On the Borderland

by F. Britten Austin

The doctor stopped, looked round upon his audience.

“And the treasure?” queried one of them.

“There was no treasure. There was no more digging that day. We took the poor girl’s corpse back to the yacht and I thought her mother would have died as well—or gone out of her mind. She was screaming to get away from the place. But the old man was not put off his game so easily. The next day, whilst I stayed on board with the distracted mother, he and his son went and dug again in that tragic cairn.

“They brought back all they found—the broken lid of a chest, branded with the date 1665. That, curiously enough, was underneath the skeleton, suggesting that the hoard had been rifled before the man, whoever he was, was killed.”

“A strange story!” commented another of the audience. “And what’s your hypothesis in explanation, doctor?”

The doctor smiled.

“Well—you can have your choice,” he said. “There is the possibility that, in a prior existence, Miss Vandermeulen was in fact Lucia, that she seduced John Dawson into revealing the secret of the treasure, that she murdered him on the spot and went off with it—and that the vengeful spirit of the old buccaneer, hovering around these latitudes, came into touch with her new reincarnation, and, playing with a fine irony upon that same lust of gold which was responsible for his murder but of which she was this time entirely innocent, led her to a death by that same poniard with which she had killed him. Alternatively, there is the hypothesis that her spontaneous writing and the impersonation of Lucia were but an automatic dramatization by her subconsciousness of hints dropped into it by her brother’s reading of ‘Treasure Island’ and subsequent conversations between her father and his son, and that her death was a mere coincidence.”

“An incredibly complete coincidence!” said one of the men.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

“There was one other curious thing,” he said. “Some years later, in a history of the buccaneers, I came across a paragraph to the effect that the island called Old Providence since the eighteenth century was known to the buccaneers as Santa Katalina, and that only subsequently was that name transferred to the islet north of it. So Pauline’s subconscious memory was right! Furthermore, it stated that the large island, then called Santa Katalina, was seized and garrisoned by the buccaneers in 1664 under the leadership of a man named Mansvelt. He sailed off to get recruits, leaving the island in command of a certain Simon, and died upon the voyage. Simon surrendered the island to the Spaniards who had besieged it. The date was 1665.