Chapter XII. A Point of Theology - Page 2

do as you say, I will raise such a storm over your heads to-night as will submerge and drown the whole of your island."

The natives listened to him with profound interest. "We must spill no blood!" they repeated, looking aghast at one another. "Hear what the King says! We must not cut the victim's throat. We must bind a child with cords and roast it alive for him!"

Felix hardly knew what to do or say at this atrocious proposal. "If you roast it alive," he cried, "you deserve to be all scorched up with lightning. Take care what you do! Spare the child's life! I will have no victim. Beware how you anger me!"

But the savage no sooner says than he does. With him deliberation is unknown, and impulse everything. In a moment the natives had gathered in a circle a little way off, and began drawing lots. Several children, seized hurriedly up among the crowd, were huddled like so many sheep in the centre. Felix looked on from his enclosure, half petrified with horror. The lot fell upon a pretty little girl of five years old. Without one word of warning, without one sign of remorse, before Felix's very eyes, they began to bind the struggling and terrified child just outside the circle.

The white man could stand this horrid barbarity no longer. At the risk of his life--at the risk of Muriel's--he must rush out to prevent them. They should never dare to kill that helpless child before his very eyes. Come what might--though even Muriel should suffer for it--he felt he must rescue that trembling little creature. Drawing his trusty knife, and opening the big blade ostentatiously before their eyes, he made a sudden dart like a wild beast across the line, and pounced down upon the party that guarded the victim.

Was it a ruse to make him cross the line, alone, or did they really mean it? He hardly knew; but he had no time to debate the abstract question. Bursting into their midst, he seized the child with a rush in his circling arms, and tried to hurry back with it within the protecting taboo-line.

Quick as lightning he was surrounded and almost cut down by a furious and frantic mob of half-naked savages. "Kill him! Tear him to pieces!" they cried in their rage. "He has a bad heart! He destroyed our huts! He broke down our plantations! Kill him, kill him, kill him!"

As they closed in upon him, with spears and tomahawks and clubs, Felix saw he had nothing left for it now but a hard fight for life to return to the taboo-line. Holding the child in one arm, and striking wildly out with his knife with the other, he tried to hack his way back by main force to the shelter of the taboo-line in frantic lunges. The distance was but a few feet, but the savages pressed round him, half frightened still, yet gnashing their teeth and distorting their faces with anger. "He has broken the Taboo," they cried in vehement tones.