The Blue Lagoon: A Romance | Page 7

the cabbidge, maybe, out of the pot boilin' on the fire forenint your eyes, and
baste you in the face with it; and thin, maybe, you'd hold out your fist to him, and he'd
put a goulden soverin in it."
"Wisht he was here!" murmured a voice from a bunk near the knightheads.
"Pawthrick," drawled the voice from the hammock above, "what'd you do first if you
found y'self with twenty pound in your pocket?"

"What's the use of askin' me?" replied Mr Button. "What's the use of twenty pound to a
sayman at say, where the grog's all wather an' the beef's all horse? Gimme it ashore, an'
you'd see what I'd do wid it!"
"I guess the nearest grog-shop keeper wouldn't see you comin' for dust," said a voice
from Ohio.
"He would not," said Mr Button; "nor you afther me. Be damned to the grog and thim
that sells it!"
"It's all darned easy to talk," said Ohio. "You curse the grog at sea when you can't get it;
set you ashore, and you're bung full."
"I likes me dhrunk," said Mr Button, "I'm free to admit; an' I'm the divil when it's in me,
and it'll be the end of me yet, or me ould mother was a liar. `Pat,' she says, first time I
come home from say rowlin', `storms you may escape, an wimmen you may escape, but
the potheen 'ill have you.' Forty year ago--forty year ago!"
"Well," said Ohio, "it hasn't had you yet."
"No," replied Mr Button, "but it will."


CHAPTER II
UNDER THE STARS
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!"
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,"