Authors: Dennis Wheatley
At length Basil could contain himself no longer but broke in abruptly saying that they simply must set off at once. Yonita’s face lost its radiance and she began an astonished protest. It seemed that Sir Deveril had not informed her of the imminent departure of her two friends and, to Basil’s intense annoyance, the argument as to whether they should go or remain started all over again.
By sheer stubbornness he forced the others to give way to him, but Yonita insisted that she must see them off, and as her legs were still paining her a little, more time was lost while a handcart was sent for to transport her with them to the distant shore.
Uncle Cornelius and a number of the islanders decided to go with them to the coast, so a small procession set out along the narrow track. Basil marched along in front with Sir Deveril, endeavouring to hurry their pace, but De Brissac insisted upon wheeling Yonita so that he could talk to her during the journey, and he refused to exhaust himself by pushing the cart at anything more than an easy walk. Uncle Cornelius and the other notables from the village brought up the rear of the party.
As they progressed Basil endeavoured to make polite conversation with Sir Deveril but his heart was sinking further with every quarter of a mile they advanced. Over two hours had elapsed since he and De Brissac had woken in their beds and the light was now beginning to fail. The previous day they had set off from the ship a little before six, and, glancing at his watch, he saw that it was already half past. By the time they reached the cleft in the cliff where they had cached their balloons it was after seven.
The foreshore of the island was as grim and deserted as ever in the evening light. From it the tideless waters, blotched all over with masses of the green weed, stretched east, north and west as far as the eye could see. In places it had a faintly bluish tinge as though drifting smoke was passing across its surface. The
Gafelborg
appeared to be considerably nearer in. De Brissac estimated that she must have drifted at least a couple of miles during the twenty-four hours since they had left her, but he shook his head when Basil began to pull out one of the balloons.
‘I’m sorry, my friend. You were so set upon going I thought it best we should proceed to this cliff top so that you could see how things were for yourself. I did not intentionally delay you while we were at Sir Deveril’s house but I knew before we started out
that so much time had been lost it would not be safe for us to make the crossing tonight. Look at the mist which is already quite thick, low on the weed.’
‘The mist comes up uncommon fast at sundown every evening during summer,’ Deveril informed them, ‘but it rarely rises more than thirty feet above the weed sea.’
Basil stared angrily at De Brissac and then at the ship. He wanted to insist on their attempting the crossing but, on the other hand, it would take them three-quarters of an hour at least to reach the
Gafelborg
, and the light would not last for more than half an hour at most. With acute reluctance he was forced to confess to himself that De Brissac was right; it would be sheer madness to venture now and risk missing the ship in the darkness and the rising mist.
With an angry gesture he pushed back the balloon. ‘I give in, although I hate to confess myself beaten. We delayed too long and we daren’t risk getting lost out there again. I wonder, though, if we could signal?’
They had no binoculars but peered out over the weed sea. In full daylight they might have been able to distinguish anyone moving on the
Gafelborg’s
deck, but now it was impossible to do so.
‘I should have thought of that before,’ De Brissac reproached himself. ‘If we could have signalled them that would have assured them of our safety just as well as returning to the ship, but wait—even if we cannot see them they can see us against the skyline on this low headland. Anybody on the look-out should easily be able to as they have telescopes and glasses.’
‘Plague on it! I might have brought flags to signal with, had I but thought,’ frowned Sir Deveril.
‘No matter. The ski-sticks will do and are even better because of the big balloons upon their tops. Quick, let us get them before the light grows worse.’
They snatched up the ski-sticks and De Brissac took three of them so that the balloons attached to their ends made a large black blob fifteen feet above his head. Running to the highest point of the headland he began to signal in the Morse code, repeating a message slowly twice which ran: ‘Corncob dead, rest safe; returning tomorrow.’
At the end of his second message a light began to wink on the
Gafelborg
, acknowledging his signals. As they watched he spelt out his reply from the ship: ‘Trouble on board last night, Jansen
and Harlem lost but all well now. Unity sends love to Basil, see you in morning.’
Basil heaved a sigh of relief at the knowledge that Unity was all right, but all of them were troubled by the thought of this new loss which had befallen the diminished ship’s company, and speculated fruitlessly as to what fresh calamity had befallen the survivors in the
Gafelborg
.
By the time they had finished receiving the ship’s signal the light was almost gone. The mist now totally obscured the tideless sea, hid the hull of the
Gafelborg
and was creeping up the rocky slope towards them in greyish billows; chill, dank and pregnant with the atmosphere of evil. Basil lingered a moment, thinking of Unity out there in the trapped ship, then reluctantly hurried after the others who had gladly turned their backs on the gloomy seascape and were already heading for the centre of the island.
Once they were over the rough and on the track, which started at the Randels’ farm, they split up into the same formation they had used in making their outward journey. As Yonita climbed into her handcart she asked De Brissac if he was not too tired to push her all the way back to the village again.
He laughed, showing his even white teeth under the little black moustache. ‘
Mais non
, Mademoiselle. I am only too happy to be here to do it. I really feared that stupid friend of mine would drag me out across the weed.’
‘Why was he so anxious to leave us?’ she asked curiously.
‘He had an admirable reason,’ De Brissac smiled, leaning forward a little over her shoulder and lowering his voice so that the others should not hear. ‘He is in love with Unity, the slim, brown-haired girl you met in the ship yesterday. Naturally he is anxious to get back to her.’
Yonita nodded her dark head wisely. ‘Ah ha! that explains it; but I was equally determined that you should not go. My astonishment at your decision was only pretended as Deveril had told me of your purpose when he woke me. I do not really require anything approaching an hour for my toilet, even in these garments.’
De Brissac glanced swiftly at the young baronet who was walking some paces ahead with Basil; it seemed an unchivalrous thing to make love to his host’s fiancée, yet Yonita was obviously asking for it, and the temptation proved irresistible.
‘How much I wish that I might attribute the same reason to
your wish to detain us, Mademoiselle, as to my friend’s for wanting to go,’ he murmured.
‘Mayhap you can,’ she replied lightly. ‘He is a handsome enough gentleman, although somewhat surly at the moment.’
De Brissac smiled in the semi-darkness. He knew that she was only mocking him, but he answered in a heartbroken voice: ‘Mademoiselle, you desolate me beyond measure. Last night you allowed me to suppose that you found some interest in my unworthy self, and now you infer that my surly friend has already supplanted me. What can I possibly have done to deserve such cruel treatment?’
She turned and smiled back at him over her shoulder. ‘I have a sufficiently good opinion of you both, and it is not in my disposition to be cruel. In truth, I am absurdly kind to handsome young men who flatter me by their devotion.’
‘You were going to tell me last night things that it would much interest me to know about the way some of your customs differ from ours. Do you remember? Just as those horrible crabs interrupted us?’
‘Now is not a good time for such conversation,’ she said softly. ‘Since you profess so great a curiosity I will enlighten you after the banquet tonight, perchance, should I feel so disposed.’
‘The banquet is to take place after all then?’
‘Assuredly, nothing was cancelled, once Deveril and I had formed the resolution that neither of you should leave the island yet. Credit us with some measure of finesse, I beg, sir. We contrived to delay the hour of your departure until such time as it would be too late for you to cross on account of the mist.’
It was eight o’clock when they reached Sir Deveril’s house again and full night had set in. The gentle starlight faintly lit the fair park-land and showed the outline of the ancient cedars. The banquet had been postponed till nine o’clock, and, on reaching the house, the party split up to go and dress for it. Hook-nosed Uncle Cornelius left them for his own house, but Yonita had had her clothes sent over during the afternoon and meant to spend the night under her fiancé’s roof. Sir Deveril went to his room while Yonita, who was already dressed, entertained the two visitors in the big lounge, which was now lit by shaded candles.
Twenty minutes later Sir Deveril rejoined them; a strikingly handsome figure in long, blue, cut-away coat and breeches of the Napoleonic period; other carefully preserved garments handed down by his forbears and kept by him for gala occasions. Fine
lace ruffles graced his throat and wrists, and the costume was completed by a pair of old-fashioned, square-toed shoes with silver buckles.
Basil had cheered up a little, endeavouring to put a bright face on his disappointment at being separated from Unity for another night, and De Brissac, completely happy in his semi-amorous sparring with Yonita, now appeared not to have a care in the world.
To occupy the time of waiting until they were due to walk over to the great hall where the feast was to be held, Sir Deveril showed his visitors some of his curiosities, including an old, iron-bound chest with many locks, which, as they saw with a little thrill when he opened it, contained a magnificent collection of old-fashioned jewels. ‘ ’Tis the loot,’ he declared, ‘which has come down to me through the many piracies of the first Sir Deveril Barthorne who became marooned here in 1680.’
‘I didn’t know he was a pirate,’ Basil remarked.
The young man shrugged his shoulders. ‘The glamour of his career somewhat excuses his depredations, the more particularly as they were all carried out against the shipping of nations then at war with England. He was a Cornish cavalier and he employed his early manhood fighting for the King during the Civil War. As you may know, some portion of the navy remained loyal to Charles I. When the Royalist cause was lost Barthorne fled to one of Prince Rupert’s ships. Unable to obtain funds with which to pay his men, that romantic prince sailed down to the Spanish Main and turned his navy into a pirate fleet during Cromwell’s usurpation.
‘They all sailed home after the Restoration and my ancestor was then just over forty. For a few years, he played the rakehell in Whitehall with King Charles II, Buckingham, Rochester and the rest, but the idle life left him dissatisfied. In 1665 he fitted out a privateer with the King’s Commission and set out upon his travels once more.
‘ ’Tis our belief he ne’er went home again but roamed the Spanish Main thereafter; sometimes in company with the famous Sir Henry Morgan, more often on his own; waylaying and robbing Spanish, French and Dutch vessels until he was caught in a violent hurricane. His ship was dismasted and trapped in the weed seas which surround these islands. He was a man of sixty then, yet lived on to the ripe old age of eighty-seven.’
‘What happened then?’ inquired Basil.
‘He was succeeded as uncrowned king here by the son he begot, during the first year of his sojourn, upon the beautiful Spanish Contessa, Maria Silvestre a Costa. This son died at the age of forty-nine and was followed by the third Sir Deveril. He married the daughter of the French Governor of a West Indian Island, who arrived in a French warship which had become unmanageable through mutiny and the desertion of the greater portion of her crew, in 1726.
‘The third Sir Deveril was, alas, a weakling and unable to resist a famous buccaneer known as the Red Barracuda, who was wrecked on our coast with a crew of thirty-three men and a number of women in 1744. His pirates sacked the island as though they were raiding some wretched township on the Spanish Main. They slew many of the male inhabitants, including the third Sir Deveril, but when they became sensible of the fact that they must spend the rest of their lives here, they began to settle down as peaceable colonists; much in the manner of the earlier arrivals upon whom they had brought so ill a fate.
‘ ’Twas an ungodly time for the islanders. The Red Barracuda lived up to the nickname given to him on account of his fiery red beard and temperamental likeness to the fish the Carib Indians call “the devil of the shallows”. He proved a capricious and bloody tyrant. No petticoat was safe from him and he shot any man who refused to do his bidding, but the fourth Sir Deveril had fortunately been spared during the first massacre, as he was then but an infant. Fifteen years later, when he had grown to man’s estate, he led a revolt which ended in the tyrant’s kicking out his life suspended by three feet of rope from the rafter above the door of his own residence. From the time of that happy occurrence the Barthornes resumed their suzerainty of the island and we have ruled here ever since.’
Deveril having entertained them with some more episodes of the island’s story the time came for them to attend the banquet, so they all walked across from the house to the great hall.
Here nearly the whole population had assembled, and the islanders gave the two guests a royal welcome. Sir Deveril led De Brissac and Basil to the top table and they looked round them in astonishment; the scene was almost like a pageant from English history, or a gathering for a fancy-dress ball. Both women and men had unearthed their most treasured clothes from old, cedar chests for the occasion, and the laughing crowd presented a most
colourful spectacle. The costumes ranged from embroidered satins of a bygone century, through serviceable cloth uniform coats of numerous navies, to the black, formal best that the American whaling men had brought with them to the island in 1879, and the faded naval kit of the German sailors whose gunboat had reached there in 1904. Many of the women, Basil noted, wore little Chinese jackets with lovely, colourful designs of dragons and butterflies upon them. When he asked the reason for this, Sir Deveril told him that one of their most fortunate windfalls had been a shipment of these costumes which was on its way from China to Europe in the middle of the last century.