We seldom lingered amid these sullen retreats, around which Miranda always declared she heard sighs and groanings, sobs, and even shrieks, as though the spirits of those who had suffered, and mourned, and died amidst the horrors unspeakable of prison life still lingered amid the ruins of their place of torment.
How strange, well-nigh impossible, it even seemed to me that the very earth, the dumb witness of crime immeasurable, was not polluted irredeemably by the deeds that she had perforce endured and condoned. And now—stranger than aught that dreaming poet or seer imagined—that this Inferno should have been transmuted into an Arcadia, purer and more stainless than the fabled land of old, and peopled by the most obediently moral and conscientious family of mankind that had ever gathered the fruits of the earth since the days of our first parents.
Day after day followed of this charmed life—magical, unreal, only in that it transcended all my other experiences in the degree that the glamour of fairyland and the companionship of the queen of Elfland may have exceeded the memorials of Ercildoune. If he was enchanted, I was spellbound even as true Thomas. Never had I met with a companion who combined all the charm of womanhood—the grace and joyousness of girlhood's most resistless period—with the range of thought and intellectual progress which this singular girl, amid her lonely isle and restricted companionship, had explored. And withal, she had remained in her almost infantine unconsciousness of evil—her virginal, instinctive repulsion of all things forbidden and debarred—like a being of another planet.
Naturally an end arrived to this blissful state of things. The man-of-war after a few days was compelled to continue her voyage and perform her allotted duties, which comprehended surveys of uncharted coast-lines and suspected rocks. I had to choose between going on to Sydney and remaining in this charmed isle. And here inclination and duty appeared to draw different ways with equal strength. I was naturally anxious to return to my birth-place, my family, and friends. My feelings of home-sickness had returned with redoubled strength after being long in abeyance. But all such doubts and distrusts were swept away like storm wrack before the swelling surges of Miranda's own isle. I was fain to yield to the resistless force of the passion which now dominated, nay, consumed me. True, I had not as yet definitely assured myself that this purest pearl of womanhood was within my grasp. I had made no proffer of my affections. I had not, in so many words, solicited the priceless gift of hers. But I was not so unskilled in affairs of the heart as to mistake many a sign and symbol from Love's own alphabet, denoting that the outworks of the citadel were yielding, and that the fortress would ere long open gate and drawbridge to the invader.
True to nature's own teaching, Miranda had not scrupled to confess and dilate upon the pleasure my companionship afforded her, to declare that never before in her life had she been half so happy, to wonder if my sisters would not die of joy when I returned, to chide me for my long absence from them and from such a home as I had often described to her. And all this with the steady eye and frank expression of girlish pleasure, which a less unsophisticated damsel would scarcely have acknowledged without conscious blushes and downcast eyes.
Miranda, on the other hand, stated her sensations calmly and fearlessly, her wondrous eyes meeting mine with all the trustful eagerness of a happy child, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. "You see, Hilary," she would say, laying her hand lightly on my arm, and looking up in an appealing manner, "I have never met any one before who seems to understand my feelings as you do apparently by instinct. You have travelled and been in other places besides the islands, and you have read books—nearly all those which I have. You know that story in the Arabian Nights about the prince that was changed into a bird? He knew that he was a prince, yet he was condemned to be dumb, and was unable to convey his feelings, because to all the world he was only a bird.
"I sometimes think we Pitcairn girls live the life of birds—like that one," and she pointed to a soaring white-winged sea-bird, which presently darted downwards, falling like a stone upon the blue ocean wave. "We swim and fish, we are almost more on the sea than the land, we sleep on the land like that white bird, walk a little, talk a little,—that is our whole life. I think the bird has the best of it, as she can fly and we cannot."
"But you all seem happy and contented," I said, "you and your cousins."
"They are, but I seem to have been born under a different star. I must have inherited some of the restless, adventurous spirit of my ancestor, Fletcher Christian.