HERE ONCE THEY DWELT

The wind had died to a fitful breeze that tossed the foliage to the rainy patter of the palm fronds.

Just before entering the shadow of the trees, Stanistreet paused. His quick eye had noticed something lying on the sand a little to the left. A great banana bunch half eaten by the birds, half ruined by the sun, something that must have lain there for days and got there—how?

There were no banana trees in sight, nothing but the level line of the coco-palms, like the first ranks of an army suddenly halted.

He bent to examine it. The stalk had been cut with a knife.

Straightening himself, he found that Lestrange had noticed the fact.

“Look,” said Lestrange, “it has been cut. Dick must have cut it from the tree, but there are no banana trees round here. Let us go on.” He was as much unconcerned by this, the first trace of the lost ones, as though Dick and Emmeline were alive out there, fishing in the lagoon and due to return any moment, out there on the lagoon where the blue beyond blue of the distant sea spoke at the reef break through a silence troubled only by the lamentation of the gulls.

It was a living fact that the eyes of Stanistreet were blurred and dimmed by this first find, whilst the eyes of Lestrange remained clear of sight. He followed the other, who had suddenly taken the lead, and as they passed into the shadow of the trees the whole business for Stanistreet took a new complexion, and the island a tinge of romance beyond the power of words to express.

Just that bunch of cut bananas had linked in some strange way in his mind the forms of the lost ones with the trees they had left and the ground they had trodden on. Haunted! Oh, yes, the island was haunted, if only in the imagination of the sailor man who, disbelieving in ghosts, heard voices in the wind that stirred the foliage and fancied forms moving in the coloured gloom of the groves.

Lestrange was following a path that led uphill, less a path than a trail; to right and left the narrow pillars of the coco-palms showed alleys broken by vast bread-fruits and bays of shadow, and now the voice of a little rivulet came tinkling and lisping and the palms broke, disclosing a glade, fern-haunted and showered with light from the moving leaves.

Here, over the face of an age-worn rock, a little cascade flashed to lose itself amidst the ferns, and above, like great candelabra, stood the banana trees, holding their full-ripe fruit to the sky.

“Look!” said Lestrange. He was pointing to a bunch of the fruit that had been cut and thrown down and was lying close to the ferns. Then he pointed to a diamond-trunked artu close to them on the left. A knife was sticking in the tree, left there by the banana-cutter—till his return.

Lestrange walked up close to the tree, glanced at the knife, and, without touching it, led the way on, past the waterfall, uphill and as if sure of his ground.

The trees fell away and past a coco grove, whispering in the wind, the hill-top broke to view, a sun-lit space, dome-like and surmounted by a great rock, broken and worn by a thousand years of weather.

They climbed the rock, warm as a living thing from the sun, and, resting on its upper face, looked.

The wind had freshened again from the nor’west, billowing the foliage far below and breezing the sea beyond the reef, and from here the whole island world lay beneath them alive with the wind in changing hues of emerald.

They could trace the azure-amethyst ring of the lagoon, here broad, here narrow, and the reef with its blinding outer beach bombarded by the swell of a sea consumed with light.

Sometimes a smoke of gulls would burst from the reef spurs to northward of the break and the wind would bring a chanting sound mixed with the faint murmur of the surf, a murmur ceaseless as the whisper of a shell.

Lestrange, leaning on his elbow, gazed far and wide. Just at this hour of the westering sun the shadow of the island was beginning to steal seaward, venturing timidly across the lagoon to pass the reef and lose itself in the evening sea.

Stanistreet was watching the spreading shadow that had touched the Ranatonga lying far below like a toy ship, when his companion roused him.

“Look!” said Lestrange. He was pointing to the west, to a place where the trees broke towards the lagoon bank, leaving an open space green to the water.

“Look!” said Lestrange. “Can you not see their house?”

“I see nothing,” replied the sailor, shading his eyes against the sun. “House! No, sir, I can see nothing.”

“There by the clearing, the shadow of the trees has taken it, not far from the water’s edge, close to that tree cluster that stands out a bit into the open.”

The sailor gazed again in the direction pointed out. Ah, yes, now that it was pointed out he could see something that was neither rock nor bush nor tree. Even at full moon it would not have attracted the eye of a casual gazer, small as it was and elusive, like a nest in a branch.

Yes, it was a structure of some sort, and even at this distance he thought he could make out a roof, but why, if it was a house, had the builders chosen their habitation in a spot so remote, so far from the break? The wind could not say, nor the untroubled sea, nor the great sun that builds everything from his habitation to the dreams of men.

“Come!” said Lestrange. He rose from his half recumbent position and began to descend from the rock. On the sward, where the rock’s shadow was lengthening itself, he stood for a moment with head bowed and eyes half closed; then, turning, he led the way downhill towards the west.

For quarter of a mile the cocoanut groves held, then came a great belt of mammee-apple, pandanus trees and bread-fruit, through which they passed to find a valley where the ferns grew high—the strangest surprise—for here great blocks of hewn stone lay cast about and terraces of stone stood in ruin, disrupted by the rains of the ages and the roots of screw pines working beneath them.

Fallen from its place, half prone amidst the ferns, lay a great stone idol, an island god of the long ago. The heat of the day lingered here where no wind came and where the ferns stood in stereoscopic stillness in a silence broken only by the faint hum of insects.

Stanistreet had seen temple places like this amongst the islands, but the sight was new to Lestrange. He stood for a moment gazing at the fallen god, the blocks strewn about, the terraces lit by the amber light of evening. Then he passed on down the valley and beyond, where a trodden path showed them the way past a grove of hootoo trees to the sward they had seen from the hill-top and where stood the house.

Close to the left-hand belt of trees and with a little garden beside it where toro grew, it stood, leaf-thatched and built of cane. It had no door. The light of evening entered, exposing all the simple contents, mats carefully and neatly rolled up, a shelf where stood bowls cut from cocoanut shell, a ball of twine, an old pair of scissors—all arranged neatly and in order. Some fish spears stood, leaning against a corner, and in a small bowl at the extreme end of the shelf some flowers, once bright but now withered. Yet for all the cunning of the construction the house had an unfinished look, as though the builders had been called away before its full completion.

Lestrange stood before the open door of the house, so trustful, so naive, so like a nest, this house built by the lost children whose forms he had seen but a day ago, whose voices he had not heard for so many years. It was the sight of the neatly rolled mats, the bowl of withered flowers and the carefully arranged things on the shelf that shattered for a moment the great contentment born of his vision and the surety that he was to meet the children soon. These things said “Emmeline” as plainly as a voice—Emmeline so neat, so careful of things, so fond of flowers.

The ghost child came running to him across the sands of memory, those sunlit sands that swallow so many and such great things.

He broke down and, leaning his arm against the door-post, hid his face.

Stanistreet turned on his heel and walked rapidly down to the lagoon edge, he was hit nearly as badly as the other. That house, coming after all the other things, would have moved the most callous heart.

He stood with his arms folded, looking across the lagoon water to the reef. The lagoon here was broad and shallow, corallised here and there by ridges of coral, the reef so low and far that he could see the evening light on the Pacific, the sound of whose surf on the far outer beach came like the voice of sleep.

Ah, well, it was the fate of everything and they had lived their day and been happy; there was no use in a man letting his feelings get the better of him—no use in snivelling; just as well they had come on the house: it would cure Lestrange of that madness about meeting them, it had broken down that terrible contentment—a bitter medicine, but better than the disease that threatened him.

He stood for a long while to give the other time to recover, then he turned.

Lestrange had recovered. He was standing before the house with one of the fish spears in his hand, examining it. Stanistreet walked up to him.

“Look,” said Lestrange, “how cleverly he has made the barbs; he was always clever with his hands.”

He placed the spear back where he had found it and then, with a last look at the house, turned away.

“Come,” said he, “we must get back to the ship, for there is much to be done before she sails, and I want her to sail to-morrow. I will go to her with you now and return in the morning.”

“Return?” said Stanistreet. “Are you not going with us?”

“I will never see San Francisco again,” replied Lestrange. “My home is here with my children who are coming to meet me, who have met me, for I feel them on either side of me. I cannot see them yet, but they will show themselves to me in time.”

Stanistreet made no reply for a moment. He stood looking round him at the fading lagoon soon to be showered with starlight, and the trees stirring to the wind in the ghostly light of evening.

“And the child?” said he at length.

“Their child will remain with me,” said Lestrange.