‘I shall not tell you; but if you don’t clear out of my meadow and Corston within half-an-hour, and promise never to show your face here again, I’ll lay the whole story before his lordship.’
‘Are you going, or shall I kick you out?’ inquired George.
Frederick Darley thought upon the whole he’d better go. He turned on his heel with an oath, and slunk out of the apple copse like a beaten cur.
‘Come, my girl,’ said Farmer Murray, not unkindly, as he commenced to walk homeward, with his hand still on Rosa’s arm; ‘you’ve been a fool, but I hope you’ve been nothing worse. Never see nor speak to the man again, and I’ll forgive you.’
‘Oh, papa! is it really true?’ she answered, sobbing.
‘It’s as true as Heaven, Rosa! It was Larry Barnes told it me a week ago, and he had it from one of the Whiskers, who worked near Lord Worcester’s estate in Devon, and knew Mrs Frederick Darley by sight. You’ve had a narrow escape, my girl, and you may thank Larry for it.’
‘Poor Larry!’ sighed Rosa; and if she could have known what was happening to poor Larry at that moment, she would have sighed still deeper. He had accepted her wager, and rushed off at her bidding to get the bunch of samphire that grew at the top of Corston Point. His brain was rather staggered at the idea of what he had undertaken, but he hadbeen plentifully plied with Farmer Murray’s “Old October,” and it was a bright, moonlight night, so that he did not find the expedition after all so terrible as he had imagined. The salt marshes were very lonely, it is true, and more than once Larry turned his head fearfully over his shoulder, to find that nothing worse followed him than his own shadow; but he reached the Point in safety, and secured the samphire, without having encountered old Whisker’s ghost. Then his spirits rose again, and he whistled as he commenced to retrace his steps to the village. He knew he had been longer over the transaction than he had expected, and that he should be unable to see Miss Rosa that night; but he intended to be up at the farm the very first thing in the morning, and give the bunch of samphire into her own hands. He did not expect to receive the watch chain; he had not seen the ghost, and had not earned it; but Larry’s heart was all the lighter for that. He would not have exchanged a view of the dreaded spectre even for the coveted gold chain that had hung so long round the fair neck of his divinity. But as he turned Corston Point again, he started back to see a figurebefore him. The first moment he thought it must be old Whisker’s ghost, but the next convinced him of his error. It was only Mr Darley—Lord Worcester’s gamekeeper! He had been so absorbed in angry and remorseful thought since he left the apple copse that he had unwittingly taken the wrong turning, and now found himself upon the wide, desolate waste of the salt marshes, and rather uncertain on which side to find the beaten track again which led to the road to Rooklands. The two men were equally surprised and disgusted at encountering one another.
‘What are you doing here?’ demanded Darley, insolently.
‘What business is that of yours?’ replied the other. ‘The salt marshes belong to me, I suppose, as much as they do to you.’
‘You’re not likely to have business here at this time of night. You’ve been dogging my footsteps,’ said Darley, without the least consideration for probability.
‘Followyou!’ exclaimed Larry, with a big oath; ‘it would be a long time before I’d take the trouble to care what happened to you. And since you ask my businesshere, pray what may yours be? You didn’t think to find Farmer Murray’s daughter in the marshes at twelve o’clock at night, did you?’
‘You insolent hound! how dare you take that young lady’s name upon your lips in my presence?’
‘I’ve as good a right to name her as you have—perhaps better. It was at her bidding I came here to-night. Did she send you here, too?’
‘I shall not condescend to answer your question nor to link our names together. Do you know what you are?’
‘I know whatyouare, Mr Darley, and that’s a villain!’
Poor Larry had said he would have it out with him, and he thought his time had come. A sudden thought flashed through Darley’s brain that here was the informer who had stopped his little game with the farmer’s pretty daughter.
‘Are you the man,’ he demanded fiercely, ‘who has thought fit to inform Mr Murray of my antecedents?’
‘Antecedents’ was a long word for Larry’s comprehension, but he grasped the meaning somehow.
‘If you’d say, am I the man who told the master that you have got a wife andchildren down in Devonshire, I answer “Yes;” and I hope he’s told you of it, and kicked you out of the barn to-night for a scoundrel, as you are, to try and make love to his daughter.’
‘You brute!’ cried Darley, throwing off his coat; ‘I’ll be revenged on you for this if there’s any strength left in my arm.’
‘All right,’ replied the young country-man; ‘I’ve longed to punch your head many and many a day. I’m glad it’s come at last. There’s plenty of room for us to have it out here, and the devil take the hindmost.’
He flew at his adversary as he spoke, and fastened his hands on to his coat-collar. Larry was the younger and the stronger built man of the two; but Frederick Darley had had the advantage of a politer education, in which the use of his fists was included, so that after a very little while it would have been evident to any bystander that Barnes was getting the worst of it. He had energy and muscle and right on his side, but his antagonist, unfortunately, possessed the skill, and after he had stood on the defensive four or five times, he seized his opportunity, and with a dexterous twist threw Larry heavily from him on theground. The young man fell backward, crashing his skull against a projecting fragment of rock, and then lay there, bleeding and unconscious. Darley glanced around him—not a creature was in sight. The broad harvest moon looked down placidly upon the deed of blood he had just committed, but human eyes to see it there were none. Finding that Barnes neither stirred nor groaned, he stooped down after a while, and laid his hand upon his heart. It had stopped beating. The body was getting cold. The man was dead!
Darley had not intended this, and it alarmed him terribly. His first idea was what he should do to secure his own safety. If he left the body there, would it be discovered, and the guilt traced home to him, or would the in-coming tide carry it out to sea, and wash it up again, weeks hence perhaps, as a drowned corpse upon the shore? He thought it might. He hoped it would. He remembered Larry’s words, that Miss Rosa had sent him there that night. It was known, then, that he had gone to the marshes, and the fact was favourable.
He dragged the corpse a little way upon the sands that it might the soonerbe covered by the water; but finding it left deep traces of its progress, he lifted it with some difficulty upon his shoulders, and after carrying it perhaps a couple of dozen yards towards the sea, flung it with all his force before him. What was his amazement at seeing the body immediately sink in what appeared to be the solid ground, and disappear from view? Was it magic, or did his senses deceive him? Darley rubbed his eyes once or twice, but the miracle remained the same. The sand, with its smooth, shining surface, was before him, but the corpse of Larry Barnes had vanished. With a feeling of the keenest relief—such relief as the cowardly murderer who has cheated the gallows must experience—the gamekeeper settled his clothes, glanced once or twice fearfully around him, and then, retracing his steps, ran until he had gained the high road to Rooklands. But retribution dogged his murderous feet, and he was destined never to reach his master’s home. When the morning dawned upon Corston, a fearful tale was going the round of its cottages. The dead body of Lord Worcester’s gamekeeper had been found on the borders of the estate, shot through the heart, as it was supposed, in an encounter withpoachers, as traces of a fierce struggle were plainly visible around him.
And Laurence Barnes was missing!
The two circumstances put together seemed to provide a solution of the mystery. Everyone in Corston knew that poor Larry had not been entirely free from the suspicion of poaching, and most people had heard him abuse Frederick Darley, and vow to have vengeance upon him. What more likely, then, that Larry, having been taken at his old tricks, had discharged his rusty gun at the gamekeeper, and sent him out of the world to answer for all his errors. This was the light by which Corston folk read the undiscovered tragedy. All, that is to say, but two, and those two were the dead man’s mother and his betrothed, who knew of his visit to the Point, and fully believed that old Whisker had carried him off.
The murder of Frederick Darley made quite a sensation in Corston. Lord Worcester gave his late gamekeeper a handsome funeral, and monument in the churchyard; and Rosa Murray lost her spirits and her looks, and wore a black ribbon on her bonnet for three months, although she dared not let her father know the reason why. But Darley had been sogenerally disliked that, when the first horror at his death had subsided, people began to think he was a very good riddance, and though Rosa still looked grave if anyone mentioned his name, there was a certain young farmer who rode over from Wells to see her every Sunday, on whom the gossips said she seemed to look with considerable favour. And so, in due course of time, the name of Darley appeared likely to become altogether forgotten.
But not so Larry Barnes. Larry was a native of Corston, and had been a general favourite there, and his mother still lived amongst them to keep his memory green. No one in the village thought Larry was dead, except Lizzie and Mrs Barnes. The rustics believed that, finding he had shot Darley, he had become alarmed and ran away—left the country, perhaps, in one of the numerous fishing smacks that infest the coast, and gone to make his fortune in the ‘Amerikys.’ Larry would come back some day—they were assured of that—when the present lord was dead and gone, perhaps, and the whole affair was forgotten; but they were certain he was alive, simply because they were. But Lizzie Locke knew otherwise—Lizzie Locke, to whom a glimpse of heaven hadbeen opened the day of his death, and to whom the outer life must be as dark as the inner henceforward. She mourned for Larry far more than his mother did. Mrs Barnes had lived the best part of her life, and her joys and her sorrows were well-nigh over, but the poor blind girl had only waked up to a consciousness of what life might hold for her on the awful day on which hope seemed blotted out for ever. From the moment her cousin left the barn at Rosa’s bidding, Lizzie drooped like a faded flower. That he never returned from that fatal quest was no surprise to her. She had known that he would never return. She had waited where he had left her till all the merry-making was over, and then she had gone home to her aunt, meek, unrepining, but certain of her doom. She had never been much of a talker, but she seldom opened her mouth, except it was absolutely necessary, after that day. But she would take her basket whenever the tide was low, and walk down to Corston Point and sit there—sometimes gathering cockles, but oftener talking to the dead, and telling him how much she had loved him. The few who had occasionally overheard her soliloquies said they were uncanny, and that Lizzie Lockewas losing her wits as well as her eyes. But the blind girl never altered her course. Corston Point became her home, and whenever it was uncovered by the tide, she might be seen sitting there beside her cockle basket, waiting for—she knew not what, talking to—she knew not whom.
The autumn had passed, and the winter tides had set in. Rosa Murray never rode upon the Corston marshes now—she was more pleasantly engaged traversing the leafless lanes with the young farmer from Wells. Most people would have thought the fireside a better place to mourn one’s dead by than out on the bleak marsh; yet Lizzie Locke, despite her cotton clothing and bare head, still took her way there every morning, her patient, sightless eyes refusing to reveal the depths of sorrow that lay beneath them. One day, however, Mrs Barnes felt disposed to be impatient with the girl. She had left the house at eight o’clock in the morning and had not returned home since, and now it was dark, and the neighbours began to say it was not safe that Lizzie should remain out alone on such a bitter night, and that her aunt should enforce her authority to prevent such lengthy rambles. Two or threeof the men went out with lanterns to try and find her, but returned unsuccessful, and they supposed she must have taken shelter at some friend’s house for the night. Lizzie Locke knew the marshes well, they said (no one in Corston better), and would never be so foolish as to tempt Providence by traversing them in the dark, for the currents were at their worst now, and the quicksands were shifting daily. The logs and spars of a ruined wreck of a year before had all come to the surface again within a few days, and with them a keg of pork, preserved by the saline properties of the ground in which it had been treasured, so that its contents were as fresh as though they had been found yesterday. Inquiries were made for the blind girl throughout the village, but no one had seen anything of her, and all that her friends could do was to search for her the first thing in the morning, when a large party set out for Corston Point, Mrs Barnes amongst them. Their faces were sad, for they had little hope that the cruel tide had not crawled over the watching girl before she was aware of it, and carried her out to sea. But as they neared the Point they discovered something still crouched upon the sand.
‘It can’t be Lizzie,’ said the men, drawing closer to each other, though a bright, cold sun was shining over the February morning. ‘It can’t be nothing mortal, sitting there in the frost, with the icy waves lapping over its feet.’
But Mrs Barnes, who had rushed forward, waved her arms wildly, and called to them,—
‘It’s him!It’s my Larry, washed up again by the sands; and poor Lizzie has found him out by the touch of her finger.’
The men ran up to the spot, and looked upon the sight before them. The corpse of Larry Barnes, with not so much as a feature changed by the hand of Time—with all his clothes intact and whole, and a bunch of samphire in his breast—lay out upon the shining sands, stiff as marble, but without any trace of decomposition upon his fresh young features and stalwart limbs.[1]And beside him, with her cheek bowed down upon his own, knelt Lizzie Locke. Lizzie, who had braved the winter’s frost, and withstood the cold of a February night, in order to watch beside the recovered body of her lover.
‘Lizzie!’ exclaimed Mrs Barnes. ‘Look up now; I’ve come to comfort thee! Let us thank Heaven that he’s found again, and the evil words they spoke of him must be took back.’
But the blind girl neither spoke nor stirred.
‘Can’t thee answer, my lass?’ said Isaac the poacher, as he shook her by the arm.
The answer that she made was by falling backwards and disclosing her fair, gentle face—white and rigid as her lover’s.
‘Merciful God! she is dead!’ they cried.
Yes, they were right. She was dead—she was at rest. What she had waited for she had found. What she had striven for she had gained. How many of us can say the same? Larry had been restored to her. The shifting quicksand had thrown him upon earth again, and had she not been there, his body might have been washed out to sea, and no further knowledge gained of his fate. But she had saved his dust for consecrated ground—more, she had saved his character for the healing of his mother’s heart. For in his breast there still reposed the bunch of samphire he had perilled his life to gatherfor the farmer’s daughter, and, grasped tight in his hand, they found the neckcloth of Lord Worcester’s gamekeeper—a crimson, silk neckcloth, recognised by all three—and which Larry had seized and held in the last deadly struggle. And the men of Corston looked on it and knew the truth—that their comrade was no murderer, but had fallen where he was found in a quarrel (probably pre-arranged) with Frederick Darley; and they cursed the gamekeeper in their hearts.
But Lizzie was at rest—happy Lizzie Locke! sleeping in the quiet churchyard at Corston, with her cheek pillowed on her Larry’s breast.
THE END.
[1]This is a fact, the corpse of a fisherman having been preserved in like manner for some nine months when buried in the salt marshes of Norfolk.
[1]This is a fact, the corpse of a fisherman having been preserved in like manner for some nine months when buried in the salt marshes of Norfolk.
[1]This is a fact, the corpse of a fisherman having been preserved in like manner for some nine months when buried in the salt marshes of Norfolk.