THE CORMORANT

“No,” said Lestrange, “they are dead.”

The whale boat and the dinghy lay together, gunnels grinding as they lifted to the swell. Two cable lengths away lay the schooner from which the whale boat had come; beyond and around from sky-line to sky-line the blue Pacific lay desolate beneath the day.

“They are dead.”

He was gazing at the forms on the dinghy, the form of a girl with a child embraced in one arm, and a youth. Clasping one another, they seemed asleep.

From where had they drifted? To where were they drifting? God and the sea alone could tell.

A Farallone cormorant, far above, wheeling and slanting on the breeze, had followed the dinghy for hours, held away by the awful and profound knowledge, born of instinct, that one of the castaways was still alive. But it still hung, waiting.

“The child is not dead,” said Stanistreet. He had reached forward and, gently separating the forms, had taken the child from the mother’s arms. It was warm, it moved, and as he handed it to the steersman, Lestrange, almost upsetting the boat, stood up. He had glimpsed the faces of the dead people. Clasping his head with both hands and staring at the forms before him, mad, distracted by the blow that Fate had suddenly dealt him, his voice rang out across the sea: “My children!”

Stanistreet, the captain of the schooner, Stanistreet, who knew the story of the lost children so well, knelt aghast just in the position in which he had handed the child to the sailor in the stern sheets.

The truth took him by the throat. It must be so. These were no Kanakas drifted to sea; the dinghy alone might have told him that. These were the children they had come in search of, grown, mated and—dead.

His quick sailor’s mind reckoned rapidly. The island they were making for in hopes of finding the long-lost ones was close to them; the northward running current would have brought the dinghy; some inexplicable sea chance had drifted them from shore; they were here, come to meet the man who had sought them for years—what a fatality!

Lestrange had sunk as if crushed down by some hand. Taking the girl’s arm, he drew it towards him. “Look!” he cried, as if speaking to high heaven. “And my boy—oh, look! Dick—Emmeline—oh, God! My God! Why? Why? Why?”

He dashed his head on the gunnel. Far away above the cormorant watched.

It saw the whale boat making back from the schooner with the dinghy in tow; it saw the forms it hungered for taken on board; it saw the preparations on deck and the bodies of the lost ones committed to the deep. Then, turning with a cry, it drifted on the wind and vanished, like an evil spirit, from the blue.