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 Provençal 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 have 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 the 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 was 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.
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 of 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 the 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 Sagesse 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.”
“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.