anybody’s fault it was Uncle John’s.”
“Uncle John’s!” Martha cried with sharp surprise. “If it had to be
one or the other, I should have said Uncle Robert. But Uncle
John!”
Bella smiled with slow positiveness.
“But it was Uncle Robert who made you marry George Castner,” her
sister urged.
“That is true,” Bella nodded corroboration. “But it was not the
matter of a husband, but of a horse. I wanted to borrow a horse
from Uncle John, and Uncle John said yes. That is how it all
happened.”
A silence fell, pregnant and cryptic, and, while the voices of the
children and the soft mandatory protests of the Asiatic maids drew
nearer from the beach, Martha Scandwell felt herself vibrant and
tremulous with sudden resolve of daring. She waved the children
away.
“Run along, dears, run along, Grandma and Aunt Bella want to talk.”
And as the shrill, sweet treble of child voices ebbed away across
the lawn, Martha, with scrutiny of the heart, observed the sadness
of the lines graven by secret woe for half a century in her
sister’s face. For nearly fifty years had she watched those lines.
She steeled all the melting softness of the Hawaiian of her to
break the half-century of silence.
“Bella,” she said. “We never know. You never spoke. But we
wondered, oh, often and often–”
“And never asked,” Bella murmured gratefully.
“But I am asking now, at the last. This is our twilight. Listen
to them! Sometimes it almost frightens me to think that they are
grandchildren, MY grandchildren–I, who only the other day, it
would seem, was as heart-free, leg-free, care-free a girl as ever
bestrode a horse, or swam in the big surf, or gathered opihis at
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
7
low tide, or laughed at a dozen lovers. And here in our twilight
let us forget everything save that I am your dear sister as you are
mine.”
The eyes of both were dewy moist. Bella palpably trembled to
utterance.
“We thought it was George Castner,” Martha went on; “and we could
guess the details. He was a cold man. You were warm Hawaiian. He
must have been cruel. Brother Walcott always insisted he must have
beaten you–”
“No! No!” Bella broke in. “George Castner was never a brute, a
beast. Almost have I wished, often, that he had been. He never
laid hand on me. He never raised hand to me. He never raised his
voice to me. Never–oh, can you believe it?–do, please, sister,
believe it–did we have a high word nor a cross word. But that
house of his, of ours, at Nahala, was grey. All the colour of it
was grey and cool, and chill, while I was bright with all colours
of sun, and earth, and blood, and birth. It was very cold, grey
cold, with that cold grey husband of mine at Nahala. You know he
was grey, Martha. Grey like those portraits of Emerson we used to
see at school. His skin was grey. Sun and weather and all hours
in the saddle could never tan it. And he was as grey inside as
out.
“And I was only nineteen when Uncle Robert decided on the marriage.
How was I to know? Uncle Robert talked to me. He pointed out how
the wealth and property of Hawaii was already beginning to pass
into the hands of the haoles” (Whites). “The Hawaiian chiefs let
their possessions slip away from them. The Hawaiian chiefesses,
who married haoles, had their possessions, under the management of
their haole husbands, increase prodigiously. He pointed back to
the original Grandfather Roger Wilton, who had taken Grandmother
Wilton’s poor mauka lands and added to them and built up about them
the Kilohana Ranch–”
“Even then it was second only to the Parker Ranch,” Martha
interrupted proudly.
“And he told me that had our father, before he died, been as far-
seeing as grandfather, half the then Parker holdings would have
been added to Kilohana, making Kilohana first. And he said that
never, for ever and ever, would beef be cheaper. And he said that
the big future of Hawaii would be in sugar. That was fifty years
ago, and he has been more than proved right. And he said that the
young haole, George Castner, saw far, and would go far, and that
there were many girls of us, and that the Kilohana lands ought by
rights to go to the boys, and that if I married George my future
was assured in the biggest way.
“I was only nineteen. Just back from the Royal Chief School–that
was before our girls went to the States for their education. You
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
8
were among the first, Sister Martha, who got their education on the
mainland. And what did I know of love and lovers, much less of
marriage? All women married. It was their business in life.
Mother and grandmother, all the way back they had married. It was
my business in life to marry George Castner. Uncle Robert said so
in his wisdom, and I knew he was very wise. And I went to live
with my husband in the grey house at Nahala.
“You remember it. No trees, only the rolling grass lands, the high
mountains behind, the sea beneath, and the wind!–the Waimea and
Nahala winds, we got them both, and the kona wind as well. Yet
little would I have minded them, any more than we minded them at
Kilohana, or than they minded them at Mana, had not Nahala itself
been so grey, and husband George so grey. We were alone. He was
managing Nahala for the Glenns, who had gone back to Scotland.
Eighteen hundred a year, plus beef, horses, cowboy service, and the
ranch house, was what he received–”
“It was a high salary in those days,” Martha said.
“And for George Castner, and the service he gave, it was very
cheap,” Bella defended. “I lived with him for three years. There
was never a morning that he was out of his bed later than half-past
four. He was the soul of devotion to his employers. Honest to a
penny in his accounts, he gave them full measure and more of his
time and energy. Perhaps that was what helped make our life so
grey. But listen, Martha. Out of his eighteen hundred, he laid
aside sixteen hundred each year. Think of it! The two of us lived
on two hundred a year. Luckily he did not drink or smoke. Also,
we dressed out of it as well. I made my own dresses. You can
imagine them. Outside of the cowboys who chored the firewood, I
did the work. I cooked, and baked, and scrubbed–”
“You who had never known anything but servants from the time you
were born!” Martha pitied. “Never less than a regiment of them at
Kilohana.”
“Oh, but it was the bare, naked, pinching meagreness of it!” Bella
cried out. “How far I was compelled to make a pound of coffee go!
A broom worn down to nothing before a new one was bought! And
beef! Fresh beef and jerky, morning, noon, and night! And
porridge! Never since have I eaten porridge or any breakfast
food.”
She arose suddenly and walked a dozen steps away to gaze a moment
with unseeing eyes at the colour-lavish reef while she composed
herself. And she returned to her seat with the splendid, sure,
gracious, high-breasted, noble-headed port of which no out-breeding
can ever rob the Hawaiian woman. Very haole was Bella Castner,
fair-skinned, fine-textured. Yet, as she returned, the high pose
of head, the level-lidded gaze of her long brown eyes under royal
arches of eyebrows, the softly set lines of her small mouth that
fairly sang sweetness of kisses after sixty-eight years–all made
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
9
her the very picture of a chiefess of old Hawaii full-bursting
through her ampleness of haole blood. Taller she was than her
sister Martha, if anything more queenly.
“You know we were notorious as poor feeders,” Bella laughed lightly
enough. “It was many a mile on either side from Nahala to the next
roof. Belated travellers, or storm-bound ones, would, on occasion,
stop 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