SPECTERS OF THE PAST

Hal’s boots, clumping heavily on the porch, aroused the captain from his brief revery of prayer. Almost at once the new stab of pain at realization that Dr. Filhiol must see Hal in this disheveled, half-drunken condition brought the old man sharply back to earth again. Bitter humiliation, brutal disillusionment, sickening anti-climax! The captain stifled a groan. Fate seemed dealing him a blow unreasonably hard.

A chair scraped on the porch. Briggs saw the bent and shriveled form of Dr. Filhiol arising. The doctor, rendered nervous by the arsenal and by the cabinet of curios, which all too clearly recalled the past, had once more gone out upon the piazza, to await the captain’s return. Warmed by the egg-nog within, and outwardly by a shawl that Ezra had given him, now he stood there, leaning on his cane. A smile of anticipation curved his shaven, bloodless lips. His eyes blinked eagerly behind his thick-lensed glasses.

“Home again, eh?” he piped. “Good! So then this is the little grandson back from college? Little! Ha-ha! Why, captain, he’d make two like us!”

“This is Hal,” answered the captain briefly. “Yes, this is my grandson.”

The doctor, surprised at Briggs’s curt reply, put out his hand. Hal took it as his grandfather spoke the doctor’s name.

“Glad to know you, doctor!” said he in a sullen voice, and let the hand drop. “Excuse me, please! I’ll go in and wash up.”

He turned toward the door. With perturbation Filhiol peered after him. Then he glanced at the captain. Awkwardly silence fell, broken by a cry of joy from the front door.

“Oh, Master Hal!” ejaculated Ezra. “Ef it ain’t Master Hal!”

The servitor’s long face beamed with jubilation as he seized the suit-case with one hand and with the other clapped Hal on the shoulder. “Jumpin’ jellyfish, but you’re lookin’ fine an’ stout! Back from y’r books, ain’t ye? Ah, books is grand things, Master Hal, ’specially check-books, pocketbooks, an’ bank-books. Did the cap’n tell ye? He did, didn’t he?”

“Hello, Ez!” answered Hal, still very glum. “Tell me what?”

“‘Bout the plum-cake an’ lamb?” asked Ezra anxiously as Hal slid past him into the house. “I remembered what you like, Master Hal. I been workin’ doggone hard to git everythin’ jest A1 fer you!”

His voice grew inaudible as he followed Hal into Snug Haven. The captain and the doctor gazed at each other a long, eloquent moment in the vague light. Neither spoke. Filhiol turned and sat down, puzzled, oppressed.

Briggs wearily sank into another chair. Hal’s feet stumbling up the front stairs echoed with torment through his soul. Was that the stumbling of haste, or had the boy drunk more than he had seemed to? The captain dropped his cap to the porch-floor. Not now did he take pains to hang it on top of the rocking-chair. He wiped his forehead with his silk handkerchief, and groaned.

The doctor kept silence. He understood that any word of his would prove inopportune. But with pity he studied the face of Captain Briggs, its lines accentuated by the light from the window of the cabin.

Presently the captain sighed deep and began:

“I’m glad you’re here on my quarterdeck with me to-night, doctor. Things are all going wrong, sir. Barometer’s way down, compass is bedeviled, seams opening fore and aft. It’s bad, doctor—very, very bad!”

“I see there’s something wrong, of course,” said Filhiol with sympathy.

“Everything’s wrong, sir. That grandson of mine—you—noticed just what was the matter with him?”

“H-m! It’s rather dark here, you know,” hedged Filhiol.

“Not so dark but what you understood,” said Briggs grimly. “When there’s a storm brewing no good navigator thinks he can dodge it by locking himself in his cabin. And there is a storm brewing this time, a hurricane, sir, or I’ve missed all signals.”

“Just what do you mean, captain?”

“Violence, drink, women—wickedness and sin! You smelled his breath, didn’t you? You took an observation of his face?”

“Well, yes. He’s been drinking a little, of course; but these boys in college—”

“He very nigh killed the skipper of the Sylvia Fletcher, and there’ll be the devil to pay about it. It was just luck there wasn’t murder done before my very eyes. He’s been drinking enough so as to wake a black devil in his heart! Enough so he’s like a roaring bull after the first pretty girl in the offing.”

“There, there, captain!” The doctor tried to soothe him, his thin voice making strange contrast with the captain’s booming bass. “You’re probably exaggerating. A little exuberance may be pardoned in youth,” his expression belied his words. “Remember, captain, when you were—”

“That’s just what’s driving me on the rocks with grief and despair!” the old man burst out, gripping the arms of the rocker. “God above! It’s just the realization of my own youth, flung back at me now, that’s like to kill me! That boy, so help me—why, he’s thrown clean back fifty years all at one crack!”

“No, no, not that!”

“He has, I tell you! He’s jumped back half a century. He don’t belong in this age of airplanes and wireless. He belongs back with the clipper-ships and—”

“Nonsense, captain, and you know it!”

“It’s far from nonsense! There’s a bad strain somewhere in my blood. I’ve been afraid a long time it was going to crop out in Hal. There’s always been a tradition in my family of evil doings now and then. I don’t know anything certain about it, though, except that my grandfather, Amalfi Briggs, died of bursting a blood-vessel in his brain in a fit of rage. That was all that saved him from being a murderer—he died before he could kill the other man!”

Silence came, save for the piping whistle of an urchin far up the road. The ever-rising, falling suspiration of the sea breathed its long caress across the land, on which a vague, pale sheen of starlight was descending.

Suddenly, from abovestairs, sounded a dull, slamming sound as of a bureau-drawer violently shut. Another slam followed; and now came a grumbling of muffled profanity.

“All that saved my grandfather from being a murderer,” said Briggs dourly, “was the fact that he dropped dead himself before he could cut down the other man with the ship-carpenter’s adze he had in his hand.”

“Indeed? Your grandfather must have been rather a hard specimen.”

“Only when he was in anger. At other times you never saw a more jovial soul! But rage made a beast of him!”

“How was your father?”

“Not that way in the least. He was as consistently Christian a man as ever breathed. My son—Hal’s father—was a good man, too. Not a sign of that sort of brutality ever showed in him.”

“I think you’re worrying unnecessarily,” judged the doctor. “Your grandson may be wild and rough at times, but he’s tainted with no hereditary stain.”

“I don’t know about that, doctor,” said the captain earnestly. “For a year or two past he’s been showing more temper than a young man should. He’s not been answering the helm very well. Two or three of the village people here have already complained to me. I’ve never been really afraid till to-night. But now, doctor, I am afraid—terribly, deadly afraid!”

The old man’s voice shook. Filhiol tried to smile.

“Let the dead past bury its dead!” said he. “Don’t open the old graves to let the ghosts of other days walk out again into the clear sunset of your life.”

“God knows I don’t want to!” the old man exclaimed in a low, trembling voice. “But suppose those graves open themselves? Suppose they won’t stay shut, no, not though all the good deeds from here to heaven were piled atop of them, to keep them down? Suppose those ghosts rise up and stare me in the eyes and won’t be banished—what then?”

“Stuff and nonsense!” gibed Filhiol, though his voice was far from steady. “You’re not yourself, captain. You’re unnerved. There’s nothing the matter with that boy except high spirits and overflowing animal passions.”

“No, no! I understand only too well. God is being very hard to me! I sinned grievous, in the long ago! But I’ve done my very best to pay the reckoning. Seems like I haven’t succeeded. Seems like God don’t forget! He’s paying me now, with interest!”

“Captain, you exaggerate!” the doctor tried to assure him, but Briggs shook his head.

“Heredity skips that way sometimes, don’t it?” asked he.

“Well—sometimes. But that doesn’t prove anything.”

“No, it don’t prove anything, but what Hal did to-night does! Would a thing like that come on sudden that way? Would it? A kind of hydrophobia of rage that won’t listen to any reason but wants to break and tear and kill? I mean, if that kind of thing was in the blood, could it lay hid a long time and then all of a sudden burst out like that?”

“Well—yes. It might.”

“I seem to remember it was the same with me the first time I ever had one of those mad fits,” said the captain. “It come on quick. It wasn’t like ordinary getting mad. It was a red torrent, delirious and awful—something that caught me up and carried me along on its wave—something I couldn’t fight against. When I saw Hal with his teeth grinning, eyes glassy, fists red with McLaughlin’s blood, oh, it struck clean through my heart!

“It wasn’t any fear of either of them getting killed that harpooned me, no, nor complications and damages to pay. No, no, though such will be bad enough. What struck me all of a heap was to see myself, my very own self that used to be. If I, Captain Alpheus Briggs, had been swept back to 1868 and set down on the deck of the Silver Fleece, Hal would have been my exact double. I’ve seen myself just as I was then, doctor, and it’s shaken me in every timber. There I stood, I, myself, in Hal’s person, after five decades of weary time. I could see the outlines of the same black beard on the same kind of jaw—same thick neck and bloody fists; and, oh, doctor, the eyes of Hal. His eyes!”

“His eyes?”

“Yes. In them I saw my old, wicked, hell-elected self—saw it glaring out, to break and ravish and murder!”

“Captain Briggs!”

“It’s true, I’m telling you. I’ve seen a ghost this evening. A ghost—”

He peered around fearfully in the dusk. His voice lowered to a whisper:

“A ghost!”

Filhiol could not speak. Something cold, prehensile, terrible seemed fingering at his heart! Ruddy, the Airedale, raised his head, seemed to be listening, to be seeing something they could not detect. In the dog’s throat a low growl muttered.

“What’s that?” said the captain, every muscle taut.

“Nothing, nothing,” the doctor answered. “The dog probably hears some one down there by the hedge. This is all nonsense, captain. You’re working yourself into a highly nervous state and imagining all kinds of things. Now—”

“I tell you, I saw the ghost of my other self,” insisted Briggs. “There’s worse kinds of ghosts than those that hang around graveyards. I’ve always wanted to see that kind and never have. Night after night I’ve been up there to the little cemetery on Croft Hill, and sat on the bench in our lot, just as friendly and receptive as could be, ready to see whatever ghost might come to me, but none ever came. I’m not afraid of the ghosts of the dead! It’s ghosts of the living that strike a dread to me—ghosts of the past that ought to die and can’t—ghosts of my own sins that God won’t let lie in the grave of forgiveness—”

“S-h-h-h!” exclaimed the doctor. He laid a hand on the captain’s, which was clutching the arm of the rocker with a grip of steel. “Don’t give way to such folly! Perhaps Hal did drink a little, and perhaps he did thrash a man who had insulted him. But that’s as far as it goes. All this talk about ghosts and some hereditary, devilish force cropping out again, is pure rubbish!”

“I wish to God above it was!” the old man groaned. “But I know it’s not. It’s there, doctor, I tell you! It’s still alive and in the world, more terrible and more malignant than ever, a living, breathing thing, evil and venomous, backed up with twice the intelligence and learning I ever had, with a fine, keen brain to direct it and with muscles of steel to do its bidding! Oh, God, I know, I know!”

“Captain Briggs, sir,” the doctor began. “This is most extraordinary language from a man of your common sense. I really do not understand—”

“Hush!” interrupted the captain, raising his right hand. On the stairway feet echoed. “Hush! He’s coming down!”

Silent, tense, they waited. The heavy footfalls reached the bottom of the stair and paused there a moment. Briggs and the doctor heard Hal grumbling something inarticulate to himself. Then he walked into the cabin.