he awoke not knowing in the least where he was; then he remembered.
his tongue felt huge in his mouth and his hands seemed the size of pillows. he had felt all this before once, long ago, when a knock-out drop had been put in his drink and he had been shanghaied. it was a frightful sensation, for, added to it was the depression of the rum and the knowledge that he had drunk to excess.
ah! those nervous temperaments that liquor makes god-like for a moment of illusion, how they suffer face to face with their beastlikeness the morning after!
the wind was blowing—the faintest breath—through the open door of the tent, and the sea lay beyond the beach still and grey.
the sea that yesterday had been blue as sapphire had lost its blueness and beauty and lay grey and still, breaking on the beach in little ripples. the sky above the sea was of a dull zinc colour, darker at the horizon than at the zenith. gaspard did not remember ever having seen a tropic sky like that, so still in its greyness, so steadfast, so gloomy.
through the open door of the tent the wind carried with it the faintest powdering of dust. it irritated his eyes; he looked at his right hand—it was covered with grey dust. this was not sand from the beach; this was dust, volcanic dust, grey and dismal. some volcano of244 the islands was in eruption, some volcano down martinique way, for the dust was blown from that direction by the southeast trade wind.
but gaspard knew nothing of volcanoes or their dust. he lay listening for the voice of sagesse. he had not yet recognized that a drug had been used against him the night before. he put everything down to the drink, and felt ashamed to face his companion.
he lay listening. not a sound except a slight pattering and scratching of the palm fronds as now and then they lifted to the faintest breath of air. then what breeze there was died utterly away, and complete silence held the island, broken now and then by the far-off crying of the gulls.
he struggled to his feet, cursing the rum he had drunk the night before, and himself for having drunk it. then he came tottering out on to the beach. the first thing that struck his eye was the empty space where last evening the pile of stores had stood, covered with a sail-cloth. the stores had not been completely removed; a bag of biscuits and a case of canned meat had been left.
his gaze travelled from these to the shore edge, where the longboat ought to have been had the working party been ashore. it was not there. then, flinging off his shoes and working his way a couple of yards up the stem of a palm, he sought the western anchorage.
la belle arlésienne was gone.
he came down from the tree shaking and faint, the perspiration running from the palms of his hands and his lips dry as sandstone.
he was marooned. the thing was clear. sagesse had doctored him the night before with a knock-out drop; he had been “doped,” and as he lay unconscious the evasion245 had been made. but why? the answer was easy enough to find when one knew the character of sagesse. to leave gaspard alone on his island, knowing what he had suffered there before, would be a piece of revenge after sagesse’s heart; yet gaspard felt this not to be the solution.
why had sagesse flown like this, leaving the ship of coral in the lagoon untouched? had he, then, sure knowledge that the treasure was not there, and that time would be wasted in looking for it? trying to find an answer to the riddle set him, and scarcely knowing where he went, he took the path across the islet along which the quarterboat had been drawn to the lagoon.
even before he reached the northern beach two things struck his eye; the quarterboat, with all the diving apparatus on board, lay floating in the lagoon and moored to the eastern edge of the basin; and far out at sea la belle arlésienne with all sail set lay becalmed.
out there on the desolate grey of the calm sea, her old sails hanging flaccid and without a motion, la belle arlésienne had an inexpressibly lugubrious and sinister appearance.
it was as though she had been caught in some wicked act and, trying to escape, had been arrested. the calm was holding her in a grip as powerful as the iron grip of ice; the south equatorial current, broken here, would not give her a drift of more than a mile an hour to the north. she might hang in sight of the island for a day or more.
gaspard, standing on the reef, shook his fist at her and cursed her, and her captain and crew. he remembered the very first day he had seen her, and how, working himself up into a nervous fever of imagination, he246 had fancied her passing without seeing him and had cursed her and her captain and her crew.
she had taken him from the island and had brought him back; on board of her he had given himself away to sagesse under the influence of rum. she had brought him to martinique, she had given him marie and the hope of a happy future—and she had taken them away again. she was an evil thing, and he cursed her again as he stared across the sea, not noticing that through the air, upon his clothes, upon the reef, upon the bay-cedar bushes behind him, the almost impalpable grey dust was still falling.
the wind had utterly ceased and a candle would have burnt without a flicker in that motionless air. gaspard had no idea of the time of day, for the light came through the clouded sky evenly diffused as light comes through a scuttle of ground glass.
he turned his eyes from the distant vessel to the boat floating on the lagoon.
why had sagesse abandoned the boat and the valuable diving apparatus? sagesse of all men in the world, sagesse, who turned over a half-penny twice before he parted with it! the boat and gear were worth a very considerable sum, and here they were—thrown away.
he turned from the beach and began to re-cross the islet.
halfway across, at the spot where yesterday he had shewn sagesse the skull of serpente, he stopped dead, flung up his arms, and cried out as though he had been shot.
the little mound beside which yves had found the bones of serpente and the pouch of gold was no longer there; in its place there was a cavity about six feet long and four wide and five deep.
247 he saw it all at once in one blinding flash. serpente’s treasure had never been on board that ship. it had been here safely cached, and serpente had died and left his bones beside it.
it was obvious now; the mound of earth, the ship sunk in the lagoon, the bones bleaching beside the mound; yet he had never seen a glimpse of it at all, whereas sagesse, at the first sight of the ship, had smelt the truth; sagesse at sight of the mound had known almost as a fact that the treasure of serpente lay there. he recalled how sagesse had laughed as he flung the skull away into the bushes; he recalled how last night he had demanded thirty per cent. of the findings, and how sagesse had given in and agreed to his demand. then, while he, gaspard, drugged and asleep, lay snoring in his tent, sagesse, with jules perhaps to help him, came here, dug, found what they sought, collected their men, collected their stores, rowed to la belle arlésienne, up-anchored, and sailed away north for the american coast.
the blood rushed to gaspard’s face as he thought of this, sagesse’s words, spoken in the café of the rue victor hugo, came back to him. “it is men like you who fill stokeholds.” yes, he belonged to the race of men who cannot see, the inefficient men who fill stokeholds, the men without worldly wisdom and insight, who do the work of the world with their hands, while the sharpers and scoundrels and business men take the profits.
he flung himself on his knees by the hole and looked into it. at the bottom something caught his eye, and, leaping down, he picked it up. it was a coin, heavy, battered, and almost soot-black. he bit it, and the tiny dint of the toothmark showed yellow. it was gold.
he dragged himself up amid the bushes, and with the248 coin in his hand stood looking away at the sea, where la belle arlésienne lay becalmed.
a wild idea occurred to him of trying to reach her with the quarterboat that was lying in the lagoon. impossible. there were no oars, the heavy diving pump was fixed on board her firmly, he had no tools to remove it with, and even at high tide, when the sea edge of the reef was submerged, he doubted if she could be got across it.
as he stood like this, the sea, which had been breaking in tiny waves, the still grey sea that seemed asleep, suddenly gave a deep sigh.
a glassy roller, stealthy as a thief, had stolen shoreward from the north and broken upon the reef. gaspard turned his eyes from la belle arlésienne, caught a glimpse of something in the sky to westward, shaded his eyes and looked.
