All that remained of her was the boat, the lesser of the two boats which Aioma had saved for the moment.
The island was without a single canoe, and he intended to build one as swiftly as might be for the fishing; that being done he would destroy the boat and so obliterate the last trace of the cursed papalagi.
So he set to work and the work progressed, Le Moan helping with the others. She worked at the making of the sail, Kanoa helping her, happy, ignorant of her utter deadness to all things, yet sometimes wondering.
Sometimes this woman he had taken to his heart seemed indeed a spirit or a lost soul as she had seemed to him that time before the killing of Carlin; always she was remote from him in mind, untouchable as the gulls he had chased as a child on Soma. Yet she was his and she let him love her,—and “Time,” said the heart of Kanoa, “will bring her arms around me.”
Her strangeness and indifference increased his passion. A child and yet a man, he moved now in a wonder world, he was always singing when alone and there was something in his voice that made it different from the voices of the others, so that when the women heard him singing in the groves they said “That is Kanoa.”
And despite his happiness in her and his love for her and his embraces, despite the joy of new life that filled Karolin and the beauty of the nights in which Taori and Katafa walked together on the reef, never once did the desire come to Le Moan to destroy herself—all that was nothing to her now.
She had torn out her heart and nothing else mattered, even life.
“And to-morrow or next day,” one morning said Aioma, “the canoe will be ready and we will burn the lesser ayat as we burned the greater. Ah hai, what is this, the reef is lifting before my eyes—Look you, Tahuku!”
But Tahuku saw nothing. The reef was solid as of old and the sun was shining on it and he said so.
The canoe-builder shut his eyes and when he opened them again the reef had ceased to lift, but he was weary. Bells rang in his ears and his hands were hot and dry and now after a while and towards midday one of the papalagi—so it seemed to him—had seized him from behind and tied a band round his head, screwing it so tight that he would have screamed had he been an ordinary man.
He lay on the ground, and as he lay a woman, one of the wives of Poni, came running, panting as she ran.
“I burn, I burn!” cried the woman. “Aioma, my sight is going from me; I burn, I burn!” She fell on the ground and Katafa running to her raised her head.
Aioma turning on his side tried to rise but could not, then he laughed.
Then he began to sing. He was fighting the papalagi and killing them, the Spaniards of long ago and the whale men and Carlin and Rantan; his song was a song of victory, yet he was defeated. The white men had got him with the white man’s disease. Measles stood on the beach of Karolin, for the green ship with its cargo of labour had fallen to measles and Aioma in boarding it had sealed his doom.
It was Poni who guessed the truth. He had seen measles before—and now, remembering the ship, he cried out that they were undone, that the devils from the green ship had seized them and that they must die.
He had no need to say that.
Aioma lasted only a day, and the lagoon took him; by then the whole population was down, all but Taori, Katafa, Le Moan and Kanoa.
Kanoa had taken the disease at Vana Vana many years ago and was immune; the others, saved, perhaps, by the European blood in their veins, still resisted the disease.
The people died on the coral or cast themselves burning into the lagoon and were seized by the sharks, who knew.
And to Le Moan as she watched them, it was not the green sickness that did the work, but she herself.
She had brought this curse on Karolin. She had brought the schooner and the white men, she had taken the schooner to meet the green ship; it was the mother of her mother, Le Juan, who was reaching through her to slay and slay. Aioma in a lucid interval before he died had seized her by the hands and told her this, but she had no need of the telling of Aioma. She knew. And she watched, helpless and uncaring. She could do nothing, and the people passed, vanished like ghosts, died like flies, whilst the wind blew gently and the sun shone and the gulls fished and dawn came ever beautiful as of old through the Gates of Morning.
One night, when the disease seemed past and only ten people were left of all those who had watched the burning of the schooner, Le Moan, sleeping by Kanoa, was awakened by Katafa.
Katafa was weeping.
She seized Le Moan by the hands and raising her without waking Kanoa, led her to the house above which Nan still stood frizzy-headed in the moonlight.
In the house on a mat Dick was lying tossing his head from side to side and talking in a strange tongue.
Talking the language of his early childhood, calling out to Kearney whom he had long forgotten, but whom he remembered now.
The green sickness had seized Dick—resisted for days and days it had him at last.
Le Moan stood in the doorway and the moon looking over her shoulder lit the form on the mat, the reef spoke and the wind in the trees, but she heard nothing, saw nothing and for a moment felt nothing.
Taori was lying on the mat talking in a strange tongue, turning his head from side to side.
Then, as a person all but drowned, all but dead, comes slowly back to life and comes in agony, Le Moan began to feel the world come round her once more, the world she had known before she tore her heart out.
Taori was going to die. And the heart she had torn out was back again and the love that had filled it.
Taori was going to die—to die as the others had died and as surely, and as certainly through her who had brought this curse on Karolin and through whom the hand of Le Juan was still striking.
So great was the power of this thought that it fought with and overcame the passionate desire to fling herself on her knees beside him and take him in her arms; so great was its power that it almost drove the thought of him away before the crowding recollections it brought up of her own disastrous history in which she had brought evil to everyone. To Peterson, to Rantan, to Carlin, to Poni, to Tahuku—Tirai, all whom she had touched or come in contact with. To Aioma—and lastly to Taori.
Taori is going to die—Ai amasu Taori—the wind sighed it above him, it came mixed with the sobbing of Katafa and the voice of the beach with the rumbling voice of Taori himself, talking, talking, talking, as he wandered on the reef of memory with Kearney in a land that knew not Katafa.
Ai amasu Taori—and she dared not bid him goodbye; to save him she must go, leave him untouched, for the net of Le Juan was not yet torn, nor the spears of Uta blunted.
Even to look at him was fatal, yet she could not tear her eyes away.
Ai amusu Taori—a great breaker on the coral cried it to the night and broke the spell and turned her towards the weeping Katafa.
“Oh, Katafa,” said Le Moan, speaking in a voice clear but scarcely above a whisper, “Taori will not die—I go to save him; the nets are spread for him but I will break them, I the daughter of Le Jennibon, the daughter of Le Juan”
Even as she spoke the voice from the house quieted.
“I who have brought this evil.” Katafa heard her voice, not knowing what she said, for the change in the voice of the sick man was speaking to her.
Gliding into the house she lay down beside him, her cool hand upon his brow.
Le Moan turned to the beach through the trees. Night rested on Karolin and the moon showed the sands far stretching and filled with the silky whisper of the wind.
Far to the right lay the canoe all but completed, to the left the boat of the schooner. Le Moan came to the boat.
The tide was full, almost touching the keel, it was a light boat, the sands were firm, and evil though it was, it could not resist her. Afloat, with an oar, she drove it out, and raising the sail shipping the rudder, gave the sail to the wind.
The wind was favourable for the break, the ebb was beginning to run, all things were helping her now because she had conquered. Death could do no more against her for she was his.
To the right lay the moonlit sands of the southern beach from which she had sailed that morning with Peterson and with a dread in her heart that she did not feel now; before her lay the widening break with the first ebb racing through it to the sea, a night-flying gull cried above her as the breakers loudened on the outer beach and fell behind her as the wind and tide swept her out to the sea.
Far out, beyond return by drift or chance, she brailed the little sail, unstepped the mast and cast mast and sail to the water, cast the oars to the water, and lying down gave her soul into the hands of that Power through which her mother’s people had gained release when, weary of the world, they chose to turn their faces from the sun.
Northwest of the Paumotas men talk of a vast atoll island half fabulous, half believed in. Ship masters have sighted a palm line by day reefless because, steer as they will, some sort of current has never allowed them to raise the reef and by night the pearling schooners have heard the breathing of a beach uncharted, and always on the sound a wind has followed blowing them away from the mysterious land.
Karolin—who knows?—the island of dreams, sealed by the soul of Le Moan to the civilization that the children of Lestrange and their child escaped from; a beach that the pleasant sunshine alone lights for me; where Aioma shapes his logs and where I watch, undisturbed by the noise of cities, the freshness we have lost and the light that comes alone through the Gates of Morning.