He lived in a hut on a jutting crag of the Cliff of the King. You could get to it by a hard climb up a precipitous pathway, or by a ladder of ropes which swung from his cottage door down the cliff-side to the sands. The bay that washed the sands was called Belle Amour. The cliff was huge, sombre; it had a terrible granite moroseness. If you travelled back from its edge until you stood within the very heart of Labrador, you would add step upon step of barrenness and austerity.
Only at seasons did the bay share the gloom of the cliff. When out of its shadow it was, in summer, very bright and playful, sometimes boisterous, often idle, coquetting with the sands. There was a great difference between the cliff and the bay: the cliff was only as it appeared, but the bay was a shameless hypocrite. For under one shoulder it hid a range of reefs, and, at a spot where the shadows of the cliff never reached it, and the sun played with a grim kind of joy, a long needle of rock ran up at an angle under the water, waiting to pierce irresistibly the adventurous ship that, in some mad moment, should creep to its shores.
The man was more like the cliff than the bay: stern, powerful, brooding. His only companions were the Indians, who in summer-time came and went, getting stores of him, which he in turn got from a post of the Hudson’s Bay Company, seventy miles up the coast. At one time the Company, impressed by the number of skins brought to them by the pilot, and the stores he bought of them, had thought of establishing a post at Belle Amour; but they saw that his dealings with them were fair and that he had small gain, and they decided to use him as an unofficial agent, and reap what profit was to be had as things stood. Kenyon, the Company’s agent, who had the Post, was keen to know why Gaspard the pilot lived at Belle Amour. No white man sojourned near him, and he saw no one save now and then a priest who travelled silently among the Indians, or some fisherman, hunter, or woodsman, who, for pleasure or from pure adventure, ran into the bay and tasted the hospitality tucked away on a ledge of the Cliff of the King.
To Kenyon, Gaspard was unresponsive, however adroit the catechism. Father Corraine also, who sometimes stepped across the dark threshold of Gaspard’s hut, would have, for the man’s soul’s sake, dug out the heart of his secret; but Gaspard, open with food, fire, blanket, and tireless attendance, closed like the doors of a dungeon when the priest would have read him. At the name of good Ste. Anne he would make the sacred gesture, and would take a blessing when the priest passed from his hut to go again into the wilds; but when pressed to disclose his mind and history, he would always say: “M’sieu’, I have nothing to confess.” After a number of years the priest ceased to ask him, and he remained with the secret of his life, inscrutable and silent.
Being vigilant, one would have seen, however, that he lived in some land of memory or anticipation, beyond his life of daily toil and usual dealing. The hut seemed to have been built at a point where east and west and south the great gulf could be seen and watched. It seemed almost ludicrous that a man should call himself a pilot on a coast and at a bay where a pilot was scarce needed once a year. But he was known as Gaspard the pilot, and on those rare occasions when a vessel did anchor in the bay, he performed his duties with such a certainty as to leave unguessed how many deathtraps crouched near that shore. At such times, however, Gaspard seemed to look twenty years younger. A light would come into his face, a stalwart kind of pride sit on him, though beneath there lurked a strange, sardonic look in his deep eyes—such a grim furtiveness as though he should say: “If I but twist my finger we are all for the fishes.” But he kept his secret and waited. He never seemed to tire of looking down the gulf, as though expecting some ship. If one appeared and passed on, he merely nodded his head, hung up his glass, returned to his work, or, sitting by the door, talked to himself in low, strange tones. If one came near, making as if it would enter the bay, a hungry joy possessed him. If a storm was on, the joy was the greater. No pilot ever ventured to a ship on such rough seas as Gaspard ventured for small profit or glory.
Behind it all lay his secret. There came one day a man who discovered it.
It was Pierre, the half-breed adventurer. There was no point in all the wild northland which Pierre had not touched. He loved it as he loved the game of life. He never said so of it, but he never said so of the game of life, and he played it with a deep subterranean joy. He had had his way with the musk-ox in the Arctic Circle; with the white bear at the foot of Alaskan Hills; with the seal in Baffin’s Bay; with the puma on the slope of the Pacific; and now at last he had come upon the trail of Labrador. Its sternness, its moodiness pleased him. He smiled at it the comprehending smile of the man who has fingered the nerves and the heart of men and things. As a traveller, wandering through a prison, looks upon its grim cells and dungeons with the eye of unembarrassed freedom, finding no direful significance in the clank of its iron, so Pierre travelled down with a handful of Indians through the hard fastnesses of that country, and, at last, alone, came upon the bay of Belle Amour.
There was in him some antique touch of refinement and temperament which, in all his evil days and deeds and moments of shy nobility, could find its way into the souls of men with whom the world had had an awkward hour. He was a man of little speech, but he had that rare persuasive penetration which unlocked the doors of trouble, despair, and tragedy. Men who would never have confessed to a priest confessed to him. In his every fibre was the granite of the Indian nature, which looked upon punishment with stoic satisfaction.
In the heart of Labrador he had heard of Gaspard, and had travelled to that point in the compass where he could find him. One day when the sun was fighting hard to make a pathway of light in front of Gaspard’s hut, Pierre rounded a corner of the cliff and fronted Gaspard as he sat there, his eyes idling gloomily with the sea. They said little to each other—in new lands hospitality has not need of speech. When Gaspard and Pierre looked each other in the eyes they knew that one word between them was as a hundred with other men. The heart knows its confessor, and the confessor knows the shadowed eye that broods upon some ghostly secret; and when these are face to face there comes a merciless concision of understanding.
“From where away?” said Gaspard, as he handed some tobacco to Pierre.
“From Hudson’s Bay, down the Red Wolf Plains, along the hills, across the coast country, here.”
“Why?” Gaspard eyed Pierre’s small kit with curiosity; then flung up a piercing, furtive look. Pierre shrugged his shoulders.
“Adventure, adventure,” he answered. “The land”—he pointed north, west, and east—“is all mine. I am the citizen of every village and every camp of the great north.”
The old man turned his head towards a spot up the shore of Belle Amour, before he turned to Pierre again, with a strange look, and said: “Where do you go?”
Pierre followed his gaze to that point in the shore, felt the undercurrent of vague meaning in his voice, guessed what was his cue, and said: “Somewhere, sometime; but now only Belle Amour. I have had a long travel. I have found an open door. I will stay—if you please—hein? If you please?”
Gaspard brooded. “It is lonely,” he replied. “This day it is all bright; the sun shines and the little gay waves crinkle to the shore. But, mon Dieu! sometimes it is all black and ugly with storm. The waves come grinding, booming in along the gridiron rocks”—he smiled a grim smile—“break through the teeth of the reefs, and split with a roar of hell upon the cliff. And all the time, and all the time,”—his voice got low with a kind of devilish joy,—“there is a finger—Jesu! you should see that finger of the devil stretch up from the bowels of the earth, waiting, waiting for something to come out of the storm. And then—and then you can hear a wild laugh come out of the land, come up from the sea, come down from the sky—all waiting, waiting for something! No, no, you would not stay here.”
Pierre looked again to that point in the shore towards which Gaspard’s eyes had been cast. The sun was shining hard just then, and the stern, sharp rocks, tumbling awkwardly back into the waste behind, had an insolent harshness. Day perched garishly there. Yet now and then the staring light was broken by sudden and deep shadows—great fissures in the rocks and lanes between. These gave Pierre a suggestion, though why, he could not say. He knew that when men live lives of patient, gloomy vigilance, they generally have something to watch and guard. Why should Gaspard remain here year after year? His occupation was nominally a pilot in a bay rarely touched by vessels, and then only for shelter. A pilot need not take his daily life with such brooding seriousness. In body he was like flexible metal, all cord and muscle. He gave the impression of bigness, though he was small in stature. Yet, as Pierre studied him, he saw something that made him guess the man had had about him one day a woman, perhaps a child; no man could carry that look unless. If a woman has looked at you from day to day, something of her, some reflection of her face, passes to yours and stays there; and if a child has held your hand long, or hung about your knees, it gives you a kind of gentle wariness as you step about your home.
Pierre knew that a man will cherish with a deep, eternal purpose a memory of a woman or a child, when, no matter how compelling his cue to remember where a man is concerned, he will yield it up in the end to time. Certain speculations arranged themselves definitely in Pierre’s mind: there was a woman, maybe a child once; there was some sorrowful mystery about them; there was a point in the shore that had held the old man’s eyes strangely; there was the bay with that fantastic “finger of the devil” stretching up from the bowels of the world. Behind the symbol lay the Thing what was it?
Long time he looked out upon the gulf, then his eyes drew into the bay and stayed there, seeing mechanically, as a hundred fancies went through his mind. There were reefs of which the old man had spoken. He could guess from the colour and movement of the water where they were. The finger of the devil—was it not real? A finger of rock, waiting as the old man said—for what?
Gaspard touched his shoulder. He rose and went with him into the gloomy cabin. They ate and drank in silence. When the meal was finished they sat smoking till night fell. Then the pilot lit a fire, and drew his rough chair to the door. Though it was only late summer, it was cold in the shade of the cliff. Long time they sat. Now and again Pierre intercepted the quick, elusive glance of his silent host. Once the pilot took the pipe from his mouth, and leaned his hands on his knees as if about to speak. But he did not.
Pierre saw that the time was ripe for speech. So he said, as though he knew something: “It is a long time since it happened?”
Gaspard, brooding, answered: “Yes, a long time—too long.” Then, as if suddenly awakened to the strangeness of the question, he added, in a startled way: “What do you know? Tell me quick what you know.”
“I know nothing except what comes to me here, pilot,”—Pierre touched his forehead, “but there is a thing—I am not sure what. There was a woman—perhaps a child; there is something on the shore; there is a hidden point of rock in the bay; and you are waiting for a ship—for the ship, and it does not come—isn’t that so?”
Gaspard got to his feet, and peered into Pierre’s immobile face. Their eyes met.
“Mon Dieu!” said the pilot, his hand catching the smoke away from between them, “you are a droll man; you have a wonderful mind. You are cold like ice, and still there is in you a look of fire.”
“Sit down,” answered Pierre quietly, “and tell me all. Perhaps I could think it out little by little; but it might take too long—and what is the good?”
Slowly Gaspard obeyed. Both hands rested on his knees, and he stared abstractedly into the fire. Pierre thrust forward the tobacco-bag. His hand lifted, took the tobacco, and then his eyes came keenly to Pierre’s. He was about to speak.... “Fill your pipe first,” said the half-breed coolly. The old man did so abstractedly. When the pipe was lighted, Pierre said: “Now!”
“I have never told the story, never—not even to Pere Corraine. But I know, I have it here”—he put his hand to his forehead, as did Pierre—“that you will be silent.” Pierre nodded.
“She was fine to see. Her eyes were black as beads; and when she laugh it was all music. I was so happy! We lived on the island of the Aux Coudres, far up there at Quebec. It was a wild place. There were smugglers and others there—maybe pirates. But she was like a saint of God among all. I was lucky man. I was pilot, and took ships out to sea, and brought them in safe up the gulf. It is not all easy, for there are mad places. Once or twice when a wild storm was on I could not land at Cap Martin, and was carried out to sea and over to France.... Well, that was not so bad; there was plenty to eat and drink, nothing to do. But when I marry it was differen’. I was afraid of being carried away and leave my wife—the belle Mamette—alone long time. You see, I was young, and she was ver’ beautiful.”
He paused and caught his hand over his mouth as though to stop a sound: the lines of his face deepened. Presently he puffed his pipe so hard that the smoke and the sparks hid him in a cloud through which he spoke. “When the child was born—Holy Mother! have you ever felt the hand of your own child in yours, and looked at the mother, as she lies there all pale and shining between the quilts?”
He paused. Pierre’s eyes dropped to the floor. Gaspard continued: “Well, it is a great thing, and the babe was born quick one day when we were all alone. A thing like that gives you wonder. Then I could not bear to go away with the ships, and at last I said: ‘One month, and then the ice fills the gulf, and there will be no more ships for the winter. That will be the last for me. I will be pilot no more-no.’ She was ver’ happy, and a laugh ran over her little white teeth. Mon Dieu, I stop that laugh pretty quick—in fine way!”
He seemed for an instant to forget his great trouble, and his face went to warm sunshine like a boy’s; but it was as sun playing on a scarred fortress. Presently the light faded out of his face and left it like iron smouldering from the bellows.
“Well,” he said, “you see there was a ship to go almost the last of the season, and I said to my wife, ‘Mamette, it is the last time I shall be pilot. You must come with me and bring the child, and they will put us off at Father Point, and then we will come back slow to the village on the good Ste. Anne and live there ver’ quiet.’ When I say that to her she laugh back at me and say, ‘Beau! beau!’ and she laugh in the child’s eyes, and speak—nom de Dieu! she speak so gentle and light—and say to the child: ‘Would you like go with your father a pretty journey down the gulf?’ And the little child laugh back at her, and shake its soft brown hair over its head. They were both so glad to go. I went to the captain of the ship. I say to him, ‘I will take my wife and my little child, and when we come to Father Point we will go ashore.’ Bien, the captain laugh big, and it was all right. That was long time ago—long time.”
He paused again, threw his head back with a despairing toss, his chin dropped on his breast, his hands clasped between his knees, and his pipe, laid beside him on the bench, was forgotten.
Pierre quietly put some wood upon the fire, opened his kit, drew out from it a little flask of rum and laid it upon the bench beside the pipe. A long time passed. At last Gaspard roused himself with a long sigh, turned and picked up the pipe, but, seeing the flask of rum, lifted it, and took one long swallow before he began to fill and light his pipe. There came into his voice something of iron hardness as he continued his story.
“Alors, we went into the boat. As we travelled down the gulf a great storm came out of the north. We thought it would pass, but it stayed on. When we got to the last place where the pilot could land, the waves were running like hills to the shore, and no boat could live between the ship and the point. For myself, it was nothing—I am a strong man and a great swimmer. But when a man has a wife and a child, it is differen’. So the ship went on out into the ocean with us. Well, we laugh a little, and think what a great brain I had when I say to my wife: ‘Come and bring the child for the last voyage of Gaspard the pilot.’ You see, there we were on board the ship, everything ver’ good, plenty to eat, much to drink, to smoke, all the time. The sailors, they were ver’ funny, and to see them take my child, my little Babette, and play with her as she roll on the deck—merci, it was gran’! So I say to my wife:
“‘This will be bon voyage for all.’ But a woman, she has not the mind like a man. When a man laugh in the sun and think nothing of evil, a woman laugh too, but there come a little quick sob to her lips. You ask her why, and she cannot tell. She know that something will happen. A man has great idee, a woman great sight. So my wife, she turn her face away all sad from me then, and she was right—she was right!
“One day in the ocean we pass a ship—only two days out. The ship signal us. I say to my wife: ‘Ha, ha! now we can go back, maybe, to the good Ste. Anne.’ Well, the ships come close together, and the captain of the other ship he have something importan’ with ours. He ask if there will be chance of pilot into the gulf, because it is the first time that he visit Quebec. The captain swing round and call to me. I go up. I bring my wife and my little Babette; and that was how we sail back to the great gulf.
“When my wife step on board that ship I see her face get pale, and something strange in her eyes. I ask her why; she do not know, but she hug Babette close to her breast with a kind of fear. A long, low, black ship, it could run through every sea. Soon the captain come to me and say: ‘You know the coast, the north coast of the gulf, from Labrador to Quebec?’ I tell him yes. ‘Well,’ he say, ‘do you know of a bay where few ships enter safe?’ I think a moment and I tell him of Belle Amour. Then he say, ver’ quick: ‘That is the place; we will go to the bay of Belle Amour.’ He was ver’ kind to my face; he give my wife and child good berth, plenty to eat and drink, and once more I laugh; but my wife—there was in her face something I not understan’. It is not easy to understan’ a woman. We got to the bay. I had pride: I was young. I was the best pilot in the St. Lawrence, and I took in the ship between the reefs of the bay, where they run like a gridiron, and I laugh when I swing the ship all ver’ quick to the right, after we pass the reefs, and make a curve round—something. The captain pull me up and ask why. But I never tell him that. I not know why I never tell him. But the good God put the thought into my head, and I keep it to this hour, and it never leave me, never—never!”
He slowly rubbed his hands up and down his knees, took another sip of rum, and went on:
“I brought the ship close up to the shore, and we go to anchor. All that night I see the light of a fire on the shore. So I slide down and swim to the shore. Under a little arch of rocks something was going on. I could not tell, but I know from the sound that they are to bury something. Then, all at once, it come to me—this is a pirate ship! I come closer and closer to the light, and then I see a dreadful thing. There was the captain and the mate, and another. They turn quick upon two other men—two sailors—and kill them. Then they take the bodies and wound them round some casks in a great hole, and cover it all up. I understan’. It is the old legend that a dead body will keep gold all to itself, so that no one shall find it. Mon Dieu!”—his voice dropped low and shook in his throat—“I give one little cry at the sight, and then they see me. There were three. They were armed; they sprang upon me and tied me. Then they fling me beside the fire, and they cover up the hole with the gold and the bodies.
“When that was done they take me back to the ship, then with pistols at my head they make me pilot the ship out into the bay again. As we went they make a chart of the place. We travel along the coast for one day; and then a great storm of snow come, and the captain say to me: ‘Steer us into harbour.’ When we are at anchor, they take me and my wife, and little child and put us ashore alone, with a storm and the bare rocks and the dreadful night, and leave us there, that we shall never tell the secret of the gold. That night my wife and my child die in the snow.”
Here his voice became strained and slow. “After a long time I work my way to an Injin camp. For months I was a child in strength, all my flesh gone. When the spring come I went and dug a deeper grave for my wife, and p’tite Babette, and leave them there, where they had died. But I come to the bay of Belle Amour, because I knew some day the man with the devil’s heart would come back for his gold, and then would arrive my time—the hour of God!”
He paused. “The hour of God,” he repeated slowly. “I have waited twenty years, but he has not come; yet I know that he will come. I feel it here”—he touched his forehead; “I know it here”—he tapped his heart. “Once where my heart was, there is only one thing, and it is hate, and I know—I know—that he will come. And when he comes—” He raised his arm high above his head, laughed wildly, paused, let the hand drop, and then fell to staring into the fire.
Pierre again placed the flask of rum between his fingers. But Gaspard put it down, caught his arms together across his breast, and never turned his face from the fire. Midnight came, and still they sat there silent. No man had a greater gift in waiting than Pierre. Many a time his life had been a swivel, upon which the comedies and tragedies of others had turned. He neither loved nor feared men: sometimes he pitied them. He pitied Gaspard. He knew what it is to have the heartstrings stretched out, one by one, by the hand of a Gorgon, while the feet are chained to the rocking world.
Not till the darkest hour of the morning did the two leave their silent watch and go to bed. The sun had crept stealthily to the door of the but before they rose again. Pierre laid his hand upon Gaspard’s shoulder as they travelled out into the morning, and said: “My friend, I understand. Your secret is safe with me; you shall take me to the place where the gold is buried, but it shall wait there until the time is ripe. What is gold to me? Nothing. To find gold—that is the trick of any fool. To win it or to earn it is the only game. Let the bodies rot about the gold. You and I will wait. I have many friends in the northland, but there is no face in any tent door looking for me. You are alone: well, I will stay with you. Who can tell—perhaps it is near at hand—the hour of God!”
The huge hard hand of Gaspard swallowed the small hand of Pierre, and, in a voice scarcely above a whisper, he answered: “You shall be my comrade. I have told you all, as I have never told it to my God. I do not fear you about the gold—it is all cursed. You are not like other men; I will trust you. Some time you also have had the throat of a man in your fingers, and watched the life spring out of his eyes, and leave them all empty. When men feel like that, what is gold—what is anything! There is food in the bay and on the hills.
“We will live together, you and I. Come and I will show you the place of hell.”
Together they journeyed down the crag and along the beach to the place where the gold, the grim god of this world, was fortressed and bastioned by its victims.
The days went on; the weeks and months ambled by. Still the two lived together. Little speech passed between them, save that speech of comrades, who use more the sign than the tongue. It seemed to Pierre after a time that Gaspard’s wrongs were almost his own. Yet with this difference: he must stand by and let the avenger be the executioner; he must be the spectator merely.
Sometimes he went inland and brought back moose, caribou, and the skins of other animals, thus assisting Gaspard in his dealings with the great Company. But again there were days when he did nothing but lie on the skins at the hut’s door, or saunter in the shadows and the sunlight. Not since he had come to Gaspard had a ship passed the bay or sought to anchor in it.
But there came a day. It was the early summer. The snow had shrunk from the ardent sun, and had swilled away to the gulf, leaving the tender grass showing. The moss on the rocks had changed from brown to green, and the vagrant birds had fluttered back from the south. The winter’s furs had been carried away in the early spring to the Company’s post, by a detachment of coureurs de bois. There was little left to do. This morning they sat in the sun looking out upon the gulf. Presently Gaspard rose and went into the hut. Pierre’s eyes still lazily scanned the water. As he looked he saw a vessel rounding a point in the distance. Suppose this was the ship of the pirate and murderer? The fancy diverted him. His eyes drew away from the indistinct craft—first to the reefs, and then to that spot where the colossal needle stretched up under the water. It was as Pierre speculated. Brigond, the French pirate, who had hidden his gold at such shameless cost, was, after twenty years in the galleys at Toulon, come back to find his treasure. He had doubted little that he would find it. The lonely spot, the superstition concerning dead bodies, the supposed doom of Gaspard, all ran in his favour. His little craft came on, manned by as vile a mob as ever mutinied or built a wrecker’s fire.
When the ship got within a short distance of the bay, Pierre rose and called. Gaspard came to the door. “There’s work to do, pilot,” he said. Gaspard felt the thrill of his voice, and flashed a look out to the gulf. He raised his hands with a gasp. “I feel it,” he said: “it is the hour of God!”
He started to the rope ladder of the cliff, then wheeled suddenly and came back to Pierre. “You must not come,” he said. “Stay here and watch; you shall see great things.” His voice had a round, deep tone. He caught both Pierre’s hands in his and added: “It is for my wife and child; I have no fear. Adieu, my friend! When you see the good Pere Corraine say to him—but no, it is no matter—there is One greater!”
Once again he caught Pierre hard by the shoulder, then ran to the cliff and swung down the ladder. All at once there shot through Pierre’s body an impulse, and his eyes lighted with excitement. He sprang towards the cliff. “Gaspard, come back!” he called; then paused, and, with an enigmatical smile, shrugged his shoulders, drew back, and waited.
The vessel was hove to outside the bay, as if hesitating. Brigond was considering whether it were better, with his scant chart, to attempt the bay, or to take small boats and make for the shore. He remembered the reefs, but he did not know of the needle of rock. Presently he saw Gaspard’s boat coming. “Someone who knows the bay,” he said; “I see a hut on the cliff.”
“Hello, who are you?” Brigond called down as Gaspard drew alongside.
“A Hudson’s Bay Company’s man,” answered Gaspard.
“How many are there of you?”
“Myself alone.”
“Can you pilot us in?”
“I know the way.”
“Come up.”
Gaspard remembered Brigond, and he veiled his eyes lest the hate he felt should reveal him. No one could have recognised him as the young pilot of twenty years before. Then his face was cheerful and bright, and in his eye was the fire of youth. Now a thick beard and furrowing lines hid all the look of the past. His voice, too, was desolate and distant.
Brigond clapped him on the shoulder. “How long have you lived off there?” he asked, as he jerked his finger towards the shore.
“A good many years.”
“Did anything strange ever happen there?” Gaspard felt his heart contract again, as it did when Brigond’s hand touched his shoulder.
“Nothing strange is known.”
A vicious joy came into Brigond’s face. His fingers opened and shut. “Safe, by the holy heaven!” he grunted.
“‘By the holy heaven!’” repeated Gaspard, under his breath.
They walked forward. Almost as they did so there came a big puff of wind across the bay: one of those sudden currents that run in from the ocean and the gulf stream. Gaspard saw, and smiled. In a moment the vessel’s nose was towards the bay, and she sailed in, dipping a shoulder to the sudden foam. On she came past reef and bar, a pretty tumbril to the slaughter. The spray feathered up to her sails, the sun caught her on deck and beam; she was running dead for the needle of rock.
Brigond stood at Gaspard’s side. All at once Gaspard made the sacred gesture and said, in a low tone, as if only to himself: “Pardon, mon capitaine, mon Jesu!” Then he turned triumphantly, fiercely, upon Brigond. The pirate was startled. “What’s the matter?” he said.
Not Gaspard, but the needle rock replied. There was a sudden shock; the vessel stood still and shivered; lurched, swung shoulder downwards, reeled and struggled. Instantly she began to sink.
“The boats! lower the boats!” cried Brigond. “This cursed fool has run us on a rock!”
The waves, running high, now swept over the deck. Brigond started aft, but Gaspard sprang before him. “Stand back!” he called. “Where you are you die!”
Brigond, wild with terror and rage, ran at him. Gaspard caught him as he came. With vast strength he lifted him and dashed him to the deck. “Die there, murderer!” he cried.
Brigond crouched upon the deck, looking at him with fearful eyes. “Who-are you?” he asked.
“I am Gaspard the pilot. I have waited for you twenty years. Up there, in the snow, my wife and child died. Here, in this bay, you die.”
There was noise and racketing behind them, but they two heard nothing. The one was alone with his terror, the other with his soul. Once, twice, thrice, the vessel heaved, then went suddenly still.
Gaspard understood. One look at his victim, then he made the sacred gesture again, and folded his arms. Pierre, from the height of the cliff, looking down, saw the vessel dip at the bow, and then the waters divided and swallowed it up.
“Gaspard should have lived,” he said. “But—who can tell! Perhaps Mamette was waiting for him.”
She was only a big gulf yawl, which a man and a boy could manage at a pinch, with old-fashioned high bulwarks, but lying clean in the water. She had a tolerable record for speed, and for other things so important that they were now and again considered by the Government at Quebec. She was called the Ninety-Nine. With a sense of humour the cure had called her so, after an interview with her owner and captain, Tarboe the smuggler. When he said to Tarboe at Angel Point that he had come to seek the one sheep that was lost, leaving behind him the other ninety-and-nine within the fold at Isle of Days, Tarboe had replied that it was a mistake—he was the ninety-nine, for he needed no repentance, and immediately offered the cure some old brown brandy of fine flavour. They both had a whimsical turn, and the cure did not ask Tarboe how he came by such perfect liquor. Many high in authority, it was said, had been soothed even to the winking of an eye when they ought to have sent a Nordenfeldt against the Ninety-Nine.
The day after the cure left Angel Point he spoke of Tarboe and his craft as the Ninety-and-Nine; and Tarboe hearing of this—for somehow he heard everything—immediately painted out the old name, and called her the Ninety-Nine, saying that she had been so blessed by the cure. Afterwards the Ninety-Nine had an increasing reputation for exploit and daring. In brief, Tarboe and his craft were smugglers, and to have trusted gossip would have been to say that the boat was as guilty as the man.
Their names were much more notorious than sweet; and yet in Quebec men laughed as they shrugged their shoulders at them; for as many jovial things as evil were told of Tarboe. When it became known that a dignitary of the Church had been given a case of splendid wine, which had come in a roundabout way to him, men waked in the night and laughed, to the annoyance of their wives; for the same dignitary had preached a powerful sermon against smugglers and the receivers of stolen goods. It was a sad thing for monsignor to be called a Ninety-Niner, as were all good friends of Tarboe, high and low. But when he came to know, after the wine had been leisurely drunk and becomingly praised, he brought his influence to bear in civic places, so that there was nothing left to do but to corner Tarboe at last.
It was in the height of summer, when there was little to think of in the old fortressed city, and a dart after a brigand appealed to the romantic natures of the idle French folk, common and gentle.
Through clouds of rank tobacco smoke, and in the wash of their bean soup, the habitants discussed the fate of “Black Tarboe,” and officers of the garrison and idle ladies gossiped at the Citadel and at Murray Bay of the freebooting gentlemen, whose Ninety-Nine had furnished forth many a table in the great walled city. But Black Tarboe himself was down at Anticosti, waiting for a certain merchantman. Passing vessels saw the Ninety-Nine anchored in an open bay, flying its flag flippantly before the world—a rag of black sheepskin, with the wool on, in profane keeping with its name.
There was no attempt at hiding, no skulking behind a point, or scurrying from observation, but an indolent and insolent waiting—for something. “Black Tarboe’s getting reckless,” said one captain coming in, and another, going out, grinned as he remembered the talk at Quebec, and thought of the sport provided for the Ninety-Nine when she should come up stream; as she must in due time, for Tarboe’s home was on the Isle of Days, and was he not fond and proud of his daughter Joan to a point of folly? He was not alone in his admiration of Joan, for the cure at Isle of Days said high things of her.
Perhaps this was because she was unlike most other girls, and women too, in that she had a sense of humour, got from having mixed with choice spirits who visited her father and carried out at Angel Point a kind of freemasonry, which had few rites and many charges and countercharges. She had that almost impossible gift in a woman—the power of telling a tale whimsically. It was said that once, when Orvay Lafarge, a new Inspector of Customs, came to spy out the land, she kept him so amused by her quaint wit, that he sat in the doorway gossiping with her, while Tarboe and two others unloaded and safely hid away a cargo of liquors from the Ninety-Nine. And one of the men, as cheerful as Joan herself, undertook to carry a little keg of brandy into the house, under the very nose of the young inspector, who had sought to mark his appointment by the detection and arrest of Tarboe single-handed. He had never met Tarboe or Tarboe’s daughter when he made his boast. If his superiors had known that Loco Bissonnette, Tarboe’s jovial lieutenant, had carried the keg of brandy into the house in a water-pail, not fifteen feet from where Lafarge sat with Joan, they might have asked for his resignation. True, the thing was cleverly done, for Bissonnette made the water spill quite naturally against his leg, and when he turned to Joan and said in a crusty way that he didn’t care if he spilled all the water in the pail, he looked so like an unwilling water-carrier that Joan for one little moment did not guess. When she understood, she laughed till the tears came to her eyes, and presently, because Lafarge seemed hurt, gave him to understand that he was upon his honour if she told him what it was. He consenting, she, still laughing, asked him into the house, and then drew the keg from the pail, before his eyes, and, tapping it, gave him some liquor, which he accepted without churlishness. He found nothing in this to lessen her in his eyes, for he knew that women have no civic virtues. He drank to their better acquaintance with few compunctions; a matter not scandalous, for there is nothing like a witty woman to turn a man’s head, and there was not so much at stake after all. Tarboe had gone on for many a year till his trade seemed like the romance of law rather than its breach. It is safe to say that Lafarge was a less sincere if not a less blameless customs officer from this time forth. For humour on a woman’s lips is a potent thing, as any man knows that has kissed it off in laughter.
As we said, Tarboe lay rocking in a bight at Anticosti, with an empty hold and a scanty larder. Still, he was in no ill-humour, for he smoked much and talked more than common. Perhaps that was because Joan was with him—an unusual thing. She was as good a sailor as her father, but she did not care, nor did he, to have her mixed up with him in his smuggling. So far as she knew, she had never been on board the Ninety-Nine when it carried a smuggled cargo. She had not broken the letter of the law. Her father, on asking her to come on this cruise, had said that it was a pleasure trip to meet a vessel in the gulf.
The pleasure had not been remarkable, though there had been no bad weather. The coast of Anticosti is cheerless, and it is possible even to tire of sun and water. True, Bissonnette played the concertina with passing sweetness, and sang as little like a wicked smuggler as one might think. But there were boundaries even to that, as there were to his love-making, which was, however, so interwoven with laughter that it was impossible to think the matter serious. Sometimes of an evening Joan danced on deck to the music of the concertina—dances which had their origin largely with herself fantastic, touched off with some unexpected sleight of foot—almost uncanny at times to Bissonnette, whose temperament could hardly go her distance when her mood was as this.
Tarboe looked on with a keener eye and understanding, for was she not bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh? Who was he that he should fail to know her? He saw the moonlight play on her face and hair, and he waved his head with the swaying of her body, and smacked his lips in thought of the fortune which, smuggling days over, would carry them up to St. Louis Street, Quebec, there to dwell as in a garden of good things.
After many days had passed, Joan tired of the concertina, of her own dancing, of her father’s tales, and became inquisitive. So at last she said:
“Father, what’s all this for?”
Tarboe did not answer her at once, but, turning to Bissonnette, asked him to play “The Demoiselle with the Scarlet Hose.” It was a gay little demoiselle according to Bissonnette, and through the creaking, windy gaiety Tarboe and his daughter could talk without being heard by the musician. Tarboe lit another cigar—that badge of greatness in the eyes of his fellow-habitants, and said:
“What’s all this for, Joan? Why, we’re here for our health.” His teeth bit on the cigar with enjoyable emphasis.
“If you don’t tell me what’s in the wind, you’ll be sorry. Come, where’s the good? I’ve got as much head as you have, father, and—”
“Mon Dieu! Much more. That’s not the question. It was to be a surprise to you.”
“Pshaw! You can only have one minute of surprise, and you can have months of fun looking out for a thing. I don’t want surprises; I want what you’ve got—the thing that’s kept you good-tempered while we lie here like snails on the rocks.”
“Well, my cricket, if that’s the way you feel, here you are. It is a long story, but I will make it short. Once there was a pirate called Brigond, and he brought into a bay on the coast of Labrador a fortune in some kegs—gold, gold! He hid it in a cave, wrapping around it the dead bodies of two men. It is thought that one can never find it so. He hid it, and sailed away. He was captured, and sent to prison in France for twenty years. Then he come back with a crew and another ship, and sailed into the bay, but his ship went down within sight of the place. And so the end of him and all. But wait. There was one man, the mate on the first voyage. He had been put in prison also. He did not get away as soon as Brigond. When he was free, he come to the captain of a ship that I know, the Free-and-Easy, that sails to Havre, and told him the story, asking for passage to Quebec. The captain—Gobal—did not believe it, but said he would bring him over on the next voyage. Gobal come to me and told me all there was to tell. I said that it was a true story, for Pretty Pierre told me once he saw Brigond’s ship go down in the bay; but he would not say how, or why, or where. Pierre would not lie in a thing like that, and—”
“Why didn’t he get the gold himself?”
“What is money to him? He is as a gipsy. To him the money is cursed. He said so. Eh bien! some wise men are fools, one way or another. Well, I told Gobal I would give the man the Ninety-Nine for the cruise and search, and that we should divide the gold between us, if it was found, taking out first enough to make a dot for you and a fine handful for Bissonnette. But no, shake not your head like that. It shall be so. Away went Gobal four months ago, and I get a letter from him weeks past, just after Pentecost, to say he would be here some time in the first of July, with the man.
“Well, it is a great game. The man is a pirate, but it does not matter—he has paid for that. I thought you would be glad of a fine adventure like that, so I said to you, Come.”
“But, father—”
“If you do not like you can go on with Gobal in the Free-and-Easy, and you shall be landed at the Isle of Days. That’s all. We’re waiting here for Gobal. He promised to stop just outside this bay and land our man on us. Then, blood of my heart, away we go after the treasure!”
Joan’s eyes flashed. Adventure was in her as deep as life itself. She had been cradled in it, reared in it, lived with it, and here was no law-breaking. Whose money was it? No one’s: for who should say what ship it was, or what people were robbed by Brigond and those others? Gold—that was a better game than wine and brandy, and for once her father would be on a cruise which would not be, as it were, sailing in forbidden waters.
“When do you expect Gobal?” she asked eagerly. “He ought to have been here a week ago. Maybe he has had a bad voyage, or something.”
“He’s sure to come?”
“Of course. I found out about that. She’s got a big consignment to people in Quebec. Something has gone wrong, but she’ll be here—yes.”
“What will you do if you get the money?” she asked. Tarboe laughed heartily. “My faith! Come play up those scarlet hose, Bissonnette! My faith, I’ll go into Parliament at Quebec. Thunder! I will have sport with them. I’ll reform the customs. There shan’t be any more smuggling. The people of Quebec shall drink no more good wine—no one except Black Tarboe, the member for Isle of Days.”
Again he laughed, and his eyes spilt fire like revolving wheels. For a moment Joan was quiet; her face was shining like the sun on a river. She saw more than her father, for she saw release. A woman may stand by a man who breaks the law, but in her heart she always has bitterness, for that the world shall speak well of herself and what she loves is the secret desire of every woman. In her heart she never can defy the world as does a man.
She had carried off the situation as became the daughter of a daring adventurer, who in more stirring times might have been a Du Lhut or a Rob Roy, but she was sometimes tired of the fighting, sometimes wishful that she could hold her position easier. Suppose the present good cure should die and another less considerate arrive, how hard might her position become! Then, she had a spirit above her station, as have most people who know the world and have seen something of its forbidden side; for it is notable that wisdom comes not alone from loving good things, but from having seen evil as well as good. Besides Joan was not a woman to go singly to her life’s end.
There was scarcely a man on Isle of Days and in the parish of Ste. Eunice, on the mainland, but would gladly have taken to wife the daughter of Tarboe the smuggler, and it is likely that the cure of either parish would not have advised against it.
Joan had had the taste of the lawless, and now she knew, as she sat and listened to Bissonnette’s music, that she also could dance for joy, in the hope of a taste of the lawful. With this money, if it were got, there could be another life—in Quebec. She could not forbear laughing now as she remembered that first day she had seen Orvay Lafarge, and she said to Bissonnette: “Loce, do you mind the keg in the water-pail?” Bissonnette paused on an out-pull, and threw back his head with a soundless laugh, then played the concertina into contortions.
“That Lafarge! H’m! He is very polite; but pshaw, it is no use that, in whisky-running! To beat a great man, a man must be great. Tarboe Noir can lead M’sieu’ Lafarge all like that!”
It seemed as if he were pulling the nose of the concertina. Tarboe began tracing a kind of maze with his fingers on the deck, his eyes rolling outward like an endless puzzle. But presently he turned sharp on Joan.
“How many times have you met him?” he asked. “Oh, six or seven—eight or nine, perhaps.”
Her father stared. “Eight or nine? By the holy! Is it like that? Where have you seen him?”
“Twice at our home, as you know; two or three times at dances at the Belle Chatelaine, and the rest when we were at Quebec in May. He is amusing, M’sieu’ Lafarge.”
“Yes, two of a kind,” remarked Tarboe drily; and then he told his schemes to Joan, letting Bissonnette hang up the “The Demoiselle with the Scarlet Hose,” and begin “The Coming of the Gay Cavalier.” She entered into his plans with spirit, and together they speculated what bay it might be, of the many on the coast of Labrador.
They spent two days longer waiting, and then at dawn a merchantman came sauntering up to anchor. She signalled to the Ninety-Nine. In five minutes Tarboe was climbing up the side of the Free-and-Easy, and presently was in Gobal’s cabin, with a glass of wine in his hand.
“What kept you, Gobal?” he asked. “You’re ten days late, at least.”
“Storm and sickness—broken mainmast and smallpox.” Gobal was not cheerful.
Tarboe caught at something. “You’ve got our man?” Gobal drank off his wine slowly. “Yes,” he said. “Well?—Why don’t you fetch him?”
“You can see him below.”
“The man has legs, let him walk here. Hello, my Gobal, what’s the matter? If he’s here bring him up. We’ve no time to lose.”
“Tarboe, the fool got smallpox, and died three hours ago—the tenth man since we started. We’re going to give him to the fishes. They’re putting him in his linen now.”
Tarboe’s face hardened. Disaster did not dismay him, it either made him ugly or humourous, and one phase was as dangerous as the other.
“D’ye mean to say,” he groaned, “that the game is up? Is it all finished? Sweat o’ my soul, my skin crawls like hot glass! Is it the end, eh? The beast, to die!”
Gobal’s eyes glistened. He had sent up the mercury, he would now bring it down.
“Not such a beast as you think. Alive pirate, a convict, as comrade in adventure, is not sugar in the teeth. This one was no better than the worst. Well, he died. That was awkward. But he gave me the chart of the bay before he died—and that was damn square.”
Tarboe held out his hand eagerly, the big fingers bending claw-like.
“Give it me, Gobal,” he said.
“Wait. There’s no hurry. Come along, there’s the bell: they’re going to drop him.”
He coolly motioned, and passed out from the cabin to the ship’s side. Tarboe kept his tongue from blasphemy, and his hand from the captain’s shoulder, for he knew only too well that Gobal held the game in his hands. They leaned over and saw two sailors with something on a plank.
“We therefore commit his body to the deep, in the knowledge of the Judgment Day—let her go!” grunted Gobal; and a long straight canvas bundle shot with a swishing sound beneath the water. “It was rough on him too,” he continued. “He waited twenty years to have his chance again. Damn me, if I didn’t feel as if I’d hit him in the eye, somehow, when he begged me to keep him alive long enough to have a look at the rhino. But it wasn’t no use. He had to go, and I told him so.
“Then he did the fine thing: he give me the chart. But he made me swear on a book of the Mass that if we got the gold we’d send one-half his share to a woman in Paris, and the rest to his brother, a priest at Nancy. I’ll keep my word—but yes! Eh, Tarboe?”
“You can keep your word for me! What, you think, Gobal, there is no honour in Black Tarboe, and you’ve known me ten years! Haven’t I always kept my word like a clock?”
Gobal stretched out his hand. “Like the sun-sure. That’s enough. We’ll stand by my oath. You shall see the chart.”
Going again inside the cabin, Gobal took out a map grimed with ceaseless fingering, and showed it to Tarboe, putting his finger on the spot where the treasure lay.
“The Bay of Belle Amour!” cried Tarboe, his eyes flashing. “Ah, I know it! That’s where Gaspard the pilot lived. It’s only forty leagues or so from here.” His fingers ran here and there on the map. “Yes, yes,” he continued, “it’s so, but he hasn’t placed the reef right. Ah, here is how Brigond’s ship went down! There’s a needle of rock in the bay. It isn’t here.”
Gobal handed the chart over. “I can’t go with you, but I take your word; I can say no more. If you cheat me I’ll kill you; that’s all.”
“Let me give a bond,” said Tarboe quickly. “If I saw much gold perhaps I couldn’t trust myself, but there’s someone to be trusted, who’ll swear for me. If my daughter Joan give her word—”
“Is she with you?”
“Yes, in the Ninety-Nine, now. I’ll send Bissonnette for her. Yes, yes, I’ll send, for gold is worse than bad whisky when it gets into a man’s head. Joan will speak for me.”
Ten minutes later Joan was in Gobal’s cabin, guaranteeing for her father the fulfilment of his bond. An hour afterwards the Free-and-Easy was moving up stream with her splintered mast and ragged sails, and the Ninety-Nine was looking up and over towards the Bay of Belle Amour. She reached it in the late afternoon of the next day. Bissonnette did not know the object of the expedition, but he had caught the spirit of the affair, and his eyes were like spots of steel as he held the sheet or took his turn at the tiller. Joan’s eyes were now on the sky, now on the sail, and now on the land, weighing as wisely as her father the advantage of the wind, yet dwelling on that cave where skeletons kept ward over the spoils of a pirate ship.
They arrived, and Tarboe took the Ninety-Nine warily in on a little wind off the land. He came near sharing the fate of Brigond, for the yawl grazed the needle of the rock that, hiding away in the water, with a nose out for destruction, awaits its victims. They reached safe anchorage, but by the time they landed it was night, with, however, a good moon showing.
All night they searched, three silent, eager figures, drawing step by step nearer the place where the ancient enemy of man was barracked about by men’s bodies. It was Joan who, at last, as dawn drew up, discovered the hollow between two great rocks where the treasure lay. A few minutes’ fierce digging, and the kegs of gold were disclosed, showing through the ribs of two skeletons. Joan shrank back, but the two men tossed aside the rattling bones, and presently the kegs were standing between them on the open shore. Bissonnette’s eyes were hungry—he knew now the wherefore of the quest. He laughed outright, a silly, loud, hysterical laugh. Tarboe’s eyes shifted from the sky to the river, from the river to the kegs, from the kegs to Bissonnette. On him they stayed a moment. Bissonnette shrank back. Tarboe was feeling for the first time in his life the deadly suspicion which comes with ill-gotten wealth. This passed as his eyes and Joan’s met, for she had caught the melodrama, the overstrain; Bissonnette’s laugh had pointed the situation; and her sense of humour had prevailed. “La, la,” she said, with a whimsical quirk of the head, and no apparent relevancy: