CHAPTER XI

A SWIM IN THE LAGOON

We made a celebration of dinner, that first night after the _Myra’s_ return from New York. Besides our own family, there were the two Carreaus and Mr. Hopper, the mate from the _Myra_, so we were quite a big party.

Martin refused to sit down at the table, saying it wasn’t for a “hand before the mast” to dine with the Captain and Mate, and nothing we could say to him--about his being no longer connected with the schooner, but a member of the Island colony now--made any difference in his determination.

“I began as a mess boy,” he said. “And I guess I ain’t forgot how to wait on table. I’ll be your butler, Miss Gay, for the party.”

So, since he seemed to have set his heart on it, we finally let him have his way, and Aunt Mollie, who’d trained a good many waitresses in the old days before we left Braeburn, had to admit that Martin was a perfect butler, which made him blush fierily all over his freckled face in a most un-butlerish manner.

We had vegetables from Syd’s and my garden; oranges served in several varieties of styles, from the Sunset Island grove; and eggs, laid by our own chickens, cooked according to a brand new, sc-crumptious recipe Aunt Mollie had made up specially for the occasion. We hadn’t any fresh meat, but the _Myra_ had brought us a new supply of hams and bacon, and we had roast ham, Virginia style, with yams--candied. Yum-yum! as Reddy remarked feelingly when he first caught sight of the dish being carried in by Martin. And it certainly tasted as wonderful as it looked.

Andy, who’s an artist when it comes to flower decorations, had made the table a perfectly gorgeous riot of color, and at Madame’s place she had laid the sweetest little old-fashioned posy of the hardy perennials that must have once formed part of the original garden. It was a pretty little attention. I was disappointed for a moment I hadn’t thought of it myself, when I saw how touched Madame was as she picked it up and buried her nose in its colorful sweetness before pinning it on the front of her gown.

After dinner we sat around and talked, everybody trying to tell what had happened to them during the month we had been separated, and the hub-bub was awful. However, after a while Aunt Mollie declared that both Monsieur and Madame Carreau had had enough excitement for one evening, and that it was high time all of us were in bed.

I hadn’t had a chance to say anything to Syd yet about Madame’s suggestion of another treasure hunt, but as we were going up the broad stairway, I managed to whisper him a hurried account of our talk.

“That plateau is pretty far from the beach, you know,” he reminded me doubtfully. “It’s a bad climb too, and it would have taken a lot of hard work to clear a path through the jungle, for carrying treasure chests up there.”

“But maybe they had some other way of going, that we don’t know yet,” I insisted eagerly. “And, besides, they _wanted_ a hard place to get at, didn’t they? The harder the better, I should say. Old Morgan didn’t want anyone walking in sort of easy and casual and making off with his pieces of eight. And he had plenty of men in his crew to carry out orders, no matter how difficult they might be.”

Syd nodded. “Yes, that’s all quite true,” he agreed. “Of course, it doesn’t correspond with the map at all, but I’ve always had a hankering to look that plateau over. There must be a mighty fine view from there anyhow. As soon as we get a chance to clear a path, let’s organize another treasure hunt, and take it by easy stages so Madame Carreau can go too. She seems a good little sport, by what you tell me.”

I had to laugh at that description of the dainty, fragile looking little old lady, with her Dresden china coloring and her manner of being a sort of grand duchess of what Mademoiselle, at Miss Porter’s School, used to call the old _Faubourg Saint Germain_. But all the same I knew what Syd meant in spite of his slang. She was just as young and eager underneath her delicate outside, as any of us. If we had to take turns carrying her up that jungly climb to the plateau, I was resolved she shouldn’t miss the fun of going with us.

That night I dreamed a whole series of exciting dreams about _almost_ finding the buried treasure, and always just missing it by a silly little bit of bad luck at the end. I woke from the last of these to find that morning had come. The sun wasn’t up yet, but my window, which looked out to the east, showed long pink and golden streaks across the sky, and a lovely rose-tinted glow on the water--low down, where the clouds and ocean met.

This was the nicest hour of the whole day on the Island, because it was so fresh and cool and _clean_, somehow. You had a feeling that overnight the whole world had been scrubbed after the hot yesterday, and before the hot tomorrow. I didn’t always wake early enough to see it, but when I did, I never failed to spring out of bed, gather up a kimono and towels, and run down the old Planter’s Road to the beach, for a morning dip in the lagoon.

I was up out of bed in a jiffy that morning, and as I was stealing down the hall toward the stairs, trying to walk softly so as not to wake anyone else in the house, I was startled to see the door of Madame Carreau’s bedroom open, very carefully, an inch or two at a time, and Madame’s white head, covered with a gay lavender and rose bathing cap, peep out.

She smiled in a funny, half guilty manner at seeing me, and put her finger to her lips cautiously.

Then she opened the door wider, and slipped out into the hall to join me. She looked very tiny and doll-like, somehow, in a fleecy lavender kimono wrapped tightly round her, and with her bare feet in little high-heeled lavender silk mules that seemed just big enough for a six-year-old child.

She carried a huge Turkish bath towel over one arm, and I guessed at once that she was bound for the lagoon and a swim, just as I was. Probably it was an old custom of hers when she used to live on the Island.

Without either of us saying a word for fear of waking the sleepers round us, we tip-toed down the stairs side by side, and out across the terrace in front of the house. There Madame stopped and drew a long breath of the wonderful morning air. Her black eyes were shining.

“I had forgotten how beautiful it was,” she whispered. “You love it too, little Gay? This is the best time of the whole twenty-four hours, and those sleepy-heads waste it in bed! _Pouf!_ We are wiser, you and I!”

“I’m afraid I don’t always wake in time to come down here at this hour,” I said honestly. “But when I do, I’m up in a hurry. I’m glad you swim too. It’s lot nicer to have company. Andy’s too lazy for early morning exercise, and the boys like to wait till the middle of the morning when they can stay in longer. They say it’s so hot then they need to be cooled off more than now. But I like this time best.”

She put her hand out and pinched my cheek, but I noticed suddenly that her kind, faded, old eyes were looking at me sort of keenly.

“It is too beautiful, this morning, to keep all to ourselves,” she suggested, smiling that warm friendly smile of hers. “Why don’t you go upstairs--oh, very softly,--and bring that pretty little cousin Andrée down to share our swim with us? I have been more used to boys than young girls, all my life, but now that I have a chance, I propose to become acquainted with my own sex. Don’t you think if you wake her, Andrée would enjoy all this--loveliness?” She made a gesture that took in the morning about us, and with that funny, new feeling of having been unconsciously a bit unfair to my girl cousin, that I’d experienced yesterday in Madame’s room, I nodded and ran back into the house.

When I woke her, Andy was inclined to grumble just at first and roll over for another forty winks. But when she understood Madame wanted her, she sat up in a hurry.

“Why didn’t you tell me that at once?” she demanded rather crossly. “Isn’t she a wonder, Gay? Fancy her going swimming at sunrise, when she must be pretty nearly seventy years old.”

“She’s seventy years young, I guess,” I corrected her. “But, you’ve got to hurry if you’re coming. We can’t keep her waiting down there alone. Where did you put your Annette yesterday, it’s not in the closet--Oh, here it is, back of this door--grab a towel now and come on!”

Madame had a quick approving little smile for me when we came hurrying across the terrace to join her.

“Isn’t this a morning of mornings?” she greeted Andy. “Little Gay here, and I couldn’t bear to have you miss it.”

I was surprised to see Andy flush, and her lip start trembling unexpectedly at the words, but she looked away so we shouldn’t see and pretended to be fussing with a loose thread on her bathing suit.

“It was sweet of you not to forget me,” she said, still not looking up, and again I had that feeling of having been unkind without meaning it. It was a horrid, uncomfortable feeling, and it made me sort of half mad with myself for having had to be reminded about Andrée, and half mad with her for always waiting to be singled out, instead of joining in naturally like the rest of the family.

“Let’s start,” I said impatiently, deciding it was pleasanter to be doing something than to think just then.

So we three trotted along together down the Planter’s Road, and came out on the cool white sand of the lagoon beach. The sky and ocean were both quite a deep rose in the East now, and there was that lovely, spicy little breeze blowing from the land behind us that I’d smelled the first day the schooner lifted the Island.

No matter how many times I’d smelled it since, I had never got over feeling it meant romance and adventure, desert islands, buried treasure and all sorts of wonderful, unreal things that don’t happen in an every-day world.

I saw Madame lift her head suddenly, and sniff, and I knew she recognized the odor too.

“Once,” she said to us, “way out in India, I smelled something like it, at the edge of the jungle. We were traveling from a small native village, and had to cross quite a strip of real jungle to get to our next stopping place. It made me so homesick, I cried when my husband wasn’t looking. It was after then I began to want to come home to Sunset Island.”

She took off her lavender kimono and underneath it she had on the funniest, most old-fashioned bathing suit of black silk I’d ever seen, but somehow it suited her--all bunches and ruffles and little bows. I felt Andy and I were awfully modern in our Annettes, but she seemed to like them, and told us she knew one couldn’t swim really far in skirts. Anyhow, she just liked now to paddle about and lie down in the shallow water.

But when we were actually in, I found she swam a good deal better than she’d led us to suppose.

“I taught Raoul to swim when he was only five,” she told me shyly. “We used to swim out to the reef every morning, when he was a little older. I’d like to do that again.”

I was a little bit worried over this, because though it wasn’t a long swim across for me, or for the boys, Madame was a different matter. Even Andy, who wasn’t a strong swimmer, had never attempted it yet. However, Madame looked so little and light, I finally decided I could tow her safely ashore if she did give out on the way, so we set out, swimming slowly, a few feet apart, leaving Andy splashing lazily near the beach.

The surf was breaking over the barrier reef, but not as strongly as it would later when the tide was high, and we found a place where we could climb up and rest on the rocks without getting more than an occasional splash of spray. The first rim of the sun was showing through the clouds behind us, and when we sat facing the shore there was a wide gold pathway right across the lagoon, from our feet to the white sand of the beach.

The Island itself looked awfully deserted and mysterious from the reef. The undergrowth was so thick that you couldn’t see the house, or any of our improvements and outbuildings. The land sloped upward from the beach to the north, to the pointed hill I’d always called Sugar Loaf, on top of which was the small, jungle-covered plateau Madame wanted to search for the treasure.

Uncle Joe had estimated the height of that hill at about three hundred feet or so, but from the reef, and in the early morning light, it looked higher--and sort of dark and forbidding as well. You could easily believe, just looking at it, that it had all kinds of secrets to keep. So why not Morgan’s too?

Madame Carreau pointed it out with her small, wrinkled hand.

“Raoul climbed it several times,” she said. “Do you see that little break in the jungle growth--over there to the right? You can scarcely find it--as if there’d been a road cut through once. It’s nearly grown over now, I suppose. Raoul cut that path so I could go exploring with him, but my husband was always worrying about my heart--he thinks because I look frail I must be delicate. My family have always tried to make an invalid of me by too much care and pampering. But I’m really as strong as--as a carthorse.” She ended so emphatically, and the comparison was so utterly absurd applied to her, that I had to laugh. She joined me a second afterwards but kept nodding her head determinedly.

“Now don’t you get to fancying, Gay, that my husband is right,” she warned. “He finally succeeded in frightening Raoul so he would never take me up there.” Once more her hand pointed to the top of Sugar Loaf. “But now _I’m going_, and I’m counting on you, _bébé_, to help me. I want to see that view from up there, and have one more hunt for Morgan’s gold pieces before I die.”

After that we slipped into the water again, and swam comfortably back to the beach. She seemed a little out of breath, I thought, when we reached the sand, and I insisted that we should lie there a while to dry off and rest, before going back to the house.

I scooped up the sand into a high chair-back for Madame to lean against, and Andy and I sprawled out luxuriously, on either side of her and talked for nearly an hour, till we heard the sound of the breakfast gong clanging faintly down the Planter’s Road through the woods to us, and all jumped to our feet guiltily.

But in that hour Andy and I learned to know Madame as an old friend. We said afterwards we couldn’t quite believe she had arrived on the _Myra_ only the day before, and that in reality we had known her for less than twenty-four hours.

She told us such vivid, quaintly worded stories of Sunset Island--the traditions about its former pirate visitors, the building of the plantation house by Rosemary’s husband--the first Carreau to settle on the Island over a hundred years ago--and last of all, but scarcely less interesting, her own life in Planter’s House, and Raoul’s boyhood.

In return I told her of Braeburn--Andy as usual preferring to sit back and listen--and how Aunt Mollie had taken me in when my mother died and my young father was drowned at sea rescuing one of his own men. Except for that part about Daddy, the rest of what I had to tell sounded pretty tame to me, compared with Madame’s stories, but she really seemed interested, and kept asking questions that finally drew Andy, too, on to talk about Dan and Sydney, and little Red, and all our good times together.

Then while we were both still chattering like magpies, finding something new to remember at every pause, that gong rang, and we were suddenly reminded that we were starved for breakfast.

So we started back up the road, and Madame thought of the little side door that led into the passageway behind the back-staircase, and let us slip up to our rooms without meeting any of the family.

Monsieur Carreau, seated at Aunt Mollie’s right, looked up with a twinkle in his black eyes when we appeared in the dining room.

“Now, Mademoiselle Gay and Mademoiselle Andrée, I am wondering which of you three led the others into mischief,” he said. “You will find that this wife of mine, although she may appear to be sixty, is in reality no more than six, and liable to get into all sorts of scrapes unless you keep an eagle eye on her.”

The family laughed, and Madame, her own eyes twinkling as brightly as Monsieur’s, sat down in her place by Uncle Charles, and attacked her orange with a hungry air.

“You should know my habits after forty years, Jean,” she said with pretended severity. “I was taking my morning swim in the lagoon, and these young ladies have also the same excellent and healthful custom. _Voila!_ We swam together.”

Perhaps it went through Monsieur Carreau’s mind, as she spoke, that she had formed her habit of swimming years ago, with a much nearer and dearer companion than either Gay or Andrée, for his face softened, though he merely nodded and resumed his breakfast.

“We discussed the treasure _cache_,” Madame went on with her brave little air of gaiety. “We are going to make a real business of the search. I warn you all that this time we are going to accomplish something.”

“Hooray for Madame Carreau!” Syd cried impulsively, and then blushed scarlet for fear he’d be thought forward and disrespectful. But Madame looked as pleased as Punch.

“Will you join our search party, Sydnee?” she asked him. She had queer, unexpected little touches of accent at times, especially in saying names, and at others she would talk ahead without giving a sign that she had been brought up to French as her mother tongue.

“You bet!” Syd said with emphasis, and only grinned when Aunt Mollie arched her eyebrows at him as she does when we get too slangy. It’s the nearest she ever comes to actual scolding.

“Madame doesn’t mind--she’s used to boys,” Syd said quickly, and then stopped short, for fear his reference to Raoul might hurt our guests.

“Yes, I am used to boys,” Madame wasn’t hurt, but pleased. “As I told you I am not so used to girls,” she added apologetically, smiling at Andrée and me. “But I am already very fond of two.”

That day Syd, Andrée and I appointed ourselves a committee of three to show Madame and Monsieur all the changes we had made in the house and grounds, and our plans for the future. They were as interested and excited as we could have asked, and every once in a while would stop to point out something to each other, and say softly, “You remember? See--this is different--Why did we not think of doing so?” Or else--“Here it is the same. We could have remembered no better ourselves.”

After the midday meal, Madame rested, and Monsieur sat in the big, cool hall by the fountain, and read during the heat of the early afternoon. But about the time the shadows had lengthened out along the Planter’s Road, and walking was pleasanter, Madame came downstairs--in old-fashioned lavender sprigged dimity--and they set out together for the beach, arm in arm.

“I guess maybe they want to talk about Raoul and old days,” Andy said with a quick sympathy that surprised me a little from her. “Suppose we stay away a while, and let them get accustomed to things.”