A SWIM IN THE LAGOON
We made a celebration of dinner, that first night after the _Myra’s_
return from New York. Besides our own family, there were the two
Carreaus and Mr. Hopper, the mate from the _Myra_, so we were quite a
big party.
Martin refused to sit down at the table, saying it wasn’t for a “hand
before the mast” to dine with the Captain and Mate, and nothing
we could say to him--about his being no longer connected with the
schooner, but a member of the Island colony now--made any difference in
his determination.
“I began as a mess boy,” he said. “And I guess I ain’t forgot how to
wait on table. I’ll be your butler, Miss Gay, for the party.”
So, since he seemed to have set his heart on it, we finally let him
have his way, and Aunt Mollie, who’d trained a good many waitresses in
the old days before we left Braeburn, had to admit that Martin was a
perfect butler, which made him blush fierily all over his freckled face
in a most un-butlerish manner.
We had vegetables from Syd’s and my garden; oranges served in several
varieties of styles, from the Sunset Island grove; and eggs, laid by
our own chickens, cooked according to a brand new, sc-crumptious recipe
Aunt Mollie had made up specially for the occasion. We hadn’t any fresh
meat, but the _Myra_ had brought us a new supply of hams and bacon, and
we had roast ham, Virginia style, with yams--candied. Yum-yum! as Reddy
remarked feelingly when he first caught sight of the dish being carried
in by Martin. And it certainly tasted as wonderful as it looked.
Andy, who’s an artist when it comes to flower decorations, had made the
table a perfectly gorgeous riot of color, and at Madame’s place she had
laid the sweetest little old-fashioned posy of the hardy perennials
that must have once formed part of the original garden. It was a pretty
little attention. I was disappointed for a moment I hadn’t thought of
it myself, when I saw how touched Madame was as she picked it up and
buried her nose in its colorful sweetness before pinning it on the
front of her gown.
After dinner we sat around and talked, everybody trying to tell what
had happened to them during the month we had been separated, and the
hub-bub was awful. However, after a while Aunt Mollie declared that
both Monsieur and Madame Carreau had had enough excitement for one
evening, and that it was high time all of us were in bed.
I hadn’t had a chance to say anything to Syd yet about Madame’s
suggestion of another treasure hunt, but as we were going up the broad
stairway, I managed to whisper him a hurried account of our talk.
“That plateau is pretty far from the beach, you know,” he reminded me
doubtfully. “It’s a bad climb too, and it would have taken a lot of
hard work to clear a path through the jungle, for carrying treasure
chests up there.”
“But maybe they had some other way of going, that we don’t know yet,”
I insisted eagerly. “And, besides, they _wanted_ a hard place to get
at, didn’t they? The harder the better, I should say. Old Morgan didn’t
want anyone walking in sort of easy and casual and making off with his
pieces of eight. And he had plenty of men in his crew to carry out
orders, no matter how difficult they might be.”
Syd nodded. “Yes, that’s all quite true,” he agreed. “Of course, it
doesn’t correspond with the map at all, but I’ve always had a hankering
to look that plateau over. There must be a mighty fine view from there
anyhow. As soon as we get a chance to clear a path, let’s organize
another treasure hunt, and take it by easy stages so Madame Carreau can
go too. She seems a good little sport, by what you tell me.”
I had to laugh at that description of the dainty, fragile looking
little old lady, with her Dresden china coloring and her manner of
being a sort of grand duchess of what Mademoiselle, at Miss Porter’s
School, used to call the old _Faubourg Saint Germain_. But all the same
I knew what Syd meant in spite of his slang. She was just as young and
eager underneath her delicate outside, as any of us. If we had to take
turns carrying her up that jungly climb to the plateau, I was resolved
she shouldn’t miss the fun of going with us.
That night I dreamed a whole series of exciting dreams about _almost_
finding the buried treasure, and always just missing it by a silly
little bit of bad luck at the end. I woke from the last of these to
find that morning had come. The sun wasn’t up yet, but my window, which
looked out to the east, showed long pink and golden streaks across the
sky, and a lovely rose-tinted glow on the water--low down, where the
clouds and ocean met.
This was the nicest hour of the whole day on the Island, because it
was so fresh and cool and _clean_, somehow. You had a feeling that
overnight the whole world had been scrubbed after the hot yesterday,
and before the hot tomorrow. I didn’t always wake early enough to see
it, but when I did, I never failed to spring out of bed, gather up a
kimono and towels, and run down the old Planter’s Road to the beach,
for a morning dip in the lagoon.
I was up out of bed in a jiffy that morning, and as I was stealing down
the hall toward the stairs, trying to walk softly so as not to wake
anyone else in the house, I was startled to see the door of Madame
Carreau’s bedroom open, very carefully, an inch or two at a time, and
Madame’s white head, covered with a gay lavender and rose bathing cap,
peep out.
She smiled in a funny, half guilty manner at seeing me, and put her
finger to her lips cautiously.
Then she opened the door wider, and slipped out into the hall to join
me. She looked very tiny and doll-like, somehow, in a fleecy lavender
kimono wrapped tightly round her, and with her bare feet in little
high-heeled lavender silk mules that seemed just big enough for a
six-year-old child.
She carried a huge Turkish bath towel over one arm, and I guessed at
once that she was bound for the lagoon and a swim, just as I was.
Probably it was an old custom of hers when she used to live on the
Island.
Without either of us saying a word for fear of waking the sleepers
round us, we tip-toed down the stairs side by side, and out across the
terrace in front of the house. There Madame stopped and drew a long
breath of the wonderful morning air. Her black eyes were shining.
“I had forgotten how beautiful it was,” she whispered. “You love it
too, little Gay? This is the best time of the whole twenty-four hours,
and those sleepy-heads waste it in bed! _Pouf!_ We are wiser, you and
I!”
“I’m afraid I don’t always wake in time to come down here at this
hour,” I said honestly. “But when I do, I’m up in a hurry. I’m glad you
swim too. It’s lot nicer to have company. Andy’s too lazy for early
morning exercise, and the boys like to wait till the middle of the
morning when they can stay in longer. They say it’s so hot then they
need to be cooled off more than now. But I like this time best.”
She put her hand out and pinched my cheek, but I noticed suddenly that
her kind, faded, old eyes were looking at me sort of keenly.
“It is too beautiful, this morning, to keep all to ourselves,” she
suggested, smiling that warm friendly smile of hers. “Why don’t you go
upstairs--oh, very softly,--and bring that pretty little cousin Andrée
down to share our swim with us? I have been more used to boys than
young girls, all my life, but now that I have a chance, I propose to
become acquainted with my own sex. Don’t you think if you wake her,
Andrée would enjoy all this--loveliness?” She made a gesture that took
in the morning about us, and with that funny, new feeling of having
been unconsciously a bit unfair to my girl cousin, that I’d experienced
yesterday in Madame’s room, I nodded and ran back into the house.
When I woke her, Andy was inclined to grumble just at first and roll
over for another forty winks. But when she understood Madame wanted
her, she sat up in a hurry.
“Why didn’t you tell me that at once?” she demanded rather crossly.
“Isn’t she a wonder, Gay? Fancy her going swimming at sunrise, when
she must be pretty nearly seventy years old.”
“She’s seventy years young, I guess,” I corrected her. “But, you’ve got
to hurry if you’re coming. We can’t keep her waiting down there alone.
Where did you put your Annette yesterday, it’s not in the closet--Oh,
here it is, back of this door--grab a towel now and come on!”
Madame had a quick approving little smile for me when we came hurrying
across the terrace to join her.
“Isn’t this a morning of mornings?” she greeted Andy. “Little Gay here,
and I couldn’t bear to have you miss it.”
I was surprised to see Andy flush, and her lip start trembling
unexpectedly at the words, but she looked away so we shouldn’t see and
pretended to be fussing with a loose thread on her bathing suit.
“It was sweet of you not to forget me,” she said, still not looking up,
and again I had that feeling of having been unkind without meaning it.
It was a horrid, uncomfortable feeling, and it made me sort of half mad
with myself for having had to be reminded about Andrée, and half mad
with her for always waiting to be singled out, instead of joining in
naturally like the rest of the family.
“Let’s start,” I said impatiently, deciding it was pleasanter to be
doing something than to think just then.
So we three trotted along together down the Planter’s Road, and came
out on the cool white sand of the lagoon beach. The sky and ocean were
both quite a deep rose in the East now, and there was that lovely,
spicy little breeze blowing from the land behind us that I’d smelled
the first day the schooner lifted the Island.
No matter how many times I’d smelled it since, I had never got over
feeling it meant romance and adventure, desert islands, buried treasure
and all sorts of wonderful, unreal things that don’t happen in an
every-day world.
I saw Madame lift her head suddenly, and sniff, and I knew she
recognized the odor too.
“Once,” she said to us, “way out in India, I smelled something like
it, at the edge of the jungle. We were traveling from a small native
village, and had to cross quite a strip of real jungle to get to our
next stopping place. It made me so homesick, I cried when my husband
wasn’t looking. It was after then I began to want to come home to
Sunset Island.”
She took off her lavender kimono and underneath it she had on the
funniest, most old-fashioned bathing suit of black silk I’d ever seen,
but somehow it suited her--all bunches and ruffles and little bows. I
felt Andy and I were awfully modern in our Annettes, but she seemed to
like them, and told us she knew one couldn’t swim really far in skirts.
Anyhow, she just liked now to paddle about and lie down in the shallow
water.
But when we were actually in, I found she swam a good deal better than
she’d led us to suppose.
“I taught Raoul to swim when he was only five,” she told me shyly. “We
used to swim out to the reef every morning, when he was a little older.
I’d like to do that again.”
I was a little bit worried over this, because though it wasn’t a long
swim across for me, or for the boys, Madame was a different matter.
Even Andy, who wasn’t a strong swimmer, had never attempted it yet.
However, Madame looked so little and light, I finally decided I could
tow her safely ashore if she did give out on the way, so we set out,
swimming slowly, a few feet apart, leaving Andy splashing lazily near
the beach.
The surf was breaking over the barrier reef, but not as strongly as it
would later when the tide was high, and we found a place where we could
climb up and rest on the rocks without getting more than an occasional
splash of spray. The first rim of the sun was showing through the
clouds behind us, and when we sat facing the shore there was a wide
gold pathway right across the lagoon, from our feet to the white sand
of the beach.
The Island itself looked awfully deserted and mysterious from the reef.
The undergrowth was so thick that you couldn’t see the house, or any
of our improvements and outbuildings. The land sloped upward from the
beach to the north, to the pointed hill I’d always called Sugar Loaf,
on top of which was the small, jungle-covered plateau Madame wanted to
search for the treasure.
Uncle Joe had estimated the height of that hill at about three hundred
feet or so, but from the reef, and in the early morning light, it
looked higher--and sort of dark and forbidding as well. You could
easily believe, just looking at it, that it had all kinds of secrets to
keep. So why not Morgan’s too?
Madame Carreau pointed it out with her small, wrinkled hand.
“Raoul climbed it several times,” she said. “Do you see that little
break in the jungle growth--over there to the right? You can scarcely
find it--as if there’d been a road cut through once. It’s nearly
grown over now, I suppose. Raoul cut that path so I could go exploring
with him, but my husband was always worrying about my heart--he thinks
because I look frail I must be delicate. My family have always tried
to make an invalid of me by too much care and pampering. But I’m
really as strong as--as a carthorse.” She ended so emphatically, and
the comparison was so utterly absurd applied to her, that I had to
laugh. She joined me a second afterwards but kept nodding her head
determinedly.
“Now don’t you get to fancying, Gay, that my husband is right,” she
warned. “He finally succeeded in frightening Raoul so he would never
take me up there.” Once more her hand pointed to the top of Sugar
Loaf. “But now _I’m going_, and I’m counting on you, _bébé_, to help
me. I want to see that view from up there, and have one more hunt for
Morgan’s gold pieces before I die.”
After that we slipped into the water again, and swam comfortably back
to the beach. She seemed a little out of breath, I thought, when we
reached the sand, and I insisted that we should lie there a while to
dry off and rest, before going back to the house.
I scooped up the sand into a high chair-back for Madame to lean
against, and Andy and I sprawled out luxuriously, on either side of
her and talked for nearly an hour, till we heard the sound of the
breakfast gong clanging faintly down the Planter’s Road through the
woods to us, and all jumped to our feet guiltily.
But in that hour Andy and I learned to know Madame as an old friend. We
said afterwards we couldn’t quite believe she had arrived on the _Myra_
only the day before, and that in reality we had known her for less than
twenty-four hours.
She told us such vivid, quaintly worded stories of Sunset Island--the
traditions about its former pirate visitors, the building of the
plantation house by Rosemary’s husband--the first Carreau to settle on
the Island over a hundred years ago--and last of all, but scarcely less
interesting, her own life in Planter’s House, and Raoul’s boyhood.
In return I told her of Braeburn--Andy as usual preferring to sit back
and listen--and how Aunt Mollie had taken me in when my mother died and
my young father was drowned at sea rescuing one of his own men. Except
for that part about Daddy, the rest of what I had to tell sounded
pretty tame to me, compared with Madame’s stories, but she really
seemed interested, and kept asking questions that finally drew Andy,
too, on to talk about Dan and Sydney, and little Red, and all our good
times together.
Then while we were both still chattering like magpies, finding
something new to remember at every pause, that gong rang, and we were
suddenly reminded that we were starved for breakfast.
So we started back up the road, and Madame thought of the little side
door that led into the passageway behind the back-staircase, and let us
slip up to our rooms without meeting any of the family.
Monsieur Carreau, seated at Aunt Mollie’s right, looked up with a
twinkle in his black eyes when we appeared in the dining room.
“Now, Mademoiselle Gay and Mademoiselle Andrée, I am wondering which of
you three led the others into mischief,” he said. “You will find that
this wife of mine, although she may appear to be sixty, is in reality
no more than six, and liable to get into all sorts of scrapes unless
you keep an eagle eye on her.”
The family laughed, and Madame, her own eyes twinkling as brightly as
Monsieur’s, sat down in her place by Uncle Charles, and attacked her
orange with a hungry air.
“You should know my habits after forty years, Jean,” she said with
pretended severity. “I was taking my morning swim in the lagoon, and
these young ladies have also the same excellent and healthful custom.
_Voila!_ We swam together.”
Perhaps it went through Monsieur Carreau’s mind, as she spoke, that
she had formed her habit of swimming years ago, with a much nearer and
dearer companion than either Gay or Andrée, for his face softened,
though he merely nodded and resumed his breakfast.
“We discussed the treasure _cache_,” Madame went on with her brave
little air of gaiety. “We are going to make a real business of the
search. I warn you all that this time we are going to accomplish
something.”
“Hooray for Madame Carreau!” Syd cried impulsively, and then blushed
scarlet for fear he’d be thought forward and disrespectful. But Madame
looked as pleased as Punch.
“Will you join our search party, Sydnee?” she asked him. She had queer,
unexpected little touches of accent at times, especially in saying
names, and at others she would talk ahead without giving a sign that
she had been brought up to French as her mother tongue.
“You bet!” Syd said with emphasis, and only grinned when Aunt Mollie
arched her eyebrows at him as she does when we get too slangy. It’s the
nearest she ever comes to actual scolding.
“Madame doesn’t mind--she’s used to boys,” Syd said quickly, and then
stopped short, for fear his reference to Raoul might hurt our guests.
“Yes, I am used to boys,” Madame wasn’t hurt, but pleased. “As I told
you I am not so used to girls,” she added apologetically, smiling at
Andrée and me. “But I am already very fond of two.”
That day Syd, Andrée and I appointed ourselves a committee of three
to show Madame and Monsieur all the changes we had made in the house
and grounds, and our plans for the future. They were as interested
and excited as we could have asked, and every once in a while would
stop to point out something to each other, and say softly, “You
remember? See--this is different--Why did we not think of doing so?”
Or else--“Here it is the same. We could have remembered no better
ourselves.”
After the midday meal, Madame rested, and Monsieur sat in the big,
cool hall by the fountain, and read during the heat of the early
afternoon. But about the time the shadows had lengthened out along the
Planter’s Road, and walking was pleasanter, Madame came downstairs--in
old-fashioned lavender sprigged dimity--and they set out together for
the beach, arm in arm.
“I guess maybe they want to talk about Raoul and old days,” Andy said
with a quick sympathy that surprised me a little from her. “Suppose we
stay away a while, and let them get accustomed to things.”