For some minutes he pondered all this. Before him rose visions—the miasmatic Malay town; the battle in the Straits; the yellow and ghostlike presence of the witch-woman, shrilling her curse at him; the death of Scurlock and the boy, of Mahmud Baba, of Kuala Pahang, of the amok Malay who, shot through the spine and half paralyzed, still had writhed forward, horribly, to kill.
“No wonder the curse has followed me,” murmured the old man. “I haven’t suffered yet as any one would have to suffer to pay for all that. For all that, and so much more—God, how much more! It’s justice, that’s all; and who can complain about justice? Poor Hal, poor boy of mine! No justice about his having to bear it, is there? Why should he suffer for what I did fifty years ago? Thank God! Oh, thank God!” he exclaimed with passionate fervor, “that I can pay it all, and make him free!”
He relapsed into silence a little while, his face not at all marked with grief or pain, but haloed with a high and steadfast calm. The drumming rain on the porch roof, the shuddering impact of the wind as the storm set its shoulders against Snug Haven, saddened him with thoughts of the fugitive, bearing the curse that was not his, out there somewhere in the tumult and the on-drawing night, trying to flee the whips of atavism. But through that sadness rose happier thoughts.
“It’s only for a little while now,” said the captain. “The curse is nearly ended. When I’ve paid the score, it will lift, and he’ll come back again. Poor Hal—how little he knew, when he was writing this paper, that he was giving me the chart to steer my right course! If the hand of some divine Providence isn’t in this, then there’s no Providence to rule this world!”
Another thought struck him. Hal knew nothing of the fact that his grandfather had found the curse. He must never know. In the life of better things that soon was to open out for him, no embittering self-accusation must intrude. All proof must be destroyed.
Captain Briggs tossed the curse of Dengan Jouga into the flames just beginning to flicker upward from the curling birch-bark. The paper browned and puffed into flame. It shriveled to a crisp black shell, on which, for a moment or two, the writing glowed in angry lines of crimson. Captain Briggs caught one last glimpse of a word or two, grotesquely distorted—”The curse—horror and death—one—must die—”
Despite himself he shuddered. The hate and malice of the old witch-woman seemed visibly glaring out at him from the flames, after half a century. From the other side of the world, even from “beyond the Silken Sea,” words of vengeance blinked at him, then suddenly vanished; and with a gust of the storm-wind, up the chimney whirled the feather bit of ash. The captain drew his bath robe a little closer round him, and glanced behind him into the dark corners of the cabin.
“This—is very strange!” he whispered.
Still he sat pondering. Especially he recalled the Malay he had shot through the spine. That lithe, strong man, suddenly paralyzed into a thing half dead and yet alive, was particularly horrible to remember. Helplessness, death that still did not die....