He continued, however, to swim after his conscious efforts ceased: for his body was found next morning on a strip of Cornish sand between Gorran and Mevagissey, washed by every sheet of surf.
His rescuer, a shrimp-fisher, occupied one of three cots perched on a ravine; and there on the evening of the second day he opened his eyes on a settee, four children screaming in play around him; he so far having been seen only by a reporter from Mevagissey, and the doctor from Gorran, who, on his wide rounds, had been asked into the cottage.
The same night Hogarth spoke to the fisher: told him that he was not a wrecked sailor, had reasons for avoiding observation, and would pay for shelter and silence: whereat the fisher, who was drinking hot beer, winked, and promised; and the next day took for Hogarth a telegram, signed “Elm Tree”, to Mevagissey, asking of Loveday five pounds.
Finally, one midnight, after two weeks of skulking, he reached Whitechapel, where, the fact of his brown skin now giving him the idea of orientalizing himself, at a Jew's, in a little interior behind the counter, he bought sandals, a caftan, a black sudayree, an old Bagdad shawl for girdle, and a greenish-yellow Bedouin head-cloth, or kefie, which banded the forehead, draped the face like a nun's wimple, and fell loose. For these he discarded the shrimp-man's clothes; and now dubbed himself “Peter the Hermit”.
For he meant to start-a Crusade.
At a police-station on the third day he saw a description of himself: three moles, bloodshot eye, white teeth, pouting mouth; but over the moles now hung the head-cloth.
For several days he lay low in a garret, considering himself, abandoning himself to sensuality in cocoa, vast buns, tobacco: rioting above all in the thought of the secret truth which lay in his head.
Up to now, not a word to anyone about it; but on the seventh night he spoke.
It was in some “Cocoa Rooms” in a “first-class room”, strewn with sawdust, where, as he sat alone, another man, bearing his jug, came and sat; and soon he addressed Hogarth.
“Talk English?”
“I am an Englishman”, answered Hogarth.
“What, in those togs? What countryman?”
“Norfolk”.
“Know Manchester?”
“I was there one day”.
“Difference between Manchester and London, isn't there? I am a Manchester man, I am. All the difference in the world. This cold, stiff, selfish city. Londoners, eh? A lot of peripatetic tombstones!”
And so he went on; this being his whole theory of God and Man: that Londoners are peripatetic tombstones, but Manchester-men just the other way—seemed a mechanic, brisk-eyed, small; a man who had read; but now, evidently, down on his luck.
“Then, why come to London?”—from Hogarth.
“Looking for work”,—with a shrug—“looking for a needle in a bundle of hay. What would you have? the whole place overrun with Jews. England no longer belongs to the English, that's the long and short of it”.
Hogarth looked him in the face. “Did England belong to the English before the Jews came?”
“How do you mean? Of course it did”.
“Which part of it?”
“Why, all of it”.
“But fix your mind upon some particular piece of England—some street, or field, that you know—and then tell me: did that belong to the English?”
“Belonged to some Englishman”.
“But you don't mean to say that some Englishman is the English?”
“Ah, yes, I know what you are driving at”, said the mechanic, with a patronizing nod: “but the point is this: that, apart from vague theorizing, a man did manage to make a good living before these dogs overran the country”.
“But—agoodliving? How much did you make?—forty shillings a week? toiling in grime six days, sleeping the seventh? I call that a deadly living”.
“Well, Idon't, you see. Besides, I made, not forty, but forty-fiveshillings, under the sliding-scale”.
“Yes, but no brave nation would submit one day to such petty squalors after it was shown the way to escape them”.
“Thereisno way”, said the mechanic: “there are the books, and the talkers; but the economic laws that govern the units like you and me are as relentless as gravitation. Don't believe anyone who talks to you about 'ways of escape'”.
“But suppose someone has a new thought?”
“There can be no new thoughts aboutthat. The question has long since been exhausted”.
“Well, come “—with sudden decision—“I will tell you a thought of my own “. And he told.
If the English people paid the rent for England to themselves—to their government—instead of to a few Englishmen, then, by one day's labour in six, Englishmen would be much more rich in all things than a fisherman, by one day's labour in six, was rich in fish.
The expression which he awaited on the face before him was one of illuminated astonishment; but, with a chill in his nerves, he saw the workman's lips curve.
“Bah!” said the Manchester man, “that is an exploded theory!”
Exploded!!!
Hogarth was rather pale.
Yet he knew that it was true....Who, then, could have been exploding the Almighty?
“Who has exploded it?”
“Been exploded again and again!” said the Manchester man; “of all the theories of land-tenure, that is about the weakest:Ishould know, for I've studied them all. The fact is, no change in the system of land-tenure will have the least effect upon the lot of the masses; would only make things worse by unsettling the country—if it didn't mean a civil war”.
“I begin to see”.
Hogarth got up, walked home meditating: and suddenly blushed.
It was known! by mechanics in cocoa-rooms!—that secret thing of his secret cell. And it was not believed!
As for him, what was he now doing outside Colmoor? That question he asked himself, as he sat unsandaling his feet; and he commenced to dress himself again: but paused—would first see Loveday.
Accordingly, the next night, the two friends met at Cheyne Gardens.
And a long time they sat silent, Loveday feeding his eyes upon his friend's face, that hard, rounded brow which seemed harder, and frowned now, that gallant largeness of eye which seemed now wilder, and that manly height, which seemed Mahomet's in the Oriental dress.
“But where have you been for five weeks?” asked Loveday.
“Skulking, and thinking. But about my sister....”
“Do not ask...” said Loveday.
There was a long silence.
“Did not O'Hara tell you to make no more efforts for my escape?” asked Hogarth.
“Who is O'Hara?”
“Why, the priest who escaped, instead of me, through the copse”.
“O'Hara was not the name he gave me; and no, he said nothing about that. I got him off to America, and only saw him twice. I thought him rather—But why didn't you escape youself?”
“I thought it improper”.
“But you did finally?”
“For a reason: you remember the association which I was forming to answer the question as to the cause of misery? Well, that question I have answered for myself in prison”.
“Really? Tell me!”
Hogarth absently took up a water-colour drawing from the table, and turned it round and round, leaning forward on a knee, as he told how the matter was. Meantime, he kept his eyes fixed upward upon Loveday's face, who stood before him.
In the midst of his talk Loveday scratched the top of his head, where the hair was rather thin, and said he, twisting round: “Forgive me-let me ring for some brandy-and-soda—”
Hogarth stood briskly up.
“What I say, I can see, is not new to you?” said he.
“No, not new”, Loveday confessed: “I believe that it is quite an ancient theory; there are even savage tribes whose land-tenure is not unlike what you advocate—the Basutos, for example”.
“And are these Basutos richer, happier, prettier fellows than average Englishmen?”
“Oh, beyond doubt. Don't suppose that I am gainsaying you: I am only showing you that the theory is not new—”
“But why do you persist in calling it atheory?Is the fact that one and one make two atheory?”—Hogarth's brow growing every moment redder.
“What can one call it?”
“Call it what you like! But do you believe it?”
“It is quite possibly true; and now that you say it I believe it; but I have never seriously considered the matter.”
“Why not?”
“Because—I don't know. It is out of my line”.
“Your line! Yet you are a human being—”
“Well, partly, yes: say—a novelist”.
“Do not jest! It is incredible to me that you have written book after book, and knew of this divine thing, and did not cram your books with it!”
Loveday flushed. “You misunderstand my profession; and as to this theory of land-tenure, let me tell you: it will never be realized—not in England. Anyway, it would mean civil war....”
Again those words! “Civil war....”
And as, for the second time, he heard them, Hogarth dashed the picture which he held to the ground, shattering glass and frame: which meant that, then and there, he washed his hands of the world and its wagging; meant also his return to Colmoor.
He dashed from the room without a word; down the stairs; out into the street.
As he ran along the King's Road, he asked a policeman the way to the nearest police-station, then ran on through a number of smaller streets, seeking it, till, at a corner, he stopped, once more uncertain, the night dim and drizzling.
He was about to set off again, when, behind him, he heard: “Excuse me, mister—could you give a poor man a penny to get a night's lodging?”
Turning, he saw—old Tom Bates: still in the guernsey; but very senile and broken now.
The fish-rich fisher...! he had come to this...
Hogarth had twenty-eight shillings about him, and, without disclosing himself, put hand to pocket to give them all, just as the old man reached up to his ear to say: “It's the lumbago; I got it very bad; but it won't be long now. It wur a bad day for me as ever I come to Lunnon! I'm Norfolk born, I am: and I had eight sons, which the last was Fred, who, they say, met his death in Colmoor....”
At that word, “Fred”, Hogarth started: for under the elm in the beech-wood between Thring and Priddlestone Fred had concealed a thing fallen from heaven, which could be sold for—a thousand pounds.
That would keep the fisher rich during the few days that remained to him!
But the old man could hardly go himself; if he could, would bungle: the thing was heavy—on the lord-of-the-manor's land....
Do a kind act, Hogarth. He would see the old place, his father's grave; and there was a girl who lived in the Hall at Westring whom it was a thrilling thing to be near, even if one did not see....
“Here are two shillings”, said he, in an assumed voice: “and if you be at this spot, at this hour, on Thursday night coming, you shall have more. Don't fail”.
Again he ran, and took train, two hours later, for Beccles.
His risk of arrest here, round about his old home, was enormous, and he drew the Bedouin kefie well round his face, skulking from the station to the “Fen”, northward, where he got an urchin to buy him a paper lantern in a general shop, and now trudged up to Priddlestone, then down through meadows to the beech-wood, the night rough with March winds.
It was not the winds, however, which made him draw close his Arab cloak, but his approach to the elm: there, one night, he had seen a naked black man! there had fallen the Arab Jew.
He stood twenty yards from the tree, till, with sudden resolution, he strode, soon had the lantern ruby, and since the grave of “the affair” had been digged with a piece of wood, for such a piece he went seeking, having thrown off his caftan.
Instead, he found the rusted half-blade of a spade, and commenced to dig round the roots, the lantern shine reddening a face strangely agitated, uncertainty of finding what he sought heightening his excitement: for the earth showed no disturbance, and since three years had passed since that night of Bates in the wood, the object might have been already unearthed. After an hour his back was aching, his hands dabbled, his brow beaded, while the night-winds blew, the light now was commoved, and now glowed a steady red; and still he grovelled.
Presently, as he shovelled in a circle, always two feet deep, moving the light as he moved, he saw on the top of a shovelful of marl—a twig: barkless, black, cracked—scorched!
To an immoderate degree this thing agitated him—some whisper in the back of his head—some half-thought: he began now to root furiously, with a frowning intentness.
But suddenly he shuddered: a finger seemed to touch his shoulder behind; and he twisted with wild eyes, caught up the light, peered, saw no black man—nothing: but quite five minutes he stood defiant, with clenched fists; then resumed the work, though with a constant feeling now that he was being watched by the unseen seers.
After two new strokes he struck upon something hard, and, digging eagerly round it, found a quart-can, full of earth. And instantly all doubt vanished: for this must have been the beer-can carried by Bates.
Strong curiosity now wrought in Hogarth, a zeal to lay eyes upon that object which had careered through the heights of space to find that beech-wood and that elm-tree; and during fifteen minutes his little implement digged with the quick-plying movement of a distaff-shuttle, he fighting for breath, anon casting a flying wild glance behind, but still digging.
Now, frequently, he came upon burned objects, twigs, cinders. Even the marl had a scorched look; and his agitation grew to ecstasy.
Something very singular had happened to his mind with regard to this “affair” of Bates: Bates had said that it had fallen on the asteroid night; and O'Hara had told him—falsely, indeed—that a piece of the asteroid, fallen upon the French coast, had had diamonds; yet, somehow, never once had his mind associated the Fred Bates “affair” with the thought of diamonds, but only with the “thousand pounds” which Bates had been promised by old Bond. So at the moment when he had begun to dig, his whole thought was of “a thousand pounds”; but, somehow, by the time his implement at last grated against something two feet down, that word “diamonds” had grown up in his brain.
But diamonds! In the midst of his shovelling the thought flashed through him: “The world is God's! and to whom He wills He gives it....”
Now at last the thing lay definitely before him: he grated the spade from end to end, scraping away the marl; and it was very rough....
The size and shape of a man's leg, and red, anyway in the red lantern-shine—his sight dim—he moved and saw in an improbable dream; and when he tried to lift the object and failed, for a long time he sat on the edge of the trench, passing one palm across and across his forehead, till the lantern-light leapt, and went out.
He sprang upright then—awake, sure: they were diamonds, those bits of glass, big celestial ones, not of earth, in hundreds; when he passed his hand along the meteorite he felt it leprous, octahedron, dodecahedron, large and small: if they were truly diamonds, he divined that their owner must be as wealthy as some nations.
About three in the morning he managed to raise the meteorite; refilled the trench; and since it still rained, rolled the meteorite to the hollow of the elm, put on his caftan, and with his back on the interior of the tree, his feet on the meteorite, tumbled into a wonderful slumber.
He was awaked by a footstep, and, starting, saw rocking along the forest path one Farmer Pollock, wearing now fez and tassel, and he saw his clothes all clay, and, with a smile of fondness, saw how, even beneath its grime, the meteor dodged and jeered, with frolic leers, in the beams of a bright morning that seemed to him the primal morning, a fresh wedding-morning, swarming with elves and shell-tinted visions, imps and pixy princes, profligate Golcondas.
Going first to the spot where he had digged, to give to the surface a natural look, he trampled the lantern into the mire, threw the tin can far, then, taking a quantity of marl, plastered the meteorite, to cover its roughness; then boldly left it, starting out with consummate audacity for Thring, where everybody, police and all, knew him well.
A singular light now in his eyes, an evil pride; and he had the step of a Prince in Prettyland. Corresponding to an inward majesty, of which, from youth, he had been conscious, he now felt an outward, and had not been awake eight minutes when his brain was invaded by plans—plans of debauchery, palaces, orgy, flying beds of ivory arabesqued in fan-traceries of sapphire, in which Rebekah Frankl lolled, and smiled; and on toward Thring he stepped, prince new-crowned, yet by old heredity, high exalted above laws, government, and the entire little muck of Man.
At one point where the path ran close to Westring-park proper, the park on higher ground, a grass-bank seven feet high dividing them, he saw a-top of the bank in caftan, priest-cap, and phylacteries, taking snuff—Baruch Frankl.
Hogarth skipped up, and stood before the Jew, having drawn his face-cloth well forward.
“What's the row?” asked Frankl.
“Could you give a poor man a job?”
“You a Jew?”
“Yes”, replied Hogarth, not dreaming how truly: “London born”.
“A Froom?”
“I keep the fasts”.
“What you doing about here?”
“Tramping”.
“Fine mess you are in”.
“I slept in a hollow tree down yonder—an elm tree”.
“Well, there's many a worse shake-down than that. Who are you? Ever been about here before?”
“I was once”.
“You put me in mind of an old chum of mine....Well, here's half-a-crown for you to go on with”.
“Make it a crown”, said Hogarth, “and get me to clean up down there; in a shocking state with mast and leaves”.
Frankl considered. “All right, I don't mind”.
“I shall want a spade, and—a barrow”.
“Go down the path yonder, till you come to the stables, and tell them”.
Frankl resumed his musing stroll, and Hogarth ran for the barrow.
In twenty minutes he was again at the elm tree, and, with a scheme in him for seeing Rebekah, heaped the barrow with refuse, pushed it between a beck and the wood, till, wearying of this, he was about to get the meteorite into the barrow, when he had the mad thought that Frankl must be made to see and touch it, so set off to seek him: and a few yards brought him face to face with Frankl.
“Well, how goes it?” asked the Jew.
“There is a weight there which I can't lift”, said Hogarth. “Then you must do the other thing. Don't lift it, and you don't get the pay. What weight is it?”
“It is here”.
Hogarth led him, led him, pointing. Frankl kicked the meteorite.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It can't be a branch”, said Hogarth; “too heavy—more like a piece of old iron”.
“Well, slip into it. A strapping fellow like you ought to be able to do that bit”.
“But suppose it's valuable?”
“I make you a present of it, as you are so hard up”.
Now Hogarth, by tilting the barrow, with strong effort of four limbs, got the meteorite lodged, while Frankl, his smile lifting the wrinkles above his thick moustache, watched the strain: then, with arms behind, went his contemplative way.
Hogarth rolled the barrow toward Thring.
It was already eleven o'clock, the sun shining in a bright sky, under which the country round the Waveney lay broad to the hills of mist which seemed to encompass the valley; yet, when one came to them no hills were there, but were still beyond. When Hogarth came out from the wood upon a footbridge, to his right a hand-sower was sowing broadcast, with a two-handed rhythm, taking seed, as he strode, from his scrip; and to the left ran a path between fields to an eminence with a little church on it; straight northward some Thring houses visible, and north-east, near the river, Lagden Dip orchard. Only two stooping women in fields near Thring could Hogarth see; also, still further, a gig-and-horse whose remote motion was imperceptible; also the trudging two-handed process of the sower nourishing the furrows. But for these, England, supposed to be “overcrowded”, seemed a land once inhabited, but abandoned.
To Hogarth the whole, so familiar, looked uplifted now, the sunlight of a more celestial essence. Westring he would buy—though one memorable night in Colmoor he had arrived at the knowledge that it was not just that Westring should be anyone's; but then what one bought with his own diamonds was surely his own—his name being Richard.
He had passed the bridge, when, glancing to the left, he saw a fifth person in the landscape—a man under a sycamore near the church, gazing up, with hung jaw, at the apse window—dressed in a grey jacket, but a clerical hat, and he had a note-book, in which he wrote, or drew. Hogarth, whose mind was in weathercock state, rolled the barrow to the hill, left it, went stealing fleetly up, and gripped the man's collar, to whisper: “In the King's name I arrest you”.
The man's hand clapped his heart, as he turned a face of terror.
“There is—some mistake—My God! Are you—?”
“Yes”.
“Hogarth?”
“Who else?”
“But you have killed me! My heart—”
“Serves you right. Why didn't you give your right name to Loveday? And what are you doing here?”
“I was just examining this lovely old church, with its two south aisles, and one north, like St. John's at Cirencester. When the church fell in England, architecture was abolished—But as to why I am in Norfolk at all, I am skulking: and here is as another place. Your friend packed me off to America; but for some reasons I should prefer Golmoor—old Colmoor, eh? I fear I am a voluptuary, my son, fond of comfort, and old things, and pretty things. And all that I shall have yet! Tut, O'Hara is not done with the world, nor it with him. As to Norfolk, I once knew—a person—in this neighbourhood—”
The priest paused, regarding Hogarth with a smile, the “person” meant being Hogarth's mother; and he said: “But you are quite the Jew in dress: do you know now, then, that you are of the Chosen Race?”
“Singular notion! This is a mere disguise”.
“Ah. But you look quite radiant. You must have come into a fortune. When I heard of your escape, I said to myself—”
“How did you hear?”
“Why, from Harris”.
“Harris is drowned”.
“Harris is now under that little roof down there—there”—the prelate stabbed with his forefinger: “Harris is my shadow; Harris is my master. He was picked up naked by the ship which ran down your vessel, recognized me one day in Broadway, and threatened to give me in charge if I did not adopt him 'as my well-beloved son'. Well, from him I heard all, how you called fire from Heaven—it was gallant. But aren't you afraid of capture down here in your own country?”
“I cannot be captured”.
Those stony eyeballs of O'Hara, bulging from out circular trenches round their sockets, surveyed Hogarth, weighing, divining him, while his bottom lip, massive as the mouth of Polynesian stone gods, trembled.
“How do you mean?”
“I can buy King on throne, Judge on bench, Governor and Warder, the whole machinery. Even O'Hara I could buy”.
“I am for sale! Hogarth! Ismelledit about you, the myrrh of your garments! And didn't I prophesy it to you years ago? What a development! That beast, Harris, will dance for joy! Oh, there is something very artistic to my fancy, Hogarth, in the metal gold—brittle, bright, orpimented—”
“And diamonds?”
“Hogarth, have you diamonds?”
“Yes”, said Hogarth, smiling at the effect of ecstasy upon O'Hara.
“Prismic diamond!” cried the prelate: “but how—?”
“Do you want to enter my service?”
“Do Iwant?”
“Well, I want a tutor, O'Hara; and you shall be the man. Undertake, then, to teach me all you know in two years, and I'll give you—how much?—twenty thousand pounds a year”.
“My son”, whispered O'Hara, “what a development—!”
“Good-bye. In Thring Street there is a little paper-shop. Come there to-night at seven”.
He ran down the hill: and as he went northward, pushing his barrow, O'Hara had a lens at his eyes, saw the meteorite, and wondered.
Mrs. Sturgess, of the paper-shop, a clean, washed-out old lady, held up both averting hands at her back door, as Hogarth threw back his kefie, finger on lips; but soon, her alarm warming into welcome, she took him to a room above, to listen to his story of escape.
“And to think”, said she, “there is the very box your sister, poor thing, left with me to keep the day she went away, which never once have I seen her dear good face from that day to this. Anyway,there'sthe box—” pointing to a trunk covered with grey goat's-hair, the trunk to which the old Hogarth had referred in telling Richard the secret of his birth, saying to deaf ears that it contained Richard's “papers”—a box double-bottomed, on its top the letters “P. O.”, with a cross-of-Christ under them.
“But, sir”, said Mrs. Sturgess, “you must be in great danger here. I hope”—with a titter—“I shan't be implicated—”
“Don't be afraid, Mrs. Sturgess, it will be all right, and, for yourself, don't trouble about the paper-shop any more, but buy a little villa near Florence, where it is warm for the cough—don't think me crazy if I tell you that I am a very rich man. Now give me a steak”.
Mrs. Sturgess served him well that day with a pang of expectancy at her heart! Always, she remembered, Richard Hogarth had been strange—uplifted and apart—a man incalculable, winged, unknown, though walking the common ways. Hemightbe a “very rich man”...
His meal over, Hogarth threw himself upon a bed, to dream another trouble of bubbles and burden of purples; woke at four; and, with a procured cold-chisel, hammer, and a calico bag, went to the fowl-house where he had left the meteorite, shut himself in.
Sitting in the dust there, he set to chisel out the gems from the porous ore, and as the chisel won the luscious plums, held them up, glutting his gaze, scratched his name on a fragment of window-pane, and was enchanted that the adamant rim ripped the glass like rag: the whim, meanwhile, working in him to purchase Colmoor, to turn the moor into a paradise, the prison into a palace; where his old cell stood in Gallery No. III to be the bedroom of Rebekah.
To seeherthat very night was a necessity! and when it was dark he set out.
But that plot failed: on presenting himself at the front of the mansion, he was sent round to the back, where he received payment, and was dismissed; and when he again started for the front, intending to force his way in, he decided upon something else, and walked back to Thring.
He reached the Sturgess cottage soon after six, ate, with a candle returned to the lean-to to resume his work, and was still intent upon it at seven, when Mrs. Sturgess ran out to tell him that “the gentleman had come”. He said: “Show him up to my room”.
The first thing which O'Hara noticed in that room was the goat-hair trunk, with the initials and cross, the initials his own.
After some minutes he furtively turned the key, dived into a mass of things, paused to remember the whereabouts of a spring, found it, and, lifting the upper bottom, peered beneath; saw a bundle of papers; and, without removing the band, ferreted among them, and was satisfied—-Hogarth's “birth-papers”.
He presently went to a back window, and saw ruddy streaks between the boarding of the shanty, while sounds of the hammer reached him.
He would go and meet Hogarth: no harm in that; but it was stealthily that he hurried down the stair and carried himself across the yard, grinning a grimace of self-conscious caution, to peep through a cranny.
Hogarth's back was toward him, the iron leg lying near a box in which was a sitting hen, on its top a candlestick, the calico bag, and a lot of the gems: at which the priest's palm covered his awed mouth, and with a fleet thievishness, like a cat on hot bricks, he trotted back to the cottage.
Ten minutes later Hogarth entered, nodding: “Ah, O'Hara...”; and he called down: “Mrs. Sturgess! pen, ink, and paper!”
When these came, he sat and wrote:
“I have escaped from prison, and come into great power. I summon you to meet me at the elm in the beech-wood to-night at nine. I beseech you, I entreat you. I burn to ashes. Rebekah! My flames of fire! I am dying.
“R. H.”
He enclosed, and handed it, without any address, to O'Hara.
“O'Hara”, said he, “I want you to take that for me. Come—I will show you the place. You ask in the hall to see 'the young lady': her name does not concern you; but you can't mistake her: she is so-pretty. Give the note to no one else, of course: it mentions my escape, for one thing. I know you will do it well”.
He conducted O'Hara, till the two towers of Westring were visible; pointed them out; then went back, and in an hour had finished his work on the diamonds.
O'Hara, meantime, going on his way alone, muttered: “You go fast, Hogarth: prelates of the Church your errand boys? But there is a little fellow called Alf Harris...if he had seen what I have seen to-night, you would be a corpse now”.
In twenty minutes he was at Westring, which he knew well, for twenty-five years before he had lived in the Vale: but he supposed that Lord Westring de Broom was still the inmate.
He asked to see “the young lady”, persisted, and after a time Rebekah came with eyebrows of inquiry.
The moment O'Hara saw her well, his visage acquired a ghastly ribbed fixity. Even before this,she, by one flashed glance, had known him.
But she took the envelope with easy coolness. And, instead of then returning upon her steps, went still beyond, and whispered to two men in the hall: “Do not let that man pass out!”
As she again returned inward past O'Hara, she remarked: “You might wait here a little”.
She travelled then, not hurrying, down the breadth of a great apartment to a side room where her father sat, capped and writing; and she said: “Papa, the man who assaulted me in the train is now in the hall. As his sentence was three years, he must have escaped—” She was gone at once, the unaddressed envelope, still unopened, shivering a little in her hand.
Frankl leapt up, rather pale, thinking that if the man had comehere, he must mean mischief; but remembering that the man was a gentleman, a priest, he took heart, and went out.
O'Hara, meantime, stood at bay, guessing his exit blocked, while the terrors of death gat hold upon him, the flesh of his yellow jaw shivering. But he was a man of stern mind—stern as the rocky aspect of his face, and the moment he saw Frankl coming (he had seen him in the Court), he started to meet him—stooped to the Jew's ear, who shrank delicately from contact.
“There isn't any good in running me down, sir”, he whispered in sycophant haste. “I pledge you my word I came here without knowing to whom. O do, now! I have already suffered for my crime; and if you attempt to capture me, I do assure you, I strangle you where you stand! Do, now! I only brought a letter—”
Frankl, half inclined to tyrannize over misery, and half afraid, swept his hand down the beard.
“Letter?” said he: “from whom?”
“From a friend”.
“Which friend?”
“A man named Hogarth”.
O'Hara said it in an awful whisper, though not aware of any relation between Hogarth and Frankl.
Whereupon an agitation waved down Frankl's beard. The news that “a man named Hogarth” had written to his daughter would hardly have suggestedRichard—safe elsewhere; but, one night at Yarmouth, he had seen Richard Hogarth inexplicably kiss his daughter's hand.
“Hogarth?” said he: “what Christian name?”
“Richard”.
The agonized thought in Frankl's brain was this: “Well, what's the good of prisons, then?”—he, too earnest a financier to read newspaper gossip, having heard not a word of the three escapes from Colmoor.
He said: “Well, sir, generally speaking, I'm the last to encourage this sort of thing; but, as yours is a special case, I tell you plain out that, personally, I don't mean a bit of harm to you. Just step into a room here, and let us talk the matter quietly over”.
He led O'Hara to his study; and there they two remained locked half an hour, conferring head to head.
Rebekah, having excused herself from three ladies, her guests, alone in her room opened her letter.
Glanced first at the “R. H.”, and was not surprised. He had “escaped”, had “come into great power”: that seemed natural; but he “summoned” her to meet him, and she saw no connection between his “great power” and his right to summon her.
She held the paper to a fire, and, as it began to burn, in a panic of flurry extinguished the edge, and hustled it into her bosom; then perambulated; then fell to a chair-edge with staring gaze; then, rocking her head which she had dropped upon a little table, moaned: “He is mad....”
“My flames of fire! Rebekah! I am dying....”
He suffered; and a pussy's wail mewed from her; but with a gasp of anger which said “Ho!” she sprang straight, and went ranging, with a stamping gait, through the chamber, filling it with passion. “Iwon't go!” she went with fixed lips, as something within her whispered: “You must”.
To escape herself, she went again to see what had happened with regard to the convict, whose face would carry to the grave the scars of her nails.
There were no signs of any disturbance; and she asked a footman: “Where is the man who was here?”
“With your father in the study”.
That seemed a strange proceeding: she felt a touch of alarm for her father, and, passing again by the study, peeped; could see nothing for the key, but heard voices.
This messenger of Hogarth, she next thought, was a criminal: he might betray...so she stole into an adjacent room, to peep by a side door of the study, and though a key projecting toward her barred her vision, the talkers were near this point, and she could hear.
“The diamond block”, O'Hara said, “is the same which he rolled across the bridge this morning; to that I'll swear”.
“Then it must be the very same block he showed me”, Frankl said in a whisper; “that thing was worth millions....!”
“Undoubtedly it was the same”.
“Oh, but Lord”, groaned the Jew in an anguish of self-deprecation, “where were myeyes? where were mywits? I must have beendreaming! No, that's hard!”
“Well—nil desperandum! Let us be acting, sir!”
“My own land—!”
“They are still safe enough: come—”
“He may have lost one or two—in his excitement. Thousands gone! He may have hidden some!”
“Tut, he has hidden none”, said O'Hara; “we may have all. Let us make a move”.
“But he is a strong man, this Hogarth. Why do you object to the assistance of the police?”
“What have the police to do with such a matter? Hogarth would simply bribe. And there are three of us—”
“Who is this Harris?”
“He is a Cockney—assassin”.
Frankl took snuff, with busy pats at alternate nostrils.
“What will you tell him is in the bag?”
“Anything—rings—something prized by you for sentimental reasons. We offer him a thousand—two thousand pounds. And he will not fail. He strikes like lightning”.
“And we share—how?”
“Come—let us not talk of that again, sir. What could be more generous than my offer? You divide the diamonds into two heaps, and I choose one; or I divide, you choose; and, before I leave you, you give me a declaration that it was by your contrivance that I escaped prison, and that the gems which I have, once yours, are duly made over to me”.
“And you collar half!” gibed the Jew with an ogle of guile; “that's about as cool a stroke of business as I've come across. You don't take into account that the whole is mine, if the concern fell, as you confess, on my own land! And just ask yourself the question: what is to prevent me handing you over this minute to the police, and grabbing the lot? Only I'm not that sort of man—”
O'Hara drew a revolver.
“You talk to me as though I was a schoolboy, sir”, said he sternly. “Be good enough to learn to respect me. I am not less a man of the world than you are, and quite competent to safeguard my own interests. Supposing I was weak enough to permit you to send for the police, the moment they had me I should tell of Hogarth in hiding; they would go for him, and he, after bribing, may be trusted to take wing with the stones, leaving you whistling. Or perhaps you would care to tackle him in person? He would wheel you by the beard round his arm like a Catherine-wheel, I do assure you. All this you see well, and pretend not to. Do let us be honest with each other!”
“Well, I don't want to be hard”, said Frankl, looking sideward and downward, plotting behind an unwrinkled brow, intending to have every one of the diamonds; so did O'Hara, who already had his plot.
“No, don't be hard”, said O'Hara: “Iam not. I give you an incalculable fortune; I take the same. Live and let live! Why should two shrewd old fellows like you and me be like the dog which, wanting two bones, lost the one he had? Come, now—give me your hand on it”.
“Well, I'm hanged if you are not right!” cried Frankl, looking up with discovery: “Share and share alike, and shame the devil! That's the kind of little man I am, frank, bluff, and stalwart—Ha! ha! Give me your hand on it, sir!”
“Ha! ha! you are very kind. That is the only way—absolute sincerity—” and they shook hands, hob-nobbing and fraternizing, with laughs and little nods, like cronies.
“Stop—I'll just ring for a drop of brandy—” said Frankl.
“No! no ringing!—thanks, thanks, no brandy—”
“Well, you are as cautious as they make them. Oh, perfectly right, you know—perfectly right”—he touched O'Hara's chest—“not a word to say against that. I am the same kind of man myself—”
“Come; are you for making a move?”
“Agreed. Where is my hat? I suppose a man may get his hat!—ha! ha!—I can't very well go in this cap—-”
“You use mine—with the greatest pleasure. I do not need—Ah? quite the fit, quite the fit”.
“Why, so it is. Ha! ha! why, it's a curate's hat, and—I'm a Jew!”
“Excellent, excellent, ha! ha!”
So they made merry, and, with the bitter lip-corners of forced merriment, went out, while Rebekah, who had caught a great deal of that dialogue, crouched a long time there, agitated, uncertain what to do.
That her father should coolly look on at an assassination for a fortune was no revelation to her: she had long despised, yet, with an inconsistency due to the tenderness of Jewish family ties, still loved him; the notion of appealing to the police, therefore, who might ruin Hogarth, too, did not enter her head.
She ran and wrote: “Your life and bag of gems areat this momentin danger”; and sent it by a mounted messenger addressed to “The Guest at the Paper Shop”.
But in twenty minutes the messenger returned to her with it, Hogarth having gone to therendezvousat the elm—long before the appointed time.
When, accordingly, Frankl, O'Hara, and Harris arrived at the paper-shop back yard, and Harris had stolen up the back stairs, he presently, to the alarm and delight of the others, sent a whisper from the window: “No one 'ere as I can see!”
And the search for the diamonds was short: for Hogarth had actually left the bag containing them on the trunk, and Frankl and O'Hara returned with it to Westring, holding it out at arm's length, one with the right, one with the left hand, like standard-bearers.
Hogarth, meantime, was striding about the elm, and once fell to his knees, adoring a vision, and once, at a fancied step, his teeth-edges chattered.
Rebekah! He called, groaned, hissed that name, while his to-and-fro ranging quickened to a trot.
And now, fancying that he heard a call “Come !” he stood startled, struck into a twisting enquiry to the four winds; but could not locate the call, ran hither and thither, saw no one.
“Come to me, little sister”, he wailed tenderly, while to swallow was a doubtful spasm for him, her name a mountain in his bosom.
When he was certain that it must be nearer ten than “nine”, he set out in the sway of a turbulent impulse to spurt for the Hall: but as he reached the point of proximity between path and park, just there where her father had stood that morning he saw her patiently waiting—ever since that “Come!”
He flew, and was about to skip up the bank, when, with forbidding arm, she cried: “Don't you approach me!”—and he stood checked and abject, one foot planted on the bank, looking up, ready to dart for her in her Oriental dress, flimsy, baggy at the girdle, her arms bare, her fingers clasped before her, making convex the two tassels of the girdle, from her ears depending circles of gold large enough to hoop with, a saffron headdress, stuck backward, showing her hair in front, falling upon a shawl which sheltered her frank recumbent shoulders. She did not see Hogarth at all, but stood averted, implacable, unapproachable, looking across the park, while Hogarth occupied a long silence in gazing up to where, like a show, she stood, illumined by the moon.
At last he sent to her the whisper, “Did you call just now? Did you say 'Come'?”
“What is it you want with me, Hogarth? You have 'summoned' me: but be very quick”.
“I told you: I am wealthier than all the princes—”
“Well, let me inform you that your life is in danger here; if you are a wise man, you will not fail to leave this neighbourhood this night”.
“But no one knows—”
“It is known, Hogarth: your friends are false, and your enemies crafty. You will have to walk with your eyes open, my friend. What will you do with all the money?”
“I will buy the world, becauseyouare in it”.
Now she flashed upon him one glance, in which there was astonishment, and judgment.
“You said that so like my father! Hogarth among the dealers? I thought you would be more squeamish, and arduous, and complex”.
“But if a man is famished, he is not complex, he runs to the baker's. You can have no conception how I perish! And I cannot be contradicted-I claim you-I have the right-I am the lord of this lower world—”
“But you do not see the effect of your words: you disappoint me Richard. How of what the poet sings: