I contemplated him helplessly.  There was no alternative but to fall in with whatever mad caprice might seize his brain.  If I opposed him, it would lead to high and querulous words; and the hideous fact of his presence there—­of his mere existence—­I was bound to conceal at all hazards.

“I must ask you to keep quiet,” I said, stiffly.

“As a tomb,” he agreed, and his eyes twinkled disagreeably in the darkness.  “You forget that I am supposed to be in one.”

I went stealthily down into the cabin, where I secured a box of cigars and the first couple of bottles that my hands laid hold of in the locker.  They proved to contain an old Tokay wine which I had treasured for several years to no particular purpose.  The ancient bottles clinked heavily in my grasp as I mounted again to the deck.

“Now this is something like,” he purred, watching like a cat my every motion as I set the glasses forth and guardedly drew the cork.  He saluted me with a flourish and drank.

To an onlooker that pantomime in the darkness would have seemed utterly grotesque.  I tasted the fragrant, heavy wine and waited—­waited in an agony of suspense—­my ears strained desperately to catch the least sound from below.  But a profound silence enveloped the schooner, broken only by the occasional rhythmic snore of the mate.

“You seem rather ill at ease,” Farquharson observed from the depths of the deck chair when he had his cigar comfortably aglow.  “I trust it isn’t this little impromptu call of mine that’s disturbing you.  After all, life has its unusual moments, and this, I think, is one of them.”  He sniffed the bouquet of his wine and drank.  “It is rare moments like this—­bizarre, incredible, what you like—­that compensate for the tedium of years.”

His disengaged hand had fallen to the side of the chair, and I now observed in dismay that a scarf belonging to Joyce’s wife had been left lying in the chair, and that his fingers were absently twisting the silken fringe.

“I wonder that you stick it out, as you do, on this island,” I forced myself to observe, seeking safety in the commonplace, while my eyes, as if fascinated, watched his fingers toying with the ends of the scarf.  I was forced to accept the innuendo beneath his enigmatic utterances.  His utter baseness and depravity, born perhaps of a diseased mind, I could understand.  I had led him to bait a trap with the fiction of his own death, but he could not know that it had been already sprung upon his unsuspecting victims.

He seemed to regard me with contemptuous pity.  “Naturally, you wonder.  A mere skipper like yourself fails to understand—­many things.  What can you know of life cooped up in this schooner?  You touch only the surface of things just as this confounded boat of yours skims only the top of the water.  Once in a lifetime you may come to real grips with life—­strike bottom, eh?—­as your schooner has done now.  Then you’re aground and quite helpless.  What a pity!”