The Blue Lagoon: A Romance

The Blue Lagoon: A Romance by H. de Vere Stacpoole CONTENTS BOOK I PART I I. WHERE THE SLUSH LAMP BURNS II. UNDER THE STARS III. THE SHADOW AND THE FIRE IV. AND LIKE A DREAM DISSOLVED V. VOICES HEARD IN THE MIST VI. DAWN ON A WIDE, WIDE SEA VII. STORY OF THE PIG AND THE BILLY-GOAT VIII. “S-H-E-N-A-N-D-O-A-H” IX. SHADOWS IN THE MOONLIGHT X. THE TRAGEDY OF THE BOATS PART II XI. THE ISLAND XII. THE LAKE OF AZURE XIII. DEATH VEILED WITH LICHEN XIV. ECHOES OF FAIRY-LAND XV. FAIR PICTURES IN THE BLUE PART III XVI. THE POETRY OF LEARNING XVII. THE DEVIL’S CASK XVIII. THE RAT HUNT XIX. STARLIGHT ON THE FOAM XX. THE DREAMER ON THE REEF XXI. THE GARLAND OF FLOWERS XXII. ALONE XXIII. THEY MOVE AWAY BOOK II PART I I. UNDER THE ARTU TREE II. HALF CHILD-HALF SAVAGE III. THE DEMON OF THE REEF IV. WHAT BEAUTY CONCEALED V. THE SOUND OF A DRUM VI. SAILS UPON THE SEA VII. THE SCHOONER VIII. LOVE STEPS IN IX. THE SLEEP OF PARADISE PART II X. AN ISLAND HONEYMOON XI. THE VANISHING OF EMMELINE XII. THE VANISHING OF EMMELINE (CONTINUED) XIII. THE NEWCOMER XIV. HANNAH XV. THE LAGOON OF FIRE XVI. THE CYCLONE XVII. THE STRICKEN WOODS XVIII. A FALLEN IDOL XIX. THE EXPEDITION XX. THE KEEPER OF THE LAGOON XXI. THE HAND OF THE SEA XXII. TOGETHER BOOK III I. MAD LESTRANGE II. THE SECRET OF THE AZURE III. CAPTAIN FOUNTAIN IV. DUE SOUTH THE BLUE LAGOON BOOK I PART I CHAPTER I WHERE THE SLUSH LAMP BURNS 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.” CHAPTER II UNDER THE STARS 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