Absalom Martin

“ But there had been some sort of a guard put over Jason’s treasure! With what right had we been so smugly certain that the old legend was not true—that there was not still some evil, tentacled monster of the deep left to slay and drag to his cavern those that dared to penetrate the lagoon. Even now she was wading further and further from the rock wall. I could see just her head and the top of her shoulders above water, the heavy plank still guided beside her.
Fear is an emotion that speeds like lightning through the avenues of the nerves. ”

“ Yet the mystery of Kastle Krags was getting to them. They couldn’t forget that for two nights running some power that dwelt on that eerie shore had claimed one of the occupants of the manor house—and that a third night was even now encroaching over the forest. Any legend however strange concerning the old house could not wake laughter now. It was true that from time to time one of the guests laughed at another’s sallies, but always the sound rang shockingly loud over the verandas and was some way disquieting to every one that heard it. ”

“ There is more death than life in the forest, and all travelers know it, and not one can tell why. It is easier to imagine death than life, the trail grows darker instead of brighter, a murky mystery dwells between the distant trunks.... Ordinarily such abundant wild-life relieves the somber, unhappy tone of the woods, but here it some way fails to do so. No woodsman has to be told how much more cheerful it makes him feel, how less lonely and depressed, to catch sight of a doe and fawn, feeding in the downs, or even a raccoon stealing down a creek-bank in the mystery of the moon ”

“ It was a strange atmosphere that gathered over Kastle Krags in those early evening hours. Some way it gave no image of reality. It was vaguely hard to talk—the mind moved along certain channels and could not be turned aside. We couldn’t disregard the fact that the night was falling. The hours of darkness were even now upon us. And no man could keep from thinking of their possibilities.
I noticed a certain irritability on the part of all the guests. Their nerves were on edge, their tempers—almost forgotten in their years of social intercourse—excitable and uncertain. ”

“ The force of my leap carried me over and down, the descending waters seized me as the sluice in a sink might seize an insect, and slowly, steadily, as if by a giant’s hand, drew me into darkness.
I had been drawn into the subterranean outlet of the lagoon, the passageway of the waters of the outgoing tide. Life itself depended on how long that under-water channel was. I only knew that I was headed under the rock wall and toward the open sea. ”

“ The river itself rises in one of those lost and nameless lakes in the Floridan central ridge, then is hidden at once in the live oak and cypress forests that creep inland from the coasts. But it can never be said truly to flow. Over the billiard-table flatness of that land it moves so slowly and silently that it gives the effect of a lake stirred by the wind. These dark waters, and the moss-draped woodlands through which they move, are the especial treasure-field and delight of the naturalist and scientist from the great universities of the North. ”

“ Every day teaches that many things that seemed incredible a day ago are true: how had we dared to be so arrogant in regard to the legend of the lagoon. Even when three men, one after another, had disappeared without trace we had refused to change our ancient habits of thought: we had still refused to believe. I knew now the fate of the missing men. They had gone in search of Jason’s chest—and the treasure guard that dwelt in the lagoon had put them to death. ”

“ What was said beside that craggy, mysterious margin, what words were all but obscured by the sound of the tide-waves breaking against the natural wall of rock, what oaths were given, and what breathless, incredible happiness came upon us as if from the far stars, has little part in the working out of the mystery of Kastle Krags. Certain moments passed, indescribably fleet, and certain age-old miracles were reënacted. Life doesn’t yield many such moments. But then—not many are needed to pay for life. ”

“ I knew Nealman’s colored janitor—a middle-aged servant of an old-fashioned, almost departed glory—but for an instant I found it almost incredible that this was his voice. The tones were blurred, lifeless, spoken as if from drawn lips. There was only one thing to believe, and I fought it off as long as I could: that the man outside my door was simply stricken and almost dead with fear.
It wasn’t easy to open the door to hear what he had to tell. A scream in the night is one thing; a chattering fellow man, just on the other side of a pine door, is quite another. ”

“ Besides the seeming certainty of death, it was unutterably terrible to be swept through this dark, mysterious channel under the sea. Perhaps the terror lay most in the darkness of the passage. It was a darkness simply inconceivable, beyond any that the imagination could conjure up—such absolute absence of light as shadow the unfathomable caverns on the ocean floor or fill the great, empty spaces between one constellation and another. In the darkest night there is always some fine, almost imperceptible degree of light. ”

“ Nopp had nerves of steel; but the house and its mystery had got to him, just the same. The sunset rays slanted in over the veranda, poured through the big windows, and showed his face in startling detail. The inroads that had been made upon it struck me with a sudden sense of shock.
The man looked older. The lines of his face seemed more deeply graven, the flesh-sacks were swollen under his eyes, he was some way shaken and haggard. Yet you didn’t get the idea of impotence. The hands at his side had a man’s grasp in them. Nopp was still able to handle most of the problems that confronted him. ”

“ Their fight was no more with each other: rather they seemed at death grips with some resistless foe that tore at them from beneath the waves.
I saw Dell’s face. An unspeakable terror, that of one who in wickedness goes down to an awful death, was on his face. It was such a terror as men can know but once, for they never live to tell of it, and which blasts the heart of any one that beholds it. No artist, delving into the abnormal, could have portrayed that fear. ”

“ Yet the Ochakee country conveys no message of brightness and cheer. Some way, there are too many shadows. The river itself is a moving sea of shadows; and if the sun ever gets to them, it is just an unhappy glimpse through the trees in the long, still afternoons. The trees are mostly draped with Spanish moss that sways like dark tresses in the little winds that creep in from the gulf, and the trees creak and complain and murmur one to another throughout the night. The air is dank, lifeless, heavy with the odors of vegetation decaying underfoot. ”

“ Van Hope suddenly exclaimed sharply—an audible inhalation of breath, rather than an oath—and we saw him bending over, only his head and shoulders revealed in the moonlight. He stood just beside the craggy margin of the lagoon.
“What is it?” some one asked him, out of the gloom.
“Come here and see,” Van Hope replied—rather quietly, I thought. In a moment we had formed a little circle.
A dead man lay at our feet, mostly obscured in the shadow of the crags of the lagoon. ”

“ The tide was running out, and not a wave stirred in all its darkened expanse. We saw the image of the moon far out, scarcely wavering, and the long, bright trail that it made across the water to our eyes. The night was still stifling hot, and the lagoon conveyed an image of coolness.
“Don’t stand here!” Fargo cried. “We’ve got to make a search. Some poor devil is likely lying somewhere in these gardens——”
The house was lighted now, and in an uproar, and some of the other guests were racing down the driveway to us. ”

“ I’m afraid I stared at Florey. I had lived too long in the forest: the staring habit, so disconcerting to tenderfeet on their first acquaintance with the mountain people, was surely upon me. I think that the school of the forest teaches, first of all, to look long and sharply while you have a chance. The naturalist who follows the trail of wild game, even the sportsman knows this same fact—for the wild creatures are incredibly furtive and give one only a second’s glimpse. I instinctively tried to learn all I could of the gray old servant in the instant that I shook his hand. ”

“ The scream had seemed to her to be one of unfathomable fear.
The housekeeper, Mrs. Gentry, was the last of the white people to be called upon; and her testimony threw no new light upon the problem. She was in bed and asleep, and the shouts of the men without had wakened her.
The coroner called on the negroes in turn, and I was a little amazed at the ease with which he wrung their testimony out of them. He knew these dark people: no northern man could have hoped to have been so successful. ”

“ No white man in the manor house would have refused Slatterly’s offer. Mostly, when men see that they are up against a certain hard deal, some proposition that stirs the deep-buried, inherent instinct that is nothing more or less than a sense of duty—that deep-lying sense of obligation that makes the whole world beautiful and justifiable—they simply stand up and face it. No normal young man likes war. ”

“ I’m not saying that Nealman killed himself, but listen how much there is to say for such a theory. You’re right—what one man does, another’s likely to do. A curious thing about suicides, Weldon tells me, is that they usually come in droves. One man sets an example for another. Say you’re worrying to death about something, sick perhaps, or financially ruined, and you hear of some fellow—some chap you know, perhaps, a man you respect almost as much as you respect yourself—suddenly getting out of all his difficulties all nice and quiet—with one little click to the head? ”

“ Also the sportsman fishes for tarpon beyond the lagoons.
A strange, unhappy land of mystery; a misty, enchanted place whose tragic beauty no artist can trace and whose disconsolate appeal no man can fathom! Forests are never cheerful, silent and steeped in shadow as they are, but these moss-grown copses beside the Ochakee, and crowding down to the very shores of the gulf, have an [Pg 7] actual weight of sadness, like a curse laid down when the world was just beginning. Yet Grover Nealman defied the disconsolate spirit of the land. ”

“ It is an unescapable fact that the whole atmosphere of the Ochakee country is one of death. The moss-draped forests seem without life, the rivers convey no sense of motion, the air is dead, and vegetation rots underfoot. To-night the lagoon was without any image or indication of life. ”

“ Any one could read the fact in his voice. How white his skin looked in the moonlight, how raven-black his mustache and beard! He was still in the garb he had worn at dinner, immaculate and unruffled.
“We’re not getting anywhere,” he said. “Is every one here?”
“Here!” It was Joe Nopp’s voice, and he immediately joined us. We waited an instant, seeing if any further searchers were yet to come in. But the thickets were as hushed as the lagoon itself.
“Let’s take another tack,” Pescini said. “There’s nothing in these gardens. If there is we’ll find it in an organized search. ”

“ Already I heard the sound of the guests’ laughter. As I went further the hall seemed simply ringing with it. There could be no further doubt of the success of Nealman’s party. Evidently his distinguished guests had thrown all dignity to the winds, entering full into the spirit of play.
The glimpse of the big living-room only verified this first impression. The guests were evidently in that wonderful mood of merriment that is the delight and ambition of all hosts, but which is so rarely obtained. Most men know the doubtful temper of a mob. ”

“ Those hide-and-seek, half-glimpsed, eerie phantasies that are hidden deep in every man’s subconscious mind were in the ascendancy to-night. They had been implanted in the germ-plasm a thousand thousand generations gone, they were a dim and mystic heritage from the childhood days of the race, the fear and the dreads and horrors of those dark forests of countless thousands of years ago, and they still lie like a shadow over the fear-cursed minds of some of the more savage peoples. ”

“ Through the rifts in the trees we could see further—the stretching sands, gray in the moonlight, the blue-black mysterious seas beyond. What forms the crags took, in that eerie light! There was little of reality left about them.
We heard some one pushing through the shrubbery ahead of us, and he stopped for us to come up. I recognized the dark beard and mustache of Pescini. “What was it?” he asked. Excitement had brought out a deep-buried accent, native to some South European land. ”

“ Certain things are credible to the every-day man in the every-day mood—things such as aeronautics and wireless, that to a savage mind would seem a thousand times more incredible than mere witchcraft and magic—and certain things simply can not and will not be believed. Society itself, our laws, our customs, our basic attitude towards life depends on a fine balance of what is credible and what is not, an imperious disbelief in any manifestation out of the common run of things. It is altogether good for society when this can be so. Men can not rise up from savagery until it is so. ”

“ I had passed Florey the butler, gray and sphynx-like in the hallway, spoke to him as ever, and turned through the library door. And my first impression was that some other guest had arrived in my absence.
A man was standing, smoking, by the window. I supposed at once that he was an absolute stranger. There was not a single familiar image, not the least impulse to my memory. I started to speak, and beg his pardon, and inquire for [Pg 51] Nealman. But the words didn’t come out. I was suddenly and inexplicably startled into silence.
It is the rare man who can analyze his own mental processes. ”

“ But perhaps they are glad that their watch of the lagoon is over! There is nothing to hold these restless spirits now, and you can hear them rustling no more in the forest, or feel their tragic presence in the gardens. Some way, the house is more cheerful, and the sea no longer conveys the image of desolation and mystery. When our young friends visit us, to play golf on our links and shoot and fish in the lakes and rivers, they invariably speak of its homely charm [Pg 267] and cheer. ”