Chapter IX

THE LOST ISLAND

Some two or three months later, the schooner might have been seen, like a white-winged butterfly lost at sea, beating up and down before a solitary, low, green island lying far east of the lonely Paumotus. Vaiti, sitting on the top of the deck-house, was examining the land through a glass. The native crew were all on deck; also Harris and Gray, the mate and bo’sun. Captain Saxon was not to be seen.

“The old man always do get squiffy at the wrong time, don’t he?” commented Harris, rather gleefully.

Gray spat over the rail for reply.

“You’re ratty because you don’t know nothing, ain’t you?” he said.

“Do you?” asked the mate curiously. Harris had not much notion of the dignity of his office, and dearly loved a gossip at all times.

“More nor you, havin’ eyes and ears that’s of use to me occasionally,” replied the bo’sun dryly.

Harris considered.

“I’ll give you my grey shirt to tell,” he said persuasively. “There’s sure to be something up.”

“’Ow much does we ever get out of it when there is?” asked Gray sourly. “I could do with that shirt very well, though. There ain’t much to tell, except that the old man he thought there was an island hereabouts not marked on the chart that nobody knew about; and Vaiti she allowed that was all —— rot, because, says she, this part’s been surveyed, and though the Admiralty surveys isn’t the for-ever-’n-ever-Amen dead certainties the little brassbound officers thinks them, still they don’t leave whole islands out on the loose without a collar and a name round their necks, so to say. So, says she, let me work out the length of time they ran before the hurricane, says she, and the d’rection of the wind, which the old boy remembered right enough, says she; and then look it up on the chart, and I’ll be blowed, says she, if you don’t find something for a guide like. So by-and-by she looks, and says she, ‘’Ere’s something; ’ere’s a reef marked P.D., and it is P.D.,’ says she, ’for you and I knows there’s nothin’ there,’ she says. ’But we’ll look a bit more to the north’ard,’ she says, ’where it’s right off the’ track of ships, and maybe we’ll find somethin’ and maybe we won’t,’ she says. ’But I think,’ she says, ’that somewheres not too far off from that P.D. reef we’ll maybe get a sight of what we’re lookin’ for,’ she says, ’because sometimes reefs is put down for bigger things by mistake,’ she says, ’especially if you ’aven’t been to see.’ Then she comes on deck, and I makes myself scarce, for it ain’t healthy on this ship to listen at no cabin skylights, not if she knows you’re there.”

“Well, whatever the game is, I don’t suppose it’ll line our little insides any fatter, bo’sun. We don’t count on this ship anything like as we ought to when there’s shares goin’. I wonder that I stick to her, I do! Old man as drunk as a lord half the time—me doin’ his work as well as my own—a blessed she-cat running the blooming show——”

“Ready about!” sang Vaiti from the deck-house, and the mate and bo’sun sprang across the deck. There was something about the orders of the “she-cat” that enforced a smartness on the Sybil rare on an island schooner, even when heavy-fisted Saxon was not about.

Half an hour later, Vaiti had rowed herself ashore, curtly declining Harris’s polite offers of assistance, and had landed on the beach. As she did not know who she might be going to see, she had provided for all emergencies. Her revolver was in her pocket, and she wore a flowing sacque of lace-trimmed white silk that made her feel she was fit to meet any Russian princess, if such were indeed on the island. It was a gratifying thought that the said princess, if she had been a celebrated beauty, must now be well into the forties, and consequently beneath all contempt as a rival belle.

Her father’s absence did not trouble her. He had a nasty trick of starting a drinking bout just when he was most needed—in fact, it was the one point in Saxon’s character on which you could absolutely rely. Vaiti, therefore, had grown used to doing without him, and rather liked to have a perfectly free hand.

She had fully grasped the bearings of the case. There was possibly a very great chief’s daughter from Europe, with a rather insignificant chief who had stolen her away, living there in hiding. The people of her country would pay a great deal to know where she was and bring her back. Or, if there seemed any lack of safety about this proceeding (Vaiti had long ago learned that her father was not fond of putting himself within the reach of principalities and powers of any kind), the couple themselves must be made to pay for silence. It was all very simple.

The fact that the island was supposed to be uninhabited did not trouble her. She meant to investigate that matter after her own fashion.

She walked all round it first of all. It took her about an hour. There was a nice, white, sandy beach, with straggling bush behind it. There were a good many cocoanuts—all young ones—also a large number of broken trunks, apparently snapped off by a hurricane.

This set Vaiti thinking. It seemed to her that the damage was rather too universal and even to be natural. Yet why should any sane human cut short all his full-grown cocoanuts?

She crossed the island twice at the ends, noting everything with a keen and wary eye. Fairly good soil; nothing growing on it, however, but low scrub and a few berries. In the centre of the island the scrub thickened into dense bush, impenetrable without an axe. No sign of life anywhere.

Vaiti stamped her foot. Was it possible she had been mistaken? Was this indeed just what it seemed, a commonplace, infertile, useless, little mid-ocean islet, let alone because it was worth nothing, and incorrectly described as a reef because no one had ever troubled to examine it? Things began to look like it.

And yet ... she thought—she did not quite know what, but she was very sure that she did not want to leave the island just yet. She would at least climb a tall tree and take a general survey before she gave it up.

Nothing simpler—but there was no such tree.

All the palms were young, or broken off short; all the pandanus trees were in the same condition. There was no rock, no commanding height. She could not get a view.

Vaiti’s cheek flushed crimson under its olive brown. The spark was struck at last!

Somebody had cut short those trees—to prevent anyone from climbing up and overlooking the island. The encircling reef would not allow any ship to approach close enough for a look-out at the mast-head to see over the island, except in a very general way. There was something to conceal. What, and where?

Only one answer was possible. The mass of apparently virgin bush in the centre of the island—several acres in extent—was the only spot where a cat could have concealed itself. The scent was growing hot.

With sparkling eyes Vaiti began to circle the wood, watching narrowly for the smallest trace of a pathway. The branches were interlocked and knitted together as only tropical bush can be. Many were set with huge thorns; all were laced and twined with bush ropes and lianas of every kind.

Nothing larger than a rat could have won its way through such a rampart. Vaiti walked swiftly on and on, striking the bushes now and then with a stick, to make sure that there were no loose masses of stuff masking a concealed entrance, and keeping a sharp eye for traces of footsteps.... It was with a heart-sinking shock that she found herself once more beside the low white coral rock that had marked the commencement of her journey, and realised that she had been all round, and that there was most certainly no opening.

The sun was slipping down the heavens now. She had been exploring half the day, but she was not beaten yet. The unexpected difficulties she had met with only sharpened her determination to enter the thicket at all costs. Harris, suffering acutely, as usual, from suppressed curiosity, was nearly driven mad by the sight of the “she-cat” suddenly reappearing on the ship, picking up an axe, and departing as silently as she had come, with a countenance that did not invite questions. She had taken off her smart silk dress, and was in her chemise and petticoat, arms and feet bare, and waist girdled with a sash into which she had stuck her revolver. She dropped the axe into her boat, rowed silently away, and disappeared on the other side of the island.

The sun was still some distance above the sea when she let the axe slip from her torn, scratched, and aching hands, and stood at last, tired but triumphant, in the heart of the mysterious island’s mystery. She had won her way, with the woodcraft that was in her island blood, through the dense belt of bush, hacking and slashing here, stooping and writhing there, until the light began to show through the tangled stems in front, and a few swift strokes cleared the way into the open. Yes! there was a space in the centre, after all—a clearing over an acre in extent. There was grass here, and a few overgrown bananas, and a tangle of yam and pumpkin vines. Passion fruit ran in a tangle of wild luxuriance over the inner wall of the thicket; pine-apples rotted on the ground and fig-trees spread their wide leaves unchecked and unpruned.... In the middle of all was a house—a one-storied little bungalow, iron-roofed, with a tank to catch the rain. There was a long, low store behind it, and something that looked like a pig-sty, and something that might have been a fowl-run. But....

But everything was rotten, ruined, overgrown, hardly to be distinguished in the thick tangle of vegetation that had overflowed the little retreat like a great green wave let loose upon a low-lying shore. Vaiti knew what she was going to see before she had reached the door of the bungalow—a rotten floor, with green vines shooting up between the crevices, and bush rats scuffling and squeaking under the boards—a rusted iron roof, where pink convolvulus bloom peeped in under the rafters, and lizards sunned themselves in the airy blue furniture unglued and decayed fast sinking into one common mass of ruin—door aslant, and thresholds sunken. Everywhere silence, emptiness, decay. There needed no explanation of the vanished pathway.

The Maori blood owns strange instincts. Again Vaiti knew what she was going to see before it came—knew, and walked straight over to a certain corner of the enclosure, as if she had been there before.... It was under a scarlet-flowered hibiscus tree that she found it—a long, low grave, fenced round with a wall of coral slabs, so that the overflowing bush had surged less thickly here, and one could see that there was something lying on the mound, only half hidden by creeping vines—something long and white and slender.

Vaiti dragged away the creepers.... Yes, it was a skeleton, bare and fleshless, with bony fingers and black, empty eyes. There was a splintered gap in one temple, and close to one of the hands lay a mass of rusted steel that had once been a revolver.

On a flat white stone, standing at the head of the grave, a long inscription had been carved with infinite care in three different languages. Two of them Vaiti did not understand, but the third was English. She pulled the growing ferns off the stone, and, wiping its surface, read:

“Here is buried Junia, of the race of Vasilieff. Died 20th June, 1889.

“Here is buried Anton, son of Junia Vasilieff and her husband, Alexis, Baron Varsovi, Born 20th June, died 21st June, 1889.

“Here rests Alexis, Baron Varsovi. Into the unknown thou didst follow me: into the Great Unknown I follow thee. Reunited 21st June, 1889.”

Vaiti, descendant of cannibal chiefs and lawless soldiers, more than half a pirate herself, and hard of nature as a beautiful flinty coral flower, was yet at bottom a woman after all. What passed in the breast of this dark, wild daughter of the southern seas, as she stood above the strange, sad record of loves and lives unknown, cannot be told. But in a little while, with some dim recollection of the long-ago, gentle, pious days of her convent school, she knelt down beside tie lonely grave, and, crossing herself, said something as near to a prayer as she could remember. Then, still kneeling, she cut and tied two sticks into the form of a cross, and set them upright in the earth of the mound. The sun was slanting low and red across the grave as she turned away.

* * * * *

“What’d she give you?” asked Harris eagerly, as the bo’sun stepped across the gang-plank on to the quay. The lights of San Francisco were blazing all about, the cars roared past, there was a piano-organ jangling joyously at the corner.

“Fifty dollars for the two of us,” said Gray, his acid face sweetened with unwonted smiles.

“Crikey! Honest men is riz in the market at last! What in h—— can she have got herself?”

“Might as well arst me what she got it for. Don’t know, and don’t care, so long as we’ve got the makings of a spree like this out of it. I see her comin’ out of the Rooshian Consulate this mornin’ lookin’ like as if some one ’ad been standin’ treat to her.”

“You know she don’t touch anything.”

“I’m speaking figuryative; she looked that sort of way. And coming’ back to the ship, she says to the old man, she says: ’Why, dad, better dead than alive!’ she says. And he laughs.”

“Don’t sound ’olesome,” observed Harris thoughtfully.

“Now, don’t you get to thinkin’, for you ain’t built that way, and you’ll do yourself a mischief,” said the boatswain warningly. “And let’s be thankful to ’eaven for all its mercies, say I, that we’ve got such a nice, warm, dry, convenient night for to go and get drunk in.”