THE VISION

He entered the saloon.

The place was gay with the morning beams shining through the ports and skylight. Lestrange, who had been looking into the starboard after-bunk, turned, and as the two men came face to face, Stanistreet saw at once that his fears were groundless. Lestrange had quite recovered himself. That was the first impression; then came another—the thin, nervous Lestrange, always brooding and dreaming as with the air of one possessed by some pressing anxiety, had become altered. He looked cheerful, younger, no longer anxious.

Stanistreet felt almost shocked for a moment, contrasting the vision of the distraught man of yesterday with the figure before him; but a weight was taken from his mind and the next moment, impulsively, his hand went out to grip the hand of the other.

“We are still keeping south?” said Lestrange.

“Yes,” said the captain. “I carried on. I thought it best, but what’s your wishes in the matter?”

“South,” said Lestrange. “Come up on deck, I want to talk to you.”

Stanistreet followed, wondering what was to happen next. There was a contained vivacity in the voice and manner of the other that, to the logical and matter-of-fact mind of the sailor, seemed a portent of troubles to come.

He followed closely, and when Lestrange walked to the port rail and stood with his hands upon it fronting the blazing east, the captain of the Ranatonga came and stood beside him, elbow touching elbow, and ready for any emergency. But his mind was soon put at rest. Lestrange, quite calm and cheerful in manner, stood contemplating the splendour before him and breathing in the fresh sea air with evident delight.

Then he turned and glanced along the deck to where Peterson, one of the hands, had succeeded Bowers at the wheel.

“What is she doing?” asked he.

“Ten knots,” replied Stanistreet.

“And the island?”

“Less than sixty miles from here.”

“Good,” said Lestrange. He turned again to the rail. A land gull passed them flying topmast high, drifted a bit on the wind, lit on the water and rose again, making north.

Lestrange watched it for a moment. Then he spoke.

“Stanistreet, I said down below I had something to tell you. It’s difficult, and I would not say it to any other man. It’s just this. I am happy—for the first time in twelve years I am happy.”

The captain made no reply.

“That sounds strange, does it not?” went on the other; “and maybe you will think my mind has been unhinged by all that has occurred, especially when you hear me out. It has not, and I will just tell you why I am happy. Happy! that is no name for it. I am joyful, jubilant, praising God, who knows all things and does all things right! You believe in God, Stanistreet?”

“Yes, sir,” replied the sailor, not at all happy at the turn things were taking. “I believe in God; ought to, anyway, seeing what I’ve seen.”

“Well, then, listen,” said the other. “For twelve long years, as you know, I sought for the children I loved, always sure that they were alive, always uncertain as to their fate. It is the uncertainty that kills. I suppose I am more imaginative than most people. I conjured up visions of them falling into the hands of Chinese, falling into the hands of the ruffians that infest these seas, finding sin and misery as their portion in life; but worse than that were the things I could not conjure up. There were times when I said to myself, ‘There is surely no God,’ but always I was driven back to prayer, which was my only hope. I prayed that I might meet the children again. I prayed and prayed, and searched and sought, and yesterday my prayer was granted.

“My children were handed back to me by a merciful God—but they were dead! What a mockery! What an answer to the humble and heartfelt prayer of one of His poor creatures! Yesterday as I lay broken in the cabin below whilst you were committing them to the deep, I blasphemed His name, whilst He sat smiling in the Infinite—He who knows all things and does all things right.

“Listen. Grief, when it rises to its true stature, is a magician. I fell asleep and grief drove me beyond sleep into a world of visions where I met the children. It was no dream. I saw them as I see you. Dick and Emmeline, just as they were long years ago, pure and sweet and happy and childlike, but knowing all things. Stanistreet, as sure as there is a God in heaven, what I am telling you is no fiction of the imagination. I have seen the children and I am to see them again, for they are about to return.”

“Return!”

“Yes, return. They have told me the place, but not the time. I am to go to the island and they will come to me. I am to wait for them and they will come to me.”

“But how, sir?” said Stanistreet, for a moment almost believing what the other said, so intense was the conviction in Lestrange’s manner and voice.

“How, I do not know, but they will come to me. It is permitted them for my sake and to save my reason, for otherwise I would have gone mad; also for some other purpose they would not say.—Do you not believe me?”

“Yes, yes,” said the other soothingly. “It’s strange, but there’s no telling—no telling.” He felt that Providence or Nature had possibly used the dream device to save the poor gentleman from, at all events, violent insanity, but he doubted if he had gained much by the exchange.

“No telling,” said Lestrange. “We know as little of this life as our shadows know of us, but there it is, and now you know why I am happy. My mind is free from all care and my loved ones are coming to meet me.”

He turned from the rail and went below. Stanistreet saw the steward come along with breakfast things—the Ranatonga had a deck galley—and vanish down the cabin hatch. Then he heard the voice of a child and the voice of the steward as if talking to it.

Then Bowers rose like a sea elephant from the fo’c’sle and came along the deck. Bowers had handed over the wheel to Peterson just before Lestrange came up. He had dodged below to light a pipe, risen to see Lestrange and Stanistreet in confabulation and then lain doggo, waiting.

“How’s the gentleman taking it now, sir?” asked Bowers, speaking in a lowered voice. “I popped my head up when you was talkin’ and he looked to have got back to his self.”

“God help me, I don’t know,” said Stanistreet; “but if there’s any sense in the world he’s gone crazy, plain crazy—but he’s happy.”

“Well, thank the Lord he’s gone the laughin’, not the howlin’ kind,” said Bowers. “Happy, is he? Well, it’s fortunit for him. That’s all I have to say.”

“Maybe. Anyhow, dodge down, will you, and bring up that kid. The steward’s fooling with it and wasting his time, and I want to see it on deck—after-bunk you’ll find it.”

Bowers dived.

A minute later he reappeared with the “kid” wrapped in a bunk blanket and clasped in one huge arm.

Plump, brown as a berry, auburn-haired and laughing, it was a very different child from the child that had come aboard yesterday.

“It pulled me beard,” said Bowers. “It’s as strong as Ham, b’gosh.—There, out you get and play in the sun, where you used to.”

He turned the naked child out of the blanket on to the deck. “Called me Dick as I was comin’ up with him,” said Bowers, now on his knees beside it, tickling it and rolling it over with his huge hand. “Called me Dick, did you—where’s your pants? Eh? Where’s your pants, you little devil, sold them, did you?—Hand’s a belaying pin, sir, till I knock the brains out of him.”

Stanistreet handed the pin.

“Now,” said Bowers, putting it in the two hands of the child, “bang the deck and be happy.”

He had no need to give directions.

“Well, sir, what do you think of that?” said the sailor, rising to his feet. “Looked like dying of wantin’ to go to sleep yesterday afternoon, and hark at it now!”

“It’s a fine kid,” said Stanistreet, contemplating it. “I’d make it to be getting on for two years, but I’m no judge of children. But I’ll tell you what, Bowers; it’s my opinion it wasn’t so much asleep when we got it aboard as doped. Did you see that sprig of a tree lying in the dinghy? Well, I’ll bet my hat that was arita. I’ve seen the stuff growing in some of the islands and it’s more poisonous than oap; a couple of berries will do for any man. I believe those two ate some of the berries, not knowing what they were, maybe, and maybe the child took the poison through the mother’s milk. I’m dead sure that’s how the thing went, for them two showed no signs of dying of starvation or thirst and they’d come a long way.”

“Maybe,” said Bowers, his eyes on the child. “Now then, now then, where are you rollin’ that pin to?—Come out of it or you’ll be tumblin’ down the hatch—God’s truth, I’ll have to hobble you before I’ve done with you.”

He was leading the child away from the companion hatch, when Lestrange reappeared and joined Stanistreet near the wheel. Lestrange glanced at the sailor and his charge but seemed to take little interest in it, or only that benign interest which he seemed, now, to bestow on everything animate and inanimate; it might have been the child of Bowers for all he seemed to care. Stanistreet tried to draw the conversation to it, and the other did not resist, but he let the subject drop as though it was of little account, and then, the steward announcing breakfast, they went below.