CHAPTER II
UNDER THE STARS
It was a wonderful night up on deck, filled with all the majesty andbeauty of starlight and a tropic calm.
The Pacific slept; a vast, vague swell flowing from far away down southunder the night, lifted the _Northumberland_ on its undulations to therattling sound of the reef points and the occasional creak of therudder; whilst overhead, near the fiery arch of the Milky Way, hung theSouthern Cross like a broken kite.
Stars in the sky, stars in the sea, stars by the million and themillion so many lamps ablaze that the firmament filled the mind withthe idea of a vast and populous city—yet from all that living andflashing splendour not a sound.
Down in the cabin—or saloon, as it was called by courtesy—were seatedthe three passengers of the ship; one reading at the table, two playingon the floor.
The man at the table, Arthur Lestrange, was seated with his large,deep-sunken eyes fixed on a book. He was most evidently inconsumption—very near, indeed, to reaping the result of that last andmost desperate remedy, a long sea voyage.
Emmeline Lestrange, his little niece—eight years of age, a mysteriousmite, small for her age, with thoughts of her own, wide-pupilled eyesthat seemed the doors for visions, and a face that seemed just to havepeeped into this world for a moment ere it was as suddenlywithdrawn—sat in a corner nursing something in her arms, and rockingherself to the tune of her own thoughts.
Dick, Lestrange’s little son, eight and a bit, was somewhere under thetable. They were Bostonians, bound for San Francisco, or rather for thesun and splendour of Los Angeles, where Lestrange had bought a smallestate, hoping there to enjoy the life whose lease would be renewed bythe long sea voyage.
As he sat reading, the cabin door opened, and appeared an angularfemale form. This was Mrs Stannard, the stewardess, and Mrs Stannardmeant bedtime.
“Dicky,” said Mr Lestrange, closing his book, and raising thetable-cloth a few inches, “bedtime.”
“Oh, not yet, daddy!” came a sleep-freighted voice from under thetable; “I ain’t ready. I dunno want to go to bed, I— Hi yow!”
Mrs Stannard, who knew her work, had stooped under the table, seized himby the foot, and hauled him out kicking and fighting and blubbering allat the same time.
As for Emmeline, she having glanced up and recognised the inevitable,rose to her feet, and, holding the hideous rag-doll she had beennursing, head down and dangling in one hand, she stood waiting tillDicky, after a few last perfunctory bellows, suddenly dried his eyesand held up a tear-wet face for his father to kiss. Then she presentedher brow solemnly to her uncle, received a kiss and vanished, led bythe hand into a cabin on the port side of the saloon.
Mr Lestrange returned to his book, but he had not read for long whenthe cabin door was opened, and Emmeline, in her nightdress, reappeared,holding a brown paper parcel in her hand, a parcel of about the samesize as the book you are reading.
“My box,” said she; and as she spoke, holding it up as if to prove itssafety, the little plain face altered to the face of an angel.
She had smiled.
When Emmeline Lestrange smiled it was absolutely as if the light ofParadise had suddenly flashed upon her face: the happiest form ofchildish beauty suddenly appeared before your eyes, dazzled them—andwas gone.
Then she vanished with her box, and Mr Lestrange resumed his book.
This box of Emmeline’s, I may say in parenthesis, had given moretrouble aboard ship than all of the rest of the passengers’ luggage puttogether.
It had been presented to her on her departure from Boston by a ladyfriend, and what it contained was a dark secret to all on board, saveits owner and her uncle; she was a woman, or, at all events, thebeginning of a woman, yet she kept this secret to herself—a fact whichyou will please note.
The trouble of the thing was that it was frequently being lost.Suspecting herself, maybe, as an unpractical dreamer in a world filledwith robbers, she would cart it about with her for safety, sit downbehind a coil of rope and fall into a fit of abstraction: be recalledto life by the evolutions of the crew reefing or furling or what not,rise to superintend the operations—and then suddenly find she had losther box.
Then she would absolutely haunt the ship. Wide-eyed and distressed offace she would wander hither and thither, peeping into the galley,peeping down the forescuttle, never uttering a word or wail, searchinglike an uneasy ghost, but dumb.
She seemed ashamed to tell of her loss, ashamed to let any one know ofit; but every one knew of it directly they saw her, to use Mr Button’sexpression, “on the wandher,” and every one hunted for it.
Strangely enough it was Paddy Button who usually found it. He who wasalways doing the wrong thing in the eyes of men, generally did theright thing in the eyes of children. Children, in fact, when they couldget at Mr Button, went for him _con amore_. He was as attractive to themas a Punch and Judy show or a German band—almost.
Mr Lestrange after a while closed the book he was reading, lookedaround him and sighed.
The cabin of the _Northumberland_ was a cheerful enough place, piercedby the polished shaft of the mizzen mast, carpeted with an Axminstercarpet, and garnished with mirrors let into the white pine panelling.Lestrange was staring at the reflection of his own face in one of thesemirrors fixed just opposite to where he sat.
His emaciation was terrible, and it was just perhaps at this momentthat he first recognised the fact that he must not only die, but diesoon.
He turned from the mirror and sat for a while with his chin restingupon his hand, and his eyes fixed on an ink spot upon the table-cloth;then he arose, and crossing the cabin climbed laboriously up thecompanion-way to the deck.
As he leaned against the bulwark rail to recover his breath, thesplendour and beauty of the Southern night struck him to the heart witha cruel pang. He took his seat on a deck chair and gazed up at theMilky Way, that great triumphal arch built of suns that the dawn wouldsweep away like a dream.
In the Milky Way, near the Southern Cross, occurs a terrible circularabyss, the Coal Sack. So sharply defined is it, so suggestive of a voidand bottomless cavern, that the contemplation of it afflicts theimaginative mind with vertigo. To the naked eye it is as black and asdismal as death, but the smallest telescope reveals it beautiful andpopulous with stars.
Lestrange’s eyes travelled from this mystery to the burning cross, andthe nameless and numberless stars reaching to the sea-line, where theypaled and vanished in the light of the rising moon. Then he becameaware of a figure promenading the quarter-deck. It was the “Old Man.”
A sea captain is always the “old man,” be his age what it may. CaptainLe Farges’ age might have been forty-five. He was a sailor of the JeanBart type, of French descent, but a naturalised American.
“I don’t know where the wind’s gone,” said the captain as he drew nearthe man in the deck chair. “I guess it’s blown a hole in the firmament,and escaped somewheres to the back of beyond.”
“It’s been a long voyage,” said Lestrange; “and I’m thinking, Captain,it will be a very long voyage for me. My port’s not ’Frisco; I feel it.”
“Don’t you be thinking that sort of thing,” said the other, taking hisseat in a chair close by. “There’s no manner of use forecastin’ theweather a month ahead. Now we’re in warm latitoods, your glass willrise steady, and you’ll be as right and spry as any one of us, beforewe fetch the Golden Gates.”
“I’m thinking about the children,” said Lestrange, seeming not to hearthe captain’s words. “Should anything happen to me before we reachport, I should like you to do something for me. It’s only this: disposeof my body without—without the children knowing. It has been in mymind to ask you this for some days. Captain, those children knownothing of death.”
Le Farge moved uneasily in his chair.
“Little Emmeline’s mother died when she was two. Her father—mybrother—died before she was born. Dicky never knew a mother; she diedgiving him birth. My God, Capta
in, death has laid a heavy hand on myfamily; can you wonder that I have hid his very name from those twocreatures that I love!”
“Ay, ay,” said Le Farge, “it’s sad! it’s sad!”
“When I was quite a child,” went on Lestrange, “a child no older thanDicky, my nurse used to terrify me with tales about dead people. I wastold I’d go to hell when I died if I wasn’t a good child. I cannot tellyou how much that has poisoned my life, for the thoughts we think inchildhood, Captain, are the fathers of the thoughts we think when weare grown up. And can a diseased father—have healthy children?”
“I guess not.”
“So I just said, when these two tiny creatures came into my care, thatI would do all in my power to protect them from the terrors of life—orrather, I should say, from the terror of death. I don’t know whether Ihave done right, but I have done it for the best. They had a cat, andone day Dicky came in to me and said: ‘Father, pussy’s in the gardenasleep, and I can’t wake her.’ So I just took him out for a walk; therewas a circus in the town, and I took him to it. It so filled his mindthat he quite forgot the cat. Next day he asked for her. I did not tellhim she was buried in the garden, I just said she must have run away.In a week he had forgotten all about her—children soon forget.”
“Ay, that’s true,” said the sea captain. “But ’pears to me they mustlearn some time they’ve got to die.”
“Should I pay the penalty before we reach land, and be cast into thatgreat, vast sea, I would not wish the children’s dreams to be hauntedby the thought: just tell them I’ve gone on board another ship. Youwill take them back to Boston I have here, in a letter, the name of alady who will care for them. Dicky will be well off, as far as worldlygoods are concerned, and so will Emmeline. Just tell them I’ve gone onboard another ship—children soon forget.”
“I’ll do what you ask,” said the seaman.
The moon was over the horizon now, and the _Northumberland_ lay adrift ina river of silver. Every spar was distinct, every reef point on thegreat sails, and the decks lay like spaces of frost cut by shadowsblack as ebony.
As the two men sat without speaking, thinking their own thoughts, alittle white figure emerged from the saloon hatch. It was Emmeline. Shewas a professed sleepwalker—a past mistress of the art.
Scarcely had she stepped into dreamland than she had lost her preciousbox, and now she was hunting for it on the decks of the _Northumberland_.
Mr Lestrange put his finger to his lips, took off his shoes andsilently followed her. She searched behind a coil of rope, she tried toopen the galley door; hither and thither she wandered, wide-eyed andtroubled of face, till at last, in the shadow of the hencoop, she foundher visionary treasure. Then back she came, holding up her littlenightdress with one hand, so as not to trip, and vanished down thesaloon companion very hurriedly, as if anxious to get back to bed, heruncle close behind, with one hand outstretched so as to catch her incase she stumbled.
The Blue Lagoon: A Romance Page 2