CHAPTER II
THE SECRET OF THE AZURE
To lose a child he loves is undoubtedly the greatest catastrophe thatcan happen to a man. I do not refer to its death.
A child wanders into the street, or is left by its nurse for a moment,and vanishes. At first the thing is not realised. There is a pang andhurry at the heart which half vanishes, whilst the understandingexplains that in a civilised city, if a child gets lost, it will befound and brought back by the neighbours or the police.
But the police know nothing of the matter, or the neighbours, and thehours pass. Any minute may bring back the wanderer; but the minutespass, and the day wears into evening, and the evening to night, and thenight to dawn, and the common sounds of a new day begin.
You cannot remain at home for restlessness; you go out, only to returnhurriedly for news. You are eternally listening, and what you hearshocks you; the common sounds of life, the roll of the carts and cabsin the street, the footsteps of the passers-by, are full of anindescribable mournfulness; music increases your misery into madness,and the joy of others is monstrous as laughter heard in hell.
If some one were to bring you the dead body of the child, you mightweep, but you would bless him, for it is the uncertainty that kills.
You go mad, or go on living. Years pass by, and you are an old man.You say to yourself: “He would have been twenty years of age to-day.”
There is not in the old ferocious penal code of our forefathers apunishment adequate to the case of the man or woman who steals a child.
Lestrange was a wealthy man, and one hope remained to him, that thechildren might have been rescued by some passing ship. It was not thecase of children lost in a city, but in the broad Pacific, where shipstravel from all ports to all ports, and to advertise his lossadequately it was necessary to placard the world. Ten thousand dollarswas the reward offered for news of the lost ones, twenty thousand forthe recovery; and the advertisement appeared in every newspaperlikely to reach the eyes of a sailor, from the _Liverpool Post_ tothe _Dead Bird_.
The years passed without anything definite coming in answer to allthese advertisements. Once news came of two children saved from the seain the neighbourhood of the Gilberts, and it was not false news, butthey were not the children he was seeking for. This incident at oncedepressed and stimulated him, for it seemed to say, “If these childrenhave been saved, why not yours?”
The strange thing was, that in his heart he felt a certainty that theywere alive. His intellect suggested their death in twenty differentforms; but a whisper, somewhere out of that great blue ocean, told himat intervals that what he sought was there, living, and waiting for him.
He was somewhat of the same temperament as Emmeline—a dreamer, with amind tuned to receive and record the fine rays that fill this worldflowing from intellect to intellect, and even from what we callinanimate things. A coarser nature would, though feeling, perhaps, asacutely the grief, have given up in despair the search. But he kept onand at the end of the fifth year, so far from desisting, he chartered aschooner and passed eighteen months in a fruitless search, calling atlittle-known islands, and once, unknowing, at an island only threehundred miles away from the tiny island of this story.
If you wish to feel the hopelessness of this unguided search, do notlook at a map of the Pacific, but go there. Hundreds and hundreds ofthousands of square leagues of sea, thousands of islands, reefs, atolls.
Up to a few years ago there were many small islands utterly unknown;even still there are some, though the charts of the Pacific are thegreatest triumphs of hydrography; and though the island of the storywas actually on the Admiralty charts, of what use was that fact toLestrange?
He would have continued searching, but he dared not, for the desolationof the sea had touched him.
In that eighteen months the Pacific explained itself to him in part,explained its vastness, its secrecy and inviolability. The schoonerlifted veil upon veil of distance, and veil upon veil lay beyond. Hecould only move in a right line; to search the wilderness of water withany hope, one would have to be endowed with the gift of moving in alldirections at once.
He would often lean over the bulwark rail and watch the swell slip by,as if questioning the water. Then the sunsets began to weigh upon hisheart, and the stars to speak to him in a new language, and he knewthat it was time to return, if he would return with a whole mind.
When he got back to San Francisco he called upon his agent, Wannamakerof Kearney Street, but there was still no news.
The Blue Lagoon: A Romance Page 47