Читать книгу On the Borderland - F. Britten Austin - Страница 3

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For the last twenty minutes the after-dinner talk of the little group of men in the liner’s smoking-room had revelled in the uncanny. One man had started it, rather diffidently, with a strange yarn. Another had capped it. Then, no longer restrained by the fear of a humiliating scepticism in their audience, they gave themselves up to that mysteriously satisfying enjoyment of the inexplicably marvellous, vying with each other in stories which, as they were narrated, were no doubt more or less unconsciously modified to suit the argument, but which one and all dealt with experience that in the ultimate analysis could not be explained by the normal how and why of life.

“What do you think of all this, doctor?” said one of the story-tellers, turning suddenly to a keen-eyed elderly man who had been listening in silence. “As a specialist in mental disorders you must have had a vast experience of delusions of every kind. Is there any truth in all this business of spiritualism, automatic writing, reincarnation and the rest of it? What’s the scientific reason for it all?—for some reason there must be! People don’t tell all these stories just for fun.”

The doctor shifted his pipe in his mouth and smiled, his eyes twinkling.

“You seem to find a certain amount of amusement in it,” he remarked, drily. “The scientific reasons you ask for so easily are highly controversial. But many of the phenomena are undoubtedly genuine—automatic writing, for instance. It is a fact that persons of a certain type find their hand can write, entirely independent of their conscious attention, coherent sentences whose meaning is utterly strange to them. They need not even deliberately make their mind a blank. They may be surprised by their hand suddenly writing on its own initiative when their consciousness is fixed upon some other occupation, such as entering up an account-book. Always they have a vivid feeling that not their own but another distinctly separate intelligence guides the pen. This feeling is not evidence, of course. It may be an illusion; probably is.

“The best-analyzed reincarnation story is probably that dealt with by Professor Flournoy in his study of the famous medium Hélène Smith of Geneva. This lady sincerely believed herself to be a reincarnation of Marie Antoinette—and in her trance-state she acted the part with astonishing fidelity and dramatic power. In her normal condition she certainly possessed neither so much detailed knowledge of the life of the ill-fated queen nor so much histrionic ability. She also wrote automatically, and some of her productions were amazing, to say the least of them. Well, Professor Flournoy’s psychological investigations proved clearly to my thinking that it was a case of her subconscious mind dramatizing, with that wonderful faculty of impersonation which characterizes it, a few hints accidentally dropped into it and combining with her subconscious memory, which forgets nothing it has ever heard or read or even casually glanced at, to produce an almost perfect representation of Marie Antoinette. Also he proved that her automatic writing emanated from her own subconscious mind and nowhere else.

“Now, I am not going to say that discarnate spirits do not communicate through this subconscious activity of which one form is automatic writing. I am not going to say that we do not become reincarnated through an endless cycle of lives. I do not know enough about it to assert such a negative—no one does. All I know about the human mind is that we know very little about it. It is like the moon, of which you never see more than the small end. Infinite possibilities lie in the shadow. You are only conscious of a small fraction of your own personality. The subconscious—the unillumined portion of your soul—is incomputably vast. It learns everything, forgets nothing; possibly it even goes on from life to life. When it is tapped by any of those traditional means which nowadays we call spiritualistic one may—or may not—come across buried treasure.”

“But you yourself do not believe in the truth of spiritualism as an actual fact, doctor?” queried one of the group, a trace of aggression in his tone.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

“I accord belief to a very limited number of attested facts, my friend,” he said. “That I am sitting here with you, for example. I am ready to adopt provisionally all sorts of hypotheses to explain those varied phenomena of life, the ultimate explanation of which must in any case elude me. They are hypotheses for myself—I do not announce them as dogmas for others. But—if you do not think it is too late—I will tell you a story, a rather queer experience of my own, and you can form your own hypotheses in explanation of it.”

There was a chorus of approval. The doctor waited while the steward refilled the glasses at the instance of one of the group, relit his pipe, and settled himself to begin.

It was in 1883. I was a young man. I had recently finished walking the hospitals, got my degree, and before settling down into practice at home had decided to see a little of the world. So I signed on for a few voyages as a ship’s doctor. At the termination of one of them I found myself at a loose end in New York. There I became friendly with the son of a man who in his young days had been a Californian “Fortyniner,” had made a pile, settled East, become a railroad speculator and made millions—William Vandermeulen.

Old Vandermeulen had a delicate daughter, Pauline, then about nineteen years of age and in the incipient stages of consumption. Under medical advice, he was accustomed to take her each winter for a cruise around the West Indies in his steam yacht. That year, young Geoffrey Vandermeulen persuaded his father to ship me as medical officer. There was nothing alarming in the young girl’s condition, of course, or a much older and more experienced man would have accompanied them. She was merely delicate.

We were a small party on board: the old man, his wife—a faded old lady with no personality whatever—Pauline, Geoffrey, and myself. Geoffrey was an ordinary, high-spirited young man, intelligent and a pleasant companion, but not particularly remarkable. His sister was mildly pretty but utterly devoid of attractiveness, extremely shy, and given to sitting in blank reverie over a book. Although she always had one in her hand, she read, as a matter of fact, very little. It was just an excuse for day-dreaming. Of this girl the old man, otherwise as keen as a razor and as hard as nails—commercially, I believe, he was little better than a pirate—was inordinately fond. Outside business, she was the absorbing passion of his life. There was no whim of hers that he would not gratify. It was rather pathetic to see the old scoundrel hanging over her frail innocence, all that he had of idealism centred in her threatened life.

The cruise was pleasant but uneventful enough for some weeks. We pottered down through the Bahamas to Jamaica and then turned eastward with intent to visit the various ports of the Antilles as far south as Barbados.

It was one evening while we were chugging peacefully across the Caribbean Sea that occurred the first of the remarkable incidents which made this voyage so memorable to me. I remember the setting of it perfectly. We were all in the saloon; I suppose because the night was for some reason unpleasant. The weather was calm, at any rate. Geoffrey and I were reading. Old Vandermeulen and his wife were playing cribbage. Pauline was sitting at a writing-table fixed in a corner of the saloon, entering up the day’s trivial happenings in the diary which she religiously kept. I remember glancing at her and noticing that she was chewing the nail of her left thumb—a habit of which I was vainly trying to break her—as she stared vacantly at the bulkhead, no doubt ransacking her memory for some incident to record.

Suddenly she turned round upon us with a startled cry.

“Look, Mamma!—I have scrawled all over my diary without knowing that I did it!—Isn’t that strange!”

We all of us looked up languidly. The mother made some banal remark, but did not withdraw her attention from her cards. The father glanced affectionately toward her without ceasing to count up the score he was about to peg on the board. Geoffrey and I continued our reading.

But the girl had been puzzling over the scrawl and all at once she jumped up from her seat and came across to us.

“Look!” she said. “Isn’t it funny? These words—they’re all like the words on blotting-paper—they go backwards and inside out! And there are figures, too!—Whatever could have made me do it?—And I don’t remember doing it either, though of course I must have done so. There was nothing on that page a minute before, I am sure of that!”

There was something curiously uneasy in the girl’s manner, a note in her voice that impressed me. I got up, took the open diary from her hand and there sure enough was a large uneven scrawl, two lines of it, diagonally across the page, and, as she said, reversed, as though it had been blotted down upon it.

Almost without thinking, I held the open page against one of the mirrors panelled in the saloon wall—and I could not repress a cry of astonishment. The scrawl was a decipherable sentence, mysterious enough, but coherent!—I’ll write it down for you as nearly as I remember it, so as to show you how it looked. He produced pencil and paper from his pocket, wrote: “lucia 1324 N 8127 W katalina sculle point SWbS 3 trees digge jno dawson youre turne:” There you are—the last two words were added like a postscript and were followed by a rough sketch, an irregular oval over a St. Andrew’s cross, like this—

I read out what was written, and Pauline stared at me wide-eyed.

“Whatever could have made me write that?” she exclaimed.

Geoffrey looked up, fraternally scornful.

“It’s a thin joke, Pauline! You can’t monkey us in that fashion! I suppose you want to pretend that the ghost of some old pirate wrote it down in your book so as to start us off on a Treasure Island hunt.” Stevenson’s romance was then in its first success and Geoffrey had just been reading it. “Of course, you wrote it deliberately—what nonsense!”

She turned round upon him, her eyes filling with tears in the vehemence of her protest.

“Geoffrey, I couldn’t!—I couldn’t write reversed like that if I tried!”

“Oh, yes, you could,” asserted Geoffrey, confidently. “It’s easy enough.”

“Supposing we all try,” said I, curious to test its feasibility. I felt considerably puzzled. Pauline was not at all the sort of girl one would expect to persist in such a pointless sort of practical joke as this, and persistent she was—tearful like a child unjustly accused of a crime of which it protests innocence.

Her mother and father renounced their game of cribbage and bent their heads together over the enigmatic screed, without proffering an opinion. It was evident that they did not wish to hurt their daughter’s feelings by open scepticism. They would have humoured her in anything, no matter how absurd.

I reiterated my suggestion and it was accepted in the spirit of a parlour-game. A line from a book was selected, we all tried—and we all failed hopelessly. None of us got more than two or three consecutive letters right. It is not so easy as it sounds. Try it for yourselves!

At that time, although spiritualism was a great craze in America, and D. D. Home, Eglinton, and other famous mediums, were arousing enormous interest and controversy in England, automatic script was an uncommon phenomenon. Table-rapping, levitation, slate-writing and materialization were the wonders in vogue—and I had then never heard of the “mirror-writing” which has since become a frequent form of automatic expression. Neither, of course, à fortiori, had the young girl who had just produced this mysterious specimen.

We all felt puzzled and impressed at our failure to imitate deliberately the reversed script. Old Vandermeulen picked up the diary and read the reflection of the scrawled page in the wall-mirror.

“Well, it’s sure strange!” he said in his twangy drawl. “Geoff! You write this down in a straightaway hand and we’ll see if we can get any sense out of it. I guess there’s some meaning in it. Pauline ain’t joking.”

Geoffrey obeyed and read out the script again.

“‘lucia 1324 N 8127 W katalina sculle point SWbS 3 trees digge jno dawson youre turne’—It’s exactly like the directions to a pirate’s buried treasure, Father!” he added, excitedly. “Skull and crossbones and all! But of course that’s ridiculous! Though I can’t understand how Pauline could have written it like she did!”

“And I did not know even that I was writing!” asseverated Pauline, “let alone know what I wrote! It was just as if my hand did not belong to me—it was a sort of numbness that made me look down.”

“Tear it up, dear!” implored her mother anxiously. “I am sure it comes from the Devil!” Mrs. Vandermeulen belonged to a particularly strict little sect and was always ready to discern the immediate agency of the Evil One.

“Devil or not!” said old Vandermeulen. “I guess if there’s any buried treasure lying around here, I’m going to peg out my claim on it.” He turned to me. “Young man, was there ever any pirates about these parts?” The old ruffian was quite illiterate; had never, I believe, read a book in his life.

“Why, yes,” I replied, “from the end of the sixteenth century these seas were the chief haunt of the buccaneers and, after them, of the pirates who were not entirely suppressed until well in the eighteenth century. There must be any amount of their hidden treasure buried in these islands.”

“You don’t say!” he exclaimed, his avaricious old eyes lighting up. “And here have I been running this yacht up and down these parts for five years at a dead loss!” His disgust would have been comic, were it not for the ugly, ruthless lust of gold which looked suddenly out of his face. “Guess I’m going to quit this fooling around right away! I don’t know and don’t care if it was the Devil himself wrote this specification in Pauline’s book—I’m darned sure she didn’t write it herself—the handwriting’s different, d’you see?”—It was, as a matter of fact, compared with the previous pages, quite another hand—hers was an upright, rounded schoolgirl calligraphy, this was a cursive old-fashioned script inclined well forward. “So as we’ve got nothing else to start upon, we may as well see if there’s anything to it.” He tossed Geoffrey’s transcription across to me. “What do you make of it, young man?” he asked, with the sneering condescension he accorded to my superior literary attainments.

I took it, rather amused at the old scoundrel’s simplicity. That there was any authentic meaning in Pauline’s scrawl seemed to me wildly improbable. I was a frank materialist in those days and had Carpenter’s formula of “unconscious cerebration” glibly ready to cover up anything psychologically abnormal. However, I considered the sheet of paper with attention.

“Assuming this to be a genuine message,” I said, “it would appear to give the precise latitude and longitude of some point where it is desirable to dig. I take it that the figures stand for 13 degrees 24 minutes North, 81 degrees 27 minutes West. The world ‘lucia’ puzzles me—unless the island of St. Lucia is meant. What ‘katalina’ stands for, I do not know—it is evidently a proper name of some kind, ‘sculle point SWbS 3 trees digge’ presumably means that one should dig under three trees south-west-by-south of Skull Point—wherever that is. ‘jno dawson’ is, of course, John Dawson. Assuming this to be a spirit-message from the other world,” I could not help smiling ironically, “it is possibly the name of the ghost who is communicating—and who desires to indicate to some person that it is his or her turn. He does not specify for what. I may remark that the ghost is either ill-educated or he has an archaic taste in spelling.”

“I don’t like it,” said Mrs. Vandermeulen, querulously timid. “Do tear it up, William! I am sure harm will come of it!—It is the Devil tempting you!”

“So long as he’s serious, he can tempt me sure easy!” said the old ruffian in a tone of cool blasphemy which sent the colour out of his wife’s face. He rang the bell and the negro steward appeared. “Sam! Ask Captain Higgins to step in here for a moment!”

Captain Higgins, the skipper of the yacht, was a level-headed mariner of middle age whom nothing ever ruffled. He was competence itself.

“Good evening, Captain Higgins,” said old Vandermeulen, fixing him with the keen eyes under shaggy gray brows, eyes which defied you to divine his purpose whilst they probed yours. “What’s the latitude and longitude of the island of St. Lucia?”

“Fourteen North, sixty-one West,” replied Captain Higgins promptly.

Old Vandermeulen turned to me.

“Then it’s not St. Lucia, young man,” he said. He picked up Geoffrey’s transcription. “Well, now, Captain Higgins, is there any place thirteen-twenty-four North, eighty-one twenty-seven West?”

The skipper reflected a moment.

“No place of importance, certainly. I’ll get the chart.”

He returned with it, spread it out on the saloon table, ran his forefinger across it.

“Here you are!” he said. “A small island called Old Providence. It belongs to Colombia.”

Geoffrey, who was peering over his shoulder, uttered a startled exclamation.

“And look!” he cried. “There’s your Katalina!” He pointed to a small islet just north of Old Providence, a mere dot on the chart. “Santa Katalina!—My hat! that is weird!”

It certainly was. From whatever stratum of Pauline’s consciousness her writing had emanated, it was an amazing thing that she should have written down the exact latitude and longitude of a tiny island off the Nicaraguan coast and named it correctly. Even I could not help feeling that it was more than a fortuitous coincidence, that it was uncanny. The others surrendered themselves straight away.

I turned to look at Pauline. She was deathly white; evidently frightened at being made the vehicle of this message from the beyond. Her mother clutched at her, as though protecting her from unseen dangers. Geoffrey’s imagination had caught fire, his eyes were bright with excitement.

“My sakes! Pauline!” he cried. “I believe you now! You couldn’t have written that out of your head. I’ve read of things like this before—I guess you’re a medium and didn’t know it!—Father! We’ll track this message down, wherever it comes from, say now?”

“It comes from the Devil! Tear it up—oh, tear it up!” implored Mrs. Vandermeulen. “William! Tear it up—don’t follow it!”

Old Vandermeulen turned to the skipper. His jaw had set hard, his lips were compressed, only the glitter in his eyes, peering in a momentary fixation of thought from under his bent brows, showed that he shared the excitement of his son. So he must have looked in his office when he took the decisions which had made his millions.

“Captain Higgins,” he said, curtly ignoring the supplications of his wife, “how long will it take us to reach that island?”

The skipper put his finger on the chart at a point south of Haiti.

“We’re here,” he said. He measured off the distance. “At our best rate of twelve knots—about sixty hours steaming.”

The old man nodded.

“Put her about,” he said. His harsh tone had an odd ring about it, as though he was secretly conscious of affronting mysterious dangers, was all the more emphatic. “Right now!”

Captain Higgins never queried owners’ orders.

“Very good, sir,” he replied, stolidly, and walked out of the cabin.

A minute or two later we felt the yacht swing round. There is always something impressive when a ship on the open sea goes about upon her course, but I never felt it more powerfully than then. It seemed that there was a fateful significance in our deliberate action.

Geoffrey meanwhile was poring over the sheet of paper on which he had transcribed his sister’s reversed scrawl.

“It’s all perfectly clear,” he said, triumphantly. “We’ve got to make this island of Santa Katalina, thirteen-twenty-four North, eighty-one twenty-seven West, try and find a place called Skull Point, look for three trees south-west-by-south of it, and dig! We understand every word of it now!”

“All except the word ‘lucia’” I corrected, “and whose turn it is.”

“Yes—there’s that,” he said, dubiously. “I suppose every word has some meaning.”

“You can bet it has!” I replied, half sarcastically humouring his credulity, half surrendering myself to an uncritical acception of these mysteriously given directions. “I wonder who this John Dawson was—if he existed?”

“He’s a sure-enough ghost of some old pirate!” said Vandermeulen, with complete conviction. “And I guess he’s putting us fair and good on to his pile!”

I laughed, involuntarily, at this childishness. The old man frowned.

“There’s some things that perhaps even you all-fired clever young fellows don’t know,” he said, crushingly. “’Tain’t the first time I’ve heard of this sort of thing. A mate of mine in the old days at ’Frisco was waked up one morning by the ghost of a prospector who’d died up in the ranges. He told him just where he’d made his strike before his grub gave out. My mate had never heard of the place but he lit straight away on the trail—and sure enough the ghost was telling the truth. Old Jim Hamilton it was—and he drank himself to death on what he got out of it.” The old man looked me straight in the eyes as though challenging me to doubt him. Of course, I could say nothing. He grunted scornfully, and turned again to the chart still spread out upon the table. “It’s a nice quiet out-of-the-way place,” reflected the old ruffian, putting his thumb-nail on the lonely island. “Just the location for a cache—guess they’d feel pretty sure of not being interfered with there!” There was a grim undertone in his voice which was decidedly ugly. He might, himself, have been the reincarnation of just such a pirate as the one whose existence he was postulating.

Well, nothing more happened that night. Mrs. Vandermeulen, thoroughly alarmed and uneasy, hustled her daughter off to bed. Old Vandermeulen and his son sat up in an endless discussion of the mysterious script, referring again and again to the chart which so startlingly confirmed its indications, and speculating optimistically as to the nature and amount of the treasure they were convinced was buried in the designated place. They talked themselves into a complete faith in the supernatural origin of the message, and, father and son alike—it was curious to note the traits of resemblance which cropped out in them—were equally indifferent as to whether its source was diabolic or benevolent. Enormously wealthy although they already were, the prospect of this phantom gold waiting to be unearthed had completely fascinated them. At last I turned in, wearied with the thousand and one questions they asked me and to which I could give no answer, disgusted with their avarice, and scornfully contemptuous of their simplicity.

I found sleep no easy matter. Sceptical though I was, I could not get Pauline’s curious production out of my head, and the more I thought of it the more inexplicable seemed its coincidence with the chart. The subconscious mind, with its amazing memory, its dramatic faculty, its unexpected invasion of the surface consciousness in certain types, was not then the commonplace of psychology that it is now—or I should probably have referred the whole thing to the combination of a casual, apparently unheeding, glance at the chart with a memory of some of her brother’s remarks about “Treasure Island,” automatically and dramatically reproduced. As it was, I could formulate no explanation that satisfied me—though I utterly disbelieved in the ghost of a piratical John Dawson, of which the two Vandermeulens were now fully persuaded.

The next day found us steaming steadily westward. Father and son could talk of nothing else but their fancied buried treasure and their plans for digging it up without taking the crew of the yacht into their confidence. Mrs. Vandermeulen hovered round her daughter, horribly anxious of she knew not what, but—after having been once silenced by a peremptory oath from her husband—afraid to make further protest. Pauline herself sat all day in a deck-chair, more silent even than usual, staring dreamily across the empty sea in a reverie which ignored us all. Naturally, I watched her closely. But, except that her eyes had a kind of haunting fear in them, she seemed perfectly normal. Evidently the occurrence of the previous night had shocked her profoundly, for once, when I casually mentioned it, she shuddered and implored me not to speak of it again. The fear of the uncanny in herself stared out of her eyes as she entreated me.

This dreamy absorption in herself continued until supper time that evening. Throughout the meal, I do not think she uttered a single word. She seemed not even to hear the conversation around her, but toyed listlessly with her food and finally ceased to eat long before the others had finished. Watching her with a professionally interested observation, I was uneasy. She had leaned back in her chair, was gazing straight before her with wide-open eyes. Suddenly I noticed that they had glazed over. All expression faded out of her face. The arm that rested on the salmon-table stiffened into a cataleptic sort of rigidity.

Her mother was also anxiously watching her.

“Pauline!” she cried. “Are you ill?”

There was no answer. The girl sat like a statue. Mrs. Vandermeulen glanced at me in wild alarm, silently imploring my intervention. Old Vandermeulen and his son were hotly arguing the desirability or otherwise of informing Captain Higgins of their plans, and took no notice of us.

I got up from my seat and went round the table to the girl. I lifted up her lifelessly heavy arm with my fingers on her pulse. It was normal.

“Miss Vandermeulen!” I said, rather sharply. “Are you not well?”

She turned her head slowly round to me, like a sleep-walker faintly aware of some sound that does not, however, wake her, and stared me full in the face with eyes in which there was not the slightest glimmer of recognition.

“Pauline!” almost screamed her mother, “don’t you know your own name?”

An expression of curious intelligence dawned in her face—her aspect changed in some subtle manner, as though another, quite different, personality was emerging in her—she laughed in low, confident tones utterly unlike her ordinary laugh.

“My name is Lucia!” she said, as though stating a well-known fact.

Lucia! To say that we were startled is to understate our astonishment—we were dumbfounded. The first word of the cryptic message! We gazed at her for a moment as at a complete stranger from the clouds—and indeed she looked it, as she smiled at us with bright malicious eyes. The diffident Pauline we knew had completely disappeared.

“She is possessed!” screamed her mother. “Oh, God—restore her! restore her!”

The girl stood up suddenly from her chair, passed her hand over her eyes, shook herself as though shaking off sleep. She turned away from us deliberately.

“Oh, John!” she said, and there was an odd little foreign accent in her tone, “I have dreamed—such a strange dream! I dreamed—I know not!—that I was not Lucia!” She laughed softly in her new low tones, “—That strange people were asking me my name. Then I woke—oh, John!” she sidled up in a wheedling manner to what, so far as we could see, was vacant space. “I am Lucia, am I not?—And you love me? You love me?” Her shoulders moved sinuously as though she were putting herself under the caresses of a person invisible to us. “You love me—and I love you, although you have only that one terrible eye!” She still spoke with that curious foreign accent which lent a certain piquancy to her speech. “You love me, you John Dawson, you Englishman, you love me for ever, say?” She reminded me of Carmen sidling up to Don José. “You not deceive me—or——!” She looked up as into a tall man’s face with a sudden expression of feline vindictiveness, her white teeth showing in an ugly little rictus of the mouth, and slid her hand down stealthily toward her stocking. “But no!” She smiled; her hand came up again as though to rest upon a man’s shoulder. “You love me—and I love you—and,” her voice dropped, “when we have killed the others we go away with the treasure—you promise me, John Dawson?”

She appeared utterly unaware of our presence. There was a dramatic intensity in her voice and gestures which thrilled even me, although I had attended some hypnotic experiments in London and was aware of the complete realism with which a somnambulist will play a part suggested to him. I had no doubt whatever that she was in a state of hypnosis, accidentally self-induced, and that she was merely acting on the suggestions of the talk she had overheard.

Her mother, however, had no such consoling certitude. She hid her face in her hands, groaning: “She is possessed! She is possessed! Oh, God, cast out the evil spirit! cast out the evil spirit!”

Geoffrey was white to the lips, appalled, unable to utter a sound. The old man stared at her, fascinated, a strange gleam in his eyes.

The mother turned to me in despair.

“Oh, doctor! Do something—do something!—Oh, if only we had a minister here! She is possessed by an evil spirit! My Pauline! My Pauline!” She sank on her knees by one of the swivel-chairs, gave herself up to agonized prayers. “Oh, God, cast out the evil one! Oh, God, cast out the evil one!”

Thinking that this strange incident had already lasted more than long enough, I took a step toward the girl with a vague idea (though I didn’t quite know how) of breaking the hypnosis. She stood looking upward still, with a wheedling, diabolical smile, into apparent nothingness.

“We will go together—we two—with the treasure, say, John Dawson?” she murmured seductively, the very incarnation of a Delilah. “Mansvelt is dead—we will run away from Simon and go with my people before they kill us all—they are very many and you can only hold out two-three days—but we might take the treasure, John Dawson, the treasure you and Simon hid with Mansvelt—Simon, we will kill him—and we will go away and be rich—rich, John Dawson—say?” Her voice was perfidiously honeyed, her eyes glistened, as she caressed that uncanny empty air.

“What is she talking about?” muttered Geoffrey in a low, excited voice. “Who are these people—Mansvelt and Simon? Have you heard of them, doctor?”

I shook my head. They were utterly unknown to me. For a moment I hesitated, fascinated by the little drama, curious to hear more.

The mother moaned.

“Oh, do something, doctor! do something!—Save her! Save her! Oh, God, deliver her from the evil one!”

Her agony recalled me to my professional duty. I started forward but before I could reach her I was snatched back by a violent hand on my shoulder.

“Stand aside!” commanded old Vandermeulen in a terrible voice. “Evil spirit or no evil spirit, I guess it knows all about that treasure—and I’m going to hear what it’s got to say!” Of his normal love for his daughter there was not a trace. The man was completely dominated, to the exclusion of any other sentiment, by the lust for gold, more gold. He looked scarcely human as his eyes glowered upon me, murder in them if I thwarted him. “If it’s the Devil himself that’s got her—let her talk!”

But the mother sprang up with a wild shriek, rushed toward her daughter.

“Do you wish her eternal damnation?” she cried, flinging her arms about the girl. “Pauline! Pauline! For the love of God, don’t you know me?—Oh, say a prayer—say a prayer after me!” She commenced the Lord’s Prayer in a voice that trembled with anguish.

The girl stood rigid in her embrace, drawn up away from her, looking down upon her with fixed and hostile eyes. She made one instinctive movement to escape—and then suddenly crumpled in a swoon upon the floor.

She came round easily enough under simple restoratives, looked up at us with childish, bewildered eyes—the old Pauline again! Her mother completely broke down over her, sobbing in almost crazy joy at her restoration. Emotionally infected, perhaps, the girl also gave way to a hysterical passion of weeping, which would not be checked, and for which she could give no reason. She seemed not to have the slightest recollection of the part she had just played. Old Vandermeulen, still obsessed by his lust for the treasure, tried to question her. She only stared at him dumbly—a vague fear coming into her eyes, but giving no response. I silenced him with all the authority of my professional position, and got the girl into her stateroom, where we left her with her mother.

Throughout the next day neither of the two women appeared. Pauline was utterly prostrated, and she remained in bed. Her mother stayed with her, under strict injunctions to mention nothing of last night’s terrible scene.

Meanwhile, of course, we were steadily drawing nearer to the Nicaraguan coast and the island of Old Providence with its tiny and, to us, fascinating satellite, Santa Katalina. Even I could not help wondering what we should find there. The two Vandermeulens were in a fever of excitement, cursing at every moment the slowness of the yacht. We were, as a matter of fact, due to reach the island early next morning.

Some time in the afternoon, the old man approached me confidentially.

“Say, young know-all,” he said, “what d’you figure out was the meaning of last night’s gaff? I guess Pauline ain’t got no natural talent for play-acting like that.”

Rather foolishly, I amused myself with his credulity.

“Of course,” I said, concealing a smile, “it may be that in a previous existence your daughter’s name was Lucia—the Spanish lady friend of some of the buccaneers and particularly of a certain John Dawson, who is now directing her to the treasure they buried together a few hundred years ago.” I regretted my words the moment they were uttered. The man’s infatuation needed no fanning from me.

“By God, you’ve hit it!” he exclaimed. “And she’s just remembering!—I guess she can lead us straight to it!”

“Don’t be absurd!” I said, pettishly. “I was only joking!”

He glared at me in savage disappointment.

“You’re joking with the wrong man!” he said harshly. “Besides, it sure ain’t impossible!—You don’t know what happens to us when we’re dead, though you do think you know everything!”

“No—it’s not impossible,” I conceded. “But it’s improbable.”

“That’s your opinion,” he sneered. “You know nothing about it!—I’ve had them feelings myself—feelings that I’ve been to a place before when I sure know I haven’t. By God, that’s it!—Pauline’s just remembering—coming back to these old places—and she’ll take us a bee-line to the cache!”

He strode off to impart this illuminating theory to his son, and I saw no more of them until supper time. They were, I was sure, concerting some plan for cutting me out of a share in the treasure.

They had the furtive look of a couple of conspirators as we three, Pauline and her mother still absent, sat that night at table. Both forced themselves to exhibit a strained politeness to me, which obviously concealed some treacherous design. I didn’t like the atmosphere at all and was impelled to clear it.

“By the way,” I remarked, casually, “I don’t want a share in that treasure—I prefer to work for my living.” As I had not the slightest faith in its existence, this renunciation was not difficult. “Supposing your theory to be true, it belongs to Miss Vandermeulen if it belongs to any one.”

“Sure, that’s so!” agreed the old man. “It’s Pauline’s treasure, right enough. Ain’t it, Geoffrey?”

“I guess it’s no one else’s,” said Geoffrey, picking up the idea. “I’ll see to that.”

I could not help smiling at the gratuitous menace in his tone; he might have been sitting on the treasure-chests already.

At that moment we were startled by an appalling scream, a choking cry, from Pauline’s stateroom.

We rushed in and stood for a moment transfixed with horror. Pauline, leaning out of her bunk, was throttling with both hands the life out of her mother, who had been sitting by the bedside. In a flash of my first perception of the scene, I saw that the girl had reverted to her trance-personality. It was Lucia who had that deadly grip upon the other woman’s throat, Lucia who glared at her with fiendishly triumphant eyes, Lucia who gloated mockingly in her foreign accent: “Ah, Teresa!—You think you would take the Englishman from me—you think you would go away with John Dawson and the treasure?” She laughed, cruelly exultant. “I think no, Teresa—I think no—not with the treasure! You can go with that John Dawson, yes! But not with the treasure! You go and wait for him—for your John Dawson—I will send him to you—soon—soon!” Her low laugh was diabolical.

We flung ourselves upon her, but her strength was superhuman. She seemed utterly oblivious of us, as heedless of our struggles as though we were not there. Her eyes flashing, her teeth showing, she continued to jeer at her victim in her foreign voice: “He will come to you to-night—your John Dawson—as he promised, yes! I will send him to you——!” Only as we finally tore the almost strangled Mrs. Vandermeulen from her hands did she suddenly cease to speak. She sank back upon the bed, swooning into complete unconsciousness.

I drove out the father and son and applied myself to reviving the mother. I shall not forget the terrible night I had with her, after she had resuscitated. At length, I had to give her a few drops of laudanum to get her off to sleep. Pauline slept like a child.

I woke up the next morning to that strange feeling of hushed stillness which pervades a ship when her engines are at rest after a long period of unbroken activity. We were pitching heavily, evidently at anchor, for our upward rise was every now and then suddenly and jarringly arrested. We had arrived!

I went to look at my patients and found them both suffering from sea-sickness. This vicious plunging of the yacht was more than their weak stomachs could stand. I gave them each a steadying draught and then went on deck.

The two Vandermeulens were on the bridge with the skipper. I ignored them, instinctively avoiding their certain excitement. Upon our port bow was a fairly large island, its rocky shore crowned with a dense tropical foliage. On the other side of us was a small islet, barren save for a few sparse trees scattered over it, surf breaking white upon its beaches. Old Providence and its satellite, Santa Katalina! Between the two islands a strong current was running, with a heavy ground-swell in which we plunged and kicked, straining at our cables. No wonder the two ladies were ill, I thought, as the deck sank sickeningly sideways under my feet.

I went into the saloon and found that the Vandermeulens had already breakfasted. As I ate my solitary meal, I could hear the heavy trampling of feet on the deck overhead, and guessed that they were hoisting outboard the little steam-launch we used when in harbour.

When I had finished, I went to have another look at Pauline. Her mother was with her. Mentally, she was completely her normal self, with apparently no memory even of that trance-personality which had for the second time surged up in her. But she was feeling very ill in this violent and disturbing motion of the anchored yacht.

Old Vandermeulen came in.

“Get up and dress, Pauline!” he commanded, brutally, as though bearing down opposition in advance. “We’re going ashore!”

His wife sprang forward.

“Oh, no, no, William! Don’t take her! Don’t take her!—Don’t tempt Providence. Don’t go! William! William!” she clung to him in supplication. “She’s too ill to go! She’s too ill to go, isn’t she, doctor?”

The old man shook her off.

“Nonsense!” he said roughly. Nevertheless, he turned enquiringly to me.

I considered the pros and cons dispassionately for a moment. Of course, the old lady’s fears were mere superstition and did not influence me in the least.

“Well,” I said, “I think that if Miss Vandermeulen feels equal to the effort of dressing, it would do her good to get away from the yacht and walk about on firm land for an hour or two.”

“I should like to,” said Pauline, all docility. “Besides,” she smiled, “I should like to see for myself if there is any truth in that strange writing.”

Half an hour later we had, with some difficulty, stowed the ladies—for the mother insisted on coming also—in the stern-sheets of the little launch which rose and fell dizzily under the lee of the yacht. The two Vandermeulens were amidships, ready to give instructions to the helmsman. I noticed that they had a pick and shovel on board. I sat close to Pauline. She was looking pale, but the sea-sickness was in abeyance for the moment and a touch of digitalis I had given her had stiffened her up.

We sheered off, set a course over the rolling dark blue well toward the islet we could see as we lifted on the waves. We had anchored rather on the Old Providence side of the channel dividing the islands, and the launch was about midway between the two when Pauline, who had been looking around her with some curiosity, uttered a sudden ejaculation.

“That’s not the island!” she cried, with a gesture toward Santa Katalina. “It’s the other one—the big one!” She pointed to Old Providence. Then she checked herself, a peculiar look of puzzlement in her face. “I wonder whatever made me say that!” she exclaimed. “One would think I have been here before—but I can’t have!”

“But that’s Santa Katalina!” objected Geoffrey, pointing to the islet. It undoubtedly was.

“Wait!” said old Vandermeulen, who had been sharply watching his daughter for any sign of recognition. “I guess Pauline knows what she is talking about!”

He stopped the engine and for a few moments we rose and fell idly upon the waves, while the two men stared across to Old Providence.

“By Jove, yes!” cried Geoffrey suddenly. “Pauline’s right! Look! There’s Skull Point!”

He indicated, with outstretched hand, a jutting headland whose face had been weather-sculptured into the unmistakable semblance of a skull.

“Skull Point it is!” said old Vandermeulen, with such an oath as he did not usually let come to his daughter’s ears.

In another moment we had gone about and were throbbing quickly toward the headland. All eyes were fixed on it as we approached. Geoffrey had produced a compass.

“Look!” he cried. “The three trees! South-west-by-south from Skull Point!”

Sure enough, in the direction designated, three enormous trees, evidently hundreds of years old, raised their heads high above the mass of more recent vegetation.

A quarter of an hour later we were running into a little cove on the west side of the headland. A ledge of rock, sheltered from the swell, offered itself as a landing-stage, and we ran alongside and made fast.

Old Vandermeulen ordered the two members of the yacht’s crew, who had accompanied us, to remain in the launch. The rest of us started off into the island, Geoffrey carrying the tools. The three trees were at no great distance, at the summit of a slope of broken-down volcanic rock. Geoffrey arrived first.

“No need to worry where to dig, Father!” he shouted. “Here it is—plain enough!”

Under the centre tree was a cairn of loose stones, more than half buried under the detritus of many years, it is true, but evidently the work of men’s hands.

“That’s it, sure!” cried the old man. “First time you’ve seen this place, Pauline?” he queried, with a touch of grim cynicism.

“Of course!” she replied. “What do you mean, Father?—and yet—” she hesitated, looking around her—“yet I do have a strange sort of feeling as though I had been here before. But I can’t have! It’s absurd!”

Mother and daughter sat down under the shade of the trees whilst we three set to work to open the cairn. I was as excited as they by this time, and I helped with a will. The old man, wielding his pick with the skill of an ex-miner, loosened the stones on the surface. I rolled away the big ones, and Geoffrey shovelled away the smaller stuff. At the end of an hour we had made a pretty deep excavation. We then took it in turns to work with pick and shovel in the hole, from which we threw up the stones.

Suddenly Geoffrey uttered an exclamation.

“We’re on something!—What’s that, doctor?” He passed me up a long bone.

“That’s the tibia of a man,” I replied. “I expect you’ll find the rest of him there.”

“Sure thing!” he said. “Here he is!” He cleared away one or two large lumps of rock and revealed the grinning skeleton of a man. “Hallo!” he added, as he bent down to it, “what’s this?”

A long thin stiletto was lying loosely between the fleshless ribs of the skeleton.

The old man snatched it from him as he plucked it out.

“And by all that’s holy!” he cried, “it’s got her name on it! Look!”

I took it from him. The dagger was of antique pattern, its steel rusted and corroded but still resilient enough to make it a dangerous weapon, and on the hilt, still legible, roughly inlaid in silver like the amateur work of a sailorman, was the name—Lucia!

“I guess she murdered him with that!” said the old man, grimly, glancing from the stiletto to the skeleton grinning up at us from the hole where it had so long lain undisturbed. He turned toward where his daughter sat in the shade of the trees. “Here, Pauline!” he called to her. “Come and see—your friend the pirate and the knife that killed him!”

The girl jumped up and ran across to us, all excitement.

“How wonderful!” she said. “It’s like a dream come true!”

At the time, excited as we all were, I did not notice the strangeness of that spontaneous phrase. She stood upon the edge of the excavation and took the stiletto with eager curiosity from her father. She held it in both hands, breast-high, the point toward her, to read the name upon the hilt.

“Lucia!” she cried, with a strange look toward us, as though dimly and uncertainly recalling some terrible experience. “Lucia!” She repeated the name with a peculiar, slow intonation—an intonation of puzzled half-remembrance.

We stared at her, fascinated. Was our fantastic theory true?

Her gaze lost us, fixed itself into vacancy. Her features changed. An expression of vague fear—the fear of the hypnotic shrinking at some invisible danger—came into them. She opened her mouth as though to speak.

She uttered only an inarticulate cry—a cry of fright as the loose stones of the excavation slipped from under her. She fell headlong into the hole, where she lay oddly—ominously—still. I jumped down after her, lifted her up. The rusty old stiletto, caught under her in her fall, had driven straight into her heart—broken off at the hilt!

The doctor stopped, looked round upon his audience.

“And the treasure?” queried one of them.

“There was no treasure. There was no more digging that day. We took the poor girl’s corpse back to the yacht and I thought her mother would have died as well—or gone out of her mind. She was screaming to get away from the place. But the old man was not put off his game so easily. The next day, whilst I stayed on board with the distracted mother, he and his son went and dug again in that tragic cairn.

“They brought back all they found—the broken lid of a chest, branded with the date 1665. That, curiously enough, was underneath the skeleton, suggesting that the hoard had been rifled before the man, whoever he was, was killed.”

“A strange story!” commented another of the audience. “And what’s your hypothesis in explanation, doctor?”

The doctor smiled.

“Well—you can have your choice,” he said. “There is the possibility that, in a prior existence, Miss Vandermeulen was in fact Lucia, that she seduced John Dawson into revealing the secret of the treasure, that she murdered him on the spot and went off with it—and that the vengeful spirit of the old buccaneer, hovering around these latitudes, came into touch with her new reincarnation, and, playing with a fine irony upon that same lust of gold which was responsible for his murder but of which she was this time entirely innocent, led her to a death by that same poniard with which she had killed him. Alternatively, there is the hypothesis that her spontaneous writing and the impersonation of Lucia were but an automatic dramatization by her subconsciousness of hints dropped into it by her brother’s reading of ‘Treasure Island’ and subsequent conversations between her father and his son, and that her death was a mere coincidence.”

“An incredibly complete coincidence!” said one of the men.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

“There was one other curious thing,” he said. “Some years later, in a history of the buccaneers, I came across a paragraph to the effect that the island called Old Providence since the eighteenth century was known to the buccaneers as Santa Katalina, and that only subsequently was that name transferred to the islet north of it. So Pauline’s subconscious memory was right! Furthermore, it stated that the large island, then called Santa Katalina, was seized and garrisoned by the buccaneers in 1664 under the leadership of a man named Mansvelt. He sailed off to get recruits, leaving the island in command of a certain Simon, and died upon the voyage. Simon surrendered the island to the Spaniards who had besieged it. The date was 1665.

“Of course, Miss Vandermeulen may have read that paragraph and subconsciously retained the names—but, for her, it was an improbable kind of reading. At any rate, she had a curious knowledge of an out-of-the-way piece of history. As I said, when you tap the subconsciousness you never know what buried treasure you may find. Well, I leave you to your hypotheses, gentlemen.” He stood up, knocked out his pipe. “Good-night!”