Then his eyes wandered to the reef, the hush of whose surf reached him here with an occasional breath of sound from the wind-touched trees below.
From here he could see the sward and the little house half shaded by the trees. That darker spot was the patch of taro, and just by that great breadfruit whose leaves were beginning to turn lay the patch of yams. He could not see it, for it was hidden in a bay of the trees.
Well, there it all lay as they had left it—never to return.
The exaltation born of the vision that had saved his reason had departed, yet as he sat here to-day feeling in his heart sure that never, never would the dead return visibly, as he had dreamed, to this mortal place, the promise of the vision, in some curious way, did not seem quite broken.
The children might be with him even now without his knowing it—even in the house they had built, and the evidence of their handiwork—were they not with him after a fashion? When he died he might meet them—who could tell? He only felt that they never would return as he had hoped. Never come out from amidst the trees to meet him, or steal to him at night. Then came a new thought. He said to himself as he sat there, with the island before him, “How could they? The dead, if they could return, would come back as they were when they died.—They had grown up; their childish selves vanished long ago, existing only in my memory. Even had they lived, even were they with me here instead of lying there beneath that blue sea, they would be grown up. The children I loved vanished when we parted long years ago. They did not die—they grew up. And yet it is always those children that I have been seeking—what madness!”
Quite clear now in his mind, reasoning without any trace of delusion, it seemed to him that nothing dies so utterly as childhood. That growing up separates a parent from a child with a barrier more invincible than death, stronger, often more sad.
And yet, in his vision, the children had appeared to him just as they had been, and against logic, against reason, came the feeling that the promise of the vision was not to be utterly broken.
The question, did they ever really grow up, ever lose their childhood here in this place where the birds were the only other inhabitants and where sin was not?—this question, unasked, unanswered, scarcely nascent in his mind, may have worked upon him subconsciously, perhaps answering itself in the negative, or leaving the door open to doubt.
It was a brilliant and breezy day, just like the day on which they had made the lagoon. The Ranatonga had listed over to port under the press of the wind, the main boom lifting, and the foam roaring aft, gunnel high.
Out of the rainy seasons it was always bright here, yet there were days when the north seemed to come south in some great blue ship whose sails were filled by the winds of the north spilling over in zephyrs that touched the palms with fingers scented by the pine—fresh breezes that whipped the lagoon to amethyst and spread meadows of tourmaline on the coloured swell of the ocean beyond.