He came down from the tree shaking and faint, the perspiration running from the palms of his hands and his lips dry as sandstone.
He was marooned. The thing was clear. Sagesse had doctored him the night before with a knock-out drop; he had been “doped,” and as he lay unconscious the evasion had been made. But why? The answer was easy enough to find when one knew the character of Sagesse. To leave Gaspard alone on his island, knowing what he had suffered there before, would be a piece of revenge after Sagesse’s heart; yet Gaspard felt this not to be the solution.
Why had Sagesse flown like this, leaving the ship of coral in the lagoon untouched? Had he, then, sure knowledge that the treasure was not there, and that time would be wasted in looking for it? Trying to find an answer to the riddle set him, and scarcely knowing where he went, he took the path across the islet along which the quarterboat had been drawn to the lagoon.
Even before he reached the northern beach two things struck his eye; the quarterboat, with all the diving apparatus on board, lay floating in the lagoon and moored to the eastern edge of the basin; and far out at sea La Belle Arlésienne with all sail set lay becalmed.
Out there on the desolate grey of the calm sea, her old sails hanging flaccid and without a motion, La Belle Arlésienne had an inexpressibly lugubrious and sinister appearance.
It was as though she had been caught in some wicked act and, trying to escape, had been arrested. The calm was holding her in a grip as powerful as the iron grip of ice; the south equatorial current, broken here, would not give her a drift of more than a mile an hour to the north. She might hang in sight of the island for a day or more.
Gaspard, standing on the reef, shook his fist at her and cursed her, and her captain and crew. He remembered the very first day he had seen her, and how, working himself up into a nervous fever of imagination, he had fancied her passing without seeing him and had cursed her and her captain and her crew.
She had taken him from the island and had brought him back; on board of her he had given himself away to Sagesse under the influence of rum. She had brought him to Martinique, she had given him Marie and the hope of a happy future—and she had taken them away again. She was an evil thing, and he cursed her again as he stared across the sea, not noticing that through the air, upon his clothes, upon the reef, upon the bay-cedar bushes behind him, the almost impalpable grey dust was still falling.
The wind had utterly ceased and a candle would have burnt without a flicker in that motionless air. Gaspard had no idea of the time of day, for the light came through the clouded sky evenly diffused as light comes through a scuttle of ground glass.
He turned his eyes from the distant vessel to the boat floating on the lagoon.