My South Sea Sweetheart | Page 8

was

Saturday, and a holiday, went off together to climb Parnassus, and look
for ships. Ships never came or almost never but none the less, we
looked as industriously as if we had been wrecked sailors marooned out
here on Hiliwa Dara, hoping for release.
Father had called the hill in the middle of the island Parnassus, because
he was a poet, and used to go up there and write when he happened to
have the time. I think, with the knowledge of later days, I can
reconstruct much of the frame of mind that led him to settle on Hiliwa
Dara. He was, as I have said, a poet ; not a very famous one, but still
not unknown. He had as much of the poetic temperament as many
whose names are greater, but he had, I imagine, more feeling than
power of expression. Thereby hung the tragedy of his marriage. He had
married a girl who believed in nothing that she didn't see, credited the
existence of nothing that was not told to her in plainest of words. And
father couldn't tell her the things that she ought to have known, without
any necessity for telling. And somebody else, in time, proved apt at
telling that which she never should have known....
My little mother "played the game." If she had not, I, her daughter,
would scarcely tell this tale. She loved the man of the silver tongue (I
have wondered, words or no words, if he could ever have had a voice
as silver as my father's was). She even told him so. She told my father.
She would have told all the world. Her love, she said, was her glory. ...
I don't know what she thought it was to her husband. I suppose she did
not think about that at all.
The man waited. Probably he thought not understanding my little
mother, even as she had not understood my rather that he had only to
wait.
I was born my father's own child. When I was three days old, she laid
me in his arms, and asked him to take me away from the room she
wanted a good long sleep. Even the nurse was to go away.
They all went. They stayed within hearing, but no one heard a sound....
An hour later, my mother's body was found floating at the foot of the
cliffs. They called it childbirth mania. I do not know or perhaps, I think

I do....
The man? He went to "the war." You will not want to know which war
it was. He never came back.
After that, when the shadows had cleared away a little, my father being,
as I have said, a poet dreamed a dream. It was the dream that
everybody has, at some period of his or her life the dream of an island
of one's own. I need not tell you about it; you have had it too. But you
never hoped to realize it, and never tried. I don't think my father would
have tried either being so much of a poet if he had not about this time
met old Ivory. Mr. Ivory was a retired missionary, who had spent many
years in the Pacific. Father, in his Sydney home the beautiful little nest
he had built for the bird that only wanted to fly free talked with the
strange old man, and found that he, too, had suffered. His marriage had
been unhappy. His sons had been unhappy. His grandsons had been
more or less unhappy. All were still living, save the grandson, who had
died in a shipwreck with his wife, leaving one little baby boy, whom
Ivory had adopted.
He told my father these things, and I infer that they found each other
very congenial on the subject of unhappy marriages. I thought in my
childish days, and I think still more now, that the Ivorys, on the whole,
were a violent-willed, impetuous crowd who made too early and too
hurried choices. Their very virtues, which were as fierce as everything
else connected with them, probably contributed to this result. But Ivory
did not think so. He thought the institution of marriage itself was to
blame. He was not, and is not, alone in his error.
He told my father much about islands and island life; told him,
incidentally, that islands were purchasable things, and that a man who
wanted one, and could afford to pay for his fancy, might have one as
readily as he might have a horse or a house. It turned out, when inquiry
was made, that few were at that time in the market. Hiliwa Dara being
some miles square, of good soil, well watered, and uninhabited,
naturally was valued high by the government to which