The Isle of Seven Moons/Chapter 27
CHAPTER XXVII
A SONG IN THE WILDERNESS
"Why didn't we make a copy of the chart?"
"Don't worry," he replied, touching his forehead, "I've got it all in here. It's too queer to forget."
The boy and girl stood on the southern slope of the divide, a mile from the gorge and the great sea wall, surveying the lay of the land.
It lacked an hour of high noon. The small ties with the military heels were scratched and worn from the long climb. Tiny drops of moisture beaded the tanned throat where it softly swelled into the bosom below the serge blouse. She was very tired, but her spirits and curiosity were unquenched.
"That must be the place."
He pointed to a little cape of sand which stretched out into the waters like a facsimile of Don Alfonso's pink tongue.
"But what does the spur in the corner of the chart mean?"
"Spur—spur, I wonder, Ben, if the sign didn't represent the trunk and branches of a tree?"
"Great head, Sally! Mine must be covered with barnacles. It's that single palm out there."
"How about the 5 and the M ?"
"It wasn't an M, was it?"
"I thought it was," the girl returned, "but that awful hand moved just as I was looking at the stone, and we hurried out after that. Perhaps it means five million burried there!"
Ben whistled.
"Five million. Now you are seeing things. But I'm ready to believe almost anything now. Still that figure's more likely to stand for some measurement. We'll dig around the tree tomorrow and find the iron men—if there are any—. I'll bet it s a practical joke that some fellow thought he'd play on his lazy descendants to make 'em work."
"Never mind, it will be fun just the same."
"There are your friends, Sally."
"Who?"
"The three crooks from the yacht."
Below the cape and headed away from it, three black figures, one taller and more slender than the others, one of medium size and burly, the last bow-legged and short, and trailing behind the others, picked their way over the sands in the noontide glare.
"I wonder if they've found the place."
"I don't know," he answered, "but they're getting very warm."
While Sally rested, Ben descended to the beach on a scouting expedition. He was far out on the sands when she, feeling thirsty and hearing laughing ripples that betrayed the presence of a brook somewhere in the woods behind her, went in seach of it.
It was a pretty, harum-scarum stream, unbridged except for boulders in it. With the birds she bent over to drink, when she heard far off haunting strains of music.
She looked for the flash of whirring wings. But it couldn't be that. Harsh voices too often went with the brilliant plumage. Besides, the sounds were like those of human voices singing—or spirits, if there were such inhabiting the island.
Frightened yet impelled by devouring curiosity, she stepped from stone to stone to the other brink of the brook, then wandered through the colourful maze of the wild-wood, on up the mountainside and towards the voices.
At last she hit into what must have once been a path cut through the thinning woods, but it was rankly overgrown and there were no traces of footsteps.
The path wound towards the sea and into a bright open space, once a rich garden, now a beautiful tangle, commanding a view over the descending phalanxes of trees to the waters, east, west, and south.
The north side was barricaded by a cliff-like section of the mountain, whose summit towered a quarter of a mile above.
Against the cliff and half-concealed by the deep green foliage of trees, their branches seeming consciously to protect and soften its ruin, was a great house, facing directly South. Its roof, dulled by Time from bright red to the hue of rust, had fallen in at different places. But many of the slender pillars supporting the upper and lower verandahs, and the gracefully carved balconies, were still intact. In the windows, tattered remnants of curtains fluttered back and forth, stirred by the disconsolate wind.
The whole place, designed in the sunny style of the early French and Spanish colonies, was covered with vines and the vesture of decay. But it had grown old gracefully, as a woman who, long after youth has fled, adds a late loveliness that charms more than her earlier bloom because of its haunting elusiveness and what it so pathetically suggests.
Now, from the apparently deserted house, floated the same strains of music, slow and sorrowful, as if someone were chanting a requiem for the dead.
The great doors were swung open, their upper hinges dislocated by some violent convulsion. She entered, following the thread of song.
Dust and ashes lay everywhere. At every step she started little golden typhoons whirling in the stray sunbeams. There were mounds on the quaint eighteenth century tables and spindle-legged chairs, some overturned, some still upright and arranged in an intimate circle, unbroken by the capricious catastrophe that had startled their occupants into flight. Ceilings, mirrors, and candlesticks, were thick with mazes of cobwebs, and on one of the tables the torn pages of a book stirred in the breeze.
It was bound in vellum and had a clasp of jewelled bronze. She looked at the torn stubs. So exquisite had been the workmanship that some of the colour of the illuminated French text still brightened the yellowing pages. It lay there just as the fair hand had left it. The girl looked around, almost expecting to hear the rustle of a silken skirt trailing through the room.
She started towards the door, but paused a moment to look at the rows of pictures. Two had fallen on the floor; the rest still hung securely upon the wall. Beruffed and long-curled cavaliers, and ladies with billowing skirts, and coiffures towering high like the poops of ancient galleons, or clad in the revealing costumes of the later Napoleonic era, stared back at her as if wondering at her intrusion.
A gloomy sea-scape hung over the piano, and in the adjoining corner of the wall, its companion, now nothing but a gaping frame. Jagged remnants of canvas left in the slits of the tarnished gilt, showed that the painting had been hurriedly slashed from the carved wood, undoubtedly by some thief, fearful of discovery.
She heard a stray footfall above her head, and again the slow-measured, sorrowful chant. For all its weirdness in these strange surroundings, it was so beautiful that she was not afraid. She ascended the staircase. In the deep layer of dust upon the rail, at regular intervals, were the recent impressions of human fingers.
On tiptoe she stepped over the hallway, and saw three figures within the most spacious of the upper rooms. Under a moth-eaten canopy, the bed was banked with flowers. And there, as though she had fallen asleep overcome by their fragrance, lay the tiny form of a very old lady. Grey ringlets, like a child's, fell over delicate cameo features, pale as the whitest of the blossoms. She made even Death seem a lovely thing when it brought so deep and quiet a slumber.
Beside her knelt a young man, whose profile was like hers but dark and animate. From his hand an open prayer-book had fallen on the floor.
Near him a girl clasped a crucifix. She, too, was alive, for her rounded bosom rose and fell gently, and the olive-brown cheeks were richly tinted with the warm colour of ripening apricots.
They rose from their knees, and the watcher noticed behind them a third figure,—a giant negro, fully a half over the six feet, in a livery of faded blue and gold. He had the unmistakable look of the congenital mute.
She stepped back of the door, as the young man and the giant mute lifted their burden very tenderly upon a bier of leafy boughs, scattered the flowers upon it and bore it down the staircase, the woman leading the way, with the crucifix held high before her.
To the left of the house and facing the morning sun, was a pile of black-red, newly-turned earth. There were mounds and crosses on either side.
Never noticing the one unbidden mourner who stood hidden behind the torn draperies of a window near them, they laid the quiet form on its bed of flowers in the dark earth.
The last rite payed, and the rough cross raised, they turned back towards the house, pausing under the trees. Sally listened to their voices, the young man's quite as pleasing in ordinary speech as in the chant, the woman's not shaming the rich contralto of the requiem, but shot through now, even in this sorrowful moment, with a certain lilt, as if she were altogether in love with him.
Their talk was all in French. Only a few nouns and verbs, and fewer adjectives, remained from Sally's old High-School vocabulary but she caught this much:
" return with "
"No, no, monsieur, I will stay."
Then the contralto voice asked a question which she could not understand, but she translated a fragment of the answer.
"Here—the one home left."
Again in the woman's voice she recognized two words, "dig," and "gold."
Shaking his head and smiling as at a child's foolish fancy, he answered still in French:
"I will dig—yes—but it should be for food, not for fool's gold."
Still another band of strangers who knew of the mysterious treasure!
In her surprise Sally's hand fell on the piano keys, warped and dried like the teeth in those death-heads on the sand. She started the little golden typhoons whirling through the sun beams again, and a snarling discord that woke the echoes of the house.
Startled, she shrank from the ancient instrument, but then, a little ashamed of her fears, and full of sympathy for the young man outside, whose face was so kind, she passed out of the doorway to offer help.
But when she reached the tree under which the three had stood, they had disappeared, probably in the surrounding forest.