Wilfrid Baillon was out of the hospital in just ten days.  His release, as cured by the doctor, coincided curiously with his payment in advance.  I saw him off for New Zealand by the steamship leaving the next day.

“Those people were awful good to me,” he said in farewell.  “It hurts me to treat those girls this way, but I’m scairt o’ them.  They’re too strong in their feelings.”

He ran away from a mess of love pottage that many men would have gone across seas to gain.

Ormsby, an Englishman in his early twenties, good-looking and courteous, with an air of accustomedness to luxury, but of being roughened by his environment, was sitting on a bench one morning with a girl.  He called me over to meet her.

“You are an old-timer here now,” he began, “and I’ve got to go away on the schooner to the Paumotus to-morrow.  Drop in at Tahia’s shack once in a while and cheer her up.  She lives back of the Catholic mission, and she’s pretty sick.”

Tahia was desperately ill, I thought.  She was thin, the color of the yellow wax candles of the high altar, and her straight nose, with expanded nostrils, and hard, almost savage mouth, features carved as with the stone chisel of her ancient tribe, conjured up the profile of Nenehofra, an Egyptian princess whose mummy I had seen.  She was stern, silent, resigned to her fate, as are these races who know the inexorable will of the gods.

“Is she your girl?” I asked Ormsby.

He colored slightly.

“I suppose so, and the baby will be mine if it’s ever born.  At any rate, I’m going to stick to her while she’s in this fix.  I’ll tell you on the square, I’m not gone on her; but she had a lover, an Australian I knew, and he was good to her, but he got the consumption and couldn’t work.  Maybe he came here with it.  They hadn’t a shilling, and Tahia built a hut in the hills up there near where the nature men live, and put him in it, and she fed and cared for him.  She went to the mountains for feis she came down here to the reef to fish, and she found eggs and breadfruit in other people’s gardens.  She kept him alive, the Lord knows how, until he could secure money from Sydney to go home and die.  Now, she’s got the con from him, I suppose, and it would be a shabby trick to leave her when she’s dying and will be a mother in two months, according to Doctor Cassiou!”

He made a wry face and lit his pipe.  The girl could not understand a word and sat immovable.

“She’s Marquesan,” he went on.  “Her mother has written through a trader in Atuona, on Hiva-Oa, to send her to her own valley, but she’s quit.  She sits and broods all day.  I ’d like to go back to my own home in Warwickshire.  I know I’m changing for the bad here.  I live like a dam’ beach-comber.  I only get a screw of three hundred francs a month, and that all goes for us two, with medicines and doctors.  She’d go to Atuona if I’d go; but I can’t make a living there, and I’m rotten enough now without living off her people in the cannibal group.  She’s skin and bones and coughs all night.”