The Merrow takes Jack to dinner at the bottom of the sea, and shows him the lobster pots wherein he keeps the souls of old sailormen, and then they have dinner, and the Merrow produces a big bottle of rum.

It was a fatal story for him to remember and recount; for, after his companions were asleep, the vision of the Merrow and Jack hobn.o.bbing, and the idea of the jollity of it, rose before him, and excited a thirst for joviality not to be resisted.

There were some green cocoa-nuts that he had plucked that day lying in a little heap under a tree--half a dozen or so. He took several of these and a sh.e.l.l, found the dinghy where it was moored to the aoa tree, unmoored her, and pushed off into the lagoon.

The lagoon and sky were full of stars. In the dark depths of the water might have been seen phosph.o.r.escent gleams of pa.s.sing fish, and the thunder of the surf on the reef filled the night with its song.

He fixed the boat's painter carefully round a spike of coral and landed on the reef, and with a sh.e.l.lful of rum and cocoa-nut lemonade mixed half and half, he took his perch on a high ledge of coral from whence a view of the sea and the coral strand could be obtained.

On a moonlight night it was fine to sit here and watch the great breakers coming in, all marbled and clouded and rainbowed with spindrift and sheets of spray. But the snow and the song of them under the diffused light of the stars produced a more indescribably beautiful and strange effect.

The tide was going out now, and Mr b.u.t.ton, as he sat smoking his pipe and drinking his grog, could see bright mirrors here and there where the water lay in rock-pools. When he had contemplated these sights for a considerable time in complete contentment, he returned to the lagoon side of the reef and sat down beside the little barrel. Then, after a while, if you had been standing on the strand opposite, you would have heard sc.r.a.ps of song borne across the quivering water of the lagoon.

"Sailing down, sailing down, On the coast of Barbaree."

Whether the coast of Barbary in question is that at San Francisco, or the true and proper coast, does not matter. It is an old-time song; and when you hear it, whether on a reef of coral or a granite quay, you may feel a.s.sured that an old-time sailor-man is singing it, and that the old-time sailor-man is bemused.

Presently the dinghy put off from the reef, the sculls broke the starlit waters and great shaking circles of light made rhythmical answer to the slow and steady creak of the thole pins against the leather. He tied up to the aoa, saw that the sculls were safely shipped; then, breathing heavily, he cast off his boots for fear of waking the "childer." As the children were sleeping more than two hundred yards away, this was a needless precaution especially as the intervening distance was mostly soft sand.

Green cocoa-nut juice and rum mixed together are pleasant enough to drink, but they are better drunk separately; combined, not even the brain of an old sailor can make anything of them but mist and muddlement; that is to say, in the way of thought--in the way of action they can make him do a lot. They made Paddy b.u.t.ton swim the lagoon.

The recollection came to him all at once, as he was walking up the strand towards the wigwam, that he had left the dinghy tied to the reef. The dinghy was, as a matter of fact, safe and sound tied to the aoa; but Mr b.u.t.ton's memory told him it was tied to the reef. How he had crossed the lagoon was of no importance at all to him; the fact that he had crossed without the boat, yet without getting wet, did not appear to him strange. He had no time to deal with trifles like these.

The dinghy had to be fetched across the lagoon, and there was only one way of fetching it. So he came back down the beach to the water's edge, cast down his boots, cast off his coat, and plunged in. The lagoon was wide, but in his present state of mind he would have swum the h.e.l.lespont. His figure gone from the beach, the night resumed its majesty and aspect of meditation.

So lit was the lagoon by starshine that the head of the swimmer could be distinguished away out in the midst of circles of light; also, as the head neared the reef, a dark triangle that came shearing through water past the palm tree at the pier. It was the night patrol of the lagoon, who had heard in some mysterious manner that a drunken sailor-man was making trouble in his waters.

Looking, one listened, hand on heart, for the scream of the arrested one, yet it did not come. The swimmer, scrambling on to the reef in an exhausted manner, forgetful evidently of the object for which he had returned, made for the rum cask, and fell down beside it as though sleep had touched him instead of death.

CHAPTER XX

THE DREAMER ON THE REEF

"I wonder where Paddy is?" cried d.i.c.k next morning. He was coming out of the chapparel, pulling a dead branch after him. "He's left his coat on the sand, and the tinder box in it, so I'll make the fire. There's no use waiting. I want my breakfast. Bother!"

He trod the dead stick with his naked feet, breaking it into pieces.

Emmeline sat on the sand and watched him.

Emmeline had two G.o.ds of a sort: Paddy b.u.t.ton and d.i.c.k. Paddy was almost an esoteric G.o.d wrapped in the fumes of tobacco and mystery. The G.o.d of rolling ships and creaking masts--the masts and vast sail s.p.a.ces of the Northumberland were an enduring vision in her mind--the deity who had lifted her from a little boat into this marvellous place, where the birds were coloured and the fish were painted, where life was never dull, and the skies scarcely ever grey.

d.i.c.k, the other deity, was a much more understandable personage, but no less admirable, as a companion and protector. In the two years and five months of island life he had grown nearly three inches. He was as strong as a boy of twelve, and could scull the boat almost as well as Paddy himself, and light a fire. Indeed, during the last few months Mr b.u.t.ton, engaged in resting his bones, and contemplating rum as an abstract idea, had left the cooking and fishing and general gathering of food as much as possible to d.i.c.k.

"It amuses the craythur to pritind he's doing things," he would say, as he watched d.i.c.k delving in the earth to make a little oven--Island-fashion--for the cooking of fish or what-not.

"Come along, Em," said d.i.c.k, piling the broken wood on top of some rotten hibiscus sticks; "give me the tinder box."

He got a spark on to a bit of punk, and then he blew at it, looking not unlike Aeolus as represented on those old Dutch charts that smell of schiedam and snuff, and give one mermaids and angels instead of soundings.

The fire was soon sparkling and crackling, and he heaped on sticks in profusion, for there was plenty of fuel, and he wanted to cook breadfruit.

The breadfruit varies in size, according to age, and in colour according to season. These that d.i.c.k was preparing to cook were as large as small melons. Two would be more than enough for three people's breakfast. They were green and k.n.o.bbly on the outside, and they suggested to the mind unripe lemons, rather than bread.

He put them in the embers, just as you put potatoes to roast, and presently they sizzled and spat little venomous jets of steam, then they cracked, and the white inner substance became visible. He cut them open and took the core out--the core is not fit to eat--and they were ready.

Meanwhile, Emmeline, under his directions, had not been idle.

There were in the lagoon--there are in several other tropical lagoons I know of--a fish which I can only describe as a golden herring. A bronze herring it looks when landed, but when swimming away down against the background of coral brains and white sand patches, it has the sheen of burnished gold. It is as good to eat as to look at, and Emmeline was carefully toasting several of them on a piece of cane.

The juice of the fish kept the cane from charring, though there were accidents at times, when a whole fish would go into the fire, amidst shouts of derision from d.i.c.k.

She made a pretty enough picture as she knelt, the "skirt" round the waist looking not unlike a striped bath-towel, her small face intent, and filled with the seriousness of the job on hand, and her lips puckered out at the heat of the fire.

"It's so hot!" she cried in self-defence, after the first of the accidents.

"Of course it's hot," said d.i.c.k, "if you stick to looward of the fire.

How often has Paddy told you to keep to windward of it!"

"I don't know which is which," confessed the unfortunate Emmeline, who was an absolute failure at everything practical: who could neither row nor fish, nor throw a stone, and who, though they had now been on the island twenty-eight months or so, could not even swim.

"You mean to say," said d.i.c.k, "that you don't know where the wind comes from?"

"Yes, I know that."

"Well, that's to windward."

"I didn't know that."

"Well, you know it now."

"Yes, I know it now."

"Well, then, come to windward of the fire. Why didn't you ask the meaning of it before?"

"I did," said Emmeline; "I asked Mr b.u.t.ton one day, and he told me a lot about it. He said if he was to spit to windward and a person was to stand to loo'ard of him, he'd be a fool; and he said if a ship went too much to loo'ard she went on the rocks, but I didn't understand what he meant. d.i.c.ky, I wonder where he is?"

"Paddy!" cried d.i.c.k, pausing in the act of splitting open a breadfruit.

Echoes came from amidst the cocoa-nut trees, but nothing more.

"Come on," said d.i.c.k; "I'm not going to wait for him. He may have gone to fetch up the night lines"--they sometimes put down night lines in the lagoon--"and fallen asleep over them."

Now, though Emmeline honoured Mr b.u.t.ton as a minor deity, d.i.c.k had no illusions at all upon the matter. He admired Paddy because he could knot, and splice, and climb a cocoanut tree, and exercise his sailor craft in other admirable ways, but he felt the old man's limitations.

They ought to have had potatoes now, but they had eaten both potatoes and the possibility of potatoes when they consumed the contents of that half sack. Young as he was, d.i.c.k felt the absolute thriftlessness of this proceeding. Emmeline did not; she never thought of potatoes, though she could have told you the colour of all the birds on the island.

Then, again, the house wanted rebuilding, and Mr b.u.t.ton said every day he would set about seeing after it to-morrow, and on the morrow it would be to-morrow. The necessities of the life they led were a stimulus to the daring and active mind of the boy; but he was always being checked by the go-as-you-please methods of his elder. d.i.c.k came of the people who make sewing machines and typewriters. Mr b.u.t.ton came of a people notable for ballads, tender hearts, and potheen. That was the main difference.

"Paddy!" again cried the boy, when he had eaten as much as he wanted.