Edward Barry, George Lewis Becke [lightweight ebook reader txt] 📗

a pause before Barry could bring himself to reply. The woman, with pale face and quivering lips, waited for his answer.

"Yes. He is dead."

Mrs. Tracey bent her head and covered her face with her hands.

"I knew it," she said, after one sob. "I knew I should never see him again--that they would murder him as they tried to murder me. Will you tell me how you knew it?"

"I saw him lying dead in Sydney. I was told that he shot himself in a fit of melancholy. He was lying on board the Mahina--and the Mahina is here at anchor in this lagoon. I am the chief officer."

"And the captain?"

"His name is Rawlings."

"Ah!--he is one of them, he was the passenger; and who are the other officers?"

"Barradas, a Spaniard, and a Greek."

"Paul, the boatswain! He it was who threw me overboard. Now tell me all you know about my husband. See, I am not crying. My grief is done. I will live now to take vengeance on these cruel murderers."

Barry was about to send his boat's crew out of hearing, but Mrs. Tracey begged him not to do so.

"Let them stay. It can do no harm; and if they are men, they will help me."

"I think you are right, Mrs. Tracey. And here is my hand and solemn promise to do all in my power to retake the Mahina, for now I begin to suspect that your husband did indeed meet with foul play."



[1] A foli is a huge mussel, with an edge as keen as that of a razor.



CHAPTER VIII.


MRS. TRACEY TELLS HER STRANGE STORY.

Mrs. Tracey listened with the most intense interest to Barry's account of his first meeting with Captain Rawlings, of the strange, mysterious midnight sailing of the Mahina from Sydney Harbour, and of the story of her husband's suicide as related by the captain to his newly-engaged chief mate on the following day, when he came on deck and said that Tracey was dead.

"It may be that my poor husband did indeed take his own life," she said, "but I do not believe it."

"Yet why should they--Rawlings and the others--have spared him so long?" inquired Barry.

"Neither Barradas nor Rawlings were navigators," replied Mrs. Tracey quickly.

"Ah, I see," and the chief officer stroked his beard thoughtfully; "but yet, you see, Rawlings would have sailed without a navigator on board had he not met me on the wharf that night."

"Perhaps so--yet I do not think it. He has the cunning of Satan himself."

"Indeed he has, ma'am," broke in Joe. "Why, sir," turning to Barry, "the night we sailed he drugged the Custom House officer and flung him into the dinghy. Then when you was for'ard heavin' up anchor the Greek and two of the native chaps took him ashore, and chucked him down on the wharf."

"The scoundrel!" exclaimed Barry, thinking of the letter he had written to Rose Maynard that night. "But how do you know this?"

"I been tell Joe jus' now," said one of the native seamen; "de captain give me an' Billy Onotoa ten shilling to take that man ashore with the bos'un. An' he say if we tell any one he kill us by an' by."

"The ruffian!" muttered Barry.

"Now that you have told me your own story, Mr. Barry," said Mrs. Tracey excitedly, "let me tell you mine from the beginning, and show you how this heartless wretch has imposed upon you from the very first. The tale he has given you is a tissue of lies, interwoven with a thread of truth."

"I can well believe it now. Many things which have hitherto puzzled me are now clear enough."

"Nearly two years ago," began Mrs. Tracey, "my husband owned and sailed a small cutter of thirty tons, trading among the Marshall and Caroline Islands. His headquarters were at Jaluit, in the Marshall Islands, where he had a store, and where I lived whilst he was away on his cruises. During the seven years we spent among these islands I would often accompany him, for it was very lonely on Jaluit--only natives to talk to--and he would sometimes be away many months at a time.

"On our last voyage in the cutter we called in at Port Lele on Strong's Island. Old Gurden, the trader there, and my husband had had business dealings with each other for many years. He was a good-hearted but very intemperate man, and several times we had taken him away with us in the cutter, when he was in a deplorable condition from the effects of drink, and nursed him back to health and reason again. On this occasion we were pleased to find him well, though rather despondent, for he had, he said, an idea that his last carouse had 'done for' him, and that he would not live much longer.

"That evening the old man told us the story of his life. It was a truly strange and chequered one. When quite a young man he had been flogged, and then deserted from H.M.S. Blossom, Captain Beechy, in 1825, and ever since then had remained in the South Seas, living sometimes the idle and dissolute life of the beach-comber, sometimes that of the industrious and adventurous trader. My husband was interested, for he liked the old fellow, who, in spite of his drunken habits, had many excellent qualities. For myself he always professed the greatest regard, and that evening he proved it.

"After he had finished his story he turned to my husband, and said--

"'You and your wife have always been true friends to drunken old Jack Gurden. Now, tell me, did you ever know me to tell a lie except when I wanted to get a drink and hadn't any excuse?'

"We both laughed, and said we knew he was a truthful man.

"'Did you ever hear me talking about a lagoon full of pearl shell--when I was mad with drink?' he inquired.

"We laughed again, and said that he had done so very often.

"'Ah,' he said, 'but it is true. There is such a place, and now that my time is coming near, I'll tell you where it is, and you, Mrs. Tracey, who have nursed the old drunken, blackguard beachcomber, and asked him to seek strength from God to keep off the cursed grog, will be one of the richest women in the world. I wrote it all down four or five months ago, in case when you came back here you found I was dead.'

"Thereupon he handed my husband a number of sheets of paper, on one of which was drawn a rough plan of Arrecifos Island, or, as he called it, Ujilong. The rest contained clear and perfectly written details of the position of the pearl-shell beds."

Barry nodded. "He had lived there, I suppose."

"For quite a number of years--from 1840 to 1846. He married one of the native women there. There were then over seven hundred natives living on these thirteen islands, and Gurden said he could quite understand why the richness of the pearl beds were never discovered by white men, for no ship had ever entered the lagoon within the memory of any living native of the place, and not once in ten years did the people even see a passing ship send a boat ashore."

(That this was true, Barry knew, for he had often heard trading captains speak of Arrecifos and Eniwetok as great chains of palm-clad islets, enclosing lagoons through which there was no passage for ships.)

"The natives themselves had no idea of the value to white men of the beds of pearl shell, and as a matter of fact Gurden himself at that time did not think them of much value. Later on, after he left the Island and visited China, he spoke to several merchants and traders there, and tried to induce them to send him back to the lagoon with a crew of divers, but as he was usually drunk when he called on them, no one would listen to him. His story was merely regarded as the fiction of a drunken sailor.

"My husband did not so regard it. He had never been to Arrecifos, but knew something of it by its native name of Ujilong and its chart name of Providence as a place of very few inhabitants--the group takes its name from the island off which you are anchored--living on a number of low islands covered with coconuts.

"'Let us go there and you can pilot me in,' he said to Gurden.

"The old man agreed with alacrity. Taking him on board, we sailed the following morning, and reached this place five days later. He took us in safely through the south-east passage, and the moment we landed he was recognised and welcomed by the people as one returned from the dead.

"We remained in the lagoon for three months, and during that time Gurden and my husband, aided by the willing natives, obtained ten tons of magnificent shell, and more than a thousand pounds' worth of pearls. Those which Rawlings showed you were some of them; I suppose he found them in my husband's cabin after he was murdered. He had often shown them to both Rawlings and Barradas on board the Mahina, for he was, as I will show you later on, the most unsuspicious and confiding of men.

"Convinced that there was indeed at least some hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of pearl shell to be obtained if he could secure experienced native divers from the equatorial islands--for these people here are not good divers--my husband decided to go to Honolulu, sell the cutter and the pearl shell we had obtained, and then with the money he had in hand, which amounted to about 1,100 pounds, buy a larger vessel, secure a number of good divers, and return to the lagoon, on one of the islands of which he intended to make his home for perhaps many years. Arrecifos, he knew, did not belong to any nation, and both he and old Gurden thought that the British Consul at Honolulu would give us what is, I think, called a 'letter of protection,' whereby a British subject hoisting the English flag upon one of the Pacific Islands can, with the approval of a naval officer, and the concurrence of the native inhabitants, purchase it, and get protection from the English Government.

"He wished Gurden to remain until we returned, but the old man said it would be too lonely for him, but that if we took him back to Strong's Island he would be content to await our return there. The long voyage to Honolulu, he thought, would be too much for him, and beside that he wished to return to Strong's Island, if only to say farewell to its people with whom he had lived for so many years. After that he would be content to end his days with us on Arrecifos.

"Returning to Strong's Island, we landed Gurden, and after a long and wearisome voyage reached Honolulu; my husband sold the pearl shell for a thousand pounds--about half its value--and the cutter and the rest of the cargo for 600 pounds, bought the Mahina, and