The Isle of Seven Moons/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
BEHIND THE PICTURE
The hall of the Huntington home has a spaciousness and breadth consonant with the dignity of its owners, so gravely maintained until this last heir came to upset it. At the further end of the scrupulously waxed floors, stands a giant clock, a century old and more, with purple and red and yellow festoons of flowers and fruit decorating its imperturbable face. On days when the air is still and all the doors are open, its tongue can be heard in the great cupola, which surmounts the broad square roof, overlooking the town, and commanding a view of harbour and sea for many miles.
Now, up to this sixth of September there had been a legend in the family that the long black hands had never once stopped their visible march around the dial. Six generations of Huntingtons had in turn religiously attended to the rite of its winding, on the sacred eighth day; and each head of the line, rather incongruously, when his hour of abdication came and he had the least concern with Time, had solemnly handed on the brass key like some sacred torch of his race. Neglect of this duty would have been held as disgraceful by the beruffed figures in the gilt frames on the wall as embezzlement, or infraction of any statute on the books of the good Bay State.
But today the dread sin of omission had been committed. The tongue was silent. The hands stood stock still, pointed at eight, the fatal hour when Philip's answer had been so sacrilegiously yet so appropriately translated. In the excitement of the wedding, the elder Huntington had neglected the equally important ceremony of the brass key, and when he and the luckless bridegroom returned from the church, the former was almost as perturbed over this discovery as the tragedy at the altar. Without removing hat or coat, he rectified the error. Then, in silence, unbroken save by the reproachful monosyllables of the clock, they went to their rooms.
Now, on three sides of the house are beautiful lawns, shaded by elms and maples, at the rear a garden. Philip's room in the northeast corner has windows overlooking this garden and the East lawn. When the panes turned to yellow, with the suddenly switched-on light, a figure in the shelter of the trees stopped the restless tapping of her foot and intently watched the shadow, now thrown on the shade, and now withdrawn, as its owner paced nervously back and forth.
The front door clicked, and the older man went up the street. Next, the kitchen door opened, throwing a warning pathway of light on the garden, and the cook appeared to discuss with the neighbour's domestic, over the hedge, the untoward event of the evening. On front porch and back, upstairs and down, in all Salthaven, it seemed the only theme worth discussion that night—and would probably so hold first place for many moons to come.
Had the figure under the trees been ignorant of it, she could have caught its entire history from the conversational scraps borne from the gossips by the night wind.
"Such a shame—him lookin' so grand— But Ben and her kep' company so long.— The poor young man—the foreigner with them earrings of gold and all in rags—but them awful words the parrot used—um, um,—the man did look like the old boy hisself—but then Master Phil's sowed his wild oats— Oh, oh, they do say"
The two were now so engrossed that they might as well have been gagged. So with another glance at the lighted window and the nervous shadow, the figure left the big elm for the porch, and so through the door. Quietly she tiptoed through the pantry and kitchen, looked about, listened, found the back stairs, ascended them, and entered the door of the northeast chamber.
Philip threw the twentieth quarter-smoked cigarette in the tray. His hair was disordered, his face flushed, and the whiskey line in the flask a full four inches lower than a half hour before. It threatened to ebb still more before the night was much older.
Hearing a staccato laugh, shot through with hints of ragtime, topical songs, and all such titillating things, he turned in his chair, assuming a waggish expression, which at once changed to one of alarm.
"Carlotta!"
"Same to you, angel-face, how does it feel to be left waitin' at the church?" Then glancing at him coquettishly,—"You look lonesome—you're glad ta see me, aren't you now, sweetie?"
"You're welcome in any other city but this, Carlotta. Why in—" he mentioned a familiar place, not, it is to be assumed, that he particularly desired her removal thither, but merely as a vivid instance—"didn't you make a date for somewhere else?"
"Tried to all day, but your poppa musta kep' his ol' whiskers ambushin' that phone—stalled me ev'ry time, an what's more humiliatin' to a lady, when I called, acshually slammed the door in my face."
"Well, it's no use your coming here—I'm flat broke."
Now there could have been in this carefully swept room no verminous signs, but Carlotta inquired with some heat as to what was "bitin' him, anyway," then, probably thinking the query malapropos, sat on the arm of his chair, her arm creeping softly around his neck.
"What's your game, now?" he shot out, angrily jerking away from the embrace.
"Say, kiddo, yuh misconstrue muh intenshuns, which is, so to speak, as it were, you done me wrong. Perhaps it amuses you—an' Mac cert'nly thinks so—but—I'm—not—looking—for—coin. I've cert'nly staked you often enough, if anyone should ast you, an' I wouldn't a done that, would I, if I hadn't fell for you?"
"No, little one, no one would accuse you of that," he returned, shaking his head in alcoholic perspicacity.
But her arms were softly emphasizing her plea. In fact she gave him their full opulence, and Philip wondered—if—after all
"I've got money enough. Supposin' I stake you till you get a job? You can dance. Me an' you together, why, we'd be a riot—cabaret or big time—we'd stop the show!"
"Besides, dearie," she went on, smoothing the disordered hair, "don't kid yourself into thinkin' that little Bright Eyes, who left you flat at the altar, is ever comin' back to youoo-ooh. No, sir, never on your tintype! She's pretty an'" (strange admission here for Carlotta) "she's good—probably—sort o' fell for her myself. But she's all for that sailor guy what's doin' the Robbie Crooso stunt. Gee! wouldn't it make anelluva movie!"
Catching sight of her own dishevelled condition in the mirror, she jumped up to make repairs, first with lipstick (1911! she was a pioneer!) and powder, then with his military brushes, which, looking over her shoulder, she plied with an implication of intimacy that riled him.
"Feel quite at home, don't you?" he jeered sullenly, "but if the governor comes"
"I'll get the hook, don't I know it!—but about Little Agnes, now," she returned to his chair, "lissen, dearie,"
"Though most people think I'm nothin' but a nut dancer, I can read 'em like a book "
"Did you ever—" he interrupted, only to be cut short in turn,—
"Now, don't get off that old wheeze about a chorus girl's readin' one once—you oughta be ashamed of yourself—I subscribe to a circ'lating lib'r'y an' don't short circuit me again, either." Then assuming the wisely guaging look of one to whom the human soul was quite transparent, she explained:
"I started to tell you that she won't never giv' him up. She's one of the forever-after kind—damn fools, too, for as far as the men are concerned, that Roomyo an' Jooliet stuff's the bunk—" she sawed the air, sidewise, with a gesture of utter disgust— "An' I'd stack my pile that that Mr. Roomyoh, soon as he left Jooly lyin' there stiff an' cold, lamped some other dame at the exit an' giv' her the high sign.
"But to get back to this kiddo,—there's too much smalltown about her—y'know, blush all over when anyone menshuns legs, what we most cert'nly all got. Yep, she'd make nice apple tarts from your farm out there, an' sweep the porch clean, an' on Sundays doll up like a reg'lar curly-haired baby-doll. But she'd never do for you, kiddo, you gotta have pep an' good rag—why, all you could do when yuh get all het up is to play the organ an' look at the photygraft album, by Heck!" Here she snapped her fingers and executed that rustic shuffle, by which pieces of business her kind always know that beings from beyond their own sacred purlieus hold the boards.
"An', an'," she wound up, "Philip, me bhhoy, you'd have plenty of babies, oodles uv 'em—like rabbits. You'd make a swell father walkin' the floor with 'em, wouldn't you, now?"
For further derision she hummed a popular favourite of the day—"When Mr. and Mrs. Rabbit Rented a Harlem Flat," it was called with pantomime of infant-on-each-arm, until Philip writhed and reached for the flask. But Carlotta, who was surprising both herself and him that night, snatched it away.
"You've had about enough of that!"
Again the heavy emphasis of soft arms, and he wavered. He would go—but the broad stairs announced the approach of someone.
"It's the governor—quick—in there!"
The knob of the door turned behind Carlotta, and the ceiling lights were snapped off, leaving the room in half darkness as his father entered.
He seemed to be concerned for his son, wanting to say something—he didn't quite know what. He felt still more worried when he saw the unusual débris in the tray, and the flask which Phil had neglected to hide.
"That won't help, my boy, it never does. I'm sorry things turned out so badly—sorrier than I can say. But, cheer up, Sally'll come round on time. The whole thing's so romantic that it naturally appealed to her—all girls are that way."
"Maybe," the boy replied, "but you're wrong about her—she won't get the chance."
A sharp breeze, heralding the return of the storm, which had subsided for a while, blew through the curtains, knocking Sally's picture from the bureau. Renewed rumbles of thunder followed, and fitful spurts of lightning.
In the uncertain atmosphere of lamplight, lightning flash, and whiskey haze, commingled, through which Phil's brain was none too buoyantly volplaning, a picture on the wall opposite held him spellbound.
By day it was only a dingy oil in a tarnished frame, the canvas fissured by Time with tiny cracks like a maze of spider webs. But now it was wonderfully lifelike. On a heavy sea a full-rigged ship tossed, under reefed topsails and jib, with tall masts raking clouds and a ghostly moon. When the lightning flickered out, the red lanterns on her rail glowed, he would have sworn, with a supernatural fire. It wasn't paint but flame. Almost like a phantom ship, the Flying Dutchman of unholy memory, perhaps, she seemed actually to skim the waves, those devil s lights blinking on her port.
To the bewildered son it was uncanny, and even the prosaic and perfectly sober father, though he tried to dismiss it as an illusion, was impressed. And now the wind, increasing in violence, started the sleeping ghosts of the house. The sheeted rain lashed savagely at the window panes. The storm had returned in good earnest. A vivid flash stabbed the darkness, and, hard on the shaft, a series of others, and accompanying reverberations like the ruffling of tremendous drums above the storm, in such swift succession it was hard to tell whether the crashes followed or preceded the bolts.
In the dazzling illumination, the dimmed port lights, all the tones of the painting, faded into oblivion, until it became but a framed bit of midnight. It was only in the spaces between, when the lamplight was not paled into insignificance, that they could discern the colours at all.
There came an instant s lull, as if the warring forces of Nature were gathering all their powers for the spring. The final onslaught was presaged by a strange ball of fire caroming around the room, with a train of sparks like the fiery impedimenta of a convict from some subterranean cell. Then the whole room burst into a white searing dawn, such as the last of all must be when it comes, almost simultaneously with so mighty a roar that it strangely sounded not at all like artillery however gigantic, but rather the chorused hissing of legions of lost souls, raised into the most terrible of fortissimos. When it finally rolled away, in an almost equally inspiring diminuendo, they were unscathed, but the giant elm in the garden below, under which Carlotta had stood, was split as cleanly as a piece of cordwood halved by a sharp axe. The scream from the closet had passed unheard—one little note in the whole pandemonium.
The electric reading lamp had gone out, and Philip stumbled over something on the floor. The bulb brightened again. It was the picture. The worn moulding giving way, it had fallen unnoticed in the din of the tempest.
Now it lay back uppermost, and the boy saw the irregular lines of a crude chart, swiftly outlined in faded blues and yellows by a painter's brush. He held it to the lamp.
"What does it mean, this spooky ship, and the crazy chart?"
His father, apparently not hearing him at all, was abstractedly musing. But the boy, anxious for distraction, and scenting a mystery, perhaps even a hint of hidden, other-world treasure, demanded—wilfully as always:
"What is it? Shoot, guv nor."
"Oh, it's just a fool yarn, not worth repeating—the sort you can hear in any place where there are ships and drunken old sailors—and fools to listen to 'em."
"But you swallowed it yourself once, didn't you?"
"I'm not so sure about that. Anyway, the sooner one forgets such wild yarns and gets down to practical business, the better."
Philip, thinking this presaged something rather ominous, very probably the horrible suggestion of some job for his princely self, and strangely forgetting the very living skeleton now ensconced in the closet, tried to wheedle him.
"Come, dad," he urged.
"All right, but forget it when I'm through.
"It goes back forty years, Philip. I can remember it as clearly as if it took place yesterday. Your grandfather was sitting on the porch here, reading The Log, the same old Log, at the usual hour—he was always on schedule to the split second in everything he did—when some old tramp, half seaman, half derelict, staggered up the path.
"He was ragged and half-starved, I guess, and under his arm he carried that painting, wrapped in oilskin. He gripped it hard, as if it were his own soul he was carrying, and sometimes I thought it was. He reached the steps and almost fell at your grandfather's feet. Of course, we took him in, fed him, and put him up for the night. Later he seemed to feel better, and told us an odd sort of story of some island in the French West Indies, haunted, and entirely deserted because the long line of owners had had so many misfortunes there,—volcanoes, epidemics, assassinations—everything. There was also some preternatural quality about the place. That's not worth repeating, but he did give some practical reasons for its condition; said it was mixed up in litigation in the courts—and French colonial courts are bad enough—the titles were all snarled up or something. But the important thing to the old fellow was the treasure that he swore was there.
"It was a weird mixture anyway you look at it, but, though as a boy I wanted to believe every word of it, even then I had the sense to call it a fairy tale.—Which it was—" he interjected half cautiously, torn between his desire to "get this out of his system," as Phil mentally put it, and his reluctance to throw any more crazy ideas into the boy's head.
"However, the old boy was so earnest, and he showed us this painting with the chart on the back—my, how it has faded!—that I got to believe him, and I think Father half believed him, too—that night—in the dark. But in the light of the morning after, when the fellow got down to brass tacks and asked him to fit out a ship, why, that was another story. Your grandfather said it was a 'good enough yarn to spin when there was no work to be done but puffin' on your evening pipe, but to fit out a ship and spend a year cruising and digging for fairy gold, when there were genuine cargoes waiting on the wharves of a thousand ports, why, that was something else again.'
"Apparently, the old man had tried every shipowner in New England. They all listened, but no one would give him even a catboat, let alone the schooner he wanted.
"When he reached us he was in pretty bad shape from exposure, and we were his last chance, I guess. We kept him, of course. It would have been worse than cruel to turn him out. Anyway, one night about a week later, it was mighty warm—the sort of oppressive heat that tells a heavy electrical storm coming. Later it blew great guns and a storm broke—just like tonight. You remember that stump which your mother always kept covered with flowers, near the elm that was struck a few moments ago? Well, that was split the same way that night. Just before the crash, when the storm was at its worst, we heard cries from the sailor's room. We could hear them even above the roar of the wind. We ran to the room. He was dying, but just before he passed away, he held out this canvas which he always kept by his pillow.
"'You had faith, boy, take it,' he called to me, then, between the hacks of his death rattle, managed somehow to gasp out,—'get the gold.'
"I was only a youngster, and I was terribly frightened, as you may imagine, for he choked on that last word,—'gold.' It was just at that very second that the bolt came, the one that struck that other tree.
"Afterwards, Father had the painting framed and hung up here. And, of course, I forgot it like the fool yarn it was— Hello!" he paused and looked startled; "what's that?"
"Where? I didn't see anything."
Now, the older man was sure he had seen a figure steal down the hallway past the door, but he dismissed the idea as some vagary. It was altogther too wild a night, and incomprehensible things were happening everywhere—things which could be sensibly explained, of course, he assured himself.
But the boy was leaning forward to grasp his father's hands.
"Father," he pled, "let me take the Aileen and make a try for it"
"No, Phil, we won't go chasing rainbows. Your grandfather was right about it. No good would come of such a fool expedition.
"Besides," he went on—more crisply now, "I've had a letter today. I didn't tell you about it before, because I thought you had had enough trouble for one day. But the Registrar has written me some news I wouldn't say pleased me down to the ground. Says he wrote another letter, which I never got."
At this Philip flinched a little, but even now the father trusted him too much to suspect the extent of his turpitude.
"I want you to come into the office and settle down," the old man explained, "there'll be a fine business for you when I die, my boy. But first we'd better get this picture out of the way. It's caused enough trouble already."
He picked up the painting and started for the closet.
"Let's put it in the attic, father. The closet's locked and I've lost the key."
But something had attracted the other's eye,—a bit of wine-coloured skirt caught in that door.
Now after a very bad half hour, Carlotta was almost welcoming release, even by an enemy. It was a fairly large and airy closet, but, nevertheless, she had sweated and trembled at the possibility of discovery, as well as the violence of the storm and the uncanny incident of the painting. Nerve in plenty she might have for her business and the ordinary exigencies of Broadway, but her old friend, the property man, had no such powerful "props" in his possession. As for the real demonstrations of the elements, they aways seemed so far above a sky-scraper, so futile to one behind steel and concrete. But in this creaking and groaning "hangout," why, as the old gentleman had just said, "this was something else again." And that yarn which she couldn't help hearing against her inhibitions, not of taste but caution, was the most fearful of all. Bit by bit the chain begun by that medium was being forged. The ghost ship was but another link in the chain! The long journey approached ominously, perilously, near.
The older man snapped on the ceiling lights and looked at the betraying evidence in the crack of the door. In spite of his paternal trust, he could add the two of the girl's call and her telephone message, the two of the Registrar's letter and that bit of wine-coloured cloth. They totalled a perfect incriminating four.
"Give me that key!"
There was nothing to do but deliver it. It turned, and Mr. Huntington confronted Carlotta. Now that he enjoyed a clearer view of the visitor, it didn't take any very acute observation to realize that she was no Salthaven product. She was so plainly an errant, brightly-coloured bulb, straying far from its proper setting on the "Great White Way," and with all the allurement thereof. But this stoutish little beauty, with her jet earrings, carmine flushes, snapping eyes, and pose and walk that were always on the point of swaying into ragtime, held no attraction for a perfectly respectable Salthaven father.
"Well, young man," he snorted in disgust, "so this is the indorsement of the Registrar's letter."
He went to the head of the stairs and called the cook, who came, breathless with excitement at the urgency of the summons.
"Show this young woman to the door, the kitchen door, I mean."
Powder and paint, and her clever selection of a modiste, had given Carlotta a certain sort of flashy smartness, but after all, under the skin she was "a tough little kyke," as she had often been called. But not the whole of her. She really loved the boy in her way, or wanted him—which amounts to the same thing. Ordinarily she would have reverted to type, and had a most distinct "mad on," as they used to say in the old days of her childhood, when she bit and fought and scratched her way on the Street of Pushcarts and Old Clothes; and an impudent retort, such as "you poor old boob" (it was that in that year) would have issued from her lips, and she might also have jabbed a hatpin into the screaming cook. Because she really did care in her way for the boy, and did not want to further antagonize the father, she did none of these things. She simply said—"You've got me wrong, Mr. Huntington, you'll find out some day," then "bye, bye, Phil," and walked a little stagily, but with at least an approach to dignity, out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the front door. She refrained even from banging that.
Just as it closed, every light in the house went out.
In the darkness, Philip called
"Dad, that arm!"
The lights went up, and there was no trace of any one, ghost, demon, or human soul. But they heard a sound as of a displaced shingle, and running to the window, saw ten fingers curled around the gutter, as though the owner of them were suspended below, calculating the drop.
Philip hurled some object at them—the bottle crashed, slicing the fingers—then they disappeared.
Returning into the room they looked for the painting, but it, too, had gone.