CHAPTER XXXII.
THE SOLITUDE IS INTERRUPTED.
The weather had changed, and, as is always the case in the tropics, the change was extreme.
The wind blew now from the northeast, dashing the sea up in mountains on to the strip of beach around that quarter of Coffin Island, hurling it with a roar like great claps of thunder over the beach on to the vegetation beyond it, crashing down trees and saplings, and entirely obliterating for a time the three little Keys, in the middle one of which was Simon Alderly's treasure. This Key Reginald had gazed upon more than once since he had been in the island; he had even pointed it out to Barbara on the morning after she had told her tale, and had added the few missing links to the knowledge she already possessed; and he had also informed her that therein lay her fortune.
"So," the girl said on that morning, as she gazed down from the cliff on which they stood to where the already fast-rising waves were washing over the spot in question, "it is there they ought to have searched. It has laid there all the time! Yet no one ever thought of those little islets. Well! I am glad!"
"Why?" asked Reginald, as he looked round at her. He had given her his arm to steady her against the fierce wind blowing now under the purple, sun-coloured clouds rolling up from the northeast, and she had taken it. Yet, as she did so, she scarcely knew why she should accept that proffered arm. She was used to all changes of weather in this, her island; she could stand as easily upon the tallest crags that it possessed as any of her goats, or even the sea-birds that dwelt upon them, could do. Yet, still, she had taken it!
"Oh! I don't know," she replied in answer to his question; "yet--yet, I think I am. Because--" she paused again, and then went on. "Because, you see, if any of my people had found it before now--before you came here--why, you would have found nothing yourself when you arrived, after you had made so long a journey. And, we should have been gone--you and I would never have met."
Something in the sailor's nature tingled as she said those words in her simplicity--something, he knew not what. Still, in response, he turned his eyes on her, and gazed into those other clear eyes beside him, shaded with their long, jet-black lashes. Then he said--
"For us never to have met would have been the worst thing of all, Barbara."
It seemed absurd to call her Miss Alderly, here in this wild tropical garden inhabited only by themselves; to give her the stilted prefix that would have been required in the midst of civilisation. So, not for the first time, he had addressed her by her Christian name. And to her--who perhaps in her schooldays only, in Antigua, had ever known what it was to be spoken of as Miss Alderly--it appeared not at all strange that he should so address her.
"But," he went on, "as for the treasure, as for the finding of it--that might as well have happened fifty or a hundred years ago as now. It is yours and your family's; not a farthing of it belonged to my relative, nor belongs to me."
"That shall never be," she replied. "My father, although a rough, simple sailor, is an honest, straightforward man; he, at least, would never hear of such a thing as your not having your share. And for my brother----" but here she paused.
"Why," asked Reginald, after a moment had elapsed--"why do you hesitate at the name of your brother?"
"Because," she replied, "he is different. He is," and she buried her face in her hands for a moment and then uncovered it again--"he is a cruel, grasping man, selfish and greedy. He rules us more as if he were father than father himself, and he tyrannises even over him. He takes all the money they both earn while they are away together, and, generally, he spends it. When they went to Aspinwall, at the time they were so busy about the Canal, he took all they had both earned and spent it at the Faro and Monte tables, as they call them down there. And once he struck father before me, when they were both at home, because he wanted to go over to Porto Rico, where the Spaniards gamble day and night, and father would not give him the money for some goats he had sold to a Tortola dealer. Oh!" she continued, "he is terrible! and when he takes his share of what is in the Key, I dread to think of what he will do with it."
As she finished, the storm increased with such violence that it was necessary for them to leave the crag on which they stood--otherwise they would possibly be blown off it ere many moments had elapsed. Moreover, the hot rain was beginning now--and in these regions only a few moments elapse between the fall of the first drop and the drenching downpour of a tropical storm; it was time for them to seek the refuge of Barbara's home. The thunder, too, was very near now, so at once they hurried onwards, gaining the desired shelter before the worst of the storm had set in.
It was to-day--the day following Barbara's account of Simon Alderly--that Reginald had promised to read to her Nicholas's narrative. He had it in his pocket now; indeed he regarded it as too precious a thing to leave carelessly about, and consequently it was always with him, and to-day he proposed ere leaving her to get through some portion of it. He meant to read it all through, partly as a story that he thought would interest the girl, partly as a justification of Nicholas. For, he considered, if, since she already believed her ancestor to be a pirate, he proved to her that he was indeed such, then Nicholas must be acquitted in her mind for having himself removed and hidden away that which did not belong to him. So they, having reached the house, sat themselves down to the narrative, he to read and she to listen. They were no longer able to sit upon the verandah since the rain now beat down pitilessly and as though it never meant to cease, and the wind, even in the middle of the little island, was very boisterous. And so, when the jalousies had been fastened tightly to prevent the flapping they had previously made, Reginald began Nicholas's story, prefacing it with the account of how it had been found.
It was about ten o'clock in the day when this young couple, who had so strangely been brought together in this island, began that story--for they met and parted early; it was nearly nightfall when Reginald arrived at the description of how Alderly died singing his drunken song. And amidst the swift-coming darkness--a darkness made more intense by the heavy pall of clouds that hung above the island--there seemed to come over them both that feeling of creepiness, of melancholy horror, which Nicholas had described himself as becoming overwhelmed with.
The girl seemed far more overcome by this feeling than Reginald was. She started again and again at every fresh gust that shook the frail fabric in which she dwelt, her eyes stared fixedly before her as though she saw the spectre of her pirate ancestor rising up, and once she begged him to desist for a moment from his reading.
"It was below here," she whispered, "below the very spot where we sit, that that wretch, that murderous villain, died in his sin. Oh! it is horrible! horrible to think that we have all lived here so long, that I was born here. Horrible!"
"Barbara," said Reginald, "do not regard it so seriously. I was wrong to read you all I have--yet, think. Think! It is two hundred years since it all happened--we have nothing to do with that long-buried past."
"Yes, yes," she said. "I know that we have not. Yet--yet--this is the very spot--the very place. That makes it all so much more horrible, so much more ghostly. And to-night, I know not why, I feel as I have never felt before, nervous, frightened, alarmed, as though at some danger near at hand. Let me light the lamp ere you continue."
"It is the storm has made you nervous," he replied, trying to soothe her while he assisted her to arrange the lamp. "The air, too, is charged with electricity--that alone will unstring your nerves, to say nothing of the darkness and the noise of the tempest. I have done wrong, Barbara; I have selected the worst time for reading this horrible story to you. I should have chosen one of the bright days when we could sit on the crags and have nothing but the brilliant sun about and over us."
She glanced up at him with a smile in her clear eyes--the smile that never failed to make him think that he had lit on some woman belonging to another world than his, it was so full of innocence as well as a simple trust that would have well befitted a little child--and laid her hand upon his arm as though to assure him that he had done nothing to affright her. But, as she did so, there came a terrific flash of lightning which illuminated all the tropical wood outside--as they could see through the slats of the jalousie--and then a roar of thunder that made the girl scream and let fall the lamp just lighted.
But Reginald caught it deftly, and placing it on the table said with a smile--
"It would never do for another lamp to be overturned here as one was so long ago. Come, Barbara, cheer up, take heart! We will read no more to-night."
"Yes, yes," she exclaimed. "Read. Go on reading and finish your story. Besides, we must do something to pass the night--you cannot go to your yacht, and I--I--; for the first time in my life I fear to be alone. I dread, though I know not what. I have been alone night after night here for even weeks and months together, and never feared anything. Yet, now, I am afraid. Pray, do not leave me to-night."
He looked at her, admiring, almost worshipping her for the innocence she showed in every word she spoke, and then he said--
"Have no fear, I will not leave you if you wish it. But, Barbara, we must do something else to pass the hours away than read old Nicholas's story. What shall we do? Let us have a game of cards."
There were some packs in her house that they had played with before now--cards brought from other islands by her dissolute brother, with which to pass the long nights in, as she frankly owned, trying to get the better of his father; but she would not play now.
"No," she said. "Let us come to the end of the tale. I cannot rest until I have heard it all. Do, do finish it."
"Very well, if you will," he answered. "And, at any rate, the worst is told. There is nothing more to shock or affright you. Nothing but the burying of the treasure in the spot where it now lies, and where we will dig it up."
The jalousies rattled as he spoke--yet at this moment the wind had ceased, and nought was heard but the steady downpour of the rain.
But, perhaps because of the incessant noise the storm had made for some hours, neither of them noticed this peculiar incident, though Reginald glanced up as the blind stirred.
Then he began again, reading on through Nicholas's strange story, and doing so with particular emphasis, so that she might grasp every word of his description as he told how the measurements were to be taken in the middle Key. And Barbara sat there listening silently. Yet, as he turned a leaf--having now got to that part of the account where Nicholas was picked up by the Virgin Prize--he paused in astonishment at the appearance of her face.
For she was gazing straight before her at the jalousie, her eyes opened to their widest, her features drawn as though in fright, her face almost distorted.
"Look! Look!" she gasped. "Look at the blind."
And he, following her glance, was for the moment appalled too.
A large hand was grasping half-a-dozen of the slats in its clutch; between those slats a pair of human eyes were twinkling as they peered into the room.
As Reginald rose to rush at the intruder, whoever he was, Barbara gave another gasp and fell back fainting into her chair; and then, before her companion could ask the owner of those eyes what he meant by his intrusion, the blinds were roughly thrust aside, and, following this, there came a man of great size, from whom the water dripped as from a dog who had just quitted a river--a man whose face was all bruised and discoloured as though he had been badly beaten.