Part 29 (1/2)
”And why not?” she answered, with heightened colour and flas.h.i.+ng 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 s.e.x 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 n.o.ble 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 s.h.i.+fting 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.”
”I do not despise them,” she said; ”of course every one knows that we are descended from those of Tahiti. I only say that they are not fit companions for white men--I mean of educated white men who in the end become as bad as they are--even worse--much worse. But tell me about your being ill. And who tended you? Was it a woman?”
”I will tell you all about it to-morrow if you will walk with me and show me some of the scenery of this beautiful island of yours. But it is a long story, and it is too late to begin to-night.”
”I should like it above all things,” she said frankly, ”though you must have seen so many grand places in your roamings that our poor landscapes will hardly interest you.”
”Much depends on the guide,” I said, as I gazed admiringly at her eloquent countenance.
”I know that,” she answered, meeting my too ardent gaze with perfect unconsciousness of any hidden meaning. ”They tell me I am the best guide on the island, and indeed I should be, for my father and I were never tired of exploring and finding out traces of the old occupation by the Sydney Government, and many curious discoveries we made. So I will come here after breakfast to-morrow.”
She was true to her appointment, and then commenced a series of delightful rambles which, perhaps, I more truly enjoyed than many later and more pretentious travels.
In despite of Miranda's depreciation of her lovely isle we found endless excuses for interest and admiration. It was truly a wonderful little ”kingdom by the sea.” Sc.r.a.ped along the side of a hill would be one of the beautiful roads constructed by the forced labour of the convicts which at one time almost filled the island. Rising from the valley slope were gigantic ferns, broad-leaved palms, lemons, oranges, guavas, all originally imported, but now flouris.h.i.+ng in the wildest luxuriance in the rich soil and semi-tropical climate; while above all, stately and columnar, rose the great Araucaria peculiar to the island--the Norfolk Island pine of the colonists.
Hand in hand we roamed together through this Eden amid the main, as though our great progenitors had again been transplanted to this wondrous wild--a latter day Adam, by whose side smiled a sinless Eve--pure as her prototype, and yet informed of much of the lore which men had wrested from the rolling ages. Together we explored the gloomy corridors and echoing halls of the ruinous prison houses--once the dark abodes of sorrow, torment, and despair unutterable.
Miranda shuddered at the thought that these dismal cells and courtyards had echoed to the cries of criminals under the lash--to the clanking of chains--had even witnessed the death penalty inflicted on the murderer and the mutineer.
Mute and terrible witnesses were they to the guilt to which human nature may descend--to the abysmal depths of despair into which the felon and the outcast may be hurled, when, hopeless of help from G.o.d or man, he abandons himself to all the baser instincts.
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 trans.m.u.ted 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 companions.h.i.+p 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 companions.h.i.+p, 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 pa.s.sion which now dominated, nay, consumed me. True, I had not as yet definitely a.s.sured 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 companions.h.i.+p 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.”