CHAPTER XVII
THE FIRST OF THE TWO PEARLS
He came back to the beach.
Schumer had left him two boats, the dinghy and the boat of the Cormorant. They were both on the beach, and as the dinghy was the easiest to launch single-handed, he used it and pushed off to the fishing ground.
The gulls started after him from the reef opening, and now their voices came singly, mewing and miauling, the very voice of desolation itself.
Looking back as he rowed, he could see the figure of Isbel; she was putting things straight about the house, and just at that moment, as if stirred by the loneliness and the voices of the gulls, his heart went out to her. She was the only live thing in all that place for him. There were living things—fish in the lagoon and Kanaka laborers on the reef—but Isbel was the only warm spot for his mind to cling to.
The child had differentiated herself from her surroundings. By some extraordinary magic she had, without effort and almost without speech, pushed the image of Schumer to one side, and the forms of the Kanakas to the other.
Schumer, despite his powerful personality, seemed a dead thing beside Isbel, and the Kanakas, powerful and brawny as they were, seemed puppets—things of mechanism—fantoccini. What was the magic property that gave her the ascendency in the mind of Floyd?
For one thing, Isbel, despite her silence, her self-isolation, and the other-world atmosphere with which she surrounded herself, had always proved herself sterling.