BOOK III
CHAPTER I
MAD LESTRANGE
They knew him upon the Pacific slope as “Mad Lestrange.” He was notmad, but he was a man with a fixed idea. He was pursued by a vision:the vision of two children and an old sailor adrift in a little boatupon a wide blue sea.
When the _Arago_, bound for Papetee, picked up the boats of the_Northumberland_, only the people in the long-boat were alive. Le Farge,the captain, was mad, and he never recovered his reason. Lestrange wasutterly shattered; the awful experience in the boats and the loss ofthe children had left him a seemingly helpless wreck. The scowbankers,like all their class, had fared better, and in a few days were aboutthe ship and sitting in the sun. Four days after the rescue the _Arago_spoke the _Newcastle_, bound for San Francisco, and transhipped theshipwrecked men.
Had a physician seen Lestrange on board the _Northumberland_ as she layin that long, long calm before the fire, he would have declared thatnothing but a miracle could prolong his life. The miracle came about.
In the general hospital of San Francisco, as the clouds cleared fromhis mind, they unveiled the picture of the children and the littleboat. The picture had been there daily, seen but not trulycomprehended; the horrors gone through in the open boat, the sheerphysical exhaustion, had merged all the accidents of the great disasterinto one mournful half-comprehended fact. When his brain cleared allthe other incidents fell out of focus, and memory, with her eyes setupon the children, began to paint a picture that he was ever more tosee.
Memory cannot produce a picture that Imagination has not retouched; andher pictures, even the ones least touched by Imagination, are no merephotographs, but the work of an artist. All that is inessential shecasts away, all that is essential she retains; she idealises, and thatis why her picture of a lost mistress has had power to keep a man acelibate to the end of his days, and why she can break a human heartwith the picture of a dead child. She is a painter, but she is also apoet.
The picture before the mind of Lestrange was filled with this almostdiabolical poetry, for in it the little boat and her helpless crew wererepresented adrift on a blue and sunlit sea. A sea most beautiful tolook at, yet most terrible, bearing as it did the recollections ofthirst.
He had been dying, when, raising himself on his elbow, so to say, helooked at this picture. It recalled him to life. His willpower asserteditself, and he refused to die.
The will of a man has, if it is strong enough, the power to rejectdeath. He was not in the least conscious of the exercise of this power;he only knew that a great and absorbing interest had suddenly arisen inhim, and that a great aim stood before him—the recovery of thechildren.
The disease that was killing him ceased its ravages, or rather wasslain in its turn by the increased vitality against which it had tostrive. He left the hospital and took up his quarters at the PalaceHotel, and then, like the General of an army, he began to formulate hisplan of campaign against Fate.
When the crew of the _Northumberland_ had stampeded, hurling theirofficers aside, lowering the boats with a rush, and casting themselvesinto the sea, everything had been lost in the way of ship’s papers; thecharts, the two logs—everything, in fact, that could indicate thelatitude and longitude of the disaster. The first and second officersand a midshipman had shared the fate of the quarter-boat; of theforemast hands saved, not one, of course, could give the slightesthint as to the locality of the spot.
A time reckoning from the Horn told little, for there was no record ofthe log. All that could be said was that the disaster had occurredsomewhere south of the line.
In Le Farge’s brain lay for a certainty the position, and Lestrangewent to see the captain in the “Maison de Sante,” where he was beinglooked after, and found him quite recovered from the furious mania thathe had been suffering from. Quite recovered, and playing with a ball ofcoloured worsted.
There remained the log of the _Arago_; in it would be found the latitudeand longitude of the boats she had picked up.
The _Arago_, due at Papetee, became overdue. Lestrange watched theoverdue lists from day to day, from week to week, from month to month,uselessly, for the _Arago_ never was heard of again. One could not affirmeven that she was wrecked; she was simply one of the ships that nevercome back from the sea.