CHAPTER XI
WINDS OF CHANCE
Long that night the boy lay, couched on his bed of fern, and watched the gold and purple cyclorama of the night wheel over the coronals of the palms. Leagues to the North a girl sat, draped in a blue and white counterpane, listening to the ticking of the old Seth Thomas in the hall, and wished she could cry herself to sleep.
But the voyage of the bottle had begun—the tiniest of objects to outwit Fate, or else to consummate his plans.
Flowing in from the Atlantic, the ocean currents and their sighing overtones, the winds, bore it on and on to the West, past storied islands, like jewels adorning the burnished breastplate of the sea, some crowned with massive overhanging mountains, others nestling low on the waters, rich with fertile plantations and white-walled, red-roofed towns, steeped in molten sunshine, and slumbering 'neath royal palms—picturesque, unsewered, full of white palaces and mired, insect-ridden slums, yet all beautiful to look at from the sea, for the fairest hues are often born out of corruption.
Now the bottle was almost caught and churned to pieces in the swirl from a fruit-steamer's screw. Near St. Kitts, a gaudily-painted pleasure craft hove in sight; a mulatto's hand tried to grasp the long neck, but it bobbed out of reach. Above him, a girl, Cooks-touring the Indies, called:
"Sort of a message from home."
He heard her, and their mingling laughter came through the porthole, his with the mellow gold of the negro, hers all staccato and silver.
Then the currents swept the bottle through the straits of the Greater Antilles, until it floated with the myriad islands of seaweed on the waters of the Gulf, then swung it to the North beyond the Florida Keys.
And so the seasons passed, and many wonderful sights it could have seen, had it eyes and a soul, which it should have had with that message inside, but it was only a thing of sand and potash and lead-oxide, subject to immutable laws of wind and moon and tide, not caring at all about the loves of two mortals as frail and puny as itself.
So they came and went,—the white wings of many ships, low-waisted tramps, sullen derelicts, and once, after a storm, a raft of ship s timbers hastily lashed together, and on it a gigantic black with hollow eyes and emaciated cheeks, and around it those ever-winking fins.
Now the bottle was nosed by a school of porpoises curveting over the foam-curdled crests, their sleek sides turning to dusky rainbows in the sun. And again the twin masts of a steam-yacht pricked the horizon, then came daintily step ping over the waves. On its deck lay a great railroad king whose wallet had digested millions of securities in perfect comfort, but whose stomach could not even assimilate curds and whey.
And at last came bearing down on the bottle, the ship from the North that might have been Destiny's own. Under the overhanging stern were the letters,—"Mary Ann, Salthaven, Mass.," and from its quarterdeck a child perilously leaned over the rail, piping in the smallest of trebles:
"Daddy, see the bottle—it's dancing on the waves!"
But the bottle with the insistent message, of course, never answered at all, or clamoured, or even dislocated the cork in its neck, through any effort to be heard.
So shark and wreckage, spar and life-belt, tree and seaweed, flower and dead men, floated by. So cape and headland, and suns and storms, and winds and tides and seasons, passed; and countless tiny white wings in the blue above, and the great white wings of the ships on the blue beneath, and still the unthinking bottle danced gaily, almost sportively, on the waves.