CHAPTER XI

THE ISLAND

“Childer!” shouted Paddy. He was at the cross-trees in the full dawn, whilst the children standing beneath on deck were craning their faces up to him. “There’s an island forenint us.”

“Hurrah!” cried Dick. He was not quite sure what an island might be like in the concrete, but it was something fresh, and Paddy’s voice was jubilant.

“Land ho! it is,” said he, coming down to the deck. “Come for’ard to the bows, and I’ll show it you.”

He stood on the timber in the bows and lifted Emmeline up in his arms; and even at that humble elevation from the water she could see something of an undecided colour—green for choice—on the horizon.

It was not directly ahead, but on the starboard bow—or, as she would have expressed it, to the right. When Dick had looked and expressed his disappointment at there being so little to see, Paddy began to make preparations for leaving the ship.

It was only just now, with land in sight, that he recognised in some fashion the horror of the position from which they were about to escape.

He fed the children hurriedly with some biscuits and tinned meat, and then, with a biscuit in his hand, eating as he went, he trotted about the decks, collecting things and stowing them in the dinghy. The bolt of striped flannel, all the old clothes, a housewife full of needles and thread, such as seamen sometimes carry, the half-sack of potatoes, a saw which he found in the caboose, the precious coil of tobacco, and a lot of other odds and ends he transhipped, sinking the little dinghy several strakes in the process. Also, of course, he took the breaker of water, and the remains of the biscuit and tinned stuff they had brought on board. These being stowed, and the dinghy ready, he went forward with the children to the bow, to see how the island was bearing.

It had loomed up nearer during the hour or so in which he had been collecting and storing the things—nearer, and more to the right, which meant that the brig was being borne by a fairly swift current, and that she would pass it, leaving it two or three miles to starboard. It was well they had command of the dinghy.

“The sea’s all round it,” said Emmeline, who was seated on Paddy’s shoulder, holding on tight to him, and gazing upon the island, the green of whose trees was now visible, an oasis of verdure in the sparkling and seraphic blue.

“Are we going there, Paddy?” asked Dick, holding on to a stay, and straining his eyes towards the land.

“Ay, are we,” said Mr Button. “Hot foot—five knots, if we’re makin’ wan; and it’s ashore we’ll be by noon, and maybe sooner.”

The breeze had freshened up, and was blowing dead from the island, as though the island were making a weak attempt to blow them away from it.

Oh, what a fresh and perfumed breeze it was! All sorts of tropical growing things had joined their scent in one bouquet.

“Smell it,” said Emmeline, expanding her small nostrils. “That’s what I smelt last night, only it’s stronger now.”

The last reckoning taken on board the Northumberland had proved the ship to be south by east of the Marquesas; this was evidently one of those small, lost islands that lie here and there south by east of the Marquesas. Islands the most lonely and beautiful in the world.

As they gazed it grew before them, and shifted still more to the right. It was hilly and green now, though the trees could not be clearly made out; here, the green was lighter in colour, and there, darker. A rim of pure white marble seemed to surround its base. It was foam breaking on the barrier reef.

In another hour the feathery foliage of the cocoa-nut palms could be made out, and the old sailor judged it time to take to the boat.

He lifted Emmeline, who was clasping her luggage, over the rail on to the channel, and deposited her in the stern-sheets; then Dick.

In a moment the boat was adrift, the mast stepped, and the Shenandoah left to pursue her mysterious voyage at the will of the currents of the sea.

“You’re not going to the island, Paddy,” cried Dick, as the old man put the boat on the port tack.

“You be aisy,” replied the other, “and don’t be larnin’ your gran’mother. How the divil d’ye think I’d fetch the land sailin’ dead in the wind’s eye?”

“Has the wind eyes?”

Mr Button did not answer the question. He was troubled in his mind. What if the island were inhabited? He had spent several years in the South Seas. He knew the people of the Marquesas and Samoa, and liked them. But here he was out of his bearings.

However, all the troubling in the world was of no use. It was a case of the island or the deep sea, and, putting the boat on the starboard tack, he lit his pipe and leaned back with the tiller in the crook of his arm. His keen eyes had made out from the deck of the brig an opening in the reef, and he was making to run the dinghy abreast of the opening, and then take to the sculls and row her through.

Now, as they drew nearer a sound came on the breeze, a sound faint and sonorous and dreamy. It was the sound of the breakers on the reef. The sea just here was heaving to a deeper swell, as if vexed in its sleep at the resistance to it of the land.

Emmeline, sitting with her bundle in her lap, stared without speaking at the sight before her. Even in the bright, glorious sunshine, and despite the greenery that showed beyond, it was a desolate sight seen from her place in the dinghy. A white, forlorn beach, over which the breakers raced and tumbled, sea-gulls wheeling and screaming, and over all the thunder of the surf.

Suddenly the break became visible, and a glimpse of smooth, blue water beyond. Mr Button unshipped the tiller, unstepped the mast, and took to the sculls.

As they drew nearer, the sea became more active, savage, and alive; the thunder of the surf became louder, the breakers more fierce and threatening, the opening broader.

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 around 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.

CHAPTER XII

THE LAKE OF AZURE

On either side lay a great sweep of waving blue water. Calm, almost as a lake, sapphire here, and here with the tints of the aqua marine. Water so clear that fathoms away below you could see the branching coral, the schools of passing fish, and the shadows of the fish upon the spaces of sand.

Before them the clear water washed the sands of a white beach, the cocoa-palms waved and whispered in the breeze; and as the oarsman lay on his oars to look a flock of bluebirds rose, as if suddenly freed from the tree-tops, wheeled, and passed soundless, like a wreath of smoke, over the tree-tops of the higher land beyond.

“Look!” shouted Dick, who had his nose over the gunwale of the boat. “Look at the fish!”

“Mr Button,” cried Emmeline, “where are we?”

“Bedad, I dunno; but we might be in a worse place, I’m thinkin’,” replied the old man, sweeping his eyes over the blue and tranquil lagoon, from the barrier reef to the happy shore.

On either side of the broad beach before them the cocoa-nut trees came down like two regiments, and bending gazed at their own reflections in the lagoon. Beyond lay waving chapparel, where cocoa-palms and breadfruit trees intermixed with the mammee apple and the tendrils of the wild vine. On one of the piers of coral at the break of the reef stood a single cocoa-palm; bending with a slight curve, it, too, seemed seeking its reflection in the waving water.

But the soul of it all, the indescribable thing about this picture of mirrored palm trees, blue lagoon, coral reef and sky, was the light.

Away at sea the light was blinding, dazzling, cruel. Away at sea it had nothing to focus itself upon, nothing to exhibit but infinite spaces of blue water and desolation.

Here it made the air a crystal, through which the gazer saw the loveliness of the land and reef, the green of palm, the white of coral, the wheeling gulls, the blue lagoon, all sharply outlined—burning, coloured, arrogant, yet tender—heart-breakingly beautiful, for the spirit of eternal morning was here, eternal happiness, eternal youth.

As the oarsman pulled the tiny craft towards the beach, neither he nor the children saw away behind the boat, on the water near the bending palm tree at the break in the reef, something that for a moment insulted the day, and was gone. Something like a small triangle of dark canvas, that rippled through the water and sank from sight; something that appeared and vanished like an evil thought.

It did not take long to beach the boat. Mr Button tumbled over the side up to his knees in water, whilst Dick crawled over the bow.

“Catch hould of her the same as I do,” cried Paddy, laying hold of the starboard gunwale; whilst Dick, imitative as a monkey, seized the gunwale to port. Now then:

“‘Yeo ho, Chilliman,
Up wid her, up wid her,
Heave O, Chilliman.’

“Lave her be now; she’s high enough.”

He took Emmeline in his arms and carried her up on the sand. It was from just here on the sand that you could see the true beauty of the lagoon. That lake of sea water forever protected from storm and trouble by the barrier reef of coral.

Right from where the little clear ripples ran up the strand, it led the eye to the break in the coral reef where the palm gazed at its own reflection in the water, and there, beyond the break, one caught a vision of the great heaving, sparkling sea.

The lagoon, just here, was perhaps more than a third of a mile broad. I have never measured it, but I know that, standing by the palm tree on the reef, flinging up one’s arm and shouting to a person on the beach, the sound took a perceptible time to cross the water: I should say, perhaps, an almost perceptible time. The distant signal and the distant call were almost coincident, yet not quite.

Dick, mad with delight at the place in which he found himself, was running about like a dog just out of the water. Mr Button was discharging the cargo of the dinghy on the dry, white sand. Emmeline seated herself with her precious bundle on the sand, and was watching the operations of her friend, looking at the things around her and feeling very strange.

For all she knew all this was the ordinary accompaniment of a sea voyage. Paddy’s manner throughout had been set to the one idea, not to frighten the “childer”; the weather had backed him up. But down in the heart of her lay the knowledge that all was not as it should be. The hurried departure from the ship, the fog in which her uncle had vanished, those things, and others as well, she felt instinctively were not right. But she said nothing.

She had not long for meditation, however, for Dick was running towards her with a live crab which he had picked up, calling out that he was going to make it bite her.

“Take it away!” cried Emmeline, holding both hands with fingers widespread in front of her face. “Mr Button! Mr Button! Mr Button!”

“Lave her be, you little divil!” roared Pat, who was depositing the last of the cargo on the sand. “Lave her be, or it’s a cow-hidin’ I’ll be givin’ you!”

“What’s a ‘divil,’ Paddy?” asked Dick, panting from his exertions. “Paddy, what’s a ‘divil’?”

“You’re wan. Ax no questions now, for it’s tired I am, an’ I want to rest me bones.”

He flung himself under the shade of a palm tree, took out his tinder box, tobacco and pipe, cut some tobacco up, filled his pipe and lit it. Emmeline crawled up, and sat near him, and Dick flung himself down on the sand near Emmeline.

Mr Button took off his coat and made a pillow of it against a cocoa-nut tree stem. He had found the El Dorado of the weary. With his knowledge of the South Seas a glance at the vegetation to be seen told him that food for a regiment might be had for the taking; water, too.

Right down the middle of the strand was a depression which in the rainy season would be the bed of a rushing rivulet. The water just now was not strong enough to come all the way to the lagoon, but away up there “beyant” in the woods lay the source, and he’d find it in due time. There was enough in the breaker for a week, and green “cuca-nuts” were to be had for the climbing.

Emmeline contemplated Paddy for a while as he smoked and rested his bones, then a great thought occurred to her. She took the little shawl from around the parcel she was holding and exposed the mysterious box.

“Oh, begorra, the box!” said Paddy, leaning on his elbow interestedly; “I might a’ known you wouldn’t a’ forgot it.”

“Mrs James,” said Emmeline, “made me promise not to open it till I got on shore, for the things in it might get lost.”

“Well, you’re ashore now,” said Dick; “open it.”

“I’m going to,” said Emmeline.

She carefully undid the string, refusing the assistance of Paddy’s knife. Then the brown paper came off, disclosing a common cardboard box. She raised the lid half an inch, peeped in, and shut it again.

“Open it!” cried Dick, mad with curiosity.

“What’s in it, honey?” asked the old sailor, who was as interested as Dick.

“Things,” replied Emmeline.

Then all at once she took the lid off and disclosed a tiny tea service of china, packed in shavings; there was a teapot with a lid, a cream jug, cups and saucers, and six microscopic plates, each painted with a pansy.

“Sure, it’s a tay-set!” said Paddy, in an interested voice. “Glory be to God! will you look at the little plates wid the flowers on thim?”

“Heugh!” said Dick in disgust; “I thought it might a’ been soldiers.”

“I don’t want soldiers,” replied Emmeline, in a voice of perfect contentment.

She unfolded a piece of tissue paper, and took from it a sugar-tongs and six spoons. Then she arrayed the whole lot on the sand.

“Well, if that don’t beat all!” said Paddy.

“And whin are you goin’ to ax me to tay with you?”

“Some time,” replied Emmeline, collecting the things, and carefully repacking them.

Mr Button finished his pipe, tapped the ashes out, and placed it in his pocket.

“I’ll be afther riggin’ up a bit of a tint,” said he, as he rose to his feet, “to shelter us from the jew to-night; but I’ll first have a look at the woods to see if I can find wather. Lave your box with the other things, Emmeline; there’s no one here to take it.”

Emmeline left her box on the heap of things that Paddy had placed in the shadow of the cocoa-nut trees, took his hand, and the three entered the grove on the right.

It was like entering a pine forest; the tall symmetrical stems of the trees seemed set by mathematical law, each at a given distance from the other. Whichever way you entered a twilight alley set with tree boles lay before you. Looking up you saw at an immense distance above a pale green roof patined with sparkling and flashing points of light, where the breeze was busy playing with the green fronds of the trees.

“Mr Button,” murmured Emmeline, “we won’t get lost, will we?”

“Lost! No, faith; sure we’re goin’ uphill, an’ all we have to do is to come down again, when we want to get back—ware nuts!” A green nut detached from up above came down rattling and tumbling and hopped on the ground. Paddy picked it up. “It’s a green cucanut,” said he, putting it in his pocket (it was not very much bigger than a Jaffa orange), “and we’ll have it for tay.”

“That’s not a cocoa-nut,” said Dick; “cocoa-nuts are brown. I had five cents once an’ I bought one, and scraped it out and y’et it.”

“When Dr Sims made Dicky sick,” said Emmeline, “he said the wonder t’im was how Dicky held it all.”

“Come on,” said Mr Button, “an’ don’t be talkin’, or it’s the Cluricaunes will be after us.”

“What’s cluricaunes?” demanded Dick.

“Little men no bigger than your thumb that make the brogues for the Good People.”

“Who’s they?”

“Whisht, and don’t be talkin’. Mind your head, Em’leen, or the branches’ll be hittin’ you in the face.”

They had left the cocoa-nut grove, and entered the chapparel. Here was a deeper twilight, and all sorts of trees lent their foliage to make the shade. The artu with its delicately diamonded trunk, the great breadfruit tall as a beech, and shadowy as a cave, the aoa, and the eternal cocoa-nut palm all grew here like brothers. Great ropes of wild vine twined like the snake of the laocoon from tree to tree, and all sorts of wonderful flowers, from the orchid shaped like a butterfly to the scarlet hibiscus, made beautiful the gloom.

Suddenly Mr Button stopped.

“Whisht!” said he.

Through the silence—a silence filled with the hum and the murmur of wood insects and the faint, far song of the reef—came a tinkling, rippling sound: it was water. He listened to make sure of the bearing of the sound, then he made for it.

Next moment they found themselves in a little grass-grown glade. From the hilly ground above, over a rock black and polished like ebony, fell a tiny cascade not much broader than one’s hand; ferns grew around and from a tree above where a great rope of wild convolvulus flowers blew their trumpets in the enchanted twilight.

The children cried out at the prettiness of it, and Emmeline ran and dabbled her hands in the water. Just above the little waterfall sprang a banana tree laden with fruit; it had immense leaves six feet long and more, and broad as a dinner-table. One could see the golden glint of the ripe fruit through the foliage.

In a moment Mr Button had kicked off his shoes and was going up the rock like a cat, absolutely, for it seemed to give him nothing to climb by.

“Hurroo!” cried Dick in admiration. “Look at Paddy!”

Emmeline looked, and saw nothing but swaying leaves.

“Stand from under!” he shouted, and next moment down came a huge bunch of yellow-jacketed bananas. Dick shouted with delight, but Emmeline showed no excitement: she had discovered something.

CHAPTER XIII

DEATH VEILED WITH LICHEN

“Mr Button,” said she, when the latter had descended, “there’s a little barrel”; she pointed to something green and lichen-covered that lay between the trunks of two trees—something that eyes less sharp than the eyes of a child might have mistaken for a boulder.

“Sure, an’ faith it’s an’ ould empty bar’l,” said Mr Button, wiping the sweat from his brow and staring at the thing. “Some ship must have been wathering here an’ forgot it. It’ll do for a sate whilst we have dinner.”

He sat down upon it and distributed the bananas to the children, who sat down on the grass.

The barrel looked such a deserted and neglected thing that his imagination assumed it to be empty. Empty or full, however, it made an excellent seat, for it was quarter sunk in the green soft earth, and immovable.

“If ships has been here, ships will come again,” said he, as he munched his bananas.

“Will daddy’s ship come here?” asked Dick.

“Ay, to be sure it will,” replied the other, taking out his pipe. “Now run about and play with the flowers an’ lave me alone to smoke a pipe, and then we’ll all go to the top of the hill beyant, and have a look round us.

“Come ’long, Em!” cried Dick; and the children started off amongst the trees, Dick pulling at the hanging vine tendrils, and Emmeline plucking what blossoms she could find within her small reach.

When he had finished his pipe he hallooed, and small voices answered him from the wood. Then the children came running back, Emmeline laughing and showing her small white teeth, a large bunch of blossoms in her hand; Dick flowerless, but carrying what seemed a large green stone.

“Look at what a funny thing I’ve found!” he cried; “it’s got holes in it.”

“Dhrap it!” shouted Mr Button, springing from the barrel as if some one had stuck an awl into him. “Where’d you find it? What d’you mane by touchin’ it? Give it here.”

He took it gingerly in his hands; it was a lichen-covered skull, with a great dent in the back of it where it had been cloven by an axe or some sharp instrument. He hove it as far as he could away amidst the trees.

“What is it, Paddy?” asked Dick, half astonished, half frightened at the old man’s manner.

“It’s nothin’ good,” replied Mr Button.

“There were two others, and I wanted to fetch them,” grumbled Dick.

“You lave them alone. Musha! musha! but there’s been black doin’s here in days gone by. What is it, Emmeline?”

Emmeline was holding out her bunch of flowers for admiration. He took a great gaudy blossom—if flowers can ever be called gaudy—and stuck its stalk in the pocket of his coat. Then he led the way uphill, muttering as he went.

The higher they got the less dense became the trees and the fewer the cocoa-nut palms. The cocoa-nut palm loves the sea, and the few they had here all had their heads bent in the direction of the lagoon, as if yearning after it.

They passed a cane-brake where canes twenty feet high whispered together like bulrushes. Then a sunlit sward, destitute of tree or shrub, led them sharply upward for a hundred feet or so to where a great rock, the highest point of the island, stood, casting its shadow in the sunshine. The rock was about twenty feet high, and easy to climb. Its top was almost flat, and as spacious as an ordinary dinner-table. From it one could obtain a complete view of the island and the sea.

Looking down, one’s eye travelled over the trembling and waving tree-tops, to the lagoon; beyond the lagoon to the reef, beyond the reef to the infinite space of the Pacific. The reef encircled the whole island, here further from the land, here closer; the song of the surf on it came as a whisper, just like the whisper you hear in a shell; but, a strange thing, though the sound heard on the beach was continuous, up here one could distinguish an intermittency as breaker after breaker dashed itself to death on the coral strand below.

You have seen a field of green barley ruffled over by the wind, just so from the hill-top you could see the wind in its passage over the sunlit foliage beneath.

It was breezing up from the south-west, and banyan and cocoa-palm, artu and breadfruit tree, swayed and rocked in the merry wind. So bright and moving was the picture of the breeze-swept sea, the blue lagoon, the foam-dashed reef, and the rocking trees that one felt one had surprised some mysterious gala day, some festival of Nature more than ordinarily glad.

As if to strengthen the idea, now and then above the trees would burst what seemed a rocket of coloured stars. The stars would drift away in a flock on the wind and be lost. They were flights of birds. All-coloured birds peopled the trees below—blue, scarlet, dove-coloured, bright of eye, but voiceless. From the reef you could see occasionally the sea-gulls rising here and there in clouds like small puffs of smoke.

The lagoon, here deep, here shallow, presented, according to its depth or shallowness, the colours of ultra-marine or sky. The broadest parts were the palest, because the most shallow; and here and there, in the shallows, you might see a faint tracery of coral ribs almost reaching the surface. The island at its broadest might have been three miles across. There was not a sign of house or habitation to be seen, and not a sail on the whole of the wide Pacific.

It was a strange place to be, up here. To find oneself surrounded by grass and flowers and trees, and all the kindliness of nature, to feel the breeze blow, to smoke one’s pipe, and to remember that one was in a place uninhabited and unknown. A place to which no messages were ever carried except by the wind or the sea-gulls.

In this solitude the beetle was as carefully painted and the flower as carefully tended as though all the peoples of the civilised world were standing by to criticise or approve.

Nowhere in the world, perhaps, so well as here, could you appreciate Nature’s splendid indifference to the great affairs of Man.

The old sailor was thinking nothing of this sort. His eyes were fixed on a small and almost imperceptible stain on the horizon to the sou’-sou’-west. It was no doubt another island almost hull-down on the horizon. Save for this blemish the whole wheel of the sea was empty and serene.

Emmeline had not followed them up to the rock. She had gone botanising where some bushes displayed great bunches of the crimson arita berries as if to show to the sun what Earth could do in the way of manufacturing poison. She plucked two great bunches of them, and with this treasure came to the base of the rock.

“Lave thim berries down!” cried Mr Button, when she had attracted his attention. “Don’t put thim in your mouth; thim’s the never-wake-up berries.”

He came down off the rock, hand over fist, flung the poisonous things away, and looked into Emmeline’s small mouth, which at his command she opened wide. There was only a little pink tongue in it, however, curled up like a rose-leaf; no sign of berries or poison. So, giving her a little shake, just as a nursemaid would have done in like circumstances, he took Dick off the rock, and led the way back to the beach.

“Mr Button,” said Emmeline that night, as they sat on the sand near the tent he had improvised, “Mr Button—cats go to sleep.”

They had been questioning him about the “never-wake-up” berries.

“Who said they didn’t?” asked Mr Button.

“I mean,” said Emmeline, “they go to sleep and never wake up again. Ours did. It had stripes on it, and a white chest, and rings all down its tail. It went asleep in the garden, all stretched out, and showing its teeth; an’ I told Jane, and Dicky ran in an’ told uncle. I went to Mrs Sims, the doctor’s wife, to tea; and when I came back I asked Jane where pussy was—and she said it was deadn’ berried, but I wasn’t to tell uncle.”

“I remember,” said Dick. “It was the day I went to the circus, and you told me not to tell daddy the cat was deadn’ berried. But I told Mrs James’s man when he came to do the garden; and I asked him where cats went when they were deadn’ berried, and he said he guessed they went to hell—at least he hoped they did, for they were always scratchin’ up the flowers. Then he told me not to tell any one he’d said that, for it was a swear word, and he oughtn’t to have said it. I asked him what he’d give me if I didn’t tell, an’ he gave me five cents. That was the day I bought the cocoa-nut.”

The tent, a makeshift affair, consisting of two sculls and a tree branch, which Mr Button had sawed off from a dwarf aoa, and the stay-sail he had brought from the brig, was pitched in the centre of the beach, so as to be out of the way of falling cocoa-nuts, should the breeze strengthen during the night. The sun had set, but the moon had not yet risen as they sat in the starlight on the sand near the temporary abode.

“What’s the things you said made the boots for the people, Paddy?” asked Dick, after a pause.

“Which things?”

“You said in the wood I wasn’t to talk, else—”

“Oh, the Cluricaunes—the little men that cobbles the Good People’s brogues. Is it them you mane?”

“Yes,” said Dick, not knowing quite whether it was them or not that he meant, but anxious for information that he felt would be curious. “And what are the good people?”

“Sure, where were you born and bred that you don’t know the Good People is the other name for the fairies—savin’ their presence?”

“There aren’t any,” replied Dick. “Mrs Sims said there weren’t.”

“Mrs James,” put in Emmeline, “said there were. She said she liked to see children b’lieve in fairies. She was talking to another lady, who’d got a red feather in her bonnet, and a fur muff. They were having tea, and I was sitting on the hearthrug. She said the world was getting too—something or another, an’ then the other lady said it was, and asked Mrs James did she see Mrs Someone in the awful hat she wore Thanksgiving Day. They didn’t say anything more about fairies, but Mrs James——”

“Whether you b’lave in them or not,” said Paddy, “there they are. An’ maybe they’re poppin’ out of the wood behint us now, an’ listenin’ to us talkin’; though I’m doubtful if there’s any in these parts, though down in Connaught they were as thick as blackberries in the ould days. O musha! musha! the ould days, the ould days! when will I be seein’ thim again? Now, you may b’lave me or b’lave me not, but me own ould father—God rest his sowl!—was comin’ over Croagh Patrick one night before Christmas with a bottle of whisky in one hand of him, and a goose, plucked an’ claned an’ all, in the other, which same he’d won in a lottery, when, hearin’ a tchune no louder than the buzzin’ of a bee, over a furze-bush he peeps, and there, round a big white stone, the Good People were dancing in a ring hand in hand, an’ kickin’ their heels, an’ the eyes of them glowin’ like the eyes of moths; and a chap on the stone, no bigger than the joint of your thumb, playin’ to thim on a bagpipes. Wid that he let wan yell an’ drops the goose an’ makes for home, over hedge an’ ditch, boundin’ like a buck kangaroo, an’ the face on him as white as flour when he burst in through the door, where we was all sittin’ round the fire burnin’ chestnuts to see who’d be married the first.

“‘An’ what in the name of the saints is the mather wid yiz?’ says me mother.

“‘I’ve sane the Good People,’ says he, ‘up on the field beyant,’ says he; ‘and they’ve got the goose,’ says he, ‘but, begorra, I’ve saved the bottle,’ he says. ‘Dhraw the cork and give me a taste of it, for me heart’s in me throat, and me tongue’s like a brick-kil.’

“An’ whin we come to prize the cork out of the bottle, there was nothin’ in it; an’ whin we went next marnin’ to look for the goose, it was gone. But there was the stone, sure enough, and the marks on it of the little brogues of the chap that’d played the bagpipes—and who’d be doubtin’ there were fairies after that?”

The children said nothing for a while, and then Dick said:

“Tell us about Cluricaunes, and how they make the boots.”

“Whin I’m tellin’ you about Cluricaunes,” said Mr Button, “it’s the truth I’m tellin’ you, an’ out of me own knowlidge, for I’ve spoken to a man that’s held wan in his hand; he was me own mother’s brother, Con Cogan—rest his sowl! Con was six fut two, wid a long, white face; he’d had his head bashed in, years before I was barn, in some ruction or other, an’ the docthers had japanned him with a five-shillin’ piece beat flat.”

Dick interposed with a question as to the process, aim, and object of japanning, but Mr Button passed the question by.

“He’d been bad enough for seein’ fairies before they japanned him, but afther it, begorra, he was twiced as bad. I was a slip of a lad at the time, but me hair near turned grey wid the tales he’d tell of the Good People and their doin’s. One night they’d turn him into a harse an’ ride him half over the county, wan chap on his back an’ another runnin’ behind, shovin’ furze prickles under his tail to make him buck-lep. Another night it’s a dunkey he’d be, harnessed to a little cart, an’ bein’ kicked in the belly and made to draw stones. Thin it’s a goose he’d be, runnin’ over the common wid his neck stritched out squawkin’, an’ an old fairy woman afther him wid a knife, till it fair drove him to the dhrink; though, by the same token, he didn’t want much dhrivin’.

“And what does he do when his money was gone, but tear the five-shillin’ piece they’d japanned him wid aff the top of his hed, and swaps it for a bottle of whisky, and that was the end of him.”

Mr Button paused to relight his pipe, which had gone out, and there was silence for a moment.

The moon had risen, and the song of the surf on the reef filled the whole night with its lullaby. The broad lagoon lay waving and rippling in the moonlight to the incoming tide. Twice as broad it always looked seen by moonlight or starlight than when seen by day. Occasionally the splash of a great fish would cross the silence, and the ripple of it would pass a moment later across the placid water.

Big things happened in the lagoon at night, unseen by eyes from the shore. You would have found the wood behind them, had you walked through it, full of light. A tropic forest under a tropic moon is green as a sea cave. You can see the vine tendrils and the flowers, the orchids and tree boles all lit as by the light of an emerald-tinted day.

Mr Button took a long piece of string from his pocket.

“It’s bedtime,” said he; “and I’m going to tether Em’leen, for fear she’d be walkin’ in her slape, and wandherin’ away an’ bein’ lost in the woods.”

“I don’t want to be tethered,” said Emmeline.

“It’s for your own good I’m doin’ it,” replied Mr Button, fixing the string round her waist. “Now come ’long.”

He led her like a dog in a leash to the tent, and tied the other end of the string to the scull, which was the tent’s main prop and support.

“Now,” said he, “if you be gettin’ up and walkin’ about in the night, it’s down the tint will be on top of us all.”

And, sure enough, in the small hours of the morning, it was.

CHAPTER XV

FAIR PICTURES IN THE BLUE

“I don’t want my old britches on! I don’t want my old britches on!”

Dick was darting about naked on the sand, Mr Button after him with a pair of small trousers in his hand. A crab might just as well have attempted to chase an antelope.

They had been on the island a fortnight, and Dick had discovered the keenest joy in life—to be naked. To be naked and wallow in the shallows of the lagoon, to be naked and sit drying in the sun. To be free from the curse of clothes, to shed civilisation on the beach in the form of breeches, boots, coat, and hat, and to be one with the wind and the sun and the sea.

The very first command Mr Button had given on the second morning of their arrival was, “Strip and into the water wid you.”

Dick had resisted at first, and Emmeline (who rarely wept) had stood weeping in her little chemise. But Mr Button was obdurate. The difficulty at first was to get them in; the difficulty now was to keep them out.

Emmeline was sitting as nude as the day star, drying in the morning sun after her dip, and watching Dick’s evolutions on the sand.

The lagoon had for the children far more attraction than the land. Woods where you might knock ripe bananas off the trees with a big cane, sands where golden lizards would scuttle about so tame that you might with a little caution seize them by the tail, a hill-top from whence you might see, to use Paddy’s expression, “to the back of beyond”; all these were fine enough in their way, but they were nothing to the lagoon.

Deep down where the coral branches were you might watch, whilst Paddy fished, all sorts of things disporting on the sand patches and between the coral tufts. Hermit crabs that had evicted whelks, wearing the evicted ones’ shells—an obvious misfit; sea anemones as big as roses. Flowers that closed up in an irritable manner if you lowered the hook gently down and touched them; extraordinary shells that walked about on feelers, elbowing the crabs out of the way and terrorising the whelks. The overlords of the sand patches, these; yet touch one on the back with a stone tied to a bit of string, and down he would go flat, motionless and feigning death. There was a lot of human nature lurking in the depths of the lagoon, comedy and tragedy.

An English rock-pool has its marvels. You can fancy the marvels of this vast rock-pool, nine miles round and varying from a third to half a mile broad, swarming with tropic life and flights of painted fishes; where the glittering albicore passed beneath the boat like a fire and a shadow; where the boat’s reflection lay as clear on the bottom as though the water were air; where the sea, pacified by the reef, told, like a little child, its dreams.

It suited the lazy humour of Mr Button that he never pursued the lagoon more than half a mile or so on either side of the beach. He would bring the fish he caught ashore, and with the aid of his tinder box and dead sticks make a blazing fire on the sand; cook fish and breadfruit and taro roots, helped and hindered by the children. They fixed the tent amidst the trees at the edge of the chapparel, and made it larger and more abiding with the aid of the dinghy’s sail.

Amidst these occupations, wonders, and pleasures, the children lost all count of the flight of time. They rarely asked about Mr Lestrange; after a while they did not ask about him at all. Children soon forget.