The Garden of God (Romance Classic). Henry De Vere Stacpoole
and broke into several groups, the grumble of their voices coming on the wind.
The fellow with the red handkerchief broke away from the others and came aft touching his forehead.
“Ax your pardon, sir,” said he, “but the chaps wants to know what’s a bolus?”
“A present,” said Stanistreet, “fifty dollars for nothing into the hand of the chap that stays.”
The meeting resumed, but, it was plain to be seen, without enthusiasm. Then, at last, all in one group they came aft and halted, whilst the spokesman gave their decision to the skipper.
“The chaps ain’t unwillin’ to oblige you or the gentleman, sir, but it’s the lonesomeness.”
“None of you will stay?”
“Well, sir, it’s not the stayin’, but the keepin’ here.”
“Of course you’d have to keep here—but that’s enough—get forward.”
Then, suddenly, came a voice of mockery, the voice of Jim. Jim had taken little part in the discussion, leaving to abler speakers the handling of the affair, but he had made no objection to the general verdict. It was a characteristic that, whilst one with the others, he was always a bit apart; illiterate as any of them, his mind was of a different stamp.
“Lonesomeness be sugared, it’s the booze they’re thinkin’ of, sir.”
For a moment the presence of the after-guard was forgotten and voices were raised.
“You’re thinkin’ of, you mean, or why don’t you stay yourself?” enquired the man with the red handkerchief.
“And who says I won’t?” asked Jim.
That is how it happened, all of a sudden. I doubt if a moment before he had made up his mind or whether the necessity of answering back smart had done the business. At all events it was done, and Jim Kearney, long, red-headed, lantern-jawed and trailing behind him his tattered past, was enlisted the third inhabitant of the Garden of God.
Stanistreet had pointed out to Lestrange the impossibility of the schooner putting out that day: stores had to be landed, and not only landed, but brought round to the house away at the other side of the lagoon.
Lestrange did not want stores, and Jim Kearney, who was a small eater for all his size and strength, and who in these latitudes was indifferent to meat, despite his advocacy of beef as a food for children, only wanted tobacco. All the same, the captain of the Ranatonga had his own ideas on the subject. A cask of flour was broken out of the hold, the medicine chest was ransacked of pain-killer, opium and Epsom salts; needles, thread, scissors, carpenter’s tools, lines and fish-hooks—nothing was forgotten.
A shack had to be run up in the trees behind the house to hold the stores, and it was not till the morning of the third day that all was finished.
The old dinghy was overhauled and condemned, but Lestrange wished to keep it, so it was left, together with the dinghy of the Ranatonga, for practical purposes, and they were towed round by the whale boat to the sward by the house and tied up to the bank.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning when all was finished. Dick was playing about in the sun under the eye of Kearney, pipe in mouth and hands in pockets, and Lestrange was saying good-bye to his skipper.
Stanistreet was downcast. The very beauty of the morning, the loveliness of the sward with its protecting trees, the lagoon with its coloured shadows and depths, the remote reef and the perfect sky above it, all this only served to deepen the depression that had come upon him.
Now, at the moment of parting, the feeling came to him that he would never see Lestrange again, that on the child playing on the sward, Kearney, and the grey-haired man with those strange eyes that seemed fixed upon another world, Fate was preparing to drop a curtain that it would never be his part to lift.
For a moment and to his plain, simple mind the tragedy of the lost children seemed part of this new happening and the hand that had shaped their fate not yet finished with its work.
The fellows in the whale boat that was hanging onto the bank ready to take him round the lagoon back to the ship, seemed under the same blanket; Jim, for all his rating them over the drink business, had been a favourite, and here they were leaving him, marooned, so to speak. Bowers, who had left the boat to give some last instructions to Jim, returned to his place in the stern sheets, and Stanistreet cast his eye over the house with its open doorway, over the child, over Jim.
“Well, sir,” said he, “I don’t think we’ve forgotten anything, and I’ve got your orders safe in mind and pocket—and—” He held out his hand and gripped that of the other.
“Good luck,” said Lestrange.
The boat shoved off, some of the fellows shouting, “Bye, Jim!” others nodding their heads at him.
Then, just before rounding the cape to the right, the oars came in and the crew, scrambling to their feet, gave a cheer that roused the echoes in the trees. Then the boat passed away for ever beyond the cape.
“Kearney,” said Lestrange, “those are good men—would that there were more like them in this strange world.”
“Yes, sir,” said Kearney. “They ain’t bad—off the wharfside.”
But Lestrange, fallen into a dream, scarce heard, and hearing would not have understood this profound and comprehensive summary of the ethical condition of the departed ones.
He cared for nothing. He was at peace. The presence of Stanistreet, the very decks of the Ranatonga were ties connecting him with the misery of the last twelve years, things disturbing that perfect new mood of mind, born of his vision and the surety that here in this paradise, at their own good time, his children would come to him, be with him.
Leaving the child to Kearney, he turned to the house and began to put things in order. This dreamer was no idler; he had brought all his books with him, some dozen volumes or so, and he arranged them on the shelf already prepared for him by the children, taking care that none of the other objects were disturbed.
He examined the walls, still incomplete in parts, and the roof all but finished, but not quite; the thought that the children had left it for him to complete came to him suddenly and made him pause in his work. It was only a fancy, yet his mind held it and dwelt on it as though it had been a fact of the first importance. It was to be his house as well as theirs.
As he stood like this, idle for a moment and gazing out across the sunlit sward, his eyes fell on Kearney and the child. The sailor’s hands were out of his pockets and he was standing, knife in one hand and a bit of stick in the other, whittling away and evidently making some sort of toy. Dick, seated on the ground, naked as the sun, was looking up at the work in progress.
Bowers had decided not to force clothes upon the child, firstly, because Dick, like some form of insane people, fought against any covering, even a blanket; secondly, because the child’s skin was already clothed, covered with a lovely golden brown tinge, a suit given him by the sea. He didn’t look naked, and the simple and logical mind of the sailor decided to let him be, and there he sat, perhaps the most beautiful object on earth, whilst above him stood Kearney whittling his stick—and Lestrange, casting his benevolent eye upon them, saw nothing but a little child waiting for a toy at the hands of a sailor man.
For Dick was almost nothing to Lestrange, he had no part in his obsession. Stanistreet had reckoned him half crazy partly because of his indifference to this grandchild—but he had forgotten that the forms for ever in the mind of the “poor gentleman” were the forms of the children of the past, that the vision that had brought him what seemed the peace of madness was the vision of two little children of six and seven. “Dick and Emmeline, just as they were long years ago, pure and sweet and happy and childlike, but knowing all things.” The fact that they had mated in life, the very fact of Dick, were alien to the consuming dream that here at their own chosen time little hands would push the leaves aside and that in some twilight he would see