On either side lay a great sweep of waving blue water. Calm, almost as a lake, sapphire here, and here with the tints of the aqua marine. Water so clear that fathoms away below you could see the branching coral, the schools of passing fish, and the shadows of the fish upon the spaces of sand.
Before them the clear water washed the sands of a white beach, the cocoa-palms waved and whispered in the breeze; and as the oarsman lay on his oars to look a flock of bluebirds rose, as if suddenly freed from the tree-tops, wheeled, and passed soundless, like a wreath of smoke, over the tree-tops of the higher land beyond.
“Look!” shouted Dick, who had his nose over the gunwale of the boat. “Look at the fish!”
“Mr Button,” cried Emmeline, “where are we?”
“Bedad, I dunno; but we might be in a worse place, I’m thinkin’,” replied the old man, sweeping his eyes over the blue and tranquil lagoon, from the barrier reef to the happy shore.
On either side of the broad beach before them the cocoa-nut trees came down like two regiments, and bending gazed at their own reflections in the lagoon. Beyond lay waving chapparel, where cocoa-palms and breadfruit trees intermixed with the mammee apple and the tendrils of the wild vine. On one of the piers of coral at the break of the reef stood a single cocoa-palm; bending with a slight curve, it, too, seemed seeking its reflection in the waving water.
But the soul of it all, the indescribable thing about this picture of mirrored palm trees, blue lagoon, coral reef and sky, was the light.
Away at sea the light was blinding, dazzling, cruel. Away at sea it had nothing to focus itself upon, nothing to exhibit but infinite spaces of blue water and desolation.
Here it made the air a crystal, through which the gazer saw the loveliness of the land and reef, the green of palm, the white of coral, the wheeling gulls, the blue lagoon, all sharply outlined—burning, coloured, arrogant, yet tender—heart-breakingly beautiful, for the spirit of eternal morning was here, eternal happiness, eternal youth.
As the oarsman pulled the tiny craft towards the beach, neither he nor the children saw away behind the boat, on the water near the bending palm tree at the break in the reef, something that for a moment insulted the day, and was gone. Something like a small triangle of dark canvas, that rippled through the water and sank from sight; something that appeared and vanished like an evil thought.
It did not take long to beach the boat. Mr Button tumbled over the side up to his knees in water, whilst Dick crawled over the bow.
“Catch hould of her the same as I do,” cried Paddy, laying hold of the starboard gunwale; whilst Dick, imitative as a monkey, seized the gunwale to port. Now then:
“‘Yeo ho, Chilliman,
Up wid her, up wid her,
Heave O, Chilliman.’
“Lave her be now; she’s high enough.”
He took Emmeline in his arms and carried her up on the sand. It was from just here on the sand that you could see the true beauty of the lagoon. That lake of sea water forever protected from storm and trouble by the barrier reef of coral.
Right from where the little clear ripples ran up the strand, it led the eye to the break in the coral reef where the palm gazed at its own reflection in the water, and there, beyond the break, one caught a vision of the great heaving, sparkling sea.
The lagoon, just here, was perhaps more than a third of a mile broad. I have never measured it, but I know that, standing by the palm tree on the reef, flinging up one’s arm and shouting to a person on the beach, the sound took a perceptible time to cross the water: I should say, perhaps, an almost perceptible time. The distant signal and the distant call were almost coincident, yet not quite.
Dick, mad with delight at the place in which he found himself, was running about like a dog just out of the water. Mr Button was discharging the cargo of the dinghy on the dry, white sand. Emmeline seated herself with her precious bundle on the sand, and was watching the operations of her friend, looking at the things around her and feeling very strange.
For all she knew all this was the ordinary accompaniment of a sea voyage. Paddy’s manner throughout had been set to the one idea, not to frighten the “childer”; the weather had backed him up. But down in the heart of her lay the knowledge that all was not as it should be. The hurried departure from the ship, the fog in which her uncle had vanished, those things, and others as well, she felt instinctively were not right. But she said nothing.
She had not long for meditation, however, for Dick was running towards her with a live crab which he had picked up, calling out that he was going to make it bite her.
“Take it away!” cried Emmeline, holding both hands with fingers widespread in front of her face. “Mr Button! Mr Button! Mr Button!”
“Lave her be, you little divil!” roared Pat, who was depositing the last of the cargo on the sand. “Lave her be, or it’s a cow-hidin’ I’ll be givin’ you!”
“What’s a ‘divil,’ Paddy?” asked Dick, panting from his exertions. “Paddy, what’s a ‘divil’?”
“You’re wan. Ax no questions now, for it’s tired I am, an’ I want to rest me bones.”
He flung himself under the shade of a palm tree, took out his tinder box, tobacco and pipe, cut some tobacco up, filled his pipe and lit it. Emmeline crawled up, and sat near him, and Dick flung himself down on the sand near Emmeline.
Mr Button took off his coat and made a pillow of it against a cocoa-nut tree stem. He had found the El Dorado of the weary. With his knowledge of the South Seas a glance at the vegetation to be seen told him that food for a regiment might be had for the taking; water, too.
Right down the middle of the strand was a depression which in the rainy season would be the bed of a rushing rivulet. The water just now was not strong enough to come all the way to the lagoon, but away up there “beyant” in the woods lay the source, and he’d find it in due time. There was enough in the breaker for a week, and green “cuca-nuts” were to be had for the climbing.
Emmeline contemplated Paddy for a while as he smoked and rested his bones, then a great thought occurred to her. She took the little shawl from around the parcel she was holding and exposed the mysterious box.
“Oh, begorra, the box!” said Paddy, leaning on his elbow interestedly; “I might a’ known you wouldn’t a’ forgot it.”
“Mrs James,” said Emmeline, “made me promise not to open it till I got on shore, for the things in it might get lost.”
“Well, you’re ashore now,” said Dick; “open it.”
“I’m going to,” said Emmeline.
She carefully undid the string, refusing the assistance of Paddy’s knife. Then the brown paper came off, disclosing a common cardboard box. She raised the lid half an inch, peeped in, and shut it again.
“Open it!” cried Dick, mad with curiosity.
“What’s in it, honey?” asked the old sailor, who was as interested as Dick.
“Things,” replied Emmeline.
Then all at once she took the lid off and disclosed a tiny tea service of china, packed in shavings; there was a teapot with a lid, a cream jug, cups and saucers, and six microscopic plates, each painted with a pansy.
“Sure, it’s a tay-set!” said Paddy, in an interested voice. “Glory be to God! will you look at the little plates wid the flowers on thim?”
“Heugh!” said Dick in disgust; “I thought it might a’ been soldiers.”
“I don’t want soldiers,” replied Emmeline, in a voice of perfect contentment.
She unfolded a piece of tissue paper, and took from it a sugar-tongs and six spoons. Then she arrayed the whole lot on the sand.
“Well, if that don’t beat all!” said Paddy.
“And whin are you goin’ to ax me to tay with you?”
“Some time,” replied Emmeline, collecting the things, and carefully repacking them.
Mr Button finished his pipe, tapped the ashes out, and placed it in his pocket.
“I’ll be afther riggin’ up a bit of a tint,” said he, as he rose to his feet, “to shelter us from the jew to-night; but I’ll first have a look at the woods to see if I can find wather. Lave your box with the other things, Emmeline; there’s no one here to take it.”
Emmeline left her box on the heap of things that Paddy had placed in the shadow of the cocoa-nut trees, took his hand, and the three entered the grove on the right.
It was like entering a pine forest; the tall symmetrical stems of the trees seemed set by mathematical law, each at a given distance from the other. Whichever way you entered a twilight alley set with tree boles lay before you. Looking up you saw at an immense distance above a pale green roof patined with sparkling and flashing points of light, where the breeze was busy playing with the green fronds of the trees.
“Mr Button,” murmured Emmeline, “we won’t get lost, will we?”
“Lost! No, faith; sure we’re goin’ uphill, an’ all we have to do is to come down again, when we want to get back—ware nuts!” A green nut detached from up above came down rattling and tumbling and hopped on the ground. Paddy picked it up. “It’s a green cucanut,” said he, putting it in his pocket (it was not very much bigger than a Jaffa orange), “and we’ll have it for tay.”
“That’s not a cocoa-nut,” said Dick; “cocoa-nuts are brown. I had five cents once an’ I bought one, and scraped it out and y’et it.”
“When Dr Sims made Dicky sick,” said Emmeline, “he said the wonder t’im was how Dicky held it all.”
“Come on,” said Mr Button, “an’ don’t be talkin’, or it’s the Cluricaunes will be after us.”
“What’s cluricaunes?” demanded Dick.
“Little men no bigger than your thumb that make the brogues for the Good People.”
“Who’s they?”
“Whisht, and don’t be talkin’. Mind your head, Em’leen, or the branches’ll be hittin’ you in the face.”
They had left the cocoa-nut grove, and entered the chapparel. Here was a deeper twilight, and all sorts of trees lent their foliage to make the shade. The artu with its delicately diamonded trunk, the great breadfruit tall as a beech, and shadowy as a cave, the aoa, and the eternal cocoa-nut palm all grew here like brothers. Great ropes of wild vine twined like the snake of the laocoon from tree to tree, and all sorts of wonderful flowers, from the orchid shaped like a butterfly to the scarlet hibiscus, made beautiful the gloom.
Suddenly Mr Button stopped.
“Whisht!” said he.
Through the silence—a silence filled with the hum and the murmur of wood insects and the faint, far song of the reef—came a tinkling, rippling sound: it was water. He listened to make sure of the bearing of the sound, then he made for it.
Next moment they found themselves in a little grass-grown glade. From the hilly ground above, over a rock black and polished like ebony, fell a tiny cascade not much broader than one’s hand; ferns grew around and from a tree above where a great rope of wild convolvulus flowers blew their trumpets in the enchanted twilight.
The children cried out at the prettiness of it, and Emmeline ran and dabbled her hands in the water. Just above the little waterfall sprang a banana tree laden with fruit; it had immense leaves six feet long and more, and broad as a dinner-table. One could see the golden glint of the ripe fruit through the foliage.
In a moment Mr Button had kicked off his shoes and was going up the rock like a cat, absolutely, for it seemed to give him nothing to climb by.
“Hurroo!” cried Dick in admiration. “Look at Paddy!”
Emmeline looked, and saw nothing but swaying leaves.
“Stand from under!” he shouted, and next moment down came a huge bunch of yellow-jacketed bananas. Dick shouted with delight, but Emmeline showed no excitement: she had discovered something.
It was on the 10th of May, so quickly did things move under the supervision of the bedridden captain, that the Raratonga, with Lestrange on board, cleared the Golden Gates, and made south, heeling to a ten-knot breeze.
There is no mode of travel to be compared to your sailing-ship. In a great ship, if you have ever made a voyage in one, the vast spaces of canvas, the sky-high spars, the finesse with which the wind is met and taken advantage of, will form a memory never to be blotted out.
A schooner is the queen of all rigs; she has a bounding buoyancy denied to the square-rigged craft, to which she stands in the same relationship as a young girl to a dowager; and the Raratonga was not only a schooner, but the queen, acknowledged of all the schooners in the Pacific.
For the first few days they made good way south; then the wind became baffling and headed them off.
Added to Lestrange’s feverish excitement there was an anxiety, a deep and soul-fretting anxiety, as if some half-heard voice were telling him that the children he sought were threatened by some danger.
These baffling winds blew upon the smouldering anxiety in his breast, as wind blows upon embers, causing them to glow. They lasted some days, and then, as if Fate had relented, up sprang on the starboard quarter a spanking breeze, making the rigging sing to a merry tune, and blowing the spindrift from the forefoot, as the Raratonga, heeling to its pressure, went humming through the sea, leaving a wake spreading behind her like a fan.
It took them along five hundred miles, silently and with the speed of a dream. Then it ceased.
The ocean and the air stood still. The sky above stood solid like a great pale blue dome; just where it met the water line of the far horizon a delicate tracery of cloud draped the entire round of the sky.
I have said that the ocean stood still as well as the air: to the eye it was so, for the swell under-running the glitter on its surface was so even, so equable, and so rhythmical, that the surface seemed not in motion. Occasionally a dimple broke the surface, and strips of dark sea-weed floated by, showing up the green; dim things rose to the surface, and, guessing the presence of man, sank slowly and dissolved from sight.
Two days, never to be recovered, passed, and still the calm continued. On the morning of the third day it breezed up from the nor’-nor’west, and they continued their course, a cloud of canvas, every sail drawing, and the music of the ripple under the forefoot.
Captain Stannistreet was a genius in his profession; he could get more speed out of a schooner than any other man afloat, and carry more canvas without losing a stick. He was also, fortunately for Lestrange, a man of refinement and education, and what was better still, understanding.
They were pacing the deck one afternoon, when Lestrange, who was walking with his hands behind him, and his eyes counting the brown dowels in the cream-white planking, broke silence.
“You don’t believe in visions and dreams?”
“How do you know that?” replied the other.
“Oh, I only put it as a question; most people say they don’t.”
“Yes, but most people do.”
“I do,” said Lestrange.
He was silent for a moment.
“You know my trouble so well that I won’t bother you going over it, but there has come over me of late a feeling—it is like a waking dream.”
“Yes?”
“I can’t quite explain, for it is as if I saw something which my intelligence could not comprehend, or make an image of.”
“I think I know what you mean.”
“I don’t think you do. This is something quite strange. I am fifty, and in fifty years a man has experienced, as a rule, all the ordinary and most of the extraordinary sensations that a human being can be subjected to. Well, I have never felt this sensation before; it comes on only at times. I see, as you might imagine, a young baby sees, and things are before me that I do not comprehend. It is not through my bodily eyes that this sensation comes, but through some window of the mind, from before which a curtain has been drawn.”
“That’s strange,” said Stannistreet, who did not like the conversation over-much, being simply a schooner captain and a plain man, though intelligent enough and sympathetic.
“This something tells me,” went on Lestrange, “that there is danger threatening the—” He ceased, paused a minute, and then, to Stannistreet’s relief, went on. “If I talk like that you will think I am not right in my head: let us pass the subject by, let us forget dreams and omens and come to realities. You know how I lost the children; you know how I hope to find them at the place where Captain Fountain found their traces? He says the island was uninhabited, but he was not sure.”
“No,” replied Stannistreet, “he only spoke of the beach.”
“Yes. Well, suppose there were natives at the other side of the island who had taken these children.”
“If so, they would grow up with the natives.”
“And become savages?”
“Yes; but the Polynesians can’t be really called savages; they are a very decent lot. I’ve knocked about amongst them a good while, and a kanaka is as white as a white man—which is not saying much, but it’s something. Most of the islands are civilised now. Of course there are a few that aren’t, but still, suppose even that ‘savages,’ as you call them, had come and taken the children off—”
Lestrange’s breath caught, for this was the very fear that was in his heart, though he had never spoken it.
“Well?”
“Well, they would be well treated.”
“And brought up as savages?”
“I suppose so.”
Lestrange sighed.
“Look here,” said the captain; “it’s all very well talking, but upon my word I think that we civilised folk put on a lot of airs, and waste a lot of pity on savages.”
“How so?”
“What does a man want to be but happy?”
“Yes.”
“Well, who is happier than a naked savage in a warm climate? Oh, he’s happy enough, and he’s not always holding a corroboree. He’s a good deal of a gentleman; he has perfect health; he lives the life a man was born to live face to face with Nature. He doesn’t see the sun through an office window or the moon through the smoke of factory chimneys; happy and civilised too—but, bless you, where is he? The whites have driven him out; in one or two small islands you may find him still—a crumb or so of him.”
“Suppose,” said Lestrange, “suppose those children had been brought up face to face with Nature—”
“Yes?”
“Living that free life—”
“Yes?”
“Waking up under the stars”—Lestrange was speaking with his eyes fixed, as if upon something very far away—“going to sleep as the sun sets, feeling the air fresh, like this which blows upon us, all around them. Suppose they were like that, would it not be a cruelty to bring them to what we call civilisation?”
“I think it would,” said Stannistreet.
Lestrange said nothing, but continued pacing the deck, his head bowed and his hands behind his back.
One evening at sunset, Stannistreet said:
“We’re two hundred and forty miles from the island, reckoning from to-day’s reckoning at noon. We’re going all ten knots even with this breeze; we ought to fetch the place this time to-morrow. Before that if it freshens.”
“I am greatly disturbed,” said Lestrange.
He went below, and the schooner captain shook his head, and, locking his arm round a ratlin, gave his body to the gentle roll of the craft as she stole along, skirting the sunset, splendid, and to the nautical eye full of fine weather.
The breeze was not quite so fresh next morning, but it had been blowing fairly all the night, and the Raratonga had made good way. About eleven it began to fail. It became the lightest sailing breeze, just sufficient to keep the sails drawing, and the wake rippling and swirling behind. Suddenly Stannistreet, who had been standing talking to Lestrange, climbed a few feet up the mizzen ratlins, and shaded his eyes.
“What is it?” asked Lestrange.
“A boat,” he replied. “Hand me that glass you will find in the sling there.”
He levelled the glass, and looked for a long time without speaking.
“It’s a boat adrift—a small boat, nothing in her. Stay! I see something white, can’t make it out. Hi there!”—to the fellow at the wheel “Keep her a point more to starboard.” He got on to the deck. “We’re going dead on for her.”
“Is there any one in her?” asked Lestrange.
“Can’t quite make out, but I’ll lower the whale-boat and fetch her alongside.”
He gave orders for the whale-boat to be slung out and manned.
As they approached nearer, it was evident that the drifting boat, which looked like a ship’s dinghy, contained something, but what, could not be made out.
When he had approached near enough, Stannistreet put the helm down and brought the schooner to, with her sails all shivering. He took his place in the bow of the whale-boat and Lestrange in the stern. The boat was lowered, the falls cast off, and the oars bent to the water.
The little dinghy made a mournful picture as she floated, looking scarcely bigger than a walnut shell. In thirty strokes the whale-boat’s nose was touching her quarter. Stannistreet grasped her gunwale.
In the bottom of the dinghy lay a girl, naked all but for a strip of coloured striped material. One of her arms was clasped round the neck of a form that was half hidden by her body, the other clasped partly to herself, partly to her companion, the body of a baby. They were natives, evidently, wrecked or lost by some mischance from some inter-island schooner. Their breasts rose and fell gently, and clasped in the girl’s hand was a branch of some tree, and on the branch a single withered berry.
“Are they dead?” asked Lestrange, who divined that there were people in the boat, and who was standing up in the stern of the whale-boat trying to see.
“No,” said Stannistreet; “they are asleep.”
THE END
Mr Button was seated on a sea-chest with a fiddle under his left ear. He was playing the “Shan van vaught,” and accompanying the tune, punctuating it, with blows of his left heel on the fo’cs’le deck.
“O the Frinch are in the bay,
Says the Shan van vaught.”
He was dressed in dungaree trousers, a striped shirt, and a jacket baize—green in parts from the influence of sun and salt. A typical old shell-back, round-shouldered, hooked of finger; a figure with strong hints of a crab about it.
His face was like a moon, seen red through tropical mists; and as he played it wore an expression of strained attention as though the fiddle were telling him tales much more marvellous than the old bald statement about Bantry Bay.
“Left-handed Pat,” was his fo’cs’le name; not because he was left-handed, but simply because everything he did he did wrong—or nearly so. Reefing or furling, or handling a slush tub—if a mistake was to be made, he made it.
He was a Celt, and all the salt seas that had flowed between him and Connaught these forty years and more had not washed the Celtic element from his blood, nor the belief in fairies from his soul. The Celtic nature is a fast dye, and Mr Button’s nature was such that though he had been shanghaied by Larry Marr in ’Frisco, though he had got drunk in most ports of the world, though he had sailed with Yankee captains and been man-handled by Yankee mates, he still carried his fairies about with him—they, and a very large stock of original innocence.
Nearly over the musician’s head swung a hammock from which hung a leg; other hammocks hanging in the semi-gloom called up suggestions of lemurs and arboreal bats. The swinging kerosene lamp cast its light forward, past the heel of the bowsprit to the knightheads, lighting here a naked foot hanging over the side of a bunk, here a face from which protruded a pipe, here a breast covered with dark mossy hair, here an arm tattooed.
It was in the days before double topsail yards had reduced ships’ crews, and the fo’cs’le of the Northumberland had a full company: a crowd of packet rats such as often is to be found on a Cape Horner “Dutchmen” Americans—men who were farm labourers and tending pigs in Ohio three months back, old seasoned sailors like Paddy Button—a mixture of the best and the worst of the earth, such as you find nowhere else in so small a space as in a ship’s fo’cs’le.
The Northumberland had experienced a terrible rounding of the Horn. Bound from New Orleans to ’Frisco she had spent thirty days battling with head-winds and storms—down there, where the seas are so vast that three waves may cover with their amplitude more than a mile of sea space; thirty days she had passed off Cape Stiff, and just now, at the moment of this story, she was locked in a calm south of the line.
Mr Button finished his tune with a sweep of the bow, and drew his right coat sleeve across his forehead. Then he took out a sooty pipe, filled it with tobacco, and lit it.
“Pawthrick,” drawled a voice from the hammock above, from which depended the leg, “what was that yarn you wiz beginnin’ to spin ter night ’bout a lip me dawn?”
“A which me dawn?” asked Mr Button, cocking his eye up at the bottom of the hammock while he held the match to his pipe.
“It vas about a green thing,” came a sleepy Dutch voice from a bunk.
“Oh, a Leprachaun you mane. Sure, me mother’s sister had one down in Connaught.”
“Vat vas it like?” asked the dreamy Dutch voice—a voice seemingly possessed by the calm that had made the sea like a mirror for the last three days, reducing the whole ship’s company meanwhile to the level of wasters.
“Like? Sure, it was like a Leprachaun; and what else would it be like?”
“What like vas that?” persisted the voice.
“It was like a little man no bigger than a big forked raddish, an’ as green as a cabbidge. Me a’nt had one in her house down in Connaught in the ould days. O musha! musha! the ould days, the ould days! Now, you may b’lave me or b’lave me not, but you could have put him in your pocket, and the grass-green head of him wouldn’t more than’v stuck out. She kept him in a cupboard, and out of the cupboard he’d pop if it was a crack open, an’ into the milk pans he’d be, or under the beds, or pullin’ the stool from under you, or at some other divarsion. He’d chase the pig—the crathur!—till it’d be all ribs like an ould umbrilla with the fright, an’ as thin as a greyhound with the runnin’ by the marnin; he’d addle the eggs so the cocks an’ hens wouldn’t know what they wis afther wid the chickens comin’ out wid two heads on them, an’ twinty-seven legs fore and aft. And you’d start to chase him, an’ then it’d be mainsail haul, and away he’d go, you behint him, till you’d landed tail over snout in a ditch, an’ he’d be back in the cupboard.”
“He was a Troll,” murmured the Dutch voice.
“I’m tellin’ you he was a Leprachaun, and there’s no knowin’ the divilments he’d be up to. He’d pull the cabbidge, maybe, out of the pot boilin’ on the fire forenint your eyes, and baste you in the face with it; and thin, maybe, you’d hold out your fist to him, and he’d put a goulden soverin in it.”
“Wisht he was here!” murmured a voice from a bunk near the knightheads.
“Pawthrick,” drawled the voice from the hammock above, “what’d you do first if you found y’self with twenty pound in your pocket?”
“What’s the use of askin’ me?” replied Mr Button. “What’s the use of twenty pound to a sayman at say, where the grog’s all wather an’ the beef’s all horse? Gimme it ashore, an’ you’d see what I’d do wid it!”
“I guess the nearest grog-shop keeper wouldn’t see you comin’ for dust,” said a voice from Ohio.
“He would not,” said Mr Button; “nor you afther me. Be damned to the grog and thim that sells it!”
“It’s all darned easy to talk,” said Ohio. “You curse the grog at sea when you can’t get it; set you ashore, and you’re bung full.”
“I likes me dhrunk,” said Mr Button, “I’m free to admit; an’ I’m the divil when it’s in me, and it’ll be the end of me yet, or me ould mother was a liar. ‘Pat,’ she says, first time I come home from say rowlin’, ‘storms you may escape, an’ wimmen you may escape, but the potheen ’ill have you.’ Forty year ago—forty year ago!”
“Well,” said Ohio, “it hasn’t had you yet.”
“No,” replied Mr Button, “but it will.”
It was a wonderful night up on deck, filled with all the majesty and beauty of starlight and a tropic calm.
The Pacific slept; a vast, vague swell flowing from far away down south under the night, lifted the Northumberland on its undulations to the rattling sound of the reef points and the occasional creak of the rudder; whilst overhead, near the fiery arch of the Milky Way, hung the Southern Cross like a broken kite.
Stars in the sky, stars in the sea, stars by the million and the million; so many lamps ablaze that the firmament filled the mind with the idea of a vast and populous city—yet from all that living and flashing splendour not a sound.
Down in the cabin—or saloon, as it was called by courtesy—were seated the three passengers of the ship; one reading at the table, two playing on the floor.
The man at the table, Arthur Lestrange, was seated with his large, deep-sunken eyes fixed on a book. He was most evidently in consumption—very near, indeed, to reaping the result of that last and most desperate remedy, a long sea voyage.
Emmeline Lestrange, his little niece—eight years of age, a mysterious mite, small for her age, with thoughts of her own, wide-pupilled eyes that seemed the doors for visions, and a face that seemed just to have peeped into this world for a moment ere it was as suddenly withdrawn—sat in a corner nursing something in her arms, and rocking herself to the tune of her own thoughts.
Dick, Lestrange’s little son, eight and a bit, was somewhere under the table. They were Bostonians, bound for San Francisco, or rather for the sun and splendour of Los Angeles, where Lestrange had bought a small estate, hoping there to enjoy the life whose lease would be renewed by the long sea voyage.
As he sat reading, the cabin door opened, and appeared an angular female form. This was Mrs Stannard, the stewardess, and Mrs Stannard meant bedtime.
“Dicky,” said Mr Lestrange, closing his book, and raising the table-cloth a few inches, “bedtime.”
“Oh, not yet, daddy!” came a sleep-freighted voice from under the table; “I ain’t ready. I dunno want to go to bed, I— Hi yow!”
Mrs Stannard, who knew her work, had stooped under the table, seized him by the foot, and hauled him out kicking and fighting and blubbering all at the same time.
As for Emmeline, she having glanced up and recognised the inevitable, rose to her feet, and, holding the hideous rag-doll she had been nursing, head down and dangling in one hand, she stood waiting till Dicky, after a few last perfunctory bellows, suddenly dried his eyes and held up a tear-wet face for his father to kiss. Then she presented her brow solemnly to her uncle, received a kiss and vanished, led by the hand into a cabin on the port side of the saloon.
Mr Lestrange returned to his book, but he had not read for long when the cabin door was opened, and Emmeline, in her nightdress, reappeared, holding a brown paper parcel in her hand, a parcel of about the same size as the book you are reading.
“My box,” said she; and as she spoke, holding it up as if to prove its safety, the little plain face altered to the face of an angel.
She had smiled.
When Emmeline Lestrange smiled it was absolutely as if the light of Paradise had suddenly flashed upon her face: the happiest form of childish beauty suddenly appeared before your eyes, dazzled them—and was gone.
Then she vanished with her box, and Mr Lestrange resumed his book.
This box of Emmeline’s, I may say in parenthesis, had given more trouble aboard ship than all of the rest of the passengers’ luggage put together.
It had been presented to her on her departure from Boston by a lady friend, and what it contained was a dark secret to all on board, save its owner and her uncle; she was a woman, or, at all events, the beginning of a woman, yet she kept this secret to herself—a fact which you will please note.
The trouble of the thing was that it was frequently being lost. Suspecting herself, maybe, as an unpractical dreamer in a world filled with robbers, she would cart it about with her for safety, sit down behind a coil of rope and fall into a fit of abstraction: be recalled to life by the evolutions of the crew reefing or furling or what not, rise to superintend the operations—and then suddenly find she had lost her box.
Then she would absolutely haunt the ship. Wide-eyed and distressed of face she would wander hither and thither, peeping into the galley, peeping down the forescuttle, never uttering a word or wail, searching like an uneasy ghost, but dumb.
She seemed ashamed to tell of her loss, ashamed to let any one know of it; but every one knew of it directly they saw her, to use Mr Button’s expression, “on the wandher,” and every one hunted for it.
Strangely enough it was Paddy Button who usually found it. He who was always doing the wrong thing in the eyes of men, generally did the right thing in the eyes of children. Children, in fact, when they could get at Mr Button, went for him con amore. He was as attractive to them as a Punch and Judy show or a German band—almost.
Mr Lestrange after a while closed the book he was reading, looked around him and sighed.
The cabin of the Northumberland was a cheerful enough place, pierced by the polished shaft of the mizzen mast, carpeted with an Axminster carpet, and garnished with mirrors let into the white pine panelling. Lestrange was staring at the reflection of his own face in one of these mirrors fixed just opposite to where he sat.
His emaciation was terrible, and it was just perhaps at this moment that he first recognised the fact that he must not only die, but die soon.
He turned from the mirror and sat for a while with his chin resting upon his hand, and his eyes fixed on an ink spot upon the table-cloth; then he arose, and crossing the cabin climbed laboriously up the companion-way to the deck.
As he leaned against the bulwark rail to recover his breath, the splendour and beauty of the Southern night struck him to the heart with a cruel pang. He took his seat on a deck chair and gazed up at the Milky Way, that great triumphal arch built of suns that the dawn would sweep away like a dream.
In the Milky Way, near the Southern Cross, occurs a terrible circular abyss, the Coal Sack. So sharply defined is it, so suggestive of a void and bottomless cavern, that the contemplation of it afflicts the imaginative mind with vertigo. To the naked eye it is as black and as dismal as death, but the smallest telescope reveals it beautiful and populous with stars.
Lestrange’s eyes travelled from this mystery to the burning cross, and the nameless and numberless stars reaching to the sea-line, where they paled and vanished in the light of the rising moon. Then he became aware of a figure promenading the quarter-deck. It was the “Old Man.”
A sea captain is always the “old man,” be his age what it may. Captain Le Farges’ age might have been forty-five. He was a sailor of the Jean Bart type, of French descent, but a naturalised American.
“I don’t know where the wind’s gone,” said the captain as he drew near the man in the deck chair. “I guess it’s blown a hole in the firmament, and escaped somewheres to the back of beyond.”
“It’s been a long voyage,” said Lestrange; “and I’m thinking, Captain, it will be a very long voyage for me. My port’s not ’Frisco; I feel it.”
“Don’t you be thinking that sort of thing,” said the other, taking his seat in a chair close by. “There’s no manner of use forecastin’ the weather a month ahead. Now we’re in warm latitoods, your glass will rise steady, and you’ll be as right and spry as any one of us, before we fetch the Golden Gates.”
“I’m thinking about the children,” said Lestrange, seeming not to hear the captain’s words. “Should anything happen to me before we reach port, I should like you to do something for me. It’s only this: dispose of my body without—without the children knowing. It has been in my mind to ask you this for some days. Captain, those children know nothing of death.”
Le Farge moved uneasily in his chair.
“Little Emmeline’s mother died when she was two. Her father—my brother—died before she was born. Dicky never knew a mother; she died giving him birth. My God, Captain, death has laid a heavy hand on my family; can you wonder that I have hid his very name from those two creatures that I love!”
“Ay, ay,” said Le Farge, “it’s sad! it’s sad!”
“When I was quite a child,” went on Lestrange, “a child no older than Dicky, my nurse used to terrify me with tales about dead people. I was told I’d go to hell when I died if I wasn’t a good child. I cannot tell you how much that has poisoned my life, for the thoughts we think in childhood, Captain, are the fathers of the thoughts we think when we are grown up. And can a diseased father—have healthy children?”
“I guess not.”
“So I just said, when these two tiny creatures came into my care, that I would do all in my power to protect them from the terrors of life—or rather, I should say, from the terror of death. I don’t know whether I have done right, but I have done it for the best. They had a cat, and one day Dicky came in to me and said: ‘Father, pussy’s in the garden asleep, and I can’t wake her.’ So I just took him out for a walk; there was a circus in the town, and I took him to it. It so filled his mind that he quite forgot the cat. Next day he asked for her. I did not tell him she was buried in the garden, I just said she must have run away. In a week he had forgotten all about her—children soon forget.”
“Ay, that’s true,” said the sea captain. “But ’pears to me they must learn some time they’ve got to die.”
“Should I pay the penalty before we reach land, and be cast into that great, vast sea, I would not wish the children’s dreams to be haunted by the thought: just tell them I’ve gone on board another ship. You will take them back to Boston; I have here, in a letter, the name of a lady who will care for them. Dicky will be well off, as far as worldly goods are concerned, and so will Emmeline. Just tell them I’ve gone on board another ship—children soon forget.”
“I’ll do what you ask,” said the seaman.
The moon was over the horizon now, and the Northumberland lay adrift in a river of silver. Every spar was distinct, every reef point on the great sails, and the decks lay like spaces of frost cut by shadows black as ebony.
As the two men sat without speaking, thinking their own thoughts, a little white figure emerged from the saloon hatch. It was Emmeline. She was a professed sleepwalker—a past mistress of the art.
Scarcely had she stepped into dreamland than she had lost her precious box, and now she was hunting for it on the decks of the Northumberland.
Mr Lestrange put his finger to his lips, took off his shoes and silently followed her. She searched behind a coil of rope, she tried to open the galley door; hither and thither she wandered, wide-eyed and troubled of face, till at last, in the shadow of the hencoop, she found her visionary treasure. Then back she came, holding up her little nightdress with one hand, so as not to trip, and vanished down the saloon companion very hurriedly, as if anxious to get back to bed, her uncle close behind, with one hand outstretched so as to catch her in case she stumbled.
It was the fourth day of the long calm. An awning had been rigged up on the poop for the passengers, and under it sat Lestrange, trying to read, and the children trying to play. The heat and monotony had reduced even Dicky to just a surly mass, languid in movement as a grub. As for Emmeline, she seemed dazed. The rag-doll lay a yard away from her on the poop deck unnursed; even the wretched box and its whereabouts she seemed to have quite forgotten.
“Daddy!” suddenly cried Dick, who had clambered up, and was looking over the after-rail.
“What?”
“Fish!”
Lestrange rose to his feet, came aft and looked over the rail.
Down in the vague green of the water something moved, something pale and long—a ghastly form. It vanished; and yet another came, neared the surface, and displayed itself more fully. Lestrange saw its eyes, he saw the dark fin, and the whole hideous length of the creature; a shudder ran through him as he clasped Dicky.
“Ain’t he fine?” said the child. “I guess, daddy, I’d pull him aboard if I had a hook. Why haven’t I a hook, daddy?—why haven’t I a hook, daddy?— Ow, you’re squeezin’ me!”
Something plucked at Lestrange’s coat: it was Emmeline—she also wanted to look. He lifted her up in his arms; her little pale face peeped over the rail, but there was nothing to see: the forms of terror had vanished, leaving the green depths untroubled and unstained.
“What’s they called, daddy?” persisted Dick, as his father took him down from the rail, and led him back to the chair.
“Sharks,” said Lestrange, whose face was covered with perspiration.
He picked up the book he had been reading—it was a volume of Tennyson—and he sat with it on his knees staring at the white sunlit main-deck barred with the white shadows of the standing rigging.
The sea had disclosed to him a vision. Poetry, Philosophy, Beauty, Art, the love and joy of life—was it possible that these should exist in the same world as those?
He glanced at the book upon his knees, and contrasted the beautiful things in it which he remembered with the terrible things he had just seen, the things that were waiting for their food under the keel of the ship.
It was three bells—half-past three in the afternoon—and the ship’s bell had just rung out. The stewardess appeared to take the children below; and as they vanished down the saloon companion-way Captain Le Farge came aft, on to the poop, and stood for a moment looking over the sea on the port side, where a bank of fog had suddenly appeared like the spectre of a country.
“The sun has dimmed a bit,” said he; “I can a’most look at it. Glass steady enough—there’s a fog coming up—ever seen a Pacific fog?”
“No, never.”
“Well, you won’t want to see another,” replied the mariner, shading his eyes and fixing them upon the sea-line. The sea-line away to starboard had lost somewhat its distinctness, and over the day an almost imperceptible shade had crept.
The captain suddenly turned from his contemplation of the sea and sky, raised his head and sniffed.
“Something is burning somewhere—smell it? Seems to me like an old mat or summat. It’s that swab of a steward, maybe; if he isn’t breaking glass, he’s upsetting lamps and burning holes in the carpet. Bless my soul, I’d sooner have a dozen Mary Anns an’ their dustpans round the place than one tomfool steward like Jenkins.” He went to the saloon hatch. “Below there!”
“Ay, ay, sir.”
“What are you burning?”
“I an’t burnin’ northen, sir.”
“Tell you, I smell it!”
“There’s northen burnin’ here, sir.”
“Neither is there, it’s all on deck. Something in the galley, maybe—rags, most likely, they’ve thrown on the fire.”
“Captain!” said Lestrange.
“Ay, ay.”
“Come here, please.”
Le Farge climbed on to the poop.
“I don’t know whether it’s my weakness that’s affecting my eyes, but there seems to me something strange about the main-mast.”
The main-mast near where it entered the deck, and for some distance up, seemed in motion—a corkscrew movement most strange to watch from the shelter of the awning.
This apparent movement was caused by a spiral haze of smoke so vague that one could only tell of its existence from the mirage-like tremor of the mast round which it curled.
“My God!” cried Le Farge, as he sprang from the poop and rushed forward.
Lestrange followed him slowly, stopping every moment to clutch the bulwark rail and pant for breath. He heard the shrill bird-like notes of the bosun’s pipe. He saw the hands emerging from the forecastle, like bees out of a hive; he watched them surrounding the main-hatch. He watched the tarpaulin and locking-bars removed. He saw the hatch opened, and a burst of smoke—black, villainous smoke—ascend to the sky, solid as a plume in the windless air.
Lestrange was a man of a highly nervous temperament, and it is just this sort of man who keeps his head in an emergency, whilst your level-headed, phlegmatic individual loses his balance. His first thought was of the children, his second of the boats.
In the battering off Cape Horn the Northumberland lost several of her boats. There were left the long-boat, a quarter-boat, and the dinghy. He heard Le Farge’s voice ordering the hatch to be closed and the pumps manned, so as to flood the hold; and, knowing that he could do nothing on deck, he made as swiftly as he could for the saloon companion-way.
Mrs Stannard was just coming out of the children’s cabin.
“Are the children lying down, Mrs Stannard?” asked Lestrange, almost breathless from the excitement and exertion of the last few minutes.
The woman glanced at him with frightened eyes. He looked like the very herald of disaster.
“For if they are, and you have undressed them, then you must put their clothes on again. The ship is on fire, Mrs Stannard.”
“Good God, sir!”
“Listen!” said Lestrange.
From a distance, thin, and dreary as the crying of sea-gulls on a desolate beach, came the clanking of the pumps.