Cursed

“To fifty years of life!” the doctor exclaimed. He stood up, raising the glass that Briggs had given him. His eye cleared; for a moment his aged hand held firm.

“To fifty years!” the captain echoed. And so the glasses clinked, and so they drank that toast, bottoms-up, those two old men so different in the long ago, so very different now.

When Filhiol had resumed his seat, the captain drew a chair up close to him, both facing the sea. Through the doctor’s spent tissues a little warmth began to diffuse itself. But still he found nothing to say; nor, for a minute or two, did the captain. A little silence, strangely awkward, drew itself between them, now that the first stimulus of the meeting had spent itself. Where, indeed, should they begin to knit up so vast a chasm?

Each man gazed on the other, trying to find some word that might be fitting, but each muted by the dead weight of half a century. Filhiol, the more resourceful of wit, was first to speak.

“Yes, captain, we’ve both changed, though you’ve held your own better than I have. I’ve had a great deal of sickness. And I’m an older man than you, besides. I’ll be eighty-four, sir, if I live till the 16th of next October. A man’s done for at that age. And you’ve had every advantage over me in strength and constitution. I was only an average man, at best. You were a Hercules, and even to-day you look as if you might be a pretty formidable antagonist. In a way, I’ve done better than most, captain. Yes, I’ve done well in my way,” he repeated. “Still, I’m not the man you are to-day. That’s plain to be seen.”

“We aren’t going to talk about that, doctor,” the captain interposed, his voice soothing, as he laid a strong hand on the withered one of Filhiol, holding the arm of the rocker. “Let all that pass. I’m laying at anchor in a sheltered harbor here. What breeze bore you news of me? Tell me that, and tell me what you’ve been doing all this time. What kind of a voyage have you made of life? And where are you berthed, and what cargo of this world’s goods have you got in your lockers?”

“Tell me about yourself, first, captain. You have a jewel of a place here. What else? Wife, family, all that?”

“I’ll tell you, after you’ve answered my questions,” the captain insisted. “You’re aboard my craft, here, sitting on my decks, and so you’ve got to talk first. Come, come, doctor – let’s have your log!”

Thus urged, Filhiol began to speak. With some digressions, yet in the main clearly enough and even at times with a certain dry humor that distantly recalled his mental acuity of the long ago, he outlined his life-story.

Briefly he told of his retirement from the sea, following a wreck off the coast of Chile, in 1876 – a wreck in which he had taken damage from which he had never fully recovered – and narrated his establishing himself in practice in New York. Later he had had to give up the struggle there, and had gone up into a New Hampshire village, where life, though poor, had been comparatively easy.

Five years ago he had retired, with a few hundred dollars of pitiful savings, and had bought his way into the Physicians’ and Surgeons’ Home, at Salem, Massachusetts. He had never married; had never known the love of a wife, nor the kiss of children. His whole life, the captain could see, had been given unhesitatingly to the service of his fellow-men. And now mankind, when old age had paralyzed his skill, was passing him by, as if he had been no more than a broken-up wreck on the shores of the sea of human existence.

Briggs watched the old man with pity that this once trim and active man should have faded to so bloodless a shadow of his former self. Close-shaven the doctor still was, and not without a certain neatness in his dress, despite its poverty; but his bent shoulders, his baggy skin, the blinking of his eyes all told the tragedy of life that fades.

With a pathetic moistening of the eyes, the doctor spoke of this inevitable decay; and with a heartfelt wish that death might have laid its summons on him while still in active service, turned to a few words of explanation as to how he had come to have news again of Captain Briggs.

Chance had brought him word of the captain. A new attendant at the home had mentioned the name Briggs; and memories had stirred, and questions had very soon brought out the fact that it was really Captain Alpheus Briggs, who now was living at South Endicutt. The attendant had told him something more – and here the doctor hesitated, feeling for words.

“Yes, yes, I understand,” said Briggs. “You needn’t be afraid to speak it right out. It’s true, doctor. I have changed. God knows I’ve suffered enough, these long years, trying to forget what kind of a man I started out to be; trying to forget, and not always able to. If repentance and trying to sail a straight course now can wipe out that score, maybe it’s partly gone. I hope so, anyhow; I’ve done my best – no man can do more than that, now, can he?”

“I don’t see how he can,” answered the doctor slowly.

“He can’t,” said the captain with conviction. “Of course I can’t give back the lives I took, but so far as I’ve been able, I’ve made restitution of all the money I came by wrongfully. What I couldn’t give back directly I’ve handed over to charity.

“My undoing,” he went on, then paused, irresolute. “My great misfortune – was – ”

“Well, what?” asked Filhiol. And through his glasses, which seemed to make his eyes so strangely big and questioning, he peered at Captain Briggs.

CHAPTER XVI

THE CAPTAIN SPEAKS

The captain clenched his right fist, and turned it to and fro, studying it with rueful attention.

“My undoing was the fact that nature gave me brute strength,” said he. “Those were hard, bad days, and I had a hard, bad fist; and together with the hot blood in me, and the Old Nick, things went pretty far. Lots of the things I did were needless, cruel, and beyond all condemnation. If I could only get a little of the guilt and sorrow off my mind, that would be something.”

“You’re morbid, captain,” answered Filhiol. “You’ve made all the amends that anybody can. Let’s forget the wickedness, now, and try to remember the better part. You’ve changed, every way. What changed you?”

“Just let me have another look through the glass, and I’ll tell you what I can.”

Briggs raised his telescope and with it swept the harbor.

“H-m!” said he. “Nothing yet.”

“Expecting some one, captain?”

“My grandson, Hal.”

“Grandson! That’s fine! The only one?”

“The only one.” Briggs lowered his glass with disappointment. “He’s the sole surviving member of the family, beside myself. All the rest are up there, doctor, in that little cemetery on the hilltop.”

Filhiol’s eyes followed the captain’s pointing hand, as it indicated the burial-ground lying under the vagrant cloud-shadows of the fading afternoon, peaceful and “sweet with blade and leaf and blossom.” In a pine against the richly luminous sky a bluejay was scolding. As a contrabass to the rhythm of the blacksmith’s hammer, the booming murmur of the sea trembled across the summer air. The captain went on:

“I’ve had great losses, doctor. Bitter and hard to bear. After I fell in love and changed my way of life, and married and settled here, I thought maybe fate would be kind to me, but it wasn’t. One by one my people were taken away from me – my wife, and then my son’s wife, and last of all, my son. Three, I’ve lost, and got one left. Yet it isn’t exactly as if I’d really lost them. I’m not one that can bury love, and forget it. My folks aren’t gone. They’re still with me, in a way.

“I don’t see how people can let their kin be buried in strange places and forgotten. I want to keep mine always near me, where I can look out for them, and where I know they won’t feel lonesome. I want them to be right near home, doctor, where it’s all so friendly and familiar. Maybe that’s an old man’s foolish notion, but that’s the way I feel, and that’s the way I’ve had it.”

“I – think I understand,” the doctor answered. “Go on.”

“They aren’t really gone,” continued Briggs. “They’re still up there, very, very near to me. There’s nothing mournful in the lot; nothing sad or melancholy. No, Ezra and I have made it cheerful, with roses and petunias and zinnias and all kinds of pretty flowers and bushes and vines. You can see some of those vines now on the monument.” He pointed once more. “That one, off to starboard of the big elm. It’s a beautiful place, really. The breeze is always cool up there, doctor, and the sun stays there longest of any spot round here. It strikes that hill first thing in the morning, and stays till last thing at night. We’ve got a bench there, a real comfortable one I made myself; not one of those hard, iron things they usually put in cemeteries. I’ve given Hal lots of his lessons, reading and navigation, up there. I go up every day a spell, and take the dog with me, and Ezra goes, too; and we carry up flowers and put ’em in jars, and holystone the monument and the headstones, and make it all shipshape. It’s all as bright as a button, and so it’s going to be, as long as I’m on deck.”

“I think you’ve got the right idea, captain,” murmured Filhiol. “Death, after all, is quite as natural a process, quite as much to be desired at the proper time, as life. I used to fear it, when I was young; but now I’m old, I’m not at all afraid. Are you?”

“Never! If I can only live to see Hal launched and off on his life journey, with colors flying and everything trig aloft and alow, I’ll be right glad to go. That’s what I’ve often told my wife and the others, sitting up there in the sunshine, smoking my pipe. You know, that’s where I go to smoke and think, doctor. Ezra goes too, and sometimes we take the old checkerboard and have a game or so. We take the telescopes and sextant up, too, and make observations there. It kind of scandalizes some of the stiff-necked old Puritans, but Lord love you! I don’t see any harm in it, do you? It all seems nice and sociable; it makes the death of my people seem only a kind of temporary going away, as if they’d gone on a visit, like, and as if Hal and Ezra and I were just waiting for ’em to come back.

“I tell you, doctor, it’s as homy and comfortable as anything you ever saw. I’m truly very happy, up there. Yes, in spite of everything, I reckon I’m a happy man. I’ve got no end of things to be thankful for. I’ve prospered. Best of all, the main thing without which, of course, everything else wouldn’t be worth a tinker’s dam, I’ve got my grandson, Hal!”

“I see. Tell me about him, captain.”

“I will. He’s been two years in college already, and he’s more than made good. He’s twenty-one, and got shoulders on him like Goliath. You ought to see him at work in the gym he’s fitted up in the barn! Oh, doctor, he’s a wonder! His rating is A1, all through.”

“I don’t doubt it. And you say he’s coming home to-day?”

“To-day – which makes this day a great, wonderful day for his old grandfather, and that’s the living truth. Yes, he’s coming home for as long as he’ll stay with me, though he’s got some idea of going out with the fishing-fleet, for what he calls local color. He’s quite a fellow to make up stories; says he wants to go to sea a while, so he can do it right. Though, Lord knows, he’s full enough of sea-lore and sea-skill. That’s his grandfather’s blood cropping out again, I suppose, that love for blue water. That’s what you call heredity, isn’t it, doctor?”

“H-m! yes, I suppose so,” answered Filhiol, frowning a little. “Though heredity’s peculiar. We don’t always know just what it is, or how it acts. Still, if a well-marked trait comes out in the offspring, we call it heredity. So he’s got your love of the sea, has he?”

“He surely has. There’s salt in his blood, all right enough!”

“H-m! You don’t notice any – any other traits in him that – remind you of your earlier days?”

“If you mean strength and activity, and the love of hard work, yes. Now see, for example. Any other boy would have come home by train, and lots of ’em would have traveled in the smoker, with a pack of cigarettes and a magazine. Does Hal come home that way? He does not! He writes me he’s going to work his way up on a schooner, out of Boston, for experience. That’s why I’m keeping my glass on the harbor. He told me the name of the schooner. It’s the Sylvia Fletcher. The minute she sticks her jib round Truxbury Light, I’ll catch her.”

“Sylvia Fletcher?” asked the doctor. “That’s an odd coincidence, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“Why, just look at those initials, captain. Sylvia Fletcher– S.F.”