Broken bits of gold like the twigs from which jewelled fruit had been torn, spinels, peridots, star sapphires, slab-shaped emeralds, cinnamon stones, a black pearl shaped like a pear, diamonds, an enormous turquoise de la vieille roche sun-stricken, coloured, flashing, the treasure of Simon Serpente lay before Gaspard, other treasure there doubtless had been in coin and gold, but this was the cream of it, skimmed by Sagesse, selected no doubt during that calm behind which the sailor’s eye had seen the approaching hurricane.
Loot from the towns of Spanish South America, from ships plundered and scuttled, from women and from altars, all lay here in a confusion of colours. Some of these stones absolutely shouted of sacrilege, huge, and splendid, never could they have been worn as jewellery, except by emperors or by jewelled saints in the twilit and incense-laden air of some cathedral. Gaspard knew little of precious stones, but a child or a savage would have guessed the worth of this amazing collection of gems. For a moment after he had turned them out of the handkerchief, his breath came in gasps like the breath of a person dashed with cold water. He could not touch them for a moment, it was as though he were afraid of shattering an illusion. Then came the thought:
They are mine.
265 He curled his fingers, his lips drew back from his teeth, then he laughed.
They are mine.
He banged his right hand, palm down on the sand beside him, then he clapped his knees with both hands, then, stretching out his hand he seized a wine-coloured amethyst. It was the least valuable stone of the lot, but it was lovely and it lay in his palm like a little lake of colour. He felt its smoothness, turned it about, touched it with his tongue as if he wanted to taste its beauty as well as feel and see it.
It was his, all these things were his and as the thought came back to him he sprang to his feet and with the amethyst in his left hand and his right hand shading his eyes, he looked wildly around him.
Yes, he was alone, no one was watching him; no one was there to dispute his possession; the wind blew and the bay-cedar bushes bent before the wind, the sun shone, the sea burned blue and flashed beneath the sun. In all the island world there was no sign or sound of life save the flickering wings of the cormorants on the northern beach and occasionally their cries.
Loneliness no longer had terrors for him, the sight of a ship at this moment would have flung him into consternation. He, the man who had flung himself face downward in the tent weeping at the thought that it might be months before a ship sighted the island and took him off to begin his long journey back to Martinique and Marie, would, had he sighted a sail at this moment, have cursed it.
With the knowledge of possession had come the fear of dispossession. He had not forgotten Marie, he had not foregone his desire to return to Martinique, but in the first wonderful hours with his treasure, he wished to be alone, to feel it live under his hand, to make plans as to safe disposal,266 to dream for a while the wonderful dream of wealth here, where there was nothing to disturb him but the gulls and the waves.
Besides, why should he grieve about Marie now? There was nothing to stop him from reaching her, the road was clear before him once he was free from the island, the least of those stones lying there in a glittering heap would give him his passage to Martinique from the ends of the earth.
He looked around at the far horizon—not a sail.
As he was standing thus with his hand in his left-hand pocket containing the pocket-book of Sagesse which he had not yet examined, he felt something beside the pocket-book. A round, hard disc. It was the coin he had picked out of the treasure pit. Rich as he was, this was the only coin in his possession. Then, sitting down on the sand beside his treasure, he began to sort the stones, arranging them in lines according to their colour. Some were unset, others had still clinging to them some fragments of the settings from which they had been broken.
There were seven rubies, all of the true pigeon-blood colour, the least of these was as large as one’s little finger-nail, the three largest were immense stones as big as the top of an ordinary man’s thumb above a line drawn across the base of the nail; it is only in rubies of the true colour and of this great size that the splendour of precious stones finds its ultimate expression. There is nothing in the inanimate world to approach them in magnificence and beauty.
There were seventeen emeralds, ten quite small and inconsiderable, and seven simply priceless, all save the largest, which was starred and flawed.
He arranged these beneath the rows of rubies. Then came the diamonds of which there were forty-eight, not counting the diamond in the ring lying where he had placed267 it by the jewelled snake. Some of these diamonds still had the gold of their settings clinging to them, the six largest were the size of hazel nuts and of perfect water. In any market of the world those six diamonds would have fetched thirty thousand pounds and have given a huge profit to the buyer, seven were about half the size of hazel nuts, but of these one was blue and it alone was a little fortune; of the thirty-five remaining three were sherry-coloured and the remainder pure white.
The great turquoise had no companion, he placed it alone on the sand beneath the diamonds, and then, under it, he began to arrange the sapphires; as he was doing it a shadow passed over him, it was the shadow of a frigate bird, flying heavily, gorged with its feast and making south; the same wind on which it was drifting brought with it the clamouring of the cormorants; he rose, glanced around and with dazed eyes looked over the sea, sweeping the horizon; there was no sign of smoke or sail and he sat down again to continue the jewelled pattern on the sand.
He counted the sapphires, two dozen and four there were, varying from cornflower blue to the blue of night, varying in size from the size of a pea to the size of a broad bean. He arranged them between the turquoise. The great amethyst he placed beneath the sapphires, and under the amethyst the spinels, and peridots, of which there were half a handful. The pear-shaped black pearl, the only pearl amidst all these treasures, he placed last.
The white pearl, the ring, and the snake were still lying apart by themselves; besides the stones arranged in lines there were a few fragments of gold, bits of settings, which he disregarded.
Then he sat and contemplated the glittering battalions of his treasure. White, red, blue, the blue of the turquoise,268 the wine colour of the amethyst, the black of the pearl, he feasted his eyes on them all. Then, turning on his back, shutting his eyes and casting his right hand backwards across them, he laughed.
He could see them almost better with his eyes shut. That was the most delightful and extraordinary moment in his life, it would have been in any man’s life; coloured Fortune, real, tangible Fortune, Fortune in her most beautiful guise at his elbow and the whole blue world before him; what he would do with it all he did not dream; great houses of the wealthy people, snow-white yachts that he had seen in the various parts of the world, the vision of the saloon of the Rhone laid out with cut glass and flowers arose before him for a moment; all that belonged to the world of the wealthy, all that world was his now, but he built no imaginary palaces yet, just for the moment the sensation of possession was all powerful, he wanted nothing else.
Marie was fully alive and in the background of his mind, and the knowledge that his wealth would enable him to reach her was there and formed part of his satisfaction; but he saw nothing truly yet but the great, blinding light that Fortune was flashing in his eyes.
As he lay, the wash of the waves on the desolate beach, the blowing of the wind across the bay-cedar bushes, the crying of the frigate birds and cormorants came to him like sounds heard in a dream.
Then the crying of the birds led his thoughts back to Yves and Yves led him back to the stokehold. He could hear the roar of the furnaces and the boom of the sea, the clatter of the ash lift, the clash of the furnace doors. The vision of Fortune had driven all that from his mind. In the last couple of hours, he had passed through an amazing269 development; all the nobility and pride in his nature had been quickened into life, latent powers until now unsuspected were awakening in his being, wealth, and the power of wealth were at his disposal. He felt like some exiled king who had at last come to his own, and then, lo and behold, like some horrible poor relation into his dream stepped the stoker of the Rhone. Gaspard Cadillac, the Moco, came to spoil the dreams of Gaspard Cadillac, the wealthy man. Wealth, that thing for which we all crave, had been in his possession scarcely an hour when it hit him a blow.
“Hi, there, you dog of a Moco, hurry your stumps, down to your furnace, vite!—vite!—vite!”
Those words had been shot at him by Cuillard, the chief engineer of the Rhone as he had come aboard across the Messagerie wharf at Marseilles before starting. They were nothing to a stoker, but the remembrance of them was bitter now, flame-like hatred a............