The Garden of God (Romance Classic). Henry De Vere Stacpoole
rel="nofollow" href="#ua599ec24-9089-52a7-ae78-17efda436074">CHAPTER THE LAST
BOOK I
ON THE ISLAND
CHAPTER I
THE CORMORANT
“No,” said Lestrange, “they are dead.”
The whale boat and the dinghy lay together, gunnels grinding as they lifted to the swell. Two cable lengths away lay the schooner from which the whale boat had come; beyond and around from sky-line to sky-line the blue Pacific lay desolate beneath the day.
“They are dead.”
He was gazing at the forms on the dinghy, the form of a girl with a child embraced in one arm, and a youth. Clasping one another, they seemed asleep.
From where had they drifted? To where were they drifting? God and the sea alone could tell.
A Farallone cormorant, far above, wheeling and slanting on the breeze, had followed the dinghy for hours, held away by the awful and profound knowledge, born of instinct, that one of the castaways was still alive. But it still hung, waiting.
“The child is not dead,” said Stanistreet. He had reached forward and, gently separating the forms, had taken the child from the mother’s arms. It was warm, it moved, and as he handed it to the steersman, Lestrange, almost upsetting the boat, stood up. He had glimpsed the faces of the dead people. Clasping his head with both hands and staring at the forms before him, mad, distracted by the blow that Fate had suddenly dealt him, his voice rang out across the sea: “My children!”
Stanistreet, the captain of the schooner, Stanistreet, who knew the story of the lost children so well, knelt aghast just in the position in which he had handed the child to the sailor in the stern sheets.
The truth took him by the throat. It must be so. These were no Kanakas drifted to sea; the dinghy alone might have told him that. These were the children they had come in search of, grown, mated and—dead.
His quick sailor’s mind reckoned rapidly. The island they were making for in hopes of finding the long-lost ones was close to them; the northward running current would have brought the dinghy; some inexplicable sea chance had drifted them from shore; they were here, come to meet the man who had sought them for years—what a fatality!
Lestrange had sunk as if crushed down by some hand. Taking the girl’s arm, he drew it towards him. “Look!” he cried, as if speaking to high heaven. “And my boy—oh, look! Dick—Emmeline—oh, God! My God! Why? Why? Why?”
He dashed his head on the gunnel. Far away above the cormorant watched.
It saw the whale boat making back from the schooner with the dinghy in tow; it saw the forms it hungered for taken on board; it saw the preparations on deck and the bodies of the lost ones committed to the deep. Then, turning with a cry, it drifted on the wind and vanished, like an evil spirit, from the blue.
CHAPTER II
DAWN
It was just on daybreak and the Ranatonga, running before an eight-knot breeze, was boosting the star-shot water to snow.
Bowers, the bo’sun, an old British Navy quartermaster, was at the wheel and Stanistreet, the captain, had just come on deck.
“Gentleman goin’ on all right, sir?” asked Bowers.
“Mr. Lestrange is still asleep, and thank God for it,” said Stanistreet, “and the child’s well. It woke and I gave it a pannikin of condensed and water and it’s in the starboard after-bunk asleep again.”
“I thought the gentleman was dead when you brought him back aboard, sir,” said Bowers. “I never did see such a traverse, them pore young things and all; we goin’ to hunt for them, as you may say, and them comin’ off to meet us like that—why, that dinghy was swep’ clean down to the bailer—no oars, nuthin—and what were they doin’ with that dinghy? Where’d they get that dinghy from’s what I want to know.”
“Curse the dinghy,” said Stanistreet. “Only for her I wouldn’t believe this thing true—but I’ve got to, there’s no getting away from it. I’ll tell you about that dinghy. It’s just like this. It belonged to a hooker that Mr. Lestrange was coming up to Frisco in long years ago. She got burnt out way down here somewhere, the boats got separated in a fog that came on them and the ship’s dinghy, with his two kids and an old sailor man, was never seen again. He never believed them dead; he’s been hunting all these years up and down the ports of the world on chance of finding news of them. He had it in his head some chap had picked them up—not a sign; then, a bit ago, a friend of mine, Captain Fountain, struck one of his advertisements, and gave news of indications he’d found on this island we’re seeking for; he’d picked up a child’s toy box, but he hadn’t made a search of the place, being after whales and knowing nothing of the story, so Mr. Lestrange, when he got the news, put the Ranatonga in commission. That’s what we started on this voyage for, and now you know.”
“How far’s that island from here, sir?” asked Bowers.
“When we struck the dinghy yesterday it was a hundred and fifty south; we’re not more than sixty from it now. We’ll reach it before noon.”
“And them pore things came driftin’, father, mother and child, a hundred and fifty mile without bite or sup?”
“God knows,” said Stanistreet, “what food they had with them. There was nothing in the boat but a bit of tree branch with a red berry on it.”
Bowers spun the wheel and shifted the quid in his mouth.
“And the child stood the batter of the business better than them,” said he. “I’ve known that happen before; kids take a lot of killing as long as the cold don’t get at them. They weren’t both his children, was they, sir?”
“No,” said Stanistreet. “The young fellow was his son, the girl was his niece.”
The old quartermaster lay silent for a moment, while in the east a line of turbulent and travelling gold marked the horizon of the lonely sea. The slash of the low wash and the creak of block and cordage remained the only sounds in that world of dawn above which Canopus and the Cross were fading.
There was no morning bank; nothing to mar the splendour of the sunburst across the marching swell; far away a gull had caught it and showed wings of rose and gold against the increasing azure.
Bowers saw nothing but the binnacle cord. Without letting her half a point from her course, the mind of this perfect steersman was travelling far afield. He had signed on not knowing and not caring whither the Ranatonga was bound. He thought Lestrange was taking a voyage for the good of his health. He liked the thin, nervous man with grey eyes who always had a good word for every one, and, now that he knew his story, he pitied him. The whole business was plain before him: he could see the burning ship of long years ago, the escape in the boats, the separation in the fog, the children landed on some island, growing up together, mating, and then in some unaccountable manner being drifted out to sea with the child that had been born to them. Maybe they had been fishing and caught in a storm—who could tell? It was easy to be seen that chance had only half a hand in the meeting between the father and his dead children, seeing that Captain Fountain’s information had brought him right to the spot. All the same, the thing gripped the battered and sea-stained and case-hardened mind of Bowers as ivy grips an old wall. Bowers was close on seventy, British-born.