A Modern Buccaneer

This question I had asked Miranda more than once. But she would not consent to take it seriously. One day, however, I compelled her to listen, though she had again declared that we were so happy as we were that no change could be for the better, possibly for the worse – even.

"Then, Miranda," I answered, "I must leave the island. Did we not hear from the last whaler that called in for fresh provisions that my old friend – the friend of the family, Captain Carryall, was to touch here in the Florentia?" He was the best known, the most popular of all the skippers next to Captain Hayston. Unlike him, however, his reputation was spotless, while for fair dealing and adherence to his promises his fame was proverbial. "Shall I go with him?" I said, "and must I go alone?"

"And would you leave me?" she asked, imploringly – her dark eyes turned towards my face in a passion of reproachful tenderness, of which she herself scarce understood the meaning, "Oh! I thought once that I could let you go, though it has been life and happiness untold having you to talk to and read with. I fancied I should only mourn for you for a while – like the other island girls who weep and lament, and then dry their tears and dance and sing as if nothing had happened. But, oh! It is not so with me. They always say the Fletcher-Christians are different. I shall die! I shall die! I know I shall."

And with that she cast herself on my neck, sobbing as though her heart would break. In the same breath declaring that she would never consent to spoil my life by marriage with a poor savage island girl, but a few degrees superior to the women of Pingelap and Ocean Island whom she had so often despised.

By degrees I persuaded her to listen to my pleadings, and then calmly set before her my plans for the future. We must be married here, and after remaining on the island, living the idyllic life we were revelling in now, we would sail for Sydney in the Florentia, or some other vessel, and there begin life in earnest. Some employment would be found, doubtless, which would pave the way, by which I might make a serious effort towards a career, perhaps a competency in the future, or even a fortune.

I had but little difficulty in carrying out my plan. The elders of the community, the relations and friends of Miranda, were overjoyed at the prospect of her marriage with a person of my position, who might also be enabled to do them many a good turn if I settled in Sydney, a port with which they had close business relations. I found, too, that I was not altogether an unknown personage. Some of the young men who had made voyages in whaleships had heard of my companionship with Captain Hayston. However, it would seem that all the natives whom they had met had given a good account of me as a fair dealer, and, moreover, generous in my treatment of them, – an apparently unimportant matter at the time, but serious enough now. Miranda told me afterwards, that had it been otherwise nothing would have induced her guardians to give their consent, or her to defy their decision.

As it was, however, all seemed couleur de rose. No great preparations were needed. The simple island fashion was not encumbered with any great multiplication of garments. On the happy day Miranda was escorted to the modest building which did duty for a church by a band of white-robed maidens, in whose dark hair was wreathed the crimson blossoms of the coral plant and the hibiscus, with little other adornment but nature's furnishing in the flower-time of life. My comrades were selected from the younger men of the island, among whom I had always taken care to stand well, joining in their sports, and entering as an equal competitor their athletic contests. I was therefore looked upon as a most desirable acquaintance, able to hold my own, moreover, in all manly accomplishments (except swimming), and much esteemed for a gift of relating adventures in strange lands, and describing the foreign manners and customs with which a roving life had made me familiar.

It might have been imagined that a girl so singularly gifted and attractive as Miranda would have had lovers in abundance, by whom a successful aspirant like myself would be regarded with jealousy. Unlikely as it may appear I observed no feeling of this kind. In that strange society, the passions which rage so fiercely in more civilised communities appeared to have lost their force, or to flow with the peaceful motion of the incoming tide rather than the resistless rush of a mountain torrent, which love, hate, jealousy, and envy in other lands so often resemble. The young men admired Miranda, indeed, worshipped her from afar. But they seemed rather elated by her good fortune, as it so appeared to them, than enviously disposed, and had no thought of other than the warmest friendship for their more fortunate companion. Even Fletcher Quintal, who might have been expected to view with dislike, if not a stronger sensation, my marriage with his favourite cousin, had apparently no feeling of this sort. He certainly expressed none, but congratulated me with all the warmth which a brother might be supposed to exhibit at the marriage of his best loved sister with his dearest friend. Truly it was the long lost rediscovered Arcadia. There were moments when I doubted whether it was wise to leave a land where care was unknown; where want, with its attendant evils, had never been heard of; where there were no rich men to envy; no bad ones to fear; no poor to despise; where no one died but of old age or mishap; whence all the ills that flesh is heir to had, like the snakes of Ireland, been banished by some good genius, and only the gifts of virtue, contentment, and regulated industry remained. But there was wild blood in my veins, long dormant as it had lain. The murmur of the ocean seemed to call me with a tone of magical power. I longed for the wave-music once more – for the voyage which was to speed me to my birthland. I hurried on the preparations for our wedding, and, lingering though were all the slow sweet hours, endless the days, almost tedious the soft starlight glow of the summer nights, the day of days at last dawned that was to herald the happiness of a life-time.

Our small domain had been carefully measured and marked out for us. A cottage had been built, thatched with palm leaves, floored with the soft mats of the island, simply furnished, and, as it happened, near to a bubbling spring, and shaded by the wondrous wild orange, which here grows almost to the height and girth of a forest tree. It happened to be the flower-time of these charming fruit bearers, so that wreaths and garlands of the blossom sacred to Hymen were plentiful and profuse.

CHAPTER XV

EPITHALAMIUM

Our marriage day! Oh, day of days! Dawn of a new existence! 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. When he blessed our union in the solemn language of the ritual familiar to me in the days of my childhood, every head was bowed, each woman's eye was wet with heart-felt sympathy and warmest affection for their erst-while playmate.

The day was cloudless, a breeze at times sighed through the fragrant foliage of the grove wherein the little church had been built. 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 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; and yet all these phases of experience I had known and reckoned with even in my short life.

No; these and kindred ills were forgotten, banished from earth and sea. On this blissful morn the golden age of the earth seemed to have returned. Recalling the half-forgotten classics of my boyhood, I could fancy that I saw fauns peeping through the leaves of the orange grove, that the ages had reverted to the freshness of the elder world, when the flush of the fair Arcadian life informed all things with divinity.

And Miranda, my bride of brides! what words can describe her as she stood, with an expression half-timid, half-rapt, and inspired, before the humble altar that day? Her simple dress of virgin white which but slightly concealed while it outlined the curves of her statuesque form; her large dark eyes, which had often appeared to me to hold a shade of melancholy, were now irradiated by the love-light which she, in the purity and innocence of her heart, made no attempt to conceal. Her soft, abundant tresses had been gathered up into becoming form and classic simplicity, and, save a wreath of scarlet berries and the traditional orange blossom, she wore no ornament. As all unconscious of her maiden loveliness she stood beside me, with her head raised and an expectant smile which disclosed her pearly teeth, she seemed to my enraptured gaze a daughter of the wave, – no mortal maiden, but a being compact of air and sea and sky, visible but beneath the moonbeams, and unrevealed to the dwellers of the garish day.

We had been but a month wedded; our simple home, our tiny domain, our forest rambles, our sea-baths at dawn and eve, as yet contented us – filled us with all fullest delight in which mortal beings can revel beneath this ethereal dome. And yet the spirit of unrest, the veritable serpent of the world's fairest Aidenns, gradually found means to discover himself.

Miranda and I had, indeed, begun to discuss our projected voyage to Sydney, and I had many times described to her an ideal home on one of the thousand and one bays which render the northern shore of the unrivalled Sydney harbour matchless in beauty and convenience for those who, like myself, have salt water in their blood. 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. Then your mother and sisters – I am so much afraid of them. They will regard me as a kind of savage, I am sure; and, indeed, compared with them, or real civilised people, I am afraid that I shall feel like one. And, oh! shall we ever be happier than we are now? Why should we change? Do you think we can come back now and then and visit my people? I should break my heart if I thought I should see them no more!"

I promised this and other things, doubtless, at the time. But before we had completed the conversation about our future life – which indeed supplied us with endless subjects of interest – the great island wonder-sign appeared. A shout – a rush of excited people past our hut told of a ship in sight. We were down at the beach nearly as soon as the others, and as a long, low barque came up before the wind, something told me that she was the Florentia.

A boat – a whaleboat, with a kanaka crew – put off soon after she was at anchor, and in the tall man at the steer-oar, whose commanding figure, even at that distance, I seemed to know, there was no difficulty in identifying our old friend Captain Carryall.

Directly he jumped ashore, a dozen of the islanders dashed into the surf and ran the boat up on the beach. Our recognition was mutual.

"Well, young fellow!" he said, "I've been hunting you up half over the South Seas. Wherever have you stowed yourself all this time? Why, what a man you've grown – a couple of inches taller than me, and I'm no pony. Brown as a berry, too! You'll have to come home with me this trip. Your old man's beginning to get anxious about you – and you know he's not much in that line – and your mother and sisters."

"Captain Carryall," I said, "there's no necessity for more reasons. I'm going to Sydney with you if you'll give me a passage."

"Half a dozen if you want it," quoth the jolly sailor. "And now I must have a word with my friends. Anybody been married since I was here last; no Quintals – no Millses! Mary, how's this? Dorcas – Grace – Mercy Young, I'm ashamed of you. And Miranda! Nobody run away with you yet? I see I must take you to Sydney and show you at a Government House ball. Then they'd see what a Pitcairn girl was like."

"You may do that yet," I said, "for, seriously, Miranda is now Mrs. Hilary Telfer. We have been married more than a month."

The captain could not refrain from giving a prolonged whistle at this announcement, which certainly appeared to take him by surprise. However, he rallied with ease and celerity, and addressing Miranda, whose hand he took as he spoke, said, "My dear! let me congratulate the son of my old friend, Captain Telfer, upon his marriage with the best, cleverest, and prettiest girl I have fallen across in all my wanderings. I don't suppose you have any great amount of capital to begin life with; but if two young people like you don't manage to find some path to fortune in a country like Australia, I'm a Dutchman. He needs to be a good fellow, and a man all round, to be worthy of Miranda Christian; but he can't help, as the son of his father and his mother, being all that, and more. So now, my dear! you must let me kiss you, as your husband's old friend, and wish you all happiness."

Miranda blushed as the warm-hearted fellow folded her in his arms, but submitted with becoming grace; and leaving her among her young friends, he and I strolled away towards our hut to talk over affairs more at leisure.

"Well, youngster!" said he, laying his hand on my shoulder, "I suppose you've had enough island life for a while, and won't be sorry to see Sydney Heads again. Nor I either. I've been out fifteen months this time, and that's rather long to be away from one's home and picaninnies. They'll be glad to see your face again at Rose Bay, I'll be bound. But they certainly will be taken aback when you turn up as a married man. Nineteen times out of twenty it's a mistake to tie one's self up for life at your age. But all depends upon getting the right woman, and Miranda is the one woman in a thousand that a man might be proud to marry, whether he was rich or poor, and to work and wear out his life for all his days. I've known her since she was a baby, and, taking her all round, I don't know her equal anywhere. It seems queer to say so, considering her birth and bringing up. But these Pitcairners are well known to be the best and finest women, in all womanly ways, that the world can show. And your wife is, and has always been, the flower of the flock."

I grasped the captain's hand. I knew that I had secured a powerful ally; and though I felt so secure in the wisdom of my choice that no disapprobation of family and friends would have had power to affect me, yet, in such matters, it is well to have a friend at court, and the captain's reputation for sense and sagacity stood so high, that I felt not only my relatives, but my acquaintances and friends, would be strongly swayed by his judgment.

"Now that we've got so far," he said, "you had better make your arrangements to sail with me on Sunday morning; this is Thursday, but my passengers want to see the island and the people of whom they have heard so much."

"Passengers!" I said. "How many? and where from?"

"Well, I picked them up at Honolulu. Half a dozen, and very nice people, too. They came in an English yacht that went to San Francisco for them, and they wanted to see Australia, and so came with me. They're rather big people at home, I believe, though they're very quiet, and give themselves no airs."

"Any ladies?"

"There are two married couples, and a young lady, with her brother."

"That's very serious, captain," said I. "I don't quite know how Miranda will get on with travelling Englishwomen – they're rather difficult sometimes."

"Miranda will get on with any one," answered the captain, with a decided air. "She will sit on my right hand, as a bride, and no one in my ship will show her less than proper respect. Anyhow, these people are not that sort. You'll see she's all ready to start on Sunday morning. 'The better the day, the better the deed.'"

So the captain went to pay a visit to the people of the settlement, among whom his free, pleasant manner and generous bearing had made him most popular. The girls crowded around him, laughing and plying him with questions about the commissions he had promised to execute for them, and the presents he had brought. These attentions he never omitted. Full of curiosity they were, too, about the English ladies on board. "How they were dressed?" "How long they would stay in Sydney?" "What they would think of the poor Pitcairn girls?" and so on.

With the elders he told of the whaleships he had spoken, and of their cargoes of oil – of the Quintals, or Youngs, Mills, or M'Coys who were harpooners and boat-steerers on board some of the Sydney whalers, and of the chances of their "lay" or share of profit being a good one. Besides all this, the captain consented to act as their ambassador to the Governor-General in Sydney, and lay before that potentate certain defects of their island administration – small, perhaps, in themselves, but highly important to the members of an isolated community. In addition to all this, he (as I heard afterwards) specially attended to my marriage with Miranda, of which he highly approved; telling the old pastor and the elders of the community that he had known my father for ever so many years; that he was highly respected now, when retired, but had been well known in the South Seas and New Zealand many years ago as the captain of the Orpheus, one of the most successful whalers that ever sailed through Sydney Heads.

"Captain Telfer of the Orpheus!" said one of the oldest men of the group, "I remember him well. I was cast away on Easter Island the time the Harriet was wrecked in a hurricane. He gave me a free passage to Tahiti, a suit of clothes, and ten dollars when I left the ship. He wanted me to finish the voyage with him and go to Sydney. I was sorry afterwards I didn't. He was a fine man, and a better seaman never trod plank. No wonder Hilary is such a fine chap. I can see the likeness now. I don't hold with our young women going off this island in a general way, but Miranda is a lucky girl to have Captain Telfer's son for a husband." All this the captain told me afterwards with slight embellishments and variations of his own.

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.

We were invested, so to speak, with the blessing of the whole community, and began our modest preparations with added cheerfulness and resolve.

In the afternoon we saw a boat put off from the Florentia and the visitors land. They were five in number. We could see them walk over to the village, where they were met by some of the principal people and a few of the women and girls. We had been making ready for our voyage, and having finished our simple meal, sat in the shade of our orange tree, near the door, and awaited the strangers whom I judged rightly that curiosity and the captain would bring to our dwelling.

In less than an hour's time we saw them strolling along the path which led to our nest. As they approached we arose and went to meet them, when the captain with all due form introduced us, "The Honourable Mr. and Mrs. Craven, Colonel Percival, Mr. Vavasour, and his sister, Miss Vavasour." Mrs. Percival had remained on board, as her little boy of four or five years old was not well. Miranda, rather to my surprise, was perfectly unembarrassed, and talked away to the stranger ladies as if she had been accustomed to the society business all her life.

I could see that they were pleased and surprised at her appearance, as also gratified with the manner in which she invited them to inspect our simple dwelling.

"Oh! what a charming nest of a place – quite a bower of bliss!" cried Miss Vavasour. "I declare I will come here when I am married and spend my honeymoon. What shade and fragrance combined! What a lovely crystal lakelet to bathe in! and I suppose, Mrs. Telfer, you go out fishing in that dear canoe? What an ideal life!"

"I quite agree with you and feel quite envious," said Mrs. Craven. "Charlie and I have been married too long to have our honeymoon over again; but it would have been idyllic, wouldn't it, Charlie?"

"Splendid place to smoke in," assented her husband. "No hounds meet nearer than Sydney, though, I presume. Drawback rather, isn't it?"

"You men are always thinking of horses, and hounds or guns," pouted Miss Vavasour. "What can one want with them here? What can life offer more than this endless summer, this fairy bower, this crystal wave, this air which is a living perfume? It is an earthly paradise."

"And the beloved object," added Mrs. Craven, with quiet humour. "You have left him out. It would be an incomplete paradise without Adam."

"Oh! here he comes!" exclaimed Miranda (as she told me afterwards), who had not been attending to the enthusiastic speech, but was watching bird-like for my approach.

"Who? Adam?" said Miss Vavasour, laughingly.

"Oh, no!" answered she, smiling at the apparent absurdity. "You must excuse me a little, but I was looking out for Hilary."

"Now, then, ladies!" said the cheerful voice of Captain Carryall, "we must get back to our boat. It's dangerous to stop ashore all night, isn't it, Miranda? We must leave you to finish your packing. It's a long voyage to Sydney, eh? It may be years before you see the island again."

We all went down together to the boat, where the visitors were seen off by all the young people of the island, the girls wondering with respectful admiration at the English ladies' dresses, hats, boots, and shoes – in fact, at everything they did and said as well. It was a revelation to them, not that they had any envious feeling about those cherished possessions. They had been too well trained for that, and were secure in the guidance of their deeply-rooted religious faith and lofty moral code. On the other hand, their visitors admired sincerely the noble forms and free, graceful bearing of the island maidens, as well as the splendid athletic development of the men.

"Here, you Thursday Quintal, come and show these ladies how you can handle a steer-oar," called out the captain. "He was the boat-steerer on board the Florentia one voyage, and steered in the pulling race for whaleboats at the regatta on anniversary day, which we won the year before last in Sydney harbour. We'll bring you ashore in the morning."

"Ay, ay, captain," said the young fellow, showing his splendid teeth in a pleasant smile. "It will feel quite natural to take an oar in a boat of yours again."

The wind had freshened during the afternoon, and the rollers on the beach lifted the whaleboat as she came up to the landing rather higher than the ladies fancied. However, they were carefully seated, and at the captain's word, "Give way, my lads," the crew picked her up in great style, while Quintal, standing with easy grace at the stern, the sixteen foot oar in his strong grasp, directed her course with instinctive skill so as to avoid the growing force of the wave. As he stood there – tall, muscular, glorious in the grace and dignity of early manhood – he seemed the embodiment of a sculptor's dream.