The Pirate Woman Part 24

"For my part, Pea.r.s.e, I would give all I have just to see those great violet eyes laugh at me again; to hear that mocking laugh from her maddening lips. G.o.d, will she never awake?"

Astern of the schooner the sun was slowly descending to the western sea-rim, and as the course was resumed after picking up Dolores, the Point and the cliff gradually drew out across the path of the sun, until the outlines of the rock and trees stood out black and sharp. On the cliff-top a heavy pall of greasy smoke hung low about the shattered pirates' camp; from fissures high up the frowning side spirals of smoke testified to the wide-spread destruction that followed the blast.

They looked at the terrific devastation, and again at its nearer victim.

And as they gazed down at her, Dolores's lips trembled in a faint smile, her great eyes opened wide, looking directly and fearlessly back at them.

"I thank ye, my friends; I knew you would take me," she whispered, and the two men turned away with a shudder. As she had lived, Dolores was now meeting her inevitable end, bold and indomitable.

"Where are you hurt?" inquired Venner lamely. "Let me do something to ease you."

"Ease?" she laughed as of old, but her teeth clenched upon her lower lip immediately, with the pain it caused. "I shall ask ye to ease me presently, good friends. Grim Death has me by the throat already. But carry me outside. I am stifling in here. Let me see the ocean and the sky at least in my pa.s.sage. And I have something to tell ye also."

On the gratings around the stern, abaft the wheel, they laid her on soft cushions. She drank greedily of the wine and water they offered her; she quivered with eagerness to unburden her mind before her thirst was quenched forever. She motioned them, to bend over her, and began to speak in, husky whispers.

"That chest, thou cast it overboard. Dost know what was in it?"

Both shook their heads. None had seen inside the chests after they came from the great chamber.

"I'll tell ye, then, for the peace of your souls and the tranquillity of your voyage. Lest thy men be seized with a desire for treasure that shall work ye mischief, have them open the other two chests. Quickly, for I am faint."

Venner went to the chests himself and flung back the lids, which were bolted on the outside and not locked. He stared for a moment, unbelievingly, then nodded to Pea.r.s.e. Pea.r.s.e stared, too, in amazement, and one after the other the sailors were called to see. They saw two great strong-boxes filled to the brim with iron chains, broken cutlases, rusty bilboes, and rock; a fool's treasure in truth.

"'Twas a trick to set my rascals at odds," Dolores told them when they returned to her. "To thee, Pea.r.s.e, I showed my treasure, and I fear that blast has buried it beneath a mountain. Milo was to take it out. I cannot believe it can have been taken away ere that powder blew it to fragments. It was still in the powder store."

"Yes, I know," said Pea.r.s.e quietly. "It was that which precipitated the fight between us three that killed poor Tomlin."

"Well, if thou still art hungry for treasure, my friends, there is my store buried where thou knowest, and I shrewdly fear but few of my people are left. But I am slipping. Stand aside, that I may close my eyes on the place I called home."

Dolores ceased speaking and lay, scarcely stirred by her faint respiration, gazing over the schooner's stern at the sinking sun. The golden disk was turning to red and across its darkened face the cliff and Point stood out in sharp silhouette, which grew larger as the great glowing sun was distorted and enlarged by the refraction near the horizon. The breeze had changed, and now blew with gentle strength out of the west, a fair wind for their homeward course, and the strands of Dolores's glorious hair blew about her face like tendrils about an orchid of unearthly beauty.

Presently she stirred again, and now she summoned all her remaining vitality to raise herself on an elbow. Pea.r.s.e and Venner leaned closer, sensing the end in the tremendous brilliancy of her wide, dry eyes.

She spoke softly, yet with a thrilling note of yearning that choked her hearers with harsh sobs.

"Father, I come," she whispered. "If I have failed in obeying thy commands, I ask forgiveness, for I am but a woman. A woman with instincts and yearnings, born of the mother I never knew. Thy very treasures that were to appease me put the yearning more strongly in my brain. Thy teachings showed me a world of beasts and savagery; thy treasures gave me dreams of a world peopled by such as I would be. My mother's blood forced me to seek this other, better world; thy blood forced me to seek it wrongfully."

She paused, and gathered her fleeting breath.

Then, sitting suddenly upright, she flung both arms out to the setting sun now lipping the sea, and cried:

"G.o.ds I know not. Yet must there be such, else had I never known the devotion of a Milo! Wherever ye be, brave Milo, living or dead, commend me to thy own G.o.ds and forgive me for my ingrat.i.tude." She seized Venner and Pea.r.s.e by the arms as she fell back, and whispered: "In pity, friends, set my feet toward the west, and launch my poor body down the sun path as it sinks into the blue Caribbean that was my only home."

She relaxed with a little shivering sigh, the glorious eyes closed with a tired tremor, and the spirit of Dolores the beautiful, the wicked, the tempestuous, winged its way down the mysterious paths of the dark unknown.

"Come," said Venner, suddenly shaking off his abstraction, "time is all too short if we are to render her this last small service."

"How shall we do it?" asked Pea.r.s.e doubtfully.

"We shall send her down her chosen path in a boat. Peters will load the dingey with ballast, while you and I will lay Dolores out as well as we may. Bring me that grating, Pea.r.s.e. We will speed her in the dress she loved. Her soul would sicken at a suffocating winding sheet. Hurry, for the sun is half gone!"

Swiftly they worked, these men who had cause to remember the departed siren without great love, and they placed her, secured to a grating, across the thwarts of the dingey, to which the grating was in turn secured. Then, all prepared, Peters sprang into the boat, bored a score of auger-holes in the bottom, and as the great red sun set fierce and blazing behind the black profile of the cliff, the filling boat was set adrift, straight down the path of the luminary, bound ever westward, until the sea G.o.ds claimed it and its pa.s.senger for their own.

"Farewell, place of ill-luck!" cried Pearce, as the schooner bore away before the rising evening breeze. "May I never set my eyes on such evil sh.o.r.es again."

"Then you will not come back to seek the treasure?" asked Venner, with a shadowy flicker of a smile.

"Not for a thousand times the treasure that lies there!" cried Pea.r.s.e vehemently. "And I have seen it! The horror of this will haunt me until my dying day. I only hope G.o.d will look kindly upon that poor woman, that's all."

"I hope so, too," rejoined Venner thoughtfully. "With a white woman's opportunities, what a woman she could have been."

But the G.o.ds are inscrutable. Only the warm mantle of the setting sun gave a hint that Dolores might be even now entering into a place of eternal rest, where her sins of ignorance and untutored instincts would not count too heavily against her. The sea is very benign to its elect; a calm sea in the setting sun received Dolores in arms of infinite benignity.

(The end.)

[Transcriber's Note: The following typographical errors present in the original edition have been corrected. In Chapter V, "inscrutaable" was changed to "inscrutable"; in Chapter X, "Let me show thee they master"

was changed to "Let me show thee thy master"; in Chapter XVII, "could not enchance your worth" was changed to "could not enhance your worth"; in Chapter XVIII, "shaking his first at Milo" was changed to "shaking his fist at Milo"; and in Chapter XXI, "protruding a foot for Tomlin's back" was changed to "protruding a foot from Tomlin's back".]

[Transcriber's Note: The following summary originally appeared at the beginning of the serial's second installment.]

PRECEDING CHAPTERS BRIEFLY RETOLD

Within his mysterious stronghold, "The Cave of Terrible Things," on the Maroon coast of Jamaica, washed by the waters of the Caribbean Sea, Red Jabez, Sultan of Pirates, had just died.

Dolores, his daughter, "a splendidly lithe, glowing creature of beauty and pa.s.sion," "a royal woman conscious of mental and physical perfection," succeeded her father as tyrant over the motley crew of Spaniard and Briton, Creole and mulatto, Carib and octoroon, and coal-black negroes.

Milo, the giant Abyssinian, who knew no fear and no law save the will of this capricious creature, served Dolores as body-guard and chief.

Pascherette, "a gleaming, gold-tinted creature, a miniature model of Aphrodite," beloved of Milo, was her maid and attendant.

Moved to mutiny by Rufe, the Spaniard, the pirates had risen in revolt to loot the rich treasure of the dead Sultan's cave; but supported by Milo, Dolores had cowed them, no less by her dagger than her threats.

But discontent rode the soul of the Sultana. She longed for other lands, other people. With Milo's aid she determined to capture the first sail that pa.s.sed her sh.o.r.e, and escape.

When Rupert Venner and his guests, Craik Tomlin and John Pearce, aboard the Venner yacht, Feu Follette, pa.s.sed that way, they were easily induced to go ash.o.r.e.

In the midst of a reception accorded them by Dolores, the party beheld Yellow Rufe and a band of mulattoes and blacks making for the schooner, from whose rail shots crackled.

Venner raised a cry of treachery and called, "Come, fellows!" But the woman held him as much by her eyes as by her promise: "I shall preserve thy ship, and give thee back an eye for an eye, if thy men are harmed."

Then she sprang down the cliff like a deer.

[Transcriber's Note: The following summary originally appeared at the beginning of the serial's third installment. The summary at the beginning of the serial's fourth installment, if one was present, was not available when preparing this electronic edition.]