A Modern Buccaneer Part 28

The island had been brought into a high state of cultivation by convict labour. Its roads, buildings, and gardens were in admirable order. But with the establishment of the new rgime--a different race with different tasks--much was neglected, a part became decayed and ruinous.

The island is now part.i.tioned into blocks of fifty acres, of which each adult male is allowed one, drawn for and decided by lot.

Whale fis.h.i.+ng is the favourite and most profitable occupation. From this and the sale of farm produce, which finds a market in Sydney, the inhabitants are furnished with all their needs require. Their wants are few, simple, and easily supplied.

The old convict town with its huge, dilapidated barracks, gaol-officers' quarters, and servants' houses, is situated on the south-east edge of the island, where the little Nepean islet gives sufficient shelter to form a precarious roadstead available in certain winds. The old town is occupied by the Pitcairn islanders--in number about three hundred.

Five miles across the island, on its north-eastern sh.o.r.e, and communicating with it by a fair road, lies the Melanesian Mission estate of a thousand acres. Sloping gently down to a low cliff and a rocky sh.o.r.e, the land is an undulating meadow, broken by ravines, and covered with a thick sward of conch gra.s.s or "doubh," said to have been imported from India, whence we drew our chief food supplies so many a year ago.

Nothing more beautiful in a state of nature had ever been seen, I thought, when I first cast my admiring eyes on it. Here and there gigantic, graceful pines (_Araucaria excelsa_) stood in stately groves.

Higher up on the flanks of Mount Pitt (a thousand feet above) grow the lemon and guava, cotton and wild tobacco. The island is nine hundred miles from Sydney and thirteen hundred and fifty from Cape Pillar, Tasmania. The Nepean and Phillip Islands lie to the south of the main island.

We were in such a hurry to see the famous island and still more famous islanders, that we omitted a precaution which had been earnestly impressed upon us the day before. This was not to attempt to land unless we had a Pitcairner to steer. When the long swell of the Pacific rolls in upon the shallow beaches of Sydney Bay there is no more dangerous place in the world--the roadstead of Madras hardly excepted--than the boat harbour at Norfolk Island.

Like most sailors, and man-of-war's men in particular, the crew was reckless and confident. For myself, I was a fair hand in a boat, and had mixed in so many cases of touch-and-go, where all hands would have fed the sharks in a few more minutes, that I had lost any sense of caution that I might have originally possessed. As we neared the sh.o.r.e, rising and falling upon the tremendous billows, which told of a scarce pa.s.sed gale, I felt a sense of exhilaration to which I had been long a stranger. A party of the islanders, seeing a boat leave the s.h.i.+p, had come down to watch our landing, apparently with interest. As we came closer I noticed them talking rapidly to one another, and occasionally waving their arms to one side or the other as if to direct our steering.

There were several women in the group, but as we neared the landing my attention was rivetted upon a girl who stood out some distance from the others at the end of a rocky point, which jutted beyond the narrow beach.

I had seen strikingly beautiful faces and faultless forms among the island girls, as all unconscious, they threw themselves into att.i.tudes so graceful and unstudied that a sculptor would have coveted them for models. Among these children of nature, roaming at will through their paradisal isles, the perfection of the human form had doubtless been developed. But there was a subtle charm about this girl, as she stood with bare feet beside the plas.h.i.+ng wave,--a statuesque presentment of n.o.bility, courage, and refinement which I had never before recognised in living woman. Tall and slender of frame, she yet possessed the rounded outlines which, in all island women, promise a fuller development in the matured stage of womanhood. Her features were delicately regular; in her large dark eyes there was an expression of strong interest, deepening almost into fear, as she gazed at our incoming boat. She had bent slightly forward, and stood poised on her rock as if waiting for a signal to plunge into the boiling surf. Her complexion was so fair that, but for her att.i.tude, which spoke her a daughter of the sea, one which no mortal born away from the music of the surges could have a.s.sumed, I might have taken her for an Englishwoman.

"In the name of all the divine maidens since Nausicaa" (I had not quite forgotten my _Odyssey_, rusty though was my Greek) "who can she be?"

thought I.

At this point my reflections and conjectures came to an abrupt end, as, indeed, nearly did also "the fever called living" in my particular case.

I felt the boat rise heavenwards on the back of a tremendous roller. The islanders shouted as though to warn us of danger, the steersman gave the tiller a wrong turn, or omitted to give it the right one, and the next moment the boat was buried beneath an avalanche of foam, with crew and pa.s.sengers struggling for their lives. I could swim well, that is, of course, comparatively, for the difference between the best performance of a white man--well practised from youth though he be--and of an islander is as that of a dog and a fish. Still, having risen to the surface, I made no doubt but that I could easily gain a landing. In this I was deceived. As in other spots, the constant surf concealed a treacherous undertow against which the ordinary swimmer is powerless.

Again and again did I gain foothold, to be swept back by the resistless power of the backward current. Each time I became weaker, and at length, after a long fruitless struggle, I closed my eyes and resigned myself to my fate. Borne backward and half fainting, I saw the whole party of natives in the water mingling with the crew, who, like myself, had been making desperate efforts to reach the landing.

My senses were leaving me; darkness was before my eyes, when dimly, as in a dream, I seemed to mark the girl upon the rock plunge with the gliding motion of a seal into the boiling foam. Her bosom shone as with outstretched arms she parted the foaming tide, her short under-dress, reaching only to the knees, offered no impediment to the freedom of her limbs. I felt soft arms around me. A cloud of dusky hair enveloped me.

Strains of unearthly music floated in my ears. It was the dirge of the mermaidens, as they wail over the drowned sailor and bear him with song and lament to his burial cavern. All suddenly it ceased.

The mid-day sun had pierced the roof and side of the cottage wherein I was lying upon a couch, softly matted. When I awoke I looked around.

Surely I had been drowned, and must be dead and gone! How, then, was I once more in a place where the sun shone, where there were mats and signs of ordinary life? I closed my eyes in half-denial of the evidences of my so-called senses. Then, as I raised myself with difficulty, the door opened and a man entered.

He was a tall, grandly developed Pitcairner, one of the men who had been on board the night before. His face was dark, with the tint of those races which, though far removed from the blackness of the Ethiop, are yet distinct from the pure white family of mankind. But his eyes, curiously, were of bright and distinct blue, in hereditary transmission, doubtless, from that ancestor who had formed one of the historic mutineers of the _Bounty_.

"You've had a close shave, Hilary. That's your name, I believe. A trifle more salt water and you'd have been with the poor chap that's drowned.

We got all the crew out but him."

"I thought I _was_ drowned," I replied, "but I begin to perceive that I'm alive. I see you're of the same opinion, so I suppose it's all right."

"It's not a thing to laugh at," the Pitcairner said gravely. "G.o.d saw fit to save you this time. To Him and Miranda you owe your thanks for being where you are now."

"There are people in Sydney," I said, "who will be foolish enough to be glad of it, and after I have a little time to think, I daresay I shall be pleased myself. But who is Miranda, and how did she save me?"

"Miranda Christian, my cousin, is the girl you saw standing on the rock.

She had a strong fight of it to get you in, and but for one of us going on each side neither of you would have come out. We had been hard at it trying to save the crew, and nearly left it too late. She was just about done."

"I shall be uneasy till I thank her. What a brave girl! And what am I to call you?"

"Fletcher Quintal, and her cousin," the islander replied, drawing himself up and looking at me with a steady gaze. "You won't see her till the afternoon. She has gone home to rest after staying with you till you came to. My sister, Dorcas, will bring you food directly, and perhaps you'd better rest yourself too till sundown. Then some of us will pay you a visit. Good morning."

A pleasant-faced damsel, with the sparkling eyes and perfect teeth of the race, came in shortly afterwards, who smilingly informed me that her name was Dorcas Quintal, and that her cousin Miranda had told her she was not to talk much to me.

However, during the time occupied in making a creditable lunch--all things considered,--I succeeded in convincing her that I was strong enough for a decent dose of gossip, in the course of which I learned several interesting pieces of information about Miranda, who certainly had posed as my Guardian Angel in the late accident. She was, according to Dorcas, the leader in all sports and pastimes, and also the most learned and accomplished damsel on the island. "She sang and played in their church choir. She had read all the poets in the world," Dorcas believed. "She could recite pages and pages of poetry and history.

Altogether she was a wonderful girl to be born and brought up in such a place as Norfolk Island, where we never see any one"--here Dorcas wreathed her lips into an expressive pout--"that is, except captains of s.h.i.+ps and strangers like yourself."

"So she is quite perfect," I said, "alike on land and sea. I can vouch for the last. I suppose she can pull an oar and is quite at home in a boat?"

"Indeed she is," answered Dorcas, warming up. "She can sail a cutter with any man on the island, and steer a whaleboat besides. You should see her standing up with the big steer oar in those tiny hands of hers."

"So, then, she has no faults?" I queried, a little mischievously.

The girl smiled. "I suppose we have all some here as in other places.

She is rather proud and quiet, the other girls say. I never saw it, and if there is anything else you must find it out for yourself. And now, as you have finished eating and drinking, I must go. Miranda will be here by and by."

"Only one word, Dorcas," said I, as she turned towards the doorway. "How many admirers has she--all the young men in the island, I suppose?"

"Only one," she replied, impressively, "my brother, Fletcher Quintal. He would die for her."

"And she?"

The girl paused before replying, and gazed earnestly at me.

"She says she will never marry." And with that she pa.s.sed out and left me to my meditations.

I must have been fatigued, even bruised and battered by my conflict with sea and sh.o.r.e, as I felt a kind of la.s.situde creep over me, and presently fell into a dreamless sleep, which lasted till the sun was low and the dimness of the light told me that the day had pa.s.sed.

I raised myself and saw Miranda sitting on a low stool near the window, or the aperture which served for one. As I turned, she smiled and came towards me, putting out her hand for me to take, and gazing into my face with a frank pleasure of the unspoiled woman of the woods and fields. "I have to thank you for my life," I said, as I pressed her hand warmly.

"It is of no great value to any one, as things have been going lately, but being such as it is, you have my warmest grat.i.tude. I should hardly have changed for the worse if I had been lying beside poor Bill Dacre."

"You must not talk in that mocking way," she said, with a pained expression like that of a hurt child. "G.o.d has given us all a life to use for some good purpose. Surely you have friends? perhaps a mother and sisters, who would weep when they heard you were lying under the waves?"

"You are right, Miranda, and I will not talk foolishly again; but I thank you with my whole heart for your n.o.ble courage in risking your life to save mine. I wonder now how we both got to land, in spite of that beastly undertow?"

"I never could have done it without help," she said. "I was nearly exhausted, yet I did not like to let you go, when Fletcher Quintal and Peter Mills, who had each brought out a man, swam in again, and we came in between them."

"You seem to be quite at home in the water," I said. "I thought I could swim, and at Strong's Island and other places could hold my own with the natives pretty well. But I found my mistake here."

"Of course we all swim well," she replied, smiling, "and know how to manage a boat. It would be curious if we did not; there is little else to do, in Norfolk Island, except when we are working in the fields. Our life is sometimes dull, I must allow."

"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 cas.e.m.e.nt 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."