“Yes, the child is going. She won’t stay away from her old dad. She hasn’t a mother, poor thing.”
Regarding Archie’s visit to Victoria, we must let him speak himself another time; for the scene of our story must now shift.
Chapter Eighteen.
Book III—In the Wild Interior.
“In This New Land of Ours.”
There was something in the glorious lonesomeness of Bush-life that accorded most completely with Archie’s notions of true happiness and independence. His life now, and the lives of all the three, would be simply what they chose to make them. To use the figurative language of the New Testament, they had “taken hold of the plough,” and they certainly had no intention of “looking back.”
Archie felt (this too is figurative) as the mariner may be supposed to feel just leaving his native shore to sail away over the broad, the boundless ocean to far-off lands. His hand is on the tiller; the shore is receding; his eye is aloft, where the sails are bellying out before the wind. There is hardly a sound, save the creaking of the blocks, or rattle of the rudder chains, the joyous ripple of the water, and the screaming of the sea-birds, that seem to sing their farewells. Away ahead is the blue horizon and the heaving sea, but he has faith in his good barque, and faith in his own skill and judgment, and for the time being he is a Viking; he is “monarch of all he surveys.”
“Monarch of all he surveys?” Yes; these words are borrowed from the poem on Robinson Crusoe, you remember; that stirring story that so appeals to the heart of every genuine boy.