CHAPTER IX A STAR ON THE SEA

The island had passed away, painted out by distance; the sky above the horizon, paled by the indigo of the sea, lay like a ring of sparkling emerald; to southward, where the emerald passed into the living burning sapphire of the sky, lay a line of white clouds, swan-white and like a flock of flying swans, darkening with their suggestion of snow the blueness of the water, deepening with their remoteness the distance.

The warm wind blew steadily sparkling up the blue, the incredible blue of the sea; the scull-blades, immersed half a foot in the water, were tinted with azure, the floating scraps of seaweed were tinted with indigo; a man floating a yard deep would have shewn like a form of lazulite.

Gaspard had drawn in his sculls; free of the island now, what use was there in rowing? He had no idea of direction, North, South, East or West. His only chance, so he told himself, lay in his sighting a ship. He was in the hands of chance and he did not feel afraid. Not only that, but he felt in his mind a certainty that before long he would be rescued.

The relief of his escape from the island may have had something to do with this intuitive optimism, and the fact that he had provisions and water enough to last him for days. Loneliness had vanished; he had left her behind on the island, she and Yves.

54 It seemed like a bad dream, all that, and Yves was the worst part of it. He felt neither sorrow nor compunction for what had happened. Why should he? He had not meant to kill, and if he had meant to kill, would he not have been justified? He felt nothing of remorse, nothing of that pity for the dead man which had come to him yesterday, when, standing by the reefs on the eastward of the island, he had looked at the heap of raffle he had salved. He had suffered too much since then to have any sentimental feelings on the matter. Haunted and bedevilled, he had escaped with his reason more by luck than anything else.

He dressed himself and then he sat, rocked by the swell, drifting, the sun rising higher towards the zenith, the wind blowing steadily out of the southeast, warm as a woman’s breath. Every now and then a flying-fish like a silver arrowhead would leave the sea, flash through the air, and vanish.

Towards noon a shoal of them chased by some enemy broke the water to starboard; one passed right over the boat, soundless in flight, swift, brilliant against the blue, with staring sightless eyes; a phantom from the deep pursued by a phantom, definite for a moment and hard to the sight as a jewel, gone like a ghost the moment after, made one again with the blue sea.

The wind tempered the heat of the sun, long strips of seaweed floated past lazily, and a turtle that had been sunning itself basking on the water’s surface, slipped away and vanished as the boat drew near. A great gull came along drifting on the wind, passed with the silence of a moving cloud and dwindled to nothingness in the blue to northward.

Nothing in the world of water and sky seemed to move55 with effort, a profound languor filled it all from the depths below to the heights above, from the little boat whispering and chuckling on the ripples to the distances of the horizon; distances that shewed nothing, told of nothing but summer, vagueness, and azure.

Two hours before sunset Gaspard standing up to get a better horizon and shading his eyes with his hand saw, away on the eastern sea line, a bright point burning like a star.