"Afraid! Why should I be? We cannot find the buried treasure,
therefore it is not likely anyone else could do so. And there is
nothing else here to tempt anyone."
"Was there not?" Reginald reflected. "Was there not?" Yet she seemed
so innocent and simple that he could not tell her his thoughts. He
could not tell her, as he might have told a more worldly girl, that to
many men there was a greater temptation in that graceful form and
those hazel eyes and tawny golden hair than in all the dross beneath
the surface of the earth. So he only said--
"But if you found the treasure? What would you do then?"
"We should go away, I suppose--though I should be sorry to leave this
island. We should go into the world then--perhaps to Antigua or
Trinidad." Reginald here politely concealed a smile, and she went on,
"But I hope we shall never find it. My father and brother are used to
the life they lead here; I do not think the outer world would suit
them."
"But they are sailors and have seen it, you say?"
"They are sailors, but not such as you. They are simple, rough men,
scarcely able to read or to write. That was, I think, why they--why my
father--sent me to school at Antigua."
"But how do you live while they are away?" he asked her now.
"Very well. I have the hut, and there is always plenty of dried meat
and fresh fruit. And sometimes I fish, or shoot a bird. There are
plenty here of both kinds." Then she stopped and, looking at him,
said, "Would you like to see our home? It is not far."
The girl's _naïveté_ won on him so that there was but one reply
possible--an immediate and fervent assent to this invitation; and a
few moments later they were treading a path through the wood.
"The path," Reginald said to himself, "that doubtless he walked,
leading to the hut where he saw Alderly die. The same, yet all so
different!"
"A little glade on which the moon did shine as though on a sweet
English field at home," he remembered Nicholas had written--and, lo!
they were in it now. "A little glade bordered on all sides by golden
shaddocks, grapefruits, citrons and lime-trees, with, at their feet
and trailing round them, the many-hued convolvuli of the tropics,
passion-flowers and grandillos." Only, instead of seeking for a
bloodstained sea-robber, Reginald was following in the footsteps of
this woodland nymph--this girl whose beauty and innocence acted like a
charm upon him.
Then, next, they entered the tangled forest that Nicholas had passed
through, and here again all was as he had described it. The gleaming
leaves of the star-apple shone side by side with the palms and
cotton-trees; the fresh cool plantains and the cashews stopped their
way sometimes; the avocados and yams and custard-apples were all
around them. And turning a bend of the path they came upon the hut,
even as, two centuries ago, Nicholas had come upon the hut where
Alderly had played host to the spectres of his drunken imagination.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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