Something fluttering beneath the palms drew Gaspard’s attention; he borrowed Sagesse’s glass and looked. It was the remains of the tent, a few rags of canvas; they seemed beckoning to him like brown hands, skeleton-thin and sinister.
Even as he looked, the roar of the anchor-chain through the hawse pipe tore the air, and La Belle Arlésienne swung at her moorings in eight fathoms of water a few cable-lengths from the shore.
The barquentine had come in with scarcely a sound, but scarcely had she taken anchorage than Babel broke out on board. The voice of Jules could be heard above the others, ordering the boats to be got ready; stores were being brought on deck, whilst Sagesse, silent beside Gaspard, watched the preparations for landing with a brooding eye, throwing in a command now and then.
The longboat and a quarterboat were lowered and laden with stores and the diving apparatus; it was nearly an hour before the business was complete and Sagesse and his companion, taking their places in the stern of the longboat, found themselves free of La Belle Arlésienne and making for the shore.
They rowed to the southern beach.
“I will take the quarterboat across the island,” said Sagesse. “It will be a bit of a job, but she’s light enough, and eight of the hands will be able to do it. I’m going to use her for the diving. Mordieu, but it’s a desolate place, this island of yours. There’s no gainsaying that. Who would ever think there was a ship sunk here, and lying in shallow water, too?”
“It’s lonely enough,” said Gaspard, his eyes fixed on the white beach, the palms, and the grey-green stretch of bay-cedar bushes. Now that he was close in shore, all the elation of the treasure hunt had passed from him, giving place to a feeling of melancholy. Oh, those palms, that rag of tent fluttering in the wind, that scorching splash of sunlight on the beach—what visions of desolation did they not call up! The place seemed to him full of death and tragedy, repellant, as though the shade of Simon Serpente were walking in the sun-blaze of the beach, as though the voices of the gulls were the voices of his men; ghosts of old buccaneers condemned to eternal restlessness and discontent.
But with the grounding of the boat’s nose on the sand all this passed away. He flung himself over the side and helped to run her up as far on the beach as the weight of her cargo would let them pull her; the quarterboat was beached just beside her, and then the unlading began.
Whilst it was still in progress Sagesse, leaving Jules to superintend, took Gaspard’s arm.
“Come,” said he, “let’s have a look at her. The tide’s half out and she ought to show up well.”