Foul Play Part 79

He felt as if he must go mad.

Then he prayed--prayed fervently. And at last, worn out with such fierce and contending emotions, he fell into a deep sleep, and did not wake till the sun was high in heaven.

He woke; and the first thing he saw was the fatal letter lying at his feet in a narrow stream of sunshine that came peering in.

He eyed it with horror. This, then, was then to haunt him by night and day.

He eyed it and eyed it. Then turned his face from it; but could not help eying it again.

And at last certain words in this letter seemed to him to bear an affinity to another piece of writing that had also caused him a great woe. Memory by its subtle links connected these two enemies of his together. He eyed it still more keenly, and that impression became strengthened. He took the letter and looked at it close, and held it at arm's length and devoured it; and the effect of this keen examination was very remarkable. It seemed to restore the man to energy and to something like hope. His eyes sparkled, and a triumphant "Ah!" burst from his bosom.

He became once more a man of action. He rose, and bathed, and walked rapidly to and fro upon the sands, working himself up to a daring enterprise. He took his saw into the jungle, and cut down a tree of a kind common enough there. It was wonderfully soft, and almost as light as cork. The wood of this was literally useless for any other purpose than that to which Penfold destined it. He cut a great many blocks of this wood, and drilled holes in them, and, having hundreds of yard of good line, attached these quasi corks to the gunwale, so as to make a life-boat. This work took him several days, during which time an event occurred that encouraged him.

One morning he saw about a million birds very busy in the bay, and it proved to be a spermaceti whale come ash.o.r.e.

He went out to her directly with all his tools, for he wanted oil for his enterprise, and the seal oil was exhausted.

When he got near the whale in his boat, he observed a harpoon sticking in the animal's back. He cut steps with his ax in the slippery carca.s.s, and got up to it as well as he could, extracted it by cutting and pulling, and threw it down into his boat, but not till he had taken the precaution to stick a great piece of blubber on the barbed point. He then sawed and hacked under difficulties, being buffeted and bothered with thousands of birds, so eager for slices that it was as much as he could do to avoid the making of minced fowl; but, true to his gentle creed, he contrived to get three hundred-weight of blubber without downright killing any of these greedy compet.i.tors, though he buffeted some of them, and nearly knocked out what little sense they had.

He came ash.o.r.e with his blubber and harpoon, and when he came to examine the latter, he found that the name of the owner was cut deeply in the steel-- Josh. Fullalove, J. Fernandez. This inscription had a great effect on Robert Penfold's mind. It seemed to bring the island of Juan Fernandez, and humanity in general, nearer to him.

He boiled down the blubber, and put a barrel of oil on board his life-boat. He had a ship's lantern to burn it in. He also pitched her bottom as far as he could get at it, and provisioned her for a long voyage: taking care to lash the water-cask and beef-cask to the fore-thwart and foremast, in case of rough weather.

When he had done all this, it occurred to him suddenly that, should he ever escape the winds and waves, and get to England, he would then have to encounter difficulties and dangers of another cla.s.s, and lose the battle by his poverty.

"I play my stake now," said he. "I will throw no chance away."

He reflected, with great bitterness, on the misery that want of money had already brought on him; and he vowed to reach England rich, or go to the bottom of the Pacific.

This may seem a strange vow for a man to make on an unknown island; but Robert Penfold had a powerful understanding, sharpened by adversity, and his judgment told him truly that he possessed wealth on this island, both directly and indirectly. In the first place, knowledge is sometimes wealth, and the knowledge of this island was a thing he could sell to the American merchants on the coast of Chili; and, with this view, he put on board his boat specimens of the ca.s.sia and other woods, fruit, spices, pitch, guano, pink and red coral, pearl oysters, sh.e.l.ls, cochineal, quartz, cotton, etc., etc.

Then he took his chisel, and struck all the larger pearls off the sh.e.l.ls that lined Helen's cave. The walls and roof yielded nine enormous pearls, thirty large ones, and a great many of the usual size.

He made a pocket inside his waistcoat to hold the pearls safe.

Then he took his spade and dug into the Spanish ship for treasure. But this was terrible work. The sand returned upon the spade and trebled his labor.

The condition to which time and long submersion had reduced this ship and cargo was truly remarkable. Nothing to be seen of the deck but a thin brown streak that mingled with the sand in patches; of the timbers nothing but the uprights, and of those the larger half eaten and dissolved.

He dug five days, and found nothing solid.

On the sixth, being now at the bottom the ship, he struck his spade against something hard and heavy.

On inspection it looked like ore, but of what metal he could not tell; it was as black as a coal. He threw this on one side, and found nothing more; but the next day he turned up a smaller fragment, which he took home and cleaned with lime juice. It came out bright in places like silver.

This discovery threw light on the other. The piece of black ore, weighing about seven pounds, was in reality silver coin, that a century of submersion had reduced to the very appearance it wore before it ever went into the furnace.

He dug with fresh energy on this discovery, but found nothing more in the ship that day.

Then it occurred to him to carry off a few hundred-weight of pink coral.

He got some fine specimens; and, while he was at that work, he fell in with a piece that looked very solid at the root and unnaturally heavy. On a nearer examination this proved to be a foreign substance incrusted with coral. It had twined and twisted and curled over the thing in a most unheard-of way. Robert took it home, and, by rubbing here and there with lemon juice, at last satisfied himself that this object was a silver box about the size of an octavo volume.

It had no keyhole, had evidently been soldered up for greater security, and Robert was left to conjecture how it had come there.

He connected it at once with the ship, and felt a.s.sured that some attempt had been made to save it. There it had lain by the side of the vessel all these years, but, falling clear of the sand, had been embraced by the growing coral, and was now a curiosity, if not a treasure.

He would not break the coral, but put it on board his life-boat just as it was.

And now he dug no more. He thought he could sell the galleon as well as the island, by sample, and he was impatient to be gone.

He reproached himself, a little unjustly, for allowing a woman to undertake the task of clearing him.

"To what annoyances, and perhaps affronts, have I exposed her!" said he.

"No, it is a man's business to defend, not to be defended."

To conclude: At high tide one fine afternoon he went on board with Ponto, and, hoisting his foresail only, crossed the bay, ranging along the island till he reached the bluff. He got under this, and, by means of his compa.s.s and previous observations, set the boat's head exactly on the line the ducks used to take. Then he set his mainsail too, and stretched boldly out across the great Pacific Ocean.

Time seems to wear out everything, even bad luck. It ran strong against Robert Penfold for years. But, when it had struck its worst blow, and parted him and Helen Rolleston, it relaxed, and a tide of good luck set in, which, unfortunately, the broken-hearted man could not appreciate at the time. However, so it was. He wanted oil; and a whale came ash.o.r.e. He wanted treasure, and the sea gave him a little back of all it had swallowed; and now he wanted fine weather; and the ocean for days and nights was like peach-colored gla.s.s, dimpled here and there; and soft westerly airs fanned him along by night and day.

To be sure, he was on the true Pacific Ocean, at a period when it is really free from storms. Still, even for that lat.i.tude, he had wonderful weather for six days; and on the seventh he fell in with a schooner, the skipper and crew of which looked over the bulwarks at him with wonder and cordiality, and, casting out a rope astern, took him in tow.

The skipper had been eying him with amazement for some hours through his telescope; but he was a man that had seen a great many strange things, and it was also a point of honor with him never to allow that he was astonished, or taken by surprise, or greatly moved.

"Wal, stranger," said he, "what craft is that?"

"The _Helen."_

"Where d'ye hail from? not that I am curious."

"From an unknown island."

"Do tell. What, another! Is it anyways nigh?"

"Not within seven hundred miles."

"Je--rusalem! Have you sailed all that in a c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.l?"

"Yes."

"Why, what are ye? the Wandering Jew afloat, or the Ancient Mariner? or only a kinder nautilus?"

"I'm a landsman."

"A landsman! then so is Neptune. What is your name when you are ash.o.r.e?"

"Robert Penfold. The Reverend Robert Penfold."