CHAPTER IX
OUT OF THE SEA
That morning, three hours after sun-up and half an hour after breakfast, Fate and Mr. Kearney had a difference of opinion.
The bananas were ripe on the eastern side of the island and he had arranged in his mind to go and fetch a bunch, taking the quickest way—that is to say, right over the hill-top instead of round by the lagoon edge—but he was lazy and disposed to put the business off to a more convenient time. He would have made Dick row him round in the dinghy, only that Dick wanted the boat for purposes of his own beyond on the reef.
Sitting with his back against a tree bole, he could see the figure of the boy away out on the coral; the amethyst and azure lagoon, the reef with the moving figure upon it and a touch of purple sea beyond, all made a picture as soothing as it was lovely on that perfect and almost windless morning.
But Kearney was not thinking of the beauty of the scene. Bananas were bothering him; he did not want to move, and they were calling on him to get on his legs, cross the island, cut them and fetch them.
Ten years of island life had altered Kearney almost as much as they had altered Dick. Always on the look-out for a ship during the first three years, he would not have left the island to-day unless shifted with a derrick. He had grown into the life, grown lazy and stout and grizzled—and moral. A most extraordinary type of beach-comber. The child and the island, the sun and the easy way of life, had all conspired in this work upon him. He had no hankerings now after bar-rooms; without tobacco for years, he had taken to chewing gum, finding plenty of it in the woods, and he had devised several innocent and non-laborious amusements for himself and the child, among others, ship building. The very first act of Kearney when they had landed on the island had been the cutting of a little boat for Dick from a bit of wood. He could do anything with a knife and one day, some six years ago, when time was hanging heavy, the saving idea came to him of constructing a model of the lost Ranatonga. It took him nearly eight months to accomplish, but it was a beauty when finished, with sails of silk made from an old shirt of Lestrange’s and a leaden keel constructed from the lead wrappings of a tea chest which he managed to melt down.
They took it over and sailed it on the reef pool where the nautilus fleet had once floated, and next day he set to work on another, a frigate this time. Four ships altogether had left the stocks of the Kearney-Dick combination, and meanwhile three real ships had touched the island, two whalers and a sandalwood schooner. The whalers Kearney had carefully avoided; the sandalwood schooner had come up in the arms of a hurricane, smashed herself to pieces on the reef, drowned every soul on board of her and left the coral littered with trade goods, bolts of cloth enough to clothe a village, boxes of beads, cheap looking-glasses, dull Barlow knives—everything but tobacco.
Having contemplated the lagoon, the reef and the moving figure of Dick for a while, Kearney suddenly shifted his position, rose, stretched himself and, fetching a case knife from the shelf in the house, turned towards the trees. The bananas had conquered. Passing through the woods, he struck uphill till he reached the summit, where he paused for a moment to rest, a figure not unlike that of Robinson Crusoe, standing with his hand on the great summit rock and gazing far and wide across the ocean.
Then he shaded his eyes. Far off on the dead calm sea a canoe was drifting; two miles away it might have been to the south and perhaps half a mile to the east. The land wind had died off completely and the tiny sail hung without a stir. He could not tell at that distance whether it had any occupants. Brown, like a withered leaf on the water, it lay drifting with the current that would take it past the island just as it had taken the dinghy with the lost children of Lestrange.