Stanistreet moved beside Lestrange, who turned, his face lit as if with the reflection of all the beauty around.
“Well, sir,” said the captain, “we’re in harbour at last. Shall I order the shore boat out?”
“Yes,” said the other, turning again to the rail. “Yes—but look, Stanistreet, look!”
“It’s fine,” said the sailor. “I never struck a prettier bit of beach—ay, it’s grand!”
“It is the Garden of God,” said Lestrange. “He made it and He has kept it, in all the wide world the one spot undefiled. He made it and He kept it for my children, and now He has led me to it that I should meet them once again and, dying, praise His name.”
The idea that the God who made the great world to receive man should make a tiny island to receive and protect two innocent children, should furnish it with beauty and hide it with sea, might not seem strange to a true believer in the omniscience of a benevolent deity, but to Stanistreet the words of Lestrange brought back the dread of a few hours ago—what would happen on landing?
He went forward a bit and gave Bowers the order for the boat. The whaler was dropped and, leaving Bowers in charge of the deck, Stanistreet got in, following Lestrange.
Lestrange was of the nervous type that does not show its age. Dying of consumption years ago, his spirit had triumphed over disease; he had said to himself, “I will not die till I have found my children.” The mental strength that had defied disease refused age. Though well over sixty, he did not look it, and since yesterday a decade seemed to have fallen from his shoulders.
The boat pushed off and again, just as on passing the break, dreamland cast its magic upon them. The Ranatonga on whose solid decks they had trod a moment ago, showed now as a ship floating on air, air liquid and tinted with emerald and aquamarine. So clear was the lagoon water, they could see her copper and the weeds upon it and the anchor chain, now slack with the turn of the tide and lying like a conger on the coral. As the oars drove them shoreward the illusion held, for, glancing over-side, the brains of coral and sand patches, though fathoms deep, seemed likely to scrape the keel.
The boat touched the sand where wavelets were breaking scarce a foot high, and Stanistreet, getting out, helped Lestrange over the gunnel.
“Take her back,” said the captain to the fellow who had been rowing stern oar. “You can stream her on a line. I’ll signal when I want you.”
The boat put back and the two men stood watching it.
Here on the beach was a new prospect and a new enchantment. Fair as the vision of the island seemed from the water, who could say that this was not fairer? For distance stood on the far reef beyond the lonely and unutterable blue of the broad lagoon, and beyond the reef break distance led the eye to the rim of an almost purple sea. There was nothing to break the charm or fetter the eye, not even the Ranatonga mirroring herself near the reef, nor the boat, the creak of whose oars came lazily across the water; they had become, in some way, part and parcel of the desolation.
Stanistreet, turning from the sea, cast his eyes about. The extraordinary thing was that the mind of the sailor was perturbed, anxious, eager for any traces of the children, whilst the mind of Lestrange seemed absolutely at peace. Stanistreet had dreaded some outbreak on landing, he had dreaded trouble should they discover traces, some instinct told him that this quietude might mean something graver than any outburst could foreshadow.
But Lestrange, despite his placidity and brightness of eye, showed no sign of alienation from the normal. Having gazed his fill, he turned and took his companion’s arm as one might take the arm of a brother. They walked towards the trees.
CHAPTER VI
HERE ONCE THEY DWELT
The wind had died to a fitful breeze that tossed the foliage to the rainy patter of the palm fronds.
Just before entering the shadow of the trees, Stanistreet paused. His quick eye had noticed something lying on the sand a little to the left. A great banana bunch half eaten by the birds, half ruined by the sun, something that must have lain there for days and got there—how?
There were no banana trees in sight, nothing but the level line of the coco-palms, like the first ranks of an army suddenly halted.
He bent to examine it. The stalk had been cut with a knife.
Straightening himself, he found that Lestrange had noticed the fact.
“Look,” said Lestrange, “it has been cut. Dick must have cut it from the tree, but there are no banana trees round here. Let us go on.” He was as much unconcerned by this, the first trace of the lost ones, as though Dick and Emmeline were alive out there, fishing in the lagoon and due to return any moment, out there on the lagoon where the blue beyond blue of the distant sea spoke at the reef break through a silence troubled only by the lamentation of the gulls.
It was a living fact that the eyes of Stanistreet were blurred and dimmed by this first find, whilst the eyes of Lestrange remained clear of sight. He followed the other, who had suddenly taken the lead, and as they passed into the shadow of the trees the whole business for Stanistreet took a new complexion, and the island a tinge of romance beyond the power of words to express.
Just that bunch of cut bananas had linked in some strange way in his mind the forms of the lost ones with the trees they had left and the ground they had trodden on. Haunted! Oh, yes, the island was haunted, if only in the imagination of the sailor man who, disbelieving in ghosts, heard voices in the wind that stirred the foliage and fancied forms moving in the coloured gloom of the groves.
Lestrange was following a path that led uphill, less a path than a trail; to right and left the narrow pillars of the coco-palms showed alleys broken by vast bread-fruits and bays of shadow, and now the voice of a little rivulet came tinkling and lisping and the palms broke, disclosing a glade, fern-haunted and showered with light from the moving leaves.
Here, over the face of an age-worn rock, a little cascade flashed to lose itself amidst the ferns, and above, like great candelabra, stood the banana trees, holding their full-ripe fruit to the sky.
“Look!” said Lestrange. He was pointing to a bunch of the fruit that had been cut and thrown down and was lying close to the ferns. Then he pointed to a diamond-trunked artu close to them on the left. A knife was sticking in the tree, left there by the banana-cutter—till his return.
Lestrange walked up close to the tree, glanced at the knife, and, without touching it, led the way on, past the waterfall, uphill and as if sure of his ground.
The trees fell away and past a coco grove, whispering in the wind, the hill-top broke to view, a sun-lit space, dome-like and surmounted by a great rock, broken and worn by a thousand years of weather.
They climbed the rock, warm as a living thing from the sun, and, resting on its upper face, looked.
The wind had freshened again from the nor’west, billowing the foliage far below and breezing the sea beyond the reef, and from here the whole island world lay beneath them alive with the wind in changing hues of emerald.
They could trace the azure-amethyst ring of the lagoon, here broad, here narrow, and the reef with its blinding outer beach bombarded by the swell of a sea consumed with light.
Sometimes a smoke of gulls would burst from the reef spurs to northward of the break and the wind would bring a chanting sound mixed with the faint murmur of the surf, a murmur ceaseless as the whisper of a shell.
Lestrange, leaning on his elbow, gazed far and wide. Just at this hour of the westering sun the shadow of the island was beginning to steal seaward, venturing timidly across the lagoon to pass the reef and lose