The Isle of Seven Moons/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII
THE AILEEN
So, by haphazard chance, or trick of Fate, were gathered in the port the motley crews that were to embark on that mad voyage, whose perils and strange adventures your historian will try to recount, from his own recollections, pieced out by the records and the most trustworthy tales of the survivors. But one of the participants was still missing.
He was on—the Tuesday after the wedding—conversing with none other than Queer Hat, the painter who had walked from the wharf so abruptly that morning of Ben's return, and who was destined to have nothing more to do with Sally's life except, perhaps, his propelling of the Unknown into it.
He—that is Queer Hat—was still daubing away, erasing and retouching his portrait, presumably for the Academy. For a fellow of only moderate talent, it wasn't a half bad portrait at that. Being one of those chaps who never can allow an opinion or observation to go unexpressed, he was haranguing the stranger, a friend of a few months, on the virtues of the portrait or its fair original.
"It's the damndest thing to get—begging your pardon" (he bowed to the canvas), "I mean that compounding of common sense and the spirituelle"—here he turned half-hopefully to his auditor—"Or do you get it?"
But the other, who could let his reflections travel their designed course without delivering them up to chance companions, gazed at the picture in silence. He was presumably Latin, but not at all Gascon. His features, delicately moulded, were saved by the clean-cut conformation of jaw and skull. When he moved it was alertly, but out of action he seemed to possess a repose with which the poorly in formed rarely credit his race. The eye, too, was steady but sad. There was about him the air, bravely and gracefully borne, of one who had always played in hard luck, whose ancestors had bequeathed him, possibly an honoured name, most certainly a heritage of poverty, and with it, of fatalism.
A slight, but not disfiguring, scar on his cheek, and a touch of ribbon in his lapel, suggested some service in the Foreign Legion.
But Queer Hat was pleasantly meandering on,
"The figure, too, balks me. Somehow, simplicity seems to be the most complex thing in the world, the most difficult thing to arrive at. There's spring lilt—poise"
The Legionnaire now broke his silence
"Elan,—you mean—body and spirit pointe du pied—on tiptoe, you would say."
"By Jove, that's good—on tiptoe!" the other exclaimed, but the Frenchman went on as if he hadn't heard him.
"One has the impression of having seen her, somewhere before."
"You're not getting that American habit!" the painter not unpleasantly jeered, "Haven't I met you somewhere before! Ye Gods!"
Only half conscious of his meaning, the other continued,
"No, it's not that, it is only that beauty"
"I know what you mean," the painter replied, taking the explanation out of his mouth, "it's only that that elusive thing is so eternal, so right, that when you meet up with it in any form, you'd swear you'd known it—or her (indicating the picture) always, and you have, anyway, in your dreams."
But the Legionnaire was examining the background with its masts, and cordage, and wash of blue water. "There is not so much colour, but it is very like the Breton coast. But perhaps it is only because I am homesick."
"Yep, quaint place—called Salthaven," the painter said between puffs.
"Salthaven—in what department, mon ami!"
"Department! Oh, I see—in what state—Massachusetts—" then he looked up at him inquiringly. "You're not thinking of trekking there, you mad Gaul, are you?"
"I tire of your city, fren' Tony, too much fever"
"And that from you!"
"It is a different sort of fever. Our kind is that of the sea, of the winds, and is governed by some law of Nature. There is peace even in the unrest, the wandering. But here in your nervous city, it is the spasm of the—what is your happy idiom—the capon decapitated? And, perhaps, I am homesick, though a man might travel far even for a pair of eyes he had never seen away from the canvas. I did once, my fren', for a miniature—as far as Bokhara—and there is so much more there." He bowed to the canvas, then stood up. "Can you unravel me your railroads?"
"That's easy. Here's a time-table. The New Haven will take you there, if it chances to be its wreckless day."
"Wrecks are always my good fortune, my bad that always I survive them."
He started for the door, but was called back by his jovial friend.
"Hey there, now get this straight,—from Bunker Wharf you turn to Water Street, then two turns to the right and three to the left, up the hill. House, French windows—whitewashed trees, walk, shells, whitewashed everything—skiff groaning with flowers—and—name's Sally."
The other looked at him with a twinkle of amusement.
"Crude, as you say in your expressive American, but au revoir."
As he had judged from the picture and his friend's portrayal, the town was like the other his boyhood remembered, with roofs sloping to the harbour, but neither so gayly coloured nor sheltering so joyous a life. And this sky was blue yet not quite so blue, if he trusted his fancy.
Other pictures came back to him,—his proud testy old granduncle, tall and silver-haired, hawk-eyed and hawk-nosed, and Bourbon to the backbone, who, ever since the last Napoleon, had locked himself in his château and gardens, sternly refusing to recognize the new order by even so much as mingling with it, while his estate dwindled to a third of its former glory and, what was more to the point, to even less of its liquidability; of his beautiful mother whose spirit was as determined as that of the old Royalist, and whose marriage to the rising young councillor from the North had broken the old man s heart, though it had proved longer in the breaking than one would have supposed; and so on down through the long sequence of his ill-lucked wanderings since.
The visions passed, and, though he was not at all given to vulgar curiosity, it was quite natural to follow those directions so chaffingly tossed as a farewell by Queer Hat. He traversed the two turns to the right, and three to the left, up the hill, as verbally diagrammed, found the white wash, the old skiff, and its cargo of petunias. However, over its creaking gate loomed something not in the prospectus,—a female most rigidly boned and coiffured, and most precisely pursed of mouth.
A few cues he caught from her conversation,—"Sally," and "kidnapped,"—"or run away to sea," then a more ominous "judgment of God." So he made his way to the beach.
The sky was overcast, but a half-mile away a fire was burning. He followed its pennons, to discover a group around it,—a tall fellow, pallid of feature, and dressed in contrasting black, of the sort, the observing stranger decided, an American would at once label "smooth"; a trio of rascals that most certainly deserved the epithet "precious"; a smartly-dressed youth, a little the worse for whiskey—and a girl.
Pictorially she would have made an excellent Carmen, he thought, with her swarthiness set in a crimson dress, but she seemed ill at ease, every once in a while casting a troubled glance at the sea.
Not being given to eaves-dropping any more than to other forms of inordinate curiosity, he would have passed on, but the object which they were studying caught his attention. It was an old oil-painting. Strange, he thought, when that was just the thing that had sent him here. The flames leaped up a little and even at that distance he thought the painting familiar, though all he could detect was that it was a marine.
"Curious," he said, then "impossible," but he felt in his pockets as if searching for some object that was precious and so always carefully carried. He found it,—a yellow paper, a rough chart of some sort, very old, and yellow, and crinkled. The outlines upon it strangely resembled the lines on the back of the painting on the Huntington wall.
He hid in the lee of a rock close at hand, again catching enough of this conversation to piece out a suspicious, if not absolutely incriminating, case.
The callow youth was talking or rather trying to
"You go to Hell, Mac"—Mac—something the listener couldn't be sure— "Th' ol' man don't give me Aileen, I take her—just like that—you shign up crew here—mos' dishtingshd crew"—he drunkenly waved his arms to take in the group—"an we'll sail away to lil ole islan'—'n spade up iron men in ches'—have funny lil fairy tale all 'r own."
And now the girl was talking, scarcely in the musical tones of the Carmen she resembled, though it is conceivable that the Bizet lady could have acquired the same raucous voice and gesture, had she been transplanted to this catarrhal belt.
"Who d'ya think yuh are, pulling this Robinson Croosoe stuff? It'd go big at Miner's, but as a real honest-to-Gawd journey, it doesn't make a hit with me."
She seconded this declaration with the queer twitchings of shoulder and hip, which, the stranger had observed, were the heart and soul of American dancing. A queer lot, but as amusing to him, in pantomime and patois, as a band of rioters in a Nice carnival to a Yankee tourist. It all depends on the point of view. The unfamiliar is always refreshing.
The leader admonished her in the same incomprehensible dialect:
"It'll do you good, Carlotta, to see some foam besides that you blow off glasses."
To this, the exotic but amusing Carmen responded that "steppin' on Broadway suited her better'n rollin' on the deep," also that "she didn't speak no language like the wild sea waves."
There was more argument, then her further declaration:
"I know, Mac, but there are some things I won't pull, an' shopliftin' a young steam yacht is one of 'em."
The Legionnaire was decidedly bewildered. Such sentences had never appeared in any conversational grammar he had studied, yet he had been told that he spoke perfect English. He began to think that his professors had been badly chosen, or else that the only way to study any tongue was in the natural habitat. But the next demand from the leader was more to the point.
"Here, let's look at that chart."
But the alcoholic youth wouldn't deliver the painting.
"You shtole this once, MacAllshter, but you don't get 'way with it again."
At this the girl raised her tousled black head from her voluptuous elbows, and broke in.
"Say, Mac, what did yuh try that fool stunt for? Second story worker—huh! I thought yuh had more sense. Yuh mighta got filled with lead." She paused and surveyed him slyly, almost with a challenge—"I suppose yuh thought I'd double cross yuh, didn't yuh?"
"Women have been known to change their minds," he responded.
"Yuh said it, Mac, I nearly did."
"Well, Hermione, little flower of the slums, pure lily springing from the mire"—the ironic epithets fell from his bloodless lips with a delicate, almost melodious, lilt—"in changing yours, see that you don't short-change yourself."
Meanwhile, during these retorts most courteous, the youth, replenished from the flask with which the man called MacAllister was maliciously plying him, gazed down at the painting.
"Funny lil ol' islan', ain't it now?" He kept repeating the idea as if it vastly amused him, "but whaz zis?" his tongue failing him a little more, "muz be lil tent."
"That's a mountain, son," the leader informed him.
"Mountain!" the boy echoed it vaguely as most astounding information, "but whaz zis, tthhen? Ol' Doc Sawbones—how are you, ol' top?" (bowing gravely to the skull and crossbones) "an' that mus' be ad for Turkssh cigaret."
"They're moons, you poor " (he couldn't catch this amazing appellative!) "seven of 'em."
Now this discovery of Carlotta's came near to unravelling the conversation, which the stranger mistakenly thought was extraordinarily uncommon. He decided that, in spite of his faulty knowledge of the purest Americanese, he could now understand the cryptic allusion to the "yacht," though why it should be called "young" was beyond him to fathom.
But the girl was talking on. Picturesque—but that voice—Diable!
"An' those marks in the corner—like chicken trac's an' letters?"
"That's the key to it," MacAllister deigned to explain. "And damned if I don't believe it's that island I heard of down in Kingston. If it is—by the beard of your alleged ancestor, Carlotta, it means treasure!"
"You mean," she said, "that that means real cash?"
"It's a fifty-fifty chance, you doubting Thomasina."
"Well, all right, but all I gotta say is,—if yuh can read money in those Shriner marks, I can bring yuh a stack uv Yiddish newspapers that'll cash in for millions." She turned away. "Gawd! It—" the pronoun referring to none other than her mentor, "IT," she repeated, "wants me to sign that fool contrac'!"
The further dialogue that now ensued between the three huskies, who had been lying motionless save for their masticating lips, was also illuminating.
The nearest, a bent old fellow, stood up, the flames leaping higher in the wind and revealing the matted whiskers which completely encircled his jaws. The stranger couldn't see the colour of his eyes, but they looked cunning enough, even at that distance.
Between pauses for salivary punctuation, he inquired:
"Now atter you gents has settled this among yerselves, supposin' ye let us sit in. To get down to cases, if I might ax ye, what might be the compensation fer all this risk to our souls?"
The explanation of the leader was now inaudible, but it didn't satisfy the second, a burly chap with a pugilist's crouch and build, and a frightful scar, which the firelight revealed, forking across his flat, challenging features.
"We gotta split better'n that," he growled surlily.
"But Mr. Huntington owns the boat, I'm promoting the job. You three can spilt a third three ways, if you know what that means."
"You mean he gets a third, you get a third, and we divvy what's left?"
And the gesture of his thumb, as he indicated the spoils-men, reminded the spectator of some sign of the vendetta.
"You're a lightning calculator, Pete, but you don't invest any capital or brains, you see."
"Mebbe, but you sail without us, then, hey Swedie?"
The last one addressed, the bullet-headed roustabout in the sleeveless red undershirt, with enormous biceps and a close-cropped head, merely returned his usual "Ay tank so," and lay down on the sands as if indifferent to, or confident of, the outcome.
The man called MacAllister apparently yielded the point, probably with his usual mental reservations, for even the lone spectator observed,—"I wouldn't give much for your share, Monsieur Pete."
Then, stamping out the fire, the six trudged over the sand to the East, the girl dragging behind in the torment of fear and indecision, while the youth still informed the night, over and over again, that it was "a funny lil ol' islan'."
Shortly after, the Frenchman hurried to the hotel, packed his bag, and took the creaky bus to the station, much earlier than he had expected.
Meantime the six, after a suitable refreshment at Tom Grogan's, resumed their journey, past the wharves and schooners, the sail-lofts and chandleries, to a dock clear at the other end of the waterfront.
Through a rift in the clouds, the moon shone on the Aileen, riding at anchor in all her trim beauty, a little way out in the harbour.
Alongside the dock lay a little gasoline launch, with a figure in the cockpit, working over the engine. To MacAllister's question the man replied,—"All set, cap," and the five stepped in the launch, the girl shrinking back as though it were a maelstrom she was about to enter.
"None of your sulks, Carlotta," ordered MacAllister, "come, in with you."
Then it was that Carlotta tried what was always her last resort, a still prettier bit of temperament, that luxury of all stars, than any she had ever conceived in more familiar haunts.
"Phil," she shrieked, grabbing the youth's arm, "yuh know I been true to yuh an staked yuh an' stood for your leaving me flat an everything. Before Gawd, I ask yuh not to go.—It means death—do yuh hear—death." And there was a sincerity in that last huskily whispered word that seemed to show more genuine fear than any desire for mere histrionic effect.
She actually cried (it was hard work for Carlotta, the weeping being rather expressed in shrieks and moans than salty tears), then ran the whole gamut of wringing of hands, and stamping, and kicking, until her arms were seized from behind, and across her vociferous lips was thrust a hand that was viselike for all its alabaster finish.
His watch came out.
"I'll give you just one minute, sixty seconds—d'y' hear? to make up your mind—once and for all."
She watched the hands of the stopwatch ticking away, as if the little black arrow marked her own swift race into the jaws of annihilation.
Phil was standing up in the boat, or rather trying to.
"Come on, be a shport, Carlotta."
Then he drunkenly fell athwart the gunwale, to be hauled in by the slack of the trousers, a ridiculous figure.
"All right, I know when I'm beaten," the girl admitted between the slightly relaxed fingers, and then as she stepped in the boat, her short skirts unnecessarily raised in abject apprehension of this alarming new means of locomotion, she muttered,—"But Gawd help that medyum if I ever get these claws on her."
The moon shone out gloriously now, in a golden and most engaging innocence, as she seems best to do when foul deeds are afoot, and the freshening wind brought the sound of church bells from off shore. At the ninth peal, the little launch with its self-important "put, put," headed for the yacht. They hove alongside, Phil hailing the solitary watch a trifle pugnaciously. A head appeared over the taffrail, as if ready for resistance. But recognizing the young son of the owner, the sailor let down the ladder, and the six adventurers climbed aboard.
Hearing voices on deck, the old engineer came above. He touched his cap to Phil, but this futile deference was all that he showed him, and the boy, in his nervousness to be off, commanded a little too brusquely:
"Get up shteam at once, Stephens!"
The latter was stubborn and did not budge from the companion way.
"Your father hasn't given his orders, sir," he said, as if that settled it.
"Look here, old boy, you do as I tell you or you'll be fired," stormed the prince chap with alcoholic ugliness.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Philip, but I only take orders from your father."
At a sign from MacAllister, Pushbutton Pete and the Pink Swede ranged themselves on either side of the recalcitrant engineer, the first confronting him.
"Stephens, you'll either get up steam or go overboard."
At the answering protest,—"Why this is piracy!" Pete's hairy hand was over his mouth, and he was catapulted by four strong arms into the bay.
"You oughtn'ta do that," cried Carlotta in alarm. "Why the poor fellah 'll drown."
But when she ran to the rail and saw in the moonlight silvering the dark waves the sure swift strokes of their victim, swiftly heading for shore, her fears of murder were dispelled, only to be succeeded by others equally alarming.
"He'll start the bulls after us, Mac."
The latter assuring her that "no flatfoot could walk with any speed on the asphalt, let alone on the water," turned to the sailor.
"You there, will you ship with us? We'll double your wages if you can use your hands and lay off your mouth. Might as well. If you don't,—" and he significantly indicated the disappearing swimmer.
"Just as you say, Cap," the man assented sullenly.
Pushbutton Pete, who knew something of engines, as the odd scars attested, went below, and in three-quarters of an hour, just as they noticed a suspicious scurrying on shore, they weighed anchor, slipped between the two capes, and put out to sea.
In the morning, Old Man Veldmann and the Pink Swede went over the side in little swinging seats, and changed the yacht's markings, rimming her portholes, and adding a line of red one foot below her gunwales. Then they ripped off the brass letter N from prow and stern, and one E of her name, ingeniously transforming it into a C, then transposed the I and the L. Forthwith, the Aileen became the Alice. To complete the deception, MacAllister searched through the yachting register and found the ensign of a man who happened to own a vessel of the same burthen and name as the newly christened Alice.
He went over to Carlotta, who lay in a steamer chair, strangely inanimate. She looked at the cut of the desired pennant, but feebly turned away her face.
"You're no Lady Duff Gordon, Carlotta, but you ought to be able to make something like this."
She groaned.
"The only flag I could make now, Mac, is the white flag of surrender."
However, the hands of the profane old man were quite equal to the occasion. A half-hour later the blue and white ensign of the supposititious owner was hauled to the peak.