"I will come, by all means," he said.
The stranger bowed us out of the room.
"That is right," he exclaimed. "You will find me here. Good-bye for the
present."
As we plunged like dazed men into the street, now grown sunny, I turned
on my friend.
"William," I said, "did you happen to look back as we left the cabin?"
"No."
"I did."
"Well?"
"There was no stranger there at all. The place was empty."
"Well?"
"You will not go to-night?"
"You bet I do."
I shrugged my shoulders. We walked on a little way in silence. Suddenly
my companion turned on me, a most truculent expression on his face.
"For an independent thinker," he said, "you are rather a pusillanimous
jackass. A man of your convictions to shy at a shadow! Fie, sir, fie!
What if the room _were_ empty? The place was full enough of traps to
permit of Captain Iron's immediate withdrawal."
Much may be expressed in a sniff. I sniffed.
That afternoon I went back to town, and left the offensive William to his
fate.
* * * * *
It found him at once.
The very day following that of my retreat, I was polishing phrases by
gaslight in the dull sitting-room of my lodgings in the Lambeth Road,
when he staggered in upon me. His face was like a sheep's, white and
vacant; his hands had caught a trick of groping blindly along the backs
of chairs.
"You have obtained your 'copy'?" I said.
I made him out to murmur "yes" in a shaking under-voice. He was so
patently nervous that I put him in a chair and poured him out a
wine-glassful of London brandy. This generally is a powerful emetic, but
it had no more effect upon him than water. Then I was about to lower the
gas, to save his eyes, but he stopped me with a thin shriek.
"Light, light!" he whispered. "It cannot be too light for me!"
"Now, William Tyrwhitt," I said, by-and-by, watchful of him, and marking
a faint effusion of colour soak to his cheek, "you would not accept my
warning, and you were extremely rude to me. Therefore you have had an
experience--"
"An awful one," he murmured.
"An awful one, no doubt; and to obtain surcease of the haunting memory of
it, you must confide its processes to me. But, first, I must put it to
you, which is the more pusillanimous--to refuse to submit one's manliness
to the tyranny of the unlawful, or to rush into situations you have not
the nerve to adapt yourself to?"
"I could not foresee, I could not foresee."
"Neither could I. And that was my very reason for declining the
invitation. Now proceed."
It was long before he could. But presently he essayed, and gathered voice
with the advance of his narrative, and even unconsciously threw it into
something the form of "copy." And here it is as he murmured it, but with
a gasp for every full-stop.
"I confess I was so far moved by the tone of your protest as, after your
departure, to make some cautious inquiries about the house we had
visited. I could discover nothing to satisfy my curiosity. It was known
to have been untenanted for a great number of years; but as to who was
the landlord, whether Captain Iron or another, no one could inform me;
and the agent for the property was of the adjacent town where you met me.
I was not fortunate, indeed, in finding that any one even knew of the
oddly appointed room; but considering that, owing to the time the house
had remained vacant, the existence of this eccentricity could be a
tradition only with some casual few, my failure did not strike me as
being at all bodeful. On the contrary, it only whetted my desire to
investigate further in person, and penetrate to the heart of a very
captivating little mystery. But probably, I thought, it is quite simple
of solution, and the fact of the repairers and the landlord being in
evidence at one time, a natural coincidence.
"I dined well, and sallied forth about nine o'clock. It was a night
pregnant with possibilities. The lower strata of air were calm, but
overhead the wind went down the sea with a noise of baggage-wagons, and
there was an ominous hurrying and gathering together of forces under
the bellying standards of the clouds.
"As I went up the steps of the lonely building, the High Street seemed to
turn all its staring eyes of lamps in my direction. 'What a droll
fellow!' they appeared to be saying; 'and how will he look when he
reissues?'
"'There ain't nubbudy in that house,' croaked a small boy, who had paused
below, squinting up at me.
"'How do you know?' said I. 'Move on, my little man.'
"He went; and at once it occurred to me that, as no notice was taken of
my repeated knockings, I might as well try the handle. I did, found the
door unlatched, as it had been in the morning, pushed it open, entered,
and swung it to behind me.
"I found myself in the most profound darkness--that darkness, if I may
use the paradox, of a peopled desolation that men of but little nerve or
resolution find insupportable. To me, trained to a serenity of stoicism,
it could make no demoralizing appeal. I had out my matchbox, opened it at
leisure, and, while the whole vaulting blackness seemed to tick and
rustle with secret movement, took a half-dozen vestas into my hand,
struck one alight, and, by its dim radiance, made my way through the
building by the passages we had penetrated in the morning. If at all I
shrank or perspired on my spectral journey, I swear I was not
conscious of doing so.
"I came to the door of the cabin. All was black and silent.
"'Ah!' I thought, 'the rogue has played me false.'
"Not to subscribe to an uncertainty, I pushed at the door, saw only
swimming dead vacancy before me, and tripping at the instant on the sill,
stumbled crashing into the room below and slid my length on the floor.
"Now, I must tell you, it was here my heart gave its first somersault. I
had fallen, as I say, into a black vault of emptiness; yet, as I rose,
bruised and dazed, to my feet, there was the cabin all alight from a
great lanthorn that swung from the ceiling, and our friend of the morning
seated at a table, with a case-bottle of rum and glasses before him.
"I stared incredulous. Yes, there could be no doubt it was he, and pretty
flushed with drink, too, by his appearance.
"'Incandescent light in a West Indiaman!' I muttered; for not otherwise
could I account for the sudden illumination. 'What the deuce!'
"'Belay that!' he growled. He seemed to observe me for the first time.
"'A handsome manner of boarding a craft you've got, sir,' said he,
glooming at me.
"I was hastening to apologize, but he stopped me coarsely.
"'Oh, curse the long jaw of him! Fill your cheek with that, you Barbary
ape, and wag your tail if you can, but burn your tongue.'
"He pointed to the case-bottle with a forefinger that was like a dirty
parsnip. What induced me to swallow the insult, and even some of the
pungent liquor of his rude offering? The itch for 'copy' was, no doubt,
at the bottom of it.
"I sat down opposite my host, filled and drained a bumper. The fire ran
to my brain, so that the whole room seemed to pitch and courtesy.
"'This is an odd fancy of yours,' I said.
"'What is?' said he.
"'This,' I answered, waving my hand around--'this freak of turning a back
room into a cabin.'
"He stared at me, and then burst into a malevolent laugh.
"'Back room, by thunder!' said he. 'Why, of course--just a step into the
garden where the roses and the buttercupses be agrowing.'
"Now I pricked my ears.
"'Has the night turned foul?' I muttered. 'What a noise the rain makes
beating on the window!'
"'It's like to be a foul one for you, at least,' said he. 'But, as for
the rain, it's blazing moonlight.'
"I turned to the broad casement in astonishment. My God! what did I see?
Oh, my friend, my friend! will you believe me? By the melancholy glow
that spread therethrough I saw that the whole room was rising and sinking
in rhythmical motion; that the lights of King's Cobb had disappeared, and
that in their place was revealed a world of pale and tossing water, the
pursuing waves of which leapt and clutched at the glass with innocuous
fingers.
"I started to my feet, mad in an instant.
"'Look, look!' I shrieked. 'They follow us--they struggle to get at you,
you bloody murderer!'
"They came rising on the crests of the billows; they hurried fast in our
wake, tumbling and swaying, their stretched, drowned faces now lifted to
the moonlight, now over-washed in the long trenches of water. They were
rolled against the galleries of glass, on which their hair slapped like
ribbons of seaweed--a score of ghastly white corpses, with strained black
eyes and pointed stiff elbows crookt up in vain for air.
"I was mad, but I knew it all now. This was no house, but the good,
ill-fated vessel _Rayo,_ once bound for Jamaica, but on the voyage fallen
into the hands of the bloody buccaneer, Paul Hardman, and her crew made
to walk the plank, and most of her passengers. I knew that the dark
scoundrel had boarded and mastered her, and--having first fired and sunk
his own sloop--had steered her straight for the Cuban coast, making
disposition of what remained of the passengers on the way, and I knew
that my great-grandfather had been one of these doomed survivors, and
that he had been shot and murdered under orders of the ruffian that now
sat before me. All this, as retailed by one who sailed for a season under
Hardman to save his skin, is matter of old private history; and of common
report was it that the monster buccaneer, after years of successful
trading in the ship he had stolen, went into secret and prosperous
retirement under an assumed name, and was never heard of more on the high
seas. But, it seemed, it was for the great-grandson of one of his victims
to play yet a sympathetic part in the grey old tragedy.
"How did this come to me in a moment--or, rather, what was that dream
buzzing in my brain of 'proof' and 'copy' and all the tame stagnation
of a long delirium of order? I had nothing in common with the latter. In
some telepathic way--influenced by these past-dated surroundings--dropped
into the very den of this Procrustes of the seas, I was there to re-enact
the fearful scene that had found its climax in the brain of my ancestor.
"I rushed to the window, thence back to within a yard of the glowering
buccaneer, before whom I stood, with tost arms, wild and menacing.
"'They follow you!' I screamed. 'Passive, relentless, and deadly, they
follow in your wake and will not be denied. The strong, the helpless,
the coarse and the beautiful--all you have killed and mutilated in your
wanton devilry--they are on your heels like a pack of spectre-hounds, and
sooner or later they will have you in their cold arms and hale you down
to the secret places of terror. Look at Beston, who leads, with a fearful
smile on his mouth! Look at that pale girl you tortured, whose hair
writhes and lengthens--a swarm of snakes nosing the hull for some open
port-hole to enter by! Dog and devil, you are betrayed by your own
hideous cruelty!'
"He rose and struck at me blindly; staggered, and found his filthy voice
in a shriek of rage.
"'Jorinder! make hell of the galley-fire! Heat some irons red and fetch
out a bucket of pitch. We'll learn this dandy galloot his manners!'
"Wrought to the snapping-point of desperation, I sprang at and closed
with him; and we went down on the floor together with a heavy crash.
I was weaponless, but I would choke and strangle him with my hands. I had
him under, my fingers crookt in his throat. His eyeballs slipped forward,
like banana ends squeezed from their skins; he could not speak or cry,
but he put up one feeble hand and flapped it aimlessly. At that, in the
midst of my fury, I glanced above me, and saw a press of dim faces
crowding a dusk hatch; and from them a shadowy arm came through, pointing
a weapon; and all my soul reeled sick, and I only longed to be left time
to destroy the venomous horror beneath me before I passed.
"It was not to be. Something, a physical sensation like the jerk of a
hiccup, shook my frame; and immediately the waters of being seemed to
burst their dam and flow out peaceably into a valley of rest."
William Tyrwhitt paused, and "Well?" said I.
"You see me here," he said. "I woke this morning, and found myself lying
on the floor of that shattered and battered closet, and a starved demon
of a cat licking up something from the boards. When I drove her away,
there was a patch there like ancient dried blood."
"And how about your head?"
"My head? Why, the bullet seemed stuck in it between the temples; and
there I am afraid it is still."
"Just so. Now, William Tyrwhitt, you must take a Turkish, bath and some
cooling salts, and then come and tell me all about it again."
"Ah! you don't believe me, I see. I never supposed you would.
Good-night!"
But, when he was gone, I sat ruminating.
"That Captain Iron," I thought, "walked over the great rent in the floor
without falling through. Well, well!"