第41章 THE ISLE OF VOICES.(5)

The days were long to him,and the nights terrifying.He made a lamp of cocoa-shell,and drew the oil of the ripe nuts,and made a wick of fibre;and when evening came he closed up his hut,and lit his lamp,and lay and trembled till morning.Many a time he thought in his heart he would have been better in the bottom of the sea,his bones rolling there with the others.

All this while he kept by the inside of the island,for the huts were on the shore of the lagoon,and it was there the palms grew best,and the lagoon itself abounded with good fish.And to the outer slide he went once only,and he looked but the once at the beach of the ocean,and came away shaking.For the look of it,with its bright sand,and strewn shells,and strong sun and surf,went sore against his inclination.

"It cannot be,"he thought,"and yet it is very like.And how do Iknow?These white men,although they pretend to know where they are sailing,must take their chance like other people.So that after all we may have sailed in a circle,and I may be quite near to Molokai,and this may be the very beach where my father-in-law gathers his dollars."So after that he was prudent,and kept to the land side.

It was perhaps a month later,when the people of the place arrived -the fill of six great boats.They were a fine race of men,and spoke a tongue that sounded very different from the tongue of Hawaii,but so many of the words were the same that it was not difficult to understand.The men besides were very courteous,and the women very towardly;and they made Keola welcome,and built him a house,and gave him a wife;and what surprised him the most,he was never sent to work with the young men.

And now Keola had three periods.First he had a period of being very sad,and then he had a period when he was pretty merry.Last of all came the third,when he was the most terrified man in the four oceans.

The cause of the first period was the girl he had to wife.He was in doubt about the island,and he might have been in doubt about the speech,of which he had heard so little when he came there with the wizard on the mat.But about his wife there was no mistake conceivable,for she was the same girl that ran from him crying in the wood.So he had sailed all this way,and might as well have stayed in Molokai;and had left home and wife and all his friends for no other cause but to escape his enemy,and the place he had come to was that wizard's hunting ground,and the shore where he walked invisible.It was at this period when he kept the most close to the lagoon side,and as far as he dared,abode in the cover of his hut.

The cause of the second period was talk he heard from his wife and the chief islanders.Keola himself said little.He was never so sure of his new friends,for he judged they were too civil to be wholesome,and since he had grown better acquainted with his father-in-law the man had grown more cautious.So he told them nothing of himself,but only his name and descent,and that he came from the Eight Islands,and what fine islands they were;and about the king's palace in Honolulu,and how he was a chief friend of the king and the missionaries.But he put many questions and learned much.The island where he was was called the Isle of Voices;it belonged to the tribe,but they made their home upon another,three hours'sail to the southward.There they lived and had their permanent houses,and it was a rich island,where were eggs and chickens and pigs,and ships came trading with rum and tobacco.It was there the schooner had gone after Keola deserted;there,too,the mate had died,like the fool of a white man as he was.It seems,when the ship came,it was the beginning of the sickly season in that isle,when the fish of the lagoon are poisonous,and all who eat of them swell up and die.The mate was told of it;he saw the boats preparing,because in that season the people leave that island and sail to the Isle of Voices;but he was a fool of a white man,who would believe no stories but his own,and he caught one of these fish,cooked it and ate it,and swelled up and died,which was good news to Keola.As for the Isle of Voices,it lay solitary the most part of the year;only now and then a boat's crew came for copra,and in the bad season,when the fish at the main isle were poisonous,the tribe dwelt there in a body.It had its name from a marvel,for it seemed the seaside of it was all beset with invisible devils;day and night you heard them talking one with another in strange tongues;day and night little fires blazed up and were extinguished on the beach;and what was the cause of these doings no man might conceive.Keola asked them if it were the same in their own island where they stayed,and they told him no,not there;nor yet in any other of some hundred isles that lay all about them in that sea;but it was a thing peculiar to the Isle of Voices.They told him also that these fires and voices were ever on the seaside and in the seaward fringes of the wood,and a man might dwell by the lagoon two thousand years (if he could live so long)and never be any way troubled;and even on the seaside the devils did no harm if let alone.Only once a chief had cast a spear at one of the voices,and the same night he fell out of a cocoanut palm and was killed.

Keola thought a good bit with himself.He saw he would be all right when the tribe returned to the main island,and right enough where he was,if he kept by the lagoon,yet he had a mind to make things righter if he could.So he told the high chief he had once been in an isle that was pestered the same way,and the folk had found a means to cure that trouble.