out to the great realities of life. He placed the flower in his buttonhole, then gazed on the girl as only an infatuated youth can gaze, and said: “Will you meet me here again, by this lagoon? Any day and time will do for me.”

      “I’m sure to be this way again,” she said, and before the young apprentice could stop her she had flitted away under the coco-palms.

      Before she got out of sight she turned and waved her hand. In his excitement he responded by waving his cap. Then she disappeared under the thick belt of dark mangroves by the swamp track that led inland in the direction of her father’s bungalow.

      “What a girl!” That was the only audible comment he made as the girl went out of sight. And where did she go? She ran away over the slopes that lay just behind the township of Rokeville, back to her home and her trader father.

      Old Everard, her parent, was a kind of freak too. He was a tall, clean-shaved, thin-faced man, with blue-grey eyes and a beaked nose; his mouth had a melancholy droop about it; the face in repose looked strong at times, but when he grinned and revealed his tobacco-blackened teeth it looked characterless, almost weak. At times he was extremely garrulous, at other times either reticent or insulting to anyone who might be unfortunate enough to come near him. Gabrielle seemed to be the only person in Bougainville who understood him. He didn’t take much interest in his daughter, though she might have done so in him. All he did was religiously to exercise his parental control by sending the girl on his selfish errands, mostly for rum and whisky. At other times he demanded that she should attend to his comforts when delirium tremens shook his spine. He was an ex-sailor. Trailing from the mainyard of his ship whilst anchored off the Solomon Group, he had lost a leg, and during his convalescence in Honolulu had married, finally settling down in Bougainville.

      His homestead was a three-roomed bungalow, and he kept things going by the money he had saved during his seafaring life; he was also interested in copra plantations at Bougainville and at Ysabel. His temperament was choleric. He was known in the vicinity by the nickname “Shiver-me-timbers.” This cognomen was derived from the fact that he always stamped his wooden leg, making it shiver in his impatience, when he wanted a drink, consequently his wooden leg was never at rest. He looked like some wooden-legged Nemesis as he sat there that evening; and if any glamour still lingered in Gabrielle’s brain from her chance meeting with the young apprentice, it was swiftly dispelled by the stumping of that wooden member as she rushed indoors.

      Even a wooden leg would seem to have its part to play in the universe: there was something imperative about its tapping voice. That fate-like tapping had smashed up many of Gabrielle’s young dreams; possibly that wooden leg was a soulless agent of the devil.

      “Here’s the whisky, Dad,” said she, as the cockatoo looked down from its perch and shrieked: “Gabby-ell! Gabby-ell! Kai-kai-too!”

      In a moment that weird symbol in wood, that represented all that was unromantic to her ardent soul, ceased its ominous “tip-e-te-tap-tap” as the old sailor looked up and spied his daughter.

      “Thankee, thankee, kid!” he growled as he put forth his hand. Such was the domestic atmosphere that the girl had rushed back to.

      After the young apprentice had waved his farewell to Gabrielle he strolled away under the palms. “Well, she’s a beautiful creature. Who’d have thought of meeting her in this wild place? She’s ethereal, too beautiful to make love to,” he sighed.

      Possibly the contrast between Gabrielle Everard and the Solomon Island mop-headed girls etherealised her natural beauty in his eyes. This was a fatal outlook for Hillary, considering the girl’s impulsive nature and his chances in the love affair that he had unknowingly embarked upon. And possibly this outlook of his was the result of outward glamour having greatly influenced his indwelling life. He had succeeded in making himself the more unfitted to cope with his immediate surroundings by poring over such writers as Tolstoy, Walt Whitman, Rousseau and Ruskin. But still, these writers, with their mad denunciations and rhapsodies, had helped to awaken in Hillary’s soul that adoration for the beautiful, that love for living art that nourishes a delight in God’s work. The young apprentice did not digest the whole contents of those volumes; he was too young to grasp their full meaning, but his mind had grasped enough to make him a kind of derelict missionary of the beautiful. When the moods came to him he would bury his nose in the pages of Byron, Shelley, Keats, etc. And the influence gathered from those poets possibly filled his head with vague imaginings over beauty and innocence, feeding the fires of wild aspiration that cannot be realised in this world, and were never realised and acted up to by the poets who wrote the poems.

      As he walked on thoughts of the strange girl on the lagoon would haunt his brain. He had quite made up his mind to secure a berth on the sailing-ship that was leaving for New South Wales in a few days, but Gabrielle Everard’s eyes seemed to have magically changed the future for him.

      It was almost with relief that he gave his arm to the drunken shellback who suddenly appeared from nowhere, struck him on the back and spat a stream of tobacco juice across Hillary’s poetic vision, taking him completely away from himself. Then the shellback faded away, went off shouting some wild sea chantey as he rolled over the slopes, bound for the sailor’s Morning and Evening Star—the distant light of Parsons’s grog shanty. It was getting dark. That night Hillary seemed inspired. He sat outside the wooden building where he lodged and played his violin to the shellback, traders and natives who came over the slopes to listen. Mango Pango, the pretty Polynesian servant, grinned from ear to ear, showing her pearly teeth, as she danced beneath the palms that grew right up to the verandah of his landlady’s homestead. Even the congregated sailormen ceased their unmelodious oaths as they pulled their beards and listened to his playing.

      Hillary wasn’t a master on the violin; his career had been too erratic for him to get the necessary practice to accomplish great things in instrumental playing. But still he could perform the Poet and Peasant overture and most of the stock pieces, besides playing heathen melodies that sent the natives into ecstasies of delight. His sailor critics swore that his extemporised sea-jigs were the most classical of compositions that they had ever heard. For when he played the South Sea maids threw their limbs about in rhythmical swerves, till the soles of their pretty bare feet sometimes seemed turned toward the South Sea moon! Mango Pango, Marga Maroo and Topsy Turvy were dancing to their heart’s content as the hills re-echoed the shellbacks’ laughter and the wild chorus of O, For Rio Grande when the concert was disturbed. For notwithstanding the wild surroundings, the hilarity and awful oaths, piety roamed those savage isles.

      As the strains of the Poet and Peasant overture trembled from Hillary’s violin a tall, handsome savage, attired in European clothes, stepped out from beneath the palms and complimented the young Englishman on his artistic performance. He was an educated savage, and naturally conducted himself in public just as a late missionary from the North-West Mission School at Honolulu should do. He was certainly an attractive-looking being,