IN THE GARDEN OF GOD THERE IS TRUTH

Yes, the promise of the vision had not been entirely broken, but that night, as he lay sleepless in the house, Lestrange almost wished it had.

If you have been waiting years for the return of someone you love, will you be satisfied with a likeness, however vivid and living, even if that likeness is wrought from flesh and blood and spirit?

In the days that followed, watching closely now, he saw that not only had heredity given the child the attributes of the mother, but of the father. Perhaps to the absolute isolation of the parents from the world was due this more than ordinary duplicity and simplicity of mind-structure in the child—he could not tell—but the fact was there. Racing about like a dog, following Kearney, imitating him in the things he did, the child was the Dick of long ago, different somewhat in face, but Dick to the life; tired of play or seized with a fit of day-dreaming, Emmeline would peep forth. Even in play, sometimes, Lestrange would notice the characteristics of the mother in the child’s love for coloured things, flowers, bits of coral and bright shells, and in the careful way the toys would be collected and hidden.

Sometimes so vivid was the impression that he could have thrown out his arms and cried: “Emmeline!” only that he knew Emmeline would know him not.

One day, suddenly moved by an impulse he could not resist, he caught the child up in his arms. It let itself be held unresisting, and then, sighting Kearney, who had suddenly appeared, it struggled free and ran to the sailor.

It cared far more for Kearney than for him—no wonder, seeing how he had neglected it, yet, even though it ran to the sailor, Lestrange noted that its interest was not so much in the man as the object he was carrying, a little turtle that he had found trapped in a pool.

“Kearney,” said Lestrange, as they sat talking after supper that night, “you remember a long time ago my asking you about the other name you gave Dick—Dick M you called him.”

“Yes, sir,” said Kearney, “that’s what he labelled himself.”

“His mother’s name was Emmeline,” said Lestrange; “he used to call her Em. He was repeating his mother’s name, which he would have often heard from the lips of his father, but the strange thing is that he used both names. It was only the other day that I noticed the likeness, Kearney.”

“Which, sir?” asked Kearney.

“The likeness he bears to his mother and to his father as well. Sometimes when he is at play or when he sits quiet, it is just exactly as if I were looking at his mother when she was a tiny child, and sometimes when he is running about busy, it is just as if I were watching little Dick of long ago; the thing has given me a shock, Kearney, and I don’t know how to take it.”

“Well, sir,” said the sailor, “children are apt to take after their fathers and mothers. I’ve seen it often meself, an’ I wouldn’t be worryin’ about that, if I were you.”

“I know,” said the other, “but it’s a bit different in my case, Kearney. I have been waiting and hoping so long—and then to see them at last like—like reflections in a mirror—that’s what it is to me, Kearney—just like reflections in a mirror, things that I know and love, but that do not know me and do not love me.”

Now Kearney knew only of one child, the solid and redoubtable Dick M, and to hear Lestrange talking of two children and reflections in a mirror gave him a touch of the old uneasiness. Not knowing what to say, he said nothing, and the subject dropped.

It would have been better if Lestrange could have thrashed the whole thing out in conversation with someone of a more philosophic bent than the sailor. Thinking, in a case like this, leads to brooding.

One night the strange thought came to him: Do children really care? Did Dick and Emmeline long ago love me? Have I been all these years breaking my heart for the loss of two beings who, caring for me after their way, had no enduring love, were incapable of enduring love—being children?

The thought was born of Dick’s indifference towards him and of his apparent affection for Kearney. Watching closely it seemed to Lestrange that this affection was less for Kearney than for the things Kearney did and the things Kearney handled. Kearney stripped the dinghy of the fishing lines, fish spears; Kearney unable to climb trees or carve toys would not have been the Kearney loved by Dick; the great size of the sailor probably had something to do also with the business, maybe was the cause that made Dick run to him first on the Ranatonga.

Then, when Dick in his moody fits turned into Emmeline, he seemed to care for nobody at all.

Lestrange, casting his mind years back, and with his eyes made clear by this new revelation, tried to remember any one instance that would show him Dick or Emmeline’s love for him—he could not.

The sweet, dreamy little figure of Emmeline sat before him on the deck of the long lost Northumberland, hunted for its lost box of toys, was carried off to bed by the stewardess, came, as a matter of routine, to kiss him good-night—but it was her charm that she seemed to live in a world of her own.

Dick, an affectionate child enough, had called him “Daddy” and sat on his knee only to wriggle off at the first enticement—had, indeed, shown more affection and interest for an old sailor on board, one Paddy Button, than for his father.

Lestrange, looking back across the years, could still see him riding round the deck on Mr. Button’s back, and recalled his own pleasure in seeing the child amused. Then they had vanished with Mr. Button, and he, Lestrange, had broken his heart for them, and they had grown up without him, surely and absolutely forgetting him—never having loved him as he loved them.

It was only now, here in the Garden of God, as he had chosen to call this land of Nature, only here, and taught by Nature herself, that the truth was borne to him: the truth that for years he had been wandering in the world of illusion searching for what was not there—searching for what he told himself, perhaps truly, perhaps falsely, could not be there—the love of a child for a parent equal to the love of a parent for a child.

Nature said to him: You must grow up to love, Love is the blossom of the mind, not the green tendril. Children do not love as men love, they only twine. Would you have it otherwise? Would you have condemned Dick and Emmeline to endless regret for your loss and have made them suffer what you have suffered—even in part?

“Dick,” cried Kearney, “kim along, aisy! That’s no way to be gettin’ into a boat. Now set steady and give over handlin’ them spears.”

The tide was on the ebb and he was going over to the reef to hunt in the rock pools.

Since the revelation that had come to Lestrange, six months and more had passed, making over twelve months since the Ranatonga sailed, and with the passing of the months the child had grown.

He was now perhaps three and a half years of age, yet he was big as a civilised child of five, the germ of a man full of vigour and daring, restless, a thing actuated entirely by the moment, except when now and then a broody fit would take him.

Kearney had made him a little kilt of grass such as he had seen worn by the natives of Nauru, and Dick in his kilt sat now in the stern sheets watching every movement of the man as he cast off from the bank.

They had only one boat now, for a little while ago the old dinghy of the Northumberland had given up the ghost, opening her seams, which they had no means of caulking, and filling with lagoon water.

It was nine o’clock in the morning, and when they reached the reef and tied up, the sea was half out and the pools showed, flashing like shields in the morning sun.

Spray and the fume of beach filled the air, and the crying of gulls, and the everlasting murmur of the surf. Out here one’s environment was completely altered: the still lagoon, the mirrored trees, the foliage and earth scents changing to thunderous sea, blinding coral and sea breeze scented by beach and wave. There the coloured birds passed softly across the groves, here the sea gulls charged down the wind.

With the breeze blowing their hair about, the man and the child stood for a moment. Kearney was looking about him to right and left; then, deciding on the eastern pools, he turned to the right.

Dick followed, avoiding the sharp places in the coral, disdaining to notice the small scuttling crabs or to pick up the stray shells and cuttle-fish bones that a civilised child would have pounced on; they were after fish, not futilities of that sort, and he carried the cane, cut for him by Kearney, over his right shoulder in exact imitation of the man before him with the fish spears.

The first pool they reached was lovely, like a jeweller’s shop window for colour; rose-red and amber coral, pink and purple sea anemones, tiny shells like golden buttons, and strips of emerald fucus showed up through the diamond-clear water, but there was no game, only a little fish like a sardine that flitted here and there, and a “piker” no bigger than a saucer pumping itself along. Dick took aim at the jellyfish with his pointed cane and speared it plumb through the centre.

“Now then,” said Kearney, noting the fact, and not for the first time, that the child had allowed for refraction, “shoulder your stick an’ come along. We’ve no time to be playin’—Christmas!”

A crab with a body the size of a penny bun and legs three feet long had elevated itself from a cleft in the coral after the fashion of a camera when set up; it seemed to take a snapshot of the oncomers and then, legs in a hurry and body wobbling as if on springs, passed over into the water on the lagoon side.

“Crab!” cried Dick.

The length of the legs differentiated the creature from its fellows. It looked more like a huge spider than a crab, but the reef craft born in the child was not to be deceived. The movement of the creature was enough for him.

The pool beyond held a trapped Jew-fish which fell a victim to Mr. Kearney, owing to the fact that the pool itself was small. In the great pools, floored with sand and showing the silvery gleam of mullet and the scarlet of rock cod, little or nothing could be done with the spear.

It did not matter; the lines gave them all the fish they wanted from the lagoon, and this business was more in the nature of sport.

They wandered along in the blazing sunshine inspecting the pools and exploring the pot-holes, killing squids and turning over the heaps of coloured fuci left by the outgoing tide. A polished rock would sometimes move, disclose itself as a hawk-bill turtle and plunge into a pool. Shells of crabs and whelks lay everywhere, and great haliotis shells empty of everything but the whisper of the sea. Here, amongst the weeds, you could find the sucker claws of octopi, big as the claws of a tiger, and there, on the slab coral polished like window glass by the washing of the sea, huge sea-slugs the size of parsnips.

Kearney preferred the reef to the island. There was “more air” and, as a rule, out here he was lost to everything but the interests around him, pleased as the child with the ever-varying wonders of the place. There was always something new left by the tide. Last time in the biggest of the pools a chambered nautilus was sailing like a lost galleon, the most exquisite dream of Nature; a bit beyond they had come upon the skull of a whale, whose tongue had been torn out by orcas and whose body had been devoured by sharks.

To-day, however, Mr. Kearney seemed to have little interest in the business of the reef. He was bothered. Lestrange had been going very much to pieces of late, physically more than mentally. His heart was troubling him. Sometimes he would be all right, and sometimes he would have to sit down to rest after a little exertion. He had “gone baggy” under the eyes and wasn’t himself at all. The fact that the schooner was getting long overdue did not help matters.

Kearney, as he prodded about in the pools, would sometimes stand erect and gaze away off into the north, but in the north there was nothing but the brimming sea, broken only by the wing of a distant gull.

About eleven o’clock they turned back. Lestrange was nowhere to be seen, but he often went wandering in the woods, and Kearney, having put the spears aside, set to work preparing the midday meal.

When it was ready and the fish cooked to a turn, Lestrange had not yet come back. However, he was sometimes late, and the child was hungry, so they set to, the sailor grumbling to himself like a housewife whose cooking has been slighted.

“Wonder where he can have got to,” said Mr. Kearney to himself. “Tomfoolin’ about in them woods.”

After the meal he sat down with his back to a tree and lit a pipe. The pipe finished, he lay on his back with his hands behind his head, looking up at the leaves moving gently in the wind. Next moment he was asleep.

He slept several hours, and when he awoke Lestrange had not yet come back. He was nowhere to be seen, and Kearney, now seriously alarmed, after a glance into the house, stood looking about him, now towards the lagoon, now towards the woods. Then, seeing Dick, who had roused from sleep and was playing about, he caught the child by the hand and made towards the trees.

The act was unconscious; it was as though the sudden sense of loneliness had made him seize the child’s hand for companionship.

Dick, nothing loath, and divining some new game, trotted beside him till they reached the trees, amidst which Mr. Kearney plunged, child in hand.

He halted after a few yards and began to shout: “Hi! Are ye there?—Are ye there?—Hi!—Hi!” The child, laughing, took up the call, his small voice sounding through the woods:

“Hi—hi—hi!”

No answer.

They plunged deeper into the groves, and the twilit alleys of the coco-palms and the stretches of pandanus and bread-fruit heard the calling of the man and the child, to which only the wind in the branches made reply.