Rolf Boldrewood

“ Right in the centre an enormous billow came careering along at the speed of an express train. Though it had no "breaking curl" on its towering crest, I instinctively placed my hands in the starboard boat davits, expecting to see the vast volume of water sweep our decks. Some of the traders sprang into the main rigging just as the brig lifted to the sea, to plunge downward with a swift and graceful motion, never losing her way for a moment. No man of our crew took the least notice. They knew what the brig could do, they knew the Captain, and no more anticipated a disaster than a mutiny. ”

“ The Leonora—our pride and boast, our peerless floating home—no longer "walked the waters like a thing of life," but lay dead, dismantled, dishonoured on the ruthless coral rocks which had crushed the life out of her on that fatal night.
I realised now with thankfulness that I had narrowly escaped being liable as an accessory for some of Hayston's ultra-legal proceedings—to call them by no harsher name.
How often, indeed, in the reckless daring of boyhood is the fatal line crossed which severs imprudence from crime! The inexorable fiat of human justice knows no shade of criminality. ”

“ Lastly, the harbour lights disappear as I sit in my cane lounge in the verandah of Edenhall, and in place of the wooded heights and distant city I see the breakers upon the reef of Ocean Island, and discern a solitary figure in the stern of a small boat sailing out into the illimitable gloom; I fall a musing upon the mysterious problems of Fate—of man's life and the strange procession of circumstance—until the hour strikes and I retire. ”

“ I feel like those people in the Arabian Nights who had been all their lives in a glass tower on a desert island. Not that our dear Norfolk Island was a desert—very far from it. And now I am going to the first grand house I ever saw, and to live in it—more wonderful still. I feel like a princess in a fairy tale," she went on, as she smilingly skipped into the carriage. "Everything seems so unreal. Do you think this will turn into a pumpkin, drawn by mice, like poor Cinderella's? Hers was a chariot, though. What is a chariot?" ”

“ If I decided to marry Miranda, or any other island maiden, I should be put in possession of a landed estate of fifty acres, where I might dream away life in a round of labour that was half recreation, wandering amid the island groves, reclining under giant ferns or lofty pines, bathing in crystal founts or clear-hued seas at dawn or under the yellow moon. Passing contentedly from youth to middle age, from that half-way stage to a later span of life, which in this enchanted land implied little or no diminution of natural powers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She agreed with me, that with a boat, a garden, a bath-house, and a cottage built of the beautiful white, pink-veined sandstone, which is so abundant beneath and around Sydney, existence might be endured away from her island home, with the aid of books and the inspiring idea of the coming fortune.
"And even if we do not make money," she said, "as people call it—what a strange idea it seems to me, who have hardly ever seen any—we shall be happy. I can't imagine people who are married and love each other ever being unhappy. ”

“ Except for an occasional visit to the Captain or the king, nothing disturbed the pleasing monotony of my existence.
Why Kusis should have taken such a violent and wholly unreasonable attachment to me is a mystery I never could unravel. Yet such is island life. And how strange it is, and hard of comprehension! Women take their fancies here, as in other worlds (surely this is a world in itself, distinct, mystic, unreal) , but the extraordinary point in the social system is, that men will, as a matter of mere caprice, conceive the most ardent friendship for an utter stranger. ”

“ My reputation had fairly gone before, but this light thrown on my parentage placed me in a most exalted position—next to their spiritual pastor and master, before whom they bowed in genuine respect and reverence. Perhaps there is no man in the whole world more honoured and admired in the South Seas than the captain of a ship. And now that the name of my father's barque, once pretty well known south of the line, had been recalled from the past, every doubt as to the future of Miranda and myself was set at rest. ”

“ Whatever Lālia's past life had been, I could never help admiring her many noble traits of character. I owed her life-long gratitude for her heroic self-sacrifice on the fateful night of the wreck of the Leonora; by me, at least, she will never be forgotten. Poor Lālia! Brave, loving, lovely child of the charmed isles of the southern main! reckless alike in love and hate, who shall judge? who condemn thee? Not I!
Kusis, Tulpé, and Kinie clung to me as if they could not bear to say farewell. ”

“ 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 casement 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? ”

“ He smiled bitterly, then answered, "Hilary, my boy, it is too late. I am an outlaw in fact, if not in name. The world's doors are closed, and society has turned its back on me. Out of ten professed friends nine are false, and would betray me to-morrow. When I think of what I once was, what I might have been, and to what I have now fallen, I am weary of existence. So I take the world as it comes, with neither hope nor fear for the morrow, knowing that if I do not make blue shark's meat, I am doomed to leave my bones on some coral islet." ”

“ Among the crew, fortunately for me as I then thought, was a sailor who had actually known in the flesh the idol of my daydreams.
"And it's the great Captain Hayston you'd like to hear about," said Dan Daly, as we sat together in the foc'sle head of the old barque Clarkstone, before we made Honolulu. Dan had been a South Sea beach-comber and whaler; moreover, had been marooned, according to his own account, escaping only by a miracle; a trader's head-man—once, indeed, more than half-killed by a rush of natives on the station. ”

“ I had read every book that had ever been written about them, from Captain Cook's Voyages to The Mutiny of the Bounty. In my dreams how many times had I seen the purple mountains, the green glow of the fairy woodlands, had bathed in the crystal streams, and heard the endless surf music on the encircling reef, cheered the canoes loaded with fruit racing for their market in the crimson flush of the paradisal morn, or lingered amidst the Aidenns of the [Pg 6] charmed main, where the flower-crowned children of nature—maidens beauteous as angels—roamed in careless happiness and joyous freedom! ”

“ The inner shore of the harbour, sheltered by the reef from the fury of the terrific rollers, is surrounded by a broad belt of darkest green mangroves and hibiscus, forming a dense barrier, monotonous in colouring, but blending harmoniously with sea and sky. A well-nigh impassable forest coloured the landscape from sea to mountain top. Only near the shore were groves of cocoa-palms waving their plumy banners to the soft trade breezes. Interspersed at intervals one descried plantations of bananas and sugar-cane, yams and taro. ”

“ 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. ”

“ After a two months' cruise through this group we bore away for Strong's Island, distant some five hundred miles. We had favourable winds, and the brig's speed was something wonderful. In thirty-eight hours we had covered a distance of four hundred and ninety miles, when the lofty hills of this gem of the North Pacific, covered with brightest verdure, gladdened our eyes after the long, low-lying chains of islets and atolls of the Marshall and Kingsmill groups. ”

“ 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 passengers 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All nature seemed to sympathise with us in our supernal joy. For us, for us alone in all the world the streamlets murmured, the breezes whispered together, the wavelets plashed musically, the blue sky glowed, the sun shone goldingly. The venerable pastor of the community—he who had watched over every man and woman present from infancy, who had christened, and married, and buried the whole population of the island as they require these offices—read the time-honoured service of the Church of England, which was followed with deepest reverential attention by all present. ”

“ The wavelets murmured on the beach, and the unresting surges seemed but to exchange loving memories of coral islands and crystal seas, of waving palms and the green gladness of tropic forests, of maidens, feather-crowned and flower-bejewelled, dancing on silver strands beneath the full-orbed midnight moon, or gliding, a laughing bevy of syrens, beneath the translucent wave. No sullen, dirge-like refrain on that paradisal day brought [Pg 256] from the ocean voices the memory of drifting wrecks, of stormy seas, of drowned seamen—no hint of danger, of despair, of pestilence, and death ”

“ CHAPTER II WILLIAM HENRY HAYSTON
These were the first particulars I ever heard of the man who had afterwards so great an influence upon my destiny that no incident of my sojourn with him will ever be forgotten. A man with whom I went into the jaws of death and returned unhurt. A man who, no matter what his faults may have been, possessed qualities which, had they been devoted to higher aims in life, might have rendered him the hero of a nation.
Our Captain's altercation with the crew nearly blossomed into a mutiny. ”

“ Clouds of black smoke and sheets of flame were everywhere visible, and amidst the continuous roar of the flames, the crackling of the burning cane-work of the native houses, and the incessant reports of the Sniders, came savage shouts and yells from the raiders, and answering cries of defiance from the New Britain men, who retreated slowly to the grassy hills of the interior, whence they watched the total destruction of some four or five of their villages. ”

“ On the south the land heads in a graceful sweep to leeward, until lost in the all-enveloping sea-mists of the tropics, while the straggling town, white-walled, reed-roofed, peeps through a dark-green grove of the bananas and cocoa-palms which fringe the beach. ”

“ Every man on the ship that could be spared, and Hope Island Nellie to boot, who had begged to be allowed to go with the attacking party, and whose ruffled temper was restored to equanimity by the chance of having a shot at her foes, and avenging her cousin's death. We left a boat's crew watch, and made for the shore, Nellie sitting in the bow of the Captain's boat with a Winchester rifle across her knees, and her eyes sparkling with a light I had never seen in a woman's face before. ”

“ 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." ”