Even the princess had not arrived. There had been a "first robber" on the boards, perhaps—even more of that persuasion. But the principal stage business was only commencing—the dénouement was obviously far off. Thereupon my hopes rose as if freshly illumined. My sanguine nature—boundless in faith, fertile in expedient—reasserted itself. Temporarily depressed, more in sympathy with Hayston than with my own ill-luck, it seemed more vigorous and elastic in rebound than ever. The memory of my island life became faint and dreamily indistinct. The forms of Hayston, the king and queen, of Lālia, with sad, reproachful gaze—of Hope Island Nellie, lifting a rifle with the mien of an angered goddess—of Kitty of Ebon, incarnate daughter of the dusky Venus—of the bronzed and wrinkled trader, with blood and to spare on his sinewy hand—of young Harry and the negro Johnny. All these forms and faces, once so familiar, seemed to recede into the misty distance until they faded away from my mental vision.
With them passed into shadow-land the joyous life of my youth—of the untrammelled, care-free existence—such as no man may find again in this world of slow, tracking care and hasty disenchantment. "Was I wise?" I asked myself again and again, in quitting it for the hard and anxious pursuits of the Continent? Were there not a dozen places besides Strong's Island where I should be welcomed, fêted, caressed, almost worshipped as a restored divinity? Was it well to abandon the rank which I had acquired among these simple people? Was it— But no. For ever had I made the decision. Once resolved, I disliked changing my plans. Burdened with a regret which for days I could neither subdue nor remove, I adhered unflinchingly to my resolution, and addressed myself to the steady contemplation of the future.
Now had commenced for me a new life—a new world socially speaking. The quiet reserve and unemotional bearing of the British officer was substituted for the frank accost and reckless speech of the island trader or wandering mariner. I was prompt, however, to assimilate the modish bearing of my companions, and assisted by some natural alertness, or perhaps inherited tendencies, soon became undistinguishable from the honourables and lordlings of the gun-room. Upon my repose of manner, indeed, I was often complimented. "By Jove, old fellow," one of the offshoots of the British aristocracy would say, "one would think you had been at Rugby or Eton. And I suppose you have never seen England. Certainly you have the pull of us in make and shape. I can't think how they grow such fellows,—more English than the English,—with your blue eyes and fair hair, too, in these God-forsaken regions."
"Because," I said, "I am of as pure English blood as yourself; have been reared, and moulded, and surrounded by English people, and have all the traditions of the old country at my fingers' end. For the rest, I hold that this end of the world is more favourable to the growth of Anglo-Saxons, as you call yourselves, than the other."
"Well! it looks like it, I must say," said my new friend. "I only hope that when the time comes for fighting, by sea and land—and, mark my words, come it will—that you will be found as stanch as I think you are."
"Be sure we shall be," said I. "We have inherited the true English 'grit,' as Americans say. You all said they couldn't fight when their war began; when it finished, the world gave a different verdict. We are our fathers' sons, neither more nor less. The bull-dog and the game-cock still fight to the death in our country. Many a time have I seen it. And so will we when our time comes, and when we think it worth our while."
We carried an order from the New South Wales Government to call in at Norfolk Island—once the ocean prison of the more desperate felons of the old convict régime, who had been replaced by the descendants of the Pitcairn islanders. They, in their turn the descendants of mutinous sailors and Tahitian women—now the most moral, God-fearing, and ideally perfect race on the face of the earth.
What a miracle had been wrought! Who could have imagined that the last days of a rough old sailor, spent among the survivors of a group of savage women who had butchered their mates, could have so firmly fixed the morale of a whole community that virtue should have indelibly impressed itself upon a hundred families. Sydney lies about S.S.W. from Kusaie, but to avoid passing through the dangers of the New Hebrides, and the reef-studded vicinity of New Caledonia, a direct south course with a little easting was decided upon.
We made Norfolk Island, the distance being about two thousand miles, in ten days' easy steaming from Strong's Island. This lovely island was discovered by Cook in 1774.