CHAPTER XXII
ALONE
The idea of spiritual life must be innate in the heart of man, for allthat terrible night, when the children lay huddled together in thelittle hut in the chapparel, the fear that filled them was that theirold friend might suddenly darken the entrance and seek to lie downbeside them.
They did not speak about him. Something had been done to him; somethinghad happened. Something terrible had happened to the world they knew.But they dared not speak of it or question each other.
Dick had carried his companion to the hut when he left the boat, andhidden with her there; the evening had come on, and the night, and nowin the darkness, without having tasted food all day, he was telling hernot to be afraid, that he would take care of her. But not a word ofthe thing that had happened.
The thing, for them, had no precedent, and no vocabulary. They had comeacross death raw and real, uncooked by religion, undeodorised by thesayings of sages and poets.
They knew nothing of the philosophy that tells us that death is thecommon lot, and the natural sequence to birth, or the religion thatteaches us that Death is the door to Life.
A dead old sailor-man lying like a festering carcass on a coral ledge,eyes staring and glazed and fixed, a wide-open mouth that once hadspoken comforting words, and now spoke living crabs.
That was the vision before them. They did not philosophise about it;and though they were filled with terror, I do not think it was terrorthat held them from speaking about it, but a vague feeling that whatthey had beheld was obscene, unspeakable, and a thing to avoid.
Lestrange had brought them up in his own way. He had told them therewas a good God who looked after the world; determined as far as hecould to exclude demonology and sin and death from their knowledge, hehad rested content with the bald statement that there was a good Godwho looked after the world, without explaining fully that the same Godwould torture them for ever and ever, should they fail to believe inHim or keep His commandments.
This knowledge of the Almighty, therefore, was but a half knowledge,the vaguest abstraction. Had they been brought up, however, in the moststrictly Calvinistic school, this knowledge of Him would have been nocomfort now. Belief in God is no comfort to a frightened child. Teachhim as many parrot-like prayers as you please, and in distress or thedark of what use are they to him? His cry is for his nurse, or hismother.
During that dreadful night these two children had no comfort to seekanywhere in the whole wide universe but in each other. She, in a senseof his protection, he, in a sense of being her protector. Themanliness in him greater and more beautiful than physical strength,developed in those dark hours just as a plant under extraordinarycircumstances is hurried into bloom.
Towards dawn Emmeline fell asleep. Dick stole out of the hut when hehad assured himself from her regular breathing that she was asleep,and, pushing the tendrils and the branches of the mammee apples aside,found the beach. The dawn was just breaking, and the morning breeze wascoming in from the sea.
When he had beached the dinghy the day before, the tide was just at theflood, and it had left her stranded. The tide was coming in now, and ina short time it would be far enough up to push her off.
Emmeline in the night had implored him to take her away. Take her awaysomewhere from there, and he had promised, without knowing in the leasthow he was to perform his promise. As he stood looking at the beach, sodesolate and strangely different now from what it was the day before,an idea of how he could fulfil his promise came to him. He ran down towhere the little boat lay on the shelving sand, with the ripples of theincoming tide just washing the rudder, which was still shipped. Heunshipped the rudder and came back.
Under a tree, covered with the stay-sail they had brought from the_Shenandoah_, lay most of their treasures: old clothes and boots, and allthe other odds and ends. The precious tobacco stitched up in a piece ofcanvas was there, and the housewife with the needles and threads. Ahole had been dug in the sand as a sort of _cache_ for them, and thestay-sail put over them to protect them from the dew.
The sun was now looking over the sea-line, and the tall cocoa-nut treeswere singing and whispering together under the strengthening breeze.