Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (417 page)

I clambered back upon the rocks, and threw the plant of tangle at my feet.  Something at the same moment rang sharply, like a falling coin.  I stooped, and there, sure enough, crusted with the red rust, there lay an iron shoe-buckle.  The sight of this poor human relic thrilled me to the heart, but not with hope nor fear, only with a desolate melancholy.  I held it in my hand, and the thought of its owner appeared before me like the presence of an actual man.  His weather-beaten face, his sailor’s hands, his sea-voice hoarse with singing at the capstan, the very foot that had once worn that buckle and trod so much along the swerving decks — the whole human fact of him, as a creature like myself, with hair and blood and seeing eyes, haunted me in that sunny, solitary place, not like a spectre, but like some friend whom I had basely injured.  Was the great treasure ship indeed below there, with her guns and chain and treasure, as she had sailed from Spain; her decks a garden for the seaweed, her cabin a breeding place for fish, soundless but for the dredging water, motionless but for the waving of the tangle upon her battlements — that old, populous, sea-riding castle, now a reef in Sandag Bay?  Or, as I thought it likelier, was this a waif from the disaster of the foreign brig — was this shoe-buckle bought but the other day and worn by a man of my own period in the world’s history, hearing the same news from day to day, thinking the same thoughts, praying, perhaps, in the same temple with myself?  However it was, I was assailed with dreary thoughts; my uncle’s words, ‘the dead are down there,’ echoed in my ears; and though I determined to dive once more, it was with a strong repugnance that I stepped forward to the margin of the rocks.

A great change passed at that moment over the appearance of the bay.  It was no more that clear, visible interior, like a house roofed with glass, where the green, submarine sunshine slept so stilly.  A breeze, I suppose, had flawed the surface, and a sort of trouble and blackness filled its bosom, where flashes of light and clouds of shadow tossed confusedly together.  Even the terrace below obscurely rocked and quivered.  It seemed a graver thing to venture on this place of ambushes; and when I leaped into the sea the second time it was with a quaking in my soul.

I secured myself as at first, and groped among the waving tangle.  All that met my touch was cold and soft and gluey.  The thicket was alive with crabs and lobsters, trundling to and fro lopsidedly, and I had to harden my heart against the horror of their carrion neighbourhood.  On all sides I could feel the grain and the clefts of hard, living stone; no planks, no iron, not a sign of any wreck; the
Espirito Santo
was not there.  I remember I had almost a sense of relief in my disappointment, and I was about ready to leave go, when something happened that sent me to the surface with my heart in my mouth.  I had already stayed somewhat late over my explorations; the current was freshening with the change of the tide, and Sandag Bay was no longer a safe place for a single swimmer.  Well, just at the last moment there came a sudden flush of current, dredging through the tangles like a wave.  I lost one hold, was flung sprawling on my side, and, instinctively grasping for a fresh support, my fingers closed on something hard and cold.  I think I knew at that moment what it was.  At least I instantly left hold of the tangle, leaped for the surface, and clambered out next moment on the friendly rocks with the bone of a man’s leg in my grasp.

Mankind is a material creature, slow to think and dull to perceive connections.  The grave, the wreck of the brig, and the rusty shoe-buckle were surely plain advertisements.  A child might have read their dismal story, and yet it was not until I touched that actual piece of mankind that the full horror of the charnel ocean burst upon my spirit.  I laid the bone beside the buckle, picked up my clothes, and ran as I was along the rocks towards the human shore.  I could not be far enough from the spot; no fortune was vast enough to tempt me back again.  The bones of the drowned dead should henceforth roll undisturbed by me, whether on tangle or minted gold.  But as soon as I trod the good earth again, and had covered my nakedness against the sun, I knelt down over against the ruins of the brig, and out of the fulness of my heart prayed long and passionately for all poor souls upon the sea.  A generous prayer is never presented in vain; the petition may be refused, but the petitioner is always, I believe, rewarded by some gracious visitation.  The horror, at least, was lifted from my mind; I could look with calm of spirit on that great bright creature, God’s ocean; and as I set off homeward up the rough sides of Aros, nothing remained of my concern beyond a deep determination to meddle no more with the spoils of wrecked vessels or the treasures of the dead.

I was already some way up the hill before I paused to breathe and look behind me.  The sight that met my eyes was doubly strange.

For, first, the storm that I had foreseen was now advancing with almost tropical rapidity.  The whole surface of the sea had been dulled from its conspicuous brightness to an ugly hue of corrugated lead; already in the distance the white waves, the ‘skipper’s daughters,’ had begun to flee before a breeze that was still insensible on Aros; and already along the curve of Sandag Bay there was a splashing run of sea that I could hear from where I stood.  The change upon the sky was even more remarkable.  There had begun to arise out of the south-west a huge and solid continent of scowling cloud; here and there, through rents in its contexture, the sun still poured a sheaf of spreading rays; and here and there, from all its edges, vast inky streamers lay forth along the yet unclouded sky.  The menace was express and imminent.  Even as I gazed, the sun was blotted out.  At any moment the tempest might fall upon Aros in its might.

The suddenness of this change of weather so fixed my eyes on heaven that it was some seconds before they alighted on the bay, mapped out below my feet, and robbed a moment later of the sun.  The knoll which I had just surmounted overflanked a little amphitheatre of lower hillocks sloping towards the sea, and beyond that the yellow arc of beach and the whole extent of Sandag Bay.  It was a scene on which I had often looked down, but where I had never before beheld a human figure.  I had but just turned my back upon it and left it empty, and my wonder may be fancied when I saw a boat and several men in that deserted spot.  The boat was lying by the rocks.  A pair of fellows, bareheaded, with their sleeves rolled up, and one with a boathook, kept her with difficulty to her moorings for the current was growing brisker every moment.  A little way off upon the ledge two men in black clothes, whom I judged to be superior in rank, laid their heads together over some task which at first I did not understand, but a second after I had made it out — they were taking bearings with the compass; and just then I saw one of them unroll a sheet of paper and lay his finger down, as though identifying features in a map.  Meanwhile a third was walking to and fro, polling among the rocks and peering over the edge into the water.  While I was still watching them with the stupefaction of surprise, my mind hardly yet able to work on what my eyes reported, this third person suddenly stooped and summoned his companions with a cry so loud that it reached my ears upon the hill.  The others ran to him, even dropping the compass in their hurry, and I could see the bone and the shoe-buckle going from hand to hand, causing the most unusual gesticulations of surprise and interest.  Just then I could hear the seamen crying from the boat, and saw them point westward to that cloud continent which was ever the more rapidly unfurling its blackness over heaven.  The others seemed to consult; but the danger was too pressing to be braved, and they bundled into the boat carrying my relies with them, and set forth out of the bay with all speed of oars.

I made no more ado about the matter, but turned and ran for the house.  Whoever these men were, it was fit my uncle should be instantly informed.  It was not then altogether too late in the day for a descent of the Jacobites; and may be Prince Charlie, whom I knew my uncle to detest, was one of the three superiors whom I had seen upon the rock.  Yet as I ran, leaping from rock to rock, and turned the matter loosely in my mind, this theory grew ever the longer the less welcome to my reason.  The compass, the map, the interest awakened by the buckle, and the conduct of that one among the strangers who had looked so often below him in the water, all seemed to point to a different explanation of their presence on that outlying, obscure islet of the western sea.  The Madrid historian, the search instituted by Dr. Robertson, the bearded stranger with the rings, my own fruitless search that very morning in the deep water of Sandag Bay, ran together, piece by piece, in my memory, and I made sure that these strangers must be Spaniards in quest of ancient treasure and the lost ship of the Armada.  But the people living in outlying islands, such as Aros, are answerable for their own security; there is none near by to protect or even to help them; and the presence in such a spot of a crew of foreign adventurers — poor, greedy, and most likely lawless — filled me with apprehensions for my uncle’s money, and even for the safety of his daughter.  I was still wondering how we were to get rid of them when I came, all breathless, to the top of Aros.  The whole world was shadowed over; only in the extreme east, on a hill of the mainland, one last gleam of sunshine lingered like a jewel; rain had begun to fall, not heavily, but in great drops; the sea was rising with each moment, and already a band of white encircled Aros and the nearer coasts of Grisapol.  The boat was still pulling seaward, but I now became aware of what had been hidden from me lower down — a large, heavily sparred, handsome schooner, lying to at the south end of Aros.  Since I had not seen her in the morning when I had looked around so closely at the signs of the weather, and upon these lone waters where a sail was rarely visible, it was clear she must have lain last night behind the uninhabited Eilean Gour, and this proved conclusively that she was manned by strangers to our coast, for that anchorage, though good enough to look at, is little better than a trap for ships.  With such ignorant sailors upon so wild a coast, the coming gale was not unlikely to bring death upon its wings.

CHAPTER IV.  THE GALE.

I found my uncle at the gable end, watching the signs of the weather, with a pipe in his fingers.

‘Uncle,’ said I, ‘there were men ashore at Sandag Bay — ’

I had no time to go further; indeed, I not only forgot my words, but even my weariness, so strange was the effect on Uncle Gordon.  He dropped his pipe and fell back against the end of the house with his jaw fallen, his eyes staring, and his long face as white as paper.  We must have looked at one another silently for a quarter of a minute, before he made answer in this extraordinary fashion: ‘Had he a hair kep on?’

I knew as well as if I had been there that the man who now lay buried at Sandag had worn a hairy cap, and that he had come ashore alive.  For the first and only time I lost toleration for the man who was my benefactor and the father of the woman I hoped to call my wife.

‘These were living men,’ said I, ‘perhaps Jacobites, perhaps the French, perhaps pirates, perhaps adventurers come here to seek the Spanish treasure ship; but, whatever they may be, dangerous at least to your daughter and my cousin.  As for your own guilty terrors, man, the dead sleeps well where you have laid him.  I stood this morning by his grave; he will not wake before the trump of doom.’

My kinsman looked upon me, blinking, while I spoke; then he fixed his eyes for a little on the ground, and pulled his fingers foolishly; but it was plain that he was past the power of speech.

‘Come,’ said I.  ‘You must think for others.  You must come up the hill with me, and see this ship.’

He obeyed without a word or a look, following slowly after my impatient strides.  The spring seemed to have gone out of his body, and he scrambled heavily up and down the rocks, instead of leaping, as he was wont, from one to another.  Nor could I, for all my cries, induce him to make better haste.  Only once he replied to me complainingly, and like one in bodily pain: ‘Ay, ay, man, I’m coming.’  Long before we had reached the top, I had no other thought for him but pity.  If the crime had been monstrous the punishment was in proportion.

At last we emerged above the sky-line of the hill, and could see around us.  All was black and stormy to the eye; the last gleam of sun had vanished; a wind had sprung up, not yet high, but gusty and unsteady to the point; the rain, on the other hand, had ceased.  Short as was the interval, the sea already ran vastly higher than when I had stood there last; already it had begun to break over some of the outward reefs, and already it moaned aloud in the sea-caves of Aros.  I looked, at first, in vain for the schooner.

‘There she is,’ I said at last.  But her new position, and the course she was now lying, puzzled me.  ‘They cannot mean to beat to sea,’ I cried.

‘That’s what they mean,’ said my uncle, with something like joy; and just then the schooner went about and stood upon another tack, which put the question beyond the reach of doubt.  These strangers, seeing a gale on hand, had thought first of sea-room.  With the wind that threatened, in these reef-sown waters and contending against so violent a stream of tide, their course was certain death.

‘Good God!’ said I, ‘they are all lost.’

‘Ay,’ returned my uncle, ‘a’ — a’ lost.  They hadnae a chance but to rin for Kyle Dona.  The gate they’re gaun the noo, they couldnae win through an the muckle deil were there to pilot them.  Eh, man,’ he continued, touching me on the sleeve, ‘it’s a braw nicht for a shipwreck!  Twa in ae twalmonth!  Eh, but the Merry Men’ll dance bonny!’

I looked at him, and it was then that I began to fancy him no longer in his right mind.  He was peering up to me, as if for sympathy, a timid joy in his eyes.  All that had passed between us was already forgotten in the prospect of this fresh disaster.

‘If it were not too late,’ I cried with indignation, ‘I would take the coble and go out to warn them.’

‘Na, na,’ he protested, ‘ye maunnae interfere; ye maunnae meddle wi’ the like o’ that.  It’s His’ — doffing his bonnet — ’His wull.  And, eh, man! but it’s a braw nicht for’t!’