The Isle of Seven Moons/Chapter 29
CHAPTER XXIX
TWENTY-ONE
Next morning, a half-hour before sunup, the long-boat with the skipper, Ben, Sally, and Spanish Dick, Benson the bo'sun, Jack Beam, and Zeke Yeo, and tents, provisions, and a stock of tools, left the North Star and stole out between the Twin Horn Capes. No life was yet visible on the deck of the black yacht.
Feeling perhaps that rigid ship's discipline must be relaxed on such a mad expedition, the old bo'sun remarked in a cautious voice to the skipper:
"You didn't congratulate me on my birthday, Captain. If there was an election in this latitude and longitude, I'd cast my first ballot today. I've just come of age," he finished with a smirk that would have been a fit piece of business for his execution of that ridiculous hornpipe the day before, or the old rascal's waggish recital of "I'm to be Queen of the May, Mother, I'm to be Queen of the May."
Then they bent to the oars right gallantly and skirted the white lime-stone cliffs of the western shore, under a sky as pink as a wild-rose on the hedge by the roadside, in late June.
The black-eyed sprite forward, laughed joyously as the prow danced up and down, now clear of the water, now descending to meet the crest of the following wave, buffeting it playfully with a resounding slap, and tossing the spray over her shinning face and the black tresses flying free. Her eye had little lights of excitement in them like those in the veil Spanish Dick was forever telling about.
And Captain Brent, sanguine-cheeked, blue-eyed, deep-chested, his brown hair and full beard but sparsely frosted, altogether a fine figure of a man, sat by the tiller and boomed out a song in his deep bass voice. The tune was an old one, but the words, Sally felt, for she knew the streak of poetry in him, were his own.
1
"When you played hookey and I played hookey
And we ran away to sea,
Our ship was a raft in a little pond,
But we sailed to the end of the world and beyond,
And wonderful things did we,
Yo ho! and wonderful things did we.
2
"Oh, we fell in with a pirate ship;
We spoke them loud and bold.
We raked them fore, we raked them aft,
When the devil s crew sank we only laughed,
And we divvyed their good red gold,
Yo ho! we divvyed their good red gold.
3
"When you played hookey and I played hookey
And we ran away to fish,
Our line was a string, our hook a pin,
But the big fish came a tumbling in
Oh! anything we did wish,
Yo ho! Oh anything we did wish.
4
"Oh, there were dolphins rainbow bright
That came to our net from the streams;
A whale with tons of good sperm oil,
Wicked sharks grinning for human spoil
And—things you see only in dreams,
Yo ho! Things you see only in dreams.
5
"And now we're rich and we can't play hookey
Just as once we did,
Can't dig such gold, can't catch such fish,
Nor sail those seas and how I wish
I was still a foolish kid!
Yo ho! I was still a foolish kid."
So they rowed and rowed until they reached the great sea wall, rising sheer above the foam that laced its foot like swirling chiffon in a breeze. The boy and girl gazed up at the white sea-birds sailing in circles around it, and saw the opening of the cavern, approached by the perilous path. Quite innocent in the bright daylight it looked, but still they shuddered, remembering.
Now they sighted the Cape and there, in the very centre, waving in the morning breeze, stood the solitary palm, per haps the key to the whole puzzle.
Rounding the Cape, they beached the longboat, unloaded the tools, and carried them to the base of the palm. The provisions were stacked farther back under a favouring clump of trees, and water was located. Then, in spite of Sally's impatient protests, at Captain Brent's orders they drove stakes where the verdure first fringed the coral-tinged sands with emerald, and in a jiffy poles and guy-ropes were set, the canvas stretched, and a shelter for Sally prepared against the swift-climbing sun.
But she would have none of this now, and made straight for the sentinel palm.
"What's your reading of the chart, Ben?" asked the skipper, but not as if that made any difference. One location was as good as another. Never a doubloon would they find anyway. Still, in any event, he would find, in fact he was already finding, the gold he was searching for.
With his forefinger Ben hastily sketched in the sand his recollection of the odd markings on the stone in the cavern.
"It was like this," he said, "or at least something like it"
"The tongue of land is surely the cape, and that forking mark, like a spur or a chicken track, represents the palm, we decided. It's as good a guess as any."
"A pretty safe bet that, I should say," commented the skipper over his shoulder. "My boy, you could read the devil's own chart of the shoals and reefs of Hades."
"It is a sort of a devil's chart, isn't it? but it was Sally's idea. I can't figure out the rest. Say Sally, was that letter after the 5 an M or an N?"
The boy and girl looked at each other in chagrin. They were both quite uncertain on that point. They had hurried away from the cavern too quickly when that grisly hand had moved.
"We were more scary than a pair of kids," Ben snorted. "I'm going back to the cave to make sure."
The girl had sudden visions of the skeletons, those vagabonds from the yacht, whom she did not like, the dizzy path, and the waiting buzzard.
"No, you don't," she shouted. "You've been there twice already. The third time something's bound to happen."
The skipper gave one big glorious laugh. He was having the time of his life, sure enough.
"Never mind, my gay young bucko, what's the difference? You might as well go for a divining rod, or fetch one of those crystal-gazers on Howard Street, that fool the Jackies on shore leave when they re three sheets in the wind. We ll just dig a little jag around here and try our luck."
Then he playfully tweaked the girl's ears, for that year it was not the fashion to cover them entirely (fortunately—for they matched the delicate colouring of the sands on which they stood).
"That 5 and the M mean five million gold pieces for your wedding chest, my lass."
"Now, who's bewitched by the island," she retorted, then executing that funny little dance of hers, a precursor of the modern fox-trot, called, for she was determined to banish that old cave idea from Ben's head:
"Come on, let's begin."
"Righto, my girl, but we must start with the proper ceremony, as befits this momentous occasion."
The skipper's voice boomed from his chest in a mock-forensic base, as he handed Ben a shovel.
"When the railroad is finished, the President drives the gold spike, and the Governor always unveils the town statue. Ben, you're the chief Bey or Pshaw of this island—so you strike first."
"No, the Captain's daughter always christens the ship. Let Sally try, for good luck."
So the mariners gathered round, and the small black slipper rested on the iron rim of the implement, when she glanced at Spanish Dick, who was rolling his eyes and crossing himself while he muttered incoherently.
"Whatever are you doing now, Spanish Dick?"
"Do not deeg, Señorita. It ees bad luck. The gold ees stain with red. That means someone die a bad death."
For once the girl lost her patience and upbraided him unjustly.
"For Heaven's sake, stop! You're nothing but a kill-joy, Spanish Dick."
The small foot drove the iron in viciously, and several inches deeper than one would have expected from the size of the slipper. Over her shoulder she tossed the sand and coral dust, showering the recalcitrant gypsy who, feeling very aggrieved, retired to a hillock in the shade, muttering to his small buff-coloured companion, the only one in all the world, he complained, that understood him.
Then they began in real earnest, Ben and the bosun, Jack Beam and Joe Bowling, old Yeo and the skipper himself. Shovels swung, picks described their arcs, backs curved and rose, rivulets of sweat dripped from sun-coppered faces, or glistened on the swift-playing muscles. Shining clouds of sand whirled through the air, and gaping holes yawned around the sentinel palm.
The sun curved through segment after segment of the zodiac, a canopy of luminous turquoise, but no gold except his own, stained or stainless, gleamed on their expectant—or doubting eyes.
At noon they paused for a spell, but after luncheon and a leisurely pulling on well-seasoned pipes, they struck again.
By now the keen edge of the holiday spirit had been dulled a trifle, but with the persistence of stout men of the open, who always like to see through a hard job once begun, their backs rose and fell in that slow swing of the digger which always seems to the idle onlooker too leisurely, but which, as the experienced hand knows, sets the only pace that can finish a hard stint with the spade.
Sally herself had tried to help as often as she was permitted. She paid for it. With her tendency to darkness, the backs of her hands always resembled the palest of the tea-roses around her home. And in spite of her activity, the palms had always kept the satin-soft finish of the moss-roses near by. But now, angry red welts and yellowish blisters discoloured them. Still, she kept at it until ordered to stop, then, with a cajolery which this quiet little maiden could use very cleverly, she soothed Spanish Dick's fears and persuaded him to take her place. At first he protested with a rapid play of his hands and shoulders.
"You tell me to deeg, Señorita,—I deeg. But only evil will come."
But finally he had taken his shovel, and from where she sat, under the flap of the tent, she could see his red bandana and shaking earrings, bobbing up and down in unison with the bald pate of old Benson and the straw coloured thatch of young Jack Beam, a few inches above the latest trench.
At three, Ben threw down his pick, surveyed the gaping holes in disgust, and announced that he was going to climb to the cavern once more, to make sure of the forgotten markings.
In vain, this time, did Sally protest. Finding him adamant, she insisted that she would go, too. However, he laughed at her premonitions and refused her company, setting out alone through the wooded tangle, northward towards the mountain.
And now as the girl sat there, the old, vague forebodings assailed her in overwhelming force, spoiling the golden holiday, as a swarm of pestiferous mayflies suddenly mars for the forest wanderer the sylvan beauty of a woodland scene. All utterly unreasonable and idiotic, she tried to tell herself, but without any responding conviction.
In her New England home, common sense was a quality as indispensable to existence as a roof to a dwelling. But now it seemed quite as frail and as much of a mummery as superstition in her old life would have been deemed. By some strange witchery of the clime, values were uncannily reversed. The substance there was shadow here. Common sense was gossamer, the fairy tale the tangible nugget of gold. The superstitions at which the world represented by Aunt Abigail would have so scornfully sniffed, this moment seemed the logical and immutable laws of this hauntingly lovely island.
As she tried to escape from the swarm of fancies, the vision of the haunted house on the mountainside flashed before her. An uncontrollable curiosity piqued her. Why hadn't she solved that mystery, at least! Even as she rose, a figure swung down the old overgrown pathway, that led like a clogged vein from the heart of the green forest. The figure, too, carried a spade over his shoulder. The girl turned, half-expecting to see one of the villainous voyagers of the black yacht.
It was the young man himself! The tenant of the haunted house, who had chanted the requiem so sorrowfully and so musically.
Behind him shambled a second figure,—the giant mute, his huge, loose-jointed six feet six looking altogether ludicrous in the faded blue livery with the tarnished gilt trappings. Set in a face as dead black, the girl thought, as the mire under the reeds of the Salthaven marshes, his eyes had the dull unhappy stare of one who silently protests against his affliction. The latter was all too evident, for his cavernous mouth, forced by the abnormally flattened nose to gape open for breath, showed only the grotesque root of a tongue. Still his uncouthness did not frighten her as the polished, well-groomed, but sinister, personage who led that other band. For the mute she felt only pity, and for his master an even gentler pang.
The young man paused and dropped the spade, surveying the group of seamen, at first in surprise, then with a half-quizzical, half-fatalistic look that concealed his disappointment. She caught and translated his exclamation.
"Voilà! Late as usual. Kismet."
His glances fell on the girl under the trees. He must have guessed her race, for, raising his hat with that courtliness which had amused Carlotta, but which would have both flattered and softened the heart of the average woman, he addressed her in English, perfect except for the elusive accent of the Frenchman, the tongue feathering the syllables as a rower the waves. And yet, for all its music and charm, which was strange to one accustomed to the frank rough speech of New England seafaring folk, the voice was quite as manly as theirs.
"Pardon me, Mademoiselle, are they your friends? It is not often that one sees a living soul on this island."
The girl rose. From the start she liked the stranger, his bearing—a pathetic mingling of forlornness and debonair bravery—and that same fleeting, half-quizzical expression in those sombre eyes, which suggested fires banked with the cold ashes of many burned out ventures, scattered by Patience over the surface to keep the flame of the undaunted spirit still alive. When she looked at him she, too, felt she knew what his mother looked like, and that was no disgrace, no implication of effeminacy—the mother would have been proud of her son. Then the lovely vision of the peaceful old lady on the bed of flowers recurred to her. She wondered but his question had not yet been answered.
"Yes, they all belong to one party. The tall good-looking man with the beard is Captain Brent. He's the Captain of the ship in which we came."
"Why did you come here, Mademoiselle? It is the back-stairs of the world, the jumping-off place, the springboard from which one leaps into a sea of oblivion or disaster."
"We came to find a castaway. It sounds like a fairy tale, but it's all true. The message came in a bottle from a boy we knew."
"No, it is not strange, for one who has sailed these seas and lived on this island knows that many things happen that the rest of the world would shake their heads at— And so the message in the bottle came from him—the young man I saw climbing the mountain?"
Again the quizzical expression and, startled, Sally asked:
"Yes, but how did you know?"
She flushed, and he, to spare her embarrassment, turned away, which was rather chivalrous and Spartan, with two wild roses blooming so suddenly and bewitchingly in the brown fields of her cheeks.
"When one has roved the world many years, he learns to read the human heart, and to put two and two together—or one and one—very quickly."
He looked at the toiling sailors again.
"And so they are digging for gold?"
"You guessed that, too—who are you, anyway?" she asked in sudden alarm, but the winning smile banished all suspicions. "Do you live on the island?"
He avoided a direct answer to this.
"I have lived in many places—but tell me, if I may ask, why you are looking for gold here. It is not the likeliest place for a mine."
"Those awful skeletons on the trail, and the chart on the stone in the cavern, gave us the clue. It seems silly, perfectly idiotic, to believe it, but, as Spanish Dick says and as you told me just now, so many odd things happen here. It's just fun to hunt for it—just a lark, you see. And anyway there's too much prose in the world, so I'm going to take the poetry when I find it. This was what was on it—the stone," and she traced what she could remember of the markings in the sand. "I'm not sure whether it was M or N, though.
"I don't want the gold for myself," she went on, "though it would be nice to have if there is any of course there isn't, but if there is—" (he smiled at her prettily-mixed sentences) "it would be fine for Ben—Mr. Boltwood after all he's stood. He could have his own ship then. Just imagine it—he was here almost a year and a half. That was hard wasn't it?"
"Yes, that must have been pretty hard here—all alone."
Then shyly she ventured, for she already felt quite at home with this well-bred stranger in the carefully mended clothes, which she correctly surmised were about all he possessed in the world:
"I'm an American and I live in Salthaven, way up north in Massachusetts. My name is Sally Fell."
He bowed—"Salthaven! I have heard of that place."
"Of course," she said, "it's on the map, but won't you tell me yours?"
"Charles Larone of—well—everywhere."
"I saw you yesterday."
"Yesterday, Mademoiselle?"
"Yes, back in the house by Cone Mountain."
"Cone Mountain?" He looked puzzled then smiled. "You have rechristened the Sleeping Giant up there? He is harmless now, but watch out when he wakes. He rises about every fifty years."
"But what do those seven moons mean?"
"You! Have you seen them, too?"
"No, but I've heard a story about them."
"It is not in my power to explain it, it has been that way for many hundred years. Perhaps it is some condition of sky and sea, perhaps it is supernatural. But they always come before some earthquake or misfortune."
Then, thinking of his own, she ventured,—
"I wanted to tell you I was sorry—so sorry." She hesitated then asked gently:
"It was someone near to you—the one you lost, wasn't it? You don't mind my asking?"
"I understand and thank you. It was my mother."
He was quiet for a moment, in which she longed to take his hand, to express her sympathy in one of the thousand impulsive and eloquent ways which a woman's heart suggests in times of sorrow. But he was speaking again.
"My mother came with my father, and the big Alexandre here, to the island six weeks ago. It was her only refuge from some trouble that has always followed her. My father lived only a week and, day before yesterday, I came to find her—dying. I had been looking for her for twenty years. I was glad to see her once more—even though it was the end."
There was nothing that she could say to this, but he felt grateful for her silence, and that which her dark eyes expressed so plainly. Perhaps even this slight unburdening of his sorrow was a relief to the reserved wanderer, for excepting the girl in the big house on the mountain side, there was no one who could offer sympathy, and on her he could not lean. That was enough of a predicament already.
Sally turned towards the diggers on the beach.
"I must tell them to stop, Monsieur." Unconsciously she called him this, although she had never had any but his imaginary countrymen of that High School course to practise on. "The island is yours and the gold, if there is any, belongs to you too."
Now Charles Larone did a Quixotic and a handsome thing when he answered:
"No, if, as you say, there is any gold—and I think you will find it—it belongs surely to Monsieur Boltwood and yourself. I am only a rover who happened here. The buried treasure is the property of him who finds it. Good luck to your picks and shovels, Mademoiselle— But make that an N and try five paces north."
It was indeed quite as fine a thing as if the duly recorded title to a California mine of richest vein, and not phantom gold hidden by long forgotten pirates, had been at stake. Perhaps the whimsicality of the whole affair amused him, but had the actual doubloons lain gleaming before him, he would have made the same answer. And never had he needed the money so much as now.
And the existence of that gold was more than a legend with his people—it had grown to be a tradition, almost an accepted historic fact. The yellowing chart, stolen by the vagabond with the forking scar at the Café of Many Tongues, had been in their possession more than a century and a half. So, too, had been the picture of the ghost-ship, with the facsimile chart on its back, cut by the covetous painter from the frame still hanging on the wall of the deserted house. Even here the tradition had held, for disease and death had come to the culprit in the end.
Two hundred years ago the rich treasure had been cached on the island. If the reading of the ancient paper was right, the hiding place was on this very cape where even now the sailor's pick rang as it struck something hard—perhaps some coral formation or volcanic rock. No—it was a skull which the Captain held for a moment in his hands, then tossed away.
With that old chart had gone the warning that disaster and death, violent and sudden, would come to unsuccessful seekers and finders alike. But there had been this romantic codicil—no harm would come from the quest to lovers who had plighted their troth and kept it faithfully and true.
At this ancient superstition he would have laughed now, as never in the days of his boyhood. It was his last chance after all his ill-starred wanderings. But—he had looked into the dark eyes and pure face of a girl, and another fairy tale, a very real one, was swiftly spun, there by the sands of the shining sea.
•••••••
As for the girl, she did not realize what had happened. How could she? Like all good women, and many whom the world calls bad, she was quickly sensible to the appeal of misfortune, especially when so bravely borne as by this gallant Frenchman. She liked him better than anyone she had ever known on so short an acquaintance, and she felt—at home with him.
Perhaps—if Fate had cast them together on this island three years before—but that is a gambling in sentiment, a speculation on margin that benefits no one. Her love for her sailor sweetheart had not been like the river that had sprung full-grown in the stranger's heart, as swiftly as great streams were born when the earth was still young and in the throes of adolescence.
It had been like a mountain-rill's, in a later and well-ordered age, separated by a strip of green forest from its companion stream. Side by side they flow on in playful friendship, singing to each other as they go, until the silver threads of rills become swift running brooks, and then, swiftly dancing down the mountainside, they change to deep-flowing rivers in the valley. Farther on, at last they will join, on their way to the sea.
Back in the hills their course might have been deflected—but now?
So the eyes of the girl turned towards the opening in the green wild-wood, watching for the sturdy five foot eight of a not exactly graceful, but very dear, sailor boy. She didn't like that cavern at all.
But it was an entirely different sort of a person whose figure was framed by the wavering green tracery of the foliage,—a girl who stood studying them with the air of one who had been so engaged for some time, and, with that sixth or seventh sense of a woman deeply in love, wondering what had happened.
As she started towards them, her fingers agitatedly tore the scarlet petals of a flower from its dark centre. She was not wont to do that with the things she loved.
Languorously she walked, not indolently. Her graciously-curved figure had too much of latent vitality for that. Sally thought the dark rich olive line of the cheeks and throat, so flawlessly curved, and the soft brown eyes, really beautiful. The newcomer was dark, like that other visitor of the island, who called herself Carlotta, but her beauty was gentler than the metallic hardness of the good-natured dancer. It didn't occur to Sally that her own loveliness, with all the purity and delicacy of outline, compared not unfavourably with the other types. Three very distinct ones they were, though all dark, and quite as strongly contrasted, as if one of them had been suddenly changed to Titian, and one to bright blonde.
At the relationship between the man and the girl he called "Linda," Sally was puzzled. Chivalry, protection, were in his attitude. Was there more?
She welcomed her frankly, winning only a shy response. The eyes of the strange girl were very soft, but something sharpened them now, and her strange concern placed a restraint on the other two.
It is a funny way Life has of snarling things. Sometimes the three fates are nothing but malicious cats. Linda's eyes were gazing at the man, his were bent on the younger girl, while she was watching the opening in the green, waiting for a fourth to appear. And the threads were even more badly snarled with Carlotta and Phil not far away.
Their attention was called to the blue sea again by the voice of Benson singing out to the skipper:
"If there ain't that black devil of a yacht again! If she'd only shake out some good canvas instead o' showin' them blasted funnels, I'd swear old Cap'n Bluebeard himself had his bloody claws on the wheel, or that woman-killer Lollinoy, with a chip of an iceberg for a heart. Wished I had a little eight-pounder and I'd send her to Davy Jones' locker where she belongs."
Trim and black, rakish and sinister, the yacht nosed her way over the blue, rounded the Cape, and, bearing South west, cast anchor in the harbour which Ben had called "South Bay"—smaller and not so safe as Rainbow Bay.
Above the headland, they could see the twin needles of masts and the last grey blue feather of smoke, floating away.
Sally turned towards the mountain.
Over the decapitated cone hung, like a black ostrich plume, almost motionless, the same coil of smoke which she had seen at moonrise of the night before, but grown a little larger now.