CHAPTER IX
IN WHICH TWO CHILDREN OF THE SUN ASTONISH A
SCOUNDREL
BEFORE the day was ended the winds and waves had signed a truce, but on the beach, far to the westward of the Mississippi’s mouth, lay ghastly trophies of their recent war. In a vain effort to propitiate the demon of the storm—according to the Portuguese sailors: to lighten the vessel, the captain would have said—cables, spars, water-casks, kits and chests of varying size, puncheons of wine, bags of sea-biscuit, cannon, powder, and stone ballast had been thrown overboard in a futile effort to float the shattered ship from a sunken reef. A portion of this impotent sacrifice the sullen surf had uplifted upon its crest, and, rushing shoreward, had tossed it spitefully upon the sands.
As the hours dragged on, while the storm, in full retreat, hurried its black battalions toward the west, the moaning beach became a resting-place for grimmer flotsam than sailor’s kit or broken spar. Trusting to the stanchness of their ships and the favor of their saints, the Spanish seamen in those adventurous days but seldom learned to swim. In constant peril from the hungry waves, forever searching unknown seas, where shipwreck menaced him at every hour, the Spaniard or the Portuguese would drown, amazed to find no saving potency in strings of beads, no buoyancy in dangling crucifix.
When the ship Concepcion, abandoned by the saints, struck on a rock, concealed beneath the waves by Satan’s crafty hand, there was only one man aboard the vessel who had learned to breast the surf with strength and skill sufficient for a crisis such as this—and he was a white-faced landsman, who had spent his life with pen and books, learning nothing of the sea save what had come to him when bathing in the sunny waters of Seville.
For the first time in all the countless centuries since the floods had tossed it there, the curving beach now watched the grewsome pastime which a shipwreck grants the surf. A shadow on a billow rushing landward, a black spot on a white-plumed, tossing wave, a splash and hissing on the trembling sands, and there on the shore, as the storm-wind rushes by, lies a thing which was once a man, a black-and-white blotch in the dim light vouchsafed by the scudding clouds. With uncanny satisfaction at its task, the undercurrent, slinking back again beneath the sea, returns to lay upon the sands another horrid plaything of the surf. ’Tis novel sport for this deserted coast, but how the waves enjoy it! They roar and thunder, sob and laugh and hiss; they toss their new-found toys upon the sands, then snatch them back again and turn them ’round and ’round as if in envy of the grasping beach. But as the hours pass by, the shore keeps gaining what the billows lose. When the sun has pierced the western clouds, to cast a passing gleam across the panting sea, the glistening sands are dotted far and wide with worthless relics of the surf’s grim sport.
The arms of Juan Rodriquez had been moved by mighty passions to a most stupendous feat. Strong swimmer though he was, the burden of a senseless girl, and the striving of the deep to make no blunder in the game it played, had turned his heart to ice, while the minutes seemed like hours and each stroke that he made was feebler than the last. But the struggling wretch was urged to mad endeavor by a combination of the most potent motives which can inspire the efforts of a man. Fear of death and love of a woman united in that awful hour to give to Juan’s slender but well-knit body a stubborn endurance that foiled the undertow and checked, for the nonce, the surf’s ghastly pastime. Slowly but persistently, with gasping breath and straining eyes, now smothered in the brine, now lifted like a cork upon a wave, a man who was not fit to die fought wildly with the sea for life and love. To leave the girl to drown and struggle on alone, with certain victory within his grasp, his dread of death had tempted him to do. But at that instant a kindlier current than he had hoped to find eased for a moment the pressure upon his chest, and bore him slantingly athwart the beach far westward of the wrecked Concepcion.
To the fainting youth and his senseless burden the damp strand offered no easy couch, but it was better to lie there on the shore, while the enemy, checkmated, scolded and threatened and boasted in complaining impotence just outside the danger-line, than to choke and die, and go to judgment unshrived and with black crimes upon one’s soul. What mattered it to Juan Rodriquez that for a time, as he lay struggling for breath upon the beach, the ripples, malicious offspring of the giant breakers, washed moist sand into his hair and ears, and licked his corpselike face as if they kissed him for his prowess while they whispered vengeful threats?
Presently the victorious swimmer regained his senses, and, tottering to his feet, dragged the shrunken figure of Doña Julia further up the beach. Her black gown clung close around her as she lay, as if asleep, upon the sands, the only thing of beauty that the sea had brought to land. Juan bent down and placed his hand upon her bosom. The gleam of despair in his sunken eyes died out as he felt the feeble beating of her heart and upon his cheek the faint impact of her returning breath. Then he drew himself up to his full height, cast a glance of triumph at the treacherous sea, and, assured of Doña Julia’s safety, hurried eastward across the shingle, glistening at that moment from the rays of the setting sun.
It was a dismal task that the dripping, trembling youth had essayed. From one staring, motionless victim of the storm to another went Juan, placing his shaking hand above hearts which would never beat again, and starting back in horror from faces which served as mirrors to the pain of sudden death. And ever as he crept on from one purple corpse to another the conviction became more fixed in his mind that he alone, of all the sturdy men upon that fated ship, had kept the spark of life within his breast. Suddenly the sightless eyes of Miquel Sanchez stared up at him in the sunlight.
“Curse you! Curse you!” cried Juan, kicking the unprotesting corpse in senseless rage. “Had I known you were a lubber, Hernandez had not died! ’Tis well for you the sea took all your life, or I’d choke the dying breath from out your throat! Curse you!”
Bending down, the youth, a madman for the instant, seized a handful of moist sand and hurled it spitefully into the upturned face of the man whose stubborn ignorance had placed in jeopardy his schemes for self-aggrandizement. But at that horrid moment Juan Rodriquez knew, for self-confession forced itself upon him, that it was his own weak yielding to the thirst for vengeance which had wrecked the vessel. Coward that he was, the fury of his self-reproach found vicious vent upon a lifeless trunk that had no power of protest against so grave a wrong.
The fervor of his unjust anger spent, Juan turned, like a snarling cur, from the outraged corpse, and, hungry for human intercourse, resolved to return at once to Doña Julia’s side, restore her to her senses, and fortify his faltering heart by the sound of a living voice. He had gazed into dead men’s faces until his soul was sick with the horror of the day. He glanced at the sinking sun petulantly, as if he awaited with impatience the black shroud that oncoming night would throw over the motionless bodies scattered along the beach.
Suddenly the youth, an expression of mingled astonishment, horror, and fear upon his changing face, fell upon his knees and crossed himself with a fervor begotten of the miracle upon which his straining eyes now gazed.
Beside the out-stretched figure of Doña Julia stood two angelic beings, taller than the run of men, who faced the sun and raised their arms straight upward toward the evening sky. They wore white robes, and from the distant dune to which the startled Juan crawled it seemed as if golden halos glorified the heads of these marvellous messengers from Paradise. They stood for a time with arms upraised, while to the straining ears of a youth whose heart felt like a lump of ice came the subdued notes of a chant which, he knew full well, was music not of earthly origin. Presently the angels bent their heads together, as if in heavenly converse, while Juan cast a stealthy glance across the sun-red sands to see if Miquel Sanchez had roused himself from death to totter toward God’s envoys with an awful accusation upon his lips. When his eyes turned toward the west again, relieved to find the sailor still lying stark and still, Juan saw that the angels had gently uplifted the body of Julia de Aquilar, and, with stately grace, were bearing it away toward the twilight of the foot-hills. With his wet garments chilling the very marrow in his bones, the thief and murderer watched these celestial beings bearing his love away to Paradise. The grim mockery of the chattering prayer that he breathed he could not comprehend. He paid the homage of furtive worship to angels whose searching glance, he feared, might seek him out behind his sandy lurking-place.
The red-fringed twilight had lost its glow, and the zenith had pinned a star upon its breast before Juan Rodriquez, still trembling at the miracle that he had seen, found courage to slink westward along the shore. Behind him dead men seemed to stalk, following his footsteps with grim persistence, while somewhere from the hills upon his right the eyes of angels searched his very soul. On across the beach he hurried, while the waters of the gulf turned black, and the dread silence of the night was broken only by the gossip of the waves, telling the sands a horrid secret that they had learned.
Alone with his thoughts, with the memory of dark crimes upon his soul, Juan strove through the long night to cast far behind him the haunted shore upon which angels came and went. The interplay of life and death had left him only this—the hope of wealth. Had he known that between him and the silver mines that he sought lay more than a thousand weary miles, he would have made a pillow of the sand in his despair.