One night the strange thought came to him: Do children really care? Did Dick and Emmeline long ago love me? Have I been all these years breaking my heart for the loss of two beings who, caring for me after their way, had no enduring love, were incapable of enduring love—being children?
The thought was born of Dick’s indifference towards him and of his apparent affection for Kearney. Watching closely it seemed to Lestrange that this affection was less for Kearney than for the things Kearney did and the things Kearney handled. Kearney stripped the dinghy of the fishing lines, fish spears; Kearney unable to climb trees or carve toys would not have been the Kearney loved by Dick; the great size of the sailor probably had something to do also with the business, maybe was the cause that made Dick run to him first on the Ranatonga.
Then, when Dick in his moody fits turned into Emmeline, he seemed to care for nobody at all.
Lestrange, casting his mind years back, and with his eyes made clear by this new revelation, tried to remember any one instance that would show him Dick or Emmeline’s love for him—he could not.
The sweet, dreamy little figure of Emmeline sat before him on the deck of the long lost Northumberland, hunted for its lost box of toys, was carried off to bed by the stewardess, came, as a matter of routine, to kiss him good-night—but it was her charm that she seemed to live in a world of her own.
Dick, an affectionate child enough, had called him “Daddy” and sat on his knee only to wriggle off at the first enticement—had, indeed, shown more affection and interest for an old sailor on board, one Paddy Button, than for his father.
Lestrange, looking back across the years, could still see him riding round the deck on Mr. Button’s back, and recalled his own pleasure in seeing the child amused. Then they had vanished with Mr. Button, and he, Lestrange, had broken his heart for them, and they had grown up without him, surely and absolutely forgetting him—never having loved him as he loved them.
It was only now, here in the Garden of God, as he had chosen to call this land of Nature, only here, and taught by Nature herself, that the truth was borne to him: the truth that for years he had been wandering in the world of illusion searching for what was not there—searching for what he told himself, perhaps truly, perhaps falsely, could not be there—the love of a child for a parent equal to the love of a parent for a child.
Nature said to him: You must grow up to love, Love is the blossom of the mind, not the green tendril. Children do not love as men love, they only twine. Would you have it otherwise? Would you have condemned Dick and Emmeline to endless regret for your loss and have made them suffer what you have suffered—even in part?
“Dick,” cried Kearney, “kim along, aisy! That’s no way to be gettin’ into a boat. Now set steady and give over handlin’ them spears.”