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ON THE BORDERLAND
* * * * * *
BOOKS BY
F. BRITTEN AUSTIN
ACCORDING TO ORDERS
IN ACTION
ON THE BORDERLAND
THE SHAPING OF LAVINIA
THE THING THAT MATTERS
* * * * * *
ON THE BORDERLAND
by
F. BRITTEN AUSTIN
[Illustration: Logo]
Garden City New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1923
Copyright, 1923 by
Doubleday, Page & Company
All Rights Reserved, Including That of Translation
into Foreign Languages, Including the Scandinavian
Copyright, 1919, by the Curtis Publishing Company in
the United States and Great Britain
Copyright, 1919, 1920, by International Magazine Co.
Copyright, 1920, by Consolidated Magazines Corporation
(The Red Book Magazine)
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States
at
The Country Life Press, Garden City, N. Y.
First Edition
TO
EDWARD CECIL
IN
OLD FRIENDSHIP
CONTENTS
PAGE
BURIED TREASURE 1
A PROBLEM IN REPRISALS 28
SECRET SERVICE 51
THE STRANGE CASE OF MR. TODMORDEN 83
THROUGH THE GATE OF HORN 98
THE WHITE DOG 122
A POINT OF ETHICS 143
THE LOVERS 165
HELD IN BONDAGE 187
SHE WHO CAME BACK 211
FROM THE DEPTHS 231
YELLOW MAGIC 253
ON THE BORDERLAND
BURIED TREASURE
For the last twenty minutes the after-dinner talk of the little group
of men in the liner’s smoking-room had revelled in the uncanny. One
man had started it, rather diffidently, with a strange yarn. Another
had capped it. Then, no longer restrained by the fear of a humiliating
scepticism in their audience, they gave themselves up to that
mysteriously satisfying enjoyment of the inexplicably marvellous, vying
with each other in stories which, as they were narrated, were no doubt
more or less unconsciously modified to suit the argument, but which one
and all dealt with experience that in the ultimate analysis could not
be explained by the normal how and why of life.
“What do you think of all this, doctor?” said one of the story-tellers,
turning suddenly to a keen-eyed elderly man who had been listening in
silence. “As a specialist in mental disorders you must have had a vast
experience of delusions of every kind. Is there any truth in all this
business of spiritualism, automatic writing, reincarnation and the rest
of it? What’s the scientific reason for it all?--for some reason there
must be! People don’t tell all these stories just for fun.”
The doctor shifted his pipe in his mouth and smiled, his eyes twinkling.
“You seem to find a certain amount of amusement in it,” he
remarked, drily. “The scientific reasons you ask for so easily are
highly controversial. But many of the phenomena are undoubtedly
genuine--automatic writing, for instance. It is a fact that persons
of a certain type find their hand can write, entirely independent
of their conscious attention, coherent sentences whose meaning is
utterly strange to them. They need not even deliberately make their
mind a blank. They may be surprised by their hand suddenly writing on
its own initiative when their consciousness is fixed upon some other
occupation, such as entering up an account-book. Always they have
a vivid feeling that not their own but another distinctly separate
intelligence guides the pen. This feeling is not evidence, of course.
It may be an illusion; probably is.
“The best-analyzed reincarnation story is probably that dealt with by
Professor Flournoy in his study of the famous medium Hélène Smith of
Geneva. This lady sincerely believed herself to be a reincarnation
of Marie Antoinette--and in her trance-state she acted the part with
astonishing fidelity and dramatic power. In her normal condition she
certainly possessed neither so much detailed knowledge of the life of
the ill-fated queen nor so much histrionic ability. She also wrote
automatically, and some of her productions were amazing, to say the
least of them. Well, Professor Flournoy’s psychological investigations
proved clearly to my thinking that it was a case of her subconscious
mind dramatizing, with that wonderful faculty of impersonation which
characterizes it, a few hints accidentally dropped into it and
combining with her subconscious memory, which forgets nothing it has
ever heard or read or even casually glanced at, to produce an almost
perfect representation of Marie Antoinette. Also he proved that her
automatic writing emanated from her own subconscious mind and nowhere
else.
“Now, I am not going to say that discarnate spirits do not communicate
through this subconscious activity of which one form is automatic
writing. I am not going to say that we do not become reincarnated
through an endless cycle of lives. I do not know enough about it to
assert such a negative--no one does. All I know about the human mind
is that we know very little about it. It is like the moon, of which
you never see more than the small end. Infinite possibilities lie in
the shadow. You are only conscious of a small fraction of your own
personality. The subconscious--the unillumined portion of your soul--is
incomputably vast. It learns everything, forgets nothing; possibly
it even goes on from life to life. When it is tapped by any of those
traditional means which nowadays we call spiritualistic one may--or may
not--come across buried treasure.”
“But you yourself do not believe in the truth of spiritualism as an
actual fact, doctor?” queried one of the group, a trace of aggression
in his tone.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders.
“I accord _belief_ to a very limited number of attested facts, my
friend,” he said. “That I am sitting here with you, for example. I am
ready to adopt provisionally all sorts of hypotheses to explain those
varied phenomena of life, the ultimate explanation of which must in any
case elude me. They are hypotheses for myself--I do not announce them
as dogmas for others. But--if you do not think it is too late--I will
tell you a story, a rather queer experience of my own, and you can form
your own hypotheses in explanation of it.”
There was a chorus of approval. The doctor waited while the steward
refilled the glasses at the instance of one of the group, relit his
pipe, and settled himself to begin.
It was in 1883. I was a young man. I had recently finished walking the
hospitals, got my degree, and before settling down into practice at
home had decided to see a little of the world. So I signed on for a few
voyages as a ship’s doctor. At the termination of one of them I found
myself at a loose end in New York. There I became friendly with the son
of a man who in his young days had been a Californian “Fortyniner,”
had made a pile, settled East, become a railroad speculator and made
millions--William Vandermeulen.
Old Vandermeulen had a delicate daughter, Pauline, then about nineteen
years of age and in the incipient stages of consumption. Under medical
advice, he was accustomed to take her each winter for a cruise
around the West Indies in his steam yacht. That year, young Geoffrey
Vandermeulen persuaded his father to ship me as medical officer. There
was nothing alarming in the young girl’s condition, of course, or a
much older and more experienced man would have accompanied them. She
was merely delicate.
We were a small party on board: the old man, his wife--a faded old lady
with no personality whatever--Pauline, Geoffrey, and myself. Geoffrey
was an ordinary, high-spirited young man, intelligent and a pleasant
companion, but not particularly remarkable. His sister was mildly
pretty but utterly devoid of attractiveness, extremely shy, and given
to sitting in blank reverie over a book. Although she always had one in
her hand, she read, as a matter of fact, very little. It was just an
excuse for day-dreaming. Of this girl the old man, otherwise as keen as
a razor and as hard as nails--commercially, I believe, he was little
better than a pirate--was inordinately fond. Outside business, she
was the absorbing passion of his life. There was no whim of hers that
he would not gratify. It was rather pathetic to see the old scoundrel
hanging over her frail innocence, all that he had of idealism centred
in her threatened life.
The cruise was pleasant but uneventful enough for some weeks. We
pottered down through the Bahamas to Jamaica and then turned eastward
with intent to visit the various ports of the Antilles as far south as
Barbados.
It was one evening while we were chugging peacefully across the
Caribbean Sea that occurred the first of the remarkable incidents which
made this voyage so memorable to me. I remember the setting of it
perfectly. We were all in the saloon; I suppose because the night was
for some reason unpleasant. The weather was calm, at any rate. Geoffrey
and I were reading. Old Vandermeulen and his wife were playing
cribbage. Pauline was sitting at a writing-table fixed in a corner of
the saloon, entering up the day’s trivial happenings in the diary which
she religiously kept. I remember glancing at her and noticing that she
was chewing the nail of her left thumb--a habit of which I was vainly
trying to break her--as she stared vacantly at the bulkhead, no doubt
ransacking her memory for some incident to record.
Suddenly she turned round upon us with a startled cry.
“Look, Mamma!--I have scrawled all over my diary without knowing that I
did it!--Isn’t that strange!”
We all of us looked up languidly. The mother made some banal remark,
but did not withdraw her attention from her cards. The father glanced
affectionately toward her without ceasing to count up the score he was
about to peg on the board. Geoffrey and I continued our reading.
But the girl had been puzzling over the scrawl and all at once she
jumped up from her seat and came across to us.
“Look!” she said. “Isn’t it funny? These words--they’re all like the
words on blotting-paper--they go backwards and inside out! And there
are figures, too!--Whatever could have made me do it?--And I don’t
remember doing it either, though of course I must have done so. There
was nothing on that page a minute before, I am sure of that!”
There was something curiously uneasy in the girl’s manner, a note in
her voice that impressed me. I got up, took the open diary from her
hand and there sure enough was a large uneven scrawl, two lines of it,
diagonally across the page, and, as she said, reversed, as though it
had been blotted down upon it.
Almost without thinking, I held the open page against one of the
mirrors panelled in the saloon wall--and I could not repress a cry
of astonishment. The scrawl was a decipherable sentence, mysterious
enough, but coherent!--I’ll write it down for you as nearly as I
remember it, so as to show you how it looked. He produced pencil and
paper from his pocket, wrote: “_lucia 1324 N 8127 W katalina sculle
point SWbS 3 trees digge jno dawson youre turne_:” There you are--the
last two words were added like a postscript and were followed by
a rough sketch, an irregular oval over a St. Andrew’s cross, like
this--O/X
I read out what was written, and Pauline stared at me wide-eyed.
“Whatever could have made me write that?” she exclaimed.
Geoffrey looked up, fraternally scornful.
“It’s a thin joke, Pauline! You can’t monkey us in that fashion! I
suppose you want to pretend that the ghost of some old pirate wrote it
down in your book so as to start us off on a Treasure Island hunt.”
Stevenson’s romance was then in its first success and Geoffrey had just
been reading it. “Of course, you wrote it deliberately--what nonsense!”
She turned round upon him, her eyes filling with tears in the vehemence
of her protest.
“Geoffrey, I couldn’t!--I couldn’t write reversed like that if I tried!”
“Oh, yes, you could,” asserted Geoffrey, confidently. “It’s easy
enough.”
“Supposing we all try,” said I, curious to test its feasibility. I felt
considerably puzzled. Pauline was not at all the sort of girl one would
expect to persist in such a pointless sort of practical joke as this,
and persistent she was--tearful like a child unjustly accused of a
crime of which it protests innocence.
Her mother and father renounced their game of cribbage and bent their
heads together over the enigmatic screed, without proffering an
opinion. It was evident that they did not wish to hurt their daughter’s
feelings by open scepticism. They would have humoured her in anything,
no matter how absurd.
I reiterated my suggestion and it was accepted in the spirit of a
parlour-game. A line from a book was selected, we all tried--and we all
failed hopelessly. None of us got more than two or three consecutive
letters right. It is not so easy as it sounds. Try it for yourselves!
At that time, although spiritualism was a great craze in America,
and D. D. Home, Eglinton, and other famous mediums, were arousing
enormous interest and controversy in England, automatic script was
an uncommon phenomenon. Table-rapping, levitation, slate-writing and
materialization were the wonders in vogue--and I had then never heard
of the “mirror-writing” which has since become a frequent form of
automatic expression. Neither, of course, _à fortiori_, had the young
girl who had just produced this mysterious specimen.
We all felt puzzled and impressed at our failure to imitate
deliberately the reversed script. Old Vandermeulen picked up the diary
and read the reflection of the scrawled page in the wall-mirror.
“Well, it’s sure strange!” he said in his twangy drawl. “Geoff! You
write this down in a straightaway hand and we’ll see if we can get any
sense out of it. I guess there’s some meaning in it. Pauline ain’t
joking.”
Geoffrey obeyed and read out the script again.
“‘_lucia 1324 N 8127 W katalina sculle point SWbS 3_ _trees digge jno
dawson youre turne_’--It’s exactly like the directions to a pirate’s
buried treasure, Father!” he added, excitedly. “Skull and crossbones
and all! But of course that’s ridiculous! Though I can’t understand how
Pauline could have written it like she did!”
“And I did not know even that I was writing!” asseverated Pauline, “let
alone know what I wrote! It was just as if my hand did not belong to
me--it was a sort of numbness that made me look down.”
“Tear it up, dear!” implored her mother anxiously. “I am sure it comes
from the Devil!” Mrs. Vandermeulen belonged to a particularly strict
little sect and was always ready to discern the immediate agency of
the Evil One.
“Devil or not!” said old Vandermeulen. “I guess if there’s any buried
treasure lying around here, I’m going to peg out my claim on it.”
He turned to me. “Young man, was there ever any pirates about these
parts?” The old ruffian was quite illiterate; had never, I believe,
read a book in his life.
“Why, yes,” I replied, “from the end of the sixteenth century these
seas were the chief haunt of the buccaneers and, after them, of the
pirates who were not entirely suppressed until well in the eighteenth
century. There must be any amount of their hidden treasure buried in
these islands.”
“You don’t say!” he exclaimed, his avaricious old eyes lighting up.
“And here have I been running this yacht up and down these parts for
five years at a dead loss!” His disgust would have been comic, were
it not for the ugly, ruthless lust of gold which looked suddenly out
of his face. “Guess I’m going to quit this fooling around right away!
I don’t know and don’t care if it was the Devil himself wrote this
specification in Pauline’s book--I’m darned sure she didn’t write it
herself--the handwriting’s different, d’you see?”--It was, as a matter
of fact, compared with the previous pages, quite another hand--hers
was an upright, rounded schoolgirl calligraphy, this was a cursive
old-fashioned script inclined well forward. “So as we’ve got nothing
else to start upon, we may as well see if there’s anything to it.” He
tossed Geoffrey’s transcription across to me. “What do you make of it,
young man?” he asked, with the sneering condescension he accorded to my
superior literary attainments.
I took it, rather amused at the old scoundrel’s simplicity. That there
was any authentic meaning in Pauline’s scrawl seemed to me wildly
improbable. I was a frank materialist in those days and had Carpenter’s
formula of “unconscious cerebration” glibly ready to cover up anything
psychologically abnormal. However, I considered the sheet of paper with
attention.
“Assuming this to be a genuine message,” I said, “it would appear to
give the precise latitude and longitude of some point where it is
desirable to dig. I take it that the figures stand for 13 degrees
24 minutes North, 81 degrees 27 minutes West. The world ‘_lucia_’
puzzles me--unless the island of St. Lucia is meant. What ‘_katalina_’
stands for, I do not know--it is evidently a proper name of some kind,
‘_sculle point SWbS 3 trees digge_’ presumably means that one should
dig under three trees south-west-by-south of Skull Point--wherever
that is. ‘_jno dawson_’ is, of course, John Dawson. Assuming this
to be a spirit-message from the other world,” I could not help
smiling ironically, “it is possibly the name of the ghost who is
communicating--and who desires to indicate to some person that it is
his or her turn. He does not specify for what. I may remark that the
ghost is either ill-educated or he has an archaic taste in spelling.”
“I don’t like it,” said Mrs. Vandermeulen, querulously timid. “Do
tear it up, William! I am sure harm will come of it!--It is the Devil
tempting you!”
“So long as he’s serious, he can tempt me sure easy!” said the old
ruffian in a tone of cool blasphemy which sent the colour out of his
wife’s face. He rang the bell and the negro steward appeared. “Sam! Ask
Captain Higgins to step in here for a moment!”
Captain Higgins, the skipper of the yacht, was a level-headed mariner
of middle age whom nothing ever ruffled. He was competence itself.
“Good evening, Captain Higgins,” said old Vandermeulen, fixing him
with the keen eyes under shaggy gray brows, eyes which defied you to
divine his purpose whilst they probed yours. “What’s the latitude and
longitude of the island of St. Lucia?”
“Fourteen North, sixty-one West,” replied Captain Higgins promptly.
Old Vandermeulen turned to me.
“Then it’s not St. Lucia, young man,” he said. He picked up Geoffrey’s
transcription. “Well, now, Captain Higgins, is there any place
thirteen-twenty-four North, eighty-one twenty-seven West?”
The skipper reflected a moment.
“No place of importance, certainly. I’ll get the chart.”
He returned with it, spread it out on the saloon table, ran his
forefinger across it.
“Here you are!” he said. “A small island called Old Providence. It
belongs to Colombia.”
Geoffrey, who was peering over his shoulder, uttered a startled
exclamation.
“And look!” he cried. “There’s your Katalina!” He pointed to a small
islet just north of Old Providence, a mere dot on the chart. “Santa
Katalina!--My hat! that is weird!”
It certainly was. From whatever stratum of Pauline’s consciousness her
writing had emanated, it was an amazing thing that she should have
written down the exact latitude and longitude of a tiny island off the
Nicaraguan coast and named it correctly. Even I could not help feeling
that it was more than a fortuitous coincidence, that it was uncanny.
The others surrendered themselves straight away.
I turned to look at Pauline. She was deathly white; evidently
frightened at being made the vehicle of this message from the beyond.
Her mother clutched at her, as though protecting her from unseen
dangers. Geoffrey’s imagination had caught fire, his eyes were bright
with excitement.
“My sakes! Pauline!” he cried. “I believe you now! You couldn’t have
written that out of your head. I’ve read of things like this before--I
guess you’re a medium and didn’t know it!--Father! We’ll track this
message down, wherever it comes from, say now?”
“It comes from the Devil! Tear it up--oh, tear it up!” implored Mrs.
Vandermeulen. “William! Tear it up--don’t follow it!”
Old Vandermeulen turned to the skipper. His jaw had set hard, his lips
were compressed, only the glitter in his eyes, peering in a momentary
fixation of thought from under his bent brows, showed that he shared
the excitement of his son. So he must have looked in his office when he
took the decisions which had made his millions.
“Captain Higgins,” he said, curtly ignoring the supplications of his
wife, “how long will it take us to reach that island?”
The skipper put his finger on the chart at a point south of Haiti.
“We’re here,” he said. He measured off the distance. “At our best rate
of twelve knots--about sixty hours steaming.”
The old man nodded.
“Put her about,” he said. His harsh tone had an odd ring about it, as
though he was secretly conscious of affronting mysterious dangers, was
all the more emphatic. “Right now!”
Captain Higgins never queried owners’ orders.
“Very good, sir,” he replied, stolidly, and walked out of the cabin.
A minute or two later we felt the yacht swing round. There is always
something impressive when a ship on the open sea goes about upon her
course, but I never felt it more powerfully than then. It seemed that
there was a fateful significance in our deliberate action.
Geoffrey meanwhile was poring over the sheet of paper on which he had
transcribed his sister’s reversed scrawl.
“It’s all perfectly clear,” he said, triumphantly. “We’ve got to make
this island of Santa Katalina, thirteen-twenty-four North, eighty-one
twenty-seven West, try and find a place called Skull Point, look for
three trees south-west-by-south of it, and dig! We understand every
word of it now!”
“All except the word ‘_lucia_’” I corrected, “and whose turn it is.”
“Yes--there’s that,” he said, dubiously. “I suppose every word has some
meaning.”
“You can bet it has!” I replied, half sarcastically humouring his
credulity, half surrendering myself to an uncritical acception of these
mysteriously given directions. “I wonder who this John Dawson was--if
he existed?”
“He’s a sure-enough ghost of some old pirate!” said Vandermeulen, with
complete conviction. “And I guess he’s putting us fair and good on to
his pile!”
I laughed, involuntarily, at this childishness. The old man frowned.
“There’s some things that perhaps even you all-fired clever young
fellows don’t know,” he said, crushingly. “’Tain’t the first time I’ve
heard of this sort of thing. A mate of mine in the old days at ’Frisco
was waked up one morning by the ghost of a prospector who’d died up in
the ranges. He told him just where he’d made his strike before his grub
gave out. My mate had never heard of the place but he lit straight away
on the trail--and sure enough the ghost was telling the truth. Old Jim
Hamilton it was--and he drank himself to death on what he got out of
it.” The old man looked me straight in the eyes as though challenging
me to doubt him. Of course, I could say nothing. He grunted scornfully,
and turned again to the chart still spread out upon the table. “It’s
a nice quiet out-of-the-way place,” reflected the old ruffian,
putting his thumb-nail on the lonely island. “Just the location for
a cache--guess they’d feel pretty sure of not being interfered with
there!” There was a grim undertone in his voice which was decidedly
ugly. He might, himself, have been the reincarnation of just such a
pirate as the one whose existence he was postulating.
Well, nothing more happened that night. Mrs. Vandermeulen, thoroughly
alarmed and uneasy, hustled her daughter off to bed. Old Vandermeulen
and his son sat up in an endless discussion of the mysterious script,
referring again and again to the chart which so startlingly confirmed
its indications, and speculating optimistically as to the nature and
amount of the treasure they were convinced was buried in the designated
place. They talked themselves into a complete faith in the supernatural
origin of the message, and, father and son alike--it was curious to
note the traits of resemblance which cropped out in them--were equally
indifferent as to whether its source was diabolic or benevolent.
Enormously wealthy although they already were, the prospect of this
phantom gold waiting to be unearthed had completely fascinated them.
At last I turned in, wearied with the thousand and one questions they
asked me and to which I could give no answer, disgusted with their
avarice, and scornfully contemptuous of their simplicity.
I found sleep no easy matter. Sceptical though I was, I could not get
Pauline’s curious production out of my head, and the more I thought of
it the more inexplicable seemed its coincidence with the chart. The
subconscious mind, with its amazing memory, its dramatic faculty, its
unexpected invasion of the surface consciousness in certain types, was
not then the commonplace of psychology that it is now--or I should
probably have referred the whole thing to the combination of a casual,
apparently unheeding, glance at the chart with a memory of some of
her brother’s remarks about “Treasure Island,” automatically and
dramatically reproduced. As it was, I could formulate no explanation
that satisfied me--though I utterly disbelieved in the ghost of a
piratical John Dawson, of which the two Vandermeulens were now fully
persuaded.
The next day found us steaming steadily westward. Father and son could
talk of nothing else but their fancied buried treasure and their plans
for digging it up without taking the crew of the yacht into their
confidence. Mrs. Vandermeulen hovered round her daughter, horribly
anxious of she knew not what, but--after having been once silenced by
a peremptory oath from her husband--afraid to make further protest.
Pauline herself sat all day in a deck-chair, more silent even than
usual, staring dreamily across the empty sea in a reverie which ignored
us all. Naturally, I watched her closely. But, except that her eyes had
a kind of haunting fear in them, she seemed perfectly normal. Evidently
the occurrence of the previous night had shocked her profoundly, for
once, when I casually mentioned it, she shuddered and implored me not
to speak of it again. The fear of the uncanny in herself stared out of
her eyes as she entreated me.
This dreamy absorption in herself continued until supper time that
evening. Throughout the meal, I do not think she uttered a single
word. She seemed not even to hear the conversation around her, but
toyed listlessly with her food and finally ceased to eat long before
the others had finished. Watching her with a professionally interested
observation, I was uneasy. She had leaned back in her chair, was gazing
straight before her with wide-open eyes. Suddenly I noticed that they
had glazed over. All expression faded out of her face. The arm that
rested on the salmon-table stiffened into a cataleptic sort of rigidity.
Her mother was also anxiously watching her.
“Pauline!” she cried. “Are you ill?”
There was no answer. The girl sat like a statue. Mrs. Vandermeulen
glanced at me in wild alarm, silently imploring my intervention.
Old Vandermeulen and his son were hotly arguing the desirability or
otherwise of informing Captain Higgins of their plans, and took no
notice of us.
I got up from my seat and went round the table to the girl. I lifted up
her lifelessly heavy arm with my fingers on her pulse. It was normal.
“Miss Vandermeulen!” I said, rather sharply. “Are you not well?”
She turned her head slowly round to me, like a sleep-walker faintly
aware of some sound that does not, however, wake her, and stared me
full in the face with eyes in which there was not the slightest glimmer
of recognition.
“Pauline!” almost screamed her mother, “don’t you know your own name?”
An expression of curious intelligence dawned in her face--her aspect
changed in some subtle manner, as though another, quite different,
personality was emerging in her--she laughed in low, confident tones
utterly unlike her ordinary laugh.
“My name is Lucia!” she said, as though stating a well-known fact.
Lucia! To say that we were startled is to understate our
astonishment--we were dumbfounded. The first word of the cryptic
message! We gazed at her for a moment as at a complete stranger
from the clouds--and indeed she looked it, as she smiled at us with
bright malicious eyes. The diffident Pauline we knew had completely
disappeared.
“She is possessed!” screamed her mother. “Oh, God--restore her! restore
her!”
The girl stood up suddenly from her chair, passed her hand over her
eyes, shook herself as though shaking off sleep. She turned away from
us deliberately.
“Oh, John!” she said, and there was an odd little foreign accent in
her tone, “I have dreamed--such a strange dream! I dreamed--I know
not!--that I was not Lucia!” She laughed softly in her new low tones,
“--That strange people were asking me my name. Then I woke--oh, John!”
she sidled up in a wheedling manner to what, so far as we could see,
was vacant space. “I am Lucia, am I not?--And you love me? You love
me?” Her shoulders moved sinuously as though she were putting herself
under the caresses of a person invisible to us. “You love me--and I
love you, although you have only that one terrible eye!” She still
spoke with that curious foreign accent which lent a certain piquancy
to her speech. “You love me, you John Dawson, you Englishman, you love
me for ever, say?” She reminded me of Carmen sidling up to Don José.
“You not deceive me--or----!” She looked up as into a tall man’s face
with a sudden expression of feline vindictiveness, her white teeth
showing in an ugly little rictus of the mouth, and slid her hand down
stealthily toward her stocking. “But no!” She smiled; her hand came up
again as though to rest upon a man’s shoulder. “You love me--and I love
you--and,” her voice dropped, “when we have killed the others we go
away with the treasure--you promise me, John Dawson?”
She appeared utterly unaware of our presence. There was a dramatic
intensity in her voice and gestures which thrilled even me, although I
had attended some hypnotic experiments in London and was aware of the
complete realism with which a somnambulist will play a part suggested
to him. I had no doubt whatever that she was in a state of hypnosis,
accidentally self-induced, and that she was merely acting on the
suggestions of the talk she had overheard.
Her mother, however, had no such consoling certitude. She hid her face
in her hands, groaning: “She is possessed! She is possessed! Oh, God,
cast out the evil spirit! cast out the evil spirit!”
Geoffrey was white to the lips, appalled, unable to utter a sound. The
old man stared at her, fascinated, a strange gleam in his eyes.
The mother turned to me in despair.
“Oh, doctor! Do something--do something!--Oh, if only we had a minister
here! She is possessed by an evil spirit! My Pauline! My Pauline!”
She sank on her knees by one of the swivel-chairs, gave herself up to
agonized prayers. “Oh, God, cast out the evil one! Oh, God, cast out
the evil one!”
Thinking that this strange incident had already lasted more than long
enough, I took a step toward the girl with a vague idea (though I
didn’t quite know how) of breaking the hypnosis. She stood looking
upward still, with a wheedling, diabolical smile, into apparent
nothingness.
“We will go together--we two--with the treasure, say, John Dawson?” she
murmured seductively, the very incarnation of a Delilah. “Mansvelt is
dead--we will run away from Simon and go with my people before they
kill us all--they are very many and you can only hold out two-three
days--but we might take the treasure, John Dawson, the treasure you
and Simon hid with Mansvelt--Simon, we will kill him--and we will go
away and be rich--rich, John Dawson--say?” Her voice was perfidiously
honeyed, her eyes glistened, as she caressed that uncanny empty air.
“What is she talking about?” muttered Geoffrey in a low, excited voice.
“Who are these people--Mansvelt and Simon? Have you heard of them,
doctor?”
I shook my head. They were utterly unknown to me. For a moment I
hesitated, fascinated by the little drama, curious to hear more.
The mother moaned.
“Oh, do something, doctor! do something!--Save her! Save her! Oh, God,
deliver her from the evil one!”
Her agony recalled me to my professional duty. I started forward but
before I could reach her I was snatched back by a violent hand on my
shoulder.
“Stand aside!” commanded old Vandermeulen in a terrible voice. “Evil
spirit or no evil spirit, I guess it knows all about that treasure--and
I’m going to hear what it’s got to say!” Of his normal love for his
daughter there was not a trace. The man was completely dominated, to
the exclusion of any other sentiment, by the lust for gold, more gold.
He looked scarcely human as his eyes glowered upon me, murder in them
if I thwarted him. “If it’s the Devil himself that’s got her--let her
talk!”
But the mother sprang up with a wild shriek, rushed toward her daughter.
“Do you wish her eternal damnation?” she cried, flinging her arms
about the girl. “Pauline! Pauline! For the love of God, don’t you know
me?--Oh, say a prayer--say a prayer after me!” She commenced the Lord’s
Prayer in a voice that trembled with anguish.
The girl stood rigid in her embrace, drawn up away from her, looking
down upon her with fixed and hostile eyes. She made one instinctive
movement to escape--and then suddenly crumpled in a swoon upon the
floor.
She came round easily enough under simple restoratives, looked up at
us with childish, bewildered eyes--the old Pauline again! Her mother
completely broke down over her, sobbing in almost crazy joy at her
restoration. Emotionally infected, perhaps, the girl also gave way to
a hysterical passion of weeping, which would not be checked, and for
which she could give no reason. She seemed not to have the slightest
recollection of the part she had just played. Old Vandermeulen, still
obsessed by his lust for the treasure, tried to question her. She only
stared at him dumbly--a vague fear coming into her eyes, but giving
no response. I silenced him with all the authority of my professional
position, and got the girl into her stateroom, where we left her with
her mother.
Throughout the next day neither of the two women appeared. Pauline
was utterly prostrated, and she remained in bed. Her mother stayed
with her, under strict injunctions to mention nothing of last night’s
terrible scene.
Meanwhile, of course, we were steadily drawing nearer to the Nicaraguan
coast and the island of Old Providence with its tiny and, to us,
fascinating satellite, Santa Katalina. Even I could not help wondering
what we should find there. The two Vandermeulens were in a fever of
excitement, cursing at every moment the slowness of the yacht. We were,
as a matter of fact, due to reach the island early next morning.
Some time in the afternoon, the old man approached me confidentially.
“Say, young know-all,” he said, “what d’you figure out was the meaning
of last night’s gaff? I guess Pauline ain’t got no natural talent for
play-acting like that.”
Rather foolishly, I amused myself with his credulity.
“Of course,” I said, concealing a smile, “it may be that in a previous
existence your daughter’s name was Lucia--the Spanish lady friend of
some of the buccaneers and particularly of a certain John Dawson, who
is now directing her to the treasure they buried together a few hundred
years ago.” I regretted my words the moment they were uttered. The
man’s infatuation needed no fanning from me.
“By God, you’ve hit it!” he exclaimed. “And she’s just remembering!--I
guess she can lead us straight to it!”
“Don’t be absurd!” I said, pettishly. “I was only joking!”
He glared at me in savage disappointment.
“You’re joking with the wrong man!” he said harshly. “Besides, it sure
ain’t impossible!--You don’t know what happens to us when we’re dead,
though you do think you know everything!”
“No--it’s not impossible,” I conceded. “But it’s improbable.”
“That’s your opinion,” he sneered. “You know nothing about it!--I’ve
had them feelings myself--feelings that I’ve been to a place before
when I sure know I haven’t. By God, that’s it!--Pauline’s just
remembering--coming back to these old places--and she’ll take us a
bee-line to the cache!”
He strode off to impart this illuminating theory to his son, and I saw
no more of them until supper time. They were, I was sure, concerting
some plan for cutting me out of a share in the treasure.
They had the furtive look of a couple of conspirators as we three,
Pauline and her mother still absent, sat that night at table. Both
forced themselves to exhibit a strained politeness to me, which
obviously concealed some treacherous design. I didn’t like the
atmosphere at all and was impelled to clear it.
“By the way,” I remarked, casually, “I don’t want a share in that
treasure--I prefer to work for my living.” As I had not the slightest
faith in its existence, this renunciation was not difficult. “Supposing
your theory to be true, it belongs to Miss Vandermeulen if it belongs
to any one.”
“Sure, that’s so!” agreed the old man. “It’s Pauline’s treasure, right
enough. Ain’t it, Geoffrey?”
“I guess it’s no one else’s,” said Geoffrey, picking up the idea. “I’ll
see to that.”
I could not help smiling at the gratuitous menace in his tone; he might
have been sitting on the treasure-chests already.
At that moment we were startled by an appalling scream, a choking cry,
from Pauline’s stateroom.
We rushed in and stood for a moment transfixed with horror. Pauline,
leaning out of her bunk, was throttling with both hands the life out
of her mother, who had been sitting by the bedside. In a flash of my
first perception of the scene, I saw that the girl had reverted to
her trance-personality. It was Lucia who had that deadly grip upon
the other woman’s throat, Lucia who glared at her with fiendishly
triumphant eyes, Lucia who gloated mockingly in her foreign accent:
“Ah, Teresa!--You think you would take the Englishman from me--you
think you would go away with John Dawson and the treasure?” She
laughed, cruelly exultant. “I think no, Teresa--I think no--not with
the treasure! You can go with that John Dawson, yes! But not with the
treasure! You go and wait for him--for your John Dawson--I will send
him to you--soon--soon!” Her low laugh was diabolical.
We flung ourselves upon her, but her strength was superhuman. She
seemed utterly oblivious of us, as heedless of our struggles as
though we were not there. Her eyes flashing, her teeth showing, she
continued to jeer at her victim in her foreign voice: “He will come
to you to-night--your John Dawson--as he promised, yes! I will send
him to you----!” Only as we finally tore the almost strangled Mrs.
Vandermeulen from her hands did she suddenly cease to speak. She sank
back upon the bed, swooning into complete unconsciousness.
I drove out the father and son and applied myself to reviving the
mother. I shall not forget the terrible night I had with her, after she
had resuscitated. At length, I had to give her a few drops of laudanum
to get her off to sleep. Pauline slept like a child.
I woke up the next morning to that strange feeling of hushed stillness
which pervades a ship when her engines are at rest after a long period
of unbroken activity. We were pitching heavily, evidently at anchor,
for our upward rise was every now and then suddenly and jarringly
arrested. We had arrived!
I went to look at my patients and found them both suffering from
sea-sickness. This vicious plunging of the yacht was more than their
weak stomachs could stand. I gave them each a steadying draught and
then went on deck.
The two Vandermeulens were on the bridge with the skipper. I ignored
them, instinctively avoiding their certain excitement. Upon our port
bow was a fairly large island, its rocky shore crowned with a dense
tropical foliage. On the other side of us was a small islet, barren
save for a few sparse trees scattered over it, surf breaking white upon
its beaches. Old Providence and its satellite, Santa Katalina! Between
the two islands a strong current was running, with a heavy ground-swell
in which we plunged and kicked, straining at our cables. No wonder the
two ladies were ill, I thought, as the deck sank sickeningly sideways
under my feet.
I went into the saloon and found that the Vandermeulens had already
breakfasted. As I ate my solitary meal, I could hear the heavy
trampling of feet on the deck overhead, and guessed that they were
hoisting outboard the little steam-launch we used when in harbour.
When I had finished, I went to have another look at Pauline. Her mother
was with her. Mentally, she was completely her normal self, with
apparently no memory even of that trance-personality which had for
the second time surged up in her. But she was feeling very ill in this
violent and disturbing motion of the anchored yacht.
Old Vandermeulen came in.
“Get up and dress, Pauline!” he commanded, brutally, as though bearing
down opposition in advance. “We’re going ashore!”
His wife sprang forward.
“Oh, no, no, William! Don’t take her! Don’t take her!--Don’t tempt
Providence. Don’t go! William! William!” she clung to him in
supplication. “She’s too ill to go! She’s too ill to go, isn’t she,
doctor?”
The old man shook her off.
“Nonsense!” he said roughly. Nevertheless, he turned enquiringly to me.
I considered the pros and cons dispassionately for a moment. Of course,
the old lady’s fears were mere superstition and did not influence me in
the least.
“Well,” I said, “I think that if Miss Vandermeulen feels equal to the
effort of dressing, it would do her good to get away from the yacht and
walk about on firm land for an hour or two.”
“I should like to,” said Pauline, all docility. “Besides,” she smiled,
“I should like to see for myself if there is any truth in that strange
writing.”
Half an hour later we had, with some difficulty, stowed the ladies--for
the mother insisted on coming also--in the stern-sheets of the little
launch which rose and fell dizzily under the lee of the yacht. The
two Vandermeulens were amidships, ready to give instructions to the
helmsman. I noticed that they had a pick and shovel on board. I sat
close to Pauline. She was looking pale, but the sea-sickness was in
abeyance for the moment and a touch of digitalis I had given her had
stiffened her up.
We sheered off, set a course over the rolling dark blue well toward the
islet we could see as we lifted on the waves. We had anchored rather
on the Old Providence side of the channel dividing the islands, and
the launch was about midway between the two when Pauline, who had been
looking around her with some curiosity, uttered a sudden ejaculation.
“That’s not the island!” she cried, with a gesture toward Santa
Katalina. “It’s the other one--the big one!” She pointed to Old
Providence. Then she checked herself, a peculiar look of puzzlement in
her face. “I wonder whatever made me say that!” she exclaimed. “One
would think I have been here before--but I can’t have!”
“But that’s Santa Katalina!” objected Geoffrey, pointing to the islet.
It undoubtedly was.
“Wait!” said old Vandermeulen, who had been sharply watching his
daughter for any sign of recognition. “I guess Pauline knows what she
is talking about!”
He stopped the engine and for a few moments we rose and fell idly upon
the waves, while the two men stared across to Old Providence.
“By Jove, yes!” cried Geoffrey suddenly. “Pauline’s right! Look!
There’s Skull Point!”
He indicated, with outstretched hand, a jutting headland whose face had
been weather-sculptured into the unmistakable semblance of a skull.
“Skull Point it is!” said old Vandermeulen, with such an oath as he did
not usually let come to his daughter’s ears.
In another moment we had gone about and were throbbing quickly toward
the headland. All eyes were fixed on it as we approached. Geoffrey had
produced a compass.
“Look!” he cried. “The three trees! South-west-by-south from Skull
Point!”
Sure enough, in the direction designated, three enormous trees,
evidently hundreds of years old, raised their heads high above the mass
of more recent vegetation.
A quarter of an hour later we were running into a little cove on the
west side of the headland. A ledge of rock, sheltered from the swell,
offered itself as a landing-stage, and we ran alongside and made fast.
Old Vandermeulen ordered the two members of the yacht’s crew, who had
accompanied us, to remain in the launch. The rest of us started off
into the island, Geoffrey carrying the tools. The three trees were at
no great distance, at the summit of a slope of broken-down volcanic
rock. Geoffrey arrived first.
“No need to worry where to dig, Father!” he shouted. “Here it is--plain
enough!”
Under the centre tree was a cairn of loose stones, more than half
buried under the detritus of many years, it is true, but evidently the
work of men’s hands.
“That’s it, sure!” cried the old man. “First time you’ve seen this
place, Pauline?” he queried, with a touch of grim cynicism.
“Of course!” she replied. “What do you mean, Father?--and yet--” she
hesitated, looking around her--“yet I do have a strange sort of feeling
as though I had been here before. But I can’t have! It’s absurd!”
Mother and daughter sat down under the shade of the trees whilst we
three set to work to open the cairn. I was as excited as they by this
time, and I helped with a will. The old man, wielding his pick with the
skill of an ex-miner, loosened the stones on the surface. I rolled away
the big ones, and Geoffrey shovelled away the smaller stuff. At the end
of an hour we had made a pretty deep excavation. We then took it in
turns to work with pick and shovel in the hole, from which we threw up
the stones.
Suddenly Geoffrey uttered an exclamation.
“We’re on something!--What’s that, doctor?” He passed me up a long bone.
“That’s the tibia of a man,” I replied. “I expect you’ll find the rest
of him there.”
“Sure thing!” he said. “Here he is!” He cleared away one or two large
lumps of rock and revealed the grinning skeleton of a man. “Hallo!” he
added, as he bent down to it, “what’s this?”
A long thin stiletto was lying loosely between the fleshless ribs of
the skeleton.
The old man snatched it from him as he plucked it out.
“And by all that’s holy!” he cried, “it’s got her name on it! Look!”
I took it from him. The dagger was of antique pattern, its steel rusted
and corroded but still resilient enough to make it a dangerous weapon,
and on the hilt, still legible, roughly inlaid in silver like the
amateur work of a sailorman, was the name--_Lucia!_
“I guess she murdered him with that!” said the old man, grimly,
glancing from the stiletto to the skeleton grinning up at us from the
hole where it had so long lain undisturbed. He turned toward where his
daughter sat in the shade of the trees. “Here, Pauline!” he called to
her. “Come and see--your friend the pirate and the knife that killed
him!”
The girl jumped up and ran across to us, all excitement.
“How wonderful!” she said. “It’s like a dream come true!”
At the time, excited as we all were, I did not notice the strangeness
of that spontaneous phrase. She stood upon the edge of the excavation
and took the stiletto with eager curiosity from her father. She held it
in both hands, breast-high, the point toward her, to read the name upon
the hilt.
“Lucia!” she cried, with a strange look toward us, as though dimly and
uncertainly recalling some terrible experience. “Lucia!” She repeated
the name with a peculiar, slow intonation--an intonation of puzzled
half-remembrance.
We stared at her, fascinated. Was our fantastic theory true?
Her gaze lost us, fixed itself into vacancy. Her features changed. An
expression of vague fear--the fear of the hypnotic shrinking at some
invisible danger--came into them. She opened her mouth as though to
speak.
She uttered only an inarticulate cry--a cry of fright as the loose
stones of the excavation slipped from under her. She fell headlong into
the hole, where she lay oddly--ominously--still. I jumped down after
her, lifted her up. The rusty old stiletto, caught under her in her
fall, had driven straight into her heart--broken off at the hilt!
The doctor stopped, looked round upon his audience.
“And the treasure?” queried one of them.