Coral Sands/Chapter 17

HE occupied her morning by doing needlework, seated under the double awning, aft. Needlework to her was a time killer, better than gum chewing or patience, or the working of acrostics. Anyhow, it was at least useful. This heiress to the millions of Cyrus Hardanger worked for the poor with her needle; garments she had cut and sewn covered many an unfortunate child in San Francisco. You might say that she might easily have given a check; yes, she might easily have given a check—and many a check she had extracted from Cyrus for her charities—but, you see, a check is not the same thing as personal work. It is like touching the poor with a barge pole, not with one's hand.

At a quarter to three she fetched her sun hat and, calling a quartermaster, ordered him to tell off a man to take her ashore in the dinghy.

Cyrus was asleep in a hammock swung beneath the awning. She did not wake him but told the quartermaster that she would be back by half past four, in time for tea. Then she went down the steps to the boat stage, against which the little white dinghy was nuzzling and rubbing its fenders.

“Take it back,” said she to the man when she landed. “You can row off for me when you see me signal. Tell the quartermaster to keep a lookout.”

Then she turned to the left, going along by the houses in the direction where she saw Fernand waiting for her.

They met as if by accident. To an onlooker it was just as though she had come ashore for a walk and had met him by chance. More especially as he stood by her for a while, pointing here and there as if showing her places of interest.

“It was better for me not to come down to the boat to meet you,” said he. “One does not know what eyes are watching; even now they may be on us, so we will stand for a moment as if I were showing you the place, pointing so and so. And now we can go on; but walk slowly. Follow me onto the coral and take care that you do not slip.”

She followed him.

The tide was going out and the outer beach was showing exposed rock glittering in the sun. The world here was quite different from the world of the inner beach; here there was sand and movement and the fume of the sea, the thunder of the breakers and the cry of the gull on the wind.

Here, too, were reef pools left by the retreating tide, great baths, some of them, where a man might swim, others quite small, but all of them strange and beautiful with colored life.

Fernand for a little while said nothing of the business in hand, but led the way across the coral, stopping here and there to point out things. In one of the newly formed pools something gray and narrow was moving with vicious darts and plunges, now here, now there. It was a baby shark, separated from its mother by one of the chances of the sea. In another a great frilled eel made the water boil as their shadows disturbed it.

They were beyond the reach of human eye now and Fernand, as if suddenly made sure of his environment, broke the silence.

“I told you,” said he, “that there are bad men here in Araffura who might do you and your father an injury, but I could not tell you all.”

He stopped, embarrassed. He had not reckoned on the difficulty of the job he had taken in hand. How was he to tell this girl that Cyrus Hardanger, the man who had protected her from childhood, the man who was both father and mother to her—how was he to tell her that this man had broken the law, that he had killed a man, and that those men who were pursuing him could perhaps put him in prison were they balked and not bought off?

“Yes?” she said tentatively. Then, as he hesitated: “Go on. Why do you hold back? These men may do us an injury. How?”

“In this way,” said he. “But first of all I must tell you how it happened that I know anything of this matter. When your ship came into the lagoon the other evening, I left the pearling grounds with my partner. I wanted to see your ship close, and then as we drew near I saw you. I spoke to you and promised to come for you in the morning to show you the pearling grounds.”

“Yes?” There was a ledge of smooth coral here and she sat down. He took his place beside her.

“Well,” he said, “I had seen you only once, but I was to see you forever. Whatever happens to me or to you, I shall see you in my mind just as you were then.”

He took her hand and she let him hold it. He was not talking of love, he was just telling her the truth, and it applied to herself as well as to him. Whatever happened to her or to him, his picture would always be with her—though not if he died. In that event she would die, too.

“When I went ashore,” he said, “I found my partner ill from opium given him by a man, Yakoff, the trader. I went to Yakoff's house to beat him, and drawing near I heard Yakoff's voice. He was talking to a man who lives on the beach—Chales is his name—bad just as Yakoff is bad—and I heard your ship spoken of, and listened.”

“Yes,” said June.

He seemed to find it difficult to go on talking.

“It is hard to say to you what these two men were talking of. It was about your father.”

“My father?”

“Your stepfather.”

“Don't mind that,” said June. “He has always been to me my real father. These men were talking about him. What did they say?”

“This is where I find it hard. Yakoff said to the other: 'I know him; many years ago he killed a man. No one else knows but me, and I will make him pay me money not to tell.'”

“Killed a man?”

“Yes. Those were Yakoff's words.”

“Father—why, what nonsense. He could never kill any one, unless it was accident. I know him. I tell you, I know him; he is the best of all the people who were ever born. What do you mean by telling me such things? I know! Forgive me. It's not your fault; it's what you heard. Well”

She sat for a moment, looking before her at the falling breakers now drawn farther out. Her mind was in confusion. The image of Cyrus was there, but blurred as if by smoke clouds.

A trader here called Yakoff had said that Cyrus away in the past had killed a man and that he, Yakoff, was going to make him pay; otherwise he would talk.

June had a clear-thinking brain, and even shaken as it was just now she could perceive one thing clearly. This charge could have nothing to do with accidental killing. If the thing had been an accident, there would be nothing to hide.

But of course it was all absurd—all absurd. Yakoff had made a mistake.

And yet combating this consoling thought came the remembrance of the fact that Cyrus half in jest had once or twice indicated that his past had been not altogether on visiting terms with the law.

He had told her he had done gun running, but it was less what he had told than what he had left untold that was the trouble now.

As a matter of fact, she knew next to nothing of his life. He was not a communicative man; all the same, he might have told much more to the girl whose life was so bound up with his, the girl who would be his heiress, the girl who, though not related to him by blood, was considered by him and talked of by him as his daughter.

He always called her his daughter, not his stepdaughter, and she always spoke of him as her father. She knew next to nothing of his past out of which this thunderbolt had suddenly sprung to hit her.

As a matter of fact, June's position was not unique. Among the ranks of the newly rich and the millionaires who were nobodies the day before yesterday, the pasts of the fathers don't always bear raking up before the eyes of their children; but her position was none the less painful.

“Of course,” she burst out at last, “all this is nonsense. Has father seen this man?”

“Yes. I believe Yakoff went on board to sell pearls to him and so came to recognize him.”

“Well, didn't my father recognize him in return?”

“No. Yakoff said that he himself had altered in the years—it was twenty years ago—but that your father had not altered much. It is so with men; some change more than others.”

She was silent for a minute.

“But how about the name?” she said at last.

“Yakoff said that your father was living under a different name then Excuse me for saying these things; they hurt me to say them.”

He retook her hand which she had drawn away, and she let him hold it, but it was unresponsive as a thing dead. Love for the moment had flown far away.

“The thing now,” said he, “is what we can do against Yakoff. I would kill him just as I would kill a shark, only he is not alone. There is the other man, Chales.”

“We must tell father at once.”

“I don't know,” said Fernand. “I think perhaps it would be better for us not. Last night I went to consult with Ona.”

“Who is Ona?”

“The wise woman who lives on the reef. All the people here go to her if the fishing is bad or if they are sick or if they wish to know the future. It took me all night to reach her and get back, for Ona lives far away. I gave her my pearl to get her help against Yakoff, but she would not take it; she gave me it back. But she gave me advice.”

He took the little box from his pocket and, opening it, showed the pearl in its nest of wool as if he wished it to be a witness and a corroboration of his statement.

“She said to me: 'Let this thing to itself. Do not interfere with Yakoff and the other. Leave them to the Dark People who have prepared a path for them with a pit at its end so that they may fall in and be lost.'”

“But,” said June, “he ought to be told so that he may fight this thing.”

“How?” asked Fernand. “Yes. I felt as you feel when this morning I came to your ship to give you warning, but during the day I have been thinking of Ona's words, and I am pulled this way and that, till now I feel that she spoke the truth. It is sometimes better to run before the storm than to try and paddle against it. There is a God who hates the wicked.”

June said nothing for a moment. She was deep in thought.

How could she speak of this thing to Cyrus. How could she say to him: “There are two men here who are going to attack you for something you did years ago and try and get money out of you on account of it.”

Put in any other way it would have been just as bad. “Did you kill a man years ago? Do you know anything of a man called Yakoff?” No, it was impossible—at least, impossible without wounding herself as much as Cyrus. And besides, what would be the use?

Cyrus couldn't kill Yakoff and Chales, yet killing alone would stop their mouths.

If there was truth in this story of Yakoff's, one course of action alone seemed open to Cyrus. Effacement. He would have to disappear from San Francisco, drop everything, become another man with another name. For if the story were true and the law could be evoked, she saw quite clearly that these men would destroy Cyrus.

June had received a good education at the Pinkerton Academy at Monterey. But the best and cheapest education you can give any person is to teach him or her to read, and besides the academic subjects taught at the Pinkerton Academy she had by reading picked up a good deal of knowledge of the world.

The vast San Francisco daily and Sunday newspapers had told her a lot about life, enough anyhow to make her aware of the true facts of this position.

“I'll think of what is to be done,” said she. “You may be right, but, all the same, it is impossible to sit and do nothing.”

“If you will let me,” said Fernand, “I will keep watch on these men. Stay!—an idea has come to me. Why not—why not”

“Make them fight,” said he, a dark flash coming into his face and a light that June had never seen before in his eyes.

“Yakoff insulted me,” he went on, “the very day your ship came into the lagoon. I will make him fight. It shall be man to man and I will kill him because I am the better man. Chales I will also make fight; him, too, will I kill, in fair fight—but I must get them separate and alone.”

It was the Spaniard speaking—The fiery spirit that inspired the conquistadors, the desperate indifference to life that one still may find even beneath the orange trees of Seville.

“At all events,” said he, “leave me to fight this thing. Do nothing till you hear from me.”