My South Sea Sweetheart

My South Sea Sweetheart
By Beatrice Grimshaw
Author of "The Terrible Island"
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1921
All rights reserved

MY SOUTH SEA SWEETHEART
CHAPTER I
"MARRIAGES" said my father "would in the whole be quite as successful as they are if they were arranged by the Lord Chancellor without reference to the will of the parties."
"That's not your own," said old Ivory, throwing a piece of driftwood on the fire. The log, seasalted, snapped into flames of vivid green and blue.
"Of course not," replied my father. "I don't even remember who said it. But it's true."
"It may be," said old Ivory caustically, "but if the Lord Chancellor only managed to be ' quite as successful ' as existing arrangements are, I wouldn't give much for his chance of a long life."
"Perhaps you and I are a trifle prejudiced," offered my father. The smoke rose up in a steady stream to the dark roof of the cave. There was an opening there, invisible by day.
"We've had some cause.... Son and grandson in my case; your father's and your well, well! for you."
I saw he had bitten off what he was going to say. I knew what it was, of course. Mother and father hadn't got on. Mother was dead in the dark ages, before I remembered. Father and I and Lorraine my aunt had come to Hiliwa Dara Island with old Mr. Ivory and his great-grandson, Luke. I didn't know when, and didn't know why. They owned the island among them. Nobody else lived there but a score or two of native laborers whom we had brought with us. Nobody ever came. Once or twice a year our cutter went away, and came back again with goods from another island. There were many other islands in the world; there was one, very, very big, that was called Australia, whence I had come, I did not know when or how. I could not remember it. I could not remember anything but what I knew the island and my father and aunt, old Ivory and his boy, the laborers, the gardens, the great cave house where we lived. These were my world ringed round by the pathless sea.
"Luke's parents' marriage had its good points," said my father consideringly.
Luke, at this, raised his head from the arrow he was shaping by the firelight. (We always used a driftwood fire by night, since the main hall of the cave was never warm.) I saw his blue eyes glitter under their heavily carved brow arches. Boy though he was, he had a masculine face, in nothing at all like the small, pointed countenance, with the dark eyes and delicate forehead, that met me every morning in my glass.
"Certainly Mark was fond of the boy's mother," said the old, old man in the corner of the cave. "She spent his fortune and more. But we won't discuss her before the boy."
Luke looked up again, and then down at his work once more. His lips were set rather tightly. I thought he had been near speaking, but he uttered no word. In the pause that followed, the sea, a long way outside, talked on the coral beach; a puff of wind, blown down the entrance tunnel, set the driftwood to leaping and blazing.
Lorraine, her hands round her knees, sat staring at the light. Her eyes, green as the flames, her hair, black as charred ashes, seemed to relate her in some strange way to those wild fires of our far-off island. I could not have put the thought into words then. I can now. Child as I was, I knew her to be the flame under ashes. I had the wisdom that those older than I had not.
It was she who spoke next. I was sitting with my bare, sunburned legs stretched out under my blue tunic, staring at her, and wondering if she was not very, very old. She must be very aged, I thought thirty at the least. Or maybe sixty. Perhaps it was her black clothing made her look old. My father and Ivory wore light khaki clothes, Luke and I had blue tunics very much alike, but Lorraine went always dressed in loose, thin robes of black. No one, I knew, had seen her in any other color, since the wedding day that had left her a widow before she was a wire, in the world I had never seen, long ago.
She said, looking at the green of the fire:
"I grant you that most marriages are unhappy, love matches as often as the rest. But the happy marriage is a Paradise that's worth taking any risk for. Any risk!" Her voice died down, as the flames were dying. The wind that whipped them into life had blown itself away.
Old Ivory settled himself more comfortably on the wrack-filled cushion of his seat.
"It's just