The Seafarers

by John Bloundelle-Burton

'Heaven bless you,' she exclaimed from where she also rose as she saw him do so, and while going towards him. 'Heaven bless you. You spare yourself no trouble nor fatigue on my account.'

'It is best,' he answered, though he scarcely knew what reply to make. 'It is best that there should be no chance lost. If--if----' Then he held out his hand to her as he had not done before, and at once, after she had taken it, set out upon the remaining portion of his search. And, for some reason which he, perhaps, could not have explained to himself, he cast back no last look at her in the swift-coming daylight--nor gave any word of farewell as he had done on the previous afternoon.

That daylight brought a little breeze with it which was cool and soft as it came off the ocean that, for some hours, had been free from the burning rays of the sun; and Charke made his way along the beach while glancing everywhere, as he had done during his search of yesterday,--into every spot wherein, if any one, anything, had come ashore, they would probably have been cast. But as it had been when he proceeded towards the left or south, so it was now as he went towards the right or north end of the island. He found nothing; not even, this time, a rag of clothing or a spar from the ship. He observed, however, amongst other things of which his vigilant eyes took notice, that here the formation of the island was considerably different from what it had been on the southern side. There, as he made his way back inland to Bella, cutting across from the eastern to the western shore, he had found the glades and groves almost flat, except for small knolls and little eminences on which, as everywhere else, there grew the long, deep-green grass, the cocoa trees and tamarinds, and the flowering shrubs and bushes. But here, upon the side he was now following, all was very different. Inland, he could perceive that the surface rose until it developed into quite high hills, and that those hills, forming into spurs as they ran down to the water's edge, created a number of little bays or coves, some of them being scarcely more than fifty yards in breadth. Also he perceived that on high, where the crests or summits of these spurs were, their sides were abrupt declivities resembling often the sheer sides of cliffs instead of sloping gradually and being covered by the deep emerald-green, velvety grass. And they were white as English cliffs--as those of Dover!--and, sometimes, as precipitous. Huge masses, too, of fallen, crumbling rock lay tumbled together at their base and in the tiny valleys which they formed between them, and gave, thereby, signs of either a convulsion which had some time or another taken place, or of their lack of solidity and insecure composition. 'I shall have,' Charke thought, 'a mountainous, up-and-down kind of return journey if I go back to her inland. Yet it will cut off a good deal of the way and make it easier for me.'

He found as he progressed, however, that soon, if he wished to continue his inspection of the whole of the coast, he would, in any circumstances, have to continue his walk more or less inland, since now he could observe, by looking about, that the spurs ran quite out into the sea, so that they hid each little bay from its neighbour on either side of it. Consequently, if he wished to inspect the space between each, he would have to mount to their tops and thus peer down into the recesses that they formed. At present, however, there was no necessity for him to do this. Still looking, he saw that there were three more bays, or coves, which he could reach by walking between the feet of the spurs and the water, the spurs stopping some yards short of the gentle surf which the morning breeze was raising.

'Three,' he said, 'three. This one where I am now, the first; then two more. And, after that, I must ascend and gaze down. There will be no getting farther along the bank.'

So he entered the first cove, finding it as desolate and bare as the others into which he glanced in his journey; bare of everything, and with its white beach so void of all else but its own stones, that it might, that morning, have been swept clean and clear. The second was the same, except that here, upon its beach, there lay the long iron shank of an anchor with one arm and fluke upon it, but with the other gone. An anchor that, he knew at a glance, had never been made in recent days--that, by its quaint form, must be some centuries old. And, even as he continued his journey, he wondered how it had come there, and if, in long-forgotten and unnumbered years, some toilers of the sea had been flung ashore in this spot, and if this was all that had been left by time to hint at the story.

Then he entered the third, and last, bay or cove which remained passable by the shoreway--the last he would be able to inspect until he ascended to the cliffs above.

As he did so he started--knowing, feeling, that beneath his bronze and sunburn he had turned white--recognising that he was trembling with a faint, nervous tremor. For this cove to which he had penetrated was different from the previous ones; it ran back between the two spurs which formed its walls until it merged into the wooded, grassy declivity that sloped down from above, while, at the foot of that declivity, was more grass forming a little carpeted ravine and, growing on it, some of the island trees--orange trees, lemon trees, even bananas.

And on the grass there lay a man. Dead or asleep!

A man, fair-haired, clad in a white drill suit with brass buttons--they glistened now in the rays of the risen sun!--the white uniform of the Royal Navy. A man who was Gilbert Bampfyld.