West India Lights

I had engaged Melbourne House, a fine old mansion on the hill back of Fredericksted on the West India Island of Santa Cruz, for the winter. And I found when I arrived one November day that I was to have one more room at my disposal than I had bargained for. This was, really, an end of the second-floor passageway, which had been made into a room by a slat-partition.

My landlady, Old Mistress James Desmond, had had moved out certain articles of decrepit furniture for the housing of which I had agreed to give up the use of that ‘room’, which looked like an old-fashioned wine-closet.

I bestowed my trunks and packing cases on its floor and had Esmerelda, my coal-black servant, clear off the shelves for hand-luggage and odds and ends.

In order to do so Esmerelda had to move several discarded belongings which had been left there, and among these was a large, old-fashioned picture in a heavy wooden frame which had escaped the ravages of wood-worms for countless decades. I noticed the old picture when I was bestowing some of my own odds and ends near where it stood, and carried it into my workroom to have a look at it.

At first I had thought it was a chromo. But this was no chromo, olio, nor anything mechanically produced. It was paint.

I looked at it closely, with interest. The composition was amateurish. The coloring was too faded with the dimness of years for me to make much of it.

I carried the painting into the bathroom, made a lather and, after taking the ancient and brittle canvas out of its frame, began to clean it with soap and water. I dried it, and then used a little typewriter oil on it.

The colors began to jump out at me. The artist had been, plainly, a lover of color. My restoration accentuated the amateurishness of the thing, but I forgave the artist much because of the subject he – or she – had chosen.

My imaginary young lady in her flowered muslin dress of a century ago had chosen to depict the execution of a pirate, and – the pirate could have been none other than Fawcett.

There could be no doubt about it whatever. That bloody villain was the only pirate that had been executed at St Thomas – except his own two mates who had paid the penalty of their murderous rascality at the same time – and this was a picture of St Thomas, painted photographically, apparently from the deck of some vessel conveniently anchored offshore.

The costumes, too, were of Fawcett’s period. His execution had taken place in September, 1824, and that, too, fixed the period of the painting.

High as the colors were pitched, stilted as were the many characters, there was something convincingly lifelike about the thing. Apparently this picture had been painted from actual observation.

The colors too, on reflection, were not so much exaggerated. Did not one do well here to wear smoked glasses in the middle of the day? Was not the glowing indigo of the Caribbean incredible – the scarlet of the hibiscus painful to the unaccustomed eye?

I fastened up the canvas with carpet tacks on the wall of my workroom where it would catch the north light. I began at its upper corners, pressing tacks along its upper edge, and then, pulling it down flat, inserted others along the lower edge and up the sides.

The last tack went through the arm of one of Fawcett’s lieutenants, just where he had hurtled through the air at the end of his rope over at the extreme lefthand of the picture. A little, trailing ‘C. L.’ was the signature.

That afternoon at Estate Montparnasse, where I had been invited hospitably for tea, I told my kind hosts, the Maclanes, about my find. And I made it an excuse – though none was needed – to ask them to drive in for tea with me the following afternoon.

When they saw it I think it made the same impression on them that it had upon me, at first. I imagine that only their impeccable courtesy prevented their telling me that I had been gloating over something very like a chromo!

It was Miss Gertrude Maclane who first began to get the real charm of it. I noticed her leaning close and examining it very carefully.

Suddenly, as I talked with Mr and Mrs Maclane, there came from Miss Gertrude a little, smothered cry – an exclamation almost like a sigh – but so poignant, though subdued, that her mother turned quickly toward her on hearing it. We both stepped toward her.

‘What is it, Miss Gertrude?’ I inquired.

‘What is it, my dear?’ echoed her mother.

‘It’s this poor creature,’ replied Miss Gertrude Maclane, indicating the fellow whose arm I had transfixed.

‘Why – he’s in agony! It’s dreadful, I think! It’s wonderfully done. It quite startled me, in fact. The little figures are wonderfully done, if you look at them closely. I think they must – some of them, anyhow – be portraits, just as you said yesterday, Mr Canevin. This one, certainly, is almost uncanny.’

We all looked at the dangling fellow. I had not seen him since yesterday. Curious! He was not, as I had supposed, dangling. He was hurtling through the air; had not quite reached the end of that fatal fall from the drop where stood the hangman, a terrible, fierce fellow.

No – the rope was not yet wholly taut. That knot of seven turns had not broken the poor devil’s neck. He was as alive as any of the spectators.

But it was not this new interpretation of the artist’s skill, not the look of tortured horror, which had so moved Miss Gertrude. No!

What caused me to close my eyes in a spasmodic, futile effort to shut out a deeper horror, caused me to lean heavily against the table, fighting to retain some measure of my composure, was the fact that the man’s expression had changed since yesterday. Now out of his horror-shot, protruding, agonized eyes came straight at me a look of strange reproachfulness.

And down his little, painted arm, from the place where I had driven the carpet tack through it, were running little drops of bright red blood . . .

I opened my eyes and turned to my guests. I had pulled myself together with an effort which was like a wrench. I bowed to Mrs Maclane.

‘Shall we go down for tea?’ I inquired.

Miss Gertrude lingered behind after the rest had passed out of the room. She took my arm and I could feel her slim white hand trembling.

‘I think it is very dreadful, somehow, that picture,’ she whispered confidingly, ‘but oh, Mr Canevin, it’s fascinating. I wonder if “C. L.” really was a girl. Perhaps we can find out!’

‘We’ll see what can be done,’ I replied with an attempt at lightness, and she smiled up at me most charmingly in a way she has. A lively young girl is Miss Gertrude Maclane, daughter of Old Scottish Gentry-Planters, people who had come to the island in the old days.

When the Maclanes had gone after tea, I went upstairs and pulled out that tack. I will admit that I almost expected to see fresh blood flow from the wound. Nothing of the sort happened, of course.

I looked closely at the place. Red paint, put on a hundred years ago. The reproachful expression I had imagined was, too, wholly absent from the man’s face. I was looking at the picture now by electric light.

The marked differences in light-effects that we get in the West Indies might well be expected to play queer optical tricks. They are a land of imagination, the islands. Some of the original crudity, too, seemed, somehow, to have got back into the picture.

After breakfast the next morning I went straight in to the picture. In this clear, raw, morning light there remained only that look of apprehension which the artist had painted in.

No agony. Certainly no reproach. Queer tricks, strange illusions, those begotten of our tropical sun!

I examined the tiny hole left by the carpet tack under a magnifying glass. The ‘bloodstains’ of my aroused imagination of yesterday were stains of century-old, brittle paint – probably a slip of the brush just after touching-in those flamboyant trees or a scarlet head-turban or so – mere little meaningless, incidental dabs they were, and nothing more that I was able to discover.

That afternoon I called upon old Mrs Desmond, who owns Melbourne House. She is a little, faded lady of the Old Irish Gentry; of a family which has been in the West Indies since early in the eighteenth century.

She was dressed, as usual, in hot-looking black silk, with a little lace around the edges. There is about her a penumbra of veils and a suggestion of quaint, leather reticules. She has, too, that dead-white, colorless complexion of the West Indian Caucasian lady who has spent the bulk of a long lifetime avoiding the direct rays of the sun.

I told Mrs Desmond about finding the picture, and our curiosity about the identity of the artist. She smiled at me kindly, rocking herself back and forth in an enormous Copenhagen mahogany rocking-chair the while, and fanning herself with a regularity which suggested doom.

‘It was painted by my aunt, Mr Canevin,’ said Mrs Desmond, ‘who was Camilla Lanigan, my mother’s elder sister. She died before I was born, about 1841 – I’ll not be positive. ’Tis said she was a remarkable woman in her day, and if you’ll wait till I’m dead and gone, I’ll tell you what’s known about her.’

‘With pleasure, Mistress Desmond, and may that day be a long way off; as long as you care to have it yourself!’

‘What I can tell you is indeed no credit to the Lanigans and their gentry, you’ll understand,’ continued Mrs Desmond. ‘She was of a very inquiring disposition and I dare say she learned much that she would have done better to leave alone – about the doings of the blacks and all! My grandfather, Cornelius Lanigan that was, and her father, was a gentleman-merchant there in St Thomas.

‘It was from St Thomas that James Desmond took me when we were married to live here on Santa Cruz, and I no more than a child of eighteen, Mr Canevin. It was in ’sixty-four I was married, and all I know of my Aunt Camilla Lanigan I learned from the sayings of my mother before that year when I was a girl at home.

‘There was little she did not know about the Obeah of the black people, so ’tis said – nor, indeed, of the voodoo as well, belike! Their mother being long dead and my own mother the younger of the two sisters, there was no one to stop my Aunt Camilla from doing much as she liked. The black people held her in great respect, so ’twas said.

‘As to the picture itself, I can tell you but little about it. It was in the house when I was born, in ’forty-six that was, and my mother had a great dislike for it. ’Twas I who would be taking it out of an old dust-box where it was kept, now and again, and frightening myself, as a child would, with the queer little figures and the hanging!

‘When I was married I begged for it, and I think my mother was glad to be rid of it, for the memory of my Aunt Camilla was still in the house there in St Thomas.

‘James Desmond, my husband, would never allow it to be hung on the wall, saying that it was indelicate of a lady to have painted such a scene. And I believe he was in the right of it, Mr Canevin, with all respect to my Aunt Camilla!’

I thanked the dear old lady for her information as I bowed over her withered hand at parting. Her last remark was cryptic and somewhat startling: ‘ ’Twas more than paint, belike, went into the composition of that picture, Mr Canevin!’

I called up Miss Gertrude as soon as I was back at Melbourne House.

‘I have some information about the picture and the artist,’ said I.

‘Come as early as you can manage it,’ said Miss Gertrude, and after dinner I started.

‘Oh, Mr Canevin,’ said she eagerly, when I had recounted what Mrs Desmond had told me. ‘How I wish I might see it again now at once!’

‘I had anticipated that,’ said I. ‘It lies on the table in the entryway.’

We laid it out on the mahogany centre-table and looked down at it together in silence. At last Miss Gertrude spoke.

‘What do you see now in his expression, Mr Canevin?’

I did not need inquire in whose expression.

A baffling, elusive change appeared to have taken place now that we were looking down at him under the electric light.

‘Expectation,’ said I slowly.

I hesitated. It was not quite expectation. Interest? Not quite that, either. I pondered the matter, the bizarre whimsicality of it making its natural appeal to my mind the while.

‘Hope!’ I cried at last. ‘And, coming through the hope, a wish!’

‘Yes, yes!’ cried Miss Gertrude, clasping her hands excitedly. ‘It – it seemed to me almost as though there were something – something he wanted to tell us!’

She hurried over these hesitating words and, now that they were spoken, there was a look of relief on her lovely face.

‘Your moral courage is better than mine, Miss Gertrude,’ said I. ‘For that is what was really in the back of my mind. It seemed to me too – well, too preposterous to put into words.’

Her eyes glowed with an enthusiasm almost childish. She placed her hand upon my arm.

‘Do you suppose we could find out what it is?’

Her voice was very low.

‘We could try,’ said I.

The whimsicality of the proposal had intrigued me.

‘But how?’ cried Miss Gertrude.

‘That’s what I’m puzzling my poor brains about,’ I answered. ‘One cannot converse with a little figure two and one-half inches high and made of paint!

‘No! We cannot just talk to him – and expect him to answer. He hasn’t the – the apparatus. He’s only a brittle little manikin fastened down flat on some very tender old canvas. He can’t speak and he can’t write. But, somehow, he does seem able to change his expression.

‘If there really is something in him – something besides paint, as old Mrs Desmond hinted – at least we’re not meddling with that for any wicked purpose, whatever Mrs Desmond’s Aunt Camilla Lanigan may have had in mind.’

‘Do you remember that paralyzed old man in Monte Cristo?’ inquired Miss Gertrude eagerly. ‘Noirtier, de Villefort’s father; you remember?’

‘He was one of the friends of my childhood,’ said I. ‘What about him?’

‘He could move only his eyes, and yet his granddaughter “talked” with him. She asked him questions that could be answered by “yes” or “no”, and he closed the right eye for one and the left for the other!’

‘Yes?’ said I dubiously.

‘Well!’ said she, looking down at the picture, ‘shall we try him?’

I stepped over and looked at the manikin closely.

‘I’m looking to see if Mrs Desmond’s Aunt Camilla gave him ears,’ said I lightly. ‘Apparently she put “blood” in him.’

And I proceeded to tell Miss Gertrude the incident of the carpet tack.

‘We’ll have to work out the questions very carefully,’ said she.

I looked at her in amazement.

‘Can you seriously mean it?’ I asked.

‘Look at him!’ cried Miss Gertrude and put her hands over her eyes and sank down upon the sofa.

I stepped quickly toward her, alarmed.

‘No, no!’ she cried. ‘I’m all right – only startled a little. Look for yourself, if you please, Mr Canevin.’

I looked, and for the life of me I could not escape the conviction that there was a wry smile on the manikin’s face.

‘My God!’ said I, and did not apologize.

I almost hesitate to proceed.

Well, we sat down together after that and worked the thing out. The evening was before us. The rest of the family were dining with friends and would not be home before eleven.

It was plain to us that ‘he’ could move, although he had not done so while anyone was actually looking at him. The fact that this last ‘change’ had come upon his countenance in the briefest of intervals would indicate, somehow, that he could also ‘hear’.

For it seemed plain to us in our eerie mood of that strange evening that the smile was one of satisfaction, induced by our conversation. He wanted us to try to talk to him!

We decided to formulate certain questions, ask them, then turn away and, after a short interval, look at the manikin again. The method of communication we derived from ‘Noirtier’, as the simplest possible.

Miss Gertrude asked the first question.

‘We think you wish to communicate with us,’ said she, in a still small voice. ‘We shall ask you questions, and you are to close your right eye if the answer is “yes”, and your left if it is “no”. Will you answer?’

Then we sat, side by side, on the sofa, watching the great clock in the corner of the drawing-room ticking off the seconds of that minute which we had decided to allow to pass before looking at him again.

It was a long, long minute, that one! At first I felt like a fool, but that feeling dissipated itself as soon as we had, together, bent over the picture at the expiration of that first minute.

The right eye had drooped in a kind of leering half-wink – precisely as though Miss Camilla Lanigan had painted it so one hundred years ago.

After several long minutes of silence between us there on the sofa. I said: ‘I’m going to ask the next question, if you don’t mind.’

She nodded.

I walked over to the table. The eyes were alike again!

‘Have you more than one thing to communicate?’ I inquired.

I came back to the sofa again and sat down, my eyes once more on the clock.

Again we bent over the picture.

‘There’s a slight droop in the right eye,’ said Miss Gertrude.

The manikin had answered ‘yes’ again.

After that, somehow, we felt freer. Two questions – the real ordeal of the thing – were over and past.

There was little feeling of strangeness from then on. It was precisely as though we were talking with some person of flesh and blood like ourselves, with someone not immediately present – as though we were talking over the telephone. It was something like that.

He had two things to communicate. We took thought now how to proceed. The eyes, alike, were always open and staring straight ahead whenever we approached with a new question. And so it continued through to the end.

I thought of a necessary question.

‘Have you more than two things to communicate?’ I asked.

‘No,’ came the answer.

‘Does the first thing concern you?’ I ventured.

‘Yes.’

‘And the second thing? Does that also concern you?’

This time, when we looked for the answer, the eyes had not moved at all so far as we could tell.

I glanced up at the electric light. Our lights not infrequently change their density, go up and down, without warning. We have only the little, local electrical plants, one in each of the towns. The light appeared even enough.

We were a little nonplused, for, although I had been telling myself subconsciously all along that the whole thing was a farce, a bit of childish play, I had come by now to expect an answer!

‘Perhaps it’s because we asked him an unanswerable question,’ I suggested. ‘I’ll try to clear it up.’

‘He’s helping,’ said Miss Gertrude. ‘He’s only showing us that it was asked wrong!’

I looked down at her and smiled, and she smiled back at me.

‘Does the second thing concern more than you – that is, someone else?’ I asked the pirate.

‘Yes,’ came the answer.

‘Is Mr Canevin the other person?’ asked Miss Gertrude.

I smiled again at this. If there was anything that could be construed as an answer, I certainly expected that it would be ‘no’.

The answer was ‘yes’.

I began to feel the beginnings of a cold consternation, but I found Miss Gertrude smiling happily.

‘I thought so,’ said she simply.

Women, most of them certainly, are beyond me! It was a woman who had painted this picture!

Miss Gertrude hastened to ask another question.

‘Do you want to tell Mr Canevin what he can do for you first, and then what you’re going to do for him in return?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you wish to be released from something?’

‘Yes, he does,’ reported Miss Gertrude, who was now asking the questions, I being seated for the time being alone on the sofa.

‘Do you wish to pass out of existence?’

She nodded over to me to show that he did.

‘Can we accomplish that for you?’

‘He says we can.’

We were making progress, it appeared! She clapped her hands gaily. All her gravity had disappeared. It was merely a game to her, then. I had almost begun to suspect that she had been taking the thing seriously.

‘I thought it would come out more or less like that!’ she announced. Then: ‘The poor, poor man!’ said she softly, and I wondered once more.

She returned to the picture and looked down at it for a long time.

‘Is there anything else that can be done for you?’ she inquired.

There wasn’t, it seemed.

I will summarize, for brevity’s sake, the series of questions which followed and the ‘replies’.

We were to find out how to obtain the ‘reward’. Then we were to ask no further questions. I was to take the picture home, put it back on the wall, and destroy it the next morning – tomorrow.

All this seemed to me, on the sofa, grotesque, unintelligible. I was almost becoming bored with this seemingly foolish play, but nothing would stop Gertrude Maclane.

‘Is it a material reward for Mr Canevin?’

‘Yes,’ came the answer to this one. And, going over and looking down at the manikin, such is human nature – or our somewhat unstable lighting system on Santa Cruz – that it seemed even to me in that mood, that I could discern the merest ghost of a twisted grin on that strange little face beneath the looming, cruelly twisted knot of hangman’s rope.

I will bring what seemed to me an increasingly absurd performance to its conclusion. I left, with definite instructions to dig in the northeast corner of the cellar under Melbourne House – that cellar once devoted to the housing of materials for planter’s punches and sangaree, and now fallen to a low estate of habitation for spiders and perhaps an occasional scorpion thriving in its ancient dust.

My brain, I will confess it, was in a kind of whirl as I drove home that night from Montparnasse House. When I had obediently hung the picture back in its place on my workroom wall, I took a good, long, searching look at it. It seemed as wooden, as laboriously limned, as amateurish, as on that day when I had rescued it from the dustroom.

There were the strutting St Thomas gentry and merchants, a lordly group of aristocrats, who had come out to see Captain Fawcett die. There, too, were their silken and be-muslined ladyfolk; the Danish soldiers in their boxlike, Frederick-the-Great uniforms; the swarming, pop-eyed negroes; the hangman, Fawcett and his two mates . . .

I went to bed. That had been a strange, weird evening.

To dig under my own house. It was too much. And I had promised Gertrude Maclane to do so!

Promised, too, to destroy this picture the next morning. Awkward, that! Gentlemen do not build bonfires in their back yards in the West Indies.

Our very cooking is done on charcoal-pots, or on an occasional oilstove. We have no gas, and coal we know only as a commodity for fueling ships. It would have to be a coal-pot.

That is the idea I carried with me into sleep, the last thing I remembered until the sun, the bright, morning sun, saluted me awake.

‘Keep a fire in the coal-pot, Esmerelda, if you please,’ I called through the bathroom door. ‘I want to use it myself a little later.’

I stepped into the workroom to take down the picture. I had promised to destroy it, I would keep my word.

I looked at it, for the last time, under that clear, pitiless, blazing morning sunlight.

Probably the nervous strain had been heavier than I had imagined. I managed to control myself. I made no shandramadan – which is the black’s term for foolishness or rascality! I avoided, too, by holding on tight to the table’s edge, a caffoon, which means a fall.

For ‘he’ was not, it seemed now, and could never indeed have been, if paint is paint, hurtling through the air in his last instant of life, so to express it. The rope as I looked at it was unmistakably taut.

That deadly knot of seven turns of good, new manila rope must already have struck home under one of those strange little ears into which, last night, Gertrude Maclane and I had . . .

I set my face down for a moment in my shaking hands. The eyes of the figure which we had watched last night – his eyes were, unmistakably, closed like those of his two companions in wickedness. He had joined Captain Fawcett of the fine, plum-colored, laced coat and Hessian boots.

Our pirate really swung now. He was dead – delivered, it came through my shuddering mind, from those uncanny sorceries of Camilla Lanigan, she who had been so strangely respected by the black people of St Thomas; she who knew their Obeah and their voodoo.

I pulled down the picture a moment later with a firm hand and laid it out flat on my work table. I cut it into convenient strips for burning in a coal-pot. Some of the old, brittle paint flaked off in this process, and this I gathered up to the final crumb on a sheet of paper.

But for the most part my penknife went cleanly through the old canvas.

Downstairs I found that Esmerelda had gone after the morning’s supply of ice for the drinking water with the large thermos bottle. But a glowing coal-pot stood on the floor of the little stone gallery outside the kitchen door.

Into this I poured the fragments of the chipped paint and watched them bubble and hiss. I thrust in the strips, one after another. They curled, caught, and were swiftly consumed.

Then I stirred the charcoal and a few sparks came out. Not a vestige of Camilla Lanigan’s picture remained.

I should have to wait until Esmerelda was gone for the afternoon, and dig in that cellar in the hottest part of the day among the ghosts of wine-barrels and demijohns. I stepped out into the yard to investigate.

In a shed I found an ancient spade and, best of all, a thing like a mattock which might have been dug up on the site of Persepolis. These I carried down into the dim, cool cellar. With the spade I knocked loose the hooks of a hurricane shutter. That would dissipate the slight, musty smell and also provide a better light for me that afternoon.

Esmerelda was still bargaining among the bebustled vendors in the market when I returned upstairs to wash by hands.

After lunch I waited until I heard Esmerelda leave. I watched the good soul as she walked down the hill, through slanted jalousies. And when she passed out of sight around the corner by St Paul’s Church, I locked the front door and descended into the cellar. It was fairly cool and hardly musty at all. I hung my coat on an ancient, hand-wrought nail and set to work.

The hard-pounded earth came away reluctantly as I picked at it. loosening the surface for a hole about six feet square. Alternately with this I shoveled out the loose dirt, placing it well to one side, so that it would not run back.

It was two when I began. The fort clock had chimed three-thirty a few minutes before I struck something metallic. It took me at least fifteen minutes more before I had uncovered a small iron trunk in the corner of the large square I had opened.

I broke the rusty lock with the edge of the spade, raised it, and there before me – and such is human nature that I must say I was more surprised than amazed, at the very first – lay, neatly stacked in rouleaus from which the ancient cotton cloth fell away in shreds and flakes, row after row of gold coin – all the coinage of romance: doubloons, of course; ancient American eagles; Louis d’Or; even a few East Indian Mohurs!

In a side compartment by themselves lay, carefully packed in, an assortment of jeweled implements, jeweled chalices and patens from the loot, doubtless, of those rich Spanish Churches of Central and South American seaside cities, perhaps even from Porto Rico and Santo Domingo; jewelry, much of it monogrammed; gold plate such as had graced the hospitable boards of many a fabulously rich sugar baron of the islands of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

At the very bottom of this separate compartment, which was of the capacity of about one-third the trunk’s cubical contents, lay, flattened and stiff, a sack of oiled silk. I picked it up and had to untie the leather pouch-strings, so well was it preserved.

I looked in and then thrust in my right hand, and even in the comparatively dim light of the old cellar there leaped out at me the myriad coruscations of cut jewels, throwing back the light they had not known for fully a century. My hand was full of jewels, and I had hardly taken off the edge – the very topmost.

Diamonds, rubies, sapphires, blazing emeralds. A king’s, an emperor’s ransom here, in the cellar of Melbourne House.

The pirate! He had not misled us. What, in God’s name, did it mean!

Well, I had other things to think of besides mooning over that problem there in the cellar, with a fair-sized fortune held in my hand and God knows how much else there in the iron trunk – gold, vessels, jewels.

I spent the next half-hour carrying the trunk’s contents up to my bedroom in the wholly unromantic iron pail in which Esmerelda boils the drinking water. I deposited them all, in a kind of order – gold coin all together, vessels and jewels separate – in two bureau drawers, turning out shirts and collars for this accommodation.

I locked the drawers, stuffed the shirts into the mahogany wardrobe, placed the bureau key in my pocket and returned to the cellar. There, by leaving open the old trunk’s lid, I was able in another half-hour of feverish work, which left me literally dripping and soaking, to get back and roughly to pound down all the dry earth I had taken out.

When I had tossed the spade and mattock behind some ancient lumber, closed and hooked the hurricane shutter and returned to my bedroom to strip off my soaking clothes, before the most refreshing bath I can remember, it was precisely nine minutes before five. And Esmerelda would not be back until five precisely.

I remember sitting, about six-thirty, fresh and cool now, in white drill, waiting for Esmerelda to announce dinner, with the necklace of emeralds which I had taken out from the rest as soon as I saw it, to give to Miss Gertrude Maclane.

I had telephoned to Montparnasse House, and explained to her that I must see her as soon as possible. She had arranged that I was to call that evening after dinner.

Among other matters, I had been considering my duty with respect to this find. It involved certain responsibilities, I began to see. I resolved to return anything that might prove identifiable.

Apparently this was the hoard of some master pirate, possibly even that of Fawcett himself. Its disappearance, or rather the fact that it had never been discovered, was one of the standard mysteries of the islands. How, if that were the case, it had got itself under Melbourne House was apparently an insoluble mystery.

I may as well mention here that the restoration has proved an actuality in one or two cases. A dozen gold spoons, monogrammed, have gone back to the representatives of the Despard family in Christiansted. And a lovely old ‘tulip’ chalice, filigreed, with its attendant paten, all the way to Valparaiso.

I dined that evening with the necklace loose in the pocket of my drill jacket. I fear I made only a sketchy meal.

Esmerelda seemed disturbed. She thought, good soul, as she told me the next morning, that the crustadas of shell-fish had not been up to standard! I had not, really, been certain what I was eating.

On my arrival at Montparnasse House I felt a note of constraint. It is very hard to describe what I mean. I can only say I felt it. Santa Crucian moods and similar delicacies of feeling are most difficult to describe!

I remembered that I had called three times in the past four days! I was not unwelcome. It was not that. Otherwise Robert Maclane, Esq., would have waited perhaps fifteen minutes, instead of five, before having a swizzel served.

But – it was conveyed to me so subtly that I despair of making the matter clear, that Mr and Mrs Maclane, while recognizing me as an equal and a friend, were not quite clear as to what I was up to!

They were not, precisely, objecting to my coming so often. They wanted me to know they thought it unusual. That is the best I can do by way of saying how I felt.

Mr Maclane and I conversed about new kinds of canes which were being tried out; about the labor situation; about the pink boll-worm and how certain Montserrat cotton planters were meeting its ravages; about the newly inaugurated onion crop; about the perennial subject of the rainfall.

The ladies, of course, joined in from time to time as Victorian ladies did, and as Crucian ladies do to this day. But the burden of that evening’s conversation lay upon Mr Maclane and myself.

Not so much as the overt flicker of an eyelash served to indicate the natural curiosity of my hosts as to why I was paying their hospitable estate house so many visits. But – I could feel it, all the time, circulating in my blood!

It was half-past nine when Miss Gertrude took her courage in her hands, looked straight at me, and said: ‘May I speak with you aside for a few moments, Mr Canevin? Father and mother will excuse us.’

I rose and followed her out onto the great gallery which runs all along the front of Montparnasse House. And I knew, in my blood and bones, that Mr and Mrs Maclane did not so much as glance at one another when we had left the drawing-room. I could hear their voices as they conversed quietly together, all the time we were on the gallery.

Miss Gertrude led me to its extreme end and there, in the mellow light of a full moon and to the intoxicating accompaniment of jessamine and night-tuberose odors, faced me.

‘I have something for you,’ said I, and laid the necklace across her hands. ‘This is for you, Miss Gertrude, with all my gratitude and all my admiration.’

‘But – I cannot accept this,’ she said, looking at the emeralds as they glowed in the moonlight.

‘You will wear it, I was hoping, on your wedding day.’

‘But, Mr Canevin, I am not considering being married. I am only nineteen.’

‘But you will be married some day – God send, happily. Keep the necklace and bring it out when that delightful young gentleman who may be half-way worthy of you comes along. Let it be a portion of your trousseau.’

‘But – I am not interested in “delightful young gentlemen”, Mr Canevin.’

This conversation, it seemed to me, had got rather far away from what Miss Gertrude had summoned me out there on the gallery to talk about.

She was speaking again.

‘I do not see why you should suggest such a thing to me, Mr Canevin.’

Women! I should never understand them! This, at that moment, I felt instinctively, hopelessly. I remembered, sharply, that almost telepathic feeling I have mentioned on my arrival.

‘I am sure I ask your pardon if I have offended you,’ I said lamely and stood aside, waiting for her to precede me back into the drawing-room.

I bowed slightly to indicate that I was waiting for her to pass. I think I even may have made a slight, indicative motion of the hand.

But she did not move, and I looked down at her, troubled, vaguely puzzled. Was this the simple, sweet Miss Gertrude who had entered into the comedy of that picture with an almost childish enthusiasm?

That picture! I think I shuddered slightly. She reached out the necklace toward me, but I did not take it back. With the strangest, most poignant look on her face, she was speaking again.

Like ‘Annie Laurie’s’, her voice is low and sweet. All the phrases of that ballad of sentimental nonsense, as I was suddenly reminded, looking down at her, fit her like a glove.

‘I think you have failed to understand me, and that is why you are vexed, Mr Canevin. You see – I cannot accept your gift. I am no longer a child, you will remember, and such a gift could come only from a near relative, or – or . . . ’

She looked down. Her courage had given out. I saw her face, red as a red rose in the faint whiteness of that pouring moonlight.

The delicate, moaning coo of a disturbed wood dove came through the silent mahogany trees, and a little, faint puff of the evening trade wind came wandering across from the sea, across acres of sweet grass.

Light came to me then and blinded me.

‘ – or one who is to be your husband,’ I finished for her, bending my head toward her. She did not move, and I reached out and took both her dear hands in mine, where they lay like lilies. The necklace hung across her wrists between us.

It was, suddenly, as though ‘Annie Laurie’, played very softly and sweetly and yet, somehow, madly, played by many well-tuned violins and fairy horns, surged all about me, and it went to my head like strong wine.

‘And will you let me be that one?’ I asked her quietly.

She left her hands where they were, and raised her lovely face and looked at me, all her shame gone now, and I took her into my arms . . .

A little after we went back into the drawing-room. Mr and Mrs Maclane were chatting quietly, precisely as we had left them. I bowed to both of them.

‘I must not delay the happiness I have in informing you,’ said I, and the words seemed to come to me with a clarity almost uncanny – the right words, for such an announcement – ‘that I expect to have the honor of becoming your son-in-law.’

But, I assure you, no one, not even a Canevin, can get ahead of a real Crucian of the Old Scottish Gentry when it comes to these matters of courtesy.

‘We are happy to welcome you into the family, Gerald,’ said Mrs Maclane, without the flicker of an eyelash.

She rose and made me a quaint, Old World courtesy, and I bowed in return as she resumed her chair.

Mr Maclane took his wife’s hand in his and said: ‘My wife has spoken for both of us, Mr Canevin.’

‘Gerald has given me this,’ said Gertrude, and laid the necklace, blazing now under the electric chandelier, in her mother’s lap.

Mrs Maclane examined it with interest, polite interest. Its value would easily have purchased Estate Montparnasse – yes, and several other contiguous estates thrown in.

‘It is very kind of him,’ said she, and handed the necklace back to her daughter.

Gertrude gave it to her father to examine. He looked at it with much the same type of merely courteous interest, and then clasped the lovely thing about his daughter’s neck, which is ‘like the swan’, as ‘Annie Laurie’ has it. He kissed her gravely on her white forehead.

‘We must have in a bottle of champagne to drink your health,’ said he, and paused to bow to me again as he left the room to get it.

Of course I told Mrs Desmond about everything.

But no information could I derive from her that would throw any light on anything. She would only say: ‘After I am dead, Mr Canevin!’

But on the matter of the picture’s destruction she waxed eloquent.

‘God be praised,’ said she, ‘that the fearful thing is no more! ’Twas my poor mother, God rest her soul, that was always wishful of having it destroyed and never daring; and as for me, Mr Canevin, as I’ve told you, there was more than paint went into it.

‘But I believe every word. ’Tis enough of my Aunt Camilla’s cap-abilities that I’ve heard about to leave no doubt in my mind. After I’m dead, Mr Canevin – after I’m dead, and not before!’

And that was all we were able to learn.

We had been married less than two months; the restoration of my estate was only just beginning to be under way, when Mrs Desmond departed this life at the age of seventy-six.

The English Church was full – St Paul’s – and so, too, was the churchyard itself, for virtually the entire island turned out to pay its last respects to one of its most notable old inhabitants, a member of the Old Island Gentry who pass, these days, one by one.

Gertrude and I had come back on foot from the funeral – it is only a step to Melbourne House, where we were living until the estate-house should be ready – to be met by a young colored fellow, a clerk in Lawyer Esperson’s employ. He handed me a long envelope and asked for a receipt, which I gave him.

The envelope, addressed to me, was one of Lawyer Esperson’s. I tore it open, and within was a brief document, also addressed to me, and in the fine, beautifully formed, almost continental handwriting of Mistress Desmond herself.

I called Gertrude and we sat down together and I read it out.

Dear Mr Canevin

I have left instructions with Esperson that this is to be handed to you after my burial. I told you that I would clear up certain matters for you after I was gone.

There are two mysteries connected. One is why I would not touch a penny’s value of what you discovered under Melbourne House. The other is how the evil takings of a ‘Freetrader’ could come there, to the residence of a respectable family.

I shall hope to clear up both of these. As to how it was done, God – and Satan – know. I cannot tell you that.

But this much I can, and will, tell you.

Even before my time, we of the gentry have been constrained to marry among ourselves. It’s new blood, like your own, these islands are needing. I hope you will remain, now that you are to be married, and to one of a blood as good as your own.

For the reason I mention, we are mostly related like royalty!

I was courted by my cousin, James Desmond, whom I married. It was the uncle of my husband, Saul Macartney, who sought to marry my Aunt Camilla Lanigan in the generation before mine. This Saul was the only living child of his father, Thomas Macartney, who lived here on Santa Cruz, and was a merchant and shipowner in the island trade.

It is because James Desmond was his nephew that Melbourne House came to us by inheritance. It belonged to Saul Macartney.

This young gentleman was accustomed to go about the islands in charge of his father’s vessel, the Hope. And in the intervals of these voyages he would be courting my Aunt Camilla Lanigan in St Thomas. A young man he was, so it is said, with but little of the fear of God, and none of the love, in his heart.

When his father died, leaving him Melbourne House, the ships, three sugar estates and a grand store here in Fredericksted, he was not content to marry my Aunt Camilla and settle down.

Off he went in the Hope again before his father was well settled in his grave. And on that very voyage, from which my Aunt Camilla had sought to disuade him, the Hope was captured off Caracas by Fawcett himself.

Saul Macartney, willing as always to turn to his own advantage what might betide, ‘joined’ Fawcett and rose to be second in command to the bloodiest villain that ever scourged the Caribbean.

Now, I am thinking, you begin to see light. The connection with the picture. What depended on that bitter fact?

It had not been known to me before you dug it up that treasure had been placed under Melbourne House. But consider, Mr Canevin, where better? It was Saul Macartney’s property and only came, indeed, into the hands of my husband, James Desmond, his nephew, on Macartney’s disgraceful death on the gallows in St Thomas.

Nothing could have been easier than for him to come ashore here, and Captain Fawcett with him belike, and do as he pleased on his own property. The people would bow to the ground before a ‘Freetrader’ in those days, and the fat of the land was not too good for them. Many had their fine houses ashore. Was not Henry Morgan himself knighted and made Leftenant Governor of Jamaica?

Saul Macartney went and came as he wished, and even sought to continue his courtship with my Aunt Camilla Lanigan. It was that which roused the bitter hatred of her against him, Mr Canevin, and – woe betide the man that roused my Aunt Camilla Lanigan to hate!

For she knew how to hate, and how to make her hatred count, and may God our Heavenly Father have mercy on her soul.

Ann Jane Desmond

That was all. Granting it was true – and it was plausible enough, to be sure – it cleared up much that had been obscure; the identity of the pirate mate, for example.

But, as Mrs Desmond herself had said, it could not clear up how the thing had been brought about. Granted that Camilla Lanigan had acquired skill in black magic, and that is a great deal to grant in any such case, or any case at all, the rest fitted together like the halves of a trysting ring. I saw it all, from that point of view, and I shuddered internally.

I raised my head and looked at my dear wife. Her eyes were shining, and there was in them rather more than a suspicion of tears.

‘What a vengeance!’ she said, in her low, sweet voice. ‘Saul Macartney choosing the life of a Freetrader as against that of a decent merchant! Reduced to what appeared on that canvas!

‘Well – he is released now, Gerald. We released him. And he has rewarded us. I think we should pray for the repose of his soul. He is a century behind the others in Purgatory!’

‘You believe – ’ said I.

‘If I were not certain you would call me “Victorian”, ’ my dear wife smiled through that suspicion of tears, ‘I should say: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio!” ’

‘We shall have to let it go at that, I imagine,’ said I, ‘but I am going to give St Paul’s Church a complete new set of altar hangings in brocades, with some such idea as you have suggested.’

‘Which idea?’ inquired my wife.

‘For the repose of his soul,’ I answered.