The Island Mystery Part 11

Kalliope rowed easily and was well content to go on rowing all day.

She was almost perfectly happy. Fuller's sweets were a revelation of unimagined delight to her, and she could gaze without interruption at the Queen. There was little in the world left for her heart to desire.

The girls rowed round the sh.o.r.e of the bay. The shadow of the white cliffs was grateful. The Queen delighted to drag her hands through the cool water. The sound of its lapping against the steep rocks soothed her. She liked to peer into the blue depths. When she looked up it was pleasant to meet Kalliope's soft brown eyes and to see the ready smile broaden on the girl's lips. Now and then, laughing, she leaned forward and pressed a chocolate into Kalliope's mouth. The Queen's fingers were often wet with salt water, but that did not spoil the flavour of the sweets for Kalliope.

The boat slipped past high sheer cliffs, past little coves, on whose sand men's feet had surely never trodden, past the mouths of great caves, gloomy, mysterious, from the depths of which came a hollow murmuring of water. The caves had a strange fascination for the Queen. Her eyes followed their steep walls up to the arches of their high dripping roofs, tried to pierce the dim and darkening shades within, gazed down through the water at round boulders and flat shelves of rock, seen magnified and strangely blue in the depths. At first she was half fearful and would not allow the boat to be taken near the mouths of the caves she pa.s.sed. At the mouth of one cave Kalliope shouted suddenly. Echoes answered her from within, repeating her shout and repeating it till the cries seemed to come from far off, from the very centre of the island. Opposite another cave Kalliope shouted again and banged her oars against the gunwhale of the boat. A flock of grey birds, some kind of rock pigeons, flew out, making a sound of rushing with their wings. The Queen became, little by little, less fearful and more curious.

They came at last to a cavern with a wide entrance. The daylight shone far inside. The water was blue far into the depths, not purple or black as it seemed to be just inside the narrower caves. The Queen signed to Kalliope. The boat turned, slipped into the wide entrance, rose and fell upon the swelling water under the high roof. Kalliope rowed on. For awhile she rowed with her oars full stretch on their rowlocks. Then the walls narrowed more and more till she must ship her oars. The boat glided on slowly from the impulse of her last stroke.

The walls narrowed still. Kalliope stood up. Pushing against one wall and then the other with an oar grasped midway in her hands she drove the boat forward. Suddenly the s.p.a.ce widened. The roof was higher, almost out of sight. The boat pa.s.sed into a huge cavern very dimly lit. The Queen gasped, sat open-mouthed in breathless silence for a moment; then looking round she saw that the cavern was lit by several thin shafts of pale-blue light. More than one of the caves whose entrance the boat had pa.s.sed led into this great cavern. Kalliope, laughing, plunged an oar into the waters. It shone silver like some long fish. The Queen gazed at it. She plunged her own arm in and saw it turn silver too.

The water was still deep and seemed scarcely to shallow at all as the boat moved forward into the depths of the cavern. Suddenly the Queen saw before her a steep beach covered with large, round stones. The boat grounded. Kalliope leaped on sh.o.r.e. She held her hand out to the Queen. The two girls stood together on the beach. Kalliope, still holding her Queen's hand, led the way upwards, away from the boat and the water. Her bare feet moved lightly over the stones which shifted and rolled under the Queen's shoes, making a hollow sound. Echoes multiplied the sound until the air was full of hollow mutterings, like the smothered reports of very distant guns. Kalliope led on.

To her the way was familiar. The dim light and hollow noises were commonplace. At last she stopped and with a little cry pointed forward.

The Queen looked. Her eyes were well accustomed now to the dim light.

She saw.

There in the depths of the mysterious cavern, it would not have surprised the girl to see strange things. She would scarcely have been astonished if Kalliope had pointed to a group of mermaids combing damp hair with long curved sh.e.l.ls. Old Triton with his wreathed horn would have been in place, almost an expected vision, if he had sat on a throne of rock, sea carved, with panting dolphins at his feet. The Queen saw no such beings. What she did see called from her a little cry of surprise, made her cling suddenly to Kalliope's arm.

"Oh!" she said. "Oh, Kalliope, what are they?"

"d.a.m.n boxes," said Kalliope.

Before the eyes of the Queen, stretching along the back of the cave, was a long row of large galvanized iron tanks, strongly made, with heavily studded seams, each with a great copper tap. They were ranged in a most orderly line, like some grey monsters carefully drilled.

They were all exactly the same width, the same height, and the copper spouts exactly matched each other.

"d.a.m.ned boxes," said Kalliope cheerfully.

Any one looking at them might almost have agreed with her. They were not precisely boxes. They were cisterns, tanks, but they gave the impression of being d.a.m.nable and d.a.m.ned.

"But," said the Queen, "what are they for? What's the meaning of them? How did they get here? Who brought them?"

Kalliope did not understand the questions, but guessed at what her mistress asked. She had been learning English for three days only. She had been quick to pick up certain words from the Queen, words in frequent use between them. But in face of questionings like these the vocabulary of millinery and hair dressing failed her hopelessly. She fell back on what she had picked up from the sailors' lips and from her brothers who were already enriching the island language with English slang.

"Blighters," she said, "mucky ship--go row, go row--d.a.m.n boxes."

In spite of the pale light and the sinister mystery of the tanks in front of her the Queen laughed aloud. The pursuing echoes made Kalliope's English irresistibly absurd. Then she pondered.

Men--whether "blighters" in Kalliope's mouth conveyed reproach or were simply a synonym for men she did not know--men in a ship--"mucky"

described the ship as little probably as "d.a.m.n boxes" described the packing-cases of furniture or "b.l.o.o.d.y" her trunks of clothes. Men in a ship had brought the tanks, had rowed them--"go row" was plain enough--ash.o.r.e in boats.

"But who," said the Queen, "and why?"

Kalliope was beaten. Who and why were too much for her, as indeed they have been for people far wiser than she. Are not all theology and all philosophy attempts, and for the most part vain attempts, to deal with just those two words, who and why?

"Blighters," said Kalliope, and the echoes repeated her words with emphasis, "blighters, blighters, blighters," till the Queen came to believe it.

Then Kalliope, memory wakened in her, grew suddenly hopeful. She began to hum a tune, very softly at first, making more than one false start; but getting it nearly right at last. The Queen recognized it. She had heard it a hundred times in old days at prayers in the chapel of her college. It was a hymn tune. The words came back to her at once.

"Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion, city of our G.o.d." She took Kalliope by the arm and led her back to the boat.

"Come away," she said, "quick, quick. I'm going mad."

Kalliope entered into the spirit of a new game. She ran down across the rolling pebbles.

"Go row," she said. "Quick, quick."

The boat, Kalliope pushing, dragging, rowing, burst from the cavern, fled beyond the shadow of the cliffs, glided into the blaze of sunshine and the sparkling water of the outer bay. The Queen lay back in the stern and laughed. Kalliope, resting on her oars, laughed too.

The Queen's laughter pa.s.sed into an uncontrollable fit. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Her sides were sore. She gasped for breath. The thought of that row of portentously solemn grey tanks was irresistibly comic. They looked like stranded codfish with their tongues out. They looked like a series of caricatures of an American politician, a square-headed ponderous man, who had once dined with her father. He had the same appearance of imbecile gravity, the same enormous pomposity. The copper spouts were so many exaggerated versions of his nose.

Her imagination flew to a vision of the men who had brought the tanks and cisterns there in a "mucky ship." She seemed to see them, thin scarecrows of men, crawling over the rusty sides of some battered tramp steamer; mournful men with brown faces and skinny arms, singing their hymn with sharp cracked voices while they laboured at their utterly preposterous task. Laughter conquered the Queen. She lay back helpless in the merciless grip of uncontrollable merriment. Kalliope could not laugh so much. The joke was beyond her. She sat with a wavering half-smile on her lips watching the Queen. The box of chocolates lay in the bottom of the boat. Kalliope stretched her foot out, touched the box, pushed it gently towards the Queen. It seemed to her waste of a golden opportunity to leave the box, no more than half empty, at their feet. The movement broke the spell of the Queen's laughter. She picked up the box, pushed chocolates into Kalliope's mouth, filled her own with them.

CHAPTER XI

I find it necessary to remind myself from time to time that the Queen of Salissa is a young girl, in mind and experience little more than a child. If I think of her as a woman or allow myself to credit her with any common sense, that blight which falls on the middle-aged, her actions become unintelligible.

She ought, no doubt, to have gone straight to her father and told him about the cisterns in the cave. That was the sane thing to do. Donovan was a man of clear understanding and wide knowledge. He would have--I do not know precisely what he would have done, but it would have been something entirely sensible. The Queen dreaded nothing so much as that. She found herself for the first time in her life in touch with a mystery, surrounded by things fascinatingly incomprehensible. Her island held a secret, was the scene--there could be no doubt about it--of a deep, dark, perhaps dangerous plot. She was thrilled. The more she thought of the cavern and the mysterious tanks, the more delightful the thrills became.

She made a confidant of Phillips, choosing instinctively the only person on the island likely to be in full sympathy with her. Phillips was older than she was. He was twenty-eight; but he was a simple, straightforward young man with his boyish taste for adventure unspoiled. He was also deeply in love with the Queen.

I have found it very difficult to get either from the Queen or from Phillips a complete and coherent account of what happened between the discovery of the cisterns and the day when the _Ida_ sailed, taking Phillips away from the island. I gather that they were both the victims of a bad attack of detective fever. They have talked to me quite freely and cheerfully of the "Island Mystery." That was the Queen's phrase. About a much more important matter the Queen will not speak at all, and Phillips cannot be induced to dwell on details. I have been obliged to depend mainly on Kalliope for information, and even now Kalliope does not speak English well.

"We have three clues," said the Queen hopefully, "three really good clues. We ought to be able to unearth the mystery. Detectives hardly ever have so many."

Phillips named the three clues, ticking them off on his fingers.

"First, the torn envelope; second, Smith's expedition to the cave before dawn----"

"Before dawn," said the Queen with rapture.

"Third, the cisterns in the cave. Let's go and see the cisterns."

"No," said the Queen. "The great thing is not to be carried away by pa.s.sion. We must be cold, purely intellectual. We must be thoroughly systematic. We'll begin with the torn envelope. It happened first."

They retired to a shady corner of the balcony outside the Queen's rooms and studied the torn envelope for two hours. They were a.n.a.lytical, keenly and minutely observant, coldly cautious in forming conclusions. They tried every method of detection known to detective science. They held the envelope up to the light in order to discover a watermark. They examined the texture of the paper, the ink and the postage stamp, carefully through a powerful magnifying gla.s.s. They sc.r.a.ped one corner of the envelope with the blade of a penknife. They took four photographs, two of the front and two of the back, with the Queen's hand camera. They talked a good deal about fingerprints.

Phillips had a logical mind and a capacity for synthetic induction.

The Queen was perhaps the more careful observer. She had certainly the more brilliant imagination. After two hours' work they summed up their conclusions, making careful notes with the Queen's fountain pen on the blank pages at the end of a large diary.

"A man or men----" said Phillips.

The Queen wrote down "A man or men" in the diary.

"Has," said Phillips, "or have, been present on the island of Salissa at some date between December 15, 1913, and April 30, 1914. The said man or men was or were during part of that period in occupation of the royal palace."

"Royal palace," said the Queen, writing rapidly.

"This man--or men, of course--was in correspondence with some person at present unknown, resident in the city of London."