“Be there ice in November that ’ill bear a duck,There’ll be nothing after but sludge and muck.”
“Be there ice in November that ’ill bear a duck,There’ll be nothing after but sludge and muck.”
“Be there ice in November that ’ill bear a duck,
There’ll be nothing after but sludge and muck.”
The bellying winds of December were to drive up such clouds of rain and storm that every gully in the meadows was to join its neighbor in one common conspiracy against the land, and every stream to overrun its banks, swollen with the pride of hearing itself called a flood.
I had been reading one bright morning to my father until he fell asleep, and was sitting on pensively with the book in my hand, when I became aware of a step mounting the stairs below and pausing at the sitting-room door. I rose softly at once, and, descending, came plump upon Dr. Crackenthorpe, just as he was crossing the threshold to enter.
He was very sprucely dressed, for him, with a spray of ragged geranium in his button-hole; and this, no less than the mere fact of his presence in the house, filled me with a momentary surprise so great that I had not a word to say. Only I bowed him exceedingly politely into the parlor and civilly asked his business.
An expression of relief crossed his face, I thought, as though he had been in two minds as to whether I should take him by the collar and summarily eject him there and then.
“I haven’t seen your father about lately,” he jerked out, with some parody of a smile that, I concluded, was designated to propitiate. “I called to inquire if the old gentleman was unwell.”
“He is practically an invalid,” I said; “he keeps entirely to his own room.”
“Indeed? I am concerned. Nothing serious, I trust? My services, I need not say, are at the command of so valued an old friend.”
“He needs no services but mine. It is the debility of old age, I fear—nothing more.”
“Yet he is a comparatively young man. But it’s true that to mortgage one’s youth too heavily is to risk the premature foreclosing of old age.”
“I dare say. Was there any other object in your visit?”
“One other—frankly.”
He held out a damp hand to me. It shook rather.
“I’m tired of this duel of cross-purposes. Will you agree to cry an armistice—peace, if you like?”
I took him in from head to foot—a little to his discomfiture, no doubt.
“Is this pure philanthropy, Dr. Crackenthorpe?” I said.
“Most pure and disinterested,” said he. “I claim, without offense, the grievance as mine, and I am the first to come forward and cry. Let there be an end to it.”
“Not so fast. You start on a fundamental error. A grievance, as I take it, can only separate friends. There can be no question of such a misunderstanding between us, for we have always been enemies.”
“That’s your fancy,” cried he; “that’s your mistaken fancy! I’m not one to wear my heart on my sleeve. If I’ve always repressed show of my innate regard for you, you’re not to think it didn’t exist.”
“Why waste so many words? That’s a good form of regard, to act the bulldog to us, as you always did. It was a chastening sense of duty, I suppose, that induced you to leave me for years under an ugly stigma when you knew all the time that I was innocent. Is your valued friendship for the old man best expressed by blackmailing and robbing him on the strength of a fragment of circumstantial evidence?”
“I have made myself particeps criminis. Does that go for nothing? A little consideration was due to me there. A moiety of the treasure he was squandering, I took advantage of my influence to secure in trust for his children. You shall have it all back again some day, and should show me profound gratitude in place of sinister disbelief.”
“A fine cheapening of cupidity, and well argued. How long were you thinking it out?”
“As to that question of the suspicions you labored under—remember that any conclusion drawn from circumstances was hypothetical. I may have had a professional opinion as to the cause of death, and a secret one as to the means employed. That was conjecture; but if you are fair, you will confess that, by running away to London, you did much to incriminate yourself in men’s minds.”
“I never looked upon it in that light.”
“I dare say not. Innocence, from its nature, may very often stultify itself. I think you innocent now. Then I was not so certain. It was not, perhaps, till your father sought to silence me, that my suspicions were diverted into a darker channel.”
“You put a good case,” I said, amazed at the man’s plausibility. “You might convince one who knew less of you.”
“You can prove nothing to my discredit. This is all the growth of early prejudice. Think that at any moment I might have denounced him and left the proof of innocence on his shoulders.”
“And killed the goose with the golden eggs? I am not altogether childish, Dr. Crackenthorpe, or quite ignorant of the first principles of law. In England the burden of proof lies on the prosecution. How would you have proceeded?”
“I should at least have eased my conscience of an intolerable load and escaped the discomforting reflection that I might be considered an accessory after the fact.”
“As indeed you are in the sight of heaven by your own showing, though I swear my father is as innocent of the crime as I am.”
He shrugged his shoulders with a deprecating gesture.
“Anyhow, my position shows my disinterestedness,” he said.
“And you are growing frightened over it, it seems. Well, take whatever course pleases you. From our point of view, here, I feel quite easy as to results.”
“You misapprehend me. This visit is actuated by no motive but that of friendliness. I wish to bury the hatchet and resume the pleasant relations that existed of old.”
“They were too one-sided. Besides, all the conditions changed upon my return.”
“And no one regretted it more than I. I have from the first been your true friend, as I have attempted to show. You have a valuable inheritance in my keeping. Indeed”—he gave a sort of high embarrassed titter—“it would be to your real advantage to hand the residue over to me before he has any further opportunity of dissipating it.”
I broke into a cackle of fierce laughter.
“So,” I cried, “the secret is out! I must compliment you on a most insatiable appetite. But, believe me, you have more chance of acquiring the roc’s egg than the handful!”
He looked at me long and gloomily. I could feel rather than hear him echo: “The handful.” But he made a great effort to resume his conciliatory tone when he spoke again.
“You jump to hot-headed conclusions. It was a simple idea of the moment, and as you choose to misinterpret it, let it be forgotten. The main point is, are we to be friends again?”
“And I repeat that we can’t resume what never existed. This posturing is stupid farce that had best end. Shall we make the question conditional? That cameo, that you have come into possession of—we won’t hazard a supposition by what means—restore it, at least, to its rightful owner as an earnest of your single-mindedness. I, who am to inherit it in the end, give you full permission.”
He started back, and his face went the color of a withered aspen leaf.
“It’s mine,” he cried, shrilly. “I wouldn’t part with it to the queen!”
“See then! What am I to believe?”
I walked close up to him. His fingers itched to strike me, I could see.
“Dr. Crackenthorpe,” I said, “you had best have spared yourself this errand. Why, what a poor scamp you must be to think to take me in with such a fusty trick. Make the most of what you’ve got. You’ll not have another stiver from us. Look elsewhere for a victim. Your evil mission in life is the hounding of the wretched. Mine, you know. Some clews are already in my hand, and, if there is one man in the world I should rejoice to drag down—you are he!”
He walked to the door, and, turning, stamped his foot furiously down on the boards.
“You bitter dolt!” he roared, with a withering sneer. “Understand that the chance I gave you is withdrawn forever. There are means—there are means; and I——”
He stopped; gulped; put his hand to his throat, and walked out of the house without another word.
I stood looking after him, all blazing with anger. No least fear of the evil creature was in me, but only a blank fierce astonishment that he should thus have dared to brave me on my own ground. What cupidity was that, indeed, that could not only think to gloss over long years of merciless torment by a few false suave words, but could actually hope to find the profit of his condescension in a post-prandial gorging of the fragments his inordinate gluttony of avarice had passed over!
However, putting all thought of him from me, I returned to my father.
One result of Dr. Crackenthorpe’s visit was that I determined to then and there push my secret inquiries to a head in the direction of my friend, the sexton of St. John’s.
I had not seen or heard of this man since the day of his seizure in the archway of the close, but I thought his attack must surely by now have yielded and left him sane again.
That very afternoon, leaving my father comfortably established with book and paper, I walked over to the old churchyard under the hill and looked about among the graves for some sign of him who farmed them. The place was empty and deserted; it showed clearly that the hand of order was withdrawn and had not been replaced.
Not knowing whither to go to make inquiries, I loitered idly about some little time longer, in the hope that chance might throw some one who could direct me in my way.
Within my vision two mounds only stood out stark and sterile from the tangled green of Death’s garden, and one was Modred’s and the other the grave of the murdered man.
It was only a strange chance, of course, yet a strange chance it was that should smite those two out of all the yard with barrenness.
As I turned I was aware of a bent old man issuing from a side door of the church with a bunch of keys in his hand. To him I walked and addressed my inquiries.
“Ah!” he said, struggling out of a violent fit of coughing. “George White, sir? The man’s dismissed for drunkenness. To my sorrer, so it is. I has to do his work till they finds a substitoot. It’ll be the death of me this chill autumn.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“He ain’t app’inted yet.”
“George White, I mean?”
“He lives, if living he is, ower at Fullflood yonder. I misremember the number, but it’s either 17 or 27, or mebbe 74. They’ll tell you if you ask. Not but what I’d leave him alone, if I was you, for he’ll do you no good.”
“He can’t do me any harm, at least. I think I’ll try.”
“Go your courses, then. Young men are that bold-blooded. Go your courses. You can’t miss if you follers my directions.”
I had my own opinion as to that, but I tramped off to the district indicated, which lay in the western quarter of the town. Chance put out a friendly hand to me.
I had paused in indecision, when a woman standing at an open door behind me hailed another who was coming down the pavement with a little basket over her arm.
“Good-arternoon, Mrs. White,” said the first wife as the other came up. “And how did ye find your marn?”
I pricked up my ears.
“No better and no worse, Mrs. Catty, and tharnk ye kindly.”
“The horrers has left him, I’m told.”
“Ye’re told true, but little recommends the going. His face is the color o’ my apron here—an awesome sight. It’s the music membrim in his stommick, ’tis said that’s out o’ toon.”
“Ah, ma dear, I know it. It’s what the doctors call an orgin; and the pain is grinding.”
“God bless ye—it’s naught to what it were. ’Tis the colic o’ the mind he suffers, one may say.”
“Deary me, deary me! Poor Mr. White!”
“I left him a-sitting before the infirmary fire in a happythetic state, they names it, though to my mind he looked wretched.”
“And so must you be to harve your marn in the house. Well, well—and dismissed from his post, too, come rain or sunshine.”
I hurried off, satisfied with what I had heard. If the woman with the basket was not the sexton’s wife, there was no happy fortuity in fate. For a moment I had thought I would address myself to her, but the reflection that no good purpose could be answered thereby, and that by doing so I might awaken suspicions where none existed, made me think better of it.
Expanding her allusions, I writ down in my mind that George White, taken in hand by the police, had been remanded to the workhouse infirmary pending his recovery from an attack of delirium tremens, and such I found to be the case. Now the hope of getting anything in the nature of conclusive proof from him seemed remote. At least no harm could be done by me paying him a visit.
Fortunately I discovered, upon presenting myself at the “house,” that it was a visitors’ day, and that a margin yet remained of the time limit imposed upon callers.
I was referred to the infirmary doctor—a withered stick of a man, with an unprofessional beard the color and texture of dead grass. This gentleman’s broadcloth, reversing the order of things, seemed to have worn out him, instead of he it, so sleek, imposing and many sizes too large for him were his clothes.
He listened with his teeth, it seemed, for his lip went up, exposing them every time he awaited an answer.
“George White? The man’s in a state of melancholia following alcoholic excess. He is only a responsible creature at moments, and has hallucinations. I doubt his recovery.”
“I might take my chance of one of the moments, sir.”
“You might, if you could recognize your opportunity. Is it important?”
“Very. That’s no idle assertion, I assure you. He only knows the truth of a certain matter, the solution of which affects many people.”
“Well, you can try. I give you little hope. An attendant must be within reach. There’s no calculating the next crazy impulse in such cases.”
An attendant took me in charge and convoyed me to the infirmary—a cleanly bare room, with a row of bedsteads headed against a distempered wall, and nailed to the latter over each patient’s pillow, a diagnosis of his disease and its treatment, like a descriptive label in a museum.
Some of the beds were occupied; a convalescent pallid figure or two lingered about the sunny windows at the end of the room, and seated solitary before the fire was the foundering wreck of George White.
The attendant briefly said, “That’s him,” and, retiring a short distance away, leaned against a bedstead rail. I fetched a chair from the wall and sat myself down by the poor shattered ruin.
A hopeless vacuity reigned in his expression at first, and presently he began to maunder and dribble forth a liquid patter of words all unintelligible.
By and by some connectedness was apparent in his wanderings. I stooped my head to listen.
“He’s alone and asleep—the only one. Time to try—sarftly, now—a fut i’ the toe-hole wi’ caution—and I’m up and out. Curse the crumbling clay. Ah! a bit’s fell on him! My God, what a grin! One eye’s open! If I cud sweat to moisten it, now! I’m dry wi’ fire and dust! I’m farlin’ back—I’m——”
He half-rose to his feet; I put out a hand to control him, but he sunk down again and into apathy in a moment.
A few minutes and the stream of words was flowing once more.
“Not so deep—not so deep, arter all. The tails o’ the warms wriggles on the coffin, while their heads be stuck out i’ the blessed air. Two fut, I make it. I cud putt my harnd through, so be as this cruel lid would heist up. It’s breaking—the soil’s coming through the cracks. It’s pouring in and choking me—it’s choking me, I say. Isn’t there none to hear? Why, I’m sinking! The subsoil’s dropped in! I shall be ten fut down and no chance if——”
Again the struggle; again the collapse; and by and by, the monotonous murmur gathering volume as it proceeded.
“Sing, says you—and the devil drums i’ the pit if I so much as whisper. Look’ee ther—at the white square o’ the sky. Thart’s what keeps me going. If you was to blot thart out, he’d have me by the hip wi’ a pinch like a bloodhound’s jaw. There’s summut darkens! Who’s thart a-looking down? Why, you bloody murderer, I knows you! I found you out, I did, you ugly cutthroat devil. Already dead, says you? Who kills dead men? There bain’t a thing i’ the warld I’d hold my tongue for but drink—you gie it me, then. What’s this? The bottle’s swarming wi’ maggots—arnts, black arnts. You’re a rare villain! Not a doctor, I say. A doctor don’t cut the weasands o’ dead men and let out the worms—millions of them—and there’s some wi’ faces and shining rings and gewgaws. The ungodly shall go down into the pit—help me out o’ it—they’re burying me alive!”
He leaped to his feet, with drawn, ashy face. The watchful attendant was at his side in a moment and had put a restraining hand on him.
“You’ll get nought out of him, sir,” he said. “It’s my belief he’ll never utter sane word again.”
As he spoke the sexton’s eyes lighted on me in their wild roving, steadied, flickered and took a little glint of reason. Still gazing at me, he sunk into his chair again.
“Leave us alone for a minute,” I said to the man. “He seems to recognize me, I think.”
“As long as his eyes don’t wander, maybe,” he answered. “Keep ’em fixed on you”—and he withdrew to his former standpoint.
“George,” I said, in a low, distinct voice, “do you know me?”
I held him with an intense gaze. He seemed struggling in an inward agony to escape it.
“George,” I said again, “do you know who I am?”
“The grave yon, where no grass grows,” he muttered.
“Yes, yes. Why doesn’t it grow there?”
“Ask the——”
“Ask whom? I’m listening.”
“It’s he—oh, my God!”
I saw the terror creep and flutter behind the surface of his skin. I saw it leap out and heard a yell, as his eyes escaped their thraldom; and on the instant the attendant was there and struggling with him.
In the shock of it I jumped up and turned—and saw Dr. Crackenthorpe standing in the doorway.
I ran at him in a sort of frenzy.
“What do you want?” I cried; “what are you here for?”
I think I was about to strike him, when the wizened figure of the doctor who had given me permission to enter thrust itself between us.
“What’s all this?” he said, in a sharp, grating voice. “How dare you make this uproar, sir?”
I fell back, shaking with rage. All down the row of beds pale sick faces had risen, looking on in wonder. Beside the fire my escort was still struggling with the madman.
“What right has he to be here—to come and spy upon me?” I cried.
“This is simply outrageous! Dr. Crackenthorpe” (he glanced at the newcomer with no very flattering expression) “is here to superintend the removal of a patient of his. He must be protected from insult. I rescind my permit. Johnson, see this man off the premises.”
A second attendant advanced and took me, police fashion, by the elbow. I offered no resistance. Impulse had made a fool of me, and I felt it.
The sound of the scuffle by the fire still continued. As I passed Dr. Crackenthorpe he made me a mocking bow, hat in hand. Then, waving me aside as if I were some troublesome supplicant he desired to ignore, he advanced further into the room.
Then came a sudden thud and loud exclamation, at which both I and my attendant turned.
The madman had bested his enemy and dashed him to the floor. A moment then he paused, his gasping mouth and pale eyes indicative of his terror of the man approaching—a moment only, and he turned and fled. I was conscious of a sudden breaking out of voices—of a fearful screech ringing above them—of a hurried rush of shapes—of a bound and crash and shattering snap of glass. It all happened in an instant, and there was a jagged and gaping fissure in a window at the end of the room—and George White was gone.
I fully expected to be summoned as a witness to the inquest held on George White. However, as it turned out, they left me alone, and for that I was thankful, though indeed I had little to fear from any cross-examination; and Dr. Crackenthorpe would hardly have ventured under the circumstances to use his professional influence to my discomfiture, seeing that I had shown knowledge of the fact that between him and the dead man was once, at least, some species of understanding. So he gave his version of the affair, without any reference to me, who indeed could hardly in any way be held responsible for the catastrophe.
And now he lay dead, the latest victim of the inquisition of the wheel, I most fully believed; a poor wretch withered under its ban that would reach, it seemed, to agents but remotely connected with the dark history of its immediate neighbors. He was dead, and with him, I could but think, had passed my one chance of probing the direful mystery in that direction where the core of it festered.
Thereafter for weeks I walked in a stubborn rebellion against fate, intensified by the thought that this stultifying of my purpose had come upon me on the heels of my triumphant mastery of that old weird influence of the mill—a triumph that had seemed to pronounce me the very chosen champion of truth to whom all ways to the undoing of the wicked should be revealed.
But, now, as the month drew to its close, a new anxiety came to humble me with the pathos of the world, and to assimilate all restless emotions into one pale fog of silence, gray and sorrowful.
On a certain morning, looking in my father’s face when I brought him his breakfast, I read something there, the import of which I would not consider or dwell upon until I could escape and commune with myself alone.
There was little external change in him and he was bright and cheerful. It was only a certain sudden sense of withdrawal that struck a chill into me—a sense as if life, seeking to steal unobserved from its ancient prison, knew itself noticed and affected to be dallying simply with the rusted locks and bolts.
Realizing this presently to the full, I determined then and there to put everything else to one side and to devote myself single-handed to the tender ministering to his last days upon earth. And grief and sadness were mingled in me, for I loved the old man and could not but rejoice that the inevitable should come to him so peacefully. But prospect of the utter loneliness that would fall upon me when he was gone woke a selfish resentment that he should be taken from me and fought in my heart for mastery over the better emotion.
Did he know? Not certainly, perhaps, for slowly dying men give little thought to the way they wander. But something in the prospect opening out before him must, I think, have struck him with a dawning marvel at its strangeness; as a sleeper, wakened from a weird romance of dreaming, finds a wonder of unfamiliarity in the world restored to him.
It may have been that some increase of care on my part making itself apparent was the first warning to him that all was not as it used to be, for there came a night when he called to me as I was leaving his room—after seeing him comfortably established—in a voice with a queer ring of emotion in it.
“What is it, dad?” I asked, hurrying back to his bedside.
“I’m wakeful to-night, my lad; well and easy, but wakeful.”
“Shall I stop with you a bit longer?”
I saw he wished it and sat myself down upon the foot of the bed.
“Good lad,” he said. “I don’t deserve all this, Renalt. It should be a blank and empty thing to review a life spent in idleness and self-indulgence. I ought to feel that, and yet I’m at peace. Why wasn’t I of your militant philosophers, who treating love like any other luxury, find salve for the bitter sting of it in a brave independence of righteousness!”
“As well ask, dad, why in battle the bullets spare some and mangle others.”
“You mean the faculty of overriding fate is constitutional, not a courageous theory, Renalt?”
“Yet I think your philosopher would be the first to acknowledge its truth.”
“Of course. He’d have a principle to prove. But I can’t gather consolation there for having wittingly sunk myself to the beasts.”
“Dad!”
“Why should I mince matters? Let me look at you full face. I have never been a liar, but I’ve chosen to deceive myself into the belief that mere brute self-indulgence was a fine revolt against the tyranny of the gods.”
“It may have been nature’s counter-irritant to unbearable suffering.”
“Sophistry, my boy. It’s out of the kindness of your heart, but it’s sophistry. Better to die shrieking under the knife than to live to be a hopeless, disfigured cripple. Look at me lying here. What heritage of virtue, what example of endurance, shall I leave to my children?”
“You have never complained.”
“No comfort, Renalt—none. I nursed my resentment from base fear only that by revealing it, it would dissipate. With such a belief I have to face the Supreme Court up there; and”—he looked at me earnestly—“before very long, I think.”
I shook my head in silence. I could find no word to say.
“Am I afraid?” he went on, still intently regarding me. “I think not—at present. Yet I have some bitter charges to answer.”
“This rest will restore you again, dad.”
He did not seem to hear me. His eyes left my face and he continued in a murmuring voice:
“The last dispossession the old suffer is sleep, it seems. Balm in Gilead—balm in Gilead!”
“What little breath will keep the spark alive,” I thought as I sat and watched the worn quiet figure. The face looked as if molded out of wax and so moved me that presently I must rise and bend over it, thinking the end had actually come while I watched.
With my rising, however, a sigh broke from it, and a little stir of the limbs, so that my heart that had fallen leaped up again with gladness. Then he looked up at me standing above him, and a smile passed like a gleam of sunlight over his features.
“I always loved you, my son Renalt,” he murmured, and, murmuring, fell into a light trance once more.
The following day there was no change in his condition. I could have thought him floating out of life on that tide of dreaming thoughts that seemed to bear him up so gently and so easily. When, at moments, he would rise to consciousness of my presence, he would nod to me and smile; and again sink back on the pillow of gracious somnolence.
I had been sitting reading to myself in my father’s room and all was glowing silence about me, when a sudden clap at the window-casement made me start. I jumped to my feet and looked out. A vast gloomy curtain of cloud was drawing up from the east; even as I looked, some shafts of its bitterness drove through the joints of the lattice, stabbing at me with points of ice, and I shivered, though the sunlight was still upon me.
The storm came on with incredible speed; within five minutes of my rising clouds of hail were flogging the streets, and from a whirling fog of night jangle of innumerable voices hooting and whistling broke like a besieging cloud of Goths upon the ancient capital.
For ten minutes, during which the city was blind with hail, I could see nothing but a thicket of white strings dense as the threads in a loom; hear nothing but the pounding crash of thunder and fierce hiss and clatter of the driving stones. Then darkness gathered within and without, and down came the storm with an access of fury that seemed verily as if it must flatten out the town like a scattered ants’ nest.
So infernal for the moment was the uproar that I hurried to my father’s side, fearful that his soul might actually yield itself to the raging tyranny of its surroundings.
He lay unmoved in the same quiet stupor of the faculties, unconscious, apparently, that anything out of nature’s custom was enacting near him.
As suddenly as it had begun, the white deluge ceased, as though the last of its reservoirs above were emptied. The reaction to comparative silence was so intense that in the first joy of it one scarcely harkened to the voice of a great wind that had risen and was following on the heels of the storm, to batten like a camp follower on the wreckage of the battle that had swept by. For four weary days it flew, going past like an endless army, and laden clouds were its parks of artillery and the swords of its bitterness never rested in their scabbards.
On that first evening, when the hailstorm had passed and light was restored, I was standing by the window looking out on the bridge and the street all freckled with white, when a low moaning sound came to my ears. I turned sharply round, thinking it was my father, but he lay peaceful and motionless. I hurried to the door and opened it, and there in the passage outside was old Peggy, cast down upon her face, and groaning and muttering in a pitiful manner.
I gave her a little ungallant peck with my foot.
“Now!” I cried, “what’s this? What are you doing?”
Her face was hidden on her arm and she spoke up mumblingly.
“Oh!” she said; “Lord—Lord! It bain’t worthy o’ you!”
“What’s the matter, I say?”
“Take the clean and well-preserved! There’s better fish than a poor feckless old ’ooman all fly blown like a carkis wi’ ungodliness!”
I gave her another little stir.
“I repent!” she shrieked. “I’ll confess everything! Only spare me now. Gie me a month—two months, to prepare my sore wicked soul for the felon’s grave.”
“Peggy,” I said, sternly, “get up and don’t make a fool of yourself.”
She seemed to listen.
“Is that you, Renalt?” she said, presently.
“Get up—do you hear?”
“Keep the bolt fro’ me. Pray to the Lord for a bad old ’ooman. Wrastle for me, Renalt.”
“Are you crazy?”
She bumped her elbows on the floor as she lay, in fretful terror.
“Wrastle—wrastle!” she whined. “Don’t waste your breath on axing things. While you talk He enters.”
“Who enters?”
“The Lord of hosts. I saw His face at the window, and the breath o’ His nostrils was like the sound o’ guns. I arlays meant to repent—I swear it on the blessed book. It’s a wicked thing to compact wi’ the prince o’ darkness. Believe me, truth, I arlays meant it, but the pot must be boiled and the beds made and where were old Peggy’s time? You wudn’t smite a body, Lord, for caring of her dooties, and I repent now. It’s never too late over one sinner doing penance. Oh, Lord, take the young and well-favored and gie crass Rottengoose a month for her sins!”
“Peggy, I haven’t a doubt you’ve plenty to do penance for. But have you really the stupendous assurance to think that all this storm is got up on your account? Get up, you old idiot! The thunder’s past and there’s nothing to be afraid of now.”
Her lean body went in with a great sigh. For some moments she lay as she was; then cautiously twisted her head and peered up at me.
“Sakes alive!” she muttered, listening. “Was it all for nowt, then?”
I saw the craft come back to her withered eyes in the dusk.
“Heave me up, Renalt,” she said. “The Lord has seen the wisdom o’ let alone, praise to His mercy.”
“Don’t presume on that, Peggy. He’ll call to you at His own time, though it mayn’t be through a thunderstorm.”
“Look to yourself, Renalt. The young twigs snap easiest. You may be the first to go, wi’ the load o’ guilt you gathered in London yon for company.”
“Very likely. You asked me to pray for you just now, you know. What’s on your mind, Peggy Rottengoose?”
I had the old sinner to her feet by this time. Her face was a yellow, haggard thing to look at—shining like stained brass. Something in it seemed to convey to me that perhaps after all the angel of the storm had struck at her in passing.
She looked at me morosely and fearfully.
“What but ministering to Satan’s children?” she said.
“You graceless old villain, I’ve a mind to pitch you into the race.”
I made a clutch at her as I spoke, but she evaded me with a wriggle and a shrill screech.
“I didn’t mean it! Let me go by!”
“What have you got to repent of in the first place?”
“I was stealing the pictur’ o’ Modred—there! No peace ha’ I hard since I done it!”
I let the old liar pass, and she shuffled away, hugging herself and glancing round at me once or twice as if she still doubted the meaning of my threat. I paid no more attention to her, but returned to my father’s room.
The old man lay on his back placid and unconcerned, but his eyes were open and he greeted me with a cheerful little nod.
Darkness deepened in the room, and the white face on the pillow became a luminous spot set weirdly in the midst of it. I had not once till then, I think, admitted a single feeling of disloyalty toward my father to my heart. Now a little unaccountable stirring of impatience and resentment awoke in me. I was under some undefinable nervous influence, and was surely not true to myself in the passing of the mood. It seemed suddenly a monstrous thing to me that he, the prime author of all that evil destiny that had haunted our lives, should be fading peacefully toward the grave, while we must needs live on to outface and adjust the ugly heritage of responsibilities that were the fruits of his selfish policy of inaction.
Such sudden swift reactions from a long routine of endurance are humanly inevitable. They may flame up at a word, a look, a shying thought—the spark of divinity glowing with indignation over intolerable injustice. Then the dull decorum of earth stamps it under again and we go on as before.
During that spell of rebellion, my soul passed in review the incidents of a cruel visitation of a father’s sins upon his children. I saw the stunted minds meanly nurtured in an atmosphere of picturesque skepticism. I saw the natural outgrowth of this in a reckless indifference to individual responsibility. Following thereon came one by one the impulse to triumph by evil—the unchecked desire—the shameless deed—the road, the river and the two lonely graves.
I rose to my feet and paced the room to and fro, casting a resentful glance now and again at the quiet figure on the bed. Driven to quick desperation I strode to the door, opened it and descended the stairs.
In the blaze of my anger I burst into the haunted room, thinking to stay the monster with the mere breath of my fury. But the cold blackness drove at me, and, for all my confidence, repelled me on the very threshold.
I rushed away to the sluice, let it fall and shut off the race. Then I returned, breathless and panting, and looked at the open door.
“You’re a very material devil,” I muttered; “a boy could silence your voice, for all its boastfulness.”
As I spoke, again a little ugly secret laugh seemed to issue from it. Probably it was only an expiring screech of the axle, but it made my blood run tingling for all that.
I mounted the stairs, determinedly crushing down the demon of fear that sought to unman me.
“I have silenced its hateful voice,” I cried to myself, and whispered it again as I re-entered my father’s room.
The old man lay silent and motionless as I seated myself once more by the window. Now the great blasts of tempest held monopoly of the ghostly house, unpierced of that other voice that had been like the grinding of the teeth of the storm.
Presently I heard him stirring restlessly in his bed, and little fitful moans came from his lips. His uneasiness increased; he muttered and threw his arms constantly into fresh positions. Could it be that my untoward silencing of that voice that for such long years had been his counselor and familiar was making a vacancy in his soul into which deadlier demons were stealing?
I moved to the bed and looked down upon him. As I did so the old tenderness reasserted itself and the mood of blackness passed away. If he had bequeathed to us a dark heritage of suffering, it is by suffering that the soul climbs from the bestial pitfalls of the senses.
As I leaned down to cover his chest that his restless tossing had bared, a second tempest of hail swept furiously upon the town. I ran to the window and looked out. In the flashing radiance of the lamp that stood upon the bridge opposite—for night was now settled upon the city—I saw the tumult of white beat upon the stones and rebound from them and thrash all the road, as it were, with froth.
Suddenly a figure started up in the midst of the flickering curtain of ice. It was there in a moment—waving its wild arms—wringing its hands—shrieking, I could have fancied, though no sound came to me. But, in the wonder and instant of its rising, I knew it to be Duke’s.
Hardly had I mastered the first shock of surprise when there came the sound of a great cry behind me. I turned, and there was my father sitting up in bed, and his face was ghastly.
“The wheel!” he shrieked, in a suffocating voice; “the wheel! I’m under it!” And fell back upon his pillow.
It was not immediate death that had alighted, but death’s forerunner, paralysis. I realized this in a moment. The mute and stricken figure; the closed eyes; the darkly flushed face wrenched to the right and the flapping breath issuing one-sided from the lips—I needed no experience to read the meaning of these.
I ran to the head of the stairs and shrieked to old Peggy to come up. Then I hurried to the dressing-table and lighted a candle that stood thereon. As I took it in my hand to approach the bed, a pane in the lattice behind me went with a splintering noise, and something whizzed past my head like a hornet, and a fragment of plaster spun from the wall near. At the same instant a little muffled sound, no louder in the tumult of hail than the smack of an elastic band on paper, came from the street outside.
Instinctively I winced and dodged, not knowing for the moment what had happened, then in the midst of my distraction, fury seized me like a snake.
The blind was up; my figure plainly visible from the bridge as I crossed the room. The madman outside had shot at me, whether from pure deviltry or because he took me for Jason I neither knew nor cared. Coming on the head of my trouble, the deed seemed wantonly diabolical. Had I been master of my actions I think I should then and there have rushed forth and grappled with the evil creature and crushed the life out of him. As it was I ran to the window and dashed it open and leaned forth.
He was there on the bridge still; standing up in the pelting storm; bare-headed, fantastic—a thing of nameless expression.
I shrieked to him and cursed him. I menaced him with my fists. For the moment I was near as much madman as he.
Perhaps some words of my outcry reached him through the hurtling of the storm. Perhaps he recognized me, for I saw him shrink down and cower behind the stones of the bridge. I rattled to the window, pulled down the blind and turned myself to the stricken figure on the bed. As I did so old Peggy came breathing and shambling into the room.
“What’s to do?” she said, coughing feebly and glaring at me. “What’s to do, Renalt?”
“Look there! What’s happened—what’s the matter with him? It is death, perhaps!”
She shuffled to the bedside, holding in her groaning chest with one hand. For a minute she must have stood gazing down.
“Ay,” she said at last, leering round at me. “The Lord mistook the room, looking in at winder. Ralph it was were wanted—not old Peggy, praise to His goodness.”
“Is he dying?”
“Maybe—maybe not yet awhile. The dumbstroke have tuk him.”
“Paralysis?”
“So they carls it. Better ax the doctor.”
“Look you to him, then, and look well, while I run out to seek for one. I leave him in your charge.”
I took her by the arm and stared in her face as I spoke. My expression must have been frowning and threatening, but indeed I mistrusted the old vagabond. She shrunk from me with a twitch of fear.
“He’ll come round wi’ his face to the judgment,” she said; and I left her standing by the bedside and hurried from the house.
Leaving the yard, I turned sharply round upon the bridge. The storm had yielded, but the ground was yet thickly strewed with white. Not a soul seemed to be abroad. Only low down against the parapet of the bridge was a single living thing, and it crouched huddled as if the storm had claimed a victim before it passed.
My brain still burned with fury over the foul action that had so nearly sent me from my father in his utmost need. I could think of nothing at the moment but revenge, of nothing but that I must sweep this horror into the river before I could hope to deal collectedly with the fatality that had befallen me. I only feared that it would escape me, and leaped on it, mad with rage.
I tore him up to his feet and held him from me with a savage gaze, and he looked at me with a dark, amazed stare, but there was no terror in his eyes. And even as I held him I saw in the dim lamplight how worn and haggard he had grown, how sunken was his white face, how fearfully the monomania of revenge had rent him with its jagged teeth.
“You dog!” I said. “You end in the millrace here—do you understand? You are a murderer in will and would have been in deed if your aim had answered true to your devil’s heart! Down with you!”
I closed with him, but he still struggled to hold me off.
“I thought it was he—the other. He’s left London. He must be here somewhere.”
There was no deprecation in his tone. He spoke in a small dry voice and with an air as if none could doubt that he was justified in his pursuit and must stand aside or suffer by it rather than that it should cease.
“Where he is I neither know nor care,” I answered, set and stern. “You’ve raised your hand to me at last, dog that you are, and that’s my concern. I should have known at first—that it’s useless arguing mercy with a devil.”
I had my arms round him like steel bands. Once he might have been my match, or better, but not now in his state of physical degeneration.
“Yes, end it,” he whispered. “I always thought to die by water as she did. The chase here is exhausting me. I can finish my task more effectively from the other side the grave.”
I gave a mocking laugh.
“You shall purge your hate in fire, there,” I said. “Ghostly revenge on the living is an old wives’ tale.”
He struggled to force an arm free and pointed down at the foaming mill-tail.
“There’s a voice there,” he cried, “that says otherwise. I read it, and so do you, for all your shaking heroics. Fling me down! I escape the self-destruction that was to come. Fling me down and end it!”
I tightened my arms about him. The first desperate fury of my mood was leading me and with it the impulse to murder. The wan, once-dear features were appealing to me against their will and mine.
Suddenly, while I wavered, an appalling screech burst from him; he wrenched himself free of me with one mad superhuman effort, struck out at the empty air, and turned and fled across the bridge and up toward the hill beyond. In a moment he was lost to sight in the darkness.
In the shock of his escape I twisted about to see what had so moved him—and, not a yard behind me, was standing Dr. Crackenthorpe.
For many seconds we stared at one another speechless and motionless. His face was pale and set very grimly.
At last he spoke, and “Murder!” was the word he muttered.
“He runs fast for a murdered man,” I said, with a sneer.
“Who was it?” he said, gazing with a strange, fixed expression up the dark blown hill.
“A ghost,” I answered, with a reckless laugh. “The town is full of them to-night.”
He looked at me gloomily. I could have thought he shivered slightly.
“Do you know him?”
“He was my friend once. Stand out of my way. I’ve an errand on hand. My father’s had a seizure.”
“Had a—come, I’ll go see him.”
“You won’t. I won’t have you near him. Stand out of my way.”
“You’re a fool. Promptness is everything in such cases.”
I hesitated. For what his professional opinion was worth, this man had always stood to us as adviser in such small ailments as we suffered. I had no notion where to seek another. My father would be unconscious of his presence. At least he could pronounce upon the nature of the stroke.
“Very well,” I said, ungraciously. “You can see him and judge what’s the matter.”
The old man was lying as I had left him when we entered the bedroom. His eyes were still closed, and his breathing sounded hard and stertorious.
“He’s mortal bad, sir,” Peggy said. “He’ll die hard, I do believe.”
Dr. Crackenthorpe waved her away and bent over the prostrate figure. As he did so its eyelids seemed to flicker, as if with dread consciousness of his approach.
“Be quick!” I said. “What has happened?”
He felt the dying pulse; bent his yellow face and listened at the heart. He was some minutes occupied.
Presently he rose and came to me, all formal and professional.
“You must prepare for the worst,” he said. “He may speak again by and by, but I doubt it. In my opinion it is a question of a few days only. No medical skill can avail.”
“Is there nothing I can do?”
“Nothing.”
He bowed to me stiffly.
“I am at your service,” he said, in a cold voice. “If I can be of any further use to you, you will let me know. You are not ignorant of where to find me, I believe.”
He was walking to the door, but turned and came toward me again.
“That one-time friend of yours,” he said. “Is he stopping in the town?”
“I really don’t know, Dr. Crackenthorpe. I met him by chance, and you saw he ran from me. You seem interested in him.”
“He—yes; he struck me as bearing a likeness to a—to a patient I once attended. Good-night.”
My escape from that strong net of fatality that had enmeshed so many years of my still young life, had been, it seemed, only a merciful respite. Now the toils, regathering about me again, woke a spirit of hopeless resignation in me that had been foreign to my earlier mood of resistance. Man has made of himself so plodding an animal as to almost resent the unreality of his brief vacations. He eats his way, like a wood-boring larva, through a monotonous tunnel of routine, satisfied with the thought that some day he may emerge into the light on the other side, ready-winged for flight to the garden of paradise. Perhaps Lazarus was humanly far-seeing in refusing the rich man a drop of water. It would have made the poor wretch’s after lot tenfold more unendurable.
Now a feeling came over me that I could struggle no more, but would lie in the web and suffer unresisting the onsets of fate. My father’s seizure; Duke’s reappearance and his hint as to the visit I was to expect from Jason; the sudden flight of the cripple before the vision of Dr. Crackenthorpe—all these were strands about my soul with which I would concern myself no longer. I would do my duty, so far as I could, and set my face in one direction and glance aside no more.
That night I ordered Peggy to bed—for since Jason’s going she slept in the house—and myself passed the dreary vigil of the hours by my father’s side. Indeed, for the three days following I scarcely lay down at all, but took my food in snatches and slept by fits and starts in chairs or window-corners as occasion offered.
During the whole of this time the condition of the patient never altered. He lay on his back, breathing crookedly from his twisted mouth; his eyes closed; the whole of the right side of his body stricken motionless. His left hand he would occasionally move and that was the single sign of animate life he showed.
And day and night the wind blew and the hail and rain came down in a cold and ceaseless deluge. The whole country was flooded, I heard, and the streams risen, but still the rending storm flew and added devastation to misery.
It was on the afternoon of the third day that, chancing to look at the old man as I sat by his bedside, I saw, with a certain shock of pleasure, that his eyes were open and fixed upon my face. I jumped to my feet and leaned over him, and at that some shadow of emotion passed across his features, as if the angel of death stood between him and the window.
Presently his left hand, that lay on the coverlet, began moving. The fingers twitched with a beckoning motion and he raised his arm several times and let it fall again listlessly. I fancied I was conscious of some dumb appeal addressed to me, toward which my own soul yearned in sympathy. Yet, strive as I would, I could not interpret it. An inexpressible trouble seemed lost and wandering in the fathomless depths of the eyes; passionate utterance seemed ever hovering on the lips, ever escaping the grasp of will and sliding back into blackness.
“Dad,” I said, “what is it? Try to express by a sign and I will try to understand.”
The hand rose again, weakly fluttered in the air and dropped upon the coverlet. Thrice the effort was made and thrice I failed to interpret its significance. Then a little quivering sigh came from the mouth and the eyes closed in exhaustion.
I racked my brains for the meaning of the sign. Some trouble, it was evident, sought expression, but what—what—what? My mind was all dulled and confused by the incidents of the last few days.
While I was vainly struggling for a solution old Peggy entered the room with tea and bread and butter for my afternoon meal. She paused with the tray in her hands, watching the blind groping of the fingers on the bed.
“Ay,” she said, “but I doubt me ye cudn’t hold a pen, master.”
I turned sharply to her.
“Is that what he wants?”
“Pen or pencil—’tis arl one. When speech goes, we talk wi’ the fingers.”
What a fool I had been! The sign I had struggled in vain for hours to read, this uncanny old beldame had understood at a glance.
I hurried out of the room and returned with paper and pencil. I thrust the latter between the wandering fingers and they closed over it with a quick, weak snap. But they could not retain it, and it slipped from them again upon the coverlet. A moan broke from the lips and the arm beat the clothes feebly.
“Heave en up,” said the old woman. “He’s axing ye to.”
I put my arm under my father’s shoulders and with a strong effort got him into a sitting posture, propped among the pillows. I placed the pencil in his hand again and held the paper in such a position that he could write upon it. He succeeded in making a few hieroglyphic scratches on the white surface and that was all.
“It’s no manner o’ use, Renalt,” said Peggy. “Better lat en alone and drink up your tea.”
“Put it down there and leave us to ourselves.”
The old creature did as she was bidden and shuffled from the room grumbling.
I placed the paper where my father’s hand could rest upon it, and sat down to my silent meal.
Presently, watching, as I ate, the weak restless movements of the hand upon the quilt, a thought occurred to me, which then and there I resolved to put into practice. It was evident that, unless through an unexpected renewal of strength, those dying fingers would never succeed in forming a legible word with the pencil they could barely hold. But they could make a sign of themselves and that little power I must seek to direct.
I hurried down to the kitchen and seized from the wall an ancient bone tablet that Peggy used for domestic memoranda. Scraping a little soot from the chimney I mixed it with water into a thick paste and spread a thin layer of the latter over the surface of the tablet. It dried almost immediately, and writing on it with the tip of my finger, I found that the soot came readily away, leaving the mark I had made stenciled white and clear under the upper coating.
Returning to my father, with this extemporized first principle and the saucer of black paste, I held the tablet before his dim, wandering eyes, and wrote on it with my finger, demonstrating the method. At first he hardly seemed to comprehend my meaning, but, after a repetition or two his glance concentrated and his forehead seemed to ripple into little wrinkles of intelligence. At that I smeared the surface of the bone afresh, waited a minute for it to dry, and placed it under his hand upon the bed, leaving him to evolve the method from his poor crippled inner consciousness.
But a few moments had elapsed when a small, low sound from the bed brought me to my father’s side.
He looked from me to the tablet, where it lay, and there was a strained imploring line between his eyes. Gently I took up the little black square and I saw that something was formed on it. With infinite toil, for it was only his left hand he could use, he had scratched on it a single, straggling word, and in the fading light I read it:
“Forgive.”
“Father!” I cried; “is that what you have been striving to say?”
He dragged up his unstricken arm slowly into an attitude as if the hand sought its fellow to join it in a prayer to me.
“Before God,” I said, “you wrong me to think I could say that word! What have I to forgive you for? My sins have been my own, and they have met with their just reward. Am I to forgive you for loving me? Dad—dad! I have known so little love that I can’t afford to wrong yours by a thought. Look! I will blot this out, that you may know my heart has nothing but tenderness in it for you!”
I snatched up the tablet and smeared out the cruel word and placed the blank surface under his hand again. He was looking at me all the time with the same dim anguished expression, and now his head sunk back on the pillow and a tear rolled down his face.
Night came upon me sitting there, and presently, overcome by emotion and weariness, I fell over upon the foot of the bed and sunk into a profound sleep. For hours I lay unconscious and it was broad day in the room when I awoke with a sudden start.
Realizing in a moment how I had betrayed my vigil, I leaped to my feet with a curse at my selfishness and looked down upon my father. He was lying back, sunk in a wan exhausted sleep, and under its influence his features seemed to have somewhat resumed their normal expression.
But it appeared he had again been scrawling on the tablets, with the first of the dawn, probably; and these were the broken words thereon that stared whitely up at me:
“I murd Mored.”
For a minute or more I must have stood gazing down on the damning words, unmoving, breathless almost. Then I glanced at the quiet face on the pillow and back again to the tablet I held in my hand.
I am glad to know—proud, in the little pride I may call mine—that at that supreme moment I stood stanch; that I cried to myself: “It is a lie, born of his disease! He never did it!” That I dashed the tablet back upon the bed and that my one overwhelming thought was: “How may I defend this poor soul from himself?”
That he might die in peace with his conscience—that was the end of my desire. Yet how was I, knowing so little, to convince him? Disproof I had none, but only assurance of sympathy and a moral certainty that a nature so constituted could never lend itself to so horrible a deed.
In the midst of my confusion of thought a sudden idea woke in me and quickened into a resolve. I went swiftly out of the room, down the stairs, and walked in upon old Peggy mumbling her bread and milk in the kitchen. I was going out for awhile, I told her, and bade her listen for any sound upstairs that might betoken uneasiness on the part of the patient.
For the time being there was no rain to greet me as I stepped outside, but the wind still blew boisterously from the east, and the sky was all drawn and wrapt in a doleful swaddle of cloud. Sternly and without hesitation I made my way to the house of Dr. Crackenthorpe. An anaemic, cross-looking servant girl was polishing what remained of the handle of the front door with a tattered doeskin glove.
“Is the doctor inside?” I said to her.
She left the glove sticking on the handle like a frouzy knocker, and stood upright looking down upon me.
“What do you want with him?” she said.
“I wish to see him on private business.”
“He’s at his breakfast. He won’t thank you for troubling him now.”
“I don’t want him to thank me. I wish to see him, that’s all.”
“Well, then, you can’t—and that’s all.”
I pushed past her and walked into the hall and she followed me clamoring.
The ugly voice I knew well called from a back room I had not yet been into: “What’s that?”
I turned the handle and walked in. He was seated before a stained and dinted urn of copper, and a great slice of toast from which he had just bitten a jagged semicircle was in his hand.
“I told him you was at breakfast,” said the cross girl, “but nothing ’ud suit his lordship but to drive his elbow into my chest and walk in.”
She emphasized her little lie with a pressure of her hand upon the presumably wounded part.
“Assault and battery,” said the doctor, showing his teeth. “Get out of my house, fellow.”
“After I’ve had a word with you.”
“Eh? Edith, go and fetch a constable.”
“Certainly,” I said. “The very thing I should like. I’ll wait here till he comes.”
He called to the girl as she was running out: “Wait a bit! Leave the fellow with me and shut the door.”
She obeyed sulkily and we were alone together.
He went on with his breakfast with an affectation of unconcern and took no notice of me whatever.
“I believe you wished me to let you know, Dr. Crackenthorpe, if I should be in further need of your services?”
He swallowed huge gulps of tea with an unpleasant noise, protruding his lips like a gargoyle, but answer made he none.
“I am in need of your services.”
He dissected the leg of a fowl with professional relish, but did not speak. In a gust of childish anger that was farcical I nipped the joint between finger and thumb and threw it into the fire.
For an instant he sat dumfounded staring at his empty plate; then he scrambled to his feet and ran to the mantelshelf all in a scurry of fury and began diving among the litter there and tossing it right and left.
“The pistol—the pistol!” he muttered, in a cracked voice. “Where is it? What have I done with it?”
“Never mind. You expect a fee for your services, I suppose?”
He slackened in his feverish search and I saw he was listening to me.
“You don’t want to kill the goose with the golden eggs, I presume?” said I, coolly.
He twisted round and faced me.
“You have a rude boorish insistence of your own,” he cried at me hoarsely. “But I suppose I must value it for what it’s worth. It’s the custom to ask a fee for professional services.”
“You volunteered yours, you know.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Quite so,” he said. “The matter lies with you.”
“With you, I think. In visiting my father the other night you had no secret hope, I suppose, that we should pay you in the sort of coin you have already had too much of?”
“You insult me, sir.”
“Unwittingly, I assure you. Will you answer me one question? Is there the remotest chance of my father recovering from this attack?”
“Not the remotest—not of his definitely rallying even, I should say.”
“Is that only an opinion?”
“Bah! Miracles don’t occur in surgery. He is practically a dead man, I tell you.”
“Why do you adopt this attitude to me, then, if you have an eye to a particular sort of fee?”
“Perhaps I wanted proof that the old man was past levying toll on.” A wicked smile wrinkled his mouth. “Perhaps I satisfied myself he was, and from you I expected no consideration or justice.”
“You can leave that out of the question. A mere business contract is another matter, and that is what I come to propose.”
“Oh, indeed!”
He said it with a sneer, but moved nevertheless nearer the table, so that we could talk without raising our voices.
“May I ask the nature of this stupendous contract?”
“I will tell you without asking. I make you this offer—to hand over to you all that remains of the treasure on one condition.”
“And that is?”
“That you tell me how my brother Modred came by his death.”
He gave a little start; then dropped his eyes, frowning, and drummed with his fingers on the table. I saw he understood; that he was groping in his mind for some middle course, whereby he could satisfy all parties and secure the prize for himself.
“If your father didn’t do it,” he was beginning, but I took him up at the outset.
“You know he didn’t! It is a foul lie of such a man. Dr. Crackenthorpe”—my voice, despite my stubborn resolve, broke a little—“he is lying there on his deathbed, despairing, haunted with the thought that it was he who in a fit of drunken madness strangled the life in his own son. It is all hideous—monstrous—unnatural. You know more about it, I believe, than any man. You were sitting with him that night.”
“But he left me awhile.”
“You know it wasn’t in his nature to do such a thing!”
“Pardon me. I have always looked upon your father as a dangerous, reckless fellow.”
“I won’t believe it. You know more than you will say—more than you dare to tell. Oh, if that churchyard fellow had only lived I would have had the truth by now.”
“I hope so, though you do me the honor to hold me implicated with him in some absurd and criminal secret, and on the strength of a little delirious raving—not an uncommon experience in the profession, trust me.”
“I don’t appeal to your charity or your mercy. There’s a rich reward awaiting you if you tell what you know and ease the old dying man’s mind. Further than that—if you withhold the truth and let him pass in his misery, I swear that I’ll never rest till I’ve dragged you down and destroyed you.”
He bent his body in a mocking and ungainly bow.
“I really can’t afford to temporize with my conscience for any one living or dead. As it is, I have allowed myself to slip into the position of an accomplice, which is an extreme concession on my part of friendly patronage toward a family that has certainly never studied to claim my good offices.”
I looked at him gloomily. I could not believe even now that he would dismiss me without some by-effort toward the prize that he saw almost within his grasp; and I was right.
“Still,” he went on, “I don’t claim infallibility for my deduction. I shall be pleased, if you wish it, to return with you and if possible to question the patient.”
I was too anguished and distraught to reject even this little thread of hope. Perhaps it was in me that at the last moment the sight of that stricken figure at home might move the cold cynicism of the man before me to some weak warmth of charity.
He bade me wait in the hall while he finished his breakfast and I had nothing for it but to go and sit down under the row of smoky prints.
He kept me a deliberate while, and then came forth leisurely and donned his brown coat, that was hanging like a decayed pirate beside me. We walked out together.