They knew him upon the Pacific slope as “Mad Lestrange.” He was not mad, but he was a man with a fixed idea. He was pursued by a vision: the vision of two children and an old sailor adrift in a little boat upon a wide blue sea.

When the Arago, bound for Papetee, picked up the boats of the Northumberland, only the people in the long-boat were alive. Le Farge, the captain, was mad, and he never recovered his reason. Lestrange was utterly shattered; the awful experience in the boats and the loss of the children had left him a seemingly helpless wreck. The scowbankers, like all their class, had fared better, and in a few days were about the ship and sitting in the sun. Four days after the rescue the Arago spoke the Newcastle, bound for San Francisco, and transhipped the shipwrecked men.

Had a physician seen Lestrange on board the Northumberland as she lay in that long, long calm before the fire, he would have declared that nothing but a miracle could prolong his life. The miracle came about.

In the general hospital of San Francisco, as the clouds cleared from his mind, they unveiled the picture of the children and the little boat. The picture had been there daily, seen but not truly comprehended; the horrors gone through in the open boat, the sheer physical exhaustion, had merged all the accidents of the great disaster into one mournful half-comprehended fact. When his brain cleared all the other incidents fell out of focus, and memory, with her eyes set upon the children, began to paint a picture that he was ever more to see.

Memory cannot produce a picture that Imagination has not retouched; and her pictures, even the ones least touched by Imagination, are no mere photographs, but the work of an artist. All that is inessential she casts away, all that is essential she retains; she idealises, and that is why her picture of a lost mistress has had power to keep a man a celibate to the end of his days, and why she can break a human heart with the picture of a dead child. She is a painter, but she is also a poet.

The picture before the mind of Lestrange was filled with this almost diabolical poetry, for in it the little boat and her helpless crew were represented adrift on a blue and sunlit sea. A sea most beautiful to look at, yet most terrible, bearing as it did the recollections of thirst.

He had been dying, when, raising himself on his elbow, so to say, he looked at this picture. It recalled him to life. His willpower asserted itself, and he refused to die.

The will of a man has, if it is strong enough, the power to reject death. He was not in the least conscious of the exercise of this power; he only knew that a great and absorbing interest had suddenly arisen in him, and that a great aim stood before him—the recovery of the children.

The disease that was killing him ceased its ravages, or rather was slain in its turn by the increased vitality against which it had to strive. He left the hospital and took up his quarters at the Palace Hotel, and then, like the General of an army, he began to formulate his plan of campaign against Fate.

When the crew of the Northumberland had stampeded, hurling their officers aside, lowering the boats with a rush, and casting themselves into the sea, everything had been lost in the way of ship’s papers; the charts, the two logs—everything, in fact, that could indicate the latitude and longitude of the disaster. The first and second officers and a midshipman had shared the fate of the quarter-boat; of the foremast hands saved, not one, of course, could give the slightest hint as to the locality of the spot.

A time reckoning from the Horn told little, for there was no record of the log. All that could be said was that the disaster had occurred somewhere south of the line.

In Le Farge’s brain lay for a certainty the position, and Lestrange went to see the captain in the “Maison de Sante,” where he was being looked after, and found him quite recovered from the furious mania that he had been suffering from. Quite recovered, and playing with a ball of coloured worsted.

There remained the log of the Arago; in it would be found the latitude and longitude of the boats she had picked up.

The Arago, due at Papetee, became overdue. Lestrange watched the overdue lists from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, uselessly, for the Arago never was heard of again. One could not affirm even that she was wrecked; she was simply one of the ships that never come back from the sea.

CHAPTER II

THE SECRET OF THE AZURE

To lose a child he loves is undoubtedly the greatest catastrophe that can 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 and hurry at the heart which half vanishes, whilst the understanding explains that in a civilised city, if a child gets lost, it will be found and brought back by the neighbours or the police.

But the police know nothing of the matter, or the neighbours, and the hours pass. Any minute may bring back the wanderer; but the minutes pass, and the day wears into evening, and the evening to night, and the night to dawn, and the common sounds of a new day begin.

You cannot remain at home for restlessness; you go out, only to return hurriedly for news. You are eternally listening, and what you hear shocks you; the common sounds of life, the roll of the carts and cabs in the street, the footsteps of the passers-by, are full of an indescribable 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 might weep, 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 a punishment 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 the children might have been rescued by some passing ship. It was not the case of children lost in a city, but in the broad Pacific, where ships travel from all ports to all ports, and to advertise his loss adequately it was necessary to placard the world. Ten thousand dollars was the reward offered for news of the lost ones, twenty thousand for the recovery; and the advertisement appeared in every newspaper likely to reach the eyes of a sailor, from the Liverpool Post to the Dead Bird.

The years passed without anything definite coming in answer to all these advertisements. Once news came of two children saved from the sea in the neighbourhood of the Gilberts, and it was not false news, but they were not the children he was seeking for. This incident at once depressed and stimulated him, for it seemed to say, “If these children have been saved, why not yours?”

The strange thing was, that in his heart he felt a certainty that they were alive. His intellect suggested their death in twenty different forms; but a whisper, somewhere out of that great blue ocean, told him at intervals that what he sought was there, living, and waiting for him.

He was somewhat of the same temperament as Emmeline—a dreamer, with a mind tuned to receive and record the fine rays that fill this world flowing from intellect to intellect, and even from what we call inanimate things. A coarser nature would, though feeling, perhaps, as acutely the grief, have given up in despair the search. But he kept on; and at the end of the fifth year, so far from desisting, he chartered a schooner and passed eighteen months in a fruitless search, calling at little-known islands, and once, unknowing, at an island only three hundred miles away from the tiny island of this story.

If you wish to feel the hopelessness of this unguided search, do not look at a map of the Pacific, but go there. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands 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 the greatest triumphs of hydrography; and though the island of the story was actually on the Admiralty charts, of what use was that fact to Lestrange?

He would have continued searching, but he dared not, for the desolation of 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 schooner lifted veil upon veil of distance, and veil upon veil lay beyond. He could only move in a right line; to search the wilderness of water with any hope, one would have to be endowed with the gift of moving in all directions 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 his heart, and the stars to speak to him in a new language, and he knew that 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, Wannamaker of Kearney Street, but there was still no news.

CHAPTER III

CAPTAIN FOUNTAIN

He had a suite of rooms at the Palace Hotel, and he lived the life of any other rich man who is not addicted to pleasure. He knew some of the best people in the city, and conducted himself so sanely in all respects that a casual stranger would never have guessed his reputation for madness; but when you knew him better, you would find sometimes in the middle of a conversation that his mind was away from the subject; and were you to follow him in the street, you would hear him in conversation with himself. Once at a dinner-party he rose and left the room, and did not return. Trifles, but sufficient to establish a reputation of a sort.

One morning—to be precise, it was the second day of May, exactly eight years and five months after the wreck of the Northumberland—Lestrange was in his sitting-room reading, when the bell of the telephone, which stood in the corner of the room, rang. He went to the instrument.

“Are you there?” came a high American voice. “Lestrange—right—come down and see me—Wannamaker—I have news for you.”

Lestrange held the receiver for a moment, then he put it back in the rest. He went to a chair and sat down, holding his head between his hands, then he rose and went to the telephone again; but he dared not use it, he dare not shatter the newborn hope.

“News!” What a world lies in that word.

In Kearney Street he stood before the door of Wannamaker’s office collecting himself and watching the crowd drifting by, then he entered and went up the stairs. He pushed open a swing-door and entered a great room. The clink and rattle of a dozen typewriters filled the place, and all the hurry of business; clerks passed and came with sheaves of correspondence in their hands; and Wannamaker himself, rising from bending over a message which he was correcting on one of the typewriters’ tables, saw the newcomer and led him to the private office.

“What is it?” said Lestrange.

“Only this,” said the other, taking up a slip of paper with a name and address on it. “Simon J. Fountain, of 45 Rathray Street, West—that’s down near the wharves—says he has seen your ad. in an old number of a paper, and he thinks he can tell you something. He did not specify the nature of the intelligence, but it might be worth finding out.”

“I will go there,” said Lestrange.

“Do you know Rathray Street?”

“No.”

Wannamaker went out and called a boy and gave him some directions; then Lestrange and the boy started.

Lestrange left the office without saying “Thank you,” or taking leave in any way of the advertising agent—who did not feel in the least affronted, for he knew his customer.

Rathray Street is, or was before the earthquake, a street of small clean houses. It had a seafaring look that was accentuated by the marine perfumes from the wharves close by and the sound of steam winches loading or discharging cargo—a sound that ceased not night or day as the work went on beneath the sun or the sizzling arc lamps.

No. 45 was almost exactly like its fellows, neither better nor worse; and the door was opened by a neat, prim woman, small, and of middle age. Commonplace she was, no doubt, but not commonplace to Lestrange.

“Is Mr Fountain in?” he asked. “I have come about the advertisement.”

“Oh, have you, sir?” she replied, making way for him to enter, and showing him into a little sitting-room on the left of the passage. “The Captain is in bed; he is a great invalid, but he was expecting, perhaps, some one would call, and he will be able to see you in a minute, if you don’t mind waiting.”

“Thanks,” said Lestrange; “I can wait.”

He had waited eight years, what mattered a few minutes now? But at no time in the eight years had he suffered such suspense, for his heart knew that now, just now in this commonplace little house, from the lips of, perhaps, the husband of that commonplace woman, he was going to learn either what he feared to hear, or what he hoped.

It was a depressing little room; it was so clean, and looked as though it were never used. A ship imprisoned in a glass bottle stood upon the mantelpiece, and there were shells from far-away places, pictures of ships in sand—all the things one finds as a rule adorning an old sailor’s home.

Lestrange, as he sat waiting, could hear movements from the next room—probably the invalid’s, which they were preparing for his reception. The distant sounds of the derricks and winches came muffled through the tightly-shut window that looked as though it never had been opened. A square of sunlight lit the upper part of the cheap lace curtain on the right of the window, and repeated its pattern vaguely on the lower part of the wall opposite. Then a bluebottle fly awoke suddenly into life and began to buzz and drum against the window pane, and Lestrange wished that they would come.

A man of his temperament must necessarily, even under the happiest circumstances, suffer in going through the world; the fine fibre always suffers when brought into contact with the coarse. These people were as kindly disposed as any one else. The advertisement and the face and manners of the visitor might have told them that it was not the time for delay, yet they kept him waiting whilst they arranged bed-quilts and put medicine bottles straight—as if he could see!

At last the door opened, and the woman said:

“Will you step this way, sir?”

She showed him into a bedroom opening off the passage. The room was neat and clean, and had that indescribable appearance which marks the bedroom of the invalid.

In the bed, making a mountain under the counterpane with an enormously distended stomach, lay a man, black-bearded, and with his large, capable, useless hands spread out on the coverlet—hands ready and willing, but debarred from work. Without moving his body, he turned his head slowly and looked at the newcomer. This slow movement was not from weakness or disease, it was the slow, emotionless nature of the man speaking.

“This is the gentleman, Silas,” said the woman, speaking over Lestrange’s shoulder. Then she withdrew and closed the door.

“Take a chair, sir,” said the sea captain, flapping one of his hands on the counterpane as if in wearied protest against his own helplessness. “I haven’t the pleasure of your name, but the missus tells me you’re come about the advertisement I lit on yester-even.”

He took a paper, folded small, that lay beside him, and held it out to his visitor. It was a Sidney Bulletin three years old.

“Yes,” said Lestrange, looking at the paper; “that is my advertisement.”

“Well, it’s strange—very strange,” said Captain Fountain, “that I should have lit on it only yesterday. I’ve had it all three years in my chest, the way old papers get lying at the bottom with odds and ends. Mightn’t a’ seen it now, only the missus cleared the raffle out of the chest, and, ‘Give me that paper,’ I says, seeing it in her hand; and I fell to reading it, for a man’ll read anything bar tracts lying in bed eight months, as I’ve been with the dropsy. I’ve been whaler man and boy forty year, and my last ship was the Sea-Horse. Over seven years ago one of my men picked up something on a beach of one of them islands east of the Marquesas—we’d put in to water—”

“Yes, yes,” said Lestrange. “What was it he found?”

“Missus!” roared the captain in a voice that shook the walls of the room.

The door opened, and the woman appeared.

“Fetch me my keys out of my trousers pocket.”

The trousers were hanging up on the back of the door, as if only waiting to be put on. The woman fetched the keys, and he fumbled over them and found one. He handed it to her, and pointed to the drawer of a bureau opposite the bed.

She knew evidently what was wanted, for she opened the drawer and produced a box, which she handed to him. It was a small cardboard box tied round with a bit of string. He undid the string, and disclosed a child’s tea service: a teapot, cream jug, six little plates—all painted with a pansy.

It was the box which Emmeline had always been losing—lost again.

Lestrange buried his face in his hands. He knew the things. Emmeline had shown them to him in a burst of confidence. Out of all that vast ocean he had searched unavailingly: they had come to him like a message, and the awe and mystery of it bowed him down and crushed him.

The captain had placed the things on the newspaper spread out by his side, and he was unrolling the little spoons from their tissue-paper covering. He counted them as if entering up the tale of some trust, and placed them on the newspaper.

“When did you find them?” asked Lestrange, speaking with his face still covered.

“A matter of over seven years ago,” replied the captain, “we’d put in to water at a place south of the line—Palm Tree Island we whalemen call it, because of the tree at the break of the lagoon. One of my men brought it aboard, found it in a shanty built of sugar-canes which the men bust up for devilment.”

“Good God!” said Lestrange. “Was there no one there—nothing but this box?”

“Not a sight or sound, so the men said; just the shanty abandoned seemingly. I had no time to land and hunt for castaways, I was after whales.”

“How big is the island?”

“Oh, a fairish middle-sized island—no natives. I’ve heard tell it’s tabu; why, the Lord only knows—some crank of the Kanakas, I s’pose. Anyhow, there’s the findings—you recognise them?”

“I do.”

“Seems strange,” said the captain, “that I should pick ’em up; seems strange your advertisement out, and the answer to it lying amongst my gear, but that’s the way things go.”

“Strange!” said the other. “It’s more than strange.”

“Of course,” continued the captain, “they might have been on the island hid away som’ere, there’s no saying; only appearances are against it. Of course they might be there now unbeknownst to you or me.”

“They are there now,” answered Lestrange, who was sitting up and looking at the playthings as though he read in them some hidden message. “They are there now. Have you the position of the island?”

“I have. Missus, hand me my private log.”

She took a bulky, greasy, black note-book from the bureau, and handed it to him. He opened it, thumbed the pages, and then read out the latitude and longitude.

“I entered it on the day of finding—here’s the entry. ‘Adams brought aboard child’s toy box out of deserted shanty, which men pulled down; traded it to me for a caulker of rum.’ The cruise lasted three years and eight months after that; we’d only been out three when it happened. I forgot all about it: three years scrubbing round the world after whales doesn’t brighten a man’s memory. Right round we went, and paid off at Nantucket. Then, after a fortni’t on shore and a month repairin’, the old Sea-Horse was off again, I with her. It was at Honolulu this dropsy took me, and back I come here, home. That’s the yarn. There’s not much to it, but, seein’ your advertisement, I thought I might answer it.”

Lestrange took Fountain’s hand and shook it.

“You see the reward I offered?” he said. “I have not my cheque book with me, but you shall have the cheque in an hour from now.”

“No, sir,” replied the captain; “if anything comes of it, I don’t say I’m not open to some small acknowledgment, but ten thousand dollars for a five-cent box—that’s not my way of doing business.”

“I can’t make you take the money now—I can’t even thank you properly now,” said Lestrange—“I am in a fever; but when all is settled, you and I will settle this business. My God!”

He buried his face in his hands again.

“I’m not wishing to be inquisitive,” said Captain Fountain, slowly putting the things back in the box and tucking the paper shavings round them, “but may I ask how you propose to move in this business?”

“I will hire a ship at once and search.”

“Ay,” said the captain, wrapping up the little spoons in a meditative manner; “perhaps that will be best.”

He felt certain in his own mind that the search would be fruitless, but he did not say so. If he had been absolutely certain in his mind without being able to produce the proof, he would not have counselled Lestrange to any other course, knowing that the man’s mind would never be settled until proof positive was produced.

“The question is,” said Lestrange, “what is my quickest way to get there?”

“There I may be able to help you,” said Fountain, tying the string round the box. “A schooner with good heels to her is what you want; and, if I’m not mistaken, there’s one discharging cargo at this present minit at O’Sullivan’s wharf. Missus!”

The woman answered the call. Lestrange felt like a person in a dream, and these people who were interesting themselves in his affairs seemed to him beneficent beyond the nature of human beings.

“Is Captain Stannistreet home, think you?”

“I don’t know,” replied the woman; “but I can go see.”

“Do.”

She went.

“He lives only a few doors down,” said Fountain, “and he’s the man for you. Best schooner captain ever sailed out of ’Frisco. The Raratonga is the name of the boat I have in my mind—best boat that ever wore copper. Stannistreet is captain of her, owners are M’Vitie. She’s been missionary, and she’s been pigs; copra was her last cargo, and she’s nearly discharged it. Oh, M’Vitie would hire her out to Satan at a price; you needn’t be afraid of their boggling at it if you can raise the dollars. She’s had a new suit of sails only the beginning of the year. Oh, she’ll fix you up to a T, and you take the word of S. Fountain for that. I’ll engineer the thing from this bed if you’ll let me put my oar in your trouble; I’ll victual her, and find a crew three quarter price of any of those d--d skulking agents. Oh, I’ll take a commission right enough, but I’m half paid with doing the thing—”

He ceased, for footsteps sounded in the passage outside, and Captain Stannistreet was shown in. He was a young man of not more than thirty, alert, quick of eye, and pleasant of face. Fountain introduced him to Lestrange, who had taken a fancy to him at first sight.

When he heard about the business in hand, he seemed interested at once; the affair seemed to appeal to him more than if it had been a purely commercial matter, such as copra and pigs.

“If you’ll come with me, sir, down to the wharf, I’ll show you the boat now,” he said, when they had discussed the matter and threshed it out thoroughly.

He rose, bid good-day to his friend Fountain, and Lestrange followed him, carrying the brown-paper box in his hand.

O’Sullivan’s Wharf was not far away. A tall Cape Horner that looked almost a twin sister of the ill-fated Northumberland was discharging iron, and astern of her, graceful as a dream, with snow-white decks, lay the Raratonga discharging copra.

“That’s the boat,” said Stannistreet; “cargo nearly all out. How does she strike your fancy?”

“I’ll take her,” said Lestrange, “cost what it will.”

CHAPTER IV

DUE SOUTH

It was on the 10th of May, so quickly did things move under the supervision of the bedridden captain, that the Raratonga, with Lestrange on board, cleared the Golden Gates, and made south, heeling to a ten-knot breeze.

There is no mode of travel to be compared to your sailing-ship. In a great ship, if you have ever made a voyage in one, the vast spaces of canvas, the sky-high spars, the finesse with which the wind is met and taken advantage of, will form a memory never to be blotted out.

A schooner is the queen of all rigs; she has a bounding buoyancy denied to the square-rigged craft, to which she stands in the same relationship as a young girl to a dowager; and the Raratonga was not only a schooner, but the queen, acknowledged of all the schooners in the Pacific.

For the first few days they made good way south; then the wind became baffling and headed them off.

Added to Lestrange’s feverish excitement there was an anxiety, a deep and soul-fretting anxiety, as if some half-heard voice were telling him that the children he sought were threatened by some danger.

These baffling winds blew upon the smouldering anxiety in his breast, as wind blows upon embers, causing them to glow. They lasted some days, and then, as if Fate had relented, up sprang on the starboard quarter a spanking breeze, making the rigging sing to a merry tune, and blowing the spindrift from the forefoot, as the Raratonga, heeling to its pressure, went humming through the sea, leaving a wake spreading behind her like a fan.

It took them along five hundred miles, silently and with the speed of a dream. Then it ceased.

The ocean and the air stood still. The sky above stood solid like a great pale blue dome; just where it met the water line of the far horizon a delicate tracery of cloud draped the entire round of the sky.

I have said that the ocean stood still as well as the air: to the eye it was so, for the swell under-running the glitter on its surface was so even, so equable, and so rhythmical, that the surface seemed not in motion. Occasionally a dimple broke the surface, and strips of dark sea-weed floated by, showing up the green; dim things rose to the surface, and, guessing the presence of man, sank slowly and dissolved from sight.

Two days, never to be recovered, passed, and still the calm continued. On the morning of the third day it breezed up from the nor’-nor’west, and they continued their course, a cloud of canvas, every sail drawing, and the music of the ripple under the forefoot.

Captain Stannistreet was a genius in his profession; he could get more speed out of a schooner than any other man afloat, and carry more canvas without losing a stick. He was also, fortunately for Lestrange, a man of refinement and education, and what was better still, understanding.

They were pacing the deck one afternoon, when Lestrange, who was walking with his hands behind him, and his eyes counting the brown dowels in the cream-white planking, broke silence.

“You don’t believe in visions and dreams?”

“How do you know that?” replied the other.

“Oh, I only put it as a question; most people say they don’t.”

“Yes, but most people do.”

“I do,” said Lestrange.

He was silent for a moment.

“You know my trouble so well that I won’t bother you going over it, but there has come over me of late a feeling—it is like a waking dream.”

“Yes?”

“I can’t quite explain, for it is as if I saw something which my intelligence could not comprehend, or make an image of.”

“I think I know what you mean.”

“I don’t think you do. This is something quite strange. I am fifty, and in fifty years a man has experienced, as a rule, all the ordinary and most of the extraordinary sensations that a human being can be subjected to. Well, I have never felt this sensation before; it comes on only at times. I see, as you might imagine, a young baby sees, and things are before me that I do not comprehend. It is not through my bodily eyes that this sensation comes, but through some window of the mind, from before which a curtain has been drawn.”

“That’s strange,” said Stannistreet, who did not like the conversation over-much, being simply a schooner captain and a plain man, though intelligent enough and sympathetic.

“This something tells me,” went on Lestrange, “that there is danger threatening the—” He ceased, paused a minute, and then, to Stannistreet’s relief, went on. “If I talk like that you will think I am not right in my head: let us pass the subject by, let us forget dreams and omens and come to realities. You know how I lost the children; you know how I hope to find them at the place where Captain Fountain found their traces? He says the island was uninhabited, but he was not sure.”

“No,” replied Stannistreet, “he only spoke of the beach.”

“Yes. Well, suppose there were natives at the other side of the island who had taken these children.”

“If so, they would grow up with the natives.”

“And become savages?”

“Yes; but the Polynesians can’t be really called savages; they are a very decent lot. I’ve knocked about amongst them a good while, and a kanaka is as white as a white man—which is not saying much, but it’s something. Most of the islands are civilised now. Of course there are a few that aren’t, but still, suppose even that ‘savages,’ as you call them, had come and taken the children off—”

Lestrange’s breath caught, for this was the very fear that was in his heart, though he had never spoken it.

“Well?”

“Well, they would be well treated.”

“And brought up as savages?”

“I suppose so.”

Lestrange sighed.

“Look here,” said the captain; “it’s all very well talking, but upon my word I think that we civilised folk put on a lot of airs, and waste a lot of pity on savages.”

“How so?”

“What does a man want to be but happy?”

“Yes.”

“Well, who is happier than a naked savage in a warm climate? Oh, he’s happy enough, and he’s not always holding a corroboree. He’s a good deal of a gentleman; he has perfect health; he lives the life a man was born to live face to face with Nature. He doesn’t see the sun through an office window or the moon through the smoke of factory chimneys; happy and civilised too—but, bless you, where is he? The whites have driven him out; in one or two small islands you may find him still—a crumb or so of him.”

“Suppose,” said Lestrange, “suppose those children had been brought up face to face with Nature—”

“Yes?”

“Living that free life—”

“Yes?”

“Waking up under the stars”—Lestrange was speaking with his eyes fixed, as if upon something very far away—“going to sleep as the sun sets, feeling the air fresh, like this which blows upon us, all around them. Suppose they were like that, would it not be a cruelty to bring them to what we call civilisation?”

“I think it would,” said Stannistreet.

Lestrange said nothing, but continued pacing the deck, his head bowed and his hands behind his back.

One evening at sunset, Stannistreet said:

“We’re two hundred and forty miles from the island, reckoning from to-day’s reckoning at noon. We’re going all ten knots even with this breeze; we ought to fetch the place this time to-morrow. Before that if it freshens.”

“I am greatly disturbed,” said Lestrange.

He went below, and the schooner captain shook his head, and, locking his arm round a ratlin, gave his body to the gentle roll of the craft as she stole along, skirting the sunset, splendid, and to the nautical eye full of fine weather.

The breeze was not quite so fresh next morning, but it had been blowing fairly all the night, and the Raratonga had made good way. About eleven it began to fail. It became the lightest sailing breeze, just sufficient to keep the sails drawing, and the wake rippling and swirling behind. Suddenly Stannistreet, who had been standing talking to Lestrange, climbed a few feet up the mizzen ratlins, and shaded his eyes.

“What is it?” asked Lestrange.

“A boat,” he replied. “Hand me that glass you will find in the sling there.”

He levelled the glass, and looked for a long time without speaking.

“It’s a boat adrift—a small boat, nothing in her. Stay! I see something white, can’t make it out. Hi there!”—to the fellow at the wheel “Keep her a point more to starboard.” He got on to the deck. “We’re going dead on for her.”

“Is there any one in her?” asked Lestrange.

“Can’t quite make out, but I’ll lower the whale-boat and fetch her alongside.”

He gave orders for the whale-boat to be slung out and manned.

As they approached nearer, it was evident that the drifting boat, which looked like a ship’s dinghy, contained something, but what, could not be made out.

When he had approached near enough, Stannistreet put the helm down and brought the schooner to, with her sails all shivering. He took his place in the bow of the whale-boat and Lestrange in the stern. The boat was lowered, the falls cast off, and the oars bent to the water.

The little dinghy made a mournful picture as she floated, looking scarcely bigger than a walnut shell. In thirty strokes the whale-boat’s nose was touching her quarter. Stannistreet grasped her gunwale.

In the bottom of the dinghy lay a girl, naked all but for a strip of coloured striped material. One of her arms was clasped round the neck of a form that was half hidden by her body, the other clasped partly to herself, partly to her companion, the body of a baby. They were natives, evidently, wrecked or lost by some mischance from some inter-island schooner. Their breasts rose and fell gently, and clasped in the girl’s hand was a branch of some tree, and on the branch a single withered berry.

“Are they dead?” asked Lestrange, who divined that there were people in the boat, and who was standing up in the stern of the whale-boat trying to see.

“No,” said Stannistreet; “they are asleep.”

THE END

----- Transcriber’s Note #1 -----

Born on April 9, 1863, in Kingstown, Ireland, Henry de Vere Stacpoole grew up in a household dominated by his mother and three older sisters. William C. Stacpoole, a doctor of divinity from Trinity College and headmaster of Kingstown school, died some time before his son’s eighth birthday, leaving the responsibility of supporting the family to his Canadian-born wife, Charlotte Augusta Mountjoy Stacpoole. At a young age, Charlotte had been led out of the Canadian backwoods by her widowed mother and taken to Ireland, where their relatives lived. This experience had strengthened her character and prepared her for single parenthood.

Charlotte cared passionately for her children and was perhaps overly protective of her son. As a child, Henry suffered from severe respiratory problems, misdiagnosed as chronic bronchitis by his physician, who in the winter of 1871 advised that the boy be taken to Southern France for his health. With her entire family in tow, Charlotte made the long journey from Kingstown to London to Paris, where signs of the Franco-Prussian War were still evident, settling at last in Nice at the Hotel des Iles Britannique. Nice was like paradise to Henry, who marveled at the city’s affluence and beauty as he played in the warm sun.

After several more excursions to the continent, Stacpoole was sent to Portarlington, a bleak boarding school more than 100 miles from Kingstown. In contrast to his sisters, the Portarlington boys were noisy and uncouth. As Stacpoole writes in his autobiograhy Men and Mice, 1863-1942 (1942), the boys abused him mentally and physically, making him feel like “a little Arthur in a cage of baboons.” One night, he escaped through an adjacent girls’ school and returned to Kingstown, only to be betrayed by his family and dragged back to school by his eldest sister.

When his family moved to London, he was taken out of Portarlington and enrolled at Malvern College, a progressive school with refined students and plenty of air and sunshine. Stacpoole thoroughly enjoyed his new surroundings, which he associated with the description of Malvern Hills in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1857): “Keepers of Piers Plowman’s visions / Through the sunshine and the snow.” This environment encouraged his interest in literature and writing.

The idyll ended, however, when Stacpoole began his medical training. At his mother’s prodding, he entered the medical school at St. George’s Hospital. Twice a day, he had to traverse a park frequented by perambulating nursemaids, and he became romantically involved with one of them. When his mother discovered their affair, she insisted that he transfer to University College, and he complied.

More interested in literature than corpses, Stacpoole began to neglect his studies and miss classes, especially the required dissections. Finally, the dean of the medical school confronted him, and their argument drove Stacpoole to St. Mary’s Hospital, where he completed his medical training and qualified L. S. A. in 1891. At some point after this date, Stacpoole made several sea voyages into the tropics (at least once as a doctor aboard a cable-mending ship), collecting information for future stories.

Stacpoole’s literary career, which he once described as being “more like a Malay fishing prahu than an honest-to-God English literary vessel,” began inauspiciously with the publication of The Intended (1894), a tragic novel about two look-alikes, one rich, the other poor, who switch places on a whim. Bewildered by the novel’s lack of success, Stacpoole consulted his friendly muse, Pearl Craigie, alias John Oliver Hobbes, who suggested a comic rather than tragic treatment. Years later, Stacpoole retold the story in The Man Who Lost Himself (1918), a commercially successful comic novel about a down-and-out American who impersonates his wealthy look-alike in England.

Set in France during the Franco-Prussian War, Stacpoole’s second novel, Pierrot (1896), recounts a French boy’s eerie relationship with a patricidal doppelganger. Like its predecessor, it was a commercial failure, and it was at this point, perhaps, that Stacpoole began to view literary success only in terms of sales figures and numbers of editions.

A strange tale of reincarnation, cross dressing, and uxoricide, Stacpoole’s third novel, Death, the Knight, and the Lady (1897), purports to be the deathbed confession of Beatrice Sinclair, who is both a reincarnated murderer (male) and a descendant of the murder victim (female). She falls in love with Gerald Wilder, a man disguised as a woman, who is both a reincarnated murder victim (female) and the descendant of the murderer (male). Despite its originality, the novel was killed by “Public Indifference” (Stacpoole’s term), which also killed The Rapin (1899), a novel about an art student in Paris.

Stacpoole spent the summer of 1898 in Sommerset, where he took over the medical practice of an ailing country doctor. So peaceful were his days in this pastoral setting that he had time to write The Doctor (1899), a novel about an old-fashioned physician practicing medicine in rural England. “It is the best book I have written,” Stacpoole declared more than forty years later. He could also say, in retrospect, that the book’s weak sales were a disguised blessing, “for I hadn’t ballast on board in those days to stand up to the gale of success, which means incidentally money.” He would be spared the gale of success for nine more years, during which he published seven books, including a collection of children’s stories and two collaborative novels with his friend William Alexander Bryce.

In 1907, two events occurred that altered the course of Stacpoole’s life: he wrote The Blue Lagoon and he married Margaret Robson. Unable to sleep one night, he found himself thinking about and envying the caveman, who in his primitiveness was able to marvel at such commonplace phenomena as sunsets and thunderstorms. Civilized, technological man had unveiled these mysteries with his telescopes and weather balloons, so that they were no longer “nameless wonders” to be feared and contemplated. As a doctor, Stacpoole had witnessed countless births and deaths, and these events no longer seemed miraculous to him. He conceived the idea of two children growing up alone on an island and experiencing storms, death, and birth in almost complete ignorance and innocence. The next morning, he started writing The Blue Lagoon. The exercise was therapeutic because he was able to experience the wonders of life and death vicariously through his characters.

The Blue Lagoon is the story of two cousins, Dicky and Emmeline Lestrange, stranded on a remote island with a beautiful lagoon. As children, they are cared for by Paddy Button, a portly sailor who drinks himself to death after only two and a half years in paradise. Frightened and confused by the man’s gruesome corpse, the children flee to another part of Palm Tree Island. Over a period of five years, they grow up and eventually fall in love. Sex and birth are as mysterious to them as death, but they manage to copulate instinctively and conceive a child. The birth is especially remarkable: fifteen-year-old Emmeline, alone in the jungle, loses consciousness and awakes to find a baby boy on the ground near her. Naming the boy Hannah (an example of Stacpoole’s penchant for gender reversals), the Lestranges live in familial bliss until they are unexpectedly expelled from their tropical Eden.

The parallels between The Blue Lagoon and the Biblical story of Adam and Eve are obvious and intentional, but Stacpoole was also influenced by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), which he invokes in a passage describing the castaways’ approach Palm Tree Island:

“One could see the water swirling round the coral piers, for the tide was flooding into the lagoon; it had seized the little dinghy and was bearing it along far swifter than the sculls could have driven it. Sea-gulls screamed about them, the boat rocked and swayed. Dick shouted with excitement, and Emmeline shut her eyes TIGHT.

“Then, as though a door had been swiftly and silently closed, the sound of the surf became suddenly less. The boat floated on an even keel; she opened her eyes and found herself in Wonderland.”

This direct reference to Wonderland prepares the reader for the many parallels that follow. When their adventures begin, both girls are about the same age, Alice seven and a half, Emmeline exactly eight. Just as Alice joins a tea party in Wonderland, Emmeline plays with her tiny tea set on the beach after they land. Emmeline’s former pet, like the Cheshire Cat, “had white stripes and a white chest, and rings down its tail” and died “showing its teeth.” Whereas Alice looks for a poison label on a bottle that says “Drink Me,” Emmeline innocently tries to eat “the never-wake-up berries” and receives a stern rebuke and a lecture about poison from Paddy Button. “The Poetry of Learning” chapter echoes Alice’s dialogue with the caterpillar. Like the wily creature smoking a hookah, Paddy smokes a pipe and shouts “Hurroo!” as the children teach him to write his name in the sand. The children lose “all count of time,” just as the Mad Hatter does. Whereas Alice grows nine feet taller, Dick sprouts “two inches taller” and Emmeline “twice as plump.” Like the baby in the “Pig and Pepper,” Hannah sneezes at the first sight of Dicky. The novel is artfully littered with references to wonder, curiosity, and strangeness—all evidence of Stacpoole’s conscious effort to invoke and honor his Victorian predecessor.

Stacpoole presented The Blue Lagoon to Publisher T. Fisher Unwin in September 1907 and went to Cumberland to assist another ailing doctor in his practice. Every day from Eden Vue in Langwathby, Stacpoole wrote to his fiancee, Margaret Robson (or Maggie, as he called her), and waited anxiously for their wedding day. On December 17, 1907, the couple were married and spent their honeymoon at Stebbing Park, a friend’s country house in Essex, about three miles from the village of Stebbing. It was there that they stumbled upon Rose Cottage, where Stacpoole lived for several years before he moved to Cliff Dene on the Isle of Wight in the 1920s.

Published in January 1908, The Blue Lagoon was an immediate success, both with reviewers and the public. “[This] tale of the discovery of love, and innocent mating, is as fresh as the ozone that made them strong,” declared one reviewer. Another claimed that “for once the title of ‘romance,’ found in so many modern stories, is really justified.” The novel was reprinted more than twenty times in the next twelve years and remained popular in other forms for more than eighty years. Norman MacOwen and Charlton Mann adapted the story as a play, which ran for 263 performances in London from August 28, 1920, to April 16, 1921. Film versions of the novel were made in 1923, 1949, and 1980.

Stacpoole also wrote two successful sequels: The Garden of God (1923) and The Gates of Morning (1925). These three books and two others were combined to form The Blue Lagoon Omnibus in 1933. The Garden of God was filmed as Return to the Blue Lagoon in 1992.

This Gutenberg etext of The Blue Lagoon: A Romance is based on the 1908 first American edition published by J. B. Lippincott Company of Philadelphia.

----- Transcriber’s Note #2 -----

The stated edition for this etext is the 1908 first American edition published by J. B. Lippincott Company of Philadelphia. Stacpoole delivered his original manuscript to publisher T. Fisher Unwin (London) in September 1907. The London edition and the Lippincott (this etext) edition were both published in 1908. Four changes were made in creating the Lippincott edition:

1. On page 18:

London edition: he sat with it on his knees staring at the white sunlit main-deck barred with the black shadows of the standing rigging.

U.S. edition: he sat with it on his knees staring at the white sunlit main-deck barred with the white shadows of the standing rigging.

Stacpoole originally indicated black shadows of the rigging on the deck.