IN WHICH I LEARN SOMETHING FROM AN
ILL-PAINTED PICTURE
I took my supper in the kitchen of the Palace Inn, with a strong reek
of tobacco to season it, and a succession of gruesome stories to make
it palatable. The company was made up for the most part of fishermen,
who talked always of wrecks upon the western islands and of dead men
drowned. But occasionally a different accent and a different anecdote
of some other corner of the world would make a variation; and doing my
best to pierce the haze of smoke, I recognised the speaker as Peter
Tortue, the Frenchman, or the man with the patch on his eye. George
Glen was there too, tucked away in a corner by the fireplace, but he
said very little. I paid, therefore, but a scanty attention, until,
the talk having slid, as it will, from dead men to their funerals,
some native began to descant upon the magnificence of Adam Mayle's.
"Ay," said he, drawing a long breath, "there _was_ a funeral, and all
according to orders dictated in writing by the dead man. He was to be
buried by torchlight in the Abbey Grounds. I do remember that! Mortal
heavy he was, and he needed a big coffin."
"To be sure he would," chimed in another.
"And he had it too," said a third; "a mortal big coffin. We carried
him right from his house over the shoulder of the island, and down
past the Abbey pond to the graveyard. Five shillings each we had for
carrying him--five shillings counted out by torchlight on a gravestone
as soon as the grave was filled in. It was all written down before he
died."
Then the first speaker took up the tale again.
"A queer, strange man was Adam Mayle, and queer strange sights he had
seen. He would sit in that corner just where you be, Mr. Glen, and
tell stories to turn a man cold. Crackers they used to call him on
board ship, so he told us--'Crackers.'"
"Why Crackers?" asked George Glen.
"'Cause he was that handy with a marlinspike. A queer man! And that
was a queer notion of his about that stick"; and then he appealed to
his companions, who variously grunted their assent.
"What about the stick?" asked Glen.
"You may well ask, Mr. Glen. It was all written down. The stick was to
be buried with him in his coffin. It was an old heavy stick with a
great brass handle. Many's the time he has sat on the settle there
with that stick atween his knees. 'Twas a stick with a sword in't, but
the sword was broken. I remember how he loosened the handle once while
he was talking just as you and I are now, and he held the stick upside
down and the sword fell out on to the ground, just two or three inches
of steel broken off short. He picked it up pretty sharp and rammed it
in again. Well, the stick was to be buried with him, so that if he
woke up when we were carrying him over the hill to the Abbey he might
knock on the lid of his coffin."
"But I doubt if any one would ha' opened the lid if he had knocked,"
said one, with a chuckle, and another nodded his head to the
sentiment. "There was five shillings, you see," he explained, "once
the ground was stamped down on top of him. It wasn't quite human to
expect a body to open the lid."
"A queer notion--about that stick."
And so the talk drifted away to other matters. The fishermen took
their leave one by one and tramped heavily to their homes. Peter
Tortue and his companion followed. George Glen alone remained, and he
sat so quiet in his corner that I forgot his presence. Adam Mayle was
the only occupant of the room for me. I could see him sitting on the
settle, with a long pipe between his lips when he was not holding a
mug there, his mulberry face dimly glowing through the puffs of
tobacco, and his voice roaring out those wild stories of the African
coast. That anxiety for a barbaric funeral seemed quite of a piece
with the man as my fancies sketched him. Well, he was lying in the
Abbey grounds, and George Glen sat in his place.
Mr. Glen came over to me from his corner, and I called for a jug of
rum punch, and invited him to share it, which he willingly did. He was
a little squabby man, but very broad, with a nervous twitting laugh,
and in his manner he was extremely intimate and confidential. He could
hardly finish a sentence without plucking you by the sleeve, and every
commonplace he uttered was pointed with a wink. He knew that I had
been over at the house under Merchant's Rock, and he was clumsily
inquisitive about my business upon Tresco.
"Why," said I, indifferently, "I take it that I am pretty much in the
same case with you, Mr. Glen."
At that his jaw dropped a little, and he stared at me utterly
discountenanced that I should be so plain with him.
"As for me," said he in a little, "it is plain enough. And when
you say"--and here he twitched my sleeve as he leaned across the
table--"'here's old George Glen, that battered about the world in
ships for fifty years, and has come to his moorings in a snug harbor
where rum's cheap, being smuggled or stole', says you--well, I am not
denying you may be right;" and here he winked prodigiously.
"And that's just what I said," I returned; "for here have I battered
about London, that's worse than the sea, and ages a man twice as
fast----"
Mr. Glen interrupted me with some astonishment, and, I thought, a
little alarm.
"Why," says she, "this is no place for the likes of you--a crazy
tumbledown of a tavern. All very well for tarry sailor folk that's
never seen nothing better than forecastle. But you'll sicken of it in
a week. Sure, you have not dropped your anchor here."
"We'll call it a kedge, Mr. Glen," said I.
"A kedge, you say," answered Mr. Glen, with a titter, "and a kedge
we'll make it. It's a handy thing to get on board in a hurry."
He spoke with a wheedling politeness, but very likely a threat
underlay his words. I thought it wise to take no notice of them, but,
rising from my seat, I wished him good night. And there the
conversation would have ended but for a couple of pictures upon the
wall which caught my eye.
One was the ordinary picture which you may come upon in a hundred
alehouses by the sea: the sailor leaving his cottage for a voyage, his
wife and children clinging about his knees, and in the distance an
impossible ship unfurling her sails upon an impossible ocean. The
second, however, it was, which caught my attention. It was the picture
of a sailor's return. His wife and children danced before him, he was
clad in magnificent garments, and to prove the prosperity of his
voyage he carried in his hand a number of gold watches and chains; and
the artist, whether it was that he had a sense of humour or that he
merely doubted his talents, instead of painting the watches, had cut
holes in the canvas and inserted little discs of bright metal.
"This is a new way of painting pictures, Mr. Glen," said I.
Mr. Glen's taste in pictures was crude, and for these he expressed a
quite sentimental admiration.
"But," I objected, "the artist is guilty of a libel, for he makes the
sailor out to be a sneak-thief."
Mr. Glen became indignant.
"Because he comes home with wealth untold?" he asked grandly.
"No, but because he comes home with watches," said I.
Whereupon Mr. Glen was at some pains to explain to me that the watches
were merely symbolical.
"And the picture's true," he added, and fell to pinching my arm.
"There's many a landsman laughs; but sailors, you says, says you,
'comes home with watches in their 'ands more than they can 'old and
sets up for gentle-folk,' says you."
"Like old Adam Mayle, I adds," said I; and Mr. Glen dropped my arm and
stood a little way off blinking at me.
"You knew Adam?" he said, in a fierce sort of way.
"No," I answered.
"But you know of him?"
"Yes," said I, slowly, "I know of him, but not as much as you do, Mr.
Glen, who were quartermaster with him at Whydah on the ship _Royal
Fortune_."
I spoke at random, wondering how he would take the words, and they had
more effect than I had even hoped for. His face turned all of a
mottled colour; he banged his fist upon the table and uttered a
horrible oath, calling upon God to slay him if he had ever set foot on
the deck of a ship named the _Royal Fortune_.
"And when you says, says you," he added, sidling up to me, "Old George
never see'd a _Royal Fortune_, says you--why, you're saying what's
right and fair, and I thanks you, sir. I thanks you with a true
sailor's 'eart "; at which he would have wrung my hand. But I had no
hand ready for him; I barely heard his words. Whydah--the Guinea
coast--the ship _Royal Fortune!_ The truth came so suddenly upon me
that I had not the wit to keep silence. I could have bitten off my
tongue the next moment. As it was I caught most of the sentence back.
But the beginning of it jumped from my mouth.
"At last I know"--I began and stopped.
"What?" said Mr. Glen, with his whole face distorted into an
insinuating grin. But he was standing very close to me and a little
behind my back.
"That my father thrashed me over twenty years ago," said I, clapping
my hand to my coat tails and springing away from him.
"And you have never forgotten it," said he.
"On the contrary," said I, "I have only just remembered it."
Mr. Glen moved away from the table and walked towards the door. Thus
he disclosed the table to me, and I laughed very contentedly. Mr. Glen
immediately turned. He had reached the door, and he stood in the
doorway biting shreds of skin from his thumb.
"You are in good spirits," said he, rather surlily.
"I was never in better," said I. "The motions of inanimate bodies are
invariably instructive."
I was very willing he should think me half-witted. He went grumbling
up the stairs; I turned me again to the picture of the sailor's
return. Whydah--the Guinea coast--the ship _Royal Fortune!_ It may
have been in some part the man's eagerness to deny all knowledge of
the ship; it was, no doubt, in some part the picture of those gold
watches, which awakened my memories. Watches of just such gold were
dangling for sale on a pedler's stall when first I heard of the ship
_Royal Fortune_. The whole scene came back to me most vividly--the
market-place of an old country town upon a fair day, the carts, the
crowds, the merry-go-rounds, the pedler's stall with the sham gold
watches, and close by the stall a ragged hawker singing a ballad of
the _Royal Fortune_, and selling copies of the ballad--a ballad to
which was added the last confessions of four men hung for piracy at
Cape Coast Castle within the flood-marks. It was well over twenty
years since that day, but I remembered it now with a startling
distinctness. There was a rough woodcut upon the title-page of the
ballad representing four men hanging in chains upon four gibbets. I
had bought one that afternoon, and my father had taken it from me and
thrashed me soundly for reading it. But I had read it! My memory was
quickened now to an almost supernatural clearness. I could almost turn
over the pages in my mind and read it again. All four men--one of them
was named Ashplant, a second Moody--went to the gallows without any
sign of penitence. There was a third so grossly stupid--yes, his name
was Hardy--so stupid that during his last moments he could think of
nothing more important than the executioner's tying his wrists behind
his back, and his last words were before they swung him off to the
effect that he had seen many men hanged, but none with their hands
tied in this way. The fourth--I could not recall his name, but he
swore very heartily, saying that he would rather go to hell than to
heaven, since he would find no pirates in heaven to keep him company,
and that he would give Roberts a salute of thirteen guns at entrance.
There was the story of a sea-fight, too, besides the ballad and the
confessions and it all cost no more than a penny. What a well-spent
penny! The fourth man's name, by-the-bye, was Sutton.
But the sea-fight! It was fought not many miles from Whydah between
His Majesty's ship _Swallow_ and the _Royal Fortune_; for the _Royal
Fortune_ was sailed by Captain Bartholomew Roberts, the famous pirate
who was killed in this very encounter. How did George Glen or Adam
Mayle or Peter Tortue (for he alone of Glen's assistants was of an age
to have shipped on the _Royal Fortune_) escape? I did not care a
button. I had my thumb on George Glen, and was very well content.
There was no doubt I had my thumb on the insinuating George. There was
Adam Mayle's fortune, in the first place; there was Adam's look when
George Glen let slip the name of the ship when he first came to
Tresco; there was Glen's consternation this evening when I repeated it
to him, and there was something more than his convincing than his
consternation--a table-knife.
He had come very close to me when I mentioned the _Royal Fortune_, and
he had stood a little behind me--against the table at which I had
eaten my supper. I had eaten that supper at the opposite side of the
table, and how should a table-knife have crawled across the table and
be now lying so handily on this nearer edge unless George had doubts
of my discretion? Yes, I had my thumb upon him and as I went upstairs
to bed I wondered whether after all Helen would be justified of her
confidence in believing that I had been sent to Tresco to some good
end. Her face was very present to me that night. There was much in her
which I could not understand. There was something, too, to trouble
one, there were concealments, it almost seemed there was a trace of
effrontery--such as Lieutenant Clutterbuck had spoken of; but to-night
I was conscious chiefly that she set her faith in me and my
endeavours. Does the reed always break if you lean upon it? What if a
miracle happened and the reed grew strong because some one--any
one--leaned upon it! I kept that trustful face of hers as I had seen
it in the sunlight, long before my eyes in the darkness of the room.
But it changed, as I knew and feared it would,--it changed to that
appalling face which had stared at me out of the dark. I tried to
drive that picture of her from my thoughts.
But I could not, until a door creaked gently. I sat up in my bed with
a thought of that knife handy on the table edge to the grasp of George
Glen. I heard a scuffle of shoeless feet draw towards my door, and I
remembered that I had no weapon--not even a knife. The feet stopped at
my door, and I seemed to hear the sound of breathing. The moon had
already sunk, but the night was clear, and I watched the white door
and the white woodwork of the door frame. The door was in the wall on
my right; it was about midway between the head and the foot of my bed,
and it opened inwards and down towards the foot; so that I should
easily see it opening. But suddenly I heard the stair boards creaking.
Whoever it was then, had merely stopped to listen at my door. I fell
back on my bed with a relief so great as to surprise me. I was
surprised, too, to find myself cold with sweat. I determined to buy
myself a knife in the morning, for there was the girl over at
Merchant's Point who looked to me. I had thus again a picture of her
in the sunlight.
And then I began to wonder at that stealthy descent of the stairs. And
why should any one wish to assure himself I slept? This was a question
to be looked into. I got out of bed very cautiously, as cautiously
opened the door and peered out.
There was a light burning in the kitchen--a small yellow light as of a
candle, but I could hear no sound. I crept to the head of the stairs
which were steep and led directly to the very threshold of the
kitchen. I lay down on the boards of the landing and stretching my
head down the stairs, looked into the room.
George Glen had taken the sailor with the watches, down from the wall.
He was seated with the candle at his elbow, and minutely examining the
picture. He looked up towards the stairs, I drew my face quickly back;
but he was gazing in a complete abstraction, and biting his thumb,
very much puzzled. I crept back to bed and in a little I heard him
come shuffling up the stairs. He had been examining that picture to
find a reason for my exclamation. It was a dull-witted thing to do and
I could have laughed at him heartily, only I had already made a
mistake in taking him to be duller-witted than he was. For he was
quick enough, at all events, to entertain suspicions.