CHAPTER XI.A CLEAN BREAST OF ITAs discoveries of moment hidden for long years or through all past time will suddenly and simultaneously burst, like Neptune, upon students widely separated, yet pursuing one goal by divers roads, so now this extraordinary circumstance stumbled upon by Jonah Cramphorn and his companion during their secret enterprise was noised abroad within a fortnight, yet without any action or intervention from them.It is true that, despite his solemn promises, Henry Collins soon found himself constitutionally unequal to preserving the secret, and he confessed the same within a week of the incidents relating to it; but those before whom he published his experience took no step upon it until they heard the story in full detail at a later date. Then the whole curious truth was blazed abroad.Mr. Cramphorn, as soon as Noah Brimblecombe's keys were back on their nail without awakening of suspicion, shut up his adventure stoutly enough, while he pondered how best to reveal the discovery; but his accomplice found the position far less endurable. Henry existed henceforth like a man struggling under some grim incubus by day as well as night. Sleep deserted him; his head ached; he found himself bungling his work, and, upon this development, the man grew alarmed for his brains and believed that he must be going mad. Even poor Henry's love-star dwindled somewhat while yet this cloud of horror hung over him, and though he had won permission from Sally's father to propose marriage, such was the tremendous nature of the price paid and its appendage of mental chaos that he found himself unequal to thoughts on any other theme. He could not profit by his new powers for the present; indeed, he felt that, until this knowledge was shifted on to other shoulders, life would hold no happy moment. Five days he spent with his secret; then, being strung to a pitch when his promise to Jonah ceased to weigh with him, he determined to make a clean breast of the whole matter. Everything should be divulged excepting only the name of his partner. First rose the question of an ear for this confession, and, hesitating only a moment between Mark Endicott and Myles, Mr. Collins decided that he would tell them both. He thought also of the vicar, but held, doubtless correctly, that his personal offence would bulk larger in the eyes of Mr. Scobell than upon the view of those at Bear Down.Chance to make his revelation offered within two nights of Henry's decision, for then it happened that Cramphorn, his daughters, Churdles Ash, and other of the hands tramped off to Chagford, where a travelling circus was attracting the countryside. Henry, though he angered Sally not a little by refusing to accompany her, found an opportunity excellent for his purpose, and seized upon it. Left alone with the blind man and Stapledon, Collins began tremulously to tell his story; and his eyes rolled as he proceeded; and his voice often failed him or rose into high squeaks between gulps of emotion; but he made his meaning clear, and so lifted a weight from off his soul."Please, your honours, I've got a thing in my head as be burstin' it, an' I'll thank you to let me have a tell now I be alone with you. A devilish secret 'tis, an' I caan't keep my lips shut 'pon it no more, or I shall go daft.""Out with it then," said Stapledon. "Your brains weren't built for devilish secrets, Henry.""No, they wasn't," admitted Collins, "an' I'm glad to hear you allow it. I do best I can wi' the gifts I've got—an' who could do more? An' 'twas last week as I promised to go along wi' another man whose name theer ban't no call to mention. He'll answer for hisself 'pon the Judgment Day; but I can't wait so long. I wants to get it awver now.""Begin at the beginning, lad; talk quietly, and light your pipe. We're friends and shan't let out your secret where it can hurt you," said Mark."I'm sure I pray God to bless you for them words," answered Collins earnestly; "but I can't smoke—the very taste of tobacco be changed since. 'Tis like this—us wanted oil of man, which you might knaw 'bout, bein' so wise as you are.""An old wife's remedy—well?""Whether or no, it was told to my mate that awnly oil of man stood between missus here an' her death. So we ordained to fetch what was needed in the faace of all men.""For that old witch on the hill, I suppose?" asked Myles."I doan't name no names, axin' your humble pardon," answered Collins uneasily. "This is my awn sacred confession—awnly my business an' yours, if I may say it without rudeness. Anyway, we went for what was wanted; an' that was a man's head bones—a chap cut off in fulness of life for choice. An' my mate—a deep man, I allow that much—thought fust of Bill Cousins—him took off by sunstroke two years ago; an' then he reckoned 'twas beyond our power these short nights to dig for what we wanted between dimpsy-light of evening an' morn. An' when he comed to me he minded me how theer was quality buried above ground so well as poor folks under; an' a young man slain in his strength by mischance. Squire Christopher Yeoland he meant. A gashly auld thought, sure enough; yet us steeled ourselves to it.""You dared that sacrilege!" burst out Stapledon; but Collins merely stared at him. Time had taken the labourer so far beyond this point in the tragedy that not only did he forget its dramatic significance upon a new listener, but also how he himself had felt when Jonah first broke it to him."Ess; us set about the job. That ban't nothin'. 'Twas for love of missus us done it. An' I watched while t'other worked; an' when he stopped hammerin' an' I went back, he was starin' an' bristlin', 'cause afore him laid—not the gen'leman us counted 'pon—but a very auld, aged man, berry-brown from keepin', yet so sweet as a rose, wi' a gert white beard to un.""You broke into the wrong coffin!""No fay, us didn't. 'Tis the carpse what comed from furrin paarts—anyways the box as did. Christopher Yeoland, beggin' his pardon, was the name 'pon the brass. An' my mate was mazed; an' us hammered back the lead all suent and tidy, an' screwed on the lid, an' put un 'pon his shelf wance more an' slipped it home. That's the tale, an' I'll take my oath of it afore God A'mighty's angel."There followed a lengthy silence upon his story; then Mr. Collins made an end."'Tis the awful hardness of sharin' such a dreadful secret wi' wan other man as I caan't endure no more. An' I swear, by any deep word you choose, that I never meant no findin' of anybody's secrets—awnly gude to missus—as might have been saved by what we went for, but won't never be better without it.""That's as may be, Henry," said Mr. Endicott. "For the rest, this thing is somebody's secret, as you say. Anyway you're not weighed down with it now. You may hold yourself free of it, and if you take my advice, having eased your mind, you'll go off to rest with a quiet conscience. No great harm can fall on you at any rate. Perhaps none at all, for I'll wager it was Cramphorn, not you, who hatched this piece of folly.""Please, please, doan't name nobody, your honours!" implored Henry. "I promised the man to bide still as a worm 'bout it. In fact I swore I would. An' I did try to keep him off my tongue at any rate, an' thought as I had.""We shall not take any steps against him or you. Now go to bed and sleep. You've done the right thing in telling us; but don't tell anybody else."Mr. Collins, not sorry to depart, did so, and for some minutes Stapledon and the blind man continued to sit in silence, each busy with his own thoughts. Then Mark spoke."A stunning, dislocating, play-acting piece of foolery, if it's true. Yet somehow I know it is. There's a deal of light shed on darkness for me, and for you too I reckon, by such an upheaval.""Not so. I see no light—unless you believe this means that Christopher Yeoland may still be alive.""Yes, I think it means that; and such a return must be an earthquake more or less in all the lives that were once connected with him. Men can't die and live again without upsetting the world. A mad imagining. Perhaps no mother's son but him would have dreamed of it. But the motive——""That," said Myles quickly, "is all I can see. Knowing as much of the man as I do, so much looks clear. When Clack joined him, I sent a message. It was as urgent as need be, and to the effect that Honor loved him still. That she loved me too Clack probably added to my message. While one of us lived, Honor would never have married the other. So this thing he did to make her road easy.""If you're right, the puzzle comes together piece by piece.""Excepting the old man in the coffin—supposing that it was a man."Endicott reflected; then was struck with an idea."It may be that the death of this old man put the cranky thought into Yeoland's head. If it was his kinsman that lies there instead of himself, all's smoothed out. What simpler way to clear Honor's road? This parade of evidence is made that there may be no doubt in any mind. A Yeoland dies and is buried in the tomb of his forefathers. But after all it wasn't our Yeoland.""Did he mean to let this farce go on for ever?""No farce for him; yet, maybe, he got some solid joy out of it. A quick mind for all his vagabond, empty life. He saw the position, and reckoned that in fulness of time she might come to be a happy wife along with you. Then this old relative dies at the right moment and sets a spark to his imagination. No, I suppose we should never have known. His idea would be to keep his secret close hid for ever from those it concerned most—unless——"He broke off and pursued his reflections in silence. Myles waited for him to speak again, but the blind man only resumed his knitting."He blotted himself clean out of life for love of Honor," Stapledon at length declared."That I believe. A strange, unlawful deed, yet 'tis a question whether the law has any punishment. To think of the immense confusion of human life if many graves yielded up their dead again!""And what is our course? Who can benefit or suffer if we state these things? There's such huge folly about it when you think of details that I feel as if it must all be a nightmare of Henry's.""No, no; it's true enough.""Then he may be married himself by this time, and in a new home, with England a mere dream behind him?""I wish I thought he was, Myles—for—for general peace of mind; but I don't. If he had a live, guiding, absorbing passion, after Honor, it was Godleigh—the woods and hills and songs of Teign. These things were in his blood. If I know him, they might have drawn him back with bands of steel.""Why didn't they do so then?""How can we say that they didn't?""What! He may have been here—at our elbows?""I see the likelihood of that clearer than you, being blind. Yes, I can very easily think of him under shadow of night, with the true feel of a ghost, rambling beneath his own trees—his and not his—or listening to the river, or creeping to his own door when all men slept; or in the dawn—such a lover of cock-light as he was—he would steal through the dew with the birds to watch sunrise, then vanish and hide himself, or get above to some wild ridge of the moor and lie there till darkness gathered again. Such freaks would be meat and drink to him; and also to remember that he was only a live man in Australia, but a dead one in his own land. Just for argument suppose that was so; then look back a little way and think it out."But Myles could by no means divine his uncle's drift. Practical even before this surprise, he was looking to the future, not backward, for study of the past appeared vain, and doubly vain to him in this crisis."Not much use turning back," he said. "I want to know about the time to come. These two—Collins and Cramphorn—through their fool's errand have certainly unearthed an extraordinary fact: Christopher Yeoland's secret, so to call it. And it is for us to determine whether our duty is to proclaim the thing or not. There's Godleigh—it falls empty again next autumn, for the people don't renew their lease.""Well, Godleigh reverts to the man in Australia. The lawyers believe that man is an ancient settler; we know, or think we know, that the place has not really changed hands. Yeoland may reappear after giving Little Silver due warning.""Or, being a rolling stone, and probably no better off now than when he left England, he may stop in Australia. Still, there's the chance of his returning.""Be sure he will, even if he has not done so," said Mark Endicott firmly. "If 'tis only to the old life and old ways, he'll come back. He'll say, as likely as not, that the thing he meant to do is done. Honor is married and a happy wife. Who would deny him his own again after that sacrifice?""I only think of Honor and the awful shock to her. It might kill her.""Don't fret yourself there, or torture over that point. Now I'll say what will astound you: I think Honor may very possibly be less amazed and staggered at this news than ever you were, or I either.""Not amazed! What do you—what in God's name do you mean by that? That she knew? Knew it and hid it from me? That she suffers now because——"He broke off and sprang to his feet, while the other maintained silence and let the stricken man stride away his passion and regain his self-control. Soon enough Myles grew cool and contained. Then he walked to Mark and put his hand on the old man's shoulder."Forgive me; but this is the utter, blasting wreck and ruin of my whole life that you are hinting at," he said calmly."I hint at nothing," answered the other with unusual roughness. "Had I thought any such impossible thing I should have been as big a fool as you are. You ought to know your wife better than to believe she'd act a lie of that sort.""I don't believe it—I never said that I believed it Your words seemed to imply that you must believe it. Else why do you suggest that Honor would be less astonished to hear of this resurrection than you and I are?""If you had taken a look back as I bid you, Myles, instead of rushing forward without looking, you need not have asked me that question. Glance back, even now, and what has been dark as the pit may lighten and lift somewhat. Just call to mind the sorrow that has hung so heavily over us of late days—the little chick that we counted so precious—too soon."But Stapledon was in no mental mood for retrospective or other thought. A wide turmoil tossed the sea of his soul into storm; the terrible weakness of the strong got hold upon him, and he rocked in one of those moments when capacity to think deserts the mind, when intellect seems overwhelmed."I cannot see what you see," he said. "I admit that I am blind and a fool, but for God's sake don't ask me any more questions beyond my power to answer. Tell me what you think, or know, or believe you know. Consider what this means to me—the fact that Christopher Yeoland may be alive—may have stood behind a hedge yesterday, and watched me pass, and laughed. Don't you see? I've got Honor by falsehood—a false pretence—a fraud.""Not of your own breeding, if it is so. Your true and loving wife she is for all time now, whether the man be dead or alive—though of that there's a certain proof in my mind. I'd be the last to tear you with questions at this minute. I only wanted you to see what has rushed in upon me so sudden and fierce. Light in it every way—light in it for you and for Honor, I pray God. If what I make out of this puzzle is true, and Christopher Yeoland alive, then there may be matter for rejoicing in the fact rather than gloom. Not darkness anyway. Now call home to your mind that night in the woods, when at her silly whim, which I was fool enough to support, you took your wife for a drive to Lee Bridge.""I remember it well enough.""You left her to fetch water from the river, and while you were away she got out of the pony carriage, light-footed and silent as a moonbeam, to pick bluebells. Then suddenly there! Out of the mist and night—out of the dim woods—the man! Wandering alone no doubt They met, and she, being in no trim for such a fearful shock as the sight of one long dead walking the earth again, went down before it. Think of her suddenly eye to eye and face to face with him in the midst of night and sleep! It froze her blood, and froze the poor little one's blood too—that thawed no more. For she thought him a spectral thing, an' thinks so still—thinks so still! That's the dark secret she's dumb about and won't whisper to you or me, though she's been near telling us once or twice. That's what has been eating her heart out; that's what neither your prayers nor mine could get from her. She must be made to understand in careful words that will ask your best skill to choose aright She must learn that you have discovered what she's hiding, and that it was flesh and blood, not phantom, she saw. 'Tis a pity, if what I say is fact, that the fool ran away when he saw you coming to succour her. The harm was done by that time; and if we had known, how many of these ghost-haunted hours might we have saved her! I may be spinning thin air, yet I think what I tell is true."But Stapledon was glaring at the impassive face before him with a gaze that seemed to burrow through Mark's sightless eyes and reach his brain. Now Myles spoke in a voice unfamiliar to his listener, for it was loud-pitched and turbulent with sudden passion."That man killed my child!"A glass vessel 90 the dresser echoed the deep, dominant note of this cry and reverberated it; one moment of silence followed; and then came shuffle of feet on the flagged way, with laughter and echo of time-worn jests, as Churdles Ash, Pinsent, and the others returned from their pleasure. Mark Endicott, however, had opportunity for a final word."It may be as you say—a dark accident, and worse ten thousand times for him than even you. Be just—be very just to the madman, if he has really done this wayward deed and is coming back into your life again. Be just, and don't swerve an inch out of your even-handed course, for your road is like to get difficult if you do.""Us have viewed a gert pomp of braave horsemanship," announced Mr. Ash. "Never seed no better riders nor merry-men nowheer, though the hosses was poor.""An' Tommy Bates here be all for joinin' of 'em," laughed Samuel Pinsent; "but I tell un as he turns out his toes tu far to do any credit to hisself in such a wild course of life."CHAPTER XII.LIGHTBeside his sleeping wife did Stapledon recline, and endeavoured, through the hours of a weary night, to gather the significance of those great things that he had gleaned. Sometimes he surprised his own thought—as a man's conscience will often burst in roughly upon his mind—and found himself hoping that this news was untrue and that Christopher Yeoland filled a coffin, if not at Little Silver. But the edifice of probability so carefully reared by Mark Endicott showed no flaw, and even amid the mazes of his present doubt Myles found time to marvel at the ratiocination of the old man. Before this explanation it seemed difficult to believe that another clue to the puzzle existed. A note of inner unrest, a question within a question, finally brought Myles out of bed at dawn. He rose, soon stood in the air, and, through the familiar early freshness of day, walked upwards to the Moor for comfort. What was it to him if this harebrained soul had thus played at death? He, at least, was no dreamer, and moved upon solid ground. He passed beside the kingdom of the blue jasione and navel-wort on the old wall, while above him wind-worn beeches whispered in the dawn wind. From force of habit he stood at a gate and rested his arms upon the topmost bar, while his great dog roved for a rabbit. Now the man's eyes were lighted to the depths of their disquiet from the east, and at sight of the distant woods his thoughts turned back to that meeting responsible for his child's death. He had yet to learn from Honor whether his uncle's suspicion was correct concerning the incident, but little doubt existed within his mind, and he breathed heavily, and his emotions almost bordered upon malignity. Better such a futile soul under the earth in sober earnest. So ill-regulated a human machine looked worse than useless, for his erratic course impeded the progress of others more potent, and was itself a menace and a danger. This man had killed his little son—that child of many petitions and wide hopes; had crushed him, like a sweet wild flower under the heel of a fool. So bitterly he brooded; then pondered as to how his wife would receive this tremendous message.Upon the first heather ridges the cold breath of the Moor touched the man to patience and brought him nearer himself. He looked out into the dayspring; noted where one little flame-coloured forerunner of dawn already shone upon lofty granite afar off; and saw the Mist Mother rise from the ruddy seeding rushes of her sleeping-place. He beheld the ancient heron's grey pinion brighten to rose beside the river; heard cry of curlew and all the manifold music of the world waking again. Above him the sky flushed to the colours of the woodbine, while upon earth arose an incense and a savour of nightly dews sun-kissed. From marsh and moss, from the rush beds and the peat beds; from glimmering ridges cast upward by workers long gone by; from the bracken and the heather, and the cairns of the old stone men; from the gold eyes of the little tormentils, the blue eyes of the milkworts, the white stars of the galiums woven and interwoven through the texture of the budding heath—from each and all, to the horizon-line of peak and pinnacle, a risen sun won worship. Then did Stapledon's eyes soften somewhat and his brow clear in the great light, for there came songs from the Sons of the Morning—they who in time past had welcomed him as a brother; and their music, floating from the high places, soothed his troubled heart. Under that seraphic melody the life of man, his joys and his sorrows, peaked and dwindled to their just proportions; gradually he forgot his kind, and so thought only of the solemn world-order outspread, and the round earth rolling like an opal about the lamp of the sun, through God's own estate and seigniory of space.That hour and the steadfast nature of him presently retrieved his patience; then Myles shone forth unclouded as the morning. Recollection of his recent fret and passion surprised him. Who was he to exhibit such emotion? The Moor was his exemplar, and had been so since his boyish eyes first swept it understandingly. For him this huge, untamed delight was the only picture of the God he did not know, yet yearned to know; and now, as oftentimes of old, it cooled his blood, exalted his reflections, adjusted the distortions of life's wry focus, and sent him home in peace.Duty was the highest form of praise that he knew, and he prepared to fall back upon that. Let others order their brief journeys on lines fantastical or futile, he at least was wiser and knew better. He reflected that the folly of the world can injure no soul's vital spots. Only a man's self can wound himself mortally. He would live on agreeably to Nature—obedient as the granite to the soft, tireless touch of wind and rain; prompt as the bursting bud and uncurling tendril; patient as the cave spirits that build up pillars of stalagmite through unnumbered ages; faithful as the merle, whose music varies not from generation to generation. Life so lived would be life well guarded and beyond the power of outer evil to penetrate.So he believed very earnestly, and knew not that his noble theory asked a noble nature to practise it. Only a great man can use perfectly a great tool; and this obtains with higher rules of conduct than Stapledon's; for of all who profess and call themselves Christians, not one in a thousand is mentally equipped to be the thing he pretends, or even to understand the sweep and scope of what he professes. It is not roguery that makes three parts of Christendom loom hypocrite in a thinker's eyes, but mental and constitutional inability to grasp a gospel at once the most spiritual and material ever preached and misunderstood. Centuries of craft stretch between man and the Founder's meaning; confusion bred of passion has divided the House against itself; politics and the lust of power have turned religion into a piece of state machinery; and the rot at the root of the cumbrous fabric will, within half a century, bring all down in far-flung conflagration and ruin. Then may arise the immortal part out of the holocaust of the Letter, and Christianity, purged of churchcraft as from a pestilence, fly back to brood upon the human heart once more in the primal, rainbow glory of the Sermon on the Mount, preached under heaven by a Man to men.That day Myles Stapledon, with all caution and such choice of words as he had at command, broke the story to Honor, and his tactful language, born of love, was so skilful that the shock brought no immediate collapse with it. The narrative asked for some art, yet he developed it gradually, and found his reward where Mark had predicted. First Honor learnt what she herself had seen upon that fateful night; and when, in a very extremity of amazement, she confessed to the secret of a fancied spectre, Myles went further and led her to understand that what she had witnessed was flesh and blood, that a confusion, probably not intentional, had been created, and that Christopher Yeoland might be suspected still to live. Stapledon spared himself nothing in this narrative. Asked by his wife as to the reason that could have prompted her former lover to a step so extravagant, he reminded her of her own determination to marry neither of them; he explained how he had begged Christopher to come back, that her life might be as it had been; and added that doubtless the wanderer on his side, and for love of her alone, had put this trick upon them in the belief that such a course would contribute to her final happiness. Having set out this much with extreme impartiality, a human question burst from the heart of the man."For you he did this thing, love; he only thought of you and not of the thousand preposterous tangles and troubles likely to spring from such an action. Your happiness—that was all he saw or cared to see. And did he see it? Tell me, dear Honor—here on the threshold of his return perhaps—tell me; was it for your happiness? Thank God, I think I know; yet I should like to hear from your own lips the truth and that I am right."The truth, as she believed it before this most startling fact, came instantly to Honor's lips. She was enfeebled and unstrung by weeks of wayward living consequent upon great fret of mind. She had nursed this dreadful belief in an apparition until it had grown into a sort of real presence, and the conviction, fabricated through weeks of brooding, would not be dispelled at a word. Deep was the impress left upon her mind, and time must pass before a shape so clear could fade. As a result, the man now thought to be returned from the dead frightened her for a season, scarcely less than his fancied ghost had done. She was timid before the amazing whisper that he still lived. In this fear she forgot for the moment what had prompted Yeoland to his typical folly; she dreaded him in the body as she had dreaded him in the spirit; she turned to the solid being at her side, clung to Myles in her weakness, and held his great arm tightly round her waist."For my happiness indeed, dearest one. You have loved me better than I deserved, and forgiven so many faults. This makes me shiver and grow cold and fear to be alone; yet how different to the thing I thought!""And he may come home.""He will never be real to me again—not if I see him and hear him. Never so real as there—-grey-clad with the moon on his face—a shadowy part of the great web of the night, yet distinct—all very ghost. I'm frightened still. You can forgive a little of what I made you endure, now that you know what I have suffered."He hugged her up to his heart at these words, believed her as thoroughly as she believed herself, and thanked Heaven that blind Mark Endicott had been led to such a true prophecy.A week passed, yet no step was taken, though the new position came to be accepted gradually by those acquainted with the secret. For Honor the knowledge was actually health-giving by virtue of the morbid cloud that it dispelled. Such tidings liberated her soul from a strange fear and offered her mind a subject of boundless interest. Many plans were proposed, yet scarcely a desirable course of action presented itself. Mark advocated no step, and Honor added her plea to his, for she openly expressed a hope that Christopher, if still he lived, would not return to Godleigh. And this she said upon no suspicion of herself, but rather from a continued dread of the man. It seemed impossible to her that she could ever think of him as among the living. Stapledon, on the contrary, desired an explanation, and his wish was gratified most speedily by an unexpected herald from Yeoland himself. An authentic representative arrived at Endicott's—a somewhat shame-faced and apologetic messenger laden with the facts.For, upon a morning in August, Doctor Courteney Clack appeared, desired to see Mr. Endicott alone, and not only told the blind man that his theory was in the main correct, but begged that from the stores of his common sense and wisdom he would indicate the most seemly and least sensational means by which this news might be broken to those concerned. The doctor did not pretend to excuse himself or his part in the play. There was, indeed, no necessity for recrimination or censure. The future lay at the door, and Christopher Yeoland, who had, in truth, haunted his own domain by night, designed to return to it in earnest during the autumn. The temporary lease would then terminate, and circumstances now enabled the owner to free his land of every encumbrance and henceforth administer Godleigh in a manner worthy of its traditions.The interview was an old man's triumph, for Mark Endicott, too frank to pretend otherwise, gloried in the relation of the story long afterwards, loved to dwell upon his own reasoned synthesis and explain how closely it fitted the revealed facts, despite their rare singularity. As for Courteney Clack, that gentleman's amazement, when he found his intelligence more than a fortnight old, may be guessed, but can hardly be stated. Mr. Endicott sent for Myles to substantiate him, and finally the astounded physician unfolded his own narrative, now shrunk to a tame and trivial thing—an echo for the most part of Mark's deductions.On reaching Australia with Stapledon's messages the physician's first professional duty had been at the bedside of Christopher's ancient kinsman, with whom the young man was dwelling. For only two days after Doctor Clack's arrival, the old wool dealer was bitten by a whip-snake at his country seat on the Hawkesbury River, and there passed speedily out of life. This fact combined with Clack's news from home to determine Christopher Yeoland in the action he had taken, and the scheme, once adumbrated upon young Yeoland's mind, grew apace. The dead man, who was also named Christopher, proved to be very wealthy, and his money, willed to assist the establishment of technical schools in Sydney, had been withdrawn from that purpose after two months' intercourse with the youthful head of the race. Thus, in ignorance of his own near exit, the elder left it within Christopher's power to redeem the ancestral forests and roof tree in fulness of time. Apart from the imposition, built on the fact of his relative's sudden death, the traveller had already determined that he should lie in the family grave at home. It was the right place for one who had saved Yeoland credit at the last gasp and given the head of that family wherewithal to lift honour from the dust. Then came Stapledon's message and Clack's fearless gloss; so that, with wits quickened and a mind enlarged by his own unexpected good fortune, Christopher made final sacrifice of all love hope—a renunciation worthy of honest praise in sight of his own altered circumstances—and, with Clack's aid, practised his theatrical imposition that Honor's road might stretch before her straight and certain. Nothing less than his death would decide her, and so he let the implicit lie be told, and determined with himself at all cost to keep out of his own country until expiration of the period for which he had let Godleigh.Clack indicated a circumstance in itself satisfactory at this stage in his story. Christopher's resurrection would not practically prove so far-reaching as Mark Endicott and Stapledon had imagined, for none existed with any right to question the facts. On the supposed death of the owner, Godleigh had reverted to a man of the same name in Australia—that was all the lawyers knew—and the legal difficulty of reclaiming his own and re-establishing his rights promised to be but trifling. Neither had the law very serious penalties in pickle for him, because it could not be showed where Christopher had wronged any man.Time passed, and even the limits of patience that he had set himself were too great for Yeoland of Godleigh. Now he was rich, and hated Australia with a deep hatred. He returned home therefore, and those events related had fallen almost act for act as Endicott declared. In the flesh had the man haunted Godleigh. Once a keeper nearly captured him upon his own preserves; once, during the past spring, he had crept to the great beech tree, impelled thither at the same hour and moment as his old sweetheart. Her collapse had frightened him out of his senses, and, on seeing Stapledon approaching, he had retreated, concealed himself, and, upon their departure, returned to his hidden horse. Deeply perturbed, but ignorant of all that the incident really signified, he had ridden back that night to Exeter, and so departed to the Continent, there to dwell unrecognised a while longer, and wait, half in hope, half in fear, that Honor might proclaim him.But no sound reached his ear, and of Little Silver news neither he nor Courteney Clack had learnt anything of note for many weeks. Now, however, with only two months between himself and his return to Godleigh, Christopher Yeoland felt the grand imposture must be blown away. It had at least served his purpose.Thus spoke Clack; then his own curiosity was satisfied, and he learned how, by the lawless operation of obscure men, that secret hidden in the churchyard had become known, and how, upon the confession of one conspirator, three others beside the two discoverers had come to hear of it."And as for that terrible thing—the child killed by him accidentally—my child—" said Stapledon without emotion, "little use tearing a tender-hearted creature with that to no purpose. I do not want him to know it.""I won't tell him, you may be sure," answered the doctor, still in a dream before this unexpected discounting of his great intelligence. "He will not hear of it from me. But know he must sooner or later. That can't be spared him. Only a question of time and some blurted speech.""I'll tell him, then," declared Myles. "There's nobody more fitting. I don't forget."The question next arose as to how Little Silver should be informed, and Mr. Endicott declared that the vicar must make a formal announcement after morning service on the following Sunday. Then, with further conversation upon minor points, Doctor Clack's great confession ended; while as for the matter of the desecration, he held with Mr. Endicott that no notice need be taken beyond, perhaps, warning Mr. Cramphorn that his egregious enterprise was known, and that his own safety rested in silence.The doctor stopped a few days at Endicott's; saw Honor, who heard him with deep interest and decreasing fear; then wrote at length to Christopher in London; but, not caring to face the publication of Yeoland's existence and pending return, Clack finally took himself off until the sensation was on the wane. Before he set out, Myles had a private conversation with him in nature comforting enough, for, concerning Honor, the medical man gave it as his professional opinion that this counter-shock would serve adequately to combat her former hopeless, nerveless condition. The truth, despite its startling nature, must bring wide relief from spiritual terrors, and so probably participate in and hasten the business of recovery.Then came the thunder-clap, whose echoes reverberated in journals even to the great metropolitan heart of things, and Christopher Yeoland achieved a notoriety that was painful to him beyond power of words to express. Only one gleam of satisfaction shone through all the notes and comments and unnumbered reasons for his conduct: not one came nearer the truth than the utterance of a West Country journalist, who knew the history of the Yeoland family, and opined that a touch of hereditary eccentricity was responsible for all.Of Little Silver, its comments, theories, bewilderment, and general suspicion that there must be something rotten at the roots of the world while such deeds could be, there appears no need to discourse. How Ash and his kind reviewed the matter, or with what picturesque force it appealed to Noah Brimblecombe, janitor of the mausoleum, may easily be imagined; while for the rest it would be specially interesting, if pertinent, to describe the emotions of Jonah Cramphorn. Relief and disappointment mingled in his mind; he had made no history after all; he was not the mainspring of this commotion, and when he nodded darkly and showed no surprise, folks merely held him too conceited to display honest amazement like everybody else, and laughed at his assumption of secret knowledge. There came a night, however, when Mr. Endicott spoke with him in private, after which Jonah desired nothing more than silence for himself, and poured his pent-up chagrin and annoyance upon Charity Grepe, who—poor soul—derived little lustre from this resurrection.BOOK III.CHAPTER I.VANESSA IOBetween Bear Down and the valley was fern and the breath of fern and great gleam and drone of summer flies under the living sun. Here Teign tumbled through deep gorges, and from the wind-swept granite of Godleigh hill, beneath unclouded noonday splendour, acres of bracken panted silver-green in the glare, dipped to the fringes of the woods below, and shone like a shield of light upon the bosom of the acclivity. At river-level spread a forest, where oak and alder, larch and pinnacles of pine shimmered in the haze. Dark shadows broke the manifold planes of them, and the song of the river beneath, with lull and rise on the lazy summer breeze, murmured from mossy granite stairways twining through the woods. Here shone masses of king fern, twinkled jewels of honeysuckle, and the deep, pink blossoms of eglantine. The atmosphere was very dry; the leaves on a little white poplar clapped their hands to the river melody; hirundines wheeled and cried in the upper blue, and there lacked not other signs, all dearer than rainbows to a farmer whose corn is ripe, of fine weather and its continuance.In the shadow of a great stone upon the hillside, where, beneath the fairy forest of the fern, sad grasses robbed of sunlight seeded feebly, and wood strawberries gemmed the under-green, sat Honor Stapledon alone. Upon one hand sloped bare descents, already blistered somewhat by a hot July, patched with rusty colour where the heather had been roasted under the eye of the sun, painted with tawny, thirsty foliage, brightened by the blue spires of viper's bugloss, starred with pink of centauries. A great bramble bore red fruit and pale blossom together; and here butterflies made dancing, glancing gleam and tangle of colour as they came and went, flashed hither and thither, or settled to sun themselves on the flowers and rocks. One—Vanessa Io—feared nothing, and pursued his business and pleasure upon the bramble within a few inches of Honor's cheek.As yet Christopher Yeoland had not plucked courage to return publicly, but that morning came rumours from Little Silver that he was upon a visit to Godleigh, as guest of the departing tenant. Noah Brimblecombe had actually seen him and mentioned the fact to Mr. Cramphorn. Honor, therefore, expecting an early visit, and feeling quite unequal to such an experience now that it had come so near—desiring moreover that Myles and not herself should first welcome the wanderer—had stolen away to the adjacent hillside, there to pass some hours with a book. But her thoughts proved of a nature more interesting than verses. Indeed they lacked not poetry and even images to be described as startling, for the matter was dramatic and sufficiently sensational to fire a less imaginative mind. So her book remained unopened, and she watchedVanessa Io, though her thoughts were not with him.While Stapledon had grasped the fact of Christopher's continued existence and pending return somewhat sooner than his wife, the positions a month later seemed reversed. He faced the upheaval on the first proclamation, and she shrank from it with emotion bred from her recent terror; but now it was Honor who discussed affairs in the calmer spirit, and Myles who changed the subject, not always without impatience. The woman's frank interest daily grew, and she saw no cause to hide it; while the man, whose mind had been jolted from the rut of accepted things, now felt a desire to return into it and found himself come near resentment of this wonder. Such a tremendous circumstance hung over his days like a cloud, for it meant more to him than anybody, so at least he believed at that season. Stapledon's intellect was of a sort likely to be impatient at such monkey tricks. He found all the solid building of the past, all the logical sequences of events and movements leading to possession of Honor, tumbled into ruins around him. To his order-loving nature the skein of life grew in some measure tangled before such sleight and jugglery. Though he strove hard to keep in sight the sure knowledge that Yeoland had played his part for love of Honor, yet indignation would now and then awake to burn in him; and that first spark of passion, lighted when he thought of his child, after the earliest confession from Henry Collins, was not as yet wholly extinguished. Now, while the return of the wanderer came nearer, Myles shook himself into a resolute attitude and told himself that the uncertain depths and shallows of his own emotions must be discovered and his future line of conduct determined, as Mark Endicott had forewarned him. But while he stood thus, in unfamiliar moods of doubt, Honor, contrariwise, from a standpoint almost approaching superstitious fear, was come to accept the truth and accept it thankfully. The tremendous mental excitement, the shock and clash of thoughts afforded by this event, possessed some tonic faculty for her, and, as Doctor Clack had predicted, wrought more good than harm within her nature. For a little while she had wept after the first wave of fear was passed; she had wept and wondered in secret at the snarling cruelty of chance that willed this man, of all men, to rob her of her baby treasure; but the thought of his sorrow when the truth should reach him lessened her own.The reason for Christopher's conduct Honor had of course learned. That much Myles set out for her with the most luminous words at his command; and he smarted even while he told of the other's renunciation and self-sacrifice. He explained many times how for love of her Yeoland departed and let it be imagined that he was no more; how, from conviction that her happiness was wound up with her present husband, he had done this thing. Myles strove to live in an atmosphere of naked truth at this season, for his instinct told him that the way was strange and that salvation only lay in stripping off it every cloud or tissue of unreality.As for Mark Endicott, from mere human interest at an event beyond experience, he passed to estimate and appraisement of Christopher's deeds. Averse from every sort of deception, he yet found himself unable to judge hardly before the motives and the character of the first puppet in this tragi-comedy. Yeoland had meant well in the past, and the only question for the future was his own sentiments toward Honor. That these justified him in his return to Godleigh Mr. Endicott nothing doubted. He recollected the somewhat peculiar emotional characteristics of the man and felt no cause for fear, save in the matter of Myles.As for Little Silver, intelligence that their squire, resuscitated in life and pocket, was returning to his own filled most hearts with lively satisfaction after the first amazement had sobered. Recollection of his generosity awakened; whereon the fathers of the village met in conclave and determined to mark their great man's home-coming with some sort of celebration, if only a bonfire upon the hill-top and some special broaching of beer-barrels.Honor moved her parasol a little, mused on time to come, and wished the ordeal of meeting with Christopher behind her. The chapter of their personal romance was sealed and buried in the past, and her feelings were not fluttered as she looked back. The interest lay ahead. She thought of the life he had lived since last they met, and wondered what women had come into it—whether one above all others now filled it for him. She hoped with her whole heart that it might be so, and sat so quiet, with her mind full of pictures and possibilities for him, thatVanessa Iosettled within a foot of her and opened and shut his wings and thanked the sun, as a flower thanks him for his warmth, by display of beauty. His livery caught the thinker and brought her mind back behind her eyes so that she noted the insect's attire, the irregular outline of his pinions, their dull brick-red and ebony, brown margins, and staring eyes all touched and lighted with lilac, crimson, yellow, and white. Within this splendid motley the little body of him was wrapped in velvet, and as he turned about upon a bramble flower his trunk, like a tiny trembling watch-spring, passed to the honeyed heart of the blossom. Then he arose and joined the colour-dance of small blue butterflies from the heath, of sober fritillaries, and other of his own Vanessa folk—tortoise-shells, great and small, and a gorgeous red admiral in black and scarlet.Far beneath a horn suddenly sounded, and the music of otter-hounds arose melodious from the hidden valley. Flight of blue wood-pigeons and cackle of a startled woodpecker marked the progress of the hunt. Here and there, with shouts and cries, came glint of a throng through the trees that concealed them. Then Honor heard the grander utterance of an elderly foxhound who was assisting the pack. He had suddenly lighted on the scent of his proper prey, and a moment later she saw him away on his own account, climbing the opposite hill at speed. His music died, and the clamour beneath soon dwindled and sank until a last note of the horn, mellowed by distance, slowly faded away. But Honor was uninterested, for the modern fashion of otter-hunting at noon instead of grey dawn, though it may promise the presence of fair maidens at a meet, holds forth small likelihood of otters, who are but seldom slain upon these lazy runs.Then the sound of a step sprang out of the silence, and the woman turned and drew breath at sight of Christopher Yeoland, standing knee-deep in the fern behind her. He was clad as when she saw him last, in grey country wear; and to her first startled glance he seemed unchanged."Never pass a parasol without looking under it, if I can," he said; and then, before she could rise, he had flung himself beside her and taken her left hand and squeezed it gently between his. Her other hand went unconsciously towards her breast, but now she lowered it into his and suffered the greeting she had no power to speak, be uttered by that pressure of palm on palm."What tremendous, tragic things we ought to whisper at this moment," he said; "yet, for the life of me, I can only think of a single question: Have you forgiven me for my far-reaching fool's trick? If you haven't, I can't live at Godleigh under the shadow of Endicott's frown. And I certainly can't live anywhere else, so, should you refuse to pardon, I must die in real earnest.""If anybody can forgive you, it is I, Christopher. Oh dear—I am glad we are over this meeting. It has made me feel so strange, so curious. It seems only yesterday that I saw you last; and I could laugh, now that you are alive once more, to think your spirit had power to frighten me—or anybody. Yet I do not quite believe I shall ever feel that you are flesh and blood again.""It will take time. I began to doubt myself when I came home and stole about in the old haunts, and felt how ghosts feel. Once a keeper chased me out of Godleigh, and I only escaped by the skin of my teeth! Thrice I saw you—at your window in moonlight, and driving with your husband, and—the last time."His voice faltered; she saw tears in his eyes and knew that he had learned of the misfortune in the wood. The fact pleased her, in that this sorrow was bound to come to him and now it would not be necessary for Myles to speak about the past. A moment of silence passed between them, and she looked at Christopher softly and saw him unchanged. Every feature and expression, every trick of voice and gesture was even as it used to be. She knew his careless tie, his jerk of head, his habit of twisting up the corner of his moustache and then biting it."How wonderful this is!" she said, not heeding his broken sentence. "How mysterious to think I sit here talking to a man I have believed for two years to be dead! And yet each moment my heart grows calmer and my pulse beats more quietly.""Things are always commonplace when you expect them to be theatrical and rise to fine, giddy heights. That's the difference between plays and real life. Chance works up to her great situations and then often shirks them in the most undramatic and disappointing way. But when she does want a situation, she just pitches people headlong into it—like our meeting at the old tryst by the beech. Memory took me there; what took you? God forgive me, I——""Leave that," she said quickly. "It can't be talked about. Have you seen Myles or Uncle Mark yet?""No; a proper attraction brought me here, and somehow I knew that I should find you. But I long to meet him too—your husband. It's a blessing to know that among the many who blame me he won't be counted. Please Heaven, I shall see a great deal of you both in the future. I always loved the west wind best, because it blew over Bear Down before it came to me. Sunshine ahead, I hope, and some for me. I've come home to be happy.""Have you found a wife?""Honor!—No, I haven't looked for one. Godleigh's my wife. And I must set about spending some money on her, now I've got plenty. So strange—that lonely old cadet of our family. He was, I thought, as poor as a church mouse. Three parts of a miser, and lived hard and laughed at luxuries, as so many do who have had to make their own fortunes. Money-grubbing carries that curse along with it, that it often turns the grubber blind and deaf to all save the sight and clink of the hateful, necessary stuff. But the dear old boy somehow warmed to me; and I drew pictures of home for him; and he promised to come home and see me some day when he grew old. He was seventy-three then, but utterly refused to accept the fact. Then death suddenly rushed him, in the shape of a whip-snake, and dying, his thoughts turned home, and it was his wish, not my whim, that he should lie there. That put my plot into my head, for he was of the same name. Not until after his death did I know he had altered his will; and I can tell you, seeing the style he lived in and the size of his ideas, that I was staggered when I found he had left me a real fortune. That's my adventure—a mere bit of a story-book, yet a very pleasant bit to the hero of it."Vanessa Ioreturned, and so still sat Honor that he settled boldly upon the sun-kissed folds of her skirt."Do you remember how I used to say you were all butterfly, though in grave moments you rather claimed for yourself the qualities of staid and sober twilight things—solemn beetles, whose weight of wing-case reminds them that life is real and earnest?""You were right upon the whole. I've got the same spirit in me as that little, gaudy, self-complacent atom there, opening and shutting his wings, like a fairy's picture-book upon your knee. Our rule of life is the same. I only hope he's having more luck with his existence than I have had with mine."She reflected a moment. This was the first hint of his own sorrows in the past, of the price he had paid."But I'm not changed, for all the world of experiences that separates us," he continued quickly. "I'm only a thought older. Time is beginning to do a little gradual work in grey just above my ears. So delicate and apologetic and gentle he is that I can't grumble. Is Mr. Endicott well?""Very well.""And Myles and the farm?""Both flourishing abundantly, I believe.""And to think the sadness on your face is solely of my bringing—yet you can welcome me after what I have done!"She marvelled a little that he could speak of it"Pray, Christo, do not harp upon that. None accuses you. How could such a thing be thrown as blame upon anybody? Fate so often uses the kindest of us to do her cruel deeds. 'Tis the height of her cynic fun to plan parts in her plots and make the wrong actor play them.""I ought to have used common sense and kept away altogether.""Common sense!""I know; but I found it in Australia. There was no excuse for me. Can he forgive me?""I have not heard him breathe so much as one hasty word since he has known. You do not understand him to ask such a question. He is above admiration. No woman ever had such a good husband. And the better I love him, Christo, the better shall I love you, for giving him to me.""Good God! you mustn't talk like that, must you?" he asked with some flutter; but she regarded him calmly as she answered."Why should not I? He knows that I loved you, and, therefore, love you. I am a most logical woman, and unchanging. It has all been very smooth and clear between Myles and me from the first, because we both hated any shadow of misunderstanding. That's the strength of our married life.""My only fear centred in the recollection of his great straightness. He hates a trick, even though he may win by it.""He loves me with all his heart.""Yes—there it is. I didn't feel very anxious about the thing I did first; only about what I have done since I sometimes get a doubt. The question is whether, once dead, I was justified in coming to life again. Man's only built to be heroic in snatches—at least the average man—and when I found myself rich, instead of keeping it up and going through to the bitter end, as a bigger chap would have done, I thought of Godleigh. If you had lived a year and more among gum trees I think you might find it in you to forgive me for coming back. Those eternally lost gum trees! And springtime calling, calling from home! And here I am in God's good green again—His always, mine for a little while.""Who can wonder that you came? The wonder would have been if you had stopped away. The thing you desired to bring about is done—happily and for ever.""But Myles? He's so thorough. What does he think? Half-measures wouldn't win his respect.""Half-measures you call them; but even a saint's life is only patchwork—all wrought in the drab colours of human nature, with a few bright stars marking the notable deeds. Yes, and lesser existences are a mere patchwork of good intentions, mostly barren.""Not barren for certain. We sow decent grain and dragon's teeth mixed; and the poor sowers so often don't know which is which—till the crop's past praying for.""That's your philosophy, then. I was wrong; you have changed.""It's true. These things are in copybooks, but we never heed them when we are young. So that is why sometimes I have my doubts about Myles. Then I think along another line and the cloud vanishes.""There can be no cloud, and he will soon rejoice that such a friend is in the land of the living."But suspicion had already wakened in Yeoland."You say 'he will rejoice'; you don't say 'he does.'""Of course he does. How can you doubt it?""Tell him you have seen me, and that I am a perceptible shade wiser than when I left England. Tell him that incident in the wood has come near breaking my heart. I can feel great griefs if I don't show them. I do not expect him to slip into the old relations as you have. You and I were a couple of wild wood children together for years, until our elders trapped us and attempted to tame and educate and spoil us. Yet between him and me now there are close bonds enough—bonds as deep to me, as binding, as eternal as the dawn-light we both adore. But he's a fire-worshipper, or something, and I'm a Christian; so, when all's said, we shall never get straight to one another's hearts like Honor and Christo. It isn't possible. I thought to meet him with a handshake to bridge the years, and a silent understanding too deep for words; I pictured him all the way home as my friend of friends, and now—now I ought to go upon my knees to him and ask him to put his foot on my neck and forgive me for that moonlight madness.""Now I know that it is you, not I, who fail to understand my husband," said Honor. "He is a greater man by far than you think or I know. Never utter or dream these things any more, for they are wrong. Forget them and look forward to happiness."They talked a while longer on divers themes; then the woman rose to return home, and Christopher, declaring an intention to visit Endicott's that evening, went back to Godleigh.Each now marvelled much from a personal point of view at this, their first meeting—at its familiarity of texture and lack of distinction. Both indeed felt dumbly astonished that, after such a gap, converse could be renewed thus easily; yet they joyed in the meeting; and while Yeoland ingenuously gloried in the sight and voice of the woman he had loved, Honor's pleasure was of a colour more sober, a quality more intricate.
CHAPTER XI.
A CLEAN BREAST OF IT
As discoveries of moment hidden for long years or through all past time will suddenly and simultaneously burst, like Neptune, upon students widely separated, yet pursuing one goal by divers roads, so now this extraordinary circumstance stumbled upon by Jonah Cramphorn and his companion during their secret enterprise was noised abroad within a fortnight, yet without any action or intervention from them.
It is true that, despite his solemn promises, Henry Collins soon found himself constitutionally unequal to preserving the secret, and he confessed the same within a week of the incidents relating to it; but those before whom he published his experience took no step upon it until they heard the story in full detail at a later date. Then the whole curious truth was blazed abroad.
Mr. Cramphorn, as soon as Noah Brimblecombe's keys were back on their nail without awakening of suspicion, shut up his adventure stoutly enough, while he pondered how best to reveal the discovery; but his accomplice found the position far less endurable. Henry existed henceforth like a man struggling under some grim incubus by day as well as night. Sleep deserted him; his head ached; he found himself bungling his work, and, upon this development, the man grew alarmed for his brains and believed that he must be going mad. Even poor Henry's love-star dwindled somewhat while yet this cloud of horror hung over him, and though he had won permission from Sally's father to propose marriage, such was the tremendous nature of the price paid and its appendage of mental chaos that he found himself unequal to thoughts on any other theme. He could not profit by his new powers for the present; indeed, he felt that, until this knowledge was shifted on to other shoulders, life would hold no happy moment. Five days he spent with his secret; then, being strung to a pitch when his promise to Jonah ceased to weigh with him, he determined to make a clean breast of the whole matter. Everything should be divulged excepting only the name of his partner. First rose the question of an ear for this confession, and, hesitating only a moment between Mark Endicott and Myles, Mr. Collins decided that he would tell them both. He thought also of the vicar, but held, doubtless correctly, that his personal offence would bulk larger in the eyes of Mr. Scobell than upon the view of those at Bear Down.
Chance to make his revelation offered within two nights of Henry's decision, for then it happened that Cramphorn, his daughters, Churdles Ash, and other of the hands tramped off to Chagford, where a travelling circus was attracting the countryside. Henry, though he angered Sally not a little by refusing to accompany her, found an opportunity excellent for his purpose, and seized upon it. Left alone with the blind man and Stapledon, Collins began tremulously to tell his story; and his eyes rolled as he proceeded; and his voice often failed him or rose into high squeaks between gulps of emotion; but he made his meaning clear, and so lifted a weight from off his soul.
"Please, your honours, I've got a thing in my head as be burstin' it, an' I'll thank you to let me have a tell now I be alone with you. A devilish secret 'tis, an' I caan't keep my lips shut 'pon it no more, or I shall go daft."
"Out with it then," said Stapledon. "Your brains weren't built for devilish secrets, Henry."
"No, they wasn't," admitted Collins, "an' I'm glad to hear you allow it. I do best I can wi' the gifts I've got—an' who could do more? An' 'twas last week as I promised to go along wi' another man whose name theer ban't no call to mention. He'll answer for hisself 'pon the Judgment Day; but I can't wait so long. I wants to get it awver now."
"Begin at the beginning, lad; talk quietly, and light your pipe. We're friends and shan't let out your secret where it can hurt you," said Mark.
"I'm sure I pray God to bless you for them words," answered Collins earnestly; "but I can't smoke—the very taste of tobacco be changed since. 'Tis like this—us wanted oil of man, which you might knaw 'bout, bein' so wise as you are."
"An old wife's remedy—well?"
"Whether or no, it was told to my mate that awnly oil of man stood between missus here an' her death. So we ordained to fetch what was needed in the faace of all men."
"For that old witch on the hill, I suppose?" asked Myles.
"I doan't name no names, axin' your humble pardon," answered Collins uneasily. "This is my awn sacred confession—awnly my business an' yours, if I may say it without rudeness. Anyway, we went for what was wanted; an' that was a man's head bones—a chap cut off in fulness of life for choice. An' my mate—a deep man, I allow that much—thought fust of Bill Cousins—him took off by sunstroke two years ago; an' then he reckoned 'twas beyond our power these short nights to dig for what we wanted between dimpsy-light of evening an' morn. An' when he comed to me he minded me how theer was quality buried above ground so well as poor folks under; an' a young man slain in his strength by mischance. Squire Christopher Yeoland he meant. A gashly auld thought, sure enough; yet us steeled ourselves to it."
"You dared that sacrilege!" burst out Stapledon; but Collins merely stared at him. Time had taken the labourer so far beyond this point in the tragedy that not only did he forget its dramatic significance upon a new listener, but also how he himself had felt when Jonah first broke it to him.
"Ess; us set about the job. That ban't nothin'. 'Twas for love of missus us done it. An' I watched while t'other worked; an' when he stopped hammerin' an' I went back, he was starin' an' bristlin', 'cause afore him laid—not the gen'leman us counted 'pon—but a very auld, aged man, berry-brown from keepin', yet so sweet as a rose, wi' a gert white beard to un."
"You broke into the wrong coffin!"
"No fay, us didn't. 'Tis the carpse what comed from furrin paarts—anyways the box as did. Christopher Yeoland, beggin' his pardon, was the name 'pon the brass. An' my mate was mazed; an' us hammered back the lead all suent and tidy, an' screwed on the lid, an' put un 'pon his shelf wance more an' slipped it home. That's the tale, an' I'll take my oath of it afore God A'mighty's angel."
There followed a lengthy silence upon his story; then Mr. Collins made an end.
"'Tis the awful hardness of sharin' such a dreadful secret wi' wan other man as I caan't endure no more. An' I swear, by any deep word you choose, that I never meant no findin' of anybody's secrets—awnly gude to missus—as might have been saved by what we went for, but won't never be better without it."
"That's as may be, Henry," said Mr. Endicott. "For the rest, this thing is somebody's secret, as you say. Anyway you're not weighed down with it now. You may hold yourself free of it, and if you take my advice, having eased your mind, you'll go off to rest with a quiet conscience. No great harm can fall on you at any rate. Perhaps none at all, for I'll wager it was Cramphorn, not you, who hatched this piece of folly."
"Please, please, doan't name nobody, your honours!" implored Henry. "I promised the man to bide still as a worm 'bout it. In fact I swore I would. An' I did try to keep him off my tongue at any rate, an' thought as I had."
"We shall not take any steps against him or you. Now go to bed and sleep. You've done the right thing in telling us; but don't tell anybody else."
Mr. Collins, not sorry to depart, did so, and for some minutes Stapledon and the blind man continued to sit in silence, each busy with his own thoughts. Then Mark spoke.
"A stunning, dislocating, play-acting piece of foolery, if it's true. Yet somehow I know it is. There's a deal of light shed on darkness for me, and for you too I reckon, by such an upheaval."
"Not so. I see no light—unless you believe this means that Christopher Yeoland may still be alive."
"Yes, I think it means that; and such a return must be an earthquake more or less in all the lives that were once connected with him. Men can't die and live again without upsetting the world. A mad imagining. Perhaps no mother's son but him would have dreamed of it. But the motive——"
"That," said Myles quickly, "is all I can see. Knowing as much of the man as I do, so much looks clear. When Clack joined him, I sent a message. It was as urgent as need be, and to the effect that Honor loved him still. That she loved me too Clack probably added to my message. While one of us lived, Honor would never have married the other. So this thing he did to make her road easy."
"If you're right, the puzzle comes together piece by piece."
"Excepting the old man in the coffin—supposing that it was a man."
Endicott reflected; then was struck with an idea.
"It may be that the death of this old man put the cranky thought into Yeoland's head. If it was his kinsman that lies there instead of himself, all's smoothed out. What simpler way to clear Honor's road? This parade of evidence is made that there may be no doubt in any mind. A Yeoland dies and is buried in the tomb of his forefathers. But after all it wasn't our Yeoland."
"Did he mean to let this farce go on for ever?"
"No farce for him; yet, maybe, he got some solid joy out of it. A quick mind for all his vagabond, empty life. He saw the position, and reckoned that in fulness of time she might come to be a happy wife along with you. Then this old relative dies at the right moment and sets a spark to his imagination. No, I suppose we should never have known. His idea would be to keep his secret close hid for ever from those it concerned most—unless——"
He broke off and pursued his reflections in silence. Myles waited for him to speak again, but the blind man only resumed his knitting.
"He blotted himself clean out of life for love of Honor," Stapledon at length declared.
"That I believe. A strange, unlawful deed, yet 'tis a question whether the law has any punishment. To think of the immense confusion of human life if many graves yielded up their dead again!"
"And what is our course? Who can benefit or suffer if we state these things? There's such huge folly about it when you think of details that I feel as if it must all be a nightmare of Henry's."
"No, no; it's true enough."
"Then he may be married himself by this time, and in a new home, with England a mere dream behind him?"
"I wish I thought he was, Myles—for—for general peace of mind; but I don't. If he had a live, guiding, absorbing passion, after Honor, it was Godleigh—the woods and hills and songs of Teign. These things were in his blood. If I know him, they might have drawn him back with bands of steel."
"Why didn't they do so then?"
"How can we say that they didn't?"
"What! He may have been here—at our elbows?"
"I see the likelihood of that clearer than you, being blind. Yes, I can very easily think of him under shadow of night, with the true feel of a ghost, rambling beneath his own trees—his and not his—or listening to the river, or creeping to his own door when all men slept; or in the dawn—such a lover of cock-light as he was—he would steal through the dew with the birds to watch sunrise, then vanish and hide himself, or get above to some wild ridge of the moor and lie there till darkness gathered again. Such freaks would be meat and drink to him; and also to remember that he was only a live man in Australia, but a dead one in his own land. Just for argument suppose that was so; then look back a little way and think it out."
But Myles could by no means divine his uncle's drift. Practical even before this surprise, he was looking to the future, not backward, for study of the past appeared vain, and doubly vain to him in this crisis.
"Not much use turning back," he said. "I want to know about the time to come. These two—Collins and Cramphorn—through their fool's errand have certainly unearthed an extraordinary fact: Christopher Yeoland's secret, so to call it. And it is for us to determine whether our duty is to proclaim the thing or not. There's Godleigh—it falls empty again next autumn, for the people don't renew their lease."
"Well, Godleigh reverts to the man in Australia. The lawyers believe that man is an ancient settler; we know, or think we know, that the place has not really changed hands. Yeoland may reappear after giving Little Silver due warning."
"Or, being a rolling stone, and probably no better off now than when he left England, he may stop in Australia. Still, there's the chance of his returning."
"Be sure he will, even if he has not done so," said Mark Endicott firmly. "If 'tis only to the old life and old ways, he'll come back. He'll say, as likely as not, that the thing he meant to do is done. Honor is married and a happy wife. Who would deny him his own again after that sacrifice?"
"I only think of Honor and the awful shock to her. It might kill her."
"Don't fret yourself there, or torture over that point. Now I'll say what will astound you: I think Honor may very possibly be less amazed and staggered at this news than ever you were, or I either."
"Not amazed! What do you—what in God's name do you mean by that? That she knew? Knew it and hid it from me? That she suffers now because——"
He broke off and sprang to his feet, while the other maintained silence and let the stricken man stride away his passion and regain his self-control. Soon enough Myles grew cool and contained. Then he walked to Mark and put his hand on the old man's shoulder.
"Forgive me; but this is the utter, blasting wreck and ruin of my whole life that you are hinting at," he said calmly.
"I hint at nothing," answered the other with unusual roughness. "Had I thought any such impossible thing I should have been as big a fool as you are. You ought to know your wife better than to believe she'd act a lie of that sort."
"I don't believe it—I never said that I believed it Your words seemed to imply that you must believe it. Else why do you suggest that Honor would be less astonished to hear of this resurrection than you and I are?"
"If you had taken a look back as I bid you, Myles, instead of rushing forward without looking, you need not have asked me that question. Glance back, even now, and what has been dark as the pit may lighten and lift somewhat. Just call to mind the sorrow that has hung so heavily over us of late days—the little chick that we counted so precious—too soon."
But Stapledon was in no mental mood for retrospective or other thought. A wide turmoil tossed the sea of his soul into storm; the terrible weakness of the strong got hold upon him, and he rocked in one of those moments when capacity to think deserts the mind, when intellect seems overwhelmed.
"I cannot see what you see," he said. "I admit that I am blind and a fool, but for God's sake don't ask me any more questions beyond my power to answer. Tell me what you think, or know, or believe you know. Consider what this means to me—the fact that Christopher Yeoland may be alive—may have stood behind a hedge yesterday, and watched me pass, and laughed. Don't you see? I've got Honor by falsehood—a false pretence—a fraud."
"Not of your own breeding, if it is so. Your true and loving wife she is for all time now, whether the man be dead or alive—though of that there's a certain proof in my mind. I'd be the last to tear you with questions at this minute. I only wanted you to see what has rushed in upon me so sudden and fierce. Light in it every way—light in it for you and for Honor, I pray God. If what I make out of this puzzle is true, and Christopher Yeoland alive, then there may be matter for rejoicing in the fact rather than gloom. Not darkness anyway. Now call home to your mind that night in the woods, when at her silly whim, which I was fool enough to support, you took your wife for a drive to Lee Bridge."
"I remember it well enough."
"You left her to fetch water from the river, and while you were away she got out of the pony carriage, light-footed and silent as a moonbeam, to pick bluebells. Then suddenly there! Out of the mist and night—out of the dim woods—the man! Wandering alone no doubt They met, and she, being in no trim for such a fearful shock as the sight of one long dead walking the earth again, went down before it. Think of her suddenly eye to eye and face to face with him in the midst of night and sleep! It froze her blood, and froze the poor little one's blood too—that thawed no more. For she thought him a spectral thing, an' thinks so still—thinks so still! That's the dark secret she's dumb about and won't whisper to you or me, though she's been near telling us once or twice. That's what has been eating her heart out; that's what neither your prayers nor mine could get from her. She must be made to understand in careful words that will ask your best skill to choose aright She must learn that you have discovered what she's hiding, and that it was flesh and blood, not phantom, she saw. 'Tis a pity, if what I say is fact, that the fool ran away when he saw you coming to succour her. The harm was done by that time; and if we had known, how many of these ghost-haunted hours might we have saved her! I may be spinning thin air, yet I think what I tell is true."
But Stapledon was glaring at the impassive face before him with a gaze that seemed to burrow through Mark's sightless eyes and reach his brain. Now Myles spoke in a voice unfamiliar to his listener, for it was loud-pitched and turbulent with sudden passion.
"That man killed my child!"
A glass vessel 90 the dresser echoed the deep, dominant note of this cry and reverberated it; one moment of silence followed; and then came shuffle of feet on the flagged way, with laughter and echo of time-worn jests, as Churdles Ash, Pinsent, and the others returned from their pleasure. Mark Endicott, however, had opportunity for a final word.
"It may be as you say—a dark accident, and worse ten thousand times for him than even you. Be just—be very just to the madman, if he has really done this wayward deed and is coming back into your life again. Be just, and don't swerve an inch out of your even-handed course, for your road is like to get difficult if you do."
"Us have viewed a gert pomp of braave horsemanship," announced Mr. Ash. "Never seed no better riders nor merry-men nowheer, though the hosses was poor."
"An' Tommy Bates here be all for joinin' of 'em," laughed Samuel Pinsent; "but I tell un as he turns out his toes tu far to do any credit to hisself in such a wild course of life."
CHAPTER XII.
LIGHT
Beside his sleeping wife did Stapledon recline, and endeavoured, through the hours of a weary night, to gather the significance of those great things that he had gleaned. Sometimes he surprised his own thought—as a man's conscience will often burst in roughly upon his mind—and found himself hoping that this news was untrue and that Christopher Yeoland filled a coffin, if not at Little Silver. But the edifice of probability so carefully reared by Mark Endicott showed no flaw, and even amid the mazes of his present doubt Myles found time to marvel at the ratiocination of the old man. Before this explanation it seemed difficult to believe that another clue to the puzzle existed. A note of inner unrest, a question within a question, finally brought Myles out of bed at dawn. He rose, soon stood in the air, and, through the familiar early freshness of day, walked upwards to the Moor for comfort. What was it to him if this harebrained soul had thus played at death? He, at least, was no dreamer, and moved upon solid ground. He passed beside the kingdom of the blue jasione and navel-wort on the old wall, while above him wind-worn beeches whispered in the dawn wind. From force of habit he stood at a gate and rested his arms upon the topmost bar, while his great dog roved for a rabbit. Now the man's eyes were lighted to the depths of their disquiet from the east, and at sight of the distant woods his thoughts turned back to that meeting responsible for his child's death. He had yet to learn from Honor whether his uncle's suspicion was correct concerning the incident, but little doubt existed within his mind, and he breathed heavily, and his emotions almost bordered upon malignity. Better such a futile soul under the earth in sober earnest. So ill-regulated a human machine looked worse than useless, for his erratic course impeded the progress of others more potent, and was itself a menace and a danger. This man had killed his little son—that child of many petitions and wide hopes; had crushed him, like a sweet wild flower under the heel of a fool. So bitterly he brooded; then pondered as to how his wife would receive this tremendous message.
Upon the first heather ridges the cold breath of the Moor touched the man to patience and brought him nearer himself. He looked out into the dayspring; noted where one little flame-coloured forerunner of dawn already shone upon lofty granite afar off; and saw the Mist Mother rise from the ruddy seeding rushes of her sleeping-place. He beheld the ancient heron's grey pinion brighten to rose beside the river; heard cry of curlew and all the manifold music of the world waking again. Above him the sky flushed to the colours of the woodbine, while upon earth arose an incense and a savour of nightly dews sun-kissed. From marsh and moss, from the rush beds and the peat beds; from glimmering ridges cast upward by workers long gone by; from the bracken and the heather, and the cairns of the old stone men; from the gold eyes of the little tormentils, the blue eyes of the milkworts, the white stars of the galiums woven and interwoven through the texture of the budding heath—from each and all, to the horizon-line of peak and pinnacle, a risen sun won worship. Then did Stapledon's eyes soften somewhat and his brow clear in the great light, for there came songs from the Sons of the Morning—they who in time past had welcomed him as a brother; and their music, floating from the high places, soothed his troubled heart. Under that seraphic melody the life of man, his joys and his sorrows, peaked and dwindled to their just proportions; gradually he forgot his kind, and so thought only of the solemn world-order outspread, and the round earth rolling like an opal about the lamp of the sun, through God's own estate and seigniory of space.
That hour and the steadfast nature of him presently retrieved his patience; then Myles shone forth unclouded as the morning. Recollection of his recent fret and passion surprised him. Who was he to exhibit such emotion? The Moor was his exemplar, and had been so since his boyish eyes first swept it understandingly. For him this huge, untamed delight was the only picture of the God he did not know, yet yearned to know; and now, as oftentimes of old, it cooled his blood, exalted his reflections, adjusted the distortions of life's wry focus, and sent him home in peace.
Duty was the highest form of praise that he knew, and he prepared to fall back upon that. Let others order their brief journeys on lines fantastical or futile, he at least was wiser and knew better. He reflected that the folly of the world can injure no soul's vital spots. Only a man's self can wound himself mortally. He would live on agreeably to Nature—obedient as the granite to the soft, tireless touch of wind and rain; prompt as the bursting bud and uncurling tendril; patient as the cave spirits that build up pillars of stalagmite through unnumbered ages; faithful as the merle, whose music varies not from generation to generation. Life so lived would be life well guarded and beyond the power of outer evil to penetrate.
So he believed very earnestly, and knew not that his noble theory asked a noble nature to practise it. Only a great man can use perfectly a great tool; and this obtains with higher rules of conduct than Stapledon's; for of all who profess and call themselves Christians, not one in a thousand is mentally equipped to be the thing he pretends, or even to understand the sweep and scope of what he professes. It is not roguery that makes three parts of Christendom loom hypocrite in a thinker's eyes, but mental and constitutional inability to grasp a gospel at once the most spiritual and material ever preached and misunderstood. Centuries of craft stretch between man and the Founder's meaning; confusion bred of passion has divided the House against itself; politics and the lust of power have turned religion into a piece of state machinery; and the rot at the root of the cumbrous fabric will, within half a century, bring all down in far-flung conflagration and ruin. Then may arise the immortal part out of the holocaust of the Letter, and Christianity, purged of churchcraft as from a pestilence, fly back to brood upon the human heart once more in the primal, rainbow glory of the Sermon on the Mount, preached under heaven by a Man to men.
That day Myles Stapledon, with all caution and such choice of words as he had at command, broke the story to Honor, and his tactful language, born of love, was so skilful that the shock brought no immediate collapse with it. The narrative asked for some art, yet he developed it gradually, and found his reward where Mark had predicted. First Honor learnt what she herself had seen upon that fateful night; and when, in a very extremity of amazement, she confessed to the secret of a fancied spectre, Myles went further and led her to understand that what she had witnessed was flesh and blood, that a confusion, probably not intentional, had been created, and that Christopher Yeoland might be suspected still to live. Stapledon spared himself nothing in this narrative. Asked by his wife as to the reason that could have prompted her former lover to a step so extravagant, he reminded her of her own determination to marry neither of them; he explained how he had begged Christopher to come back, that her life might be as it had been; and added that doubtless the wanderer on his side, and for love of her alone, had put this trick upon them in the belief that such a course would contribute to her final happiness. Having set out this much with extreme impartiality, a human question burst from the heart of the man.
"For you he did this thing, love; he only thought of you and not of the thousand preposterous tangles and troubles likely to spring from such an action. Your happiness—that was all he saw or cared to see. And did he see it? Tell me, dear Honor—here on the threshold of his return perhaps—tell me; was it for your happiness? Thank God, I think I know; yet I should like to hear from your own lips the truth and that I am right."
The truth, as she believed it before this most startling fact, came instantly to Honor's lips. She was enfeebled and unstrung by weeks of wayward living consequent upon great fret of mind. She had nursed this dreadful belief in an apparition until it had grown into a sort of real presence, and the conviction, fabricated through weeks of brooding, would not be dispelled at a word. Deep was the impress left upon her mind, and time must pass before a shape so clear could fade. As a result, the man now thought to be returned from the dead frightened her for a season, scarcely less than his fancied ghost had done. She was timid before the amazing whisper that he still lived. In this fear she forgot for the moment what had prompted Yeoland to his typical folly; she dreaded him in the body as she had dreaded him in the spirit; she turned to the solid being at her side, clung to Myles in her weakness, and held his great arm tightly round her waist.
"For my happiness indeed, dearest one. You have loved me better than I deserved, and forgiven so many faults. This makes me shiver and grow cold and fear to be alone; yet how different to the thing I thought!"
"And he may come home."
"He will never be real to me again—not if I see him and hear him. Never so real as there—-grey-clad with the moon on his face—a shadowy part of the great web of the night, yet distinct—all very ghost. I'm frightened still. You can forgive a little of what I made you endure, now that you know what I have suffered."
He hugged her up to his heart at these words, believed her as thoroughly as she believed herself, and thanked Heaven that blind Mark Endicott had been led to such a true prophecy.
A week passed, yet no step was taken, though the new position came to be accepted gradually by those acquainted with the secret. For Honor the knowledge was actually health-giving by virtue of the morbid cloud that it dispelled. Such tidings liberated her soul from a strange fear and offered her mind a subject of boundless interest. Many plans were proposed, yet scarcely a desirable course of action presented itself. Mark advocated no step, and Honor added her plea to his, for she openly expressed a hope that Christopher, if still he lived, would not return to Godleigh. And this she said upon no suspicion of herself, but rather from a continued dread of the man. It seemed impossible to her that she could ever think of him as among the living. Stapledon, on the contrary, desired an explanation, and his wish was gratified most speedily by an unexpected herald from Yeoland himself. An authentic representative arrived at Endicott's—a somewhat shame-faced and apologetic messenger laden with the facts.
For, upon a morning in August, Doctor Courteney Clack appeared, desired to see Mr. Endicott alone, and not only told the blind man that his theory was in the main correct, but begged that from the stores of his common sense and wisdom he would indicate the most seemly and least sensational means by which this news might be broken to those concerned. The doctor did not pretend to excuse himself or his part in the play. There was, indeed, no necessity for recrimination or censure. The future lay at the door, and Christopher Yeoland, who had, in truth, haunted his own domain by night, designed to return to it in earnest during the autumn. The temporary lease would then terminate, and circumstances now enabled the owner to free his land of every encumbrance and henceforth administer Godleigh in a manner worthy of its traditions.
The interview was an old man's triumph, for Mark Endicott, too frank to pretend otherwise, gloried in the relation of the story long afterwards, loved to dwell upon his own reasoned synthesis and explain how closely it fitted the revealed facts, despite their rare singularity. As for Courteney Clack, that gentleman's amazement, when he found his intelligence more than a fortnight old, may be guessed, but can hardly be stated. Mr. Endicott sent for Myles to substantiate him, and finally the astounded physician unfolded his own narrative, now shrunk to a tame and trivial thing—an echo for the most part of Mark's deductions.
On reaching Australia with Stapledon's messages the physician's first professional duty had been at the bedside of Christopher's ancient kinsman, with whom the young man was dwelling. For only two days after Doctor Clack's arrival, the old wool dealer was bitten by a whip-snake at his country seat on the Hawkesbury River, and there passed speedily out of life. This fact combined with Clack's news from home to determine Christopher Yeoland in the action he had taken, and the scheme, once adumbrated upon young Yeoland's mind, grew apace. The dead man, who was also named Christopher, proved to be very wealthy, and his money, willed to assist the establishment of technical schools in Sydney, had been withdrawn from that purpose after two months' intercourse with the youthful head of the race. Thus, in ignorance of his own near exit, the elder left it within Christopher's power to redeem the ancestral forests and roof tree in fulness of time. Apart from the imposition, built on the fact of his relative's sudden death, the traveller had already determined that he should lie in the family grave at home. It was the right place for one who had saved Yeoland credit at the last gasp and given the head of that family wherewithal to lift honour from the dust. Then came Stapledon's message and Clack's fearless gloss; so that, with wits quickened and a mind enlarged by his own unexpected good fortune, Christopher made final sacrifice of all love hope—a renunciation worthy of honest praise in sight of his own altered circumstances—and, with Clack's aid, practised his theatrical imposition that Honor's road might stretch before her straight and certain. Nothing less than his death would decide her, and so he let the implicit lie be told, and determined with himself at all cost to keep out of his own country until expiration of the period for which he had let Godleigh.
Clack indicated a circumstance in itself satisfactory at this stage in his story. Christopher's resurrection would not practically prove so far-reaching as Mark Endicott and Stapledon had imagined, for none existed with any right to question the facts. On the supposed death of the owner, Godleigh had reverted to a man of the same name in Australia—that was all the lawyers knew—and the legal difficulty of reclaiming his own and re-establishing his rights promised to be but trifling. Neither had the law very serious penalties in pickle for him, because it could not be showed where Christopher had wronged any man.
Time passed, and even the limits of patience that he had set himself were too great for Yeoland of Godleigh. Now he was rich, and hated Australia with a deep hatred. He returned home therefore, and those events related had fallen almost act for act as Endicott declared. In the flesh had the man haunted Godleigh. Once a keeper nearly captured him upon his own preserves; once, during the past spring, he had crept to the great beech tree, impelled thither at the same hour and moment as his old sweetheart. Her collapse had frightened him out of his senses, and, on seeing Stapledon approaching, he had retreated, concealed himself, and, upon their departure, returned to his hidden horse. Deeply perturbed, but ignorant of all that the incident really signified, he had ridden back that night to Exeter, and so departed to the Continent, there to dwell unrecognised a while longer, and wait, half in hope, half in fear, that Honor might proclaim him.
But no sound reached his ear, and of Little Silver news neither he nor Courteney Clack had learnt anything of note for many weeks. Now, however, with only two months between himself and his return to Godleigh, Christopher Yeoland felt the grand imposture must be blown away. It had at least served his purpose.
Thus spoke Clack; then his own curiosity was satisfied, and he learned how, by the lawless operation of obscure men, that secret hidden in the churchyard had become known, and how, upon the confession of one conspirator, three others beside the two discoverers had come to hear of it.
"And as for that terrible thing—the child killed by him accidentally—my child—" said Stapledon without emotion, "little use tearing a tender-hearted creature with that to no purpose. I do not want him to know it."
"I won't tell him, you may be sure," answered the doctor, still in a dream before this unexpected discounting of his great intelligence. "He will not hear of it from me. But know he must sooner or later. That can't be spared him. Only a question of time and some blurted speech."
"I'll tell him, then," declared Myles. "There's nobody more fitting. I don't forget."
The question next arose as to how Little Silver should be informed, and Mr. Endicott declared that the vicar must make a formal announcement after morning service on the following Sunday. Then, with further conversation upon minor points, Doctor Clack's great confession ended; while as for the matter of the desecration, he held with Mr. Endicott that no notice need be taken beyond, perhaps, warning Mr. Cramphorn that his egregious enterprise was known, and that his own safety rested in silence.
The doctor stopped a few days at Endicott's; saw Honor, who heard him with deep interest and decreasing fear; then wrote at length to Christopher in London; but, not caring to face the publication of Yeoland's existence and pending return, Clack finally took himself off until the sensation was on the wane. Before he set out, Myles had a private conversation with him in nature comforting enough, for, concerning Honor, the medical man gave it as his professional opinion that this counter-shock would serve adequately to combat her former hopeless, nerveless condition. The truth, despite its startling nature, must bring wide relief from spiritual terrors, and so probably participate in and hasten the business of recovery.
Then came the thunder-clap, whose echoes reverberated in journals even to the great metropolitan heart of things, and Christopher Yeoland achieved a notoriety that was painful to him beyond power of words to express. Only one gleam of satisfaction shone through all the notes and comments and unnumbered reasons for his conduct: not one came nearer the truth than the utterance of a West Country journalist, who knew the history of the Yeoland family, and opined that a touch of hereditary eccentricity was responsible for all.
Of Little Silver, its comments, theories, bewilderment, and general suspicion that there must be something rotten at the roots of the world while such deeds could be, there appears no need to discourse. How Ash and his kind reviewed the matter, or with what picturesque force it appealed to Noah Brimblecombe, janitor of the mausoleum, may easily be imagined; while for the rest it would be specially interesting, if pertinent, to describe the emotions of Jonah Cramphorn. Relief and disappointment mingled in his mind; he had made no history after all; he was not the mainspring of this commotion, and when he nodded darkly and showed no surprise, folks merely held him too conceited to display honest amazement like everybody else, and laughed at his assumption of secret knowledge. There came a night, however, when Mr. Endicott spoke with him in private, after which Jonah desired nothing more than silence for himself, and poured his pent-up chagrin and annoyance upon Charity Grepe, who—poor soul—derived little lustre from this resurrection.
BOOK III.
CHAPTER I.
VANESSA IO
Between Bear Down and the valley was fern and the breath of fern and great gleam and drone of summer flies under the living sun. Here Teign tumbled through deep gorges, and from the wind-swept granite of Godleigh hill, beneath unclouded noonday splendour, acres of bracken panted silver-green in the glare, dipped to the fringes of the woods below, and shone like a shield of light upon the bosom of the acclivity. At river-level spread a forest, where oak and alder, larch and pinnacles of pine shimmered in the haze. Dark shadows broke the manifold planes of them, and the song of the river beneath, with lull and rise on the lazy summer breeze, murmured from mossy granite stairways twining through the woods. Here shone masses of king fern, twinkled jewels of honeysuckle, and the deep, pink blossoms of eglantine. The atmosphere was very dry; the leaves on a little white poplar clapped their hands to the river melody; hirundines wheeled and cried in the upper blue, and there lacked not other signs, all dearer than rainbows to a farmer whose corn is ripe, of fine weather and its continuance.
In the shadow of a great stone upon the hillside, where, beneath the fairy forest of the fern, sad grasses robbed of sunlight seeded feebly, and wood strawberries gemmed the under-green, sat Honor Stapledon alone. Upon one hand sloped bare descents, already blistered somewhat by a hot July, patched with rusty colour where the heather had been roasted under the eye of the sun, painted with tawny, thirsty foliage, brightened by the blue spires of viper's bugloss, starred with pink of centauries. A great bramble bore red fruit and pale blossom together; and here butterflies made dancing, glancing gleam and tangle of colour as they came and went, flashed hither and thither, or settled to sun themselves on the flowers and rocks. One—Vanessa Io—feared nothing, and pursued his business and pleasure upon the bramble within a few inches of Honor's cheek.
As yet Christopher Yeoland had not plucked courage to return publicly, but that morning came rumours from Little Silver that he was upon a visit to Godleigh, as guest of the departing tenant. Noah Brimblecombe had actually seen him and mentioned the fact to Mr. Cramphorn. Honor, therefore, expecting an early visit, and feeling quite unequal to such an experience now that it had come so near—desiring moreover that Myles and not herself should first welcome the wanderer—had stolen away to the adjacent hillside, there to pass some hours with a book. But her thoughts proved of a nature more interesting than verses. Indeed they lacked not poetry and even images to be described as startling, for the matter was dramatic and sufficiently sensational to fire a less imaginative mind. So her book remained unopened, and she watchedVanessa Io, though her thoughts were not with him.
While Stapledon had grasped the fact of Christopher's continued existence and pending return somewhat sooner than his wife, the positions a month later seemed reversed. He faced the upheaval on the first proclamation, and she shrank from it with emotion bred from her recent terror; but now it was Honor who discussed affairs in the calmer spirit, and Myles who changed the subject, not always without impatience. The woman's frank interest daily grew, and she saw no cause to hide it; while the man, whose mind had been jolted from the rut of accepted things, now felt a desire to return into it and found himself come near resentment of this wonder. Such a tremendous circumstance hung over his days like a cloud, for it meant more to him than anybody, so at least he believed at that season. Stapledon's intellect was of a sort likely to be impatient at such monkey tricks. He found all the solid building of the past, all the logical sequences of events and movements leading to possession of Honor, tumbled into ruins around him. To his order-loving nature the skein of life grew in some measure tangled before such sleight and jugglery. Though he strove hard to keep in sight the sure knowledge that Yeoland had played his part for love of Honor, yet indignation would now and then awake to burn in him; and that first spark of passion, lighted when he thought of his child, after the earliest confession from Henry Collins, was not as yet wholly extinguished. Now, while the return of the wanderer came nearer, Myles shook himself into a resolute attitude and told himself that the uncertain depths and shallows of his own emotions must be discovered and his future line of conduct determined, as Mark Endicott had forewarned him. But while he stood thus, in unfamiliar moods of doubt, Honor, contrariwise, from a standpoint almost approaching superstitious fear, was come to accept the truth and accept it thankfully. The tremendous mental excitement, the shock and clash of thoughts afforded by this event, possessed some tonic faculty for her, and, as Doctor Clack had predicted, wrought more good than harm within her nature. For a little while she had wept after the first wave of fear was passed; she had wept and wondered in secret at the snarling cruelty of chance that willed this man, of all men, to rob her of her baby treasure; but the thought of his sorrow when the truth should reach him lessened her own.
The reason for Christopher's conduct Honor had of course learned. That much Myles set out for her with the most luminous words at his command; and he smarted even while he told of the other's renunciation and self-sacrifice. He explained many times how for love of her Yeoland departed and let it be imagined that he was no more; how, from conviction that her happiness was wound up with her present husband, he had done this thing. Myles strove to live in an atmosphere of naked truth at this season, for his instinct told him that the way was strange and that salvation only lay in stripping off it every cloud or tissue of unreality.
As for Mark Endicott, from mere human interest at an event beyond experience, he passed to estimate and appraisement of Christopher's deeds. Averse from every sort of deception, he yet found himself unable to judge hardly before the motives and the character of the first puppet in this tragi-comedy. Yeoland had meant well in the past, and the only question for the future was his own sentiments toward Honor. That these justified him in his return to Godleigh Mr. Endicott nothing doubted. He recollected the somewhat peculiar emotional characteristics of the man and felt no cause for fear, save in the matter of Myles.
As for Little Silver, intelligence that their squire, resuscitated in life and pocket, was returning to his own filled most hearts with lively satisfaction after the first amazement had sobered. Recollection of his generosity awakened; whereon the fathers of the village met in conclave and determined to mark their great man's home-coming with some sort of celebration, if only a bonfire upon the hill-top and some special broaching of beer-barrels.
Honor moved her parasol a little, mused on time to come, and wished the ordeal of meeting with Christopher behind her. The chapter of their personal romance was sealed and buried in the past, and her feelings were not fluttered as she looked back. The interest lay ahead. She thought of the life he had lived since last they met, and wondered what women had come into it—whether one above all others now filled it for him. She hoped with her whole heart that it might be so, and sat so quiet, with her mind full of pictures and possibilities for him, thatVanessa Iosettled within a foot of her and opened and shut his wings and thanked the sun, as a flower thanks him for his warmth, by display of beauty. His livery caught the thinker and brought her mind back behind her eyes so that she noted the insect's attire, the irregular outline of his pinions, their dull brick-red and ebony, brown margins, and staring eyes all touched and lighted with lilac, crimson, yellow, and white. Within this splendid motley the little body of him was wrapped in velvet, and as he turned about upon a bramble flower his trunk, like a tiny trembling watch-spring, passed to the honeyed heart of the blossom. Then he arose and joined the colour-dance of small blue butterflies from the heath, of sober fritillaries, and other of his own Vanessa folk—tortoise-shells, great and small, and a gorgeous red admiral in black and scarlet.
Far beneath a horn suddenly sounded, and the music of otter-hounds arose melodious from the hidden valley. Flight of blue wood-pigeons and cackle of a startled woodpecker marked the progress of the hunt. Here and there, with shouts and cries, came glint of a throng through the trees that concealed them. Then Honor heard the grander utterance of an elderly foxhound who was assisting the pack. He had suddenly lighted on the scent of his proper prey, and a moment later she saw him away on his own account, climbing the opposite hill at speed. His music died, and the clamour beneath soon dwindled and sank until a last note of the horn, mellowed by distance, slowly faded away. But Honor was uninterested, for the modern fashion of otter-hunting at noon instead of grey dawn, though it may promise the presence of fair maidens at a meet, holds forth small likelihood of otters, who are but seldom slain upon these lazy runs.
Then the sound of a step sprang out of the silence, and the woman turned and drew breath at sight of Christopher Yeoland, standing knee-deep in the fern behind her. He was clad as when she saw him last, in grey country wear; and to her first startled glance he seemed unchanged.
"Never pass a parasol without looking under it, if I can," he said; and then, before she could rise, he had flung himself beside her and taken her left hand and squeezed it gently between his. Her other hand went unconsciously towards her breast, but now she lowered it into his and suffered the greeting she had no power to speak, be uttered by that pressure of palm on palm.
"What tremendous, tragic things we ought to whisper at this moment," he said; "yet, for the life of me, I can only think of a single question: Have you forgiven me for my far-reaching fool's trick? If you haven't, I can't live at Godleigh under the shadow of Endicott's frown. And I certainly can't live anywhere else, so, should you refuse to pardon, I must die in real earnest."
"If anybody can forgive you, it is I, Christopher. Oh dear—I am glad we are over this meeting. It has made me feel so strange, so curious. It seems only yesterday that I saw you last; and I could laugh, now that you are alive once more, to think your spirit had power to frighten me—or anybody. Yet I do not quite believe I shall ever feel that you are flesh and blood again."
"It will take time. I began to doubt myself when I came home and stole about in the old haunts, and felt how ghosts feel. Once a keeper chased me out of Godleigh, and I only escaped by the skin of my teeth! Thrice I saw you—at your window in moonlight, and driving with your husband, and—the last time."
His voice faltered; she saw tears in his eyes and knew that he had learned of the misfortune in the wood. The fact pleased her, in that this sorrow was bound to come to him and now it would not be necessary for Myles to speak about the past. A moment of silence passed between them, and she looked at Christopher softly and saw him unchanged. Every feature and expression, every trick of voice and gesture was even as it used to be. She knew his careless tie, his jerk of head, his habit of twisting up the corner of his moustache and then biting it.
"How wonderful this is!" she said, not heeding his broken sentence. "How mysterious to think I sit here talking to a man I have believed for two years to be dead! And yet each moment my heart grows calmer and my pulse beats more quietly."
"Things are always commonplace when you expect them to be theatrical and rise to fine, giddy heights. That's the difference between plays and real life. Chance works up to her great situations and then often shirks them in the most undramatic and disappointing way. But when she does want a situation, she just pitches people headlong into it—like our meeting at the old tryst by the beech. Memory took me there; what took you? God forgive me, I——"
"Leave that," she said quickly. "It can't be talked about. Have you seen Myles or Uncle Mark yet?"
"No; a proper attraction brought me here, and somehow I knew that I should find you. But I long to meet him too—your husband. It's a blessing to know that among the many who blame me he won't be counted. Please Heaven, I shall see a great deal of you both in the future. I always loved the west wind best, because it blew over Bear Down before it came to me. Sunshine ahead, I hope, and some for me. I've come home to be happy."
"Have you found a wife?"
"Honor!—No, I haven't looked for one. Godleigh's my wife. And I must set about spending some money on her, now I've got plenty. So strange—that lonely old cadet of our family. He was, I thought, as poor as a church mouse. Three parts of a miser, and lived hard and laughed at luxuries, as so many do who have had to make their own fortunes. Money-grubbing carries that curse along with it, that it often turns the grubber blind and deaf to all save the sight and clink of the hateful, necessary stuff. But the dear old boy somehow warmed to me; and I drew pictures of home for him; and he promised to come home and see me some day when he grew old. He was seventy-three then, but utterly refused to accept the fact. Then death suddenly rushed him, in the shape of a whip-snake, and dying, his thoughts turned home, and it was his wish, not my whim, that he should lie there. That put my plot into my head, for he was of the same name. Not until after his death did I know he had altered his will; and I can tell you, seeing the style he lived in and the size of his ideas, that I was staggered when I found he had left me a real fortune. That's my adventure—a mere bit of a story-book, yet a very pleasant bit to the hero of it."
Vanessa Ioreturned, and so still sat Honor that he settled boldly upon the sun-kissed folds of her skirt.
"Do you remember how I used to say you were all butterfly, though in grave moments you rather claimed for yourself the qualities of staid and sober twilight things—solemn beetles, whose weight of wing-case reminds them that life is real and earnest?"
"You were right upon the whole. I've got the same spirit in me as that little, gaudy, self-complacent atom there, opening and shutting his wings, like a fairy's picture-book upon your knee. Our rule of life is the same. I only hope he's having more luck with his existence than I have had with mine."
She reflected a moment. This was the first hint of his own sorrows in the past, of the price he had paid.
"But I'm not changed, for all the world of experiences that separates us," he continued quickly. "I'm only a thought older. Time is beginning to do a little gradual work in grey just above my ears. So delicate and apologetic and gentle he is that I can't grumble. Is Mr. Endicott well?"
"Very well."
"And Myles and the farm?"
"Both flourishing abundantly, I believe."
"And to think the sadness on your face is solely of my bringing—yet you can welcome me after what I have done!"
She marvelled a little that he could speak of it
"Pray, Christo, do not harp upon that. None accuses you. How could such a thing be thrown as blame upon anybody? Fate so often uses the kindest of us to do her cruel deeds. 'Tis the height of her cynic fun to plan parts in her plots and make the wrong actor play them."
"I ought to have used common sense and kept away altogether."
"Common sense!"
"I know; but I found it in Australia. There was no excuse for me. Can he forgive me?"
"I have not heard him breathe so much as one hasty word since he has known. You do not understand him to ask such a question. He is above admiration. No woman ever had such a good husband. And the better I love him, Christo, the better shall I love you, for giving him to me."
"Good God! you mustn't talk like that, must you?" he asked with some flutter; but she regarded him calmly as she answered.
"Why should not I? He knows that I loved you, and, therefore, love you. I am a most logical woman, and unchanging. It has all been very smooth and clear between Myles and me from the first, because we both hated any shadow of misunderstanding. That's the strength of our married life."
"My only fear centred in the recollection of his great straightness. He hates a trick, even though he may win by it."
"He loves me with all his heart."
"Yes—there it is. I didn't feel very anxious about the thing I did first; only about what I have done since I sometimes get a doubt. The question is whether, once dead, I was justified in coming to life again. Man's only built to be heroic in snatches—at least the average man—and when I found myself rich, instead of keeping it up and going through to the bitter end, as a bigger chap would have done, I thought of Godleigh. If you had lived a year and more among gum trees I think you might find it in you to forgive me for coming back. Those eternally lost gum trees! And springtime calling, calling from home! And here I am in God's good green again—His always, mine for a little while."
"Who can wonder that you came? The wonder would have been if you had stopped away. The thing you desired to bring about is done—happily and for ever."
"But Myles? He's so thorough. What does he think? Half-measures wouldn't win his respect."
"Half-measures you call them; but even a saint's life is only patchwork—all wrought in the drab colours of human nature, with a few bright stars marking the notable deeds. Yes, and lesser existences are a mere patchwork of good intentions, mostly barren."
"Not barren for certain. We sow decent grain and dragon's teeth mixed; and the poor sowers so often don't know which is which—till the crop's past praying for."
"That's your philosophy, then. I was wrong; you have changed."
"It's true. These things are in copybooks, but we never heed them when we are young. So that is why sometimes I have my doubts about Myles. Then I think along another line and the cloud vanishes."
"There can be no cloud, and he will soon rejoice that such a friend is in the land of the living."
But suspicion had already wakened in Yeoland.
"You say 'he will rejoice'; you don't say 'he does.'"
"Of course he does. How can you doubt it?"
"Tell him you have seen me, and that I am a perceptible shade wiser than when I left England. Tell him that incident in the wood has come near breaking my heart. I can feel great griefs if I don't show them. I do not expect him to slip into the old relations as you have. You and I were a couple of wild wood children together for years, until our elders trapped us and attempted to tame and educate and spoil us. Yet between him and me now there are close bonds enough—bonds as deep to me, as binding, as eternal as the dawn-light we both adore. But he's a fire-worshipper, or something, and I'm a Christian; so, when all's said, we shall never get straight to one another's hearts like Honor and Christo. It isn't possible. I thought to meet him with a handshake to bridge the years, and a silent understanding too deep for words; I pictured him all the way home as my friend of friends, and now—now I ought to go upon my knees to him and ask him to put his foot on my neck and forgive me for that moonlight madness."
"Now I know that it is you, not I, who fail to understand my husband," said Honor. "He is a greater man by far than you think or I know. Never utter or dream these things any more, for they are wrong. Forget them and look forward to happiness."
They talked a while longer on divers themes; then the woman rose to return home, and Christopher, declaring an intention to visit Endicott's that evening, went back to Godleigh.
Each now marvelled much from a personal point of view at this, their first meeting—at its familiarity of texture and lack of distinction. Both indeed felt dumbly astonished that, after such a gap, converse could be renewed thus easily; yet they joyed in the meeting; and while Yeoland ingenuously gloried in the sight and voice of the woman he had loved, Honor's pleasure was of a colour more sober, a quality more intricate.