“All right, Johnson,” he said. “I just slipped out between the acts for a whiff of fresh air.”
“Well,” said the man, “you must be quick and come along, or you’ll spile the play.”
He went quite tamely, and the second official outside received him stolidly into custody. Mate number one lingered to touch his cap to me and explain.
“Flyborough Asylum, sir. They give him a part in some private theatricals, and he tuk advantage of his disguise as a family lawyer to hook it between the acts. None of us reco’nized him, or guessed what he’d done, till the time come for him to take up his cue; and then, with the prompter howling for him and him not answering, the truth struck us of a heap.”
I was down in my chair, flabby and gasping.
“But what brought him tome?” I groaned.
“Train, sir,” answered the man; “plenty of ’em, and easy to catch from the suburbs. Why he come on here? Why, his offices in the old days was in Furnival’s; it were that give us the clue. I suppose, now” (he took off his cap, took a red handkerchief from it, thoughtfully mopped his forehead, and returned the bandana to its nest), “I suppose, now, he’s been a-gammoning of you pretty high with his insurances? His fust principle in life was always to play upon fools.”
“Exactly,” said the Reverend Septimus Prior; “the exchange was the most fortuitous, not to say the most fortunate” (he gave a little giggle and bow) “possible. Your uncle saw my advertisement, answered it, and for a brief period he goes to my cure, and I come to his.”
“Well, if you feel certain,” said Miss Robin, regretfully resting in her lap the novel she was reading.
Mr. Prior sipped his tea and nibbled his rusk. In the intervals between, he would occasionally glance at the portrait of a scholarly cleric, with a thin grim mouth and glassy eyes, which bantered him from the wall opposite.
“Your uncle—Mr. Fearful?” he had once ventured to ask; and the niece had answered, “Yes. It is very like him.”
Now he paused, with his cup half-way to his mouth.
“I beg your pardon?” he exclaimed.
Miss Robin put her book to her lips, and looking over it—really rather charmingly,—yawned behind the cover. She was surprisingly dégagée for a country vicar’s niece—self-collected, and admirably pretty; though her openwork stockings, which she did not hesitate to cross her legs to display, filled him with a weak sense of entanglement in some unrighteous mystery.
“You said?” he invited her.
“I said, If you feel certain,” she repeated calmly.
“Ah!” he said. “Yes. You mean?”
“I mean,” she said, without a ruffle, “that Uncle Philipmayhave settled to swap livings with youpro tem., andmayhave started off to take yours, andmayhave got there—ifyou feel certain that he has.”
“To be sure,” he answered. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“Had he arrived—when you started—for here?”
“No. Certainly he hadn’t arrived. My train was due. I had to leave a message; but——”
She stopped him by dropping her book into her lap; and, clasping one knee in her hands, conned him amiably.
“Did he lead you to expect a niece among the charges he was committing to your care—or cure?” she asked.
“Well, I must confess,” said the young man, blushing, “he—ah! mentioned a housekeeper—Mrs. Gaunt, I think—but——”
“No, of course not,” she interrupted him. “He had forgotten all about me.”
Mr. Prior gasped, and looked down. This was his first holiday exchange of livings—an unsophisticated venture, which he was already half repenting. A suburban cure; a desire for fresh pastures; a daring resolution; an advertisement in the “Church Times”; a prompt answer; as prompt an acceptance (after due reference to the Clergy List); a long railway journey; a tramp, relatively as long, to a remote parsonage on the road to a seaport; an arrival in the dark; an innocence of all expectation of, or preparation for him; an explanation; production of his written voucher, and—here he was, accepted, he could not but think, on sufferance. But there he thought wrong. Miss Robin was not near so upset by his appearance as he was.
“He comes and goes” (she said of Uncle Philip) “without reference to anybody or anything. We never know what he’ll do next, or who’ll introduce himself into the house as his friend. It may be a burglar or a pirate for all we know. All sorts of strange people come up from the port, and are shown into my uncle’s room, and out again by himself at the side door. At least, I suppose so. We never know what becomes of them, or what’s going on, any more than I doubt he does himself. I dare say they fleece him nicely; and—you may laugh—but when he’s in his absent moods, you might undress him without his knowing. Only he’d probably strike you to the ground when he found out—he’s such an awful temper.”
“Dear me!” murmured the young man; “how very curious. One hears of such cases.”
“Does one?” said Miss Robin. “I’d rather hear of, than live with them, anyhow; and in a desert, too. It wouldn’t so much matter if he didn’t always hold others to blame for his mistakes and mislayings. He kept me in bed a week once, because he’d read right through a treatise on explosives in the pulpit, before he discovered that it wasn’t his peace-thanksgiving sermon.”
“Astonishing!” said Mr. Prior; then added, with a faint smile, “Well, I can promise you, at least, thatI’mnot a pirate.”
“No,” she said, “I can see you’re not. Won’t you have some more tea?”
He was shown to his bedroom by Mrs. Gaunt, who was a stony, silent woman, bleak with mystery. All night the wind howled round the lonely building; and the unhappy man, who, in a phase of worldly revolt, egged on by a dare-devil parishioner, had once read “The House on the Marsh”, thought of Sarah and Mr. Rayner, and of a silent weaving of strings across the stairway in the dark to catch him tripping should he venture upon escape.
He arose, feverish, to a sense of hooting draughts in a grey house, and went to matins in the gaunt dull church, which stood as lonely as a shepherd’s hut on a slope hard by. There was nothing in sight but wind-torn pastures, and, all around, little graves, which seemed trying vainly to tuck themselves and their shivering epitaphs under the grass. There appeared nothing in the world to attract a congregation; but, as a matter of fact, there were a few old frosted spinsters present, of that amphibious order, a sort of landcrabs, which forgathers on the neutral wastes between sea and country.
Mr. Prior went back to his dreary breakfast at the Vicarage. His lady hostess, it appeared, was wont to lie late abed, and did not think it worth her while to alter her habits for him. The meal, however, had been served and left to petrify, pending his return from matins. It was with a consciousness of congealed bacon-fat, insufficiently dissolved by lukewarm tea, sticking to the roof of his mouth, that he rose from it, and pondered his next movement. No one came near him. He looked dismally out on a weedy drive. He rather wished Miss Robin would condescend to his company. He was no pirate, certainly; but he believed he would brave, had braved already, much for his cloth. She had beautiful eyes—clear windows, he was sure, to a virginal soul. But then, the other end! the white feet peeping through that devil’s lattice! He tried to recall any authority in Holy Writ for openwork stockings. Certainly pilgrims went barefoot, and half a loaf was better than no bread.
“This will not do, Septimus,” he said, weakly striking his breast. “I will go and compose my sermon.”
He stepped into the hall. It was papered in cold blue and white marble, with a mahogany umbrella stand, and nothing else, to temper its tomb-like austerity. At the further end was a baize door of a faded strawberry colour.
He was entitled to the run of the house, he concluded. There had been no mention of any Bluebeard chamber. But, then, to be sure, there had been no mention of a niece. The association of ideas tingled him. What if he should turn the handle and alight on Miss Robin?
He flipped his breast again, frowning, and strode to the baize door. Beside it, he now observed, a passage went off to the kitchens. Desperately he pulled the door, found a second, of wood, beyond it, opened that also, and found himself in what was obviously the Vicar’s study.
Obviously, that is to say, to his later conceptions of his correspondent. Otherwise he might have taken it for the laboratory of a scientist. It was lined with bookcases, sparsely volumed; but five out of every six shelves were thronged with jars, instruments, and engines of a terrifying nature. In one place was a curtained recess potential with unholiness. Prints of discomposing organs hung on the walls. Immemorial dust blurred everything. There was a pedestalled desk in the middle, and opposite it, hung with a short curtain, a half-glazed door which the intruder, tiptoeing thither and peeping, with his heart at the gallop, found to lead into a dismal narrow lane which communicated with the road. He returned to the desk, which, frankly open, seemed to invite him to its use, and was pondering the moral practicability of composition in the midst of such surroundings, when a voice at his ear almost made him jump out of his skin.
“Pardon me, sir; but have you the master’s permission to use this room?”
Mrs. Gaunt had come upon him without a sound.
“Dear me, madam!” he said, wiping his forehead. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, sir,” she said, in her stony, colourless way, “that this room is interdict to both great and little, now and always, unless he makes an exception in your favour.”
“There was no specific mention of it, certainly,” said Mr. Prior, “neither for nor against. I concluded that the use of a study was not debarred me.”
“Pardon me,” she repeated monotonously. “I believe you concluded wrong, sir.”
“The door was not locked.”
“There are some prohibitions,” she said, “that need no locks.”
The inference was fearful.
“Miss June” (ecstatic name!) “and I,” she said, “have never dared so much as to put our noses inside, and not a word spoken to forbid it.”
Mr. Prior, to his own astonishment, revolted. Smarting, perhaps, under the memory of some suspected covert innuendo in a certain silvery acquiescence in a statement of his made last night, he revolted. He would prove that he could be a pirate if he chose.
“I shall stop here,” he said, trembling all over. “There was no embargo laid, and I must have somewhere to write my sermon.”
“Of course,” said a voice; and Miss Robin stood in the doorway—the most enchanting morning vision, her eyes bright with curiosity.
“I am delighted you support me,” he said, kindling and advancing.
She still looked beside and around him.
“Do you know,” she said, “it is perfectly true. I have not once dared to venture in here before, though never actually told not to. But that is all one, I think. What an extraordinary litter!”
She had not ventured! and with the inducement of her petrifying surroundings! She was uninquisitive, then—“an excellent thing in woman.”
“Since there is no veto,” he said, incomparably audacious, “supposing we explore together?”
She looked at him admiringly.
“I should like to.” She hesitated.
“June!” cried Mrs. Gaunt.
“And I will,” said the girl.
But the housekeeper, content, it appeared, with her protest, stood, not uninterested in the subsequent investigation.
“Do you not find all this a little remote, a little lifeless sometimes, Miss Robin?” said the clergyman, greatly daring.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Eels get used to skinning. It’s not life, of course. But I have to make the best of it, and there’s no help.”
“Ah, yes, there is!” said her companion, intending to imply the spiritual, but half hoping she would construe it into the material consolation.
“What do you mean?” she asked simply.
“Why,” he said, stammering and blushing furiously, and giving away his case at once, “with your youth, and—and beauty—O, forgive me! I am a little confused.”
“Where do you live?” she said, fixing him with her large eyes.
“At Clapton,” he murmured.
“It sounds most joyous,” she said, clasping her hands.
Hardly knowing what he did, he pulled the curtain away from the recess by which they stood, and instantly staggered back. The housekeeper, who, foreseeing his act, had crept up inquisitively behind, gave a mortal gasp, and Miss Robin a faint shriek—for, stretched lifeless and livid on a couch within, lay the stark body of a man.
For a minute they all stood staring, frozen with horror; then Mrs. Gaunt began to wring her hands.
“It is the same,” she cried, in awful tones. “I remember him—the dark foreigner. He wandered up here from the port a week ago; and I took him in to the master, and henever came out again. I thought he had let him go by the door there into the lane. O, woe on this fearful house! Long have I suspected and long dreaded. The sounds, and the awful, awful smells!”
“Perhaps,” whispered the girl, gulping, and clutching at her breast, “he died unexpectedly, and uncle put him away here, and forgot all about him.”
Mrs. Gaunt shrieked, and seizing the clergyman’s arm, pointed—
“Look! Pickled babies—one, two, three! And bones! And a fish-kettle! It is all plain. He kills them, and boils them down for his experiments, and by an accident he forgot to empty his larder—his larder! hoo-hoo!—before he went!”
She broke into hysteric laughter and gaspings. Miss Robin, whinnying, tottered quite close up to the young man, who stood shivering and speechless.
“What can we do to save him?” she whimpered. “Mr. Prior, say something!”
Thus urged, the unhappy young man strove to press his brain into a focus with his hand, and to rally himself to what, he felt, was the supreme occasion of his life. The appealing eyes and parted lips so close to his would have intoxicated a saint, much more a pirate.
“We must warn him—agony column—from returning,” he ejaculated, reeling. “Cryptic address—has he any distinguishing mark?”
“Yes,” she said, with frantic eagerness; “he has a large mole at the root of his nose.”
“Very well,” he said—“something of this sort: ‘Nose, with large mole at root of. All discovered. Don’t return!’ ”
“But what is the use of an advertisement? O, Mr. Prior! what is the use of an advertisement when we know where he is, or ought to be, and can go——?”
“Do you really think he will be there? It was a blind. O, Miss Robin, it is evident now it was a blind to cover his tracks!”
“But why should he have designed to escape at all, leaving this—O, Mr. Prior!—leaving this horror behind him?”
“We can only conjecture—O, Miss Robin, we can only conjecture! Perhaps because of his conscience overtaking him; perhaps because, killing in haste, he discovered at leisure thatitwould not go into the kettle; perhaps in a phase of that deadly absence of mind, which, he will have realized by now, the Lord has converted to his confusion.”
“Well, if you are right. And in the meantime we must get rid of this—somehow. O, pray think of a means! Do! Do!”
Mrs. Gaunt steadied her storming breast as she leaned for support, with hanging head, against the door.
“There’s the old well—off the lane,” she panted, without looking up. “He theremighthave fallen in—as he went out—and none have guessed it to this day.”
It was a fearful inspiration. Mr. Prior, in that moment of supreme sentient exaltation, abandoned himself to the awful rapture of things.
“June!” he whispered, putting shaking hands on the girl’s shoulders; “if I do this thing for your sake, will you—will you—I have a mother—this is no longer a place for you—come to Clapton?”
“Yes,” she answered, offering to nestle to him. “I had supposed that was understood.”
He was a little taken aback.
“We must move this first,” he said, wringing his damp forehead. “Who—who will help me?”
It was really heroic of him. In a shuddering group, they approached together the terrible thing—hesitated—plunged, and dragged it out with a sickening flop on the floor.
A greasy turban, which it wore, rolled away, disclosing a near bald head. Its eyes were closed; its teeth grinned through a fluff of dark hair; a lank frock-coat embraced its body, linen puttees its shanks, and at the end were stiff bare feet.
“Look, and see if the coast is clear,” gasped the clergyman.
Miss Robin turned to obey, and uttered a startled shriek.
“What are you doing with my Senassee?” cried a terrible voice at the door.
Mr. Prior whipped round, echoing his beloved’s squawk. A fierce old man, leaning on a stick, stood glaring in the opening.
“Uncle!” cried the girl.
He advanced, sneering and caustic, pushed them all rudely aside, dropped on his knees beside the corpse, and, thrusting his finger forcibly into its mouth, appeared to hook and roll its tongue forward. Instantly an amazing transformation occurred. A convulsion shook the body; life flowed into its drab cheeks; its eyes opened and rolled; inarticulate sounds came from its jaws.
“Ha!” cried the old man; “I have foreclosed on these busybodies.”
Then he rose to his feet, leaving the patient yawning and stretching on the floor.
“Fearful!” gasped the clergyman.
“Do you address me, sir?” asked the old man, scowling.
“Conjurer!” whispered Mr. Prior.
“If you like,” snarled the other. “It is a common enough trick with these Yogis, but one I had never seen until he came my way and offered to show it me for a consideration. I had forgot he was still lying there when I agreed to exchange livings with you. (You are Mr. Prior, I presume?) It was the merest oversight, which I remembered on my way, and came back by an early train to rectify—none too soon, it seems, for the staying of meddlesome fingers.”
“Forgot he was there!” cried Mr. Prior.
“And what if I did, sir?” snapped the other. “It was a full week he had lain tranced; and let me tell you, sir, I have more things to think of in a week than your mind could accommodate in a century. Why,” he cried, in sudden enlightenment, “I do believe the fools imagined I had murdered the man.”
“Look at the babies in the bottles!” cried Mrs. Gaunt hysterically.
“As to you, you old ass,” shouted the Vicar, flouncing round, “if you can’t distinguish embryo simiadæ from babies, you’d better call yourself Miss, as I believe you are!”
“I give notice on the spot!” cried Mrs. Gaunt.
Miss Robin stepped up bravely to the young clergyman, and linked her arm in his.
“And I,” she said. “I think you have behaved very cruelly to me, to us all, Uncle, and—and Mr. Prior has a mother.”
“I dare say; he seems fool enough for anything,” roared the old gentleman. “Go back to her, sir! Go to——”
June shrieked.
“Clapton!” he shouted, “and take this baggage with you!”
In that age of gallantry, the reign of Charles the Second, it was customary when a gentleman drank a lady’s health to throw some part of his dress into the flames, in order to do her still greater honour. This was well enough for a lover, but the folly did not stop here, for his companions were obliged to follow him in this proof of his veneration by consuming a similar article, whatever it might be.
In that age of gallantry, the reign of Charles the Second, it was customary when a gentleman drank a lady’s health to throw some part of his dress into the flames, in order to do her still greater honour. This was well enough for a lover, but the folly did not stop here, for his companions were obliged to follow him in this proof of his veneration by consuming a similar article, whatever it might be.
Aboutthe latter part of the seventeenth century, there was living at Aldersferry, in the Soke of Godsport in Hampshire, a worthy clergyman of the name of Barnabas Winthrop. The little living of St. Ascham’s—a perpetual curacy in the Archdeaconry of Winchester—supplied the moral and material needs of this amiable man; his granddaughter, Miss Joan Seabird, kept house for him; and never were cream and ripe fruit happier in contact than were these two playful and reasonable intellects in their relations of child and sage.
A hysteromaniac, however, is Fortune, who, charmed for a while with the simplicity of these her protégés, soon began to construe their contentment into self-sufficiency, and to devise some means to correct their supposed presumption on her favour, by putting it into the head of the artless divine how silence on questions which one felt called loudly for reform might be comfortable, but was shameful and an evasion of one’s duty. In short, Dr. Winthrop, entertaining original views on sanitation and the prevention of epidemics, was wickedly persuaded by her to expound them, and so to invite into his harmless Eden the snake which was to demoralize it. In one day he became a pamphleteer.
Now the Plague, in that year of 1682, was not so remote a memory but that people lived in a constant terror of its recrudescence. Pandects, treatises, expositions, containing diagnoses, palladiums and schemes of quarantine, all based on the most orthodox superstitions, did not cease to pour from the press, to the eternal confusion of an age which was yet far from realizing the pious schism of theaide-toi. What, then, as might be supposed, was the effect on it, when a clergyman of the Establishment was seen to enter the arena as a declared dissenter from thefata obstantof popular bigotry?
For a time Godsport, startled and scandalized, watched aloof the paper warfare; and it was not until after the appearance of the Doctor’s tract, “De omni re Scibili”—wherein he sought, boldly and definitely, and withal with a characteristic humour, to lay the responsibility for pestilence, not upon the Almighty’s shoulders, but, literally, at the doors of men, at their face-to-face proximity, and at “the Castynge of Noisome filth in their neare neighbourhood”—that it brought down its official hand with a weight and suddenness which shook St. Ascham’s to its roots. In brief, there was flung at the delinquent one morning his formal citation to the Sessions Court, there to answer upon certain charges of having “in divers Tracts, Opuscules and Levrets, sought insidiously to ingrafte the minds of his Majesty’s liege subjects with such impudent heresies as that it is in the power of man to limit the visitations of God—a very pestilent doctrine, and one arrogating to His servants the Almighty’s high and beneficent prerogatives; inasmuch as Plague and Fire and other His scourges, being sacriligeously wrested from His graspe, the world would waxe blown with overlife, till it crawled upon the face of the heavens like a gross putrid cheese.”
Under this bolt from the blue the liberal minds of grandsire and child sank amazed for the moment, only to rally to a consciousness of the necessity for immediate action.
“Up, wench!” cried the Doctor, “and saddle our Pinwire. I will go lay my case instanter before the Bishop.”
“Alas, dearest!” answered the weeping girl, “you forget; he is this long while bedridden.”
Her imagination, which had been wont secretly to fondle the idea of her grandfather’s enlightened piety rewarded with a bishopric, pictured it in a moment turned to his confusion, and himself, perhaps, through the misrepresentations of a blockhead Corporation, disgraced and beggared in his old age. But, though she knew the Churchman, she had not calculated the rousing effects of criticism on the author.
“Then,” roared he, “I will seek the fount itself of reason and justice. It was a good treatise, a well-argued treatise; and the King shall decide upon the practical merits of his own English.”
“The King!” she cried, clasping her hands.
“The King,” he answered. “Know you not that he moves daily between Southampton, where he lies, and Winchester, where he builds? We will go to Winchester. Nay,we, child; blubber not; for who knows but that, the shepherd being withdrawn, the wolves might think to practise on the lamb.”
He checked himself, and hung his head.
“The Lord pardon and justify me indignation,” he muttered. “I was a priest before an author.”
It was fine, but a loaded sky, when they set forth upon their journey of twenty or so miles, Joan riding pillion behind her grandfather on the sober red nag. After much cross work over villainous tracks, they were got at last into the Southampton turnpike, when they were joined by a single horseman, riding a handsome barb, who, with a very favourable face for Joan, pulled alongside of them, as they jogged on, and fell into easy talk.
“Dost ride to overtake a bishopric, master clergyman,” says he, “that you carry with you such a sweet bribe for preferment?”
Joan looked up, softly panting. Could he somehow have got wind already of their mission, and have taken them by the way to forestall it? But her eyes fell again before the besieging gaze of the cavalier.
He was a swart man of fifty or so, with a rather sooty expression, and his under-lip stuck out. His eyes, bagging a little in the lower lids, smouldered half-shut, between lust and weariness, under the blackest brows; and, for the rest, he was dressed as black as the devil, with a sparkle of diamonds here and there in his bosom. Joan looked down breathless.
“I seek no preferment, sir, but a reasonable justice,” said the curate; and, in a little, between this and that, had ingenuously, though with a certain twinkling eye for the humour of it all, confessed his whole case to the stranger. But Joan uttered not a word.
The cavalier laughed, then frowned mightily for a while. “We will indict these petty rogues of office on aquo warranto,” he growled. “What! does not ‘cleanness of body proceed from a due reverence of God’? Go on, sir, and I will promise you the King’s consideration.”
Then he forgot his indignation, leering at the girl again.
“And what isyourbusiness with Charles, pretty flower?” said he.
But, before she could answer, whish! went Pinwires’s girth out of its buckle, and parson and girl tumbled into the road.
The cavalier laughed out, and, while the Doctor was ruefully readjusting his straps, offered his hand to the girl.
“Come, sweetheart,” said he. “Since we go a common road, shalt mount behind me, and equal the odds between your jade and my greater beast.”
Joan appealed in silence to her grandfather.
“Verily, sir,” he said nodding and smiling, “it would be a gracious and kindly act.”
In a moment she was mounted, with her white arms belted about the stranger’s waist; the next, he had put quick spurs to his horse, and was away with a rush and clatter.
For an instant the Doctor failed to realize the nature of the abduction; and then of a sudden he was dancing and bawling in a sheer frenzy.
“Dog! Ravisher! Halt! Stop him! Detain him!”
He saw the flight disappear round a bend in the road. It was minutes before his shaking hands could negotiate strap and buckle, and enable him to follow in pursuit. But he carried no spurs, and Pinwire, already over-ridden, floundered in his steps. Distraught, dumbfounded, the old man was crying to himself, when he came upon Joan sitting by the roadside. He tumbled off, she jumped up, and they fell upon one another’s neck.
“O, a fine King, forsooth!” she cried, sobbing and fondling him. “O, a fine King!”
“Who? What?” said he.
“Why, it was the King himself!”
“The King!”
“The King.”
“How?” he gasped. “You have never seen him?”
“Trust a woman,” quoth she.
“A woman!” he cried. “You are but half a one yet.”
“It was the King, nevertheless.”
“Joan, let us turn back.”
“He had a wooing voice, grandfather.”
“Retro Satanas!How did you give him the slip?”
“We were stayed by a cow, the dear thing, and like an eel I slid off.”
“Dear Joan!”
“He commanded me to mount again, laughing all the while, and vowing he’d carry me back to you. But I held away, and he said such things of my beauty.”
“That proves him false.”
“Does it? But of course it does, since you say so. And while he was a-wheedling in that voice, I just whipt this from my hair on a thought, and gave his beast a vicious peck with it.”
She showed a silver pin like a skewer.
“Admirable!” exclaimed her grandfather.
“It was putting fire to powder,” she said. “It just gave a bound and was gone. If its rider pulls up this side of Christmas, I’ll give him——”
“What, woman?”
“Lud! I’ve come of age, in a minute. And it’s beginning to pour, grandfather; and where are we?”
He looked about him in the dolefullest way.
“If I knew!” he sighed. “We must e’en seek the shelter of an inn till this storm is by, and then return home. Better any bankruptcy than that of honour, Joan.”
They remounted and jogged on in the rain, which by now was falling heavily. The tired little horse, feeling the weight of his own soaked head, began to hang it and cough. Presently they dismounted at a wayside byre, and, eating the simple luncheon which their providence had provided, dwelt on a little in hopes of the weather clearing. But it grew steadily worse.
“I have lost my bearings,” said the clergyman in a sudden amazement. “We must push on.”
About four o’clock, being seven miles or so short of Winchester, they came down upon a little stream which bubbled across the road. The groaning horse splashed into it and stood still. Dr. Winthrop, wakened by the pause from a brown reverie, whipped his right leg over the beast’s withers, landed, slipped on a stone, and sat down in two feet of water. Uttering a startled ejaculation, he scrambled up, a sop to the very waist of his homespun breeches. Their points—old disused laces, fragrant from Joan’s bodice—clung weeping to his calves. He waded out, cherishing above water-mark the sodden skirts of his coat, his best, of ‘Colchester bayze.’ The horse, sensibly lightened, followed.
“O, O!” cried Joan. “Wasn’t you sopped enough already, but you must fill your pockets with water?”
“Joan!” he cried disconcerted. “I am drowned!”
Luckily, in that pass, looking up the slope of the hill, they espied near the top a toll-booth, and, beyond, the first houses of a village. Making a little glad haste, they were soon at the bar.
The woman who came to take their money looked hard at the tired girl. She was of a sober cast, and her close-fitting coif showed her of the non-conforming order.
“For Winchester, master?” said she.
“Nay,” answered the clergyman; “for the first hostelry. We are beat, dame.”
“The first and the last is ‘The Five Alls,’ ” said she. “But I wouldn’t carry the maiden there, by your leave. There be great and wild company in the house, that recks nothing of anything in its cups. Canst hear ’em, if thou wilt.” And, indeed, with her words, a muffled roar of merriment reached them from the inn a little beyond.
“One riding for Winchester, and the rest from,” she said, “they met here, and here have forgathered roistering this hour. Dare them so you dare. I have spoken.”
“Nunc Deus avertat!” cried the desperate minister. “The Fates fight against us. At all costs we must go by.”
“Nay,” said the good woman; “but, an you will, seek you your own shelter there, and leave this poor lamb with me. I have two already by the fire—decent ladies and proper, and no quarry for licence. I know the company; ’twill be moving soon; and then canst come and claim thine own.”
He accepted gladly, and, leaving Joan in her charge, rode on to the inn, where, dismounting, he betook himself to the stable, which was full of horses, and, after, to the kitchen.
The landlord, cooking a pan of rashers alone over a great fire, turned his head, focussed the new-comer with one red eye, and asked his business.
“A seat by the hearth, a clothes-rack for my breeches, a rug for my loins while they dry, and a mug of ale with a sop in it,” answered the traveller, with a smile for his own waggish epitome. And then he related of his mishap.
The landlord grunted, returned to his task, blew on an ignited rasher, presently took the skillet off the coals, forked the fizzing mess into a dish, and disappeared with it. All the while an ineffable racket thundered on the floor above.
“Peradventure they will respect my cloth,” thought the clergyman. “The Lord fend me! I am among the Philistines.”
The landlord returned in a moment with a horn of ale in one hand, and a rug in the other, which he threw down.
“Dod, man!” he cried; “peel, peel! This is the country of continence! Hast no reason to fear for thy modesty.” And he went out between chuckling and grumbling.
Very decently the curate doffed his small-clothes, hung them over a trestle before the fire, wrapped and knotted the rug about his loins, and sat down vastly content to his sup. In ten minutes—what with weariness, warmth, and stingo—he was asleep.
He woke with a little shriek, and staggered to his feet. Something had pricked him—the point of a rapier. The flushed, grinning face of the man who had wielded it stood away from him. The kitchen was full of rich company, which broke suddenly into a babble of merriment at the sight of his astounded visage. In the midst, a swart gentleman, who had been lolling at a table, advanced, and taking him by the shoulders, swung him gently to and fro till his eyes goggled.
“Well followed, parson!” said he, chuckling, and lurching a little in his speech. “What! is the cuif not to be spoiled of his bishopric because of a saucy baggage?”
He laughed, checked himself suddenly, and, still holding on, assumed a majestic air, with his wig a little on one side, and said with great dignity: “But, before I grant termsir, you shall bring the slut to canvass of herself what termsir. Godsmylife! to hold her King at a bodkin’s point! It merits no pardon, I say, unless the merit of the pardon of the termsir—no, the pardon of the merit of the termsir. Therefore I say, whither hast brought her, I say? Out with it, man!”
The clergyman, recognizing Joan’s abductor, and listening amazed, sprang back at the end with a face of horror, almost upsetting His Majesty, who, barely recovering himself, stood shaking his head with a glassy smile.
“Ifhicakins!” said he: “I woss a’most down!”
“Avaunt, ravisher!” roared the Doctor.
Charles stiffened with a jerk, stared, wheeled cautiously, and tiptoed elaborately from the room. His suite, staggering at the balance, followed with enormous solemnity; and the Doctor, still pointing denunciatory, was left alone.
At the end of a minute, after much whispering outside, a young cavalier re-entered, and approached him with a threatening visage, as if up the slope of a deck.
“His Maj’ty, sir,” said he, “demands to know if you know who the devil you was a-bawling—hic—at?”
“To my sorrow, though late, I do, sir,” answered the Doctor in a grievous voice.
“O!” said the cavalier, and tacked from the room. He returned again in a second, to poke the clergyman with his finger, and suggest to him confidentially, “Betteric la’ than never—hic!” which having uttered, he took himself off, after a vain attempt to open the door from its hinge side. In two minutes he was back again.
“His Maj’ty wan’s know where hast hidden Mrs. Seabird. Nowhere in house, says landlord. Ver’ well—where then?”
“Tell the King, where he shall reach her only over my body.”
The cavalier vanished, and reappeared.
“His Maj’ty doesn’t wan’ tread on your body. On contrary, wan’s raise you up. Wan’s hear story all over again from lady’s lips.”
“I am His Majesty’s truthful minister. There is nothing to add to what I have already reported to him.”
The cavalier withdrew, smacking his thigh profoundly. Sooner than usual he returned.
“His Maj’ty s’prised at you. Says if you won’t tell him where’ve laid her by, he’ll beat up every house within miles-’n’-miles.”
“No!” said the simple clergyman, in a sudden emotion.
“Yes,” said the gentleman, not too drunk to note his advantage. “For miles-’n’-miles. His Maj’ty ver’ s’prised her behaviour to him. Wan’s lil word with her. Tell at once where she is, or worse for you.”
The clergyman looked about him like one at bay. His glance lighted on the trestle before the fire, fixed itself there, and kindled.
“The Lord justify the ways of His servant!” he muttered; and drew himself up.
“Tell His Majesty,” he said in a strong voice, “that, so be he will honour a toast I shall call, the way he seeks shall be made clear to him.”
The other gave a great chuckle, which was loudly echoed from the passage.
“Why, thish is the right humour,” he said, and retired.
Within a few moments the whole company re-entered, tittering and jogging one another, and spilling wine from the beakers they carried.
The King called a silence.
“Sir,” said the clergyman, advancing a little, “I pray your Majesty to convince me, by proof, of a reputed custom with our gallants, which is that, being to drink a lady’s health, the one that calleth shall cast into the flames some article of his attire, there to be consumed to her honour, and so shall demand of his company, by toasters’ law, that they do likewise.”
“Dod!” said the King, chuckling; “woss he speiring at? Drink man! drink and sacrifice, and I give my royal word that all shall follow suit, though it be with the wigs from our heads.”
The Doctor lifted his horn of ale and drained it.
“I toast Joan!” he cried.
“Joan!” they all shouted, laughing and hiccuping, and, having drunk, threw down their beakers helter-skelter.
The clergyman took one swift step forward; snatched up his small-clothes from the trestle; displayed them a moment; thrust them deep into the blazing coals, and, facing about, disrugged himself, and stood in his shirttails.
“I claim your Majesty’s word, and breeches,” said he.
A silence of absolute stupefaction befell; and then in an instant the kitchen broke into one howl of laughter.
In the midst, Charles walked stately to the table, sat down, and thrust out his legs.
“Parson,” said he, “if you had but claimed my hair. The honours lie with you, sir; take ’em.”
He would have none but the Doctor handle him; and, when his ineffable smalls were burning, he rose up in his royal shift, and ruthlessly commandeering every other pair in the room, stood, the speechless captain of as shameful and defenceless a crew of buccaneers as ever lowered its flag to honesty.
Then the Doctor resumed his rug.
“Sir,” said he, trembling, “I now fulfil my bond. My granddaughter is sheltering, with other modest ladies, in the pike-house hard by.”
But the King swore—by divine right—a pretty oath or two, while the chill of his understandings helped to sober him.
“By my cold wit you have won! and there may she remain for me. And now, decent man,” he cried, “I do call my company to witness how you have made yourself to be more honoured in the breach than the observance; and since you go wanting a frock, a bishop’s you shall have.”
And with that he snatched the rug, and, skipping under it, sat on the table, grinning over the quenching of his amazed fire-eaters.
And this, if you will believe deponent, is the true, if unauthorized, version of Dr. Winthrop’s election, and of the confounding of Godsport on a writ ofquo warranto.
Si finis bonus est, totum bonum erit.
Si finis bonus est, totum bonum erit.
Therewere notices, of varying dates, posted in prominent places about the cliffs to warn the public not to go near them—unless, indeed, it were to read the notices themselves, which were printed in a very unobtrusive type. Of late, however, this Dogberriancaveathad been supplemented by a statement in the local gazette that the cliffs, owing to the recent rains succeeding prolonged frost, were in so ill a constitution that to approach them at all, even to decipher the warnings not to, was—well, to take your life out of the municipal into your own hands.
Now, had the Regius Professor a bee in his bonnet? Absurd. He knew the risks of foolhardiness as well as any pickpocket could have told him. Yet, neither general nor particular caution availed to abate his determination to examine, as soon as we had lunched, the interior formation of a cave or two, out of those black and innumerable, with which the undercliff was punctured like a warren.
I did not remonstrate, after having once discovered, folded down under his nose on the table, the printed admonition, and heard the little dry, professorial click of tongue on palate which was wont to dismiss, declining discussion of it, any idle or superfluous proposition. I knew my man—or automaton. He inclined to the Providence of the unimaginative; his only fetish was science. He was one of those who, if unfortunately buried alive, would turn what opportunity remained to them to a study of geological deposits. My “nerves,” when we were on a jaunt (fond word!) together, were always a subject of sardonic amusement with him.
Now, utterly unmoved by the prospect before him, he ate an enormous lunch (confiding it, incidentally, to an unerring digestion), rose, brushed some crumbs out of his beard, and said, “Well, shall we be off?”
In twenty minutes we had reached the caves. They lay in a very secluded little bay—just a crescent of sombre sand, littered along all its inner edge with débris from the towering cliffs which contained it.
“Are you coming with me?” said the Regius Professor.
Judged by his anxious eyes, the question might have been an invitation, almost a shamefaced entreaty. But the anxiety, never more than apparent, was delusive product of the preposterous magnifying-glasses which he wore. Did he ever remove those glasses, one was startled to discover, in the seemingly aghast orbs which they misinterpreted, quite mean little attic windows to an unemotional soul.
“Not by any means,” I said. “I will sit here, and think out your epitaph.”
He stared at me a moment with a puzzled expression, grinned slightly, turned, strode off towards the cliffs, and disappeared, without a moment’s hesitation, into the first accessible burrow. I was moved on the instant to observe that it was the most sinister-looking of them all. The tilted stratification, under which it yawned oblique, seemed on the very poise to close down upon it.
Now I set to pacing to and fro, essaying a sort of mechanical preoccupation in default of the philosophy I lacked. I was really in a state of clammy anxiety about the Professor. I poked in stony pools for little crabs, as if his life depended on my success. I made it a point of honour with myself not to leave off until I had found one. I tried, like a very amateur pickpocket, to abstract my mind from the atmosphere which contained it, only to find that I had brought mind and atmosphere away together. I bent down, with my back to the sea, and looking between my legs sought to regard life from a new point of view. Yet, even in that position, my eyes and ears were conscious, only in less degree, of the spectres which were always moving and rustling in the melancholy little bay.
Tekel upharsin.The hand never left off writing upon the rocks, nor the dust of its scoring to fall and whisper. That came away in flakes, or slid down in tiny avalanches—here, there, in so many places at once, that the whole face of the cliffs seemed to crawl like a maggoty cheese. The sound was like a vast conspiracy of voices—busy, ominous—aloft on the seats of an amphitheatre. They were talking of the Regius Professor, and his consideration in making them a Roman holiday.
Here, on no warrant but that of my senses, I knew the gazette’s warning to be something more than justified. It made no difference that my nerves were at the stretch. One could not hear a silence thus sown with grain of horror, and believe it barren of significance. Then, all in a moment, as it seemed to me, the resolution was taken, the voices hushed, and the whole bay poised on tiptoe of a suspense which preluded something terrific.
I stood staring at the black mouth which had engulfed the Regius Professor. I felt that a disaster was imminent; but to rush to warn him would be to embarrass the issues of his Providence—that only. For the instant a fierce resentment of his foolhardiness fired me—and was as immediately gone. I turned sick and half blind. I thought I saw the rock-face shrug and wrinkle; a blot of gall was expelled from it—and the blot was the Professor himself issued forth, and coming composedly towards me.
As he advanced, I turned my back on him. By the time he reached me I had made some small success of a struggle for self-mastery.
“Well,” he said. “I left myself none too much of a margin, did I?”
With an effort I faced about again. The base of the cliff was yet scarred with holes, many and irregular; but now some of those which had stared at me like dilated eyes were, I could have sworn it, over-lidded—the eyes of drowsing reptiles.And the Professor’s particular cave was gone.
I gave quite an absurd little giggle. This man was soulless—a monstrosity.
“Look here,” he said, conning my face with a certain concern, “it’s no good tormenting yourself with what might have happened. Here I am, you know. Supposing we go and sit down yonder, against that drift, till you’re better.”
He led the way, and, dropping upon the sand, lolled easily, talking to himself, by way of me, for some minutes. It was the kindest thing he could have done. His confident voice made scorn of the never-ceasing rustling and falling sounds to our rear. The gulls skated before my eyes, drawing wide arcs and figures of freedom in the air. Presently I topped the crisis, and drew a deep breath.
“Tell me,” I said—“have you ever in all your life known fear?”
The Regius Professor sat to consider.
“Well,” he answered presently, rubbing his chin, “I was certainly once near losing hold of my will, if that’s what you mean. Of course, if Ihadlet go——”
“But you didn’t.”
“No,” he said thoughtfully. “No—luckily.”
“You’re not taking credit for it?”
“Credit!” he exclaimed, surprised. “Why should I take credit for my freedom from a constitutional infirmity? In one way, indeed, I am only regretful that I am debarred that side of self-analysis.”
I could laugh lovelily, for the first time.
“Well,” I said, “will you tell me the story?”
“I never considered it in the light of a story,” answered the Regius Professor. “But, if it will amuse and distract you, I will make it one with pleasure. My memory of it, as an only experience in that direction, is quite vivid, I think I may say—” and he settled his spectacles, and began:
“It was during the period of my first appointment as Science Demonstrator to the Park Lane Polytechnic, a post which my little pamphlet on the Reef-building Serpulæ was instrumental in procuring me. I was a young man at the time, with a wide field of interests, but with few friends to help me in exploring it. My holidays I generally devoted to long, lonely tramps, knapsack on back, about the country.
“It was on one of these occasions that you must picture me entered into a solitary valley among the Shropshire hills. The season was winter; it was bitterly cold, and the prospect was of the dreariest. The interesting conformations of the land—the bone-structure, as I might say—were blunted under a thick pelt of snow, which made walking a labour. One never recognizes under such conditions the extent of one’s efforts, as inequalities of ground are without the contrast of surroundings to emphasize them, and one may be conscious of the strain of a gradient, and not know if it is of one foot in fifty or in five hundred.
“The scene was desolate to a degree; houseless, almost treeless—just white wastes and leaden sky, and the eternal fusing of the two in an indefinite horizon. I was wondering, without feeling actually dispirited, how long it was to last, when, turning the shoulder of a hill which had seemed to hump itself in my path, I came straight upon a tiny hamlet scattered over a widish area. There were some cottages, and a slated school building; and, showing above a lower hump a quarter of a mile beyond, the roofs and tall chimney of a factory.
“It was a stark little oasis, sure enough—the most grudging of moral respites from depression. Only from one place, it seemed, broke a green shoot. Not a moving figure was abroad; not a face looked from a window. Deathlily exclusive, the little stony buildings stood apart from one another, incurious, sullen, and self-contained.
“There was, however, the green shoot; and the stock from which it proceeded was the school building. That in itself was unlovely enough—a bleak little stone box in an arid enclosure. It looked hunched and grey with cold; and the sooty line of thaw at the foot of its wall only underscored its frostiness. But as if that one green shoot were the earnest of life lingering within, there suddenly broke through its walls the voices of young children singing; and, in the sound, the atmosphere of petrifaction lifted somewhat.
“Yes? What is it? Does anything amuse you? I am glad you are so far recovered, at least. Well——
“I like, I must confess, neither children nor music. At the same time, I am free to admit that those young voices, though they dismissed me promptly on my way, dismissed me pleased, and to a certain degree, as it were, reinvigorated. I passed through that little frigid camp of outer silence, and swung down the road towards the factory. As I advanced towards what I should have thought to be the one busy nucleus of an isolated colony, the aspect of desolation intensified, to my surprise, rather than diminished. But I soon saw the reason for this. The great forge in the hills was nothing but a wrecked and abandoned ruin, its fires long quenched, its ribs long laid bare. Seeing which, it only appeared to me a strange thing that any of the human part of its affairs should yet cling to its neighbourhood; and stranger still I thought it when I came to learn, as I did by and by, that its devastation was at that date an ancient story.
“What a squalid carcass it did look, to be sure; gaunt, and unclean, and ravaged by fire from crown to basement. The great flue of it stood up alone, a blackened monument to its black memory.
“Approaching and entering, I saw some writhed and tortured guts of machinery, relics of its old vital organs, fallen, withered, from its ribs. The floor, clammy to the tread, was littered with tumbled masonry; the sheet iron of the roof was shattered in a hundred places under the merciless bombardment of the weather; and, here and there, a scale of this was corroded so thin that it fluttered and buzzed in the draught like a ventilator. Bats of grimy cobweb hung from the beams; and the dead breath of all the dead place was acrid with cold soot.
“It was all ugly and sordid enough, in truth, and I had no reason to be exacting in my inspection of it. Turning, in a vaulting silence, I was about to make my way out, when my attention was drawn to the black opening of what looked like a shed or annex to the main factory. Something, some shaft or plant, revealing itself from the dim obscurity of this place, attracted my curiosity. I walked thither, and, with all due precaution because of the littered ground, entered. I was some moments in adapting my vision to the gloom, and then I discovered that I was in the mill well-house. It was a little dead-locked chamber, its details only partly decipherable in the reflected light which came in by the doorway. The well itself was sunk in the very middle of the floor, and the projecting wall of it rose scarce higher than my knees. The windlass, pivoted in a massive yoke, crossed the twilight at a height a little above my own; and I could easily understand, by the apparent diameter of its barrel, that the well was of a considerable depth.
“Now, as my eyes grew a little accustomed to the obscurity, I could see how a tooth of fire had cut even into this fastness. For the rope, which was fully reeled up upon the windlass, was scorched to one side, as though some exploded fragment of wood or brickwork had alighted there. It was an insignificant fact in itself, but my chance observation of it has its importance in the context; as has also the fact that the bight of the rope (from which the bucket had been removed) hung down a yard or so below the big drum.
“You have always considered me a sapient, or at least a rational creature, have you not? Well, listen to this. Bending over to plumb with my eyes the depth of the pit (an absurdity, to begin with, in that vortex of gloom), I caught with my left hand (wisdom number two) at the hanging end of rope in order to steady myself. On the instant the barrel made one swift revolution, and stuck. The movement, however, had thrown me forward and down, so that my head and shoulders, hanging over, and actually into, the well, pulled me, without possibility of recovery, from my centre of gravity. With a convulsive wrench of my body, I succeeded in bringing my right hand to the support of my left. I was then secure of the rope; but the violence of the act dragged my feet and knees from their last desperate hold, and my legs came whipping helpless over the well-rim. The weight of them in falling near jerked me from my clutch—a bad shock, to begin with. But a worse was in store for me. For I perceived, in the next instant, that the rusty, long-disused windlass was beginning slowly to revolve,and was letting me down into the abyss.
“I broke out in a sweat, I confess—a mere diaphoresis of nature; a sort of lubricant to the jammed mechanism of the nerves. I don’t think we are justified in attributing my first sensations to fear. I was exalted, rather—promoted to the analysis of a very exquisite, scarce mortal, problem. My will, as I hung by a hair over the abysm, was called upon to vindicate itself under an utmost stress of apprehension. I felt, ridiculous as it may appear, as if the surrounding dark were peopled with an invisible auditory, waiting, curious, to test the value of my philosophy.
“Here, then, were the practical problems I had to combat. The windlass, as I have said, revolved slowly, but it revolved persistently. If I would remain with my head above the well-rim—which, I freely admit, I had an unphilosophic desire to do—I must swarm as persistently up the rope. That was an eerie and airy sort of treadmill. To climb, and climb, and always climb, paying out the cord beneath me, that I might remain in one place! It was to repudiate gravitation, which I spurned from beneath my feet into the depths. But when, momentarily exhausted, I ventured to pause, some nightmare revolt against the sense of sinking which seized me, would always send me struggling and wriggling, like a drowning body, up to the surface again. Fortunately, I was slightly built and active; yet I knew that wind and muscle were bound sometime to give out in this swarming competition against death. I measured their chances against the length of the rope. There was a desperate coil yet unwound. Moreover, in proportion as I grew the feebler, grew the need for my greater activity. For there were already signs that the great groaning windlass was casting its rust of ages, and was beginning to turn quicker in its sockets. If it had only stuck, paused one minute in its eternal round, I might have set myself oscillating, gradually and cautiously, until I was able to seize with one hand, then another, upon the brick rim, which was otherwise beyond my reach. But now, did I cease climbing for an instant and attempt a frantic clutch at it, down I sank like a clock weight, my fingers trailed a yard in cold slime, and there I was at my mad swarming once more—the madder that I must now make up for lost ground.
“At last, faint with fatigue, I was driven to face an alternative resource, very disagreeable from the first in prospect. This was no less than to resign temporarily my possession of the upper, and sink to the under world; in other words, to let myself go with the rope, and, when it was all reeled out, to climb it again. To this course there were two objections: one, that I knew nothing of the depth of the water beneath me, or of how soon I should come to it; the other, that I was grown physically incapable of any further great effort in the way of climbing. My reluctance to forgo the useless solace of the upper twilight I dismiss as sentimental. But to drop into that sooty pit, and then, perhaps, to find myself unable to reascend it! to feel a gradual paralysis of heart and muscle committing me to a lingering and quite unspeakable death—that was an unnerving thought indeed!
“Nevertheless, I had actually resolved upon the venture, and was on the point of ceasing all effort, and permitting myself to sink, when—I thought of the burnt place in the rope.
“Do you grasp what that sudden thought meant to me? Death, sir, in any case; death, if, with benumbed and aching hands and blistered knees, I continued to work my air-mill; death, no earlier and no later, no less and no more certainly, if I ceased of the useless struggle and went down into the depths. So soon as the strain of my hanging should tell direct upon that scorched strand, that strand must part.
“Then, I think, I knew fear—fear as demoralizing, perhaps, as it may be, short of the will-surrender. And, indeed, I’m not sure but that the will which survives fear may not be a worse last condition than fear itself, which, when exquisite, becomes oblivion. Consciousnessin extremishas never seemed to me the desirable thing which some hold it.
“Still, if I suffered for retaining my will power, there is no doubt that its loss, on the flash of that deadly reflection, would have meant an immediate syncope of nerve and an instant downfall; whereas—well, anyhow, here I am.
“I was fast draining of all capacity for further effort. I climbed painfully, spasmodically; but still I climbed, half hoping I should die of the toil of it before I fell. Ever and again I would glance faintly up at the snarling, slowly-revolving barrel above me, and mark how death, as figured in that scorched strand, was approaching me nearer at every turn. It was only a few coils away, when suddenly I set to doing what, goodness knows, I should have done earlier. I screamed—screamed until the dead marrow must have crawled in the very bones of the place.
“Nothing human answered—not a voice, not the sound of a footfall. Only the echoes laughed and chattered like monkeys up in the broken roof of the factory. For the rest, my too-late outburst had but served to sap what little energy yet remained to me.
“The end was come. Looking up, I saw the burnt strand reeling round, a couple of turns away, to the test; and, with a final gulp of horror, I threw up the sponge, and sank.
“I had not descended a yard or two, when my feet touched something.”
The Regius Professor paused dramatically.
“O, go on!” I snapped.
“That something,” he said, “yielded a little—settled—and there all at once was I, standing as firmly as if I were in a pulpit.
“For the moment, I assure you, I was so benumbed, physically and mentally, that I was conscious of nothing in myself but a small weak impatience at finding the awful ecstasy of my descent checked. Then reason returned, like blood to the veins of a person half drowned; and I had never before realized that reason could make a man ache so.
“With the cessation of my strain upon it, the windlass had ceased to revolve. Now, with a sudden desperation, I was tugging at the rope once more—pulling it down hand over hand. At the fifth haul there came a little quick report, and I staggered and near fell. The rope had snapped; and the upper slack of it came whipping down upon my shoulders.
“I rose, dimly aware of what had happened. I was standing on the piled-up fathoms of rope which I had paid out beneath me. Above, though still beyond my effective winning, glimmered the moon-like disk of light which was the well mouth. I dared not, uncertain of the nature of my tenure, risk a spring for it. But, very cautiously, I found the end of the rope that had come away, made a bend in it well clear of the injured part, and, after many vain attempts, slung it clean over the yoke above, coaxed down the slack, spliced it to the other, and so made myself a fixed ladder to climb by. Up this, after a short interval for rest, I swarmed, set myself swinging, grasped the brick rim, first with one hand, then with both, and in another instant had flung myself upon the ground prostrate, and for the moment quite prostrated. Then presently I got up, struck some matches, and investigated.”
The Regius Professor stopped, laughing a little over the memory.
“Dogo on!” I said.
“Why,” he responded, chuckling, “generations of school children had been pitching litter into that well, until it was filled up to within a couple yards of the top—just that. The rope, heaping up under me, did the rest. It was a testimony to the limited resources of the valley. What the little natives of to-day do with their odd time, goodness knows. But it was comical, wasn’t it?”
“O, most!” said I. “And particularly from the point of view of the children’s return to you for your dislike of them.”
“Well, as to that,” said the Regius Professor, rather shamefacedly, “I wasn’t beyond acknowledging a certain indebtedness.”
“Acknowledging? How?”
“Why, I happened to have in my knapsack one of my pamphlets on the Reef-building Serpulæ; so I went back to the school, and gave it to the mistress to include in her curriculum.”
Migueland Nicanor were the Damon and Phintias of Lima. Their devotion to one another, in a city of gamblers—who are not, as a rule, very wont to sentimental and disinterested friendships—was a standing pleasantry. The children of rich Peruvian neighbours, they had grown up together, passed their school-days together (at an English Catholic seminary), and were at last, in the dawn of their young manhood, to make the “grand tour” in each other’s company, preparatory to their entering upon the serious business of life, which was to pile wealth on wealth in their respective fathers’ offices.
In the meanwhile, awaiting a prosaic destiny, they continued inseparable—a proverb for clean though passionate affection.
The strange thing was that, in the matters of temperament and physique, they appeared to have nothing in common. Nicanor, the younger by a few months, was a little dark, curly-haired creature, bright-eyed as a mouse. He was, in fact, almost a dwarf, and with all the wit, excitability, and vivaciousness which one is inclined to associate with elfishness. At the same time he was perfectly formed—a man in miniature, a little sheath crammed with a big dagger.
Miguel, on the other hand, was large and placid, a smooth, slumberous faun of a youth, smiling and good-natured. He never said anything fine; he never did anything noteworthy; he was not so much admirable as lovable.
The two started, well-equipped in every way, on their tour. The flocks of buzzards, which are the scavengers of Lima, flapped them good-bye with approval. They were too sweetening an element to be popular with the birds.
Miguel and Nicanor travelled overland to Cayenne, in French Guiana, where they took boat for Marseilles, whence they were to proceed to the capital. The circular tour of the world, for all who would make it comprehensively, dates from Paris and ends there. They sailed in a fine vessel, and made many charming acquaintances on board.
Among these was Mademoiselle Suzanne, called also de la Vénerie, which one might interpret into Suzanne of the chase, or Suzanne of the kennel, according to one’s point of view. She had nothing in common with Diana, at least, unless it were a very seductive personality. She was a fashionable Parisian actress, travelling for her health, or perhaps for the health of Paris—much in the manner of the London gentleman, who was encountered touring alone on the Continent because his wife had been ordered change of air.
Suzanne, as a matter of course, fell in love with Miguel first, for his white teeth and sleepy comeliness; and then with Nicanor, for his impudent bright spirit. That was the beginning and end of the trouble.
One moonlight night, in mid-Atlantic, Miguel and Nicanor came together on deck. The funnel of the steamer belched an enormous smoke, which seemed to reach all the way back to Cayenne.
“I hate it,” said Nicanor; “don’t you? It is like a huge cable paid out and paid out, while we drift further from home. If they would only stop a little, keeping it at the stretch, while we swarmed back by it, and left the ship to go on without us!”
Miguel laughed; then sighed.
“Dear Nicanor,” he said; “I will have nothing more to do with her, if it will make you happy.”
“I was thinking ofyourhappiness, Miguel,” said Nicanor. “If I could only be certain that it would not be affected by what I have to tell you!”
“What have you to tell me, old Nicanor?”
“You must not be mistaken, Miguel. Your having nothing more to do with her would not lay the shadow of our separation, which the prospect of my union with her raises between us—though it would certainly comfort me a little on your behalf.”
“I did not mean that at all, Nicanor. I meant that, for your sake, I would even renounce my right to her hand.”
“That would be an easy renunciation, dear Miguel. I honour your affection; but I confess I expect more from it than a show of yielding, for its particular sake, what, in fact, is not yours to yield.”
Miguel had been leaning over the taffrail, looking at the white wraiths of water which coiled and beckoned from the prow. Now he came upright, and spoke in his soft slow voice, which was always like that of one just stretching awake out of slumber—
“I cannot take quite that view, Nicanor, though I should like to. But I do so hate a misunderstanding, at all times; and when it is with you——!”