On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales | Page 7

with
us overnight. And you know the lavishness of the big ranches, then and
now. How we were the laughing-stock! 'What do we care!' George
would say. 'They live to-day and now. Twenty years from now will be
our turn, Bella. They will be where they are now, and they will eat out
of our hand. We will be compelled to feed them, they will need to be

fed, and we will feed them well; for we will be rich, Bella, so rich that I
am afraid to tell you. But I know what I know, and you must have faith
in me.'
"George was right. Twenty years afterward, though he did not live to
see it, my income was a thousand a month. Goodness! I do not know
what it is to-day. But I was only nineteen, and I would say to George:
'Now! now! We live now. We may not be alive twenty years from now.
I do want a new broom. And there is a third-rate coffee that is only two
cents a pound more than the awful stuff we are using. Why couldn't I
fry eggs in butter--now? I should dearly love at least one new tablecloth.
Our linen! I'm ashamed to put a guest between the sheets, though
heaven knows they dare come seldom enough.'
"'Be patient, Bella,' he would reply. 'In a little while, in only a few
years, those that scorn to sit at our table now, or sleep between our
sheets, will be proud of an invitation--those of them who will not be
dead. You remember how Stevens passed out last year--free-living and
easy, everybody's friend but his own. The Kohala crowd had to bury
him, for he left nothing but debts. Watch the others going the same
pace. There's your brother Hal. He can't keep it up and live five years,
and he's breaking his uncles' hearts. And there's Prince Lilolilo. Dashes
by me with half a hundred mounted, able-bodied, roystering kanakas in
his train who would be better at hard work and looking after their future,
for he will never be king of Hawaii. He will not live to be king of
Hawaii.'
"George was right. Brother Hal died. So did Prince Lilolilo. But George
was not ALL right. He, who neither drank nor smoked, who never
wasted the weight of his arms in an embrace, nor the touch of his lips a
second longer than the most perfunctory of kisses, who was invariably
up before cockcrow and asleep ere the kerosene lamp had a tenth
emptied itself, and who never thought to die, was dead even more
quickly than Brother Hal and Prince Lilolilo.
"'Be patient, Bella,' Uncle Robert would say to me. 'George Castner is a
coming man. I have chosen well for you. Your hardships now are the
hardships on the way to the promised land. Not always will the

Hawaiians rule in Hawaii. Just as they let their wealth slip out of their
hands, so will their rule slip out of their hands. Political power and the
land always go together. There will be great changes, revolutions no
one knows how many nor of what sort, save that in the end the haole
will possess the land and the rule. And in that day you may well be first
lady of Hawaii, just as surely as George Castner will be ruler of Hawaii.
It is written in the books. It is ever so where the haole conflicts with the
easier races. I, your Uncle Robert, who am half-Hawaiian and
half-haole, know whereof I speak. Be patient, Bella, be patient.'
"'Dear Bella,' Uncle John would say; and I knew his heart was tender
for me. Thank God, he never told me to be patient. He knew. He was
very wise. He was warm human, and, therefore, wiser than Uncle
Robert and George Castner, who sought the thing, not the spirit, who
kept records in ledgers rather than numbers of heart- beats breast to
breast, who added columns of figures rather than remembered
embraces and endearments of look and speech and touch. 'Dear Bella,'
Uncle John would say. He knew. You have heard always how he was
the lover of the Princess Naomi. He was a true lover. He loved but the
once. After her death they said he was eccentric. He was. He was the
one lover, once and always. Remember that taboo inner room of his at
Kilohana that we entered only after his death and found it his shrine to
her. 'Dear Bella,' it was all he ever said to me, but I knew he knew.
"And I was nineteen, and sun-warm Hawaiian in spite of my three-
quarters haole blood, and I knew nothing save my girlhood splendours
at Kilohana and my Honolulu education at the