Comfortably installed in a huge easy-chair beside the freshly built fire in the “cabin” of Snug Haven and with one of Ezra Trefethen’s most artful egg-nogs within easy reach, the aged doctor leaned back, and sighed deeply.
“Maybe the captain’s right,” said he. “Maybe the boy’s all right. It’s possible; but I don’t know, I don’t know.”
Blinking, his eyes wandered about the room, which opened off from an old-fashioned hallway lighted by glass panels at the sides of the front door, and by a leaded fanlight over the lintel; a hallway with a curved stairway that would have delighted the heart of any antiquarian. The cabin itself showed by its construction and furnishing that the captain had spent a great deal of thought and time and money. At first glance, save that the fireplace was an incongruous note, one would have thought one’s self aboard ship, so closely had the nautical idea been carried out.
To begin with, the windows at the side, which opened out upon the orchard, were circular and rimmed with shining brass, and had thick panes inward-swinging like ships’ portholes. A polished fir column, set a trifle on a slant, rose from floor to ceiling, which was supported on white beams, the form and curve of which exactly imitated marine architecture. This column measured no less than a foot and a half in diameter, and gave precisely the impression of a ship’s mast. On it hung a chronometer, boxed in a case of polished mahogany, itself the work of the captain’s own hand.
All the lamps were hung in gimbals, as if the good captain expected Snug Haven at any moment to set sail and go pitching away over storm-tossed seas. The green-covered table bore a miscellany of nautical almanacs; it accommodated, also, a variety of charts, maps and meteorological reports. The captain’s own chair at that table was a true swinging-chair, screwed to the floor; and this floor, you understand, was uncarpeted, so that the holystoned planking shone in immaculate cleanliness as the declining sun through the portholes painted long, reddish stripes across it. Brass instruments lay on the table, and from them the sun flecked little high-lights against the clean, white paint of the cabin.
At the left of the table stood a binnacle, with compass and all; at the right, a four-foot globe, its surface scored with numerous names, dates and memoranda, carefully written in red ink. The captain’s log-book, open on the table, also showed writing in red. No ordinary diary sufficed for Alpheus Briggs; no, he would have a regulation ship’s log to keep the record of his daily life, or he would have no record at all.
In a rack at one side rested two bright telescopes, with an empty place for the glass now out on the piazza. Beneath this rack a sextant hung; and at one side the daily government weather-report was affixed to a white-painted board.
A sofa-locker, quite like a ship’s berth, still showed the impress of the captain’s body, where he had taken his after-dinner nap. One almost thought to hear the chanting of sea-winds in cordage, aloft, and the creak and give of seasoned timbers. A curious, a wonderful room, indeed! And as Dr. Filhiol studied it, his face expressed a kind of yearning eagerness; for to his fading life this connotation of the other, braver days brought back memories of things that once had been, that now could never be again.
Yet, analyzing everything, he put away these thoughts. Many sad years had broken the spirit in him and turned his thoughts to the worse aspects of everything. He shook his head again dubiously, and his thin lips formed the words:
“This is very, very strange. This is some form of mental aberration, surely. No man wholly sane would build and furnish any such grotesque place. It’s worse, worse than I thought.”