The Isle of Seven Moons/Chapter 20
CHAPTER XX
THE GIRL LINDA
Philip did not appear for breakfast, and MacAllister found him tossing in his bunk. After a hasty examination the gambler left him, and climbed the companionway to the deck.
"It's more than a morning-after fever," he said to Carlotta, who lolled on a steamer chair under a gay bit of awning, clad in a very negligent negligee of apricot silk, which allowed a maximum of comfort in that climate, as well as freedom for those fleshly assets of hers which made her a favourite at Standishs'.
Across the water came the creak of a windlass from the red-waterlined tramp, weighing anchor. A half-mile away ranged the red roofs of the town and its walls, the more modern glistening white, the ancient, like the Café of Many Tongues, worn by Time to a softer grey. Southward, an obsolete fort with a puffy little cannon and a pyramid of rusting cannon-balls, sentinelled the place. From the twin towers of the venerable Spanish Cathedrals came the sound of pealing bells.
"Wonder if we can rustle a doctor in that God-forsaken hole," continued MacAllister and then,—"Hey, Pete, take the launch, and bring the best pill-mixer they've got in the place. If he bucks, use him gently, Pete, very gently."
The girl descended to Phil's cabin to administer the first aid of caresses, the only nursing technique in which she had had any training, mentally cursing, the while, her idiocy (she called it "boneheadedness") in leaving her habitat (that she called "God's Country"). Why should she be chasing a "fool kid" who wanted to "shake her," when, as all the real world knew, millionaires should be decorating her with diamonds and "poils"—her with her face and figure!
On deck, MacAllister watched the dock, where the little launch lay moored, through his glass. Pete was evidently following his leader's instructions to the letter, for a half-hour later MacAllister saw him backing to the wharf, one hand seemingly twisted in the collar of a struggling figure, the other hand, probably armed with an eloquent automatic, levelled on a gesticulating crowd of natives.
He got away from the wharf in perfect order, and reached the yacht. Up the ladder under Pete's gentle persuasion, or rather above it, climbed a seedy sallow-faced individual with yellow slit-pupilled eyes that looked more dangerous than any instrument in his delapidated case.
"He's a nasty bird, Cap. Keep your lamps on him," warned Pete. "Those brown on shore are stirrin' up a hell uv a mess over the Frenchy. Better weigh anchor an' damn quick!"
MacAllister summoned the shanghaied sailor, the only member of the Aileen's original crew with them, ordered up steam, then turned to the snarling-eyed practitioner of medicine.
"Here—you! Go below and fix your patient. If you try any dirty work, you'll sail with us—in bracelets."
Wincing at the clinking handcuffs, this poltroon of a practitioner scuffled, or rather slid below, and after testing pulse, forehead, and throat, and snapping out a few questions, took from his case a bottle of powders.
"Try it yourself," the gambler ordered.
The other protested, with a sputtering of oaths and angry gestures, replaced the bottle, and took out others, which he tasted.
"I thought so, you weasel. Now leave those bottles here and give the directions, pronto."
Again he obeyed, and they climbed the companionway.
Steam was curling from the funnels. From off-shore came a native row-boat. In the prow stood a pompous pot-bellied individual in a braided uniform and queer visored red hat with a cockade. This tuppeny official waved a sword in one hand and gesticulated with the other. Two brown soldiers with rifles sat in the stern.
"What'd I tell you?" growled Pete. "Them theatre-sojers is going to subpeeny us."
The chains rattled through the hawser-holes; up came the anchor; the screw churned the water under her stern; and the yacht glided on her way.
The town with its sin and squalor had been sinister and tragic enough the night before, and in it still lurked cutthroats worthy of fear, but the officialdom of the port was as ineffectual and comic as the cast of any slapstick opera-bouffé of the nineties.
Around the fort bustled little ludicrous, gay-clad figures. There was an explosion. A grape-shot skimmed the waves, a third of a mile on their port. A cloud of dust rose. The ball had cut a gaping hole in a ramshackle building on the opposite shore, and the half-naked occupants danced in frenzy on the sands, then scurried pell-mell into the palms. There was another wheezy little roar. Fragments of old iron showered the air. The little cannon had exploded and there were bright little splashes of colour on the sand, for all the ludricous soldiers in their gay uniforms lay flat on their bellies, both the sound as well as the mortally hurt.
From the prow of the row-boat wildly swished the sword of the fat official with the rakish cockade.
The gambler turned to Pete and the Pink Swede, and crooked his shoulder towards the sallow-faced practitioner of medicine.
"Overboard!"
They grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and tossed him, bag and all, his legs sprawling ridiculously in the air, clean over the port rail.
He could swim just enough to stay afloat till the row-boat reached him, and the two soldiers dragged him like a half-drowned muskrat by his heels over the stern, losing their rusty rifles in the process.
"Cuss away, ye Mocho galoots, ye flea-bitten curs, ye nicotine shrimps, ye little walking fried sausages!" was Old Man Veldmann's parting salvo, which, as Carlotta observed, was "goin' some" even for this graceless old artist.
So, after executing in this very modern way the old freehooters sentence of "walking the plank," the mongrel crew of Broadway pirates sailed away, leaving the frenzied officials of the port to take toll of their casualties.
Meanwhile, between the acts of this comic opera, the girl Linda, in her stifling room in the Café of Many Tongues, was enacting a real drama of her own. She was genuine enough herself, but, as business is business in all cities and ports, her father, a Spaniard who conducted the café in the way all such places must be run, was not heavily burdened with scruples of any sort, and her own life as his assistant had been necessarily free from many conventions. But her mother, an emigre Frenchwoman, thrifty and a regular worshipper in the big white Cathedral, had left with the girl a set of principles far beyond the conception of the average patron of the Café of Many Tongues.
She sat at the narrow window, mending the jacket of the wounded man, who lay asleep on her bed. His head was bound with a bandage of her own careful making.
She had her arts. She could use the grace of that olive-brown shoulder, all of her lithe body if necessary. Yet now, for all its softly rounded outlines, it gave only the impression of strength, boundless vitality, and the refreshing repose that the wounded man needed most. The face softly-rounded, too, was that of an olive-brown Madonna, faintly flushed with rose and Love. The sun-ray slanting through the window revealed a faint silken floss on the cheek.
From below sounded the voice of her father, busy with foaming spigots, and ordering jabbering coolies to their duties; the clatter of shifted chairs, and the clink of glasses. Angry tropical insects droned through the room, their vibrating wings translating the torpid heat into sound. She brushed them away from the sleeper's face, bent over and kissed him on the cheek, and fondled the wave in his hair. Playfully she shooed away a little lizard, then returned to her seat by the window and began to sing softly as she sewed. She was very happy. Not that she would have had him wounded—to suffer so—oh Mother Mary in Heaven, no! But if it had to happen, the Blessed Virgin must have sent him to her.
"At first sight!" There is no such love you say. But there is such a glorious thing, sceptic and worldly wiseman notwithstanding. If you have the seeing eye you will find before you grow old or at least then, when the inner eye clears as the outer—dims many witnesses who will testify to the miracle.
Linda could have been one of the witnesses. The miracle had happened over a year ago when into the Café of Many Tongues first came this foreigner with his air of old-world distinction. How well she remembered that! And there he was now, weak and wounded, yet with her, and in her care, which was all that mattered.
He opened his eyes and called:
"Linda!"
"Yes." It was only one word, yet it told many things.
"The yellow paper—the chart! Did you see it?"
She searched everywhere. At the envelopes she looked carefully, jealously studying the handwritings on each.
"No, Monsieur, there is no yellow paper, only these envelopes, three white, and this one of blue."
"They have taken it, the scoundrels!"
He tried to rise—
"I must start today!"
"Where, Monsieur?"
"For the island."
"You are too weak. Lie still," she said, lowering him gently as a mother a child. "You must be good. Maybe in three weeks, maybe two, you can go."
"And then," she said, remembering the words the Old Padre had once repeated in the Confirmation Class, in that very pretty story,—"Whither thou goest I will go!"
The wounded man, too weak to protest, closed his eyes.
"Whither thou goest, I will go," the girl softly repeated.