“WAKE up! Wake up! If you want to see the Southern Cross, wake up and come on deck!” And we remember how long we had been waiting for those wonderful stars, and how Daddy, who many nights slept on deck, had told us that he often saw them, and how we had, night after night, vowed we would make the effort to awaken at two in the morning, and how, each night, we had slept along, too tired with the wonder days to move an inch until bugle-call.

But here comes this far-off voice again calling us from the Northland of dreams, and it seems to be saying, “This is your last chance. By to-morrow (whenever that uncertainty comes!) the stars will have rolled away, or you will have sailed along, and there will be no Southern Cross, and you may as well not have come away down here to the Spanish Main at all if you miss seeing it,”—and then we wake a bit more, and the figure in the doorway stands there with “come” on his face, and “wake up!” on his lips, and we try to think how sorry we shall be if we do not see the Southern Cross. And then the door closes with a rather contemptuous click, and we land in the middle of the floor, aroused by the disappearance of the figure in pajamas and by our somewhat reawakened sense of duty.

Throwing on light wrappers, the little girls stumble along after me to where our man stands leaning against the rail, his face turned skyward.

“There it is—see? Right in the south, directly opposite the Great Bear that sunk below the northern horizon two hours ago. One star down quite low, near the horizon, and one almost in a straight line above, and one at either side equal distances apart, like an old four-cornered kite. You must imagine the cross. But it’s hardly what it’s cracked up to be!” And we blink at the stars, and they blink at us, and we feel strangely unreal and turned about.

What in all the world has the Southern Cross to do with the nineteenth century? It belongs to Blackbeard, and the great procession of pirates and roving buccaneers who swept these seas in tall-sparred, black-hulled craft, some hundreds of years ago. One or the other of us is out of place. The only consistent part of the night is, that, while our eyes are searching for the four luminous dots in the Southern Cross, our ship is plunging on toward Jamaica, that one-time Mecca of the bandit rover of the sea. There he found safe harbour and friends in the same profession; there it was that the hoards of Spanish gold and plate and all conceivable sorts of plunder, taken from the hapless merchantmen, were bought and sold and gambled away. But, without the accompaniment of roystering pirates and swaggering buccaneers, the Southern Cross seems out of joint. Jamaica may do as she is, but, as we look out across the scurrying waters, there’s a malicious twinkle to the top star in the Southern Cross and that makes us all the more determined to give it an opportunity to renew old acquaintance. We’ll have a pirate—we must have a pirate, if not a real one, bloody and black and altogether fascinating, we must conjure one by magic! Pirates there must be! So, to pacify our insatiable desire to resuscitate the ghostly heroes of the long-dead past, the Spanish Student offers a yarn.

Four bells of the second night watch rings out, and “All’s well!” floats above our heads, and the witching hour of two in the morning brings the proper flavour to the story. We cuddle down on some stray ship chairs, and the story begins:

“Once upon a time—”

“Oh, dear! Is it to be a ‘once upon a time’ story, Dad? Then it won’t be real,” breaks in the Wee One.

“Yes, it is real, Chick; at least, so far as I know. But you must not interrupt me again. If you do, I might forget, and then the Cross up there would put out its lights and go to bed.”

“No, Dad, I’ll be good.”

“Well, once upon a time, there was a doughty old French Corsair, who was one of the most daring pirates on the Spanish Main. Morals were in a topsyturvy state in those days, and in none were they more wrong-side-to than in this famous old Frenchman. He had a long, low, topsail schooner, painted black, with sharp clipper stem, clean flush decks and tall and raking masts, and—”

“I know all about him, Dad. He had a black beard, and he used to braid it in lots of pigtails, and tie it with ribbons,” says Wee One, again.

“Now, Toddlekins, what did I say? I shall certainly bundle you off to bed. No, it wasn’t Blackbeard, but it was a pirate just as fierce and fully as bad mannered. This old fellow had been rampaging around here, there, and everywhere, all about this Caribbean Sea and along the Spanish Main, in search of ships and gold and prisoners, and occasionally even food, and in fact anything of value he might come across; when not very far from where we are now—yes, just about this latitude, it was, but a few leagues more to the west—by the light of the stars—yes, by the light of this very Southern Cross, he makes out the land, and soon after spies a tidy, prosperous little village handy to the shore of a palm-fringed inlet. Like the provident pirate that he was, he at once decides that he is both hungry and thirsty and that his lusty followers are short of rations. Here is a likely port from which to supply.

“So off goes a long-boat filled with his precious cutthroats, carrying a pressing invitation to the village priest and some of his friends to come aboard. The fat priest is routed out and escorted to the waiting boat; he understands his mission, he has seen such men before. So, taking along a few chosen friends, he makes the best of a bad business and is rowed off to the ship in short order. The citizens, meanwhile, are requisitioned for all sorts of food and drink, and the priest and his friends have a jolly time of it as hostages. But as his wit grows with the wine it occurs to our Corsair that, with a priest aboard, Holy Church should have due reverence, and roars out his imperative suggestion that mass would be in order. An altar is rigged up on the quarter-deck, holy vestments and vessels are quickly brought from the village church, and the ship’s crew are summoned to assemble and warned to take hearty part in the service. In place of music, broadsides are ordered fired from the pirate’s cannon after the Credo, after the Elevation, and after the Benediction. At the Elevation of the Host, the captain finds occasion to reprove a sailor for lack of reverence. But at a second offence from the same trifler, out comes his cutlass—a swift, shining circle follows the Corsair’s blade, and off flies the still grinning head and the blood spirts high from the jumping trunk. The poor priest is startled, but the captain reassures him with kind words, for, says he, it is only his duty and always his pleasure to protect the sanctity of holy things; he would do the same thing again—and a thousand times!—to any one who was disrespectful to the Holy Sacrament. For why is there a great God above and his Holy Church on earth except to be honoured? Then the service continues as if nothing had happened and again comes the whine of the Latin chants and the thunder of the reverent guns.

“After mass, the body is heaved overboard and no burial rites are said, for who shall try to save a heretic’s soul? The priest is put ashore with many a smile and oath and many a pious crossing, and our Corsair and his pack of thieves go their way, having paid their respects to Holy Church.”

“Oh, Dad!” says Toddlekins, “that was lovely; is it true? Tell us another! Just one more! Don’t you remember about Captain Kidd?

“Don’t you remember the other verses? You used to sing them to us on the yacht before we ever thought of seeing the real Southern Cross.”

And just as the indulgent parent begins to waver, and the little girls are sure they have won another story, down—down—down—drops a big star, the foot of the Cross, millions of miles away, and the three lonely wanderers still hanging low in the heavens reach out their great shadowy arms in ghostly warning to those unthinking children of Adam who defy time and sleep and all things reasonable, just for the sake of a few old memories of a very questionable past.

Then those three deserted stars quiver and shiver and hide behind the wandering company of torch-bearers, and silently disappear, and a tired moon gives a vague uncertainty to sea and air.

In spite of the early morning mystery, all our efforts to reinstate the French Corsair, the black-hulled phantom, and the headless sailor, fail.

The decks of the ship are damp and empty and long. The ungainly deck chairs are locked together in gruesome lines like monstrous grasshoppers dying in winrows, and the great engines below beat and throb, and the water rolls past us in giant breathings, full of the sighs of dead men lying fathoms deep beneath our keel, and the stars sink lower and lower, and we are hurrying on toward the morning. Our eyes are still longing for sleep, and the little girls flutter down below, and we two after them. In the morning, after some strange dreams, we lie at anchor off the Blue Mountains of Jamaica.