“Which he was,” replied Sagesse. “Now, look you here. One may listen to old wives’ tales by the hour and get no profit, but when one gets an old wife’s tale repeated and repeated, and always the same, one may claim there is truth in it. The stories and the pictures of Serpente all tally—why, mordieu, you yourself have seen his skull, which I hope to find and keep as a curiosity.”
“As for me,” said Gaspard, “I never want to see the thing again. I do not care what you say about old wives’ tales, but I believe this, that Serpente was the devil in the form of a man—”
“Or a child,” laughed Sagesse, “or a monkey, for he wasn’t bigger—in his head-piece, anyhow.”
“—monkey or child or man, what I have said I have said. He was the devil, or as much of himself as the devil could stuff into such a carcase, and if he lets us off that island with the gold, all I can say is, the devil’s dead or gone out of business.”
Sagesse laughed, and lit another cigar, and turned the subject. He felt a profound contempt for the superstition of Gaspard, but he did not shew it.
On the morning of the seventh day out he came up to Gaspard, who was sitting on the main hatch, took his seat beside him, and unrolled a small chart.
“We ought to be there to-morrow, shortly after sun-up, if this wind holds,” said Sagesse, spreading the chart on his knee. “I got this from Jaques; it’s a French Admiralty chart of Turks Island and the Caicos, at least a bit of it; the whole thing was as big as a blanket and I cut this piece out. The Diane—she was a French cruiser—included our island when she was out here ten years ago taking soundings. She little thought how useful it would be to us.”
Gaspard looked at the chart. There was the island, no bigger than a sixpence, the reefs and shoals all carefully mapped out. It gave him a strange sensation to see this picture of the place that for him had the mystery of dreamland attached to it; there were times when he half believed the island to be non-existent and that La Belle Arlésienne, sail the blue sea as far as she might, would never raise that landfall. Yet here it was pictured out by men who had visited the spot ten years before he had landed there.
It had been waiting there all these years for him, to shew him the meaning of desolation and Death, just as the little Place de la Fontaine had been waiting for him to shew him Love.
Ah! those places that wait for us since the time we were born! the places where we part with and meet the people we love, the place where we shall lie down to die!—we never reckon them amidst our friends and enemies; yet what friends are more faithful, what enemies more inexorable?