CHAPTER IV
DUE SOUTH
It was on the 10th of May, so quickly did things move under thesupervision of the bedridden captain, that the _Raratonga_, withLestrange on board, cleared the Golden Gates, and made south, heelingto a ten-knot breeze.
There is no mode of travel to be compared to your sailing-ship. In agreat ship, if you have ever made a voyage in one, the vast spaces ofcanvas, the sky-high spars, the _finesse_ with which the wind is met andtaken advantage of, will form a memory never to be blotted out.
A schooner is the queen of all rigs; she has a bounding buoyancy deniedto the square-rigged craft, to which she stands in the samerelationship as a young girl to a dowager; and the _Raratonga_ was notonly a schooner, but the queen, acknowledged of all the schooners inthe Pacific.
For the first few days they made good way south; then the wind becamebaffling and headed them off.
Added to Lestrange’s feverish excitement there was an anxiety, a deepand soul-fretting anxiety, as if some half-heard voice were telling himthat 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 aspanking breeze, making the rigging sing to a merry tune, and blowingthe spindrift from the forefoot, as the _Raratonga_, heeling to itspressure, went humming through the sea, leaving a wake spreading behindher like a fan.
It took them along five hundred miles, silently and with the speed of adream. Then it ceased.
The ocean and the air stood still. The sky above stood solid like agreat pale blue dome; just where it met the water line of the farhorizon 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 eyeit was so, for the swell under-running the glitter on its surface wasso even, so equable, and so rhythmical, that the surface seemed not inmotion. Occasionally a dimple broke the surface, and strips of darksea-weed floated by, showing up the green; dim things rose to thesurface, and, guessing the presence of man, sank slowly and dissolvedfrom 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 morespeed out of a schooner than any other man afloat, and carry morecanvas 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 waswalking with his hands behind him, and his eyes counting the browndowels 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, butthere 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 myintelligence 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, andin fifty years a man has experienced, as a rule, all the ordinary andmost of the extraordinary sensations that a human being can besubjected to. Well, I have never felt this sensation before; it comeson only at times. I see, as you might imagine, a young baby sees, andthings are before me that I do not comprehend. It is not through mybodily eyes that this sensation comes, but through some window of themind, from before which a curtain has been drawn.”
“That’s strange,” said Stannistreet, who did not like the conversationover-much, being simply a schooner captain and a plain man, thoughintelligent enough and sympathetic.
“This something tells me,” went on Lestrange, “that there is dangerthreatening the—” He ceased, paused a minute, and then, toStannistreet’s relief, went on. “If I talk like that you will think Iam not right in my head: let us pass the subject by, let us forgetdreams and omens and come to realities. You know how I lost thechildren; you know how I hope to find them at the place where CaptainFountain found their traces? He says the island was uninhabited, but hewas not sure.”
“No,” replied Stannistreet, “he only spoke of the beach.”
“Yes. Well, suppose there were natives at the other side of the islandwho 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 avery decent lot. I’ve knocked about amongst them a good while, and akanaka is as white as a white man—which is not saying much, but it’ssomething. Most of the islands are civilised now. Of course there are afew that aren’t, but still, suppose even that ‘savages,’ as you callthem, had come and taken the children off—”
Lestrange’s breath caught, for this was the very fear that was in hisheart, 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 myword I think that we civilised folk put on a lot of airs, and waste alot 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’shappy enough, and he’s not always holding a corroboree. He’s a gooddeal of a gentleman; he has perfect health; he lives the life a man wasborn to live face to face with Nature. He doesn’t see the sun throughan office window or the moon through the smoke of factory chimneys;happy and civilised too—but, bless you, where is he? The whites havedriven him out; in one or two small islands you may find him still—acrumb or so of him.”
“Suppose,” said Lestrange, “suppose those children had been brought upface to face with Nature—”
“Yes?”
“Living that free life—”
“Yes?”
“Waking up under the stars”—Lestrange was speaking with his eyesfixed, as if upon something very far away—“going to sleep as the sunsets, feeling the air fresh, like this which blows upon us, all aroundthem. Suppose they were like that, would it not be a cruelty to bringthem to what we call civilisation?”
“I think it would,” said Stannistreet.
Lestrange said nothing, but continued pacing the deck, his head bowedand his hands behind his back.
One evening at sunset, Stannistreet said:
“We’re two hundred and forty miles from the island, reckoning fromto-day’s reckoning at noon. We’re going all ten knots even with thisbreeze; we ought to fetch the place this time to-morrow. Before that ifit freshens.”
“I am greatly disturbed,” said Lestrange.
He went below, and the schooner captain shook his head, and, lockinghis arm round a ratlin, gave his body to the gentle roll of the craftas she stole along, skirting the sunset, splendid, and to the nauticaleye full of fine weather.
The breeze was not quite so fresh next morning, but it had been blowingfairly all the night, and the _Raratonga_ had made good way. About elevenit began to fail. It became the lightest sailing breeze, justsufficient to keep the sails drawing, and the wake rippling andswirling behind. Suddenly Stannistreet, who had been standing talkingto Lestrange, climbed a few feet up the mizzen ratl
ins, and shaded hiseyes.
“What is it?” asked Lestrange.
“A boat,” he replied. “Hand me that glass you will find in the slingthere.”
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 seesomething white, can’t make it out. Hi there!”—to the fellow at thewheel “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 heralongside.”
He gave orders for the whale-boat to be slung out and manned.
As they approached nearer, it was evident that the drifting boat, whichlooked like a ship’s dinghy, contained something, but what, could notbe made out.
When he had approached near enough, Stannistreet put the helm down andbrought the schooner to, with her sails all shivering. He took hisplace in the bow of the whale-boat and Lestrange in the stern. The boatwas lowered, the falls cast off, and the oars bent to the water.
The little dinghy made a mournful picture as she floated, lookingscarcely bigger than a walnut shell. In thirty strokes the whale-boat’snose was touching her quarter. Stannistreet grasped her gunwale.
In the bottom of the dinghy lay a girl, naked all but for a strip ofcoloured striped material. One of her arms was clasped round the neckof a form that was half hidden by her body, the other clasped partly toherself, partly to her companion, the body of a baby. They werenatives, evidently, wrecked or lost by some mischance from someinter-island schooner. Their breasts rose and fell gently, and claspedin the girl’s hand was a branch of some tree, and on the branch asingle withered berry.
“Are they dead?” asked Lestrange, who divined that there were people inthe boat, and who was standing up in the stern of the whale-boat tryingto see.
“No,” said Stannistreet; “they are asleep.”
THE END
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