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Father O’Leary’s Confessional Box—Penitent Natives, Chiefs, Dethroned Kings and Queens—Waylao goes into the Confessional Box—Father O’Leary’s Philosophy

THAT dance of Waylao’s in the grog shanty created a strange impression in my mind. Henceforth I looked upon her as some half-wild faery creature of the forest. I do not wish to give the impression that I was in love with Waylao. It was only a romantic boy’s fancy, a clinging to something that faintly resembled his immature ideals. I cannot tell the events that followed in their exact progression. I recall that about this period I started off with Grimes seeing the sights of the isles. I could not tolerate sitting in a grog shanty for any length of time, though I must admit the tales I heard there and much that occurred was deeply interesting to one who wished to see more sides of life than one.

I think Grimes and I were away from Tai-o-hae two or three weeks. Things were about the same when we returned. The natives were still singing as they toiled on the various plantations. A few fresh schooners were in the bay, and others loaded and ready to go seaward on their voyages to the far-scattered isles of the Pacific.

My immediate recollections are centred on the occasion when, with the help of Grimes, I was building a little outhouse for Father O’Leary. It was near his mission-room, which, by the way, adjoined his homestead. During the erection of this wooden building I became very pally with the priest. Up to that period I had looked upon priests as unapproachable mortals who lingered between the border-line of mortality and the Promised Land. To my pleasant surprise, I found the Father a human being of intellectual calibre. He knew the hearts of men and women to an almost infallible degree. Nor was this to be wondered at, for his old confessional box had held what strange types of mortals, what strange tales of hope and remorse had he heard there!

The experiences of his profession seemed to have gifted him with second sight and imbued his heart with extreme sympathy for erring mankind. Yes, he toiled on in that temple of thought, a temple of spiritual faith he had slowly built up, as it were, wall by wall, and turret by turret, round the sorrow of his mortal dreams. Just think of it—the multitudes of disenchanted native children who had crept out of the forest depths to fall and confess at his feet! What hearts full of remorse, what benighted lovers, what hapless wives, youths, girls with their cherished dreams, quaking, had come to him after passion had burnt their converted souls!

I myself had seen them arrive: dethroned kings and guilty queens, aged, tattooed chiefs on tottering feet, shaking with fear of the wrath of the great white God, after some wild reversion to the heathen orgies in the old amphitheatres by the mountains. I had seen the Father put forth his hands to hold up the stricken forms as they appeared before him—tawny old chiefs swaying like dead men with the terror they felt—ere they entered that confessional box.

For lo! a native once converted to Christianity takes to it seriously, believes implicitly all that he professes to believe but cannot adhere to.

I have seen old chiefs and women, girls too, come out of that confessional box as though they had just been given everlasting life. The tears all vanished as they leapt off into the forest, or stood on their heads with delight just behind the mission-room coco-palms. There’s no doubt about it, but that box was the supreme court of true justice and glad truth. In there terrible dramas were unrolled to the Father’s ears. He was the solitary judge; nor was he hard in the sentences that he meted out to the culprits, for alas! he expiated for all their crimes with prayers from his own soul.

But to revert to my experiences. I was digging away at post-holes and feeling down in the mouth (for I do not tell all my reflections and troubles of those times), when Waylao stepped out of the shade of the pomegranates. In a moment I perceived that something was wrong with her. Her eyes stared wildly. She did not respond to my cheery salutations in her usual way.

As the Father stepped out of his mission-room she nearly fell into his arms. I saw her embrace the old fellow as a daughter would a father. “What’s the matter, my child?” he said, as he noticed her hysterical manner. I threw my spade aside. The knowledge that the girl was in trouble upset me. I could get no further than wondering at the meaning of it all as I heard her weeping violently in that silent, sacred wooden enclosure—the confessional box.

I heard the girl’s sighs as she ceased weeping, and the Father’s solemn voice as he gave advice and absolution. I suppose Waylao was a true daughter of Eve, and only told the Father half the truth. I know she did not tell all, otherwise things would have taken a very different course. Though the Father knew it not, Waylao had become the wife of a sensualist.

So much I discovered long after. I did not know then how some of the native girls and white girls got married in the South Seas. I had heard a good deal of chaff, as I thought, about the ways of the Chinese and the Indians, but I little dreamed how true it all was. As it turned out, Waylao had married an Indian—which means that she had gone through a midnight ceremony which was as follows. A deluded girl would come under the influence of some emigrant hawker from Calcutta, or the Malay Peninsula, usually a man with a smile that would have brought a fortune to a Lyceum tragedian, for it was the breathing essence of limelight sadness and sensual longing. One can imagine how such a man would trade on a girl’s infatuation. It was the custom to lure them into the forest and repeat the following wedding service, which is the Mohammedan marriage prayer:—“There is no deity but Mohammed, and Mohammed is the one prophet of Allah. I who now kneel before thee, O man, renounce the heathen creed called Christianity, I, such an one’s daughter, by the grace of my heart and the testimony of my virtue, give myself up to thee body and soul for life and life everlasting.”

After getting the maid to repeat the foregoing drivel, the Mohammedan would murmur mystical Eastern phrases. The deluded girl then thought the great romantic hero of her life had blessed her with faithful love. Her lips met those of the sensualist. The light of fear died away from the child-girl’s eyes as she clung to her prize. Well might Adam and Eve have sighed in their graves!

Such was the practice of the followers of Islam in the South Seas, and probably closely resembled the marriage service that had brought Waylao in fright and remorse to Father O’Leary’s mission-room. I remember that Waylao was considerably cheered up after she had received the priest’s blessing.

That same night, as I played the violin and the Father accompanied me on the harmonium, she returned and sang to us. She seemed to want to haunt the father’s presence. The old priest was as pleased as I to see her again. She had a sweet, tremulous voice.

I suppose I was happy that night, for it is all very clear to my memory after many years.

We sat outside beneath the palms. Far away between the trunks of the giant bread-fruits we could see the moonlight tumbling about on the distant seas. Father O’Leary had been speaking of his native land. I was deeply interested, and surprised to hear much that he said. It was somehow strange to me to find that an old Catholic priest had once been a romping, careless boy.

I cannot tell how the conversation turned to the subject of emigrant Indians, but it certainly did do so. Probably it was a subject that deeply interested Waylao.

To the priest’s surprise and mine, Waylao looked up into the old man’s face and said in this wise:

“Father, why do you call these strange men, who come from other lands than your own, infidels?”

The old priest was suddenly struck dumb with astonishment.

Even I noticed that something had happened that he had never expected to hear in his lifetime from that girl’s lips. For a moment he was silent, like to a man who sees a multitude of meanings behind one remark. His high, smooth brow creased into lines of thought. Then he laid his hand upon Waylao’s shoulder and said, in his rich, kind voice, the following:—

“My child, there are many paths that lead to many heavens, for that which is heaven to one man is hell to another. But, believe me, there is only one path to the reward of righteousness and a clear conscience.”

Waylao, who listened more to the music of that old voice than to what it actually said, stood like an obedient child as the priest proceeded:

“Listen, Waylao. Many paths have evil-smelling flowers by the wayside; some paths have sweet-scented blossoms; and is it not best to follow the sweeter path—to drink the pure waters of the singing brook, bathe in the seas of holiness and avoid those dismal swamps of pestilence wherefrom they who drink shall find only bitterness?”

Seeing Waylao’s earnest attention, he continued with tremulous voice, for he was a religious man and not a bigot:

“And, my child, if indeed all paths should happen to be stumbling-blocks that lead, in the inevitable end, to darkness, still, is it not best to go home to God after our travels, full of sweetness? Yes, even though we should go home deluded, it shall not be said that we did not do our best. And do not old graves look the sweeter for the bright flowers upon them, instead of rank, evil-smelling weeds?”

“Father, why does God have so many paths and creeds that are evil or good?” said Waylao.

At hearing her say this, I looked at her. Her face was very serious. It seemed like some dream to me as the seas wailed up the shore and the face of the girl turned with so serious a glance up at the priest. Then the Father continued:

“My child, but a little while ago you played in your father’s house with your many dolls: some had black faces with dark eyes, and some pale faces, yet did you not love them all, even the ugliest, and love one more than all the rest? Did you question or wonder why there was a difference in them, or did those old dolls question you?”

“Not that I remember, Father,” said the girl absently.

“Just so, then, as we are the children of God, shall we question the mysteriousness of His ways? Oh, my child, listen to me. We are the sad poems that the Great Master writes on the scroll of Time. We are written for some purpose that we know not of. And shall the poems in the great Poet’s book of Life arise from their pages, inquire and demand from whence came their thoughts—or criticise the Great Author and His works?”

The foregoing is the gist of all that I remember of old Father O’Leary’s replies to Waylao’s strange questions. I saw the girl home that night.