The Isle of Seven Moons/Chapter 37
CHAPTER XXXVII
ALL HANDS AHOY!
Once more the ship's bells sounded musically over the waters. The moon came up, gleaming wanly like a pale yellow moth through the clouds of smoke pouring from the inverted funnel of the mountain. The whirling eddies of these black columns, the motion of the moon, which appeared to float against their dark tides, and—to those that could see them—her six white shadows, were the only evidences that Nature was not slumbering. All else was motionless. No silver lip of wavelet kissed the cutwater of the ship; her deck did not heave—it was quite as steady as when, the voyage ended, she would rest in drydock.
Calm was the air. The depth and fulness of its silence presaged many things, perhaps a quiet gathering of all her forces for some fatal spring.
Again those strange tingles titillated through the whole of Sally's body. So surcharged was the atmosphere that when she stretched her hand out, it was as if it touched some invisible steel, completing the circuit of a ghostly battery.
She looked aloft. The southern half of the heavens with its smoke and lost moon souls was like the fouled and corrupted ending of a once bright life; the north with its clear, untainted purple and pure-shining stars—the virgin years before the fall.
And over her head ever trembled and vanished, trembled and vanished, the little lights on the motionless topmasts and yards.
The strangely subdued girl and her repentant lover paced the deck. They tried to overcome the oppression of air, and sea, and mood, which had held them mute and uneasy in the dog watches. At last they ventured a few sentences of conversation.
"I thought I'd lost you for keeps, Sally."
"You came near it. You would have, if it hadn't been for him."
"And to think I suspected him of yellowness. I was a fool."
"Not quite that, dear. Just a foolish boy."
"I deserve worse names than that."
"We'll forget them now, Benny boy. But don't you think you ought to say something to him—to make up."
"You bet I ought. I'd eat humble pie now, if it had an assafœtida crust and a castor-oil filling."
Then he added thoughtfully:
"He may be a frog-eater, but he's a real man."
This phrasing she did not quite like, so she returned very slowly:—
"Perhaps, if we tried hard, we could forgive the diet. And as you say, he—is—a—real—man."
The accompanying smile was strangely made up of irony and wistfulness, neither of which ingredients the boy discerned, so absorbed was he in the task of apology, always a hard one for self-conscious youth.
Larone and the captain he found by the wheel, deep in consultation, and glancing now and then at that vast umbrella of smoke aloft, rotating slowly now, and weirdly muffling the moon.
Haltingly but with a winning honesty, the boy asked forgiveness. The other, in his graceful way, accepted the apology, accenting the gesture whimsically with that old quizzical smile of his.
"Think nothing of that, Monsieur. It was natural. Anyone would have felt the same way."
Looking out at sea, he went on slowly, and with a little grip and tenseness in each tone and word:
"I know you will be good to her. That is all I ask."
He turned then and faced him fully.
"You can sail the seven seas, but you'll never find a lovelier woman if you voyage as long as the Flying Dutchman himself—but what were you asking, Captain?"
"What are the risks, my friend?" the skipper repeated.
"I think we are safe for a few days. All the signs would point to that, and I have sailed not only the Caribbees but in many other places where surly fellows like the giant up there, sleep for a while, wake for a quiet smoke, turn over again, and then at last when the devil's nightmare is on them rise and stalk down the mountain, destroying whole cities and islands as fair as this. But—with the women I would not risk an hour."
With his charred pipe the captain reproduced in miniature the smoking mountain, before he replied.
"It's a snug little fortune for Sally to lose. Besides, the crew's seen the glint o' that gold and it's got 'em like the smile of the light o' loves when the battleships come to port. Haven't we leeway enough to anchor off the cape in the morning, recover the chest, bag the rascals in the bargain, then sail in the afternoon?"
The other shook his head.
"As I said. Monsieur Captain, there may be time but with the women."
The gesture of his hands expressively finished the warning. More than ever the heavy-bowled pipe looked like the mountain above, as the captain puffed and pondered.
"This island was never on any chart. There's no lead can sound its waters, I would swear, no barometer to tell its weather. All we can do is to trust to old witch signs. Let's leave it to the girl."
At his hail she came slowly along the deck, drooping a little and supporting herself by the rail. However, she rallied her spirits and made her choice.
"I'll never touch the stuff after what I've seen, but I can't rob the others. Let's take the chance, once, in the morning, then, whatever happens, sail before sundown."
But the captain felt that inasmuch as history records isolated instances of feminine tacks of mind, in the end, for Ben's sake anyway, she might take her allotment—besides, he knew his men, so he gave his orders for the next watch, and went below.
The little fires which for some time had been burning on the spars above their heads steadily, and with a sizzle like arclights when the protecting bulbs are broken, went out suddenly as if switched off by some unseen hand, then up again. Three times the uncanny performance was repeated.
"Like the last call for drinks in one o' them fancy grog shops like Yaller Petticoat over there makes her livin' in," growled Benson to young Beam. "And the Devil's both brewer and barkeep. It's his claw as is dousin' them lights."
"Yes, and a mixin' the last drinks for one o' us," returned the other.
"Of course—it's fur yerself, Mister Beam. There they go again, those damned lights. Last call! What'll ye have?"
"He's not axin' me what'll I have, with that leaky old hulk Jerry Benson stranded on his bar."
"Stow yer gab, ye young fool. But whomsoever it is, here is hopin' he's got a roll to pay for the drinks. It's when he's copped it hisself ye've got to look out for the Black Barkeep."
So, on through the night watches the stars floated out of the black haze to the south, swam for a little while in the clear purple pool to the north, then one by one sank below the horizon.
Long after midnight, somewhere about seven bells, they grew fainter and fainter, and the sea began to swell unbroken by long rollers, just one even surface, grey in the false dawn, and rising like water in a glass when some displacing object is gently dropped into it.
It subsided, rose and fell again as if under the influence of a series of intermittent tides, the anchor chains creaking ominously through the holes, as the ship was buoyed upward on the waters.
Finally, all was still again, oppressively still. The clear section of the sky to west and north did not turn to turquoise with the morning, but paled to an anæmic white. From the cone, clouds came columning, like vast, revolving, powder-puffs still of soft texture, but fouled by swabbing the great chimneys of that giant's furnace below. In between their sooty masses floated little white plumes of vapour, all enveloping the island and thinning a little as they spread over the coast waters.
Through these fugitive mists the sea birds wandered on disconsolate wing, like phantom wraiths. The sun came up, not jubilant, and golden, and glorious, but a pale oxblood wafer behind the smoke clouds, like the celluloid tiddlewinks Sally remembered in her parlour.
Then sounded over the troubled waters the old command of the sea, with its long drawn vowels and hoarse musical tones.
"Aa-ll ha-aands! Up annchorr a-ho-oy!"
Through the shifting fogs it sounded, like the deep sea-warning of some brazen-throated steamer off the Banks of Newfoundland.
Already the sails were loosed, the capstan creaked, and through hawser-holes came the anchor chains, clanking.
The wheel spun, yards were braced, and sails set, and through the channel between the Twin Horn Capes, like a ghostly ship of the night, floated the North Star.
"Better give up the chase, Sally," said the Captain.
"No, let's stick till noon, then sail, homeward bound," she replied.
With that, the smoke-avalanche weakened a little, and under the uplifted dark curtain, as they anchored off the Cape of the Solitary Palm, for a brief hour the island became its old living green self again.
From the deck the longboat sank to the waves. Into it tumbled the Captain and Ben, Benson and Jack Beam, and with six sturdy tars as oarsmen, they swung through the galloping white-toothed squadrons of breakers, and ran her up on shore.
But even as they vanished into the thicket, two standing guard by the boat, the dark mists descended, the sun turning to the colour of coagulated blood again.
During the eventful day of her captivity, well had Sally kept her head, and she had a natural sense of location, so her directions this morning had been fair enough. Following these, the searchers headed on an angle through the woods for South Bay.
But so dense was the gloom of the forest under the canopy of cloud, so intricate the tangle of roots and vines and sharp branches, that three hours of cautious scouting and constant reference to the compass passed before they discovered the first sign.
It must have been high noon when Ben, ahead and a little to the right of the rest, saw a flame flickering between the greenish black boles that buttressed the saucer-shaped glen.
They deployed. Over the rim of the saucer and through the soft fern, their eight round steel muzzles pointed into the green hollow. It was very still and lonely save for the life of the rosily-leaping fire.
In the far corner, against a trunk a rifle rested, by its side a form crouched—near a pile of strewn boughs. Following the lines of the figure to the extended arm, they saw that it was caught by something heavy and black—the cover of the iron chest.
The eight muzzles circled, covering the figure.
A sharp demand for surrender rang through the glen. But the sentry was quite as silent as that other one, in the dawn by the drift-wood log.
Down into the saucer the eight clambered, with rifles on the alert for fear of treachery.
Benson's heavy boot kicked the thigh of the prone figure.
"Dead, stone dead," he said.
Swollen was the face, the mouth twisted in its last grimace of horror and agony. The fatuous, light-blue eyes held more of expression now than ever they had in life, and the stiff tow pompadour seemed to bristle still, though the evil heart had passed beyond any capacity for fear.
They glanced at the chest. The heavy cover had pinioned the arm. It was swollen to twice its size.
"But that couldn't have killed him," said Ben.
"No, there's the assassin's mark."
The captain pointed to two tiny sharp holes in the blue-black corruption of the arm.
From under the lid, they heard a dull clink of some disturbed pieces, then saw a long wriggling thing coil out of the chest and disappear into the green.
Still on the tree hung its stiffened mate, nailed there by MacAllister's knife.
"It even breeds serpents, that gold," whispered Benson, shuddering fearsomely. "It's accursed, I can't touch it, sir."
"Don't be an old woman, Benson. Come, up with it, men!"
They lowered the lid, and swung it by the poles on four pairs of shoulders, with difficulty climbed out of the saucer, and zigzagged on their way through the serried phalanxes of trees, towards the shore.
If it hadn't been for the pocket compass, they never would have made it so quickly. There was need for haste, for as they went, long, far-away, rumbles sounded, leagues below where they were standing, like the echoes of heavy artillery firing in the deep quarries and caverns of the underworld.
Over and over they sounded, gathering force as the Plutonian batteries answered each other, and the whole earth recoiled with each subterranean salvo.
There was a rushing above, whipping the massed treetops like the surface of a lake in a sudden gale, and the trunks danced before the astonished sailors' eyes like the jumbled trees of a drunken man's dreams. Then, following each salvo, fell a death-like silence like the little respites which Nature brings, between the throes, to a woman in travail.
They had dropped the chest, but finally the rumblings ceased altogether. In the absolute silence now holding the forest, they could hear the swish of the surges rushing on shore, and picking up the chest, they hurried on again.
Through the glass from the deck, Sally's eyes followed the figures as they left behind them the green-black density of the woods, and bore that coffin-shaped thing on their shoulders, over the strip of sand, whose lively pink flush the gloom of the day had turned now to a bleak white bordering a leaden sea.
Into the rolling teeth of the breakers, head on they drove the boat, her gunwales bristling with oars. Threateningly she pitched and tossed, the weight of the chest almost dragging the stern under. But at last they gained the side of the North Star.
Chest and boat were hoisted over the rail; the anchor came up; the ship heeled to the breeze, and pointed north.
"Did you see any of the thieves?" Sally's voice called above the roar of the wind.
"Nary a one alive," the bosun replied.
"Or dead?"
"One by the chest."
"That was?"
"The tow-headed one with the complexion of a gal and the heart of a hell-hound."
"The others'll escape in the yacht."
"No fear o' that, though there's no watch aboard her. The bay's full of long grey revenue cutters with fins and teeth, and though I don't know much about the ways o' engines, I'd swear they won't run without these."
In his brawny fists he clinked the round, threaded metal things he had just taken from his pocket.
"Old Joe; the sailor in South Bay; the ornery old man; and the wicked Swede—one, two, three, four"—he slowly counted. "Yes, that's the devil's toll of that cursed gold already."
Up and down in his hands, he shook the cubes of iron and steel until they clanked like chain-links of the Evil One's own forging.
On the grey heave of the sullen sea, they rounded the Twin Horns, and swung north eastward on the starboard tack.
Through the glass they saw three figures walk from the trees by the hut, wade into the snapping breakers, arch for the long dive, go under, emerge, then inch slowly towards the pitching yacht.
Now, the drifting fog hid them from sight, and all they could see in the harbour was the ghostly tracery of her spars.
"They are lost," the girl shrieked in a voice that sounded like the cry of a doomed soul.
"What would you have," the captain answered. "It is the judgment of God."
Then, as if all Nature corroborated him, suddenly the jagged crater was brightly outlined by flames that spurted like jets of blood, followed by gorgeous streamers of yellow, and blue, and rose, that wove fantastic patterns on the sky.
Then woke the long drawn subterranean thunder again, and swell after swell drove the ship northward, while through the spars little lights threaded in and out like ropes of flame, and on the deck fell showers of mud coated with a weird phosphorescence.
And all the while, over the mountain to the south, the great balls of fire described their arcs against the pitch-black fumes; gigantic geysers sprayed the zenith with white cascades; and red rivers flowed in swift destruction down the green terraces Ben had so often roved.
But most fearful of all were the vivid lightnings that like the invisible hand on the ancient walls of Babylon, wrote on the massing clouds their warnings in fiery, swift-vanishing script.
Set and stern was the captain's face, as his fingers held to the spokes, and he peered ahead through the straining ropes and the flying scud at the grey surface that heaved so it was almost breast to breast with the sky. But he held the North Star to her course, and they rode out the storm
Leagues northward, a strange thing befell. They sailed into a little calm, as sweet and refreshing to the weary sailors as an oasis to travellers after the sand-storms of the Sahara.
Around them, the sea and sky were blue, and silver, and serene, once more; the sun, at his setting, jubilant and rosy; and in his golden wake, the evening star throbbed like a lover's heart at the first meeting.
Far away, near the last line of the horizon, hovered a pall of smoke above a dark smudge, the last they were to see of it—of the Island of Seven Moons. And the girl thought that now and then she could see them—the full seven, still circling through the haze, shining like pale gold, with beams falling from them like faintest lightnings. At last they went out, but these threads continued to glow like the filaments of a globe after the current fails.
She plucked Ben's sleeve.
"There, it does look like the veil that Spanish Dick told about, with the gold lightnings in it. And—perhaps he was right in more ways than one."
Again the pad of shoeless feet, and the gypsy smiled up at her, delighted at this vindication.
"An' see, Señorita, as I tell you, eet is floating away."
And indeed, as they voyaged northward, it did seem to be drifting, drifting, behind and away from them, over the rim of the sea, over the edge of the world.
No, no mariner ever brought word of the three buccaneers again. No letter ever came to the elder Huntington, and Lloyds and all the human sleuths of the sea gave them up as deservedly lost.
Benson always swore that they reached the yacht, and raised jib and foresail—he saw them steer through the murk, over that unprecedented swell—the yacht list as she reached the choppy Dead Man's Channel, between the Twin Horns. Even so they sailed to their doom, for no eighty-foot craft could live in that sea.
It was not until long afterwards that Sally realized that there were seven that perished,—old Joe Beam, by the knife, the sailor in the jaws of the shark, the wicked old man in his shower of gold, the Pink Swede from the viper's bite; and at last, in the sea itself, in the last eruption, MacAllister, who had fancied himself omnipotent; his henchman Pete; and the wayward and luckless Phil—lost, all lost through their lust for that gold. Seven of them—one for each of the moons.
Carlotta, they say, does not sing any more—at least in public. She was married—and here we have nothing less than the authority of Queer Hat—to a tailor, for whom she acted as forewoman for a while—but only for that, shortly after settling down to the erecting of a living stairway like her own parents'. In fact she threatens to become a fleshy, girdleless "momma" herself.
About once a year, Spanish Dick drifts into the front yard of the old Pell place to talk to Don Alfonso, who rises painfully now, for he is old, and very stiff and rheumatic. The children hang on his collar, pull his sausage of a tail, and poke their chubby ringers in his eyes. But he is quite patient, waiting for that Heaven to which, his bearded master assures him, as a "good doggie" he will go. A legion of new tales the gypsy has invented, and a cycle of songs he has sung to little Henry and Sally, the perfect miniatures, by the way, of the captain and owner of the Sally Fell, and his wife.
Of some "misery" did Aunt Abigail die, and nobody really much cared, and not long after old Cap'n Bluster himself, in a fit of laughter at one of Gus Peter's sallies, which was better than passing in one of his old choleric squalls.
As for Benson and Jack Beam, they are still sailing the seas, as tars worth their salt should be doing, and Cap'n Harve each day saunters from his home, not far away from the old Fell place, to play with the youngsters there.
Linda and the lovable stranger were married—after they were dropped at that tropical port where lay the Café of Many Tongues—of that, without any concrete confirmation, Sally was sure. It would have been his way, she knew.
Never a letter or word had she, except when little Sally and little Harve came. Then there also arrived, that is a week or so later, a package with some indistinguishable foreign postmark, and, inside the careful wrappings, a silver spoon with seven little moons engraved on the handle. But there was no card, for none was needed.
But she was very happy nevertheless. She had her beautiful dream, and she had a real live sweetheart and husband, too, and one very faithful and true. For such things can be.
And oh! about that chest! Well, when it was opened, after they left the port, the gleam seemed to have dulled, and when they bent over to count the treasure, they found but a few of the round shiny things, on the surface—under them, nothing but piles of pebbles. So had the wicked old man's "idee" worked out.
Into the sea they went, the iron chest, and after it, the top layer of the coins. She would have none of it, nor the sailors either. It was accursed, they said, and afterwards told in Salthaven how the shiny things spattered and hissed when they struck the waves.
And Sally, as they watched the last bubble break above them, kissed her sweatheart.
"Better heart's treasure than pirate gold, eh Ben?"
And oh—yes once, ten years later, last summer it was—she went with Ben on a voyage around the Horn. And longing, of course, to see the island once more, they voyaged east, and west, and north, and south, in that region, but no island did they see.
"He was right, was Spanish Dick," Sally said. "It was a floating island, and it has drifted away—over the edge of the world."
Once she thought she saw or, for the children's sake, tried to think she saw, its blue summit and emerald terraces, shining many fathoms deep under the ocean, the green stairways peopled with beautiful beings and gleaming with gold. Ben tried to explain it away by an earthquake of great violence that had occurred in that latitude three years before. But she shook her head, and be that as it may, you will not find The Island of Seven Moons on any chart.
But they were very happy.
THE END