Cursed

VISIONS OF THE PAST

Comfortably installed in a huge easy-chair beside the freshly built fire in the “cabin” of Snug Haven and with one of Ezra Trefethen’s most artful egg-nogs within easy reach, the aged doctor leaned back, and sighed deeply.

“Maybe the captain’s right,” said he. “Maybe the boy’s all right. It’s possible; but I don’t know, I don’t know.”

Blinking, his eyes wandered about the room, which opened off from an old-fashioned hallway lighted by glass panels at the sides of the front door, and by a leaded fanlight over the lintel; a hallway with a curved stairway that would have delighted the heart of any antiquarian. The cabin itself showed by its construction and furnishing that the captain had spent a great deal of thought and time and money. At first glance, save that the fireplace was an incongruous note, one would have thought one’s self aboard ship, so closely had the nautical idea been carried out.

To begin with, the windows at the side, which opened out upon the orchard, were circular and rimmed with shining brass, and had thick panes inward-swinging like ships’ portholes. A polished fir column, set a trifle on a slant, rose from floor to ceiling, which was supported on white beams, the form and curve of which exactly imitated marine architecture. This column measured no less than a foot and a half in diameter, and gave precisely the impression of a ship’s mast. On it hung a chronometer, boxed in a case of polished mahogany, itself the work of the captain’s own hand.

All the lamps were hung in gimbals, as if the good captain expected Snug Haven at any moment to set sail and go pitching away over storm-tossed seas. The green-covered table bore a miscellany of nautical almanacs; it accommodated, also, a variety of charts, maps and meteorological reports. The captain’s own chair at that table was a true swinging-chair, screwed to the floor; and this floor, you understand, was uncarpeted, so that the holystoned planking shone in immaculate cleanliness as the declining sun through the portholes painted long, reddish stripes across it. Brass instruments lay on the table, and from them the sun flecked little high-lights against the clean, white paint of the cabin.

At the left of the table stood a binnacle, with compass and all; at the right, a four-foot globe, its surface scored with numerous names, dates and memoranda, carefully written in red ink. The captain’s log-book, open on the table, also showed writing in red. No ordinary diary sufficed for Alpheus Briggs; no, he would have a regulation ship’s log to keep the record of his daily life, or he would have no record at all.

In a rack at one side rested two bright telescopes, with an empty place for the glass now out on the piazza. Beneath this rack a sextant hung; and at one side the daily government weather-report was affixed to a white-painted board.

A sofa-locker, quite like a ship’s berth, still showed the impress of the captain’s body, where he had taken his after-dinner nap. One almost thought to hear the chanting of sea-winds in cordage, aloft, and the creak and give of seasoned timbers. A curious, a wonderful room, indeed! And as Dr. Filhiol studied it, his face expressed a kind of yearning eagerness; for to his fading life this connotation of the other, braver days brought back memories of things that once had been, that now could never be again.

Yet, analyzing everything, he put away these thoughts. Many sad years had broken the spirit in him and turned his thoughts to the worse aspects of everything. He shook his head again dubiously, and his thin lips formed the words:

“This is very, very strange. This is some form of mental aberration, surely. No man wholly sane would build and furnish any such grotesque place. It’s worse, worse than I thought.”

Contemplatively he sipped the egg-nog and continued his observations, while from the kitchen – no, the galley – sounded a clink of coppers, mingled with the piping song of old Ezra, interminably discoursing on the life and adventures of the unfortunate Reuben Ranzo, whose chantey is beknown to all seafaring men. The doctor’s eyes, wandering to the wall nearest him, now perceived a glass-fronted cabinet, filled with a most extraordinary omnium gatherum of curios.

Corals, sponges, coir, nuts, pebbles and dried fruits, strange puffy and spiny fishes, specimens in alcohol, a thousand and one oddments jostled each other on the shelves.

Nor was this all to excite the doctor’s wonder. For hard by the cabinet he now perceived the door of a safe, set into the wall, its combination flush with the white boards.

“The captain can’t be so foolish as to keep his money in his house,” thought Filhiol. “Not when there are banks that offer absolute security. But then, with a man like Captain Briggs, anything seems possible.”

He drank a little more of Ezra’s excellent concoction, and turned his attention to the one remaining side of the cabin, almost filled by the huge-throated fireplace and by the cobbled chimney.

“More junk!” said Dr. Filhiol unsympathetically.

Against the cobble-stones, suspended from hooks screwed into the cement, hung a regular arsenal of weapons: yataghans, scimitars, sabers and muskets – two of them rare Arabian specimens with long barrels and silver-chased stocks. Pistols there were, some of antique patterns bespeaking capture or purchase from half-civilized peoples. Daggers and stilettos had been worked into a kind of rough pattern. A bow and arrows, a “Penang lawyer,” and a couple of boomerangs were interspersed between some knobkerries from Australia, and a few shovel-headed spears and African pigmies’ blow-guns. All the weapons showed signs of wear or rust. In every probability, all had taken human life.

Odd, was it not, that the captain, now so mild a man of peace, should have maintained so grim a reliquary? But, perhaps (the doctor thought), Briggs had preserved it as a kind of strange, contrasting reminder of his other days, just as more than one reformed drunkard has been known to keep the favorite little brown jug that formerly was his undoing.

Filhiol, however, very deeply disapproved of this collection. Old age and infirmity had by no means rendered his disposition more suave. He muttered words of condemnation, drank off a little more of the egg-nog, and once again fell to studying the collection. And suddenly his attention concentrated, fixing itself with particular intentness on a certain blade that until then had escaped his scrutiny.

This blade, a Malay kris with a beautifully carved lotus-bud on the handle, seemed to occupy a sort of central post of honor, toward which the other knives converged. The doctor adjusted his spectacles and studied it for a long minute, as if trying to bring back some recollections not quite clear. Then he arose lamely, and squinted up at the blade.

“That’s a kris,” said he slowly. “A Malay kris. Good Lord, it couldn’t be —the kris, could it?”

He remained a little while, observing the weapon. The sunlight, ever growing redder as the sun sank over Croft Hill and the ancient cemetery, flicked lights from the brass instruments on the table, and for a moment seemed to crimson the vicious, wavy blade of steel. The doctor raised a lean hand to touch the kris, then drew back.

“Better not,” said he. “That’s the one, all right enough. There’s the groove, the poison groove. There couldn’t be two exactly alike. I remember that groove especially. And curaré lasts for years; it’s just as fatal now, as when it was first put on. That kris is mighty good to let alone!”

A dark, rusty stain on the blade set him shuddering. Blood, was it – blood, from the long ago? Who could say? The kris evoked powerful memories. The battle of Motomolo Strait rose up before him. The smoke from the fire in the grate seemed, all at once, that of the burning proa, drifting over the opalescent waters of that distant sea. The illusion was extraordinary. Dr. Filhiol closed his eyes, held tightly to the edge of the mantel, and with dilated nostrils sniffed the smoke. He remained there, transfixed with poignant emotions, trembling, afraid.

It seemed to him as if the shadowy hand of some malignant jinnee had reached out of the bleeding past, and had laid hold on him – a hand that seized and shook his heart with an envenomed, bony clutch.

“God!” he murmured. “What a time that was – what a ghastly, terrible time!”

He tried to shake off this obsessing vision, opened his eyes, and sank down into the easy-chair. Unnerved, shaking, he struck the glass still holding some of the egg-nog, and knocked it to the floor.

The crash of the breaking glass startled him as if it had been the crack of a rifle. Quivering, he stared down at the liquor, spreading over the holystoned floor. Upon it the red sunlight gleamed; and in a flash he beheld once more the deck of the old Silver Fleece, smeared and spotted with blood.

Back he shrank, with extended hands, superstitious fear at his heart. Something nameless, cold and terrible fingered at the latchets of his soul. It was all irrational enough, foolish enough; but still it caught him in its grip, that perfectly unreasoning, heart-clutching fear.

Weakly he pressed a shaking hand over his eyes. With bloodless lips he quavered:

“After fifty years, my God! After fifty years!”

CHAPTER XVIII

THE LOOMING SHADOW

Old Captain Briggs, meanwhile, absorbed in the most cheerful speculations, was putting his best foot forward on the road to Hadlock’s Wharf. A vigorous foot it was, indeed, and right speedily it carried him. With pipe in full eruption, leaving a trail of blue smoke on the late afternoon air, and with boots creaking on the hard, white road, the captain strode along; while the Airedale trotted ahead as if he, too, understood that Master Hal was coming home.

He made his way out of the village and so struck into the road to Endicutt itself. “The mingled scents of field and ocean” perfumed the air, borne on a breeze that blent the odors of sea and weedy foreshore and salt marsh with those of garden and orchard, into a kind of airy nectar that seemed to infuse fresh life into the captain’s blood. His blue eyes sparkled almost as brightly as the harbor itself, where gaily painted lobster-pot buoys heaved on the swells, where dories labored and where gulls spiraled.

Briggs seemed to love the sea, that afternoon, almost as he had never loved it – the wonderful mystery of tireless, revivifying, all-engendering sea. Joy filled him that Hal, in whose life lived all the hopes of his race, should have inherited this love of the all-mother, Ocean.

Deeply the captain breathed, as he strode onward, and felt that life was being very good to him. For the most part, rough hillocks and tangled clumps of pine, hemlock and gleaming birch hid the bay from him; but now and again these gave way to sandy stretches, leaving the harbor broad-spread and sparkling to his gaze. And as the old man passed each such place, his eyes sought the incoming canvas of the Sylvia Fletcher, that seemed to him shining more white, uprearing itself with more stately power, than that of any other craft.

Now and then he hailed the boy as if Hal could hear him across all that watery distance. His hearty old voice lost itself in the ebbing, flowing murmur of the surf that creamed up along the pebbles, and dragged them down with a long, rattling slither. Everything seemed glad, to Captain Briggs – dories hauled up on the sand; blocks, ropes and drying sails; lobster-pots and fish-cars; buoys, rusty anchors half-buried – everything seemed to wear a festive air. For was not Hal, now homeward bound, now almost here?

So overflowing were the old man’s spirits that with good cheer even beyond his usual hearty greeting he gave the glad news to all along the road, to those he met, to those who stopped their labors or looked up from their rest in yards and houses, to give him a good-evening.

“It is a good evening for me, neighbor,” he would say, with a fine smile, his beard snowy in the sun now low across the western hills. “A fine, wonderful evening! Hal’s coming home to-night; he’s on the Sylvia Fletcher, just making in past the Rips, there – see, you can sight her, yourself.”

And then he would pass on, glad, triumphant. And as he went, hammers would cease their caulking, brushes their painting; and the fishers mending their russet nets spread over hedge or fence would wish him joy.

Here, there, a child would take his hand and walk with him a little way, till the captain’s stout pace tired the short legs, or till some good mother from a cottage door would call the little one back for supper. Just so, fifty years ago, yellow-skinned Malay mothers had called their children within doors, at Batu Kawan, lest Mambang Kuning, the demon who dwelt in the sunset, should do them harm. And just so the sunset itself, that wicked night at the Malay kampong, had glowered redly.

A mist was now rising from the harbor and the marshland, like an exhalation of pale ghosts, floating vaguely, quite as the smoke had floated above Batu Kawan. The slowly fading opalescence of the sky, reddening over the hills, bore great resemblance to those hues that in the long ago had painted the sky above the jagged mountain-chain in that far land. But of all this the captain was taking no thought.

No, nothing could enter his mind save the glad present and the impending moment when he should see his Hal again, should feel the boy’s hand in his, put an arm about his shoulder and, quite unashamed, give him a kiss patriarchal in its fine simplicity and love.

“It is a good evening!” he repeated. “A wonderful evening, friends. Why, Hal’s been gone nearly six months. Gone since last Christmas. And now he’s coming back to me, again!”

So he passed on. One thing he did not note: this – that though all the folk gave him Godspeed, no one inquired about Hal. That after he had passed, more than one shook a dubious head or murmured words of commiseration. Some few of the fisherfolk, leaning over their fences to watch after him, talked a little together in low tones as if they feared the breeze might bear their words to the old man.

Of all this the captain remained entirely unaware. On he kept, into the straggling outskirts of Endicutt. Now he could see the harbor only at rare intervals; but in the occasional glimpses he caught of it, he saw the Sylvia Fletcher’s tops’ls crumpling down and perceived that she was headed in directly for the wharf. He hurried on, at a better pace. Above all things Hal must not come, and find no grandfather waiting for him. That, to the captain’s mind, would have been unthinkable treason.

The captain strode along the cobblestoned main street, past the ship-chandlers’ stores, the sail-lofts and quaint old shops, and so presently turned to the right, into Hadlock’s Wharf. Here the going was bad, because of crates and barrels of iced fish and lobsters, and trucks, and a miscellany of obstructions. For a moment the captain was entirely blocked by a dray across the wharf, backing into a fish-shed. The driver greeted him with a smile.

“Hello, cap!” cried he. “Gee, but you’re lookin’ fine. What’s up?”