CHAPTER XXXV THE LANDING

The island, close to them now and on the starboard bow, lay burning coral-white and sage-green on the blue sea.

One could see the palms bending to the breeze, and the snow of the surf and the white flicker of the gulls, whose voices came, now and then, weak and spirit-like, across the water.

Something fluttering beneath the palms drew Gaspard’s attention; he borrowed Sagesse’s glass and looked. It was the remains of the tent, a few rags of canvas; they seemed beckoning to him like brown hands, skeleton-thin and sinister.

Even as he looked, the roar of the anchor-chain through the hawse pipe tore the air, and La Belle Arlésienne swung at her moorings in eight fathoms of water a few cable-lengths from the shore.

The barquentine had come in with scarcely a sound, but scarcely had she taken anchorage than Babel broke out on board. The voice of Jules could be heard above the others, ordering the boats to be got ready; stores were being brought on deck, whilst Sagesse, silent beside Gaspard, watched the preparations for landing with a brooding eye, throwing in a command now and then.

The longboat and a quarterboat were lowered and laden with stores and the diving apparatus; it was nearly an hour before the business was complete and Sagesse and231 his companion, taking their places in the stern of the longboat, found themselves free of La Belle Arlésienne and making for the shore.

They rowed to the southern beach.

“I will take the quarterboat across the island,” said Sagesse. “It will be a bit of a job, but she’s light enough, and eight of the hands will be able to do it. I’m going to use her for the diving. Mordieu, but it’s a desolate place, this island of yours. There’s no gainsaying that. Who would ever think there was a ship sunk here, and lying in shallow water, too?”

“It’s lonely enough,” said Gaspard, his eyes fixed on the white beach, the palms, and the grey-green stretch of bay-cedar bushes. Now that he was close in shore, all the elation of the treasure hunt had passed from him, giving place to a feeling of melancholy. Oh, those palms, that rag of tent fluttering in the wind, that scorching splash of sunlight on the beach—what visions of desolation did they not call up! The place seemed to him full of death and tragedy, repellant, as though the shade of Simon Serpente were walking in the sun-blaze of the beach, as though the voices of the gulls were the voices of his men; ghosts of old buccaneers condemned to eternal restlessness and discontent.

But with the grounding of the boat’s nose on the sand all this passed away. He flung himself over the side and helped to run her up as far on the beach as the weight of her cargo would let them pull her; the quarterboat was beached just beside her, and then the unlading began.

Whilst it was still in progress Sagesse, leaving Jules to superintend, took Gaspard’s arm.

“Come,” said he, “let’s have a look at her. The tide’s half out and she ought to show up well.”

232 “This way,” said Gaspard.

He led his companion amidst the bushes, avoiding the spot where he knew, face down amidst the bay cedars, the body of Yves was lying; he dared not even look twice towards the place, and he breathed more freely when they had passed it.

The line he took would also lead them twenty yards or so to westward of the mound beside which Yves had discovered the belt and pouch and the skeleton to which they belonged.

In a few minutes they were free of the bushes and on the northern beach.

The tide was more than half out and the whole of the encircling reef of the lagoon was visible. Gaspard led the way on to the reef, then along it, till he reached the spot opposite the foretop, weed-grown and projecting from the water.

“Look,” said he, pointing into the lagoon.

Sagesse without a word, stared down at the vision beneath him.

It was a part of the mystery of the sea that the lagoon water changed in brilliancy and clarity with the tide; with a flooding tide, and at full, its diamond brightness dimmed almost imperceptibly and brightened almost imperceptibly with the ebb. One would not have noticed the fact but for the submerged ship and her crust of coral jewellery; which shewed brighter or dimmer according to the clarity of the water.

Possibly outside the lagoon the sea floor held some clay that misted almost imperceptibly the incoming water—who knows?—but the fact remained that at half-tide of the ebb she was more brilliantly defined than at half-tide of the full—as to-day.

233 Gaspard, as he stood beside Sagesse, looking also, followed with his eyes the fish-like form and the trend of the bulked-out bulwarks. At the sight of her and the thought of the diving apparatus and all the tackle for salving, the treasure-fever was on him again, hot and strong. Mordieu! when she was broken open, what might they not find?

He turned from her to Sagesse, expecting to read his own eagerness in the Captain’s face, but the face of Sagesse shewed nothing.

“Well,” said Gaspard, “what do you think of her?”

Sagesse did not seem to hear the remark; he seemed plunged in thought.

Then he spat into the water and turned back along the reef to the shore. Gaspard followed him.

“Well, what do you think of her?”

“What do I think? Ma foi! I think she was sunk at her moorings.”

There was a note of gloom in his tone.

“You think she was not wrecked?”

“She’s lying on too even a keel; she’s lying by that reef just as a ship would lie if scuttled at her moorings.”

“But, see here, if she was moored in that basin, she must have entered it, and there is no opening to admit a ship.”

“Not now—but eighty or so years ago there was likely an opening, and that place was a kind of harbour. Serpente would have used that harbour.”

“But,” said Gaspard, “why should he have scuttled his ship?”

“Ah, why?—who knows? We know he was chased; we know he had a cargo of slaves, and a crew each man of whom was a witness against him. He may have kept a234 boat provisioned and moored to the ship’s side; then, at night, with a confederate, battened the hatches, main and fo’cs’le, scuttled her, and made for the American coast in the boat—see?”

Sagesse seemed to have worked out the whole question in his dark mind and seemed deeply dissatisfied with the solution arrived at.

“But,” said Gaspard, “how about those bones we found, that skull?”

“Oh, the skull! He may have been killed in turn, and robbed of his treasure by his confederate,—who knows? there are a hundred ways of making skulls in a job like that. Only I say this: I lay a hundred to one, if he scuttled his ship, he didn’t scuttle her with the money on board.”

“Then it’s a hundred to one we will find nothing.”

“I said it was a hundred to one if he scuttled her the money wasn’t on board. I don’t know whether he scuttled her or not; I’m only supposing that he did it. No, the chances are not so bad as that, but they aren’t as good as I thought. But—”

“Yes?”

“I don’t smell money there. It may be stupidity, it may be I don’t know what, but when there’s money in a thing I seem to know it. I don’t seem to feel there is money on that ship.”

They were returning not by the path through the bushes, but by the eastern beach. From their left came the crying of the gulls, from their right the cries and shouts of the negroes unlading the last of the boat’s cargo.

The diving apparatus was already ashore, under shelter of a sail stretched between two of the palms; the white sand was strewn with packages and boxes. Sagesse, who235 thought of everything, was going to run no risks; provisions for three months for the shore party were being landed, for there was always the chance of the vessel being blown off the island and leaving the shore party marooned.

Not only had stores to be landed, but a tent had to be erected to protect them from the sun. This was now being put up.

Two of the crew with cutlasses were slashing a path through the bushes for the men who would have to carry the boat to the lagoon.

As Gaspard and Sagesse watched the busy crowd, Sagesse drew a cigar from his pocket and lit it. Gaspard searched for his pipe in his pocket, found it and filled it; but before he could strike a light a horrible thing happened.