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 Proven?al 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 have222 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 the223 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 was224 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.

225 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............