I

IN THE room, besides the people, there was a coffin and a black flag decorated with the skull and crossbones of buccaneers—or fictioneers. Every once in a while persons went down a ladder to a dim, smoky room where heads bumped the ceiling and where casks and kegs and straw-covered wine bottles stood and hung about in an ornamental sort of way. Mediterranean-looking servitors went to and fro in the subterranean crypt or chamber with great mugs of ginger ale. Visitors usually bent over the large, dark table in the centre whereon lay a carefully executed map—the map of “Treasure Island.” The men wore their hair long, the women wore theirs bobbed. Candles, the only light, threw grotesque shadows. Occasionally a waiter sang, “Pour, oh, pour the pirate sherry” from “The Pirates of Penzance” or “Yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum.” Somewhere in obscure darkness a parrot squawked. The sounds were favourably construed into cries of “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

Mermaid, otherwise Mary Smiley, wore coiled upon her head such a magnificence of dark, red-gold hair as to make her the target of envious glances from cropped young women all about her. Of these looks she seemed completely unaware, but they excited the amusement of her companion. Dick Hand did not fit in with the general Bohemian scheme of the place. He was in Greenwich Village but not of it. His proper environment was a certain office much farther down town in New York, on Broadway a little above Bowling Green. There, in the region of tall buildings at once rigid and supple and perfectly self-possessed as only skyscrapers can be, Dick worked by day. By night he pleasured about town. He was by no means addicted to the Pirates’ Den, nor to the Purple Pup, nor Polly’s, but Mermaid, in her last year of special study at Columbia, had expressed a desire to visit—or, rather, revisit—the Village. So they had come down on a bus to Washington Square and then fared along afoot. Mermaid had been expressing her satisfaction with the evening.

“How badly they do this sort of thing here,” she said, glancing again about her. “You and I, Dickie, wouldn’t be so unoriginal, I hope!”

Dickie, who had no instinct in these matters, asked, “Are they unoriginal?”

“Of course.” She smiled at him and two tiny shadows marked the dimples in her cheeks. “They have simply no ideas. Don’t you see how religiously they have copied all the traditional stuff and accepted all the traditional ideas of what a pirates’ den ought to be? A real pirates’ den was never like this. Pirates lived in a ship’s fo’c’s’le or, on occasion, in a cave; or they went glitteringly along a white beach such as we have at home across the bay from Blue Port. They did not live in a litter of empty casks; an empty bottle was only good to heave overboard unless you had occasion to break it over a comrade’s head. Pirates never had a skillfully executed chart. Usually they had no chart at all; only certain sailing directions and a cross bearing. Robert Louis Stevenson, writing ‘Treasure Island,’ burlesqued an ancient, if not very honourable, profession.”

“Never thought about it,” responded Dick, carelessly. “You may be right. But what do you know about pirates, anyway. Where do you get all this stuff?”

“There are just as many pirates as ever there were,” asserted the young woman. “There’s Captain Vanton out home. He is a typical pirate. The pirates who visited the Great South Beach at one time or another are still there, off and on.”

“Oh, say, Mermaid. You don’t really believe in ghosts, do you?”

“I don’t have to believe in them, Dickie, I have seen them.”

“On the beach, home?”

“On the beach, home, and here in New York, too.”

“What were they?”“Just people, Dickie. I don’t pretend they were flesh and blood. I don’t pretend they ever spoke to me or looked at me. They looked through me, sometimes.”

“But, Mermaid, you know it’s silly.”

“But, Dickie, I know it’s not.”

Young Hand finished his ginger ale and made a face at the mug. Then he asked: “Well, how do you account for ’em?”

“Have I got to account for them, Dickie?”

“I mean, why can’t I see them?”

“How do you know you can’t?”

“I never have.”

“That doesn’t prove anything—it doesn’t prove you never will. Dick, see here, go back to your mathematics. There’s the fourth dimension. All we can see and feel has only three dimensions—length, breadth, and thickness or height—but mathematics tells you things may exist which measure four ways instead of three.”

“But I can’t see ’em; neither can you or anybody else.”

“Of course. But you can see representations of them. A house on paper is not a house, but a picture of one. A ghost may only be a representation, a sort of picture, a projection of Something or Somebody that measures four ways. A house measures three ways and you can put it, after a fashion, on a sheet of paper where it measures only two ways. Why can’t a ghost be a three-dimensional——”

“Tommy Lupton never saw a ghost,” interrupted Dick, with a smile. “Can you picture Tommy patrolling the beach at night as a dutiful Coast Guard and coming upon a projection of Captain Kidd?”

“Certainly. Tommy is extremely likely to meet Captain Vanton,” said Mermaid, promptly.

“You mean that Captain Vanton is Captain Kidd living on earth again?” jested the young man.

“A reincarnation? No. He might be the shadow of Captain Kidd, though. He might be the three-dimensional shadow of a four-dimensional creature.”

“Come off! You said awhile ago that you didn’t pretend the ghosts you saw were flesh and blood.”

“Is Captain Vanton flesh and blood?” asked Mermaid. “Did you ever pinch him or see him bleed?”

Dick stared at her with pain and disapproval.

“Mermaid, what a crazy thing to suggest! And how—how confoundedly gruesome! Sounds like Poe. We’ve been living with a spectre all these years out in Blue Port. A spectre with an invalid wife nobody ever sees. Seems to me Mrs. Vanton is more likely to be the ghost. And a spectre with a son. He’s flesh and blood, for Tommy Lupton once punched his head. Guy’s flesh and blood, Mermaid.”

A colour overspread the young woman’s check. “I know that,” she said.Then with a triumphant thought Hand exclaimed: “Besides, lots of people have heard Captain Vanton talk. What do you say to that? You said ghosts didn’t talk.”

“I said I had never had them speak to me,” she corrected him. “I said they looked through you, and not at you. Captain Vanton does not look at you.”

Dick felt aggrieved. “I didn’t think you’d quibble, Mermaid,” he said. “It isn’t like you.”

Mermaid reached up and patted a coil of her hair. Then she rested her cheek on that hand and, reaching across the table, closed the other gently over Dick’s.

“I’m not quibbling, Dickie,” she declared. “I mean just what I say. Captain Vanton is a ghost to me and that’s all about it. I don’t have to pretend. Once, years ago, he came to see Aunt Keturah and I answered the door. I don’t remember whether he looked at me then or not. It doesn’t matter. If we can see ghosts, ghosts can certainly see us. They can certainly speak to us, too, if they wish; though whether we can speak to them I’m not so sure. You’ve got the wrong idea entirely.

“A ghost is simply a person or thing that joins you with the past, the unremembered or unrecorded or unknown past. Somewhere, sometime, at some place, and in some manner, Captain Vanton and I have met. I don’t know it; I feel it. You’re a chemical engineer and I’m a chemist, too, of a sort. I’m getting into chemico-therapy, the chemistry of the body, and chemical agencies in healing. Now chemistry is all right, in fact, it’s wonderful, but it doesn’t explain everything and it never will. You may say that’s because there’s a lot yet to be explored. There is, but when it has all been dug up and tested, something will still remain in the dark. The world will always have its ghosts.”

Dick looked at her sympathetically. “If you were any one else, Mermaid, I’d say you were nutty,” he vouchsafed. “I’ll admit this place is enough to make a person go plumb insane. Look at that coffin! And look at these freaks about us!”

Mermaid smiled. By the flickering of the candles he could see three freckles, the three he always remembered, about her nose, rather high up, a decorative arrangement to call attention, perhaps, to the brilliant blue of her eyes. He was struck again with the sense of her charm and unusualness. He had never met another girl like her, and he knew he never would. There couldn’t be, anywhere. What other girl, versed in exact science, would argue earnestly for the existence of ghosts? Dick knew that she meant what she was saying. He thought to himself: “It’s only the difficulty of getting it over to me. There aren’t the words, I suppose. She’d always be two jumps ahead of you!” Aloud he said: “Then your ghost may be someone else’s flesh and blood. Ghost—flesh—blood—coffin—skull and crossbones—nightmare people. This is the life!”

Mermaid laughed. There was a ring in her laugh of complete surrender to mirth. A joyful surrender. She said: “I am worried about Aunt Keturah. She hasn’t been well. I’m going home as soon as college closes. I don’t suppose I’ll see you again soon, Dickie.”

“Why not?” said her companion. “Come West with me—you and she—to San Francisco this summer. I’ve a water purification job across the bay in Marin County. It would do your aunt a lot of good to see California. There’ll be days when I’ll have nothing to do—waiting around while tests are going on and contracts are being drawn. We could go to Palo Alto and Monterey and Lake Tahoe. Perhaps farther.”

Mermaid considered.

“I have a particular wish to visit San Francisco,” she said. “It has to do with ghosts. I’ll try to persuade her, Dickie.”

Mr. Hand was elated. They rose and went out into the coolness of the springtime night. They walked, and found themselves presently in Washington Square. Something in the moment took Dick Hand by the throat. In a shadowy lane, a little apart from the benches of people, his words dulled by the rumble of the Fifth Avenue omnibuses, he took Mermaid’s hand, his fingers closing over it with intensity.“Can’t we—can’t we make it a honeymoon trip, Mermaid?” he asked.

He could just see the slight movement of her silhouetted head. She murmured: “I’m afraid not, Dickie. I—I want to be very sure.”

He unclasped her hand slowly and they walked to one of the green monsters, vain of their size and path and importance, which take people uptown.

II

College closed. Mermaid went home. She found Keturah Hand in “poor health,” but a diagnosis of any specific complaint seemed difficult.

“Old age and remorse, my girl,” her aunt assured her. “Thinking of all the things I’ve done I might better not have done, or have done differently.”

“Why, any one can do that,” Mermaid answered. “I looked for you to develop some interesting ailment, Aunt Keturah, something new and original that I might exercise my knowledge upon. I am now certified to be competent to analyze you. I know all the diets. If there is anything you’d like particularly to eat, don’t eat it.”

“You remind me of John Pogginson of Patchogue,” protested Mrs. Hand. “An up-to-date doctor put him on a diet some time ago. But instead of telling John what he couldn’t eat he gave him a list of all the things he could eat. There were eighty-seven of them; and in the eighty-seven were things John Pogginson had never heard of. He had a wonderful time. But his wife almost died of indigestion. She said it wasn’t what she ate, but seeing the things John could eat, that made her ill.”

The two women sat down that night for what Keturah called “a long talk.” Mrs. Hand wanted first to discuss Mermaid’s plans; but Mermaid said she hadn’t any.

“Thanks to you,” she told her aunt, “I’ve been able to get what I wanted; but I confess I don’t know yet what I want to do with it. I want to go to work, of course, and I hope I can get into experimental work of some kind. Perhaps at the Rockefeller Institute, perhaps elsewhere. Chemicals won’t cure all the ills flesh is heir to, but they will cure a lot more than we know about. I don’t care about a career, that is, I don’t care about making a world-startling discovery or getting particularly rich or especially famous. I do care about getting a reasonable amount of happiness and satisfaction out of life; and that means being busy at something congenial to you. And going ahead a little in one direction or another.”

“I hope you’ll marry,” said Mrs. Hand, abruptly.

“I hope so, too,” assented Mermaid. “If I can be so fortunate as to find the right man, or if some man can be fortunate enough to find me the right woman, or—well, both. We’ve both got to find each other, I suppose.”“Children,” said Mrs. Hand, with condensation.

“The more the merrier.” Mermaid did not speak lightly. Some deepening of her voice took all the flippancy from the words.

“You’ll have money, my money,” pursued Keturah Hand. “Eventually; it goes to John first. He’s a good brother to me and he’s been a good father to you, as good as he could have been to his own flesh and blood. You know the story?” she asked, with harsh suddenness.

“Dad has told me,” Mermaid replied, quietly. “It is so many years ago that he has no thought but that his wife and his own daughter are dead.”

“I have something to answer for in that connection,” her aunt said, and in spite of the harshness with which she spoke, her voice trembled. “I made Mary Smiley, that was Mary Rogers, very unhappy. I thought her unfit to be John’s wife. I—I rubbed it into her that she was unfit. Little, silly, childish, frivolous creature. How much I am to blame for her running away with her baby I don’t know—never shall, I suppose, until the time comes to answer for it.”

“Whatever you said to her, the facts remain,” the girl commented. “Actions not only speak louder than words, they talk the universal language. She ran away.”

“I think John felt that,” said Keturah. “He has a strict sense of justice and she wronged it. It was the child. That cut him to the heart, and no wonder. After five years you were washed ashore. I’ve always believed in miracles since that day.”

Mermaid nodded.

“When you study science, Aunt,” she said, confidingly, “you come to believe in miracles as a matter of course. That is, unless you have one of these impossible minds that thinks a thing more wonderful than the explanation. It’s the explanation of everything that’s really miraculous. For instance, you used to scoff at Dad and myself because we saw ghosts. There was the Duneswoman——”

“You wrote me that it was an effect of phosphor——” Mrs. Hand paused, helplessly.

“Phosphorescence,” supplied Mermaid, “the wonderful glow you see sometimes in sea water. It’s rare as far north as this but very common in the tropics. But to say it is an effect of phosphorescence doesn’t explain it, except to the impossible, narrow little mind. The real explanation lies in the mind of the person seeing it. If it were just a peculiar phosphorescent outline everybody should see it—everybody who was around. Dad and I see it; the others don’t. Do you know why?”

Keturah hesitated, then shook her head.

“It is something in common,” Mermaid told her. “There is, or was, someone who knew us both, and who becomes manifest to us both in that way. It’s like two people seeing the same ghost. Why should the ghost appear in that way? I can’t tell you. Perhaps the person was drowned. Why should the Duneswoman appear to us at all? Perhaps to witness to something. We may never discover what; and then again the day may come when that vision will be the last impalpable evidence necessary to make something clear. Then the Duneswoman may make complete the explanation of a surprising but perfectly ordinary set of facts; and the explanation, and not the facts themselves, will make up the miracle.”

“I guess likely you’re right enough,” surmised Mrs. Hand, “though I’m not sure I follow you all through. I’m a matter-of-fact kind of a person. That’s why any one like Captain Vanton gives me the creeps and gets on my nerves so. I don’t know what he does to that wife of his, or what he has done, but I don’t wonder we never see anything of her. She must be a wreck, living with that man. And he’s ruining that boy.”

“Guy?” asked Mermaid. A quick ear would have caught the peculiar note in her voice.

“Guy goes around with a hang-dog look. He never speaks to any one. He lives like a hermit, and his father’ll make him as bad as himself,” stated Keturah, with conviction.

“I must go see him,” said the girl. Her voice was deep and vibrant. “I must see his father.”

“His father has got Aunt Keturah’s jewels,” announced Mrs. Hand. “I’ve been sure of it ever since the day they disappeared over to the beach. How he knew about them I don’t pretend to say; but as he followed Captain John Hawkins in the command of the China Castle he must have come to knowledge of them some way or other. Do you remember when you were not more than eleven his coming to call here?”

“I’ve never forgotten it.”

“He said a Captain King was dead and that he had killed him. He said this Captain King wouldn’t trouble us any longer—your father and me. Your father remembered then that one of the crew from the wreck of the ship, the ship you were saved from, had talked of a Captain King when he was dying and of a little girl that must have been you. So we thought—your father thought, anyway—that Captain Vanton might have known something about you.” She reached over and took Mermaid’s hand, awkwardly. “He went to see him, but Captain Vanton couldn’t or wouldn’t tell him anything.” Keturah paused and sighed.

“Captain Vanton told Dickie Hand’s father about the death of Captain King,” said Mermaid, surprising her aunt. “Dickie once told me so.”

“I want to know!” exclaimed Keturah. She was silent for several moments in busy speculation.

“What do you make of it all?” she asked, finally, lifting her head. Mermaid, who had been looking steadfastly at the wall, her hands clasped behind her head, the whiteness of her arm gleaming against the rich colouring of her hair, spoke without looking at her aunt, without shifting her pose.

“I make something of it,” she said, “and I am going to find out—something. I may not find out the truth of it all, but I will at least find out if I am wrong.”

III

Captain Vanton looked much less like a ghost than a man who had seen a ghost when Mermaid confronted him in the mahogany and teakwood parlour. She had with her a black bag, as if she were about to take a journey. She seated herself easily and her manner was composed, though her heart was beating rapidly. The short, thick figure of the retired seaman moved back and forth across the polished and whitened floor of the room as it had moved across the whitened and polished afterdeck of tall ships. His spreading sidewhiskers with their misleading air of benevolence could not contradict the disturbance in his reddened eyes. He had not looked at his caller since her arrival, and he did not now. Stranger still, he had not spoken to her. A few gestures and she was in the parlour, seated; the door was closed and they were alone.

“Captain Vanton,” began Mermaid. She paused an instant, then went on: “I am grown up and it is time that you told me my story.”

She saw the hands of the mariner, clasped behind him as he paced away from her, tighten. She knew she must say more to make him address her.

“Captain King——” she began.

The heavy tread was cut short. He was standing in front of her. He was speaking in a throaty voice as if his words had to carry against the force of a powerful gale to reach her.

“Don’t speak that man’s name,” he was saying.

“You must tell me my story,” Mermaid repeated.

He stood there irresolutely, an abject figure of shame, a sea captain unready with an instant decision, an order, a command, a shouted epithet. He hesitated; and when he would have put his helm hard over it was too late.

“My aunt and I are going to San Francisco,” the girl was saying. “In San Francisco they will remember Captain King.”

And now his hands twisted and shook, and again he turned toward her. He muttered: “I will tell you all that matters.”

But he could not begin. He cleared his throat and shook his head. His red and tormented eyes looked her way. She found herself looking directly into them—and then away. She could not read all they held; and she knew she did not want to.

“You find it difficult. Correct me if I go wrong.”

He made a sound that could be taken for assent.

“I was in San Francisco as a very small child,” Mermaid began. “This I know because the ship, from the wreck of which I was saved, sailed from there. But I know it quite as much because Guy has told me about the city and it recalls something to me. For a long time it recalled nothing distinct—only a vague sense of the familiar. I have thought and thought about it, and some time ago there came to me a definite image of something in the past. It was the figure of a man, a sea captain like yourself, coming and going to the house or wherever it was that I had my home. I don’t remember anything about it. I only remember that there was someone in it—it must have been my mother—who had a childish voice.... And she was pretty, too, in a girlish way; at least I suppose she was. I remember no faces; I remember no figures except the single figure of the seaman who came and went; I remember only the childish voice and the sense of prettiness about me. One other thing I do remember and that was seasons of fright. I think they were connected with the coming and going of that seaman. He was, no doubt, the man you have refused to let me name. Very well; it is unnecessary to name him. What I want to know is—did he live with my mother?”

The man in front of her had been standing stock still. Still with his back turned to her he answered, “Yes.”

“He was not my father?”

“No.”“Who was?”

“John Smiley.”

The girl showed no surprise, only relief. She drew a deep breath, then murmured: “Thank God for that!”

From the motionless figure facing away from her came a question: “You knew?”

“I was certain.”

“How?”

“Both my father and I have seen her.”

“Since—since——?”

“Since her death.”

The standing bulk of Captain Vanton quivered. He reached for the arm of a chair and collapsed in it. He kept his back to his visitor.

“She was drowned at sea?” Mermaid put the question in a shaky voice.

“Aye,” he answered, and the unexpected word had in it a ring of terror.

Suddenly Mermaid found herself sobbing silently in a terrible anguish of thankfulness and wonder and sorrow. The stifled sound of her weeping filled the room. Captain Vanton made no move but sat with his head fallen on his breast, the white sidewhiskers concealing his profile. His breast rose and fell slowly.

The girl got control of herself, and said: “I have what I need to know. The rest does not matter, except as it concerns—Guy.” Her voice trembled again and her eyes filled. “Your own story—that’s your affair. But you have no right to ruin his life because of it—and that’s what you are doing!”

Something of the awful sternness of the patriarch sounded in his reply: “I will save him.”

The words stung the girl. In a moment he had become a silly and tyrannical and destructive old man with a fixed idea, a delusion—the worst possible delusion, a delusion of a duty to be performed.

“You are making of him a hermit, a recluse, a solitary and distorted young man,” she said. Her voice was like the lash of a whip. “You have poisoned his mind, and you will permanently poison his peace and happiness. Everything that would shame him you have told him; without knowing what it is you have told him, I have sensed that. And this has been going on for years. You have forbidden him to associate with other boys and other young men. The sunlight of companionship you have shut away from him. Here in this desolate house, shrouded in these wintry evergreens, in the dark, in the damp, in the company of a sick woman and an old man full of years and past evil, you have kept him and tried to form him. If he is not wholly misshapen it is through no omission of yours. It must stop!”

She was thinking to herself, in her rage, that of all madnesses a monomania was the most terrible to contend with. She was in no doubt as to the form of his malady. He was obsessed by a notion of saving Guy from the snare of the world’s wickedness into which he himself had fallen, into which he had seen so many men fall. He had seen the trap spring and close on himself and others. Not many had ever escaped it; those who had were mutilated for life. There had been this mutilation in his own life. He would not trust the boy to walk warily, he would not trust himself to teach him to avoid the snare. He would keep him where he could not walk into it if he had to seal him in a living tomb to accomplish his purpose.

With many a boy the undertaking would have been a preposterous impossibility. With a sensitive youth of a poetic and dreamy temperament, under absolute control from earliest childhood, the thing was feasible; more, it was being done. Mermaid recalled with a sense of pitiful compunction Guy’s strange eyes with their wild animal look, the most characteristic thing about him. But at least then, in his teens, he had held up his head, and looked about him. Now.... She had passed him on the street twice and he had not even seen her. She had spoken to him once and he had hardly been articulate in his reply; had seemed to hate and distrust her, not as Mermaid, not as a woman, but as a person of his own kind.

She came back to a consciousness of what Guy’s father, after an interval of silence, was saying:

“... I have told him only the truth.”

“The truth! You have not told him the truth, nor shown him the truth. What you have told him is worse than a lie. For a lie is like certain substances which are poisonous only in large doses. Strychnine, for example. Tiny quantities, a nerve tonic; larger quantities, convulsions and death. But a little truth is a deadly poison, always. And the only antidote is more truth and more and more! There cannot be too much of it; but you have never given him anything but the truth of two or three persons out of the millions of men and women that dwell on earth.”

She rose from her chair, picked up the black bag she had brought with her, walked around deliberately in front of the seated man and opening it showed him the contents—jewels. Roped pearls and lovely sapphires, Oriental rubies, diamonds, unnamable stones—all the blazing wealth of gems that Keturah Hand had kept stuffed in a pillow for many years and had lost one summer on the beach.

“See,” said Mermaid, quietly. “Here is a ransom. Take it. Let Guy go free. Let him live the life of a man. Let him stumble and sin and suffer, pick himself up, breathe the fresh air, and feel the warmth of the sunshine. You, who choose to live here in the darkness, can be happy in the artificial light of—these.”

The man’s face became red in a ghastly setting of white whiskers. He struggled to sit up. He put out one thick hand and clutched a rope of pearls. Then, with a great effort, he unclenched his hand and drew it slowly back to his side as if he were dragging a heavy weight back with it. He managed to articulate one word:

“Where?”

“They were once Keturah Hawkins’s,” she told him. At the name his shoulders twitched. “They were coveted by the mate of the China Castle. He insulted their owner, and for it he was flogged. I do not know what crimes they may have been responsible for before they came into John Hawkins’s hands. But they have been responsible, since that time, for a flogging, the wreck of one life, the destruction of one soul, and now I offer them to you to save a boy’s happiness. Will you take them and be satisfied?”

“They spell ruin,” he muttered, thickly. He made no gesture. Mermaid quietly closed the black bag.

“Since you will not take them as a ransom I will return them,” she said, “and offer another ransom in their stead.” Her low utterance was without the note of determination and equally without assurance of success.

He heard the door close after her. Then the man called Captain Vanton did an unpremeditated thing. He went to a drawer in the desk at the end of the mahogany and teakwood cabin-parlour, drew out a bundle of manuscript, wrote carefully a signature upon it, and the date, then thrust it back. Again he drew out something, this time a pistol, and shot himself dead.

IV

The first thing to note about the manuscript left by the late Captain Buel Vanton, a resident of Blue Port, Long Island, who inexplicably shot himself dead after affixing the date, was unquestionably the name, written at the end of the document a few seconds before the author took leave of it—and a good many other things—forever. Captain Vanton signed his narrative, for a narrative it turned out to be upon examination, with what had, at first, the appearance of a pen name. It was entirely legible, and read: “Jacob King.”

Not a name of any distinction. It suggested absolutely nothing to the coroner. In fact, it would have been regarded as a piece of annoying irrelevance on the part of the late Captain Vanton had not his son, a young fellow with a hang-dog look, said sullenly that it was the real name of the writer. The coroner had been mightily puzzled and not a little suspicious. Whereupon Guy Vanton had suggested, still more sullenly, that the manuscript itself might supply an explanation fuller and more convincing than his own assertion. The coroner thereupon turned his attention again to the document before him, and read it—a serious occupation that took him as long as an ordinary inquest. Yet, in a way, the occupation saved trouble if not time, for after his perusal the coroner decided that it was “a plain case of suicide—man plumb crazy—must have been crazy for years”; and that an inquest was wholly unnecessary. As the manuscript on which the late Captain Vanton (or Jacob King) had lavished so much literary skill (or insane invention) thus became, through the coroner’s intervention, an official record, any one caring to hunt through the dusty and sneeze-provoking accumulation of papers in the coroner’s office could read it in full, from beginning to end, written, as it had been, at various times and in various places, in several colours of ink, but always in the same small, slanting, distinctive hand. So perused, it ran as follows:

V

I, Jacob King, was born in New York City. I ran away to sea at the age of 14, and at 19 I was a ship’s officer.

At 19 I was a man, not a young man but a grown man, and any one who has followed the sea will know what that means. The sea ripens a man early, ripens him and fixes his mind for good or for evil, according to his capacity to understand the life about him. Nowadays on shore I see young fellows of 19 that are not much better than children, except that they have stretched enough to wear long trousers. That is the life of the land, where such a thing as responsibility seems to be unknown until men have begun to decay. I was not that way; and if I had had a better mind I might have made a success of life. I think I would have been successful ashore, anyway, for I was quick and clever and never shirked work; but mostly I think so because I was hard and young and brazen. I knew how to fight and I knew how to bluff. Ashore, it would have been enough to know how to bluff, I should not have had to fight. At sea a man cannot succeed, permanently, without actual worth and fighting and winning. On the land, so far as my observation goes, actual worth is by no means necessary to success. Any number of things may make a landsman successful; he may acquire money or fame and his success is measured by what of these things he has acquired; it is not measured by the stuff in him, as it is at sea, but by what he gets hold of; and if he cannot keep hold of it he becomes a failure again, though he is no worse a man than before. Landsmen do not value the man but what he has. By that measure I have become, I suppose, a pretty successful person ashore; I, who was a disgrace to salt water, can hold up my head here with some of the best of them. I am not famous, it is true, but I have a fortune of $200,000 more or less, a pretty considerable figure in these days.

At 19 I was a ship’s officer and at 21 I was a first mate. It was then, on my first passage as chief officer, that the first of a series of events which I have to relate occurred. The ship on which I was then was the fast clipper China Castle, John Hawkins, master, and the passage was from Boston to Shanghai. Captain Hawkins was a young man in years, like myself—about 26, I think. He had sailed the China Castle between New York and San Francisco at the time of the California gold rush and was now taking her out on her first passage to the East. At last she was to be put into the tea trade, for which she had been built, but from which she had been taken from her very launching for the immensely profitable California route. Besides myself and Captain Hawkins there was in the cabin Mrs. Hawkins, his young wife; she is the only other person aft who matters in my story. She had not been married to Captain Hawkins long, only a year or so, and this was her first passage with him and a sort of deferred honeymoon.

Mrs. Hawkins was a beautiful woman, a young woman, of course. She was, I think, two or three years younger than her husband and about as much older than I. She was very pleasant, as agreeable as she was beautiful; and she did not stand on ceremony as a captain’s wife is likely to do. I suppose this was partly because it was her first voyage and it may have been partly because we were all about the same age; but it was mainly her own gracious nature. I, for my part, had not seen or met many women and I had never seen or met any woman like her. From a boy I had been to sea, and while I had been on ships where the captains had their wives along they had never been women of my own age. They had never been good-looking women, let alone being half so lovely as Keturah Hawkins, and I had never been aft as first officer and privileged to associate with them on terms of something resembling social equality. Of course, social equality is impossible on board a ship; but in so far as it could be brought about Mrs. Hawkins brought it about in the cabin of the China Castle. That and her beauty turned my head. She used to wear splendid jewels that her husband had got for her, though they were nothing to what he procured afterward, I judge, in the Orient. She had very fine blue eyes, a bright and flashing blue such as you see in midocean, particularly in the tropics in fine weather, the blue of deepest water. Her hair was a dark red, in great coils as thick as the heaviest rope cable aboard the ship, and her skin was a white that did not seem to tan or lose its whiteness from wind or weather, though sometimes a faint freckle or two would appear upon it. Her grandniece, though but a young girl, is wonderfully like her in every appearance. The sight of this girl tears me to pieces. It brings it all back. It brings back the hour in which I went clean out of my senses, sitting there alone in the cabin with Keturah Hawkins. She did not scream or struggle, but in a moment she ran away and bolted herself in her room. Of course when the Captain came down from the poop deck, where his regular pacing had been audible over our heads all this time, she told him.

I don’t know why he didn’t shoot me dead; well, yes, I think I do. I think his wife interceded for me and I think he believed the proper punishment could only be something everlastingly shameful and as painful as possible. He had me triced up by the thumbs and flogged in the sight of the crew. I was flogged till I lost consciousness. It was two days before I could stand a watch. My only idea then was to kill him. I told him so, which was an unnecessary thing to do. He took precautions, however, such as seeing that I had no weapons, and never giving me an opportunity to attack him. Mrs. Hawkins kept to her room; I had my work to do, and that went on as though nothing had happened. No private affair, no matter how serious, relaxes the discipline of the sea. When I told Captain Hawkins that I would kill him some day he only looked at me and said: “You’re a good ship’s officer but you’re a disgrace to salt water. If you want to kill a man, the first man for you to kill is Jacob King.”I thought he meant suicide—“go drown yourself” as the contemptuous phrase of the fo’c’s’le puts it. It was years before I saw what he meant by that “If you want to kill a man, the first man for you to kill is Jacob King.” I know now just what he was driving at. I have killed Jacob King. I have killed my man. I won’t need to kill another.

But that has come a long time after. A long time. Too long, maybe.

When we reached Shanghai I got my discharge, of course, and a good discharge it was, for I had done my work well and Captain Hawkins, as fine a seaman as ever lived, was strictly just. I stayed ashore awhile and lived an evil life, drinking and smoking opium and consorting with thieves and ticket-of-leave men and all the riffraff of an Eastern seaport. All the while I was haunted by the remembrance of Keturah Hawkins. Drunk or sober, sane or in opium dreams, I saw her—saw her great cables of dark red hair, her white skin, her dazzling blue eyes, her delightful smile that she had smiled expressly for the benefit of the young and capable first mate of her husband’s fine ship. If I had been able to do it I would have possessed myself of her even then. I would have killed her husband, I would have killed every one aboard the China Castle, to have her. In opium dreams I did kill them all; I slew all Shanghai and burned the city and launched as many ships to pursue her as were launched to bring back Helen from ancient Troy. All dreams, all mad delusions! I was a fevered, burning, babbling, stupefied wretch of a sailor with no money in my pockets and nothing to fall back upon but a splendid ruggedness of body and a good discharge as first mate.The good discharge was sufficient to get me a berth on a ship sailing for San Francisco. Once at sea again I was all right except in my mind. That had been all twisted and distorted by the punishment inflicted upon me by Captain Hawkins. I couldn’t get over the disgrace of it; which was deserved, of course, though I didn’t think so. I kept thinking of myself as a man who had been shamed beyond all deserving. I was convinced that I had merely been too rashly assuming, and that if I had gone about it differently or had taken more time, had not acted so impulsively—— All this was self-deception, of course, and it degraded Keturah Hawkins, in my thoughts, at least. Perhaps I thought that if I could not lift myself up to her I could pull her down to my level. What I didn’t see was that a good woman—or a good man either, likely—cannot be lowered by whatever baseness any one may choose to think or say. The only person that is lowered is the thinker or the sayer. You’ll find this and a whole lot more coiled away in that poem of Emerson’s about Brahma: “I am the thinker and the thought,” or something like that, it runs. I don’t know whether a man makes the thought that passes through his mind, but I do know that the thought makes the man. At least, it made me. I was still Jacob King, but I wasn’t the same Jacob King. Something in me had been poisoned. The slow poisoning of——? The swiftest poison is not the most sure.

I was very bad, I mean mentally, when I got to San Francisco, and the life I led there did not mend me. Gradually as I kept seeing the image of Keturah Hawkins in all states of sleep and waking, at all hours and under the influence of all sorts of drugs and in the midst of all kinds of surroundings the image itself faded; or changed and coarsened. I did not notice that the dazzling blue, as of sunshine trying vainly to shaft through unfathomable depths, had disappeared from her eyes, but soon I could no longer see those heavy cables of dark red hair, made up of so many twisted strands, nor the wonderful milky whiteness of the skin. The features became indistinct, and soon I saw clearly nothing but the magnificent jewels she had worn—the ropes of pearls that took lustre from her skin; the emeralds that shone in green drops in the rich, dark, smouldering red of her hair; the sapphires that seemed to condense and make permanent the more brilliant blue of her eyes. About these gems that she had worn there was the glitter, the undying glitter of hard stones. All that was lovely, all that was spiritual, all that was human in the vision of her perished; and still the splendour of those jewels remained. I used to see her as an imperceptible outline—no face, no rounded arm, no wealth of hair, just an imagined outline with here and there certain gorgeous jewels in an ornamental and decorative arrangement—fastened on the air. At such times I went clean crazy, but I could do nothing. I was getting too besotted to straighten up for any length of time. And there wasn’t any cure. How could there be? I couldn’t cure myself. I was being poisoned by the irremediable past. How abolish the past? It’s all very well to talk about living a thing down, but the only thing that can be lived down is the thing that wasn’t entirely so. My past was.

It was in San Francisco that I got acquainted with a man named Hosea Hand and came into a strange relationship with his brother, one Richard Hand. Hosea Hand was a sailor, one of the crew of the ship on which I had come from Shanghai. He was younger than I, and after we got to San Francisco and the ship’s discipline relaxed I saw a good deal of him, first and last. One day in a lonely mood he told me his story. His brother had cheated him out of an inheritance, or so he figured, and he had run away to sea, like myself, as a boy. Two things about the story struck me: his brother, if what he said was true, might pay money to have him stay away from home—not that Hosea Hand had any thought of returning home but I could represent him as being bent on doing so, and myself as able to keep him away, for a price; the other thing—and this impressed and excited me much the more strongly—was that the Hand farm was on Long Island not far from the little town of Blue Port where Keturah Hawkins had her home. I turned the whole thing over in my mind during the sodden days and nights of a week. I do not believe that in the condition I was in all that time I was capable of reaching a bold decision—not even boldly evil. At last I wrote to Richard Hand. I told him that I, a stranger to him, not only knew his brother’s whereabouts but knew his story; and I had found Hosea Hand resolved to return home and settle accounts. I could keep the boy away, but must have something for doing it. It would be a sensible thing for him to do business with me. I wanted money, and I wanted information. His reply and its enclosure would be evidence of good faith.

He replied; and it was plain that he was frightened. Hosea Hand was no longer in San Francisco, having shipped on a vessel for New York. Richard Hand did not send much money, but any sum looked large to me at the moment. I spent the money in one night, and began to consider how I could get more, or how I should proceed next, having in mind the fact that the young brother had expressed an intention of going home. If he did so, I knew he would not bother Richard Hand further than to tell him to his face that he was a cheat and might go to the devil as fast as he liked. Then I should be unable to get more money. I wrote to Richard Hand—the letter would reach him before his brother appeared—asking about Captain Hawkins. Where was he, where was his wife, what were their means, what connections had they? Richard Hand sent back a pretty full account of the Hawkinses. Both were at sea at the time. There was property. They had no child as yet. Mrs. Hawkins had an older sister, married, with two children, a boy and a girl. Their name was Smiley and the girl was named after Mrs. Hawkins. In the event of the Hawkinses remaining childless, these two would most likely inherit their property. All this did not interest me much and I wrote no more to Richard Hand at that time. Of a sudden the passion for that woman of the dark red hair and milky skin reawakened in me. I was young; I shook off my dissipation, and set out to find her.

In all sorts of ships and in any sort of berth I went about the world, from seaport to seaport; and as I was a good ship’s officer I had no trouble to get about. I sailed from San Francisco to New York, and there I heard that Captain Hawkins had left the China Castle and was somewhere on the Western Ocean, as seamen term the North Atlantic, with cotton for Liverpool. I followed, as nearly as possible, but got to Liverpool after he had sailed on his return trip. A long chase followed. There is no point in setting it down here. It lasted for years. We three ranged from Singapore to Boston and from Rotterdam to the Cape Settlement. Twice in that time I caught glimpses of Keturah Hawkins. Once I saw her standing on the afterdeck of her husband’s ship, clearing from Havre as we entered the harbour; again I saw her driven past, on a boulevard in Rio de Janeiro. The third time I did not have merely a glimpse of her but met her face to face.

It was totally unexpected. I did not even know that the other vessel in the harbour of Almeria was her husband’s. Almeria is a Spanish town with nothing to recommend it to any one except the trader. I was in ballast and called on the chance of a cargo—grapes or anything. Above the town, on the bare brown hills, lies the ruin of the Moorish fort, just a long enclosure, a masonry wall about shoulder high, with embrasures. It is the only thing to see. She had come ashore to see it, leaving her husband supervising the work of loading cargo, a job he never left entirely to his mate. I was wandering around with a young Spaniard; not that either of us could understand the other very well but some kind of company seemed essential. We came upon her, all alone, a foolhardy thing, but she had superb self-confidence. She lifted her eyes, saw me, half turned and started away, walking steadily but with no appearance of flight. I overtook her. I don’t know, as I live, what I said, but whatever it was she never answered, nor did she look at me. As we passed through the gateway out of the fort she paused for an instant and gave a beggar a small coin. At that moment I saw Captain Hawkins approaching.He looked straight at me, never moving a muscle of his face, approached her, and said something in an undertone, a request to wait, I imagine. Then he came toward me and I turned and led the way into the fort, within those shell-like walls four centuries old. Inside I faced him. It was easy to see what was coming.

I was beaten, badly beaten. His fists, hard as iron belaying pins, broke down my defence and hammered blows upon my head, my shoulders, my body. I was soon winded and down, and still he did not leave off beating me. He kicked me about as I grovelled there in the fine dust of that Moorish citadel, the outpost of Granada. I was a dog and he used me like a dog. When I was senseless he left. How I got out of it I don’t know; I think the young Spaniard got others to help him and put me on board my vessel. When I recovered the next day the other ship had gone.

All the evil in me was loosed by this adventure. I swore to myself that I would be revenged upon those people and any and all of their people, and that I would live if only to accomplish that. But eighteen months in which I lost all track of the Hawkinses cooled that purpose. I married, and Keturah Hawkins was half forgotten. Of my marriage it is not necessary to say anything. It took place in San Francisco and was forced upon me at the point of a pistol. My wife died within a year. I left the sea and became a prospector when I was not an idler. I was nearly 50 when a child was born. This is the boy known as Guy Vanton. After his mother’s death, very shortly after, I struck it rich. Concerning my money and the source of it I have nothing to say; concerning the boy’s mother nothing except that we were not married. I may not be his father, but I am the only father he has known. All these things I have told him. I would save him, if possible, from what has befallen me. You will see what that is shortly.

After I became rich—so rich that I could not waste my substance in a night, or a week, or a year; so old that caution was the stronger impulse always and made me hoard what I had—after the death of Guy Vanton’s mother I lived just outside San Francisco with the boy and the memories of a vicious life. There is nothing like old age to intensify the good or evil in a man. Here was I with my memories, which all at once, in my loneliness, became vivid, alive, crawling. I thought of Keturah Hawkins and writhed. I thought of her jewels and a terrible greed filled me. I thought of that flogging on the China Castle and my shoulders twitched; of the impact of Captain Hawkins’s fists and quivered, half raising a protective arm. I wrote again to Richard Hand and learned that these two people were dead; that their nephew had married and displeased Keturah Hawkins; that her fortune had gone to her niece. From Richard Hand I was able to learn something about these persons and to figure out a way I might strike at them and hurt or crush them. How was I able to get this out of him? Partly by threats to show him up as compounding with me to keep his brother out of a lawful inheritance; partly with money. I have no time for details and there are things that are better to go forever unrecorded.

It was I, Jacob King, who hired a man to make love to and fascinate John Smiley’s wife. It was an easy thing to do, with her husband mostly absent on the beach. To avoid the townspeople’s eyes was more difficult, but it was managed with secret meetings of one sort or another. She was led to leave him, taking her baby girl with her; eventually she was led to me. How much of this Richard Hand surmised I don’t know or care. But he had no part in it beyond giving me facts about the Smileys to go upon.

I subjected Mary Smiley to all the tortures I could devise. She lived with me though she was John Smiley’s wife. She was a silly, childish creature and she was absolutely at my mercy. I made her life a hell for several years. In the meantime, her little girl was growing—into a tiny image of Keturah Hawkins. It was that which conquered me, or the settled wickedness within me. I, who had set out to wreak remotely my revenge on Keturah Hawkins, was myself becoming the victim of a living punishment. For here was Keturah Hawkins in the house with me. Every physical characteristic was there in the child later known as Mermaid Smiley, the daughter of John Smiley and Mary Rogers Smiley, the grandniece of the woman I remembered. The child had Keturah Hawkins’s hair, eyes, skin, and features; even, in embryo, her manner. I could torture her silly and pitiable mother and the child would enter the room, a living taunt to me. Here she was, and she would outlive me; she would be flesh and blood, wonderful glinting hair, flashing blue eyes, matchless white skin, unconquerably alive and superb, unconquerably young and gay when I was not merely a cruel and old and despicable man, but dust. She would dance on my grave.

I stood it as long as I could and then something happened within me, a mental overthrow comparable to the physical defeats I had suffered because of Keturah Hawkins. Something in the continual presence of that child rained blows upon me until I was numb in my mind, until I couldn’t think or plan at all, until the torture I could inflict on her mother was a meaningless thing; and there had always been a terrible futility about it for the reason that I could not make my revenge anywhere near complete and satisfactory. I could not, for instance, communicate to John and Keturah Smiley the triumph of vengeance that was mine. John Hawkins was not alive to witness it; Keturah Hawkins—— Was she alive, in the person of that child, to see it? Perhaps, and perhaps she was alive in the person of that child to thwart it. She would beat me down; dead or living she would best me. A superstitious, or perhaps a holy, terror laid hold of me so that I dared not lay hands on the little girl, or even say to her things that might bring tears to childish eyes. I dared not, I tell you! And besides, it would be laying hands on Keturah herself.

You see the situation? Do you see how the poison of evil had worked in me all these years, how it had dominated me for a time, how it had lain dormant, how it had cropped out hideously like some unspeakable and inexterminable disease? Silently through the years it had corrupted me, corrupting my mind even more than my body, more insidiously and more surely, and with more deadly a result. And at last from a small boat on San Francisco Bay—we had gone into the city to live—John Smiley’s wife was drowned. I was left with the child on my hands and with no embodiment for my fancied vengeance. I think I went nearly insane then, if I was not insane already.I determined to make what atonement I could. I took certain cowardly precautions and prepared to send the child back to her father. There is something supernatural in the manner in which that return was accomplished. I did not learn of it for some years. I took the boy, Guy, and went to Paris, taking a servant with me in the semblance of my wife and his mother. She became an invalid abroad, but I have not cast her off.

In Paris I came to see that my atonement must be as complete as I could make it. So I came back to New York and made inquiries through Richard Hand. I was then “Captain Vanton,” or “Buel Vanton” but I wrote him as Jacob King. He replied; from what he told me—and I paid him, of course—I was able to piece together the truth that was hidden from him and from others. The next step was the appearance of Captain Vanton in Blue Port.

The rest, externally, is known; what can never be known is the suffering I have endured. It is all deserved and much more, no doubt, but endurance is nearing an end. I am probably insane in some peculiar fashion. I see nothing but jewels; jewels arranged as if in the hair and on the bosom of an invisible woman. Then I see Keturah Hawkins, a very young Keturah Hawkins, but Keturah Hawkins beyond question, pass along the street—and she wears no jewels. I think her aunt has them, and some day in my madness I shall break in and steal them, just to handle them, these stones that touched her white skin and were nested in that wine-dark hair. Pray God, I may never lay hold of them or I shall go raving mad! The girl, this reincarnation of the woman I once held in my arms, I have no further concern with. If ever she comes to me to know her story I shall tell her. But she is Keturah. She knows.

The boy, young Guy, I have kept close by me, and I have told him some of this shameful story in order that, if he does indeed have any of my blood in his veins, he may have, in knowledge of the truth, some antidote to its poison. The girl will have money, and I will provide for the boy.

The girl and boy are friends; something else may ripen of their friendship. If he is my son and if, as may be, she loves him, or comes to love him, will that be a final triumphant twist in my favour against Keturah? Will that be the last word—my word—in this problem of revenge? You see, you see how deeply it has poisoned me. Perhaps I will anticipate the end.

The signature of “Jacob King” completed this narrative, obviously too incredible in its statements and too monomaniacal in its tone to have any bearing on the death of Captain Buel Vanton from a pistol wound, self-inflicted.

VI

“I can’t,” said the smooth-shaven young man—young but evidently not so very young, either. His pale face had dark circles under the strange-lighted eyes. His black, straight hair was not brushed. The wind which ruffled it brought no colour to his cheeks. His nostrils—he had rather a snub nose—twitched. At his sides his hands kept closing and unclosing, and he stood stiffly, like a scarecrow absurdly taken from a field and firmly rooted in this spot on the sand of the Great South Beach.

The young woman who faced him, with her glowing hair and her eyes and skin which seemed to reflect every atom of the downpouring sunlight, made no gesture, but met his denial with an affirmation. Two words pronounced in a low, vibrating voice:

“You can.”

They were ordinary young people of the twentieth century in appearance, the one perhaps more striking in beauty, the other certainly more distraught, than the average of their ages. But, except for the absence of any archaism from their speech, they might have been speakers in a drama as dark as “Hamlet.”

“You are thirty,” began the girl; “I am twenty-four. You have a fortune—well, $200,000 anyway. Enough for our needs. You have another inheritance, and I do not mean a blood inheritance. You are not likely to be the son of Jacob King.”

“But the son of Jacob King’s——”

“Don’t say it,” she interrupted, quietly. “She has not mattered these thirty years, why should she now? No, the inheritance I mean is not of blood, but of dread, shame, and repulsion. Isn’t it enough, Guy, that in his crazed lifetime he did everything that a man could do to make you as bad as himself? Are you going to let him rule you now that he is dead? Are you going to accept that inheritance? For you need not. While he lived he dominated your life, he made you share his thoughts, he made you an innocent accomplice in evil; you were an accessory after the fact of his wrong-doing. But now he has liberated you. When he shot himself dead it was an act of emancipation. He struck the shackles from you and set you free at the same instant that he went forward to meet his sentence and punishment.”

“I—I can’t,” repeated the man, hopelessly. “You forget the living tie, the woman there in the house, the one who is known as Mrs. Vanton.” The words seemed to hurt his throat.

The woman’s breast rose and fell, but there was tremendous control in her over herself, and she exerted some of it in her answer.

“There is only one thing to do,” she assured him. “It is to sever everything that joins you with him, dead or alive. Do this: put the inheritance money in a trust. The income will care for—for Mrs. Vanton, completely: medical attendance, nursing, everything. Give her the house, give her every dollar, but leave! You can take every precaution to see that she is properly cared for but you must get away. You must have a physical and a mental escape. You have got to renounce the past and everything in the present that threads you to the past. You have got to get out into a sunlit world, a world of normal men and women, of fighting and playing and loving, of shops and homes, of marriage and children, of discomforts and hardships, adventures and trifling worries and happiness. At thirty you must act, you who have been passive and acted upon. You have a life to live. Live it. Oh, Guy, live your own life!”

She turned away from him. Something in her voice galvanized him, communicated an electric thrill along the dead circuit of his nerves, startled him, shocked him from his inertia. He looked up quickly, took a step or two, and saw that she was crying. As if it were a reflex action he took two steps more and stood beside her, then put his arm timidly about her. For one instant she relaxed slightly, so that her weight fell upon the arm, then she was alive again and turned to him a smiling face with cheeks still wet.

“It doesn’t matter what you do,” she assured him. “Why don’t you do this? You aren’t in trim, physically; that’s plain. You’re in need of conditioning, some sort of outdoor life, something that will harden you. And you need company, companionship. Why not stay here on the beach this summer and then through next winter with my father at the Coast Guard station? He can’t take you on as a surfman, of course, for you’d have to pass an examination. Though you might do that, a surfman has to have had several years experience as a bayman, too. But you could be a sort of volunteer member of the crew. You wouldn’t make any money but you won’t need any money. You’ll have bad hours, but fewer than you suppose. You won’t even have the ordinary loneliness, for you can’t take a beach patrol and you’ll always be out with one of the other men. And there’s Tommy Lupton—he’s here. You and he can travel together; you’re good friends. And Uncle Ho. Aunt Keturah can’t persuade him to leave the beach permanently. She says,” Mermaid smiled at the recollection, “she says that marriage with him has made no difference, that she sees him as often as ever.

“You haven’t to look a long way ahead,” she continued. “You oughtn’t to. Those who look too far ahead see the reflection of the past. You must live, as nearly as possible, from day to day. Plan for a year and plan, in the circumstances, no farther. Keep to the beach. Keep to the men, especially Uncle Ho and Tommy. They have something they can share with you, something you need above everything else just now.”

So it was decided and so arranged. Mermaid, who was concerned over her aunt’s health, felt that to go to California might do Keturah Hand a world of good. It could be tried, anyway. She came over to the beach one morning to say good-bye to her father, to Hosea Hand, to the men generally, one or two of whom, particularly Joe Sayre, remembered her from her childhood among them. And to say good-bye to Guy Vanton.He already looked better physically, she thought, noting the trace of colour in his face and the absence of the dark rings from under his eyes. Their gaze met as they said good-bye. His curious, fawn-like glance was fixed on the shining blue surfaces that hid such great deeps within her eyes, a wild creature of the shore looking with wonder on the unfathomable sea. He said:

“Good-bye. I shall see you every time the sun shines on the ocean. You—you must come back. Please do write to me.”

“I shall be back,” she answered, with calm warmth. Only the blue opacity of her eyes concealed the great tides moving within her. “I shall write. Work hard. Sand and sea and sun are great chemicals to act upon the mind. The beach here is so like a desert island. You must think of yourself as on a desert island, cut off by the sea of present living from the lands of past remembrance. And eventually, like Atlantis, those lands will sink beneath the sea.”

With a firm handclasp they parted.

VII

On the train travelling westward Mermaid and her aunt had some talk of events, recent and not so recent.

“But why did you take my jewels?” demanded Keturah.

“Because they worried you. They were like a piece of bone, a tiny fragment pressing on the brain,” responded the young woman. “I knew that if they disappeared in such a way as to make it seem that they had been stolen—and I suppose, strictly, they were stolen—the worrying would cease. What made you think of Captain Vanton as the thief?”

“Because it was impossible to think of any one else, I suppose,” said Mrs. Hand. “And while I never guessed that he was the man King, still he evidently knew more about King than any of us did; and King had known or seen Keturah Hawkins and knew of or had seen the stones. Any one might want to steal them who knew about them. And he did.”

Mermaid had a question in turn:

“I should have thought Uncle Ho would have recognized Captain Vanton as the Jacob King he had known in San Francisco.”

“Child, half a century had elapsed between his acquaintance with Jacob King and the appearance of Captain Vanton in Blue Port. Then, those sidewhiskers....”

“Dickie will come out next week,” Mermaid said, absently.

“Are you going to marry young Dick Hand?” Keturah inquired, with her natural abruptness.

“Aunt, you wouldn’t have me marry a man just because he asks me, would you?”

“Well, I hope you wouldn’t marry him without his asking you to.”“I might ask him.”

“Dickie?”

“Oh, no—that is—I mean—Dickie has asked me, but I mean I might—sometime——” Mermaid seemed unnecessarily embarrassed. Her aunt looked at her intently; then, as if she thought it better to swerve the conversation slightly, remarked abruptly: “Well, old Richard Hand died a natural death at the end of his unnatural life, after all.”

“I don’t think you can call death from fear a natural death,” objected the younger woman.

“Fear! What was he afraid of?”

“He was partly senile, of course, but he could not be convinced that Captain Vanton was really dead. He heard more or less of Captain Vanton’s story. The coroner didn’t give it out, but things like that always get around, or some of them. When they told him that Captain Vanton was Jacob King, he had a stroke. Paralysis. After that he kept looking about him and saying: ‘The King is dead! Long live the King!’ And when they told him that Captain Vanton had been buried he cried out: ‘Nothing is ever buried. He’ll come to life again.’ Later he had delusions that he saw King or Vanton. Do you remember when Dad went to see him? He caught sight of Dad and shrieked: ‘Don’t kill me, John Smiley! I didn’t steal your daughter! Kill King! Only you can’t kill him!’”

Mermaid finished with a shudder.Mrs. Hand asked: “How much of the whole story does young Dick know?”

“His father’s part in it pretty fully. The rest—about Guy and Mrs. Vanton and all—no more than the other Blue Port people. About all they know is that Mrs. Vanton wasn’t the Captain’s wife and that the Captain was a mad old man who made his boy’s life miserable and who had had something underhanded to do with Richard Hand.”

“I’ve always wondered what you told that man to make him tell you that you were John Smiley’s daughter,” Mrs. Hand remarked.

“Only what I guessed. He was ready to tell me,” said Mermaid. “I was really fighting for Guy. I offered your jewels to him as a ransom for Guy. It sounds ridiculous, but since I knew you thought he had taken them I knew you must think he coveted them, had some craving that they might satisfy. I was more or less in the dark; I went ahead by instinct.”

“It’s a wonder, since he shot himself right after you left the house, that you were not accused of murder,” said Keturah, grimly. “You might have shot him dead and walked away.”

“You forget Mrs. Vanton,” Mermaid reminded her. “She had come to the head of the stairs. She saw the door close after me. It was two or three minutes later before she heard the pistol shot.”

“She’s honest, it seems.”“Yes, poor creature.”

“Mary,” asked Keturah Hand as she leaned forward while her niece adjusted the pillows behind her in the big Pullman chair, “when that man refused the jewels you told him that you would offer another ransom for Guy Vanton. What had you in mind?”

The younger woman was behind her aunt. Mrs. Hand twisted about suddenly to see her face. It was flushed, but Mermaid’s deep and brilliant eyes met her aunt’s unflinchingly.

“I would have married Guy,” she said, her voice vibrating slightly. “His father—that is, that man—talked about saving him. I would have matched my salvation of him against his—father’s. I would have fought for him against all the past evil that was dragging him down. Now his father is dead. He can—possibly—pull himself out alone, unaided. If not, I am ‘standing by.’ Oh, yes—I love him,” she finished, answering the interrogation that leaped from Keturah Hand’s eyes.

In the sunshine of California, in the cheerfulness of life in San Francisco, Keturah grew steadily better. Dick Hand executed a variety of projects, and only Mermaid remained unstirred and uninfluenced by her surroundings, by the change of air and scene. It is perhaps wrong to speak of her as “unstirred.” She was stirred and very deeply, but by no trifle of environment or of company. Down in her the great tides were swinging, moving resistlessly and in vast volume, imperceptible in their drift and direction on the surface. As was inevitable, Dick Hand again asked her to marry him and this time she gave him a final refusal. She did not put him off. She knew it would be useless. The current had set and was sweeping on through her. She could chart it, and she knew it would not shift. Something tremendous, something massive in her life would be required to deflect it.

“Why,” she asked herself, “should I pretend to myself any longer? I love Guy Vanton. I think I have always loved him. He is in peril and he needs my help. When he was caught in the surf did I wait to see if he could save himself? Not one instant! Why do I wait now? Why do I risk losing him, by letting him drown, forever? It isn’t right.”

She did up her hair in great coils, like thick cables of ship’s rope, and it seemed to her that each separate strand, so slender, so easily snapped, redoubled in its tensile power as it was gathered with the hundreds of others.

“Life,” she thought to herself, “is like that. We are tied to the past by a thousand filaments, every one of them slight, fragile, easily snapped, quickly broken. But they are all twisted together. They are like this coil of hair. They are like a thousand threads spun together, not to be snapped, not to be broken. A thousand things join Guy to the past. Some of the threads join the two of us.”

A fresh thought struck her.

“He can never escape wholly from his past. And I am almost the only thing or person in it that is pleasant or even halfway wholesome for him to remember.”

She recalled what she had told him, that he must no longer be passive but must act. Did not this counsel apply to herself? She knew she wanted him. She knew he wanted her. But however great his want of her he could not and would not call upon her to make what might be the sacrifice of a life—her life—to save his own. How could he, a man nearing middle age, really nameless, a child of disgrace and the son and heir of evil, lonely, sensitive, not unliked, but virtually friendless—how could he ask her to become his wife? He could ask of her nothing that she did not freely and of her own impulse offer and give him—friendship, sympathy, help, advice. The last item had an ironical ring in Mermaid’s consciousness. Advice to the drowning!

If he had the strength to save himself he had that strength, and that was all there was to it. For what was she waiting? To see him exercise it? But she loved him. It was not proof of his strength she required. What he had, what he lacked, was nothing—simply nothing. If he hadn’t it, she had strength enough for two. Suppose she failed? Suppose she knew she would fail? The old image persisted before her. If he were drowning and she knew that her effort to save him would not succeed, would she abandon him, just stand there watching, or await what would happen with averted eyes? Of course not. You had to make the effort no matter if it was absolutely foredoomed to failure. And this effort which confronted her was not necessarily foredoomed at all; at least, so far as she or any one else could see. They might shake their heads but they could not tell.

In her way, the best way she could manage, she put this to her aunt, who listened almost silently until the end and then said, suddenly and abruptly: “Of course, Mary, if you love him—why, that settles everything.”

Mermaid felt bound to insist on the logic leading to this conclusion.

“Nonsense!” exclaimed Mrs. Hand, irritably. “You can’t reason about such a thing. When two persons love each other it settles everything—and unsettles everything, too,” she added. “There’s only one thing to do, and there’s only one person to do it.”

“There’s really no reason why a woman shouldn’t propose to a man,” continued Keturah. “I’m no great respecter of conventions. You may remember the time when I used to wear a man’s old coat. Conventions were made for the man and not man for the conventions, except political conventions.” She was resorting, as was not unusual with her, to flippancy to cover emotion. “I don’t know but that I may be said to have proposed to your Uncle Hosea, when I got money that was rightfully his from his brother and put it in his hands, indirectly, as a lover sends a box of flowers to his sweetheart. Only I couldn’t have the florist, Lawyer Brown, put my card in the box,” she noted. “However, it wasn’t necessary; it seldom is. You always know who sent the flowers.

“I believe, though I don’t know, that Keturah Hawkins proposed to John Hawkins,” she went on. “John was a speechless sort of man all his life. I’m sure he never brought himself to utter any such words as: ‘Will you marry me?’ They would have choked him. I suspect that at the proper time Keturah began calmly to talk about plans for the house I live in, progressing by easy stages to such matters as the date of the wedding and the clothes he would need, down to his underwear, winter weight.

“They say the way to resume is to resume, but often the way to begin is to resume, too. Each night that John called, Keturah resumed the subject she had not discussed the night before; and so they were married and lived happily ever after.”

Mermaid, reduced to laughter by this narration, said: “Well, to resume what we were not talking about just now, I shall go East day after to-morrow if you are willing. I will bring Guy out here and then I can see you home. You ought not to travel alone.”

“Don’t think you are going away and leave me in this place 3,000 miles from Blue Port, missy!” exclaimed her aunt. “I won’t stay here. Besides, Dick Hand is cross as a catamount since you told him for the last time that——”

Mrs. Hand broke off the sentence as she might have bitten off a thread of unnecessary length. She looked at her niece and sighed.

“You are a fine woman, my dear,” she said. “Come here and kiss me. You don’t have to put your mind on it. Just a dutiful kiss will do.”

Mermaid kissed her with undutiful violence.

IX

They met, the two, on the beach, on a long sweep of the ocean shore where snipe were running at the edge of the lacy waves but where there was no other human being within sight or sound of them. They had met, you may say, before—at the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station, for instance, where Mermaid had kissed her father and shaken hands with everybody, including the one or two surviving honorary uncles of her childhood. They had sat them down at the long table over which Cap’n Smiley still presided, encouraging the art of conversation as one of those social amenities that marked the civilized man. They had eaten heartily of simple and appetizing fare, had joked, laughed, told stories. Mermaid had been delighted at the physical transformation in Guy. He was broader shouldered, or certainly seemed so, and was obviously heavier, “filled out,” as her father put it. The colour in his cheeks was a thing to wonder at; so was the calm of his eyes. They were still those wild-animal eyes, but the look in them was that of a creature at peace with the world and, for the rest, unafraid. He was, except for the fact of a somewhat wider education, one of them.

But that had not been a meeting. This was their meeting, here on the smooth and endless stretch of hard-packed sand at the ocean’s edge.

They stood side by side, not looking at each other but at the ocean, at the curling, magnificent breakers which the southeast wind was driving in. The sun shone, the air was magic. Bird cries reached them, a tiny treble to the bass of the water’s roar.

“Out of the ocean you came,” he said. “Will you slip away and return into it again some day, I wonder? Mermaid! The name is poetry and the story is romance. When you go back, you must look for me. I shall be a wreathed Triton, blowing upon a conch shell. I shall be among those who pull the sea god’s chariot while you will be among those who swim in his escort. And we shall be much together. Always.”

“You have done it!” she said, exultingly. “You have become a man, and yet you have not lost the child and the poet in you. You are really the Guy Vanton I first knew, only grown, matured, with the world before you.”

“I have it all yet to conquer,” he told her, half laughing.

“Your greatest conquest has been made.”

He reached for her hand, pressed it, and held it.

“Guy,” she said, suddenly, “will you marry me?”

She felt his hand tremble. The tremendous tide within her swept on, and in her ears there was a noise like singing. She felt his arm about her, and it was needed. She made out his voice, saying: “Mermaid, will you have me? Will you—have—me? Oh, if you will!”

It was a cry of entreaty, a prayer, a thanksgiving.

She suddenly slipped down onto the sand and quite ridiculously collapsed in a heap. And he was on the sand beside her, folding her to him, murmuring little words that were inaudible and precious. She felt his hair against her cheek and for an instant their strange eyes confronted each other. In his were brown and golden lights; hers were less brilliantly blue, as if the surface reflection were gone, and looking into them it would be possible, almost for the first time, to guess at the depths concealed by their mirror-like quality.

They sat there for a long time while the sun declined slowly through the heavens, a futile effort of the wheeling universe to measure by cycles and hours a moment of eternity.

X

The death of “Mrs. Vanton”—no one ever was heartless enough to call her anything else—left entirely to Guy the moderate fortune which had been Captain Vanton’s. And now he had a use for it.

Mermaid and her husband travelled about, crossing the Atlantic and visiting Paris, where Guy showed his wife some scenes of his boyhood. They rambled through little towns. And in these the streets seemed always to be crowded with youngsters at play.

Mermaid had hold of Guy’s arm. He felt her red-gold hair brush his cheek.

“Children!” he said, and fell silent. “We, too, were children once. I think we will always remain children, you and I. The spirit does not die, but the body must be renewed. It is ours to renew it.”

They walked on together, and everywhere the children looked up from the excitement and laughter of their games to glance at them interestedly or disinterestedly, curiously or with indifference, and here and there they caught a smile, fleeting and momentary, fashioned expressly for them, inviting them to share the instant’s joy. As they walked they drew closer together. They were no longer blissfully happy, moving in a thoughtless perfection of shared and reciprocated love. They were intelligently happy, perceptively, hopefully happy. To the delight of the moment and of each other was added the delight of anticipation. They walked on and looked down the long vista of the future.

Their love had now a meaning and a purpose for both of them that transcended the dear comradeship and pleasure of the present. It was still love, but it was not the same love; it had in it a sense of obligation, an instinct of fidelity, a passion of service, an element of devotion. In a little village church they knelt together, reverently, before the altar, and the same prayer was in both their hearts.

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