Pieces of Eight Part 21

Meanwhile, after poking about in as much of the ruins as I could penetrate, I stepped out through a gap in one of the walls and found myself again on the path by which I had entered. I noticed that it still ran on farther north, as having a destination beyond. So leaving the haunted ruins behind, I pushed on, and had gone but a short distance when the path began to descend slightly from the ridge on which the ruins stood; and there, in a broad square hollow before me, was the welcome living green of a flouris.h.i.+ng plantation of cocoanut palms! It was evidently of considerable extent--a quarter of a mile or so, I judged--and the palms were very thick and planted close together. To my surprise, too, I observed, as at length the path brought me to them after a sharp descent, that they were fenced in by a high bamboo stockade, for the most part in good condition, but here and there broken down with decay.

Through one of these gaps I presently made my way, and found myself among the soaring columns of the palms, hung aloft with cl.u.s.ters of the great green nuts. Fallen palm fronds made a carpet for my feet--very pleasant after the rough and tangled way I had travelled, and now and again one of the cocoa nuts would fall down with a thud amid the green silence. One of these, which narrowly missed my head, suggested that here I had the opportunity of quenching very agreeably the thirst of which I had become suddenly aware. My claspknife soon made an opening through the tough sh.e.l.l, and, seated on the ground, I set my mouth to it, and, raising the nut above my head, allowed the "milk"--cool as spring water--to gurgle deliciously down my parched throat. When at length I had drained it, and my head once more returned to its natural angle, I was suddenly made aware that my poaching had not gone un.o.bserved.

"Ha! ha!" called a pleasant voice, evidently belonging to a man of an unusually tall and lean figure who was approaching me through the palm trunks; "so you have discovered my hidden paradise--my Alcinous garden, so to say"; and he quoted two well-known lines of Homer in the original Greek, adding: "or if you prefer it in Pope's translation, which I think,--don't you?--remains the best:

"Close to the gates a s.p.a.cious garden lies, From storms defended and inclement skies--

"and so on. Alas! for an old man's memory! It grows shorter and shorter--like his life, eh? Never mind, you are welcome, sir stranger, mysteriously tossed up here like Ulysses, on our island coast."

I gazed with natural wonderment at this strange individual, who thus in the heart of the wilderness had saluted me with a meticulously pure English accent, and welcomed me in a quotation from Homer in the original Greek. Who, in the devil's name, was this odd character who, I saw, as I looked closer at him, was, as he had hinted, quite an old man, though his unusual erectness and sprightliness of manner, lent him an illusive air of youth? Who on earth was he?--and how did he happen in the middle of this haunted wood?

CHAPTER V

_Calypso._

Of course a glance, and the first sound of his voice, had told me that I had to do with a gentleman, one of those vagabond English gentlemen in exile who form a type peculiar, I think, to the English race; men that are a curious combination of aristocrat and gipsy, soldier, scholar, and philosopher; men of good family, who have drifted everywhere, seen and seen through everything, but in all their wanderings have never lost their sense and habit of "form," their boyish zest in living, their humorous stoicism, and, above all, their lordly accent.

"Now that you have found us, Sir Ulysses"--continued my eccentric host, motioning me, with an indescribably princely wave of the hand to accompany him--"you must certainly give us the pleasure of your company to luncheon. Visitors are as rare as black swans on this _Ultima Thule_ of ours--though, by the way, the black swan, _cygnus atratus,_ is nothing like so rare as the ancients believed. I have shot them myself out in Australia. Still they are rare enough for the purpose of imagery, though really not so rare as a human being one can talk intelligently to on this island."

Talk! My friend, indeed, very evidently was a talker--one of those fantastic monologists to whom an audience is little more than a symbol.

I saw that there was no need for me to do any of the talking. He was more than glad to do it all. Plainly his encounter with me was to him like a spring in a thirsty land.

"Solitude," he continued, "is perhaps the final need of the human soul.

After a while, when we have run the gamut of all our ardours and our dreams, solitude comes to seem the one excellent thing, the _summum bonum._"

I murmured that he certainly seemed to have come to the right place for it.

"Very true, indeed," he a.s.sented, with a courtly inclination of his head, as though I had said something profound; "very true, indeed, and yet, wasn't it the great Bacon who said: 'Whoever is delighted with solitude is either a beast or a G.o.d'?--and this particular solitude, I confess, sometimes seems to me a little too much like that enforced solitude of the Pontic marshes of which Ovid wailed and whimpered in the deaf ears of Augustus."

I could not help noticing at last as he talked on with this fantastic magnificence, the odd contrast between his speech and the almost equally fantastic poverty of his clothing. The suit he wore, though still preserving a certain elegance of cut, was so worn and patched and stained that a negro would hardly have accepted it as a gift; and his almost painful emaciation gave him generally the appearance of an animated framework of rags and bones, startlingly embodying the voice and the manners of a prince. Yet the shabby tie about his neck was bound by a ring, in which was set a turquoise of great size and beauty.

Evidently he was a being of droll contrasts, and I prepared myself to be surprised at nothing concerning him.

Presently, as we loitered on through the palms, we came upon two negroes chopping away with their machetes, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g up the debris of broken and decaying palm fans. They were both st.u.r.dy, ferocious-looking fellows, but one of them was a veritable giant.

"Behold my bodyguard!" said my magnificent friend, with the usual possessive wave of his hand; "my Switzers, my Janissaries, so to say."

The negroes stopped working, touched their great straw hats, and flashed their splendid teeth in a delighted smile. Evidently they were used to their master's way of talking, and were devoted to him.

"This chap here is Erebus," said my host, and the appropriateness of the name was apparent, for he was certainly the blackest negro I had ever seen, as superbly black as some women are superbly white.

"And this is Samson. Let's have a look at your muscles, Samson--there's a good boy!"

And, with grins of pleasure, Samson proudly stripped off his thin calico jacket and exposed a torso of terrifying power, but beautiful in its play of muscles as that of a G.o.d.

"But since my name is Hercules, the man Who owes me hatred hides it if he can,

"eh, Samson?" was his master's characteristic comment.

"Yaas, sar!" said Samson, as pleased as a flattered bulldog, and understanding the compliment precisely in the same instinctive fas.h.i.+on.

Leaving Samson and Erebus to continue their savage play with their machetes, we walked on through the palms, which here gave a particularly jungle-like appearance to the scene, from the fact of their being bowed out from their roots, and sweeping upward in great curves. One involuntarily looked for a man-eating tiger at any moment, standing striped and splendid in one of the openings.

Then suddenly to the right, there came a flash of level green, suggesting lawns, and the outlines of a house, partly covered with brilliant purple flowers--a marvellous splash of colour.

"_Bougainvillea! Bougainvillea spectabilis_--of course, you know it. Was there ever such a purple? Not Solomon in all his glory, _et cetera._ And here we are at the house of King Alcinous--a humble version of it indeed."

It was evidently quite impossible for my friend to speak otherwise than in images, picturesque sc.r.a.ps from the coloured rag-bag of a mind stored with memories of the cla.s.sics, all manner of romantic literature, and tags of Greek and Latin which he mouthed with the relish of an epicure.

It was a large rambling stucco house, somewhat decayed looking, and evidently built on the ruins of an older building. We came upon it at a broad Italian-looking loggia, supported by stone pillars bowered in with vines--very cool and pleasant--with mossy slabs for its floor, here and there tropical ferns set out in tubs, some wicker chairs standing about, and a table at one side on which two little barelegged negro girls were busy setting out yellow fruit, and other appurtenances of luncheon, on a dazzling white cloth.

"Has your mistress returned yet, my children?" asked the master.

"No, sar," said the older girl, with a giggle, twisting and grimacing with embarra.s.sment.

"My daughter," explained my host, "has gone to the town on an errand.

She will be back at any moment. Meanwhile, I shall introduce you to a cooling drink of my own manufacture, with a basis of that cocoanut milk which I need not ask you whether you appreciate, recalling the pleasant circ.u.mstance of our first acquaintance."

Motioning me to a seat, and pus.h.i.+ng toward me a box of cigarettes, he went indoors, leaving me to take in the stretch of beautiful garden in front of me, the trees of which seemed literally to be hung with gold--for they were mainly of orange and grapefruit ranged round a s.p.a.cious beautifully-kept lawn with the regularity of sumptuous decoration. In the middle of the lawn, a little rock foundation threw up a jet of silver, falling with a tinkling murmur into a broad circular basin from which emerged the broad leaves and splendid pink blossoms of an Egyptian lotus. Certainly it was no far-fetched allusion of my cla.s.sical friend to speak of the garden of Alcinous; particularly connected as it was in my mind with the white beach of a desert isle, and that marble statue in the moonlight.

As I sat dreaming, bathed in the golden-green light of the orange trees, and lulled by the tinkling of the fountain, my host returned with our drinks, his learned disquisition on which I will spare the reader, highly interesting and characteristic though it was.

Suffice it that it was a drink, whatever its ingredients--and there was certainly somewhere a powerful "stick" in it--that seemed to have been drawn from some cool grotto of the virgin earth, so thrillingly cold and invigorating it was.

While we were slowly sipping it, and smoking our cigarettes, in an unwonted pause of my friend's fanciful verbosity, I almost jumped in my chair at the sound of a voice indoors. It was instantly followed by a light and rapid tread, and the sound of a woman's dress. Then a tall beautiful young woman emerged on the loggia.

"Ah! there you are!" cried my host, as we both rose; and then turning to me, "this is my daughter--Calypso. Her real name I a.s.sure you--none of my nonsense--doesn't she look it? Allow me, my dear, to introduce--Mr.

Ulysses!"--for we had not yet exchanged each other's names....

I am a wretched actor, and I am bound to say that she proved herself no better. For she gave a decided start as she turned those glowing eyes on me, and the lovely olive of her cheeks glowed as with submerged rose-colour. Our embarra.s.sment did not escape the father.

"Why you know each other already!" he exclaimed, with natural surprise.

"Not exactly,"--I was grateful for the sudden nerve with which I was able to hasten to the relief of her lovely distress--"but possibly Miss--Calypso recalls as naturally as I do, our momentary meeting in Sweeney's store, one evening. I had no expectation, of course, that we should meet again under such pleasant circ.u.mstances as this."

She gave me a grateful look as she took my hand, and with it--or was it only my eager imagination?--a shy little pressure, again as of grat.i.tude.

I had tried to get into my voice my a.s.surance that, of course, I remembered no other more recent meeting--though, naturally, as she had given that little start in the doorway, there had flashed on me again the picture of her standing, moonlit, in another resounding doorway, and of the wild start she had given then, as the golden pieces streamed from her lovely surprised mouth, and her lifted hands. And her eyes--I could have sworn--were the living eyes of Jack Harkaway! Had she a brother, I wondered. Yet my mind was too dazzled and confused with her nearness to pursue the speculation.

As we sat down to luncheon, waited upon by the little barelegged black children--waited on, too, surprisingly well, despite the contortions of their primitive embarra.s.sment--my host once more resumed his character of the cla.s.sic king welcoming the storm-tossed stranger to his board.

"Far wanderer," he said, raising his gla.s.s to me, "eat of what our board affords, welcome without question of name and nation. But if, when the food and wine have done their genial office, and the weariness of your journeying has fallen from you, you should feel stirred to tell us somewhat of yourself and your wanderings, what manner of men call you kinsman, in what fair land is your home and the place of your loved ones, be sure that we shall count the tale good hearing, and, for our part, make exchange in like fas.h.i.+on of ourselves and the pa.s.sage of our days in this lonely isle."

We all laughed as he ended--himself with a whinny of laughter. For, odd as such discourse may sound in the reading, it was uttered so whimsically, and in so spirited and humorous a style that I a.s.sure you it was very captivating.

"You should have been an actor, my lord Alcinous," I said, laughing. I seemed already curiously at home, seated there at that table with this fantastic stranger and that being out of fairyland, toward whom I dared only turn my eyes now and again by stealth. The strange fellow had such a way with him, and his talk made you feel that he had known you all your life.