“Land from hell it was, land cursed seven times.  Did not Scallamera become a leper and die of it horribly?  And all his twelve children by that Henriette?  It was the ground.  It had been leprous since the Chinese came.  Oh, it was a fine return for the cut-off hand!”

Gasping and choking, the ghastly creature paused for breath, and in the shuddering silence the banana-leaves ceaselessly dripped, and the hum of innumerable mosquito-wings was sharp and thin.

“I did not become a leper.  I was young and strong.  I was never sick.  I worked all day, and at night I was with the women.  Ah, the beautiful, beautiful women!  With souls of fiends from hell.  Mohuto is not dead yet.  She lives too long.  She lives and sits on the path below, and watches.  She should be killed, but I have no strength.

“I was young and strong, and loved too many women.  How could I know the devil behind her eyes when she came wooing me again?  I had left her.  She was with child, and ugly.  I loved beautiful women.  But she was beautiful again when the child was dead.  I was with another.  What was her name?  I have forgotten her name.  Is there no more rum?  I remember when I have rum.

“So I went again to Mohuto.  The devil from hell!  There was poison in her embraces.  Why does she not die?  She knew too much.  She was too wise.  It was I who died.  No, I did not die.  I became old before my time, but I am living yet.  The Catholic mission gave me this land.  I planted bananas.  I have never been away.  How long ago? Je ne sais pas. Twenty years?  Forty?  I do not see any one.  But I know that Mohuto sits on the path below and waits.  I will live long yet.”

He was like a two-days’ old corpse.  He rose to his feet, staggered, and lay down on the heap of soggy leaves.  The mosquitos circled in swarms above him.  They were devouring us, but the hermit they never lighted on.  Le Vergose and I fled from the hut and the grove.

“He is an example like those in Balzac or the religious books,” said the Breton, crossing himself.  “I have been here many years, and never before did I come here, and again. Jamais de la vie! I must begin to go to church again.”

We said nothing more as we slid and slipped downward on the wet trail, but when we came again to the straw hut hidden in the trees Mohuto was still on the paepae, watching us, and I paused to speak to her.

“You knew Hemeury Francois when he was young?”

She put her hand over her eyes, and spat.

“He was my first lover.  I had a child by him.  He was handsome once.”  Her eyes, full of malevolence, turned to the dark grove.  “He dies very slowly.”

The memory of her face was with me when at midnight I went alone to my valley.  On my pillows I heard again the cracked voice of the hermit, and saw the blue-white skin upon his shaking bones.  He could not believe in Po, the Marquesan god of Darkness, or in the Veinehae, the Ghost-Woman who watches the dying; nor did I believe in them or in Satan, but about me in my Golden Bed until midnight was long past the spirits that hate the light moaned and creaked the hut.