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His resolution was taken. He ordered Captain Stillwell to stop the ship and lower a boat.

“I am going to treat myself to a run ashore,” he said by way of explanation.

The vessel slowly stopped. The covers were whipped off the gig. She was hoisted out and lowered, the crew dropping down the ladder into their places at the peep-peep-peep of the whistle.

“I leave the ship,” said Sir John, not to convey a fact patently obvious, but in obedience to a naval formula.

He was landed at a little cove where in bygone days he had often whiled away an hour waiting in charge of Hadow’s boat. It gave him a singular sensation to feel the keel grate against the shingle, and to find himself once more setting foot in Lihua. He drew a deep breath as he looked about and noticed how unchanged it all was. There were some new houses in new places, and grass on the sites of others that were endeared to him in recollection; but it was Lihua, after all, the Lihua of his boyhood, the Lihua of his dreams. For a while he strolled about at random, walking with the phantoms of the past, hearing their laughter, seeing their faces, recalling a thousand things he had forgotten.

It came over him with a start that the village was empty. Then he remembered it was Sunday, and they were all in church. Thank God, there was none to watch him; no prying, curious eyes to disturb his thoughts. But they would soon be out again, and it behooved him to make the best use of his solitude while he might. He struck inland, his heart beating with a curious expectancy; at every sound he held his breath, and he would turn quickly and look back with a haunting sense that Tehea was near him; that perhaps she was gazing at him through the trees. He approached his old home through overgrown plantations. It awed him to part the branches and to feel himself drawing nearer at every step to the only house he had ever called his own. As he heard the splashing waterfall he stopped, not daring for the moment to go on. When at last he did so, and mounted the little hill, he found no house at all; nothing but ferns and weeds, man-high. He moved about here and there, up to the armpits in verdure, in a sort of consternation at discovering it gone.

His foot struck against a boulder.

He had forgotten there were any rocks on the hill. He moved along, and his foot struck again. He pressed the weeds back and looked down. He saw a tomb of crumbling cement, green with age and buried out of sight under the tangle.

It had never occurred to him before that Tehea might be dead.

He held back the undergrowth again and peered into the depths. Yes, it was the grave of a chief, or of a woman of rank, one of those artless mounds of cement and rock that the natives, with poetic fancy, used to call falelauasi, houses of sandalwood; oliolisanga, or the place where birds sing; or, in vulgar speech, simply tuungamau, or tombs. These words, unspoken, unthought of for forty years, lost, overlaid, and forgotten in some recess of his brain, now returned to him with tormenting recollection. He laid both hands on the thick stem of a shrub and tore it out of the ground. He seized another and dragged it out with the same ferocity. It was intolerable that she should suffocate under all this warm, wet jungle; he would give her air and sunshine, she that had loved them both; he would uncover the poor stones that marked her last resting place; he would lay bare the earth that wrapped her dead beauty.

He worked with desperation until his hands were bleeding, until his eyes were stung and blinded with the streaming sweat. Dizzy with the heat, parched with thirst, and sick with the steam that rose from the damp ground, he was forced again and again to desist and rest. He cut his waistcoat into slips and bound them round his bloody hands; he broke the blades of his penknife on recalcitrant roots that defied the strength of his arms; he labored with fury to complete the task he had set before him. Here he stood, within four walls of vegetation, the sky above him, the cracked and rotted tomb below, satisfied at last by the accomplishment of his duty. The gold on his sleeves was dirty and disordered; one of his shoulder-straps dangled loose from his sodden coat; his trousers were splashed with earth. But for the moment the post captain was forgotten in the man, as he mused on the tragedy of human life, on the mysteries of love and death and destiny, on his own irrevocable youth now so far behind him, when he had forfeited his honor for the dead woman at his feet. He called her aloud by name. He bent down and kissed her mossy bed. He whispered, with a strange conviction that she could hear him, that he had kept his promise to return.

Then, rising to his feet, he turned toward the sea and retraced his steps. The people were still in church, and the village was deserted as before. He walked swiftly lest they might come flocking out before he could reach his boat, to torture him with recognition, with the questions they would ask, with their story of Tehea’s death. Then he laughed at his own fears, remembering his white hair and the intervening generation. Time had passed over Borabora, too. The world, he remembered, was older by forty years–older and sadder and emptier.

* * * * *

He swung himself up the ladder, mounted the bridge, and put the vessel on her course. The telegraph rang, the engineers repeated back the signal, and the great battleship, vibrating with her mighty engines, resumed once more her ponderous way.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: “Existence doubtful; position doubtful,” familiar contractions still on any Pacific chart.]