The Garden of God

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

He rebaited and dropped his hook, talking to the child as he did so.

“Did your daddy teach you that, eh? Well, you’re a cleverer chap than I thought—don’t be tanglin’ the line; there, you can hold it if you want.” He let the little hand clutch the line without letting go of it himself and they fished in partnership, Dick between his knees and helping to haul in the catches. But from that day he began to take a different and more lively interest in the child, and as the weeks passed the bother about the Ranatonga began to fade. There was no use in bothering, for one thing, and for another the island life was beginning to clutch him.

Time measured by the shadow of a palm tree, days so like that they slipped by uncounted, no watches to be kept, no worry, and food which was just a pleasant exercise to collect, no home to regret—in a month the thought of the Ranatonga had passed away even as the ship herself had passed beyond the sea-line. In two months the fo’c’sle had receded, a dark vision that seemed separated from him by years.

Then, as time went on, the sprouting of Dick became for this common sailor man an interest that beat fishing, spearing grampus on the reef, beating the woods for new fruit patches or speculating on the rumness of Lestrange, whose mild peculiarities seemed spreading in a new direction, to be noted presently.

He heard his own words repeated by the child. It was like teaching a parrot to talk, only with a difference, for under the influence of this conversationalist Dick was beginning to string his words together. He had a little stock of old words collected in his past life—“Dick”—“Em”—“Koko”—“Daddy”—but, whether the strange, new experience of waking to find himself on the schooner had broken the threads or whether his parents had almost forgotten language, he had nothing of connected speech.

The man who takes an interest in a thing has two sets of eyes, and Kearney’s interest in Dick made him see things lost to Lestrange, whose indifference to the child, so far from diminishing, seemed to increase as time went on; one might say that it almost amounted to a dislike—as though the presence of a living child here was distasteful to him who was waiting for the children who were dead.

During the first few months his mind was so busy, so intrigued with the new surroundings, so intent on completing the house, clearing the yam patch of weeds and finishing what the lost children had left undone, that time passed as it passed for Kearney. Then, gradually, and as though time were losing the feathers of his wings one by one, the days began to lengthen for Lestrange.

The glorious vision that had brought him such assurance and comfort, had it been born after all of dementia, of that compensating madness which turns grief sometimes into indifference or laughter? Was it a toy produced by Nature to soothe his mind? He did not ask himself this, he questioned nothing, but fishing began to lose its interest for him and, now that the house was finished, there seemed nothing more to do.

How the children were to come to him he had never tried clearly to imagine—perhaps in dreams—perhaps in a vision or stealing to him as ghosts. Perhaps he would die and they would come to lead him into that glorious country where he had met them—he could not tell, he had only been sure that they would come.

But now, as time went on, it was as though the vaguest tinge of darkness had come upon the blessed assurance—a tinge so vague at first that it only changed contentment into expectancy. The first chill touch, perhaps, of that sanity whose home is the commonplace, the sanity that knows nothing of visions, that questions, turns over and doubts. Who knows? But as time went on, expectancy began to take on the tinge of doubt.