The breeze had freshened up, and was blowing dead from the island, as though the island were making a weak attempt to blow them away from it.
Oh, what a fresh and perfumed breeze it was! All sorts of tropical growing things had joined their scent in one bouquet.
“Smell it,” said Emmeline, expanding her small nostrils. “That’s what I smelt last night, only it’s stronger now.”
The last reckoning taken on board the Northumberland had proved the ship to be south by east of the Marquesas; this was evidently one of those small, lost islands that lie here and there south by east of the Marquesas. Islands the most lonely and beautiful in the world.
As they gazed it grew before them, and shifted still more to the right. It was hilly and green now, though the trees could not be clearly made out; here, the green was lighter in colour, and there, darker. A rim of pure white marble seemed to surround its base. It was foam breaking on the barrier reef.
In another hour the feathery foliage of the coconut palms could be made out, and the old sailor judged it time to take to the boat.
He lifted Emmeline, who was clasping her luggage, over the rail on to the channel, and deposited her in the stern-sheets; then Dick.
In a moment the boat was adrift, the mast stepped, and the Shenandoah left to pursue her mysterious voyage at the will of the currents of the sea.
“You’re not going to the island, Paddy,” cried Dick, as the old man put the boat on the port tack.
“You be aisy,” replied the other, “and don’t be larnin’ your gran’mother. How the divil d’ye think I’d fetch the land sailin’ dead in the wind’s eye?”
“Has the wind eyes?”
Mr. Button did not answer the question. He was troubled in his mind. What if the island were inhabited? He had spent several years in the South Seas. He knew the people of the Marquesas and Samoa, and liked them. But here he was out of his bearings.
However, all the troubling in the world was of no use. It was a case of the island or the deep sea, and, putting the boat on the starboard tack, he lit his pipe and leaned back with the tiller in the crook of his arm. His keen eyes had made out from the deck of the brig an opening in the reef, and he was making to run the dinghy abreast of the opening, and then take to the sculls and row her through.
Now, as they drew nearer a sound came on the breeze, a sound faint and sonorous and dreamy. It was the sound of the breakers on the reef. The sea just here was heaving to a deeper swell, as if vexed in its sleep at the resistance to it of the land.
Emmeline, sitting with her bundle in her lap, stared without speaking at the sight before her. Even in the bright, glorious sunshine, and despite the greenery that showed beyond, it was a desolate sight seen from her place in the dinghy. A white, forlorn beach, over which the breakers raced and tumbled, seagulls wheeling and screaming, and over all the thunder of the surf.
Suddenly the break became visible, and a glimpse of smooth, blue water beyond. Mr. Button unshipped the tiller, unstepped the mast, and took to the sculls.
As they drew nearer, the sea became more active, savage, and alive; the thunder of the surf became louder, the breakers more fierce and threatening, the opening broader.
One could see the water swirling round the coral piers, for the tide was flooding into the lagoon; it had seized the little dinghy and was bearing it along far swifter than the sculls could have driven it. Seagulls screamed around them, the boat rocked and swayed. Dick shouted with excitement, and Emmeline shut her eyes tight.
Then, as though a door had been swiftly and silently closed, the sound of the surf became suddenly less. The boat floated on an even keel; she opened her eyes and found herself in Wonderland.
XII
The Lake of Azure
On either side lay a great sweep of waving blue water. Calm, almost as a lake, sapphire here, and here with the tints of the aqua marine. Water so clear that fathoms away below you could see the branching coral, the schools of passing fish, and the shadows of the fish upon the spaces of sand.
Before them the clear water washed the sands of a white beach, the cocoa-palms waved and whispered in the breeze; and as the oarsman lay on his oars to look a flock of bluebirds rose, as if suddenly freed from the treetops, wheeled, and passed soundless, like a wreath of smoke, over the treetops of the higher land beyond.
“Look!” shouted Dick, who had his nose over the gunwale of the boat. “Look at the fish!”
“Mr. Button,” cried Emmeline, “where are we?”
“Bedad, I dunno; but we might be in a worse place, I’m thinkin’,” replied the old man, sweeping his eyes over the blue and tranquil lagoon, from the barrier reef to the happy shore.
On either side of the broad beach before them the coconut trees came down like two regiments, and bending gazed at their own reflections in the lagoon. Beyond lay waving chapparel, where cocoa-palms and breadfruit trees intermixed with the mammee apple and the tendrils of the wild vine. On one of the piers of coral at the break of the reef stood a single cocoa-palm; bending with a slight curve, it, too, seemed seeking its reflection in the waving water.
But the soul of it all, the indescribable thing about this picture of mirrored palm trees, blue lagoon, coral reef and sky, was the light.
Away at sea the light was blinding, dazzling, cruel. Away at sea it had nothing to focus itself upon, nothing to exhibit but infinite spaces of blue water and desolation.
Here it made the air a crystal, through which the gazer saw
