He seemed to have forgotten all about the house-building, a fact comforting to the mind of Mr. Kearney, who didn’t want to cut canes and hunt for palmetto leaves, but to fish.
Lighting his pipe, he followed down to the water’s edge and ten minutes later he had his charge safe out on the lagoon, anchored over a vast deep pool and within eyeshot of Dick.
The child was busy. He had toys of his own hidden in some hole behind the house and which he had unearthed: stones and lumps of coloured coral and oyster shells, with which he was making patterns on the sward. He seemed quite happy and content.
Just at first, on board the Ranatonga, on awakening from that strange dead sleep induced, perhaps, as Stanistreet had suggested, by the poison of the berries, he had seemed to miss his parents, calling out “Daddy” and stretching out his arms to some imaginary person; but whether the drug had drawn some curtain or whether he had been used to long absences of his parents in their wild life on the island, who can say?—but, content with the moment, he seemed soon to forget the burning interest of the decks of the schooner, the masts and sails and crew occupying his mind.
Lestrange, with a piece of crab on his hook, leaned over the gunnel, gazing at the painted world below; just as the child was occupied with its play, so was he and so was Jim Kearney with their fishing. A shoal of tiny fish, the whole school not bigger than one’s hand, would pass like a silver cloud, its shadow following across the coral and sand patches; then a scarus with moving gills would circle, nose the bait and pass, fish and shadow suddenly and utterly dissolved from sight. Everything that moved within a certain distance of the lagoon floor had its shadow, a thing inseparable, blind, yet endowed with movement and duplicating the object that cast it in all things but solidity and colour. These fish shadows seen through water were things quite new to Lestrange, different in some subtle way from terrestrial shadows seen through air. He remarked on them to Kearney, who agreed that they looked rum when you weren’t used to them.
“And who knows,” said Lestrange, remembering a conversation he had had with Stanistreet, “whether we aren’t the shadows of our real selves, Kearney? Knowing nothing, and just following the movements and the dictates of our souls; have you ever thought of these matters, Kearney?”
“No, sir,” replied the sailor. “I was never any good at l’arnin’.”
Lestrange was about to reply when a fish took his bait, a thing like a rock cod with a bright red band across its back, weighing four or five pounds, and beating the water to spray as it was hauled up.
Lestrange, as he brought this “soul” on board, to Kearney’s relief, seemed to have cast speculative philosophy over the other gunnel. Excited as a boy with his catch, he rebaited and the fishing resumed.
Here on this island there was one thing steadfast as the sun, insistent as hunger and merciful as death—sleep. Sleep with no bad taste in its mouth, no feverish dreams in its hand. Sleep as God made it and before man spoiled it.