The Blue Lagoon: A Romance | Page 8

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 her- self--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 companionway 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