"Mr. Poyntz," said I, clasping my hands behind my head, and crossing
one knee over the other, "how happens your house to be set up directly
opposite the Devil's Ribs, and at least a mile and a half from the
village? It's well enough in summer of course, but in winter, when the
snow is on the ground, I should think you'd want to be nearer your
butcher, not to speak of the meeting-house."
"Ay, surely!" answered Mr. Poyntz, taking the pipe from his mouth, and
smoothing down the great sheaf of his beard. "But, d'ye see, sir, 'twas
not I set the house here, nor my father before me, and maybe there was
no butcher, nor yet no meeting-house along in those times. And another
thing, since you've set me a-going, sir; you see the lighthouse on the
point yonder?" indicating an abrupt rocky promontory half a mile to the
right of our position, which lay athwart the shore like a vast wall,
separating us from the little fishing hamlet on the other side. "Ye see
the lighthouse on tip-end of Gloam's Point, don't ye? Well, sir, old as
that lighthouse looks to you now, I, that am a deal older than you are,
can remember when 'twa'nt there. And that brings me round to what I was
going to say. Along in those times, sir, when there wa'nt no regular
lighthouse, but no bit less danger of craft running ashore, they used to
rig up a sort of a jury-light, if I might so call it, in the front of
our old gable. Ye may see the fixings now if ye steps forward a bit and
look up there. Ay, ay, every dark night, more especially every dirty
night, some of us would mount the garret shrouds, d'ye see, and show the
lantern. And many a ship we saved, no doubt; but they'd come ashore once
in a while, for the best we could do."
"That's a suggestive name--Devil's Ribs. I suppose the bones of many a
good man and vessel lie swallowed up in them."
"Ay, surely," returned the ancient mariner, swathing his head in a haze
of tobacco-smoke. "The more since the currents and whirlpools thereabout
mostly keep back the floating bits--spars, bodies, and such like--from
getting to the beach. Whatever strikes there, sinks there, speaking in a
general way. And forasmuch as there's five-and-thirty fathom clear water
there, and always a tidy bit of surf on, 'tain't very popular work
dredging."
"That's an ugly thought," I observed; "a great ship might go down there,
and nothing ever be found to show what she was or who sailed in her."
I happened to glance at Agatha as I made this observation, and noticed
that she paled a little and let her hands fall in her lap, and after a
few moments she got up and entered the house, leaving Mr. Poyntz and
me to ourselves. I fancied--but I may have been mistaken--that as she
passed the threshold she laid her finger upon the pearl-shell necklace.
"Miss Agatha doesn't like to hear of wrecks," I remarked after a pause.
"Why no, sir," said Poyntz slowly, his blue eyes fixed upon the
surf-whitened reef; "and perhaps 'tis natural she should not--specially
those wrecks that the Devil's Ribs is to blame for."
"Has that necklace of hers anything to do with it?" I asked--though I
cannot tell what possessed me to put so inconsequent a question. Partly
to justify myself, I added: "It looks as if it might have been washed up
out of the sea."
Poyntz threw a sharp look at me out of the corner of his weather-eye.
"Ye've noticed the necklace, have ye?" said he; "and ye've a quick wit
of your own, as they say is the way with lawyers. Howbeit, I think Jack
Poyntz knows an honest man when he sights him, and hoping ye'll excuse
the freedom, sir, methinks you are one. Now there's a bit of a yarn I'd
like to spin ye--you being beknown amongst the great gentlefolks down to
New York and elsewhere--about a wreck that once was on the Devil's Ribs.
Maybe some of those you do business for can throw light upon it like;
for what the ship was that was wrecked, or whence she sailed, was
never known; for only that necklace that Agatha wears--only that
and--something else, ever came to land. Ye guessed right, sir, d'ye see,
and in hopes of your guessing yet more, I'll spin ye the yarn, leastways
if ye've no objection. But afore starting, if ye'll kindly allow me,
sir, I'll load my pipe, for with me the words come ever easier when
there's smoke behind 'em."
I said nothing, but Poyntz saw well enough that I was very much
interested, and, like all incorrigible yarn-spinners, he found a
humorous pleasure in prolonging his hearer's suspense. It was five
minutes before his pipe was cleaned out, refilled, and lighted to his
satisfaction, and then, having spread out his great arms along the back
of the bench, stretched his mighty legs in front of him, and fixed his
gaze upon the lighthouse--his favourite yarn-spinning attitude--he
appeared to wait for an inspiration.
"How long ago was it?" I asked at length, to set him going.
"Well, sir, it might be five-and-twenty years ago that that wreck took
place. You was hardly more than out of your nursery then, I'm thinking.
As for me, I was a chap of maybe forty--or maybe not so much; my old
father he had just parted his last cable, as I might say, and I had just
come in from a voyage to the Pacific Coast for hides, and was living in
this house alone by myself. I'd come home, sir, to find the girl as had
given me her word spliced to another man; and so it happened that I
stayed a bachelor till after the age when many find themselves grandads.
But I wedded at last, sir, as ye see, and never had cause to think the
worse of myself for doing it!"
"I should think not, indeed," I assented, laughing. But meanwhile I was
telling myself that Agatha must be nearly twenty years old, and that if
Poyntz had wedded only at the age of a grandfather, she could hardly
be his own offspring by marriage. Were the doubts which her aspect had
already suggested to me well founded, then? I prudently waited, in the
hope that this question likewise might find its answer in the course of
my host's story.
"It was along about that time, sir," Poyntz continued, having
acknowledged my compliment with a friendly nod, "that I first came
acquainted with Scholar Gloam, as the folks called him; him that yonder
point's named after, and that lived at the Laughing Mill, over there,
back of the wood. But now I come for to think on it," broke off the old
yarn-spinner, pulling his meerschaum out of the corner of his mouth and
looking round at me, "did I ever chance to speak to ye of Scholar Gloam
afore?"
"I don't think you ever did; but I always like to hear about anything
that has a picturesque nickname, as almost everything hereabouts seems
to have."
The hale old man laughed, and raked his brown fingers through his
spreading beard. "In an out-of-the-way place like this, sir," said he,
"where's few enough things anyway, nicknames come natural. Well, now, as
touching Scholar Gloam, he died nigh a score of years ago; leastways he
knocked off living in the body. For there be those," lowering his voice
and wrinkling his brows, "there be those--superstitious like--ready to
take affidavit of having seen him, certain days in the year, a prowling
round the Laughing Mill. His grave is near by, right under the Black
Oak; and maybe the place is a bit skeery.
"Howsoever, that don't concern us now. When I knew Scholar Gloam, he was
a middling-sized, slender-built young gentleman, having queer hair not
all of the same colour, and a trick of talking to himself in a sort of a
low mumbling way, as it might be the bubbling of water under a ship's
stern, if ye know what I mean, sir. He was a comely favoured man of the
pale sort, and grave and silent, though always the gentleman in his
manners, as by blood and breeding. For the Gloams was the great family
here fifty years ago, and was landlords of most of the farms roundabout;
but they steered a bad course, as I might say, and died out, so as
Scholar Gloam was the last of 'em. Old Harold, the Scholar's father, he
was a reckless devil if any man ever was; and when he died 'twas found
that Gloam Hall and all belonging thereto must go to the auction. The
only bit left was the Laughing Mill itself, and an acre or two of land
round about it."
"What did the mill laugh at, Mr. Poyntz? its own prosperity?"
"Nay, sir!" returned the burly mariner, shaking his head. "I heard it
laugh once, and I'd as soon crack jokes with Davy Jones as listen to
it again. 'Twas a mad, wild scream more than a laugh, and like nothing
human, praise goodness, that ever I heard! There was ugly yarns about
that mill, d'ye see; folks said as how it had killed a man, and
afterwards had got possessed with his evil spirit that was always
roaming about seeking whom it might devour ... or maybe I've got
things a bit mixed!"
"Who was it that was killed?" I suggested.
"Ay, surely," said Mr. Poyntz thoughtfully, "I should have told ye that.
It was the man that was married to old Squire Harold's housekeeper.
And that housekeeper, sir, when she was a young one, was about as
well-favoured a wench as a man would care to speak with on a week day;
and 'twas said," hitching himself nearer to me on the bench and rumbling
in my ear, "that the Squire had a fancy to her, and that after a time
she was married off in a hurry and sent to live at the mill, and that
her baby was born six months from the wedding. Well, all I know is,
little enough that child looked like him as passed for its father; and
now comes the ugliest part of it. A year after the child's birth the
miller was found dead one morning underneath his own mill-wheel. Seems
he'd fallen in the mill-race by some mishap, and so had the life crushed
out of him. But bad things was said ... and the widow and child they
went back to the Hall, and lived there many years, till the Squire died.
The child got all his growth and training there, and folks used to say
he'd have been more like the Squire if he hadn't been most like his
mother. Well, the Squire being gone at last, and the estate all sold
saving just the mill, as I told ye, what does the housekeeper and her
son do but go back to the mill again. The son--David he was called--was
then a likely young chap of maybe seventeen; and he took right hold and
began for to run the mill, and a very fair profit he made out of it,
taking one year with another. And Scholar Gloam, he was living in the
mill-house along with them, having his room to himself, and his books
and instruments quite cosy."
"Wasn't that rather an odd thing for him to do, Mr. Poyntz, under the
circumstances?"
"Ay, surely; but ye must keep it in mind, sir, that Scholar Gloam was a
wondrous odd man. He'd been his whole life shut up with his books and
his studies, and no doubt had a vast deal of that sort of learning; but
of worldly knowledge, as I might say, he'd none at all whatever, no more
than a child. Little he'd heard of his father's doings, be it with the
handsome housekeeper or anything else; and little he dreamed--ye can
make affidavit--that her son had any claim to call himself his brother,
though 'twas told him once afterwards, as we'll come to presently. Nay,
but my thought of him is, he was a simple, honest gentleman at that
time, kind of heart and thinking ill of no one; only a bit strange and
distant, d'ye see, as was no harm in the world for him to be. And being
quite the same thing to him whether he lived in a palace or a mud hut,
so long as he might study his fill, why, likely he'd an easy enough time
of it.
"And 'twould have been smooth enough sailing for the whole of them only
for one thing, which is to say as how, ever and anon, in the mid of a
big run of luck, that there mill would take on a spell of its laughing;
and with that folks would be giving it a wide berth, and business would
slack up again. It was no use the old woman and David a swearing that a
bit of rust on the axle was the cause of it all; for, mind ye, there was
no steering round that black fact of the old miller's having met his
death on the wheel; and, too, though they was never done hunting for
that bit of a rust spot, they never found it, or if ever they thought
they had, lo! there'd be the laugh in their faces again, so to say, the
next morning. Ay, 'twas a bad, unholy sound that, sir; but the Scholar,
strange to be told, seemed less to mind it than anyone; the cause being,
mayhap, as how he was a wondrous absent-minded man anyway, and the only
one as had never been told the true story of how the old miller came by
his end.
"So now, sir, having dropped ye this bit of a hint of who Scholar Gloam
was, I'll go on with the yarn of the wreck on the Devil's Ribs and the
necklace.