door; it had been picked free of weeds, and the currant-bushes on either
side trimly harnessed up to a set of stakes. A white curtain flounced
behind the old lattice; there was a row of flowering geraniums in pots
upon the sill. Through the open door you might see a clear fire and Mary
Smith's saucepans glowing on the wall. The place, I thought, wore, for a
kitchen, the best air conceivable of decent and humble dignity; nor
would one have supposed that mere thrift and cleanliness could be so
comely. I turned to her with some such words, and found her facing me,
so much of haggard trouble in her eyes that I stopped, aghast.
"Sir," she said, twisting her fingers, "I see you do not understand--I
thought you knew. I--I am the woman you speak of. Your grandfather is
within, and the other--the man--with him."
III
Our old house being designed and built with a shiplike compactness,
there was but one room on the ground floor besides the kitchen and its
offices. It was a plain, comfortable place, wainscoted about, with
shelves and lockers in the whimsical copy of a vessel's cabin. And it
contained the single work of art our establishment could show; that is,
a portrait of my grandfather's grandfather,--he who founded this
house,--in a finicking attitude, with a brocade coat and a pair of
compasses. In his rear were to be seen a pillar and a red velvet
curtain, and (distantly) a fine storm of clouds and lightning. Never was
a respectable old sailorman so misrepresented; but all his descendants
except one regarded this gaudy daub with almost religious veneration.
Every family has its one great man; the admiral was ours. His was the
distinction of being the only Pendarves who had ever managed to amass a
fortune. It had dribbled through the fingers of succeeding generations;
but there was a tradition that some part of it, buried or otherwise
secreted with an admirable forethought by the old gentleman, might yet
be discovered, to the further glorification of our house.
The picture hung directly opposite the door, favoring me, as I entered,
with a disconcerting smirk; it needed no great stretch of fancy to
credit him with cherishing some secret and villainous joke. Beneath it
sat my grandfather, with his pipe, in the same place and attitude as I
remembered him for upward of twenty years, but so spectral a likeness of
himself that the sight of him shocked me like a blow. He had wasted to a
mere parchment envelop of bones, and the eyes he turned to mine were
bright with inward fever. I had looked for I do not know what signs of
an unstable mind, but at first, save for the eyes, saw none. He showed
only a not too well pleased surprise.
"Nicol!" he said, and pushed back his chair, without rising. "Nicol!"
and then for a moment sat staring closely at me under his heavy brows.
With his next action something of the horror of his affliction came home
to me, for I saw that, but for some confused sense that I had been
absent against his will, he had utterly forgot everything concerning me,
the terms of our last meeting, and the events of many years besides.
"Hush, and sit down!" he said, in the habitually chiding tone he had
used to the boy of ten or twelve. "Take your books and get your lesson!"
He pointed with the stem of his pipe to a stool in the corner where, as
a lad, I had passed more than one grim hour, and turned to his
companion, as older people turn from the interruptions of children.
Mary Smith, following behind, touched me gently on the arm. "Go and sit
down," she formed the words with her lips rather than voiced them.
There sat beside my grandfather a vast, fat creature with a forest of
greasy black hair and beard about his pallid face; his heavy hands lay
motionless in his lap, forcibly reminding me of an image I had seen of
some Oriental god upon his throne. His eyes were scarcely opened, his
breathing was almost imperceptible; a gross animal content appeared in
him as of a full-fed, lethargic crocodile. Side by side, he and the
gaunt, fierce-eyed old man presented no mean allegory of spirit and
body. A table was before them, and in the middle of it a toy the like of
which I had never seen in this house or elsewhere--a globe of crystal,
perhaps the size of an orange, held up on a little bronze pedestal. The
fat man's eyes, or so much of them as one might see, were fixed upon
this thing with a kind of stupid intensity; one could have fancied him
paying tribute to some idolatrous shrine. The captain watched him with
an equal earnestness; so might the Roman mob have hung upon the reading
of the sacred entrails; and there was about it the air of a
well-practised, familiar rite. At last my grandfather asked:
"What do you see?"
[Illustration: "THE FAT MAN'S EYES ... WERE FIXED UPON THIS THING WITH A
KIND OF STUPID INTENSITY"]
The other's lips moved, and an unintelligible whisper reached me.
"Ay, that's it, that's it," said the captain, and sent a quick,
searching look about the room. "Doubloons--pieces-of-eight--Spanish
pillar-dollars--doubloons, doubloons! That is what it would likely be
made up of, eh? But where--try to see that--where?"
Another interval of silent gazing, and the oracle uttered some further
statement, which my grandfather received with an impatient groan.
"Doubloons--piles of gold--I know!" he said. "And a ship. But
whereabouts was it, eh? Surely you can see whereabouts it was?"
"It's all a mist; I can see nothing," the other answered, after a pause.
I could have found it in me to laugh at the whole miserable hocus-pocus,
had I been less indignant. The situation was, besides, sufficiently
grave; and as I listened to this silly and profane juggling, and
observed the wildness of my grandfather's bearing, it became plain to me
that he could not long endure such an influence. I guessed from his talk
that the old man's disorder was based upon the idea of treasure lost,
sunk, or hidden hereabout; for our coast was dangerous, a menace to
vessels, and not innocent, besides, of smugglers and worse. Perhaps the
poverty of his later years was at the root of his delusion; perhaps his
madness would have taken this form anyhow. However he had fallen into
the fat man's hands, this was the secret of the latter's power. While I
pondered gloomily, the sitting (so to call it) came to an end. Perhaps
my unwelcome appearance somewhat contracted it. My grandfather lapsed
into his chair, his chin on his chest, brooding. Excitement died in him
almost visibly, like the flickering down of a spent fire. Instead of
eighty, he looked a hundred and eighty, and his face was as lifeless as
a mummy's.
"Zaira!" said the fat man, raising his thick lids (but I fancied he had
already taken some shrewd peeps at me from under them), "I have slept,
and the spirit has spoken. Arise! take away the mirror of Time and
Space!"
And hereupon the girl, advancing with a shamed glance at me, carried the
globe to one of the lockers, shoved it in, and slammed the door on it
savagely.
"Have a care!" the seer warned her somberly; the mirror of Time and
Space, apparently, was not immune from the ordinary risks of mirrors, as
one might have expected so august an instrument to be. When speaking
aloud thus, he used a great rolling, sonorous voice; it filled the room
until the very window-panes vibrated.
She gave him a look of angry rebellion, opened her lips as if to retort
with some stinging word, stood irresolute a moment with eyes that
wavered between the three of us, then walked off, leaving us sitting
facing each other in silence.
The fat man and I exchanged a long stare, I choking down my temper, he
smooth and placid, to outward seeming, as the idol he resembled. The
resolution with which he stuck to his silly pose was, in its way, a
rogue's masterpiece; nothing more exasperating than this stolid
effrontery was ever devised. The scoundrel feared, and yet knew he had,
in a sense, the better of me; the helpless old man between us was his
shield.
"Young man," he said at last, in the same booming monotone, "have you
the gift of the seeing eye?"
"I have more the gift of the feeling fist, I think," said I, with what
calmness I could muster. "If you doubt it, sir, I shall be pleased to
show you. I am Nicol Pendarves, as a soothsayer like yourself will have
guessed already. Perhaps you will honor me with your name and business
here?"
"Many names are mine," he answered, and made a solemn gesture. "Many
names are mine----"
"Doubtless," I said; "but I meant your _last_ alias."
He went on, unruffled, in his great voice, as if I had not spoken: "Many
names have been mine through the uncounted eons--many names. In this
flesh men call me Constantine Paphluoides."
It was no wonder Chepstow could not turn its tongue about that name;
that and his manner together must have dumfounded our straight-thinking
townspeople. I do not remember--indeed, I took no pains to note--what
else he said; bits of mythology, history, poetry, rolled from him in a
cataract of meaningless noise. Had I been an ardent disciple sitting at
his feet, he could not have feigned a greater exaltation. The fellow was
at once dull and crafty; he loosed this gust of windy rhetoric at me as
if he thought to win upon me by mere sound and fury signifying nothing.
I got up at length, when I had had enough of him, and, walking across to
where he sat, "Mr. Constantine Paphluoides," said I, "this is my house;
I give you until to-morrow morning to leave it; you will go quietly and
without any formalities of farewell. You will find it expedient to obey
me: otherwise, although I have not consulted the mirror of Time and
Space, I should not be surprised if it revealed you, to the seeing eye,
in the town jail and later in the stocks."
He made no answer, but sat staring at me, blinking, and opening and
shutting his mouth in a gasping fashion like a fish. I had striven to
speak quietly, but (being in a breathing heat of anger) must
unconsciously have raised my voice, for unexpectedly, and, as it were,
for a warning, my grandfather came out of his semi-stupor and
straightened up, eying me over with a kind of wandering severity.
"Nicol, go to bed! You hear me? Go to bed!" He reached, cursing, for his
cane. There was a grotesque familiarity in the act. With that very cane
he had sought to coerce me into the straight and narrow road, as he
conceived it, how many times during all my childhood!
"Go to bed, I tell you!" he screamed, and half rose, brandishing his rod
of correction.
Somebody pulled at my sleeve; it was the girl. "Please come away, Mr.
Pendarves; please do come away, sir, just for a minute, and then he'll
forget it," she urged; and, with her earnest air of responsibility:
"It's so bad for him."
IV
[Illustration: "'GO TO BED, I TELL YOU,' HE SCREAMED, AND HALF ROSE"]
In the kitchen, Zaira Mary Smith was getting supper ready, as it
appeared. I followed her out passively, and sat down in a sort of maze.
It seemed incredible that, amid the shabby tragedy of this household,
there should be time or thought for the kindly business of spreading a
meal. The girl marched briskly to and fro, stooping to the oven door,
tinkling softly among her spoons and bowls, evidently taking a timid
zest in her labors. It made her seem the most sane, assured, and stable
person among us, spite of her position. I could have imagined her
singing as she went, had it not been for my presence. She was
desperately conscious of me, watching me askant with the curiously
commingled fear and trustfulness of a child. Nor, notwithstanding the
untruths or half-truths she had told me, could her connection with the
abominable rogue-fool in the next room appear other than an enormity--as
if she might be the enchanted heroine of some fairy-tale, condemned to
the service of a monster. At last, when she came and laid a board and
pan on the table beside me, and, rolling up the sleeves about her
capable, round little arms, began a severe maltreatment of a batch of
dough, I could keep silence no longer; curiosity crowded every other
feeling out of me.
"Mary Smith!" I burst out, "for God's sake, tell me all about it!"
She rested her hands on the edge of the bowl an instant. "About us?" she
said, with a quick glance at me. She gave the dough one or two
perfunctory pats and punches, biting her lips; and then suddenly, with a
rush of color, her face puckered together, she clapped her befloured
hands over it, and fell on the nearest bench in a perfect whirlwind of
sobs.
"I--I--I w-w-wanted to be respectable!" was all I could make out between
gasps--but that was staggering enough news, I thought. She wanted to be
respectable!
She went on: "I didn't come here of my own free will, Mr. Pendarves,
truly I didn't; but when we came, and I saw how nice I could make
it,--and I never had a home before,--I knew, if you ever came back, that
would end it all, and I did so hope you wouldn't!"
"It seemed a pity not to make hay while the sun shone?" I suggested.
She nodded, a little doubtfully. "I didn't think of it just that way,"
she said. "But--yes, I suppose any one would put it so. Only--I haven't
hurt anything, Mr. Pendarves; I--I only scrubbed--and cooked--and
cleaned a little. I was so happy: there was no harm, it seemed to me.
And when I pretended to be the housekeeper, that--that was just a little
game I played with myself; it was silly, I dare say, but, after all, it
did no harm, either. It was like another game I play by myself
sometimes--of having a birthday, you know? I put little things I've made
beside the bed, and when I wake up in the morning, I make believe it's
my birthday, and I'm so surprised at all the presents I've got! It's
silly, isn't it?' I knew you'd laugh."
"I never felt less like it," I said. "Don't you know your real
birthday?"
She shook her head. No, she did not know that. She had never known
anything about her father and mother. She was not even certain of her
own name. "He calls me Zaira," she said, with a scornful jerk of her
auburn head toward the other room; "but that's a stupid name, and I hate
it. I tell every one my name's Mary Smith. Why not? I might as well call
myself what I like--nobody cares. I think Mary Smith's beautiful, don't
you? It's so respectable, isn't it?" she added wistfully.
Of her childhood she could remember nothing but being in some sort of
school or institution (a home for foundlings, most likely) governed by
nuns, or at least by women who went about in black stuff dresses and
white caps, and whom one called _ma soeur_--for this was in southern
France, she thought. The life was clean, decorous, and peaceful, and she
might have grown up to wear a white cap herself, and herd little waifs
into chapel; but when she was probably ten or eleven years old, the fat
man came and took her away, and they had been wandering up and down the
world ever since. He said he was her uncle, but she was no more sure of
that than of anything else concerning herself.
When they had been in Chepstow a time, she said, her uncle came into
their fortune-telling booth one day with Captain Pendarves, whose name
she did not then know. He talked a great deal in an excited way about
finding some treasure----"money I think he said his father or
grandfather had hidden a long while ago. He kept saying it would all be
in 'doubloons, doubloons,' because it was got in the Spanish Main and
brought here in a ship. And he said there was treasure, heaps of it, in
the bottom of the Cat's Mouth, where ships had sunk, gold pieces all in
amongst the ribs of dead men. Mr. Pendarves,"--she looked at me with a
shy, awed sympathy,--"I saw your grandfather was--was----"
"He is crazy, or nearly so," said I. "Plain talk is best."
"I'm afraid so. I thought shame to beguile a poor old man that way, but,
sir, I could not stop it. He came every day, and they looked in the
crystal--just as they were doing this afternoon, you know. He's worse
now; I think he forgets betweenwhiles what was said the last time they
looked. Then, one day, _he_ told me we were to come here to live. It was
wrong--I knew it; but when I saw it, and thought what I could do--and I
did so want to have a home and--and be respectable--and I thought, too,
if I worked hard and made it nice, it would be a--a kind of payment,
wouldn't it? I couldn't help longing to----"
"Don't cry that way," I said. "I can't bear to see you cry."
"I can't help it," she sobbed. "It's so hard to leave it all."
"Well, then, why leave it?" said I. "_He_ has to, surely; but that need
make no difference to you. We must have a housekeeper, you know."
She gave me a woeful glance; and I understood that, according to her
poor little code, it would be more "respectable" to resume her
journeyings with the fat crystal-gazer than to stay in the house with
Nick Pendarves as his grandfather's housekeeper. Here was a ticklish
point to argue with her; and, for all her tears, there was a firmness in
the set of her chin (it was dented with a dimple) that warned me such
argument would be a waste of time. She had made up her mind, and would
stand to it at all costs. It was martyrdom in an eminently feminine
style; women deliver themselves up to it day by day, and contrive to be
perfectly unreasonable, yet somehow in the right. She wiped her eyes
presently, shut her mouth on a sob, and went resolutely about her work.
We had, after all, a tolerably cheerful evening in the kitchen. It
seemed wisest for me not to show myself again before Captain Pendarves,
but I am afraid I did not repine greatly at the banishment. As the door
swung to and fro behind Mary carrying their dishes, I caught glimpses of
the gloomy parlor, my grandfather huddled in his chair by the table,
with bright, roving eyes; the sorcerer surprisingly busy about the food
for a person of his ethereal habits; and, on the wall beyond, old
Admiral Pendarves simpering eternally over his private fun.
V
The wind came up strong again after sunset, and all night long went
noisily about the gables, and piped down our trembling old chimneys. It
did not lessen with the approach of morning, and when I thrust open the
window, an hour or so after dawn, there was a low-hanging gray sky and a
great, driving stir in the air. I had hardly pushed the casement out,
had one brief vision of bare tormented trees, felt a slap of rain, and
heard, not far away, the measured beating of breakers as they charged at
the foot of our cliff, when the wind, plucking the latch from my grasp,
slammed the lattice and went yelling around the corner of the house like
a jocular demon. I began to dress, thinking, as I had often thought
before, that the place had a kind of fantastic kinship with the sea;
every timber in it seemed to strain and creak to the repeated onsets of
the storm, like those of any ship. The house stood steady enough, yet
our position, open to all the winds of heaven, and within a few hundred
paces of the furious water, was surely such as none but a sailor would
have chosen. We rode out the weather in the open, so to speak, with
abundant sea-room. And, for the better carrying out of the simile, there
presently arose, somewhere outside, a long, drawling hail, calculated,
with a mariner's nicety, to overcome the wind. "Ah-o-oy! The house,
ah-o-oy!"
It came from the landward-looking or highroad side of the house--about
two points on the starboard bow, as old Crump would have said. And, in
fact, when I reached the door, there was Crump himself huddled in a
pea-jacket on the seat of his cart, with his gray pony drooping
dolefully between the shafts. I could just see them above the ragged
hedge that divided our little front yard from the public way. Towering
columns of rain swept across the landscape; Crump and the pony looked
soaked to the core; and I was admiring the Spartan devotion to duty that
brought him out at this hour, in such weather, when he began another
wailing like a castaway banshee: "Ah-o-oy, the house! Pendarves,
ah-o-oy!"
I set a hand to either side of my mouth and roared an answering hail to
him up the wind. We were a bare twenty yards apart, but if he had not
chanced at that moment to look in my direction, I doubt if he would have
been aware of me, for all my efforts. The wind, in a fresh swoop,
snatched the sound from my lips and ranged through the house with a
turmoil of banging doors, falling crockery, and wildly fluttering
draperies. As it was, he caught sight of me, shouted something
unintelligible, and gesticulated toward a formless heap tucked up in
oilskins behind him in the cart. Then he descended laboriously and
signaled for help to remove it.
"What is it? What has he got?" screamed Mary Smith in my ear. She must
have come running from the back of the house at the recent outburst of
racket. Her petticoats swirled; her red curls streamed (they were
shining with wet). She had certainly been outdoors already, as early as
it was, in the teeth of all this blow, and I was startled by the pale
anxiety of her look. "What is it? Who is there?" she cried again
shrilly.
"Nobody but Crump with my baggage," I cried back. "What's the matter?"
"Oh, Mr. Pendarves, haven't you seen them? They are both gone! I've
looked everywhere about the house. They were gone when I got up, and I
can't find them high or low!"
"You mean Captain Pendarves--and the other?"
She nodded, with terror-struck eyes on me; then, raising on tiptoe,
screamed painfully, with her mouth close to my ear (it was almost
impossible to hear otherwise): "He--your grandfather--has done it
before. He's always restless in a storm. He goes down to the shore
sometimes. I'm so afraid----" her look said the rest.
"Ask him--ask Crump; maybe he's seen them," she added in a shriek, as I
started to the carrier's help. It was but a few steps to the gate, yet I
reached it wet through, half blinded by sheets of water driven slantwise
in my face, and with the breath nearly beaten out of me. In the open,
thus, the storm seemed to increase tenfold in violence; it filled the
vast cloudy hollow of the sky with reverberating din; and I felt, or
fancied I felt, the solid ground shiver with the pounding of the waves
on the ledges along the Cat's Mouth.
Crump greeted me with a cheerful grin; he had all the seaman's tolerance
for the vagaries of the weather.
"Coming on to blow some, ain't it?" he remarked at the top of his lungs.
"Your old apple-tree's carried away--that one in the corner of the
orchard, I mean. I could see it as I came along by the upper road."
"Have you seen my grandfather anywhere about?" I shouted.
He could not have understood the question, for he answered, squinting up
at me knowingly as he stooped over his end of my chest: "I see you got
rid of _him_, Mr. Nick, and in short order, too. I spoke him a little
way back, bound for Sidmouth with all sails set--at least, he was laying
a course that way. Come on board, ma'am!" He pulled his forelock and
made a leg respectfully before Mary (albeit eying her with no small
interest) as we shoved our burden through the door. The girl clapped it
shut, with a sharp struggle against the draught, and in the momentary
silence that followed we stood awkwardly and apprehensively surveying
one another, while the hurricane rumbled outside.
"I asked you if you had seen my grandfather," I said to Crump, at last.
"Seen the cap'n? Why, no, sir," he said, surprised. "I was telling you
I saw----" He stopped, with a glance at Mary.
"Yes, go on. You saw _him_? Where? What was he doing?" she said sharply.
"I was saying he crossed my bows laying his course for Sidmouth, or that
way," said Crump, evidently striving for a witness-box exactness. "He
didn't answer my hail. Looked like he was in too much of a hurry."
Mary cast a troubled look about. "Did he have anything with him? A
portmanteau, or carpet-bag, or anything to carry clothes?"
"Not that I noticed," said Crump carefully. "Looked as if he was going
out in ballast--except his pockets; there was something in his pockets,
I should say."
I stared at Mary in some perplexity. What the fat man did, or what
should become of him, were, indeed, matters of indifference to me,
except so far as they concerned her. I was well enough pleased that he
should go, but there was something unusual in the manner of his going;
it was a headlong flight. To tell the truth, I had looked for further
trouble with him. What would the girl do now? And where was Captain
Pendarves? She met me with eyes at once frightened and resolute.