Then we sat, side by side, on the sofa, watching the great clock in the corner of the drawing-room ticking off the seconds of that minute which we had decided to allow to pass before looking at him again.
It was a long, long minute, that one! At first I felt like a fool, but that feeling dissipated itself as soon as we had, together, bent over the picture at the expiration of that first minute.
The right eye had drooped in a kind of leering half-wink – precisely as though Miss Camilla Lanigan had painted it so one hundred years ago.
After several long minutes of silence between us there on the sofa. I said: ‘I’m going to ask the next question, if you don’t mind.’
She nodded.
I walked over to the table. The eyes were alike again!
‘Have you more than one thing to communicate?’ I inquired.
I came back to the sofa again and sat down, my eyes once more on the clock.
Again we bent over the picture.
‘There’s a slight droop in the right eye,’ said Miss Gertrude.
The manikin had answered ‘yes’ again.
After that, somehow, we felt freer. Two questions – the real ordeal of the thing – were over and past.
There was little feeling of strangeness from then on. It was precisely as though we were talking with some person of flesh and blood like ourselves, with someone not immediately present – as though we were talking over the telephone. It was something like that.
He had two things to communicate. We took thought now how to proceed. The eyes, alike, were always open and staring straight ahead whenever we approached with a new question. And so it continued through to the end.
I thought of a necessary question.
‘Have you more than two things to communicate?’ I asked.
‘No,’ came the answer.
‘Does the first thing concern you?’ I ventured.
‘Yes.’
‘And the second thing? Does that also concern you?’
This time, when we looked for the answer, the eyes had not moved at all so far as we could tell.
I glanced up at the electric light. Our lights not infrequently change their density, go up and down, without warning. We have only the little, local electrical plants, one in each of the towns. The light appeared even enough.
We were a little nonplused, for, although I had been telling myself subconsciously all along that the whole thing was a farce, a bit of childish play, I had come by now to expect an answer!
‘Perhaps it’s because we asked him an unanswerable question,’ I suggested. ‘I’ll try to clear it up.’
‘He’s helping,’ said Miss Gertrude. ‘He’s only showing us that it was asked wrong!’
I looked down at her and smiled, and she smiled back at me.
‘Does the second thing concern more than you – that is, someone else?’ I asked the pirate.
‘Yes,’ came the answer.
‘Is Mr Canevin the other person?’ asked Miss Gertrude.
I smiled again at this. If there was anything that could be construed as an answer, I certainly expected that it would be ‘no’.
The answer was ‘yes’.
I began to feel the beginnings of a cold consternation, but I found Miss Gertrude smiling happily.
‘I thought so,’ said she simply.
Women, most of them certainly, are beyond me! It was a woman who had painted this picture!
Miss Gertrude hastened to ask another question.
‘Do you want to tell Mr Canevin what he can do for you first, and then what you’re going to do for him in return?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you wish to be released from something?’
‘Yes, he does,’ reported Miss Gertrude, who was now asking the questions, I being seated for the time being alone on the sofa.
‘Do you wish to pass out of existence?’
She nodded over to me to show that he did.
‘Can we accomplish that for you?’
‘He says we can.’
We were making progress, it appeared! She clapped her hands gaily. All her gravity had disappeared. It was merely a game to her, then. I had almost begun to suspect that she had been taking the thing seriously.
‘I thought it would come out more or less like that!’ she announced. Then: ‘The poor, poor man!’ said she softly, and I wondered once more.
She returned to the picture and looked down at it for a long time.
‘Is there anything else that can be done for you?’ she inquired.
There wasn’t, it seemed.
I will summarize, for brevity’s sake, the series of questions which followed and the ‘replies’.
We were to find out how to obtain the ‘reward’. Then we were to ask no further questions. I was to take the picture home, put it back on the wall, and destroy it the next morning – tomorrow.
All this seemed to me, on the sofa, grotesque, unintelligible. I was almost becoming bored with this seemingly foolish play, but nothing would stop Gertrude Maclane.
‘Is it a material reward for Mr Canevin?’
‘Yes,’ came the answer to this one. And, going over and looking down at the manikin, such is human nature – or our somewhat unstable lighting system on Santa Cruz – that it seemed even to me in that mood, that I could discern the merest ghost of a twisted grin on that strange little face beneath the looming, cruelly twisted knot of hangman’s rope.
I will bring what seemed to me an increasingly absurd performance to its conclusion. I left, with definite instructions to dig in the northeast corner of the cellar under Melbourne House – that cellar once devoted to the housing of materials for planter’s punches and sangaree, and now fallen to a low estate of habitation for spiders and perhaps an occasional scorpion thriving in its ancient dust.
My brain, I will confess it, was in a kind of whirl as I drove home that night from Montparnasse House. When I had obediently hung the picture back in its place on my workroom wall, I took a good, long, searching look at it. It seemed as wooden, as laboriously limned, as amateurish, as on that day when I had rescued it from the dustroom.
There were the strutting St Thomas gentry and merchants, a lordly group of aristocrats, who had come out to see Captain Fawcett die. There, too, were their silken and be-muslined ladyfolk; the Danish soldiers in their boxlike, Frederick-the-Great uniforms; the swarming, pop-eyed negroes; the hangman, Fawcett and his two mates . . .
I went to bed. That had been a strange, weird evening.
To dig under my own house. It was too much. And I had promised Gertrude Maclane to do so!
Promised, too, to destroy this picture the next morning. Awkward, that! Gentlemen do not build bonfires in their back yards in the West Indies.
Our very cooking is done on charcoal-pots, or on an occasional oilstove. We have no gas, and coal we know only as a commodity for fueling ships. It would have to be a coal-pot.
That is the idea I carried with me into sleep, the last thing I remembered until the sun, the bright, morning sun, saluted me awake.
‘Keep a fire in the coal-pot, Esmerelda, if you please,’ I called through the bathroom door. ‘I want to use it myself a little later.’
I stepped into the workroom to take down the picture. I had promised to destroy it, I would keep my word.
I looked at it, for the last time, under that clear, pitiless, blazing morning sunlight.
Probably the nervous strain had been heavier than I had imagined. I managed to control myself. I made no shandramadan – which is the black’s term for foolishness or rascality! I avoided, too, by holding on tight to the table’s edge, a caffoon, which means a fall.
For ‘he’ was not, it seemed now, and could never indeed have been, if paint is paint, hurtling through the air in his last instant of life, so to express it. The rope as I looked at it was unmistakably taut.
That deadly knot of seven turns of good, new manila rope must already have struck home under one of those strange lit
tle ears into which, last night, Gertrude Maclane and I had . . .
I set my face down for a moment in my shaking hands. The eyes of the figure which we had watched last night – his eyes were, unmistakably, closed like those of his two companions in wickedness. He had joined Captain Fawcett of the fine, plum-colored, laced coat and Hessian boots.
Our pirate really swung now. He was dead – delivered, it came through my shuddering mind, from those uncanny sorceries of Camilla Lanigan, she who had been so strangely respected by the black people of St Thomas; she who knew their Obeah and their voodoo.
I pulled down the picture a moment later with a firm hand and laid it out flat on my work table. I cut it into convenient strips for burning in a coal-pot. Some of the old, brittle paint flaked off in this process, and this I gathered up to the final crumb on a sheet of paper.
But for the most part my penknife went cleanly through the old canvas.
Downstairs I found that Esmerelda had gone after the morning’s supply of ice for the drinking water with the large thermos bottle. But a glowing coal-pot stood on the floor of the little stone gallery outside the kitchen door.
Into this I poured the fragments of the chipped paint and watched them bubble and hiss. I thrust in the strips, one after another. They curled, caught, and were swiftly consumed.
Then I stirred the charcoal and a few sparks came out. Not a vestige of Camilla Lanigan’s picture remained.
I should have to wait until Esmerelda was gone for the afternoon, and dig in that cellar in the hottest part of the day among the ghosts of wine-barrels and demijohns. I stepped out into the yard to investigate.
In a shed I found an ancient spade and, best of all, a thing like a mattock which might have been dug up on the site of Persepolis. These I carried down into the dim, cool cellar. With the spade I knocked loose the hooks of a hurricane shutter. That would dissipate the slight, musty smell and also provide a better light for me that afternoon.
Esmerelda was still bargaining among the bebustled vendors in the market when I returned upstairs to wash by hands.
After lunch I waited until I heard Esmerelda leave. I watched the good soul as she walked down the hill, through slanted jalousies. And when she passed out of sight around the corner by St Paul’s Church, I locked the front door and descended into the cellar. It was fairly cool and hardly musty at all. I hung my coat on an ancient, hand-wrought nail and set to work.
The hard-pounded earth came away reluctantly as I picked at it. loosening the surface for a hole about six feet square. Alternately with this I shoveled out the loose dirt, placing it well to one side, so that it would not run back.
It was two when I began. The fort clock had chimed three-thirty a few minutes before I struck something metallic. It took me at least fifteen minutes more before I had uncovered a small iron trunk in the corner of the large square I had opened.
I broke the rusty lock with the edge of the spade, raised it, and there before me – and such is human nature that I must say I was more surprised than amazed, at the very first – lay, neatly stacked in rouleaus from which the ancient cotton cloth fell away in shreds and flakes, row after row of gold coin – all the coinage of romance: doubloons, of course; ancient American eagles; Louis d’Or; even a few East Indian Mohurs!
In a side compartment by themselves lay, carefully packed in, an assortment of jeweled implements, jeweled chalices and patens from the loot, doubtless, of those rich Spanish Churches of Central and South American seaside cities, perhaps even from Porto Rico and Santo Domingo; jewelry, much of it monogrammed; gold plate such as had graced the hospitable boards of many a fabulously rich sugar baron of the islands of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
At the very bottom of this separate compartment, which was of the capacity of about one-third the trunk’s cubical contents, lay, flattened and stiff, a sack of oiled silk. I picked it up and had to untie the leather pouch-strings, so well was it preserved.
I looked in and then thrust in my right hand, and even in the comparatively dim light of the old cellar there leaped out at me the myriad coruscations of cut jewels, throwing back the light they had not known for fully a century. My hand was full of jewels, and I had hardly taken off the edge – the very topmost.
Diamonds, rubies, sapphires, blazing emeralds. A king’s, an emperor’s ransom here, in the cellar of Melbourne House.
The pirate! He had not misled us. What, in God’s name, did it mean!
Well, I had other things to think of besides mooning over that problem there in the cellar, with a fair-sized fortune held in my hand and God knows how much else there in the iron trunk – gold, vessels, jewels.
I spent the next half-hour carrying the trunk’s contents up to my bedroom in the wholly unromantic iron pail in which Esmerelda boils the drinking water. I deposited them all, in a kind of order – gold coin all together, vessels and jewels separate – in two bureau drawers, turning out shirts and collars for this accommodation.
I locked the drawers, stuffed the shirts into the mahogany wardrobe, placed the bureau key in my pocket and returned to the cellar. There, by leaving open the old trunk’s lid, I was able in another half-hour of feverish work, which left me literally dripping and soaking, to get back and roughly to pound down all the dry earth I had taken out.
When I had tossed the spade and mattock behind some ancient lumber, closed and hooked the hurricane shutter and returned to my bedroom to strip off my soaking clothes, before the most refreshing bath I can remember, it was precisely nine minutes before five. And Esmerelda would not be back until five precisely.
I remember sitting, about six-thirty, fresh and cool now, in white drill, waiting for Esmerelda to announce dinner, with the necklace of emeralds which I had taken out from the rest as soon as I saw it, to give to Miss Gertrude Maclane.
I had telephoned to Montparnasse House, and explained to her that I must see her as soon as possible. She had arranged that I was to call that evening after dinner.
Among other matters, I had been considering my duty with respect to this find. It involved certain responsibilities, I began to see. I resolved to return anything that might prove identifiable.
Apparently this was the hoard of some master pirate, possibly even that of Fawcett himself. Its disappearance, or rather the fact that it had never been discovered, was one of the standard mysteries of the islands. How, if that were the case, it had got itself under Melbourne House was apparently an insoluble mystery.
I may as well mention here that the restoration has proved an actuality in one or two cases. A dozen gold spoons, monogrammed, have gone back to the representatives of the Despard family in Christiansted. And a lovely old ‘tulip’ chalice, filigreed, with its attendant paten, all the way to Valparaiso.
I dined that evening with the necklace loose in the pocket of my drill jacket. I fear I made only a sketchy meal.
Esmerelda seemed disturbed. She thought, good soul, as she told me the next morning, that the crustadas of shell-fish had not been up to standard! I had not, really, been certain what I was eating.
On my arrival at Montparnasse House I felt a note of constraint. It is very hard to describe what I mean. I can only say I felt it. Santa Crucian moods and similar delicacies of feeling are most difficult to describe!
I remembered that I had called three times in the past four days! I was not unwelcome. It was not that. Otherwise Robert Maclane, Esq., would have waited perhaps fifteen minutes, instead of five, before having a swizzel served.
But – it was conveyed to me so subtly that I despair of making the matter clear, that Mr and Mrs Maclane, while recognizing me as an equal and a friend, were not quite clear as to what I was up to!
They were not, precisely, objecting to my coming so often. They wanted me to know they thought it unusual. That is the best I can do by way of saying how I felt.
Mr Maclane and I conversed about new kinds of canes which were being tried out; about the labor situation; about the pink boll-w
orm and how certain Montserrat cotton planters were meeting its ravages; about the newly inaugurated onion crop; about the perennial subject of the rainfall.
The ladies, of course, joined in from time to time as Victorian ladies did, and as Crucian ladies do to this day. But the burden of that evening’s conversation lay upon Mr Maclane and myself.
Not so much as the overt flicker of an eyelash served to indicate the natural curiosity of my hosts as to why I was paying their hospitable estate house so many visits. But – I could feel it, all the time, circulating in my blood!
It was half-past nine when Miss Gertrude took her courage in her hands, looked straight at me, and said: ‘May I speak with you aside for a few moments, Mr Canevin? Father and mother will excuse us.’
I rose and followed her out onto the great gallery which runs all along the front of Montparnasse House. And I knew, in my blood and bones, that Mr and Mrs Maclane did not so much as glance at one another when we had left the drawing-room. I could hear their voices as they conversed quietly together, all the time we were on the gallery.
Miss Gertrude led me to its extreme end and there, in the mellow light of a full moon and to the intoxicating accompaniment of jessamine and night-tuberose odors, faced me.
‘I have something for you,’ said I, and laid the necklace across her hands. ‘This is for you, Miss Gertrude, with all my gratitude and all my admiration.’
‘But – I cannot accept this,’ she said, looking at the emeralds as they glowed in the moonlight.
‘You will wear it, I was hoping, on your wedding day.’
‘But, Mr Canevin, I am not considering being married. I am only nineteen.’
‘But you will be married some day – God send, happily. Keep the necklace and bring it out when that delightful young gentleman who may be half-way worthy of you comes along. Let it be a portion of your trousseau.’
‘But – I am not interested in “delightful young gentlemen”, Mr Canevin.’
This conversation, it seemed to me, had got rather far away from what Miss Gertrude had summoned me out there on the gallery to talk about.
She was speaking again.
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Page 4
