He flung himself on his knees again beside the body, seized the hand with the ring, drew the jewel off and put it in his pocket. He scarcely noticed that a crab was clinging to the hand as he flung it aside. The left coat pocket of Sagesse was bulging. He thrust his hand in and drew out a knotted handkerchief; it chinked like a bag of marbles, and from a corner a piece of broken gold fell out. It was part of a brooch. He did not stay to investigate further; the handkerchief held treasure. He thrust it into his pocket and went on. There was a pocket-book in the breast pocket of the coat, in the other pockets nothing of value. He opened the waistcoat; he tore open the shirt; nothing more. Wiping the sweat from his brow, he was about to rise to his feet when he remembered that he had not examined the left hand for rings.
The left hand of Sagesse was closed tight on something. The _rigor mortis_ was just passing, and Gaspard had no difficulty in unlocking the fingers from the treasure they contained. It was a pearl, a lovely milk-white pearl, large almost as a pigeon’s egg. Why he had clung to this thing especially, whether from superstition or not, who can say?
Or was it a pearl not belonging to Serpente’s treasure at all? A pearl of the lagoon that by some extraordinary chance the drowning man had seized upon unknowingly in his struggles? One might almost have imagined this to be the case, for this thing was virginal as the sea and had evidently never been set or worn by mortal.
Who can say? But so the captain of _La Belle Arlésienne_ had gone to his Maker, clasping this emblem of purity in his hand, almost a parable on the mighty truth that each one of us, however evil, has yet, in his soul, somewhere, a priceless pearl.
He had risen to his feet. In his pockets lay the plunder he had taken from Sagesse, in his hand the pearl, around his feet the crabs swarming to their prey.
The sea had given him the riches that other men toil their lives for, given it to him in one great glittering handful. He seemed standing before a blinding light. It seemed unthinkable that he who had striven all his life for a pittance, working now as a sailor before the mast, now as a slave in the blind alley of the stokehold, it seemed unthinkable that he should have drawn this tremendous and glittering prize.