It was near here that she had anchored when the squall struck the canoe, driving her from Karolin, but to-night there was no danger of squalls. The wind had sunk to a steady breathing from the north, and the swell had fallen to a gentle heave that rocked the little boat like a cradle to the lullaby of the surf.
Dick, tired out, had fallen asleep lying in the bottom of the boat, clasped by the girl, just as his father had fallen asleep long years ago clasped by Emmeline and death.
But death was far away to-night. Life ringed the sleepers with its charm, and the future spoke in the voice of the reef.
“Taori, Karolin has called you to be her king and rule her people and make her laws and break her chains of error; for this you were born, for this you still live, and war shall be your portion whilst you live, and peace shall crown your victories and lead you at last to the eternal peace which is Freedom.”
With his head on the pasht, unconscious as the dead, he slept whilst the sea wind blew and the great reef sang, mourned, murmured and spoke.
CHAPTER XLI
HIS KINGDOM
Broad as the reef break was at Karolin, no ship under sail could enter at the full ebb. Sweeping with an eight-knot clip and boiling round the coral piers, the waters of the great lagoon met the northward-running current in a leaping cross-sea of aquamarine and emerald whipped to snow when the wind was in the east. At slack all this died away; a child might have swum the passage and a leaf would have drifted with scarce a change of place. This was the sea gate of Karolin, and the keepers of the gate were the sun and the moon.
The sun and the moon and the wind and the sea—these four held the great atoll between them and had here a significance unguessed by dwellers on the continents and lands of the world; for here the new and the full moons were manifestly the letters-in of the great spring tides, and the first- and third-quarter moons the admitters of the neaps. Here the sun was seen from his rising to his setting, from his leap to his plunge, and storm and halcyon cast their spells on life, unbroken and uninterfered with by hills or walls or mountains or forests.
Here for undated ages man had lived alone with the sea and the gulls and the fish, and had remained man, learning little, forgetting nothing, with a memory and tradition kept alive by the necessities of the moment that urged him to build canoes as his forefathers had built them, and houses to shelter the canoes, and houses to protect him from the rains and winds.