XXVI

I cannot express the strange effect it had on me to hear Rarahu speak English. She was fully aware of this, and never used it excepting when she was very sure of what she meant to say and wished me to be greatly impressed by it. At such moments her voice had an indescribable sweetness, and a quaint, penetrating charm of sadness. Some words and phrases she pronounced very well, and then I could fancy her a daughter of my own race and blood; it seemed suddenly to bring us closer together in a mysterious and unexpected way. She saw now that it was vain to think of keeping me with her; that this notion was past and gone like a dream of childhood; that all this was quite impossible and done with for ever. Our days were numbered. At most could I talk of returning, and she had ceased to believe me. What she had done during my absence I knew not; she had taken up no other sailor lover, and this was all I asked. I had not lost a sort of prestige over her imagination; absence had not broken it, and no one else could have exerted it. On my return she had lavished on me all the love that a passionate little being of sixteen has to give;—and yet, I saw it clearly, as time flew on, day by day, Rarahu was slipping from me. She smiled with the same quiet smile, but her heart, I knew, was full of bitterness, of disenchantment, of obscure wrath, and all the seething passions of a savage child.