THE RETURN OF THE CHILDREN

One day, moved by a spirit of restlessness, Lestrange went off by himself through the woods, making towards the hill-top. It was the first time he had gone there alone, and when he reached the great boulder that crowned the rise he climbed it. Resting on its upper face, he looked far and wide across the sea, northward where the Ranatonga had vanished and westward where the sun would vanish that evening, the vast blue sea so beautiful from here, the sea that had taken his children—for ever.

Nothing broke the wheel of that sea-line; in the sou’west one could see a faint blur in the sky above it as though another island might be there, but the line itself was perfect, like the ring of a pentagram imprisoning Loneliness.

Then his eyes wandered to the reef, the hush of whose surf reached him here with an occasional breath of sound from the wind-touched trees below.

From here he could see the sward and the little house half shaded by the trees. That darker spot was the patch of taro, and just by that great breadfruit whose leaves were beginning to turn lay the patch of yams. He could not see it, for it was hidden in a bay of the trees.

Well, there it all lay as they had left it—never to return.

The exaltation born of the vision that had saved his reason had departed, yet as he sat here to-day feeling in his heart sure that never, never would the dead return visibly, as he had dreamed, to this mortal place, the promise of the vision, in some curious way, did not seem quite broken.

The children might be with him even now without his knowing it—even in the house they had built, and the evidence of their handiwork—were they not with him after a fashion? When he died he might meet them—who could tell? He only felt that they never would return as he had hoped. Never come out from amidst the trees to meet him, or steal to him at night. Then came a new thought. He said to himself as he sat there, with the island before him, “How could they? The dead, if they could return, would come back as they were when they died.—They had grown up; their childish selves vanished long ago, existing only in my memory. Even had they lived, even were they with me here instead of lying there beneath that blue sea, they would be grown up. The children I loved vanished when we parted long years ago. They did not die—they grew up. And yet it is always those children that I have been seeking—what madness!”

Quite clear now in his mind, reasoning without any trace of delusion, it seemed to him that nothing dies so utterly as childhood. That growing up separates a parent from a child with a barrier more invincible than death, stronger, often more sad.

And yet, in his vision, the children had appeared to him just as they had been, and against logic, against reason, came the feeling that the promise of the vision was not to be utterly broken.

The question, did they ever really grow up, ever lose their childhood here in this place where the birds were the only other inhabitants and where sin was not?—this question, unasked, unanswered, scarcely nascent in his mind, may have worked upon him subconsciously, perhaps answering itself in the negative, or leaving the door open to doubt.

It was a brilliant and breezy day, just like the day on which they had made the lagoon. The Ranatonga had listed over to port under the press of the wind, the main boom lifting, and the foam roaring aft, gunnel high.

Out of the rainy seasons it was always bright here, yet there were days when the north seemed to come south in some great blue ship whose sails were filled by the winds of the north spilling over in zephyrs that touched the palms with fingers scented by the pine—fresh breezes that whipped the lagoon to amethyst and spread meadows of tourmaline on the coloured swell of the ocean beyond.

To-day the horizon was curiously hard, like the rim of a great jewel, and to-day in the south that pale indication of another island was more distinct.

There were days when the horizon was hot, the azure of sea dimming off into a luminous haze flowing up to the blue of the sky.

Lestrange, with his eyes fixed on the sea-line, seemed fallen into a dream. Then, slowly recovering himself, he rose from his half-recumbent position, climbed down the rock and began the descent of the hillside.

To reach the sward he had to pass through a bad patch where the ground was moist and where things grew with a luxuriance unknown on any other part of the island. Trees living, trees dead and rotting, unknown sappy plants and cables of liantasse, rope convolvulus and python lianas made this place difficult; the air was like the air of a conservatory and to lose oneself here would be easy, but it had never troubled him; his sense of direction was keen and the slight downhill trend of the ground was guide enough.

There was about this place the vague, uncanny something that clings to the rooms of an old deserted house. One felt oneself closed in, yet not alone.

Here, as on the other side of the island, there was a little stream, a thing scarcely a foot broad that passed chuckling, half hidden by ground leaves, and making on either side of it a zone of marsh. Lestrange was stepping across this stream when something clutched the side of his coat. It was as if a tiny hand had been put out to draw him back. It was only a thorn branch, a green tendril armed with thorns an inch long, curved like the claws of a cat.

He disentangled it and passed on, reaching the valley where the great stone blocks lay strewn about and where the idol of a thousand years ago lay amidst the ferns; the thing that had once been a god, omnipotent in the minds of a people long vanished.

Here, to rest himself, he sat down on a boulder and, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his chin in the cup of his hands, fell into a reverie.

The name he had given to this island came back to him as he sat there surrounded by those ruins, perhaps two thousand years old: “The Garden of God.”

Ages ago men with hearts and minds, men who loved their children and hated their enemies, had worshipped here—generations of them—and there lay their god, thrown down, and his impotence confessed in stone; and not only here. All across the world stretched the fireless altars and the broken figures of gods that had been, the graveyards of futile faiths—gardens of derision.

The great stone figure of the god that had been held his mind in this train of thought: What was the use? All those ancestors of his whom he had never seen, whose forms he could not imagine—of what use had been their sufferings, their religions; what remained of them and their worship, their tears and their laughter?

“You.” It was as though the ferns had answered him, the ferns that seemed trying to hide the debasement of the great figure, the ferns still green for all the passage of the years, immortal because they were alive.

The very pines that had broken the blocks apart took up the tale, the pines whose ancestors were green when the blocks were hewn. “The God of this garden knows nothing of ghosts or ruins, cares for nothing but the one untarnishable thing, life; the spirit that repeats itself through the centuries in the forms of the ferns and the trees, in the guise of the insect on the man: you.”

Near by a pine was standing dead and withered, a half-grown tree that had fallen victim to disease. Close to it shoots were springing, its children, born of seeds cast maybe a year ago, children of its spirit as well as its body.

Lestrange’s eyes wandered from the stricken parent to the children green and striking towards the sun; then, rising from his seat, he went on through the valley, reaching the sward and the house.

It was a couple of hours after midday, Kearney was nowhere visible, and Dick, down by the waterside, was busy with a cane Kearney had cut for him in imitation of a fish spear. Kearney had taken to spearing fish in the reef pools during the past six months, taking Dick with him sometimes, an apt pupil, to judge by his imitative performances.

An hour later, when Lestrange was seated by the house door reading a book, Dick, who had given up imitation fish-spearing and had fetched some toys from his cache, took his place on the sward near by. Lestrange, who had taken more notice of the child in the last few days, watched him for a bit and then relapsed into his book.

He was busy for a while, and the clink of oyster shells and bits of coral kept the reader aware of the fact. Then he ceased play and Lestrange, looking up again from his book, saw before him, seated on the sward, Emmeline.

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The child, having lost interest in its play, was seated with hands folded, gazing away across the lagoon, gazing wide-pupiled beyond the world, just as Emmeline had often sat, caught away suddenly into daydream-land. The folded hands were the hands of Emmeline, and the attitude of the body, and, just in that moment, the expression of the face was as if the shade of little Emmeline’s sweet soul had reappeared vaguely braving the glances of the sun.

This was no illusion. The likeness was there, evanescent, independent of feature, yet distinct.

Expression, gaze, attitude of body and carriage of hands all said to Lestrange: Here is Emmeline reborn, living again—her gaze, her expression, her attitude, her very self. It was only lately that Mr. Kearney had noticed the child falling into what he called “moody fits.” It was only now that the negligent eye of Lestrange, sharpened maybe by his return to the normal, saw what Kearney had missed. Nothing supernatural, something as common as the ground he stood on, and as strange—the parent reappearing in the child.

Then, as Lestrange gazed on this wonder which was yet so commonplace, it passed away. Kearney broke from the trees on the opposite side, carrying a bunch of bananas he had been to fetch, and Emmeline, sighting him, vanished—turned, as if touched by a magic wand, into Dick, who went running towards the sailor across the sward.