Pieces of Eight Part 23

He had not yet, he said, shown me that haunt of the wild bees, where the golden honey now took the place of that treasure of golden money; and there were also other curiosities of the place he desired to show me.

And that led me--his invitation being accepted without further parley--to mention the idea I had conceived as I came along, of exploring those curious old ruined buildings. Need I say that the mere suggestion was enough to set him aflame? I might have known that here, of all men, was my man for such an enterprise. He had meant to do it himself for how many years--but age, with stealing step, _et cetera._

However, with youth--so he was pleased to flatter me--to lend him the sap of energy, why who knows? And in a moment he had us both akindle with his imaginations of what might--"might"! what a word to use!--no!

what, without question, _must_ lie unsunned in those dark underground vaults, barricaded with all that deviltry of vegetation, and guarded by the coils of a three-headed dragon with carbuncles for eyes--eyes that never slept--for the advantage of three heads to treasure-guarding dragons, he explained, was that they divided the twenty-four hours into watches of eight hours each as the ugly beast kept ward over that heap of gold--bars of it, drifts of it, banks of it minted into gleaming coins--doubloons, doubloons, doubloons--so that the darkness was bright as day with the s.h.i.+ne of it, or as the bottom of the sea, where a Spanish galleon lies sunk among the corals and the gliding water snakes.

"O King!" I laughed, "but indeed you have the heart of a child!"

"To-morrow," he announced, "to-morrow we shall begin--there is not a moment to lose. We will send Samson with a message to your captain--there is no need for you to go yourself; time is too precious--and in a week, who knows but that Monte Cristo shall seem like a pauper and a penny gaff in comparison with the fantasies of our fearful wealth. Even Calypso's secret h.o.a.rd will pale before the romance of our subterranean millions--I mean billions--and poor Henry Tobias will need neither hangman's rope nor your friend Webster's cartridges for his quietus. At the mere rumour of our fortune, he will suddenly turn a green so violent that death will be instantaneous."

So, for that evening, all was laughingly decided. In a week's time, it was agreed, we should have difficulty in recognising each other. We should be so disguised in cloth of gold, and so blinding to look upon with rings and ropes of pearls. As our dear "King" got off something like this for our good-night, my eyes involuntarily fell upon his present garments--far from being cloth of gold. Why? I wondered. There was no real financial reason, it was evident, for these penitential rags. But I remembered that I had known two other millionaires--millionaires not merely of the imagination--whom it had been impossible to separate from a certain beloved old coat that had been their familiar for more than twenty years. It was some odd kink somewhere in the make-up of the "King," one more trait of his engaging humanity.

When we met at breakfast next morning, glad to see one another again as few people are at breakfast, it was evident that, so far as the "King"

was concerned, our dream had lost nothing in the night watches. On the contrary, its wings had grown to an amazing span and iridescence. It was so impatient for flight, that its feet had to be chained to the ground--the wise Calypso's doing--with a little plain prose, a detail or two of preliminary arrangement, and then....

Calypso, it transpired, had certain household matters--of which the "King" of course, was ever divinely oblivious--that would take her on an errand into the town. Those disposed of, we two eternal children were at liberty to be as foolish as we pleased. The "King" bowed his uncrowned head, as kings, from time immemorial have bowed their diadems before the quiet command of the domesticities; and it was arranged that I should be Calypso's escort on her errand.

So we set forth in the freshness of the morning, and the woods that had been so black and bewildering at my coming opened before us in easy paths, and all that tropical squalor that had been foul with sweat and insects seemed strangely vernal to me, so that I could hardly believe that I had trodden that way before. And for our companion all the way along--or, at least, for my other companion--was the Wonder of the World, the beautiful strangeness of living, and that marvel of a man's days upon the earth which lies in not knowing what a day shall bring forth, if only we have a little patience with Time--Time, with those gold keys at his girdle, ready, at any turn of the way, to unlock the hidden treasure that is to be the meaning of our lives.

How should I try to express what it was to walk by her side, knowing all that we both knew?--knowing, or giddily believing that I knew, how her heart, with every breath she took, vibrated like a living flower, with waves of colour, changing from moment to moment like a happy trembling dawn. To know--yet not to say! Yes! we were both at that divine moment which hangs like a dew-drop in the morning sun--ah! all too ready to fall. O! keep it poised, in that miraculous balance, 'twixt Time and Eternity--for this crystal made of light and dew is the meaning of the life of man and woman upon the earth.

As we came to the borders of the wood, near the edge of the little town, we called a counsel of two. As the outcome of it, we concluded that, having in mind the "King's" ambitious plans for our cloth-of-gold future, and for other obvious reasons, it was better that she went into the town alone--I to await her in the shadow of the mahogany tree.

As she turned to leave me, she drew up from her bosom a little bag that hung by a silver chain, and, opening it, drew out, with a laugh--a golden doubloon!

I sprang toward her; but she was too quick for me, and laughingly vanished through an opening in the trees. I was not to kiss her that day.

CHAPTER VIII

_News!_

Calypso was so long coming back that I began to grow anxious--was, indeed, on the point of going into the town in search of her; when she suddenly appeared, rather out of breath, and evidently a little excited--as though, in fact, she had been running away from something.

She caught me by the arm, with a laugh:

"Do you want to see your friend Tobias?" she said.

"Tobias! Impossible!"

"Come here," and she led me a yard or two back the way she had come, and then cautiously looked through the trees.

"Gone!" she said, "but he was there a minute or two ago--or at least some one that is his photograph--and, of course, he's there yet, hidden in the brush, and probably got his eyes on us all the time. Did you see that seven-year apple tree move?"

"His favourite tree," I laughed.

"Hardly strong enough to hang him on though." And I realised that she was King Alcinous's daughter.

We crouched lower for a moment or two, but the seven-year apple tree didn't move again, and we agreed that there was no use in waiting for Tobias to show his hand.

"He is too good a poker-player," I said.

"Like his skeletons, eh?" she said.

"But what made you think it was Tobias?" I asked, "and how did it all happen?"

"I could hardly fail to recognise him from your flattering description,"

she answered, "and indeed it all happened rather like another experience of mine. I had gone into Sweeney's store--you remember?--and was just paying my bill."

"In the usual coinage?" I ventured. She gave me a long, whimsical smile--once more her father's daughter.

"That, I'm afraid, was the trouble," she answered; "for, as I laid my money down on the counter, I suddenly noticed that there was a person at the back of the store ..."

"A person?" I interrupted.

"Yes! suppose we say 'a pock-marked person'; was it you?"

"What a memory you have for details," I parried, "and then?"

"Well! I took my change and managed to whisper a word to Sweeney--a good friend, remember--and came out. I took a short cut back, but the 'person' that had stood in the back of the store seemed to know the way almost better than I--so well that he had got ahead of me. He was walking quietly this way, and so slowly that I had at last to overtake him. He said nothing, just watched me, as if interested in the way I was going--but, I'm ashamed to say, he rather frightened me! And here I am."

"Do you really think he saw the--doubloon--like that other 'person'?" I asked.

"There's no doubt of it."

"Well, then," I said, "let's hurry home, and talk it over with the 'King.'"

The "King," as I had realised, was a practical "romantic" and at once took the matter seriously, leaving--as might have surprised some of those who had only heard him talk--his conversational fantasies on the theme to come later.

Calypso, however, had the first word.

"I always told you, Dad," she said;--and the word "Dad" on the lips of that big statuesque girl--who always seemed ready to take that inspired framework of rags and bones and talking music into her protecting arms--seemed the quaintest of paradoxes--, "I always told you, Dad, what would happen, with your fairy-tales of the doubloons."

"Quite true, my dear," he answered, "but isn't a fairy-tale worth paying for?--worth a little trouble? And remember, if you will allow me, two things about fairy-tales: there must always be some evil fairy in them, some dragon or such like; and there is always--a happy ending. Now the dragon enters at last--in the form of Tobias; and we should be happy on that very account. It shows that the race of dragons is not, as I feared, extinct. And as for the happy ending, we will arrange it, after lunch--for which, by the way, you are somewhat late."

After lunch, the "King" resumed, but in a brief and entirely practical vein:

"We are about to be besieged," he said. "The woods, probably, are already thick with spies. For the moment, we must suspend operations on our Golconda"--his name for the ruins that we were to excavate--"and, as our present purpose--yours no less than ours, friend Ulysses--is to confuse Tobias, my suggestion is this: That you walk with me a mile or two to the nor'ard. There is an entertaining mangrove swamp I should like to show you, and also, you can give me your opinion of an idea of mine that you will understand all the better when I have taken you over the ground."

So we walked beyond the pines, down onto a long interminable flat land of marl marshes and mangrove trees--so like that in which Charlie Webster had shot the snake and the wild duck--that only Charlie could have seen any difference.

"Now," said the "King," "do you see a sort of river there, overgrown with mangroves and palmettos?"

"Yes," I answered, "almost--though it's so choked up it's almost impossible to say."

"Well," said the "King," "that's the idea; you haven't forgotten those old ruins we are going to explore. You remember how choked up they are.

Well, this was the covered water-way, the secret creek, by which the pirates--John Teach, or whoever it was, perhaps John P. Tobias himself--used to land their loot. It's so overgrown nowadays that no one can find the entrance but myself and a friend or two; do you understand?"