My South Sea Sweetheart | Page 9

out, had me named "Dara--" after the island. And Hiliwa Dara was bought, and the poet realized his dream.
If you had seen Hiliwa Dara, you would have envied him; it was, in every way, the island of a dream....
Many Pacific islands are nothing of the kind. The "low" island, lovely though it is, is no one's dream. People do not know enough about it to dream of it although its coloring, as a rule, is superb, unmatchable, its palm trees the best of all island palms. Hiliwa Dara was not one of these. It was "high" island, with just the tall purple peak standing up in the middle, the drooping veils of stream and cataract, the bright green climbing woods, and lawny bays, and the white, white coral shore that you have pictured so often to yourself.
It had palms in plenty what is a South Sea island without its palms? leaning over the green, still water of the lagoon within the reef, pluming the slopes of "Parnassus," standing out on the ends of seaward-running points, as palms do stand, just as if they had been planted there for sheer beauty. We planted a good many ourselves after coming to the island, but no one would have noticed them, since they were all set out on a rather ugly but convenient flat away at the back of the island.
Yes, it was lovely, very, very lovely. It lay in the central belt of the Pacific, where hurricanes never come, and there is so little difference between the seasons that one may well call life one long, unending summer.... There were rainy days, of course, sometimes day after day of rain for quite a good while; there were equinoctial gales of a kind; there were "cold" nights when the thermometer went down to sixty-nine, and everybody said that the climate must be changing, and nothing had ever been seen like it. There were hot days, plenty, when the instruments in our little thatched hut stood well over ninety at high noon, but there was never cold nor tempest, nor destroying heat; always there was a core of life and coolness in the air from the breath of the great seas; almost always there was sun, and flowers that marked two summers in the year with a double gift of bloom. Our fruits, too, came twice a year, not once, as in less generous climes. There were two seasons, marked by the changing of the winds from sluggish, sometimes stormy northwest, to the cool, clear river of the flowing southeast "trades" that ran for nearly seven months of the year without a break, through our high pale blue heavens. Some of our flowers kept no season, but bloomed endlessly. Always there were secretive orchid blooms hiding in the great bush flower-butterflies and moths of white and pink and yellow, of orange spotted with brown, of flesh-red tipped with color of new blood. Always the faithful frangipanrii bore white, bold-centered stars, sometimes many, ^sometimes few, that loaded every breeze with floating honey, and the hibiscus burned red at the edges of the bush, and the paw-paw hung out waving streams of greenwhite blossoms, almost too cloyingly sweet. The orange trees that stood about the cave house were young, but they flowered most of the time, and fruited twice yearly, so that the stabbing scent of orange bloom blown down the entrance archway was never absent from our rooms and the golden fruit was almost always piled upon our tables. Season melted into season on Hiliwa Dara, with not so much change as comes of morning melting into afternoon. It was always lovely, it was always summer. And it was always peace.
Until the day when Dinah said there was ill luck about.
It would be absurd to say that Luke and I did not feel it, when we started on our climb of Parnassus, that splendid Saturday morning. Children are as sensitive as sea anemones to currents and movements of the minds about them. We had both felt that change was afoot, and Dinah's remarks had only underlined our own convictions. First it had been the odd, uncomradely way in which Luke had looked at me. Then it had been the demanding, and the giving of his " toga virilis " a change that made him almost a stranger to me. Also, and underneath everything, running through and influencing everything, had been the thought of the mysterious talk of our elders rountj the fire last night. Of course I had told Luke every word of it ; I told him everything. But to my surprise, he had talked almost like old Ivory or Lorraine. He had told me that I oughtn't to have listened which I knew as well as he; only I did not expect to