captain vanton looked much less like a ghost than a man who had seen a ghost when mermaid confronted him in the mahogany and teakwood parlour. she had with her a black bag, as if she were about to take a journey. she seated herself easily and her manner was composed, though her heart was beating rapidly. the short, thick figure of the retired seaman moved back and forth across the polished and whitened floor of the room as it had moved across the whitened and polished afterdeck of tall ships. his spreading sidewhiskers with their misleading air of benevolence could not contradict the disturbance in his reddened eyes. he had not looked at his caller since her arrival, and he did not now. stranger still, he had not spoken to her. a few gestures and she was in the parlour, seated; the door was closed and they were alone.
“captain vanton,” began mermaid. she paused an instant, then went on: “i am grown up and it is time that you told me my story.”
she saw the hands of the mariner, clasped behind him[184] as he paced away from her, tighten. she knew she must say more to make him address her.
“captain king——” she began.
the heavy tread was cut short. he was standing in front of her. he was speaking in a throaty voice as if his words had to carry against the force of a powerful gale to reach her.
“don’t speak that man’s name,” he was saying.
“you must tell me my story,” mermaid repeated.
he stood there irresolutely, an abject figure of shame, a sea captain unready with an instant decision, an order, a command, a shouted epithet. he hesitated; and when he would have put his helm hard over it was too late.
“my aunt and i are going to san francisco,” the girl was saying. “in san francisco they will remember captain king.”
and now his hands twisted and shook, and again he turned toward her. he muttered: “i will tell you all that matters.”
but he could not begin. he cleared his throat and shook his head. his red and tormented eyes looked her way. she found herself looking directly into them—and then away. she could not read all they held; and she knew she did not want to.
“you find it difficult. correct me if i go wrong.”
he made a sound that could be taken for assent.
“i was in san francisco as a very small child,” mermaid[185] began. “this i know because the ship, from the wreck of which i was saved, sailed from there. but i know it quite as much because guy has told me about the city and it recalls something to me. for a long time it recalled nothing distinct—only a vague sense of the familiar. i have thought and thought about it, and some time ago there came to me a definite image of something in the past. it was the figure of a man, a sea captain like yourself, coming and going to the house or wherever it was that i had my home. i don’t remember anything about it. i only remember that there was someone in it—it must have been my mother—who had a childish voice.... and she was pretty, too, in a girlish way; at least i suppose she was. i remember no faces; i remember no figures except the single figure of the seaman who came and went; i remember only the childish voice and the sense of prettiness about me. one other thing i do remember and that was seasons of fright. i think they were connected with the coming and going of that seaman. he was, no doubt, the man you have refused to let me name. very well; it is unnecessary to name him. what i want to know is—did he live with my mother?”
the man in front of her had been standing stock still. still with his back turned to her he answered, “yes.”
“he was not my father?”
“no.”
[186]“who was?”
“john smiley.”
the girl showed no surprise, only relief. she drew a deep breath, then murmured: “thank god for that!”
from the motionless figure facing away from her came a question: “you knew?”
“i was certain.”
“how?”
“both my father and i have seen her.”
“since—since——?”
“since her death.”
the standing bulk of captain vanton quivered. he reached for the arm of a chair and collapsed in it. he kept his back to his visitor.
“she was drowned at sea?” mermaid put the question in a shaky voice.
“aye,” he answered, and the unexpected word had in it a ring of terror.
suddenly mermaid found herself sobbing silently in a terrible anguish of thankfulness and wonder and sorrow. the stifled sound of her weeping filled the room. captain vanton made no move but sat with his head fallen on his breast, the white sidewhiskers concealing his profile. his breast rose and fell slowly.
the girl got control of herself, and said: “i have what i need to know. the rest does not matter, except as it concerns—guy.” her voice trembled again and her eyes filled. “your own story—that’s your affair.[187] but you have no right to ruin his life because of it—and that’s what you are doing!”
something of the awful sternness of the patriarch sounded in his reply: “i will save him.”
the words stung the girl. in a moment he had become a silly and tyrannical and destructive old man with a fixed idea, a delusion—the worst possible delusion, a delusion of a duty to be performed.
“you are making of him a hermit, a recluse, a solitary and distorted young man,” she said. her voice was like the lash of a whip. “you have poisoned his mind, and you will permanently poison his peace and happiness. everything that would shame him you have told him; without knowing what it is you have told him, i have sensed that. and this has been going on for years. you have forbidden him to associate with other boys and other young men. the sunlight of companionship you have shut away from him. here in this desolate house, shrouded in these wintry evergreens, in the dark, in the damp, in the company of a sick woman and an old man full of years and past evil, you have kept him and tried to form him. if he is not wholly misshapen it is through no omission of yours. it must stop!”
she was thinking to herself, in her rage, that of all madnesses a monomania was the most terrible to contend with. she was in no doubt as to the form of his malady. he was obsessed by a notion of saving guy[188] from the snare of the world’s wickedness into which he himself had fallen, into which he had seen so many men fall. he had seen the trap spring and close on himself and others. not many had ever escaped it; those who had were mutilated for life. there had been this mutilation in his own life. he would not trust the boy to walk warily, he would not trust himself to teach him to avoid the snare. he would keep him where he could not walk into it if he had to seal him in a living tomb to accomplish his purpose.
with many a boy the undertaking would have been a preposterous impossibility. with a sensitive youth of a poetic and dreamy temperament, under absolute control from earliest childhood, the thing was feasible; more, it was being done. mermaid recalled with a sense of pitiful compunction guy’s strange eyes with their wild animal look, the most characteristic thing about him. but at least then, in his teens, he had held up his head, and looked about him. now.... she had passed him on the street twice and he had not even seen her. she had spoken to him once and he had hardly been articulate in his reply; had seemed to hate and distrust her, not as mermaid, not as a woman, but as a person of his own kind.
she came back to a consciousness of what guy’s father, after an interval of silence, was saying:
“... i have told him only the truth.”
“the truth! you have not told him the truth, nor[189] shown him the truth. what you have told him is worse than a lie. for a lie is like certain substances which are poisonous only in large doses. strychnine, for example. tiny quantities, a nerve tonic; larger quantities, convulsions and death. but a little truth is a deadly poison, always. and the only antidote is more truth and more and more! there cannot be too much of it; but you have never given him anything but the truth of two or three persons out of the millions of men and women that dwell on earth.”
she rose from her chair, picked up the black bag she had brought with her, walked around deliberately in front of the seated man and opening it showed him the contents—jewels. roped pearls and lovely sapphires, oriental rubies, diamonds, unnamable stones—all the blazing wealth of gems that keturah hand had kept stuffed in a pillow for many years and had lost one summer on the beach.
“see,” said mermaid, quietly. “here is a ransom. take it. let guy go free. let him live the life of a man. let him stumble and sin and suffer, pick himself up, breathe the fresh air, and feel the warmth of the sunshine. you, who choose to live here in the darkness, can be happy in the artificial light of—these.”
the man’s face became red in a ghastly setting of white whiskers. he struggled to sit up. he put out one thick hand and clutched a rope of pearls. then, with a great effort, he unclenched his hand and drew[190] it slowly back to his side as if he were dragging a heavy weight back with it. he managed to articulate one word:
“where?”
“they were once keturah hawkins’s,” she told him. at the name his shoulders twitched. “they were coveted by the mate of the china castle. he insulted their owner, and for it he was flogged. i do not know what crimes they may have been responsible for before they came into john hawkins’s hands. but they have been responsible, since that time, for a flogging, the wreck of one life, the destruction of one soul, and now i offer them to you to save a boy’s happiness. will you take them and be satisfied?”
“they spell ruin,” he muttered, thickly. he made no gesture. mermaid quietly closed the black bag.
“since you will not take them as a ransom i will return them,” she said, “and offer another ransom in their stead.” her low utterance was without the note of determination and equally without assurance of success.
he heard the door close after her. then the man called captain vanton did an unpremeditated thing. he went to a drawer in the desk at the end of the mahogany and teakwood cabin-parlour, drew out a bundle of manuscript, wrote carefully a signature upon it, and the date, then thrust it back. again he drew out something, this time a pistol, and shot himself dead.
