_In Which I Catch a Glimpse of a Different Kind of Treasure._
I had, as I have said, made up my mind to start on the homeward trip
early the following morning, but something happened that very evening to
change my plans. I had dropped into the little settlement's one store,
to buy some tobacco, the only kind that Charlie Webster--who carried his
British loyalty into the smallest concerns of life, declared fit to
smoke--some English plug of uncommon strength, not to say ferocity, a
real manly tobacco such as one might imagine the favourite chew of
pirates and smugglers.
I stayed chatting with the storekeeper--a lean, astute-looking
Englishman, with the un-English name of Sweeney--who made a pretty good
thing of selling his motley merchandise to the poor natives, on the good
old business principle of supplying goods of the poorest possible
quality at the highest possible prices. He was said to hold a mortgage
on the lives of half the population, by letting them have goods on
credit against their prospective wages from sponging trips, he himself
being the owner of three or four sponging sloops, and so doubly insured
against loss. His low-ceilinged, black-beamed store, dimly lit with
kerosene lamps, was a wilderness of the most unattractive merchandise
the mind of man can conceive, lying in heaps on trestles, hanging from
the rafters, and cluttering up every available inch of space, so that
narrow lanes only were left among dangling tinware, coils of rope,
coarse bedding, barrels in which very unappetising pork lay steeping in
brine, other barrels overflowing with grimy looking "grits" and sailors'
biscuits, drums of kerosene and turpentine, cans of paint, jostling
clusters of bananas, strings of onions, dried fish, canned meats, loaves
of coarse bread, tea and coffee, and other simple groceries.
Two rough planks laid on barrels made the counter, up to which from time
to time rather worn-looking, spiritless negro women and girls would come
to make their purchases, and then shuffle off again in their listless
way. Once in a while a sturdy negro would drop in for tobacco, with a
more independent, well-fed air. The Englishman served them all with a
certain contemptuous indifference in which one somehow felt the presence
of the whip-hand.
While he was thus attending a little group of such customers, I had
wandered toward the back of the store, curiously examining the thousand
and one commodities which supplied the strange needs of humanity here in
this lost corner of the world; and, thus occupied, I was diverted by a
voice like sudden music, a voice oddly rich and laughing and confident
for such grim and sinister surroundings. It was one, too, which I seemed
to have heard before, and not so very long ago. When I turned in its
direction, I was immediately arrested, as one always is by any splendour
of vitality; for a startling contrast indeed--to the spiritless, furtive
figures that had been coming and going hitherto--was this superb young
creature, tall and lithe with proudly carried head on glorious
shoulders. Her skin was a golden olive, and it had been hard to say
which was the more intensely black--her hair, or the proud eyes which,
turning presently in my direction, seemed to strike upon me as with an
actual impact of soft fire. I swear I could feel them touch me, as it
were, with a warm ray, the radiating glow of her fragrant vitality
enfolding me as in a burning golden cloud.
I wondered whether her glance enfolded everything she looked on in the
same way. Perhaps it was but the unconsciously exerted force of her
superb young womanhood intensely alive. Yet--there was too a significant
wild shyness about her. My presence seemed at once to put her on her
guard. The music of her voice was suddenly hushed, as though she had
hurriedly, almost in terror, thrown a robe of reticence about an
impulsive naturalness not to be displayed before strangers. As for the
storekeeper, he was evidently a familiar acquaintance. He had known
her--he said, after she was gone--since she was a little girl.
While he spoke, my eyes had accidentally fallen on the coin still in his
hand, with which she had just paid him.
"Excuse me," I said, "but that is a curious-looking coin."
I thought that a shade of annoyance passed over his face, as though he
had been better pleased if I had not noticed it. However, it was too
late, and he handed it to me to examine--a large antique-looking gold
coin.
"Why!" I said, "this is a Spanish doubloon!"
"That's what it is," said the Englishman laconically.
"But doesn't it strike you as strange that she should pay her bills with
Spanish doubloons?" I asked.
"It did at first," he answered; and then, as if annoyed with himself, he
was attempting to retrieve an expression that carried an implication he
evidently didn't wish me to retain, he added: "Of course, she doesn't
always pay in Spanish doubloons."
"But she does sometimes?"
"O! once in a great while," he answered, evasively. "I suppose they have
a few old coins in the family, and use them when they run out of
others."
It was as lame an explanation as well could be, and no one could doubt
that, whatever his reason for so doing, he was lying.
"But haven't you trouble in disposing of them?" I enquired.
"Gold is always gold," he answered, "and we don't see enough of it here
to be particular as to whose head is stamped upon it, or what date.
Besides, as I said, it isn't as if I got many of them; and you can
always dispose of them as curiosities."
"Will you sell me this one?" I asked.
"I see no harm in your having it," he said, "but I'd just as soon you
didn't mention where you got it."
"Certainly," I answered, disguising my wonder at his secretiveness.
"What is it worth?"
He named the sum of sixteen dollars and seventy-five cents. Having paid
him that amount, I bade him good-night, glad to be alone with my eager,
glowing thoughts. These I took with me to a bit of coral beach made
doubly white by the moon, rustled over by giant palms, and whispered to
by the vast living jewel of the sea. Surely my thoughts had a brightness
to match even this glitter of the night. I took out my strange doubloon,
and flashed it in the moon.
But, brightly as it shone, it hardly seemed as bright as it would have
seemed a short while back; or, perhaps, it were truer to say that in
another, newer aspect it shone a hundred times more brightly. The
adventure to which it called me was no longer single and simple as
before, but a gloriously confused goal of cloudy splendours, the burning
core of which--suddenly raying out, and then lost again in
brightness--were the eyes of a mysterious girl.