CHAPTER XXXIV THE VISION OF TREASURE

From that day Sagesse’s manner changed. One might have fancied that the man’s nature had changed; a friendliness and a bonhomie never exhibited before appeared in his tone and conversation. Gaspard’s simple and somewhat primitive mind rejected the first overtures towards this better understanding; he suspected treachery; but the manner of the captain was so uniformly equable and sustained that the primitive mind could not but fall under its spell.

No man could act friendship like that and keep the acting up, thought Gaspard; and in this he was perhaps right. Sagesse had the power of closing a door on all sorts of passions and hanging the key up; just as a visitor to an hotel hangs the key of his room up, forgetting it; or rather putting it out of his mind till, the business of the day over, he remembers the key and enters his room.

At nights, over rum and water, smoking Martinique cigars, without his coat, seated at the table in his shirt-sleeves like the prosperous landlord of some Proven?al auberge, Sagesse would give rein to his tongue and imagination. Treasure, now, was his entire theme, or nearly so.

“Mark you,” he would say, “I have been trading in these waters now for thirty years and more, and this is the first treasure-ship business I have taken up, because it is the first time I have seen the chance of profit. Yes, I have222 had hundreds of knaves and fools coming to me with ‘locations.’ Mordieu, I have had men bring me ‘locations’ in five hundred fathom water, in channels where any fool would know the rush of the tide made working impossible, over reefs that a child might guess would saw a ship asunder in six months—but here we have a thing perfectly new, a ship lying in a few fathoms of still water, tucked away safe for us. Of course, she may have been visited and sacked years ago, but I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“For this reason: If she is Serpente’s ship, she has been lying there a great many years, under water all the time, with water deep enough to prevent salvage unless with diving apparatus, and they hadn’t diving apparatus handy in those days. If people had got at her recently, they would have dynamited her. She would not be lying there so quietly, take my word for it, if the Americans or the Spaniards had smelt her out.”

“You think she is really Serpente’s ship?”

“I do.”

“Do you think that he was really a man like what Monsieur Jaques made out?”

“Why not?”

“Ma foi! why—if he was like what Monsieur Jaques said, he would have been unlike any other man.”

“Which he was,” replied Sagesse. “Now, look you here. One may listen to old wives’ tales by the hour and get no profit, but when one gets an old wife’s tale repeated and repeated, and always the same, one may claim there is truth in it. The stories and the pictures of Serpente all tally—why, mordieu, you yourself have seen his skull, which I hope to find and keep as a curiosity.”

“As for me,” said Gaspard, “I never want to see the223 thing again. I do not care what you say about old wives’ tales, but I believe this, that Serpente was the devil in the form of a man—”

“Or a child,” laughed Sagesse, “or a monkey, for he wasn’t bigger—in his head-piece, anyhow.”

“—monkey or child or man, what I have said I have said. He was the devil, or as much of himself as the devil could stuff into such a carcase, and if he lets us off that island with the gold, all I can say is, the devil’s dead or gone out of business.”

Sagesse laughed, and lit another cigar, and turned the subject. He felt a profound contempt for the superstition of Gaspard, but he did not shew it.

On the morning of the seventh day out he came up to Gaspard, who was sitting on the main hatch, took his seat beside him, and unrolled a small chart.

“We ought to be there to-morrow, shortly after sun-up, if this wind holds,” said Sagesse, spreading the chart on his knee. “I got this from Jaques; it’s a French Admiralty chart of Turks Island and the Caicos, at least a bit of it; the whole thing was as big as a blanket and I cut this piece out. The Diane—she was a French cruiser—included our island when she was out here ten years ago taking soundings. She little thought how useful it would be to us.”

Gaspard looked at the chart. There was the island, no bigger than a sixpence, the reefs and shoals all carefully mapped out. It gave him a strange sensation to see this picture of the place that for him had the mystery of dreamland attached to it; there were times when he half believed the island to be non-existent and that La Belle Arlésienne, sail the blue sea as far as she might, would never raise that landfall. Yet here it was224 pictured out by men who had visited the spot ten years before he had landed there.

It had been waiting there all these years for him, to shew him the meaning of desolation and Death, just as the little Place de la Fontaine had been waiting for him to shew him Love.

Ah! those places that wait for us since the time we were born! the places where we part with and meet the people we love, the place where we shall lie down to die!—we never reckon them amidst our friends and enemies; yet what friends are more faithful, what enemies more inexorable?

He looked attentively at the little picture. A hair’s-breadth beyond the southern edge he knew that the body of Yves was lying amidst the bay-cedar bushes, in the middle, there, the bones of Serpente, just beyond the northern edge, the ship of coral patient in the green lagoon; that tiny spur to southward was the place where he stood when he first felt the haunting “grue,” and from there he had swum to the boat. The sea gulls would still be flying over those reefs to the southeast, calling wheeling, fishing.—

“It’s all clear water to westward,” said Sagesse. “Ten fathom close in shore; we can anchor there; sandy beach, you told me it was, to southward—are you sure?”

“Mon Dieu! Sure! If you had been there, as I was, you would be sure.” He had grown so friendly with Sagesse in the last few days that he could talk about intimate things to him, and with southern vehemence he began to paint rapidly in words the horror of that time, lost, locked away by the sea on that spot where the wind and the sun and the silence were conspirators with madness.

225 Sagesse listened, and never did a man seem more friendly and interested than Captain Pierre Sagesse, as he sat on the main hatch of La Belle Arlésienne, listening to the tale of the man whom he had sworn in his heart to be revenged on; but not by the brutal methods of ordinary revenge that would have satisfied an ordinary man.

That night Gaspard did not join Sagesse in his rum-and-water; he smoked his pipe on deck. The moon would not rise till after midnight, and though the stars were unclouded they were paled to insignificance by the sea. La Belle Arlésienne seemed sailing through an ocean of liquid phosphorus. The sea burned white, dimly glowing in the distance like a snow-covered country, brightly glowing at the ship’s side, and furiously smouldering in the wake; it was the light of dead-wood, of corpse fires, of things rotten, dismal as the light from the lake of Dante where dwell the spirits of the damned.

At ten o’clock Gaspard went to his bunk; Sagesse, with the prospect of a hard day’s work on the morrow, was already in his and snoring. The deck was in charge of Jules.

For a long time Gaspard could not sleep, haunted by the thoughts of the morrow. Notwithstanding his hatred of the island and his half-formed resolve to have no share in the treasure, the treasure had already laid ghostly hands upon him. No man can withstand the fascination of the near presence of free gold. Men may be cold to women, to wine, to sin, but gold hidden and to be had for the finding is a magnet for all men, even as it was for Gaspard. He had been brooding upon it all day, and now, as he lay in his bunk, it chased away sleep; it made him forget Marie.

It would seem that this fatal island had the power of226 casting him from his proper path. Here for the sake of the gold in the belt he had forgotten his brotherhood to Yves, here for the sake of the gold in the ship he was forgetting his love for the woman who loved him.

A week ago he had no thought for the treasure; four days ago he had little thought of it; yesterday it was beginning to haunt his dreams; to-night it had him in its grip. The nearer they came to it, the stronger grew the attraction.

As he lay in his bunk he saw sacks large as corn-sacks bursting with napoleons; he saw jewels such as he had seen in the shop windows of Marseilles; he saw wealth, not as a power to be used, but in its crude form of wealth. And this is how Serpente had seen it, and all these lousy pirates, who, incapable of using gold except in a tavern or a gambling-hell, ransacked the Caribbean, slew men, and with the wealth of the Indies in their pockets found peace at last in a noose.

He fell asleep, only to dream of gold, and he awoke shortly before dawn with a dry mouth and a burning forehead.

He came on deck. Sagesse had relieved Jules and was standing by the man at the wheel. The moon, in her last quarter, held the sea; she was low down on the horizon and the stars above were bright and huge; the wind had fallen to a gentle breathing, just filling the sails which slatted now and then with a sound like the wing of a great bird.

Gaspard spoke a word to Sagesse, and then went forward a bit and leaned on the starboard bulwarks. He lit a pipe. The slow way on the vessel irritated him. What if the wind fell to a dead calm? It seemed almost impossible that this was the man who had fled from the227 place that he was now so anxious to reach, the man who had tried to dissuade Sagesse from the venture which now filled his being with fire and anxiety.

He leaned for a while smoking, motionless, in a reverie; then, as if suddenly awakened to some disagreeable fact, he started and smacked his hand on the bulwark.

“Fifteen per cent.! Fifteen francs out of every hundred francs! Coquin de sort! never! He thought he had me tied up with Yves in fear of the law. Well, how about Pedro? It seems to me if he threatens me with Yves, I can threaten him with Pedro, and a ship’s company to bear witness! Fifty per cent.! I will stick to that. But I will say nothing yet.”

Now in the sky to eastward the darkness was paling and stars that were there shining brightly a moment ago had vanished.

Some atmospheric influence had caught the first faintest sunrays and held them from spreading in a fan-shaped haze, grey, then spreading to blue, luminous with fire. Almost before one could say, “It is no longer night,” day was coming over the sea like a golden breeze.

“Land ho! Ahoy! Ahee! Land ho!”

Thin, in the French of the colonies, came the cry from the maintop, where Sagesse had stationed a hand.

Gaspard sprang on the bulwark and, clinging with one hand to the ratlines of the mainmast, shaded his eyes with the other hand and looked.

La Belle Arlésienne was heading now N.N.W., and there, away on the sky-line, traced as if with a fine brush, the palm tops of Skeleton Island caught his eye. The beach would be visible from the maintop, but from here one could only see the trees as yet.

Gaspard, as he gazed, could hear the voice of Sagesse228 giving orders, the clicking of the rudder chains, and then the palms swung slowly out of sight as the vessel altered her course and jib and foresail clouded them.

He dropped on to the deck.

“Well,” said Sagesse, coming up, “La Belle Arlésienne is not late at the rendezvous. She knows her way about, does La Belle. We will be at our anchorage in an hour, and then it will be work, my brave, for you and me. Come, let us have breakfast. We’ll have little enough time for meals once the anchor is down, for I intend to have the boat and gear across that island by sunset; then to-morrow morning the real business will begin.”

They passed into the deck-house, where the cook was already laying the table, and were soon seated opposite to one another before a dish of bananas fried with bacon and a can of hot coffee.

They talked as they ate, and laughed. Sagesse, in the highest spirits, sketched out his plan of campaign, and Gaspard could not but admire the thoroughness of the man, for he had forgotten nothing, and had thought out the whole business to the minutest detail. Not only had a boat to be fetched across the island to the lagoon and the pump and gear to fix in the boat, but a shelter had to be built in which to keep the diving-dresses and the perishable rubber connections from the sun when not in use.

“You see,” said Sagesse, “this may be a job of weeks, and we must land enough food for the working party right off, so as not to be making journeys to the vessel. There is water, you say?”

“Yes, there is a spring.”

“You told me you left a tent.”

“A boat sail we made a tent of.”

“It will do.”

229 “Listen!” said Gaspard, suddenly turning his head and half rising to his feet.

Through the open doorway of the deck-house thin, faint, far away, came a lamentable sound.

It was the crying of gulls.

The men rose from the table and came out on deck.