CHAPTER XLIII.ANOTHER RESPITE.

“What brings you to London? I thought you were still abroad.”

“What drove me? What always drives me? That cruel, persecuting demon!”

“He found you out over there, then?”

“I can’t hide from him. I’ve never had a week of rest and peace after that first year. It was all right then. I threw upon the green cloth the miserable surplus of the stuff you lent me and won. For six months we lived like fighting cocks. We dressed the young ’un in the color that brought us luck. My soul, she’s a promising chick, Renny. You’re her uncle, you know; you can’t go back from that.”

“Where did he come across you?”

“In a kursaal at Homburg. We were down in the mouth then. Six weeks of lentils and sour bread. I saw him looking at me across the petits chevaux table—curse his brute’s face! We never got rid of him after that. Give me some drink. My heart’s dancing like a pea on a drum.”

“There’s water on the wash-hand stand.”

“Don’t talk like that. There’s a fire here no water can reach.”

“I see there is. You’ve added another strand to the rope that’s dragging you down.”

He fell back on the bed, writhing and moaning.

“What’s the good of moralizing with a poor fool condemned to perdition? It’s my only means of escaping out of hell for a moment. Sometimes, with that in me, I’m a man again.”

“A man!”

“There—get it for me, like a dear old chap, and don’t talk. It’s so easy for a saint to point a moral.”

He was so obviously on the verge of utter collapse that I felt the lesser responsibility would be to humor him. I fetched what he begged for and he gulped down a wineglassful of the raw stuff.

“Now,” I said, “are you better?”

“A little drop more and I’m a peacock with my tail up.” He tossed off a second dose of almost like proportion.

“Now,” he said, dangling his legs over the bedside, and giving a foolish reckless laugh, “question, mon frère, and I will answer.”

Though his manner disgusted and repelled me, I must needs get to the root of things.

“You fled from him to England again?”

“To London, of all places. It’s the safest in the world, they say; where a man may leave his wife and live in the next street for twenty-five years without her knowing it.”

“You haven’t left yours?”

“No—we stick together. Zyp’s trumps, she is, you long-faced moralizer; not that she holds one by her looks any longer. And that’s to my credit for sticking to her. You missed something in my being beforehand with you there, I can tell you.”

Was this pitiful creature worth one thrill of passion or resentment? I let him go on.

“For months that devil followed us,” he said. “At last he forced a quarrel upon me in some vile drinking-place and brought me a challenge from the man he was seconding. You should have seen his face as he handed it to me! It took all the fighting nerve out of me. I swear I would have stood up to his fellow if he had found another backer.”

“And you ran away?”

“What else could I do?”

“And he pursued you again?”

“There isn’t any doubt of it—though his dreadful face hasn’t appeared to me as yet.”

“You had the nerve, it seems, to travel down here all alone?”

“I borrowed it. Sometimes now, when the stuff runs warm in me, I feel almost as if I could turn upon him and defy him. I’m in the mood at this moment. Why doesn’t he come when I’m ready for him? Oh, the brute! The miserable, cowardly brute!”

He jumped to his feet, gnashing his teeth and shaking his fists convulsively in the air.

As he stood thus, the door of the room opened, and I turned to see my father fall forward upon his face, with a bitter cry.

Jason stood looking stupidly down on the prostrate form, while I ran to it and struggled to turn it over and up into a sitting posture.

“Father!” I cried, “I’m here—don’t you know me?”—then I turned fiercely to my brother and bade him shift his position out of the range of the staring eyes.

“What’s the matter?” he muttered, sullenly. “I’ve done no harm. Can’t he see me, even, without going off into a fit?”

“Get further away; do you hear?”

He shambled aside, murmuring to himself. A little tremulous sigh issued from the throat of the poor stricken figure. I leaned over, seized the bottle of brandy from the bed, and moistened his lips with a few drops from it.

“Does that do you good, dad?”

He nodded. I could make out that he was trying to speak, and bent my head to the weak whisper.

“I saw somebody.”

“I know—I know. Never mind that now. Leave it all to me.”

“You’re my good son. You won’t let him rob me, Renny?”

“In an hour or two he shall be packed off. You needn’t even see him again.”

“Is he back in England?”

“In London, yes.”

“What does he want?”

“To see us—that’s all.”

“Not money?”

“No, no. He isn’t in need of that just now. Can you move back to your bed, do you think, if I help you?”

“You won’t let him come near me?”

“He shall go straight from this room out of the house.”

“Come,” he said, presently; “I’ll try.”

I almost lifted him to his feet, and he clung to my arm, stumbling beside me down the passage to his room.

When he was lying settled on his bed, and at ease once more, I returned to my brother.

He was sitting in a maudlin attitude by the window, and I saw that he had been at the bottle again.

“Now,” I said, sternly, “let’s settle the last of this with a final question: What is it you want?”

He looked up at me with an idiotic chuckle.

“Wand? What everybody’s always wanding, and I most of all.”

“You mean more money, I suppose?”

“More? Yes, mush more—mush more than you gave me last time, too.”

“Not so much, probably. But lest Zyp should starve I’ll send you what I can in the course of a few days.”

He rose with a feebly menacing look.

“I’m not going till I get what I wand. I wand my part of the treasure. I know where it’s hid, you fool, and I’m wound up for a try at it. Ge’ out of my way! I’ll go and help myself.”

He made a stumbling rush across the room and when I interposed myself between the door and him he struck out at me with a blow as aimless and unharmful as a baby’s.

“If you don’t knock under at once,” I said, “I swear I’ll tie you up and keep you here for Duke’s next coming.”

He stood swaying before me a moment; then suddenly threw himself on the bed, yelping and sobbing like a hysterical school-girl.

“It’s too cruel!” he moaned. “You take advantage of your strength to bully me beyond all bearing. Why shouldn’t I have my share as well as you?”

“Never mind all that. Give me your address if you want anything at all.”

He lay some time longer yet; then fetched out a pencil and scrap of paper and sulkily scrawled what I asked for.

“Now”—I looked at my watch—“there’s a train back to town in half an hour. You’d best be starting.”

“Nice hospitality, upon my word. Supposing I stop the night?”

“You’re not going to stop the night, unless you wish to do so in the street.”

“I’ve a good mind to, you beast, and bring a crowd about the place.”

“And Duke with it, perhaps—eh?”

His expression changed to one most fulsomely fawning.

“Renny,” he said, “you can’t mean to treat me, your own brother, like this? Let’s have confidence in one another and combine.” He gave a little embarrassed laugh. “I know where the treasure’s hid, I tell you. S’posing we share it and——”

He stopped abruptly, with an alarmed look. Something in my face must have forewarned him, for he walked unsteadily to the door, glancing fearfully at me. Passing the brandy bottle on his way, he seized it with sudden defiance.

“I’ll have this, anyhow,” he murmured. “You won’t object to my taking that much away.”

Hugging it to his breast under his coat, he went from the room. I followed him down the stairs; saw him out of the house; shut the door on him. Then I listened for his shuffling footstep going up the yard and away before I would acknowledge to myself that he had been got rid of at a price small under the circumstances.

I remained at my post for full assurance of his departure for many minutes after he had left, and when at last I stole up to my father’s room I found the old man fallen into a doze. Seen through the wan twilight how broken and decaying and feeble he seemed!

I sat by him till he stirred and woke. His eyes opened upon me with a pleased look at finding me beside him, and he put out a thin rugged hand and took mine into it.

“I’ve been asleep,” he said. “I dreamed a bad son of mine came back and terrified the old man. It was a dream, wasn’t it, Renny?”

“Only a dream, dad. Jason isn’t here.”

“I thought it was. It didn’t trouble me much, for all that. I learned confidence in the presence of this strong good fellow here.”

“Dad, we’ve £30 left of the fifty I raised two months ago on that Julian medallion. May I have ten of them?”

“Ten pounds, Renalt? That’s a mighty gap in the hoard.”

“I want it for a particular purpose. You can trust me not to ask you if it were to be avoided.”

He gave a deep sigh.

“Take it, then. It isn’t in you to misapply a trust.”

He turned his face away with a slight groan. Poor old man! My soul cried out with remorse to so trouble his confidence in me. Yet what I proposed seemed to me best.

He would not rise and come down to supper when I suggested it.

“Let me lie here,” he said. “Sometimes it seems to me, Renalt, I’m breaking up—that the wheel down there crows and sings for a victim again.”

It was the first time I had ever heard him directly refer to this stormy heart of the old place, that had throbbed out so incessantly its evil influence over the lives shut within range of it. It was plunging and murmuring now in the depths below us, so insistent even at that distance that the soft whining of the stones in our more immediate neighborhood was scarcely audible.

“It’s a bewildering discovery,” he went on, “that of finding oneself approaching the wonderful bourne one has struggled toward so long. I don’t think I’m afraid, Renalt, lying here in peace and watching my soul walk on. Yet now, though I know I have done two great and wicked deeds in my lifetime, I wouldn’t put off the moment of that coming revelation by an hour.”

I stroked his hand, listening and wondering, but I made no answer.

“It’s like being a little child,” he said; “fascinated and compelled toward a pleasant fright. When you were a toddling baby, if one came at you menacing and growling in fun, you’d open your eyes in doubt with fear and laughter; and then, instead of flying the danger, would run at it half-way and be caught up in daddy’s arms and kissed. That seems to illustrate death to me now. The heart of that grim, time-worn playfellow may be very soft, after all. It’s best not to cry out, but to run to him and be caught up and kissed into forgetfulness.”

Oh, my father! How in my soul did I echo your words!

He wandered on by such strange sidewalks till speech itself seemed to intermingle with the inarticulate language of dream. Is there truth after all in the senile visions of age that can penetrate the veil of the supernal, though the worn and ancient eyes are dim with cataracts?

As I sat alone with my thoughts that night many emotions, significant or pathetic, wrought changing phantoms of the shadows in the dimly lighted room. Sometimes, shapeless and full of heavy omen, they revolved blindly about that dark past life of my father, a little corner of the curtain over which had that evening been lifted for my behoof. Sometimes they thrilled with spasms of pain at the prospect of that utter loneliness that must fall upon me were the old man’s quiet foretelling of his doom to justify itself. Sometimes they took a red tinge of gloom in memory of his words of self-denunciation.

What had been a worser evil in him than that long degrading of his senses? Yet, of the “wicked deeds” he had referred to, that which could hardly be called a “deed” was surely not one. Perhaps, after all, they were nothing but the baseless product of a fancy that had indulged morbidity until, as with Frankenstein, the monster it had created mastered it.

Might this not be the explanation of all? Even of that eerily expressed fear of his, that had puzzled me in its passing, that the wheel was calling for a victim again?

The day that followed the unlooked-for visit of my brother Jason to the mill my father spent in bed. When, in the morning, I took him up his breakfast, I could not help noticing that the broad light flooding the room emphasized a change in him that I had been only partly conscious of the evening before. It was as if, during the night, the last gleams of his old restless spirit had died out. I thought all edges in him blunted—the edges of fear, of memory, of observation, of general interest in life.

The immediate cause of this decline was, with little doubt, the shock caused by my brother’s unexpected return. To this I never again heard him allude, but none the less had the last of his constitution succumbed to it, I feel sure.

The midday post brought me a letter, the sight of which sent a thrill through me. I knew Zyp’s queer crooked hand, that no dignity of years could improve from its immature schoolgirl character. She wrote:

“Dear Renny: Jason told you all, I suppose. We are back again, and dependant on dad’s bounty, and yours. Oh, Renny, it goes to my heart to have to wurry you once more. But we are in soar strates, and so hampered in looking for work from the risk of coming across him again. At present he hasn’t found us out, I think, but any day he may do so. If you could send us ever so little it would help us to tide over a terruble crisus. The little one is wanting dainties, Renny; and we—it is hard to say it—bread sometimes. But she will only eat of the best, and chocalats she loves. I wish you could see her. She is my own fairy. I work the prettiest flowers into samplers, and try to sell them in the shops; but I am not very clever with my needel; and Jason laughs at them, though my feet ake with walking over these endless paving stones. Renny, dear, I must be a beggar, please. Don’t think hardly of me for it, but my darling that’s so pretty and frale! Oh, Renny, help us. Your loving sister,Zyp.”“What you send, if annything, please send it to me. That’s why I write for the chief part. Jason would give us his last crust; but—you saw him, Renny, and must know.”

“Dear Renny: Jason told you all, I suppose. We are back again, and dependant on dad’s bounty, and yours. Oh, Renny, it goes to my heart to have to wurry you once more. But we are in soar strates, and so hampered in looking for work from the risk of coming across him again. At present he hasn’t found us out, I think, but any day he may do so. If you could send us ever so little it would help us to tide over a terruble crisus. The little one is wanting dainties, Renny; and we—it is hard to say it—bread sometimes. But she will only eat of the best, and chocalats she loves. I wish you could see her. She is my own fairy. I work the prettiest flowers into samplers, and try to sell them in the shops; but I am not very clever with my needel; and Jason laughs at them, though my feet ake with walking over these endless paving stones. Renny, dear, I must be a beggar, please. Don’t think hardly of me for it, but my darling that’s so pretty and frale! Oh, Renny, help us. Your loving sister,

Zyp.”

“What you send, if annything, please send it to me. That’s why I write for the chief part. Jason would give us his last crust; but—you saw him, Renny, and must know.”

I bowed my head over the queer, sorrowful little note. That this bold, reliant child of nature should come to this! There and then I vowed that, so long as I had a shilling I could call my own, Zyp should share it with me, at a word from her.

I wrote to her to this effect. I placed my whole position before her and bade her command me as she listed; only bearing in mind that my father, old and broken, had the first claim upon me. Then I went out and bought the largest and most fascinating box of chocolates I could secure, and sent it to her as a present to my little unknown niece, and forwarded also under cover the order for the £10.

A day or two brought me an acknowledgment and answer to my letter. The latter shall forever remain sacred from any eyes but mine; and, unless man can be found ready to brave the curse of the dead, shall lie with me, who alone have read it, in the grave.

On the morning preceding that of its arrival, a fearful experience befell me, that was like to have choked out my soul then and there in one black grip of horror.

All that first day after Jason’s visit my father lay abed, and, whenever I visited him, was cheerfully garrulous, but without any inclination to rise. The following morning also he elected to have breakfast as before in his room; and soon after the meal he fell into a light doze, in which state I left him.

It was about 11 o’clock that, sitting in the room below, I was startled by hearing a sudden thud above me that shook the beams of the ceiling. I rushed upstairs in a panic and found him lying prostrate on the floor, uninjured apparently, but with no power of getting to his feet again.

“What’s this?” I cried. “Dad! Are you hurt?”

He looked at me a little wondering and confused, but answered no, he had only slipped and fallen when rising to don his clothes.

I lifted him up and he couldn’t stand, but sunk down on the bed again with a blank, amazed look in his face.

“Renalt,” he said, in a thin, perplexed voice, “what’s happened to the old man? The will was there, but the power’s gone.”

Gone it was, forever. From that day he walked no more—did nothing but lie on his back, calm and unconcerned for the most part, and fading quietly from life.

But in the first discovery of his enforced inertness, some peculiar trouble, unconnected with the certain approach of death, lay on him like a black jaundice. Sitting by his side after I had got him back upon the bed, I would not break the long silence that ensued with shallow words of comfort, for I thought that he was steeling his poor soul as he lay to face the inevitable prospect.

Suddenly he turned on the bed—for his face had been darkened from me—and looked at me with his lips trembling.

“What is it, dad?”

“I’m down, Renny. I shall never rise again.”

“You’ll rest, dad; you’ll rest. Think of the peace and quiet while I sit and read to you and the sun comes in at the window.”

“Good lad! It isn’t that, though rest has a beautiful sound to me. It’s the thought—harkee, Renny! It’s the thought that a task I’ve not failed in for twenty years and more must come to be another’s.”

“What task?”

“There are ears in the walls. Closer, my son. The task of oiling the wheel below.”

“Shall I take it up, dad? Is that your wish?”

I answered stoutly, though my heart sunk within me at the prospect.

“You or nobody, it must be. Are you afraid?”

“I wish I could say I wasn’t.”

He clutched my hand in tremulous eagerness.

“Master it! You must, my lad! Much depends on it. They whisper the room is haunted. Not for you, Renalt, if for anybody. Haven’t I been familiar with it all these years, and yet I lie here unscathed? How can it spare the evil old man and hurt the just son?”

He half-rose in his bed and stared with dilated eyes at the wall.

“You are there!” he cried, in a loud, quavering voice. “Out of the years of gloom and torture you menace me still! Why, it was just, I say! How could I have clung to my purpose and defied you, otherwise? You will never frighten me!”

He fell back, breathing heavily. In sorrow and alarm I bent over him. Suddenly conscious of my eyes looking down upon him, he smiled and a faint flush came to his cheek.

“Dreams and shadows—dreams and shadows!” he murmured. “You will take up my task, Renalt?”

“Must I, dad?”

“Oh, be a man!” he shrieked, grasping at me. “I have defied it—I, the sinner! And how can it hurt you?”

“Is it so necessary?”

“It’s the key to all—the golden key! Were it to rust and stop, the secret would be open to any that might look, and the devil have my soul.”

“Do you wish me, then, to learn the secret—whatever it is?”

He looked at me long, with a dark and searching expression.

“I ask you to oil the wheel,” he said at length—“nothing more.”

“Very well. I will do what you ask.”

He gave a deep sigh and lay back with his eyes closed. I saw the faint color coming and going in his face. Suddenly he uttered a cry and turned upon me.

“My son—my son! Bear with me a little longer. It is an old habit and for long made my only joy in a dark world. I find it hard to part with my fetish.”

“I don’t want you to part with it. What does it matter? I will oil the wheel and you shall rest in peace that your task is being faithfully performed by another.”

“Hush! You don’t mean it, but every word is a reproach. I’ve known so little love; and here I would reject the confidence that is the sign of more than I deserve. For him, the base and cruel, to guess at it, and you to remain in ignorance! Renalt, listen; I’m going to tell you.”

“No, dad; no!”

“Renalt, you won’t break my heart? What trust haven’t you put in me? And this is my return! Feel under my pillow, boy.”

“Oh, dad; let it rest!”

Eagerly, impatiently, he thrust in his own hand and brought forth a shining key.

“Take it!” he cried. “It opens the box of the wheel. But first lower the sluice and turn the race into the further channel. You will see a rope dangling inside in the darkness. Hold on to it and work the wheel round with your hands till a float projecting a little beyond its fellows comes opposite you. In this you’ll find a slit cut, ending in an eye-hole. Pass the rope, as it dangles, into this hole, and keep it in place by a turn of the iron button that’s fixed underneath the slit. Now step on to the broad float, never letting go the rope, and the weight of your body will turn the wheel, carrying you downward till a knot in the rope stops your descent.”

“What then, dad?”

“My son—you’ll see the place that for twenty years has held the secret of my fortune.”

If it had many a time occurred to me, since first I heard of the jar of coins, that the secret of their concealment was connected somehow within the room of silence, it must have done so from that old association of my father with a place that the rest of us so dreaded and avoided. The scorn of superstitious terror that he showed in his choice; the certainty that none would dream of looking there; the encouragement his own mysterious actions gave to the sense of a haunting atmosphere that seemed ever to hang about the neighborhood of the room—these were all so many justifications of the wisdom of his choice. Now I understood the secret of that everlasting lubrication; for had anything happened, when he might chance to be absent, to choke or damage the structure of the ancient wheel, the stoppage or ruin ensuing might have laid bare the hiding-place to any curious eye; for, as part of his general policy, I conclude, no veto except the natural one of dread was ever laid on our entering the room itself if we wished to.

“Well,” I said, stifling a sigh that in itself would have seemed a breach of confidence, “when am I to do my first oiling, father?”

“It wasn’t touched yesterday, Renalt. From the first I have not failed to do it once, at least, in the twenty-four hours.”

“You would like me to go now—at once?”

“Ah! If you will.”

“Very well.”

As I was leaving the room he called me back.

“There’s the oil can in yonder cupboard and a bull’s-eye lantern fixed in a belt. You will want to light that and strap it round you.”

I went and fetched them, and, holding them in my hand, asked him if there was anything more.

“No,” he said; “be careful not to let go the rope; that’s all.”

“Why do you want me to go down, dad? Let me just do the oiling and come away.”

“No, now—now,” he said, with feverish impatience. “The murder’s out and my conscience quit of it. You’ll satisfy me with a report of its safety, Renalt? There’s a brave fellow. It would be a sore thing to compose myself here to face the end, and not know but that something had happened to your inheritance.”

My spirit groaned, but I said to him, very well; I would go.

He called to me once more, and I noticed an odd repression in his voice.

“Assure yourself, and me, of the safety of the jar. Nothing else. If by chance you notice aught beyond, keep the knowledge of it locked in your breast—never mention it or refer to it in any way.”

Full of dull foreboding of some dread discovery, I left him and went slowly down the stairs.

I paused outside the ominous door, with a thought that a little whisper of laughter had reached my ears from its inner side. Then, muttering abuse on myself, for my cowardice, I pushed resolutely at the cumbrous oak and swung it open.

A cold, vault-like breath of air sighed out on me, and the marrow in my bones was conscious of a little chill and shiver. But I strode across the floor without further hesitation and fetched from my pocket the iron key. The hole it fitted into was near the edge of the great box that inclosed the wheel. Standing there in close proximity to the latter, I was struck by the subdued character of the flapping and washing sounds within. Heard at a distance, they seemed to shake the whole building with their muffled thunder. Here no formidable uproar greeted me; and so it was, I conclude, from the concentration of noise monopolizing my every sense.

I put in the key, swung open the door—and there before me was a section of a huge disk going round overwhelmingly, and all splashed and dripping as it revolved, with great jets of weedy-smelling water.

I say “disk,” for the arms to this side had been boarded in, that none, I supposed, might gather hint of what lay beyond.

The eyes into which the shaft ends of the wheel fitted were sunk in the floor level, flush with the lintel of the cupboard door that lay furthest from the window; so that only the left upper quarter of the slowly spinning monster was visible to me.

It turned in an oblong pit, it seemed, wooden in its upper part, but going down into a narrow gully of brick, at the bottom of which the race boomed and roared with a black sound of fury.

If the hollow thunder of the unseen torrent had been dismal to hear, the sight of it boiling down there in its restricted channel was awful indeed. From the forward tunnel through which it escaped into the tail bay, a thin streak of light tinged the plunging foam of it with green phosphorescence and made manifest the terror of its depths.

For all my dread of the place, a strange curiosity had begun to usurp in me the first instincts of repulsion. Though I had been in the room some minutes, no malignant influence had crept over me as yet, and a hope entered me that by thus forcing myself to outface the fear I had perhaps triumphed over its fateful fascination.

Leaving the door of the cupboard open, I hurried from the room, and so to the rear of the building and the platform outside, where the heads of the sluices were that regulated the water flow. Here, removing the pin, I dropped the race hatch and so cut off the stream from the wheel.

Returning, I left open the door of the room that the wholesome atmosphere outside should neighbor me, at least, and means of escape, if necessary, readily offer themselves; and, lighting the lantern in the belt, strapped the latter round my waist.

When I came to the cupboard again the boom of water below had subsided to a mouthing murmur, and the spin of the wheel was lazily relaxed, so that before it had turned half its own circumference it stood still and dripping. The sight when I looked down now was not near so formidable, for only a band of water slid beneath me as I bent over. Still, my heart was up in my mouth for all that, now the moment had come for the essaying of my task.

Oiling such parts of the machine as were within reach, I next grasped the rope, which I had at the first noticed hanging from the darkness above down into the pit, just clear of the blades, and set to peering for the broader float my father had mentioned. Luckily, the last motion of the wheel had brought this very section opposite me, so that I had no difficulty in slipping in the rope and securing it by means of the button underneath.

Then, with a tingling of the flesh of my thighs and a mental prayer for early deliverance, I stepped upon the blade, with a foot on either side of the rope to which I clung grimly, and in a moment felt myself going down into blackness.

The wheel turned gently under my weight, giving forth no creak or scream; and the dark water below seemed to rise at me rather than to wait my sinking toward it. But though the drip and slime of the pit shut me in, there was action in all I was doing so matter-of-fact as to half-cure me for the moment of superstitious terror.

Suddenly the wheel stopped with a little jerk and thud of the float on which I stood against a bend in the tackle that passed through it.

Holding on thus—and, indeed, the tension necessary to the act spoke volumes for my father’s vigor of endurance—the light from the lantern flashed and glowed about the interior structure of the wheel before me. Then, looking between the blades—for the periphery of the great circle was not boxed in—I saw revealed to me in a moment the secret I had come to investigate. For, firmly set in a hole dug in the brick side of the chasm at a point so chosen within the sweep of the wheel that no spoke traversed it when it lay motionless, and at arm’s reach only from one standing on the paddle, was a vessel of ancient pottery about a foot in height, and so smeared and dank with slime as that a careless grasp on its rim might have sent the whole treasure clattering and raining through the wheel into the water below.

Cautiously I put out a hand, grasped and gently shook the jar. A dull jingle came from it, and so my task was accomplished.

By this time, however, I was so confident of my position that I got out the oil can and began to lubricate deliberately the further shaft end of the wheel. While I was in the very act, a metallic glint, struck by the lantern light from some object pinned on to the huge hub that crossed the channel almost directly in front of my line of vision, caught my eye and drove me to pause. I craned my neck to get a nearer view, and gave so great a start of wonder as to lose my hold of the oiler, which fell with clink and splash into the water underfoot.

Nailed to the great axle was something that looked like the miniature portrait of a man; but it was so stained and flaked by years of dark decay that the features were almost obliterated. The face had been painted in enamel on an oval of fluxed copper; yet even this had not been able to resist the long corrosion of the atmosphere in which it was held prisoner.

I could make out only that the portrait was that of a young man of fair complexion, thin, light-haired and dressed in the fashion of a bygone generation. More I had not time to observe; for, as I gazed, suddenly with a falling sway and a flicker the lantern at my waist went out.

In the first horror of blackness I came near to letting go the rope and falling from my perch on the blade. My brain went with a swing and turn and a sick wave overwhelmed my heart and flooded all my chest with nausea.

Was I trapped after all—and just when confidence seemed established in me? For some evil moments I remained as I was, not daring to move, to look up, even; blinded only by the immediate plunge into cabined night, terrible and profound.

I had left the matches above. There was no rekindling of the lamp possible. Up through the darkness I must climb—and how?

Then for the first time it occurred to me that my father’s directions had not included the method of the return journey. Perhaps he had thought it unnecessary. To clearer senses the means would have been obvious—a scramble, merely, by way of the paddles, while the wheel was held in position by the rope.

In the confusion of my senses I thought that my only way was to swarm up the dangling rope; and, without doubt, such was a means, if an irksome one, of escape. Only I should have left the tackle anchored as it was to the wheel. This I did not do, but, moved by a sudden crazy impulse, stooped and turned the button that held all in place.

It was good fortune only that saved me then and there from the full consequences of my act. For, pulled taut as it was, and well out of the perpendicular, the moment it was released the rope swung through the slit like a pendulum, carrying me, frantically clinging to it with one hand, off the paddle. Then, before I had time to put out my free hand to ward off the danger, clump against the wheel I came in the return swing, and with such force that I was heavily bruised in a dozen places and near battered from my hold.

Clawing and scratching like a drowning cat and rendered half-stupid by the blow, I yet managed to grasp the rope with my other hand, and so dangle there with little more than strength just to cling on. Once I sought to ease the intolerable strain on my arms by toeing for foothold on the paddle again, but the wheel, swinging free now, slipped from under me, so that I was nearly jerked from my clutch. Then there was nothing for it but to gather breath and pray that power might come to me to swarm up the rope by and by.

Drooping my head as I hung panting, the blackness I had thought impenetrable was traversed by the green glint of light below that I have mentioned. The sight revived me in a moment. It was like a draught of water to a fainting soldier. Now I felt some connectedness of thought to be possible. With a bracing of all my muscles, I passed my legs about the rope and began toilingly to drag myself upward.

I had covered half the distance, when I felt myself to be going mad. How this was I cannot explain. The fight against material difficulties had hitherto, it seemed, left tremors of the supernatural powerless to move me. Now, in a moment, black horror had me by the heart. That I should be down there—clambering from the depths of that secret and monstrous pit, the very neighborhood of which had always filled me with loathing, seemed a fact incredible in its stupendous unnature. This may sound exaggerated. It did not seem so to me then. Despite my manhood and my determination, in an instant I was mastered and insane.

Still I clung to the rope and crawled upward. Then suddenly I saw why night had fallen upon me in one palpable curtain when the lantern was extinguished; for the door of the cupboard was closed.

Had it only swung to? But what air was there in the close room beyond to move it?

Hanging there, like a lost and fated fiend, a bubble of wild, ugly merriment rose in me and burst in a clap of laughter. I writhed and shrieked in the convulsion of it; the dead vault rung with my hysterical cries.

It ceased suddenly, as it had begun, and, grinding my teeth in a frenzy of rage over the thought of how I had been trapped and snared, I swung myself violently against the door, and, letting go my hold at the same instant, burst it open with the force of my onset and rolled bleeding and struggling on the floor of the room beyond.

After a minute or two I rose into a sitting posture, leaning on one hand, half-stunned and half-blinded. A dense and deadly silence about me; but this was penetrated presently by a fantastic low whispering sound at my back, as if there were those there that discussed my fate. I turned myself sharply about. Dull emptiness only of rotting floor and striding rafter, and the gathered darkness of wall corners.

The sense of fanciful murmuring left me, and in its place was born a sound as of something stealthily crossing the floor away from me. At the same instant the door of the room, which I had left open, swung softly to on its hinges, and I was shut in.

Then, with a fear that I cannot describe, I knew that the question was to be put to me once more, and that I was destined to die under the torture of it.

I had no hope of escape—no thought that the passion that prompted me to self-effacement might, diverted, carry me to the door in one hard dash for light and liberty. The single direction in which my mind moved unfettered was that bearing upon the readiest means to my purpose—to die, and thereto what offered itself more insistently than the black pit I had but now risen from? A run—a leap—a shattering dive—and the murmuring water and oblivion would have me forevermore.

I turned and faced the dark gulf. I pressed my hands to my bursting temples to still the throb of the arteries that was blinding me. Then, spasmodically, my feet moved forward a pace or two; I gave a long, quivering sigh; my arms dropped inert, and a blessed warmth of security gushed over all my being.

Pale; luminous; most dear and pitiful, an angel stood before the opening and barred my way. A shadow only—but an angel; a spirit come from the sorrowful past to save me, as I, alas! had never saved her.

I fell on my knees and held out my arms to her, with the drowning tears falling over my cheeks. I could not speak, but only moan like a child for cheer and comfort. And she smiled on me—the angel smiled on me, as Dolly, sweet and loving, had smiled of old. Oh, God! Oh, God! Thus to permit her to come from over the desolate waste for solace of my torment!

Was all this only figurative of the warring clash of passion and conscience? The presence was to me actual and divine. It led me, or seemed to lead, from the mouthing death—across the room—out by the open door, that none had ever shut; and then it was no longer and I stood alone in the gusty passage.

I stood alone and cured forever of the terror of that mad and gloomy place, whose influence had held me so long enthralled. Henceforth I was quit of its deadly malice. I knew it as certainly as that I was forgiven for my share in a most bitter tragedy that had littered the shore of many lives with wreckage. For me, at least, now, the question was answered—answered by the dear ghost of one whose little failings had been washed pure in the bountiful spring of life.

Presently, moved by the sense of sacred security in my heart, I passed once more into the room of silence—not with bravado, but strong in the good armor of self-reliance. I closed and locked the door of the cupboard and walked forth again, feeling no least tremor of the nerves—conscious of nothing to cause it. Thence I went out to the platform, and, levering up the sluice, heard the water discharge itself afresh into the hollow-booming channel that held the secret of the wheel.

And now, indeed, that my thoughts were capable of some order of progression, that very secret rose and usurped the throne of my mind, deposing all other claimants.

What weird mystery attached to the portrait nailed to the axle? That it was placed there by my father I had little doubt; but for what reason and of whom was it?

I recalled his wild command to me to never make reference to aught my eyes might chance to light upon, other than the treasure I had gone to seek. In that direction, then, nothing but silence must meet me.

Of whom was the portrait, and what the mystery?

On the thought, the attenuated voice of old Peggy came from the kitchen hard by in a cracked and melancholy stave of her favorite song:

“I washed my penknife in the stream—Heigho!I washed my penknife in the stream.And the more I washed it the blood gushed out—All down by the greenwood side, O!”

“I washed my penknife in the stream—Heigho!I washed my penknife in the stream.And the more I washed it the blood gushed out—All down by the greenwood side, O!”

“I washed my penknife in the stream—

Heigho!

I washed my penknife in the stream.

And the more I washed it the blood gushed out—

All down by the greenwood side, O!”

Old Peggy! When had she first established her ghoulish reign over us? Had she been employed here in my mother’s time? I only knew that I could not dispart her ancient figure and the mill in my memory.

I pushed open the door and walked into the kitchen. She was sitting darning by the frouzy little window—a great pair of spectacles on her bony nose—and looked at me with an eye affectedly vacant, as if she were a vicious old parrot speculating upon the most opportune moment for a snap at me.

“That’s a pretty song, Peggy,” I said.

“And a pretty old ’ooman to sing it,” she answered.

“Were you ever young, Peggy?”

“Not that I remembers. I were barn wi’ a wrinkle in my brow like a furrow-drain, and two good teeth in my headpiece.”

“I dare say. How old were you when you first came here?”

“How old? Old enow and young enow to taste wormwood in the sarce gleeted fro’ three Winton brats.”

“That’s no answer, you know. What’s your present age?”

“One hundred, mebbe.”

“Was Modred born when you came?”

“Born? Eighteen bard months, to my sorrow. A rare gross child, to be sure; wi’ sprawling fat puds like the feet o’ them crocodillies in the show.”

If Peggy could be trusted, I had got an answer which barred further pursuit in that direction. She could never, I calculated, have been personally acquainted with my mother or the circumstances of the latter’s death. Indeed, I could not imagine her tolerated in a house over which any self-respecting woman presided.

Elsewhere I must look for some solution of the puzzle that had added its complexity to a life already laboring under a burden of mystery.

But in the meantime, an older vital question re-reared its head from the very hearthstone of the mill, whereon it had lain so long in stupor that I might have fancied it dead.

November had come, with early frosts that flattened the nasturtiums in the town gardens and stiffened belated bees on the Michaelmas daisies, that were the very taverns of nature to lure them from their decent homes.

This year the complacent dogmatism of an ancient proverb was most amply justified by results:

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