More, he felt that the creature, half man, half demon, had entered his life once, bringing evil into it. Yet, wildly searching his memory, he could remember nothing of the circumstance.
“Coffee or cognac?”
Monsieur Jaques was speaking and Gaspard turned from the picture and accepting a cup of coffee and a cigarette, took his seat at the table with the others.
Jaques, a cigar in his mouth and a cup of coffee before him, was deep in trade talk with Sagesse and Gaspard, pretending interest in their conversation, but hearing nothing, gazed round the room, taking in its details.
The walls were decorated with drawings of ships, Carib paddles, gourds, a glass case containing beetles and tarantulas, things of sea and land, but mostly of the sea.
Here was a chart of the Yucatan Straits marked in ink with the soundings of a wreck; beside it a chart of the waters just westward of Nassau where lies a great pond of the sea nearly two hundred miles from north to south surrounded with shoal water and reefs, this chart was marked, too, with the position of a wreck. A battle-lantern that might have lit Van Horne on some night expedition, hung from a staple near the charts, Jaques had picked it up in the sands near San Juan; an old curaçoa flask with a leathern handle, the earliest form of the bottle in which the Dutch exported their liqueur, hung by the lantern. The history of the Caribbean and the Spanish Main lay here in these things and many more, but let his eyes rove as they might, Gaspard could not stop them from returning to the picture that had fascinated him.
Taking advantage of a pause in the conversation between Jaques and Sagesse, Gaspard leaned forward:
“Excuse me, monsieur,” said he, pointing to the picture, “but you have a strange portrait on your wall, and the strangest thing about it is that I feel I have seen the gentleman before.”
Jaques looked at the picture and laughed. “Ma foi,” said he, “if you have seen him alive you are older than I am. You have most likely seen him in a print, but not such a good print as that one, it is by Coullier, very old, and I picked it up for a song.”
“And the name of the man?”