“Will!” he said, laughing. “Oh, it’s no more than the force given to the wind or the wave. Predestined! If I win yet, nephew, so it is fated; not any act of yours or mine may stay it. I do not see the event. No man may look beyond the minute that is now. Nephew, I vow I saw you yawning; I prose; I weary you; I am a dull fellow,—and who would not be, living in this house?”
“No, I am tired, that’s all. I’ll go to bed.”
He caught the bell-rope, and old Thrale answering, he bade him light me to my room. The fire upon its hearth burned brightly; the bed was warm and soft, but my comfort lulled in no way my apprehension of the night. Though I locked the door and set a chair against it, I did not feel secure. Knowing myself friendless in the house, with no more than the decaying will of an old man between me and my enemy. Knowing the house peopled with old rogues, who, I conjectured, had been seamen on my grandfather’s ship, when he was young, and sinned unpardonable sins, and grew rich under a black flag. I fell to picturing him in his youth and strength—the dark ruthless face, the powerful body, the strong, cruel hands. I pictured him on the deck of his ship,—I conjured up its build for swiftness, its rakish masts, the swell of its white sails. I conjured up illusions of glittering seas, blue as the sheen on copper in the sun; a phantasm of those old rogues, withered, bloated, tottering now, as lusty with youth. Stark to the waist I saw them, their bodies muscular and brown as iron, and lithe as steel; the wicked aged faces that had peered at me out of the shadows now young, and red with drink and lust and greed; I saw these rogues now toiling at the guns,—through smoke I saw them: their hands grip cutlass, or knife, or pistol now for dish or glass or bottle. I saw such treasure, as the massy plate upon the board that night, piled on red decks with bursting chests of rich apparel—dyed silks and satins, laces; gold pieces, precious gems, even as the red gems upon my grandfather’s fingers. And I heard piteous lamentation in the wind screaming from the sea; cries of the dying and tormented in its wailing round the house, and in its rumbling above the chimney stacks the roar of guns; and the wash of waters in the sweeping of the pine and fir boughs. The dark curtains of my bed were half-drawn; when the moon shone in, I saw a black flag flying and a death’s head on it.
For my terrors, born of the evil brooding in this house, I could not rest. I fell to wondering whether my grandsire slept soundly in his bed, or whether phantoms crowded upon him, and the winds cried menace to him—an old man black with sins and nigh to dying.
Chapter XXI. My Cousin Oliver
I slept towards morning, and did not wake until the sun was rising; the light came golden-green through the stained windows. I rose from my bed, and, opening the casement, looked out over sunlit woods; afar, through the break in the trees, I could make out the glittering waters of the sea. In the decaying garden I saw the colours of many flowers among weeds; a hawthorn by an overgrown walk was a silver fount of blossom. The gloom of the garden and the wood had passed with the darkness and the sea wind; only the pines and firs were sombre yet and sighing in the breeze.
I was still in my shirt when a rapping sounded on my door. I hastened silently to pull away the chair, asking, “Who’s there?”
My cousin Oliver answered gruffly, “It’s I, cousin,” and I let him in. He was in shabby riding-rig, his black hair tumbled over his nose; he stood awkwardly in the doorway. With the flush of drink off him he seemed not so ill a fellow, though his look was lowering and sullen, and he possessed none of his father’s elegance, but only a hard strength such as must have been my grandfather’s in his youth. “Get into your breeches, cousin,” he muttered, “and ride with me.”
“Why, I’ll be happy,” said I.
“We’ll ride down to the sea and swim in it, if you’ve a mind for it.”