Chapter 2

It was a wonderful night up on deck, filled with all the majesty and
beauty of starlight and a tropic calm.

The Pacific slept; a vast, vague swell flowing from far away down south
under the night, lifted the _Northumberland_ on its undulations to the
rattling sound of the reef points and the occasional creak of the
rudder; whilst overhead, near the fiery arch of the Milky Way, hung the
Southern Cross like a broken kite.

Stars in the sky, stars in the sea, stars by the million and the
million; so many lamps ablaze that the firmament filled the mind with
the idea of a vast and populous city—yet from all that living and
flashing splendour not a sound.

Down in the cabin—or saloon, as it was called by courtesy—were seated
the three passengers of the ship; one reading at the table, two playing
on the floor.

The man at the table, Arthur Lestrange, was seated with his large,
deep-sunken eyes fixed on a book. He was most evidently in
consumption—very near, indeed, to reaping the result of that last and
most desperate remedy, a long sea voyage.

Emmeline Lestrange, his little niece—eight years of age, a mysterious
mite, small for her age, with thoughts of her own, wide-pupilled eyes
that seemed the doors for visions, and a face that seemed just to have
peeped into this world for a moment ere it was as suddenly
withdrawn—sat in a corner nursing something in her arms, and rocking
herself to the tune of her own thoughts.

Dick, Lestrange’s little son, eight and a bit, was somewhere under the
table. They were Bostonians, bound for San Francisco, or rather for the
sun and splendour of Los Angeles, where Lestrange had bought a small
estate, hoping there to enjoy the life whose lease would be renewed by
the long sea voyage.

As he sat reading, the cabin door opened, and appeared an angular
female form. This was Mrs Stannard, the stewardess, and Mrs Stannard
meant bedtime.

“Dicky,” said Mr Lestrange, closing his book, and raising the
table-cloth a few inches, “bedtime.”

“Oh, not yet, daddy!” came a sleep-freighted voice from under the
table; “I ain’t ready. I dunno want to go to bed, I— Hi yow!”

Mrs Stannard, who knew her work, had stooped under the table, seized him
by the foot, and hauled him out kicking and fighting and blubbering all
at the same time.

As for Emmeline, she having glanced up and recognised the inevitable,
rose to her feet, and, holding the hideous rag-doll she had been
nursing, head down and dangling in one hand, she stood waiting till
Dicky, after a few last perfunctory bellows, suddenly dried his eyes
and held up a tear-wet face for his father to kiss. Then she presented
her brow solemnly to her uncle, received a kiss and vanished, led by
the hand into a cabin on the port side of the saloon.

Mr Lestrange returned to his book, but he had not read for long when
the cabin door was opened, and Emmeline, in her nightdress, reappeared,
holding a brown paper parcel in her hand, a parcel of about the same
size as the book you are reading.

“My box,” said she; and as she spoke, holding it up as if to prove its
safety, the little plain face altered to the face of an angel.

She had smiled.

When Emmeline Lestrange smiled it was absolutely as if the light of
Paradise had suddenly flashed upon her face: the happiest form of
childish beauty suddenly appeared before your eyes, dazzled them—and
was gone.

Then she vanished with her box, and Mr Lestrange resumed his book.

This box of Emmeline’s, I may say in parenthesis, had given more
trouble aboard ship than all of the rest of the passengers’ luggage put
together.

It had been presented to her on her departure from Boston by a lady
friend, and what it contained was a dark secret to all on board, save
its owner and her uncle; she was a woman, or, at all events, the
beginning of a woman, yet she kept this secret to herself—a fact which
you will please note.

The trouble of the thing was that it was frequently being lost.
Suspecting herself, maybe, as an unpractical dreamer in a world filled
with robbers, she would cart it about with her for safety, sit down
behind a coil of rope and fall into a fit of abstraction: be recalled
to life by the evolutions of the crew reefing or furling or what not,
rise to superintend the operations—and then suddenly find she had lost
her box.

Then she would absolutely haunt the ship. Wide-eyed and distressed of
face she would wander hither and thither, peeping into the galley,
peeping down the forescuttle, never uttering a word or wail, searching
like an uneasy ghost, but dumb.

She seemed ashamed to tell of her loss, ashamed to let any one know of
it; but every one knew of it directly they saw her, to use Mr Button’s
expression, “on the wandher,” and every one hunted for it.

Strangely enough it was Paddy Button who usually found it. He who was
always doing the wrong thing in the eyes of men, generally did the
right thing in the eyes of children. Children, in fact, when they could
get at Mr Button, went for him _con amore_. He was as attractive to them
as a Punch and Judy show or a German band—almost.

Mr Lestrange after a while closed the book he was reading, looked
around him and sighed.

The cabin of the _Northumberland_ was a cheerful enough place, pierced
by the polished shaft of the mizzen mast, carpeted with an Axminster
carpet, and garnished with mirrors let into the white pine panelling.
Lestrange was staring at the reflection of his own face in one of these
mirrors fixed just opposite to where he sat.

His emaciation was terrible, and it was just perhaps at this moment
that he first recognised the fact that he must not only die, but die
soon.

He turned from the mirror and sat for a while with his chin resting
upon his hand, and his eyes fixed on an ink spot upon the table-cloth;
then he arose, and crossing the cabin climbed laboriously up the
companion-way to the deck.

As he leaned against the bulwark rail to recover his breath, the
splendour and beauty of the Southern night struck him to the heart with
a cruel pang. He took his seat on a deck chair and gazed up at the
Milky Way, that great triumphal arch built of suns that the dawn would
sweep away like a dream.

In the Milky Way, near the Southern Cross, occurs a terrible circular
abyss, the Coal Sack. So sharply defined is it, so suggestive of a void
and bottomless cavern, that the contemplation of it afflicts the
imaginative mind with vertigo. To the naked eye it is as black and as
dismal as death, but the smallest telescope reveals it beautiful and
populous with stars.

Lestrange’s eyes travelled from this mystery to the burning cross, and
the nameless and numberless stars reaching to the sea-line, where they
paled and vanished in the light of the rising moon. Then he became
aware of a figure promenading the quarter-deck. It was the “Old Man.”

A sea captain is always the “old man,” be his age what it may. Captain
Le Farges’ age might have been forty-five. He was a sailor of the Jean
Bart type, of French descent, but a naturalised American.

“I don’t know where the wind’s gone,” said the captain as he drew near
the man in the deck chair. “I guess it’s blown a hole in the firmament,
and escaped somewheres to the back of beyond.”

“It’s been a long voyage,” said Lestrange; “and I’m thinking, Captain,
it will be a very long voyage for me. My port’s not ’Frisco; I feel it.”

“Don’t you be thinking that sort of thing,” said the other, taking his
seat in a chair close by. “There’s no manner of use forecastin’ the
weather a month ahead. Now we’re in warm latitoods, your glass will
rise steady, and you’ll be as right and spry as any one of us, before
we fetch the Golden Gates.”

“I’m thinking about the children,” said Lestrange, seeming not to hear
the captain’s words. “Should anything happen to me before we reach
port, I should like you to do something for me. It’s only this: dispose
of my body without—without the children knowing. It has been in my
mind to ask you this for some days. Captain, those children know
nothing of death.”

Le Farge moved uneasily in his chair.

“Little Emmeline’s mother died when she was two. Her father—my
brother—died before she was born. Dicky never knew a mother; she died
giving him birth. My God, Captain, death has laid a heavy hand on my
family; can you wonder that I have hid his very name from those two
creatures that I love!”

“Ay, ay,” said Le Farge, “it’s sad! it’s sad!”

“When I was quite a child,” went on Lestrange, “a child no older than
Dicky, my nurse used to terrify me with tales about dead people. I was
told I’d go to hell when I died if I wasn’t a good child. I cannot tell
you how much that has poisoned my life, for the thoughts we think in
childhood, Captain, are the fathers of the thoughts we think when we
are grown up. And can a diseased father—have healthy children?”

“I guess not.”

“So I just said, when these two tiny creatures came into my care, that
I would do all in my power to protect them from the terrors of life—or
rather, I should say, from the terror of death. I don’t know whether I
have done right, but I have done it for the best. They had a cat, and
one day Dicky came in to me and said: ‘Father, pussy’s in the garden
asleep, and I can’t wake her.’ So I just took him out for a walk; there
was a circus in the town, and I took him to it. It so filled his mind
that he quite forgot the cat. Next day he asked for her. I did not tell
him she was buried in the garden, I just said she must have run away.
In a week he had forgotten all about her—children soon forget.”

“Ay, that’s true,” said the sea captain. “But ’pears to me they must
learn some time they’ve got to die.”

“Should I pay the penalty before we reach land, and be cast into that
great, vast sea, I would not wish the children’s dreams to be haunted
by the thought: just tell them I’ve gone on board another ship. You
will take them back to Boston; I have here, in a letter, the name of a
lady who will care for them. Dicky will be well off, as far as worldly
goods are concerned, and so will Emmeline. Just tell them I’ve gone on
board another ship—children soon forget.”

“I’ll do what you ask,” said the seaman.

The moon was over the horizon now, and the _Northumberland_ lay adrift in
a river of silver. Every spar was distinct, every reef point on the
great sails, and the decks lay like spaces of frost cut by shadows
black as ebony.

As the two men sat without speaking, thinking their own thoughts, a
little white figure emerged from the saloon hatch. It was Emmeline. She
was a professed sleepwalker—a past mistress of the art.

Scarcely had she stepped into dreamland than she had lost her precious
box, and now she was hunting for it on the decks of the _Northumberland_.

Mr Lestrange put his finger to his lips, took off his shoes and
silently followed her. She searched behind a coil of rope, she tried to
open the galley door; hither and thither she wandered, wide-eyed and
troubled of face, till at last, in the shadow of the hencoop, she found
her visionary treasure. Then back she came, holding up her little
nightdress with one hand, so as not to trip, and vanished down the
saloon companion very hurriedly, as if anxious to get back to bed, her
uncle close behind, with one hand outstretched so as to catch her in
case she stumbled.