long ago was it?” I asked at length, to set him going.
“Well, sir, it might be five-and-twenty years ago that that wreck took place. You was hardly more than out of your nursery then, I’m thinking. As for me, I was a chap of maybe forty—or maybe not so much; my old father he had just parted his last cable, as I might say, and I had just come in from a voyage to the Pacific Coast for hides, and was living in this house alone by myself. I’d come home, sir, to find the girl as had given me her word spliced to another man; and so it happened that I stayed a bachelor till after the age when many find themselves grandads. But I wedded at last, sir, as ye see, and never had cause to think the worse of myself for doing it!”
“I should think not, indeed,” I assented, laughing. But meanwhile I was telling myself that Agatha must be nearly twenty years old, and that if Poyntz had wedded only at the age of a grandfather, she could hardly be his own offspring by marriage. Were the doubts which her aspect had already suggested to me well founded, then? I prudently waited, in the hope that this question likewise might find its answer in the course of my host’s story.
“It was along about that time, sir,” Poyntz continued, having acknowledged my compliment with a friendly nod, “that I first came acquainted with Scholar Gloam, as the folks called him; him that yonder point’s named after, and that lived at the Laughing Mill, over there, back of the wood. But now I come for to think on it,” broke off the old yarn-spinner, pulling his meerschaum out of the corner of his mouth and looking round at me, “did I ever chance to speak to ye of Scholar Gloam afore?”
“I don’t think you ever did; but I always like to hear about anything that has a picturesque nickname, as almost everything hereabouts seems to have.”
The hale old man laughed, and raked his brown fingers through his spreading beard. “In an out-of-the-way place like this, sir,” said he, “where’s few enough things anyway, nicknames come natural. Well, now, as touching Scholar Gloam, he died nigh a score of years ago; leastways he knocked off living in the body. For there be those,” lowering his voice and wrinkling his brows, “there be those—superstitious like—ready to take affidavit of having seen him, certain days in the year, a prowling round the Laughing Mill. His grave is near by, right under the Black Oak; and maybe the place is a bit skeery.
“Howsoever, that don’t concern us now. When I knew Scholar Gloam, he was a middling-sized, slender-built young gentleman, having queer hair not all of the same colour, and a trick of talking to himself in a sort of a low mumbling way, as it might be the bubbling of water under a ship’s stern, if ye know what I mean, sir. He was a comely favoured man of the pale sort, and grave and silent, though always the gentleman in his manners, as by blood and breeding. For the Gloams was the great family here fifty years ago, and was landlords of most of the farms roundabout; but they steered a bad course, as I might say, and died out, so as Scholar Gloam was the last of ’em. Old Harold, the Scholar’s father, he was a reckless devil if any man ever was; and when he died ’twas found that Gloam Hall and all belonging thereto must go to the auction. The only bit left was the Laughing Mill itself, and an acre or two of land round about it.”
“What did the mill laugh at, Mr. Poyntz? its own prosperity?”
“Nay, sir!” returned the burly mariner, shaking his head. “I heard it laugh once, and I’d as soon crack jokes with Davy Jones as listen to it again. ’Twas a mad, wild scream more than a laugh, and like nothing human, praise goodness, that ever I heard! There was ugly yarns about that mill, d’ye see; folks said as how it had killed a man, and afterwards had got possessed with his evil spirit that was always roaming about seeking whom it might devour … or maybe I’ve got things a bit mixed!”
“Who was it that was killed?” I suggested.
“Ay, surely,” said Mr. Poyntz thoughtfully, “I should have told ye that. It was the man that was married to old Squire Harold’s housekeeper. And that housekeeper, sir, when she was a young one, was about as well-favoured a wench as a man would care to speak with on a week day; and ’twas said,” hitching himself nearer to me on the bench and rumbling in my ear, “that the Squire had a fancy to her, and that after a time she was married off in a hurry and sent to live at the mill, and that her baby was born six months from the wedding. Well, all I know is, little enough that child looked like him as passed for its father; and now comes the ugliest part of it. A year after the child’s birth the miller was found dead one morning underneath his own mill-wheel. Seems he’d fallen in the mill-race by some mishap, and so had the life crushed out of him. But bad things was said … and the widow and child they went back to the Hall, and lived there many years, till the Squire died. The child got all his growth and training there, and folks used to say he’d have been more like the Squire if he hadn’t been most like his mother. Well, the Squire being gone at last, and the estate all sold saving just the mill, as I told ye, what does the housekeeper and her son do but go back to the mill again. The son—David he was called—was then a likely young chap of maybe seventeen; and he took right hold and began for to run the mill, and a very fair profit he made out of it, taking one year with another. And Scholar Gloam, he was living in the mill-house along with them, having his room to himself, and his books and instruments quite cosy.”
“Wasn’t that rather an odd thing for him to do, Mr. Poyntz, under the circumstances?”
“Ay, surely; but ye must keep it in mind, sir, that Scholar Gloam was a wondrous odd man. He’d been his whole life shut up with his books and his studies, and no doubt had a vast deal of that sort of learning; but of worldly knowledge, as I might say, he’d none at all whatever, no more than a child. Little he’d heard of his father’s doings, be it with the handsome housekeeper or anything else; and little he dreamed—ye can make affidavit—that her son had any claim to call himself his brother, though ’twas told him once afterwards, as we’ll come to presently. Nay, but my thought of him is, he was a simple, honest gentleman at that time, kind of heart and thinking ill of no one; only a bit strange and distant, d’ye see, as was no harm in the world for him to be. And being quite the same thing to him whether he lived in a palace or a mud hut, so long as he might study his fill, why, likely he’d an easy enough time of it.
“And ’twould have been smooth enough sailing for the whole of them only for one thing, which is to say as how, ever and anon, in the mid of a big run of luck, that there mill would take on a spell of its laughing; and with that folks would be giving it a wide berth, and business would slack up again. It was no use the old woman and David a swearing that a bit of rust on the axle was the cause of it all; for, mind ye, there was no steering round that black fact of the old miller’s having met his death on the wheel; and, too, though they was never done hunting for that bit of a rust spot, they never found it, or if ever they thought they had, lo! there’d be the laugh in their faces again, so to say, the next morning. Ay, ’twas a bad, unholy sound that, sir; but the Scholar, strange to be told, seemed less to mind it than anyone; the cause being, mayhap, as how he was a wondrous absent-minded man anyway, and the only one as had never been told the true story of how the old miller came by his end.
“So now, sir, having dropped ye this bit of a hint of who Scholar Gloam was, I’ll go on with the yarn of the wreck on the Devil’s Ribs and the necklace.
III.
“But, first and foremost,” continued Mr. Poyntz, after having revived his failing pipe with a dozen or so of quick whiffs, “first and foremost I must mention a queer habit he had—Scholar Gloam, I mean—and by which it was as I first came acquainted with him. As long as the sun was over the horizon line he’d stay indoors, behind the lock of his study door; but at nightfall out he’d walk, foul weather or fair, and
