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Updated: June 9, 2025
The moon shone down above from among the fronds of tall coco-palms, on a dense crowd of native worshipers men and a few women the men for the most part clad in little more than a loin-cloth, the women picturesque in their colored saris and jewelled ear and nose rings.
Raymond was a lonely man, and passionately attached to his only child; so no one wondered when, reaching California a year after and finding her gone, he shot himself in his room at an hotel. "I will ask him, anyway," I said; and as we went back into the house the ALIDA shot past our line of vision through the coco-palms, and brought up inside the brig.
This was in the afternoon; in the dark hours of the night the sea burst upon the island like a flood; the settlement was razed all but the church and presbytery; and, when day returned, the survivors saw themselves clinging in an abattis of uprooted coco-palms and ruined houses. Danger is but a small consideration.
The sea was as smooth as a lake, and only the faintest air was ruffling the surface of the water. Three miles away were two small, low-lying islands, clad with coco-palms, their white belting of beach glistening like iridescent pearl-shell under the glowing tropic sun. As the boats were lowered he said to Frewen, "You know what I have said, sir.
His back was turned, but hearing my steps he 'went about' and faced me. 'Twas a bright moonlight night, and the bullet plugged him fair between the eyes. Over he rolled without a kick. Then I heard a shriek or laughter, and saw half a dozen girls scuttling away among the coco-palms. A horrible suspicion nearly made me faint.
He stood awhile, looking about him, and then turned toward a cleared space among the coco-palms, where a low, square enclosure formed of loosely piled blocks of coral stood clearly out in the moonlight; in the centre of the square were two graves, one of which had at its head a cross roughly hewn from a slab of coral stone.
Shortly before noon, the boat rounded a low headland and entered a lovely little bay, embowered in thick groves of coco-palms and breadfruit trees. The new house which Raymond had built was not visible from the bay, but there were some thirty or forty native houses clustered under the shade of the trees, a few yards up from the beach, on which they noticed a ship's longboat was lying.
The island beach was quite three hundred yards away, but Maurice was a good swimmer, and although he shuddered at the thought of sharks, he plunged in the water after his dark-skinned companion and soon reached the islet, which was but a tiny spot, containing some two or three score of coco-palms, and three untenanted native huts.
In the days of Nakaeia the palace was beset with some tall coco-palms which commanded the enclosure. It chanced one evening, while Nakaeia sat below at supper with his wives, that the owner of the grove was in a tree-top drawing palm-tree wine; it chanced that he looked down, and the king at the same moment looking up, their eyes encountered. Instant flight preserved the involuntary criminal.
I know not how much earth had gone to the garden of my villa; some at least, for an alley of prosperous bananas ran to the gate, and over the rest of the enclosure, which was covered with the usual clinker-like fragments of smashed coral, not only coco-palms and mikis but also fig-trees flourished, all of a delicious greenness. Of course there was no blade of grass.
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