"I hear that you can do all sorts of other things," I said. "That you are the chief musician and teacher, besides being commander of the fleet."
"Dorcas has been chattering, I am afraid," she answered, while a blush rose to her brow, tingeing the pallor of her ivory cheek with faint carmine. "I certainly have a variety of occupations, and very fortunate it is! Otherwise, I don't know what would happen to me, for I am scarcely as contented as my cousins and the other girls on the island."
"It is the old story," I said. "Now, why should you not be contented on this lovely island where you have all you could wish for in the world—perfect freedom, a matchless climate, exercise, adventure, the love of your kinsfolk, everything that satisfies the heart of woman?"
"Everything necessary to satisfy a woman's heart!" she said, rising and walking to where the casement admitted a view of the heaving deep with the Rosario lying on and off. "Can you look at the boundless ocean with its thousand paths to the cities of the earth and not wish to roam? To see the glories of the old world, all the varied richly-coloured life of ancient nations that I have read of and see in my dreams? Do you think men only are impatient of a hemmed-in life? It is not so. Women have their longings for a wider range, a larger sphere; and yet I am perhaps the only girl on the island that feels what I have described."
"You must have read much," I said, rather startled at this burst of feeling from the lips of a Norfolk Island damsel—a child of the most contented community in the world. "These strange yearnings must have been awakened in you through the word-painting of these wicked authors."
"And why not?" she answered, with heightened colour and flashing eye. "That my world is one of books I do not deny. I have daily tasks and occupations, but my evenings are my own, and in them I read and muse. Then this little island, with its patient, primitive people, seems to fade away. I spend hours in Italy, where I revel in Florence, the Pitti Palace, the Arno, and roam the streets of the Eternal City amid the monuments of the world's grandest era, their very decay 'an Empire's dust.' I fall asleep often when reclining on the banks of 'Tiber, Father Tiber, to whom the Romans pray.' But, oh! if I begin to wander away in the track of my visions I shall never stop. And you," she continued with an eager glance, "you, who have seen men and cities, are you contented to linger away your life under cocoa-palms and bread-fruit trees, taking in glorious ease among simple savages until you become one yourself in all but the colour? Is this what you were born and reared and educated for?"
As the girl thus spoke, with head upraised and exalted mien, her wondrous eyes flashing with almost unearthly light, her mobile lineaments changing with each varying mood, she looked in her strange and unfamiliar beauty like some virgin prophetess of the days of old, rousing her countrymen to deeds of patriotic valour or self-sacrificing heroism.
All enthusiasm is contagious, more especially when the enthusiast is fair to look upon, and belongs to that sex for, or on account of which, so much of the world's strife has resulted.
For the first time I began seriously to ask myself what motives had led me to waste so large a portion of my youth in heedless wandering among these fairy isles. What were my aims in life? What did I propose to myself? As I looked at the girl's face, aglow with the fire of a noble ambition, I felt humbled and ashamed.
"You have spoken truly, Miranda," I replied, after a long pause, during which my fair questioner looked with a far-away gaze across the ocean plain, now quenching its thousand shifting gleams in the quick-falling tropic night. "I have been idly careless and unheeding of the future, satisfied with the day's toil and the day's pleasure. But I am going back to my people in Australia; there I shall begin a new life. It is a land of duty, of labour, and its enduring reward. There I shall renew the tension of my moral fibre which has been too long relaxed. But you must not be too hard on me. I have had to face losses, dangers, and misfortunes. I have been wrecked; I lost everything I had in the world. I have been ill; have been wounded; and, but for some of those simple islanders you seem to despise, I should not have been a living man to-day."