The mill greeted us with no jarring thunder as we entered its door, for the discord of its phantom grinding I had myself silenced.
I listened as we climbed the wooden stairs for any sound from the room above, but only the echo of our footfalls reverberated in the lonely house.
No sign of old Peggy had I seen, but, when I pushed open the door of my father’s room there she was standing by his bed and leaning over.
At the noise of our entrance she twisted her head, gave a sort of sudden pee-wit cry and tumbled upon the floor in a collapsed heap, the tablet from the bed in her hand.
I thought that the old woman, startled by our entrance, had merely stepped back, tripped and so come to the ground; but the doctor uttered an exclamation, ran to the prostrate figure and called me to bring a spongeful of water from the wash-hand-stand.
When I had complied I saw that the ancient limbs were rigid; the teeth set, the lips foaming slightly. Peggy was in an epileptic fit and that at her age was no light matter.
I feared that her struggles might presently wake my father, who was to all appearance sleeping peacefully, and asked the doctor if it would not be possible to move her to another room. He shook his head, but gave no answer. Suddenly I was conscious that his eyes were fixed upon the tablet still held in her crooked fingers, and that in my distraction I had not erased the damning words that were traced thereon. The wet sponge was in my hand. With a quick movement I stooped and swept it across the surface. As I did so the doctor slewed his head round and smirked up at me with a truly diabolical expression. Then he snatched the sponge and plumped it with a slap on the withered forehead. The soot from the tablet ran in wet streaks over the sinister old face and made a grotesque horror of it. The wretched creature moaned and jerked under the shock, as though the water were biting acid.
Not a word was spoken between us for full twenty minutes—not till the fit at length subsided and left the racked body to the rest of exhaustion. The eyes became human, with what humanity was left them; the pallid face fell into its usual lines—the old woman lay flat with closed lids in the extreme of debility.
Then said Dr. Crackenthorpe: “Take you her feet and I her head and we’ll move her out of this.”
We carried Peggy into my room and laid her on the bed that had been Jason’s. Her hours must be numbered, I thought as I looked at the gray features, already growing spectral in the rising fog of death.
Turning from that old fallen stump, Dr. Crackenthorpe suddenly faced me, a smile on his crackled lips.
“So,” he said, “on the top of that confession, you sought to convince me against your own judgment?”
“I haven’t a thought to deny it. I value it at nothing. He has fed on a baseless chimera, at your instigation—yes, you needn’t lie—till his mind is sick with disease. What does it matter? I know him and I stake my soul on his innocence. I asked you to ease his mind—not mine. I tell you in a word”—I strode up to him and spoke slowly and fiercely—“my father had no hand in Modred’s death and I believe you know it.”
He backed from me a little, breathing hard, when a sound from the bed stopped him. I started and turned. The old woman’s hand was up to her neck. Her sick eyes were moving from the one to the other of us in a lost, questioning way; a murmur was in her lean, pulsing throat.
“Lie quiet, Peggy,” I said; “you may be able to speak in a minute if you lie quiet.”
The words seemed only to increase the panic in her. With a gurgling burst a fragment of speech came from her mouth:
“Be I passing?”
The doctor heard it. “Yes,” he said, brutally.
She appeared to collapse and shrink inward; but in a moment she was up, leaning on her elbow, and her face was terrible to look at.
“’Twas I killed the boy!” she cried, with a sort of breathless wail; “tell him—tell Ralph,” and so fell back, and I thought the life was gone from her.
Was I base and cruel in my triumph? I rose erect, indifferent to the tortured soul stretched beneath me.
“Who was right?” I cried. “Believe me now, you dog; and growl and curse your fill over the wreck of your futile villainy!”
His mouth was set in an incredulous grinning line. I brushed sternly past him, making for my father’s room. I could not pause or wait a moment. The poor soul’s long anguish should be ended there and then.
As I stooped over his bed I saw that some change had come upon him in sleep. The twist of his mouth was relaxed. His face had assumed something of its normal expression.
I seized up the tablet from where it had tumbled on the floor. I smeared it with a fresh coating from the saucer. His first waking eyes, I swore, should look upon the written evidence of his acquittal. While I was waiting for the stuff to dry, he stirred, murmured and opened his eyes.
“Renalt!” he said, in a very low, weak voice.
Speech had returned to him. I knelt by his side and passed my tremulous arms underneath him.
“Father,” I said, “you can speak—you are awake again. I have something to tell you; something to say. Don’t move or utter a sound. You have been asleep all this time—only asleep. While you were unconscious old Peggy has been taken ill—very ill. In the fear of death she has made a confession. Father, I saw what you wrote on this—look, on this tablet! It was all untrue; I have wiped it out. It was Peggy killed Modred—she has confessed it.”
He lifted his unstricken hand—the other was yet paralyzed—in an attitude of prayer. Presently his hand dropped and he turned his face to me, his eyes brimming with tears.
“Renalt,” he murmured, in the poor shadow of a voice, “I thank my God—but the greater sin—I can never condone—though you forgive me—my son.”
“Forgive? What have I to forgive, dad? My heart is as light as a feather.”
He only gazed at me earnestly—pathetically. I went and sat by his side and smoothed his pillow and took his hand in mine.
“Now the incubus is gone, dad, and you’ll get well. You must—I can’t do without you. The black shadow is passed from the mill, and the coming days are all full of sunshine.”
“What has she—confessed? How did—she—do it?”
“I didn’t wait to hear. I wanted you to know, and left her the moment she had spoken.”
“Alone?”
I hesitated and stammered.
“There,” he said, with a faint smile, “I know—I know he’s in the house. I don’t fear—I don’t fear—I tell you. I’m—past that. He won’t want—to come in here?”
He spoke all this time in a bodiless, low tone, and the effort seemed to exhaust him. For some time I sat by him, till he fell into a light slumber. No sound was in the house, and I did not even know if Dr. Crackenthorpe had left the adjoining room. But when my father was settled down and breathing quietly, I rose and stepped noiselessly thither to see.
He was standing against the window, and turned stealthily round as I entered, watching me.
As I walked toward him I glanced aside at the bed. Something about the pose of the figure thereon brought me to a sudden stop. My heart rose and fell with a sharp, quick emotion, and in the instant of it I knew that the old woman was dead. Her head had been propped against the bolster, so that her chin rested upon her withered breast. That would never beat again to the impulse of fear or evil or any kinder emotion, for Peggy had answered to her name.
For the moment I stood stupefied. I think I had hardly realized that the end was so near. Sorrow I could not feel, but now regret leaped in me that I had not waited to hear all that she might tell. Only for an instant. On the next it flashed through me that it was better to put my trust in that first wild confession than to invite it by further questioning to self-condonation—perhaps actual denial.
“You went too soon,” Dr. Crackenthorpe said, in a cold voice of irony. “I must tell you that was hardly decent.”
“I never thought she had spoken her last.”
“Nor had she—by a good deal.”
“She said more?”
“Much more—and to a different purpose.”
I stared at him, breathing hard.
“Are you going to lie again?” I muttered.
“That pleasantry is too often on your lips, sir,” he said, coolly. “None doubt truth so much as those who have dishonored her. The dead woman there leaves you this as a legacy.”
He thrust the thing he was holding into my hand. I recognized it in a sort of dull wonder. It was that ancient mutilated portrait of Modred that I had once discovered in Peggy’s possession.
From the stained and riddled silhouette to the evil face of the man before me I glanced and could only wait in dumb expectancy.
“She told me where to find it,” he said, “and I brought it to her.”
“I never heard you move.”
“I stepped softly for fear of disturbing your father. Do you see that outraged relic? The old creature’s self-accusation turned upon it—upon that and nothing else.”
“What do you mean?”
“That you must look elsewhere, I am afraid, for the criminal. Our pleasant Rottengoose shared the gross superstitions of her kind. All these years she has secretly hugged the really reprehensible thought that the boy’s death was due to her.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A base superstition, my friend—a very base superstition. She had in her possession, I understand, a flint shaft of the paleolithic period. There are plenty such to be picked up in the neighborhood. The ignorant call them elf arrowheads and cherish a belief that to mutilate with one of them a body’s portrait or image is to compass that person’s destruction. This harridan cherished no love for your brother, and fancied she saw her opportunity of seizing revenge without risk on a certain night of misfortune. The boy died and henceforth she knew herself as his murderess. Good-morning to you. May I remind you that my fee is yet unpaid? I will certify to the present cause of death, with pleasure.”
Like one in a dream I heard the doctor’s footstep recede down the stairs and heard the yard door close dully on him as he left the house. In my suffering soul I felt one cruel shaft rankling, and for the rest only a vague sense of loss hung like a cloud over all my faculties.
I had no doubt of the truth of the evil creature’s words. Not otherwise could his knowledge and possession of the tattered portrait be accounted for. Now, too, Peggy’s unaccountable terror at my discovery of her chaunting and gloating over her work on a certain afternoon recurred to me, and was confirmation irrefragable. The wretched old woman had had all the will and intention; but she was innocent of the deed.
I must look elsewhere, as he had said—begin all over again. True—but now less than ever in my father’s direction. Had I needed in my heart convincing proof of the old man’s guiltlessness, his manner in accepting his acquittal would have afforded it. By this he had shown that with him, as with the hounds that had sought to pull him down, his guilt was purely conjectural—presumed merely on the circumstantial evidence of the braces found in his pocket. But I judged him in my heart and pronounced him acquitted.
Now it was idle to moan over my impetuous rush to conclusions. I must only guard against permitting the disillusion to vex the few last days that remained to him. If I wronged the old dead housewife thereby, it was in degree only, for morally she was as guilty as if her charm had borne all the evil force she attributed to it.
Well, I must see about getting some harpy in to minister to her final dumb necessities and then—
A low cry, coming from the other room, broke upon my ears. With beating heart I rushed from the death chamber only—merciful heaven—to enter another!
At the first glance I saw that the white spirit had entered during my absence and had written the sign of eternity on my father’s forehead. He was sitting up in bed and the expression on his face was that of a dreadful, eager waiting.
“Renalt!”
He called to me in a clear, loud voice—the recovered note of an old stronger personality.
I hurried to him; fell on my knees; put my arm about his shoulders.
“Renalt, I am dying—but not yet. The spirit won’t let me pass till I have spoken.”
He turned his head with a resolute effort and gazed upon me.
“What thing have I been—what thing have I been? Send me my enemies that I may face and defy them! Which of them worse than myself? Oh, craven—craven!”
“Father! I only am with you—no enemy, father!”
He struck his fist down upon the counterpane.
“By your love for me you shall know the truth! Judge me then—judge me then as you will. Hear me speak and make no answer till I have finished. Judge me then, and let me pass to my doom weighted with your judgment.”
“Father!”
“Renalt, I killed your mother!”
I fell back appalled. An instant—then I leaned forward and again held him in my arms.
“Ah!” his voice broke, swerved and recovered itself. “Not with this hand—my God, no—but surely and pitilessly none the less. Not a month after Modred was born I found my name and trust dishonored and by her. Listen! Speak nothing. You must know all! She had been in service in London before I married her—where, to this day I have never learned. I shall know soon—I shall know. She was friendless—a weak, irresponsible, beautiful young woman. I threw aside all for her sake, and my love grew tenfold in the act of combating the misfortune it brought me. I could love, Renalt—I could love. There was a passion in my fervor.”
He clasped his hands wildly and looked piercingly before him.
“How the old torment flames up in me at the last! I think I gave my soul to the wanton and I thought I had hers in exchange. What inspired fools love makes of us! My castle in Cloudland stood firm till that month after Modred’s birth. Then all in a day—a minute—it dissolved and vanished. I came upon her secretly gloating over a portrait—the miniature of a man. I saw—suspected—wrenched half the truth from her. Half the truth only, Renalt. When I wedded with her she had a child living. She whose love I had looked upon as a precious possession was all base and hollow, behind her beautiful personality. More—she had borne me three children; yet what affection she was capable of clung about the memory of her first passion. True, this spark had wearied of her, had dismissed her from his service—his service, you understand? And from the face of her child. Yet the long years of my passionate devotion weighed as nothing in the balance. I was the means ready to make of her an honest woman—that was all. An honest woman—my God!”
His teeth snapped together with a click; his dying eyes shone out, but their inspiration was demoniacal.
“In one thing only,” he went on in a low, hard voice, “the poor frail wretch was stable. That portrait—the miniature—she died refusing to reveal to me its identity. No threats, no cruelty availed. She kept her secret to the last.”
As he now continued his left hand clutched and tightened upon the bedclothes and a dark shadow seemed to grow out of his face.
“I shut her close in the room below. There, with only the voice of the wheel for company, I swore she should remain till she confessed. Each day I brought her food and water, and each day I said, ‘Give me his name,’ but she was always silent. She had been weak and ailing from caring for her baby Modred, and she faded before my eyes. Yet I was merciless. A little more, I thought, and so worthless, fragile a thing must needs yield and answer me. It was will against will, and hers conquered.”
He paused a moment, and I could see drops of sweat freckling his forehead.
“Slowly, hour by hour, the stealth and darkness of her prison wrought madness in her. Still I persisted and she refused. Once she asked to see her children—the little baby I was rearing as best I might, with infinite toil and difficulty—and I laughed and shut her in again. The next morning, going to her, I was dumfounded to hear no booming voice greeting me from the basement. The wheel had stopped. I threw back the door and she was gone. But the cupboard was sprung open and the dammed water spurted and leaped from the motionless blades. A stump of timber was lying near. She had burst the lock with it, and—I rushed and dropped the sluice; hurried back and looked down. I saw her dress tangled in the floats below, and the water heaping into a little mound as it ran over something. Then I raced to the room over above, wrenched up a board, and, fastening a rope to a beam, lowered the slack of it into the pit. It served me well in after days, as you know.
“I can hardly remember how I got her out. I know all my efforts were futile, till I thought of notching a paddle and fixing the rope in the hole. When at last I laid her down on the floor of the room I grew sick with horror. There was that in her staring eyes that made my soul die within me.
“I threw the place open to the authorities. I courted every inquiry. She had been in a delirious state, I said, since the coming of the child, and had thrown herself down in a fit of madness. Only the evidence of the burst lock I suppressed.
“We had been reserved folk, making few friends or none. Our manner of life was known only to ourselves; not a soul suspected the truth and many pitied me in my bereavement. I kept my own counsel. They brought in a verdict of suicide during temporary insanity, and she lies under an old nameless mound in the cemetery yonder.
“Then I shut my heart and my door and made out life in the blackness.
“At first I was whelmed in the horror of the catastrophe, yet my pity was not touched and I soon came to believe in the justice of her fate. ‘I never put hand on her,’ I thought. ‘’Twas God wrought the punishment.’ But soon a terrible hatred woke in my heart for the first author of my misery. One day I descended by the wheel again and nailed the miniature to its axle. ‘Wait you there!’ I cried, ‘till the question is answered. So shall he follow in her footsteps.’ Ah, I have heard talk of the fateful fascination of the wheel! Why has it never drawn him to come and claim his portrait?”
The fevered torrent of speech broke suddenly in him, and silence reigned in the room. The dying heart leaped against my chest as I held him, and my own seemed to flutter with the contact. What could I think or say? I was dazed with the passion of my emotions.
Presently he turned himself quickly and looked at me.
“Your judgment!” he cried, hoarsely. “Did I well or wickedly?”
Through my mind there swiftly passed memory of the barren neglect of our younger lives; of all the evil and misery that had been the indirect result of so cowardly a nursing of an injury.
I bowed my head, and said in a low voice: “I forgive you. That is all you must ask of me.”
Perhaps, in the light of his later gentleness, he understood me, for suddenly the tears were running down his cheeks and he cried falteringly: “Out of the abyss of death a ghost rises and faces me! All this have I done for the son I love!”
With the words he fell back from my arm and lay gasping on his pillow. And, though my father was near spent, and I knew it, I could find in my heart no word of justification of his conduct, no comfort but the assurance of my forgiveness.
Oh, it is an evil thing to arrogate to ourselves God’s prerogative of judgment; to assume that in any personal wrong we can so disassociate justice and resentment as ever to be capable of pronouncing an impartial sentence. To return a blow in kind is a natural and wholesome impulse; but deliberate cruelty, following however great a provocation, can never be anything but most base and unmanly.
And the sin had been sinned before she even knew my father! Yet, maybe, to a nature like his, that was the reverse of a palliation. To feel that he had never had her true love or duty, while lavishing his all of both on her; to feel that in a manner the veins of his own children ran with contamination—I could conceive these operating more fiercely in his mind than the discovery that some later caprice of fancy had lured her from her faith.
It was all past and over and I would not condemn or even judge him. Though I had been one victim of his quarrel with life, what was my grievance in face of the awful prospect so immediately before him? In a few hours—moments, maybe—the call would come and his soul would have to submit itself for analysis in the theater of the skies.
About 4 of the afternoon my father, who had lain for some hours in a state bordering on stupor, and whose breathing had latterly become harsh and difficult, rose suddenly in his bed and called to me in a strong voice. I was by his side in a moment and lifted him up as he signified I should do. A mortal whiteness was in his face and I saw the end was approaching.
“I have no fear,” he said, in a sort of sick ecstasy. “I can be true to myself at the last, thank God! The soul triumphs over the body.”
He swayed in my arms, clutched at me and dragged himself erect again.
“My brain—my brain! Something seems to swerve in it! Quick! Before it’s too late!”
He held on to me. At the last moment the latent determination of his character trod weakness under and proved the soul masterful. With all his functions withering in the blighting breath of the destroyer, his spirit stood out fearless and courageous, a conqueror by its mere individuality.
It had darkened early, and candles were lighted in the room and the blind pulled down. Outside the wind tore at the crazy lattice, or, finding entrance, moaned to and fro in the gusty passages. It threatened to be a night of storm and sweeping rain. And all its wild and dismal surroundings were in keeping with the ghastly figure lying against me. Yet, if there was one in that lonely chamber who shrunk and feared, it was I, not that other so verging on his judgment, with so many and such heavy responsibilities to answer for. God forgive him!
“I triumph, Renalt,” he said, feeding the effort of speech with quick, drawn gasps. “This later craven has never been I—I was strong to carry out a purpose, even if it led me to the gallows. Some white-livered devil usurped. Out with the worm at last! I triumph and abide by that I did in the righteousness of wrath. But you—you! Let me say it—quick—I was fast on the coward grip. Oh, a bitter, bitter curse on the treacherous beast who unmanned me! Only to you, Renalt, I pray and ask for pardon. I thought—all the time—I had killed the boy—the braces—I never knew. He—he, that reptile, suggested—perhaps Modred had—found and kept the cameo. I went up blindly—came down blindly—I was drunk—bestial—I could remember nothing.”
He moaned and would have clasped his hands to me but for weakness. At the last the paralysis of his limbs had departed and he could move. Disease loosened its clutch, it seemed, in the presence of the death it had invoked.
“Renalt—I remembered nothing—but I feared—and, fearing, I saw the odium rest on you and did not speak. It was I gave you to that living death—I who submitted to that fiend’s dictating, because he struck at me through the sordid passion that had mastered my better nature. Renalt——”
“Father—hear me! Am I speaking distinctly? Listen. I forgive you all.”
It seemed as if a flush passed across his face. He pressed my hand feebly and dropped his head.
“Now,” he muttered; “come the crash of doom! To all else I am ready to answer. Call the——”
Like a glass breaking, his voice snapped and immediate silence befell. He had not stirred in my arms; but now I felt the whole surface of his body moving, as it were, of itself with a light ruffling shudder.
Suddenly he seemed to shrink into himself, rather than away from me, so that he cowered unsupported on the bed. I fell back and looked at his face. His head moved softly from side to side, the eyes following something, unseen of me, hither and thither about the room. In a moment they contracted and fixed themselves horribly on one point, as if the things had come to the bed foot and were softly mounting it. In the same instant on my dull and appalled senses broke the low booming voice of the wheel circling in its black pit far below, and I knew that in the phantom sound no material force spoke, but that the heart of the dying man was transmitting its terrors to me.
Then I saw my father sink slowly back, drawing, as he did so, the sheet up and over his face, as if to shut out the sight, and all the time the convulsive fluttering of my own breath alone stirred the tense silence that reigned about us.
I must have remained in this position many minutes, fixed and motionless in a trance of fear, when the stealthy noise below seemed to cease suddenly as it had begun. At that I leaped to my feet with a strangled cry and tore the bedclothes away from the face. The eyes stared up at me as if I were the secret presence; the jaw was dropped; the whole body collapsed and sunk into the sheets. He had died without a sound—there—in a moment; had died of that that was beyond human speech; of something to which no dreadful human cry could give expression.
* * * * *
Wading near knee deep in the flooded meadows, sense and reason returned to me by slow degrees. Then a wan streak of sunrise gaped like a dead man’s wound on the stormy horizon, and a new day was breaking to wind and deluge that seemed endless.
Ah, surely I had been tried beyond mortal endurance. So I thought, not knowing what was yet to come; what tension the soul’s fetters can be put to without breaking.
The sodden day broadened and found me still wandering. Once during the morning I crept back to the house of terror, and, standing without its door, summoned the old woman, who had come of herself to attend to dead Peggy’s laying out, and told her of my father’s death and directed her to a second task.
Later in the day, I told myself, I would return; by and by when the dead should be decently composed for rest and their expression should have resumed something of its normal cast. Then I hurried forth again and sought forgetfulness in the keen rush of air and wide reality of the open country.
Walking, resting on some gate or stile; seeking a wayside tavern for food and drink—always I kept steadily away from me the slightest reflection on any of the last words spoken by my father. I could not bear that my thoughts should so much as approach them. I had greatly suffered, been greatly wronged, yet let my mind dwell insistently on the thought that these evils were of the past, never more to vex me out of reason should I look steadily forward, shutting my ears, like the prince in the fairy tale, to the spectral voices that would fain provoke me to an answer.
It was growing near that dusky period of the short day when if one lifts one’s eyes from the ground the sky seems closing in upon the earth! Worn out and footsore, I had rounded toward the city from its eastern side and was traversing the now lonely stretch of by-path that leads from the station, when I saw a woman and little child going on in front of me haltingly. As I came up they drew aside to let me pass, and I cried out, “Zyp!” and stopped in astonishment and a little fear.
She faced round upon me, breathing quickly, and put one hand to her bosom in a startled manner that was quite foreign to her.
“Renny,” she whispered, with a fading smile on her white face—pitiful heaven, how white and worn it had become! And burst into tears the next moment.
Shocked beyond measure at her appearance, her woeful reception of me, I stepped back all amazed. She mistook my action and held out an imploring arm to me. The little weird girl at her side half buried herself in her mother’s skirts and peered up at me with deep eyes set in a tangle of hair.
“Renny!” cried Zyp; “oh, you won’t throw me off? You won’t refuse to hear me?”
“Come away,” I said, hoarsely; “to some quiet road, where we can talk undisturbed. You are not too tired?”
“Too—oh, I’m wearied to death. Why not the mill? Renny, why not the mill?”
“Zyp, not now—not at present. I’ll tell you by and by. See, I’ll take the little girl on one arm and you can cling to the other.”
She pushed the child forward with a forlorn sigh. It whimpered a little as I lifted it, but I held it snug against my shoulder, and its soft breath on my cheeks seemed to melt the hard core of agony in my brain.
Soon I had them in a quiet spot and seated upon a fallen log. There, holding the child against me, I looked in the eyes of the mother and could have wept.
“Zyp, Zyp! What is it?”
A boisterous clap of wind tumbled her dark hair as I spoke. What was it? Her lustrous head was strewed with ashy threads, as if the clipping fate had trimmed some broken skein of life over it; her eyes were like fathomless pools shrunk with drought; an impenetrable sorrow was figured in her wasted face. This was the shadow of Zyp—not the sweet substance—and moving among ghosts and shadows my own life seemed stumbling toward the grave.
Clasping thin, nervous fingers, Zyp looked up in my face fearfully.
“Have you seen Jason?”
“No. Has he come, too?”
“He’s gone on before to the mill to seek you.”
“God help him! I’ve been out all day. Is it the old trouble, Zyp?”
“Oh, Renny, I despair at last! I fought it while I was strong; but now—now.”
Her head sunk and she pressed a hand to her bosom again.
“What ails you, dear? Zyp, are you ill?”
“I don’t know. Something seems to suck at my veins. I have nothing definite. The wretchedness of life is sapping my strength, I suppose.”
“Is it still so wretched? I am always here to give you what help I can.”
“Oh, I know! And we must always be cursing your quiet with our entreaties.”
“Zyp, you needn’t talk like that. My heart is open to my little sister. And is this my bonny niece?”
She was a slender mite of four or thereabouts, with a delicate thin face, oval like a blushing rose petal, and a quaint, solemn manner of movement and broken speech.
“Give me a kiss, mouse. Oh, what a prim little peck!”
A faint smile came to the mother’s lips. “You’ll learn to love your uncle, Renna.”
“Did you name her after me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I call her Renna for short. Her real name’s Zyp.”
I laughed over the queer deduction; then sighed.
“Will you love me?” I said to the little girl, but she was too shy to answer.
I stroked her shining head and poke over it to Zyp.
“Tell me all about it, dear,” said I.
“It’s nothing, but the old miserable story—pursuit and flight; and with each new movement some little means of living abandoned.”
Looking at this pale, injured woman, a fierce deep resentment flared up in my heart against the inexorable tyranny of the fiend who would not learn mercy. I had too long stood aside; too long remained neutral in an unnatural warfare, the most innocent victim of which was she whose image my soul professed to hold inviolate. Old ties bound me no longer. Her champion would I be in life and death, meeting stealth with secrecy, pursuit with ambush.
I put the child from me and rose hurriedly to my feet.
“Zyp!” I cried, “this must end! Forgive me that, holding you in my heart as I have always done, I have not been more active in your succor. Here all doubt ends. I devote myself body and soul to your help and welfare!”
Crying softly, she drew her little one to her and wound her arms about her. Now the last of her weird nature seemed broken and gone, and she was woman only, helpless and alone.
“Renny, Renny,” she sobbed, “why didn’t you sooner? Oh, Renny! Why didn’t you sooner?”
Her anguish—her implied reproach—pierced to my soul.
“Has that been in your mind, Zyp? I never thought—it was always a habit with me to yield the lead to Jason, and you were so strong and independent.”
“Not now for long—a haunted, hunted thing! But I had no right—and then, your father.”
“If I thought I had sacrificed your interests to a mistaken sense of duty to him—ah, Zyp, it would be a very bitter thing.”
“No, no! You’ve always been strong and good and generous. Don’t mind what I say. I’m only desperate with trouble. Hush, little rabbit! Mother cries with joy to have found a friend.”
“Need you have sought long? Every word you say seems a reproach.”
“No, no, no; you’ll misread me and fall away from us at the last.”
“I swear not! Tell me what has happened.”
“We thought we had escaped him—perhaps that he was dead. There was a long respite; then one night—four, five days ago—he was there. Some place where they gamble with cards—and he accused my husband of cheating. There was a terrible scene. Jason came home all smeared with blood, but it was the old terror that made us despair. Why are such things allowed on earth? It seemed all leaf and flowers and sky to me once. How long ago! He stood outside our lodgings the next morning. His dreadful face was like a devil’s. Then we knew we must go. When the bill was paid we had only a few shillings left. In our sickness we turned to you, and we set off tramping, tramping down to Winton by easy stages. Jason carried the child; my arms were too weak.”
“And he—that other?”
“He’s sure to follow us, but he won’t know we’ve walked.”
I remembered the figure on the bridge four nights ago, and was silent.
“Renalt, what can we do?”
“Jason has gone to me for money, I suppose?”
“Oh, if you could only let us have a little; we might escape abroad again and bury ourselves in some faraway spot, where he could never find us.”
“Zyp, listen to me. My father died last night.”
“Died? The old man! Oh, Renny, Renny!”
“He had been long ailing. I have been wandering all day to try to restore my shattered nerves. That is why I have not met Jason.”
“Dead! The old, poor man! And you are alone?”
“Yes, Zyp.”
She broke down and wept long and sadly.
“He was good to me,” she moaned, “and I requited his kindness ill. And now I come to worry you in your unhappiness.”
“You came to lighten it with a glimpse of the old sweet nature—you and your pretty baby here.”
“Do you think her pretty, Renny? He would have been fond of her, and he’s gone. What a world of death and misery!”
“Now the mill is no place for you at present. Old Peggy is dead, too, and gone to her judgment. In a few days the house will be quit of mourning. Then you must all three come and live with me there, and we’ll make out life in company.”
She sat clasping her little girl and staring at me, her lips parted, as she listened breathlessly.
“That would be good,” she whispered. “Do you hear, baby? Mumby and Renna will lie down at last and go to sleep.”
The child pressed her cheek to her mother’s and put her short arms about her neck with a sympathetic sigh. Her lot, I think, had been no base contrast with that of children better circumstanced. She was dressed even now as if from the fairy queen’s wardrobe, though Zyp’s poor clothes were stained and patched in a dozen places.
Then my love—oh, may I not call her so now?—looked up at me sorrowfully over the brink of her short ecstasy.
“Dear Renny,” she said, “how can it ever be as you say? Rest can never come to us while he lives.”
“I have sworn, Zyp. I am confident and strong to grapple with this tragic Furioso. If he persists after one more warning we’ll set the law on him for a wandering lunatic.”
“That I believe he is—oh!” she closed her eyes as if in an ineffable dream of peace and security.
“The question is, what are you to do in the meantime?”
“That’s soon settled. We came over Micheldever, only a few miles away. We’ll go back there and hire a single room in the village—I saw one to let that would suit us—and wait till you send for us.”
“Very well. And what do you say to taking little Zyp back by yourself and leaving Jason here under my wing?”
“If you think it best.”
“I must make certain arrangements with him. Yes, I think that will be best.” I spoke cheerfully and buoyantly, anxious to quicken and sustain her new-born hope. Uneasy forebodings, nevertheless, drove me to make the proposition. I could not free my mind of the thought that Duke yet hung secretly about the place, induced to wait and watch on that sure instinct that had never yet in the long run failed to interpret to him the movements of his victims.
Therefore I felt it safer to keep my brother for the present under friendly lock and key rather than risk a further exposing of him to the malignant observation of his enemy.
“Zyp, take this money. I wish it were more, but it will keep you going for the present.”
“No, Renny, I have a little left.”
“Don’t worry me, changeling.”
“Ah, the name and the flowers.” She rose to her feet. “Have you forgotten my asking you never to pick one?”
“Not once in my life since, Zyp. My conscience is free of that reproach.”
She looked at me with a sweet strange expression in her wet eyes.
“Good-by, dear brother,” she said, suddenly, holding out her hand to me.
“Shall I not see you off?”
“No. We shan’t have long to wait, I dare say, and Jason will be wishing for you. Kiss—Renny, kiss dad for me—this kiss”—and she stepped hurriedly forward and put her soft trembling lips to my forehead.
My blood leaped. For a moment I was near catching her madly in my arms.
“Good-by!” I cried, swerving back. “Good-by, little Zyp!”
They moved from me a few paces. Out in the road the wind caught the woman’s skirts and flung her dark hair abroad. Suddenly she turned and came back to me.
“Renny,” she said, in low, heartrending tones, “it looks so happy and golden, but the fierce air talked in my lungs as I went. Oh, promise—promise—promise!”
“Anything, Zyp, in the wide world.”
“To care for my little one—my darling, if I’m called away.”
“Before God I swear to devote my life to her.”
She looked at me a long moment, with a piercing gaze, gave a hoarse, low sob, and catching at her child’s hand hurried away with her down the road. I watched their going till their shapes grew dim in the stormy dusk; then twisted about and strode my own way homeward.
Heaven help me! It was my last vision of her who, through all the hounding of fate, had made my life “a perfumed altar-flame.”
Before I reached the mill the rain swept down once more, wrapping the gabled city in high spectral gloom. Not dust to dust, it seemed, was our lot to be in common with the sons of men, but rather the fearfuller ruin of those whose names are “writ in water.”
So fiercely drove the onset of flying deluge that scarcely might I force headway against its icy battalions. Dark was falling when at last I reached the mill, and all conflicting emotions I might have felt on approaching it were numbed by reason of the mere physical effort of pressing forward. Therefore it was that hastening down the yard, my eyes were blind to neighboring impressions, otherwise some unaccustomed shape crouching in the shelter of its blackness would have induced me to a pause.
As it was, I fell, rather than beat, against the door, and then drew myself back to gather breath. Almost immediately a step sounded coming down the passage beyond, the door was pulled inward, and I saw the figure of Jason standing in the opening.
“Ah!” I gasped, and was about to step in, when he gave a sickly screech and his hands went up, as if in terror to ward off a blow.
I felt a breath at my ear and turned quickly round—and there was the white face of Duke almost looking over my shoulder!
That night when the flood waters rose to a head was a terrible one for Winton—one ghastly in the extreme for all lost souls whose black destinies guided their footsteps to the mill.
Perhaps a terror of being trapped—to what hideous fate, who knows?—somewhere in the tortuous darkness of the building, sent my brother leaping by a mad impulse into the waste uproar of the night. Anyhow, before my confused senses could fully grasp the dread nature of the situation, he had rushed past me, plunged into and up the yard, and was racing for his life.
As he sprang by, the cripple made a frantic clutch at him, nipped the flying skirt of his coat, staggered and rolled over, actually with a fragment of torn cloth in his hand. He was up on his feet directly, however, and off in pursuit, though I in my turn vainly grasped at him as he fled by.
Then reason returned to me and I followed.
It all happened in a moment, and there were we three hotly engaged in such a tragic game of follow-my-leader as surely had never before been played in the old city. And there was no fear of comment or interference. We had the streets, the wind and rain, the night to ourselves, and, before our eyes, if these failed us, the wastes of eternity.
Racing in the tracks of the cripple, as he followed in Jason’s, I managed to keep measured pace with him, and that was all. How he made such time over the ground with his crooked limbs was matter for marvel, yet, I think, in that mad brief burst I never lessened the distance between us by a yard. It was a comparative test of the fearful, the revengeful and the apprehensive impulses, and sorely I dreaded in the whirling scurry of the chase that the second would win.
Across the yard—to the left over the short stone bridge, under whose arch the choked mill-tail tumbled and snarled—a little further and up Chis’ll street, with a sharp swerve to the right, the hunted man rushed with Duke at his heels. Then a hundred yards on, in one lightning-like moment, Jason, giving out in a breathless impulse of despair, as it seemed, threw himself against the shadowy buttress of a wall, crouching with his back to the angle of it; Duke, checking his flying footsteps some paces short of his victim, came to a sudden stop; and I, carried forward by my own impetus, almost fell against the cripple, and, staggering, seized him by the arms from behind, and so held him fiercely, my lungs pumping like piston rods. Suddenly I marveled to find my captive offering no resistance.
Seeking for the reason of this collapse, I raised my eyes and wondered: “Can this account for it?”
We stood outside Dr. Crackenthorpe’s house. Light came through a lower window, immediately opposite us, and set in the luminous square, like an ugly shadow on a wall, was the profile and upper half of the body of the doctor himself. He seemed to be bending over some task and the outline of his face was clearly defined.
Suddenly the clothed flesh of the arms I grasped seemed to flicker, as it were, with shuddering convulsion, and from the lips of the man held against me the breath came sibilant like the breath of one caught in a horror of nightmare.
Before I could think how to act the figure of the doctor rose erect, and I saw him fix his hat on his head. Evidently he was preparing to leave the house.
I felt myself drawn irresistibly to one side. Helpless as a child, I stumbled in the wake of the cripple, tripping over his heels at every step. He hardly seemed to notice the drag set upon him, but stole into a patch of deep shadow, without the dim wedge of light cast through the window, and I had to go, too, if I would keep my hold on him.
Crouching there, with what secret terror on one side and marvel on the other it is impossible to describe, we saw the dark street and the driving rain traversed by a shaft of light as the hall door was pulled open, and become blackness again with its closing. Then, descending the shallow flight of steps, his head bent to the storm, and one hand raised to his hat, the doctor came into view and the whole body of the cripple seemed to shoot rigid with sudden tension.
This fourth actor on the scene, turning away from us, walked, unconscious of Jason hidden in the shadow as he passed him, up the street, his hand still to his head, his long skirts driven in front of him by the wind, so that he looked as if his destiny were pulling him reluctant forward by all-embracing leading strings.
As he went up the slope and vanished in the darkness, a groan as if of pent-up agony issued from Duke, and immediately he drew me from the shadow and round to the foot of the steps.
A chink of light that divided the blackness above us, showed that the door had not been closed to. Probably the doctor had gone forth on some brief errand only, and would return in a moment.
Suddenly I became conscious that Duke was mounting the steps—that some strange spirit, in which his first mission of hate was absorbed, was moving him to enter the house.
“Where are you going?” I cried, struggling with him. He gave no answer; took not the least notice of me. What response could I expect from a madman like this? Staring before him—panting like one at the end of a race—he slowly ascended, dragging me with him. Then on the turn of a thought, I quitted my hold of him and he staggered forward. The next instant he had recovered himself, had pushed open the door and was in the hall.
I hurried to where Jason yet stood motionless, his face white as a patch of plaster set against the darkness of the wall.
“Keep off!” he cried, in a wavering voice.
“You fool! It’s I! Didn’t you see him go into that house? Some insane fancy had drawn him off the scent. Run back to the mill—do you hear? I won’t leave him—he shan’t follow.”
He came from his corner and clutched me with shaking hands.
“Where’s there money? It’s all useless without that, I tell you. Give it to me or I’ll kill you. I’ve as much right to it as you. My God! Why didn’t you tell me the old man was dead? It was devilish to let me go in on him like that. Tell me where to find money and I’ll take it and be off!”
“Listen to me. If he comes out again while you talk I won’t answer for the result. We’ll discuss money matters by and by. Go now—back to the mill, do you understand? And wait till I come!”
He was about to retort, but some sound, real or fancied, strangled the words in his throat. He leaped from me—glanced fearfully at the light streaming from the open door—crossed the street, his body bent double, and, keeping this posture, hurried with a rapid shuffling motion back in the direction of the mill.
Standing with one foot on the lowest step leading up to the house, I watched till he was out of sight, then turned and looked into the dimly lighted hall. What should I do? How act with the surest safety and promptitude in so immediate a crisis? I could not guess what unspeakable attraction had so strangely drawn the hunter from his trembling quarry at the supreme moment; only I saw that he had vanished and that the hall was empty of him.
A quick, odd sound coming from the interior of the house decided me. I sprung up the steps and softly entered the hall. The door leading to the doctor’s private room, where the murderous busts grinned down, stood open; and from here issued the noise, that was like the bestial sputtering growl of some tigerish thing mouthing and mangling its prey.
I stepped hastily over the threshold and stopped with a jerk of terror.
Something was there, in the dully lighted room—down on the rug before the fire. Something had rolled and raved and tore at the material beneath it—an animal’s skin, judged by the whisps of ragged hair that stuck in the creature’s claws and between his teeth that had rent them out—something—Duke, who foamed and raged as he lay sprawled on his hands and knees and snarled like a wild beast in his frenzy of insanity.
“He’s mad—mad!” I whispered to myself in an awful voice; and yet he heard me and paused in the height of his fury, and looked round and up at me standing white-lipped by the door.
Then suddenly, while I was striving, amid the wild heat of my brain, to identify some hooded memory that raised its head in darkness, the maniac sprung to his feet, gripped me by the wrist and pointed down at the huddled heap beneath him.
“Look!” he shrieked, the firelight dancing in his glittering eyes. “Look! we’ve met at last! The dog that scared and tortured the wretched sick boy—the dog, the devil! Into the fire with him to blaze and writhe and scream as a devil should!”
He plunged again, snarling; and, before I could gather sense to stop him, had seized and flung the whole mass upon the burning coals. Flames shot out and around, and the room in a moment was sick with the stench of flaring pelt. I rushed to tear the heap away; but he met and struggled with me like a fiend inspired, and helpless I saw the flames lick higher.
Straining against me, he laughed and yelled: “He wants water! He shrieks to Abraham—but not a drop—not one! Look at his red tongue, shooting out in agony! They fall before me—at last, at last! My time has come!”
His voice rose to a scream—there was a responsive shout from the door. I slewed my head round and saw the white face of the servant girl peering through the opening behind the figure of Dr. Crackenthorpe standing there in black, blank amazement.
“Help!” I cried; “he’s mad!”
With a deep oath the doctor strode forward, and Duke saw him. In an instant, with a cry of different tone—a shriek of terror—he spun me from him, sprung past the other, drove the girl screaming into the passage, and was gone.
“Stop! By all——”
The doctor’s exclamation was for me. I had staggered back, but an immediate fear drove me, with no time for explanation, to hurried pursuit.
“Out of the way!” I cried, violently; “he mustn’t escape!”
He would have barred my passage. I came against him with a shock that sent him reeling. As his hands clutched vainly in the air I rushed from the room and from the house.
With my first plunge into the street a weltering stream of fire ran across the sky, and in a moment an explosive crash shook the city like the bursting open of the gates of torment.
Amid flood and storm and the numbing slam of thunder the tragedy of the night was drawing to its close.
Momentarily I saw—a black mote in that flickering violet transparency—the figure of Duke as he ran before me bobbing up and down like the shadow of the invisible man. Drawn by a sure instinct, he was heading for the mill, and every nerve must I strain to overtake him, now goaded by fear and triumph to maniacal frenzy.
But half the distance was covered when the rain swept down in one blinding sheet, that lashed the gutters into froth a foot high and numbed the soul with its terrific uproar.
On I staggered, knowing only for my comfort that the pursued must needs labor against no less resistance than the pursuer. Inch by inch I fought my way, taking advantage of every buttress and coign of shelter that presented itself; leaping aside with thump-heart from the crash of falling tiles or dropping swing of branches, as the wind flung them right and left in its passing; now stumbling and regaining my feet, shoulder to the storm, now driven back a pace by some gust—a giant among its fellows—inch by inch I drove on till the mill yard was reached; and all the way I gained never a foot upon him I strove to run down.
Then, rushing along the yard, where comparative shelter was, I found a thrill of fear, in the midmost confusion of my thoughts, for the safety of the building itself. For the voice of the mill-tail smote the roar of the elements and seemed to silence it, and the foam of its fury sprung and danced above the high-walled channel and flung itself against the parapet of the bridge in gusts of frosty whiteness. And in the little lulls came the whistle of sliding tiles from the roof or snap of them breaking from the walls; so that it seemed before long nothing but a skeleton of ancient timbers like the ribs and spars of the phantom death-ship would stand for the blast to scream through.
Then I came panting to the mill, my soul so whelmed in the roar of all things that room scarcely was for thought of those two stark sleepers lying quiet above and deaf forevermore to the hateful tumults of life—came to the mill, and on the instant abandoned hope. For so it appeared that in rushing from the door none had thought to shut it, and the tempest had caught and, near battering it from its hinges, had dashed it, wrenched and splintered, against the wall of the passage beyond, and in such way that no immediate human power might close it. And there lay the way into the building; open to all who listed, and if Jason had run thither, as I bade him——
These thoughts were in passing. I never stayed my progress for them, but without pause leaped into the inclosed darkness, and only then I stood still.
Instantly with my plunge into that pit of blackness the hosts of the storm without seemed to break and scatter before the wind, shaken with low spasms of thunder as they fled; but under my feet the racing waters took up great chords of sound, so that the whole building trembled and vibrated with their awful music.
Overstrung to a pitch of madness, I felt my way to the foot of the stairs, and, stumbling, mounted in the darkness, and reached the first landing.
All was still as death. Perhaps it was death come in a new shape, and stealthily lying somewhere to trip up my feet in a ghastly game of clowns. I dared not go further; dared hardly to breathe.
As I stood, a rat began gnawing at the skirting. The jar of his teeth was like the turning of a rusty lock. The old superstition about falling houses passed through my mind. What if the close night about me were to be suddenly rent with the explosive splintering of great beams—with the raining thunder of roof and chimney-stack pouring downward in one vast ruin, of which I should be the mangled palpitating core?
My body burst into a cold sweat. Perhaps above all the fear in me was that death should find me with my mission unaccomplished; that I should have striven and waited in vain.
Shrinking, I would not push further to the upper rooms, but felt my way down the stairs once more. It was, at least, hardly probable that Jason would have rushed for asylum to the very death chambers above. More likely was I to find him crouching unnerved, if still alive, in some dark corner of one of the lower rooms.
As I descended into the passage I fancied I heard a step coming toward me; and the next moment a dusky shape stood up between me and the dim oblong of lesser darkness that marked where the front door gaped open. I ran forward—grasped at it blindly; and long arms were crooked about me and held me as in a vise.
“Who’s here?” cried Dr. Crackenthorpe, in a mad voice. “Who is it? Say, Renalt Trender, and let me choke the cursed life out of him!”
His passion would hardly allow him to articulate. He dragged me unresisting to the door, up the yard, and thrust his ugly face down till it almost touched mine.
“It is!” he cried, with a scream of fury. “Look—look there! See what you’ve done!”
I had marked it already—a dull glow rising over the houses and chimney pots that lay between us and Chis’ll street—a glow writhed with twisted skeins of smoke, that rolled heavily upward, coiling sluggishly in the calm that had fallen.
“Look!” he screeched; “the priceless treasures of a life—the glories I bartered my soul for—doomed, in a moment, and by your act! Oh, dog, for revenge!”
“You lie!” I cried, outshrieking his rage with a fury that half-shook him from his hold on me. “I had no part in it! You saw it and you know! Go! Attend to your own. I’ve deadlier work in hand.”
I tore myself free of him with a violence that brought him on his knees, and hurried up the yard once more and into the pitchy house. He came upon me again while I was fumbling in my pockets for a match, but he put out no hand to me a second time.
“Listen, you,” he said, and the words rose and burst from his throat like bubbles. “You have been a thorn in my foot ever since I trod this city. If yours wasn’t the act, you were the cause. I would have killed you both on the spot—you and your accomplice—if the fire, blazing out on the curtains, had left me time. Now you shall know what it is to have made me desperate—desperate, do you understand, you fulsome cur? Better take a viper to bed with you than the thought of my revenge.”
“Dr. Crackenthorpe,” I said, very coolly, “you are a ruffian and a blackguard. Which is the more desperate of us two is an open question. Anyhow, I fancy myself the stronger. There’s the door. If you remain this side of it after I have counted twelve you try conclusions with the mill-tail yonder.”
I had struck a match while I spoke and kindled an oil lamp standing on a bracket. This wrestle with an evil soul had braced my nerves like a tonic.
He slapped back against the passage wall, staring at me and gasping. His face, I saw, was grimed with smoke, and his coat scorched in places.
I began to count, looking into his eyes, with a grim smile—had got as far as nine, without awakening movement on his part, when a deathly yell rung through the house and the words died on my lips.
I felt the blood leave my face, sinking like water in snow. There was no mistaking the direction from which the sound had come. It issued from the haunted room—there from the black end of the passage—from the core of hideous night, whose silence no storm could penetrate.
Once I looked at the face before me and saw my own terror reflected in it; then I sprung for the dreadful place, sick, at whatever cost, to solve the mystery of the cry.
Groping for the heavy timbered door, I came suddenly upon a wide luminous square and almost fell into it. Then I saw, indeed, that the door itself was open and that a dim glow lighted the interior of the room. Something else I saw in the same instant—Duke, standing at the open mouth of the cupboard that inclosed the wheel—Duke, with a fearful smile on his white face, and his head bent as if he listened. And his black glowing eyes, set in pools of shadow, alone moved, fixing their gaze steadily on mine as I came into their vision.
“Stop!” he said, in a clear, low voice. He need not have bidden me. My limbs seemed paralyzed—my heart stiffening with deadly foreboding of some approaching wickedness.
A lighted lantern stood near him on the floor and threw a gigantic distorted shadow of him on the wall against the window.
“Did you hear?” he said, in a whisper that thrilled to me where I stood. “Is it haunted, this room of yours? It seems so. Listen!”
He leaned over and looked down into the pit, so that the upper half of his body was plunged in black shadow. Simultaneously an appalling scream rose from the depths and echoed away among the rafters above.
The marrow froze in my bones. I struggled vainly to rush forward, but my feet would not obey my will.
“My God!” I muttered from a crackled throat—“my God!”
He was looking at me again across the glowing space, a grin twitching up his mouth like a dog’s.
“If you move to come at me,” he said, “I leap down there and end it. He won’t thank you, though.”
“Duke,” I forced myself to mutter, at length, in uncontrollable horror. “Is it Jason? Oh! be satisfied at last and God will forgive you.”
“Why, so I am!” he cried, with a whispering laugh. “But I never sent him down there. He went of his own accord—a secret, snug hiding-place. But he should have waited longer; and who would have thought of looking so deep! It was his leaning over, as he came up, to put the lantern where it stands that drew me.”
In the sickness of my terror I saw it all. Jason, flying back to the mill, mad with fear, mad for the means of escape—Jason, who had already solved the mystery of the treasure, and had only hitherto lacked the courage necessary to a descent upon it—Jason, in his despair, had seized a light, burst into the room of silence; had found the wheel stopped and the key in the lock, as I had left them; had, summoning his last of manliness, gone down into the pit and, returning, had met his fearful enemy face to face.
I read it all and, utterly hopeless and demoralized as I was—knowing that a movement on my part would precipitate the tragedy—yet found voice to break the spell, and delivered my agony in a shriek.
“Jason!” I screamed; “Jason! Climb up! You are as strong as he! Climb up and defy him! We are two to one!”
Even as the volume of my cry seemed to strike a responsive weak echo from the bowels of the pit, I was conscious that Dr. Crackenthorpe was breathing behind me over my shoulder. And while the sound of my voice ran from beam to beam in devilish harmonics, the cripple suddenly threw up his arms with a quavering screech and leaped upon the threshold of the cupboard.
“The man!” he yelled; “the dog, and now the man! I know him at last!”
Dr. Crackenthorpe broke past me with an answering cry:
“He fired my house! Stop him! The hound! Stop him!”
As he sprang forward Duke, with a sudden swoop, seized the lantern from the floor and flung it at him; and at the same instant—as I saw by the flaming arc of light it made—clutched the rope and swung himself into the vault. The lantern crashed and was extinguished. The doctor uttered a fierce oath. Spellbound I stood, and for half a dozen seconds the weltering blackness eddied with a ghastly silence. Then I heard the doctor fling past me, running out of the room with a fearful exclamation on his lips, and, as he went, scream after scream rise from the depths, so that my soul seemed to faint with the agony of it.
Groping, staggering, my brain reeling, I stumbled toward the sound.
“God forgive me!” I whispered. “Death is better than this.”
Even with the thought a new uproar broke upon my senses—the thunderous heaving onrush of a mighty torrent of water underfoot.
In a flash I knew what had happened. The hideous creature had lifted the sluice and turned the swollen flood upon the wheel.
Then the past swept over me in a hurried panorama as my poor brain paused for rest.
Who killed Modred—How did he die?
What is the mystery of Duke Straw?
What was the sin of my mother?
Whose portrait was it that my father nailed to the axle of the wheel?
These and many other of the problems haunting my life came to me in swift succession, only to be passed in dullness and left unanswered.