Inherited memories of the Spanish Main? Such a notion had not occurred to Richard Cary. Fantastic enough, but his quickened imagination laid hold of it.
“There must have been a Cary in one of the expeditions against Cartagena, don’t you think, Mac?”
“My word, yes. You can bet your last dollar on that. Those stout Devon lads were all over the shop, wherever there was a chance to singe the beard of the king of Spain.”
“Then wouldn’t that account for the queer feeling that I have been in these waters before? Why, the idea of sailing for Cartagena made me tingle right down to my heels when I first heard of it.”
“Here, you can’t coax me into discussing anything like that, you fine big brute,” protested McClement. “It won’t do at all. Do you think you are a blooming reincarnation? Better come to my room and have a drink and forget it.”
“Then how do you explain it?” was the stubborn question. “On the level, I am getting worried about myself.”
“No occasion for it, Dick. You are a coincidence, in a way, and a vastly interesting one. What ails you, however, is the spirit of romance and adventure. You didn’t know you had it in you. Youth often finds it in a first voyage to the tropics. I was that way myself. And the Spanish Main has a beguiling magic of its own. Most of these wild tales were fresh to you. Unconsciously you identified yourself with them because you knew you were bred from that same strain of Elizabethan seamen.”
“Have it your own way,” rather sulkily agreed Richard Cary, “but there is more to this than you can figure out, as wise as you are.”
McClement had implanted a suggestion which oddly lingered in Cary’s thoughts and colored them with strange conjectures. Who or what was the real Richard Cary? The brawny rover of Devon who had diced with the devil and the deep sea, or the prosaic son of New Hampshire farming folk who had viewed seafaring as a means of earning his bread?
“Two Richard Carys,” reflected this second officer of the Tarragona. “All my life I may have been a mixture of both and didn’t know it. When I got sore at something and cleared for action, like wading into that bunch of fo’castle outlaws on the last Western Ocean voyage, I must have been the big Dick Cary of Devon that found his fun in walloping the Spaniards.”