Myfirst impression, as I sat up to gather my wits, was of awakening from a falling nightmare to the comfortable security of bed and early morning. The frantic fears engendered of that fathomless descent were all resolved in laughter. I giggled as I recalled them, shaking my dusty noddle to get the brains into place in it. Opposite me I could discern a shadowy figure, squatting in a like process of self-recovery.
“Well, old chap,” I said; “here we are!”
The sound of my voice, clanging in a vaulted space, gave me a start.
“O!” I exclaimed; and the monosyllable rolled away into the darkness like a barrel.
We scrambled up, while it was still echoing, and catching involuntarily at one another, looked fearfully about us. At a height of twelve feet or so behind us shone the opening through which we had entered. It made a great splotch of light, with a dim tail running fanlike from it down the slope by which we had fallen. The effect to us, standing possessed by gloom, was as of our being involved in the tail of a comet. So long as we looked that way, it dazzled and perplexed us. We turned our backs on it.
Then, gradually, the obscure details of the place gathered coherence; and we saw that we were standing in a low vaulted chamber, giving at its further end upon a sewer-like mouth of blackness.
“Dicky,” said Harry, in a rather tremulous whisper, “have you got the candles and lucifers all safe? This is p-p-prime, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I gulped, to either question. But I answered without heart, being sick to postpone the advance, by whatever means, for a little.
“Don’t let me go, you old idiot!” I complained in a panic, as he made as if to step forward. “Supposing we lost one another. Ha-Harry, do you know what I saw under my arm as you p-pulled me up outside there?”
“No. What?”
“Rampick—the b-beast—scuttling for the Gap. He must have been watching us again, hidden below somewhere this time; and like enough now he’s making for the cliff overhead.”
Harry began chuckling, but stopped in a fright to hear himself answered, as it were, by a patter of little laughing hiccoughs.
“He won’t find much,” he whispered, “and we needn’t be afraid he’ll follow us down here. Light a candle, Dicky, for goodness’ sake. There seem to be all sorts of things creeping and rustling.”
My hands shook so that I boggled three good matches in coaxing the wick to take; but I would not let Harry hold the candle, for fear that he might run ahead with it, and perhaps in some labyrinth of passages leave me to follow the wrong one.
The flame caught at last, flared with a momentary brilliancy, and shrunk to a mere blink. It is the common way with candles, yet I know nothing more maddening in a nervous emergency. And if philosophy sneers over that statement, let it ponder, and be thankful but take no credit, because it had nothing whatever to do with the making of its own temperament. At length, after a moment of tension indescribable, the wicked little tongue stretched, and glowed steady; and I lifted it high, while we glared right and left.
The cellar in which we found ourselves was, or had been till shorn of its seaward end, a four-square room, with Norman vaulting—crossed flat half-hoops of stone—going down into the corners. It was very small, and very low (the candle flame, as I lifted it, blackened the roof), and very massive; and because of the three, very ancient. Probably it had once been a death-chapel under some older foundation than the abbey, and connected only as a matter of piety with the newer crypts, which, to meet it, had been tunnelled eastwards, in a manner very unusual, from beneath the nave. But, so far as we could see, it was quite empty, and undamaged by the earthquake, or explosion.
I waved the light to and fro.
“Nothing here,” whispered Harry. “Let’s get on!”
The black sewer faced us. There, we knew, was our way. If for a minute or two we hesitated to follow it, by so long was Providence our friend. For, indeed, we had never thought to take account of the stale, confined gases which for years must have been poisoning these glooms, and our delay gave the draught that we had created time to take effect.
For draught there was, though we were unconscious of the significance of it when we saw the flame of our candle draw towards the tunnel. But in truth we had forgotten in our excitement all about the badger.
At last we made a move, holding on to one another’s hands like Hansel and Gretel entering the witch’s forest. We reached the black mouth of the passage, and went in on tiptoe. It was arched, and high enough in its middle to enable one to walk erect; yet not so wide but that Harry must drop behind and follow me. I sniggered a little to feel him treading nervously on my heels, and the sense of laughter was like a tonic. If one touch of nature makes the world kin, it is surely the touch that tickles one under the fifth rib.
The passage seemed to run on endlessly—just a high stone drain with a floor of hammered earth driving straight into the hill. No other diverged from it, nor did any ruin block our path; and we were beginning to move quite merrily, when suddenly the end came in a flight of half a dozen steps going down, and at the bottom a great door torn off its hinges and shivered into splinters.
At the sight we drew back on the very brink, and stood gaping and dumbstruck, afraid for the moment to proceed.
“Dicky,” said Harry, staring over my shoulder, “here comes the tug, don’t it?”
I did not answer. Suddenly he dipped under my arm and ran down, and, terrified at the thought of being left alone, I followed him.
The fragments of the door stood wrenched at any angle; but through the black gaps in the wreck flowed the sense of shattered spaces beyond.
“Now for it!” said Harry. “Hand me the light when I’m in, and follow yourself.”
I would have lingered yet, but he broke from me, and, fearing to precipitate I knew not what nameless ruin, I let him go with only a show of interference.
He was through in a moment, and calling back to me, “Pass the light, and come on. It’s all serene.”
And then in an instant I had followed him.
The draught was still strong enough here to flutter the candle flame, so that for a little we could make out nothing of our surroundings. But stepping cautiously to one side, away from the door, we found the light to stand suddenly steady, and immediately before our eyes there grew into grotesque and shadowy being a vision of enormous destruction.
It was again a vaulted chamber we were in, but of apparent proportions infinitely greater than the other. Apparent, I say, for for two-thirds of its extent it was just one unresolvable ruin. A great part of the roof had collapsed, snapping in its downfall, like sticks of celery, the squat massive piers which had supported it. The walls on either side were bowed to an arch above, or swayed drunkenly with colossal knees bent outwards. To the further side, gaping at us across the havoc, a huge blackened rent seemed to invite to nameless horrors beyond; and scattered and spattered and spurted from under the fringe of the stony avalanche were staves of casks, and fragments of burst chests from which fountains of tea had showered all over the floor.
We stood awestruck, scarce daring to breathe. The sense of yet impending disaster, the terror of calling it down upon us by a stumble, a false step, kept us as still as mice. Before us a path went clear round the ruin to another broken archway, and yet remoter vaults. But by this time my curiosity was become something less than a negative quantity.
“Harry,” I whispered at last, almost querulously, “we’ve seen enough. I’m going back.”
His face looked into mine like a little ghost’s.
“I’m not,” he said. “But I don’t want you to come. Light me another bit of candle from yours, and stay here while I go and explore. We’ve found out nothing yet, you know.”
I am ashamed to say I let him go, only imploring him to return soon—to be satisfied with a look. He did not answer, but stole off resolutely with his bit of a torch, and it was with a feeling of agony that I saw him disappear through the opening.
It is a question with psychologists how much one can dream in a second. I will answer for the eternity of nightmare I suffered during those few moments of Harry’s absence. He could hardly, in point of fact, have set foot in the further chamber when a strange little cry from him made me start violently. And immediately, as if in response, there sprang into voice near me a step, a rustle, the menace of a coming roar, and I screamed out and fled towards my friend. The crash answered behind me as I ran, and a film of dust followed. Half blinded and deafened, I almost fell at Harry’s feet as he met me. We clutched one another convulsively, and for a minute could not speak.
The concussion was succeeded by an appalling silence. Presently he was staring over my shoulder, swaying his light to and fro.
“Dick!” He went muttering in my ear: “Dick! Dick! Dick! the roof has fallen, down by the door, and blocked our way back!”
Horror took me of a heap. I could only bite into Harry’s arm up and down with my fingers, dumbly entreating him to do something to save us from going crazy.
“O, why did we come?” I moaned at last. “Why didn’t you come when I asked you?”
“What good would that have been,” he said miserably, “if we’d been caught and squashed?”
If he could not see the way to save, he could to make a man of me. He was the first to return to his sturdy self. It struck me like sacrilege to hear him suddenly emit a faint little laugh.
“O, don’t!” I said. “It’s too awful!”
“What is?” he answered. “Look here, Dick, we’re just fools, that’s all, There must be a way out somewhere—we’d forgotten what the badger showed us.”
In an instant, at his words, I had leapt to the ultimate pole of hope.
“O, Harry!” I said, “you good old fellow to think of it! Why, of course there must be; if only we could——”
“Wait a bit!” he interrupted me. “You’ll have to make up your mind to go on.”
“I’ll go anywhere,” I said, “to get safe out of this. O, don’t stop! Any moment may bring down some more of it.”
I was wriggling and sweating in a perfect agony over his hesitation.
“All right,” he said; “pull a long breath and prepare yourself.”
“For what?”
The truth came upon me in a flash. I fell back, panting at him.
“Harry! They’re there!”
He nodded.
“Yes, they’re there. If you like to shut your eyes, I’ll lead you past.”
But he had shamed me once.
“No,” I said, with a catch in my voice. “If you stood it, so can I. Go on—quick. Are they—are they—very——”
We were in the further vault before I could shape my question; and I took one glance, and shrieked, and shrunk back under the wall. And so, in the very act, at a leap the horror was gone.
Why? I cannot tell. The problem is again for the psychologists. All I know is that, as I cried out, the sickness left me. A spring of some human sympathy gushed up in my heart and expelled it. These pitiful remnants seemed to greet us as with a wistful hail of comradeship. They were ugly, disjointed, ghastly enough in all conscience; but they appealed as from the lost to the lost, and seeing them, their quiet, sad decay, I no longer feared them as I had feared them unseen. Who might swear, indeed, that our own bones would not mingle with these others presently? They were dust of our dust in the great Commonwealth of death. If I had been a desert castaway, lying down to die beside some parched human skeleton, I could not better have testified to my sense of the sorrow that makes us kin than I did now in my changed emotions.
Yet, indeed, the scene was a very awful one. Near the whole of the further side of the crypt had collapsed, making of the place a huge cave-like mouth stuck with blackened splinters of teeth, and gorged to the throttle with a litter of human remains. They lay scattered all over the vast jaw of it—chewed, dismembered, scarce one to be identified in its entirety. Here it might be a red-capped skull, with a naked brown cutlass tilted across its teeth; here a limbless body, horribly suggestive in its crumbling stumps of a mangled doll dribbling sawdust; here something, whole but for its head, crooking its fingers into the dusty scalp of a comrade from whom the legs had been torn. They may have counted to near a dozen in all, if one had had the stomach to tally the flannel caps and brass-buttoned jackets and disjointed slops. But, ten or twenty, the moral was the same. Here at the crook of a finger was the whole life of the hill blown into fragments; and the legend of the earthquake laid.
I understood that plain enough before Harry’s low excited voice sounded over my shoulder.
“Come away, Dick! Look there; don’t you see how it happened?”
He drew me back and we stood, figures of tragedy, flashing the light from our candle-ends into dark corners. In all the hideousmélangethere were two details unmistakable in their significance. To our right, lying front-downwards with its face smashed into the floor, and its legs caught into the closing throat of the vault, was a little flattened blue-coated figure, its hands flung out, and the left yet closed upon the butt of a pistol. To our left, bolt upright against the wall through which the great rent had been blown into the adjoining crypt, sat a thing grotesque almost beyond naming. It wore, with a little air of sagging weariness, a seaman’s common jersey and good white ducks and shoes with shining buckles, and its right elbow was crooked and the hand beneath rested with a sort of exhausted jauntiness on its bent right knee. In all of which there was wonder, but no indecency, had it not been that, above, the thing had no head, nor any left arm but a stump, which stood oddly upraised from its shoulder.
And somehow one knew that these two were correlative in the tragedy, and somehow responsible for the human scatteration between them—for the bright gleams and splotches of colour which budded from the ancient soot of the holocaust—for these gaudy, half-perished weed-heaps scoring the garden of death.
“Do you see?” urged Harry again.
I sighed and shook my head, not meaning ignorance, but simply overwhelmed under the weight of my own conclusions.
“Why,” he whispered, in an awestruck voice; “that—thatthere was reaching up for the ammunition, the—the armoury in the wall where they kept their powder and things, and, as he opened the cupboard, the other fired his pistol across. The bullet must have missed who it was meant for and gone into a powder barrel.”
As he spoke, one of the lights sputtered and went dim; and he caught suddenly at me.
“Come away!” he cried. “Why don’t you come? We haven’t candles and to spare.”
His words reawoke me instantly to the unresolved horror of our situation.
“I’m coming,” I answered tremulously. “Which way? Harry, don’t go without me!”
We stumbled a few blind paces, dazzled again for the nonce.
“Look here,” he said; “we must economize these. It won’t do to waste our lights.”
Instantly, in a panic, I blew out my candle, and simultaneously he blew out his. Thus was illustrated the weakness of generalities; and, correspondingly, the value, as you shall see, of accidents. We were plunged, on the breath, into subterranean night; lapped in lead and buried beyond hope of release. At least, so it seemed for the moment; and moments make the sum of time.
We stood rigid, paralysed, too dumb-stricken for speech or movement. And, in that pass, if you will believe me, the most unearthly horror of a voice hard by came to complete our demoralization. It rose between a hiss and bark, a swinish indescribable thing that tailed off into a bubbling snarl; and I thought it was the dead man caught by the legs struggling to rise and get at us.
I could not have survived and kept my reason, I think, had not Harry at this instant scattered all shadows with a jubilant shout—
“Daylight! Look up there, Dicky! We’ve found the way.”
I shook with the cry, and raised my despairing eyes. Sure enough, at a good height before and above us, a gleam of blessed dawn filtered down through the superincumbent soil. The accident of darkness had revealed it to us so soon as our pupils had forgotten the false glare of the candles.
“O, Harry!” I cried, half hysterical. “O, Harry! what was that noise?”
And he laughed out—“Light up again, you old funk! It was the best friend in the world to us.”
Amazed, without understanding, I tremblingly rekindled the candle; and there, right before us, was a flight of stone steps going up—the ancient entrance to the crypts; and, risen bristling from his bed of straw and sticks at the foot of it, was our ally, our preserver, our most noble and honouredthe badger.
He was a surly auxiliary, resentful for his broken slumber. He stood setting at us, and bubbling, and showing his teeth, as cross a little Cerberus as ever divided his duty between guarding the way down and keeping damned souls from escaping. Harry softly pulled the geological hammer from his pocket.
“Don’t!” I gasped. “You mustn’t! He saved us.”
“I’m not going to attack,” said Harry. “But I must defend, if he makes a rush. Try a bite of him first, if you’re doubtful. I tell you, if he once fastens on, you’ll have to take him up with you.”
Keeping close together, and our eyes on the little grey gentleman, we edged gingerly round towards the foot of the flight. Fortunately, as we advanced, he withdrew, coming behind us in a circle.
“Go up first,” whispered Harry, “while I keep the rear.”
Holding the candle to light him, I went backwards up the steps, until my head touched the canopy of soil and ruin which blocked their exit; and then, backwards, Harry followed me. The badger snuffed and gurgled, pointing his snout at us, but not offering to follow.
“Now,” said Harry, turning round, “for the way!”
It was a narrow one as it first offered—a mere beast-earth driven down between chance interstices in the ruins above to meet the stair-head. But all the time while we wrought at to enlarge it, the sweet light was stretched to us to comfort and inspire, and the smell of liberty came down more and more in draughts like wine, as if Harry with his strenuous hammer were tapping the very reservoir of day. The only fear was that, striking carelessly, he might loosen some poised mass, and bury us under an avalanche of stone. But luckily, both sunk vault and tumbled ruin had so well adjusted between them the balance of collapse that our puny grubbing was all insufficient to disturb it.
For which, thank God! And tenfold for that glorious moment when, struggling and pushing up by way of the last of the littered steps, we shouldered and tore ourselves through into the mid-thicket of brambles by the fallen plinth, and felt the light of day, broken by the branches, burst over us like a salvo of resplendent rockets!
Onthe day following that of our adventure Harry was due at Yokestone. I had arranged to walk part of the way with him, for we had much and momentous matter to discuss—our discovery, and the responsibility, moral and legal, which it entailed upon us, to wit. But, to my disturbance, the morning found Uncle Jenico knocked up with a chill; and the dear soul’s hope that I would stay to keep him company was so patent, that I had not the heart to disoblige him. I just took an opportunity to run out and tell Harry I could not come, and to re-decide with him upon postponing all action until we could consider the matter in its every bearing; and then returned, very much depressed, I must own, to my duty.
I don’t know if any suspicion of the past, any premonition as to the future was operating in the old man’s mind. Pure spirits, one must think, must be strangely sensitive to any disturbance in their moral atmosphere. He was certainly oddly solicitous about me, wistfully attentive, loth that I should leave him, and for my sake, not his own. But after dinner, as luck would have it, he fell asleep in his chair, and, restless beyond endurance, I took the chance to go for a stroll.
Once outside the door, I hesitated. I had not yet slept soundly or exhaustively enough to shake off all the horror of our late experience. I dreaded to go by the hill; I dreaded to go by the beach; but at last the prospective quiet of the latter drew me, and I turned my face seawards.
I had expected to find the shore deserted, and so, reaching the cliff edge, was put out a little to see a figure, that of a stranger, already down there before me. It went to and fro, this figure, on the fringe of the surf, thoughtfully, its head bent, its hands clasped behind its back—a lean, small old man, it seemed. But I observed it with unspeculative eyes, because of my pondering all the time, abstractedly and rather dismally, on the events of yesterday.
We had not canvassed our adventure much as yet, Harry and I. The shock and the shame of it, the body and brain-weariness, had disinclined us, during our walk home, to comment on a very frightening experience, out of the reach of whose shadow we could not escape, for all our hurrying. Morning, indeed, found it still with us, like a motionless fog, which, however, we should have endeavoured to dissipate by the breath of frank discussion, had not Uncle Jenico’s illness supervened. In consequence of which I had to face the rather depressing prospect of enduring for a whole day and night the burden of unrelieved silence. Still, about one thing we had been agreed: that we must weigh all the pros and cons before deciding to suppress or confess our discovery. At first, I had been for telling Mr. Sant everything the moment he returned; for he was away in London, as it chanced, on a short visit. But Harry had at once vetoed the idea.
“It wouldn’t be fair to foist all the responsibility on him,” he had said, emphatically. “Being a parson, he’d be bound to call in the law, and if he did that, his influence here would be lost, and you might burst your cheeks trying to whistle it back. Who knows who’d be found to be mixed up in the business, if once we talked? Most of the village, likely. And we’re not going to do anything to force him into becoming unpopular, and losing what he’s been years in getting.”
“But, Mrs. Puddephatt,” I had complained feebly, “said the village had nothing to do with it.”
“Nonsense!” Harry had answered. “She didn’t neither. She said that Dunberry and the Dutchmen worked separate, with Rampick for go-between.”
“Well,” I had still protested, “isn’t that much the same?”
“Much the same, you gaby!” he had cried. “O yes, of course! Much the same as if two engine wheels connected by a rod turned up their noses about knowing one another.”
The technical inspiration of his simile had thereupon surprised him into a grin, and me, even, into a dismally funny attempt at a retort:—
“Well, theywouldmove in different circles, you know. But we’ll sleep on it—that’s the best; and thrash it out between us to-morrow.”
That, however, as I have explained, we were debarred from doing; and now there was nothing for me but to possess my troubled soul in patience until Harry’s return. In Uncle Jenico, we had neither of us thought for a moment of confiding. Some instinctive sense of his lack of grasp, of his unpractical weakness prevented us. We would not confound or agitate the dear old fellow; and so here, in the result, I was solitarily and tragically cogitating our problem on the cliff edge.
We had, indeed, already come to one conclusion too obvious for dispute. The secret entrance to the smugglers’ lair had been patently near the spot whence we had emerged, and the significance of the now obliterated cliff-path was thus revealed. Those, however, were points which only concerned indirectly the main sources of our confusion, which sources were necessarily the nature of the tragedy and Rampick’s presumptive connection with it. There lay the deep core of the shadow—the stress of the moral obligations our reckless adventure had imposed upon us. We had opened the forbidden chamber, and our fingers were bloody.
Was it murder, in short? And, if so, was Rampick an accessory? And, if so, were we also become accessories?
I started at the thought, and went hurriedly down the Gap impelled by a sudden vision, It took the form of a tax-cart, and a handcuffed man in it being carried off to Ipswich Gaol. I felt the cold grip of the iron on my own wrists, and had to thrust my hands deep into my breeches’ pockets for some familiar reassurance of warmth. The stranger still paced the sands, a mechanic irritating figure. Now noticing my advent, he stopped to regard me, his hands behind his back, the wind gently undulating his coat-tails. Going northwards, I should come under the rake of his eyes. My nerves were on the jump. I flounced peevishly, and went down the coast, till, come opposite the scene of our yesterday’s escapade, I stopped involuntarily and stared up.
I had not intended to. I could master the inclination no more than I could the morbid concentration of my thoughts. They were drawn like smoke into that black gash high up in the cliff.
It was not very noticeable even now. Another storm, any hurricane of rain, might seal it once more, and close the evidence of our passage thereby. Why let any thought of our responsibility to it vex us? Our enterprise had been a purely private one, and——
Like a blow came the memory of Rampick’s cognisance of it, of my vision of him hurrying agitated for the Gap as I was drawn in. He had seen us enter; possibly, emerge. He must at least suspect us of having made some sort of discovery, and his knowledge of our knowledge was the terror.
I still stared up. If it was really murder, then, and this man an accessory?
He might have been, and yet none know the truth of his guilt but himself. Grant it a fact that the local and foreign gangs had worked apart. Had he not been, according to the same authority, their connecting link? What more likely then that he alone of all alive should be informed of the real nature of the act which at a stroke had shattered his connection? It would account for his eternal haunting of the neighbourhood, for his terror lest some one, exploring too far, should unearth his secret—if guilty secret it were. And what proof of that? Why, none that was direct—no proof of anything; not of murder, certainly. And yet I was as sure as if my soul had witnessed it that murder, in deed or intention, had been committed. It was the position, thesettlementof the bodies, flung down with all that atmosphere of deadly suggestion. I felt that I could restore the scene, as sculptors restore a statue from a few significant fragments. That the man under the stone had been attacked, and had fired in a desperate self-defence, accidentally sending all to perdition, I had no doubt. He might have been a spy, a deposed chief—his clothing seemed to pronounce him above the order of the rest—he might have been one of, or other than themselves; he had precipitated a greater tragedy in trying to avert a lesser, of that I was sure. And Rampick?
It all resolved upon him, this doubt, this haunting stress of conscience—all concentrated itself upon the wretched, degraded creature in the tissue of whose story our destiny had entangled us. I stirred, and gave a little groan.
“Ha!” exclaimed a voice at my elbow.
With a shock I jerked round; and there was the stranger of the sands come softly up, and intently scrutinising me.
I felt unreasoningly ashamed, as if caught in some self-soliloquy. My face went like fire. “What do you——” I was beginning loud enough; and on the instant bit my teeth on the cry, and stood gaping. I could feel my jaw slackening idiotically. Minute by minute, it seemed to me, we stood silent there, regarding one another.
“Mr. Pilbrow!” I whispered at last.
It all came back to me across that shining gulf of years. I had forded the valley in the mean time, descending into deep glens and unremembering woods, distancing for ever, as I had supposed, the landmarks of childhood. And, lo! climbing the further side, and looking back, here was the past quite close; for the valley had been but a little fairy cleft after all, and all the time the memory of old things had been waiting there for me to resume them. Six years, with their fulness of growth and interest, stood between me and this man; yet I saw and knew him as if the interval were but a span. The story of him, the tragedy of my own connection with it, became in this moment the instant thing with me, bridging the abysmal lapse between.
He was not much changed, it is true. The face was the same haunting unearthly mask which had hung up before me in the court. A gurgoyle, I had called it; and still the stony inhumanity of it was the first thing to impress me. It was older only, and more scarred by wind and weather. The drench of unhealing waters had streaked its forehead and darkened the pits of its eyes; but with no other result than to emphasize the fire in them, and intensify the loneliness of the lost soul they windowed. I gave a little foolish fluttering laugh.
“So you remember me?” he said.
“Yes,” I answered. “But how do you know me?”
That was the wonder, indeed. Medusa might not change to Perseus as Perseus to Medusa.
“Were you looking for me?” I asked. “Did you know I was living here?”
He shook his head slightly.
“No more, young sir, than I know the ultimate goal of my destiny.”
It suddenly occurred to me that, after all, he had said nothing to associate me with any memory of his own. I blushed like a fool, and stammered out—
“I suppose you aren’t mistaking——”
He put up his hand to interrupt me.
“Your father gave his life for me, sir. Not a shadowed feature, not a transmitted gesture of his, but I should feel myself cursed for failing to identify, if I lived to the age of Methuselah. You are Master Richard Bowen. You will hardly deny it, I think.”
I giggled again, more foolish than ever.
“No, I won’t,” I said. “And have you yet found Abel, Mr. Pilbrow?”
Now, in a wonderful way, my ingenuous question wrought a sudden transformation in the man. As once before, his hand swept the hard evil from his eyes, and when those looked at me again, they were as soft as a weary woman’s. The change was infinitely pathetic, illuminating; and in the light of it, I seemed to see for the first time how worn was this poor creature, how tired and woeful, and how, perhaps, he wore his outlawry for a mask.
“If I doubted before, could I doubt now!” he cried. “Staunch, and unspoiled by the years! And how could it be otherwise withhisson!”
He had seized my hands in his; and, embarrassed as I was, his words moved me to a strange understanding.
“Mr. Pilbrow,” I cried, as I had cried those long years before, “he said you did not do it.”
He gazed at me rapturously a moment, then fell to urging me to walk with him.
“Come,” he cried. “I must move, or I shall be a woman. Ask me, ask me everything. This accident—this destiny—this heart-filling spring in the desert! No, I have not found Abel, my friend, my dear friend, though I have never ceased to seek him, like the spectral dog I am.”
I thought of the werewolf of Mr. Sant’s story. So damned, so abhorrent, so pitiful appeared this grey shadow moving at my side. He put his arm within mine, and hurried me up and down the desolate beach. The grinding of the sea seemed to hush itself, the drooping pall of sky to rise aloof from us. I was full of excitement and agitation, carried altogether without the oppression of the thoughts which had been vexing me.
“Ask,” he cried, feverishly pressing my arm. “Give me the chance to unburden my heart to my one true friend, I do believe, God help me, in all the world! I have not found Abel, Richard—ah! may I call you Richard?—I have not found Abel, though through these long years I have never ceased to hunt him—his shadow, some sound of his voice, some track of his footsteps.”
“To right yourself with the world?” I asked.
“Let it fall from me—the vampire!” he cried, contemptuously. “You are all the world I care, as your father was before you. It is not Abel I want, Richard; it is the secret he carried away with him—the secret, or the clue to it, which I have maddened after, pursuing it, the wicket friar’s-lantern, down the long mire of these coasts.”
“Secret?” I said, wondering. “What secret?”
“The book,” he answered—snapped, rather.
I turned and stared at him as we walked.
“You mean the book that—that you fought about?”
He nodded.
“Why,” I sniggered, incredulous, “was it worth all this?”
He did not resent my youthful irony—met it with a solemn self-deprecation, in fact.
“God knows, dear boy!” he said. “This, and more, I thought once. Now, Richard, forbear to indulge a lust till it masters you. I have damned myself like the wandering Jew. I have no rest in rest. The quest has become an obsession, a craze, which not even the discovery of the treasure itself could, I believe, appease.”
“Phew!” I whistled, soft and amazed. “A treasure, was it?”
“Yes,” he said.
“And somewhere on these coasts, I think you said?”
“Somewhere on these east coasts.”
I stopped in sheer excitement.
“I don’t wonder. They are choke full of—of things. And have you been tramping them ever since I saw you last?”
“On and off; up and down; to and fro.”
“It must have been tiring, and—and a bit expensive.”
He smacked his hand to his breast.
“There is a hundred or two left here yet. ‘Equity’—you remember your friend’s words?—‘equity is justice.’”
“You got your thousand pounds?”
“I got my thousand pounds.”
A longish silence fell between us.
“Mr. Pilbrow,” I said at last, “what has brought you here?”
“Destiny,” he answered at once; “yours and mine.”
“It was quite accidental, this meeting?”
“As the world would consider it—quite.”
“Well,” I said, after a pause, “it is very wonderful; and most of all your knowing me again. I—I hope you will be here a day or two. I must be going home.”
He looked at me with his strange wolf’s eyes.
“I only arrived last night,” he said. “You live here?—but, of course.”
“I live here—have lived, ever since that time, with my guardian.”
He started back with a gesture of repulsion.
“Not that man, that crow, that Quayle?”
I laughed. He had no sense of humour. In all my knowledge of him I never knew him even to smile.
“O dear no!” I said. “A very different person; my uncle, Mr. Paxton.”
“He could not be too different to satisfy me as your guardian,” he responded grimly. Then his face softened, and he took my hands in his. “So long as I stay,” he said sorrowfully, “you will let me see you sometimes?”
Now, at that, my heart melted to him. He was so fierce, so vicious to the rest of the world, it was a certain glory to be his chosen.
“Won’t you come and see my uncle?” I said. “He is at home, not very well. He knows all about that trial, Mr. Pilbrow, and—and he loved my father dearly.”
I believe there were tears sprung to his eyes. I turned away abashed.
“Does he loveyou?” he asked low.
“He lives for me, I think.”
“Then,” he said, “we shall have that sympathy in common, and I will risk it.”
All the way back I chattered to him of my life since we had last met. He had been so associated with my father’s end, I could not shake off the impression that we were old friends. He listened intently, sharing in all my sympathies, grinding his teeth over my little local misfortunes. And when we reached our door, he took my hand again before entering, and said in a full voice, “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”
Age, that forgets its yesterday’s company, often puts one to shame in the memories of long ago. I had pondered the problem, even while proposing it, of Joshua’s introduction to my uncle; and, behold! the dear soul recognized his guest at the first mention. His name was associated indirectly, it is true, with a momentous decision in his own life; yet, even so—well, one was not wont to look upon Uncle Jenico’s memory as the active partner in his constitution. It saved me some perplexity.
I had left Joshua by his own request in the porch while I went to prepare my relative, who I found much refreshed by his sleep, and to whom I briefly recapitulated the tale of my rally with this old client, as I might call him.
“Bring him in, by all means,” he said, adjusting his spectacles, and then beaming at me through them. “Poor soul, poor fellow, to have suffered all these years under the stigma of an unfounded slander!”
He spoke with a new-awakened loudness; the door was close at hand; the visitor heard. In a moment he came striding in, hat in hand, his eyes glittering.
“Mr. Paxton,” he said; “Mr. Paxton! You are worthy to be this dear lad’s guardian! I can say no more.”
The two men shook hands, with a full understanding, it seemed; and a pregnant minute ticked itself out between them.
“You come off a long journey?” asked my uncle, at the end.
“Off a long journey, sir—a journey of six years. I had hardly expected to find this haven by the way. I hardly know now what it means; yet Fate grant it has a meaning!”
“You are making a considerable stay?”
“If I have not lost the faculty to rest. I don’t know. I am all confounded at present.”
“He is seeking for a treasure hidden on these coasts,” I put in, and I could have put in nothing apter. My uncle kindled.
“A treasure!” he cried. “Why, so am I, Mr. Pilbrow. Only, I gather, I have the advantage of you in having already collected a part of mine. And did you read of yours, too, in Morant?”
“Morant, sir!” said the bookseller. “No, his name was Victor—Carolus Victor.”
He checked himself instantly—jealously. He had been carried away emotionally, I think, over his reception. But in the same breath his reserve was gone.
“You shall have the whole story from me,” he said; “but not now. Give me time to order my thoughts, to realize what this encounter means to me.”
“Certainly,” said my uncle, kindly. And being all openness and simplicity himself, he proceeded to relate to our visitor the entire history of our sojourn in Dunberry, and of the events and prospects which had brought us there.
“The result has justified my utmost hopes,” he ended with, enthusiastically; and then cast a sudden wistful look at me. “It is something in an otherwise empty life, Mr. Pilbrow, to have this object in accumulating. Heaven has seen fit, sir, to deny me the blessing of a family, lest by my improvidence I turned it into a curse. But it has compensated with the left hand while it withheld the right. What prouder trust to have committed to one than the welfare of the child of him who died to prove the truth!”
The visitor stepped back, shading his eyes with his hand.
“You rebuke me, sir,” he said in a stifled voice; “you teach me. Isthisthe meaning, the atonement? If I, too, might so earn quittance of this curse of emptiness!The child of him who died to prove the truth!My God, my God! To bequeath to him the fruits of this so wretched quest! To turn the curse into a blessing!”
He advanced, and seized my uncle’s hand with a strenuous entreaty.
“Let me be joint trustee with you. By that sacred life laid down for mine, I have a right. If I could so convert this evil—to enrich his son—so perhaps to earn rest.”
My uncle was distinctly snuffling. He took off his spectacles and wiped them, and put them on again tremulously.
“So be it, Mr. Pilbrow,” he said. “We have been two selfish souls, perhaps. We will win our redemption through Richard.”
Thus was I made the inheritor of phantom fortunes. I felt quite inclined to put on airs, as the sole legatee to a vast atmospheric estate. Mr. Pilbrow even came to claim me with some show of kind judicial authority, as if the law had appointed him my part guardian. But that was by-and-by.
Now, he uttered a sound, as if his emotions had been too much for him, and stepped back.
“I must go,” he said. “You will excuse me. This wonder—this kindness—I am unused; it overwhelms me. I must rest the body, even if the brain works. You will let me come and see you again?”
“But why not accept a——” began my uncle.
“No, no,” he interrupted him, gasping. “I understand your generosity, sir. I have stood, I can stand the rack. There are limits to my endurance of benignity—such human consideration. I have a good bed at the Flask. I entreat you to let me go—to——”
He left hurriedly. I would have accompanied him; but Uncle Jenico, with a better delicacy, detained me. The moment the door slammed on him he smacked one hand decisively in the palm of the other.
“That man a murderer!” he cried. “Richard, I wish your Mr. Quayle no worser fate than to die in refuting such another calumny!”
I hadforgotten all our late troubles in this wonderful encounter. Aaron’s snake had swallowed the others. This peaked wintry little ghost out of the past, starved and frost-bitten and shabby as it looked, had yet a strange suggestion of vicious force about it which, inasmuch as it seemed sworn for good or evil to my service, comforted me unconsciously in the sense of fear and helplessness which had got me in grip. Somehow Rampick seemed less formidable, my feeling of bondage to an ugly responsibility less acute, in the knowledge of this new acrid ally.
But, beyond this, there was curiosity—still-breathing, wide-eyed curiosity to know what enduring mystery yet held the footsteps of that ancient tale of The KingversusJoshua Pilbrow. I had learned something, had had my adventure tooth tickled with a taste of the truth. It had whetted my hunger for more, had tantalized me with that sharpest spur to youthful appetite—the dream of hidden treasure. When would Joshua serve up the whole dish—or would he ever? It seemed incredible that a man who had pursued such a secret, morose and self-contained, for six years, could yield it at last to a sentiment. Yet he had promised, and, though I sickened of the delay, I must not dare to risk making that eternal by over-precipitation.
In the meantime, as there could be no harm in the attentions natural to hospitality, I walked over to the Flask inn, after breakfast the following morning, to see how our visitor had slept.
It was within three or four days of Christmas, and sharp, beautiful weather. I have always since associated the deadliest scheming of Fate with such tranquillity. The robin, like a tiny phœnix, burned, singing on a spray. There was a glaze of rime on the ground, and the sweetest coldness to take into the lungs. The ringers were already practising their carols; the ruddiness of the holly was reflected in the genial cheeks of the wives; the prospect of holiday and fat fare smiled from every door. One had thought that the village, like its geese, had been gutted of the last foulness, and that Nature beamed approval. Alas! it is not the blackest thought that rides the storm. Nature, like the man, may “smile and smile and be a villain.”
The younger Miss Fleming had made herself a sad misalliance, running away with the ostler, and coming to grief and indigence. But her fate had wrought no impression on her sister, who remained as pert and coquettish as ever, and wore the same gaudy finery and shoes down at heel. She always rather courted me because of Harry, of whom she was gigglingly enamoured, and who detested her.
“Lork, Mr. Dicky!” she said, when I came in. “Is the old gentleman a friend of yours? I’m sure I’d have give him every attention if I’d known.”
She was glancing fitfully, all the time she spoke, at a little lozenge of looking-glass which stood on the bar rack.
“Whatever you could have spared from that, Tilly?” I said. “I’m sure I’m much obliged to you.”
“O, get along!” she protested. “You’re always poking your fun at me!” And I made my way upstairs, as directed, to number seven.
I found Joshua not yet out of bed when I entered to his summons. He sat up to greet me, like Lazarus new-risen—a wasted corpse-like little figure, white and grim and unshorn. But his face lighted rapturously at sight of me.
“It was no dream, then!” he said, and lay back again, with a very gentle expression. I came and stood over him, and he nodded to me.
“Richard, I shall lie abed to-day. This passion of luxury after the toil! Most restful, most wonderful! Yet the sickness is not out of my bones.”
“You will do very well,” I said. “When you are rested, we must show you all there is of the place—the local lions, you know. To-night it is a Feast of Lanterns—rather fun. Do you think you could manage it?” And between question and answer he learned all about Mr. Sant, and Harry, and what remained untold of our simple history. It might have been Hume to him, so profound an attention he gave to it.
“I shall like that Harry,” he said at the end; “and the sensible clergyman. Yes, I will come to the Feast, if you can find me a lantern.”
After arranging to fetch him at a given hour, I left him to his trance of rest. He told me no more of his story. I had hardly expected he would; yet I retreated in an itch of half-injured excitement. Ah! if I could have foreseen under what circumstances the revelation was to come to me, I would have sworn a compact of eternal silence with him, and baffled Fate.
That morning Harry returned from Yokestone, and I walked a mile to meet him. He was near as excited as I over Joshua’s coming. He knew all about him, of course. We had no secrets from one another.
“What does he look like?” he said. “I’ve never seen an acquitted murderer.”
Joshua had shaved the gallows. He was not the rose, but he had lived near it.
“I can’t say he looks like everybody else,” I said, “because he doesn’t. But his nose is in the middle of his face.”
By-and-by we fell to our long-postponed discussion of the great adventure and its moral.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Harry, “that perhaps after all we’ll tell Sant.”
“O, you may snigger!” he said. “But supposing anything were to happen to us.”
“Why, what’s going to happen to us?”
“I don’t know. One can never tell.” He spoke quite sombrely. “It wouldn’t be right, would it, to carry that secret to the grave, especially——”
“Especially what?”
“Why, I was going to say, especially if we thought we were going to be sent there by some one on purpose to keep it.”
“Look here, Harry,” I exploded; “I wish you’d speak plain, and not hint and nudge and set a fellow jumping. Who do you mean? Say out!”
“Rampick, then.”
I walked on, staring at the road. He had but given actuality to a rather haunting spectre of my own.
“You think he’ll be wanting to shut our mouths?” I said, low.
“I think—yes. He saw us go in; and—well, look here, Dick—why’s he been watching there all these years, unless out of fear that some such thing might happen? Ah, you’ve thought the same yourself, I see! It looks black against him, in my opinion, and——”
“He’s half crazed. We two ought to be a match for him.”
“Suppose he took us separate? He’s strong as the devil still, I tell you. I’m not afraid; but I don’t want to be tipped over a cliff, or have a stone fall on me, and mother be left to think I didn’t take care of my life for her sake.”
“Very well; we’ll tell Sant, then,” I said, graciously conceding the point—with much private relief.
“Then the sooner the better,” said Harry. “I’ve thought it all out since yesterday, and concluded that not to tell him would be to make him out less of a man than we are. Supposing anything were to happen to us, and some chance brought to his knowing after all what we’d died to keep from him. A pretty opinion he’d think we had of him, and a pretty ghost to haunt his conscience, to know that he might have saved us. The sooner the better, I say.”
“All right. Only he won’t be back till this evening.”
“No more he will. Very well; what do you say, then, to filling up the time by goingthereagain?”
I actually stumbled, as if he had tripped me.
“Harry!”
I had clutched hold of him to stop him, and we stood face to face.
“You ain’t afraid?” he asked.
“Afraid! I’m sick at the very thought.”
“O, that’s rot! We’ve seen the worst, and got over it.”
“Havewe? We’ve seen enough anyhow to serve me for a lifetime.”
“Don’t you bother, then. I’ll go by myself.”
“You shan’t, I tell you.”
“Shan’t I? We’ll see.”
“What do you want to go for?”
“To find out whetherhe’sbeen there since or not.”
“What does it matter if he has? Besides, he’d never get his great carcase through the way we came.”
“I dare say; but I want to see. Forewarned is forearmed.”
“Wait till we’ve spoken to Mr. Sant.”
“I’d rather have the latest facts to put before him.”
I clutched my forehead. I knew the dogged side of this friend of mine. Then I fell into a fury, and stamped.
“You’re a beast! If I have a fit, you’ll have to answer for it, that’s all.”
“I don’t want you to come!”
“Don’t you? Who gave you leave to dictate to me, I should like to know?”
“Well, come if you like.”
“Thank you, Mr. Harrier, for the permission.”
We resumed our way, and I walked by Harry’s side, ruffling. Presently he said—
“I say! Supposing that old Pilbrow’s treasure had anything to do with the secret in the hill! What a lovely complication!”
“I don’t see why it particularly should,” I snapped. “It had to do with a book; not—not with a hash of smugglers.”
I took no longer interest in Joshua for the moment. Harry had put all that story out of my head. He saw I was worked up, and said no more. We parted where our roads branched, on my side in a very depressed condition. My dinner choked me, and my desperate efforts to simulate appetite only brought me observation. Uncle Jenico was quite concerned, and Mrs. Puddephatt disgustingly critical.
“It’s the hair,” she said. “Soon or late it was bound to find ’im hout. I don’t blame you, sir, for noticing at the eleventh hour what’s long been apperient to the casual. The heyes of love is blind, and incapable of seeing into the stomach. The young gentleman, sir, is sickening for London, and no wonder. We know, sir, what Scripture says is the dog’s fancy; and is a human to be judged more himpervious to what he’s give up? Let Master Richard breathe the hair of his native ’eath once more ismyadvice.”
“Is there any truth in this, Dick?” said Uncle Jenico, when she had gone. “Have you been, perhaps unconsciously, thinking of London lately, because——”
“O, don’t be a dear old idiot!” I interrupted him impatiently. “I was never less in the mood to leave Dunberry. Can’t I keep up my character for health without stuffing myself when I ain’t hungry!”
I laughed vexedly; but still I could see he was anxious about me, and I was working myself up to the last pitch of irritability, when suddenly I was conscious that Harry had gone past the window outside. I waited for his rap at the door. It did not follow. I jumped up, stung to fury, and disregarding my uncle’s cry, ran out of the house and came up with my friend.
“What do you mean?” I said. “Were you going without me?”
“I thought,” he answered, “you’d see me; and then you could come or not as you liked.”
“Now, look here,” I said, “I won’t be treated in this way. I think it’s just beastly. Because I don’t jump at being made sick, every one’s going to pity me or be my superior.”
“Why, what’s happened?” said Harry, with a twinkle.
“Mrs. Puddephatt,” I answered. “I wish she’d leave my inside alone. And here you are going along with your nose in the air.”
Harry was chuckling out loud; but he reddened as I ended.
“I can’t help my nose,” he said gravely. “I don’t see the point.”
“No more do I,” I answered, looking at it, and beginning to come round with a vexed laugh. It is strange what self-respect we can acquire from other people’s weaknesses. Harry’s “pug” was always a rather delicate subject with him.
He flushed truculent a moment, then shrugged his shoulders and gave a good-natured laugh.
“I must take what comfort I can out of its being a cushion,” he said. “It’s very resting to the eyes—better than yours, that they can’t settle on without slipping.”
“Tit for tat,” I said. “You’ve answered me like a witty little gentleman, my darling. And now you can pull my ear, if you like, for having been cross and rude with you.”
He responded, with the addition of an amiable kick, and Richard was himself again.
The air being thus cleared, we went swiftly for the Mitre, chattering spasmodically all the way in a desperate pretence of swagger. I really think the greater credit was due to me, as I was being engaged to this anticlimax, as I considered it, entirely against my judgment. But my heart sank once more, when at last we came up on the hill among the ruins, and I realized at first hand the sinister futility of our design.
The day had fallen wintry close and breathless. The sun was not blotted out, but dulled, as if a ground-glass window had been shut upon it. A light fog was stretching shorewards from the water, chilling and isolating us. It brought the very spirit of ghostly echoes with it, and wickedness and watchfulness; and it seemed to demoralize the pith in one’s bones.
“O, if it’s got to be done, let’s get it over!” I said, with a shiver. “Why—Harry, look there!”
He nipped my arm, and we both stood staring—at the place of our yesterday’s exit.
There was no doubt about it. We had never effected, had never thought to effect, in the litter of dead stuff and bramble, so complete a concealment of our passage therethrough, for our ecstasy had taken no account at the moment of the rending evidences of our adventure which we were leaving behind us. Now, all trace of such was gone, obliterated, had been cunningly effaced and built in with other litter torn from the thicket elsewhere. The deadly spot was returned, to all appearance, to its wonted condition.
“Won’t that do?” I whispered, gulping. “We needn’t look any further.”
“We need,” returned Harry, short and grim. “Who’s to know, if we don’t, that he found his way down?”
“What does it matter if he did or didn’t? This shows plains enough that he saw us come out.”
“But it doesn’t show that he knows what we know.”
“Harry!”
He was pulling at the dead stuff as I shook out his name. A great pad of it came bodily away in his hands, revealing a savage gap behind—a hole torn and trodden beyond anything that we had made.
“Harry!” I whispered again. “Supposing—supposing he should be down there now!”
Nothing would persuade or deter him. He broke from me, and was in while I spoke; and I had in decency to follow.
Now, if more proof were needed, here it was in the black rent at our feet. It was flagrantly enlarged from our memory of it by the forced passage of a huger body. It offered no difficulty of descent, and Harry let himself down into it cautiously, but without hesitation.
“Wait,” he muttered, as he disappeared, “while I light up.”
He had brought matches and candles with him; but he paused a moment to listen before he fetched them out.
Not a sound reached us. The hill, inside and out, was wrapped in deadliest silence. The next instant a soft glow spread itself below me, and I went down into it, tingling with the horror of what it should reveal.
Not a sound; not even the snarl of the badger, which I believe I should have welcomed. The brute, scared out of his security, I think, had betaken himself to other quarters. We reached the floor, and crept on.
Again the dead came about us; but now, knowing and holding the road to flight, I could recover nothing of the sad appeal to comradeship with which they had before greeted me. They were terrors apart: ghastly chuckling grotesques without name in the kind world I had left. I hated them as they hated me.
Suddenly Harry uttered a little cry, and, stooping, rose again with some object in his hand.
“Look!” he whispered, and held it to the light.
It was the bowl, broken off short, of a blackened death’s-head pipe, such as was familiar to us in the lips of Joel Rampick.
Do you know what the French call apièce de conviction? Here it was, and we needed nothing further.
He had been here, and he shared our secret. What was he going to do?
I rememberI ate a very large supper that night, to the happy reassurance of Uncle Jenico. That suffocating tightness of the midriff, which anxiety brings, seems to expand, in its reaction, to a quite exaggerated emptiness. Have we not all had that experience? What meals we’ve made after a visit to the dentist’s! Who would have thought that this Berserker, dashing his beard with wine and roaring contempt of wounds and death, was the same individual who in the morning cowered sick-cropped in Mr. Forceps’s waiting-room? The thought of having vindicated, and proved, and so honourably acquitted one’s self of further responsibility to a much-dreaded task, is one of the most appetizing reflections in the world. And besides, I had arrears to make up.
For the moment, I was quite congratulatory to Fate on its having found so strong an instrument as myself to help it with its schemes. I even, I think, took credit for that brilliant conception of shifting the whole burden as soon as possible upon Mr. Sant’s shoulders. Through the glaze of repletion I saw, bedimmed, and even perhaps glorified, the figures of two ghostseers scuttling home that afternoon, with their tails between their legs, before the vision of a vengeance they had evoked. Now I laughed and snapped my fingers at the shadow of that vengeance left standing outside the window.
But it came to be just a leetle a different matter when it fell evening, and when shadow enwrapped the shadow, and I must go out into the first, perhaps after all to find the second also claiming and involving me. We were still, Harry and I, bound unrelieved to our secret, and must be so till late night, at least. For Mr. Sant was to return from London but in time to keep his evening engagement at the church, or, rather, the schoolrooms adjoining—to which, since their completion, the lectures had been relegated—and no opportunity could be ours to speak with him till after the entertainment. In the meanwhile, we had arranged to meet at the Flask, when I went to fetch Joshua, that Harry might be introduced; and about half-past seven I set out.
I confess I looked over my shoulder more than once as I sped for the inn. The night was very black, with a sense of creeping inquisitive mists in it. I had brought a lantern for myself and one for Joshua; but for some reason I did not want to light them as yet. Perhaps it was the thought of my moving a marked object through the gloom which prevented me. However, I reached my destination without mishap, and finding Harry already waiting for me there, took him up at once to our visitor’s bedroom.
We found Mr. Pilbrow dressed, and expecting me with some eagerness. He was quite spruce, so far as the contents of the little hand-bag, his sole baggage, it seemed, could make him. But he had been shaved and brushed, and his boots cleaned; and if his heavy green surtout was worn and smeared with a hundred stains, the character of it was redeemed by that of the little, alert, forcible face, which looked out of the frayed collar.
“So,” he said, pleased, but stiffly, “here’s the lantern, and here’s Harry, I presume?”
“How dee do, sir?” said my friend, grinning rather shy, but in his frank, attractive way. “I hope you’ll like Dunberry. We haven’t much in the way of local sights to recommend us; but what there is we’ll show you, if you’ll let us.”
“I’m obliged to ye,” said Joshua. “My young friend here mentioned some ruins.”
“Yes, there’s the ruins,” said Harry; “and—and—what else is there, Dick?”
I had hoped, under the circumstances, we might have let the ruins alone. I did not care much to think of them, for my part.
“O,” I said, airily, “there’s the wreck on the sands. It’s the only other thing I can call to mind.”
“Mighty!” said Harry. “What a genius you are, Dicky! I’d never thought of that. Would you care to pull out and see a wreck, Mr. Pilbrow?”
“Infinitely,” said the old man, handsomely. “And what wreck is it now?”
We told him.
“It’d be rather a lark,” said Harry. “Only we must time our visit to the tide. It’ll be low about to-morrow midday, if that’ll suit. If you’ll believe me, sir, we shall be the first to show any curiosity about the thing. There it’s sat for a week, and Dunberry not taken the trouble to pull five miles out to learn its name, even.”
We must go now, if we wanted to hear the lecture; and so we lighted our lanterns and descended those private stairs which I had used on the morning first after our coming. I led, and as I issued forth, I lifted my lantern to show Joshua, who followed, the way. The light shone full upon his face, where it hung, like the gurgoyle of my memory, I could have thought, in the dark entry. And on the instant a little strained scream broke at my elbow, and something staggered back against the closed door of the tap which stood hard by.
The latch burst; there was a snap and tinkle of glass, and the door flying open, let down a heavy sprawling body into the lighted bar beyond. A volley of oaths from the landlord sprung out with the glow, and some one was cursed for a crazy, drunken lout. Startled beyond measure, I hurried our guest on.
“What was it?” he asked, unruffled.
“Nothing,” I said, “but a boozy ruffian of our acquaintance.”
But by-and-by I took an opportunity to pull Harry back and whisper in his ear—
“Did you see?”
“Yes. Rampick.”
“What was he doing there?”
“What is he always doing there?”
“Yes. But to give out that screech at the sight of us!”
“It shows, anyhow, that he’s more frightened of us than we are of him.”
I was agitated, nevertheless, and more eager than ever to unburden myself to Mr. Sant. This giving of himself away was hardly to be reconciled with the drunkard’s stealthy effacement of his traces up on the hill yonder. I wanted the thing all over and taken out of our hands.
We found the road to the schools, now we came to retrace it, all dotted and lively with wandering sparks of lanterns. There was to be a good attendance, it was evident. The holiday spirit was in the air, and these lectures, after all, were the best of holiday tasks. And, indeed, when we entered the building we perceived it so crowded as, in the brilliancy of its illumination, to preclude any chance of that first fun of obscured revelations; for the drawings on the sheet were plain as truth, or anyhow as plain as good intentions. We were forced to satisfy ourselves with back places near the door. However, the room was not so large but that we could distinguish every one of the freehand objects depicted in charcoal on the screen, which, with a “Seraphine”—a late invented reed instrument blown with the feet, and the joy of Mr. Sant’s heart—was the whole of the lecturer’s paraphernalia.
“What’s that first thing?” whispered Harry, giggling.
“Hush!” I said. “I don’t know. It looks like an oyster.”
The lights, and the company, and the prospect of our tutor’s near restoration to us, were beginning to recover me, and already I was tickled with the thought of some fun ahead. And then, in a moment, there he was, the whimsical strong soul; and I breathed a great sigh of relief, and joined tumultuously in the welcome which greeted him.
His discourse this night (and the illustrations to it, presumably) was all of an appropriate observance of the sacred and festive occasion now upon us. He urged his audience to honour it with sobriety. “In the very teeth,” he said, “of that foreign clergyman who exhorted his English congregation to temperance in these words: ‘Myself I do not say no drink. Myself I would drink a pot of porter with you every minute,’ I must assure you that it is not excess which is the friend of festivity, nor is it sport to choose the devil for bottle holder, and let one’s self be knocked out of time at the first round. Take your share and drink fair is our motto; and put it down that you may keep it up, the ‘father of lies.’ A drunken christening is never a pleasant sight; but when Christ Himself is the baby, it is damning as well as shameful. What would you think, as honest men, of repaying the author of a feast by excluding him from a share in it, and not even, like the Model Constituency, in order to point a moral? You have never heard of the Model Constituency?” (“No, your reverence, no!”) “Well, I suppose not. But the one that came nearest to it was the one to the independent and enlightened electors of which a candidate once appealed with a free lunch and drinks on the day of the poll. And very polite and ingratiatory he came to it himself, too, to take a snack and a glass with his good friends and guests. Only his good friends and guests wouldn’t let him in On the contrary, a burly, red-faced elector barred his way as he was entering.