I walked home that night in a dream. The white road lay a long, luminous ribbon before me; the wet hedges were fragrant with scented mist; there was only the sound in my ears of my own quick breathing, but in my heart the echo of the sweet wild voice that had but now so thrilled and tortured me.
I thought of her swerving presently from her dreary road southward, to sleep under some bush or briar, fearless in her beauty—fearless in her confidence of the rich nature about her that was so much her own. She seemed a thing apart from the world’s evil; a queenliest queen of fancy, that had but to summon her good fellows if threatened.
“Sweet safety go with you, my fairy!” I cried, and, crying, stumbled over a poor doe rabbit sitting in the road, with glazing eyes and the stab of the ferret tooth behind her ear.
“Zyp! Zyp!” I muttered, gazing sorrowfully on the dying bunny, “are you as much earth, after all, as this poor hunted brute? Ah, never, never let your kinsfolk strike you through your motherhood.”
I found my father sitting up for me amid the gusty lights and shadows of the old mill sitting-room. He welcomed me with a joy that filled my heart with remorse at having left him so long alone.
“Dad,” I said, “I have seen Zyp!”
He only looked at me in wonder.
“She was coming to implore my help to enable her and—and her husband to escape—to get away abroad somewhere.”
“Escape? From what?”
“That man—my one-time friend—that I told you about. He has pursued them all the year with deadly hatred. Jason is half-mad with terror of him, it seems.”
My father’s face darkened.
“He summoned his own Nemesis,” he said. “What do they want—money?”
“Yes. I promised her what I could afford. To-morrow I must run up to London to raise it.”
“On what security?”
“A mortgage, I suppose. I have some small investments in house property.”
He mused a little while.
“It is better,” he said, by and by, “to leave all that intact. We must part with another coin or so, Renalt.”
“If you think it best, father. I wouldn’t for my soul go back from my promise.”
“Will you take them up and negotiate the business? I grow feeble for these journeys.”
“Of course I will, if you’ll give me the necessary instructions.”
He nodded.
“I’ll have them ready for you to-morrow,” he said.
Then for a long time he sat gazing gloomily on the floor.
“Where are they?” he said, suddenly.
“Zyp and Jason? At Southampton. She walked from there, and I met her in the woods, she would come no further, but started on her way back again.”
“How are you going to get the stuff to them, then?”
“Jason is coming here to fetch it.”
He rose from his chair, with startled eyes.
“Here? Coming here?” he cried. “Renalt! Don’t bring him—don’t let him!”
“Father!”
“He’s a bad fellow—a wicked son! He’ll drain us of all! What the doctor’s left he’ll take! Don’t let him come!”
He spoke wildly—imploringly. He held out his hands, kneading the fingers together in an agony of emotion.
“Dad!” I said. “Don’t go on so! You’re overwrought with fancies. How can he possibly help himself to more than we decide to give him? Try to pull yourself together—to be your old strong self.”
“Oh!” he moaned, “I do try, but you know so little. He’s a brazen, heartless wretch! We shall die paupers.”
His voice rose into a sort of shriek.
“Come!” I said, firmly, “you must command yourself. This is weak to a degree. Remember, I am with you, to look after your interests—your peace—to defend you if necessary.”
He only moaned again: “You don’t know.”
“I know this,” I said, “that by Zyp’s showing my brother is a broken man—helpless, demoralized—in a pitiable state altogether.”
He seemed to prick his ears somewhat at that.
“If he must come,” he said, “if he must come, watch him—grind him under—never let him think for an instant that he keeps the mastery.”
“He shall never have cause to claim that, father.”
He spoke no more, but crept to his room presently and left me pondering his words far into the night.
Later on, as I lay awake in bed, I heard his room door open softly and the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. This, however, being no unfamiliar experience with us, disturbed me not at all.
In the morning at breakfast he handed me a couple of ancient gold coins.
“Take these,” he said; “they should bring £5 apiece.”
His instructions as to the disposal of the relics I need not dwell upon. Their consignee, a highly respectable tradesman in his line, would no doubt consider any mention of his name a considerable breach of confidence. I had my own opinion as to the laws of treasure-trove, and he may have had his as to my father. When, armed with my father’s warranty, I visited this amiable “receiver,” I found him to be an austere-looking but pleasant gentleman, with an evident enthusiasm for the scholarly side of his business. He gave me the price my father had mentioned, and bowed me to the door, with a faint blush.
It was so early in the day by the time I had finished my business that, deeming it not possible that Jason could reach the mill before the evening at earliest, I determined upon returning by an afternoon train, that I might make a visit that had been in my mind since I first knew I was to revisit London. It was to a dull and lonely cemetery out Battersea way, where a poor working girl lay at rest.
It was late in the afternoon when I came to the lodge gate of the burial-place and inquired there as to the position of the grave.
Indeed, in the quarter where I found her the graves lay so close that it seemed almost as if the coffins must touch underground.
My eyes filled with humble tears as I stood looking down on the thin green mound. A little cross of stone stood at the head and on it “D. M.” and the date of her death. The grave had been carefully tended—lovingly trimmed and weeded and coaxed to the greenest growth in those nine short months. A little bush rose stood at the foot, and on the breast of the hillock, a bunch of rich, fading flowers lay. They must have been placed there within the last two or three days only—by the same hands that had gardened the sprouting turf—that had raised the simple cross and written thereon the date of a great heart’s breaking.
I placed my own sad token of autumn flowers nearer the foot of the mound, and, going to the cross, bent and kissed it. My eyes were so blinded, my throat so strangled, that for the moment I felt as if, as I did so, it put its arms about my neck and that Dolly’s soft cheek was laid against mine. I know that I rose peaceful with the assurance of pardon; and that, by and by, that gentle, unresting spirit was to extend to me once more, in the passing of a dreadful peril, the saving beneficence of its presence.
Dark was falling as on my return I came within sound of the mill race. I thought I could make out a little group of people leaning over the stone balustrade of the bridge as I approached. Such I found to be the case, and among them Dr. Crackenthorpe standing up gaunt in his long brown coat.
I was turning in at the yard, when this individual hailed me, and by doing so brought all the faces round in my direction. I walked up to him.
“Well?” I said.
“These good folk are curious. It’s no affair of mine, but half a minute ago there came a yell out of the old cabin yonder fit to wake the dead.”
“Well?” I said, again, with a mighty assumption of coolness I hardly felt.
“Oh, don’t suppose I care. It only seemed to me that some day, perhaps, you’ll have the place stoned about your ears, if you don’t let a little more light in.”
A murmur went up from the half-dozen rustics and brainless idlers.
“We don’t warnt no drownding ghosteses in Winton,” said a voice.
I went straight up to them.
“Don’t you?” I said. “Then you’d best keep out of reach of them that can make you that and something worse. I suppose some of you have cried out with the lumbago before now?”
“That warn’t no lumbago cry, master.”
“Wasn’t it, now? Have you ever had it?”
“No—I harsn’t.”
“I’ll give you a good imitation”—and I made a rush at the fellow who spoke. The crowd scattered, and the man, suddenly backing, toppled over with a crack that brought a yell out of him.
“See there!” I cried. “You scream before you are touched even. A pretty fool you, to gauge the meaning of any noise but your own gobbling over a slice of bread and bacon.”
This was to the humor of the others, who cackled hoarsely with laughter.
“If you want to ask questions,” I said, turning upon them, “put them to this doctor here, who sits every day in a room with a row of murderers’ heads looking down upon him.”
With that I walked off in a heat, and was going toward the house, when Dr. Crackenthorpe came after me with a stride and a furious menace.
“You’ll turn the tables, will you?” he said, in a suffocating voice. “Some day, my friend—some day!”
I didn’t answer him or even look his way, but strode into the mill and banged the door in his face.
As I entered our sitting-room, I found Jason standing motionless in the shadow a few feet from my father’s chair.
The old man welcomed me with an agonized cry of rapture, and endeavored to struggle to his feet, but dropped back again as if exhausted. I went and stood over him, and he clung to one of my hands, as a drowning man might.
“Who cried out just now?” I asked, fiercely, of Jason.
He gulped and cleared his throat, but could only point nervelessly at the cowering figure before him.
“Father! What is the matter?”
“You wouldn’t come, Renalt—you wouldn’t come! I prayed for you to come.”
“What has he been doing?”
“It was all the old horror over again. Send him away! Don’t let him come near me!”
I was falling distracted. I turned to Jason once more.
“Come! Out with it!” I said. “What have you been doing?”
He strove to smile. His face was ghastly—pinched and lined.
“Nothing,” he said at last, with a choking cluck in his throat. “I have done nothing.”
“Don’t believe him,” moaned my father. “He wanted all; he wanted to sink me to ruin.”
“I wanted to ruin nobody!” cried my brother, finding his voice in a wail of despair. “I’m desperate, that’s all—desperate to escape—and he offers me little more than he’d give to a beggar.”
“I tell him I’m not far from one myself! He won’t believe it. He threatened me, Renalt. He brought the hideous time back again.”
A light broke upon me, as from a furnace door snapped open.
“Dad,” I said, gently, “will you go to your room and leave the rest to me?”
I helped him to his feet—across the room. His eyes watched the other all the time. It was pitiful to see his terror of him.
Jason stood where he had planted himself, waiting my return with hanging head and fingers laced in front of him.
I led the old man to the foot of the stairs. Then I returned to the room and stood before my brother.
“I understand it all now,” I said, in a straight, quiet voice. “The ‘some one else’ you suspected, or pretended to, was our father!”
No answer.
“While I was in London you traded upon this pretended knowledge to force money out of the old man.”
No answer.
“Your silence will do. What can I say but that it was like you? To traffic upon a helpless man’s miserable apprehensions for your own sordid ends—and that man your father! To do this while holding a like threat over another’s head—your brother’s—still for your own pitiful ends. And all the time who knows but you may be the murderer?”
“I am not the murderer. You persist, and—and it’s too cruel.”
“Cruel! To you? Who killed Modred?”
“I believe it was dad.”
“I believe upon my soul it’s a lie!”
“He thinks it himself, anyhow.”
“Is it any good saying to you that a man of his habits, as he was then, might be driven to believe anything of himself?”
“Why did he have the braces in his pocket, then?”
“He had carried the boy up-stairs—you know that. He had been bathing and his things were scattered.”
“It isn’t all. Modred had discovered his secret.”
In spite of myself I started.
“What secret?” I said.
“Where the coins were hidden.”
“What coins?”
For the first time he looked at me with a faint leer of cunning.
“I won’t condescend to prevaricate for any purpose,” I said. “I do know about the treasure, because he told me himself, but I swear I know to this day nothing about its hiding-place.”
He looked at me curiously.
“Well,” he said, “Modred had found it out, anyway.”
“How do you know?”
“Didn’t he offer to give Zyp something in exchange for a kiss that night we watched them out of the window?”
“Go on.”
“It was gold. I saw it. He must have found his way to the store and stolen it. Mayn’t it be, now, that dad discovered he had been robbed, and took the surest way to prevent it happening again?”
“No—a thousand times!” I spoke stanchly, but my heart felt sick within me.
He was silent.
“So,” I said, in a high-strung voice, “this was your manner of business during my absence; that the way to the means that helped you up to London? A miserable discovery for you—for I gather from your words you, too, found out about the hiding-place. You had better have left it alone—a million times you had better.”
Still he was silent.
“Did Zyp know, too?”
“No—not from my telling. I can’t answer for what she may have found out for herself. She sees in the dark.”
“How much did you have, from first to last? But I suppose you helped yourself whenever you needed it?”
“I didn’t—I swear I didn’t! I never put finger on the stuff till dad handed it over to me. What right had he to keep us without a penny all those years, when riches were there for the taking?”
“He could do what he liked with his own, I conclude. At any rate, the end justified the means. A pretty use you made of your vile extortion—a bloody vengeance is the price you pay for it!”
At that he gave a sudden cry.
“I’m lost—I know it! Help me to escape. Renny, help me to escape.”
“Do you think you deserve that of me, Jason?”
He dropped upon his knees, an abject, wailing figure.
“I don’t—I don’t! But you’re generous—Renalt, I always thought you good and generous, when I laughed at you most. Save me from that terror! He strikes at me in the dark—I never know where his hideous face will show next. He follows me—haunts me—tries to poison me, to torture me to death! Oh, Renny, help me!”
“Answer me truly first. For how long were you robbing the old man?”
“I may have had small sums of him for a year—nothing much. When Zyp and I made up our minds to go, I bid for a larger, and he gave it me.”
“He didn’t know you were married?”
“He wouldn’t hear of it—it’s the truth. He meant her for you, I think, and the worst threats I could use never shook him from his refusal to countenance us.”
“Brave old man!”
“Renny—help me!”
“For Zyp’s sake,” I said, sternly—“yes. Were it not for her appeal, I tell you plainly you might perish for me.”
He looked so base kneeling there in his craven degradation that I could not forbear the stroke.
“My father provides the means,” I said. “I went to London to-day to realize it. Here it is, and make the most of it.”
He took it from me with trembling hands.
“Ten pounds,” he said, blankly. “No more?”
“Isn’t it enough?”
“Enough to get away with, not enough to find a living on across the water.”
“It’s all you’ll get—that’s final. Remember now that I stand here by my father. Always remember that when your fingers itch for hush money—and remember who it was that was once my friend.”
He rose and crept to the door with bowed head. Some old vein of tenderer feeling gushed warm in me.
“Jason,” I cried, “I forgive you for all you have done to me.”
He turned and came back to me, seized me by the wrist—and his eyes were moist with tears.
“For pity’s sake come a little way with me, Renny. You don’t know what I suffer.”
“A little way on your road, do you mean?”
“Yes. I daren’t go by train. He might be there. I must walk; and I dread—Renny, supposing I should meet him on the way?”
“Why, that’s nonsense. Haven’t you just come alone?”
“I was driven by the thought of what I was seeking, then. It was bad enough. But, now I’ve got it, all nerve seems shaken out of me. I’m afraid of the dark.”
Was this the stuff that villains are made of? Almost I could find it in me to soothe and comfort the poor, terrified creature.
“Very well,” I said. “I will walk part of the way with you.”
His wan cheek flushed with gratitude. I got my hat and stick, and ran up to my father to tell him whither I was off.
As I came downstairs again Jason was disappearing into the loft, where the stones were, that stood opposite the sitting-room. The wheel underneath was booming as usual and the great disks revolved softly with a rubbing noise. I saw him go to the dim window, that stood out as if hung up in the black atmosphere of the room, a square of latticed gray. It was evidently his intention to reconnoiter before starting, for the window looked upon the bridge and the now lonely tail of the High street.
Suddenly a sort of stifled rushing noise issued from his lips, and he stole back on tiptoe to the passage without the room. There, in the weak lamplight, he fell against the wall, and his face was the color of straw paper and his lips were ashen.
“He’s there,” he said, in a dreadful whisper. “He’s standing on the bridge waiting for me.”
I rushed across the room and looked out through the dim glass. At first I could make out nothing until a faint form resolved itself suddenly into a face, gray and set as the block of stone it looked over.
It never moved, but remained thus as if it were a sculptured death designed to take stock forever with a petrified stare of the crumbling mill.
Then, as my eyes grew accustomed to the outlines, I saw that it leaned down in reality, with its chin resting on its hands that were crossed over the top of the parapet. Even at that distance I should have known the mouth, though the whole pose of the figure were not visible to convince me.
Jason looked at me like a dying man when I returned to him. The full horror of a mortal fright, than which nothing is more painful to witness, spoke from his lungs, that heaved as if the sweet air had become a palpable thing to enter within and imprison his soul from all hope of escape. He tried to question me, but only sunk back with a moan.
“Now,” I said, “you must summon all your resolution. Act promptly and in half an hour you will be beyond reach of him.”
My own nerves were strung to devouring action. A kind of exultation fired me to master this tyranny of pursuit. Whatever might be its justification, the tactics of aggressive force should at least be open and human, I thought.
“You don’t want to pass the night here?”
He made a negative motion with his head.
“I think you’re right. It might only be postponing the end. Will you place yourself in my hands?”
He held out his arms to me imploringly.
“Very well. Now, listen to me. There he will remain in all likelihood for some time, not knowing he is discovered. We must give him the slip—escape quietly at the back, while he is intent on the front.”
I could only make out that his white lips whispered: “You won’t leave me?”
“Not till all danger is past. I promise you.”
I went over the house and quietly tested that every bolt and catch was secure. Then I fetched a dram of spirit, and made the poor, demoralized wretch swallow it. It brought a glint of color to his cheek—a little firmness to his limbs.
“Another,” he whispered.
“No,” I answered. “You want the nerve to act; not the overconfidence that leads to a false step. Come.”
Together we stole to the rear of the building where the little platform hung above the race. I locked the door behind us and pocketed the key.
“Now,” I said, “quietly and no hesitating. Follow me.”
The stream here sought passage between the inclosed mill-head, with its tumbling bay and waste weir—the sluice of which I never remember to have seen shut—on the one side, and on the other the wall of an adjoining garden. This last was not lofty, but was too high to scale without fear of noise and the risk of attracting observation. Underneath the heavy pull of the water would have spun us like straws off our feet had we dropped into it there.
There was only one way, and that I had calculated upon. To the left some branches of a great sycamore tree overhung the wall, the nearest of them some five feet out of reach. Climbing the rail of the platform, I stood upon the outer edge and balanced myself for a spring. It was no difficult task to an active man, and in a moment I was bobbing and dipping above the black onrush of the water. Pointing out my feet with a vigorous oscillating action, I next swung myself to a further branch, which I clutched, letting go the other. Here I dangled above a little silt of weed and gravel that stood forth the margin of the stream, and onto it I dropped, finding firm foothold, and motioned to Jason to follow.
He was like to have come to grief at the outset, for from his nerves being shaky, I suppose, he sprung short of the first branch, hitting at it frantically with his fingers only, so that he fell with a bounding splash into the water’s edge. The pull had him in an instant, and it would have been all up with him had I not foreseen the result while he was yet in midair and plunged for him. Luckily I still held on to the end of the second branch, to which I clung with one hand, while I seized his coat collar with the other. For half a minute even then it was a struggle for life or death, the stout wood I held to deciding the balance, but at last he gained his feet, and I was able to pull him, wallowing and stumbling, toward me. It was not the depth of the water that so nearly overcame us, for it ran hardly above his knees. It was the mighty strength of it rushing onward to the wheel.
He would have paused to regain his breath, but I allowed him no respite.
“Hurry!” I whispered. “Who knows but he may have heard the splash?”
He needed no further stimulus, but pushed at me to proceed, in a flurried agony of fear. I tested the water on the further side of the little mound. It was possible to struggle up against it along its edge, and of that possibility we must make the best. Clutching at the wall with crooked fingers for any hope of support, we moved up, step by step, until gradually the wicked hold slackened and we could make our way without bitter struggle.
Presently, to the right, the wall opened to a slope of desert garden ground that ran up to an empty cottage standing on the fall of the hill above. Over to this we cautiously waded, and climbed once more to dry land, drenched and exhausted.
No pause might be ours yet, however. Stooping almost to the earth, we scurried up the slope, passed the cottage, and never stopped until we stood upon the road that skirts the base of the hill.
A moment’s breathing space now and a moment’s reflection. Downward the winding road led straight to the bridge and the very figure we were flying. Yet it was necessary to cross the head of this road somehow, to reach the meadows that stretched over the lap of the low valley we must traverse before we could hit the Southampton highway.
Fortunately no moon was up to play traitor to our need. I took my brother by the coat sleeve and led him onward. He was trembling and shivering as if with an ague. Over the grass, by way of the watery tracks, we sped—passing at a stone’s throw the pool where Modred had nearly met his death, breaking out at last, with a panting burst of relief, into the solitary stretch of road running southward. Before us, in the glimmering dark, it went silent and lonely between its moth-haunted hedges, and we took it with long strides.
My brother hurried by my side without a word, subduing his breathing even as much as possible and walking with a light, springing motion on his toes; but now and again I saw him look back over his shoulder, with an awful expression of listening.
It was after one of his turns that Jason suddenly whipped a hand upon my arm and drew me to a stop.
“Listen!” he whispered, and slewed his head round, with a dry chirp in his throat.
Faintly—very faintly, a step on the road behind us came to my ears.
“He’s following!” murmured my brother, with a sort of despairing calmness.
“Nonsense,” I said; “how do you know it’s he? It’s a public highway.”
“I do know. Hark to the step!”
It was a little nearer. There was a queer dragging sound in it. Was it possible that some demon inspired this terrible man to an awful species of clairvoyance? How otherwise could he be on our tracks? Unless, indeed, the splash had informed him!
There was a gap in the hedge close by where we stood, and not far from it, in the field beyond, a haystack looming gigantic in the dark. With a rapid motion I dived, pulling Jason after me—and stooping low, we scurried for the shelter, and threw ourselves into the loose stuff lying on the further side of it. There, lying crushed into the litter, with what horror of emotion to one of us God alone may know, we heard the shuffling footsteps come rapidly up the road. As it neared the gap, my brother’s hand fell upon mine, with a convulsive clutch. It was stone cold and all clammy with the ooze of terror. As the footstep passed he relaxed his hold and seemed to collapse. I thought he had fainted, but mercifully I was mistaken.
The step behind the hedge seemed to go a little further, then die out all at once. I thought he had passed beyond our hearing, and lay still some moments longer listening—listening, through the faint rustling sounds of the night, for assurance of our safety.
At length I was on the point of rising, when a strained hideous screech broke from the figure beside me and I saw him sway up, kneeling, and totter sideways against the wall of hay. With the sound of his voice I sprung to my feet—and there was the pursuer, come silently round the corner of the stack, and gazing with gloating eyes upon his victim.
Had Jason fainted, as I thought he had, his enemy would have been upon him before I was aware of his presence even. As it was, in an instant I had interposed my body between them.
For a full minute, perhaps, we remained thus, like figures of stone, before I found my voice.
“You can go back,” I said, never taking my eyes off him. “It’s too late.”
He gave no answer, nor did he change his position.
“I won’t appeal to you,” I said, “by any claim of old friendship, to leave this poor wretch in peace. If common humanity can make no way with you, how shall any words of mine?”
He made a little sidling movement, to which I corresponded with a like.
“You’re welcome to measure your strength with mine,” I said. “You’ll have to do it before you can think to get at him.”
He looked at me with glittering eyes, as if debating my power to stop him.
“Duke!” I cried, “be merciful! If his crime was great, he has repented.”
He spoke at last, screwing out an ugly high little chuckle, with a straining of his whole body, like a cock crowing.
“Why, so have I!” he said. “There’s a place waiting for the two of us among the blessed saints, while she’s frying down below.”
“It was hers to forgive, and she has forgiven, I know. Be merciful and worthy of her you are to meet some day.”
“What can I do more disinterested, then, than send him repentant to sit with her. There’s a noble revenge to take! If he’d stopped in London I’d have allowed him a little longer, perhaps; but, as he wants to escape, I must make sure, or the devil might have me by the leg, you see.”
All the time we spoke, Jason was cowering among the hay, his breath sounding in quick gasps. Now he gave out a pitiful moan, and Duke bent his head waiting for a repetition, as if it were music to him.
“For the last time, be merciful, Duke.”
“Well, so I will.”
He spoke looking up at me, with his head still bent sideways, and, in that position, felt in one of his pockets.
“If the gentleman will condescend to take this,” he said, standing suddenly erect and holding out a little white paper packet in his hand, “I will go and welcome. But I must see him swallow it first.”
“Poison?”
“Not at all. A love potion—nothing more.”
Duke stole toward me insidiously, holding out the paper. The moment he was within reach I struck it out of his hand. While my arm was yet in the air, he came with a rush at me—caught his foot in a projecting root—staggered and fell with a sliding thump upon the grass.
“Keep behind!” I shouted to Jason, who was uttering incoherent cries and running to and fro like a thing smitten with a sunstroke. He stopped at sound of my voice; then came and clung to me, feeling me to be his last hope.
For a moment Duke lay as if stunned; then slowly gathered himself together and rose to his feet—rose only to collapse again, with a snarling curse of agony. He glowered up at us, moaning and muttering, and nursing his injured limb; for so it seemed that, in falling, he had cruelly twisted and sprained one of his ankles.
When the truth broke upon me I turned round upon my brother with a great breath of gratitude and relief.
“Run!” I cried. “You can be miles away before he will be able to move, even.”
Jason leaped from me, his eyes staring maniacally.
“You fool!” I cried; “go! Leave him to me! You can be at Southampton before he is out of the field here. Even if he is able to walk by morning, which I doubt, he has me to reckon with!”
Some little nerve came to him, once standing outside the baneful influence of the eyes. He dashed his hand across his forehead, gave me one rapid, wild glance of gratitude and renewed hope, and, turning, ran for his life into the darkness.
As his footsteps clattered faintly down the road I returned to grapple with his enemy.
I almost stumbled over him as I turned the corner. He had rolled and struggled so far in his rabid frenzy; and now, seeing me come back alone, he set up a yell of rage, reviling and cursing me and hurling impotent lightnings of hate after his escaped victim.
Gradually the storm of his passion mouthed itself away and he lay silent on the ground like a dead thing. Then I moved to him; knelt and softly pulled him by the sleeve.
“Duke, shall I bind it up for you?”
“What? My heart?” He spoke with his face in the grass. “Bind it in a sling, you fool—it’s a heavy stone—and smite the accursed Philistine on the forehead with it.”
“Has this bitter trouble dehumanized you altogether? Do you blame me in this? He was my brother.”
“And you were my friend. What is the value of it all? I would have crushed you like a beetle if you stood in my way to him. Deviltry is the only happiness. I think he was beforehand with me in that. What a poor idiot to let him be! I might have enjoyed a minute’s bliss for the price of my soul, and now my only hope of it is by killing him.”
“That you shall never do if I can prevent it.”
He rolled over on his back, thrust his arms beneath his head and lay staring at me with deeply melancholy eyes.
“Let’s cry an armistice for the night,” he said, in a low, gentle voice.
“Forever, Duke!”
“Between us two? Why not—on all questions but the one?”
“Find some pity in your heart, even for him.”
“Never!” He jerked out an arm and shook it savagely at the sky. “Never!”
I gave a heavy sigh.
“Well,” I said, “let’s look to your foot, at least.”
“Is he beyond my reach?”
“Quite. You can put it out of your head. Even if your limb were sound you’d never catch him now. With the morning they go abroad.”
“Where to?”
“Honestly, I don’t know.”
“You found him the funds?”
“Yes.”
He groaned and turned his face away for a moment. I busied myself over his bruised ankle. Presently he said:
“How long am I to lie here?”
“Till I can see to cut you a stick from the hedge. You wouldn’t be able to limp a step without one.”
“Very well. Will you sit by me?”
“As long as you like.”
“I have no likes or dislikes now, Renny, and only one hate.”
“We won’t talk of that.”
“Not now. This field is the neutral ground. Once outside it, the armistice ends.”
“Duke!”
“How can it be otherwise, Renny, my old friend? Are you going to back me in the chase? Unless you do, you must see that it is impossible for us to come together.”
“I see nothing—feel nothing, but a vast, interminable sorrow, Duke.”
“And I—you have a gentle hand, Renny. So had she. She bound up my wrist for me once, when I had crushed it in the galley-puller. Shall we recall those days?”
My heart swelled to hear him in this softened mood, as I thought. Alas! It was only a brief interval of lucidity in his madness.
“Ah, if we could look beyond!” I finally answered, with a deep sigh.
“We can—we do. Imagination isn’t guided by rule of thumb. Even here the promise dawns slowly. Scabs are thickest on the body when it’s healing of its fever. They will fall off by and by, for all the dismal shrieks that degeneration has seized us.”
He closed his eyes and lay back upon his hands once more.
“Imagination? Was this ever my world? There is a wide green forest, and the murmur of its running brooks is all of faces sweet as flowers and voices that I know, for I heard them long ago in a time before I existed here. And I walk on, free forever of the aching past; the eternity of most beautiful possibilities and discoveries before me; joyous all through but for one sad little longing that encumbers me. Not for long—no, not for long. On a lawn fragrant with loving flowers and gathered here and there to deep silence by the stooping shadows, I come upon her—my love; my dear, dear love. And she kisses the sorrow from my eyes, and holds me to her and whispers, ‘You have come at last.’”
His voice broke with a sob. Glancing at him, I saw the tears running down his cheeks. This grief was sacred from word of mine. I rose softly and set to pacing the meadow at a little distance. By and by, when I returned, I saw him sitting up. The mood had passed, but he was still gentle and human.
Till dawn was faint in the sky we sat and talked the dark hours away. The sun had risen and Duke was watching something in the grass, when suddenly he shook himself and turned to me.
“Cut me my stick, Renny,” he said. “The pilgrim must be journeying.”
“Come home with me, Duke.”
He shook his head.
“Look!” he said, “I have tried to read a lesson of a spider as Bruce did. I broke and tangled the little fellow’s web like a wanton and what did he do but roll the rubbish up into a ball and swallow it. I can’t get rid of my web in that way, Renny.”
I did my utmost to hold him to his softer mind. He would not listen, but drove me from him.
“Cut me my stick,” he said, “or I shall have to crawl down the road on all fours.”
I did his bidding sadly. Propped up by me on one side, he was able with the help of his staff to limp painfully from the field. Outside it, he sat himself down on the hedge bank.
“Good-morning, Mr. Trender,” he said.
“Duke, let me at least help you to the town.”
“Not a step, I’m obliged to you. I shall get on very well by and by. Good-morning.”
I seized and shook his hand—it dropped listlessly from mine—hesitated; looked in his face, and, turning from him, strode sorrowfully off homeward.
Nine months had passed since my parting with Duke on the hillside, and my life in the interval had flowed on with an easy uneventful monotony that was at least restorative to my turbulent soul. We had not once heard during this stretch of time from Jason or Zyp, and could only conclude that, finding asylum in some remote corner of the world, they would not risk discovery in it by word or sign. Letters, like homing pigeons, sometimes go astray.
Duke had put in no second appearance. Dr. Crackenthorpe kept entirely aloof. All the tragedy of that dark period, crushed within a single year of existence, seemed swept by and scattered like so much road dust. Only my father and I remained of the strutting and fretting actors to brood over the parts we had played; and one of us was gray at heart forevermore, and the other waxing halt and old and feeble.
Now, often I tried to put the vexing problem of my brother’s death behind me; and yet, if I thought for a moment I had succeeded, it was only to be conscious of a grinning skeleton at my back.
And in this year a strange and tragic thing happened in Winton that was indirectly the cause in me of a fresh fungus growth of doubt and dark suspicion; and it fell out in this wise:
Some twenty years before, when I was a mere child (the story came to me later), a great quarrel had taken place between two citizens of the old burg. They were partners, before the dispute, in a flourishing business, and the one of them who was ultimately worsted in the argument had been the benefactor of the man that triumphed. The quarrel rose on some question as to the terms of their mutual agreement, the partner who had been taken into the firm out of kindness claiming the right to oust the other by a certain date. The technicalities of the matter were involved in a mass of obscurity, but anyhow they went to law about it and the beneficiary won the case. The other was forced to retire, to all intents and purposes a ruined man, but he bore with him a possession that no judge could deprive him of—a deep, deadly hatred against the reptile whose fortunes he had made and who had so poisonously bitten him in return. He was heard to declare that alive or dead he would have his enemy by the heel some day, and no one doubted but that he meant it.
Some months later, as the successful partner was returning home from his office one winter night, a pistol shot cracked behind him and he was constrained to measure his portly figure in the slush of the street. There his late partner came and looked upon him and gave a weltering grunt, like a satisfied hog, and kicked the body and went his way. But his victim was scarcely finished with in the manner he fancied. The ball, glancing from a lamp-post, had smashed the bones of his right heel only, and he was merely feigning death. When his enemy was retired he crawled home on his hands and knees, leaving a sluggish trail of crimson behind him, and, once safe in the fortress of his household, sent for the doctor and an inspector of police.
The would-be murderer was of course captured, tried and sentenced to a twenty-year term of penal servitude. He made no protest and took it all in the nature of things. But, before leaving the dock, he repeated—looking with a quiet smile on his becrutched and bandaged oppressor sitting pallidly in the court—his remarkable formula about “alive or dead” having him by the heel some day.
Then he disappeared from Winton’s ken and for sixteen years the town knew him no more, and his victim prospered exceedingly and walked far into the regions of wealth and honor, for all a painful limp that seemed as if it should have impeded his advance.
At the end of this time a little local excitement was stirred by the return of the criminal, out on ticket-of-leave, and presenting all the appearance of a degraded, battered and senile old man. His one-time partner—a town councilor by then—resented his intrusion exceedingly; but finding him to be impervious, apparently, to the sting of memory, and presumably harmless to sting any more on his own account, he bestirred himself to quarter the driveling wreck on an almshouse—a proceeding which gained him much approval on the part of all but those who retained recollection of the origin of the quarrel.
In this happy asylum the poor ruin breathed his last within a month of its admission, and the rubbish of it was buried—not in the pauper corner of some city cemetery, as one might suppose, but in the very yard of the cathedral itself. For, curiously enough, the fading creature before his death had claimed lying-room in a family vault sunk in that august inclosure, and his claim was found to be a legitimate one.
I knew the place where he lay, well; for an end of the old vault they had opened for his accommodation tunneled under a pathway that cut the yard obliquely, and, passing along it one’s feet hit out the spot in a low reverberating thud of two steps that spoke of hollowness beneath the gravel.
The July of the present year I write of being the fourth from that poor thing’s death and burial, was marked by one of the most terrific thunderstorms that have ever in my memory visited Winton.
If there was one man abroad in those bitter hours, there was one only, I should say, and he paid a grewsome price for his temerity. He was returning home from a birthday party, was that fated councilor, and, fired with a Dutch courage, must have taken that very path across the yard under which his once partner lay, and which he generally for some good reason rather avoided. What followed he might never describe himself, for that was the last of him. But a strange and eerie scene met the sight of an early riser abroad in the yard the next morning.
It appeared that a bolt had struck and wrenched a huge limb from one of the great lime trees skirting the path; that the heavy butt of this, clapping down upon that spot of the gravel under which the end of the vault lay, had splintered the massive lid stone into half a dozen pieces, so that they collapsed and fell inward, crashing upon and breaking open in their fall the pauper’s coffin underneath.
“Whom God seeks to destroy, He first maddens.” Into this awful trap, in the rain and storm and darkness, Mr. Councilor walked plump, and there he was found in the morning, dead and ghastly, his already once-wounded leg caught in a crevice made by the broken stone and wood—his heel actually resting in the bony hand of his enemy who had waited for him so long.
All that by the way. It was a grim enough story by itself, no doubt, but I mention it only here as bearing indirectly upon a little matter of my own.
Old Peggy had retailed it to me, with much grisly decoration, on the afternoon following the night of the tempest. The thorns of her mind were stored with a wriggling half-hundred of such tales.
By and by I walked out to visit the scene of the tragedy. It was dark and gloomy and still threatening storm. There was little left of the ruin of the night. The fallen branch had been sawed to lengths and carted away, and only its litter remained; the vault had been covered in again with a great slab lifted and brought from one of the precinct pathways that were paved with ancient gravestones; a solitary man was raking and trimming the gravel over the restored surface. The crowds who no doubt had visited the spot during the day were dwindled to a half-dozen morbid idlers, and a sweeping flaw of tempest breaking suddenly from the clouds even as I approached drove the last of these to shelter.
I myself scuttled for a long low tunnel that pierced a south wing of the cathedral and promised the best cover available. This was to be reached by way of a double-arched portal which enjoyed the distinction of conveying ill-luck to any who should have the temerity to walk through a certain one of its two openings.
Turning when I reached the archway, I saw that the solitary grave-trimmer was running for the same shelter as myself. With head bent to the storm, he bolted through the gate of ill-omen; stopped, recognized his error, hurriedly retraced his steps; spat out the evil and came through the customary opening at slower pace. As he approached me I saw, what I had not noticed before, that he was my friend the sexton of St. John’s.
“Good-afternoon,” said I, as he walked under the tunnel, seized off his cap and jerked the rain drops from it.
I fancied there was a queer wild look on his face, and at first he hardly seemed to be able to make me out.
“Ah!” he said, suddenly. “Good-arternoon to you.”
Even then he didn’t look at but beyond me, following with his bloodshot eyes, as it were, the movements of something on the stone wall at my back.
“So you’re translated, it appears?”
“Eh?” he said, vaguely.
“You’re promoted to the yard here, aren’t you?”
“I come to oblige Jem Sweet, ars be down wi’ the arsmer,” he said.
“That was friendly, anyhow. It was an unchancy task you took upon yourself.”
“What isn’t?” he shouted, quite fiercely, all in a moment. “Give me another marn as’ll walk all day wi’ the devil arm in arm, as I does.”
“You found him down there, eh?”
He took off his cap and flung it with quick violence at the wall behind me, then pounced upon it lying on the ground, as if something were caught underneath it.
“My!” he muttered, rising with the air of a schoolboy who has captured a butterfly, and, seeking to investigate his prize, made a frantic clutch in the air, as if it had escaped him.
“What’s that?” said I, “a wasp?”
“A warsp!” he cried in a sort of furious fright. “Who ever see a pink warsp wi’ a mouth like a purse and blue inside?”
He stood by me, shaking and perspiring, and suddenly seized me with a tremulous hand.
“They shudn’t a’ sent me down there,” he whispered; “it give me the horrors, it did, to see that they’d burried him quick, and that for fower year he’d been struggling and wrenching to get out.”
“I’m afraid that the devil’s got you indeed, my friend.”
“It’s all along o’ thart. He come and he looked down upon me there in the pit.”
“Who did? The devil?”
“Him or thart Chis’ll doctor. It’s all one. I swat cold, I tell ye. I see his face make a ugly fiddle-pattern on the sky. My mate, he’d gone to dinner and the yard was nigh empty. ‘Look’ee here,’ I whispered up to him. ‘He were burried quick, as they burried that boy over in St. John’s, yonder, that you murdered.’”
For an instant the blood in my arteries seemed to stop, so that I gasped when I tried to speak.
“What boy was that?” I said, in a forced voice, when I could command myself.
“What boy?—eh?—what boy?” His eyes were wandering up and down the wall again. “Him, I say, as they burried quick—young Trender o’ the mill.”
“How do you know he was buried alive? How could he have been if he was murdered?”
“How do I know? He were murdered, I say. I’m George White, the sexton—and what I knows, I knows.”
“And the doctor murdered him?”
“Don’t I say so?”
He had hardly spoken, when he put his hand to his head, moved a step back and stood staring at me with horror-stricken, injected eyes.
“My God!” he muttered. “He whispered there into the pit that if I said to another what I said to him I were as good as a dead man.”
The panic increased in him. I could see the tortured soul moving, as it were, behind the flesh of his face. When the nerve of endurance snapped he staggered and fell forward in a fit.
Helpless to minister to a convulsion that must find its treatment in the delirium ward of a hospital, I ran to the police station, which was but a short distance away, and gave information of the seizure I had witnessed. A stretcher was sent for the poor, racked wretch; he was carried away spluttering and writhing, and so for the time being my chance of questioning him further was ended.
Now, plainly and solemnly: Had I been face to face with an awful fragment of the truth, or had I been but the chance hearer of certain delirious ravings on the part of a drink-sodden wretch—ravings as baseless as the unsubstantial horror at which he had flung his cap?
That the latter seemed the more probable was due to an obvious inconsistency on the part of the half-insane creature. If the boy had been murdered, how could he have been buried alive? Moreover, it was evident that the sexton was near a monomaniac on the subject of living interments. Moreover, secondly, it was altogether improbable and not to be accounted for that the keen-witted doctor should intrust a secret so perilous to such a confederate. And what object had he to gain by the destruction of Modred, beyond the satisfying of a little private malice perhaps? An object quite incompatible with the fearful danger of the deed.
On the other hand, I could not but recall darkly that the sexton, on the morning when, apparently sane and sensible, he had conducted me to my brother’s grave, had thrown out certain vague hints and implications, which, hardly noticed by me at the time, assumed a lurider aspect in the light of his more definite charge; that, by Zyp’s statement to me after my illness, it would seem that Dr. Crackenthorpe had shown some eagerness and made voluntary offer of his services, in the matter of hushing up the whole question of Modred’s death; that it was not impossible that he also had discovered the boy’s knowledge of the secret of the hiding-place and had jumped at a ready opportunity for silencing forever an unwelcome confederate.
Stung to sudden anxious fervor by this last thought, I broke into a hurried walk, striving by vigorous motion to coax into consistent order of progression the dread hypothesis that so tore and worried my mind. Suddenly I found that, striding on preoccupied, I was entering that part of the meadowland wherein lay the pool of uncanny memories. It shone there before me, like a silver rent in the grass, the shadow of a solitary willow smudged upon its surface, and against the trunk of the tree that stood on the further side of the water a long, dusky figure was leaning motionless. It was that of the man who was most in my thoughts; and, looking at him, even at that distance, something repellant in his aspect seemed to connect him fittingly with the stormy twilight around him that was imaged in my soul.
Straight I walked down to the water’s edge and hailed him, and, though he made no response, I saw consciousness of my presence stir in him.
“I want a word with you!” I called. “Shall I shout it across the river?”
He slowly detached himself from his position and sauntered down to the margin over against me.
“Proclaim all from the housetops, where I am concerned,” he answered in a loud voice. “Who is it wants me, and what has he to say?”
“You know me, I suppose?”
“I have not that pleasure, I believe.”
“Never mind. I have just come from talk with a confederate of yours—the sexton of St. John’s.”
“I know the man certainly. Is he in need of my services?”
“He would say ‘God forbid’ to that, I fancy. He’s had enough of you, maybe.”
“Oh, in what way?”
“In the way of silencing awkward witnesses.”
“Pray be a trifle less obscure.”
“I have this moment left him. He was seized with a fit of some sort. He’d rather have the devil himself to wait upon him than you, I expect.”
“Why so?”
“I had some talk with him before he went off his head. Do you wish to know what he charged you with?”
“Certainly I do.”
“Murder!”
Dr. Crackenthorpe looked at me across the water a long minute; then, never taking his eyes off my face, lifted up the skirts of his coat and began to shamble and jerk out the most ludicrous parody of a dance I have ever seen. Then, all of a sudden, he stopped and was doubled up in a suffocating cackle of laughter.
Presently recovering himself, he walked off down the bank to a point where the stream narrowed, and motioned me to come opposite him.
“It’s not from fear of you and your sexton,” he explained, still gasping out the dry dust of his humor. “Your exquisite pleasantry has weakened my vocal chords—that’s all.”
I treated him to a long stare of most sovereign contempt. For all his assumed enjoyment, I fancied he was pretty observant of my mood and that he was calculating the nature of the charge I had fired at him.
“And whom did I murder?” he said, making a great show of mopping his face with his handkerchief.
“Say it was my brother Modred.”
“I’m glad, for your sake, to hear you qualify it. You should be, that there is no witness to this gross slander. I presume you to be, then, one of that pleasant family of Trender, who have a local reputation none of the sweetest.”
He came down close to the water’s edge—we were but a little distance apart there—and shook a long finger at me.
“My friend, my friend,” he said, sternly, “your excuse must be the hot-headedness of youth. For the sake of your father, who once enjoyed my patronage, I will forbear answering a fool according to his folly. For his sake I will be gentle and convincing, where it is my plain duty, I am afraid, to chastise. This man you speak of is a heavy drinker, and is now, by your own showing, on the verge of delirium tremens. Do you take the gross imaginings of such a person for gospel?”
“Dr. Crackenthorpe,” I said, quietly, “your threats fall on stony ground. I admit the man is hardly responsible for his statements at the present moment; only, as it happens, I have met and spoken with him before.”
I thought I could see in the gathering darkness his lips suck inward as if with a twitch of pain.
“And did he charge me then with murdering your brother?”
“He said what, viewed in the light of his after outburst, has awakened grave suspicions in me.”
He threw back his head with a fresh cackle of laughter.
“Suspicions!” he cried. “Is that all? It’s natural to have them, perhaps. I had mine of you once, you know.”
“You lie there, of course. By your own confession, you lie.”
“And now,” he went on, ignoring my interruption, “they are diverted to another.”
“Will you answer me a question or two?”
“If they are put with a proper sense of decorum I will give them my consideration.”
“Do you know where my father keeps the treasure, the bulk of which you have robbed him of?”
“Most offensively worded. But I will humor you. I never had need”—he shot out an evil smile—“of obtaining my share of the good things by other than legitimate means.”
“Do you know?”
“No, I don’t, upon the honor of a gentleman.”
“Did my brother that’s dead know?”
“Really, you tempt me to romance to satisfy your craving for information. I was not in your brother’s confidence.”
“Was there the least doubt that my brother was dead when he was buried?”
“Ah! I see. You have been hunting chimeras in George White’s company. It is the man’s werewolf, my good friend. You may take my professional certificate that no such thing happened.”
I looked at him, my soul lowering with doubt and the gloom of baffled vengeance.
“Have you anything further to ask?” he said, with mocking politeness. “Any other insane witness to cite on behalf of this base and baseless prosecution?”
“None at present.”
I turned and walked a step or two, intending to leave him without another word, but, on a thought, strode back to the waterside.
“Listen you!” I cried. “For the time you are quit of me. But bear in mind that I never rest or waver in my purpose till I have found who it was that killed my brother.”
With that I went from him.
It behooves me now to pass over a period of two years during which so little happened that bore directly upon the fortunes of any concerned in this lamentable history that to touch upon them would be to specify merely the matter-of-fact occurrences of ordinary daily life. To me they were an experience of peace and rest such as I had never yet known. I think—a long sleep on the broad sands of forgetfulness, whitherward the storm had cast me, and from which it was to tear me by and by with redoubled fury and mangle and devour my heart in gluttonous ferocity.
As yet, however, the moment had not come, and I lived and went my way in peace and resignation.
The first forewarning came one September afternoon of that second year of rest.
I had been butterfly-hunting about the meadows that lay to the west of the city, when a particularly fine specimen of the second brood of Brimstone tempted me over some railings that hedged in the ridge of a railway cutting that here bisected the chalky slopes of pasture land. I was cautiously approaching my settled quarry, net in hand, when I started with an exclamation that lost me my prize.
On the metals, some distance below, a man whose attitude seemed somehow familiar to me was standing.
I shaded my eyes with my hand and looked down, with bewilderment and a little fear constricting my heart.
He stood very still, staring up the line, and a thickness came in my throat, so that I could not for the moment call to him as I wanted to. For there was an ominous suggestion in his posture that sent a wave of sickness through me—a suggestion of rigid expectation, like that one might fancy a victim of the old reign of terror would have shown as he waited his turn on the guillotine.
And as I paused in indecision—at that moment came a surging rumble and a puff of steam from a dip in the hills a hundred yards away, and the figure threw itself down, with its neck stretched over the shining vein of iron that ran in front of it. And I cried “Jason!” in a nightmare voice, and had hardly strength to turn my head away from the sight that I knew was coming. Yet through all my sick panic the shadow of a thought flashed—blame me for it who will—“Let me bear it and not give way, for he is taking the sure way to end his terror.”
The thunder of the monster death came with the thought—shook the air of the hills—broke into a piercing scream of triumph as it rushed down on its victim—passed and clanged away among the hollows, as if the crushed mass in its jaws were choking it to silence. Then I brushed the blind horror from my eyes and looked down.
He was lying on the chalk of the embankment below me; he was stirring; he sat up and looked about him with a bewildered stare. The tragedy had ended in bathos after all. At the last moment courage had failed the poor wretch and he had leaped from the hurtling doom.
Shaking all over, I scrambled, slipping and rolling, down the slope, and landed on my feet before him.
“Up!” I cried; “up! Don’t wait to speak or explain! They’ll telegraph from the next stopping-place, and you’ll be laid by the heels for attempted suicide.”
He rose staggering and half-fell against me.
“Renny,” he whimpered in a thick voice and clutched at my shoulders to steady himself. “My God! I nearly did it—didn’t I?”
“Come away, I tell you. It’ll be too late in another half-hour.”
I ran him, shambling and stumbling, down the cutting till we had made a half-circuit of the town and were able to enter it at a point due east to that we had left. Then at last, on the slope of that quiet road we had crossed when escaping from Duke, I paused to gather breath and regard this returned brother of mine.
It was a sorry spectacle that met my vision, a personality pitiably fallen and degraded during those thirty months or so of absence. It was not only that the mere animal beauty of it was coarsened and debauched into a parody of itself, but that its informing spirit was so blunted by indulgence as to have lost forever that pathetic dignity of despair, with which a hounding persecution had once inspired it.
As I looked at him, at his dull, bloodshot eyes and loose pendulous lower lip, my heart hardened despite myself and I had difficulty in addressing him with any show of civility.
“Now,” I said, “what next?”
He stared at me quite expressionless and swayed where he stood. He was stupid and sodden with drink, it was evident.
“Let’s go home,” he said. “I’m heavy for sleep as a hedgehog in the sun.”
I set my lips and pushed him onward. It was hopeless entirely to think of questioning him as to the reason of his sudden reappearance, and under such circumstances, in his present state. The most I could do was to get him within the mill as quietly as possible and settle him somewhere to sleep off his debauch.
In this I was successful beyond my expectations, and not even my father, who lay resting in his room—as he often did now in the hot afternoons—knew of his return till late in the evening.
In the fresh gloom of the evening he stirred and woke. His brain was still clouded, but he was in, I supposed, such right senses as he ever enjoyed now. At the sound of his moving I came and stood over him. He stared at me for a long time in silence, as he lay.
“Do you know where you are?” I said at last.
“Renny—by the saints!” He spoke in a dry, parched whisper. “It’s the mill, isn’t it?”
“Yes; it’s the mill. I brought you here filthy with drink, after you’d tried to throw yourself under a train and thought better of it.”
He struggled wildly into a sitting posture and his eyelids blinked with horror.
“I thought of it all the way in the train—coming up—from London,” he said in a shrill undervoice. “When I got out at the station I had some more—the last straw, I suppose—for I wandered, and found myself above the place—and the devil drove me down to do it.”
“Well, you repented, it seems.”
“I couldn’t—when I heard it. And the very wind of it seemed to tear at me as it passed.”