<SPAN name="chap0121"></SPAN>
<h3> CHAPTER XXI </h3>
<h3> THE GARLAND OF FLOWERS </h3>
<p>You could just make the figure out lying on the reef near the little
cask, and comfortably sheltered from the sun by an upstanding lump of
coral.</p>
<p>"He's asleep," said Dick.</p>
<p>He had not thought to look towards the reef from the beach, or he might
have seen the figure before.</p>
<p>"Dicky!" said Emmeline.</p>
<p>"Well?"</p>
<p>"How did he get over, if you said the dinghy was tied to the tree?"</p>
<p>"I don't know," said Dick, who had not thought of this; "there he is,
anyhow. I'll tell you what, Em, we'll row across and wake him. I'll boo
into his ear and make him jump."</p>
<p>They got down from the rock, and came back down through the wood. As
they came Emmeline picked flowers and began making them up into one of
her wreaths. Some scarlet hibiscus, some bluebells, a couple of pale
poppies with furry stalks and bitter perfume.</p>
<p>"What are you making that for?" asked Dick, who always viewed
Emmeline's wreath-making with a mixture of compassion and vague disgust.</p>
<p>"I'm going to put it on Mr Button's head," said Emmeline; "so's when
you say boo into his ear he'll jump up with it on."</p>
<p>Dick chuckled with pleasure at the idea of the practical joke, and
almost admitted in his own mind for a moment, that after all there
might be a use for such futilities as wreaths.</p>
<p>The dinghy was moored under the spreading shade of the aoa, the painter
tied to one of the branches that projected over the water. These dwarf
aoas branch in an extraordinary way close to the ground, throwing out
limbs like rails. The tree had made a good protection for the little
boat, protecting it from marauding hands and from the sun; besides the
protection of the tree Paddy had now and then scuttled the boat in
shallow water. It was a new boat to start with, and with precautions
like these might be expected to last many years.</p>
<p>"Get in," said Dick, pulling on the painter so that the bow of the
dinghy came close to the beach.</p>
<p>Emmeline got carefully in, and went aft. Then Dick got in, pushed off,
and took to the sculls. Next moment they were out on the sparkling
water.</p>
<p>Dick rowed cautiously, fearing to wake the sleeper. He fastened the
painter to the coral spike that seemed set there by nature for the
purpose. He scrambled on to the reef, and lying down on his stomach
drew the boat's gunwale close up so that Emmeline might land. He had no
boots on; the soles of his feet, from constant exposure, had become
insensitive as leather.</p>
<p>Emmeline also was without boots. The soles of her feet, as is always
the case with highly nervous people, were sensitive, and she walked
delicately, avoiding the worst places, holding her wreath in her right
hand.</p>
<p>It was full tide, and the thunder of the waves outside shook the reef.
It was like being in a church when the deep bass of the organ is turned
full on, shaking the ground and the air, the walls and the roof. Dashes
of spray came over with the wind, and the melancholy "Hi, hi!" of the
wheeling gulls came like the voices of ghostly sailor-men hauling at
the halyards.</p>
<p>Paddy was lying on his right side steeped in profound oblivion. His
face was buried in the crook of his right arm, and his brown tattooed
left hand lay on his left thigh, palm upwards. He had no hat, and the
breeze stirred his grizzled hair.</p>
<p>Dick and Emmeline stole up to him till they got right beside him. Then
Emmeline, flashing out a laugh, flung the little wreath of flowers on
the old man's head, and Dick, popping down on his knees, shouted into
his ear. But the dreamer did not stir or move a finger.</p>
<p>"Paddy," cried Dick, "wake up! wake up!"</p>
<p>He pulled at the shoulder till the figure from its sideways posture
fell over on its back. The eyes were wide open and staring. The mouth
hung open, and from the mouth darted a little crab; it scuttled over
the chin and dropped on the coral.</p>
<p>Emmeline screamed, and screamed, and would have fallen, but the boy
caught her in his arms—one side of the face had been destroyed by the
larvae of the rocks.</p>
<p>He held her to him as he stared at the terrible figure lying upon its
back, hands outspread. Then, wild with terror, he dragged her towards
the little boat. She was struggling, and panting and gasping, like a
person drowning in ice-cold water.</p>
<p>His one instinct was to escape, to fly anywhere, no matter where. He
dragged the girl to the coral edge, and pulled the boat up close. Had
the reef suddenly become enveloped in flames he could not have exerted
himself more to escape from it and save his companion. A moment later
they were afloat, and he was pulling wildly for the shore.</p>
<p>He did not know what had happened, nor did he pause to think: he was
fleeing from horror—nameless horror; whilst the child at his feet,
with her head resting against the gunwale, stared up open-eyed and
speechless at the great blue sky, as if at some terror visible there.
The boat grounded on the white sand, and the wash of the incoming tide
drove it up sideways.</p>
<p>Emmeline had fallen forward; she had lost consciousness.</p>
<br/><br/><br/>
<SPAN name="chap0122"></SPAN>
<h3> CHAPTER XXII </h3>
<h3> ALONE </h3>
<p>The idea of spiritual life must be innate in the heart of man, for all
that terrible night, when the children lay huddled together in the
little hut in the chapparel, the fear that filled them was that their
old friend might suddenly darken the entrance and seek to lie down
beside them.</p>
<p>They did not speak about him. Something had been done to him; something
had happened. Something terrible had happened to the world they knew.
But they dared not speak of it or question each other.</p>
<p>Dick had carried his companion to the hut when he left the boat, and
hidden with her there; the evening had come on, and the night, and now
in the darkness, without having tasted food all day, he was telling her
not to be afraid, that he would take care of her. But not a word of
the thing that had happened.</p>
<p>The thing, for them, had no precedent, and no vocabulary. They had come
across death raw and real, uncooked by religion, undeodorised by the
sayings of sages and poets.</p>
<p>They knew nothing of the philosophy that tells us that death is the
common lot, and the natural sequence to birth, or the religion that
teaches us that Death is the door to Life.</p>
<p>A dead old sailor-man lying like a festering carcass on a coral ledge,
eyes staring and glazed and fixed, a wide-open mouth that once had
spoken comforting words, and now spoke living crabs.</p>
<p>That was the vision before them. They did not philosophise about it;
and though they were filled with terror, I do not think it was terror
that held them from speaking about it, but a vague feeling that what
they had beheld was obscene, unspeakable, and a thing to avoid.</p>
<p>Lestrange had brought them up in his own way. He had told them there
was a good God who looked after the world; determined as far as he
could to exclude demonology and sin and death from their knowledge, he
had rested content with the bald statement that there was a good God
who looked after the world, without explaining fully that the same God
would torture them for ever and ever, should they fail to believe in
Him or keep His commandments.</p>
<p>This knowledge of the Almighty, therefore, was but a half knowledge,
the vaguest abstraction. Had they been brought up, however, in the most
strictly Calvinistic school, this knowledge of Him would have been no
comfort now. Belief in God is no comfort to a frightened child. Teach
him as many parrot-like prayers as you please, and in distress or the
dark of what use are they to him? His cry is for his nurse, or his
mother.</p>
<p>During that dreadful night these two children had no comfort to seek
anywhere in the whole wide universe but in each other. She, in a sense
of his protection, he, in a sense of being her protector. The
manliness in him greater and more beautiful than physical strength,
developed in those dark hours just as a plant under extraordinary
circumstances is hurried into bloom.</p>
<p>Towards dawn Emmeline fell asleep. Dick stole out of the hut when he
had assured himself from her regular breathing that she was asleep,
and, pushing the tendrils and the branches of the mammee apples aside,
found the beach. The dawn was just breaking, and the morning breeze was
coming in from the sea.</p>
<p>When he had beached the dinghy the day before, the tide was just at the
flood, and it had left her stranded. The tide was coming in now, and in
a short time it would be far enough up to push her off.</p>
<p>Emmeline in the night had implored him to take her away. Take her away
somewhere from there, and he had promised, without knowing in the least
how he was to perform his promise. As he stood looking at the beach, so
desolate and strangely different now from what it was the day before,
an idea of how he could fulfil his promise came to him. He ran down to
where the little boat lay on the shelving sand, with the ripples of the
incoming tide just washing the rudder, which was still shipped. He
unshipped the rudder and came back.</p>
<p>Under a tree, covered with the stay-sail they had brought from the
Shenandoah, lay most of their treasures: old clothes and boots, and all
the other odds and ends. The precious tobacco stitched up in a piece of
canvas was there, and the housewife with the needles and threads. A
hole had been dug in the sand as a sort of cache for them, and the
stay-sail put over them to protect them from the dew.</p>
<p>The sun was now looking over the sealine, and the tall cocoa-nut trees
were singing and whispering together under the strengthening breeze.</p>
<br/><br/><br/>
<SPAN name="chap0123"></SPAN>
<h3> CHAPTER XXIII </h3>
<h3> THEY MOVE AWAY </h3>
<p>He began to collect the things, and carry them to the dinghy. He took
the stay-sail and everything that might be useful; and when he had
stowed them in the boat, he took the breaker and filled it with water
at the water source in the wood; he collected some bananas and
breadfruit, and stowed them in the dinghy with the breaker. Then he
found the remains of yesterday's breakfast, which he had hidden between
two palmetto leaves, and placed it also in the boat.</p>
<p>The water was now so high that a strong push would float her. He turned
back to the hut for Emmeline. She was still asleep: so soundly asleep,
that when he lifted her up in his arms she made no movement. He placed
her carefully in the stern-sheets with her head on the sail rolled up,
and then standing in the bow pushed off with a scull. Then, taking the
sculls, he turned the boat's head up the lagoon to the left. He kept
close to the shore, but for the life of him he could not help lifting
his eyes and looking towards the reef.</p>
<p>Round a certain spot on the distant white coral there was a great
commotion of birds. Huge birds some of them seemed, and the "Hi! hi!
hi!" of them came across the lagoon on the breeze as they quarrelled
together and beat the air with their wings. He turned his head away
till a bend of the shore hid the spot from sight.</p>
<p>Here, sheltered more completely than opposite the break in the reef,
the artu came in places right down to the water's edge; the breadfruit
trees cast the shadow of their great scalloped leaves upon the water;
glades, thick with fern, wildernesses of the mammee apple, and bushes
of the scarlet "wild cocoanut" all slipped by, as the dinghy, hugging
the shore, crept up the lagoon.</p>
<p>Gazing at the shore edge one might have imagined it the edge of a lake,
but for the thunder of the Pacific upon the distant reef; and even that
did not destroy the impression, but only lent a strangeness to it.</p>
<p>A lake in the midst of the ocean, that is what the lagoon really was.</p>
<p>Here and there cocoa-nut trees slanted over the water, mirroring their
delicate stems, and tracing their clear-cut shadows on the sandy bottom
a fathom deep below.</p>
<p>He kept close in-shore for the sake of the shelter of the trees. His
object was to find some place where they might stop permanently, and
put up a tent. He was seeking a new home, in fact. But, pretty as were
the glades they passed, they were not attractive places to live in.
There were too many trees, or the ferns were too deep. He was seeking
air and space, and suddenly he found it. Rounding a little cape, all
blazing with the scarlet of the wild cocoa-nut, the dinghy broke into a
new world.</p>
<p>Before her lay a great sweep of the palest blue wind-swept water, down
to which came a broad green sward of park-like land set on either side
with deep groves, and leading up and away to higher land, where, above
the massive and motionless green of the great breadfruit trees, the
palm trees swayed and fluttered their pale green feathers in the
breeze. The pale colour of the water was due to the extreme shallowness
of the lagoon just here. So shallow was it that one could see brown
spaces indicating beds of dead and rotten coral, and splashes of
darkest sapphire where the deep pools lay. The reef lay more than half
a mile from the shore: a great way out, it seemed, so far out that its
cramping influence was removed, and one had the impression of wide and
unbroken sea.</p>
<p>Dick rested on his oars, and let the dinghy float whilst he looked
around him. He had come some four miles and a half, and this was right
at the back of the island. As the boat drifting shoreward touched the
bank, Emmeline awakened from her sleep, sat up, and looked around her.</p>
<br/><br/><br/>
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