The great stone figure of the god that had been held his mind in this train of thought: What was the use? All those ancestors of his whom he had never seen, whose forms he could not imagine—of what use had been their sufferings, their religions; what remained of them and their worship, their tears and their laughter?
“You.” It was as though the ferns had answered him, the ferns that seemed trying to hide the debasement of the great figure, the ferns still green for all the passage of the years, immortal because they were alive.
The very pines that had broken the blocks apart took up the tale, the pines whose ancestors were green when the blocks were hewn. “The God of this garden knows nothing of ghosts or ruins, cares for nothing but the one untarnishable thing, life; the spirit that repeats itself through the centuries in the forms of the ferns and the trees, in the guise of the insect on the man: you.”
Near by a pine was standing dead and withered, a half-grown tree that had fallen victim to disease. Close to it shoots were springing, its children, born of seeds cast maybe a year ago, children of its spirit as well as its body.
Lestrange’s eyes wandered from the stricken parent to the children green and striking towards the sun; then, rising from his seat, he went on through the valley, reaching the sward and the house.
It was a couple of hours after midday, Kearney was nowhere visible, and Dick, down by the waterside, was busy with a cane Kearney had cut for him in imitation of a fish spear. Kearney had taken to spearing fish in the reef pools during the past six months, taking Dick with him sometimes, an apt pupil, to judge by his imitative performances.
An hour later, when Lestrange was seated by the house door reading a book, Dick, who had given up imitation fish-spearing and had fetched some toys from his cache, took his place on the sward near by. Lestrange, who had taken more notice of the child in the last few days, watched him for a bit and then relapsed into his book.
He was busy for a while, and the clink of oyster shells and bits of coral kept the reader aware of the fact. Then he ceased play and Lestrange, looking up again from his book, saw before him, seated on the sward, Emmeline.
The child, having lost interest in its play, was seated with hands folded, gazing away across the lagoon, gazing wide-pupiled beyond the world, just as Emmeline had often sat, caught away suddenly into daydream-land. The folded hands were the hands of Emmeline, and the attitude of the body, and, just in that moment, the expression of the face was as if the shade of little Emmeline’s sweet soul had reappeared vaguely braving the glances of the sun.