"No, sir," said I.
He mused a little, and then said, "They will think me lost or sunk by the guns of the enemy. Add the long and tedious voyage out to the months which have passed since last July!" he sighed deeply.
"When did you sail from Amsterdam, sir?" I inquired, for I was as particular as he to say "mynheer."
"On the First of November," he answered.
"In what year?" said I.
He cried out, fiercely, "Are your senses still overboard that you repeat that question? Certainly last year—when else?"
I looked down upon the deck.
"I have reason to remember my passage through the narrow seas," continued he, speaking in a softened voice, as though his sense of courtesy upbraided him. "I sighted the squadron of your Admiral Ayscue and a frigate hauled out in chase of me, but the Braave was too fleet for her, and at dusk we had sunk the Englishman to his lower yards!"
As he said this I felt yet again the chill of a dread I had hoped to vanquish strike upon my senses like the air of a vault upon the face. It was impossible that I could now miss seeing how it was. If this man, together with his crew, were not endevilled, as Captain Skevington had surmised, yet it was certain that life was terminated in him with the Curse his wickedness had called down upon his ship and her wretched crew. Existence had come to a stand in his brain; with him it was for ever the year of our Lord 1653; time had been drowned in the eternity of the punishment that had come upon him!
I lifted my startled eyes to Vanderdecken's face and convulsively clasped my hands, whilst I thought of the mighty chapter of history which had been written since his day, and of the ashes of events prodigious in their time, and in memory still, which covered—as do the lava and scoriæ the rocks of some volcanic-created island—the years from the hour of his doom down to the moment of our meeting. The peace of 1654—the later war of 1665—Ruyter at Sheerness and Chatham and in the Hope—a stadtholder of Vanderdecken's country becoming a King of England—the peace of Ryswick—Malplaquet—the semi-Gallican founding of the Batavian Republic—with how much more that my memory did not carry? All as non-existent to this man at my side as to any human creature who had died at the hour when the Death Ship sailed on her last passage home from the island of Java!