CHAPTER XXV SIMON SERPENTE

He was awakened from sleep next morning by a voice outside his door.

It was the voice of Captain Sagesse. Then a knock came to the door and instantly on the knock it opened and the Captain came into the room.

Gaspard had slept late, it was full morning and the light was strong enough to shew Sagesse’s face and its expression. Something was evidently the matter. He shut the door and crossed the room.

“Here’s a pretty thing,” said Sagesse. “I am betrayed, my affair has been blown on—Have you spoken?”

“Spoken—on what?”

“Mon Dieu! What else but the expedition.”

“I, never—not a word—at least—”

“Yes?”

“I said to one man that I was going on a voyage with you, but I said nothing of the nature of the voyage.”

“Who was the man you spoke to?”

“An old gentleman of the name of Seguin.”

“Hell!” cried Sagesse, springing up from the chair on which he had taken his seat. “Seguin. There is only one Seguin on the island—ah, that’s where the money is coming from—” He ceased speaking, sat down on the chair again, crushed his panama hat, which he had taken off, between the palms of his hands and stared at the floor with a frown on his forehead and his lips pursed up.

161 The evening before, Jules, his first mate and henchman, had brought him wind of a rumour that was circulating amidst the drinking bars of the harbour side.

A rumour that Missie Sagesse had discovered the whereabouts of a wreck laden with kegs of gold dollars, that he was going to hunt for it, but would, most likely, fail as another expedition was starting, financed by a man much richer and more powerful than the Captain.

The whole thing had originated with Jules himself who, in his cups, had talked to a coloured woman of the secret which Sagesse had hinted to him. The hatred of the harbour side for Sagesse had supplied the other imaginary expedition.

In reality, nothing was known of any importance. Yet Sagesse, with whom suspicion was almost a disease, was sure that Gaspard had betrayed him. The only thing that made him feel uncertain on the matter was the fact that Gaspard was presumably unacquainted with any rich man capable of working mischief. And now Gaspard had confessed speaking to Seguin on the matter! Seguin, one of the richest men in the island and Sagesse’s greatest enemy.

The whole thing was plain.

Another man would have given rein to his temper, accused Gaspard to his face of the imaginary betrayal, come to blows with him.

But that was not the way of Captain Sagesse.

Gaspard was necessary to him as a working partner. If money were found, a white man, single-handed, might have an exceedingly difficult time with the black crew of La Belle Arlésienne. He had not time to find another white man to take Gaspard’s place, simply because now that the secret was known, the expedition must start as quickly as162 possible. No, it would be very impolitic to fight with him now, afterwards—ah, yes, afterwards when the money was salved and safe on board the ship, when he had discovered the temper of the crew under treasure-strain, then it would be different. He promised himself some satisfaction then, and promising himself this he unbent his brows and ceased to purse his lips.

“After all,” said he, “what does it matter? You say you told nothing to Paul Seguin. I believe you. All the same, he has got wind of the affair, he is going to send a man on the same job—”

“Tenez,” said Gaspard, “same job, how can he, when nobody knows about the island but you and me?”

“Ah,” said Sagesse, “that’s the mystery—how indeed? But he knows it and that is enough for me. I start in three days’ time.”

“Three days!”

“Yes, by working overtime, I’ll have the cargo out of the Belle day after to-morrow night—”

“Vé, but you will want time to get your tackle—”

“Oh, mon Dieu,” said Sagesse, “Do you think I ever say I’m going to do a thing without having my plans ready made? Come with me and you will see. We can have breakfast somewhere together and talk everything over when I have done my business.”

Gaspard got up and dressed and then the two men left the house and walked down the Rue du Morne side by side towards the harbour. Often in his life, Sagesse had been approached on the subject of sunken treasure. The Caribbean and the Atlantic about the Bahamas give a fine field for theoretical treasure-seekers, locations of sunken ships had been brought to him off Rum Cay, off Grand Cayman, off Matanzas. The ships were there right enough only163 waiting to be rifled, but Sagesse would have nothing to do with them. He had a profound knowledge of the sea and its trickery. He knew that though the ships were there they were tormented by currents, currents that varied with the ebb and flow so that divers could work only at slack; he knew the power of these currents to heap sand and hide treasure. He had seen the end of a broken deep-sea cable brought up, half a mile of it tied in knots by the mischievous hands of the currents as though some giant had been playing with it.

“When a treasure ship lies a prey to the currents of the sea, there is no use in hunting for treasure or for anything but disappointment,” was an axiom with him.

What led him to the present adventure was the fact that the ship was lying in a still lagoon in which diving operations could be conducted as easily as in a lake. She was not sanded up but coralled over, and if there was “stuff” in her a few charges of dynamite would soon lay her open.

The morning was bright over the sea when they reached the harbour side, La Belle Arlésienne was lying out on the blue water, the lighters beside her and the cargo coming out to the tune of winch pawls and the chanty of the negroes—
A Fort de France Ay ho!
A Fort de France Ay ho!
Bonjou Doux-Doux,
Ay ho!
A Fort de France,
A Fort de France,
Ay ho!

To southward of La Belle Arlésienne a big three-master164 was getting up anchor, a cable ship the Grappler was tramping the bay taking soundings. The water sinks to a tremendous depth here between Martinique and Dominica and from the Grappler away out on the violet blue of the “deeps” came the faint sewing-machine whirr of the Kelvin sounder at work.

Canotiers were paddling their tiny cargoes round the steamer from New York that had arrived the evening before and would start at noon; one could see the little canotiers, lemon-coloured slips of children standing up and diving for coins flung by the passengers.

It was a picture full of the spirit of morning, full of colour, and light, and movement, the hot wind of the tropics stirring flags and shaking out sail-cloth; sea gulls were fishing, flickering snow-white in the wind, their querulous cries came across the bay with the clank of the winch pawls, capstan pawls, and anchor-chain, and the endless chanty—
A Fort de France Ay ho!
A Fort de France Ay ho!
Bonjou Doux-Doux,
Ay ho!
A Fort de France,
A Fort de France,
Ay ho!

Faint, musical with distance.

Sagesse, leading the way, they passed along the shore edge to the Place Bertine.

The sunlight was just striking the Place Bertine over the shoulder of Pelée. In the blaze of morning light with the sea and wind shaking the tamarind trees, it formed a165 bright picture; women’s coloured dresses, turbans of yellow madras, men, some clad in white, some half naked, rolling the sugar hogsheads, laughing, and singing as they worked, all coloured men, from the white Creole to the jet-black negro; children—and you may be sure that wherever there is sugar either in cane or barrel you will find children—playing games, running messages; children black as sloes, yellow as bananas, honey-coloured babies naked as on the day they were born; over all the warm tropic wind blowing lazily, mixing the scent of the sea with the perfume of the land, cigar scent—for even the women are smoking the black Martinique bouts,—and the subtle ubiquitous scent of sugar in bulk.

Sagesse led the way across the Place to the row of warehouses and go-downs bordering it on the shore edge. He paused at an archway giving entrance to a big twilit warehouse, peeped into the gloom of the place as if in search of someone or something, and then entered followed by Gaspard.

It was an extraordinary warehouse, this, smelling of tar, sail-cloth, and rope. Piles of rusty chain, cable, old anchors, capstan bars, spars of all sorts, blocks of all sizes lay about, and in the gloom, ropes and remnants of tackle hanging from the beams overhead gave a last touch to the picture. One might have fancied it a cave in which a ship had come to wreck, or several ships for the matter of that.

In the midst of all the rubbish and odds and ends, the owner of the place, Monsieur Jaques, known as Jaques tout court by shipmasters from Port of Spain to Port Royal, moved about superintending three men who were engaged with palm and needle patching a sail spread on a vacant space of the floor.

There are some men who, vulture-like, make their living166 out of the ruin and dead bones of things, only in that way do they prosper, Jaques was one of these men, though you would never have guessed his vulturous instincts from his appearance which was that of a plump prosperous-looking business man, rather past the prime of life, grey-headed, clean-shaven, always smiling, always calm, always polite, always seeming to yield to your wishes—but iron in driving a bargain.

His business in life was the buying up of old ships and odds and ends of ships for next to nothing, and selling the remains at a profit. If you wanted an anchor or a suit of sails or a spar, he could always supply you. He would buy wrecks even when they were sunken—that is to say, of course, if they were lying in shallow water. He had bought in this way the Amine-Martell, lying on the thunderous beach to westward of Grande Anse. The bay in which she was lying was a death trap inaccessible from the sea or from the land, the cliffs were sheer walls of black rock polished and flawless; by lowering men over the cliff edge by ropes he had salved thirty-five thousand dollars in gold coin—a profitable business considering the fact that he had paid only two thousand dollars for her as she lay.

From Cura?oa to Porto Rico he had conducted salvage operations, fighting the sea for the pickings of ships, conducting the operations in person when there seemed a chance of good profits on the job.

Sagesse took Monsieur Jaques aside and explained what he wanted whilst Gaspard sat on a spar-end and watched the sail-patchers at work.

“I’ve got some diving work on hand,” said Sagesse. “I want two divers’ suits, a pump, everything complete. Have you them, and how much will you charge to hire them for two months?”

167 “Two thousand dollars deposit and five hundred for the hire,” replied Jaques without a moment’s hesitation.

“Three hundred and not a cent more.”

“My price is five hundred—and if you don’t like it I am sorry. I have already been approached by a gentleman on the same subject. I am expecting him here any moment, if he concludes the bargain with me, where else will you get diving apparatus—not in Martinique.”

This of course was a lie, but the mind of Sagesse, fogged with suspicion, saw in it a confirmation of the rumour that another expedition was on foot. Jaques, watchful as a bird of prey, saw the effect of his words without understanding entirely the reason.

“Who is this other person, then,” said Sagesse. “You can at least tell me his name.”

“I never give names in business, Captain, but as you have been my customer up to this, I will whisper something in your ear.”

“Yes.”

“Well,” said Jaques, lowering his voice, “I expect he is a gentleman on the same business as yourself.”

“The Devil!” said Sagesse. Then, recollecting himself, he laughed.

“If he is, he’s on a business that won’t bring him much profit—well, I can’t waste any more time, let’s see the suits and the apparatus.”

Jaques led the way through a door to the back premises, where in a shed were the diving suits, the pump, the air tubes, all nearly new and in good working order. The pump was constructed so that it could be fixed in a boat or be used from on board ship. La Belle Arlésienne had a boat that would do for the work to a nicety, she would have to be hauled across the islet and floated in the lagoon. The168 busy mind of the captain was arranging all these details as he examined the gear. Then, turning to Jaques:

“Three hundred for the hire and not a cent more.”

“Five hundred and not a cent less. Why should I let you have a thing for three hundred which I can hire out to someone else for five—that is not business.”

“Four hundred, come, the money down and the deposit.”

“Five hundred and not a cent less.”

“Four-fifty.”

“Why should I defraud myself of fifty dollars.”

“Well, five hundred be it.”

“And of course, M. le Capitaine, you will be responsible for any injury to the apparatus.”

“There will be no injury—and now that we have concluded business, I’ll tell you the name of the man who wanted to cut me out—who wanted to hire these things.”

Jaques, pleased with the bargain he had struck, delighted with the success of his ruse, and more delighted with the fact that it was the wily Captain Sagesse who had fallen a victim to his bluff, said nothing, but smiled.

“Shall I tell you?”

“If it pleases you.”

“Well, it was Paul Seguin—am I not right?”

“I cannot say—I never tell secrets of business.”

“Look here,” said Sagesse. “I want this matter put right. You and I have known each other for years. I want the information because I believe I have been betrayed on some business I have in hand. See here, if you whisper the name of the man who came to you about those diving suits, I’ll never tell, but I’ll be sure in my mind and on my guard, and I’ll pay you five dollars for the information.”

He took the money from his pocket as he spoke. “You’ll not tell—it will be kept entirely between ourselves?”

169 “Yes, I promise.”

“Then give me your ear.” Jaques approached his head close to the other’s and in a low voice said:

“Paul Seguin.”

“Thanks,” said Sagesse, handing over the money which Monsieur Jaques pocketed. Five dollars for just a lie was the best bargain he had ever made.

As Sagesse came through the warehouse, he found Gaspard still seated on the spar end watching the sail-patchers at their work. He could have shot him with all the pleasure in life, yet he greeted him cheerily and with a smile.

It is a profound popular mistake to attribute no sense of honour to a scoundrel.

He has the keenest sense of honour—in others. He feels when he is betrayed just as an honourable man feels only, perhaps, more acutely.

“And now that we have finished business,” said Jaques, “will you not take some refreshment, you and your friend?” He opened a door leading from the warehouse to a room, half sitting-room, half office, ushered them in, and opening another door, called for coffee, rum, and cigarettes.

In a moment, a servant, bearing a huge tray spread with the ordinary Martinique petit déjeuner, entered. Gaspard scarcely heard the entrance of the servant, he was examining a picture hanging on the pine boarding of the wall, a small, old-fashioned wood-engraving that had struck his eye immediately he entered and now held him fascinated as the serpent on the Place du Fort had held old M. Seguin.

It represented a man small and hideous, holding in one hand an immense sword and in the other hand a whip.

He was dressed in a shirt and loose trousers, a broad sash was round his waist and from the sash peeped the butt of a pistol.

170 The thing was horrible and grotesque. The man’s head and face were scarcely larger than the head and face of a child; yet the face had in it the ferocity of a demon; it was of extraordinary breadth across the cheek bones.

The limbs, as far as the clothing allowed them to be seen, were deformed, and as Gaspard stood fascinated and repelled, a shiver ran through him. He had seen this man—this thing—before—where? Impossible to say; in some past life, in some dream—glimpsed, perhaps, in the midst of some crowd, through the fumes of tobacco in some bar—somewhere, at some time in his life, he had seen that hideous head.

More, he felt that the creature, half man, half demon, had entered his life once, bringing evil into it. Yet, wildly searching his memory, he could remember nothing of the circumstance.

“Coffee or cognac?”

Monsieur Jaques was speaking and Gaspard turned from the picture and accepting a cup of coffee and a cigarette, took his seat at the table with the others.

Jaques, a cigar in his mouth and a cup of coffee before him, was deep in trade talk with Sagesse and Gaspard, pretending interest in their conversation, but hearing nothing, gazed round the room, taking in its details.

The walls were decorated with drawings of ships, Carib paddles, gourds, a glass case containing beetles and tarantulas, things of sea and land, but mostly of the sea.

Here was a chart of the Yucatan Straits marked in ink with the soundings of a wreck; beside it a chart of the waters just westward of Nassau where lies a great pond of the sea nearly two hundred miles from north to south surrounded with shoal water and reefs, this chart was marked, too, with the position of a wreck. A battle-lantern171 that might have lit Van Horne on some night expedition, hung from a staple near the charts, Jaques had picked it up in the sands near San Juan; an old cura?oa flask with a leathern handle, the earliest form of the bottle in which the Dutch exported their liqueur, hung by the lantern. The history of the Caribbean and the Spanish Main lay here in these things and many more, but let his eyes rove as they might, Gaspard could not stop them from returning to the picture that had fascinated him.

Taking advantage of a pause in the conversation between Jaques and Sagesse, Gaspard leaned forward:

“Excuse me, monsieur,” said he, pointing to the picture, “but you have a strange portrait on your wall, and the strangest thing about it is that I feel I have seen the gentleman before.”

Jaques looked at the picture and laughed. “Ma foi,” said he, “if you have seen him alive you are older than I am. You have most likely seen him in a print, but not such a good print as that one, it is by Coullier, very old, and I picked it up for a song.”

“And the name of the man?”

“It is Simon Serpente.”

“Who was he?”

“What! you have never heard of Simon Serpente—ah, but I forgot, you are, no doubt, fresh to the West Indies. Well, monsieur, Simon Serpente was a devil—He was a man all the same—”

Here Sagesse nodded as though he knew all about Simon Serpente.

“But,” continued Jaques, “he was all the same a devil. We have had a good many devils in these parts in the old days, but Simon out-Heroded them all. He was one of the last of the pirates and the worst. Kidd, Horne, Singleton172 were not so bad as him. What do you say, Monsieur le Capitaine?”

“O, from all accounts he was a tough man,” said Sagesse. “I’ve never held with these cut-throat scoundrels, if they’d lived in my day I’d have rooted them out if I’d been in power. The government could have done it then, only they were bribed. Don’t tell me, the governors in those days grew fat on pirates.”

“That is true,” said Jaques, “and Serpente kept his head out of the noose more than once by gilding it, all the same, Serpente was feared for himself, they said he was not a man, they said that no one could kill him and that when he departed this life he would have to die by his own hand, people imagined that he brought bad luck to anyone who crossed his path or at whom he looked crookedly.”

“All that is women’s talk,” said Sagesse, “there is no such thing as bad luck—or devil for the matter of that—go on.”

“Well,” said Jaques, “if there is no such thing as bad luck, at all events, Serpente did not bring good luck and he got such a name for being the Devil himself that he made men frightened of him, even the fellows of his own stamp.

“He’d been pirating for years and he’d made a very large fortune, no one knew where he had hidden it, wind got about that he had an island of his own somewhere in the Caribbean but no one ever tried to find it, for, I tell you quite plainly, that had his treasure been lying on the beach down there, people would have let it lie—”

“Fools,” said Sagesse.

“Perhaps so, but, all the same, I doubt if I would have cared to meddle with it myself. People said it was the Devil’s treasure and that it was well-guarded—I am not so sure that they were fools either. I know Monsieur le Capitaine,173 you are sceptical on these points, but I have seen bad effects following upon money got by force and blood and inherited. Anyhow, the money of Simon Serpente I would not have touched. Dieu! the things that man was credited with I would not speak of, even before you, and so he went through life till all at once he gave up pirating. It was a most extraordinary ending to his piracy too, for he fell foul of Laropé off Matanzas. Laropé, you must know, was a brother pirate, his ship was the Golden-Shell, Serpente’s ship was the Puerto Mexico, both ships had been chasing a brigantine when Serpente signalled Laropé to haul off, that the prize was his, as he had sighted it first; Laropé refused, and the next thing he knew, was that his maintop mast had been shot away.

“Then, forgetting the brigantine, the two pirates closed. It was off Matanzas and the shore was crowded with people watching, they said that the guns could be heard at Havana, the wind being from the east. The upshot was that Serpente laid the Puerto Mexico alongside the Golden-Shell, boarded her, put every man to death and hanged Laropé from his own main yard for a pirate.

“Then Serpente, leaving the Golden-Shell to float derelict, sailed away in the direction of Cape Sable. He never hoisted the black flag again and the next thing we hear about him is that he turned his ship into a slaver. Turned respectable, so to speak.

“Men no longer feared him so much now. They said that if he was really a devil he would not have turned over a new leaf. They began to remember his crimes and a movement was set on foot against him.

“He heard this, but he did not seem to mind, putting it down most likely, to idle talk, till one day definite news came to him as he was leaving the American coast with a174 cargo of slaves that a corvette was out against him and that when he was caught he would be hanged.

“Surely enough, two days out from port, he sighted a corvette and she chased him. The Puerto Mexico could give heels to anything in those waters, and by sundown the corvette was only showing her topsails above the horizon and by next dawn she was gone; but Serpente knew that all was over with him in these seas. The Devil had branded him with such a face and form that he could not hope to hide himself, so he perhaps made sail for that island of his where he had placed his treasure—at all events he was never seen again.”

“Ah, Mon Dieu!” suddenly cried Gaspard. He rose to his feet and went over to the picture on the wall.

Of a sudden it had flashed upon him where he had seen the frame-work of that face, that contorted form—the hideous skull on the island, the bones, could they have been the remains of Simon Serpente?

The thing seemed madly improbable, till across his mind flashed the vision of the pouch and belt, with the initials S. S. on the buckle.

Then he felt, on a sudden, physically ill.

The hideous demon of the picture had, then, entered into his life, he could not doubt that the skeleton was that of Serpente and that the money in the belt was that of Serpente.

And he had warred with Yves over that money and he had killed Yves. For a moment he saw Evil in all its horror and the tenacious clutch which Evil has upon life. To look at this hideous monkey-man was bad enough, but to feel that you were his inheritor, and that, quarrelling over this inheritance, you had killed your friend, was beyond words shocking.

175 It is so seldom that God gives us an objective view of evil, that the sight when it comes is prodigious and soul-shaking.

Gaspard looked at the picture of the man whose money had soiled his hands. This man, dead long years ago, Anisette, living, but thousands of miles away, these two were of the same brand, belonged to the company of evil, they could touch nothing without tainting it and betraying it to evil, just as they had tainted Gaspard and betrayed him into the hands of Sagesse.

Controlling his emotion, he turned again to the table from which Sagesse was now rising to go.

Monsieur Jaques accompanied them through the storehouse, bade them good-bye, and next moment they were in the brilliant sunshine of the Place Bertine, Sagesse leading the way to the water’s edge.

“I am going on board to see how things are getting on,” said he, “you had better come with me and help. We can have something to eat aboard and you will want to overhaul your cabin—Hi there, bring your boat along here!”

He called to a longshoreman—a negro, black, and fantastic as a golliwog—who was paddling his boat along the shore edge, the man brought the boat up as directed and they stepped in.

The morning had become utterly windless, and the sea like a mirror. Away out towards Dominica, a becalmed, inter-island schooner lay helpless, the snow-white sails casting a mile-long reflection on the water, the three-master which had been getting her anchor up had scarcely filled her sails when the calm fell, striking the life out of her. St. Pierre, coloured houses and motionless palms, stood fronting the blue, and passionately burning sea. It was the scenery of a most vivid dream, such infinities of colour and176 light and silence cast on the mind the unreality of mirage. The very sounds from the city and the shipping in the bay were dream sounds, voices of visionary sailors, murmurs from lotus-land.

Even the old Belle Arlésienne, that hag of the ocean, was touched by the magic of the day. Masts and spars and rigging, sun-blistered sides, all were reflected in the mirror of the harbour whilst her copper shewed up through the emerald-tinted shadows of the water; and the southern weeds and strips of fuci growing from the copper waved as if blown by a faint wind.

The cargo was coming out as fast as winches worked by hand could lift it, Jules was overseeing the work and he cast down the ladder for them to come on board. Sagesse when he reached the deck, looked around to see how things were going, then he entered the deck-house followed by Gaspard.

“You’ll take the same cabin,” said Sagesse, pointing to the dog hole on the starboard side, “I’ll tell Jules to get one of the niggers to clear it out for you, there’s a lot of old truck there that wants shifting and it will give you more room, you won’t have much gear to bring on board, I expect.”

“Not much—you say you are starting in three days, to-day is Tuesday—”

“I start on Friday.”

“Ah, yes, on Friday—well, it seems to me that is not a very good day to start on.”

“Cordieu!” cried Sagesse, suddenly shewing irritation, “what sort of old woman’s talk is that. What is wrong with Friday?”

Gaspard leaned against a bulkhead with his arms folded, he had scarcely spoken a word since leaving Jaques’ store and Sagesse had noticed his silence.

177 “I do not know what is wrong with Friday, but I do know that with a whole week to choose from, I would choose some other day, especially starting on an expedition of this sort. However, you can choose what day you like. I have only one question to ask you.”

“Yes?”

“Will you release me from the business and get someone else to take my place?”

Sagesse rapped out a laugh, took his seat at the table, folded his arms and, leaning over his folded arms, stared at his companion.

He did not speak for a moment. He seemed trying to read Gaspard’s innermost thoughts. Then “No,” he cried, “a hundred times no, you are part of the business, you gave your word, and now you want to back out—I find this morning my plans betrayed to this cursed Seguin. I say nothing about that; but this I say, you come with me or I will take you along with a member of La Garde Royale, we will hunt for the remains of a gentleman who was killed—we will look for his clothing and his bones. We will—” Sagesse stopped as Gaspard, leaving the bulkhead, took a seat at the table right opposite to him.

“You will do a lot,” said Gaspard, “if I take you by the throat and drag you out on deck and fling you into the harbour like the carrion you are. I have given you my word to go with you, on your cursed expedition, and go I will. Let no more be said. You talk of hunting for bones, you will find them. Skeleton Island ought to be the name of that place and if you don’t leave your own skeleton there you will be lucky.”

“Threats!” cried Sagesse, making as if to rise from the table.

“Threats—I never threaten and I am not threatening you now. I say you will be lucky if you don’t leave your178 bones behind you for the place is cursed—see you here—”

He leaned across the table facing Sagesse, and, lowering his voice—“See you here, I told you how I fought with a man out there and how, by accident, I killed him; well, I did not tell you all—after he was dead things happened.”

“Yes?”

“Even before he was dead I did not like the place, that ship down in the water seemed to me the devil’s own ship, no one ever saw a ship like that before, she was like an old drowning corpse and then all of a sudden just at sundown, she came to life, lit up as though she were hung with lamps—”

“Phosphorus,” said Sagesse.

“It was not, it was just the light in the sky, God’s good sunlight, but I have never seen such a thing before. Well, what happened next day? I killed my friend, I flung my knife at him, but I did not mean to kill, no, but the devil who lives on that island, took care that the knife did its work. Next day, as I was standing on the reef, looking out for ships, I felt someone standing behind me. There was no one to be seen but there was someone there, the very gulls in that place are not right, Bon Dieu, they shout at one—then, in the night someone beat a drum close to my tent—I nearly left my reason behind in that place—well, now, listen, I escaped, I said to myself, ‘never will I go back there,’ look at my luck. I meet you. I take too much rum, I talk to you and shew you that cursed gold, and what’s the result? Well, I’m going back, against my will—”

“To make your fortune against your will,” said Sagesse with a sneer, “and you call that bad luck.”

“Fortune,” cried Gaspard, echoing the sneering tone of179 the other, “and you expect to take a fortune from that place?”

“If it is there, I will take it.”

“I tell you if it were lying on the beach, you will not take it.”

“And who will prevent me?”

“There is one there who will prevent you.”

“And who is he?”

“Simon Serpente.”

Sagesse looked at his companion as if doubting his reason.

“Simon Serpente.”

“Yes, in the last few hours I have discovered whose ship that is lying there in the water, and whose money that was we found in the belt. I told you there was a skeleton by the money; well, see here, the skull wasn’t bigger than that.” He held his hands together as if clasping lightly the head of a child, “and it was not a right skull, why, I said to Yves, ‘Well, he must have been a beauty, the fellow this belonged to,’ then the bones were not the bones of an ordinary man, the minute I set eyes on that picture of Serpente, I said to myself, ‘I have seen that thing before, but where?’ It wasn’t till Monsieur Jaques told me his story, that I recognised the truth of the thing and that the skeleton was the skeleton of Serpente.”

“Rubbish,” replied Sagesse, “you are full up of fo’csle fancies; Serpente—I don’t believe myself a quarter I have heard about the chap—you talk like some old Creole woman. If Serpente ever lived, he died in some grog shop, like the rest of his sort, filled with balloon juice; or got knocked on the head in some fight down a back alley—”

“One moment—I shewed you the belt and the pouch which I brought from the island; on the buckle of the belt180 two letters were scratched, you examined them yourself—what were they?”

Sagesse started in his chair. He had cast his memory back.

“Cordieu!” cried he, “I remember now.”

“What were the letters?”

“By my faith, it’s strange, S. S. It would be the fellow’s initials.”

“Just so.”

“Simon Serpente.”

“Just so.”

“You did not scratch those letters yourself?”

Gaspard laughed.

“Did I know at that time anything about Serpente?”

“That is true.”

Sagesse’s face had flushed, he sat with his fingers drumming on the table and his eyes fixed on his fingers.

He seemed plunged in reverie of an exciting nature, then, suddenly recovering himself, he brought his great fist down with a bang on the table.

“That’s luck—one can’t doubt—He went to his hive—He’d have been making for Europe, something happened to his ship and sunk it, who knows what, but one may swear that he left his bones close to his money.”

Then to Gaspard: “Can’t you see?”

“What?”

“The gold, it’s there as sure as I am here.”

“I am certain of that.”

“Then what are you grumbling about, Mordieu, you look as though you had lost a fortune instead of having found one.”

“Perhaps it would be better to lose a fortune than find181 one like that. Have it as you will, though, but at least remember my words if anything should happen.”

“And what may they be, those words of yours?” asked Sagesse rising, going to the locker, and pouring himself out a dram.

“Just this, there’s a curse on that place as sure as my name is Gaspard Cadillac, and the man who goes hunting there for treasure will find more than he expects.”

Sagesse drank off his dram.