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ОглавлениеCHAPTER I
PALM ISLAND
The sky from sea-line to sea-line was crusted with stars, a triumphant, cloudless, tropic night-sky beneath which the Dryad rode at her anchor, lifting lazily to the swell flowing up from beyond the great Bahama bank.
She was Skelton’s boat, a six-hundred-tonner, turbine engined, rigged with everything new in the way of sea valves and patent gadgets, and she had anchored at sundown off Palm Island, a tiny spot, gull haunted, and due west of Andros.
Skelton was a Christchurch man, Bobby Ratcliffe a Brazenose, and Bobby, tonight, as he leaned on the starboard rail smoking and listening to the wash of the waves on the island beach, was thinking of Skelton, who was down below writing up his diary. Before coming on this “winter cruise to the West Indies in my yacht” Bobby did not know that Skelton kept a diary, that Skelton was so awfully Anglican, so precise, so stuffed with the convenances, that he dined in dress clothes even in a hurricane, that he had a very nasty, naggling temper, that he had prayers every Sunday morning in the cabin which the chief steward, the under stewards, and the officers off watch were expected to attend—also Bobby. Two other men were booked for the cruise, but they cried off at the last moment. If they had come, things might have been different. As it was, Bobby, to use his own language, was pretty much fed up.
Skelton was a right good sort, but he was not the man with whom to share loneliness, and Bobby, who had plenty of money of his own, was thinking how jolly this winter cruise would have been if he had only taken it on board a passenger liner, with girls and deck quoits and cards in the evening, instead of Skelton.
Bobby was only twenty-two, a good-looking clean youth, well-balanced enough, but desirous of fun. Oxford had not spoiled him a bit. He had no “manner,”—just his own naturalness—and he had shocked Skelton at Barbados by getting a great negro washing woman on board (she had come alongside in a blue boat) and giving her rum, for the fun of the thing. “Debauching a native woman with alcohol!” Skelton had called it.
Skelton vetoed shark fishing. It messed his decks. He was like an old woman about his decks. “I tell you what you ought to do, Skelly,” Bobby had said. “You ought to start a blessed laundry!” They had nearly quarreled at Guadeloupe over sharks.
And again at St. Pierre, where, lying off the ruins of the town, Skelton had likened it to Gomorrah, declaring it had been destroyed because of the wickedness of its inhabitants.
“And how about the ships in the bay?” had asked Bobby. “What had they to do with the business? Why weren’t they given notice to quit?”
“We won’t argue on the matter,” replied Skelton.
And there was still two months of this blessed cruise to be worked out!
He was thinking of this when Skelton came on deck, his white shirt-front shining in the starlight. He was in an amiable mood tonight and, ranging up beside Bobby, he spoke about the beauty of the stars.
It was chiefly on Bobby’s initiative that they had dropped the anchor so that they might prospect the island on the morrow, and as they smoked and talked the conversation passed from stars to desert islands, and from desert islands to the old Spaniards of the West Indies, bucaneers, filibusters, pirates, and Brethren of the Coast.
Perhaps it was the starlight, or the tepid wind blowing up from the straits of Florida, or the distant starlit palms of Palm Island that set Skelton off and touched a vein in his nature hitherto unsuspected: whatever it was, he warmed to his subject and for the first time on the voyage became interesting. He could talk! Nombre de Dios, Carthagena, and Porto Bello—he touched them alive again, set the old plate-ships sailing and the pirates overhauling them, sacked cathedrals of gold and jewels, showed Bobby Tortuga, the great rendezvous of the bucaneers and the Spaniards attacking it, men marooned on desolate places like Palm Island, treasure buried—and then all of a sudden closed up and became uninteresting again. The remnants of the boy in him had spoken, the old pirate that lives in most men’s hearts had shown his head. Perhaps he was ashamed of his warmth and enthusiasm over these old romantic things—who knows? At all events, he retired into himself and then went below to find a book he was reading, leaving the deck to Bobby and the anchor watch.
Then the moon began to rise from beyond the Bahamas, a vast, full moon, with the sea seeming to cling to her lower limb as she freed herself. Dusky, at first, she paled as she rose, and now, in her light, the palms of the island and the coral beach showed clear.
Palm Island is a scrub of cactus and bay cedar bushes, half a mile long and quarter of a mile broad, with not more than forty trees. Crabs and turtles and gulls are its only visitors, and desolation sits there visible and naked. But in the moonlight, on a night like this and seen from the sea, it is fairyland—storyland.
Ratcliffe, his mind full of pirates and bucaneers, Spaniards and plate-ships, found himself wondering if men had ever been marooned here, if Morgan and Van Horn and all that crowd had ever had dealings on that beach, and what the moon could tell about it all if she could remember and speak. He was thinking this when the creak of block and cordage struck his ear, and past the stern of the Dryad came gliding the fore canvas of a small vessel, a thing that seemed no larger than a fishing boat.
She had been creeping in from the sea unnoticed by them as they talked. Skelton had gone below without sighting her, and she was so close that the slap of her bow-wash came clearly as she passed.
He watched her gliding shoreward like a phantom, and then across the water came a voice, shrill as the voice of a bird:
“Seven fathom!”
And on top of that another voice:
“Let go!”
The rumble—tumble—tumble—of an anchor chain followed, and then the silence of the night closed in, broken only by the far-off wash of the waves on the beach.
This ghost of the sea fascinated Ratcliffe. He could see her now riding at anchor against the palms and bay cedars of the island.
She was shedding her canvas; and now a glow-worm spark, golden in the silver of the moonlight, climbed up and became stationary but for the lift and fall of the swell as she rode at her moorings. It was her anchor light.
He listened for voices. None came. Then he saw a lantern being carried along her deck. It vanished, probably through a hatch.
Then he went below, and, dropping asleep the instant he turned in, dreamt that he was marooned on Palm Island with Skelton, and Skelton was trying to hang him on a palm tree for a pirate, and the gulls were shouting “Seven fathom!—seven fathom—seven fathom!” Then came oblivion and the sleep of youth that defies dreams.
