For some three weeks I had lain racked and shriveled in a nervous, delirious fever. It left me at last, the ghost of my old self, to face once more the problems of a ruined life. For many days these gave me no concern, or only in a fitful, indifferent manner. I was content to sip the dew of convalescence, to slumber and to cherish my exhaustion, and the others disturbed me but little. My recovery once assured, they left me generally to myself, scarce visiting me more often than was necessary for the administering of food or medicine. Sometimes one or other of them would come and sit by my bedside awhile and exchange with me a few desultory remarks; but this was seldom, and grew, with my strength more so, for the earth was brilliant with summer outside and naturally fuller of attractions than a sick-room.
Their neglect troubled me little at first; but by and by, when the first idle ecstasy of convalescence was beginning to deepen into a sense of responsibilities that I should soon have to gather up and adjust, it woke day by day an increasing uneasiness in my soul. As yet, it is true, the immediate past I could only call up before my mental vision as a blurred picture of certain events the significance of which was suggestive only. Gradually, however, detail by detail, the whole composition of it concentrated, on the blank sheet of my mind, and stood straight before me terribly uncompromising in its sternness of outline. Had I any reason to suppose, in short, that my share in Modred’s death was known to or guessed at by my father, Jason or Zyp? On that pivot turned the whole prospect of my future; for as to myself, were the secret to remain mine alone, I yet felt that I could make out life with a tolerable degree of resignation in the certain knowledge that Modred had forgiven me before he died, for a momentary mad impulse, the provocation to which had been so bitter—the reaction from which had been so immediate and so equally impulsive.
Of my father, I may say at once, I had little fear. His manner toward me when, as he did occasionally, he came and sat by me for a half-hour or so, was marked by a gentleness and affection I had never known him to exhibit before. Pathetic as it was, I could sometimes almost have wished it replaced by a sterner mood, a more dubious attitude; for my remorse at having so bereaved him became a barbed sting in presence of his new condescension to me that dated from the afternoon of my appeal to him, and was intensified by our common loss.
Of Zyp I hardly dared to think, or dared to do more than tremulously hover round the thought that Modred’s death had absolved me from my promise to him to avoid her. Still the thought was there and perhaps I only played with self-deception when I affected to fly from it out of a morbid loyalty to him that was gone. I could not live with and not long for her with all the passion I was capable of.
Therefore it was that I dreaded any possible disclosure of a suspicion on her part—dreaded it with a fever of the mind so fierce that it must truly have retarded my recovery indefinitely had not a counter-irritant occurred to me, in certain moods, in the form of a thought that perhaps, after all, my deed might not so affright one who, on her own showing, found a charm in the contemplation of evil.
But it was Jason I feared most. Something—I can hardly give it a name—had come to me within the last few weeks that seemed to be the preface to an awakening of the moral right on my part. In the unfolding of this new faculty I was startled and distressed to observe deformities in my brother where I had before seen nothing but manly beauty and a breezy recklessness that I delighted in. Beautiful bodily, I and all must still think him, though it had worried me lately to often observe an expression in his blue eyes that was only new to my new sense. This I can but describe, with despair of the melodramatic sound of it, as poisonous. The pupils were as full and purple as berries of the deadly nightshade.
It was not, however, his eyes only that baffled me. I saw that he coveted any novelty of sensation greedily, and that sooner than forego enjoyment of it he would ruthlessly stamp down whatever obstacle to its attainment crossed his path.
Now I knew in my heart that his hitherto indifference to Zyp was an affectation born only of wounded vanity, and that such as he could never voluntarily yield so piquant a prize to homelier rivals. I recalled, with a brooding apprehension, certain words of his on that fatal morning, that seemed intended to convey, at least, a dark suspicion as to the manner of Modred’s death. Probably they were bolts shot at random with a sinister object—for I could conceive no shadow of direct evidence against me. In that connection they might mean much or little; in one other I had small doubt that they meant a good deal—this in fact, that, if I got in his way with Zyp, down I should go.
Daily probing and analyzing such darkly dismal problems as these, I slowly crawled through convalescence to recovery.
It was a sweltering morning in early July that I first crept out of doors, with Zyp for my companion. It was happiness to me to have her by my side, though as yet my weak and watery veins could prickle to no ghost of passion. I had thought that life could hold nothing for me ever again but present pain and agonized retrospects. It was not so. The very smell of the freshly watered roads woke a shadowy delight in me as we stepped over the threshold. The buoyant thunder of the river, as it leaped under the old street bridge seemed to gush over my heart with a cleansing joyousness that left it white and innocent again.
We crossed the road and wandered by a zig-zag path to the ancient close, where soft stretches and paddocks of green lawn, “immemorial elms” and scattered buildings antique and embowered wrought such an harmonious picture as filled my tired soul with peace.
Here we sat down on an empty bench. I had much to question Zyp about—much to reflect on and put into words—but my neglected speech moved as yet on rusty hinges.
“Zyp,” I said presently, in a low voice; “tell me—where is he buried?”
“In the churchyard—St. John’s, under the hill, Renny.”
Not once until now had I touched upon this subject or mentioned Modred’s name to any one of them, and a great longing was upon me to get it over and done with.
“Who went?”
“Dad and Jason and Dr. Crackenthorpe.”
“Zyp, nobody has asked me anything about it. Don’t you all want to know how—how it happened?”
“He was caught in the weeds—you said so yourself, Renny.”
Vainly I strove to get under her words; intuition was, for the time being, a sluggish quantity in me.
“Yes; but——” I began, when she took me up softly.
“Dad said it was all clear and that we were never to bother you about it at all.”
A sigh of gratitude to heaven escaped me.
“And I for one,” said Zyp, “don’t intend to.”
Something in her words jarred unaccountably on my sick nerves.
“At first,” she said, just glancing at me, “dad thought there ought to be an inquest, but Dr. Crackenthorpe was so set against it that he gave in.”
“Dr. Crackenthorpe? Why was——”
“He said that juries took such an idiotic view of a father’s responsibilities; that dad might be censured for letting the boy run wild; that in any case the family’s habits of life would be raked over and cause a scandal that might make things very uncomfortable; that it was a perfectly plain case of drowning, and that he was quite willing to give a certificate that death was due to a rupture of some blood vessel in the brain following exhaustion from exposure—or something of that sort.”
“And he did?”
“Yes, at last, after a deal of talk, and he was buried quietly and there was an end of it.”
Not quite an end, Zyp—not quite an end!
She was very gentle and patient with me all the morning, and my poor soul brimmed over with gratitude. My pulses began even to flicker a little with hope that things might be as they were before the catastrophe. After all she was a very independent changeling and, if there existed in her heart any bias in my favor, Jason might find himself quite baffled in his efforts to control her inclinations.
Presently I turned to the same overclouding subject.
“What happened the day I was taken bad, Zyp?”
“Jason found you on the stairs, talking rubbish. They carried you to bed and you hardly left off talking rubbish for weeks. Don’t you remember anything of it?”
“Nothing, after—after I saw him lying there so dreadful.”
“Ah, it was ugly, wasn’t it? Well, you must have wandered off somewhere—anywhere; and the rest of us to the parlor. There dad and the doctor fell to words. They had spent all the night over that stupid drink, sleeping and quarreling by fits and couldn’t remember much about it. They had not heard any noise upstairs, either of them; but suddenly the doctor pointed to something hanging out of dad’s pocket. ‘Why, you must have gone to the boy’s room some time,’ he said. ‘Look there!’ Dad took it out and it was Modred’s braces, all twisted up and stuffed into his pocket.”
“Modred’s braces?”
“Yes; they all knew them, for they were blue, you know—the color he liked. Dad afterward thought he must have put them there to be out of the way while he was carrying Modred upstairs, but at the time he was furious. ‘D’ye dare to imply I had a hand in my son’s death?’ he shrieked. ‘I imply nothing; I mean no offense; they are plain for every one to see,’ said the doctor, going back a little. I thought he was frightened and that dad would jump at his throat like a weasel, and I clapped my hands, waiting for the battle. But it never came, for dad turned pale and called for brandy, and there was an end of it.”
This story of the doctor’s horrible suggestion wrought only one comfort in me—it warmed my heart with a great heat of loyalty to one who, I knew, for all his faults, could never be guilty of so inhuman a wickedness.
“I should like to kill that doctor,” I said, fiercely and proudly.
“So should I,” said Zyp. “I believe he would bleed soot like a chimney.”
Zyp was my companion during the greater part of that day and the next. Her manner toward me was uniformly gentle and attentive. Sometimes during meals I would become conscious of Jason’s eyes fixed upon one or other of us in a curious stare that was watchful and introspective at once, as if he were summing up the voiceless arguments of counsels invisible, while never losing sight of the fact that we he sat in judgment on were already convicted in his mind. This, for the time being, did not much disturb me. I was lulled to a sense of false security by the gracious championship I thought I now could rely upon.
It was the evening of the second day and we three were in the living-room together; Jason reading at the window. Zyp had been so kind to me that my heart was very full indeed, and now she sat by me, one hand slipped into mine, the other supporting her little pointed chin, while her sweet, flower-stained eyes communed with other, it seemed, than affairs of earth. A strange wistful tenderness had marked her late treatment of me; a pathetic solicitude that was inexpressibly touching to one so forlorn. Suddenly she rose and I heard Jason’s book rustle in his hand.
“Now, little boy,” she said, “’tis time you were in bed.”
Then she leaned toward me and whispered:
“Is he so unhappy? What has he done for Zyp’s sake?”
In a moment she bent and kissed me, with a soft kiss, on the forehead, and shooting a Parthian glance of defiance at Jason, who never spoke or moved, ran from the room.
All my soul thrilled with a delicious joy. Zyp, who had refused to kiss him, had kissed me. The ecstasy of her lips’ touch blotted out all significance her words might carry.
Half-stunned with triumphant happiness, I climbed the stairs and, getting into bed, fell into a luminous dream of thought in which for the moment was no place for apprehension.
I did not even hear Jason enter or shut the door, and it was only when he shook me roughly by the shoulder that I became conscious of his presence in the room.
He was standing over me, and the windows of his soul were down, and through them wickedness grinned like a skull.
“I’ve had enough of this,” he said in a terrible low voice. “D’you want to drive me to telling that I know it was you who killed Modred?”
So the blow had fallen!
Yet a single despairing effort I made to beat off or at least postpone the inevitable.
I sat up in bed and answered my brother back with, I could feel, ashen and quivering lips.
“What do you mean?” I said. “How dare you say such a thing?”
“I dare anything,” he said, “where I have a particular object in view.” He never took his eyes off me, and the cold devil in them froze my blood that had only now run so hotly.
“For yourself,” he went on, “I don’t care much whether you hang or live. You can come to terms with your own conscience I dare say, and a fat brother more or less may be a pure question of fit survival. That’s as it may be—but the girl here is another matter.”
“I didn’t kill him,” I could only say, dully.
Still keeping his eyes on me he sought for and drew from his jacket pocket a twist of dry and shrunken water weed. A horrible shudder seized me as I looked upon it.
“You didn’t think to see that again?” he said. “Do you recognize it? Of course you do. It was the rope you twisted round his foot, and that I found round his foot still, after dad had carried him upstairs, bundled round with those sacks, and I was left alone in the room with him a minute.”
My heart died within me. I dropped my sick, strained eyes and could only listen in agonized silence. And he went on quite pitilessly.
“You shouldn’t have left such evidence, you know—least of all for me to see. I had not forgotten the murder in your eyes when I spoke to you that morning and the evening before.”
He struck the weed lightly with his right hand.
“This stuff,” he said, “I know it, of course—grows up straight enough of itself. It wanted something human—or inhuman—to twist it round a leg in that fashion.”
I broke out with a choking cry.
“I did it,” I said; “but it wasn’t murder—oh, Jason, it wasn’t murder, as you mean it.”
He gave a little cold laugh.
“No doubt we have different standards of morality,” he said. “We won’t split hairs. Say it was murder as a judge and jury would view it.”
“It wasn’t! Will you believe me if I tell you the truth?”
“That depends upon the form it takes.”
“I’ll tell you. It is the truth—before God, it is the truth! I won’t favor myself. I had been mad with him, I own, but had nearly got over it. I was out all day on the hills and thought I should like a bathe on my way home. I went through the ‘run’ and saw he was there. At first I thought I would leave him to himself, but just as I was going he saw me and a grin came over his face and—Jason, you know that if I had gone away then, he would have thought me afraid to meet him.”
“You can leave me, Renalt, out of the question, if you please.”
“I meant no harm—indeed I didn’t—but when I got there he taunted and mocked at me. I didn’t know what I was doing; and when he jumped for the water I followed him and twisted that round. Then in a single moment I saw what I had done—and was mad to unfasten it. It would not come away at first, and when at last I got him free and to the shore he was insensible. If you could only know what I suffered then, you would pity me, Jason—you would; you could not help it.”
I stole a despairing look at his face and there was no atom of softness in it.
“He came to on the way home and I was wild with joy, and at night, Jason, when you were in bed and asleep, I crept into his room and begged for his forgiveness and he forgave me.”
“Without any condition? That wasn’t like Modred. What did he ask for in return?”
I was silent.
“Come,” he persisted, “what did he want? You may as well tell me all. You don’t fancy that I believe he forgave you without getting something substantial in exchange?”
“I was to give up all claim to Zyp,” I said in a low, suffering voice.
Jason laughed aloud.
“Oh, Modred,” he cried, “you were a pretty bantling, upon my word! Who would have thought the dear fatty had such cunning in him?”
His callous merriment struck me with a dumb horror as of sacrilege. But he subdued it directly and returned to me and my misery in the same repressed tone as before.
“Well,” he said, “I have heard it all, I suppose. It makes little difference. You know, of course, you are morally responsible for his death, just the same as if you had stuck a knife into his heart.”
I could only hide my face in the bedclothes, writhed all through with agony. There was a little spell of silence; then my brother bespoke my attention with a gentle push.
“Renny, do you want all this known to the others?”
I raised my head in a sudden gust of passion.
“Do what you like!” I cried. “I know you now, and you can’t make it much worse!”
“Oh, yes,” he said, coolly; “I can make it a good deal worse. Nobody but I knows at present, don’t you see?”
I looked at him with a sudden gleam of hope.
“Don’t you intend to tell, Jason?”
He laughed again, lightly.
“That depends. I must borrow my cue from Modred and make conditions.”
I had no need to ask what they were. In whatever direction I looked now, I saw nothing but a blank and deadly waste.
“I want the girl—you understand? I need not go into particulars. She interests me and that’s enough.”
“Yes,” I said, quietly.
“There must be no more of that sentimental foolery between you and her. I bore it as long as you were ill; but, now you’re strong again, it must stop. If it doesn’t, you know what’ll happen.”
With that he turned abruptly on his heel and began to undress. I listened for the deep breathing that announced him to be asleep with a strained fever of impatience. I felt that I could not think cleanly or collectedly with that monstrous consciousness of his awake in the room.
Perhaps, in all my wretchedness, the full discovery of his baseness of soul was as bitter a wound as any I had received. I had so looked up to him as a superior being, so sunned myself in the pride of relationship to him; so lovingly submitted to his boyish patronage and condescension. The grief of my discovery was very real and terrible and would in itself, I think, have gone far to blight my existence had no fearfuller blast descended to wither it.
Well, it was all one now. Whatever immunity from disaster I was to enjoy henceforth must be on sufferance only.
Had I been older and sinfuller I might have grasped in my despair at the coward’s resource of self-destruction; as it was, I thought of flight. By and by, perhaps, when vigor should return to me, and with it resolution, I should be able to face firmly the problem of my future and take my own destinies in hand.
Little sleep came to me that night, and that only of a haunted kind. I felt haggard and old as I struggled into my clothes the next morning, and all unfit to cope with the gigantic possibilities of the day. Jason had gone early to the fatal pool for a bathe.
At breakfast, in the beginning, Zyp’s manner to me was prettily sympathetic and a little shy. It was the first of my great misery that I must repel her on the threshold of our better understanding, and see her fall away from me for lack of the least expression of that passionate devotion and gratitude that filled my heart to bursting. I could see at once that she was startled—hurt, perhaps, and that she shrunk from me immediately. Jason talked airily to my father all through the meal, but I knew his senses to be as keenly on the alert as if he had sat in silence, with his eyes fixed upon my face.
I choked over my bread and bacon; I could not swallow more than a mouthful of the coffee in my cup, and Zyp sat back in her chair, never addressing me after that first rebuff, but pondering on me angrily with her eyes full of a sort of wonder.
She stopped me peremptorily as, breakfast over, I was hastening out with all the speed I could muster, and asked me if I didn’t want her company that morning.
“No,” I answered; “I am well enough to get about by myself now.”
“Very well,” she said. “Then you must do without me altogether for the future.”
She turned on her heel and I could only look after her in dumb agony. Then I crept down into the yard and confided my grief to the old cart wheels.
Presently, raising my head, I saw her standing before me, her hands under her apron, her face grave with an expression, half of concern, half of defiance.
“Now, if you please,” she said, “I want to know the meaning of this?”
“Of what?” I asked, with wretched evasiveness.
“You know—your manner toward me this morning.”
“I have done nothing,” I muttered.
“You have insulted me, sir. Is it because I kissed you last night?”
“Oh, Zyp!” I cried aloud in great pain. “You know it isn’t—you know it isn’t!”
I couldn’t help this one cry. It was forced from me.
“Then what’s the reason?”
“I can’t give it—I have none. I want to be alone, that’s all.”
She stood looking at me a moment in silence, and the line of her mouth hardened.
“Very well,” she said, at last. “Then, understand, I’ve done with you. I thought at first it was a mistake or that you were ill again. I’ve been kind to you; you can’t say I haven’t given you a chance. And I pitied you because you were alone and unhappy. Jason, I will tell you, hinted an evil thing of you to me, but even if it was true, which I didn’t believe, I forgave you, thinking, perhaps, it was done for my sake. Well, if it was, I tell you now it was useless, for you will be nothing to me ever again.”
And, with these cruel words, she left me. The proud child of the woods could brook no insult to her condescension, and from my comrade she had become my enemy.
I suppose I should have been relieved that the inevitable rupture had occurred so swiftly and effectually. Judge you, you poor outcasts who, sanctifying a love in your tumultuous breasts, have had to step aside and yield to another the fruit you so coveted.
Once pledged to antagonism, Zyp, it will be no matter for wonder, adopted anything but half-measures. Had it only been her vanity that was hurt she would have made me pay dearly for the blow. As it was, her ingenuity in devising plans for my torture and discomfiture verged upon the very bounds of reason.
At first she contented herself with mere verbal pleasantries and disdainful snubbings. As, however, the days went on and my old strength and health obstinately returned to me, despite the irony of the shattered soul within, her animosity grew to be an active agent so persistent in its methods that I verily thought my brain would give way under the load.
I cannot, indeed, recall a tithe of the Pucklike devices she resorted to for my moral undoing, and which, after all, I might have endured to the end had it not been for one threading torment that accompanied all her whimsies like a strain of diabolical music. This was an ostentatious show of affection for Jason, which, I truly believe, from being more or less put on in exaggerated style for my edification, became at length such a habit with her as may be considered, in certain dispositions, one form of love.
The two now were seldom apart. Once, conscious of my presence, she kissed Jason on the lips, because he had brought her a little flowering root of some plant she desired. I saw his face fire up darkly and he looked across at me with a triumph that made me almost hate him.
And the worst of it was that I knew that my punishment was not more than commensurate with the offense; that my sin had been grievous and its retribution not out of proportion. How could full atonement and Zyp have been mine together?
Still, capable of acknowledging the fitness of things in my sadder hours of loneliness, my nature, once restored to strength, could not but strive occasionally to throw off the incubus that it felt it could not bear much longer without breaking down for good and all. I had done wrong on the spur of a single wicked impulse, but I was no fiend to have earned such bitter reprisal. By slow degrees rebellion woke in my heart against the persistent cruelty of my two torturers. Had I fled at this juncture, the wild scene that took place might have been averted, and the exile, which became mine nevertheless, have borne, perhaps, less evil fruit than in the result it did.
One November morning—my suffering had endured all these months—my father and Dr. Crackenthorpe stood before the sitting-room fire, talking, while I sat with a book at the table, vainly trying to concentrate my attention on the printed lines.
Since my recovery I had seen the doctor frequently, but he had taken little apparent notice of me. Now, I had racked my puzzled mind many a time for recollection of the conversation I had been witness of on the night preceding my seizure, but still the details of it had eluded me, though its gist remained in a certain impression of uneasiness that troubled me when I thought of it. Suddenly, on this morning, a few words of the doctor’s brought the whole matter vividly before me again.
“By the bye, Trender,” he said, drawlingly, and sat down and began to poke the fire—“by the bye, have you ever found that thing you accused me of losing for you on a certain night—you know when?”
“No,” said my father, curtly.
“Was it of any value, now?”
“Maybe—maybe not,” said my father.
“That don’t seem much of answer. Perhaps, now, it came from the same place those others did.”
“That’s nothing to you, Dr. Crackenthorpe.”
“Well, you say it’s lost, anyhow. Supposing I found it, would you agree to my keeping it? Treasure-trove, you know”—and he looked up with a grin, balancing the poker perpendicularly in his hand. “Treasure-trove, my friend,” he repeated, with emphasis, and gave the other a keen look.
Something in the tone of his speech woke light in my brain, and I remembered at a flash. I stole an anxious glance at my father. His face was pale and set with anger, but there was an expression in his eyes that looked like fear.
“You don’t mean to tell me you have found it?” he said in a forced voice.
“Oh, by no means,” answered the doctor. “We haven’t all your good luck. Only you are so full of the unexpected in producing valuables from secret places, like a conjurer, that I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind my keeping this particular one if I should chance to pick it up.”
“Keep it, certainly, if you can find it,” said my father, I could have thought almost with a faint groan.
“Thanks for the permission, my friend; I’ll make a point of keeping my eyes open.”
When did he not? They were pretty observant now on Zyp and Jason, who, as he spoke, walked into the room.
“Hullo!” said my brother. “Good-morning to you, doctor, and a sixpence to toss for your next threppenny fee.”
“Hold your tongue,” cried my father, angrily.
“I would give a guinea to get half for attending on your inquest,” said the doctor, sourly. “Keep your wit for your wench, my good lad, and see then that she don’t go begging.”
“I could give you better,” muttered Jason, cowed by my father’s presence, “but it shall keep and mature.” Then he turned boisterously on me.
“Why don’t you go out, Renny, instead of moping at home all day?”
His manner was aggressive, his tone calculated to exasperate.
Moved by discretion I rose from my chair and made for the door; but he barred my way.
“Can’t you answer me?” he said, with an ugly scowl.
“No—I don’t want to. Let me pass.”
My father had turned his back upon us and was staring gloomily down at the fire.
I heard Zyp give a little scornful laugh and she breathed the word “coward” at me.
I stopped as if I had struck against a wall. All my blood surged back on my heart and seemed to leave my veins filled with a tingling ichor in its place.
“Perhaps I have been,” I said, in a low voice, “but here’s an end of it.”
Jason tittered.
“We’re mighty stiltish this morning,” he said, with a sneer. “What a pity it’s November, so that we can’t have a plunge for the sake of coolness—except that they say the pool’s haunted now.”
I looked at him with blazing eyes, then made another effort to get past him, but he repelled me violently.
“You don’t know your place,” he said, and gave an insolent laugh. “Stand back till I choose to let you go.”
I heard the doctor snigger and Zyp gave a second little cluck. My father was still absorbed—lost in his own dark reflections.
The loaded reel of endurance was spinning to its end.
“You might have given all your morning to one of your Susans yonder,” said my brother, mockingly. “Now she’s gone, I expect, with her apron to her eyes. She’ll enjoy her pease pudding none the less, I dare say, and perhaps look out for a more accommodating clown. It won’t be the first time you’ve had to take second place.”
I struck him full between the eyes and he went down like a polled ox. All the pent-up agony of months was in my blow. As I stepped back in the recoil, madly straining even then to beat under the more furious devil that yelled in me for release, I was conscious of a hurried breath at my ear—a swift whisper: “Kill him! Stamp on his mouth! Don’t let him get up again!” and knew that it was Zyp who spoke.
I put her back fiercely. Jason had sprung to his feet—half-blinded, half-stunned. His face was inhuman with passion and was working like a madman’s. But before he could gather himself for a rush, my father had him in his powerful arms. It all happened in a moment.
“What’s all this?” roared my father. “Knock under, you whelp, or I’ll strangle you in your collar!”
“Let me go!” cried my brother. “Look at him—look what he did!”
He was choking and struggling to that degree that he could hardly articulate. I think foam was on his lips, and in his eyes the ravenous thirst for blood.
“He struck me!” he panted—“do you hear? Let me go—let me kill him as he killed Modred!”
There was a moment’s silence. Dr. Crackenthorpe, who had sat passively back in his chair during the fray, with his lips set in an acrid smile, made as if to rise, leaning forward with quick attention. Then my father shook Jason till he reeled and clutched at him.
“Have a mind what you say, you mad cur!” he cried in a terrible voice.
“It’s true! Let me go! He confessed it all to me—to me, I say!”
I stood up among them alone, stricken, and I was not afraid. I was a better man than my accuser; a better brother, despite my sin. And his dagger, plunged in to destroy, had only released the long-accumulating agony of my poor inflamed and swollen heart.
“Father,” I said, “let him alone. It is true, what he says.”
He flung Jason from him with violence.
“Move a step,” he thundered, daring him, “and I’ll send you after Modred!”
He came to me and took me gently by the shoulder.
“Renalt, my lad,” he said, “I am waiting to hear.”
I did not falter, or condone my offense, or make any appeal to them whatsoever. The kind touch on my arm moved me so that I could have broken into tears. But my task was before me and I could afford no atom of self-indulgence, did I wish to get through it bravely.
As I had told my story to Jason, I told it now; and when I had finished I waited, in a dead silence, the verdict. I could hear my brother breathing thickly—expectantly. His fury had passed in the triumph of his own abasement.
Suddenly my father put the hand he had held on my shoulder before his face and a great sob coming from him broke down the stone walls of my pride.
“Dad—dad!” I cried in agony.
He recovered himself in a moment and moved away; then faced round and addressed me, but his eyes looked down and would not meet mine.
“Before God,” he said, “I think you are forgiven for a single impulse we all might suffer and not all of us recoil from the instant after, but I think that this can be no place for you any longer.”
Then he turned upon Dr. Crackenthorpe.
“You!” he cried; “you, man, who have heard it all, thanks to that dirty reptile yonder! Do you intend to peach?”
The doctor pinched his wiry chin between finger and thumb, with his cheeks lifted in a contemplative fashion.
“The boy,” he said, “is safe from any one’s malice. No jury would convict on such evidence. Still, I agree with you, it’s best for him to go.”
“You hear, Renalt?” said my father. “I’ll not drive you in any way, or deny you harbor here if you think you can face it out. You shall judge for yourself.”
“I have judged,” I answered; “I will go.”
I walked past them all, with head erect, and up to my room, where I sat down for a brief space to collect my thoughts and face the future. Hardly had I got hold of the first end of the tangle when there came a knock at the door. I opened it and Zyp was outside.
“You fool!” she whispered; “you should have done as I told you. It’s too late now. Here, take this. Dad told me to give it you”—and she thrust a canvas bag of money into my hand, looking up at me with her unfathomable eyes.
As I took it, suddenly she flung her arms about my neck and kissed me passionately, once, twice, thrice, on the lips, and so pushed me from her and was gone. And as I stood there came to my ears a faint wail from above, and I said to myself doggedly: “It is a gull flying over the house.”
Taking nothing with me but cap, stick and the simple suit of clothes I had on, I descended the stairs with a firm tread and passed the open door of the sitting-room. There was silence there, and in silence I walked by it without a glance in its direction. It held but bitter memories for me now and was scarce less haunted in its way than the other. And so to me would it always be—haunted by the beautiful wild memory of a changeling, whose coming had wrought the great evil of my life, to whom I, going, attributed no blame, but loved her then as I had loved her from the first.
The booming of the wheel shook, like a voice of mockery, at me as I passed the room of silence. Its paddles, I thought, seemed reeling with wicked merriment, and its creaking thunder to spin monotonously the burden of one chant.
“I let you go, but not to escape—I let you go, but not to escape.” The fancy haunted my mind for weeks to come.
In the darkness of the passage a hand seized mine and wrung it fiercely.
“You don’t mean to let the grass grow on your resolve, then, Renalt?” said my father’s voice, rough and subdued.
“No, dad; I can do no good by delaying.”
“I’m sore to let you go, my boy. But it’s for the best—it’s for the best. Don’t think hardly of me; and be a fine lad and strike out a path for yourself.”
“God bless you, dad,” I said, and so left him.
As I stepped into the frosty air the cathedral bells rung out like iron on an anvil. The city roofs and towers sparkled with white; the sun looked through a shining mist, giving earnest of gracious hours to come.
It was a happy omen.
I turned my back on the old decaying past and set my face toward London.
In the year 1860, of which I now write, so much of prejudice against railways still existed among many people of a pious or superstitious turn of mind, that I can quote much immediate precedent in support of my resolve to walk to London rather than further tempt a Providence I had already put to so severe a strain. It must be borne in mind of course that we Trenders were little more than barbarians of an unusual order, who had been nourished on a scorn of progress and redeemed only by a natural leaning toward picturesqueness of a pagan kind. Moreover, the sense of mystery, which was an integral part of our daily experience, had ingrained in us all a general antagonism toward unconstructed agencies. Lastly, not one of us had ever as yet been in a train.
Still, it was with no feeling of inability to carve a road for myself through the barriers to existence that I drew, on the evening of my third day’s tramp, toward the overlapping pall that was the roof of the “City of Dreadful Night.”
I had slept, on my road, respectively at Farnham and Guildford, where, in either case, cheap accommodation was easily procurable, and foresaw a difficulty, only greater in proportion, in finding reasonable lodging in London during the time I was seeking work. Indifferently I pictured this city to myself as only an elongated High street, with ramifications more numerous and extended than those of the old burgh that was my native town. I was startled, overwhelmed, dazed with the black, aimless scurrying of those interwoven strings of human ants, that ran by their thronging brick heaps, eager in search for what they never seemed to find, or shot and vanished into tunnels and alleys of darkness, or were attracted to and scorched up by, apparently, the broad sheets of flame that were the shop windows of their Vanity Fair. Moving amid the swarm from vision to vision—always an inconsiderable atom there without meaning or individuality—always stunned and stupefied by the threatening masses of masonry that hemmed me in, and accompanied me, and broke upon me in new dark forms through every vista and gap that the rank growth of ages had failed to block—the inevitable sense grew upon me, as it grows upon all who pace its interminable streets friendless, of walking in a world to which I was by heavenly birthright an alien.
Near midnight, I turned into a gaunt and lonely square, where comparative quiet reigned.
I had entered London by way of Waterloo bridge, as the wintry dusk was falling over house and river, and all these hours since had I been pacing its crashing thoroughfares, alive only to wonder and the cruel sense of personal insignificance. As to a lodging and bed for my weary limbs—sooner had Childe Roland dared the dark tower than I the burrows, that night, of the unknown pandemonium around me. I had slept in the open of the fields before now. Here, though winter, it hardly seemed that there was an out-of-doors, but that the buildings were only so many sleeping closets in a dark hall.
All round the square inside was a great inclosure encompassed by a frouzy hoarding of wood, and set in the middle of the inclosure was some dim object that looked like a ruined statue. Such by day, indeed, I found it to be, and of no less a person than his late majesty, King George the First. When my waking eyes first lighted on him, I saw him to be half-sunk into his horse, as if seeking to shield himself therein from the shafts of his persecutors, who, nothing discomposed, had daubed what remained of the crippled charger himself with blotches of red and white paint.
I walked once or twice round the square, seeking vainly, at first, to still the tumult of my brain. The oppressive night of locked-up London, laden like a thunder cloud with store of slumbering passions, was lowering now and settling down like a fog. The theaters were closed; the streets echoing to the last foot-falls. Seeing a hole in the hoarding, I squeezed through it and withdrew into the rank grass and weeds that choked the interior of the inclosure. I had bought and brought some food with me, and this I fell to munching as I sat on a hummock of rubbish, and was presently much comforted thereby, so that nothing but sleep seemed desirable to me in all the world. Therefore I lay down where I was and buttoning my coat about me, was, despite the frosty air, soon lost in delicious forgetfulness. At first my slumber was broken by reason of the fitful rumble of wheels, or pierced by voices and dim cries that yet resounded phantomly here and there, as if I lay in some stricken city, where only the dying yet lived and wailed, but gradually these all passed from me.
I awoke with the gray of dawn on my face and sat up. My limbs were cramped and stiff with the cold, and a light rime lay upon my clothes. Otherwise no bitterer result had followed my rather untoward experiment.
Then I looked about me and saw for the first time that I was not alone. Certain haggard and unclean creatures were my bed-fellows in that desolate oasis. They lay huddled here and there, like mere scarecrows blown over by the wind and lying where they fell. There were women among them, and more than one pinched and tattered urchin, with drawn, white face resolved by sleep into nothing but pathos and starvation.
There they lay at intervals, as if on a battlefield where the crows had been busy, and each one seemed to lie flattened into the earth as dead bodies lie.
I could not but be thankful that I had stumbled over no one of them when I had entered—an accident which would very possibly have lost me my little store of money, if it had, indeed, led to nothing worse. As it was, I prepared for a hasty exit, and was about to rise, when I became conscious that my movements were under observation by one who lay not twenty feet from me.
He was so hidden by the rank grass that at first I could make out nothing but a long, large-boned face peering at me above the stems through eyes as black and glinting as boot buttons. A thatch of dark hair fell about his ears and forehead, and his eyebrows, also black, were sleek and pointed like ermine tips.
The face was so full and fine that I was startled when its owner rose, which he did on the instant, to see that he was a thick-set and stunted cripple. He shambled toward me with a winning smile on his lips, and before I could summon resolution to retreat, had come and sat down beside me.
“We seem the cocks of this company,” he said, in a deep musical voice. “Among the blind the one-eyed—eh?”
He was warmly and decently clad, and I could only wonder at his choice of bedroom. He read me in a look.
“I’ve a craving for experiences,” he said. “These aren’t my usual quarters.”
“No,” I said; “I suppose not.”
“Nor yours?” he went on, with a keen glance at me.
To give my confidence to a stranger was an unwise proceeding, but I was guileless as to the craft of great cities, and in this case my innocence was in a manner my good fortune.
I told him that I was only yesterday from the country, after a three days’ tramp, and how I was benighted.
“Ah,” he said. “Up after work, I suppose?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Well,” said he, “let’s understand your capacities. Guess my age first.”
“Forty,” said I, at a venture, for indeed he might have been that or anything else.
“I’m 21,” he said. “Don’t I look it? We mature early in London here. What do you think’s my business?”
“Oh, you’re a gentleman, aren’t you?” I asked, with some stir of shyness.
“I’m a printer’s hand. That means something very different to you, don’t it? Maybe you’ll develop in time. Where are you from?”
I told him.
“Ah,” he said. “You’ve a proverb down your way: ‘Manners makeyth man.’ So they may, as they construe it—a fork for the fingers and a pretty trick of speech; but it’s the manners of the soul make the gentleman. Do you believe in after-life?”
“Of course I do. Where do the ghosts come from otherwise?”
He laughed pleasantly, rubbing his chin in a perplexed manner, and then I noticed that his fingers were stunted like a mechanic’s and stained with printer’s ink.
“Old Ripley would fancy you,” he said.
“Who’s he?”
“My governor—printer, binder and pamphleteer, an opponent of all governments but his own. He’s an anarchist, who’d like to transfer himself and his personal belongings to some desert satellite, after laying a train to blow up the earth with nitro-glycerin and then he’d want to overturn the heavenly system.”
“He doesn’t sound hopeful.”
“No, he isn’t, but he’s fairly original for a fanatic. I wonder if he’d give you work?”
“Oh, thanks!” I exclaimed.
“Nonsense; you needn’t mind him. He’s only gas. Unmixed with his native air he wouldn’t be explosive, you know. I can imagine him a very unprogressive angel. It’s notoriety he wants. Nothing satisfies his sort in the end like a scaffold outside of Newgate with 40,000 eyes looking on and 12 guineas paid for a window in the ‘Magpie and Stump.’”
“Are you——” I began, when he took me up with:
“His kind? Not a bit of it. I’m an idealist—a dreamer asking the way to Utopia. I look about for the finger-posts in places like this. One must learn and suffer to dream properly.”
“You can do that and yet have ugly enough dreams,” I said, with subdued emphasis.
“That oughtn’t to be so,” he said, looking curiously at me. “Nightmare comes from self-indulgence. Cosset your grievances and they’ll control you. You must be an ascetic in the art of sensation.”
“And starve on a pillar like that old saint Mr. Tennyson wrote of,” I answered.
“Go and hang yourself,” he cried, pushing at me with a laugh. “Hullo! Who’s here?”
A couple of the scarecrows, evil-looking men both, had risen, and stood over us to one side, listening.
“Toff kenners,” I heard one of them mutter, “and good for jink, by the looks.”
“Tap the cady,” the other murmured, and both creatures shuffled round to the front of us.
“Good for a midjick, matey?” asked the more ruffianly looking of the two in a menacing tone.
I started, bewildered by their jargon. My companion looked up at them smiling and drumming out a tune on his knee.
“Stow it,” said the smaller man to the other; “I’ve tried the griffin and it don’t take.” Then he bent his body and whined in a fulsome voice: “Overtaken with a drop, good gentlemen? And won’t you pay a trifle for your lodgings, now?”
I was about to rise, but a gesture on the part of both fellows showed me that they intended to keep us at our disadvantage. A blowzed and noisome woman was advancing to join the group.
“Be alert,” whispered my companion. “We must get out of this.”
The words were for me, but the men gathered their import and assumed a threatening manner. No doubt, seeing but a boy and a cripple, they valued us beneath our muscular worth.
“Come,” said the big man, “we don’t stand on ceremony; we want the price of a drink.”
He advanced upon us, as he spoke, with an ugly look and in a moment my companion had seized him by the ankles and whirled him over against his friend, so that the two crashed down together. The woman set up a screech, as we jumped to our feet, and we saw wild heads start up here and there like snakes from the grass. But before any one could follow us we had gained the rent in the hoarding and slipped through. Glancing back, after I had made my exit, I saw one of the men strike the woman full in the face and fell her to the ground. It was his gentle corrective to her for not having stopped us, and the sight made my blood so boil that I was on the point of tearing back, had not my companion seized and fairly carried me off. As in many cripples, his strength of arm was prodigious.
“Now,” he said, when he had quieted me, “we’ll go home to breakfast.”
“Where?” said I.
“Home, my friend. Oh, I have one, you know, for all my sleeping out there. That was a test for experience; my first one of the kind, but valuable in its way.”
“But——” I began.
“Yes, you will,” he cried. “You’ll be my guest. I’ve taken a bit of a fancy to you. What’s your name?”
When I had told him, “Duke Straw’s mine,” he said; “though I’m not of strawberry-leaf descent. But it’s a good name for a dreamer, isn’t it? Have you ever read ‘Feathertop,’ by Hawthorne?”
“No,” I said.
“Never mind, then. When you do, you’ll recognize my portrait—a poor creature of straw that moves by smoke.”
“What smoke?” I asked, bewildered.
“Perhaps you’ll find out some day—if Ripley takes a fancy to you.”
“You don’t want me to go to him?”
“Certainly I do. I’m going to take you with me when I tramp to work at 9 o’clock.”
He was so cool and masterful that I could only laugh and walk on with him.
It was broad day when we emerged from the inclosure, and sound was awakening along the wintry streets. London stood before me rosy and refreshed, so that she looked no longer formidably unapproachable as she had in her garb of black and many jewels. I might have entered her yesterday with the proverbial half-crown, so easily was my lot to fall in accommodating places.
Duke Straw, whom I was henceforth to call my friend, conducted me by a township of intricate streets to the shop of a law stationer, in a petty way of business, which stood close by Clare market and abutted on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Here he had a little bedroom, furnished with a cheap, oil-cooking stove, whereon he heated his coffee and grilled his bacon.
Simon Cringle, the proprietor of the shop, was taking his shutters down as we walked up. He was a little, spare man, with a vanity of insignificance. His iron-gray hair fell in short, well-greased ringlets and his thin beard in a couple more, that hung loose like dangled wood shavings; his coiled mustaches reminded one of watch springs; his very eyebrows, like bees’ legs, were humped in the middle and twisted up into fine claws at the tips. Duke, in his search for lodging and experience, had no sooner seen this curiosity than he closed with him.
He gave my companion a grandiloquent “Good-morning.”
“Up with the lark, Mr. Straw,” said he, “and I hope, sir, with success in the matter of getting the first worm?” Here he looked hard at me.
“He found me too much of a mouthful,” said I; “so he brought me home for breakfast.”
Duke laughed.
“Come and be grilled,” said he. “Anyhow they roast malt-worms in a place spoken of by Falstaff.”
We had a good, merry meal. I should not have thought it possible my heart could have lightened so. But there was a fascinating individuality about my companion that, I am afraid, I have but poorly suggested. He gave me glimmerings of life in a higher plane than that which had been habitual to me. No doubt his code of morals was eccentric and here and there faulty. His manner of looking at things was, however, so healthy, his breezy philosophy so infectious, that I could not help but catch some of his complaint—which was, like that of the nightingale, musical.
Perhaps, had I met him by chance six months ago, my undeveloped soul would have resented his easy familiarity with a cubbish snarl or two. Now my receptives were awakened; my armor of self-sufficiency eaten to rags with rust; my heart plaintive for communion with some larger influence that would recognize and not abhor.
At 8:45 he haled me off to the office, which stood a brief distance away, in a thoroughfare called Great Queen street. Here he left me awhile, bidding me walk up and down and observe life until his chief should arrive, which he was due to do at the half-hour.
I thought it a dull street after some I had seen, but there were many old book and curiosity shops in it that aroused my interest. While I was looking into one of them I heard Duke call.
“Here,” he said, when I reached him; “answer out and I think Ripley will give you work. I’m rather a favorite with him—that’s the truth.”
He led me into a low-browed room, with a counter. Great bales of print and paper went up to the ceiling at the back, and the floor rumbled with the clank of subterranean machinery. One or two clerks were about and wedged into a corner of the room was a sort of glazed and wooden crate of comfortable proportions, which was, in fact, the chapel of ease of the minister of the place.
Into this den Duke conducted me with ceremony, and, retreating himself, left me almost tumbling over a bald-headed man, with a matted black beard, on which a protruding red upper lip lay like a splash of blood, who sat at a desk writing.
“Shut the door,” he said, without looking up.
“It is shut, sir.”
He trailed a glance at me, as if in scrutiny, but I soon saw he could only have been balancing some phrase, for he dived again and went on writing.
Presently he said, very politely, indeed, and still intent on his paper: “Are you a cadet of the noble family of Kinsale, sir?”
“No, sir,” I answered, in surprise.
“You haven’t the right to remain covered in the presence of the king?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, I’m king here. What the blazes do you mean by standing in a private room with your hat on?”
I plucked it off, tingling.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Mr. Straw brought me in so suddenly, I lost my head and my cap went with it, I suppose. But I see it’s not the only thing one may lose here, including tempers!” And with that I turned on my heel and was about to beat a retreat, fuming.
“Come back!” shouted Mr. Ripley. “If you go now, you go for good!”
I hesitated; the memory of my late comrade restored my equilibrium.
“I didn’t mean to be rude, sir,” I said. “I shall be grateful to you if you will give me work.”
He had condescended to turn now, and was looking full at me with frowning eyes, but with no sign of anger on his face.
“Well, you can speak out,” he said. “How do you come to know Straw?”
“I met him by chance and we got talking together.”
“How long have you been in London?”
“Since yesterday evening.”
“Why did you leave Winton?”
“To get work.”
“Have you brought a character with you?”
Here was a question to ask a Trender! But I answered, “No, I never thought of it,” with perfect truth.
“What can you do?”
“Anything I’m told, sir.”
“That’s a compromising statement, my friend. Can you read and write?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Anything else?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Don’t you know anything now about the habits of birds and beasts and fishes?”
“Oh, yes! I could tell you a heap about that.”
“Could you? Very well; I’ll give you a trial. I take you on Straw’s recommendation. His opinion, I tell you, I value more than a score of written characters in a case like this. You’ve to make yourself useful in fifty different ways.”
I assented, with a light heart, and he took me at my word and the further bargain was completed. My wages were small at first, of course; but, with what I had in hand, they would keep me going no doubt till I could prove myself worth more to my employer.
In this manner I became one of Ripley’s hands and later on myself a pamphleteer in a small way. I wrote to my father that evening and briefly acquainted him of my good fortune.
For some months my work was of a heterogeneous description. Ripley was legitimately a job printer, on rather a large scale, and a bookbinder. To these, however, he added a little venturesomeness in publishing on his own account, as also a considerable itch for scribbling. Becoming at a hint a virulent partisan in any extremist cause whatsoever, it will be no matter for wonder that his private room was much the resort of levelers, progressives and abolitionists of every creed and complexion. There furious malcontents against systems they were the first to profit by met to talk and never to listen. There fanatical propagandists, eager to fly on the rudimentary wing stumps of first principles, fluttered into print and came flapping to the ground at the third line. There, I verily believe, plots were laid that would presently have leveled powers and potentates to the ground at a nod, had any of the conspirators ever possessed the patience to sit on them till hatched. This, however, they never did. All their fiery periphrastics smoked off into the soot of print and in due course lumbered the office with piles of unmarketable drivel.
Mr. Ripley had, however, other strings to his bow, or he would not have prospered. He did a good business in bookselling and was even now and again successful in the more conventional publishing line. In this connection I chanced to be of some service to him, to which circumstance I owed a considerable improvement in my position after I had been with him getting on a year. He had long contemplated, and at length begun to work upon, a series of handbooks on British birds and insects, dealt with county by county. In the compilation of these much research was necessary, wherein I proved myself a useful and painstaking coadjutor. In addition, however, my own knowledge of the subject was fairly extensive as regarded Hampshire, which county, and especially that part of it about Winton, is rich in lepidoptera of a rare order. I may say I fairly earned the praise he bestowed upon me, which was tinged, perhaps, with a trifle of jealousy on his part, due to the fact that the section I touched proved to be undoubtedly the most popular of the series, as judged subsequently by returns.
Not to push on too fast, however, I must hark back to the day of my engagement, which was marked by my introduction to one who eventually exercised a considerable influence over my destinies.
During the course of that first morning Mr. Ripley sent me for some copies of a pamphlet that were in order of sewing down below. By his direction I descended a spiral staircase of iron and found myself in the composing-room. At a heavy iron-sheeted table stood my new-found friend, who was, despite his youth, the valued foreman of this department. He hailed me with glee and asked: “What success?”
“All right, thanks to you,” I said; “and where may the bookbinding place be and Dolly Mellison?”
“Oh, you’re for there, are you?” he said, with I thought a rather curious look at me, and he pointed to a side door.
Passing through this I found myself in a long room, flanked to the left with many machines and to the right with a row of girls who were classifying, folding or sewing the sheets of print recent from the press.
“I’m to ask for Dolly Mellison,” I said, addressing the girl at my end of the row.
“Well, you won’t have far to go,” she said. “I’m her.”
She was a pretty, slim lily of a thing, lithe and pale, with large gray eyes and coiled hair like a rope of sun-burned barleystraw, and her fingers petted her task as if that were so much hat-trimming.
“I’m sent by Mr. Ripley for copies of a pamphlet on ‘The Supineness of Theologicians,’” I said.
“I’m at work on it,” she answered. “Wait a bit till I’ve finished the dozen.”
She glanced at me now and again without pausing in her work.
“You’re from the country, aren’t you?”
“Yes. How do you know?”
“A little bird told me. What gave you those red cheeks?”
“The sight of you,” I said. I was growing up.
“I’m nothing to be ashamed of, am I?” she asked, with a pert laugh.
“You ought to be of yourself,” I said, “for taking my heart by storm in that fashion.”
“Go along!” she cried, with a jerk of her elbow. “None of your gammon! I’m not to be caught by chaff.”
“It wasn’t chaff, Dolly, though I may be a man of straw. Is that what you meant?”
“You’re pretty free, upon my word. Who told you you might call me by my name?”
“Why, you wouldn’t have me call you by any one else’s? It’s pretty enough, even for you.”
“Oh, go away with you!” she cried. “I won’t listen.”
At that moment Duke put his head in at the door.
“The governor’s calling for you,” he said. “Hurry up.”
“Well, they’re ready,” said the girl—“here,” and she thrust the packet into my hands, with a little blushing half-impudent look at me.
I forgot all about her in a few minutes. My heart was too full of one only other girlish figure to find room in itself for a rival. What was Zyp doing now?—the wonderful fairy child, whose phantom presence haunted all my dreams for good and evil.
As I walked from the office with Duke Straw that afternoon—for, as it was Saturday, we left early—a silence fell between us till we neared Cringle’s shop. Then, standing outside, he suddenly stayed me and looked in my face.
“Shall I hate or love you?” he said, with his mouth set grimly.
He made a gesture toward his deformed lower limbs with his hands, and shrugged his shoulders.
“No,” he said; “what must be, must. I’ll love you!”
There was a curious, defiant sadness in his tone, but it was gone directly. I could only stare at him in wonder.
“You’re to be my house-fellow and chum,” he said. “No, don’t protest; I’ve settled it. We’ll arrange the rest with Cringle.”
And so I slept in a bed in London for the first time.
But the noise of a water wheel roared in my ears all night.