“I want you at home,” he said, “all to myself. I’m glad that you’ve come, Renalt. It’s lonely in the old mill nowadays.”
As we walked, my heart was filled with remorseful pondering over the wrecked figure at my side. Why had I never known of this change in it? What had caused it, indeed? Gloomy, sinister remembrances of my one-time suspicion of some nameless hold that the doctor had over my father stirred in me and woke a deep anger against fate. Were we all of us, for no fault of our own, to be forever stunted in our lives and oppressed by the malign influence of the place that had given us birth? It was hateful and monstrous. What fight could a human being show against foes who shot their poison from places beyond the limits of his understanding?
A trifle more aged looking—a trifle more crazy and dark and weather-stained—the old mill looked to my returning vision, and that was all. The atmosphere of the place was cold and eerie and haunted as ever.
But a great feast awaited the returned prodigal. The sitting-room table fairly sparkled with unwonted dainties of the season, and a red fire crackled on the hearth.
My father pressed me into a chair; he heaped good things upon my plate; he could not do enough to prove the warmth of his welcome and the pathos of loneliness that underlay it.
“Here’s to my strong son!” he cried, pledging me gayly in a glass of weak wine and water; “my son that I’m feasting for all the doctor—for all the doctor, I say!”
“The doctor, dad?”
“He wouldn’t have had it, Renalt. He said it was throwing pearls before swine and most wicked waste. I wouldn’t listen to him this time—not I.”
“Why, what has he got to do with it?”
“Hush!” he paused in his sipping and looked all about him, with a fearful air of listening.
“He’s a secret man,” he whispered, “and the mill’s as full of ears as a king’s palace.”
I made no answer, but went on with my meal, though I had much ado to swallow it; but to please my father I made a great show of enjoying what was put before me.
One thing I noticed with satisfaction, and that was that my father drank sparingly and that only of wine watered to insipidity. Indeed, I was to find that a complete change in him in this respect was not the least marvelous sign of the strange alteration in his temperament.
The meal over, we drew our chairs to the fire, and talked the afternoon away on desultory subjects. By and by some shadowy spirit of his old intellectual self seemed to flash and flicker fitfully through his conversation.
The afternoon deepened into dusk; strange phantoms, wrought of the leaping flame, came out of corners or danced from wall to ceiling and were gone. He was in the midst of a fine flow of words descriptive of some metaphysical passages he had lately encountered in a book, when his voice trailed off and died away. He crept to me and whispered in my ear: “He’s there, behind the door!”
I jumped to my feet, rushed across the room and—met Dr. Crackenthorpe on the threshold.
“Can’t you come in like a decent visitor?” I cried, stamping my foot on the floor.
He looked pale and, I thought, embarrassed, and he backed a little before my onset.
“Why, what’s all this?” he said. “I walked straight up the stairs, as a body should.”
“You made no noise,” I said, black and wrathful. “What right have you to prowl into a private house in that fashion?”
For a moment his face fell menacing. But it cleared—if such may express the lightening of those muddy features—almost immediately.
“Here’s a fine reception!” he cried, “for one who comes to greet the returned prodigal in all good comradeship; and to an old friend, too!”
“You were never ours,” I muttered.
He plucked a bottle of gin from under his arm, where he had been carrying it.
“Your father has given up the pernicious habit,” he said, with a grin, “but I thought, perhaps, he’d break his rule for once on such a stupendous occasion as this. Let us pledge you in a full bumper, Mr. Renalt.”
“Pledge whom you like,” I answered, surlily, “but don’t ask a return from me. I don’t drink spirit.”
“Then you miss a very exquisite and esthetic pleasure, I may say. Try it this only time. Glasses, Mr. Trender.”
I saw my father waver, and guessed this unwonted liberality on the part of the doctor was calculated to some end of his own. In an access of rage I seized the full bottle and spun it with all my might against the wooden wall of the room. It crashed into a thousand flying splinters, and the pungent liquor flooded the floor beneath.
For an instant the doctor stood quite dumfounded, and went all the colors of the prism. Then he walked very gently to the door and turned on the threshold.
“You were always an unlicked cub,” he said, softly, “but this transcends all your past pleasantries.”
“I mean it too,” I said, still in a towering passion. “I intend it as a hint that you had best keep away from here. I’ve no cause to remember you with love, and from this time, understand, you’ve no claim of friendship upon this household.”
“I will remember,” he said. “I always do. Perhaps I’ve another sort of claim, though. Who knows?”
He nodded at me grimly once or twice, like an evil mandarin, and walked off, down the stairs.
I looked at my father. He was sitting, his hands clasping the elbows of his chair, with a wild, lost look upon his face.
“What have you done?” he whispered. “Renalt, what have you done? We are in that man’s power to ruin us at a word!”
The explanation I had desired for the morrow I determined to bring about there and then. I went and stood above the old man and looked down upon him.
“Dad,” I said, softly, “once before, if you remember, I came to you heart-full of the question that I am now going to put to you again. I was a boy then, and likely you did right in refusing me your confidence. Now I am a man, and, dad, a man whose soul has been badly wounded in its sore struggle with life.”
He had drooped forward as I began, but at this he raised his head and looked me earnestly in the eyes.
“I know, Renalt. It was I broke the bottle then, as you have now. You have taken the lead into your own hands. What is it you’d ask?”
“Don’t you know, dad?”
“Yes, I know. Give me a little time and perhaps some day I’ll tell you.”
“Why not now, dad?”
He seemed to muse a little space, with his brows gone into furrows of calculation.
“Why not?” he muttered. “Why not?”
Suddenly he leaned forward and said softly:
“Has it ever concerned you to think what might be the source of your father’s income?”
“I have thought of it, dad, many and many a time. It wasn’t for me to ask. I have tried to force myself to believe that it came from our grandfather.”
“He was a just man, Renalt, and a hard. I married against his will and he never spoke to me afterward.”
“But the mill——”
“The mill he left to me, as it had been left to him. He would not, in his justice, deprive me of the means of living. ‘What my hands have wrought of this, his may do,’ he wrote. But all his little personal estate he willed elsewhere.”
“And you never worked the mill?”
“For a time I worked it, to some profit. We began not all empty-handed. She brought a little with her.”
“My mother?”
At the word he half-started from his chair and sunk back into it again. His eyes blazed as I had not seen them do since my return.
“For twenty years and more,” he shrieked, “that name has never been on your lips—on the lips of any one of you. I would have struck him down without pity that spoke it!”
I stood looking at him amazed. For a moment he seemed transformed—translated out of his fallen self—for a moment and no more. His passion left him quakingly.
“Ah!” he cried, with a gasp, and looked up at me beseeching—“you’re not offended—you are not offended, Renalt?”
“No, no,” I said, impatiently. “You must tell me why, dad. You will, won’t you?”
He answered with a sobbing moan.
“You, her son, must not know. Haven’t I been faithful to her? Have I ever by word or sign dishonored her memory in her children’s ears—my boy, have I?”
“I have never heard you mention her till now. I have never dreamed of her but as a nameless shadow, father.”
“Let her be so always. She wrecked my life—in a day she made me the dark brute you remember well. I was not so always, Renalt. This long, degraded life of despair and the bestial drowning of it were her doing—hers, I tell you. Remorse! It has struggled to master me, and I have laughed it away—all these years I have laughed it away. Yet it was pitiful when she died. A heart of stone would have wept to see her. But mine was lead—lead—lead.”
He dropped his head on his breast. I stood darkly pondering in the quiet room. There seemed a stir and rustling all round within the house, as if ghostly footfalls were restlessly pacing out their haunting penance.
“Renalt,” said my father, presently; “never speak of her; never mention her by that name. She passed and left me what I am. I closed the mill and shut its door and that of my heart to every genial influence that might help it to forget. I had no wish to forget. In silence and solitariness I fed upon myself till I became like to a madman. Then I roused and went abroad more, for I had a mission of search to attend to.”
“You never found him?”
The words came to my lips instinctively. How could I fail to interpret that part, at least, of the miserable secret?
“To this day—never.”
He answered preoccupied—suddenly heedless of my assurance in so speaking. A new light had come to his face—an unfamiliar one. I could have called it almost the reflection of cunning—vanity—a self-complacent smugness of retrospect.
“But I found something else,” he cried, with a twitching smirk.
“What was that?”
He leaned forward in a listening attitude.
“Hush!” he murmured. “Was that a noise in the house?”
“I heard nothing, dad.”
He beckoned me to stand closer—to stoop to him.
“A jar of old Greek and Roman coins.”
He fell back in his chair and stared up at me with frightened eyes. The mystery was out, and an awful dismay seized him that at length in one moment of sentiment he had parted with the secret that had been life to him.
“What have I said?” he whispered, stilly. “Renalt, you won’t give any heed to the maundering of an old man?”
I looked down on him pityingly.
“Don’t fear me, father,” I said, almost with a groan. “I will never breathe a word of it to anybody.”
“Good, dear boy,” he answered, smiling. “I can trust you, I know. You were always my favorite, Renalt, and——”
He broke off with a sudden, sharp cry.
“My favorite,” and he stared up at me. “My favorite? So kings treat their favorites!”
He passed a nervous hand across his forehead, his wild eyes never leaving my face. I could make nothing of his changing moods.
“What about the jar of coins?” I said.
“Ah!” he muttered, the odd expression degrading his features once more. “They were such a treasure it was never one man’s lot to acquire before or since—heaven’s compensation for the cruelty of the world.”
“Where did you find them?”
“In an ancient barrow of the dead,” he whispered, looking fearfully around him—“there, on the downs. It had rained heavily, and there had been a subsidence. I was idly brooding, and idly flung a stone through a rent in the soil. It tinkled upon something. I put in my hand and touched and brought away a disk of metal. It was a golden coin. I covered all up and returned at night, unearthed the jar and brought it secretly home. It was no great size, but full to the throat of gold. Then I knew that life had found me a new lease of pleasure. I hid the jar where no one could discover it and set about to enjoy the gift. It came in good time. The mill had ceased to yield. My store of money was near spent. I selected three or four of the likeliest coins and carried them to a man in London that bought such things—a numismatist he called himself. If he had any scruples he smothered them then and afterward, in face of such treasures as it made his eyes shoot green to look upon. He asked me at first where I had got them. Hunting about the downs, I said. That was the formula. He never asked for more. He gave me a good price for them, one by one, and made his heavier profit, no doubt, on each. They yielded richly and went slowly. They made an idle, debauched man of me, who forgot even his revenge in the glut of possession.”
He seemed even then to accuse himself, through an affectation rather than a conviction of avarice.
“They went slowly,” he repeated; “till—till—Renalt, I would have loved you as boy was never loved, if you had killed that doctor, as you killed——” he stopped and gave a thin cry of anguish.
“I didn’t kill Modred, father. I know it now.”
“No, no—you didn’t,” he half-whined in a cowering voice. “Don’t say I said it. I caught myself up.”
“We’ll talk about that presently. The doctor——”
“That night, you remember,” he cried, passionately, “when I dropped a coin and he saw it—that was the beginning. Oh, he has a hateful greed for such things. A wicked, suspicious nature. He soon began cajoling, threatening, worming my secret out of me. I had to silence him now and again or he would have exposed me to the world and wrenched my one devouring happiness from me.”
“You gave him some of the coins?”
“He has had enough to melt into a grill as big as St. Lawrence’s, and he shall fry on it some day. More than that—more than that!”
He clenched his hands in impotent fury.
“There was one thing in the jar worth a soul’s ransom—a cameo, Renalt, that I swear was priceless—I, who speak from intuition—not knowledge. The beauty of the old world was crystallized in it. An emperor would have pawned his crown to buy it.”
His words brought before me with a shock the night of Modred’s death, when I had stood listening on the stairs.
“One evening—a terrible evening, Renalt—when I went to fetch a new bribe for him from the hiding-place (he demanded it before he would move a finger to help that poor boy upstairs), I found this cameo gone. He swore he hadn’t set eyes on it, and to this day I believe he lied. How can I tell—how can I tell? Twenty times a week, perhaps, my vice brought the secret almost within touch of discovery. Sometimes for days together I would carry this gem in my pocket, and take it out when alone and gaze on it with exquisite rapture. Then for months it would lie safely hidden again. If I had dropped and lost it in one of my fits—as he suggested—should I have never heard of it again? Renalt”—he held out two trembling hands to me—“it was the darling of my heart! Find it for me and I will bless you forever.”
He ended almost with a sob. I could have wept myself over the pitiful degeneration of a noble intellect.
“Father, you said he cajoled—threatened. Didn’t you ever reveal to him——”
“Where the jar was hid? No; a million times, no! He would have sucked me dry of the last coin. He knew that I had made a rich find—no more.”
“And on the strength of that vague surmise you have allowed him to blackmail you all these years?”
He hung his head, as if cruelly abashed.
“You don’t know the man as I do,” he cried, in a low voice. “He is a devil—not a man.”
I was utterly shocked and astounded.
“Well,” I said at length. “I won’t ask you for your secret. To share it with any one would kill the zest, no doubt.”
He lifted his head with a thin wail.
I put my hand gently on his shoulder.
“Dad,” I said, “I must never leave you again.”
He seized my hand and kissed it.
“Harkee, Renalt,” he whispered. “Many are gone, but there are some left. Could I find out where the cameo is, we would take it, and what remains, and leave this hateful place—you and I—and bury ourselves in some beautiful city under the world, where none could find us, and live in peace and comfort to the end.”
“Peace can never be mine again, father. Would you like to know why? Would you like to know what has made a sorrowful, haunted man of me, while you were living on at the old mill here these five years past?”
“Tell me,” he said. “Confide in this old, broken, selfish man, who has that love in his heart to seek comfort for you where he can find none himself.”
Then, standing up in the red dusk of the room, I gave him my history. “Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice.” And he sat with face darkened from me, and quivered only when he heard of Jason’s villainy.
And at the end he lifted up his voice and cried:
“Oh, Absolom, my son—my son, Absolom!”
The months that immediately followed my home-coming were passed by me in an aimless, desultory temporizing with the vexed problems that, unanswered, were consuming my heart.
I roamed the country as of old and renewed my acquaintance with bird, fish and insect. Starting to gather a collection of butterflies and moths—many of which were local and rare—with the mere object of filling in the lapses of a restless ennui and in some dull gratitude to a pursuit that had helped me to a little degree of late success, I rapidly rose to an interest in its formation that became, I may say, the then chief happiness of my life. To my father, also, it brought, in the arrangement and classification of specimens, a certain innocent pleasure that helped to restore him to some healthier show of manliness moral and physical.
Poor, broken old man! I would not now have stultified his pathetic confidence in me for the biggest bribe the world could hold out.
Yet it must not be supposed I ever really for a moment lost sight of the main issues of a mystery that was bitten into my heart with an acid that no time could take the strength from. Sometime, sooner or later, I knew it would be revealed to me who it was that killed Modred.
As to that lesser secret of the coins—it troubled me but little. Free of that dread of possible ruin that appeared to cling hauntingly to my father, I was not disinclined to the belief that the complete dissipation of his bugbear estate might prove after all his moral salvation. Remove its source of irritation, and would not the sore heal?
Sometimes in the full pressure of this thought I found it almost in my mind to hunt and hunt until I found his hiding-place and to commit its remaining treasures to the earth or the waters. Then it would seem a base thing to do—a mean advantage to take of his confidence—and I would put the thought from me.
Still, however I might decide ultimately, this determination dwelt firmly and constantly in me—to oppose by every means in my power any further levying of blackmail on the part of the doctor.
This unworthy eccentricity had not, to my knowledge, been near the mill since that night of my return. That he presently found means, nevertheless, of communicating with his victim, I was to find out by a simple chance.
June had come upon us leading this placidly monotonous life, when, returning one afternoon from a ramble after specimens, I found my father sitting upstairs in a mood so preoccupied that he did not notice my entrance. His head was bowed, his left arm drooping over one end of the table. Suddenly hearing my footsteps in the room, he started and a gold coin fell from his hand and spun and tinkled on the boards.
“What’s that?” I said.
He stooped and clutched it, and hugging it to his breast looked up in my face with startled eyes. But he gave no answer.
“Is it necessary to change another, dad?”
“No,” he muttered.
A thought stung me like a wasp.
“Is it for a bribe?” I demanded. Still he kept silence.
“Father,” I said, “give it to me.”
“Renalt—I can’t; I mustn’t.”
“Give it to me. If you refuse—I threaten nothing—but—give it to me!”
He held it forth in a shaking hand. I took it and slipped it into my pocket.
“Now,” I said, sternly, “I am going to see Dr. Crackenthorpe.”
He rose from his chair with a cry.
“You are mad, I tell you! You can do nothing—nothing.”
“It is time this ceased for good and all, father. I stand between you now—remember that. You have to choose between me and that villain. Which is it to be?”
“Renalt—my son. It is for your sake!”
“I can look after my own interests. Which is it to be?”
He dropped back into his chair with a groan.
“Go, then,” he muttered, “and God help you!”
I turned and left him. My heart was blazing with a fierce resentment. But I would not leave the house till my veins ran cooler, for no advantage of temper should be on the side of that frosty bloodsucker.
I wandered downstairs, past the door of the room of silence, but the rough jeering of the wheel within drove me away to where I could be out of immediate earshot of it.
From the kitchen at the back came the broken, whining voice of old Peggy Rottengoose, who yet survived and waited upon the meager household with a ghoulish faithfulness that no time could impair.
The words of some sardonic song came sterilely from her withered lips. She was apt at such grewsome ditties:
“I saw three ravens up a tree—Heigho!I saw three ravens up a tree;And they were black as black could be—All down by the greenwood side, O!“I stuck my penknife in their hearts—Heigho!I stuck my penknife in their hearts;And the more I stuck it the blood gushed out;All down by the greenwood side, O!”
“I saw three ravens up a tree—Heigho!I saw three ravens up a tree;And they were black as black could be—All down by the greenwood side, O!“I stuck my penknife in their hearts—Heigho!I stuck my penknife in their hearts;And the more I stuck it the blood gushed out;All down by the greenwood side, O!”
“I saw three ravens up a tree—
Heigho!
I saw three ravens up a tree;
And they were black as black could be—
All down by the greenwood side, O!
“I stuck my penknife in their hearts—
Heigho!
I stuck my penknife in their hearts;
And the more I stuck it the blood gushed out;
All down by the greenwood side, O!”
I softly pushed open the door, that stood ajar, and looked in. The old creature was sitting crooning in a chair, a picture or print of some kind, at which she was gazing in a sort of hungry ecstasy, held out and down before her at arm’s length. I stole on tiptoe behind her and sought to get a glimpse at that she devoured with her rheumy eyes.
“Why, what are you doing with that, Peg?” I said, with a start of surprise.
Cunning even under the spur of sudden discomfiture, she whipped the thing beneath her apron before she struggled to her feet and faced round upon me.
“What ails ye, Renalt?” she wheezed, in a voice like that of one winded by a blow—“to fright a body, sich like?”
“You needn’t be frightened, unless you were doing something you shouldn’t, you know.”
“Shud and shudn’t,” she said, her yellow under jaw, scratched all over with fine wrinkles, moving like a barbel’s. “I doesn’t take my morals fro’ a Trender.”
“You take all you can get, Peggy. Why not a picture with the rest?”
“My own nevvy!” she cried, with an attenuated scream—“blessed son to Amelia as were George’s first wife and died o’ cramps o’ the cold dew from a shift hung out on St. Bartlemey’s day.”
“Now, Peggy,” I said sternly, “I saw that picture and it wasn’t of your nephew or of any other relation of yours. It was a silhouette, as they call it, of my brother, Modred, made when he was a little fellow, by some one in a show that came here, and it used to hang in Modred’s room.”
“Ye lie, Renalt!” she cried, panting at me. “It’s Amelia’s boy—and mayn’t I enjoy the fruits o’ my own heritage?”
“Let me look at it, then; and if I’m wrong I’ll ask your pardon.”
“Keep arf!” she cried, backing from me. “Keep arf, or I’ll tear your weasand wi’ my claws!”
I made a little rush and clutched her. She could not keep her promise without loosening her hold of the picture, but she butted at me, with her cap bobbing, and dinted my shin with her vicious old toes. Then, seeing it was all useless, she crumpled the paper up into a ball and, tossing it from her, fell back in her chair and threw her apron over her head.
I dived for the picture and smoothed out its creases.
“Peggy!” I said.
“I tuk it—I tuk it!” wailed the old woman. “I tuk it fro’ the wall when I come up wi’ the blarnkets and nubbody were there to see!”
“Why did you take it and why have you riddled it with holes like this?”
She slipped down on her trembling knees.
“Don’tee be hard on me, Renalt—don’tee! I swear, I were frighted myself at what I done. I didn’t hardly guess it would act so. Don’tee have me burnt or drownded, Renalt. It were a wicked thing to a body old enough to be your grandam, and I’ve but a little glint o’ time left.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Peggy. You’d no business to take the picture, of course, and still less to treat it like this. But your nature’s a thieving one, and I suppose you can’t help it. Get off your knees. It’s done, and there’s an end of it.”
She stopped her driveling moan and looked up at me queerly, I thought.
“Ay, I’d no call to do it, of course,” she said. “Just a body’s absence o’ mind, Renalt, ye see—same as pricking pastry in time to a toone like. I thought maybe if ye saw it ye’d want to tell the old man upstairs, and he’s got the strong arm yet, for all the worm in his brain.”
“I sha’n’t tell him this time, but don’t let me catch you handling any of our property again”; and I left the room.
A little flustered by my late tussle and hardly yet in a mood for the interview I clearly foresaw would be no amicable one, I wandered out, turning my footsteps, not at present in the direction of the doctor’s house, but toward that part of the river called the “weirs,” which ran straight away from the mill front. This was a pleasant, picturesque stretch down which the water, shaded by many stooping trees and bushes, washed and gurgled brightly. A railed pathway ran by it and, to the same side, cottages at intervals and little plats of flowering parterres.
It was a reach which, unpreserved, was much favored of the townsfolk for fishing.
A man was whipping the stream now in its broadest part, and I stopped to watch him. He was a rosy, well-knit fellow of 35 or so, with a good-humored, bibulous eye and a foolish underjaw.
“Any sport?” I asked.
“Plenty o’ sport,” said he, “but no fish.”
“You’re a philosopher, it seems.”
“Mebbe I arm, for what it may mean. A pint of ale ’ud cure it.”
“Why not a pint of water? It’s there and to spare.”
“The beggar’s tap, master. I arns my living.”
“Well, buy your pot of ale out of it.”
“I’d rather you tuk the responsibility off me.”
“Well,” said I, with a grin, “let’s see you catch a fish and I’ll stand treat.”
He threw for some time in silence.
“I must be off,” said I.
“Fair play, master! I harsn’t got my fish yet.”
“I can’t wait all day for that.”
“Then, pay up. You put no limit to the time.”
I laughed and gave him the money, and he spat upon it for luck.
“You come fro’ yon old mill, don’tee?” said he.
“Yes, I do. You know me, it appears. Who may you be?”
“They carls me saxton ower at St. John’s yonder.”
I received his answer with a little start. Were these the hands that had dug the grave for my dead brother?
“They call you? What do you call yourself?” I said.
“High priest to the worms, wi’ your honor’s leave.”
He stuck his tongue in his cheek and whipped out his fly again. This time it disappeared with a fat blob and his hand came smartly up. I watched him while he wheeled in his floundering prize.
“Ay,” he went on, as he stooped to unhook the trout, “the worms and I works on the mutual-profit system. I feeds them and they feeds me. Sometimes”—he looked round and up at me slyly—“they shows a power o’ gratitoode ower an uncommon rich meal and makes me a particlar acknowledgment o’ my services.”
In the cool of the evening I knocked at Dr. Crackenthorpe’s front door. No one answering—his one servant was gadding, probably—I tried the handle, found it to be on the latch only, and walked in. The house was quiet as a desert, save that from the doctor’s private consulting-room, as he called it, issued a little, weak, snoring sound.
I paused in the dusky passage before tapping at the closed door of this room. The whole place was faintly stringent with the atmosphere that comes from a poor habit of ventilation—an atmosphere like that emitted from crumbling old leather-bound folios. A ragged strip of carpet, so trodden up its middle to the very string as to give the impression of a cinder-path running between dully flowering borders, climbed the flight of stairs before me, and stretched itself upon the landing above in an exhausted condition.
In a shallow alcove to one side of me stood a gaunt and voiceless old grandfather clock. A gas-browned bust of Pitt, rendered ridiculous by a perfect skull-cap of dust, stood on a bracket over a door opposite and a few anatomical prints of a dark and melancholy cast broke the monotony of the yellow walls.
Rendered none the less depressed in my errand by these dismal surroundings, I pulled myself together and tapped roundly on the doctor’s door. No response followed. I knocked again and again, without result. At length I turned the handle and stepped of my own accord into the room.
He was sitting at the table, half his body sprawled over it and an empty tumbler rolled from one of his hands. Overhead, the row of murderers’ busts looked down upon him with every variety of unclean expression, and seemed to prick their ears with sightless rapture over that bestial music of his soul.
The doors of a high cabinet, that in other brief visits I had never seen but closely locked, now stood open behind him, revealing row upon row of shelves, whereon hundreds of coins of many metals lay nicely arranged upon cotton wool. A few of these, also, lay about him on the table, and it was evident that a drunken slumber had overcome him while reviewing his mighty collection.
So deep was he in stupor that it was not until I hammered and shook the very table that he so much as stirred, and it was only after I had slipped round and jogged him roughly on the shoulder that he came to himself.
Then he dragged his long body up, swaying a little at first, and turning a stupid glazed eye on me two or three times and from me to the scattered coins and back again.
Suddenly he scrambled to his feet and backed from me.
“Thieves!” he yelled. “Thieves!”
“That’ll do,” I said, coolly. “I’m not the thief in this house, Dr. Crackenthorpe.”
“What are you doing here?” he cried in a furious voice. “How did you get in? What do you want?”
“I want a word with you—I’ll tell you what when you’re quieter. As to getting in? I knocked half a dozen times and could get no answer. So I walked in.”
“Curse the baggage!” he muttered. “Can’t I rely upon one of them? I’ll twist her pretty neck for this.”
“You need twist nothing on my account. If I had failed to catch you now I would have dogged you for the opportunity.”
“Oh, that’s it, is it?” he said, with a laugh and a savage sneer. “Well, state your business and be off.”
He spoke ferociously, but on the instant, seeing my eye caught by something lying on that part of the table his body had covered, dived for it and had it in his grasp. Then with a backward sweep of his hand he closed the cabinet doors and stood facing me.
“Now, sir,” he said.
“Dr. Crackenthorpe,” I answered, “you won’t bully me away from my purpose. I’m a better man than you, and a stronger, I believe; but I won’t begin by threatening.”
“And that’s very kind,” he put in mockingly. “Still we’d better come to business, don’t you think?”
“I’m coming to it and straight. What’s that you’ve got in your hand?”
“What I intend to keep there. Is that all?”
“It’s a cameo you stole from my father. Don’t take the trouble to deny it.”
“I don’t take any trouble on your account, my good fellow. It’s a cameo, as you very properly observe, but it happens to belong to me.”
“By thieving, I’ll swear. Now, Dr. Crackenthorpe, I intend to make you disgorge that cameo, together with one or two other trifles you’ve coerced my father into handing over to you.”
“No?” he said, in the same jeering tone.
“Further than that, I intend to put a stop here and at once to that blackmailing process you’ve carried on for a number of years.”
“Blackmailing’s a very good word. It implies a reciprocity of interests. And how are you going to do all this?”
“You shall hear at the assizes, maybe.”
He gave a laugh—quite rich for him; walked to the table, picked up deliberately the coins lying strewn there; stepped to the cabinet, deposited all therein; shut and locked it, and put the key in his pocket.
“Now, Mr. Bookbinder,” he said, facing me again, “you’ve a very pretty intelligence; but you’ve not acquired in London that knowledge of the nine points of the law without which the tenth is empty talk. Here’s a truism, also, that’s escaped your matured observation, and it’s called ‘be sure of your facts before you speak.’”
“Am I not?” I cried, contemptuously.
“We’ll see. Even a Crichton may suffer trifling lapses of memory. Let me lead yours back to that melancholy morning of your departure from the parent nest. Let me recall to you the gist of a few sentences that passed between your father and myself prior to the advent of your amiable brother, who was so hard on you. Some mention of a lost trifle was made then, I believe, and permission given me to keep it if I happened to alight upon it. Wasn’t that so?”
“I can remember something of the sort,” I muttered, gloomily.
“Ah, so far so good. Now, supposing that lost trifle were the very trinket your most observant eyes just now caught sight of?—I don’t say it was; but we will presume so, for the sake of argument—supposing it were, should I not be entitled to consider it my own?”
“You may be lying,” I said, angrily. “Probably you are. Where did you find it?”
“That is as much outside the question as your very offensive manner.”
“You’ve always been the bane of our house. What do I care what you think of my manner? The sharper it cuts, the better pleased am I. You’ve worked upon moods and weaknesses of the old man with your infernal cunning and got him under your thumb, as you think. Don’t be too sure. You’ll find an enemy of very different caliber in me. There’s a law for blackmailers, though you mayn’t think it.”
He cocked his head on one side a moment, like a vile carrion crow; then came softly and pushed a lean finger at my breast.
“And a law for fratricides,” he said, quietly.
I laughed so disdainfully that he forgot himself on the instant in a wild burst of fury.
“Toad! Filthy, poisonous viper!” he yelled. “You think to combat me with your pitiful little sword of brass! Have I overlooked your insolence, d’ye think? Speak a word further—one word, you pestilent dog, and I’ll smash you, body and soul, as I smash this glass!”
In his rabid frenzy he actually seized and threw upon the floor the tumbler from which he had lately been drinking, and, putting his heavy heel on it, crushed it into a thousand fragments.
“Oh!” he moaned, his breath chattering like a dry leaf in the wind, “I’ll be even with you, my friend—I’ll be even with you! You dare—you dare—you dare! You, the poor dependent on my bounty, whom I could wither with a word. The law you call upon so glibly has a long arm for murderers. You think a little lapse of years has made you safe”—he laughed wildly—“safe? Holy saints in heaven! I’ve only to step over to the police station—five minutes—and you’re laid by the heels and a pretty collar weaving for your neck.”
He checked himself in the torrent of his rage and lifted his hand menacingly.
“Harkee!” he cried. “I can do that and at a word I would! Now, d’ye set your little tin plate against my bludgeon?”
“Yes,” I said.
He seemed to doubt my answer, as if his ears had misinterpreted it, for he went on:
“If you value your life keep out of my way. Take the lesson from your father. He knew what I could do if I chose; and he took the best means in his power to buy my silence.”
I gave a cry of fierce triumph.
“So—the secret is out! It was to save me, as he thought, that my father parted with his treasure!”
The blackmailer gave no answer.
I went and stood close up against him, daring him with the manliness he lacked.
“You are a contemptible, dastardly poltroon,” I said, with all the coldest scorn I could muster.
He started back a little.
“If I had killed my brother in good reality, I would go to my hanging with joy if the only alternative were buying my safety from such a slimy, crawling reptile as you!”
“If?” he echoed, with a pale effort at another laugh.
“‘If’ was what I said. Pretty doctor you, not to know, as I have since found out, that the boy died by other means than drowning!”
In an ungovernable burst of fury I took him by the throat and drove him back against the table—and he offered no resistance.
“You dog!” I cried. “Oh, you dog, you dog! You did know it, of course, and you had the devil’s heart to lie to my father and beat him down in the dust for your own filthy ends! Had I a hand in my brother’s death? You know I had not any more than you—perhaps not so much!”
On the snap of the thought I spurned him from me and staggered back.
“Why,” I cried, staring at him standing cowering and sullen before me. “Had you, if the truth were known? You were in the house that night!”
He choked once or twice and, smoothing down the apple in his throat with a nervous hand, came out of his corner a pace or two.
“You can put two and two together,” he said in a shrill voice, defiant still, but with a whining ring in it. “What interest could I possibly have in murdering your brother? For the rest—you may be right.”
“And you can say it and plume yourself upon having successfully traded on the lie?”
“Yes,” he said, with a recovering grin, “I think I can.”
I turned from him, sick at his mere presence.
“And now,” said he, “I intend to trade upon the truth.”
I forced myself to face round upon him again. “The boy,” he said, looking down hatefully and shifting some papers on the table with his finger-tips, “it was obvious to any but the merest ignoramus, never died of drowning.”
“How then?”
“From the appearances—of strangulation, I should say.”
“Strangulation? Who——”
“Do you want these trifles back? Ask your father first why he had Modred’s braces in his pocket the morning after? He was very drunk that night—furiously drunk; and he left me alone in the parlor for awhile.”
All that night I tossed and tossed, in vain effort to court the sleep that should quench the fever in my racked and bewildered brain. My errand had been a failure. In every sense but the purely personal, it had been a failure. And now, indeed, that personal side was the one that least concerned me. As to every other soul in whom I was interested, it seemed that a single false step on my part might lead to the destruction of any one of them. Where could I look for the least comfort or assistance?
My father had glanced anxiously at me when I returned the evening before.
“It has been as you prophesied,” I said. “The man is a devil.”
He gave a heavy sigh and drooped his head.
“What did he tell you?” he muttered.
“He told me lies, father, I feel sure. But he is too cunning a villain to play without a second card up his sleeve.”
The old man raised imploring eyes to my face.
“Dad!” I cried, “is it true you have bought his silence all these years for my sake?”
At that he rose to his feet suddenly.
“No word of that!” he shrieked; “not a word! I can’t bear it!”
I looked at him with my throat swelling.
“I’ll not refer to it, if you wish it,” I said, gently.
“I do wish it. What does it amount to? How could I do less?”
“Very well, dad. I’ll keep my gratitude in my heart.”
“Gratitude!” He seemed greatly excited. His voice was broken with emotion. “Gratitude to me? For what? For driving you from home? For dealing out your inheritance piecemeal to that hungry vulture yonder? You kill me with your cruelty.”
“Father!” I cried, amazed.
“No, no, Renalt! You don’t mean to be! But you mustn’t talk of it—you mustn’t! It’s a long knife in my soul—every word! The one thing I might have done for you—I failed in. The wild girl, Renalt; that you loved—oh! A little more watchfulness on my part, a little less selfishness, might have saved her for you!”
He broke down a moment; then went on with a rough sob: “You think I love you, and I want you to think it; but—if you only knew all.”
“I know enough. I hold you nothing to blame in all you have referred to.”
He waved me from him, entreating me to leave him alone awhile, and he was so unstrung that I thought it best to comply.
But now a new ghost shook my very soul in its walking, and it was the specter of the blackmailer’s raising.
Was it possible—was it possible that my father that night—in some fit of drunken savagery——
I put the thought from me, with loathing, but it returned again and again.
One fair morning it occurred to me to go and look upon the grave I had never yet visited. Perhaps, I thought, I should find inspiration there. This vengeful, bewildered pursuit—I did not know how long I should be able to endure it. Sometimes, reviewing the latter, I felt as if it would be best to abandon the chase right then; to yield the chimera to fate to resolve as she might judge fit or never to resolve at all, perhaps. Then the thought that only by running to earth the guilty could I vindicate the innocent, would steel me more rigidly than ever in the old determination.
The ancient church, in the yard of which Modred was buried, stands no great distance away upon a slope of the steep hill that shuts in the east quarter of Winton.
As I passed from the road through the little gate in the yard boundaries a garden of green was about me—an acre of tree and shrub and grass set thickly with flowering barrows and tombstones wrapped in lichen, like velvet for the royal dead. The old church stood in the midst, as quiet and staid and peaceful there in its bower as if no restless life of a loud city hummed and echoed all about it.
I paused in indecision. For the first time it occurred to me that I had made no inquiry as to the position of my brother’s grave; that I did not even know if the site of his resting-place was marked by stone or other humbler monument. While I stood the sound of a voice cheerily singing came to me from the further side of a laurel bush that stood up from the grass a rood away. I walked round it and came plump upon my philosophical friend of the “weirs,” knee-deep in a grave that he was lustily excavating.
“Hullo,” I said, and “Hullo,” he answered.
“You seem to find your task a pleasant one?” said I.
“Ah!” he said. “What makes ’ee think thart, now?”
He leaned upon his spade and criticised me.
“You sing at it, don’t you?”
“Mebbe I do. Men sing sometimes, I’ve heard, when they’ve got the horrors on ’em.”
“Have you got the horrors, then?”
“Not in the sense o’ drink, though mayhap I’ve had them, too, in my time.”
He lifted his cap to scratch his forehead and resumed his former position.
“Look’ee here,” he said. “I stand in a grave, I do. I’ve dug two fut down. He could wake to a whisper so be as you laid him there. Did he lift his arm, his fingers ’ud claw in the air like a forked rardish. I go a fut deeper—and he’d struggle to bust himself out, and, not succeeding, there’d be a little swelling in the soil above there cracked like the top of a loaf. I go another fut, and he’s safe to lie, but he’d hear arnything louder than a bart’s whistle yet. At two yard he’ll rot as straight and dumb as a dead arder.”
“What then?” I said.
“What then? Why, this: Digging here, week in, week out, I thinks to myself, what if they buried me six feet deep some day before the life was out o’ me.”
“Why should they?”
“Why shouldn’t they? Men have been buried quick before now, and why not me?”
I laughed, but looking at him, I noticed that his forehead was wet with beads of perspiration not called forth by his labor.
“How long have you been digging graves?” I asked in a matter of way to help him recover his self-possession.
“Six year come Martlemas.”
He resumed his work for awhile and I stood watching him and pondering. Presently I said: “You buried my brother, then?”
“Ay,” he answered, heaving out a big clod of earth with an effort, so strained that it seemed to twist his face into a sort of leering grin.
“I was ill when my brother died,” I said, “and have lived since in London. I don’t know where he lies. Show me and I’ll give you the price of a drink.”
He jumped out of the pit with alacrity and flung his coat over his shoulders, tying the dangling arms across his breast.
“Thart’s easy arned,” he cried, hilariously. “Come along,” and he clumped off across the grass.
“See there!” he said, suddenly, stopping me and pointed to a mangy and neglected mound that lay under a corner of the yard wall.
“Is that it?”
He looked at me a moment before he answered. Through all his heartiness there was a queer suggestion of craft in the fellow’s face that puzzled me.
“It might be for its state,” he said, “but it isn’t. You may as soon grow beans in snow as grass on a murdered marn’s grave.”
“Does a murdered man lie there?”
“Ay. A matter of ten year ago, it may be. He wur found one summer morn in a ditch by the battery yon, and his skull split wi’ a billhook. Nubbody to this day knows his name or him as did it.”
A grim tragedy to end in this quiet garden of death. We moved on again, not so far, and my guide pointed down.
“There he lies,” he said.
A poor shallow little heap of rough soil grown compact with years. A few blades of rank grass standing up from it, starved and stiff like the bristles on a hog’s back. All around the barrows stretched green and kindly. Only here and on that other were sordid desolation. No stone, no boards, no long-lifeless flower even to emphasize the irony of an epitaph. Nothing but entire indifference and the withering footmark of time.
“I mind the day,” said the sexton. “Looking ower the hedge yon I see Vokes’ pig running, wi’ a straw in’s mouth. ‘We shall have rain,’ says I, and rain it did wi’ a will. Three o’ them came wi’ the coffin—the old marn and a young ’un—him ’ud be your brother now—and the long doctor fro’ Chis’ll. In the arternoon, as I was garthering up my tools, the old marn come back by hisself and chucked a sprig o’ verv’n on the mound. ‘Oho,’ thinks I. ‘That’ll be to keep the devil fro’ walking.’ The storm druv up while he wur starnding there and sent him scuttling. I tuk shelter i’ the church, and when I come out by and by, there wur the witch-weed gone—washed fro’ the grave, you’ll say, and I’ll not contradict ye; but the devil knows his own.”
“What do you mean?”
He turned and spat behind him before answering.
“He died o’ cold i’ the inside, eh?”
“Something of that sort. The doctor’s certificate said so.”
“Ah!” He took off his cap again and rubbed his hot head all over with a whisp of handkerchief. “Supposing he’d been laid two fut and no more—it wur a smarl matter arter the rain to bust the lid and stick his fingers through.”
“A small matter, perhaps, for a living man.”
He glanced sidelong at me, then gingerly pecked at the mound with his foot.
“No grass’ll ever grow there,” said he.
“That remains to be seen.”
I took a sixpence from my pocket and held it out to him.
“Look here,” I said. “Take this, and I’ll give you one every week if you’ll do your best to make and keep it like—like the other graves.”
He put out his hand instinctively, but withdrew it empty.
“No, no,” he said; “it’s no marner o’ good.”
“Try.”
“I’d rather not. Good-marning to ye,” and he turned his back on me and walked straight off, with his shoulders hunched up to his ears.
I watched his going moodily, but with no great surprise. It was small matter for wonder that Modred’s death should have roused uncanny suspicions among the ignorant and superstitious who knew of us. The mystery that overhung our whole manner of life was sufficient to account for that.
For long after the sexton had resumed his work—so long, indeed, that when I rose to go, only his head and shoulders bobbed up and down above the rim of the pit he was digging—I sat on the grass beside that poor sterile mound and sought inspiration of it.
But no voice spoke to me from its depths.
The autumn of that year broke upon us with sobbing winds and wild, wet gusts of tempest laden with flying leaves. In the choked trenches, drowned grasses swayed and swung like torn skirt fringes of the meadows; in the woods, drenched leaves clung together and talked, through the lulls, of the devastation that was wrecking their aftermath of glory.
It had been blowing in soft, irresistible onrushes all one dank October day, and all day had I spent in the high woods that crown the gentle hills three or four miles to the southwest of the city. The air in the long, quiet glades was mystic with the smell of decay; the heels of vanishing forms seemed to twinkle from tangled bends of undergrowth as I approached them. Then often, in going by a spot I could have thought lately tenanted, a sense would tingle through me as of something listening behind some aged trunk that stood back from my path.
Gradually dark shut in, and I must needs thread my way among the trees, while some little show of light remained, if I did not wish to be belated in the dense thickets. It would not have troubled me greatly had this actually happened. To yield my tired limbs and wearier soul to some bed of moss set in the heart of an antique wood seemed a blessed and most restful thing to do. But the old man awaited me at home, and thither my duty must carry me.
I had traversed a darkling alley of leafage, treading noiseless on the spongy floor of it, and was coming out into a little lap of tree-inclosed lawn that it led to when I stopped in a moment and drew myself back with a start.
Something was there before me—a fantastic moving shape, that footed the grass in a weird, sinuous dance of intricate paces, and waving arms, and feet that hardly rustled on the dead leaves. It was all wild, elfin; ineffably strange and unearthly. I felt as if the dead past were revealed to me, and that here I might lay down my burden and yield the poor residue of life to one last ecstasy.
Dipping, swaying; now here, now there, about the dusky plat of lawn; sometimes motionless for an instant, so that its drooping skirts and long, loosened hair made but one tree-like figure of it; again whirling into motion, with its dark tresses flung abroad—the figure circled round to within a yard of where I was standing.
Then in a loud, tremulous tone I cried “Zyp!” and sprung into the open.
She gave a shriek, craned her neck forward to gaze at me, and, falling upon her knees at my feet, clasped her arms about me.
For a full minute we must have remained thus; and I heard nothing but the breathless panting of the girl.
“Zyp,” I whispered at last, “what are you doing here, in the name of heaven?”
“I wanted to see you, Renny. I have walked all the way from Southampton. Night came upon me as I was passing through the wood—and—and I couldn’t help it—I couldn’t help it.”
“This mad dancing?”
“I’m so unhappy. Renny, poor Zyp is so unhappy!”
“Does this look like it?”
“The elves caught me. It was so lovely to shake off all the weight and the misery and the womanliness.”
“Are you tired of being a woman, Zyp?”
“Tired? My heart aches so that I could die. Oh, I hate it all! No, no, Renny, don’t believe me! My little child! My little, little child! How can I have her and not be a woman!”
“Get up, Zyp, and let’s find our way out of this.”
“Not till you’ve promised me. Where can we talk better? The foolish people never dare to walk here at night. You love the woods, too, Renny. Oh, why didn’t I wait for you? Why, why didn’t I wait for you?”
“Come, we must go.”
“Not till you’ve promised to help me.”
“I promise.”
She caught my hand and kissed it as she knelt; then rose to her feet and her dark eyes burned upon me in the gloom.
“You didn’t expect to see me?”
“How could I? Least of all here.”
“It’s on the road from Southampton. At least, if it isn’t, the woods drew me and I couldn’t help but go.”
“Why have you come from Southampton?”
“We fled there to escape him.”
“Him? Who?” Yet I had no need to ask.
“That horrible man. Oh, his white face and the eyes in it! Renny, I think Jason will die of that face.”
I remembered Duke’s words and was silent.
“It comes upon us in all places and at all hours. Wherever we go he finds means to track us and to follow—in the streets; in churches, where we sometimes sit now; at windows, staring in and never moving. Renny,” she came close up against me to whisper in my ear, and put her arm round my neck like the Zyp of old. Perhaps she was half-changeling again in that atmosphere of woodland leafiness. “Renny—once he tried to poison Jason!”
“Oh, Zyp, don’t say that!”
“He did—he did. Jason was sitting by an open window in the dark, and a tumbler of spirit and water was on the table by him. He was leaning back in his chair, as if asleep, but he was really looking all the time from under his eyelids. A hand came very gently through the window, pinched something into the glass, and went away again quite softly.”
“Why didn’t Jason seize it—call out—do anything that wasn’t abject and contemptible?”
“You don’t know how the long strain has told upon him. Sometimes in the beginning he thought he must face it out, for life or death, and end the struggle. But he isn’t really brave, I think.”
“No, Zyp, he isn’t.”
“And now it has gone too far. All his spirit is broken. He clings to me like a child. He sits with his hand in mine, staring and listening and dreadfully waiting. And that other doesn’t mean to kill him now, I think—not murder him, I mean. He sees he can do it more hideously by following—by only following and looking, Renny.”
In a moment she bowed her head upon my arm and burst into a convulsive flood of crying. I waited for the first of it to subside before I spoke again. These, almost the only tears I had ever known fall from her, were eloquent of her change, indeed.
“Oh!” she cried, presently, in a broken voice. “He didn’t treat me well at first—my husband—but this piteous clinging to me now—something chokes——” she flung her head back from me and wrenched with her hands at the bosom of her dress, as if the heart underneath were swollen to breaking. Then she tossed up her arms and, drooping her head, once more fell to a passion of weeping.
“Zyp,” I said, quietly, when she could hear me, “what is it you want me to do?”
“We want money, Renny——” she gasped, still with fluttering sobs, drying her eyes half-fiercely as if in resentment of that brief self-abandonment. “He has no spirit to make it now as he used. We have escaped to Southampton, intending to go abroad somewhere, and lose ourselves and be lost. We fled in a fright, unthinking, and now we can get no further. You’ll help us, Renny, won’t you?”
“I’ll help you, Zyp, now and always, if you need it—always, as far as it is possible for me to.”
“We don’t want much—enough to get away, that’s all. If he could only be free a little while, I think perhaps he might recover partly and be strong to seek for work.”
“It will take me a day or two.”
“So long? Oh, Renny!”
“I must go to London to raise it. I can’t possibly manage it otherwise.”
She gave a heavy forlorn sigh.
“I hope it won’t come too late?”
“You can trust me, dear, not to delay a minute longer over it than is absolutely necessary.”
“You are the only one I can always trust,” she said, with a little, wan, melancholy smile.
A sleek shine of moonlight was spreading so that I could see her face turned up to me.
“You will come on to the mill, Zyp?”
“Not now; it is useless. I hear my baby calling, Renny.”
“But—what will you do?”
“Walk back to Southampton.”
“To-night?”
“Part of the way, at least. When I get tired I shall sleep.”
“Sleep? Where?”
“Under some tree or bush. Where could I better?”
“Zyp! You mustn’t. Anything might happen to you.”
Her face took a flash of scorn.
“To me—in the woods or the open fields? You forget who I am, Renny.”
No insistence or argument on my part could alter her determination. Return she would, then and there.
“Well,” I said at last, hopeless of shaking her, “how shall I convey the money to you?”
“Jason shall come and fetch it.”
“Jason?”
“Yes. I can’t leave the child again. Besides, it will be better for him to move and act than sit still always watching and waiting.”
“Very well, then. Let him come when he likes. To-morrow I will get the money.”
She came and took my hand and looked up in my face. “Good-by, you good man,” she said. “Give me one kiss, Renny.”
I stooped and touched her cheek with my lips.
“That is for the baby,” I said, “and God bless Zyp and the little one.”
She backed from me a pace or two, with her dark eyes dreaming.
“Did you think I could ever be like this, Renny? I wonder if they will turn to me as they used?”
She dropped upon her knees before a little plant of yellow woundwort that grew beside a tree. She caressed it, she murmured to it, she gave it a dozen fond names in the strangest of elfin language. It did not stir. It remained just a quiet, drowsy woodland thing.
“Ah!” she cried, leaping to her feet, “it’s jealous of the baby. What do I care?” She gave it a little slap with her hand. “Wake up, you sulky thing!” she cried—“I’m going to tell you something. There’s no flower like my baby in all the world!”