“To my honoured friend, Mr. James Creel, of Gray’s Inn, I have committed, to hold in trust for certain purposes, the estate of ‘Delsrop,’ in the county of Hampshire; whereof are dwelling-house and messuage, ninety-four acres, together with two farms held on long leases, the which it is not my desire to particularize in this the present connection. But rather to state clearly that in event of the bankruptcy at any time after my death of my only son, Robert (which calamity I, considering the bent of his nature, do sorrowfully foresee), and in no other event, the said estate is to be handed over to him, to work to a profit if he will, and so redeem the past; but on the condition that from that time being he shall forego his honourable title and know himself and be known as Robert Tuke, which name of Tuke hath his mother borne before him to her maiden honour and renown. And this I state clearly, that he may take or reject without further question, knowing the estate to be mine to give, and else seeking to know nothing. And I offer it, a last chance of redemption, that he, sloughing all that foulness of the past with his dishonoured name may turn the fruits of evil to the account of good.”
“To my honoured friend, Mr. James Creel, of Gray’s Inn, I have committed, to hold in trust for certain purposes, the estate of ‘Delsrop,’ in the county of Hampshire; whereof are dwelling-house and messuage, ninety-four acres, together with two farms held on long leases, the which it is not my desire to particularize in this the present connection. But rather to state clearly that in event of the bankruptcy at any time after my death of my only son, Robert (which calamity I, considering the bent of his nature, do sorrowfully foresee), and in no other event, the said estate is to be handed over to him, to work to a profit if he will, and so redeem the past; but on the condition that from that time being he shall forego his honourable title and know himself and be known as Robert Tuke, which name of Tuke hath his mother borne before him to her maiden honour and renown. And this I state clearly, that he may take or reject without further question, knowing the estate to be mine to give, and else seeking to know nothing. And I offer it, a last chance of redemption, that he, sloughing all that foulness of the past with his dishonoured name may turn the fruits of evil to the account of good.”
In the minute of amazed silence, during which the listener sought to ponder the import of this astonishing message, Mr. Creel refolded the paper, returned it to the packet, and, sitting down again, tapped and scraped his chin with the latter in a dry manner of expectancy.
“Well?” he said at length.
Sir Robert tilted himself to his feet, and stood rumpling his hair.
“I am at sea!” he cried, in a lost voice. “What does it all mean? I never heard of this estate; nor, I protest, did the executors. How did it come to him, and when?”
“That I may answer you. It was in the year ’79—not many months before his death.”
“And from whom?”
The lawyer shook his head grimly.
“Ah!” said the baronet. “You love a secret, of course. Am I never to know more than this?”
“Sir, you understand the conditions. You are to take or reject.”
“A messuage and the rest of it? And where is the working capital?”
“These many years I have nursed the property against this contingency. It has yielded fairly, and there will be an accumulated sum to your credit.”
“And if I reject?”
“Then the whole reverts to me.”
The young man’s eyes took a sudden softness. He was only thirty-one, and susceptible yet to impressions of unworldliness.
“I fail to see your profit in the matter,” he said.
“My profit,” answered the lawyer sternly, “was in a good man’s confidence.”
Then he went on more gently:
“I soughtnoprofit in the transaction. I would have sacrificed more than the estate to save you and myself the necessity of this explanation. It was my affection for your father bound me to this solemn compact, as it was my regard for the latter drove me unknown to you to set an anxious eye upon your career.”
“And so pluck a fool from the burning and lose an estate.”
Sir Robert advanced impetuously and seized the other’s corded hand.
“You are a noble soul. I will learn to pray, and you shall be my saint to intercede. I take my life from you and this strange trust; doing my duty by it and asking no questions.”
The old lawyer’s eyes moistened; but he answered somewhat caustically:
“I won’t say it is your deserts. But the gift is from Heaven, where your father, his battles over, sits at peace. ’Tis he hath interceded, and the Almighty—to satisfy his importunity, maybe—gives you a new house, as erst he did to Job, but for a better reason.”
Then he added a little inconsequently:
“You’ll find it in a damned bad state of repair.”
Itwas six o’clock of a cold September morning when Sir Robert—or Mr. Tuke, as we must now know him—woke in his room off the stable-yard of the old “George” inn at Winchester. Lying lazily snoozed amongst the pillows, he reviewed, with some amused satisfaction, the first courses of that scheme of reformation he had mapped out for himself, whereof two rather sleepless nights at Farnham and his present quarters—the result of an abstention in the matter of numerous “nightcaps,” which habit had made necessary to slumber—were the prologue. Now, the little battle fought and won, he preened his moral feathers smugly, and felt clear-eyed and very good indeed. As to the mysterious estate—the last stage on the journey to which he should cover that day—he had soon learned to accept its acquisition with that sweetness of irresponsibility that was his most engaging and aggravating characteristic. But, after all, he had an excellent digestion—in common with a great many men of the eighteenth century—and was little inclined to dyspeptic brooding over problems.
Now, as he lay, his half-dreaming glance was arrested by a coloured print after George Morland hanging on the wall over against him. The like he remembered dimly to have known in a nursery of long ago—a picture that had often set his young soul wandering by lanes of enchantment. Nothing could have served better to confirm and make abiding his present mood. He was a boy again, an apple-skinned Ulysses, with the limitless possibilities of the unknown before him. Without stain or guile he passed beyond the narrow margins of the print into a land that no mortal foot but his own had yet trodden.
Indeed, for the moment he was a child again, and there is nothing in after-life like the pure imaginings of such. To the child every incident is a picture framed and hung upon a wall. The memory of these pictures abides long, then fades a little and a little more. We are hardly conscious of them in old age, or at least feel hardly the ecstasy of their atmosphere. In acquiring our identities (Keats’s phrase), what don’t we lose? We find a fact for a dream—a wretched exchange. But the first possession doesn’t altogether go. It recurs to us at odd moments in little sweet mental vertigoes—never so much, perhaps, as during that half-waking hour of dawn when we are least conscious of our material selves.
Then to think of a dewy morning down; of a pleached alley of fruit-trees in blossom; of a windy common; of the mystery of snow and brooding distances; of a Christmas-tree, even, and the mingled ravishing smell of lighted tapers and banked fir-branches, is momentarily to recall the amazing romance and illimitableness of life; is to be quit of the dreariness of conviction, and to stand once more at the foot of the green slope, and look up and wonder whither the clouds are sailing over the far summit. A few artists, a few writers, a few musicians, have the power, or the instinct, to inspire us with these ancient imaginings; and such as can, we must dearly love, though they may never stand in the front ranks of their fellows. The child is the only real genius; and perhaps these have remained morally children. In mid-life they can arrest and record the fugitive retrospections that to the most of us are only bubbles broken away from the far-distant spring of life, to be caught at and to vanish on the prick of possession. God bless them! they are our best earnest of the spiritual.
Out of his luminous stupor on that grassy borderland of dawn, the dreamer came with a full heart, and, it must be confessed, a biting consciousness of emptiness in his stomach.
He sprang out of bed, and bathed and dressed to the hissing accompaniment of ostlers in the yard below and to the clank of horse-hoofs on the cobble-stones.
He breakfasted, as men did in those days, as if he were victualling for a siege, and had great thoughts of kissing the chambermaid when he fee’d her—but refrained.
By half-past nine he was on the road, with a heart full of gaiety, and a recurring wonder for his destination, and clattered under the old west gateway of the town with a song on his lips—
She was throated like the stare—Well-a-day!She was white as buds of May—Well-a-day!And all with their sweet scentHer bodie was besprent,That to kiss her was a joy beyond compare,If her mouth the scarlet hips—Well-a-day!Would for redness all dismay—Well-a-day!Ah! it took its comely stainFrom the truths that she had slain;For falser than the serpent were her lips.Once with passion I did rave—Well-a-day!Now I will not, though she sayWell-a-day!For the cry of damnéd LoveAll her beauty doth disprove,And her heart it is a stone above his grave.
She was throated like the stare—Well-a-day!She was white as buds of May—Well-a-day!And all with their sweet scentHer bodie was besprent,That to kiss her was a joy beyond compare,If her mouth the scarlet hips—Well-a-day!Would for redness all dismay—Well-a-day!Ah! it took its comely stainFrom the truths that she had slain;For falser than the serpent were her lips.Once with passion I did rave—Well-a-day!Now I will not, though she sayWell-a-day!For the cry of damnéd LoveAll her beauty doth disprove,And her heart it is a stone above his grave.
She was throated like the stare—
Well-a-day!
She was white as buds of May—
Well-a-day!
And all with their sweet scent
Her bodie was besprent,
That to kiss her was a joy beyond compare,
If her mouth the scarlet hips—
Well-a-day!
Would for redness all dismay—
Well-a-day!
Ah! it took its comely stain
From the truths that she had slain;
For falser than the serpent were her lips.
Once with passion I did rave—
Well-a-day!
Now I will not, though she say
Well-a-day!
For the cry of damnéd Love
All her beauty doth disprove,
And her heart it is a stone above his grave.
Mr. Tuke had not a good voice. The chords of vibration were beyond his control. But his breast was lined with romance, and this led him to give some melodious effect to the sentiment of words that did not seem, it must be admitted, appropriate to his rather riotous character.
He left the old city and took the Stockbridge road; and presently, entering between country hedgerows, looped his reins slackly and let his horse amble fairly as he listed.
The sunshine in his soul was constitutional, inextinguishable, and not reflected from his surroundings; for the day was bitter for the time of year, and the wind stuck as rigidly in the northeast as if the stiff-pointing weathercocks had nailed it there. The greyness, however, emphasized the sparkle of hip and holly and all red berries; for every dull mood of Nature has its compensations to shame us out of peevishness. A squirrel ran from branch to root of a beech-tree like a stain of rust; a cloud of fieldfares went down the sky and wheeled, disintegrated, as if they were so much blown powder; the ruddocks twinkled in the hedges like dead leaves flicked by the wind.
The horseman had an eye and a heart for all. He was of good, lovable material, whatever the hitherto courses of his bad days and worser nights.
By and by he came out upon country very wild and barren. The road heaved and dropped by way of grim and treeless downs, through whose cropped surface-grass the white chalk smote upwards like death in a sick man’s face. For leagues the sterile slopes seemed stretching onwards; and no sign of life was on them all, but here and there a flapping crow—no music of it, but, in some more sheltered hollow, the sweet lark’s broken ground-song.
And the further he rode, the more confirmed in desolation grew the scenery. There was a wild forlorn beauty about it all, nevertheless—a clean-blown freshness that seemed to set the hillsides pulsing with opal tints, like near-extinguished ashes breathed upon.
Something, familiar to those days, was wanting, however; and the solitary rider peered for the something, unwilling to believe that a tract so lonely could be innocent of a certain unchancy landmark. He had already loosened his pistols in the holsters, and was riding with a greater regard for surprises.
He topped a hillock, and “Ah!” quoth he; “I could not be mistaken.”
On a high swell of ground, right in his path, as it seemed, a structure like a massive clothes’-horse, open at an angle, stood up against the sky. From its crowning beams a short slack or two of chain depended; but these were quit for the time of any ugly burden—a void that by no means pleased the traveller.
“When the boggart tumbles, the crows re-gather,” he murmured sententiously; but he set to singing again, though with an eye alert for mishaps.
Nothing occurred, however; nor had he sighted a solitary soul moving in the breadth of the wide landscape, when—without a change being obvious in the character of the latter—he found himself descending a steep slope to a little long township of queer and ancient houses.
Here at a pleasant small tavern—on whose sign-board, as he approached, he read the legend “The First Inn” (the reverse slyly exhibited, to the eternal merriment of chuckleheads, the obvious antiperistasis of “The Last Out”)—he drew rein, and found he had reached the village of Stockbridge, which was in truth that halting-place on his last stage, from which he was, as he had learned, to take a by-road, some five or six miles, to his destination.
Into the tap he strode; and there were a few gaping rustics swilling their muddy quarts, and the landlord, a wizened, bent-stick of a man, behind the bar.
“Oblige me by sending some one to look after my horse,” said Mr. Tuke to this person.
The person shifted a glass or two, covertly eyeing the stranger through rheumy slits of lids; but answer made he none.
Mr. Tuke repeated his request—still without result. He turned sharply on one of the grinning hinds.
“What ails the old faggot?” he said.
“He be stone deaf, master.”
Then the fellow bawled: “Jarge! Jar-rge! the gen’leman warnts ’s oss tended.”
The old man put a wrinkled claw to his ear, and shook his head.
“Eh!” said Mr. Tuke. “You refuse?”
He flushed in surprised anger, when at the moment a girl came into the bar, and addressed him in a bright civil voice.
“Grandfather’s deaf, sir,” she said; “and I was out of the way. I’ll send your horse to the stable. And what shall I draw for your honour?”
She was fresh and desirable as a spring of sweet water to a thirsty traveller. An old yellow handkerchief, of cherished silk, was knotted about her head, yet none so jealously but that a curl or two might escape—like tendrils of Tantalus his vine—for the teasing of fervid souls; and her gown, girdled under her bosom and fastened there with a favour of Michaelmas daisy, smelt of lavender and was the colour of it. She was tall, too, for a Hebe of the downs, and her arms, bare to the elbow, were tanned of a soft ivory—as were her hands, that were fine and capable-looking.
She gazed honestly at our gentleman from eyes as full of brown harmonies as a starling’s back; and he had no thought but to return her gaze with complete admiration.
“Can you give me to eat?” he said. “Anything will do.” And “Surely, sir,” she answered, “if simple fare will serve your honour.”
She showed him into a queer little parlour, with a long latticed window that looked into a vegetable garden ruddy with apple-trees, and fetched cloth and salt from a corner cupboard, while he sat down by an old grumbling grandfather clock and watched her movements.
“Who is the landlord of this good tavern?” said he.
“George Pollack, sir; and I am his granddaughter, at your service.”
“Would you were. And what is your name, my pretty maid?”
“Elizabeth, I was christened,” said she; “and Betty am I called.”
His last words suggesting an old nursery rhyme—“And what is your fortune, my pretty maid?” he could not help murmuring.
“Self-possession,” said she with a smile, and whisked out of the room.
Mr. Tukehad ridden a mile along the last lap of his journey, when he suddenly drew himself together, gave a whistle, and set to communing audibly with his inner man.
“This will not do, Roberto,” he murmured. “Thou hast eaten of the dangerous fruit, and the sweet poison courses in thy veins.”
He shrugged out a laugh.
“Why, what has my drugged headpiece been conscious of since I left the inn?—whereat I dwelt a pernicious while, by the way. The wind whistles ‘Betty Pollack’—the lark twitters ‘Betty Pollack’—she smiles over the hedgerows; she sits on every stile; the rose of the sun looks through the grey welkin like the fire of untouched maidenhood in her delicate cheeks. And I am a squire of acres—a man of substance; and a good man prospective, I believe.”
He laughed again, flicked his horse to a canter, and broke into a fragment of the old-world song that seemed queerly inapt to his character—
Sweet sun, sweet air, and a pilgrim’s scrip;Shoon to my feet and sword on hip;Flout or kiss on a ready lip,And the green by-ways of the world-a!
Sweet sun, sweet air, and a pilgrim’s scrip;Shoon to my feet and sword on hip;Flout or kiss on a ready lip,And the green by-ways of the world-a!
Sweet sun, sweet air, and a pilgrim’s scrip;
Shoon to my feet and sword on hip;
Flout or kiss on a ready lip,
And the green by-ways of the world-a!
His voice rang down the lonely swales and made their austerity human. For a profound silence reigned on all the hills and in the valleys by way of his passing, and the wind had ceased to cry of its own desolation.
Still no change marked the aspect of the country he traversed. Downs—endless downs, with, occasionally, a wryed plume of beech-trees on the peak of a slope; occasionally, a row of white stones in the cleft of a hillside, as if Nature, like some disturbed beast, were setting her teeth for a snarl.
At the end of another mile, it came as a breathing relief to him, upon topping a long incline, to see its downward pitch break away into a spread of meadow-land, whereafter began trees, at first singly or in clumps; further, in copses and little shaws, until the distance rolled with their billowing in fair, modulated waves.
The sight brought a cluck of satisfaction from him, for he was not made for loneliness; and he paused to drink in the glad prospect. Indeed, he had come to think that his acres would prove but barren sheep-runs, and his house but a magnified shepherd’s cottage on a swept table of pasturage, till this good view opened out to reassure him.
Down below, at the foot of the hill, lay a little lusty field with a noble girth of hawthorn about it, and through the green of this a shining burn flowed—a mere crooked rindle it looked, pencilled white on the grass. It was like the image of a lightning flash—earth’s engraved memory of a sublime moment—so still seemed its course from the traveller’s coign of regard; and, for some reason unaccountable—unless it typified in its innocence the cleansing spring of repentance—it drew him to dismount that he might stoop and wash his throat with a mouthful of its kindly rippling.
He rode down, tied his horse to a stake in the hedge, and, crossing a broken stile, strolled over the long grass that gave up a spicy smell of peppermint. As he neared a fat bush of wayfaring tree that stood against the margin of the brook, he became aware of a man, whom he had not at first noticed, fishing in the shadow of the green covert. The very creases in the back of this individual, who was to all appearance absorbed in his sport, excerned a suggestion of watchfulness, that somehow convinced the intruder that his every approaching step was being marked and listened for. Careless of the fact, however, he came alongside the stranger, who moved not so much as an eyelid, but continued to observe the slow voyage of his float with inexpressible serenity.
“Any sport, friend?” quoth our hero.
The stranger, without turning his head, answered, “None”—like a dog snapping at a fly. He was not a well-favoured person, it must be said, either as to his clothes or features, any of which seemed to have assimilated a common frowsiness. His long yellow jaws were clean-shaved—if so spruce an epithet could be applied to a hand-breadth of mouldy stubble—and dry tags of neutral-tinted hair fell over his cheeks and little hard eye-places. A greasy cocked hat, whereof one flap had been roughly seized down to give shade from the sun, was battened on his head, and the length of his gaunt body was expressed only by a rusty brown riding-coat that fell almost to his heels.
There was something else—some peculiarity that marked him apart from the ordinary; and in the first moments of their meeting the new-comer vainly cudgelled his brains to find out what this was. But, presently, when at length the stranger turned to read him full-face with a single covert glance, he saw in what the abnormality consisted. The man had no ears, but only little corrugated holes where these features should have been.
Mr. Tuke gave a whistle, then a laugh.
“I disturb you, I see,” said he.
“That be damned!” said the stranger icily. “You disturb the fish, sir.”
He had a great hooked nose, the corners of which were sensitive of his every word. One would have expected them to vibrate like laminæ of talc if he should ventilate his anger.
Mr. Tuke laughed again.
“Why do you swear?” he said cheerfully. “I don’t, though I think I have lost my way.”
“Then let me put you on it again, in the devil’s name.”
“You will pardon me. I can’t undertake to travel with that passport, even if countersigned by you.”
“Sir, sir! Whither are you bound? Do you think the chub are interested in your converse?”
“I don’t know. The wise man baits his hook with inquiry.”
“And the fool his with impertinence. You fish in empty waters, sir.”
“Oh! You are churlish. But I understand an angler sports for the love of solitude.”
“You are perfectly right.”
“Well—convince me that I have not wandered abroad, and I will go.”
“You are out of your path here. That I can assert.”
“For ‘Delsrop’ House?”
The long man’s fist jerked, so that his float bobbed on the water.
“For where?” said he.
The float slid out of sight. Mechanically he reeled up, bungled, and lost his fish. Curiously, he seemed little affected by the calamity.
“What place?” he repeated, busy with his hook.
“‘Delsrop,’ ’tis called—a house somewhere in the neighbourhood.”
“Why, what d’ye seek thither?”
“Surely, sir, you are a fool by your own showing. Rest content. I only seek my own.”
“Your own—‘Delsrop?’”
Mr. Tuke sniggered with amusement.
“Preserve the man!” he cried. “But I understand, sir; and appreciate the kind of welcome like to be extended to an absentee landlord.”
For a moment the stranger seemed at a loss for speech. Then suddenly he turned upon the other, with a strained smile on his lips and his nostrils in a lively state of convulsion.
“You must pardon me,” he said. “I know the house, which hath been so long untenanted, that the fact of a claimant to its wildernesses appearing fills me with a sense of the abnormal.”
He trailed his rod, staring at the intruder.
“So you own ‘Delsrop?’” said he, with a musing hand caressing his stubble. “I suppose you know—now I suppose you know the place is reputed to be haunted?”
Mr. Tuke was growing impatient.
“Can you direct me thither?” he said curtly.
“Surely, sir,”—a lean smile creased the leathery skin of his cheeks. “You have only to follow the road you left. Over the crest of the first slope you will pass a tavern—the ‘Dog and Duck.’ The gates of ‘Delsrop’ break a plantation of firs, three miles beyond.”
The baronet expressed his thanks briefly, and stalked away. His informant looked an unsavoury piece of goods, in all truth, and he was growing conscious of a sense of weariness that inclined him to resent undue eccentricity.
He remounted his horse, and pricked him to the ascent beyond the dip. Looking back as he neared the top, he noticed that the fisherman was disjointing his rod with a snapping, impatient hurry of action that seemed to signify his sport was no longer the uppermost interest with him.
“I am destined to be stalked for some weeks as a black swan,” thought he crossly. “My advent will be better than a raree-show to these local blockheads.”
He breasted the summit, and rode on. Almost immediately, he came in sight of the ale-house alluded to, and read “Dog and Duck” on its flaked and blistered sign-board that hung posted in the roadway opposite the tavern.
The latter was a forlorn and barren-enough-looking little temple of conviviality—a mere whitened sepulchre for the entombment of dead-drunks. It stood in a sterile patch of garden that was so flogged by bitter winds that the very cabbages lost heart, and the stunted potatoes cowered in their trenches like the rawest of Nature’s recruits. There was a vagabond look about the building, too, that was rather accented by a strip of lead over its dinted doorway, that gave to the two round bosses of opaque glass let into the upper panels of the latter, the appearance of weak bibulous eyes protected by a monstrous shade. To one side of the door a wooden bow-window, with its lower panes lined with some stuff of a crimson hue, projected; and on the outer sill of this, a figure, quite in keeping with the character of his surroundings, lounged at cumbrous ease, and drew the while at a long “churchwarden.”
Mr. Tuke caught only a fleeting view of this figure as he rode past; but an impression of it was taken on the retina of his mind’s eye with curious fidelity. Yet there had been nothing so remarkable about the man, who was a thick-set burly fellow, of low statue and unobtrusive physiognomy. Only, his cropt hair and eyebrows had been very white and his face very red, and somehow the combination had had an extremely ugly look. A hundred yards further on, looking backwards, with the common self-consciousness of the wayfarer, he saw that the lounger had slouched out into the road, and was watching his recession with weighty curiosity; and—“Oh!” he groaned, “that I should come to be the eye-salve of such a parcel of oafs!”
On he rode by swale and hillock, and presently the sombreness of his journey wrought a little mood of discomfort in him. He had loitered so much by the way, that dusk was beginning to gather in the hollows, and the melancholy of his surroundings found something of a kindred feeling in his heart. The rising of the mist along water-courses, as if silent trains of powder had been fired to give warning of his passing; the monotonous progression of thorny hedgerows; the flickering of sudden bats and rustle of unseen things in the roadside tangle—all oppressed him as if with a certain alarm of ominous expectancy.
Often now he dived into swoops of lower ground that were mere pits of blackness from the density of the trees that grew about them. Then the wind, that had lain coiled awhile, reared itself anew and went moaning through the branches, and met the traveller full-face on ascents, so that he shivered and greatly desired the comfort of a cloak;—but still, nothing like a house appeared in any corner of the desolate and lonely landscape.
It was in one of these dismal plunges into gloom that, as he began to toilfully breast the incline beyond, the memory of a gate half-hidden in the bush-tangle at the bottom occurred to him as something he had passed but a minute before with an abstracted eye.
At the thought he drew rein, turned his horse, with the sound of a tired trailing of hoofs, and retraced his steps a length of fifty paces.
Sure enough, set in the height of a dense shrubbery, was a tall twofold gate of wrought iron that sloped off into the bushes on either side. But years of neglect had assimilated the paint of the metal to the colour of the leafiness about it—blue and mossy green—so that little wonder was that it should stand unobserved by the belated passer-by.
“Now, the star of my destiny guide me!” said the baronet, peering curiously through the dusk. “Is this the road to my inheritance? It seems weird and neglected enough in all conscience.”
He dismounted, found the lock of the gate to be burst and useless, and decided to at least push his inquiries into the mysterious twilight beyond.
It needed an effort to force open the structure on rusted hinges and against the mat of weediness underfoot; but he did it, led his horse through, and swung-to the gate behind him. It went into place with a scream and a clang that cut piercingly into the sombre stillness. A bird or two fled twittering from the thickets, and then all sank into silence again.
The intruder paused a moment before pushing further. Peering hither and thither through the dank obscurity of trunks, whose interlacing boughs made a high fragrant vault at a lofty distance above him, he was aware of a little ruined lodge, ancient, tenantless, and all overgrown with lichen.
An eerie inheritance, in good sooth! He shivered, and, taking his horse by the bridle, led him on. The brute’s pasterns rustled in dead leaves; his hoofs thudded softly on spongy moss. To all appearance he traversed a drive making for the house; but from its character it might have been a natural alley in some primeval wood.
He had been given to understand that the caretaker had been forwarded certain directions for his reception. Now, as the wild and unordered nature of his property was brought home to him, he thought how inadequate to his present needs any preparation possible to the estate was like to be, and was half-inclined, late as the hour was, to ride back to Stockbridge—so cosily figured in his imagination the lights and good roast of the “First Inn,” with pretty Betty Pollack to serve them.
It was the reaction of a moment, and in a moment dismissed; for, whatever the spirit of the man, the good horse’s was already sufficiently tried.
Dismally cogitating he continued his way, and suddenly a new uneasiness was added to his apprehensions. Something was moving alongside him—keeping pace with him—flitting in and out at a little distance amongst the trees. It was spectral and soft-footed—a suggestion rather than a shape; but when he paused to look more closely, it was always gone. Still, if he moved again, there it was undiscernible in the dark thickset, slipping forward on a level with him, and so noiselessly that sometimes he thought it a mere trick of his fancy.
The tension on his nerves under this shadowy ordeal grew at length so taut, that he was fain to stop and cry out, if only for the relief of hearing his own voice in that ghost-haunted solitude.
“Who are you?” he shouted. “Why are you dogging me like this?”
“Like this?” a little laughing echo threw back—and silence closed upon him again.
He felt the thrill of sweat prickle down his neck; but, stubbornly pushing forward, of a sudden he saw the drive swerve into open space—a twinkle of light gleamed upon him—and there, grown out of the dark before his eyes; was a long low house of crinkled white, with either end fashioned into a protruding gable.
Too weary and out of humour with the situation to note anything but that here presumably his quest ended, he drew up at a central porch with a peaked roof, and seeing a dark iron-studded door before him, rained a shower of blows on it with the butt of his riding-whip.
A step hurried along the passage within—there was the click of a latch, and the figure of a tall man, holding a candle over its head, appeared in the opening.
As the two stood thus a moment, a white shape came out of the darkness, passed horse and traveller, and, with a tiny laugh, fled into the house and vanished.
Anyman but a Bayard is apt to lose the accent of courtesy in the rebound from a sudden fright.
Mr. Tuke fell back a pace, breathing quickly. Then he advanced in quick fury, so that the man in the doorway shrunk before him.
“Are you Whimple?” he demanded in a harsh voice, with a slight tremor in it.
“At your good service, sir.”
The caretaker spoke up timidly, and made an involuntary motion of retreat.
“Who was that that went in before me—that has been stalking me all up the drive?”
“Ah, sir! You must hold her excused. I did not know she was out. It is my sister Darda.”
“The fiend take the jade! I’ll have her out bag and baggage if she trifles with me. Here, sir—do you know who I am? Take my horse and see that he has food and water.”
He stalked angrily past the shrinking figure and made his way into the passage.
“Go, now,” he said with an impatient stamp, “and join me when your service is done.”
The man went forth silently, and the new-comer turned to look about him.
It seemed that his most dour apprehensions were realized in that first view of his surroundings.
He saw a long hall, not too wide, that in its panelling of black oak looked a very catacomb of dismality in the light of a single flaring oil-lamp that stood up on a bracket, half-way down, and whose greasy radiance rather emphasized than relieved the enwrapping gloom. Somewhere in the further obscurity, the first steps of a stairway, with old carved-end posts, were evident; and here the windy darkness seemed to rise into vacancy like smoke up a chimney.
The traveller uttered a fretful expression, and pushing open a door to his left—through which a weak shaft of light issuing appeared to give promise of a certain comfort beyond—almost fell down a couple of stone steps that led straight into a large massive-beamed room, with a great hearth in it on which some smouldering faggots glowed with a dull crimson.
Here, at any rate, was a board spread with food and drink, and, amongst them, a couple of candles in brass sconces. The revivifying sight led the baronet to look about him with a wider geniality. Certainly the room was beautiful in its proportions and in its air of antique solemnity. The floor was paved with solid stone flags; the walls were oak up to the ceiling; and a long oriel window, now heavily shuttered, was set deep in the masonry of the side over against the hearth.
The tired man sat him down on a wooden stool before the embers, and fell to a fit of musing over his queer destiny. So this was to be his fate—to plunge from the fever and glare of fashionable dissipation into a lonely and half-dismantled dwelling-place situate in the heart of an isolated thicket. Well, he had accepted his life on the terms, and the powers of destiny should find that he had the will to shake the life out of a resolution into which he had fastened his teeth.
In the depths of his pondering, he heard the front door slammed to and bolted, and was aware the next moment that the caretaker was standing in the room, silently awaiting his notice.
He twisted round on his perch, and regarded the man frowningly.
The latter hung his head under the scrutiny. He was a hectic, bashful-looking fellow, tall and weedy, with pale eyes and a weak, sloping chin. His age might have been thirty-eight or so—was in fact; though there was a curious suggestion of youthfulness in his smooth, shaven cheeks and soft, uncertain voice.
Mr. Tuke waved his hand towards the table.
“These preparations are for me?”
“The best we could compass, sir.”
He spoke with hesitancy, and in a manner of deprecation.
“The notice was very short. I had no instructions to provide but what the house could supply; and no means of learning your wishes.”
“There is little in the house, I suppose?”
“Little, indeed, sir, but some linen and a trifle of silver and a good store of wine in the cellars.”
“Of whose providing?”
The man did not answer. The other repeated his question in a more peremptory tone. Already—he could not have said why—a prejudice was forming in his mind against this patient-spoken servant.
“Of whose providing? I say. Why—don’t you know?”
“It has always been here, sir. It was here before I came.”
“And when was that?”
The answer followed so soft that the baronet could scarcely distinguish it.
“Speak out, sir!” said he angrily. “When was that? I ask.”
The caretaker cleared his throat.
“It was in November of the year ’79.”
“The year before my father’s death? Why, man, do you mean to tell me you have lived here all this age—lived and vegetated in this isolation for twenty-one years?”
“It is true, indeed, sir.”
“You were a boy when you came. Your ambition is a tortoise. And who was the last tenant?”
Again the soft, distressed answer:
“I don’t know, sir. Indeed I don’t know. How can I tell?”
“How, truly—for one who can be content to rust in a solitude for a double decade? Well—you take your service from Mr. Creel, I suppose; and he knows his business. And whither do you wend now?”
The man was emboldened to step forward, his eyes shining with a pitiful anxiety.
“Oh, sir, sir! If you will only continue the service? We have no home or hope or prospect without ‘Delsrop’; and Mr. Creel—Mr. Creel, sir, he bade me throw myself upon your bounty.”
“I am beholden to him.”
He looked a little sourly on the flushed, weak face. Perhaps there had been small charge of powder behind his shot; but anyhow, in the long run, good-nature was sure to incline him to generosity.
“I will consider of it,” he said coolly. “Perhaps you can prove yourself worthy of my interest. For the present, at least, you may stop—you, and your sister, to whom I conclude you desire me to extend the permission.”
“If you will, sir. And I can only thank you from my heart.”
His broken tones found a weak spot in the other’s breast.
“Well,” he said—“well, what are you called?”
“My name is Dennis.”
“And your sister?”
“She is Darda.”
“H’m! A pet expression, I presume.”
“Indeed, no, sir. ’Tis Hebrew, and signifies ‘Pearl of Wisdom.’”
“And is she that?”
“Ah, sir! ’Twas a fanciful notion of her mother’s. God help her, poor stricken loveling! Sure the fiends of pride suggested it in a bitter irony.”
“What ails her?”
“Her mind keeps no growth with her body. In this, her twenty-fifth year, she is nought but a wayward and fantastic child.”
“My household figures out apace. And you two are alone on the premises?”
“Alone, sir, and have always been.”
“Well, Mr. Dennis Whimple—and I would say, ‘as I would be, too.’ Leave me, my good fellow, and light me presently to bed.”
The caretaker withdrew, with a humble obeisance, and Mr. Tuke sat down to his meal. This proved homely enough, but acceptable to a ravenous stomach; and no doubt the wine made rich amends for the poverty of the repast.
His supper finished, and a great wave of sleepiness threatening to overwhelm him, he called for his henchman and demanded guidance to his bedroom.
Up the broad stairway Dennis, bearing a candlestick in either hand, preceded him, and his drowsiness inclined him there and then to little observation of the passages by which he passed. But presently he was aware of standing in a great gusty room, strongly shuttered like the one below, and having for its one conspicuous piece of furniture a mighty four-poster, with curtains and tester of heavy, faded brocade.
Dismissing his guide with a curt “good-night,” he crawled shortly between sheets fragrant of lavender, and fell almost at once into a profound slumber.
He woke in the morning to the sound of a tap on his door panels.
“Come in!” he groaned—for his head was like lead with the close atmosphere of the room.
A broad spurt of light flooded him from the opened door, and Dennis entered with shaving water and a towel.
“Ah!” said Tuke, recollecting himself. “It’s you, is it? Oblige me, my friend, by flinging open those shutters. And for the future, refrain from closing them at night.”
The man did as he was ordered, and then paused.
“Sir,” said he, with the same painful hesitancy of manner—“if I may presume—pray let me entreat you to reconsider the question.”
The other raised his head in staring surprise.
“What question?” said he.
“That of opening the shutters at night.”
Mr. Tuke sprang up into a sitting posture, with an oath.
“What the devil!” he cried. “Are you to begin by disputing my orders?”
“But——”
“Leave the room, sir.”
When he was alone—“Mr. Whimple,” muttered he, “you must have that hang-dog mouth muzzled if you are to stop.”
He looked forth through the broad-latticed casement. It was a fair, still morning, and the sun made idyllic glory of what had overnight appeared so haunted and so sombre. The house lay, so far as he could make out, in a wide basin of ground cut out of the heart of a thronging woodland, and must from its position be very private and remote. Before him was stretched a noble lawn, with a couple of gnarled and buttressed oaks to break its greenness; but the grass was a foot long, and so weighted with dew that a kilderkin of sweet water might have been gathered from it.
To his right he saw the opening of the drive by which he had come to his own. This, so far as he could see down it, was less an avenue than a passage driven through a wood, and all over its mossy floor the light fell in brilliant smears and patches, as if the branches dripped green fire.
Elsewhere, on every side visible, were trees; but with, here and there, scant openings in them. They closed in the further line of the lawn; they packed the hollows and mounted the slopes; in every direction they filled the prospect with an ardent leafiness.
The gazer turned and pursued his inquiries into the room. He found little to reward his curiosity, beyond the general beauty of an ancient interior; for the chamber was panelled in oak, like the other where he had supped, and the window was a fine oriel, with heraldic devices in stained glass in its topmost squares. For furniture there were the great bed, whose posts were richly carved in antique foliage; a wardrobe no less generously designed; a washhand-stand and chairs of plain solid oak, and an oak table in the embrasure of the window, with a cracked mirror of oldrepoussébrass work standing on it. This, indeed, was the one exception to that tasteful substantiality of accessory with which a mysterious destiny seemed to have supplied his needs. Else there were no pictures, no carpet, no curtains, no adornments of any kind—only a severe simplicity, in which was suggested a certain methodical cleanliness which, it pleased the man of fashion to think, was far remote from the systems of society with its accumulations of glittering rubbish.
He went through his toilet singing, and, opening his door, found himself on a broad landing, wherefrom half-a-dozen other doors gave access to as many rooms. Into each of these In order he peeped. They were empty, one and all—dusty, spider-haunted; and not a room of them, it appeared, but had had, at some remote period, its oak flooring roughly jarred up, and as roughly thrown and stamped into place again. In one or two, moreover, bricks, dislodged from the chimneys, were cast pell-mell upon the hearths; or fissures gaped in the walls or in the plaster of the ceilings.
“One would think,” he murmured, “that the place had withstood a siege.”
That it was designed with an eye to such a contingency, the massive nature of its window-shutters would seem to point. These—all of which had been obviously only recently thrown open—were of a common pattern of studded oak, and their hinges were sunk deep in the masonry of the walls. Closed, their power of resistance would have been as that of the stones themselves.
Throughout the house, when its owner came to explore it, this same feature was apparent. The building, in an emergency, could have been sealed as securely as a castle.
Mr. Tuke found his breakfast laid in the room where he had supped. As he entered the figure of a girl, that had been busy at the table, came forward as if to pass him. He barred her way, and she stopped immediately.
“Are you Darda?” said he.
She gave a shrill laugh, and “Yes,” she answered.
She was an eldritch creature and undersized; but the clean symmetry of her limbs was perfect, and her manners of movement showed all the mingled grace and self-consciousness of a child of ten. In her face was a marvellous contrast of colour, that was even startling on first acquaintance—for the skin was white as bleached kid, but the eyebrows were very dark; and the piled heap of hair that curled down upon her forehead was of a bright coppery tint.
She nodded at the intruder, and showed a line of even teeth.
“You come in good time for the shadows,” she said. “In the autumn the house is dark with them.”
“What shadows, girl?”
“Ah! you will know. They moan and look from corners; or swing from the cobwebs and clutch at you as you go by. You will know. Did I frighten you last night?”
“You startled me, you jade.”
She clapped her hands merrily. Her laugh was the most weird concatenation of rippling discords the baronet had ever heard.
“Poor gentleman!” she said. “Perhaps you shall see my museum for recompense. Will you come?”
“By and by, maybe. Is my breakfast ready?”
She nodded again, with her lips set, and vanished from the room.
Aboutmid-day Mr. Tuke sat himself down, like a man thoroughly wearied, in his great flagged hall—which, with a fancifulness of conceit, he had dubbed his dining-room—and summarized, with a completely depressed air, the fruits of his morning’s exploration. Briefly, these included, in the matter of “furnished apartments,” the chamber in which he rested—whereof the plainest of necessaries was comprised in a table and a few chairs; his bedroom, already described; two little closets in the north wing, appropriated to Dennis and his sister, and very modestly equipped; and a kitchen embellished with a basketful of odd pots and pans. For the rest, a score of rooms, large and small—of direct access, or approached by way of tortuous passages, whereby unexpected steps to nowhere were the least harmful of many pitfalls and obstructions—represented the present value of his inheritance, and so far as they went, a purely negative one, inasmuch as it seemed that the small fortune that would be required to put them into a moderate state of repair, would be sufficient to purchase elsewhere a messuage in sound and habitable condition.
And, without, it had been the same. The stables, substantial as the house, were in a like condition of neglect. His horse he had found ensconced in a battered stall and feeding out of a bushel basket. All the contiguous offices, of less durable material than the main building—which was of stone, coated with some form of plaster—were lamentably dilapidated and threatening to a collapse that should be general.
Clearly, unless the sum standing to his credit should prove to be a considerable one, he must give up all thought of adequately repairing the ravages of time.
As he sat in melancholy cogitation, he heard a suppressed chuckle at the door, and, slewing his head about, caught sight of Darda standing above in the hall.
“What do you want?” he said sharply.
She nodded at him with a fantastic gesture.
“My curiosities,” she said. “Do you wish to see them?”
He was about to return a peevish refusal; but bethought himself that with such an one, a promise unfulfilled was like to prove a recurring annoyance. Therefore he rose resignedly and went to the door.
“Lead on,” said he, “and I will come.”
She flitted before him, looking back from time to time with a changeling coquetry that was half-repellant, half-fascinating. Her actions, all lithe and graceful, were yet marked by an exaggeration that transcended the bounds of reasonable self-control.
She led him to a narrow back stairway mounting from a sort of stone closet set in an odd corner of the north wing, where meagre light entered by way of a square aperture cut in the masonry and barred with a sturdy grate of iron.
The spot was like a prison-cell in the black melancholy of its surroundings. Arid moss grew in the crevices of the stones, and everywhere the viscous tracks of snails laced the walls, as if in a feeble attempt to beautify what was obdurate.
Crossing the floor, the boards, at a certain place, gave up a booming sound, as if there were a vault underneath.
The girl paused, with a light foot on the stairway.
“You hear it?” she said. “That is where the shadows sleep at mid-day. But when the sun loses his hold of the white ladder he has climbed by, they come out and grow and grow in joy to see him fall. Then all night they can fill the house, for they are brave and big.”
“What is it?” said the baronet. “A vault?”
She moved back a step, and stamped with her slender foot.
“They call it ‘the Priests’ Hole,’” she said. “Perhaps they hid there and became shadows in time. You may open it if you will. It is too heavy for me.”
He saw a ring in the boards, and tugged at it. A square of flooring yielded and came slowly up, screeching like the mandrake. Beneath was revealed a stone-lined chamber, some seven feet in depth and four in width, into which a weak gush of light found passage from some distant grating.
A dismal hiding-place, in all truth, where, it seemed, a man might perish forgotten in the racket of the times that gave it existence.
“It was hard to find once,” said Darda. “Hidden and tucked away in the hollow of the wall, ’tis said. Then the shadows must have been short and the world always day.”
“A weary thing for men, my lass. Lead on.”
He let the flap fall into place with a slam of thunder, and followed the girl up the stairs. These led to the servants’ quarter, where were situated the two little sleeping-places of Dennis and his sister.
Into her own room she flitted, and bade her companion watch while she unlocked and threw open the door of a tall wooden press that stood in a recess of the chimney.
He lounged, idly looking while she revealed her treasures; and she stepped back with an expression of covert triumph on her face.
“Do you know what they are?” she said. “Name them to me, all.”
He gave an involuntary exclamation of repulsion; for verily it was a gruesome collection that met his gaze.
Many old mummified skins of bird and beast, with beak and claw still adhering to them; yellowing teeth of cattle and skulls of small-deer picked out of brake and warren; the sloughed skin of an adder; the desiccated presentment of a cat with a mouse in its jaws, found behind a stove; amongst them all, carefully arranged, a host of common pebbles, selected for some distinguishing mark, and even withered roots and potatoes, that accident had embellished with some grotesque resemblance to twisted limbs or faces—such were the principal features of Darda’s museum.
There was yet another treasure that stood prominently forward of the rest in a place of honour—a human skull—no less—with wisps of gritty hair yet clinging to the scalp, and the flesh of the face withered to a corrugated substance like bark.
The baronet gave out a note of extreme disgust. The eye-holes of the dead horror were wrinkled like a toad’s back, and one of them was bulged with a chalky lump that, gleaming through the slit, looked as if the last dying terror of the soul that once inhabited had petrified it.
Seeing his expression, the girl gave an eldritch laugh, and clipped it in the bud.
“That is Dennis,” she said, listening.
A step came up the stairway. Mr. Tuke strode into the passage without, and met the brother approaching.
“She has been showing me those abominations,” he said. “They must be cleared out, every one of them. I won’t have the ugly rubbish in my house. You hear me?”
He understood the man to give a little gasping, nervous response, and walked on fuming. At the stair-head he turned again. Whimple had not moved, and his face was drawn and white.
“Where did she pick up that filthy relic?” said he sternly.
“The head, sir?”
“The head, of course. There is no need to misapprehend me.”
The other seemed to have some difficulty in replying. More than once he cleared his husky throat; and when at length he spoke, it was in a strained, mumbling voice.
“She wanders far afield. It was at the foot of the gallows on the downs she found it fallen, and brought it home.”
“Lately?”
“Oh, sir, no. It was the first year of our coming.”
“Well, it must be got rid of. I won’t have it here.”
The words had hardly left his lips, when Darda sprang into the passage, her eyes blazing like a maniac’s.
“It shan’t go!” she shrieked—“it shan’t! it shan’t! Dennis, kill him!”
Her brother closed frantically with the mad creature, and sought to still her cries. He looked imploringly, in the midst of his struggling, at his master.
The latter took no heed of the uproar; but simply saying over his shoulder, “Remember; it is to be done as I say,”—turned coolly and descended the flight. But the noise of the girl’s screaming pursued him far into the house.
It was an hour later when Dennis begged leave to speak with him as he sat awaiting his dinner. The caretaker was palpably in a state of semi-prostration. His face was white and his hands shook. It was, perhaps, not to be expected that a man of Sir Robert’s calibre should be prepossessed by an exhibition of nervousness so pitiful.
“Well?” he said, the contempt in his heart finding some expression in his voice.
“I wanted to ask you, sir—to beg you not to hold me responsible for this—this scene. The girl has ever been a wayward unaccountable body.”
“I will not be troubled with her. If she is to stop—and God knows why she should—she must learn to keep her place and to do what service she can.”
“I know, sir. I never guessed—she must learn to appreciate your goodness. We are quite homeless but for your bounty.”
“I don’t wish to be harsh; but you must see, my good fellow, that her way of looking at things is not that of a servant towards her master. No doubt these twenty-odd years of caretaking have led her to assume a sort of semi-proprietary attitude towards the estate. I grant her that excuse; and see, of course, that you are very much bound up in her.”
“Oh! I am, sir.”
“That is commendable,” said the baronet dryly. “Only—you understand?”
“I understand fully, sir. She shall not annoy you again. I have made away with—with the things, as you ordered.”
“And the skull is gone?”
“It is—yes, it is gone.”
Was there a shifting devil in the fellow’s eyes? His master looked at him keenly. Everything about the man—his humility, his gentle voice, his poor physique, and more beggarly resignation to a life of long inaction—told against him with the robuster individuality. And, after all, were these qualities in a measure assumed? So much of doubt and mystery had entered into the baronet’s days of late, as to give birth in him to a gloom and suspicion that were hitherto foreign to his nature. He foresaw himself, with dark apprehension, the lord of a bugbear estate—beset with a thousand trials and difficulties—cut off from the world of his custom, and ever sinking into deeper sloughs of melancholy and despondence.
He roused himself with an effort. That very afternoon, he inwardly determined, he would ride into Winchester—where was to be found his agent, to whom Creel had entrusted the moneys standing to his credit—and satisfy himself as to his prospective position as a man of more or less substance. Then, if all figured out well, he could arrange for the purchase of furniture and hire of servants proportionate to his means.
At any rate he would rub shoulders with his fellow-creatures once more. That, perhaps, was not the least that induced him to the purpose. He most piously longed to shake off, if only for an hour, that sense of sombre isolation that had lain on him from his first coming, like a dark fatality.
“You can go,” he said sharply; and fell to musing again.
His meal was served by Darda. If, in her half-crazed consciousness, she resented, with a swollen, passionate heart, the cruel order that had deprived her at a blow of the chief fantastic interest of her broken life, she had disciplined herself already to give no sign of it. No doubt her brother, forced to be the instrument of a harsh despotism, had appealed to her by love of himself to control the emotion that, expressed, could only read their ruin. No doubt, also, the sense of bitter wrong driven down, would by and by stimulate certain nerves of action that had hitherto slumbered unrecognized.
She moved to and fro with set lips and white face and shot no single glance in the direction of her master. The womanly instinct for grace and neatness, that not the most debased intellect altogether foregoes, led her to give what order to the arrangement of the meal its poor accessories allowed.
When all was finished, she went softly from the room and closed the door.
Mr. Tuke did not permit a certain pity in his heart for this tender bud he had so lacerated to interfere with his appetite. But, his dinner over, he fell, as men will, to a more genial view of circumstances, and, as he sipped his wine, was inclined to regret his precipitancy of the morning.
“Yet, after all,” he thought, “the monstrosities were incompatible with any forms of feminine attractiveness, and she will soon learn to find her pleasure in more wholesome interests.”
He laughed, reviewing the items of the hideous collection.
“From the gallows!” quoth he. “And a relic of twenty years standing! And did she let the rest of the good gentleman lie—only plucking the head, like a withered medlar, from the stalk it dropped with? I am made a receiver of stolen property, by Gad—Herodias to some bloody cut-purse! What a dreary-minded wench, and what a pretty!”
The sweet old wine flushed his brain with a glamour of roses. He was inclined to take a more humorous view of his state and position.
No doubt, withheld for the time being from considerations of worldliness, he felt that relapse from reclaimed barbarism which, coming to us all in certain moods and before certain aspects of nature, restores us momentarily to the primitive joy in life untamed and unmalignant, that is our proper heritage.
After all, it is not for the trimmed parterres of existence to yield those glad surprises that are the basis of our yearning to the immortal. Who ever, wandering in an ordered garden, lost himself in a luminous mist of paganism?
Here, the infinite possibilities of Nature were before him—the search for her glimmering and elusive shrine in an endless variety of thickets. He would slough the skin of conventions, and, plunging naked into the green glooms of enchantment, pursue the way from which only is hedged off by leafiness the menacing face of Death. More than this, work—the work that should be in touch with that of the great Mother, adapting her harmonies, imitating her lines—appealed to him with sudden force, so that he was to find a purpose in living that he had never guessed at hitherto. He was fascinated—absorbed in a dream of sun and woodlands and the mossy sparkle of innocent springs.
As the spirit of the wine evaporated, however, that hideous token of a felon’s fate would slip into his thoughts with a recurring persistency. That this was so, first angered, then depressed him. He was not a particularly squeamish individual, and certainly his rough times were not favourable to sensitiveness in so common a respect. Still, he could not drive the sordid keepsake from his reflections.
“Curse the jade!” he muttered. “Wasn’t the place lonely and dismal enough without that acute accent on its ghostliness!”
He laboured out a sigh.
“Well, at any rate,” he breathed, “it’s got rid of now.”
As he spoke, his glance wandered to the long latticed window, a casement of which stood open: and there, upon the sill, a black blotch in the sunlight, lay the grinning horror itself.
Forsome seconds the diner sat, too astounded for speech or action. That either of his dependents should have dared to thus defy him!
At length he rose, and took a step or two towards the window. It was no trick of his fancy. There lay the abomination, its dry dead hair stirring in the draught, its stuft lid winking a dirty white, as if it cocked an eye at him in a hideous merriment.
He strode to the door and thundered for his henchman. The latter came immediately, apprehensive already, and doubly so when he marked the other’s face.
“You see that?” said his master, in a voice whose quiet was more appalling than any outburst of fury.
Whimple’s very lips went ghastly. He tried to answer, and broke down at the first syllable.
“I don’t accuse you of putting it there. Now, tell me—why didn’t you get rid of it as you undertook to do?”
He made out the man to say that he had—that he had removed it to his own room, intending later to find some means of disposing of it.
In the midst of his stammering explanations, Darda came softly into the hall. Her brother seized her arm with a shaking hand.
“How could you?” he muttered. “How could you do a thing so stupid and wicked?—and you have ruined us.”
She followed the direction of his wild eyes, and her own opened round in wonder.
“I didn’t put it there,” she said. “Does he say I did? It is a lie.”
He whispered “Hush!” in a fearful voice; but his master broke in at once.
“No matter who did it. One of you has thought fit to make a mock of me, and you must both pay the penalty.”
The girl laughed scornfully.
“You only wanted a pretext,” she said, “to get rid of us. I thought you would, sooner or later. Perhaps you put it there yourself.”
Her voice was rising to bitterer significance, when she heard a sound at her side, and, turning, made a frantic clutch at her brother as he slid to the floor. His head came with a little thwack on the boards; and there he lay with clinched teeth and a face like a stone.
Then—“Oh! oh!” she wailed, and threw herself down beside him.
Mr. Tuke was very embarrassed and a little shocked. He took no resentment over the girl’s spirit, though he still firmly believed she lied about the skull. But after all, it was patently unjust to hold the man responsible for the cantrips of so unmanageable a charge.
He seized a jug of water.
“Here—pour some of this over him,” he said. “He’s fainted like a woman.”
She looked up at him with fierce eyes; but she took the jug nevertheless.
“He’s a better man than you!” she cried. “He can suffer and endure; and fight too, when there’s need.”
She was human enough in her fearless championship of her own flesh and blood.
The gentleman laughed uneasily, and, feeling himself under the circumstances a littlede trop, left the hall, with a certain consciousness of shame tingling in his heels.
Outside, he thought, “Did she get the better of me? If this sort of thing goes on, I shall lose the sense of how to be master in my house.”
Stung by the thought, he threw open the door once more and looked in.
“He’ll come round in a minute,” he said hardly. “Listen to me. I shall sleep out to-night. You can——”
He broke off suddenly; paused a moment in indecision—then tip-toed gently away.
The girl’s face had been drowned in tears as she bent over her brother.
He passed to the neglected stables, and was fain to saddle his own horse and lead him forth and mount in the weed-choked yard.
He rode down by way of the long slumberous drive. Its whole course was matted with woodland moss, smooth as green felt; and thereon the beeches, staking their aftermath of glory, flung golden counters softly, as if on a card-table. At the half-ruined lodge he paused, and dwelt upon its desolation curiously. Ivy, like a cluster of swarming snakes, held the writhed chimneys in a death-grip, and had fractured the spine of the gabled roof. The ribs of the structure showed through gaping rents, like those in a stranded ship. Not a melancholy window-place but gaped a black mouth, full of broken splints of teeth and dead sticks of sashes. The whole building seemed sunk into the moss and leafiness that engirdled it.
He went out through the iron gate, and spurred along the road that was yet unfamiliar to him. The air was at once soft and keen as the taste of olives, and as such stimulated his new appetite for Nature.
Life seems never so desirable as in typical days of autumn, when the year rallies of its disease and makes a brave effort to renew its thoughtless morning with a few withering leaves. Of all the motley months, none is so pathetic as October in its likeness to an aging lady, striving to salve by gentleness the unhealed wounds inflicted of her earlier pugnacity.
Mr. Tuke’s spirits rose as he advanced. He seemed already in touch with the world again—a butterfly of the second brood emerged from a buried larva. He met a few clowns, and acknowledged their salutations brightly. His voice rose and cracked in snatches of romantic song, and he greeted with pleasure whatever landmarks he remembered.
Of these, the “Dog and Duck” stood as unchanged as any tree or hillock; for on the window-sill of the tap the same figure lounged and smoked. The rider got a better view of the fellow as he stood broadly in the sunlight. He was built sturdily, with something of an air of the sea about him; and his coat was bedecked with trinketry of faded gold, like an old galley-foist. But his face, red as brick and patched with eyebrows like tags of wild clematis-down, was a cut-throat one by every sinister mark.
As before—the traveller past—he swung heavily out into the road to watch his going.