The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
the sound of the surf suddenly increased as though a door had been
flung open. The breakers were falling and the sea-gulls crying on
either side of them, and for a moment the ocean seemed to hesitate as
to whether they were to be taken away into her wastes, or dashed on the
coral strand. Only for a moment this seeming hesitation lasted; then
the power of the tide prevailed over the power of the swell, and the
little boat taken by the current drifted gently out to sea.
Dick flung himself down beside Emmeline, who was seated in the bottom
of the boat holding the child to her breast. The bird, seeing the land
retreat, and wise in its instinct, rose into the air. It circled
thrice round the drifting boat, and then, like a beautiful but
faithless spirit, passed away to the shore.
CHAPTER XXII
TOGETHER
The island had sunk slowly from sight; at sundown it was just a trace,
a stain on the south-western horizon. It was before the new moon, and
the little boat lay drifting. It drifted from the light of sunset into
a world of vague violet twilight, and now it lay drifting under the
stars.
The girl, clasping the baby to her breast, leaned against her
companion’s shoulder; neither of them spoke. All the wonders in their
short existence had culminated in this final wonder, this passing away
together from the world of Time. This strange voyage they had embarked
on—to where?
Now that the first terror was over they felt neither sorrow nor fear.
They were together. Come what might, nothing could divide them; even
should they sleep and never wake up, they would sleep together. Had one
been left and the other taken!
As though the thought had occurred to them simultaneously, they turned
one to the other, and their lips met, their souls met, mingling in one
dream; whilst above in the windless heaven space answered space with
flashes of siderial light, and Canopus shone and burned like the
pointed sword of Azrael.
Clasped in Emmeline’s hand was the last and most mysterious gift of the
mysterious world they had known—the branch of crimson berries.
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
MAD LESTRANGE
They knew him upon the Pacific slope as “Mad Lestrange.” He was not
mad, but he was a man with a fixed idea. He was pursued by a vision:
the vision of two children and an old sailor adrift in a little boat
upon a wide blue sea.
When the _Arago_, bound for Papetee, picked up the boats of the
_Northumberland_, only the people in the long-boat were alive. Le Farge,
the captain, was mad, and he never recovered his reason. Lestrange was
utterly shattered; the awful experience in the boats and the loss of
the children had left him a seemingly helpless wreck. The scowbankers,
like all their class, had fared better, and in a few days were about
the ship and sitting in the sun. Four days after the rescue the _Arago_
spoke the _Newcastle_, bound for San Francisco, and transhipped the
shipwrecked men.
Had a physician seen Lestrange on board the _Northumberland_ as she lay
in that long, long calm before the fire, he would have declared that
nothing but a miracle could prolong his life. The miracle came about.
In the general hospital of San Francisco, as the clouds cleared from
his mind, they unveiled the picture of the children and the little
boat. The picture had been there daily, seen but not truly
comprehended; the horrors gone through in the open boat, the sheer
physical exhaustion, had merged all the accidents of the great disaster
into one mournful half-comprehended fact. When his brain cleared all
the other incidents fell out of focus, and memory, with her eyes set
upon the children, began to paint a picture that he was ever more to
see.
Memory cannot produce a picture that Imagination has not retouched; and
her pictures, even the ones least touched by Imagination, are no mere
photographs, but the work of an artist. All that is inessential she
casts away, all that is essential she retains; she idealises, and that
is why her picture of a lost mistress has had power to keep a man a
celibate to the end of his days, and why she can break a human heart
with the picture of a dead child. She is a painter, but she is also a
poet.
The picture before the mind of Lestrange was filled with this almost
diabolical poetry, for in it the little boat and her helpless crew were
represented adrift on a blue and sunlit sea. A sea most beautiful to
look at, yet most terrible, bearing as it did the recollections of
thirst.
He had been dying, when, raising himself on his elbow, so to say, he
looked at this picture. It recalled him to life. His willpower asserted
itself, and he refused to die.
The will of a man has, if it is strong enough, the power to reject
death. He was not in the least conscious of the exercise of this power;
he only knew that a great and absorbing interest had suddenly arisen in
him, and that a great aim stood before him—the recovery of the
children.
The disease that was killing him ceased its ravages, or rather was
slain in its turn by the increased vitality against which it had to
strive. He left the hospital and took up his quarters at the Palace
Hotel, and then, like the General of an army, he began to formulate his
plan of campaign against Fate.
When the crew of the _Northumberland_ had stampeded, hurling their
officers aside, lowering the boats with a rush, and casting themselves
into the sea, everything had been lost in the way of ship’s papers; the
charts, the two logs—everything, in fact, that could indicate the
latitude and longitude of the disaster. The first and second officers
and a midshipman had shared the fate of the quarter-boat; of the
foremast hands saved, not one, of course, could give the slightest
hint as to the locality of the spot.
A time reckoning from the Horn told little, for there was no record of
the log. All that could be said was that the disaster had occurred
somewhere south of the line.
In Le Farge’s brain lay for a certainty the position, and Lestrange
went to see the captain in the “Maison de Sante,” where he was being
looked after, and found him quite recovered from the furious mania that
he had been suffering from. Quite recovered, and playing with a ball of
coloured worsted.
There remained the log of the _Arago_; in it would be found the latitude
and longitude of the boats she had picked up.
The _Arago_, due at Papetee, became overdue. Lestrange watched the
overdue lists from day to day, from week to week, from month to month,
uselessly, for the _Arago_ never was heard of again. One could not affirm
even that she was wrecked; she was simply one of the ships that never
come back from the sea.
CHAPTER II
THE SECRET OF THE AZURE
To lose a child he loves is undoubtedly the greatest catastrophe that
can happen to a man. I do not refer to its death.
A child wanders into the street, or is left by its nurse for a moment,
and vanishes. At first the thing is not realised. There is a pang and
hurry at the heart which half vanishes, whilst the understanding
explains that in a civilised city, if a child gets lost, it will be
found and brought back by the neighbours or the police.
But the police know nothing of the matter, or the neighbours, and the
hours pass. Any minute may bring back the wanderer; but the minutes
pass, and the day wears into evening, and the evening to night, and the
night to dawn, and the common sounds of a new day begin.
You cannot remain at home for restlessness; you go out, only to return
hurriedly for news. You are eternally listening, and what you hear
shocks you; the common sounds of life, the roll of the carts and cabs
in the street, the footsteps of the passers-by, are full of an
indescribable mournfulness; music increases your misery into madness,
and the joy of others is monstrous as laughter heard in hell.
If some one were to bring you the dead body of the child, you might
weep, but you would bless him, for it is the uncertainty that kills.
You go mad, or go on living. Years pass by, and you are an old man.
You say to yourself: “He would have been twenty years of age to-day.”
There is not in the old ferocious penal code of our forefathers a
punishment adequate to the case of the man or woman who steals a child.
Lestrange was a wealthy man, and one hope remained to him, that the
children might have been rescued by some passing ship. It was not the
case of children lost in a city, but in the broad Pacific, where ships
travel from all ports to all ports, and to advertise his loss
adequately it was necessary to placard the world. Ten thousand dollars
was the reward offered for news of the lost ones, twenty thousand for
the recovery; and the advertisement appeared in every newspaper
likely to reach the eyes of a sailor, from the _Liverpool Post_ to
the _Dead Bird_.
The years passed without anything definite coming in answer to all
these advertisements. Once news came of two children saved from the sea
in the neighbourhood of the Gilberts, and it was not false news, but
they were not the children he was seeking for. This incident at once
depressed and stimulated him, for it seemed to say, “If these children
have been saved, why not yours?”
The strange thing was, that in his heart he felt a certainty that they
were alive. His intellect suggested their death in twenty different
forms; but a whisper, somewhere out of that great blue ocean, told him
at intervals that what he sought was there, living, and waiting for him.
He was somewhat of the same temperament as Emmeline—a dreamer, with a
mind tuned to receive and record the fine rays that fill this world
flowing from intellect to intellect, and even from what we call
inanimate things. A coarser nature would, though feeling, perhaps, as
acutely the grief, have given up in despair the search. But he kept on;
and at the end of the fifth year, so far from desisting, he chartered a
schooner and passed eighteen months in a fruitless search, calling at
little-known islands, and once, unknowing, at an island only three
hundred miles away from the tiny island of this story.
If you wish to feel the hopelessness of this unguided search, do not
look at a map of the Pacific, but go there. Hundreds and hundreds of
thousands of square leagues of sea, thousands of islands, reefs, atolls.
Up to a few years ago there were many small islands utterly unknown;
even still there are some, though the charts of the Pacific are the
greatest triumphs of hydrography; and though the island of the story
was actually on the Admiralty charts, of what use was that fact to
Lestrange?
He would have continued searching, but he dared not, for the desolation
of the sea had touched him.
In that eighteen months the Pacific explained itself to him in part,
explained its vastness, its secrecy and inviolability. The schooner
lifted veil upon veil of distance, and veil upon veil lay beyond. He
could only move in a right line; to search the wilderness of water with
any hope, one would have to be endowed with the gift of moving in all
directions at once.
He would often lean over the bulwark rail and watch the swell slip by,
as if questioning the water. Then the sunsets began to weigh upon his
heart, and the stars to speak to him in a new language, and he knew
that it was time to return, if he would return with a whole mind.
When he got back to San Francisco he called upon his agent, Wannamaker
of Kearney Street, but there was still no news.
CHAPTER III
CAPTAIN FOUNTAIN
He had a suite of rooms at the Palace Hotel, and he lived the life of
any other rich man who is not addicted to pleasure. He knew some of the
best people in the city, and conducted himself so sanely in all
respects that a casual stranger would never have guessed his reputation