III
Our old house being designed and built with a shiplike compactness, there was but one room on the ground floor besides the kitchen and its offices. It was a plain, comfortable place, wainscoted about, with shelves and lockers in the whimsical copy of a vessel's cabin. And it contained the single work of art our establishment could show; that is, a portrait of my grandfather's grandfather,—he who founded this house,—in a finicking attitude, with a brocade coat and a pair of compasses. In his rear were to be seen a pillar and a red velvet curtain, and (distantly) a fine storm of clouds and lightning. Never was a respectable old sailorman so misrepresented; but all his descendants except one regarded this gaudy daub with almost religious veneration. Every family has its one great man; the admiral was ours. His was the distinction of being the only Pendarves who had ever managed to amass a fortune. It had dribbled through the fingers of succeeding generations; but there was a tradition that some part of it, buried or otherwise secreted with an admirable forethought by the old gentleman, might yet be discovered, to the further glorification of our house.
The picture hung directly opposite the door, favoring me, as I entered, with a disconcerting smirk; it needed no great stretch of fancy to credit him with cherishing some secret and villainous joke. Beneath it sat my grandfather, with his pipe, in the same place and attitude as I remembered him for upward of twenty years, but so spectral a likeness of himself that the sight of him shocked me like a blow. He had wasted to a mere parchment envelop of bones, and the eyes he turned to mine were bright with inward fever. I had looked for I do not know what signs of an unstable mind, but at first, save for the eyes, saw none. He showed only a not too well pleased surprise.
"Nicol!" he said, and pushed back his chair, without rising. "Nicol!" and then for a moment sat staring closely at me under his heavy brows. With his next action something of the horror of his affliction came home to me, for I saw that, but for some confused sense that I had been absent against his will, he had utterly forgot everything concerning me, the terms of our last meeting, and the events of many years besides.
"Hush, and sit down!" he said, in the habitually chiding tone he had used to the boy of ten or twelve. "Take your books and get your lesson!" He pointed with the stem of his pipe to a stool in the corner where, as a lad, I had passed more than one grim hour, and turned to his companion, as older people turn from the interruptions of children.
Mary Smith, following behind, touched me gently on the arm. "Go and sit down," she formed the words with her lips rather than voiced them.
There sat beside my grandfather a vast, fat creature with a forest of greasy black hair and beard about his pallid face; his heavy hands lay motionless in his lap, forcibly reminding me of an image I had seen of some Oriental god upon his throne. His eyes were scarcely opened, his breathing was almost imperceptible; a gross animal content appeared in him as of a full-fed, lethargic crocodile. Side by side, he and the gaunt, fierce-eyed old man presented no mean allegory of spirit and body. A table was before them, and in the middle of it a toy the like of which I had never seen in this house or elsewhere—a globe of crystal, perhaps the size of an orange, held up on a little bronze pedestal. The fat man's eyes, or so much of them as one
might see, were fixed upon this thing with a kind of stupid intensity; one could have fancied him paying tribute to some idolatrous shrine. The captain watched him with an equal earnestness; so might the Roman mob have hung upon the reading of the sacred entrails; and there was about it the air of a well-practised, familiar rite. At last my grandfather asked:
"What do you see?"
"THE FAT MAN'S EYES ... WERE FIXED UPON THIS THING WITH A KIND OF STUPID INTENSITY"
The other's lips moved, and an unintelligible whisper reached me.
"Ay, that's it, that's it," said the captain, and sent a quick, searching look about the room. "Doubloons—pieces-of-eight—Spanish pillar-dollars—doubloons, doubloons! That is what it would likely be made up of, eh? But where—try to see that—where?"
Another interval of silent gazing, and the
oracle uttered some further statement, which my grandfather received with an impatient groan.
"Doubloons—piles of gold—I know!" he said. "And a ship. But whereabouts was it, eh? Surely you can see whereabouts it was?"
"It's all a mist; I can see nothing," the other answered, after a pause.
I could have found it in me to laugh at the whole miserable hocus-pocus, had I been less indignant. The situation was, besides, sufficiently grave; and as I listened to this silly and profane juggling, and observed the wildness of my grandfather's bearing, it became plain to me that he could not long endure such an influence. I guessed from his talk that the old man's disorder was based upon the idea of treasure lost, sunk, or hidden hereabout; for our coast was dangerous, a menace to vessels, and not innocent, besides, of smugglers and worse. Perhaps the poverty of his later years was at the root of his delusion; perhaps his madness would have taken this form anyhow. However he had fallen into the fat man's hands, this was the secret of the latter's power. While I pondered gloomily, the sitting (so to call it) came to an end. Perhaps my unwelcome appearance somewhat contracted it. My grandfather lapsed into his chair, his chin on his chest, brooding. Excitement died in him almost visibly, like the flickering down of a spent fire. Instead of eighty, he looked a hundred and eighty, and his face was as lifeless as a mummy's.
"Zaira!" said the fat man, raising his thick lids (but I fancied he had already taken some shrewd peeps at me from under them), "I have slept, and the spirit has spoken. Arise! take away the mirror of Time and Space!"
And hereupon the girl, advancing with a shamed glance at me, carried the globe to one of the lockers, shoved it in, and slammed the door on it savagely.
"Have a care!" the seer warned her somberly; the mirror of Time and Space, apparently, was not immune from the ordinary risks of mirrors, as one might have expected so august an instrument to be. When speaking aloud thus, he used a great rolling, sonorous voice; it filled the room until the very window-panes vibrated.
She gave him a look of angry rebellion, opened her lips as if to retort with some stinging word, stood irresolute a moment with eyes that wavered between the three of us, then walked off, leaving us sitting facing each other in silence.
The fat man and I exchanged a long stare, I choking down my temper, he smooth and placid, to outward seeming, as the idol he resembled. The resolution with which he stuck to his silly pose was, in its way, a rogue's masterpiece; nothing more exasperating than this stolid effrontery was ever devised. The scoundrel feared, and yet knew he had, in a sense, the better of me; the helpless old man between us was his shield.
"Young man," he said at last, in the same booming monotone, "have you the gift of the seeing eye?"
"I have more the gift of the feeling fist, I think," said I, with what calmness I could muster. "If you doubt it, sir, I shall be pleased to show you. I am Nicol Pendarves, as a soothsayer like yourself will have guessed already. Perhaps you will honor me with your name and business here?"
"Many names are mine," he answered, and made a solemn gesture. "Many names are mine——"
"Doubtless," I said; "but I meant your last alias."
He went on, unruffled, in his great voice, as if I had not spoken: "Many names have been mine through the uncounted eons—many names. In this flesh men call me Constantine Paphluoides."
It was no wonder Chepstow could not turn its tongue about that name; that and his manner together must have dumfounded our straight-thinking townspeople. I do not remember—indeed, I took no pains to note—what else he said; bits of mythology, history, poetry, rolled from him in a cataract of meaningless noise. Had I been an ardent disciple sitting at his feet, he could not have feigned a greater exaltation. The fellow was at once dull and crafty; he loosed this gust of windy rhetoric at me as if he thought to win upon me by mere sound and fury signifying nothing.
I got up at length, when I had had enough of him, and, walking across to where he sat, "Mr. Constantine Paphluoides," said I, "this is my house; I give you until to-morrow morning to leave it; you will go quietly and without any formalities of farewell. You will find it expedient to obey me: otherwise, although I have not consulted the mirror of Time and Space, I should not be surprised if it revealed you, to the seeing eye, in the town jail and later in the stocks."
He made no answer, but sat staring at me, blinking, and opening and shutting his mouth in a gasping fashion like a fish. I had striven to speak quietly, but (being in a breathing heat of anger) must unconsciously have raised my voice, for unexpectedly, and, as it were, for a warning, my grandfather came out of his semi-stupor
and straightened up, eying me over with a kind of wandering severity.
"Nicol, go to bed! You hear me? Go to bed!" He reached, cursing, for his cane. There was a grotesque familiarity in the act. With that very cane he had sought to coerce me into the straight and narrow road, as he conceived it, how many times during all my childhood!
"Go to bed, I tell you!" he screamed, and half rose, brandishing his rod of correction.
Somebody pulled at my sleeve; it was the girl. "Please come away, Mr. Pendarves; please do come away, sir, just for a minute, and then he'll forget it," she urged; and, with her earnest air of responsibility: "It's so bad for him."