"They trussed me up like a fowl, carried me into the hall, and didn't the old red-headed devil spit and curse? You've never seen nothing like it, sir. Sure raving mad he was that time all right. And he came and kicked me on the face and pulled my beard and spat in my eyes. I don't know what's coming to us right now, but I pray the Almighty Father to give me just one turn with my fist. I'll land him.
"Then, sir, they carried me upstairs and tumbled me into a dark room. There I was for I wouldn't like to say how long. Then they came in and took my things off me, the dirty foreigners. It's only a foreigner would think of a thing like that. I struggled a bit, but what's the use? They put their thumb in your back and they've got you. Then they tied me up here. I had to laugh, I did really. Did you ever see such a comic picture as all three of us without a stitch between us tied up here at six in the morning?
"When I tell mother about it she'll laugh all right. Like the show down to St. Ives when they have the boxing. I suppose we'll be getting out of this all serene, sir, won't we?"
"Of course we will," said Dunbar. "Don't you worry, Jabez. He's been doing all this to frighten us. He daren't touch us really. Why, he'll have the county about his ears as it is. Don't you worry."
"Thank you, sir," said Jabez, still moving from side to side within the bands, "because you see, sir, I wouldn't like anything to happen to me just now. Mother's expectin' an addition to the family in a month or so and there's six on 'em already, an' it needs a bit of doing looking after them all. I wouldn't have been working for this dirty blackguard here if it hadn't been for there being so many of us—not that I'd have one of them away if you understand me, sir."
"You needn't be afraid, Jabez," Dunbar said. "When we get out of this Mr. Harkness and I will see that you never have any anxiety again. You've been a wonderful friend to us to-night and we're not likely to forget it."
"Oh, don't you mistake me, sir," said Jabez. "It wasn't no help I was asking for. I'm doing very well with the boat and the potatoes. It was only I was thinking I wouldn't like nothing exactly to happen to me along of this crazy lunatic here if you understand me, sir. . . . I'm not so sure if they give me time I couldn't get through these bits of rope here. I'm pretty strong in the arm, or used to be—not so dusty even now. If I could work at them a bit——"
The door opened and Crispin came in.
He appeared to Harkness as he stepped in, quietly closing the door behind him, like some strange creature of a dream. He seemed himself, in the way that he moved with his eyes nearly closed, somnambulistic. He was wearing now only his white silk pyjamas, and of these the sleeves were rolled up showing his fat white arms. His red hair stood on end like an ill-fitting wig. In one hand he carried a curved knife with a handle of worked gold.
In the room, blazing with sunlight, he was like a creature straight from the boards of some neighbouring theatre, even to the white powder that lay in dry flakes upon his face.
He opened his eyes, staring at the sunlight, and in their depths Harkness saw the strangest mingling of terror, pathos, eager lust, and a bewildered amazement, as though he were tranced. The gaze with which he turned to Harkness had in it a sudden appeal; then that appeal sank like light quenched by water.
He was wrung up on the instant to intensest excitement. His whole body trembled. His mouth opened as though he would speak, then closed again.
He came close to Harkness. He put out his hand and touched his neck.
"We are alone," he said, in his soft beautiful voice. He stroked Harkness's neck. The soft boneless fingers. Harkness looked at him, and, strangely, at that moment their eyes were very close to one another. They looked at one another gently. In Harkness's eyes was no malice; in Crispin's that strange mingling of lust and unhappiness.
Harkness only said: "Crispin, whatever you do to us leave that girl alone. I beg you leave her. . . ."
He closed his eyes then. God helping him he would not speak another word. But a triumphant exultation surged through him because he knew that he was not afraid.
There was no fear in him. It was as though the warm sun beating on his body gave him courage.
Standing behind the safeguard of his closed eyes his real soul seemed to slip away, to run down the circular staircase into the hall and pass happily into the garden, down the road to the sea.
His soul was free and Crispin's was imprisoned.
He heard Crispin's voice: "Will you admit now that I have you in my hand? If I touch you here how you will bleed—bleed to death if I do not prevent it. Do you remember Shylock and his pound of flesh? 'Oh! upright Judge!' But there is no judge here to stay me!"
The knife touched him. He felt it as though it had been a wasp's sting—a small cut it must be—and suddenly there was the cool trickle of blood down his skin. Then his right shoulder—a prick! Now a cut again on his arm. Stings—nothing more. But the end had really come then at last? His hands beneath the bonds moved suddenly of their own impulse. It was not natural not to strive to be free, to fight for his life.
He opened his eyes. He was bleeding from five or six little cuts. Crispin was standing away from him. He saw that Dunbar, crimson in the face, was struggling frantically with his cords and was shouting. Jabez, too, was calling out. The room, hitherto so quiet, was alive with movement. Crispin now stood back from him watching him. The sight of blood had completed what these weeks had been preparing.
With that first touch of the knife on Harkness's body Crispin's soul had died. The battle was over. There was an animal here clothed fantastically in human clothes like a monkey or a dog at a music-hall show. The animal capered, stood on its hind legs, mowed in the air with its hands. It crept up to Harkness and, whining like a dog, pricked him with the knife point now here, now there, in a hundred places.
Harkness looked out once more at the great window with its splash of glorious sky, then ceased to struggle with his cords. His lips moved in some prayer perhaps, and once more, surely now for the last time, he closed his eyes. He had a strange vision of all the moving world beyond that window. At that moment at the hotel the maids would be sweeping the corridors, people would be stirring and rubbing their eyes and looking at their watches; in the town family breakfasts would be preparing, men would be sauntering down the narrow streets to their work; the connection with the London train would be running in with the London papers, already the men and women would be in the fields, the women would be waiting perhaps for the fishing-fleet to come in, Mrs. Jabez would be at the cottage door looking up the road for her husband. . . .
His heart pounded into his mouth, with a mighty impulse he drove it back. Crispin was laughing. The knife was raised. His face was wrinkled. He was running round the room, round and round, making with the knife strange movements in the air. He was whispering to himself. Round and round and round he ran, words pouring from his mouth in a thick unending stream. They were not words, they were sounds, and once and again a strange sigh like a catch of the breath, like a choke in the throat. He ran, bending, not looking at the three men, bending low as though as he ran he were looking for something on the floor.
Then quite suddenly he straightened himself, and with a growl and a snarl, the knife raised in one hand, hurled himself at Jabez.
All followed then quickly. The knife flashed in the sunlight. It seemed that the hands caught at Jabez's eyes, first one and then another, but there had been more than the hands because suddenly blood poured from those eyes, spouting over, covering the face, mingling with the beard.
With a great cry Jabez put forth his strength. Stung by agony to a power that he had never known until then his body seemed to rise from the ground, to become something superhuman, immortal. The great head towered, the limbs spread out, it seemed for a moment as though the pillar itself would fall.
The cord that tied him to the pillar snapped and his hands were free. He tottered, the blood pouring from his face. He moved, blindly, staggering. Not a sound had come from him since that first cry.
His hands flung out, and in another moment Crispin was caught into his arms. He raised him. The little fat hands fluttered. The knife flashed loosely and fell to the ground. The giant swung into the middle of the room blinded, but holding to himself ever tighter and ever tighter the short fat body.
Crispin, his head tossed back, his legs flung out in an agony now of terror, screamed with a strange shrill cry like a rabbit entrapped.
Jabez turned, and now he had Crispin's soft chest against his bleeding face, the arms fluttering above his head. As he turned his shoulder touched the glass of the window. He pushed backward with his arm and the window swung open, some of the broken glass tinkling to the ground. There was a great rush of air.
That strange thing, like no human body, the white silk, the brown slippers, the red hair, swung. For one second of time, suspended as it were on the thread of that long animal scream, so shrill and yet so thin and distant, the white face, its little eyes staring, the painted mouth open, hung towards Harkness. Then into the air like a coloured bundle of worthless junk, for a moment a dark shadow across the steeple of sunlight, and then down, down, into fathomless depths of air, leaving the space of sky stainless, the morning blue without taint. . . .
Jabez stood for a moment facing them, his chest heaving in convulsive pants. Then crying, "My eyes! My eyes!" crumpled to the floor.
First Harkness was conscious of a wonderful silence. Then into the silence, borne in on the back of the sea breeze, he heard the wild chattering of a multitude of birds. The room was filled with their chatter, up from the trees, crowding the room with their life.
Straight past the window, like an arrow shot from a bow, flashed a sea-gull. Then another more slowly wheeled down, curving against the blue like a wave released into air.
He recognized all these things, and then once again that wonderful blessed stillness. All was peace, all repose. He might rest for ever.
After, it seemed, an infinity of time, and from a vast distance, he caught Dunbar's voice:
". . . Jabez! Jabez! Jabez, old fellow! The man's fainted. Harkness, are you all right? Did he hurt you?"
"No," Harkness quietly answered. "He didn't hurt me. He meant to, though. . . ." Then a green curtain of dark thick cloth swept through the heavens and caught him into its folds. He knew nothing more. The last thing he heard was the glorious happy chattering of the birds.
He slowly climbed an infinity of stairs, up and up and up. The stairs were hard to climb, but he knew that at their summit there would be a glorious view, and, for that view, he would undergo any hardship. But oh! he was tired, desperately tired. He could hardly raise one foot above another.
He had been walking with his eyes closed because it was cooler that way. Then a bee stung him. Then another. On the chest. Now on the arm. Now a whole flight. He cried out. He opened his eyes.
He was lying on a bed. People were about him. He had been climbing those stairs naked. It would never do that those strangers should see him. He must speak of it. His hand touched cloth. He was wearing trousers. His chest was bare, and some one was bending over him touching places here and there on his body with something that stung. Not bees after all. He looked up with mildly wondering eyes and saw a face bending over him—a kindly bearded face, a face that he could trust. Not like—not like—that strange mask face of the Japanese. . . . That other. . . .
He struggled on to his elbow crying: "No, no. I can't any more. I've had enough. He's mad, I tell you——"
A kind rough voice said to him: "That's all right, my friend. That's all over. No harm done——"
My friend! That sounded good. He looked round him and in the distance saw Dunbar. He broke into smiles holding out his hand.
"Dunbar, old man! That's fine. So you're all right?"
Dunbar came over, sat on his bed, putting his arm around him.
"All right? I should think so. So are we all. Even Jabez isn't much the worse. That devil missed his eyes, thank heaven. He'll have two scars to the end of his time to remind him, though."
Harkness sat up. He knew now where he was, on a sofa in the hall—in the hall with the tattered banners and the clock that coughed like a dog. He looked at the clock—just a quarter to seven! Only three-quarters of an hour since that awful knock on the door.
Then he saw Hesther.
"Oh, thank God!" he whispered to himself. "Nunc dimittis. . . ."
She came to him. The three sat together on the sofa, the bearded man (the doctor from the village under the cliff, Harkness afterwards found) standing back, looking at them, smiling.
"Now tell me," Harkness said, looking at Dunbar, "the rest that I don't know."
"There isn't much to tell. We were only there another ten minutes. When you fainted off I felt a bit queer myself, but I just kept together, and then heard some one running up the stairs.
"I thought it was one of the Japs returning, but there was a great banging on the door and then shouting in a good old Cornish accent. I called back that I was tied up in there and that they must break in the door. That they did and burst in—two fishermen and old Possiter the policeman from Duntrent. He's somewhere about the house now with two of the Treliss policemen. Well, it seems that a fellow, Jack Curtis, was going up the hill to his morning work in the Creppit fields above the wood here when he heard a strange cry, and, turning the corner of the road, finds on the path above the rocks, Crispin—pretty smashed up you know. He ran—only a yard or two—to the Possiters' cottage. Possiter was having his breakfast and was up here in no time. They got into the house through a window and saw the two Japanese clearing off up the back garden. Curtis chased them but they beat him and vanished into the wood. They stopped two other men who were passing and then came on Hesther tied up in the library. She sent them to the Tower."
"Well—and then?" said Harkness.
"There isn't much more. Except this. They got up the doctor, had poor old Jabez's face looked to and cleared him off down to his cottage, were examining your cuts—all this down here. Suddenly a car comes up to the door and in there bursts—young Crispin! The two Treliss policemen had turned up three minutes earlier intheircar and were here alone except for Possiter examining Crispin Senior—who was pretty well smashed to pieces I can tell you.
"Crispin Junior breaks through, gives one look at his father, shouts out some words that no one can understand, puts a revolver to his temple and blows the top of his head off before any one can stop him. Topples right over his father's body. The end of the house of Crispin!
"I saw all this from the staircase. I was just coming down after looking at you. I heard the shot, saw old Possiter jump back and got down in time to help them clear it all up.
"No one knows where he'd been. To Truro, I imagine, looking for all of us. He must have cared for that madman, cared for him or been hypnotised by him—Idon't know. At least he didn't hesitate——"
"And now, sir, would you mind telling me . . .?" said the stout red-faced Treliss policeman, advancing towards them.
He was free; it was from the moment that the red-faced policeman, smiling upon him benevolently, had informed him that, for the moment, he had had from him all that he needed, his one burning and determined impulse—to get away from that hall, that garden, that house with the utmost possible urgency.
He had not wished even to stay with Hesther and Dunbar. He would see them later in the day, would see them, please God, many many times in the years to come.
What he wanted was to be alone—absolutely alone.
The cuts on the upper part of his body were nothing—a little iodine would heal them soon; it seemed that there had come to him no physical harm—only an amazing all-invading weariness. It was not like any weariness that he had ever before known. He imagined—he had had no positive experience—that it resembled the conditions of some happy doped trance, some dream-state in which the world was a vision and oneself a disembodied spirit. It was as though his body, stricken with an agony of weariness, was waiting for his descent, but his soul remained high in air in a bell of crystal glass beyond whose surface the colours of the world floated about him.
He left them all—the doctor, the policeman, Dunbar and Hesther. He did not even stop at Jabez's cottage to inquire. That was for later. As half-past seven struck from the church tower below the hill he flung the gate behind him, crossed the road, and struck off on to the Downs above the sea.
By a kind of second sight he knew exactly where he would go. There was a path that crossed the Downs that ran slipping into a little cove, across whose breast a stream trickled, then up on to the Downs again, pushing up over fields of corn, past the cottage gardens up to the very gate of the hotel.
It was all mapped in his mind in bright clear-painted colours.
The world was indeed as though it had only that morning been painted in green and blue and gold. While the fog hung, under its canopy the master-artist had been at work. Now from the shoulder of the Downs a shimmer of mist tempered the splendour of the day. Harkness could see it all. The long line of sea on whose blue surface three white sails hovered, the bend of the Downs where it turned to deeper green, the dip of the hill out of whose hollow the church spire like a spear steel-tipped gesticulated, the rising hill with the wood and the tall white tower, the green Downs far to the right where tiny sheep like flowers quivered in the early morning haze.
All was peace. The rustling whisper of the sea, the breeze moving through the taller grasses, the hum of tiny insects, a lark singing, two dogs barking in rivalry, a scent of herb and salt and fashioned soil, all these things were peace.
Harkness moved a free man as he had never been in all his life as yet. He was his own master and God's servant too. Life might be a dream—it seemed to him that it was—but it was a dream with a meaning, and the events of that night had given him the key.
His egotism was gone. He wanted nothing for himself any more. He was, and would always be, himself, but also he had lost himself in the common life of man. He was himself because his contact with beauty was his own. Beauty belonged to all men in common, and it was through beauty that they came to God, but each man found beauty in his own way, and, having found it, joined his portion of it to the common stock.
He had been shy of man and was shy no longer; he had been in love, was in love now, but had surrendered it; he had been afraid of physical pain and was afraid no longer; he had looked his enemy in the eyes and borne him no ill-will.
But he was conscious of none of these things—only of the freshness of the morning, of the scents that came to him from every side, and of this strange disembodied state so that he seemed to float, like gossamer, on air.
He went down the path to the little cove. He watched the ripple of water advance and retreat. The stream of fresh water that ran through it was crystal clear and he bent down, made a cup with his hands and drank. He could see the pebbles, brown and red and green like jewels, and thin spires of green weed swaying to and fro.
He buried his face in the water, letting it wash his eyes, his forehead, his nostrils, his mouth.
He stood up and drank in the silence. The ripple of the sea was like the touch on his arm of a friend. He kneeled down and let the fine sand run, hot, through his fingers. Then he moved on.
He climbed the hill: a flock of sheep passed him, huddling together, crying, nosing the hedge. The sun touched the outline of their fleece to shining light. He cried out to the shepherd:
"A fine morning!"
"Aye, a beautiful morning!"
"A nasty fog last night."
"Aye, aye—all cleared off now though. It'll be a warm day."
The dog, his tongue out, his eyes shining, ran barking hither, thither. They passed over the hill, the sheep like a cloud against the green.
He pushed up, the breeze blowing more strongly now on his forehead.
He reached the cottage gardens, and the smell of roses was once more thick in his nostrils. The chimneys were sending silver skeins of smoke into the blue air. Bacon smells and scent of fresh bread came to him.
He was at the hotel gates. Oh, but he was weary now! Weary and happy. He stumbled up the path smelling the roses again. Into the hall. The gong was ringing for breakfast. Children, crying out and laughing, raced down the stairs, passed him. He reached his room. He opened the door. How quiet it was! Just as he had left it.
Ah! there was the tree of the "St. Gilles," and there the grave friendly eyes of Strang leaning over the etching-table to greet him.
Just as they were—but he!—not as he had been! He caught his face in the glass smiling idiotically.
He staggered to his bed, flung himself down still smiling. His eyes closed. There floated up to him a face—a little white face crowned with red hair, but not evil now, not animal—friendly, lonely, asking for something. . . .
He smiled, promising something. Lifted his hand. Then his hand fell, and he sank deep, deep, deep into happy, blissful slumber.