It was settled. I had now the courage to turn about. Our men crouched
about the decks here and there with anxious, crestfallen faces, all
turned one way to watch the chaser. For the first time that morning I
perceived Cesar stretched out full length on the deck near the foremast
and wondered where he had been skulking till then. But he might in truth
have been at my elbow all the time for all I knew. We had been too
absorbed in watching our fate to pay attention to each other. Nobody had
eaten anything that morning, but the men had been coming constantly to
drink at the water-butt.
I ran down to the cabin. I had there, put away in a locker, ten thousand
francs in gold of whose presence on board, so far as I was aware, not a
soul, except Dominic had the slightest inkling. When I emerged on deck
again Dominic had turned about and was peering from under his cowl at the
coast. Cape Creux closed the view ahead. To the left a wide bay, its
waters torn and swept by fierce squalls, seemed full of smoke. Astern
the sky had a menacing look.
Directly he saw me, Dominic, in a placid tone, wanted to know what was
the matter. I came close to him and, looking as unconcerned as I could,
told him in an undertone that I had found the locker broken open and the
money-belt gone. Last evening it was still there.
“What did you want to do with it?” he asked me, trembling violently.
“Put it round my waist, of course,” I answered, amazed to hear his teeth
chattering.
“Cursed gold!” he muttered. “The weight of the money might have cost you
your life, perhaps.” He shuddered. “There is no time to talk about that
now.”
“I am ready.”
“Not yet. I am waiting for that squall to come over,” he muttered. And
a few leaden minutes passed.
The squall came over at last. Our pursuer, overtaken by a sort of murky
whirlwind, disappeared from our sight. The _Tremolino_ quivered and
bounded forward. The land ahead vanished, too, and we seemed to be left
alone in a world of water and wind.
“_Prenez la barre_, _monsieur_,” Dominic broke the silence suddenly in an
austere voice. “Take hold of the tiller.” He bent his hood to my ear.
“The balancelle is yours. Your own hands must deal the blow. I—I have
yet another piece of work to do.” He spoke up loudly to the man who
steered. “Let the signorino take the tiller, and you with the others
stand by to haul the boat alongside quickly at the word.”
The man obeyed, surprised, but silent. The others stirred, and pricked
up their ears at this. I heard their murmurs. “What now? Are we going
to run in somewhere and take to our heels? The Padrone knows what he is
doing.”
Dominic went forward. He paused to look down at Cesar, who, as I have
said before, was lying full length face down by the foremast, then
stepped over him, and dived out of my sight under the foresail. I saw
nothing ahead. It was impossible for me to see anything except the
foresail open and still, like a great shadowy wing. But Dominic had his
bearings. His voice came to me from forward, in a just audible cry:
“Now, signorino!”
I bore on the tiller, as instructed before. Again I heard him faintly,
and then I had only to hold her straight. No ship ran so joyously to her
death before. She rose and fell, as if floating in space, and darted
forward, whizzing like an arrow. Dominic, stooping under the foot of the
foresail, reappeared, and stood steadying himself against the mast, with
a raised forefinger in an attitude of expectant attention. A second
before the shock his arm fell down by his side. At that I set my teeth.
And then—
Talk of splintered planks and smashed timbers! This shipwreck lies upon
my soul with the dread and horror of a homicide, with the unforgettable
remorse of having crushed a living, faithful heart at a single blow. At
one moment the rush and the soaring swing of speed; the next a crash, and
death, stillness—a moment of horrible immobility, with the song of the
wind changed to a strident wail, and the heavy waters boiling up menacing
and sluggish around the corpse. I saw in a distracting minute the
foreyard fly fore and aft with a brutal swing, the men all in a heap,
cursing with fear, and hauling frantically at the line of the boat. With
a strange welcoming of the familiar I saw also Cesar amongst them, and
recognised Dominic’s old, well-known, effective gesture, the horizontal
sweep of his powerful arm. I recollect distinctly saying to myself,
“Cesar must go down, of course,” and then, as I was scrambling on all
fours, the swinging tiller I had let go caught me a crack under the ear,
and knocked me over senseless.
I don’t think I was actually unconscious for more than a few minutes, but
when I came to myself the dinghy was driving before the wind into a
sheltered cove, two men just keeping her straight with their oars.
Dominic, with his arm round my shoulders, supported me in the
stern-sheets.
We landed in a familiar part of the country. Dominic took one of the
boat’s oars with him. I suppose he was thinking of the stream we would
have presently to cross, on which there was a miserable specimen of a
punt, often robbed of its pole. But first of all we had to ascend the
ridge of land at the back of the Cape. He helped me up. I was dizzy.
My head felt very large and heavy. At the top of the ascent I clung to
him, and we stopped to rest.
To the right, below us, the wide, smoky bay was empty. Dominic had kept
his word. There was not a chip to be seen around the black rock from
which the _Tremolino_, with her plucky heart crushed at one blow, had
slipped off into deep water to her eternal rest. The vastness of the
open sea was smothered in driving mists, and in the centre of the
thinning squall, phantom-like, under a frightful press of canvas, the
unconscious guardacosta dashed on, still chasing to the northward. Our
men were already descending the reverse slope to look for that punt which
we knew from experience was not always to be found easily. I looked
after them with dazed, misty eyes. One, two, three, four.
“Dominic, where’s Cesar?” I cried.
As if repulsing the very sound of the name, the Padrone made that ample,
sweeping, knocking-down gesture. I stepped back a pace and stared at him
fearfully. His open shirt uncovered his muscular neck and the thick hair
on his chest. He planted the oar upright in the soft soil, and rolling
up slowly his right sleeve, extended the bare arm before my face.
“This,” he began, with an extreme deliberation, whose superhuman
restraint vibrated with the suppressed violence of his feelings, “is the
arm which delivered the blow. I am afraid it is your own gold that did
the rest. I forgot all about your money.” He clasped his hands together
in sudden distress. “I forgot, I forgot,” he repeated disconsolately.
“Cesar stole the belt?” I stammered out, bewildered.
“And who else? _Canallia_! He must have been spying on you for days.
And he did the whole thing. Absent all day in Barcelona. _Traditore_!
Sold his jacket—to hire a horse. Ha! ha! A good affair! I tell you it
was he who set him at us. . . .”
Dominic pointed at the sea, where the guardacosta was a mere dark speck.
His chin dropped on his breast.
“. . . On information,” he murmured, in a gloomy voice. “A Cervoni! Oh!
my poor brother! . . .”
“And you drowned him,” I said feebly.
“I struck once, and the wretch went down like a stone—with the gold.
Yes. But he had time to read in my eyes that nothing could save him
while I was alive. And had I not the right—I, Dominic Cervoni, Padrone,
who brought him aboard your fellucca—my nephew, a traitor?”
He pulled the oar out of the ground and helped me carefully down the
slope. All the time he never once looked me in the face. He punted us
over, then shouldered the oar again and waited till our men were at some
distance before he offered me his arm. After we had gone a little way,
the fishing hamlet we were making for came into view. Dominic stopped.
“Do you think you can make your way as far as the houses by yourself?” he
asked me quietly.
“Yes, I think so. But why? Where are you going, Dominic?”
“Anywhere. What a question! Signorino, you are but little more than a
boy to ask such a question of a man having this tale in his family.
_Ah_! _Traditore_! What made me ever own that spawn of a hungry devil
for our own blood! Thief, cheat, coward, liar—other men can deal with
that. But I was his uncle, and so . . . I wish he had poisoned
me—_charogne_! But this: that I, a confidential man and a Corsican,
should have to ask your pardon for bringing on board your vessel, of
which I was Padrone, a Cervoni, who has betrayed you—a traitor!—that is
too much. It is too much. Well, I beg your pardon; and you may spit in
Dominic’s face because a traitor of our blood taints us all. A theft may
be made good between men, a lie may be set right, a death avenged, but
what can one do to atone for a treachery like this? . . . Nothing.”
He turned and walked away from me along the bank of the stream,
flourishing a vengeful arm and repeating to himself slowly, with savage
emphasis: “_Ah_! _Canaille_! _Canaille_! _Canaille_! . . .” He left
me there trembling with weakness and mute with awe. Unable to make a
sound, I gazed after the strangely desolate figure of that seaman
carrying an oar on his shoulder up a barren, rock-strewn ravine under the
dreary leaden sky of _Tremolino’s_ last day. Thus, walking deliberately,
with his back to the sea, Dominic vanished from my sight.
With the quality of our desires, thoughts, and wonder proportioned to our
infinite littleness, we measure even time itself by our own stature.
Imprisoned in the house of personal illusions, thirty centuries in
mankind’s history seem less to look back upon than thirty years of our
own life. And Dominic Cervoni takes his place in my memory by the side
of the legendary wanderer on the sea of marvels and terrors, by the side
of the fatal and impious adventurer, to whom the evoked shade of the
soothsayer predicted a journey inland with an oar on his shoulder, till
he met men who had never set eyes on ships and oars. It seems to me I
can see them side by side in the twilight of an arid land, the
unfortunate possessors of the secret lore of the sea, bearing the emblem
of their hard calling on their shoulders, surrounded by silent and
curious men: even as I, too, having turned my back upon the sea, am
bearing those few pages in the twilight, with the hope of finding in an
inland valley the silent welcome of some patient listener.