His gaze was so vacant and the silence remained unbroken so long that Selby doubted if the old man recognised him.
"I've come back, you see. I've come to see you again." Still the figure in the bed said nothing, staring dully at his visitor. "I've come to see you again," Selby repeated.
"It's to your advantage," said the old man. His voice was weaker, and it was evident that he was, as he said, slipping his cable fast.
"Give me that there ditty-box," continued the thin, toneless voice. Selby looked round the room, and espied on a corner of the chest of drawers the scrubbed wooden "ditty-box" in which sailors keep their more intimate and personal possessions: he fetched it and placed it on the patchwork quilt; the old man fumbled ineffectually with the lid.
"Tip 'em out," he said at length, and Selby inverted the box to allow a heap of papers and odds and ends to slide on to the old man's hands. It was a pathetic collection, the flotsam and jetsam of a sailor's life: faded photographs, certificates from Captains scarcely memories with the present generation, a frayed parchment, letters tied up with an old knife-lanyard, a lock of hair from which the curl had not quite departed ... ghost of a day when perhaps the old man did "hold with" women. At length he found what he wanted, a soiled sheet of paper that had been folded and refolded many times.
"Here!" he said, and extended it to Selby. It was a printed form, discoloured with age, printed in old-fashioned type, and appeared to relate to details of prison routine and the number of prisoners victualled. Selby turned it over: on the back, drawn in ink that was now faded and rusty, was a clumsy arrow showing the points of the compass; beneath that a number of oblong figures arranged haphazard and enclosed by a line. One of the figures was marked with a cross.
"That's a cemetery," said the old man; "cemetery at a place called Port des Reines." He lay silent for a while, as if trying to arrange his scattered ideas; presently the weak voice started again.
"There's a prison at Trinidad, and my father was a warder there ... long time ago: time the old Calypso was out on the station...." He talked slowly, with long pauses. "They was sent to catch a murderer who was hidin' among the islands—a half-breed: pirate he must ha' been ... murderer an' I don't know what not.... They caught him an' they brought him to Trinidad where my father was warder in the prison ... when I was little...." The old man broke off into disconnected, rambling whispers, and the shadows began gathering in the corners of the room. A thrush in the orchard outside sang a few long, sweet notes of its Angelus and was silent. Selby waited with his chin resting in his hand. The old man suddenly turned his head: "She ain't comin'——? She an' her fussin'...? I've got something important——"
"No, no," said Selby soothingly, "there's no one here but me. And you wanted to tell me about your father——"
"Warder in the prison at Trinidad," said the old man, "my father was, an' a kind-hearted man. There was a prisoner there, a pirate an' murderer he was, what the Calypso caught ... an' father was kind to him before he was hanged ... I can't say what he did, but bein' kind-hearted naturally, it might have been anything ... not takin' into account of him being a pirate an' murderer. Jewels he had, an' rings an' such things hidden away somewhere; an' before he was hanged he told my father where they was buried, 'cos father was kind to him before he was hanged.... Port des Reines cemetery ... in the grave what's marked on that chart, he'd buried the whole lot. Seventy thousand pounds, he said...."