On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales | Page 9

age and great-great-grandchildren-- she who had lomied
them as babies in the great house at Kilohana, as her ancestresses had
lomied their ancestresses back through the unnumbered generations.
The brief duty visit over, Martha arose and accompanied her back to
the bungalow, putting money into her hand, commanding proud and
beautiful Japanese housemaids to wait upon the dilapidated aborigine
with poi, which is compounded of the roots of the water lily, with

iamaka, which is raw fish, and with pounded kukui nut and limu, which
latter is seawood tender to the toothless, digestible and savoury. It was
the old feudal tie, the faithfulness of the commoner to the chief, the
responsibility of the chief to the commoner; and Martha, three-quarters
haole with the Anglo-Saxon blood of New England, was four-quarters
Hawaiian in her remembrance and observance of the well-nigh
vanished customs of old days.
As she came back across the lawn to the hau tree, Bella's eyes dwelt
upon the moving authenticity of her and of the blood of her, and
embraced her and loved her. Shorter than Bella was Martha, a trifle, but
the merest trifle, less queenly of port; but beautifully and generously
proportioned, mellowed rather than dismantled by years, her
Polynesian chiefess figure eloquent and glorious under the satisfying
lines of a half-fitting, grandly sweeping, black-silk holoku trimmed
with black lace more costly than a Paris gown.
And as both sisters resumed their talk, an observer would have noted
the striking resemblance of their pure, straight profiles, of their broad
cheek-bones, of their wide and lofty foreheads, of their iron-grey
abundance of hair, of their sweet-lipped mouths set with the carriage of
decades of assured and accomplished pride, and of their lovely slender
eye-rows arched over equally lovely long brown eyes. The hands of
both of them, little altered or defaced by age, were wonderful in their
slender, tapering finger-tips, love-lomied and love-formed while they
were babies by old Hawaiian women like to the one even then eating
poi and iamaka and limu in the house.
"I had a year of it," Bella resumed, "and, do you know, things were
beginning to come right. I was beginning to draw to Husband George.
Women are so made, I was such a woman at any rate. For he was good.
He was just. All the old sterling Puritan virtues were his. I was coming
to draw to him, to like him, almost, might I say, to love him. And had
not Uncle John loaned me that horse, I know that I would have truly
loved him and have lived ever happily with him--in a quiet sort of way,
of course.
"You see, I knew nothing else, nothing different, nothing better in the

way of men. I came gladly to look across the table at him while he read
in the brief interval between supper and bed, gladly to listen for and to
catch the beat of his horse's hoofs coming home at night from his
endless riding over the ranch. And his scant praise was praise indeed,
that made me tingle with happiness- -yes, Sister Martha, I knew what it
was to blush under his precise, just praise for the things I had done
right or correctly.
"And all would have been well for the rest of our lives together, except
that he had to take steamer to Honolulu. It was business. He was to be
gone two weeks or longer, first, for the Glenns in ranch affairs, and
next for himself, to arrange the purchase of still more of the upper
Nahala lands. Do you know! he bought lots of the wilder and
up-and-down lands, worthless for aught save water, and the very heart
of the watershed, for as low as five and ten cents an acre. And he
suggested I needed a change. I wanted to go with him to Honolulu. But,
with an eye to expense, he decided Kilohana for me. Not only would it
cost him nothing for me to visit at the old home, but he saved the price
of the poor food I should have eaten had I remained alone at Nahala,
which meant the purchase price of more Nahala acreage. And at
Kilohana Uncle John said yes, and loaned me the horse.
"Oh, it was like heaven, getting back, those first several days. It was
difficult to believe at first that there was so much food in all the world.
The enormous wastage of the kitchen appalled me. I saw waste
everywhere, so well trained had I been by Husband George. Why, out
in the servants' quarters the aged relatives and most distant hangers-on
of the servants fed better than George and I ever fed. You remember
our Kilohana way, same as the Parker way, a bullock killed for every
meal, fresh fish by