The Treasure of the Isle of Mist Part 2

you can have your treasure when we find it, and I'll have the Spanish treasure when we find it, and there we both are. I want lots and lots and lots of those doubloons."

"What for?" said Fiona.

"Gun," said the Urchin. "Donald Ruadh has an old gun which he would sell me for two pounds. He says one barrel shoots all right sometimes.

And I would use the rest of the doubloons to buy cartridges, and then I could kill curlews."

"You little wretch," said the girl. "You won't kill my curlews while I'm about. And anyhow your old gun would probably blow you up first.

And anyhow you haven't got the doubloons yet. And they're not yours if you do find them."

"Whose would they be?" asked the Urchin.

"I suppose my father's," said Fiona. "But it depends on which cave they were in."

"Come on, then," said the boy. "I'm going to ask him for them."

The Student took the interruption good-humoredly.

"I am in the second century," he said. "Doubloons have not yet been coined. As to these doubloons, I am quite sure they are not there, wherever 'there' may be; but if they are there, I have no objection to the Urchin fighting the Government for them. Urchin, would you like a deed?"

And, to the delight of the Urchin, the Student proceeded to make out a doc.u.ment, which called on all men to know that the said Student thereby a.s.signed to the said Urchin all the estate, right, t.i.tle, and interest, if any, of the said Student in and to a certain treasure of doubloons or other coins once carried in the galleon called _Our Lady of the Holy Cross_ were the same a little more or less ("all good deeds get that in somewhere," said the Student) to hold to the said Urchin and his heirs ("but I don't suppose the heirs will see much of it") to the intent that he might become a wiser and a better Urchin and not interrupt the said Student any more when he wanted to work.

This being done, the Student signed his name at the end, made a beautiful blot of hot red sealing wax and put his signet ring on it, and made Fiona sign her name as witness ("which is probably not legal," he explained cheerfully); then he handed over the deed to the rejoicing Urchin, with the remark that it was quite as good as many lawyers' deeds, and drove the pair of them out of the bookroom.

"Good," said the Urchin. "Now I've a treasure just the same as you."

"If we find them," said Fiona.

"Well, let's go and start hunting for them at any rate," said the boy.

"Pardon me," said the sh.o.r.e lark, "if I interrupt; but you might be the better of a few hints."

Fiona dropped on her knees and took the little bird in her hands again.

"So you can talk," she said. "That's jolly. You've a first-rate chance of returning good for evil, and making us feel worms."

"Don't talk of worms," said the sh.o.r.e lark, "you have entirely omitted to provide me with any. Send him to get some, and I'll tell you something. He can't understand what I'm saying, anyhow."

"Urchin," said the girl, "he's asking for worms. Go and get him some."

"One would think you and he could talk to each other," said the boy.

"Silly, I call it, going on like that. I suppose that's what girls do."

"Urchin," said Fiona, "when you and I have a row, what happens?"

"_You_ happen," said the Urchin. "You've three years' pull; 'tisn't fair; just like a girl, to go and have three years' pull of a chap."

"Stop grousing," said the girl, "and get me the worms, there's a dear little boy."

The Urchin flung the nearest book at her, missed as usual, and, having thus made his honor white, departed, declaring in simpler language that the love of worms was the root of all evil.

"I can't tell you much," said the sh.o.r.e lark, "but one sometimes picks up things, hopping about, and I heard you say treasure. If you mean the Venetian s.h.i.+p, don't start without consulting the finner. He is very old, and I believe that he knows everything that happens in this loch."

"I don't really mean that," said Fiona. "That's half a jest. I mean my own search, the search for the treasure of the Isle of Mist."

"We have all heard of it," said the sh.o.r.e lark, "and we all know that you cannot find it by looking for it. All I can tell you is this: the curlews have a tradition that the last man who found it went up a hill. That is what they tell each other when they call in the spring; and I believe they know."

"They are like the spirits of the hills themselves," said Fiona.

"Tell me why it is I can understand you."

"I have no idea," said the sh.o.r.e lark. "I am only a little bird, and I don't know very much. I chanced speaking to you because I wanted worms."

The girl slipped across into the bookroom.

"Daddy," she said, "come back out of the second century, and tell me why I can understand the sh.o.r.e lark."

The Student looked up with a patient smile in far-away eyes.

"It isn't time to come back yet," he said. "And I have not fully grasped your meaning. You appear to refer to some conversation with some bird. There are precedents, of course. For instance, the philosopher Empedocles, having been a bird himself in a former life, remembered their speech; he ended by leaping into aetna. Siegfried also, having bathed in the blood of Fafnir, followed the voice of a bird of the wood; he ended by losing his love and his life. There was once a sailor who took the advice of a parrot, and was hanged. Birds are light-minded, as the poet Aristophanes discovered; and it would seem that little good comes of talking to them."

"My sh.o.r.e lark is a darling," said Fiona. "And I don't intend to be hanged."

"That," said the Student, "is as Providence pleases. One never knows, as my poor ancestor said when he fell into a bear-trap and found the bear there before him."

"O daddy," said the girl, "did he really? And what happened?"

"This ancestor of mine," said the Student, "was a very strong man. If he had not been, someone else would have killed him first, and he would not have been my ancestor; the other man would have been someone else's ancestor, so to speak. Being a very strong man, he naturally killed the bear. He must have, or he would not have lived to be my ancestor. In those days everyone lived in caves, and he lived in a cave too; and he always killed the other man, sometimes fairly, sometimes, I regret to say, otherwise. He courted my ancestress by knocking her down from behind with the blunt end of a stone ax, a method which I do not defend; but when her senses returned she told him he had acted like a man, and they became a most devoted couple.

This was partly due, no doubt, to the fact that he never saw the meaning of the things she said; she took good care that he shouldn't, for though slow of wit he was handy with his ax. Their life I think must have been very happy till one day he found a red stone which he could heat and shape with his ax, and he hammered out that copper bracelet you're wearing; and then came the deluge, for metal meant magic then, as you know. Next day my ancestress found him conversing with the local vulture; within a week he was giving exhibitions in the other caves with the vulture's a.s.sistance; in a month he had become the tribal G.o.d; and about two years after, owing to the persistent failure of some of his magic to come off, he was, for a brief moment, the tribal banquet. Now you know what comes of talking to sh.o.r.e larks."

"Daddy," she said, "you can't know if that's true or not, can you?"

"It may not all be what _you_ call true," said the Student, "but it's true in quite a lot of ways. It's true psychologically, and anthropologically, and palaeethnologically; and that does to start with. And I certainly _had_ ancestors. And there _is_ a bracelet. And you _were_ talking strange words about a sh.o.r.e lark. And you must really take care, my dear daughter; for you _ought_ now to become a tribal priestess, and be hurled from a high place into the sea the first season that the herring fail."

CHAPTER III

THE HAUNTED CAVE

A sunlit sheet of sea, violet and azure, clothed in slender cloud shadows and heaving gently to the long Atlantic ground-swell. Up through the calm water, to meet the eye of the gazer, came the green clearness of stone, and blinks of unveined sand showing white between the brown tangled blades of the great oar-weed; and you might see a school of little cuddies, heads all one way, playing hide and seek in the sea forest, and caring no whit for the clumsy armored crab beneath them, who crawled sideways, a laborious patch of color in the s.h.i.+mmering transparency. Up out of the deep water the gray rocks rose clear and fine, a ma.s.s of platforms and pinnacles, roughened with barnacles and tufted with dulse, whose crimson leaves floated and swung in the white foam of the lisping swell; and above the rocks and beyond the sea's reach the cliff stood up black, showing all the strata that had gone to the making of it outlined with little patches of coa.r.s.e gra.s.s. On one such patch grazed without concern a sheep which had slipped over, happy in her ignorance of the fact that she could never be drawn up again alive; the wiser raven overhead was clanging away with short barks to tell his mate. On a ridge on the cliff side sat a pair of young scarfs, almost invisible save when they twisted their long necks about like two snakes, trying to make up their minds to follow their mother, who had just flopped clumsily into the water, feet first, and had turned there and then into a miracle of easy grace, as she used her head to dash the spray over her back. Out at sea a solan rose steadily in a sweeping spiral, the white and black of him glittering in the sun; suddenly he checked, reversed engines, and fell plump like an inverted cross, his long raking wings clapping to as he struck the water; a moment, and he was up, and there sat, choking and gobbling over his fish, ere he rose again in his majestic rings.

The two children had grounded their boat on a little pebble beach between the rocks, and were sitting on a big tuft of sea pinks, munching handfuls of the sweet dulse and watching the solan at his fis.h.i.+ng. They were by way of fis.h.i.+ng themselves, but the afternoon was as yet too early and too clear for them. The Urchin had a pile of stones beside him, and was apparently trying to see how many times in twenty he could miss a large and obvious spur of rock. Fiona had a book of poetry, and was making intermittent efforts to read; but the world was too full of things to give poetry a fair chance.

The Urchin threw his last stone away.

"Silly sitting here," he said; "come and explore."

So, scrambling and sliding, the two made their way across the rocks, stopping at every rock pool to raise its fringe of weed with careful hands and investigate the wonder of the little world below; sea flowers of every hue, white and green, gray and orange, purple and white and gray and purple again, some smooth and satisfied, others with tentacles greedily awash, that could be induced to suck at a small finger dexterously inserted; sea sh.e.l.ls of every contour, some living and clutching at the rock, some cast off and dead, others again protruding alien claws, resurrected to a life of artificial movement by the little hermit crabs whose tails they sheltered; here and there the spiky pink globe of a sea urchin, waiting for the tide to float him off. And in one deep little pot, with sides green like a grotto of ferns, they found a miniature battle. A small green crab, who had cast his sh.e.l.l, sat humped in a recess of the grotto, a thing soft and vulnerable, a delight to the enemy; and in front of him, excited and transparent, were half a dozen shrimps, the horn on each forehead pointed at him; from time to time some young gallant would dash in to prod the helpless monster, and at once backwater again into the ranks of his friends. The crab bore his torment with a patience born of the knowledge that each minute his new carapace was hardening; the shrimps had no wit to count the cost, or reckon the odds that the rising tide might bear them away in safety from the day of vengeance.