“Ay, surely,” said Mr. Poyntz thoughtfully, “I should have told ye that. It was the man that was married to old Squire Harold’s housekeeper. And that housekeeper, sir, when she was a young one, was about as well-favoured a wench as a man would care to speak with on a week day; and ’twas said,” hitching himself nearer to me on the bench and rumbling in my ear, “that the Squire had a fancy to her, and that after a time she was married off in a hurry and sent to live at the mill, and that her baby was born six months from the wedding. Well, all I know is, little enough that child looked like him as passed for its father; and now comes the ugliest part of it. A year after the child’s birth the miller was found dead one morning underneath his own mill-wheel. Seems he’d fallen in the mill-race by some mishap, and so had the life crushed out of him. But bad things was said ... and the widow and child they went back to the Hall, and lived there many years, till the Squire died. The child got all his growth and training there, and folks used to say he’d have been more like the Squire if he hadn’t been most like his mother. Well, the Squire being gone at last, and the estate all sold saving just the mill, as I told ye, what does the housekeeper and her son do but go back to the mill again. The son—David he was called—was then a likely young chap of maybe seventeen; and he took right hold and began for to run the mill, and a very fair profit he made out of it, taking one year with another. And Scholar Gloam, he was living in the mill-house along with them, having his room to himself, and his books and instruments quite cosy.”
“Wasn’t that rather an odd thing for him to do, Mr. Poyntz, under the circumstances?”
“Ay, surely; but ye must keep it in mind, sir, that Scholar Gloam was a wondrous odd man. He’d been his whole life shut up with his books and his studies, and no doubt had a vast deal of that sort of learning; but of worldly knowledge, as I might say, he’d none at all whatever, no more than a child. Little he’d heard of his father’s doings, be it with the handsome housekeeper or anything else; and little he dreamed—ye can make affidavit—that her son had any claim to call himself his brother, though ’twas told him once afterwards, as we’ll come to presently. Nay, but my thought of him is, he was a simple, honest gentleman at that time, kind of heart and thinking ill of no one; only a bit strange and distant, d’ye see, as was no harm in the world for him to be. And being quite the same thing to him whether he lived in a palace or a mud hut, so long as he might study his fill, why, likely he’d an easy enough time of it.
“And ’twould have been smooth enough sailing for the whole of them only for one thing, which is to say as how, ever and anon, in the mid of a big run of luck, that there mill would take on a spell of its laughing; and with that folks would be giving it a wide berth, and business would slack up again. It was no use the old woman and David a swearing that a bit of rust on the axle was the cause of it all; for, mind ye, there was no steering round that black fact of the old miller’s having met his death on the wheel; and, too, though they was never done hunting for that bit of a rust spot, they never found it, or if ever they thought they had, lo! there’d be the laugh in their faces again, so to say, the next morning. Ay, ’twas a bad, unholy sound that, sir; but the Scholar, strange to be told, seemed less to mind it than anyone; the cause being, mayhap, as how he was a wondrous absent-minded man anyway, and the only one as had never been told the true story of how the old miller came by his end.
“So now, sir, having dropped ye this bit of a hint of who Scholar Gloam was, I’ll go on with the yarn of the wreck on the Devil’s Ribs and the necklace.
III.
“But, first and foremost,” continued Mr. Poyntz, after having revived his failing pipe with a dozen or so of quick whiffs, “first and foremost I must mention a queer habit he had—Scholar Gloam, I mean—and by which it was as I first came acquainted with him. As long as the sun was over the horizon line he’d stay indoors, behind the lock of his study door; but at nightfall out he’d walk, foul weather or fair, and through the wood back yonder, down across the rocky pasture to the sea, a trip of maybe a mile and over. And often at midnight, as I’ve been pulling shorewards from the offing in my fishing dory, I’ve seen him standing a-top of the point, where the lighthouse stands now, the sky being light behind him, and he looking black, and bigger than any human creature; and sometimes he’d be tossing his arms about, and shouting out some un-Christian lingo, though there was no one there to talk to—leastways that I could see. ’Twas a queer thing, I say, for a slender, delicate-looking gentleman like him to be out so by night, in all weathers, seeming not to know the difference whether it blew, or rained, or snowed, or all three together. Some folks used for to shake their heads over it, and say he was gone daft; others there was (the superstitious kind, d’ye see) would have it as how Davy Jones, whose black bones had been the end of many a good ship and cargo, was in the custom of coming nightly to the point to hold parley with him, as it might be to strike a bargain whereby Davy should get the Scholar his estates and riches again in change for his soul.
“But Jack Poyntz never troubled his head with such fancies, sir; and times, when I’d stowed my boat away, I’d hail him, and have him down to the house; and sitting snug together by the kitchen fire, many a strange yarn has he spun me, the like of which never was heard before—leastways not outside of the books that were hid in his library—and of which many were writ in strange tongues as are not spoken in our Christian times. But it’s not for me to be repeating of ’em now, only, as I was a-telling ye, it was such-like things brought us acquainted; and very good chums we were, allowing for his being a young gentleman scholar, and me a sailor as had no great book-learning, though knowing more of men and things than a hundred such as him. And by the end of a couple of years or so, meeting him that way off and on, I knew him as well as ever anybody knew him—as well, maybe, as he knew himself.
“Well, things being this way, one day, about the last week in September, it came on to blow. There was no rain, but no moon either, and the air was thick; and night coming on, it was as black as my hat. It wasn’t long afore there was a heavy sea running, and ye could have heard the surf on them Devil’s Ribs five miles inland. I shipped the lantern up in the fore gable as usual, though knowing it couldn’t show far in such a night; and, thinks I, see it or not, any ship that gets caught in the tide this weather is bound to wreck; so I’ll hope, says I to myself, that they’ll give us a wide berth. Howbe, I wasn’t sleepy, so I loaded my pipe, and, thinks I, I’ll have a snug smoke and a drop of grog alongside the kitchen fire afore turning in. No chance, thinks I, of my Scholar happening in this night; he never could beat up against that wind, not if he had Davy Jones himself to pilot him. Well, there I sat for maybe an hour, the noise of the storm getting ever louder and louder, so at times I could hardly hear the rattle of my spoon as I stirred up the grog in the tumbler. Then all of a sudden there comes a knocking at the door, quick and heavy, and up I jumps and opens it, and lo! there was the Scholar, with no hat and no coat, and that strange-coloured hair of his blown up wild about his head, and his eyes wide open and bright as a binnacle.
“‘Why don’t you come in, sir?’ shouts I, loud as if I was a-hailing him at the maintop, such a noise the wind made; ‘ye’ll get the heart and lungs blown clean out of ye if ye stop there!’