Cursed Be the Treasure 32Part III · Into the Morning
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Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Cursed Be the Treasure 32
Part III · Into the Morning
DrakeEnglish
I saw a smile of greeting change into a grimace of stupefied dismay. My mind went back to the morning when in the kitchen just beneath us I had blurted out, "The smugglers!" I stood horrified at what I had done. This dismay on the Captain's face grew into an expression of savage cunning, and I knew that all the deviltry of his lifelong madness was roused to a ferocious passion. His head sank below his shoulders; his hands curled and stiffened like the claws of an enraged beast; his eyes at first swelled glaringly from their sockets, then sank back beneath the half-closed lids in a terrible scrutiny of menace. And suddenly he sprang upright with his hands thrown behind his head, and burst into a peal of demoniac laughter more terrifying than the brutal crouching of his first posture. And still I stood motionless watching him.
His frenzied mirth subsided at length into broken gigglings, hysterical and unnatural. Tottering a little he felt about for a chair and sat down heavily. Then drawing out a huge kerchief he mopped his brow which was beaded over with perspiration, and still faintly chuckling said, "Ha, yes, excellent; excellent, indeed. That's good, Tommy; that's a good joke, a really good joke, 'pon my soul." He threw back his head and forced out a harsh laugh.
I took a step forward. "Sir," I began, wondering how I might undo the evil I had done. But at that he sprang up, and his savage madness returned upon him.
"Stand back," he cried in a terrible voice, "stand back. I know you, I know who you are. You think you can fool me, do you? You think I don't know you, eh? God in heaven, what do you take me for, sir?" With his curled fingers digging at the air as though to tear away some obstructing veil he stared at me with reddening eyes, and went on, "Ha, yes, you think you look like Tommy, do you? But I know you. You would hunt me down, blast your eyes! You would tell me of the bodies lying there. You would put the world upon my track. Ha, you would drag me out into the light, point at me, set men's eyes upon me, name me murderer? So? Murderer, am I? Killed my own brothers, did I? Trapped them and left them there to die?" His voice rose more shrilly with each word, and he finished with a scream, suddenly covering his face with his hands, "And I did, I did! Oh, God!"
He sank sobbing to the floor. I didn't know what to do. It was terrible, it was piteous. But I knew he was mad, and dared not approach him.
Presently he seemed to regain control of himself. Still huddled on the floor he threw out a hand to me, and looking up at me from flushed and swollen eyes began in a strained, low, monotonous tone, "See here, this is how it was. And you will know sooner or later. They'd have killed me. I tell you, they'd have killed me. Yes, my own brothers would have killed me for the gold. But I found out how it lay. I trapped them there. But one escaped; the youngest. I loved him. I tell you, I loved the boy. And he would have killed me for the gold. I tell you...." He broke off. His head fell between his hands. "You don't believe me," he moaned reproachfully, "you don't believe a word I say."
"Sir," I cried, "I do believe you."
Slowly he peered up at me, and I saw a wicked gleam lighten his face.
"So," he said. "Then come and kiss me, boy."
I think I would have ventured all and gone to him to see if I might pacify his tortured spirit, but I remembered how once before he had snared me so at Sunset Towers. I held back doubtfully, though I yearned to run to him and comfort him. At my hesitation his face grew frightful. He sprang to his feet and cried, "He hates me. Tommy hates me because I killed his father. I killed...." He stopped short, and staring at me said deliberately, "You lie. It's all a lie. I didn't kill him. My name is Field; Captain Field, I'd have you know. And the crying you hear at night, Tommy, it's the ghost. You know it's the ghost?"
"Yes, sir," I said, "I've seen it." For I thought to lead his mind back to earlier associations.
But he chuckled to himself and said, "Little fool! Seen it, eh? Little fool!"
The thought seemed to amuse him. He laughed quietly for a while. Then again I saw his eyes slanting round at me. He stopped laughing, and gazing at me stupidly, said, "Still here, eh? What do you want with me, eh? God in heaven, can't you say what you want?"
He stood so for a moment, and I couldn't say a word.
Then he passed his hands across his eyes, and his face took on a look of horror. "Tommy?" he asked. "Isn't it Tommy?"
"Yes, sir," I said, "I'm Tommy."
"Liar!" he cried. "Liar! I know you. Pah! There's the smell of blood in the air. You've come from the grave, from the grave down there in the woods. I know. Why can't you leave me in peace? Why must you follow me? They told me it was quiet in the grave. Why can't you lie still? Why can't you rest? What have I done to you? What have I ever done to you that you should follow me like this? Yes, always follow me? Away, I say; away!"
He sprang towards me with his hands before his eyes, lurching blindly as though afraid to face me. I slipped to one side, and we changed places. He removed his hands, and looking before him thought for a moment I had gone, "Ha," he muttered, "I thought I saw him. I must be going mad." Then he turned. I thought he would have fallen dead at my feet. With mouth foaming and eyes staring he tottered dizzily forward and collapsed to the floor without a struggle. I would have stepped to him, but he lifted his face and looked furtively up at me from under his brows, and said in a broken-hearted voice, "I tell you I'm sorry. I can't say more. It had to be. Blood breeds blood. You should have taken the money and gone away. But you took the money and followed me. Always you followed. What could I do?"
I knew he was mistaking me for my father. Perhaps I was really growing more like my father, or perhaps it was just his guilty imagination tricking him. But I said once more, "Sir, I'm Tommy."
He lay crouched on the floor, breathing heavily, and watched me for a minute or two. I thought his mind was clearing. "Tommy," he muttered, "Jenny's Tommy. You'll be rich, Tommy; you'll be rich. And you needn't fear. You're not to blame, boy. It's evil gold, and there's a curse on it; but it won't hurt you. There's no blood upon your hands. Thank God for that, boy; thank God for that. You take the gold, and ask no questions. Your father asked too many questions. I gave him gold, but he would ask questions. That's dangerous, boy."
He scrambled unsteadily to his feet, and said, "Come and kiss me, Tommy."
But again the memory of that pursuit round the table held me doubtfully back. Now there was no Abou to lead the Captain away if he meditated treachery. The hesitation was fatal. He burst out into a torrent of reproach: "Tommy hates me. He won't believe me. I say they would have murdered me, but he won't believe me. Oh, Tommy, Tommy! My boy! And I loved you." With a sobbing cry he burst through the door and away into the woods, where I heard his voice echoing brokenly in a dying wail.
I was too exhausted to follow. I sat down where I was, and burying my face in my hands yielded to a weak self-pity. My whole life lay in pieces at my feet. I had killed those that had loved me best, driven on by a fate that had blinded and mastered me. Through no sin of my own I felt the clinging guiltiness of blood upon my hands. Ahead of me I saw no cleansing, no healing. For now blackened out of my life was the one bright gleam that had cheered me forward: my love for Jenny. There would be no Jenny for me any more. A terrible river of blood lay between us. The bridge of reconciliation that might have spanned it I had destroyed with my own hands. If I had stifled my suspicions and gone to the Captain when he had called me, all might have been well. But I had closed the one door that he had opened. I had refused the hand he had offered. I had sealed my own fate.
Jenny's Tommy, he had named me. The name stirred bitterly at my heart. I remembered how Jenny had sent me forth to find her father's foe. I remembered, too, how I had believed I had found him and killed him, but had only killed my own friend. The irony of the thing had stung me at the time. But now it seemed that the whole conclave of the fates were heaving in laughter; for I had succeeded only in tracking down myself. I had been hunting myself about the world. I was the man I had promised to kill. I thought I couldn't do better than fulfil my promise. Jenny's Tommy! There would be no Jenny for me.
How Dirk found me I needn't relate; nor how he took me back to London, comforting me in his rough way when by broken fragments I gave him all my story. He saw nothing to mope over. "Girls," he said, "don't let a spot o' blood upset them." But I couldn't bring myself to face Jenny. Not merely was I afraid of meeting the Captain again, but the thought of naming love to Jenny sickened and disgusted me.
I was awakened into some kind of alertness when, after we had been in London some days, Dirk told me the Captain hadn't returned to his home. He knew the house, for he had tracked Abou there before he had set out for the Dolphin on his last journey. Jenny had been left in the care of the maid, while the Captain, too restless to wait for Abou to find me, had followed him after some days of fretful anxiety. Jenny, Dirk had learnt, was still awaiting her father, unconscious of the tragedy that had befallen him.
The news set me packing. I announced to Dirk that I was off to Sunset Towers to seek the Captain, for I knew where he must have gone, and I dreaded what might have happened to him. Dirk offered to take me on the brig, but I asked him merely to sail to the Rancey and await me there. Somehow I felt I must make the journey alone. The thought of company was like the rubbing of rough garments on an open wound for I seemed to be embarked on a pilgrimage of atonement. I determined to find the Captain, and mad or sane I would beg his forgiveness, and close for ever the terrible account of blood that lay between us.
Full of this resolve I travelled slowly northwards. On the way I repeated the whole story to myself, having all the clues in my hands now, even the mystery of my father's little fortune, which had evidently been hush money paid by the Captain to turn him from his quest. I felt chastened and subdued, unable to fix the blame. My father had certainly not offended to the penalty of death; and on the other hand the Captain, whipped to a madness at the memory of the crime he had been forced into, so much against his kindly nature as I knew, wasn't to be charged to the full with the blood he had shed to cover his traces. "Blood breeds blood," he had said. There was a fatality in the affair. My sympathy went out to him, for my father's stories had so stimulated my imagination that I could put myself in the Captain's place. Goaded as he had been I knew I should have acted as he had done. Nor could I reproach Abou for his mistaken devotion to an evil duty. Indeed something like admiration for him welled up in my heart when I thought how he had put aside his calm serenity of mind to dog his master's enemy year after year with the knife of murder in his hand, when his whole nature I believed craved for quietness and peace. And what a pursuit it had been! I had only glimpsed it by fleeting scenes, when those two superb trackers, the hunter and the hunted, had emerged for a moment into the daylight from their dark and tortuous burrowings underground. But the course of that tremendous chase, the shifts and wiles and dodges of that pair of consummate actors, had been a drama for the gods above, and none but they could tell its story. And so as I thought of these things I felt as I had so often felt before that I was moving in the presence of something more than human. The strange hatred, the madness, the bewildering unreason of the combat between those men who had no cause to wrong each other turned my mind back to the old tale of the curse. I yielded to the superstition, otherwise there was no accounting for the feud: it was that ancient malediction that had exacted such a penalty of blood.
When I arrived at Sunset Towers all was deathly still. There was no trace of the Captain upstairs or downstairs. For a while I thought my pilgrimage had been in vain. Then I remembered the secret chamber, and knew at once that, of course, the Captain would have taken refuge there. With my stiletto I had little difficulty in finding and penetrating the hole through the worm-eaten panel in the old oak wardrobe. I pressed back the lever which lifted the bar, and the door swung easily open. I listened for a moment wondering whether I had been overheard; if so the Captain might be waiting for me at the top of the narrow stairs. But all was still, and I ascended into the dark. I hesitated at the top, then boldly pushed open the door. The Captain lay on the bed, his face turned to the skylight, his hand gripping a dagger which was buried up to the hilt in his heart.
There was little to do. He had paid the forfeit, and was at rest. When I recovered from the shock I searched among his papers. I found a copy of his will bequeathing his property to Jenny and myself, with the hope strongly expressed that, some day, we might marry each other, and so reunite the divided inheritance. I knew his real meaning was that the feud might be healed in reconciliation.
I put the will into my pocket, but vowed never to touch a penny of that unhallowed gold. I hoped, too, I might persuade Jenny to forswear her share. That would be the last service I could do her, for I couldn't see the Captain's desire being fulfilled.
Then there seemed only one thing left to do. I searched the cellars and grounds for oil and firewood, and stacking the fuel up the stairs, and flinging open all the doors and windows, I set a light to the stuff, using as a brand first the manuscript that had caused all the evil, and then the paper I had found on the skeleton in Drift-Wood Cavern.
With the building once well ablaze I set off for the sea, turning at every few steps to look behind me to satisfy myself that the flames were mastering the great ruinous pile, wiping bare for ever all traces of the crime which had begun there with the finding of the manuscript and ended there with the suicide of the Captain.
As I left the place farther and farther behind I couldn't help thinking of that other fire I had watched as my father carried me away from the blazing hut in the woods where first I had consciously become aware of the tangled net in which my life had been so strangely and tragically involved. And here with fire I was freeing myself from the net for ever. And so I kept casting back over my shoulder to watch the flames, till at last even the smoke rising in a thick column to the clouds was merely a patch of blurred shadow on the skyline.
Then again I thought of Jenny. I began to wonder how I should break the news to her. How was I to tell her the story? For I mustn't wound her love for her father, yet I must be just to my own. The picture of the lonely little girl cast out upon the world with none to protect her took violent hold upon my pity. I yearned towards her, yet knew deep in my heart that to speak to her of love would be to stab her afresh in her still-bleeding wound.
I was utterly weary in body, utterly dejected in spirit, when I reached the sea. I found Dirk waiting me in a shore-side tavern. I told him my story. The night was falling as we rowed out to the brig. I retired to my bunk, where I lay a long while sorrowfully tossing, and at last fell into a troubled sleep.
With the chill of the morning I was up again, cheered at heart as always at the sight of the good day. I ran out on deck. And there before me was Jenny.
I stopped short, thinking my eyes were deceiving me. But she walked gravely up to me and said, "Dirk brought me, Tommy. He has told me everything."
"Everything?" I repeated.
"Yes," she said.
"And yesterday ..." I began.
"Yesterday, too," she said.
For a minute or two we faced each other in silence. Then I began again. "I have your father's will," I told her.
"Dirk showed it me," she replied.
"But, Jenny," I went on, "you mustn't touch the gold. It's evil."
"I don't want the gold," she declared, breaking from her coldness and speaking with a sudden passion.
I looked at her keenly, for there was something unspoken behind her emotion.
"Then we must say good-bye, I suppose?" I announced, not supposing any such thing, yet half turning from her. At that she spoke with something of her old imperiousness.
"You're very stupid, Tommy," she cried. "My father killed your father, and your father killed my father."
"No," I contradicted.
"Yes," she insisted, "it was so. And so that's all finished. We must try and begin again. Daddy wants us to. He says so in the will."
At that I flung my arms about her. And in the flush of that wonderful moment I seemed to steer suddenly free of the dark shadow of Fear that had closed my life around ever since I could remember, and sailed out into the clean sweet air, with the breaking dawn about me.
Of the rest what need I say? For how we sailed away to the sun and the south; and how for three years I increased in knowledge of seamanship, and put on bulk and muscle, while Jenny grew in sweetness and beauty and grace; and how Dirk taught me the ways of traffic and barter, till at length I sailed back to England with a neat little fortune of my own; and how Dirk retired and bought an inn, and the Revenge was bequeathed to me and became the Jenny brig; all this and much more that followed belongs to another story which I may tell some later day.
