Tothe making of such a scene as that recounted in the contemporary journal, much had gone during the months so crudely analysed. That damning pile of evidence had been building itself up, touch upon touch, since the first moment when Sophie Bendigo'seyes lit on the instigator of the trouble; and the causes of her own share in it had been strengthening from far earlier even than that. In after years the Wise Woman of Bosullow would recount that when the baby Sophie was brought to her to be passed for luck through the ringed stone of the Men-an-Tol, she had foretold for her the rise in life that eventually came about. True, the terms of the prophecy had been so vague that beyond the fact that a ladder, metaphorical or otherwise, was to play a part in Sophie's career, Mr. Bendigo had not been much the wiser. The mother had lain in the bleak moorland churchyard for several years now, but she had had time, during the most malleable years of a girl's life, the early teens, to impress Sophie with a sense of destiny. Not for her the vulgar loves and joys of other country girls, to her some one shining, resplendent, would come flashing down, and Sophie must learn to bear with powdered hair and hoops against that moment. For London, of course, would be her splendid bourne, and as to saying that hoops got in the way of her legs—why, hoops were the mode and to a hoop she must come. Since Mrs. Bendigo had died, worn out by the terrible combination of the Squire's slow cruelty and his suave tongue, Sophie had given up the struggle with hoops and powder, but she still lived for and by her vision of the future. If Sophie Bendigo had not glanced over her shoulder in Troon Lane, thereby presenting an exceptional face at the most alluring of angles—chin up and eyes innocently sidelong—to the view of Mr. Crandon, she might never have climbed so high. When she saw Mr. Crandon, his white wig tied with a black ribbon,and an excellent paste pin flashing from his cravat, riding up the lane, she never doubted that her star had risen at last.
Sophie Bendigo was of the pure Celtic type still preserved among the intermarrying villages of West Penwith. Her rather coarse hair was a burnt black, so were her thick, straight brows, but her eyes were of that startlingly vivid blue one only meets in Cornish women and Cornish seas. There was something curiously Puck-like about Sophie; the cheekbones wide and jaw pointed, while her mouth was long, the thin, finely cut lips curving up at the ends, and there was a freakish flaunt at the corners of her brows—Crandon thought of piskies as he looked. She wore a plain white gown, low in the throat and short in the sleeve, and she carried an apron-load of elder-flower, the pearly blossoms of it showing faintly green against the deader white of the linen.
"Excuse me, but does this lead to St. Annan?" asked Crandon, bending a little towards her. Sophie felt one swift pang lest he should be riding out of her life straightway, and swiftly answered:
"You are out of your way," she told him, "this lane only leads to our house. You must go back to the highway and follow it past the 'Nineteen Merry Maidens' and turn on to your right—but it is a matter of three or four miles."
For a moment they remained looking at each other, then Crandon said:
"Is there perhaps an inn near here where I and my mare could rest? We have come from Zennor this morning, and she is newly shod."
"There is no need for an inn," said Sophie, "weare always glad to rest a traveller at Troon Manor. I am Sophie Bendigo."
Crandon smilingly dismounted and walked by her side up the lane.
"It would be ungracious to refuse when the Fates have led me and Venus herself seconds the invitation. . . . Have you just risen from the sea, I wonder, that your eyes still hold its hue?"
Sophie, used only to the clumsy overtures of the county squires, flushed with pleasure, not at the allusion, which she did not understand, but at the air of gallantry which pervaded the man. She glanced up admiringly between her narrowed lids—Crandon was accustomed to such glances, so had his girl-wife in Scotland looked at him, before he deserted her and her child. He meditated no harm to this girl, no plan was formulated in his mind; and as to the ten thousand pounds, of which so much was heard later on, no whisper of it had then reached his ears. The road had led to her, her own face lured him on, and a few hours of a pretty girl on such a June day, where was the harm? The innocence and spontaneity of his feelings gave the Captain a delightful glow of conscious virtue, and he walked beside Sophie with a slight swagger of enjoyment.
The drive was a mere rutted cart-track; hemlock, foxgloves, purple knapweed, blue scabious and tall, thin-stemmed buttercups grew along the tangled hedges, and the blackberry flowers patterned the brambles with pearliness. The luminous chequer-work of sun and shadow fell over Sophie's white gown, and the green light, filtering through the trees, reflected on her face and on her glossy head,so that she seemed to be walking in the depths of the sea, and Crandon's simile gained in aptness.
At the bend of the lane they came on the Manor House, its whitewash dazzling in the sunshine, even the shadows thrown on it by the eaves and sills were so clear they gave a curious effect of being as light as the rest. Only the Bendigo arms—a clenched fist—carved on the granite lintel, had been left untouched by the whitewash, and showed a sullen grey. A few fawn-coloured fowls, blazing like copper in the sunshine, pecked at the dusty ground, and some white pigs, looking as utterly naked as only white pigs can, snuffled at a rubbish heap, their big ears flapping. A tall, lean woman, clad in a dirty silk dressing-jacket of bright yellow, was talking to a labourer by the dairy door. There was something oddly suggestive of secrecy in the turn of their shoulders and their bent heads, and the woman's soiled finery made her thin face—that of a shrewd but comely peasant, framed in an untidy pompadour of reddish-brown hair—seem oddly incongruous. The man lapsed into insignificance beside her, yet something of likeness in their sharpened lines, and in the tinge of hot colour showing up through them, proclaimed them kin. They were Lylie Ruffiniac, Squire Bendigo's housekeeper, and her brother James, who acted as bailiff on the estate. Sophie, her head turned towards her companion, did not see them, but Crandon did, and was pricked at once to curiosity. Living as he did by his wits, his every fibre was quickened to superficial alertness, though of intellectual effort he was almost incapable. An old journal for 1752 that published, in addition to its account of the trial, some "Memoirs of theLife of Lucius William Crandon, Esq.," had enough acumen to remark: "He was not, however, destitute of parts, for he would often surprise those who entertained a mean opinion of his abilities, by schemes and concertions which required more genius than they thought he had been master of. . . . As he was not of sufficient learning to qualify him either for law or for physic, he turned his thought towards the army, where a very moderate share of literature is sufficient, and where few voices disqualify a man from making a figure. . . ." And a figure Lucius Crandon certainly made—a figure that caused the woman in the yellow jacket to stop and stare, then to disappear into the house by a side-door—Crandon received the impression that she had gone to warn some one of his approach.
Itis said that rogues know each other by instinct—certain it is that the Squire and Captain Crandon had no need of disguises once they had crossed glances, and therefore each man cloaked himself with an elaborate pretence of being unable to see through the other's garment. It was not by any wish of Squire Bendigo's that Captain Crandon heard of the rumour of the ten thousand pounds, but when one has circulated a report with diligence for several years it is impossible to withdraw it at will, and so the Squire found, and it only needed this report of Sophie's marriage portion for Crandon to attempt the capture in earnest; whathappened to the map history does not relate, but the Captain stayed at the "Bendigo Arms," making explorations in the familiar but always surprising country of a woman's mind. A mind simpler, more passionate, and more one-ideaed than any he had met before, a mind at once proud, confiding and reckless—a mind fitted, both by the quality of it and its loneliness, to be easily influenced by the flattery of love.
Sophie Bendigo had a fixed belief in her star. The predictions of the Wise Woman and of her eager mother, and her own knowledge of her superiority to the people among whom she moved, all tended to give her that confidence in her fate which does not think misfortune possible. She had always led a hard life with her best of fathers, the smiling old rogue who had never been heard to address a rude word to her, and who was harsh and immutable as granite. She had always waited, with such sureness she had not even felt impatience, for her opportunity to come, and mingled with the half-shy, half-innocently sensuous imaginings of a young girl on the subject of love, ran a streak of personal ambition, a hardness inherited from her father.
At first, before he had found out beyond a doubt that the Captain was a needy fortune-hunter, the Squire allowed his visits at Troon, and Crandon soon grew to be on terms of intimacy with the members of the household. These consisted of the Bendigos, father and daughter, Lylie Ruffiniac, her brother, and the servant, a girl called Hester Keast. The three latter were supposed to live more or less in the back premises and take their meals in the kitchen, but once when Crandon surprised Lylie Ruffiniacwith the Squire, there were two glasses of spirits and water on the table, and, several weeks after, when he had to meet Sophie by stealth and at night, he saw a light being carried from the servants' quarters towards the Squire's room. As for Hester Keast, she was a pretty girl in her way—a way at once heavier and less strong than Sophie's. She had the dewy brown eyes, the easily affected, over-thin skin, and the soft red mouth, blurred at the edges, which betray incapacity for resistance. There was no harm in the girl, she was merely a young animal, with very little instinct of self-protection to counteract her utter lack of morals. Crandon kissed her behind the door on his second visit, and James Ruffiniac's wooing of her had long passed the preliminary stages—so long that with him ideas of marriage were growing misty, the thing seemed so unnecessary. Lylie's blood was controlled by scheming, and the most charitable explanation of the Squire's tortuous nature was that some mental or moral twist in him made him love evil for its own sake, and embrace it as his good. Such was the household where, for the last three years, Sophie had lived, practically alone—her egoism had done her that much service, it had won her aloofness. Crandon, who was by nature predisposed to think the worst of humanity, made the mistake, at first, of thinking Sophie's innocence assumed—it seemed a thing so incredible in that house of hidden schemings and furtive amours. When he found that partly a natural fastidiousness, and partly her young crudity had kept her clean in thought and knowledge as well as in deed, he wisely guessed there must be some outside influence on the side of the angels, and scenting opposition tohis own schemes, he set himself to discover all he could. That was not difficult in such a sparsely inhabited district, hemmed in on three sides by the sea, and he soon made, at St. Annan's Vicarage, the acquaintance of its vicar, Mr. Charles le Petyt. He no sooner set eyes on the clergyman's plain and frail physique, with the burning eyes and quick nervous hands, than he knew he was right to fear him as an influence, though he could scorn him as a rival.
Charles and Sophie had practically grown up together, Charles' six years of seniority making him stand in the place of an elder brother to her, until he had become her urgent lover. Charles' father, the former Vicar of St. Annan, had given Sophie what little education she possessed—a medley of mythology and history, some incorrect geography, and a smattering of literature—all the things that go to fire the imagination. Mixed with these was a mass of all the wild legendary lore of the Duchy, solemnly believed in by the common people at that date, and by no means without its effect on the gentry. Sophie would not have been of her race and time if she had not had faith in charms, witches, death-warnings and love-potions; and in Charles the spiritual sense was so acute that, though from sheer sensitiveness it rejected the more vulgar superstitions, it responded like a twanged string to the breath of a less gross world. The finer side of Sophie, the delicate feeling for the beautiful, which owed so much of its existence to Charles, received a severe shock when she discovered the change in his viewing of her. She had been so used to think of him as her brother, and as her leader in the intangible matters which were sealed books to the rest at Troon,that the discovery of warm, human sentiments in him filled her with repulsion, and she took to avoiding him as much as she had sought him before. Poor Charles, whose earthly love, though as reverent, was as fiery as his heavenly affections, and who was handicapped by the lover's inability to understand that his devotion can be repellent, suffered acutely. It was some time before he understood that Sophie was so accustomed to see him burning with a white flame that she could not forgive him for being alight with a red one as well. A more sensual love, and coarser in its expression than his could ever be, would have revolted her less coming from a less exalted man—Mr. Le Petyt paid for the high opinion she held him in. If Lucius Crandon had never come to Troon, Sophie would in time have grown used to the idea of Charles as a husband, for there is no combination of circumstances, incredible as it appears to youth, that time does not soften and make bearable. But Sophie, destiny-ridden, gave no heed to Charles, save as a friend who had made her dread him even while she was still fond of him, and Lucius Crandon stepped in just when her nerves, awakened to the existence of actual love, were beginning to calm from the shock and even to set towards curiosity—just when she was most receptive. Pitiful and ignorant Sophie, whose only protection from gross housemates and a hot-blooded, cold-hearted lover, was a dreamer as guileless as herself!
With all his unworldliness, the unfailing instinct of the spiritual-minded warned Mr. Le Petyt against the Captain, and when the Squire, strangely friendly, sent word asking his vicar to come and see him on urgentbusiness, Mr. Le Petyt guessed to what matter the business related. He found the Squire seated in his writing-room, a glass of rare old smuggled brandy before him and a packet of letters on his knee. The Squire was a big, pursy man, with a large and oddly impassive face, where even the hanging folds of flesh seemed rigid; only his small eyes, of a clear light grey, twinkled like chips of cut steel from between his wrinkled lids. His bull neck, wide as his head across the nape, sagged in a thick fold over his cravat, and his thighs swelled against the close-fitting cloth of his riding-breeches. The only contradiction to the stolidity of the man was his hands, and they were never still, but were for ever fiddling with something; with his waistcoat buttons, his rings, with a paper-knife, or the cutlery at table, or with any live thing they could get. Charles Le Petyt well remembered how, as a small boy, he had come on him superintending the reaping, and fingering a puppy behind his back. Whether the Squire was aware of what he was doing or whether his fingers did their work instinctively, without his brain, Charles never could decide, but when the Squire, turning away from the reapers, unlocked his hands, the puppy lay limp across his palm—the life choked out of it. The Squire stood still for a moment, looking at the little body, and then, moving away in a straight line from the labourers, so that it was concealed from them, he dropped it into a rabbit-hole and stuffed it down with his cane. Sick to the heart, little Charles stood at gaze, and glancing up, the Squire saw he was watched, and for a moment his impassive features were convulsed with rage—he looked as though he would have liked to treat Charlesas he had the puppy. The memory of that day would have been enough, without the sight of Sophie's dread of her father, to prevent Mr. Le Petyt from joining in the general praise of Squire Bendigo.
The two men made a great contrast as they sat opposite to each other in the little room, the Squire solid and imperturbable, the parson transparent in mind and physical texture, the quick colour flying up under his skin with his emotions. The dust lay thickly over the table and books, for Sophie, the careful housewife, was seldom admitted here, and however Lylie Ruffiniac spent the hours when she was closeted with the Squire, it was evidently not in work. The evening light shone into the low-browed room through an ash-tree by the window, filling the air with a luminous gloom, gilding the dust films, gleaming on Mr. Le Petyt's shoe-buckles, and making a bright crescent in the glass of spirits which the Squire was jerking between his finger and thumb.
"You want to consult me on something?" began the younger man, going straight to the point. The Squire, with a gesture of protest for such methods, nevertheless fell into an agreeing humour.
"The fact is, Charles," he began, with that disarming air of candour none assumed better than he, "I have had cause to be uneasy at the intimacy between my dear but headstrong daughter and this Captain Crandon, so I wrote to a trustworthy man I know in London to find out all he could for me. His letter came to-day by Mr. Borlace, who was riding down in all haste from London to his wife's bedside—thus does Providence permit the trials of others to be of use to us."
Here he paused, but Mr. Le Petyt, throwing in no suitable remark, he continued:
"I will read you some extracts from the letter, and you shall judge for yourself whether a parent's anxiety has not been justified. Let me see—ah, here we are! 'I find' (says my informant) 'that about the year 1744 Crandon became acquainted with a Miss Isabel Thirsk, then at her uncle's. Miss Thirsk was remarkably genteel, delicate, and of a very amiable disposition, which gained her a great number of admirers. Her uncle, observing that Crandon always discovered an inclination of conversing with his niece alone, desired him to explain himself fully on a point so very delicate. Crandon declared he counted Miss Thirsk on the most honourable terms, but the young lady's uncle desired that Crandon's visits should be less frequent, lest his niece should suffer in her reputation. Soon after, this gentleman's affairs caused him to be absent from his home for some time, during which Crandon proposed a private marriage, which the young lady consented to, and for some time they lived together without any of their relations being privy to it. The natural consequence arising, and her uncle, some time after his return, suspecting it, she readily acknowledged she was with child, and protested she was married to Crandon four months before, adding, that her husband, who was soon to set out for London, had not yet publicly acknowledged her for his wife. Accordingly the uncle dispatched a messenger to Crandon demanding full acknowledgment of his wife before his departure for England. Crandon wrote in answer that he never intended to deny his marriage with Miss Thirsk, and that he would ever love her with conjugal tenderness,but that at the moment he had to hasten to London, which he did. There he every day saw young fellows making their fortunes by marriage, and he imagined nothing but his being married could hinder him from being as successful as the rest, thus he began to neglect a person whose beauty and virtue merited a more worthy spouse. When he returned to Scotland that country was involved in a civil war, and rebellion raging in its bowels. He found all the relations of Miss Thirsk joined in the mad expedition and in all probability would suffer at the hands of their country for disturbing its peace. He therefore concluded that it was not in their power to give him any disturbance, and, consequently, it was a good opportunity for renouncing his wife. The affair, at last, after various meetings and expostulations of friends, came to a trial before the Lords of Session in Scotland, who found the marriage valid and settled fifty pounds a year on the lady, which she now enjoys by their decree.'"
The Squire put down the papers.
"So much for Captain Crandon!" he said, in a glow of rage at the man for trying to deceive him, mingled with pride in his own acuteness and a dash of assumed piety: "Who but a person, something worse than a villain, could ever have indulged a thought of using so innocent, so lovely a being as Miss Thirsk in such a monstrous manner! Surely Divine justice will pursue him for this unnatural, this unheard-of piece of brutality!"
"Divine justice has at least saved Sophie from the same fate," replied Mr. Le Petyt. His first feeling was for her, his second, to his own shame, was the relief of the jealous lover.
"Ah—Sophie!" said the Squire thoughtfully—"that is where I crave your help. She is headstrong, poor child, sadly headstrong, but your opinions have always had weight with her. You have an influence, Charles. Use it to save my unhappy child from this villain Crandon."
"I would save her from all villainy if I could," said Mr. Le Petyt.
The Squire pulled the bell-rope, and on the appearance of Lylie, splendid in what even the guileless parson could not but see was a new silk, stiff enough to stand up by itself, the Squire told her curtly to desire "Miss's" presence. Lylie withdrew with downdropped lids, and a few minutes later Sophie appeared. She glanced quickly from one man to the other, and scenting a conspiracy, remained standing, her head up, and her hands strongly clasped behind her. She was against the window, so that subtleties of expression were lost to Mr. Le Petyt, and only the aloofness of her pose struck at him miserably, as confounding him and her father together. The big white muslin cap she wore showed delicately dark against the daylight, the outstanding frill of it framing the solid shadow of face and neck with a semi-transparent halo, and a yoke of light lay across her shoulders—to Mr. Le Petyt's quick fancy she looked like some virgin-saint of old at her trial.
"Sophie," said the Squire gently, "I feel I should not be doing my duty by my dear daughter if I did not inform her that her lover, Lucius Crandon, is a married man."
He watched, smiling. She stood a little tense, but with scorn of him and not with fear, and he went on:
"He married a Miss Isabel Thirsk, by whom he had a child——"
A slight convulsion swept over Sophie, passed, and left her rigid, and the Squire continued:
"A lovely child, I believe—a boy, and the image of his father. . . . But that is not the chief matter of interest. Captain Crandon deserted his young and trusting wife, and appealed against the validity of the marriage. The law decided against him, and condemned him to pay fifty pounds a year for her support. It was a sad scandal, a very sad scandal. You, my sweet child, do not know the wickedness of the world as I do, therefore I must shield you from it—in short, I forbid you to have speech with Captain Crandon again."
"Is that all?" asked Sophie.
"All—save that I should much regret having to lock you up in your room to enforce obedience."
"And you, Charles?" cried Sophie, "are you, too, in this plot to speak ill of an absent man?"
"Sophie," cried Mr. Le Petyt, "do not take it so, I beg of you. There seems only too little doubt that what your father says is true."
"You are against me, too!" said Sophie cruelly. "Papa, I am going to meet Captain Crandon now, and I shall ask him for the truth."
"Sophie! You will not believe him?" exclaimed Mr. Le Petyt, half-rising in his agitation.
"Every word he says," cried Sophie, with a little laugh of utter confidence. Her hand was on the latch, and the Squire, restrained by Mr. Le Petyt's presence, dared not put out a hand to stop her by force. For half a moment more the three emotions held—the scorn of the girl, the distress of the one man andthe vindictiveness of the other, then the door had closed behind Sophie as the will to see her lover swept her on; and the taunt, one-ideaed feeling of the men fell into complexity as they turned first towards each other, then away, in the gathering dusk.
Sophie found Crandon awaiting her by the dam above Vellan-Crowse mill. The daylight was all but gone and a darkly soft glamour seemed to hold the full-foliaged trees and shadowed water in a hush of expectation. There was still enough of red reflecting from the West to make the grass and leaves a vivid though subdued green; but of the hollow in the bushes, where the lovers met, darkness already seemed to make a nest. Everything to lull the mind and stir the heart and blood was there, and Sophie's generous trust, her pride in taking his word against the world, were not more powerful allies of Crandon's tongue than the time and the place. It was of little avail later to marvel that his ingenious reconstruction of events won upon her; his garbled confession of aliaisonwith Isabel Thirsk, and denial of the marriage, his statement of Miss Thirsk's infidelities, and his evident nobility in voluntarily allowing her an income. As for the sin itself—"It was before I met you. You could make me what you will."
Sophie, only too willing to be convinced, sat by him in the little clearing, and listened almost in silence. Behind them on both sides the hazel-bushes made a faintly whispering screen of darkness, at their feet the mill-dam lay silent save for the occasional plop-plop of the tiny trout rising at late flies, on the further bank the hedge was a network of tangled black against the deepening sky, while overhead the elms andsycamores were pierced by the first faint stars. The two were set in a hushed sphere of aloofness, and for Sophie it was the world. "Trust me, my sweet Sophie—only trust me!" was whispered in her ear, and when she answered that she did, and he told her that if it were really so she would not draw away from him, she let his arms creep round her and his mouth come to hers. Weeks of carefully calculated love making had gone to make her pliable, kisses at which all the chill girlhood of her would earlier have shuddered, as it had at the same thing in Charles Le Petyt, she now bore, if not yet with passion, yet with the woman's tolerance of it in the man she loves. Crandon knew it was the moment to bind her to him irrevocably, for he guessed that to a woman of her type faithfulness is a necessity of self-respect, and with him desire was one with deliberate planning. Whether he threw a spell of words over her, or whether the mere force of his thought pleaded with her to prove she trusted him utterly, Sophie could never have told. She only knew that the still night, the soft air, the rustling leaves and the pricking stars, his presence, dimly seen but deeply felt, and the beating in her own frame, all cried to her, "It was for this that I was born! For this, for this, for this!"
Everyone, on looking back at the past, even from the near standpoint of a few months, realizes how itfalls into separate phases, unnoticed at the time, but nevertheless distinct. When she had reached her apex, Sophie saw how that night by the mill-dam had shut down one phase for ever, and ushered in a new one. Deceptions, and constant evading of her father's suspicions, secret meetings, to connive at which it became a bitter necessity to bribe the servants, hard Lylie and slow-tongued James—while at the same time instinct warned her to keep the thing from Hester Keast—all these were wearisome and galling, but by the quality of affairs with Crandon fell into insignificance, merely an added irritation, flies on a wound.
What first suggested to Crandon his idea of the love-potion was the discovery of Sophie's credulousness. Like all West Country folk, especially in those days, she was a firm believer in witches and spells, to an extent incredible to a Saxon. As late as the latter half of the nineteenth century an old woman was accused by a farmer of ill-wishing his bullocks and was brought to trial; while a "cunning man," or "white-witch," lived until lately in the northern part of the Duchy. A century earlier, therefore, when Cornwall was practically cut off from England, when even the coach came no further than Saltash, and travellers continued on horseback or in a "kitterine"; when newspapers were unknown, and books only found in parsonages or the biggest of the country houses; when animals were burned alive as sacrifices to fortune, and any man out at night went in fear of ghosts and the devil, then there was no one, of whatever rank, who did not believe in witchcraft. That Sophie, lonely, romantic, with the superstitious blood of the Celt unadulterated in her veins, should givecredence to such things, was inevitable; and when Crandon suggested giving a love-potion to the Squire, so that he might feel his heart warmed towards his would-be son-in-law, she seized at what was to her more a certainty than a hope.
It was an afternoon in late September, and she and Crandon had met in a wood about a mile away from Troon, when he first mooted his plan; she sat beside him on one of the great grey boulders with which the sloping floor of the wood was covered, and listened with growing eagerness. It was a damp, steamy day, gold and tawny leaves, blown down in one night's gale, were drifted thickly in the fissures of the rocks and over the patches of vividly green moss; and livid orange fungi grew on the tree-boles. Sophie, always affected by externals, shuddered a little and drew closer to Crandon. Slipping his hand under the heavy knot of her hair, he laid it against the nape of her neck, and as she closed her eyes in the pleasure of his touch he looked down at her with a queer expression on his narrow face.
"You have the loveliest neck in the world, my Sophie," he said, making his hands meet round it as he spoke, "see—I make you a living necklace for it."
Sophie tucked in her chin, and bending her head, kissed the clasping fingers. Although he was not of those men to whom the attained woman gains in attractions, yet there were still things about Sophie—little flashes and gleams, swift touches, that fired him afresh. She stirred him now, yet he was cold enough to be glad of the stir because it gave him added eloquence for his purpose.
"I will get you a better necklace," he told her."Nothing very fine, or what would the Squire think? I have been collecting choice bits of serpentine, and had them cut out and polished, and you shall have a necklace of them—the stones of your own country. Your throat will warm them, my Sophie, as it would warm my hands if they were cold in death."
"Death!" murmured Sophie, shuddering again, "we should not speak of it, lest it hear us."
"Then we will talk of love instead—of our love, Sophie."
"Alas, that way too lies sorrow! Lucius, what is the end to be? My father would kill me if he knew."
"Does he hate me so?"
She nodded, with the look of dumb fear in her eyes that thought of the Squire always brought there.
"Dear heart, we will change his hate to love. There is a way—if you will trust me and obey me."
A tremor of exquisite delight thrilled through her at the words. She had no arts of allurement, no strength of will to make her play the coquette with him, and she was unable, for the purpose of leading him on and tantalizing him to fresh excitement, to deny herself the joy of being his slave.
"Obey you!" she said, slipping a little lower on her rock so that her back-tilted head lay against his knee as she looked up at him, "I am yours for you to do with as you will."
Stooping, he kissed the swelling curve of her throat, and privately marvelled at her for being such a fool.
"Sweetheart," he began softly, "we will call in the aid of higher powers than our own. You know my mother was a Scotswoman, and she had the second sight, like your old Madgy Figgy of the Men-an-tol.She was learned in all kinds of charms, too. Well I remember as a child seeing her staunch the flow of blood from an old servant by crossing two charmed sticks from the hearth over him and saying a charm."
"It was Madgy Figgy who told about my ladder," Sophie said, "she has many charms, I know. She carries the water from St.Annan'sspring to the church whenever there's to be a christening. No one baptized in water from St. Annan's spring can die by hanging, every one knows that. Was your mother as learned in charms as old Madgy?"
"She was a wise woman in more than mere charms, yet we will not slight her knowledge of them, since through that we will win your father's affection for me."
"If it could be!" cried Sophie.
"It can be. Listen, my sweet. My dear mother, in dying, left me, among books of the craft of healing and suchlike things, an old love-charm she had had from a Wise Woman in the Highlands. It is nothing but a little white powder, yet it affects the very heart-strings of him who takes it."
"Could it turn my father's heart towards you? Lucius, how happy we should all be. . . . But surely it might make him love some one else instead—Mr. Le Petyt, perhaps?"
"You should know better than that, my foolish Sophie. These things all depend on the intention of he who gives them. You have but to concentrate on me while you give it him, and all will be well."
"He would be furious if he guessed," objected Sophie.
"Neither he nor anyone else must guess, or thecharm will fail. I will send it to you in packets with the serpentine beads, and mark it 'Powder to clean the pebbles.'"
"Why not give it to me?" asked Sophie.
"Because I have to go away for a time, my sweet. Not for very long—" as Sophie made a movement of distress, "but I have business I must see to in town. I will send you the beads to remember me by in my absence. Will you wear them for my sake, Sophie."
"I will wear them night and day, but I need no reminders of you, Lucius. But you—will you forget me in London? It is so big and far away and full of great ladies who will put your poor Sophie out of remembrance. Lucius, Lucius. . . ."
"My sweet, silly little Sophie," he whispered, soothing her as she clung to him, "how can you misjudge me so? Is not one black hair from your head, one glance from your blue eyes, dearer to me than all the women in the world? What have I done that you should think so ill of me?"
"Forgive me, dear. I know men are not like women, and I cannot see what there is in me to hold you—except my love for you. No other women could love you half so well, Lucius. It is my only gift, but it at least could not be bettered by anyone."
"I know it, my sweet," he told her, "and when your father is of a better mind towards me you shall give me your love before all the world, and then I need no longer travel alone. Would you like to see London, heart of mine?"
"Ah, with you!" breathed Sophie. "Once, before I met you, I thought of nothing but London, and howI meant some day to be a great lady there, but now I think of nothing but to be with you. Perhaps, after all, this is what the Wise Woman meant and my golden ladder is my love for you, and I've climbed on it from loneliness to joy."
"A Jacob's ladder, for the feet of an angel, then, my Sophie."
"If it could only reach from here to London! Oh, Lucius, need you go?"
"I must, my sweet. Don't make it harder for me."
That checked her plaint at once, as he knew it would.
"When do you go?" she asked quietly.
"In a day or two, sweetheart. Ah, Sophie, how shall I live without you?"
While she comforted him, forgetting self, he made a mental calculation as to how soon he could get away. He kissed Sophie's hair somewhat absently.
"I will write to you, heart of mine," he murmured, "and I will contrive so that he finds I have gone completely away, and that will lull any suspicion he may have against us. And while I am gone you will be working for us, my Sophie. Do not be alarmed if at first the powder seems to cause an indisposition. It has to expel the evil humours from a man before it can turn his nature to good. Give it to him in a small quantity once or twice, and he will vomit and be rid of this disaffection towards me, and the rest will work beneficially. Your father will arise and call you blessed, my Sophie, for having sworn him the evil of his own heart. Do not write me word when anything definite happens—I am leaving myservant at Penzance, and he will post up to me at once when you give him news."
"And then—then you will come down again, and we shall all be able to be happy. Perhaps my father will even dismiss Lylie Ruffiniac when his heart is turned towards you. That woman frightens me, Lucius. She is always looking at me as though she wished me away. No one loves me except yourself—and poor Charles. Hester avoids me, and James never did speak a word to me that he could avoid. Lucius, sometimes it seems to me that he and Lylie and Hester have all grown to hate me, that they would harm me if they could. It frightens me—Lucius, Lucius, what shall I do when you have left me?"
Crandon fought down his boredom and gave himself over to consoling her, with now and again a surreptitious glance at the watch dangling from his fob. He had another interview to go through—with Lylie Ruffiniac. She had to be fostered in the belief that he was going to take Sophie away as soon as possible, leaving the housekeeper free to influence the Squire—for Lylie's ambition rose to being legitimate mistress of the Manor, and Sophie once gone, she saw no reason why she should not attain her end. She knew that the ten thousand pounds was a mere myth, but that she kept hidden from Crandon, even bringing forward, as women can, apparently casual little pieces of information that would all tend to fix him in his belief. Crandon had been wise to impress on Sophie the necessity for keeping the love-potion hidden from every one—Lylie, who had a fine nose for a rogue, would have been in possession of his scheme—a scheme so devastating to her own—at once. As soon assafety and decency permitted he would carry Sophie off, go through the ceremony of marriage with her in a place where he was not known, gain possession of the money—and clear out of England for good. This was his last throw of the dice in his own country—let him but win the stake and he would disappear and enjoy his fortune elsewhere.
He took a last glance at his watch, a last kiss of Sophie's mouth, and scrambled to his feet. He walked back with Sophie as near Troon as was safe, then took an affectionate good-night of her, and started off for the cove to meet Lylie Ruffiniac.
"Thank the gods, that hard-headed vixen of a Lylie won't want me to kiss her!" he reflected as he went. "Ah, there's a woman might have been some help to me if I'd met her in the shoes of Isabel or of this Sophie. Lucius, my son, you are playing a very risky game, but the stakes are worth it. Ten thousand pounds, a fresh country—and entirely new women!"
Twoweeks after Crandon's departure the first instalment of serpentine beads arrived for Sophie. There was no concealing the fact, and Sophie replied to her father's suave inquiries that the beads were a keepsake from a friend. Enclosed with them was a tiny packet of white powder, on which was written "Powder to clean the pebbles," and this Sophie secreted at once.
A few days later the Squire was unwell with a violent headache and bilious attack resulting from too much port and smuggled brandy the night before—Sophie suggested that she should make him a dish of tea. In the night he was taken with violent sickness, but by the next day he had not only recovered from that but apparently actually benefited by it, as it had cured him of the result of his orgy. Next day, to continue the cure, Sophie again sent him up some tea, but this time the Squire thought it tasted odd, and Hester, on bearing away the dish, finding that the rare beverage was left untouched, hid it in the scullery and drank it that evening. She was soon taken with violent pains and sickness and a raging thirst, and it was in this condition that Lylie found her.
"My life, Hester, what have 'ee got?" asked Lylie.
"The pains of death, I do think," gasped Hester. "Oh, oh!"
Lylie looked at her unsympathetically.
"Simme you'm whist wi' en," she observed, "scrawlen' like that. Some bad you do look, though, there's no denyen'."
"I'm dyen'!" wailed Hester.
Sophie, who had come into the kitchen, heard the commotion, and went into the scullery.
"Why, Hester, what ails you?" she exclaimed. "Lylie, what has happened?"
"'Tes the pains o' death, she do say," replied Lylie, "but 'tes nawthen but to be in the bed and somethen' hot that she needs."
"She must get to bed at once. Here, Lylie, you take her arm that side and I'll take this. She's getting quieter."
Indeed, the worst spasms were over: Hester, weak and exhausted, was put to bed, and Sophie, her dislike of the girl forgotten in compassion, sent up weak broth and white wine whey. Late that evening as Lylie sat with the Squire, he asked her what all the noise had been about.
"'Tes that maid Hester," said Lylie indifferently, "she'd taken somethen' that went agen her and was vomiten' all evenin'. Some bad she did vomit, and Miss and I had to get her overstairs to the bed."
The Squire stirred in his chair and very slowly brought his eyes round to Lylie.
"What time did the sickness take her?" he asked.
"Soon after she'd put your tray to the kitchen, measter. Look 'ee, now, at this lutestring piece I got to Penzance church-town. It do sore need a ribbon to go wi' en. What do 'ee say to given' I a crown to buy et with, eh, measter?"
"Shalt have thy crown, woman," said the Squire shortly, "but leave me be now. I want no more for the night. And tell Miss I wish to speak with her to-morrow forenoon."
Lylie, somewhat offended, but mollified by the unexpectedly easy capture of the crown, withdrew, and next morning, as Sophie was busier than usual in household tasks—Hester still being confined to her bed—she delivered the Squire's message. It was with a heart fluttering with hope that Sophie went to his room. He was not yet out of bed, and, wrapped in a dingy dressing-gown, much stained with snuff and wine, his big jowl unshaven and his bald head innocent of wig (that ornament hung rakishly askew on a chair-back)he looked anything but a pleasant object. Sophie stopped short on the threshold.
"You sent for me, sir?" she asked.
"'Tis nothing of any importance, my dear," said the Squire smoothly, "merely to tell you how recovered I am. How blooming you look, my Sophie—more like my own daughter than you have since this shadow fell between us."
Indeed, Sophie, in her flutter of hope and excitement, showed a glowing face. Her heart softened at the kindliness of her father's tone.
"Oh, sir"—she began, "if only this shadow—if you would only let it lift—if you would only believe in me—in him!"
"Who knows," said the Squire benignly, "but that I may see cause to change my opinions. You will understand, my dear daughter, that a father is in so responsible a position, he must not accept an affair of the kind lightly, without due inquiry. Perhaps the fellow who sent me that report was prejudiced, who knows? I might, in justice, inquire further. But you are not wearing your beads, my child."
"They—they have not all come yet," she faltered, "but I received some more yesterday."
"The roses on thy cheeks are the best adornment in a father's eye," said the Squire, "and now tell Lylie to bring me some broth with brandy in it, and bless thee, my child. And," he added to himself as she left the room, "I do not think I shall be taken with sickness again yet awhile."
Sophie's easily persuaded reason and her affectionate nature were swayed to gratitude, and she reproached herself because something in her was repulsed by theold man's blandness. She ran downstairs and out into the yard singing under her breath, and saw the postboy coming up the drive. He had a packet for her which she took up to her room to open. There were a dozen or so more of the polished pebbles, cut into beads, and a short note in which Crandon assured her of his undying affection, and ended by saying, "Do not spare the powder in order to keep the rust off the pebbles."
That afternoon Charles Le Petyt came over to Troon and walked with Sophie in the garden. He was full of joy to see the increased brightness of her look, and soon detected a softening in her tone when she spoke of her father—Crandon's name they avoided by silent consent.
"You may yet be happy with your father, Sophie," said Mr. Le Petyt with the hopefulness of the born idealist, and Sophie, confident in her supernatural knowledge, agreed.
"And I reproach myself that sometimes I have been wicked enough to wish I might never see him again," she said as they walked slowly towards the house door, past the open dairy windows, "and indeed, Charles, I think it must have been the Devil himself who sometimes suggested to me how much happier I should be if he were dead. I have seemed to hear a whisper: 'Who would not wish an old father dead for ten thousand pounds?'—because that meant freedom and—peace."
"My poor Sophie," replied Charles pressing her hand.
He stayed and took tea with her and the Squire, and the latter went to bed soon after he had left. Theweather had turned rainy, autumn seemed invaded by a tang of winter that evening, and the Squire, who was subject to fits of shivering, had a huge fire lit, and demanded hot gruel of Lylie.
"There's no occasion for you to leave your ironing, Lylie," remarked Sophie when they were in the kitchen, and the woman acquiescing, Sophie went into the pantry. She was gone some time, and when she reappeared Lylie glanced up from the ironing of her turned satin slip. Sophie caught the glance, and fore-stalling a question, remarked carelessly:
"I have been stirring the gruel and eating some of the oatmeal out of it, for I've taken a great fancy to it. I believe I shall often eat from my father's gruel."
She stirred it round over the fire as she spoke.
"I'll take it overstairs," said Lylie, who viewed the friendlier relations between father and daughter with dislike. Sophie turned the gruel out into a basin and set the saucepan down on the hob.
"I will see to it," she retorted hurriedly, but Lylie seized the basin and bore it out of the kitchen.
Not a quarter of an hour later the Squire's screams echoed through the house. He was very sick, hiccuped like a person bitten by a mad dog, and cried out that he was burnt up with fire. Sophie, terrified, insisted on James riding at once to St. Annan's for the apothecary, and herself banished from the Squire's room by the commands he managed to articulate, she stayed against his door outside, every now and then pressing her fingers to her ears when a more awful sound than common came from within.
He was a trifle easier when the apothecary arrived and applied remedies, and Lylie took advantage of thelull to creep swiftly to the kitchen and pick up the saucepan Sophie had left on the hob. Hester, whom all the outcry had brought from her bed, watched her movements curiously. Lylie lit two candles and bore the pan to the light.
"Come and look here, Hester," said Lylie slowly, feeling some of the sediment from the pan between her finger and thumb, as she spoke, "Did you ever see oatmeal so white?"
"Oatmeal!" said Hester, "why, 'tes as white as flour."
"'Tes more gritty'n flour. I see et all, Hester. Have 'ee never heard that poison's white and gritty? Measter's poisoned, and tes Miss that's done et."
A slight sound came from the kitchen door and both women looked round, but Sophie, whose foot had been on the threshold, had turned and fled upstairs to the door of her father's room again, where she flung herself on the floor and pressed her forehead against the wooden panel. In that long drawn moment of listening the truth had rushed in over her consciousness—and overwhelmed reason and self-control.
The door opened and the apothecary stumbled over her.
"Miss Bendigo—" he began in compassion, then some words to which the Squire had just given vent flashed back at him and he hesitated.
"Bring her in," ordered the patient hoarsely.
Sophie scrambled to her feet and went towards the bed. She fell on her knees beside it.
"Oh, sir, forgive me, I didn't know, I didn't know," she babbled, "send me where you will, only forgive me and get well . . . I'll never see or hear from or writeto him more, if you'll but forgive me, I shall be happy. Papa, papa!"
Over Sophie's head the Squire beckoned the apothecary into the room. Then:
"I do forgive thee," he murmured, speaking with difficulty and veiling his eyes with his thin wrinkled lids, "but thou should'st have remembered I am your father. As for the villain Crandon, hadst thou loved me thou wouldst curse him and the ground he walks on."
"Oh, sir," said Sophie, to whom the words of pardon alone had penetrated, "your kindness strikes at my soul. Sir, on my knees I pray you will not curse me."
"Icurse thee!" gasped the Squire, forcing his distorted mouth into a semblance of the old bland smile, "no, child, I bless thee and hope God will bless thee, and I pray thou mayest live to repent and amend. . . . Leave me, lest thou should'st say something to thy prejudice—" apparently, thought the apothecary, who was himself trembling with horror, this martyred father had forgotten the presence of a listener. "Go to the clergyman, Mr. Le Petyt, he will take care of thee. Alas, poor man, I am sorry for him. . . ."
"Papa, I am innocent, I swear to you I am. I never knew. I am innocent of this. . . ."
"I fear thou art not quite innocent and that there is some powder in such hands as will appear against thee. Harvey take away my poor misguided child."
Sophie stumbled blindly from the room and went upstairs. Mr. Harvey hesitated a moment, saw the patient almost comatose, and went down to the kitchen. There Lylie still pored over the saucepan, which she thrust out at him.
"See, Mr. Harvey," she demanded, "what's this stuff in wi' the gruel? Can 'ee tell me that?"
Mr. Harvey examined the contents of the pan carefully, tried some on his finger, and shook his cautious head.
"I cannot be very positive," he replied at length, "but at least it can have no business in the gruel. Give me white paper and I will take some home and test it when it is dry."
Lylie helped him scrape the sediment into a sheet of paper, and he folded it up and pocketed it. He then gave instructions to the two women to heat more water for fomentations while he returned to the sick room. Finding the Squire still comatose, he sat with his fingers on the intermittent pulse. Meanwhile Sophie, in whom fear, the most sickening of all emotions had awakened, crept downstairs, holding her breath past her father's room, down to the kitchen. Lylie happened to be in the scullery at the moment, Hester, still weak from morbid excitement as well as illness, was seated in a shadowy corner of the kitchen. Sophie crept in, looked fearfully round her, listened, and then began to stuff some papers into the grate. She thrust them into the heart of the flames and then breathed a deep sigh of relief. "Now I am more easy, thank God," she murmured, and slipped out of the kitchen as cautiously as she had come. Lylie, from behind the crack of the scullery door, went towards the grate, where she was joined by Hester. . . .
A little later all was noise again, the Squire had been seized with violent spasms, raving and hiccuping like a madman, unable to swallow as much as a sip of water. Towards the small hours he grew delirious, then sank gradually; with the dawn he died.
Sophie sat rigid in her room, paler than the paling day. She looked back over the past, recalling little speeches of Crandon's which, had she been less simple, less adoring, must have warned her of his plan. She saw the skill with which he had trapped her, she saw what he hoped to gain, she saw how he would lose nothing. It was she who had to pay. At the thought fear, natural, human fear, caught at her again and she sprang to her feet, a thing distraught. Escape—she must escape, get away from this dread that was closing in on her. She tied on cloak and hood and feverishly crammed all the money that for months she had been saving against her marriage into a little bag. On the stairs she ran into James Ruffiniac, and with her hands on his coat, pressing, begging, silent suppliants, she made him come into the dining-room.
"James," she said, "do you want to make your fortune? You do, do you not? If you will come with me, it is made."
"What do you want me to do?" asked James.
"Only to hire a postchaise to go to London, and I'll give you fifteen guineas now, and more when we come there. Only to do that. And in London you would make your fortune."
"Not on my life," he told her. "What you'm done you must see the end of. 'Tes your guilty soul makes you flee. I'll have to tell of this."
"I—I was merely jesting," faltered Sophie, "to see if you would. James—" but he had swung on his heel and left her.
No one molested Sophie, but towards midday Hester put her head in at the bedroom door to inform her, with a hardly restrained gusto, that Dr. Polwhele had comeover from Penzance and was going to open the body. Sick to the soul, Sophie put on her outdoor things once more and struck out over the moors, walking blindly to try and get away from the horror that was in her. As she went all the strength of her nature, inherited from the father who could keep up a pose and plan a revenge on an agonized death-bed; the strength, which had concentrated itself during her girlhood on her ambitions, that had then made her love for Crandon, now turned to a deep hatred and rage that seemed to settle, cold and hard, on the very muscles of her body. She knew the hatred, the fierce resentment, that the trapped thing feels against the trapper, and added to it was the shame of a woman whose love has been made a mockery. And if, unacknowledged even to herself, was the pricking feeling that, could she have been spared discovery, she would not deeply have minded being the innocent cause of her own release, who is there with heart so uncomplex as to be in a position to condemn her. . . .
She tramped on and on, and presently found herself out on the St. Annan high-road. The thought of Charles came to her as a point where she could turn for help, for he had been absent all night at a distant part of the parish, ministering to a dying man, but he would surely be back by now; if she were not quick he would already have set off for Troon on hearing the news. Battling against the rain-laden wind, she bent her head and made her way into the village. There little groups of people were standing about, intent, arguing. At sight of her a common feeling animated them, the various little centres of discussion broke, joined together, swept towards her. She had animpression of shaking fists, angry sounds, rude contacts, and the smell of many rain-wet bodies pressing in around her. The panic of crowds seized her, she screamed, and screamed again, not recognizing the voice of Charles Le Petyt answering her as he made his way through the press. He struck the faces away from him right and left, and his blazing passage made men fall back. Putting an arm round Sophie he drew her up the steps of the inn and through the door, which he shut and barred.
"Take me away, Charles, take me away," she moaned, and he, his arms round her dear trembling body, answered:
"I will take you home. You are quite safe with me, Sophie. When we get back you must tell me everything and I will think of a way to help you. Stay here a moment, dear."
He put her in a chair, sent the frightened host for a glass of wine, and ordered a chaise to be got ready at the back. Sophie drank the wine passively, and passively let Charles put her in the chaise. She lay silent against him all the way back to Troon, but once there, in the parlour, her brain cleared, and she told him everything. Charles Le Petyt listened, always keeping his hand tenderly over hers, though when she let him understand what for months she had been to Crandon, his free hand gripped hard on the edge of his chair.
"What am I to do?" she asked when she had made an end.
"Is there no way by which the guilt can be fastened where it belongs—on Crandon?" he asked passionately, and in her distress Sophie sprang up and, walking to the window, hit the shut pane with her hand.
"I have destroyed everything that could have taken him," she said. "Take my key—here it is—search my press, my box, see if you can find anything. I will come with you."
Alas! Sophie had ravished her room too well, and search fell fruitless. The two desisted at last and stared at each other with pallid faces.
"Oh—Sophie!" cried Mr. Le Petyt, and, breaking into tears, she flung herself into his arms. They were clinging together, wet cheek against wet cheek, when the town-sergeant came thundering at the door.
(Account taken from a contemporary journal)
"Saturday, April 4. This morning Miss Bendigo was executed at Launceston, in the same black petelair she was dressed in at her trial, had on a pair of black gloves, and her hands and arms tied with black paduasoy ribbons. On the Friday night she sent to the sheriff, who, she was informed, was come to town to be present at her execution, and desired that he would give her till eight o'clock the next morning, and she would be ready as soon after as he pleased. On Friday, at about twelve o'clock, she took the Sacrament and signed a declaration concerning the crime for which she was to suffer; in which she denied knowing that the powders she had administered to her father had any poisonous quality in them; and also made therein a confession of her faith. Her behaviour at the gallows was becoming a person in herunhappy circumstances, and drew not only great compassion, but tears, from most of the spectators. When she got up about seven steps of the ladder, she turned herself upon it and had a little trembling, saying: 'I am afraid I shall fall.' After she had turned herself upon the ladder, the Rev. Mr. Le Petyt, who attended her, asked whether she had anything to say to the public. She said yes, and made a speech to the following purport: 'That, as she was then going to appear before a just God, she did not know that the powders, which were believed to be the death of her father, would have done him any harm, therefore she was innocently the cause of his death, but as she hoped for mercy, what she had done had been in innocence and love.' Then she stooped towards Mr. Le Petyt and she was seen to be remarkably eager in taking the parting kiss from him, which she did. The hangman then desired her to pull the white kerchief, tied over her head for that purpose, over her eyes, which she failing to do, a person standing by stepped up the ladder and pulled it down. Then, giving the signal by holding out a little book she had in her hand, she was turned off. Before she went out of the gaol she gave the sheriff's man a guinea to drink, and took two guineas in her hands with her, which she gave to the executioner. Her body was placed in a coffin of maplewood, lined with white satin, on the lid only 'Sophia Bendigo, aged 18. April 4, 1752.' It is understood that Mr. Le Petyt carried the coffin to St. Annan and buried it, by Miss Bendigo's request, in the grave of her mother. At the execution, notwithstanding the early hour, there was the greatest concourse of people ever seen on such an occasion."