No man could act friendship like that and keep the acting up, thought Gaspard; and in this he was perhaps right. Sagesse had the power of closing a door on all sorts of passions and hanging the key up; just as a visitor to an hotel hangs the key of his room up, forgetting it; or rather putting it out of his mind till, the business of the day over, he remembers the key and enters his room.
At nights, over rum and water, smoking Martinique cigars, without his coat, seated at the table in his shirt-sleeves like the prosperous landlord of some Provençal auberge, Sagesse would give rein to his tongue and imagination. Treasure, now, was his entire theme, or nearly so.
“Mark you,” he would say, “I have been trading in these waters now for thirty years and more, and this is the first treasure-ship business I have taken up, because it is the first time I have seen the chance of profit. Yes, I have had hundreds of knaves and fools coming to me with ‘locations.’ Mordieu, I have had men bring me ‘locations’ in five hundred fathom water, in channels where any fool would know the rush of the tide made working impossible, over reefs that a child might guess would saw a ship asunder in six months—but here we have a thing perfectly new, a ship lying in a few fathoms of still water, tucked away safe for us. Of course, she may have been visited and sacked years ago, but I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“For this reason: If she is Serpente’s ship, she has been lying there a great many years, under water all the time, with water deep enough to prevent salvage unless with diving apparatus, and they hadn’t diving apparatus handy in those days. If people had got at her recently, they would have dynamited her. She would not be lying there so quietly, take my word for it, if the Americans or the Spaniards had smelt her out.”
“You think she is really Serpente’s ship?”
“I do.”
“Do you think that he was really a man like what Monsieur Jaques made out?”
“Why not?”
“Ma foi! why—if he was like what Monsieur Jaques said, he would have been unlike any other man.”