“I havefound out where was hid the ‘Lake of Wine.’”
Tuke, withdrawn into his dining-hall, was sprung to his feet and faced his serving-man with wide eyes. He, the latter, was all hurried and high-strung. His lips looked as if his teeth were chattering.
“God forgive me, sir,” he said, “and grant me no break in your favour. I would, in His holy name, the bugbear had not risen again to vex us. But so it is, and I must do my duty by acquainting you of the particulars.”
“Why, man, what’s all the to-do? You are not about to convict yourself?”
“Only of carelessness or stupidity, sir, before Heaven. I might have guessed, had I the wit of a mouse. But her cranks and her whimsies, poor soul, have been little inviting to my soberer tastes, and——”
“Whose cranks?”
“My sister Darda’s.”
“Has she revealed the hiding-place?”
“She has known it all along, from near the time when she first brought the deadly thing into her collection.”
“Now, Dennis, will you craze me by assuming so much of intuition on my part? Out with it all, man! To what are you alluding?”
“Toit, sir—that gallows relic.”
“The skull, do you mean?”
“Yes, yes,” was the low answer.
“And what of it?”
“It is hid therein.”
A pregnant pause fell between the two.
“Now,” said the master presently, “give me the whole history as plain as you can speak.”
The man looked up appealingly. Some strange knowledge or emotion was impeding his every effort at an explanation. But at last he forced himself to speech.
“I have noticed her very strange of late—ever since—I have noticed her very strange, sir. Her soul seemed caught in a deeper thrall than she had known before. Somehow there has appeared more of the woman in her eyes and less of madness. To-day, in the dusk afternoon, she came upon me out of your library, sir, where she was at work. ‘Dennis,’ she said, all in a moment, ‘isn’t there a love that can be bribed with gifts of jewels?’ I answered the poor wench laughing—‘Oh, yes; no doubt there was.’ ‘Tell him,’ she said—‘tell him, your master, that I know where the great ruby is hid. I said so once to him before; but then it was for hate and he should know nothing. Now he shall learn the truth if he will.’”
“I remember something of it. Go on.”
“‘Tell him I said to you,’ she went on, ‘that the chalky dead eye of the skull is the jewel itself, and that the eye-socket is its hiding-place.’”
Tuke drew himself back, uttered a great sigh, and stood staring.
“Oh, sir,” continued the man, “I was as wildly incredulous of it as you. Much more she said, and that I am fain not to injustice the poor wench by repeating. But on the main point she was firm.”
“That the very dead eye of the horror was the ‘Lake of Wine’ itself?”
“Yes. And—oh! sir, when at last I came to think of the living highwayman as I knew him; of his resourceful cunning and ingenuity; of how, in my memory of him, this fixed and protruding eye, painted into the semblance of a real one, stood out horribly, under the nerveless lid, I was forced to the conclusion that she spoke right, and had been all these years the solitary warder of the secret.”
“Why did she hold, nor ever reveal it? How could she guess it was there? And why, being there, did it not escape when the head fell?”
“Sir, sir, think! She is mad. She would penetrate and maintain such a secret with every artifice. As to the stone’s breaking away, the skin was all contracted and toughened about it like leather.”
“Dennis—this is an insane idea! And yet—why, great God! the skull’s gone!”
He stared blankly at his man.
“Oh!” he murmured in a moment, “if by any chance there is truth in this—if the wild story is no bogle of the girl’s distemper—how my own peevishness and cruelty react upon myself!”
He took the other by the shoulder.
“Dennis,” he said, “you have your revenge at last.”
“No, no, no!”
“Then, where is the skull? What have you done with it?”
The man hesitated.
“Did you burn it, destroy it?” cried Tuke. “Speak out, man! I am the only one to blame.”
“I did not destroy it, sir. I——”
“Yes, yes. Oh, out with it, in the devil’s name!”
“I gave it to the woman, and she took it away.”
“The woman? What—? Ah! you mean the gipsy I saw you in talk with.”
It all recurred to him in a moment—the stolen interview; the bundle passed from one to the other.
“Where is she?” he said faintly. “Do you know where she is?”
“I—yes, sir. I could lead you to the wild place she inhabits.”
“You must do so,” said Tuke eagerly. “I have done an unwitting wrong to a great sufferer. Dennis, you will lead me to her, won’t you? and help me to the recovery of this accursed stone?”
“Sir, it is accursed, I think; but I will lead you to her.”
“Good fellow!—But why did you make her its custodian? What did she want with it; and has she it still?”
“I will answer for her, with her life, in that.”
He looked strange, and his master as strangely on him.
“What did she want with it?” repeated the latter.
“Sir, sir—how can I say? Perhaps for memory of a great criminal, God forgive him! I implore you not to force me to an answer.”
Tuke scarcely seemed to heed him, or his obvious distress. His vision was lost in pre-occupation.
“Wait!” he said, as if talking to himself. “We must take Luvaine into our confidence before we go further. It is his right to know all; and he must judge me fairly. Be quiet and secret, my good fellow, and don’t touch upon this subject again without my invitation.”
He dismissed his servant, and sat for an hour in the red fire-light deeply pondering. The snow pricked and rustled on the casement, as he dreamed by the still glowing hearth. A stealthy noise of mice was behind the wainscot, and through all the house the stealthy tread of unseen things wandering about the ghostly rooms overhead. One of these seemed to reveal itself—here, at his feet. It crept in very quietly, its white bosom heaving, its hair like a flame of autumn mist, and put warm lips to his hand as it hung slackly, and seized and held it a moment against its soft neck—and so went silently the way it had come.
By and by he roused himself, and looked up with a smile, half-comic and half-pitiful.
“For a country squire of particular morals,” he murmured, “I am quite unduly St. Anthonied by these visions. Did ever man so pay the penalty of his weakness?”
Sir David Blythewoodhad a particularly infectious laugh, and like all men who make a plaything of their own dignity, he was wont to find his risibilities tickled consumedly before the solemnity of another’s self-importance. Sooner or later the humorous side of any situation would find him, and then, perhaps, it was only those at whom his mischief of merriment was directed who failed to appreciate his sense of the comical.
Now the history of the “Lake of Wine,” as he knew it, had been almost a life-long tradition with him, and a very seriously romantic one, too; but this latest phase of it was destined to quite suddenly make its appeal to him—after some weighty and respectful consideration—from a quarter that, it appeared, his gravity had left unguarded. That it did so is mentioned in this connection for the reason that a certain explosion of mirth on his part was fruitful of consequences.
He and Tuke had ridden over to Winchester to acquaint Luvaine of the progress of events. Perhaps they had not thought to do more than discuss the matter, according to promise, with this melancholy monomaniac. He, however, had relieved them of any hospitable embarrassment they might have felt by at once without any attempt at apology, inviting himself to return with them, with the intimation that it would go nearer to satisfy him if they could thresh out the question on the spot. In order to this, therefore, Tuke—stifling a certain natural antipathy he felt to the man—had prevailed upon him to become for awhile his guest at “Delsrop”; and now the three, slowly trotting by way of a harshly white and iron-bound country, were making, chill and rather silent, for that lonely dwelling-place.
Riding down into Stockbridge with little concern for anything but the dangerous road, Tuke had the tail of his eye, nevertheless, for the “First Inn,” and for Betty standing at the door thereof, serving a mug of ale to a solitary traveller. The girl dropped a curtsey, as in duty bound, to the gentlemen, two of whom saluted her in reply—Blythewood, smilingly; Tuke, gravely; but the wench’s fair soft figure, standing there in bravery of the bitter cold, and her sad mouth and lowered eyelids, dwelt with him by many an after mile, and his heart throbbed out to the forlorn passion he was so hopeless to comfort.
By and by, Sir David turned to his friend a face that struggled with some tickling convulsion.
“What the deuce is the matter with you?” said the latter.
“Eh? Oh! nothin’—nothin’ whatever, Tuke. I say, did you note the gentleman in the jumper?”
“Gentleman? Where?”
“Him that was drinkin’ the ale?”
“No, I don’t think I did.”
“Didn’t you? Well, you mark my word, we’ve some more of these misbegotten rooks flown into the neighbourhood, and it’ll behoove us to keep the salt ready for their tails.”
“Oh! did he look that sort?”
“That he did.”
“And it made you laugh, eh?”
For answer, all the little man’s features swelled to a ripe colour, and he seemed on the verge of an explosion. Tuke shook his head with a grin, repudiating responsibility in the matter, and they rode on a mile further without a word exchanged amongst them. Then suddenly Blythewood was rolling in his saddle, shrieking with laughter, and they all drew rein beside a little copse.
“What inspires this?” said Luvaine, amazed and haughty.
His baneful expression set the young man off again.
“I can’t help it!” he gasped. “I’m sorry, Luvaine—but, but——”
“Well, sir! if you’ll condescend to speak, perhaps we shall be quick to share in your merriment.”
It was so extremely unlikely as far as he was concerned, that the mere suggestion brought a fresh paroxysm from the delinquent.
“Oh!” he cried at last—“to think of all these years of a grievance like yours—of the solemn counsels and the wise heads waggin’—and then to learn that the gashly eye of the creature that we turned from lookin’ at should ha’ been the very stone itself!”
Tuke caught himself grinning again, but Luvaine, furiously red in a moment, drew up stiff in his saddle.
“And you find this food for laughter?” he said, in a high voice. “A grievance, quotha!—only a grievance that hath wrought the ruin of two souls, and for me, in the prime of life, a childless and haunted old age!”
“Oh, Luvaine!” said Sir David, struggling for gravity, “I didn’t mean to cheapen you, man, or to withhold my sympathy from the problematic Mrs. L., who—who ‘very imprudently married the barber’”—he added, with a shout of merriment.
Tuke saw fit to put in a hasty word.
“He has earned a laugh. Let it be at you or me, Captain Luvaine; for though I take no loss of the robbery, I swear the knowledge of it has ridden me like a nightmare.”
The soldier waved his hand.
“Bah!” he said—“the crackling of thorns!”
He dismounted to tighten his saddle-girth.
“David,” he said over the straps, “has had his phases of idiotcy from my first knowledge of him.”
At this the culprit went into a fresh fit.
“No, but,” he said, when he could recover his voice—“on your honour d’you believe the girl’s statement, Tuke?”
“Why not? If I’m credulous, I’m happy; and there’s the true philosophy of life in a nutshell.”
He was struggling with his own imp of merriment. The other had set it squiggling; so that he was fain to look upon all this portentous business from a new irreverent point of view.
“And that Cutwater kept the jewel in his eye-hole,” persisted Sir David, “for all the world to see? And did he sacrifice the sound article to accommodate it?”
“That I cannot account for. He was blind on one side before ever you saw him.”
“You’ve got him to the life, I perceive. And he wore a dummy optic, no doubt, and substituted t’other, all ingeniously painted, for it when he conceived the resplendent idea?”
“I confess I never thought it out! But you’ve done it masterly.”
“Ain’t I? What a genius I am!—almost as good a one as Cutwater (eh, Luvaine?), that was strung up on the downs and a fortune in his head for any crow to peck at. You’d have given an eye for an eye to know that, wouldn’t you? But it needed a crazed girl to see into the creature’s methods, and bag the prize when it fell, while all the rest of us were hunting counter.”
“Are you taunting me, sir? Let me tell you your jesting is ill-timed. I would have known better, at least, than to have ordered away the skull without first examining it.”
“On my honour, sir,” said Tuke, much amused, “I am not a coroner nor even a J. P.”
“Oh! well,” muttered the soldier—“I am ready, gentlemen.”
As he was preparing to mount:
“Tuke,” said Sir David, “now I think on’t—wasn’t it that girl at the inn first gave you warning of Mr. Breeds and his gang?”
“Betty Pollack? Yes.”
He answered brusquely, and touched his horse with his heel.
“The women, it seems, give us the lead in this business.”
“Betty,” said Tuke, with a little fierce glow of emotion, “is gold to the inside of her heart. Now, gentlemen—and keep your eyes alert, by your favour, as we pass the ‘Dog and Duck.’”
A creaking, and pounding of the frozen snow, and the three were on their way once more. The long white stretches of road behind them returned to the sombreness of quiet that their human voices had interrupted. The very dun sky, that seemed to have withdrawn in high offence at their careless chatter, drooped down again, frowning and austere, to resume its ward of the imprisoned forces of life. No movement was in the stiff spurs of grass or in the petrified Hedgerows; no least cry of bird or insect in all the wastes of air.
Yet something there was that gave out a stealthy sound by and by—something that all the time they talked had held its panic breath in the copse, and sweated with terror lest the little snap of some twig under its feet should reveal its hiding-place—something with a puffed, leaden face and coward eyes—the unlovely Mr. Breeds, in fact.
He would not come out into the road, even after the last echo of the horsemen’s retreat had died away. But he crept to his little windy house on the hill by the way he had come—and Mr. Breeds’s way was always a backstairs one. Once only he paused, and his weak, evil features gathered all the definite expression of scoundrelism they could master.
“Betty Pollack!” he muttered. “So it was you, my girl, that set your dirty little torch to the beacon! Now ain’t it dangerous to play with fire, Betty? And what should you say if it came to burn your own fingers?”
He mused a moment; then brought his hand softly down on his thigh.
“But the skull comes first,” he murmured. “What’ll they give me for that piece of news, I wonder?”
Thenight fell dead and blank, and with it came the snow, crisp, large-flaked, dropping silently as autumn leaves in a windless garden. These were but the pickets of a gathering army—whose cloudy regiments moved up unwieldily from the north-west, where for weeks they had been forming and manœuvring—and the world looked indifferently on them, little thinking how presently it should be overwhelmed in the rush of forces of which they were the pioneers.
Sometimes a little galloping wind, like one of a distracted staff, would scatter a company of them right and left; and then to folks within-doors would sound a rubbing noise on window-panes, as if stealthy fingers were feeling for the hasp.
“If I had not lived all my life amongst ghosts,” said Luvaine, “I should fear this house of yours, Mr. Tuke.”
He rose as he spoke (the three gentlemen were sitting over their wine in the great dining-hall of “Delsrop”), and, walking to the casement, plucked aside a corner of the wide crimson curtain that hung thereover, and stood looking out into the night.
“The dark is full of white faces,” he muttered. “They writhe with laughter and flash down and are gone. There! did you hear that?”
Blythewood glanced, with a shrug of his shoulders, at his host.
“Oh, Luvaine!” he cried—“damn your shuddering fancies! Come to the table, man, and take your glass like an honest soldier!”
The captain dropped the curtain and walked slowly back to his place.
“That I am,” he said, “and that I have been through all the buffets of Fate. But it’s trouble, David, that teaches a man to look inward; and there, does he concentrate his gaze, he acquires the gift of second sight.”
“And what does it advantage him to ride with a spectre on his pillion? I’ve a shorter and pleasanter way to see double.”
He lifted his glass with a jolly chuckle.
“Here’s to the memory of Mr. Cutwater, the greatest broker of his age, yet who got broke himself in the end!” he cried.
Luvaine declined to drink.
“Oh!” said Tuke, laughing. “Give him the nail-toast, sir. He hath kept the gem in trust for you all these years.”
“You are pleased to be facetious, gentlemen. It is all little of a jesting matter to me. I will not drink a murdering thief.”
“Why,” said Blythewood, “he might retaliate by disputing your title, since he had the stone in his eye from the first moment of his hearing of it.”
He chuckled joyously over his own pleasantry; but the other would condescend to no answer but a wave of the hand to dismiss the subject.
“Do you drink the night out?” he said. “Mr. Tuke” (he turned sombrely to his host), “I would be loth to presume upon your hospitality; but, sir—sir, I must venture to hint I am here for a purpose that is not yet satisfied.”
Something like a muttered oath escaped from Tuke’s lips. He, however, forced his good-humour to the front.
“Why, Captain Luvaine,” he said, “I assumed that a travelled guest would prefer to postpone business to the morning.”
“I cannot look upon this as business, sir, in the ordinary sense—no more than the signing of a reprieve, every moment in the delay of which is torture to him most concerned.”
“Well, well—if you regard it in that light.”
Blythewood protested against this unseemly wet-blanketing of a convivial meeting; but he was graciously overborne by his host, who rose and rang the bell.
“Send Mr. Whimple to me,” he told the servant who answered the summons.
The man came flushed and nervous. Tuke saw that the door was carefully closed; gathered with his friends about the hearth, and bade Dennis to stand by them.
“Now,” he said, in a low voice, “this is Captain Luvaine, Whimple, from whose father was stolen the ‘Lake of Wine.’ Tell us plainly, and in a few words, the story of its discovery by your sister.”
The man bowed and moistened his lips. Once or twice he glanced in a frightened way about him, as if he sought some loophole of escape from the situation.
“Gentlemen, ’twas in the winter of ’81 that the body,hisbody, fell from the chains, and that the skull was brought hither by my sister—then a child of five, and a poor natural as she has ever been—to add to a strange collection of odds-and-ends it has been her delight to form. And there it had remained to a certain day after the coming of my master, who took an objection to it, and bade me rid the house of the thing.”
He paused, and passed a hand across his wet brow.
“Go on,” said Tuke. “I will take the blame of its disappearance, and I confess I acted harshly to the girl.”
Luvaine, from lowered eyelids, shot a malignant glance at the speaker.
“There was a woman,” continued Dennis faintly, “that used to come upon me from time to time for the little help I could afford her—a strange, wild wanderer, whose hand was against every man as she imagined every man’s was against her. I gave the skull to her. She asked for it. She would keep and cherish it, she said, in—in memory of a great criminal. I gave it to her, and she took it away.”
“Where——?” began Luvaine; but Tuke motioned him to silence.
“Let the man tell his story in his own way,” he said.
“It has been gone long months,” said Whimple, “when suddenly, this day or two ago, my sister (ah! gentlemen,” he interpolated with great emotion—“she hath not the wit to distinguish between right and wrong!) amazes me with the confession that, from early in her possession of the skull, she has known a great crimson stone—which later she learned to identify by its fanciful title—to be fixed and buried in one of its eyesockets, and that this stone had been at one time cemented smoothly over its outer surface and something resembling the picture of an eye enamelled thereon. Gentlemen, all confounded as I was, I rushed to my master, and told him what I had heard.”
Luvaine was jerking in his chair and gnawing his knuckles like a madman.
“Whither has it been taken?” he cried in a strangled voice. “That is the one moral of this accursed concatenation of accident and brutality. What has she done with it—where does she live, this woman? She must be come at—my God! she must be held responsible and whipped into disgorging.”
Whimple had shrunk back; but for all his instinctive action his face had taken a dark flush.
“She must be assured from violence, whatever has happened,” he said in a pretty strong voice, “or I will not move a finger to help you to her.”
Tuke put in a decided word. This first sign of courage in his man-servant surprised and pleased him.
“I guarantee her gentle treatment, Dennis,” he said.
The man turned gratefully to his master.
“I know you would, sir. It’s to you I reveal the truth, and God grant that she won’t curse me for betraying her. Were I to go alone, and endeavour to recover the relic——”
Luvaine sprang to his feet, interrupting him.
“No!” he cried savagely. “I’ll permit no such risk. I want no broker to deal for me. Lead me to the place—that’s all I ask.”
Tuke turned to his servant.
“Where is it?” he said, in a note of contempt, that he could not control, hardening his voice.
Whimple was about to answer, when a sound in the room disturbed them all. Luvaine broke out into a great oath.
“How did she come in? What does she want? Fling her out at the door!”
Sir David cried, “Damme, sir! you forget yourself!”
“Captain Luvaine,” said that gentleman’s entertainer, a very ugly expression tightening his mouth—“making every allowance for your condition of mind, I must ask you to leave the propriety of my servants’ behaviour to be judged by me.”
Even at that, the rabid creature could do little but pretend to control his passion.
“I will apologize,” he said sullenly. “Take any form of words you like from me; only do me the kindness to dismiss this person. Surely, sir, you can see how maddening is this interruption to me at the critical moment?”
“I can see, indeed, and regret it.”
He walked towards the door, and put his hand kindly on Darda’s shoulder; for Darda it was that had come, softly and unbidden, into the room, and who stood silently awaiting the upshot of the explosion her entrance had evoked.
Her slim white figure, her immobile face and glowing hair, made of her against the fire-lit wall such a presentment of the spiritual as one sees in old cathedral frescoes; but, at her master’s touch, a rose grew to her cheek, announcing her all one at heart with pitiful humanity.
“What is it, Darda?”
She looked up in his face with solemn eyes.
“The shadows!” she whispered—“they are abroad again; far off at present—but they are stretching towards the house, and by and by they will reach it.”
He scanned her face earnestly. Suddenly it recurred to him how once before this fancy of hers had been significant of a certain peril.
“Come,” he said hurriedly—“come and show me.”
He cried to his companions that he would be back in a moment, hesitated, and called to Dennis to follow him. Luvaine uttered a wild exclamation; but he took no heed of it.
Out in the hall, the girl sped swiftly to the stairway, the two men following her. A startled housemaid made room for them to pass, and afterwards announced in the kitchen that she had seen “crazy” playing follow-my-leader with master and her brother.
Up to the very top floor of the house; further, by way of a flight of steps, to a trap-door, and so to the leads, where the frost sparkled like emery paper, Darda climbed and the men pursued her. And there, in the high freezing night, she stood erect and pointed with her hand.
Tuke gave out a note of surprise. Far away, where Stockbridge townlet lay under the horizon hills, a broad blot of crimson was soaked into the sagging of the cloud-canopy above. This red stain palpitated like a very heart of fear, so that to gaze on it was to be insensibly influenced by a sympathetic emotion; and, in the beating of its pulse, rays and spars of shadows shot forth and were withdrawn and appeared again in other quarters, as if truly something were there struggling in its death throes.
“Dennis—whereabouts is it?”
“By the position, sir, well east of the village; about Mr. Pollack’s inn, I should reckon.”
His master started violently.
“Pollack’s inn?” he muttered, and cried, “Good God! it must be blazing to the roof!”
A momentary amazed expression was on his face—something, some sense of omen or catastrophe, knocked at his heart;—then he addressed his man with immediate decisiveness.
“Order my horse to be saddled, Dennis—quickly and silently. Say nothing of it to those within there; but, when I am gone, make Sir David my apologies and ask him, if he will, to await my return.”
The servant responded and disappeared. For some minutes Tuke stood, his gaze concentrated on the wavering splotch of light, his brain banded, it seemed, with a filament of steel. If any figure was imaged tenderly and pitifully in his soul, it was not that that breathed close by him in the icy shadow of the roof, that watched his every look and motion like a dog. Indeed, so little was she that had brought him there in his mind, that when in another minute he turned to descend, he almost brushed her in his passage without being recalled thereby to thought of her presence.
Going softly down, he found Dennis already mounted in the yard, with the bridle of his master’s horse held in his hand.
“Whimple!” he exclaimed.
“I go with you, sir,” said the man boldly. “Who knows what you may be riding to?”
“But, my good fellow—Sir David and the captain?”
“Sir, you come first. I have passed on your message.”
How could he gainsay him? It gave him a thrill of exquisite pleasure thus to experience a devotion that could so over-crow a constitutional timidity.
Silently together they padded it down the snowy drive, and in another minute were galloping along the road to Stockbridge.
High on the roof a figure watched their departure. The girl had scarcely moved since her master left her alone. But now her slender feet went crisp on the frost as she paced to and fro in the angle of the gables.
Once, suddenly, she paused at the limit of her path where the gutter-ledge, knee-high, formed the topmost courses of the house-front. And here she leapt upon the parapet, and stretched out her arms in a perilous manner into the dizzy whiteness of space.
“I know,” she said, nodding downwards fantastically. “But would you catch me if I jumped? It would hurt him to the heart to find me, when he comes back, lying there all crushed and broken.”
She seemed to listen, her face falling into shadow.
“To the heart,” she repeated, with a catch in her voice. “It would—it would, for all your secret laughing.”
Pushingonward at what fury of speed the dangerous state of the road permitted, Tuke, like a good captain, would not subordinate his prudence to his eagerness. True, he had nothing but a vague sense that some evil was abroad, to justify his mood of suspicion; yet, forasmuch as this moodwasunaccountable, it behoved him to move circumspectly through the first stages of reconnoitre.
Therefore it was that coming to the top of the long dip, on the crest of whose further slope stood Mr. Breeds’s little ill-omened tavern, he called to Dennis and, pulling on his left rein, cantered his horse on to the easterly downs, with the idea of making adétourthat should bring him into the Winchester road a half-mile above Stockbridge.
This was judicious enough; but it was some aggravation of his impatience to find now with what infinite caution it was necessary to proceed over the frozen wastes of grass and crumbling chalk patches. A rushed camp of mole-hills—a film of cat-ice, roofing some unsuspected hollow, trodden upon—and all his fine purposes of help might end in a broken neck. Fortunately there was a young wintry moon, whose radiance, struck back from the snow, made such a spectral twilight as it was possible to steer through.
He groaned to himself as yard by yard they crept upon their way and still the red glow seemed as far off as ever. Once indeed, looking as in a dream, he fancied they must have wandered widely afield, away from, instead of towards the fire; for then the latter seemed to have sunk in a little glimmer amongst distant hills, as if many miles separated it from them. But the next moment there came a great bellying upward of smoke, distinctly evident to their eyes; and immediately the pall was attacked and devoured by a dozen shooting tongues of flame, that slobbered myriads of sparks like blood as the monster of fire rent its prey.
“The roof has gone in, sir.”
“Aye, aye, Dennis. We must be near the road by now, I think.”
Not so near as he hoped and desired. It was a full hour and a half from the start when they broke at last into the Winchester highway and went down cautiously into the village. For many minutes before, there had been no doubt in Tuke’s mind but that his worst apprehensions would be realized. The “First Inn” it was that was alight—the old house endeared to him, in a sense, by more than one tender memory.
“How did it happen?” he asked of himself; and thought half-comically—“I must assure the poor girl it was like enough to have been spontaneous combustion, from the long warmth of hospitality it carried in its heart.”
Then he rebuked his levity
“Betty, Betty,” he thought, “are you safe, my dear?”—and at the fear the word evoked his breath caught in something like a sob.
The fury of the fire was over when they came upon the scene and stopped before the ravaged and gutted carcass of the once picturesque inn. But still the blackened walls blossomed with little spits and fronds of flame; and scarlet lines drawn upon the heavy curtains of smoke showed where smouldering beams clung tenacious of their hold.
The road was full of a drifting and pungent fog, and therein the whole village was alive, scurrying hither and thither in excitement like a colony of ants whose nest had been overturned.
On the outskirts of this press the two men, dismounted, were standing holding their horses, when a country youth, his red face all blubbered with tears and dust, came hurriedly up to them and seized Tuke by the sleeve.
“Master—Master Took!” he exclaimed in a broken voice.
“Jim!—Good God, man! how did this come about?”
“By foul play, your honour; and may the living hell be their portion that done it!”
“Steady, man!”
“I’ll ha’ justice o’ them—I’ll ha’ justice o’ them, by the Lord! Look at it! look here! Missy Pollack’s home—her that never done a hard thing by a soul, and treated poor Jim like a man. Drove a pauper at a blow, and her grandfather all burnt and choked and she cluckin’ to him like a hen that’s laid.”
“Where is she? Take me to her.”
The poor fellow pulled him forward immediately, shouting to those who interposed to make way for the gentleman that was come to see justice done on scoundrels and murderers. Some stared and some grinned, but one and all were too loutishly absorbed in the extempore show that yet crackled for their benefit to thrust an undesirable company upon him. So they let him pass undisturbed, and continued to ply the ashes from their useless buckets with what water they could find, while buffoonery and the animal jest at another’s misfortune kept them in a fine glow of good-humour.
To a barn in an adjacent yard Jim conducted his captive by way of a side-gate that had been closed against intruders. Within, gathered about the open door of the shed, was a little knot of men, whose dress showed them for the most part to be of the respectable class of village gentry. These Tuke saluted as he advanced.
“I trust, gentlemen,” he said, “that this I hear of the innkeeper is an exaggerated report?”
One of the company, who was muffled up in a great surtout and swung a horn lantern in his hand, detached himself from the group and came towards him.
“The man is dead, sir,” he said.
“Dead?”
“He has succumbed to shock induced by a period of inhalation of irrespirable gases, and aggravated by some superficial burns. I am Dr. Harmsworth, sir, at your service.”
Mr. Tuke bowed.
“And can you inform me, Dr. Harmsworth,” he said, “of the history of this catastrophe?”
“In faith, sir, I cannot. But it looks an ugly business. The wench, it appears, was gone to visit a neighbour, and the stableman to squire her. When they return—there is smoke leaking through the roof of the tap. They burst in, and are met by a vaporous volley of flame. The old man is down on the floor, insensible in the midst of it. They drag him out, and the young man hath the wit to observe that the fire has its three distinct sources or centres of eruption. That, to my mind, suspicions of some foulness. But him that could have best acquainted us of the truth has his mouth sealed to the Day of Judgment.”
“He is dead.”
“He is dead, sir.”
“And his granddaughter?”
“She is in there with the body. Her grief is very poignant for the moment.”
“I must see her.”
“By your leave, sir—”
“I must see her, Dr. Harmsworth. You needn’t say me nay, sir. I know, and would act the part of friend by her.”
The doctor would have further protested, but Jim put him roughly to one side and made a way for his gentleman.
“In here, sir,” he said.
It was a little sombre, pathetic scene that Tuke faced as he entered. A flaring candle, stuck in a cleft-stick, split up the windy darkness of the interior into spokes of light and shadow. From the roof, great misty mats of cobwebs drooping, swayed in the draught like grotesque banners hung appropriately to the lying-in-state of the dusty thing on the floor. Thereover a hard-grained female was stooped, engaged in covering the dead face with a napkin; and leaned upright against a partition, her head dropped listlessly upon her arm, was the poor living victim of all this tragic gallimaufry.
“Betty!”
A start and a shiver went through her, but she did not raise her face.
“I saw the glare,” he whispered behind her into her upturned ear, “and my heart misgave me and I rode over to your help. Yes, it is too late for him, Betty; but, for yourself, my dear? It is no time to speak of it all now; but if there has been villainy here, I will spend my fortune at need to procure its punishment. Betty!”
She only buried her face deeper in her arm. He put his hand on her shoulder with a caressing touch; then removed it and crossed to the kneeling woman.
“Tell me,” he said, stooping and speaking low—“has she any one relation in the village?”
“No, sir. Them two was alone in the world.”
“Friends—acquaintances? Any single soul who would show her kindness in this great affliction?”
The woman scrambled to her feet.
“Betty was none disliked,” she said. “But, Lord ha’ mercy, sir! is it righteous to talk to the poor, in sick a winter as this, o’ the grace o’ charity? Will your honour look at the gal, and tell me if them busts and shoulders was like to ha’ been nourished on pitaty parings?”
“She is ruined?”
The woman stared.
“Saving your honour, I won’t believe it. The gal is no road for the men, but as good a wench as ever served a pot.”
“Ruined, I mean, in the sense of fortune. She hath lost her all in this burning?”
“Ah! I misdoubt she’s worth no more than the clothes she stands in.”
“If I give you money, will you honestly do the last duties by the dead here?”
“Aye, that will I.”
“So that, if I procure the maid an asylum, she may feel happy that her grandfather will be laid decently to earth?”
“Aye, aye.”
She held out an eager hand; let those who have starved in a bitter winter call it a covetous one. She fingered each of the gold pieces as if it were a fairy flower of her imagination.
Tuke returned softly to the girl, who had never changed her position. He put his arm gently about her waist.
“Betty—I tell you to come with me.”
“No, no!”
Her voice shivered up, all drowned and bewildered.
“You must come, dear. This is no longer a place for you. I will arrange all matters necessary about—about him there, and I will take you into my service.”
She only lowered her head deeper, and gave out a miserable sigh.
“You are forlorn and alone in the world, Betty. You would have to exchange your independence for a wretched drudgery.”
At that she looked up at last, and put her hair from her wild eyes and wet cheeks.
“I should be honest,” she whispered. “They could not be cruel to blame me even if I starved. Why should I help you to a lie and myself to misery?”
“To a lie, Betty?”
She flashed round on him quite suddenly.
“What is the sort of service you offer me?” she cried.
He did not answer. Irresistibly impassioned, he seized her fiercely in his arms. The woman had gone out and for the moment they were alone.
“Betty, you shall come! I will try to be fair with you. If you have fought against this, so have I.”
“Hush, hush!” she cried pitifully. “Oh! think of him there!”
“He offered you to me for a price. I curse myself for telling you this now; but I must have you by fair means or foul.”
She fell against him, weeping heavily, while he held her.
“Oh, for shame!” she gasped, “that I should be put up to be bid for in my innocence! What brutes are men!”
“I won’t gainsay you. But, Betty, am I to live on in my warm house and know her cold and hungry that all my soul longs to?”
“Don’t!—oh, don’t talk to me like that!”
“Give me your lips, wench. Come! I will have them. By this and this, Betty, through every fibre of your sweetness I love and claim you.”
“Oh, what am I to do?”
“As I bid you, girl.”
He had out his handkerchief and wiped her eyes, and he smoothed her roughened hair and kissed her again into servility. Then he led her unresisting towards the door; and there was Jim mounting guard.
“Jim,” he said—“Missy Pollack is coming home with me. Go and find my man and bid him lead the horses thitherwards to some place where we can mount in quiet.”
The fellow sped away, and Tuke, leaving the girl by the barn-door, walked across to the doctor who was withdrawn with his friends to a little distance.
“Dr. Harmsworth, the pleasure of a word with you, sir.”
The other detached himself from the group and joined him.
“This unfortunate young woman is known to me. I take her into my service, with her consent and approval, and make myself responsible for her safe custody. You will greatly oblige me by undertaking the business of the proper interment of these poor remains, and you will apply to me for all professional and sundry charges. I am Mr. Tuke of ‘Delsrop,’ where I am to be seen and held to account for claims both moral and practical.”
The doctor gave a stiff bow.
“I am acquainted with you by report, sir, and will be happy to honour your instructions. As for the wench, she is of an age to negotiate her own business, and, I trust, to exhibit prudence in the conduct of it.”
He looked hard at the other, who saluted very rigidly in response.
“You can do her only justice, I am sure,” said he; and bowed once more and turned on his heel.
He found the girl prostrate on her knees beside the dead body—sobbing—appealing to it—murmuring broken words of penitence and love. She had moved the napkin from the face, and Tuke saw the cunning still engraved finely about the sightless eyes, and the little close leer of covetousness at the corners of the mouth, which showed a grotesque, clownish distortion of shape in the sooty border that suffocation had painted round it. Knowing what he did, he could not bear to see her thus wasting her heart of affection on the dead, unworthy thing. He stooped, and put his arm about her, and drew the cloth once more over the face.
“Come,” he said, and helping her to her feet, pulled off his own great-coat and wrapped it about her shoulders.
At that, “No, no!” she whispered. “You will perish of the cold.”
“I am going to take you pillion, Betty; and you must clasp your warm hands over my heart and keep it beating for you. That is your charge.”
He hurriedly withdrew her and urged her up the road. A little distance off they came upon the two men with the horses. Tuke sprang to his saddle, gave the girl a hand, and pulled her to a seat behind him.
“God bless your honour!” cried poor Jim.
“What of you, my good fellow?”
“What but the Union, master?”
“Get up behind my servant. You shall serve your mistress yet.”
Betty gasped.
“Did you kiss my shoulder, Betty?”
No answer.
With a light laugh Tuke touched up his horse, and the deadly cold of the night met them full-face as they sped homewards.
Byall the chill miles homewards, whatever and what varying emotions prevailed in the breasts of the little party found no expression in words. Indeed there could be no passion of feeling in that bitter night so hot as to resist the numbing influence of a frost that seemed to glaze the roof of one’s mouth, if opened to speak, with ice. Tuke felt little but the instinct to prick his snorting beast onwards with bloodless heels. Yet through all he was conscious of a spark that glowed and wavered in him like a pulse—a little fierce flame of triumph and of ecstasy—a suffusion of audacity, or repudiation of the formal conduct to which he had vainly struggled to subscribe. He had no deliberate plan of evil in his soul; neither had he the courage or the inclination to face the situation of his own contriving. He had snapped under a strain, so it seemed to him; and that was all. For the moment it was exquisite pleasure to feel all his moral fibres relaxed as he drove intoxicated before the force he had for a time withstood.
“Your fingers are a love-knot about my heart, Betty,” he once said over his shoulder. “It should be a toasting fire for their comfort.”
He gently unslackened the clasp of the brown hands and bent and put one to his lips.
“They are cold as snow, sweetling,” said he. “The little bones of them are stiff as flower-stalks; and they are as pretty, Betty, and by and by the buds shall break on them, if you please. Would you like these poor cold little stalks to blossom into pearls and rubies?”
She tried to pull her hand away; but he would not let her.
“No,” she said in a weeping voice. “Oh! how can you put me to the shame?”
“Is it shame? That must be a stale superstition. It were shame in my eyes to pluck my flower and leave it to wither.”
“Shame to the flower, that must be a bold, flaunting weed to invite such notice.”
“Betty, that is sorry logic. What weed ever won man’s heart?”
“I had best slip off and go back to my dead.”
“Down with you, girl! and we will lie and die in the snow together.”
“Oh, me! What can I say? Will your honour not ride on and forget I am here?”
“To be sure, Betty—as I forget myself. You had best not remind me of it by addressing me so.”
“I am your honour’s servant.”
“Lip-service, wench. No, it will not do. Before others as you like; but alone with me—there, don’t cry! the frost will catch your tears, and your lashes will be hung with diamonds no gift of mine. We must think this all out, Betty, by a glowing fire. It is too cold here. That little touch on my heart is the only feeling I am conscious of.”
“And you gave me your coat! Oh! take it—take it.”
“That I shall not.”
“I am warm—indeed I am.”
“Lie in your burrow, little rabbit, and hide your eyes from the dogs. We go up to Mr. Breeds’s tavern here, and I don’t know what may be abroad.”
He had decided to risk the main road for their return. The augmentation of his party, the necessity of direct progress in that killing cold were his sufficient reasons. They rode past the house and awakened nothing but echoes from its stony walls. On the blind of the lighted tap fell the shadows from within of a group of men. No notice, however, was taken of the little cavalcade as it went silently by outside in the snow.
“Betty, can you spell?”
“Oh! yes.”
“Spell this, then: l-o-v-e-r. What, you can’t? I must put you to school. See, l-o-v-e, and r for the little thumb that points at me. That is your lesson; and now here’s a prize for the quick scholar in the palm of her hand. Close it and keep it. You won’t? Then you shall return it to me in the dark by and by.”
He hardly knew what nonsense he talked. A core of fire flickered in the numbness of his brain. He gave a whoop! like an excited boy presently as a herd of fallow deer—some twenty or thirty of them—broke from a covert and went beating down the road in front of them.
“These must be some of friend David’s,” he cried.
The poor beasts were smitten with the frost-fright—the desolation of despair that induces the last appeal of the lower to the higher animal. “If he who by his cunning can stultify all our traditional methods of self-protection,” they must argue, “be as full of resource as of foresight, and as full of noble clemency withal, it were well to submit ourselves to his mercy.” And so in strange times, man’s littleness is forced upon himself, because all his vaunted superiority cannot make food in a wilderness or flesh on starved bones; and he cries aloud and his voice returns to him as an empty echo. Then, “I must kill,” he says, “that there may be fewer mouths to feed”; and he kills, and fancies that he has mastered the problem of life.
The deer cantered before the horsemen, grunting and shaking their heads. They had no action of escape, but seemed rather to have deliberately entrusted themselves, for safe passage to a greener land of hope, to this human convoy. They went down, a dusky bob of backs, into the hollow where was the entrance to “Delsrop”; and here, led by some attraction of the mightier race, they turned into the drive—for the gate had been left open—and trotted along it as far as the lawn, against the sheltering shrubberies of which they took refuge. And, upon the morrow, the most of them were discovered patiently waiting and snuffling about the stable-doors; and an empty coach-house was thrown open and scattered with hay for their benefit; and there, for a time at least, the trusting creatures found the help and protection they sought.
Reaching the door of his house at last, Tuke swung a leg over his beast’s withers and, leaping to the ground, pulled Betty into his arms and landed her by his side. The other two, close upon him, had dismounted at the same moment. He called Dennis to him—the formal and authoritative master.
“You will speak to your sister, and see that this young woman, whom I am taking into my service, is fitly lodged and provided for. To-morrow I shall assign her her duties. In the meantime she is to meet with every sympathy and consideration. The man, also, you must accommodate with suitable quarters. You know my interest in the girl, and the circumstances of her misfortune. I leave her proper reception to your charge.”
Not another word he said; but when they had been admitted by an amazed wench, he nodded gravely to the little group, and turned into his own dining-hall.
Here, as if his opening of the door had released a spring, Luvaine came at him like a Jack-of-the-clockhouse.
“This is well,” he cried in a high manner of sarcasm—“this is well and hospitable to quit affairs of state for the entertainment of a poor guest or so!”
The wine was still on the table, and it was evident the soldier had had free recourse to it for the smothering of his intolerable suspense. His thin hair was rumpled; his eyes bloodshot; a slumberous demon of fury seemed to struggle in him for wakefulness. Flung into an elbow-chair by the hearth, Sir David discordantly acknowledged the potency of his own cups. No doubt he had drunk himself to sleep to escape the other’s company.
“You have some title to offence, sir,” said the returned host. “You have been acquainted with the cause of my absence, I believe; but I think no words of mine will persuade you to exonerate me from blame. Still, I make you my apologies for what was virtually inevitable.”
“Well, sir, well. And you are prepared, I presume, to take up the thread where you dropped it?”
“Oh! I cry you mercy, Captain Luvaine. What would you have, sir? The night is far advanced; I have had an exhausting experience of travel. On my honour, I must recuperate for the next move.”
“Mr. Tuke, do you mean to tell me, with all deliberateness, that you purpose resting upon my sickness—upon my agony of suspense, sir, counting the question of my reason as nothing compared with your little bodily discomfort?”
“If you will put it crudely, sir; why, so must I. I refuse to act further until I have rested; and you will do well to school your reason into a little consideration for others.”
“Youmusttake note that this is a matter affecting my very last interests.”
“As the necessity for sleep affects mine. Restored, I shall be of infinitely more service to you in that respect than I could possibly be now.”
The soldier bowed. So much of the discipline of his profession remained to him. But it seemed almost a murderous demon that dictated the courtesy. He walked towards the door, and turned glowering.
“I must not gainsay you,” he said; “but—but—may God never curse you with the torment to which you are wantonly condemning me.”
He could not altogether so control his feelings as to refrain from slamming the door to behind him as he went out. The clap shook the hall, and brought Sir David to his feet with a stare and a cry.
“Hallo!” he exclaimed, his headpiece fuddled out of all comprehension. “Where—where ha’ you been, you inhospitalable scamp?”
“Never mind. I apologize; but you wouldn’t understand.”
“Understad?—understad, you conceited peddler? Lookee ’ere. Tuke. Le’s go and hunt for that skull. Ain’t you ready—ain’t you, you——”
“Oh! go to bed, Blythewood. We’ll hunt on the morrow. I’ve arranged it all. We’ll get some sleep first, man; for I’m just dropping.”
“Droppin’? You’re drunk as David’s sow, you clever man. There go away. You’re a sight to make the angels weep. I’ll have you before me to-morrer on a warra’t, by the Lord I will.”
He stopped, and struck his brow rather aimlessly.
“Angel and Dunlone!” he cried. “I forgot all about the high-stepper. Here’s a pretty host for you. I shall have to commit myself before you. Cock! the scarecrow’ll ‘drizzle’ the jade into an asylum. Tuke, d’ye hear? if I stop and join in this chase, I must sed the girl a note.”
“Well, to-morrow will do for that.”
“Curse me! What a wiggin’ I’ll get from her. You must help me out of this scrape. Let me bid ’em both to lunch at your place, to hear the result of our expedition. That’ll be a sop to the creature.”
The other hesitated. He still laboured under the excitement of his recent undertaking—still tingled with the afterglow of the late riot in his heart. He had formulated, had conceived indeed, no line of conduct for himself or Betty that should meet the occasion. He would not have her a serving drudge in his house, and beyond that one resolve all was indefinite. But he had burnt his boats behind him, and to temporize with circumstance was no longer possible. As he had made his dash for freedom, so must he continue the race recklessly.
“By all means,” he said, with a rather wild laugh. “We will dissolve the ruby in a glass of wine, and Miss Royston shall drink to the health of the ‘drizzler’ in it.”
Thewind was so bitter, the roads so glassy with peril and so scourged with swept drifts of snow, that when at last on the following morning the little party of three gentlemen, with Dennis for guide, assembled in the hall of “Delsrop” preparatory to issuing on their quest, it was resolved to make no attempt to cover any part of the distance on horseback, but to trust to their legs and their endurance for the entire course. What this was, each of the three had but an indefinite idea, for the servant showed a strange reluctance to discuss the subject, even with his master; and would only place their goal approximately at some seven or eight miles. Seeing the pain it gave him to be pressed for closer particulars, Tuke good-humouredly insisted that there should be no further flogging of their willing horse; and presently there was not a man of them all but was so engrossed in his own discomfort as to be oblivious of any consideration but that his numbed extremities called for.
Blythewood, who had relieved his mind of responsibility by early dispatching his note to his sister, was then free to give the most of his concern to his little aching tipple-befumed top-knot; Tuke, whose soul was hot with vexing self-problems, worried to get this distracting and depressing business of the stone done with; Luvaine stalked a very nightmare embodiment of grievance. Altogether it was something a dismal party that followed in the wake of the dismal serving-man—its members mere moving pillars of duffel and muffler, hands in pockets, rigid as pantomime chimney-pots, with their heads bent to the blast like cowls.
The wind was dreadful. It came screaming down the road like flights of arrows; it swept the long wastes as if the very scythe of Death were threshing there for some least little blade of life; it seemed of a sharpness to blaze the tree-trunks and cut the copses into shreds. Not a living thing but themselves appeared to be on foot or wing in all the dreary landscape. Only a grey sky frothed with snowflakes, and the inexorable endless downs received and encompassed them and wrought upon their souls with horror of the soulless.
Early in the tramp Dennis had led from the Stockbridge highway eastwards over the slopes.
“What!” whined Sir David. “You give it us full in the face, Mr. Whimple? We shall be torn like bunting.”
“There is no other way, sir,” said the man.
“Can’t we get between hedges, at least?”
“No, sir. No road leads to where she inhabits.”
Luvaine turned with a stare, and Blythewood shrugged his shoulders.
“This is Captain Phipps and the North Pole,” he said. “I protest, Luvaine, ’twill be nothing to my mind to exchange your cursed stone for half-a-dozen of my toes.”
The soldier, the wind whizzing in his set teeth, muttered a word or two about the selfishness of uninterested parties; and that at last started the little baronet laughing—the first note of gaiety the expedition had produced.
“Oh!” he chirped, “what a noble sacrifice you would make of your friends”—and he kicked up his little hoofs and scampered like a colt.
Tuke, who was tailing in the rear, called to Dennis and fell somewhat behind with him.
“Is this necessary?” he said.
“Indeed, yes, sir.”
“She lives remote on these wild downs?”
“For nigh a year, sir, now.”
“With none to neighbour or assist her?”
“None. Deep in these wastes she bides, secret and alone, and not a soul within miles, did she need succour. It is her whim—her craze, sir, if you will. She hath led a strange, solitary life—for years apart from her fellows—for years hating the world so, that she would deign to draw but the meagrest sustenance from it.”
“Meagre indeed in these solitudes. She must browse like the sheep.”
“She traps the birds and little game of the open. Those are for feast days. In general she can make much of a few dried berries.”
“Together with what you give her?”
The man hung his head in silence.
“Are you the only one that knows of her eyrie?”
“The only one, master.”
“She hath suffered some great wrong?”
“A great, great wrong.”
Tuke looked keenly at his servant.
“I am neither curious nor insolent,” he said; “but if it would ever relieve your mind to acquaint me of the truth, I am your friend to counsel and help, Dennis.”
Whimple flushed round, the tears sprung to his eyes.
“Oh!” he cried, “do you think I don’t know it? Do you think I haven’t suffered to tell you all? You would have learnt long ago, but that the confidence is not mine to give while she lives.”
“Well, well,” said his master; “go to the front again, my good fellow, and lead.”
The wind whipped the slopes, planing the fallen snow from them in ringlets like wood-shavings. Now and again a lashed clump of trees would seem to swerve at them through the blinding flakes, or the thud of tumbling chalk, sprung by the frost in some neighbouring quarry, would sound startlingly in their ears. These were the only scattered phrases on an else blank page, and the desolation made them expressive as words of comfort.
By and by Tuke moved forward to his companions.
“The snow thickens,” he cried. “I shall be easier when our faces are turned westwards.”
He shouted to Dennis: “You are not wandering afield? You are sure of your way?” And: “Quite,” the man answered. “We are nigh upon the place now, sir.”
It seemed full time, if any prospect remained to them of getting back to lunch and to the invited guests. Blythewood groaned at the very thought of being late.
“I have sinned enough already,” said he. “Angel will be ready to bite me.”
They had fought and struggled by long miles of swale and hillock, and were become mere remote atoms in the midst of a blinding wilderness, when they broke upon a little gaunt oasis—a dismal copse of good intent—stretching withered arms of welcome to them from out the whirl. This forlorn touch of nature was set at the foot of a shallow mound or tumulus that now, caked with white, looked like a huge inverted pudding-basin; and amongst the spare trunks Dennis stopped and turned a grey face to his gentlemen.
“This is the place,” he said.
“The place!” echoed Blythewood, looking about him bewildered.
“Hurry, Whimple!” cried his master.
There was a great tang of blackthorn and bramble—a little lonely thicket of it—heaped against the lower slope of the mound. From this thicket, all tossed with snow, two or three crippled beech-saplings escaped, throwing wild arms aloft as if their lower limbs were pinned in the jaws of some hidden monster in the brushwood. Thither the man made his way, and the others followed.
“They are but suckers,” he said, “of an old giant trunk, the decayed butt of which lies there in the bush. It may have fallen and been removed a hundred years ago. But while it was alive its great roots were busy undermining this hillock and boring a passage into the heart of it.”
He turned to his master.
“For all I know, sir,shewas the first to discover the way and the first to penetrate to the chamber within.”
“The chamber?”
“Aye, gentlemen. This is an ancient barrow of the dead, and the goal of our hopes.”
Luvaine pushed rudely past him. The inner character of the man seemed to reveal itself in the neighbourhood of success.
“Ourhopes!” he drawled insolently. “Here of course is the tentative place-seeker on the very threshold of my inheritance.”
“Now,” muttered Tuke to himself, “this cur snarls over his bone before the sheep is killed.”
“The way in, man—the way in!” cried Luvaine, beating his hands together. “Why do you keep me outside? You can play cicerone to your damned barrow when the stone is in my pocket.”
Tuke caught his servant’s eye entreating, and came peremptorily to the front.
“Of course,” he said to him—“you must enter first and prepare the woman for our coming. Whatever her status, she has the right of priority here.”
“A rat in a drain!” cried the soldier jeeringly. “I don’t stand on ceremony with such.”
“Pardon me, sir. You owe this consideration to my servant, without whose self-sacrificing assistance you were like to go jewelless for all time.”
He made a sign to Dennis. The man turned and went round about to where close by a scarce noticeable passage had been forced through the bramble. The thicket received and swallowed him to the shoulders. A dozen yards in, he faced about, waved to his master, stooped, and vanished. Luvaine, stamping in a fury of restlessness, would not yet venture upon pursuit; but as he padded it to and fro he cast quick, hateful glances at the man who had baulked him.
Perhaps for a minute they awaited the desired summons, hammering their feet on the frozen turf, hugging themselves with their pocketed hands for a little warmth. It seemed impossible that that smooth white desolation could contain any sunken chamber of refuge.
Quite suddenly a cry came to their ears—an attenuated scream forced from the bowels of the earth. To men in their impatient and overstrung condition it wavered up weird and deathly. With one impulse they dashed for the path into the thicket, stumbling and pushing and striving for the lead. It fell to Tuke. Reaching the spot where he calculated his man had disappeared, he flung about like a nosing hound, saw where a loose path of undergrowth was swung before a jagged fissure in the tangle, elbowed it aside, and slipped into a narrow broken tunnel that seemed to undermine the hill.